School Board Meeting: Jan. 7, 2021

001e e e I want another guys we're starting start at 6:15 we're starting open is up good evening and Welcome to our special school board meeting Independent School District 8:3 january2 and it is 6:15 p.m. we are at the district service center in Cottage Grove Minnesota 1.0 is our roll call Melinda dols here Louise Hines here simy pnic here Pat Driscoll here Sharon vanir here Katie Schwarz here Tracy brunette here thank you 2.0 please stand and join us for of the United States of America and to the repblic for it stands one nation under God indivisible uh 3.0 is the approval of our agenda I will entertain a motion to approve move move by Sharon and second by I heard Pat and Katy Pat okay so we'll see second by Pat all those in favor

002say Hi I hi or hi um any opposed motion carries 4.0 is our election of officers and I would request if anyone has a nomination to do so at this time I oh Sim I have a nomination all right uh I would like to nominate uh Tracy Bernett as chair Katie Schwarz as Vice chair pat Driscoll as Treasurer and Sharon vanleer for clerk do we have we need a second first or ask the three times now three times now okay so any other nominations sorry I have to ask three times any other nominations all right last um any other nominations this evening all right um so we have the Slate of officers presented I think can you put that in a motion uh I move that we dominate the Slate of officers I just said

003okay and can we get a second second all right so move by simy and second by Louise any questions comments all in favor say I any opposed oh she carries thank you yeah sorry we only do that once a year so always a little awkward um 5.0 are the organizational items for the district I will entertain a motion to approve those items so moved move by Katie second by Sharon and any questions comments on any of these if none all those in favor say I I any opposed motion carries 6.0 our consent items we have none this in this meeting SE uh 7.0 Workshop items we don't have any 8.0 information items we don't have any 9.0 discussion items we have none 10.0 are our uh board committees and school assignments and we did have

004a couple updates so um Dana had put those on had corrected and then put them back on on our um website so I will entertain a motion to approve the uh committees and assignments as presented so moved second moved by Louise and second by Melinda um I know you all had chance to take a look at them but any any questions concerns comments on those I guess I do have one okay just didn't notice it was an up um we really should have three people on the Personnel committee yes um we do not have anyone else who is willing to be on it at this time so at least at the moment we were going to approve as it is and then my only concern is I also requested not to be on it but

005I'm on here so I mean I think at this point we need to just appoint somebody and we do need to have three on there read the names that are on there there's only two yeah so yeah yep come so we you know we don't have anything in the near future so just if we wanted we could pull it for the moment just pull that that one and then have additional conversation and that's fine okay all right so yeah and I can be a backup I said if if there's not two people that can go okay I'm sorry melind I can be a backup if there's ever someone that can't go into it okay all right um okay all right so like I said since it this seems like we should have a little more

006conversation just because of um you know maybe Katie not we just have um a little more conversation between the board as far as the assignment to that particular committee so um Louise had made the U motion do you mind making the motion but just pulling out the Personnel committee for this we want to approve it as is and then just with the oh just make a change that we will be adding one extra person to the Personnel committee okay just the understanding that we'll approve as is and then amend would be to approve as is with adding one additional in the near future sure okay yeah that sounds that sounds good if if the board is in agreement that we can make change in the future yeah okay all right any other comments or questions

007all right um all those in favor say I I any opposed motion carries 11.0 reports and comments we don't have any future meeting dates uh we of course are having our board meeting at 6:30 today our Workshop meeting at 6:30 today and then our next business meeting is January 21st and with that we will adjourn this portion of the meeting all right but don't go anywhere oh yes take a short break until 6:30 when we will start the next meeting e e e I don't think back a lot of our people are not going back at all press and talk right [Music] oh yes okay all right welcome back to our regular school board meeting it's still Thursday January 7th 2021 and it is 6:30 now and we will do one more roll call Melinda

008dols here Louise Hines here simy patnik here Pat Driscoll here Sharon Van leer here Katie Schwarz here Tracy brunette here thank you 2.0 is the approval of our agenda so moved second by Sharon and second by Katie all those in favor say I I any opposed motion carries oh sorry I my okay uh 3.0 are district highlights they will be on our January 21st agenda public comment will also be on the agenda January 21st as well as our consent items so 6.0 are information items 6.1 is our our our audit results and our Director of Finance and operations Dan payen will join us good evening everybody um each year we have have an audit done of all our financial statements and every year we present to the school board our comprehensive annual financial report our

009Student Activities accounts reports our special purpose audit reports and our management reports um these are presented by our our the principal from mmkr Aaron neelson and he will give a presentation shortly I just want to take just a minute to thank members of the finance staff and all the administrators and directors in the school district we had a very successful audit um a clean opinion and arino explained that we have to wait on um some guidance for the F new federal dollars but outside of that we haven't heard anything back on that yet but we also had no findings this year so we're very proud of that and especially like to thank Chris Blackburn our fiscal Services director and the finance staff of Nikki Castle Manuel Brown Diana Moreno uh Petty marks suo Janowski who's

010now retired and Amy tman with that I will turn it over to Aaron neelson good evening I appreciate the opportunity to be here this evening uh as mentioned my name is Aaron neelson I'm a partner with mmkr and we have completed your audit for the year ended June 30th 2020 um you should have received three reports before you the comprehensive annual financial report uh your District does submit that to the association of school business officials for the annual award for the preparation of that comprehensive annual financial report I believe it's been 14 consecutive years you've received that award and you've prepared your audit to submit for that award for uh another opportunity to receive it you've also received the special purpose reports that includes a required reports for government auditing standards the legal compliance audit

011and generally it would include the required reports for the single audit but as I'll get to um we had to delay that because I delayed guidance available to us um to complete that portion and we also have the management report so I have put together this PowerPoint presentation I'll go through so for board members from your packets this is simply information I pulled from our management report so there isn't anything new that I'm springing on you tonight T but just to facilitate our presentation and go through that so with that I'll get to it our role as independent Auditors to the school district uh to issue that opinion on the financial statements for the district audit as well as to issue the reports on internal controls and compliance for the financial statement audit the federal

012single audit and then for the office of the state auditor state laws and regulations getting to our opinions um as Dan had mentioned we've issued an unmodified or what is known as a clean opinion that your financial statements are fairly stated as of June 30th 2020 and the results for the year then ended uh as you may have noticed in the opinion paragraph We do have an emphasis of a matter um paragraph in there just highlighting that a new gasby standard was implemented and changing how Student Activities was one of the main changes how that was reported you used to receive a separate report for that and now that activity is combined within the general fund for your organization as required and and completed that way for all of our school districts we've also issued

013the reports on internal control and compliance under government auditing standards and the state auditor leg of compliance manual and I've lumped them together because we're pleased to report we had no findings to share with you no material weaknesses and internal controls and no instances of non-compliance and as Dan alluded to the we are still completing our audit for the single audit or the federal Awards the compliance necessary to complete that audit um for the new CRF funds the Corona virus relief funds was just recently issued so we'll make sure that's completed in time they have extended the reporting deadline on that and make sure that is submitted on time for the district with that I'll start moving through some information um on some Statewide information here with this graph we've got the Statewide unrestricted operating

014fund balance and this is actually a calculation completed by the Minnesota Department of Education and we've put alongside the Statewide average your District's calculation by the mde so for the most recent year where we've got comparative information for the year ended June 30th 2019 you can see that state ride average was at 19.9% compared to your District's calculation at 4.4% uh for this year there was just a slight uptick and you can see at the end of 2020 your calculation is up 5.7% um one of the key um factors and generating revenues for school districts is the enrollment that you're serving so we've provided a graph where we've got that adjusted average daily membership and then the resulting pupil units in the graph we have here a comparison for the past 10 years just looking

015at the change from the prior year the district served an ADM of about 18727 students this past year and that represents an increase of about 182 or 1% over the prior Year my next slide here shows the general fund financial position just grabbing a couple of key factors with the cash and investment balances as of June 30th the unrestricted fund balance for the general fund and then the expenditures for each of the past 10 years to show a gain of the size of the operation for your organization so uh as you see as the time as the organization grows we would anticipate seeing a larger cash and investment balance and then an unrestricted balance to maintain the operations for the district one thing you'll see it looks a little unusual in those early years of

0162011 and 2012 it looks like you had negative cash balance um but we're showing it net of borrowing from other funds or Aid anticipation borrowing so that was caused generally in those early years by the tax shift and then how the state had metered out state aid payments to school districts at that time to help balance the state's budget um my next slide here Dives a little deeper into the general fund Equity components and we look at the fund balance of the general fund so in total the general fund balance increased slightly this past year but part of that was due to the implementation of gasby 84 and we had to rle in the general fund the Student Activity uh balances so that was part of the increase that was created this past year when

017you look at the unrestricted fund balance there there is a difference I want to highlight in our calculation compared to the previous slid so the state and and your District calculation backs off certain components in the expenditures in that denominator uh like capital and long-term facilities so when we looked earlier it was at I think I said 5.7% 5.7% for the district which does fall in that fund balance range that you have of 5 to 9% uh when you look at that unassigned fund balance you can see it runs really lean at that 0.3% um when we get to that $823,000 you can see on assign fund balance all right a couple more slides for the general fund um I just wanted to make a comment here your general fund for the size of your

018operation uh your total general fund revenues this past year totaled about 200 50 million for the general fund in 2020 uh coming in very close to budget within or coming in slightly over and close to budget of about $122,000 uh and then an increase of about 3% over the prior year so with serving more students as well as then the formula Improvement on the funding formula for general education revenues this past year uh as you can see and and I've mentioned in the past years your revenues for the general fund are highly concentrated where you get those sources from uh State sources making up about 73% of the general fund revenues in 2020 uh followed by property taxes at 23% and then each of the remaining uh Federal sources and other making up about 2%

019each then one more slide for the general fund we look at the general fund expenditures again looking budget to actual to Prior year um for 2020 your general fund expenditures amounted to almost $250 million or $249.00 million for this past year uh coming in very close to budget or within 1.7% or just slightly under budget at 1.7% under what was anticipated in the final appropriated budget and that was also about 6% over the prior year uh as anticipated with formula or increases approved as salary contracts as well as the additional students served this past year again when we look at expenditures you can see there's also a concentration there of where you're um spending your resources that we see with our other school districts as well uh largely in salaries and employee benefits making up

02079% of the general fund spending to educate your students and I have just one slide for a couple of the other operating funds the food service operation a community service operation uh both of these funds were uh impacted as the general fund was by the covid-19 pandemic you can see both of these fund experience a decrease in yearend fund balance uh at yearend the food service special Revenue fund had about 10% that 81,000 that you can see at the bottom there represents about 10% of their annual expenditures of about $8.1 million when we look at the community service fund uh that year in fund balance of 33 8,000 represents about 2.4 of their annual spending of $1 13.8 million um with that being down from the prior year due to the pandemic so and that

021also included a transfer that was approved of $400,000 to help uh support their operations this past year and just a couple more slides we include the internal service funds uh you have this slide uh within your internal service funds you're uh operating the self uh managing the operations for severance and pension obligations uh previously you can see the level of activity has decreased uh largely due to um because you used to also include your other post-employment benefits in the internal service funds so we've just shown a change over the past three years the activity in the internal service funds and then my last slide that I have for you is the entity-wide statements so to this point we've been talking about the individual funds and how I believe most of my districts operate uh looking

022at the individual activities of each fund uh this statement here is where we consolidate all of the individual governmental funds for your organization incorporate the self-insurance activities or I'm sorry the uh Severance and uh internal service fund activities within that and so you can see we've done a Reconciliation on the top half here looking at the net position the governmental activities and then how that comes to net position uh entity-wide and the biggest difference you see there uh is the incorporation of long-term obligations and long-term assets and within that is to include the pension for p and TR adjustments within that so when we look entity wide the change for the district this past year was nearly break even when you think of the size of your organization it saw a slight decrease of about

023$913,000 uh on that lower half you can see how that fits within the components of net position uh the net investment in capital assets saw a significant or a bigger increase at $16 million uh and what that tells me is you're paying off your debt at a faster Pace than the buildings are being depreciated or you're investing in those buildings uh with additions uh within the net investment in capital assets or the infrastructure infrastructure of your organization the restricted category saw a slight decrease and that was a change in largely using some of your Capital related restricted resources this past year and then the unrestricted you can see it captures everything else with a decrease of about $15.3 million and I would say probably the driving factor of that was the change in the p

024and the TR pension benefits coming through for your organization and how that your proportionate share those obligations so with that I know I went through a lot of information very quickly if there's any questions on the presentation or the documents I'd be happy to try to answer um I did have one question I don't know whether this is for Dan or for you but you had mentioned that the general fund the Student Activity fee in the is now part of the general fund yes how or how much of that is in there and how like stable is that as like a is that same year over-ear or does that amount fluctuate I couldn't get my meaning is that something that we always okay this is always going to be like I don't know a million

025dollars or whatever and so we always have to we always know that this million dollars is something that we're obligated to because it's Student Activity money or is it yeah it's generally always going to be about the same amount um year over year what kind of funds are built up for the various things you see much 89,000 it was about $589,000 in that advantage in the in that fund that and that's sitting as a restricted account so it's it's still counted in as part of the the total fund balance but not in the unassigned so it's part of the oh okay so the 4.4% that's the unassigned yes okay yes forget okay thank you I have a question but I think this might be for Dan it's the TR and P how did that affect

026our budget what what happened there uh to explain it's it's it's somewhat complicated but to explain as simply as I can um those funds are run by organizations that are monitored by the state um they have net position of you know whether they have money to hit all their obligations and things like that and you know they're funded by contributions from from teachers for TR and from all other public employees for p and they're also funded by contributions by the by said employers so when they figure out what the net position of those they proportion out to each entity to put in our books what our what our portion of the obligation is although we'll never make payments for employees they will come out of TR or P but um financially in the audit we

027have to report that as an obligation although it's not in my mind it's not a personal obligation for the district because those funds are paid by the TR and the P funds does that make sense Aaron yeah and if I could maybe just add a com so it it really gets I shouldn't say deceiving it just gets challenging when I'm talking about it my very last slide is not how you're budgeting for them but it has that impact where we're incorporating those obligations on there um when you're budgeting for it you're really budgeting for your required payments annually within the general fund and as I mentioned you came very close with um managing that so if if the plans become underfunded then it becomes almost a legislative look where they say do we want to

028adjust contribution rates and that's where it would become a budgeting impact to you and your district has continued and always has made the required payments for the pension plans as required with the payroll so they've budgeted for that and manage that very well I just had one question on let's see slide number four and you know clearly it says that Statewide fund balances are much higher but I know there are what like 300 plus districts so so um obviously this includes a lot of smaller districts is there um an average percentage of fund balance for you know like the metro area um I'm sure it could be put together I have never Analyze That separately okay uh I I would agree with you the smaller districts but it also is driven so heavily by the

029larger districts and where their percents of fund balance are okay yeah and this is the percentage of their operating expenditures so small or large is still the percentage at which they're sitting at right so a small district with a very high percent really wouldn't drive this as much as a bigger District at a high percentage okay because I was thinking it may all right if you um excuse me if you look if you look back and find your the budget adjustment committee handbook manual that we handed out I did have in the back some tables and I did have the fund balances of the of the 40 largest districts in the state and you look on there and I believe I have a column where they averaged them all but you can you can see

030all the fund balance percentages and that was actually last year because when we did the book we didn't have the new numbers yet okay okay but I do think I this is a workshop I do think this is a telling slide as we have our next conversation around budget adjustments about where South Washington County Schools is in relationship to the percentage of other Minnesota school districts yeah all right any other questions I'm sorry sorry if I was looking at the wrong person with questions too sometimes it's hard to tell what their masth exactly yeah so can I just clarify off of Pat's question oh can you put oh sorry can I I always forget um so to clarify from Pat's question the uh once as a district we pay you know the 5% or whatever

031is our Our obligation to our employees then it's up to tr and P to manage the growth of that 5% such that when the those employees retire so this 15 million is just a oh sorry oh sorry on the last slide so the 15 million is just kind of a it's a books thing it's not real cash yeah and the 16 the 15.9 the that 16 million is the change from the prior year so your share of the unfunded obligations of those pension plans is actually that 23 milon so um but but I agree with your point your question is are you're paying in your proportionate share your required contributions and those are going to separate governmental end it's the pension plans each of them and they're audited separately and those plans then make the

032payments for them and um we actually disclose the funded status of those plans so if that changes over time that's where I would say if it deteriorated and the plans went from 80% funded down to 60 and they saw that's where they would have to make measures to change the contributions so they would have enough to pay them so at this time they don't have any concerns that they're not able to make the P payments to the pension plans so then will this number always increase given the fact that our district is you know as we hire employees will this number always increase but it could go either direction depending on the funded status of the plan so if the stock market really reacted well and then that ratio of how well funded it is

033um it would change based on that but yes the size of your organization if you continued to grow would also change that your proportion of that pot or that obligation it is I I will say it is my hardest slide to present on because um you're you're continuing to make your required contributions and this obligation becomes a share by the state and all entities participating in it and it would just be a planned uh do we have enough to fund the obligations and that would be at a Statewide level for it this the pension plan would be reviewing that it depends on if the plan is in the black or in the red so right now they're looking at unfunded liability for our district they're saying of 2133 million at one point and had the

034totals for for those and I think one year I mean I calculated out in we are like 3 to 6% of the total so you can kind of imagine how big okay yes and what they have to do is is hire actuaries to figure out if they're going to have enough money to make payments to everybody that's eligible on the plan so as they look down their their board of directors looks at it and says we're not doing too well we might have to raise the employer contribution or even the employee contribution just to catch up it's no different than it's different in a sense that we don't no one gets to use it for other stuff but it's like Social Security where the current people are paying the retirees payments okay right all right

035I think we are are we have our questions so thank you very much thank well thank you have a good night all right 6.2 first reading of policy 206 and the 1300 series and superintendent neelson will present these thank you um this evening I'm bringing forward the first reading of our policy Series in the 10023 300 category um to just keep in mind as we go throughout the school year uh we created a timeline as we look at all of our policies to make sure that they are being reviewed periodically we're looking at about every 3 to 5 years to make sure that we're refreshing and taking a look at the language and so this evening we have five policies coming forward from the 100 series and of those five being reviewed um there are

036very very slight changes one adjustment that was made according to a reference policy um and just for the community just to know it was a rewarding um to student gender non-discrimination and so sometimes when we update policies there are just slight little wording changes that we're making I do want to point out that while it's on our cover sheet that 102.1 our diversity equity and inclusion policy you will see in that area it talks about more changes to come and we are still working through revisions that policy has not gone to the policy committee um we're still working through any additions as we look at our racial Equity resolution and what we need to do with that policy and also looking at other model policies um in the 200 series there is just one and

037that policy 206 is in regards to public participation and there were a couple of things added in that policy I want to point out that we did grab some language from the MSB model policy along with some grammatical changes um as well as I think it's important to note that um when we have individuals come up for public comment that we make make sure that we are doing a warning at 30 seconds I believe and then when time is up and so in there is that process of when people come and do public comment and so we just wanted to make that clear as we move forward and then finally um the 300 series there were no changes um with the exception of policy implementation which just talks about an updated language to reflect current

038practice um and so I don't know if our policy members would like to share anything more um but we took some time and and reviewed all of those oh okay and it's just first read okay um and I think we just need to yeah do the comments so as with um when we have policies on the agenda we will um welcome public comment on any of these policies if anyone would like to comment all right um so does the board have any other questions or concerns with any of the changes or any of the policies that we are looking at this evening all right hearing none they will be back for approval next time January 21st right thank you thank you all right 7.0 Workshop item 7.1 are budget adjustments Dan and Kelly will join

039us for this item and thank you while they're coming up I'm going to go ahead and kick off our budget adjustment process as the main part of our Workshop this evening um for school districts the new year is often met with the challenges of determining the budget for the next school year I know we're 6 months away from that July 1 um but already we are beginning to put in place and setting the stage for next year's school budget this includes what we call our January 1 rollover that happens over winter break in our student information Department taking a look at the rollover of students um that we will be see or see coming into to our doors on in 2021 it also includes our students are beginning to register in the month of January

040for classes at the secondary level our staffing process unfolds as we look at openings we may have in any movement of teachers as well as many of you are aware it is the time of year when we host our kindergarten registration event so there are a number of big things happening as we prepare and think about our budget that starts July 1 the goal of our budget adjustment process is to create a sustainable budget while prioritizing student learning and I think tonight the presentation by Mr neelon um showed where we are when it when we look at our overall fund balance we need to get to a point in South Washington County Schools where we have more than two weeks of operating expenses in our savings account this evening the proposed list of budget adjustments

041will be shared along with an opportunity for all of you as board members to ask questions and then to engage in a dialogue around the items being being recommended I would like to remind our community that on October 22nd the first draft of the budget adjustment guiding change document came forward we took some time to draft to have conversations and then that final document was approved with those budget parameters on November 5th um as introduced earlier Kelly Jansen and Dan um will be walking the board through the presentation and the full list of proposed adjustments uh before they begin and before I turn it over to them I would just like to recognize their effort with our budget adjustment committee as well as our steering committee um numerous meetings uh updating spreadsheets getting calculations um

042and they really have done a wonderful job of facilitating the process and getting us to this point of bringing these recommendations forward so with that I think Kelly is going to start all right see perfect um so as Julie mentioned tonight we plan to do a quick review of some of the key messages related to budget adjustments why we're doing this now um where does the district spend our money projections around our unassigned fund balance and the goals we set out at the beginning of this process and all of these are review from presentations that happened this fall so we'll we'll Dan will hopefully go quickly through those um and then we'll introduce our budget adjustment recommendations developed by the key stakeholders that Julie mentioned um and we'll close with talking about some next steps

043in terms of communication and opportunities for feedback from our community and our staff and planning for our future so here are some of the key messages we want to present this evening it's our it really is our best effort to acknowledge and honor and try to explain we understand this is a very difficult process um this isn't something that everyone wakes up and thinks about how you're going to cut your budgets um and so we do want to acknowledge that it's been an extremely difficult year and yet we know that we need to make these difficult decisions that need to be made in order to set us up for financial stability with the direction that we were heading um I do offer perhaps trying to find silver lining um that you know coming out of

044this we've learned to do things like we've never learned before so maybe it's the right time to try to make some decisions in how we're delivering instruction um the second bullet as Julie mentioned we did have a process to make these recommendations there was a continuous loop of communication between the steering committee the budget adjustment committee um principl directors supervisors I know our principes and supervisors also met with staff groups um and so there was a continual process and when the steering committee received that feed feedback it weighed heavily on items that we either adjusted or took off the list um the third bullet um sets out to talk about that the recommendations that we're putting here are going to result in a revision or reduction in programming um that's just in in working to

045provide that sustainable reduction piece that is bound to happen and so we just want to acknowledge that and for every item you do see on the list there are items that did not make the list and then finally the budget um from The Guiding change document that Julie mentioned that in all of our conversations we truly did try to remain committed to our equity and our Equity vision and Mission and um making sure we don't exacerbate those student achievement gaps that we that we see across the board so with that I will turn it over to Dan yes as we answer the the question of why now um it has been a challenging year uh financially as well as operationally we did have to do some transfers uh at the last one and you saw

046that our our fund balance was still okay at the end of last year um but as we look at this year and we constantly update the CAC assistens Financial advisory committee we constantly update the board during our financial updates that our enrollment is it's down compared to what we had budgeted and it's down compared to what we ended up at so if you just want to remember some key numbers our basic enrollment last year was 18727 ADM what to say students we have budgeted about 18, 925 which is our normal growth however right now we're running about 500 below that budget and that can easily create a gap of of about $5.5 million um so this is attributed to parents making other choices obviously for during covid-19 we hope they many return but you have

047to remember that we only get paid per year and we'll never get that money back because the kids did not go to school here this year um just quickly I don't want to talk too long about enrollment but we are many of the groups uh lobbying groups are going to the state legisl please asking them to if we can maybe use our Counts from last year or this year whichever is larger because every district has seen this this reduction but based on law if they pay us enrollment times the formula we're going to see a drop of about $5 million in our Revenue we also know that our current spending is outpacing our revenues we budgeted a deficit this year about $6.8 million um which makes our fund balance go below um Schoolboard policy we're

048required to have at least 5% in our fund balance um and we've been planning for this before the pandemic we've been talking about making budget adjustments looking at the future um anyone who um sits on our financial advisory committee knows that we've been talking about this for for more than just this year and we're also worried about what we'll get for state aid state aid is made up of enrollment multiplied by a formula amount that the state legislature determines if they don't have any money they can't increase that formula but our expenses will increase um and right now they're projected to have a banum deficit of about um $1.2 billion so we're kind of worried about what will happen at the legislature I will keep you updated as we find out more what's going on

049so just a quick review of Where where our dollars go you saw a couple present a couple slides from from Aaron neelson this one breaks it down by the function of the dollar um 42 cents for regular classroom instruction 20 cents for special ucation instruction um really all but 9 cents of every dollar goes into the classroom either through instruction goes through support it goes through maintaining the facilities and it goes to getting the kids there um pupil support is transportation it's also counselors social workers things like that facility maintenance costs are explanatory about 12 cents on each dollar um instructional support are your media resources and your curriculum support Administration is District administration three cents in every dollar and District support services are the people here that support um in the classroom so most

050of the money goes working into the classroom we talked about our fund balance this is just a graphic history I I hope people you know could pay attention to this we did have fund balances of over 12% back 10 years ago there's some intentional spend Downs got down about 5% and then it it just kept going down um we call for between five and 9% we did get back up to 5% at the end of this fiscal year which we were very proud um 9% which is the high end of our fund balance policy that's 4.7 weeks of operation that's not a lot I was signing some some reports today and I just took a glance at what we spend in the general fund each year year because that report would show our dispersements and

051it runs between 8 and $8.2 million a month and if our fund balance is below that you can see that's less than a month's worth of of payments um projected fund balance of 1.8% is only six days of operations and if we want to get back up to the 5% this year alone and we're facing a $5 million deficit in revenues uh we'd have to somehow accumulate another $6.5 million so that cave brought us to our goals as we looked out and we forecasted for the future and we when we forecast and you'll see more of that when Kelly goes through how the adjustments pan out in the long run we have to look at what's happening with the rest of our expenses because although we can reduce expenses we still have we still have

052to operate we still have increases every year based on inflation based on contract settlements based on health insurance contracts and just the regular increase in inflation of even two to two and a half percent is a lot of money in our district we also have to look at what the state increases a formula buy and compared to what our expenses go up and we don't see the same numbers the largest increase I've seen in 20 years is 2% um on the formula and I've seen years where it's been zero and zero so we have to plan on what the state is going to give us so our year one goal was about $12 million in either enhancements or reductions enhancements meaning increases in our revenues our year two goal was between three and $6 million

053and then year three goal is between 0 and $4 million and these would be additional um goals reductions on the year one that adds up to about $18 million over three years so as we began to examine the ideas that were submitted through the process um we put them into categories and so you see those categories listed and tonight we'll go through each category explain the recommendations and then offer times for conversation and so as we had a as we talked about how do we and how do we put some emotional feelings into how I'm thinking about this we offered the the what you what's known as that kind of consens and this is a process we used with the budget adjustment committee I don't know that Tracy will will do actual physical polling but

054I just we offer this as a where to gauge are you on this idea or this group of ideas um as you go through it and so um I'll I'll leave it up to to you guys on the conversation and trying to make this more of that Workshop feel even though it feels very formal sitting like this but um as you go through it think about it in that in that respect as Dan mentioned um our goals we wanted to begin with the end in mind and um before we dive into specific details this is where you you will see this again at the end um for each idea that's presented you will see three years whether it's an impact in year one year two or year three um and we introduced the ideas we

055also then in the in the summary then introduced those ideas that were sustained savings so if they were something that is a a sustained reduction or enhancement there's a they the you'll see them in years two and three but they are the the blue box will indicate those things um another Factor when we looked at the impact as Dan mentioned is that cost of living impact and so we calculated that impact at 2 and a half% so people could see that even though we're making reductions there is still that cost of living expectation and so the the net reduction you'll see under that column as well so with all of that said um the ideas we're about to present total of 2 23.1 million over three years there are some big ticket items that we

056know you're going to have lots of conversation about and we can talk about the impact of that um when we get to the end because you will see the slide again so Dan is going to start with an overview of the district adjustments so we have breaking down these this presentations of different sections um the first section we'll talk about is is District adjustments and these are adjustments that are mainly coming from uh the district support side of the of of the operation um I'll go a little quicker um so the first one's a revenue enhancement we we were looking to increase our medical assistance billing by $200,000 per year and these are are Services special I can bill for to um to the medical assistance um section of the state of Minnesota um the

057expense side we're reducing the budget for professional Technical Services by 175,000 in the first year 100,000 in the second year these are a lot of this is contingency type expenses in case we have issues that we have to employ attorneys or have to have some emergency technical advice things like that um eliminate the grant writing position that's a position that um has to do with grant writing and and our wellness program that was $100,000 a year Implement mandatory Furlow for all tier one employees these are at will employees and and they make up of uh mainly the directors and that would be a 4day Furlow um Implement a two-day ferle for tier 2 employees and those emplo employees are uh a few directors and then assistant directors and supervisors U reduce the administration out ofate

058travel budget don't do any out ofate travel 7,000 reduce um office equipment purchases um we have a budget for the whole building of about 35,000 and then we reduce um overtime Professional Services Supply budgets for the finance department about 13,000 800 uh reduce Consulting outside um Services all estate travel and the Communications Department [Music] 18,500 uh reduce professional Technical Services in the student Information Systems budget that's 12,5 the first year then the SEC the third year 7500 each reduce the cell phone reimbursement for on call staff from $90 a month to $45 a month that will save us 50,000 a year in Human Resources reduction in the recruiting efforts uh supplies overtime and advertising in the first year of $21,000 in the overall maintenance department reduce the custodial Day hours and we have five open

059positions which we will not fill that's about $336,000 a year we will charge more salaries to our long-term facility maintenance budget which includes a health and safety portion and what the net effect of that is about 250,000 a year the net effect that will be less projects that we'll be doing in long-term facility maintenance um we're committing to no new maintenance equipment right now we're on a we we committed to a lease to get all our main our custodial equipment up to par about five years ago already almost six years ago and and that lease will be paid off and we will have to make do for the next three years with the stuff and these are things like scrubbers um bathroom scrubbers and those riding carpet cleaners things like that and then for the

060first year for this year one we will freeze the allocation of funds for Capital outlay that go to the schools that's about $500,000 so there's $500,000 that spread a month all the schools and they will have to make doe with their carryover amounts or with what we have and then we'll reduce we're proposing reduce number of pre- purchased special education slots for prek from 6: to 3 that has to do with early special education Early Childhood um that's $450,000 a year right now they they buy slots and we'll we'll only buy three and then we'll have to see what's a available when it comes available in the technology department we will save $300,000 on the refresh refresh cycle we were fortunate to get CRF dollars also so that took a little strain off of the

061some of the technology needs we had and then we'll look at their total capital budget and reduce that by $500,000 a year and some of that's been offset by some um some CRF dollars in the TLs Department teaching learning service says um we're reducing our contingency textbook budget by 200,000 the first year and 100,000 in the next two years after we're reducing a0 five full-time equivalent in the teaching and learning support specialist about $ 4,496 per year and then reducing the teaching learning reading recovery support for $16,250 per year last one oh I'm sorry there's one more um we're reducing a 1.0 FTE equivalent teacher on special assignment and teaching and learning in the evaluation assessment Department um and as we do our FTE we should point out that we have a set amount um

062obviously every teacher and and different employees make different amounts ofy money but we have to use probably the lowest amount we can mainly because of bumping rights so so someone if you reduce a teaching position eventually the person on the bottom is one that's going to leave not the person that's being replaced or being eliminated reducing the assessment budget by um $3,500 a year and then in the transportation side we're committing to no new school bus purchases for two years we buy buy 10 buses a year on leases 7year leases those leases run about $125,000 a year for every set of 10 um we will buy buses this year and then the next two years we won't buy any new buses and that effect the effect on that is that would raise our average age

063of our buses to about 14 years there's no restriction by the state on how old a bus can be because they all get inspected every year and if they pass inspection then they don't look at mileage anymore or look at the age and then they were going to reduce three regular school bus routes through restructuring in year two and three for about $92,000 a year some of the things that we did not we considered and are not on the list right now um Contracting the transportation department I know that that was came up last time we did budget reductions and and um we are still studying the numbers but we we're not bringing that forward this time um we have to make sure that the numbers make sense and what's the long-term effects of doing

064that right now we do our own transportation with our own employees and many districts actually just contract with the company to do that and then there's other reductions in District support and administrative FTE that it did not make the list with this section we want to will answer any questions you may have or comments I have one question about the prease slots is that through the is that through 916 then no it's our own preschool program and I don't know if Anna want to I speak to during this part uh because this is a workshop format I just want to make sure that cabinet members that you have mics and we can just move those around because remember this is an informal time but we want to be able to answer some of those questions

065so an I think you're probably prepared to talk about those I will try so the pre- slots we um when we look at those things we purchase up ahead of time so we say that we think we will need six slots across there and we don't always use all of those slots and so but we do know that on average we use all three of those slots so we're just purchasing what we know we need not purchasing extra and so as those slots come open if we need other additional if there's a slot in an inclusionary spot if there's a slot in an inclusionary spot then we'll take that and we'll pay for it just like we normally do but we're just not banking ahead of time on that anymore because we didn't use all

066of our slots so where are we buying them from is what I guess oh we actually pay Community Education UPF front Okay that's that's I'm we actually pay for them up front is going on here okay I get it now yeah the reminder that prek is community or you know fund based yeah I was just kind of like yeah you're like where does that money go and yes it is it's a because it's a fee based program so we purchase and we pay for our students to go there that um have special education needs and so we purchase and pay for their slot to be there because it is a transfer of money from the general budget over to Community Education budget for those spots yeah okay yeah since we're just not we're not moving

067that much money over we're moving less over because we have a trend data that shows we don't necessarily use all of our slots got it thank you and just to note those slots would then be open up for other people to come in for private pay and things like that with the special education spots then we don't get those aren't parents don't pay for those spots versus the other spots erand Pap correct we don't pay for we pay for the kids that are in need of special education services we pay for their education there okay um I had a question are any of these in perpetuity like year four and Beyond and so is that what the blue sustainable is or the so so if I look at year three where it says that there's

068you know $2 million $2.3 million in year four there would also be something along those lines in terms of savings yes and that's what we talked about with the the sustainable reductions that that we'll need to have that monitoring system to you know these it's not that after year three all of these things are going to come back again right okay for can you talk a little bit about the medical assistance building billing enhancement and will the reduction in Personnel impact the amount of money that we would be able to get through medical assistance can that one to that's me too so medical assistance that is a program that is separate from it's kind of like when I want to explain it to parents um when we ask them if they would consent to this

069like um Box Tops for education or Campbell Soup labels and so it does not impact any of their um ma benefits um it's a pot of money that's set aside separately for schools to access and that we are mandated to do and so the people that bill for that are um School psychologists occupational therapists um physical therapists and then we do for Paras um and so those people um there are certain people that have those things we aren't um going to lose that type of um Revenue because those come generally with the students that have the most needs and I know that um people will probably ask about the Paras and things like that there isn't much billing in that respect from like a federal setting one which um is a least need of a

070student um and so the students that really have a lot of that Ma billing type um need are in our um programs which we are not um looking at any type of changes to their Staffing at all in those pieces and so and also we are not looking at changing our staffing ratios for um speech or OT or physical therapy and those are also our billers and so to increase that we have to first of all make sure that we are billing for every student that um we can and then second of all there are other um things that we can bill for that we aren't right now and those are the um behaviors that need um constant redirection and assistance and so right now we're not billing for those as much as we should

071and can and so that will be where those enhancements come in so it's kind of like just making sure that the staff who are doing who are providing these are filling out the appropriate paperwork so that exactly first making sure that everyone bills what they should be and then also adding in the billing part of we're looking at those um level one behaviors so that that's that's what um dhh calls them okay um and mdh calls them level one behaviors and those are things that um could cause um harm to um themselves or others or they need constant redirection and an ability to um access their education and so we aren't billing for those right now so we need to then train and Bild for those and uh and if I recall correctly even 200,000

072is a very conservative amount based on what we know that other districts similar sized or even smaller um they've done training and they've just been more intentional and so there is an opportunity there as well for additional enhancements as we go through yep it'll take some time to learn how to do that because it's it's different um and that people aren't used to billing for those kinds of things but then um moving forward those will be the training pieces and moving forward with that and then so then would this 200,000 then be that could also potentially be in perpetuity as well okay and it could be higher and it beer okay so Anna will that um potentially affect any like some of our kids with the highest needs that might be getting some services in

073school that have medical assistance but yet maybe getting some speech or some OT outside of school as well will that affect that if they're being built for that service in school will they still be able to build build ma outside of school yep those are totally separate um pots of money so ma for their family is not impacted in any way shape or form um and if they apply for a medical assistance they um in essence do give consent as they fill out those forms but we have to ask them at least one time per year that they agree for agree to that and so we present that in our um prior written notices I shouldn't say prior written in our um parent information about what's there what their rights are that's presented in there

074and if they do not wish us to build that because that's we do have to share some information um then they have to opt out of that otherwise it assumed and we move forward with that but it does not it's totally separate it's mandated by Statute so that we are to do this um and neither Nei they should never meet together it's always very separate and that's why I explained it like it looks like Box Tops for you know education or Campbell Soup labels it's things that there's no impact at all um Dan you mentioned uh CRF I think I know what that is but you want to clarify that and then how did it help us and what was the amount that we got do you know CRF was a portion of the cares

075act in a stand for Corona Relief Fund and those were dollars that were actually separated out we got cares act money that was broken into a couple other acronyms Esser and gear um which we had two years to spend but the CRF dollars needed to be spend in six months uh we received about 4.4 million in that and we had to have them all approved before we submitted and actually spent by December 31st and those were for many things that were approved PPE Equipment Technology extra time for teachers things like that and then the county had CRF dollars also and they didn't allocate all our dollars so they allocated out to the school districts in the county and that was about $1.2 million and that was even a shorter timeline it it gave us about

076two months to spend that and we once again went through the old application process so at this point the CRF dollars were $6 million although the CRF dollars could not supplant anything in your current budget okay I have one question probably for Kevin so the reduction in recruiting efforts what is the impact when um we know there's a commitment to recruit employees of color yeah great question I um actually just met with my team on Wednesday um last Wednesday and so we're putting together proposal we're just planning on reallocating where our um and strategizing specifically where um we want to recruit so that's still our highest priorities um uh recruiting for um qualified staff of color and so we will just commit to that and then maybe not do some other career fors and another

077advertis that we um typically would do what is a um what's a contingency textbook and how is it different from a regular textbook so we use Capital funds to do curriculum adoptions so we have a capital budget that we when you make for example a math curriculum adoption you use your Capital funds to do that the contingency fund is used when there's 40 people in a class versus 35 and we need five textbooks of something and so we use that contingency fund to support that um we've been fortunate to be able to use our Capital funds for a lot of those purchases and so that that allowed for us to look at that contingency fund to reduce so I had a question on our the bus routes um after having gone through the Woodberry development

078tour um how are we going to do that I mean I realize right now you know we don't have as many buses maybe going out but that actually seems like quite a few for our growing District especially moving forward uh I to be totally upfront you know this came from the Transportation but I didn't get all the details exactly how they were going to reduce the routes but they did some looking at it and we're looking at combining some stops and things like that on where the students are I mean it's going to be a moving Target obviously as as developments come in but they were confident that they could make some changes on bus stops to reduce a route couple RS I think that's also item that doesn't come into effect till year two

079it's year two and I think that's where as we look at some of those year two and year three I think it's going to require us to first of all be held accountable for what was on year one and then to continue to look forward forward to what we had on year two and then Monitor and adjust that and bring that back to the board along with the combining of the bus trots is there any guidance on like the the maximum amount of time students can spend on the bus do we know I'm not aware of any statutory uh requirements uh we have internal policies that we try to limit it to 45 minutes for any one student so this would be sort of this this is within the parameters of our of our internal

080policies around and we have so many buildings and in so many spots that from a transportation point of view and and having worked in wiona which is a lot of Hills and Valleys and hidden places this is a pretty easy District to Route pretty much everyone's together there's not a whole lot of rural routes so um and the schools are fairly close together too anyone else questions on this particular section so with sorry with the with the addition of the administrator salaries to the long-term facilities maintenance budget so then that how does that work so that comes out of a totally separate pot from the general fund so then you just shift over whatever the $250,000 yes it's an accounting it's an accounting shift as opposed to a cash shift it's a cash shift and

081effect that it would affect the number of projects we can do so we are making a reduction in long-term facility maintenance projects we put them down the road further or whatever because the amount of money you get long-term facility maintenance has an effective cap on it so we we know we're only going to spend x amount of dollars but we can take some unassigned dollars unassigned fund and put them into this restricted but it reduces the amount in the restri to fund that we could spend on long-term facility maintenance so it is a commitment to spend less there and saves money on the general fund will that do we think that'll have like a negative impact on you know deferred maintenance or something like 10 years from now we're going to well we run about

082a 8 to 10 million dollar per year expense there so the people that run those programs you know were confident that you know we're just going to have to shift and make due and in July is when I when I June and July is when I bring you the launcher facility maintenance list I mean it's it's a reduction like I said these are reductions in services and and when that's a reduction in how long we'll be fixing things too so um we were kind of thinking maybe at the end of each of these sections that we just kind of take a little bit of a a gauge as to where we are on these reductions so um we had that little consensus poll and so maybe um if anybody does uh have a feeling that

083maybe this particular section that they're having some concerns with or would like further discussion on any one item or two items or what have you um maybe we could um do that now before moving on just so we have a better idea of where we are moving forward so at this point with this group how are people feeling um with the consensus poll if you could just give us fingers sorry I had to look at it time no rush I eat no rush okay okay all right so I mean for the most part the discussion we you've had questions answered so we're we're feeling pretty good about this particular section at this time okay so we are going to move on then to our next section all right um so now we get into districtwide

084adjustments and these these reductions are these reductions listed on this page will have an impact on districtwide programs and services meaning they will impact our schools K through 12 um so you don't see these on individual slides but know that these are in addition to those individual slides as we go through them um the first item on the list is to reduce the distribution of comp compensatory education Revenue we normally distribute 90% of our comp ad money to schools and our proposal is for a year we distribute 75% so it'll be a reduction of 25% distribution to our schools um people ask where's that money going to go then this money can also be used to provide services for students who are underprepared in meeting State Standards or assumed to be underprepared and so for

085example students who qualify for El services so as you've heard in previous presentations we we don't get enough federal funds for our El services and we have to provide those services and so this comp Ed money that's not being distributed to schools will use to supplement those services in that one in that Year One item number two is to cut discretionary budgets distributed to schools by 25% these budgets are used for a variety of things by principles um the biggest purchase is printing um and it cannot this money cannot be used for Staffing this discretionary budget and that is for one year we also will for one year look to eliminate any site based staff development budgets so we usually distribute some of our our 2% that we set aside for St 2% that we

086set aside for staff development to our sites um we will look at keeping that back at the district level and reallocating some Workshop day salaries so that will have the impact on the general fund um but I do want to make sure that people understand people will still have access to District staff development funds we have a process that they can submit applications for um we've done about seven or eight this year from schools and from teachers directly and from principles um to access those funds and that is for just year one the next one won't take effect until year two this one will take some planning and some thoughtful um how are we going to implement this but we want to look at our elementary and our our elementary specials and our K12 Dae

087services and how can we look at restructuring that for a couple reasons to provide our developmentally adapted physical education which is DPE um by DPE Specialists and and so if we can have DPE specialist K12 we can look at some um personalized professional development for them for the students that they're working with and we'd also want to look at our elementary special specials and how can we reduce the travel time the windshield time that's that we have people going from one school to another um this is going to take some creative thought in terms of how do we schedule specials at the elementary schedule with the secondary mind it feels like sure we can just schedule them but I know Elementary schedules are very different and so we'll have to kind of put our minds

088together to come up what that might look like they did a little bit this year with the pandemic and um not wanting crossover and so it did result in some just reductions that happened because of that process um and I know Julie was involved in that as well so we want to sit down and be really thoughtful about the plan for this so that's why we put it in year two uh the next one is to restructure how we assign pair professionals to our case managers and these are resource pair professionals these aren't pair professionals that are assigned to students so these are resource pair professionals that we would assign one to every two case managers so they would sit down with their schedules and decide how they're going to use this PA professional and

089what classes they're going to be needed to support um currently we do a one to one allocation for a fair professionals the next one is also a special education reduction that we would look at increasing case loads K12 so our elementary case managers would go from from 16 to 18 students and our secondary case managers would go from 18 to 20 students and we've had lots of conversation and I'm sure Anna can definitely be more eloquent but case management doesn't necessarily mean direct service for that student so um I I'm sure Anna can expound upon that and then the last one is to reduce our licensed school nurse positions by four full-time equivalent positions and what that means is that there will be licensed schooled nurses who will have more than one building now our

090High School nurses in particular just had high schools I believe so they will be overseeing another building but this will not result in the health offices not having someone there there will always be either a LSN or a health assistant that will be Manning those Health offices for students so these districtwide reductions came to 2.2 in the first year 1.9 in the second year and 1.9 in the third year any questions or conversation I have it's more of a if you can just like explain like to public what a resource PA professional is versus an um a pair professional that is with like taking the students to class type of thing sure so a resource PA generally works with those students that have um lesser disabilities they might have a little bit of reading need

091or math need and they would support them in those areas is a center-based um pair of professional is one that really works with our students that has um significant needs um in different areas that could be multiple things but they usually have more needs and they need more direct service it could be that they need even help with toileting and eating um stretching because they need to stand because of their physical disabilities and so there is a big difference in what those um intensive Services look like versus what a resource student would have and so with that we need to look at um making sure that we increase the independence of our students in the resource programs instead of um attaching a human body to that student to make sure that we are um he's

092staying on task or he wrote a sentence or he made a capital letter we want to make sure that we um look at making sure that they have access to the classroom but also making sure that when they are there um the classroom teacher is paying attention to them as well rech research shows that once there is an adult attached to a child that classroom teacher does not necessarily pay very much as close attention to them because they're like that person's already taken care of there's another adult watching and so they're missing out on that direct contact service so we want to reduce that so that we are intentional about sending a pair of professional with the students that really need it and so that's where that reduction comes in um to help us look

093at what we're doing and how we plan for those kids to make sure that they are independent and can be advocates for themselves in the classroom and this would not be any reduction in if a student is currently has a one: one on their IEP with a parah this is more if a student has like a two to one or a three correct those we are not reducing anything that has a one toone service or anything like that if a student actually really needs to have a pair of professional with them we will um of course look at that and if we need to hire someone we do that because we cannot reduce their services if they need it but at this point when we look at resource Paras sometimes they go and there's one

094par in there and there's only one student so that's not a way to really look at how we use our resources we need to look at how we group our students how we um utilize them and the training they have we want to make sure that the students are accessing their curriculum and have the utmost um access to the content Specialists and not making sure that a pair of professional is the person sitting beside them teaching them can um I guess while you're at it since um there probably will be some questions about case loads can you explain that piece as well sorry that's okay we knew it'd be a Hot Topic um so case loads case management and case loads mean that they are the people that complete the due process paperwork it is

095not about who's assigned to how many kids they teach teach so that's what that case load management is is who's doing their IEP who's helping on the evaluation who's communicating with the parents and doing the progress report it doesn't mean that oh my goodness now they're not kids aren't going to get service they still get the services they need it's just that we have less number of people doing the paperwork with that and so when we look at those things I know that people are like oh my goodness there you know that case load is so high and how can you do that well when we look and I talk the directors that are in our 916 intermediate there are some schools that are much lower I mean Fridley tiny oh if their Elementary case

096load is between 10 and 12 but then when I look at North St Paul they start um way up at let's see 18 to 20 and then their mids and highs go even from 20 to 26 and um I was um with West Tonka and she's like you're kidding you're going to just having 18 they start at 20 she said that would be wonderful if we could start at 18 and so it seems like a lot and I know it's a change but we fluctuate you know based upon what we need and that's one of the things that we can do is to look at that um and yes they have a few more sets of paperwork to do but it's still not going to change what the kids get in the classroom um about

097I was going to say do you want to know about nurses too while we're here well yeah I was going to I was going to ask about nurses and about the um developmental adapted physical education sure um which one you want to hear about first oh your pick all right so DPE so um the um de adapted fied for students so um we've been doing some investigation and looking at how our programs are run and what other people do as well around us and right now currently our DPE teachers might also be our high school fied teacher or our elementary fied teacher and so when we look at those things and we compare the services that those students are getting and making sure that we're focusing on what they need because they qualify for DPE

098um because you have to qualify for DPE it's not just a oh I think he needs that you have to meet a criteria to have DPE on your IEP and so when we look at that it's um discrepant when we go through Elementary kind of focuses on how do we make sure that they learn the skills so they can be included with their classmates when we move into middle school then it becomes a class date and then they're not really participating with their peers anymore so and then at high school it kind of morphs back and forth and we really need to start focusing on the wck and Leisure of those students and how they're going to be lifelong um participants with that and how they can be physically active and do those things as

099they age I'm just like what do we do like we teach we might teach them how to do botch ball or play Bad Mitten or um how to ride a bike there are kids that don't even know how to ride a bike sometimes and so we look at that and when that continum varies so it's like what is the purpose of date when we're doing trying to include in elementary but then they get segregated in middle school and so if we look at um having more of a d specialist they may have to travel across the district but if you look at that then we can build a program that shows a a Continuum of service it helps us to know what our students are learning all the way across and give us better service

100it also helps them because the elementary mids and highs those fied teachers they see 160 kids a day and so to have those um 10 or five kid kids that they have to pay attention to it's not necessarily by anyone's fault of their own not necessarily their top priority and are they doing their best work and so if we can group them together and give them a case load of 50 students that they really need to pay attention to they become better goal writers they become better service providers and they become more part of that Special Education team for that student so that's the purpose of that restructuring there um as for nurses um we were looking at those pieces as well and having conversations with the lead nurses I'm like what can we do

101and still provide the services we need there are currently some nurses that service two buildings already and the um nurse the LSN is responsible for the delegation of what needs to happen for the care of their students and so they can delegate to their health care specialist which is um technically usually an RN or an LPN or that healthc care assistant which does not have a license and tell them what to do in that office and so the high schools did not have that there was a high school LSN paired usually with a health care specialist and so we've basically re distributed how that is so that they will have the responsibility of one more um building which will then eliminate those four FTE so this the services will still be there there will be

102either a health care specialist or a health care assistant in the office at all times along with the delegation from that LSN and also the pairing of the schools will be close so that if there was something that they really need to be there for they would be able to travel quickly to that um location thank you you're welcome any other questions on this section oh um I did have one question and maybe Kelly you're the person for the compensatory education revenue from 90% to 75% what do we do with that 10% now is is it the same thing that we're going to spend that 25% on what does the district do with that 10% yeah I would we we use it to supplement those either gifted Services El services that we don't get the

103funds for yep okay and so this is an so this is like an offset to spending that's already happening it's just coming from a different bucket correct and do we think that there's any what do we anticipate the impact will be at the different um at the different schools yeah without getting this 15% difference that they normally get Yep this was a a big conversation item in the budget adjustment committees with the principles um they are they use their comped dollars in very different ways and um most I would say use it to round out some of their Staffing positions for example if I have a 0. n and I'm going to round that out with a 1.0 I need to use my compound dollars to do that um so it we initially had this

104on the budget adjustment committee for conversation at to reduce it to 50% um and that felt very much to the principles like we can't make that work um and I I think they're just they're going to they know they're going to have to be creative in this compend dollars there's other positions that for for example um discretionary FTE are assigned are given I shouldn't say given but they're they're given to every school as a you have a discretionary FTE so the conversation was would you prefer to lose comped dollars or discretionary dollars and they certainly preferred the compad dollars versus that full FTE so um it certainly will result in adjustments but they won't be the same adjustments at every school okay and some of the schools um and it's allocated based on um the

105free and reduced count at and the concentrations at different schools but some of the schools have what we're call carryover dollars so we're hoping that they'll have good carryover dollars this year um that can help them keep some of their programs going because those those dollars are restricted so if these are based on free and reduced I mean those are typically students who have less I mean they just have fewer resources right definitionally um and those principles were oh felt comfortable with the um with the reduction in money for what they for what their school's needs were so I don't I don't know that I would say it's it was a comfortable feeling um it was a it was a big conversation and obviously as Dan mentioned for some principles it meant very little and

106for other principles it was a bigger it was a bigger fund um but that the the supplementing those services for free reduced lunch kids is one of the things in the statute that you can use your funds for like El Services is another one in that statute that you can use funds for and the allocation to schools is required at 50% is that a correct statement Dan and we allocate 90% okay so there there's been a little give and take over the years that we've allocated so much more than required um so that was kind of part of the conversation okay and Simi in addition to compensatory Ed there's also the federal title $1 and so those you know based on the what comes into the district those will still get allocated on top of

107this that's a different pot of money okay and that's only for free reduced that is and that again and those title dollars go with those specific correct our Title One schools um Newport Crestview and pman are identified Title One school so from that allocation that we received they would receive their portion of those dollars as well this is a separate P all right so um I guess we have like five other sections so I'm not sure if we need to do the consensus every time is there any I guess any other questions or any other concerns that people have on this section all right so we'll move to Elementary all right um so this slide indicates the elementary these will impact Elementary staff and programs um the first item on the list is to move

108band and Orchestra to begin in the Middle School currently Orchestra begins in fourth grade and band begins in fifth grade um this 7.2 FTE the number listed is for 7.2 FTE so that isn't the full Elementary we would look at restructuring how we offer sixth grade music and is there ways that we can enhance the sixth grade program during the school day with with four of the FTE and having those allocated to our middle schools and enhance that sixth grade year so hopefully that can help um help with our music programming this is in no way in no way an indication of our feelings for Fine Arts um there was in our conversations there's also a piece of the elementary music program where kids are pulled from the classroom and they're pulled at different times

109and so the instruction time that's that's missed for those kids happens to you know if if Dan and Julie and I are in the same class and I go to band at this time and then I come back I'm a new student in that class again and then Dan goes at a different time and so in conversations with the principes that was something that we really wanted to either look at how can we address that and how do we make sure our kids are staying for that necessary instruction in the classroom and still have opportunities that in Fine Arts so we certainly will um work with our music program and how can we provide services we currently do it different with choir and so we have a model that we could look at but we

110want to make sure the voices are at the table to have that conversation and and like I said we do plan to look at how do we do sixth grade different um perhaps smaller Ensemble opportunities or pull out during band for individual lessons with those additional FTE so the second item on the list is to eliminate the reading recovery program um we would offer that we would restructure our reading specialist positions however currently there's 32 FTE coded to reading Specialists or reading recovery and there are eight FTE recoded to reading specialist and so we would instead of having 32 we would have 16 FTE and all of them would be devoted to reading specialist so every school would be allocated a reading specialist list but there would not be the reading recovery program at schools

111um we also know this is an important intervention for our first graders and so we would commit to what does our intervention process look like and what can we do to strengthen our core instruction along with then providing intervention for all students um throughout our programming in in literacy and Elementary the third opt or the third item listed is to eliminate the third grade section at Gateway this is a um I don't know what the right way it's one of those things that happen naturally because of covid we were not able to do coat testing um there were districts that did it remotely which we found very interesting that students were sitting at home doing their Kat tests um but we made the decision not to test remotely and so um we don't have an

112identifier for our third grade section in Gateway next year so this was a natural um thing that would follow off the list because we don't have that opportunity our gifted coordinator is still working with all of our elementary schools and what does our clustering program look like uh we also for the first time tried to use the Hope scale which is a talent development scale for our teachers in second grade to to potentially identify those students that have that um gifted Ed potential and so we did try something this year to make sure that we had some identification for those students and those families and they and we'll make sure there's some clust ing happening in their third grade classrooms but there won't be that pull out or Standalone section of Gateway um we proposed

113to reduce the elementary administrative tosa or teacher on special assignment we have a 1.0 tosa that I believe is shared between two schools currently um and so we would look at what does that mean for our elementary administrative support or she acts as an assistant principal and so um the assistant superintendent and and Julie will be sitting down and what is that mean now for our allocations of our elementary schools and the last item is to restructure how office assistant and media clerk hours are allocated to our elementary schools Chris Blackburn bless her heart has a very complicated formula and she takes enrollment and all these things and allocates hours to a building and the principal decides how to use those hours between the media Clerk and the office um assistant so and they will

114be reducing that by 44 hours per day across all the elementary schools so that there will be coverage it'll be staggered in a different way than it has been um I will say this was in lie of a couple other things that we talked about was in Lee of a 10-month contract or elimination of media clerks and so we talked about all three of those that would impact that Office Professional and media clerk group and that is the summary of the elementary adjustment recommendations to give you a sense of things that we talked about um because there was quite a bit talked about in elementary looking at eliminating buses for our choice programs um phasing out the Gateway program realigning our schools so we would have a Kindergarten Center or kindergarten centers and then a

115a K2 and 35 buildings so you could consolidate Staffing and support um and increasing class sizes we did not increase class sizes at the elementary level so for the office assistant and media clerks um 44 hours a day is that still all year or is that a 10-month period as well it' be whatever they're structured at now some are 10 months some are some are 12 months okay I think the key thing there is it's across our 16 sites so I mean quickly if you do the math it's you know if all sites are even in terms of enrollment it would be about 3 hours which we know they're not even but with the Gateway third grade section so we were able to test second graders last year yep we're not able to test second

116graders next year so or this year sorry so next year Gateway will just be fourth and fifth graders because there's no third graders who will have tested in the year after that will current second graders who are who are not being tested this year will they have an opportunity to be tested and enter Gateway in fourth grade so that or will there just be an empty section that travels we talked about that and currently in our assessment budget we have two years of Kat budgeted for next year so second and third graders okay so this is just a onee next year's third graders there would be no third grade section but there would be theoretically a fourth grade section the Following fall correct okay with um Bandon Orchestra I I don't know what the choir

117model is but one of the um opportunities when band is available in elementary schools there's that opportunity to try it before you're selecting it as an elective and we know electives get tight so could you fill me in on that choir model is that an opportunity that would be like a before after school yeah and and and you bring up a good point point it's you know everybody has a mouth and can talk or you know those that have a mouth and can talk are and might be interested in choir but you don't know about band and different instruments and stuff so um there's there it's run through Community Ed I believe choir uh choir is a scheduled D contract Schedule D Schedule C so it is outside of the regular school day and so

118um students can sign up for choir they go after you know they have a concert typically around the December January time and in March so there opportunities for performance um and you know depending upon the size of the choir I mean our choirs can range from 80 or 90 students um to you know much lower in our small schools but that is all done outside of the regular school day some schools may offer it before school starts and some offer it um at the end of the day I think what's important in that is how do we and and I'm I'm making an assumption that those 4ft would end up at the middle school so I think to Julie's Point making sure that our music people are involved and now how can we creatively provide

119these opportunities for our students maybe it is that year later maybe it's maybe it's in the spring I don't know um I think we do want to make sure that we stick true to the pulling out of the instructional day because that was something that the principles really have had a lot of conversation about um as as we all know standards have increased rigor and just having kids being pulled at various times is is a is a stressful classroom situation and so but I do want to bring our band and Orchestra folks to the table to say what does this mean now and and how can we work together um to still provide this for our students and what does that look like so and Kelly I would share too that um this is not

120a right now conversation I can tell you that being an elementary principal and assistant superintendent we have continued to have this conversation about Bandon Orchestra at the elementary level I think it's important to note that when we look at the FTE right now for Bandon Orchestra across Elementary I believe we're talking above 11 11.2 or maybe plus and so remember it's some reduction so we're talking about 7.2 FTE of reduction but then what we didn't reduce we would move to provide a more robust program of uh band and Orchestra once students get to sixth grade um I can tell you that in our conversations like I said this has been going on for a while working with some of our leaders um in band and Orchestra we know that there are other Metro districts that

121have a similar model and that I think what we have to look at is what things do we need to put in place shift rep prioritize so that our outcome for students Remains the Same and I believe that we had that ability to do that I have two questions well at least one question and a comment or maybe they're both comments I don't know right it's a workshop Katie so I know when we talked about Bandon Orchestra last time there was some conversation about maybe a partnership with Community ad um for like a before school or after school I mean is that still something that's could be on the table so that kids could do the try it before I would say that um even when we have uh fourth and fifth grade band and

122Orchestra we have students who have started in first grade or younger and so we already are our directors are already um in those situations and so what we don't want to do is to jump to what our options or Solutions are and having been in another district with this very same conversation the conversation was about could Community Education provide that service and the answer is absolutely they could um because they can provide that kind of programming but then we have to remember there's fees um yes they have a sliding scale and I think when we think about Equity we want to make sure that students have access to programs so it is certainly an option I would just say that that would be a conversation I think uh we want our band directors and Orchestra

123directors to have together about what are some solutions that we can do and how could we work with Community ad okay and the next thing is I I understand the $1 million savings but the reading recovery is a hard one um because I know that when we talk about kids being able to read by you know third grader and all of those things I just I feel like this is a really hard one to take away from those little kids I mean we're talking about all the things that we're trying to do we want to get them back to school full-time first because we realize that these are the ones that need to be in there and so I mean I understand the $1 million savings but I do have to say that that is

124one that is really hard for me to swallow with and I agree yeah I agree with that because with Co and the and the bipac students who and our our um what do you call it our deficit uh in in education how the students fall below color fall below this is going to affect them great more greatly achievement Gap that's what I was trying to say so um I think this will affect them even more and we'll have even a greater deficit in terms of um achievement Gap so this is really hard to uh to look at I have a question about these about these um hear me um positions are they teachers or are they they are full-time teachers they're in the teaching contract they're reading recovery teachers so and Julie correct me if

125I'm wrong but reading recovery teacher serves four students at a time so reading recovery is a one-on-one program and it's only for first graders and so there's always a lot of confusion because people say my child's in Reading recovery when really they're in a group of three to five students that's a literacy or a reading intervention reading recovery is designed and specialized for first grade students um there's a criteria um as a school district we have done different things over time and so we have some initial criteria for round one students there are actually each teacher can serve four students um halftime so it's a halftime person round one and then round two if you're a full-time teacher so if you teach reading recovery all day typically that means you will see seven students throughout

126the day the actual reading recovery session itself is a half hour um there's time built in for planning because this is very specialized um literacy instruction um so someone like our reading specialist when we think about our reading specialist they are reading Specialists half time typically that includes coaching and supporting literacy practices in the school and then the other portion of their job is reading recovery and typically that's four students what happens round two which occurs in February so we've gone about 30 plus weeks we hit round two in February and at that point students can re-qualify and again it's only first grade and depending upon what the needs are um round two we look at the needs across the district and prior to about 10 years ago we just kept the allocation equal and

127even in every school and so round two we've actually made shifts with teachers that have to go where there are greater needs um but there is certainly um a criteria for students to get into reading recovery I will say that um sometimes students that we think may qualify they don't um there certainly is a commitment from home support you know we have to have parents that are going to be reading with their children that is one of the things that they sign off on um and I think our real question goes back to that one oneon-one intervention um and Kelly has talked about the strength of a a strong core I want to remind us all that um and I can say this because I'm the dinosaur in the district but we had gone probably

1288 to 10 years with very little support to our Core Curriculum resources um reviewing our curriculum re review cycle and so it is important that we make sure that the foundation of our work is our core instruction and then as we talk about mtss our multi-tiered levels of support we talk about read recovery and right now what we've invested in is we've invested heavily in a first grade intervention um that certainly has an impact on students and literacy but that's kind of where the intervention stops first grade and so I think I've accurately described reading recovery um you can probably tell that I'm a little bit passionate about it but I also need everyone to understand that it is a onetoone setting with students and and I think I would just offer the question are

129we at a point when we look at our District budget that we can continue to afford that one-on-one intervention and so it is a matter of cost benefit to students and the cost that we actually pay um to make that happen so with so by reducing or eliminating reading recovery the idea is that then classroom teachers would more more money would go into supporting classroom teachers supporting reading because I you know I'm I'm in agreement with Sharon and Katie that I I feel like I mean I'm a reader I love books I I feel like reading is one of the most important things we can teach kids and inculcate a love of reading for them and so I I worry a little bit that this will have a negative impact on not just you know

130in elementary school but you know you get to High School social studies there's just a lot of reading or high school English or whatever and then it's just um you know sort of the the negative impact is kind of they can't recover and so I just and simy we could certainly we have all that data um our Rea person John Lindner has all that data about that ability to show growth and move um what students look like in fifth grade and what they look like as they've gone through our system we can track all that information so that's certainly something we can bring back to the board in terms of specific data um but I think simy what we're saying is that we want to make our regular Ed teachers and our core teachers the

131best literacy teachers um because you know we're talking about reading recovery but the next bigger thing and more expensive is special education and so we owe it to have the best core instruction to eliminate dig our heels in and not have students qualifying for special education so the idea is that we spend more money in this pot to prevent them from going to more expensive pots more expensive needing more expensive interventions later on I would hope that would always be our goal to not label kids as disabled and to intervene as early as we can to make sure that that's not occurring um in terms of an invested in the classroom I think the investment that the budget process has committed to is that um we're not looking at increasing class sizes um at the

132elementary level that was not something that was put on the list and the other item that was discussed that does have an impact on interventions is that discretionary FTE and many te many principles use that discretionary FTE as an interventionist at their sites and so that position like those were the three kind of big big items out of the elementary was reading recovery increasing class sizes by one and losing a discretionary FTE and so um I I think we can all agree that none of these are great decisions but we're at this point to have this conversation and so um to Julie's point I think it's an expensive it's a very it's a very good program and we have extremely talented teachers in our schools that are doing the program I think I would offer

133imagine that Talent working with a little bit larger group as an interventionist or a reading specialist um imagine that Talent working with our teachers and helping them increase their core knowledge so I you know I totally understand the reservations around it I my heart goes out to reading you know reading recovery graduates and everyone that has been through the program um but to Julie's point it was kind of those three things that we went round and round about in our conversations and so this would be then a million dollars a year in perpetuity so once we end this we end this yes the other oh go ahead no I was just going to add you know the other thing that impacts us if we were to just say we're cutting reading recovery that would have

134been 24 FTE so you know it's complicated and I you know principles would tell me I'm probably wrong but right now we only had that 8 FTE assigned to reading specialist and so it is an increase but it's really not because we're decreasing that program the other thing that I've been thinking about though is when we increase the atps levy we also increased instructional coaches in our schools too and so the and you know unfortunately Co kind of stopped that that train from moving where it needed to go as far as true instructional coaching but they're doing a fantastic job and many of them are reading recovery trained or have a passion for literacy too so with all of those factors I think that's what came into play in selecting this one as the as

135the item for elementary one of the items and simy you should know too that our reading recovery teachers um when Kelly talks about that high level of training they by far have the biggest hats when it comes to the literacy training um the rigor that they undergo in the initial training uh they go behind the glass there's critique by their colleagues of how they're Interac in with students and so all of those things are in place in terms of solid professional development my my concern is we're letting these people go if they're so good you know no I keep in mind that we're not letting them go they're part of the teacher bargaining group okay and so um for those individuals who've been in the district U many of them are very veteran uh reading

136recovery teachers they would have a spot and like Kelly is saying that they would be backfilled into a classroom deping they would become a mandat one one is very expensive program and this makes much more sense and and that makes me feel better that they'll be in the classroom you know so um thank you and then it kind of breaks my heart to see the Bandon Orchestra on the list my kids are there and I get it you know and I I especially get that if you're going to get rid of reading intervention you can't you know Bandon orchest it's hard to keep a sort of nice to have when you don't have a you know a more critical function um but uh I did I did want to ask when um if you do

137or if you can talk with um staff or with um other school districts who do start in middle school I did get an email from um a seventh grader who was worried that if we wait until middle school kids will pick choir over band or orchestra because um picking an instrument or picking up an instrument will just be very challenging but you know everybody's been singing since they were you know two years old and so um it would just be helpful to know for districts that start like do they have kind of the same spread of what kids choose to do absolutely I can um you know Dr Lawrence our secondary curriculum coordinator is actually extremely passionate in music and and is a musician herself so I can certainly have her do some research around

138that at what happens at middle schools I'm was going to bring that same thing as Simi as far as the music program I would just really like to see if we can hopefully be able to and I know you're going to be meeting with the band Orchestra and I know it's really disruptive you know them moving in and out during the classroom but if we can try to do something similar to the choir program um that would be great so because I know that those early years are so important to um just like learning learning a language young is so important um to be able to learn instruments um young singing is something you can pick up later where you know abandoned Orchestra starting the younger the better so I'd like to see that and

139then um just on the reading recovery I had a child that went through Reading recovery and such an amazing program um I'd say what she learnning that was immeasurable um i' I'd hate to see this program be lost um especially with like Sharon was saying with covid our kids are already behind especially those younger you know kindergarten first graders have really missed this learning to read portion with um hybrid and then distance learning I really don't like to see this go but I I guess what I'd like to know is what is the difference exactly so if we're taking the 16 reading recovery full-time positions and then having eight of the reading the restruc of reading Specialists are those kids that normally would get reading recovery are they just going to be getting that in

140the classroom extra help or will they be pulled out at all to get some of that extra help that's all going to be part of that conversation regarding the mtss programming how do we build that multi-tiered system of support some certainly will happen in small groups in the classroom but that that doesn't take a pull out of a student off the table um and that's what the conversation will have to be can I just add to Kelly yeah so you know as a former Elementary principal so remember reading recovery is not the only reading intervention we have at the elementary level as Julie said it is only for first grade students and so we at Wood Elementary we had C gardeners second third fourth fifth graders that also needed reading intervention and the classroom teachers

141did an amazing job providing that for them or the discretionary teacher had l which is level literacy instruction which is small group reading intervention so there are several other things that schools do so I just want to make sure that's clear that it's just for first grade and schools do lots of other things for reading intervention including title one so several of our schools have Title One teachers as well that teach reading instruction and intervention so do we we know um how many I guess districts that we compare ourselves to whether or not they have reading recovery or whether they do something similar to what we're kind of proposing with this change most districts have that multi-tiered system of support where that level you know that second level of reading intervention that happens within either

142the classroom or or an interventionist I don't want to misspeak on this I I do believe that there's one Metro District that has reading recovery in in addition to us I but I don't know that as as as as absolute but I will certainly get that answer um and get that out okay so not the majority necessarily no and I guess you know one thing of course as we're looking through the list and none of them are easy right none of these decisions are easy but um especially since this is a larger amount as Kelly was mentioning you know know if we decide that this isn't the way we want to go then we need to find another million dollars so um and like that isn't saying we need to do this but um just

143obviously keeping that in the back of our minds but um but thank you very much for letting us know obviously about the tearing um interventions so that I mean I guess and because I had a lot of the questions that people were asking as well and that I guess that gives me some comfort and I also have been through some training and they said exactly what you were saying is that the better U or the more training I guess the more competencies that that classroom teacher has it's just exponentially beneficial for everyone so um I can see how that um would be beneficial and like I said it'll just lift all of our kids up so and hopefully not leave any behind like Sharon was mentioning obviously and we have other interventions for that so

144all right um any other questions on the elementary portion all right let's I'm sorry well I know they get more difficult right um we we all would sorry I'm okay with uh doing away with reading recovery but um if we had those all those teachers doing uh reading with groups that's the ideal you know I don't know if Eight's going to be enough there'll be 16 there'll be 16 okay there'll be 16 reading Specialists instead of eight that makes me feel much better thank you how are the teachers doing just who are doing reading recovery during distance it varies so some were put into like vaa classrooms though so some are not in Reading recovery this year um some are providing it virtually it it it does vary depending upon available staff because of the

145VA Staffing this year so to say that we're implementing it as we normally would this year is it's not the case we're not doing it as we normally would so there are some schools or some first graders who aren't getting reading recovery because that reading recovery teach for that school has been reallocated to teach distance yes okay and the same holds too for a reading Specialists I know two reading Specialists by name who have been redeployed to be classroom teachers so they've taken off their highly trained reading recovery reading Specialists had and now they're in the classrooms um just because of the Staffing so what's going to happen now that kids elementary kids are going back full-time will they be able to resume some reading recovery or are those teachers already obligated to other things

146now boy I I I'm looking at Dr brookens I think you know we we've talked talked about the staff and we have staff that's committed to vaa we have families who are committed to vaa and that will continue um but I know they're looking at those students coming back so the current plan is to remain the uh uh with the structure that has been put in place uh as we have transition uh with a different models so students who are in bla we want to maintain the uh teaching staff that are working with those students and not pull them because that begins to kind of crumble the the foundation that has been established since August and so we just want to uh like I said maintain the course that we are currently on and then

147as students transition back into the building and you know we catch our breath then those core teachers will have the responsibility of providing uh that additional intervention time and and small group time but it would not be the reading re uh reading recovery teachers all right uh Middle School Middle School adjustments um all of these will definitely have impact on programming Staffing at our middle schools we are looking to eliminate our school resource officers at our Middle School currently we have two that are shared between all the four middle schools um eliminating our welcome desk greeter position that's a standalone support position right now and we would look at building a schedule where the office Personnel would rotate and cover that um position we would look at the um community pool that's located at noas

148fronce and I this is in this middle school section because the Woodbury Middle School pool we would look at closing that for a year which would impact our our PE programming at Woodbury Middle School um the next item is one that's happening naturally it's that kind of that elimination of the third grade section the the dissolvement of the EBD program at Woodbury Middle School this was an enrollment decrease and talking to miss Lopez the principal she had two remaining students I believe and she was able to look at how she could bet how she could serve those students and not a standalone EBD program um we did in our secondaries you'll see this in the high school as well proposed to increase class size um so average class sizes at our middle level would go

149from 32 to 33 and both at our middle school and high school we are looking at restructuring our media centers and um having media clerks that would be there for the day-to-day tasks um but look at Media Center oversight including Technology support and all of those that would run through a a district supported mainly TLS and what does that look like so um you'll see that on the high school as well you will notice this is a different um price tag because we currently don't have media clerks they were an elimination a few years ago at the middle level so we would bring back media clerks at our middle schools um but eliminate media Specialists so um this was one that we know we're going to have to do a lot of planning as well

150and getting people at the table of what does that mean and look like so I want to make a note um and it's not self- serving at all but for those of you that remember our middle schools went through a very rigorous schedule change a year ago and resulted in a lot of ela math and Spanish in particular um FTE so it made wiggle room or adjustments a little more difficult with our Middle School schedule so um that is I just wanted to point that out that there was quite a few reductions during that process to our middle level ft Staffing I believe they went from eight8 period or 8 period day to six period day so um that process did take place and was implemented and so they they just didn't have a lot

151of room to do Staffing creatively so other things we considered for middle school was looking at the walking Zone um going from one and a half to two miles looking at our Avid coordinators our gifted aded coaches um and then again that discretionary ft also is for middle schools and so none of those things um rise to the level of making making the Middle School list um can you talk a little bit about average class sizes so because I see here you'd increase average class size from 32 to 33 and I know I'm not the only parent in the district who's had a kid in the middle school with 37 38 39 kids in a classroom so um how how does that work and how you know what what will what is ultimately like what

152ultimately happens as a result of this increased um class size so Dan and I made a bet that you were gonna ask that question simy um no I I totally hear what you're saying and in secondaries High School in particular but even in Middle School um you know schedules are built on what students need and what students want and so when we say average we certainly know there's going to be some that are above um but there's also some that are below and those are the you know a schedule is an extremely difficult puzzle as you saw when we were trying to figure out how do we do virtual with our schedules um and so it's never a perfect 32 or 33 we do try to put limits on how far above the cap we

153go but um it is it's that decision of trying do I want to run AP Computer Science at 21 that means that my um regular computer science might be at 35 then because I ran that one at 21 so it's a it's a conversation that the assistant principles who are scheduling have to have with the principal and I know campus does have caps and so anytime it goes above a cap it's a it's a conscious choice to to choose to say you know what we're going to go above that cap for this class um but it's I wish it was a if someone could figure out how to perfectly schedule secondary schools you'd make a lot of money Kelly do you know what that cap is in Camp the cap cap number is that hard

154cap that um the I Christine do you know how how is there a hard cap on how much they'll go above the cap is that what you're asking Louise yes yeah just like Kelly said it depends on the class I mean we have had some classes 35 to 37 we try not to do that but it depends on usually those are the core classes English science social studies those classes um just based on the schedule but we don't have a hard and fast rule but we don't want to go that high okay so when you mentioned that there sometime is a a a flag something that's a conscious decision at a certain number that do we know where that trigger is well it you you'll set it at that 33 so you'll set your clap

155sizes at 33 when you run your the schedule wizard it puts students in there and it will either stop them from going in there or if they go in there that section is flagged to say like this one is above 33 look at me and kind of are these kids that we can do that with and those are still site decisions that's a scheduling that's a and that's school to school class to class um you know there's certainly factors that come into play with with um for example AP classes intrinsically motivated Learners you know is it is it different class management things and so there's lots of things that come into that and that goes into making classes lower too um you know some of our reading Support classes at our high school aren't at

15632 or 33 they're at 20 so and there's purpose around that too so I have a question about the pools don't they have to take swimming in middle school or is that not a thing anymore well there is not a standard from the state of Minnesota that says You must learn how to do the front crawl so um we we utilize that as a teaching station to reach the general standards that are provided by the state but um there isn't a specific requirement from the state standards now that doesn't mean that the PE classes don't have that as a requirement for their classes as kind of like it's kind of like turning in a research paper or this or that it's like you we need to swim to reach this standard this is the activity

157we've chosen to get there so I thought yeah because when we were talking about gosh and one of the long-term things there was something about pools that came up and I thought Mike at that time had said well we have to have a pool in the middle school because it was a requirement so that's why I was just and we have it as a requirement within our district now requirement within our district is kind of like we've decided this is what we're going to do um um the other pools at our middle schools are competition pools and so that's why those those couldn't close so then if you're so presumably this year in the middle schools we're not doing any swim instruction correct at Woodbury Middle School no no I mean like this current oh

158like back before right so there's no and so then next year at Woodbury Middle School there's also going to be no swim instructions so there will be two years of children going through Woodbury Middle School that will not have swim they won't have swim for two years they'll only get swim one year you know either when they were in sixth grade or when they'll be in eighth okay um I have a question um could you move that from all year to half a year and would it be the same savings or not do a year and half a year on each it would not be the same savings so this was an assumption of the whole year um and we certainly can look at that I do you have the numbers for one pool Dan

159so just have oh yeah that would make sense um you know the nois one is the community pool that Community aded uses for scheduling and so if we were to take Woodbury Middle School pool off of that it would cut that in half that 168 and half so 84,000 would be that number some so would Lake continue to have swimming and the other middle schools wouldn't and how that work I you know that's the plan right now um Miss Lopez met with the PE teachers this week and had a conversation about it and they're very passionate about it of course um it doesn't mean that it's kind of like the they'll Lake will choose the swimming activity to get to a standard on large body muscle movement and um Woodbury Middle School maybe will choose

160u basketball like there there's different ways to get to the standard um and I was super vague in that so but it's kind of like when I choose the book you know I choose this book to get to this standard but this school chooses this book to get to that standard so I know it's a bigger difference than just the title of the book um and there's a lot of middle school kids who are either really excited about this or really sad about this so it's one of those things I was a middle school P teacher and there are kids that lived to be able to get in the pool and learn how to swim and then there are kids that there was no way shape or form they were going to put a swimsuit

161on and get in that pool so it's a catch 22 in Middle School PE for with the pools um can I ask a question about the school resource officers and how they're used in the middle school so I I'm presuming most of us are grew up in a time where we didn't have school resource officers in the schools so um and certainly I I didn't even uh I don't know how they're used in the middle school and how will this influence like discipline or other um things that the middle school has going on um I I'm I'm looking at Christine I don't know if you want to take it but I would you know there's they share between for example Cottage Grove and ultman share a resource officer Point 5.5 in Lake and and Woodbury

162obviously um our goal with our resource officers is relationship building and getting out there and supervising students but getting to know them it rises to the level of involvement when it's either a family chooses that or an administrator asks for them to become involved but um in talking with our principal there's been few cases discipline wise that they have needed the backup that doesn't mean that kids haven't gone to Resource officers and things like that they certainly are a valued part of the community but our in general our Middle School principles felt like that this was something that they could handle the things that were happening and in the event of an emergency they certainly have access to other resources um and we you will not see this item on our high schools and we

163we kept our resource officers in our high school is knowing the importance of of the next phase is adulthood and so just the S the real importance of building those relationships in in high school too so I don't know if there's anything you going to add I know yeah I would just reiterate um we don't want our school resource officers managing discipline in our schools that is really the position of our assistant principles and our principles and so like Kelly said only if it leads to an extreme situation where they get involved with that so related to discipline I don't know that there'll be much of an impact in addition to even this year we've had conversations with our police departments about now that they're not in our schools cuz kids aren't there how will

164we access you if we need you and and so they know that they're on call and when a school calls they are very good about responding and coming to help so um that that really isn't a concern of the middle school principls I have a question about this letter from Cottage grow is it possible to cut these if we have a contract yes the contract with cage Grove just calls for 90day um notice okay the contract with Woodberry will calls for a notice by March 31st and we have to keep them until Jan 1st or December 31st it's just the way it was written back 2008 but so we can't really realize all those Savings in the first year because we'll have to pay for the first six months yeah three months won't won't be

165too bad you're right all right um I think we can move to the high school all right um these recommendations will definitely impact programming and services at our high schools our High School uh is one that came up with a few enhancements so Revenue generators um we are looking at increasing our activities fees and our parking fees for our students um this is when we talked about various amounts and there was a lot of conversation that this puts us a little bit more in line with schools like us as far as what we're charging for activities fees and our parking fees are still well below what many schools are charging um for parking believe it or not as expensive as parking is but um the third Revenue enhancement is we you've been hearing about it

166but the Soco online and uh we have brought in our um Kelsey Nash who is working on the framework for that and we're confident that a year from the this fall or this fall we'll be prepared to roll that out so that students can enroll in it from outside our district in the fall of 2022 and so that number you see there in year two of $100,000 reflects an assumption of 50 students from outside the district enrolling in our online courses and so um and that could be more um or less but we're we're really confident that we are people want to come to South Washington County schools and we're hoping that this is um something that not only our students will be able to take advantage of but students that that want to attend

167with us um the reductions for the high school the activities directors are going to work with our principles to reduce their athletic and activities budgets by 5% for one year this will involve moving around uniform uh renewals and things like that we left it a little wide open because of the things around safety in uniforms for example football helmets and making sure that those are refreshed and and when they needed to but um they were pretty confident that they would be able to get to that 5% for one year the second one the high school teachers will will put together a a team a steering committee to have a conversation about piloting the opportunity when a teacher needs to be out um that there wouldn't be a specific sub for that classroom and the teacher

168would post things in school a similar to the model that we have now now we know this won't work for every class we know um for example we're some of the things we've thrown out are like our senior AP classes or our senior IB classes um things that are pretty specialized that which a substitute comes in it's difficult for them to cover the content or materials and so um we definitely would want to get teachers to the table and talk about this 350,000 you see here is not the entire High School sub budget um it's a it's a smaller portion of it and this was the principals are willing to give it a shot um and we're hoping to get teachers to the table to have a conversation about yep it'll work for this class

169and this class so it's very prescripted and an agreement it's not something that's put upon someone um the third one is to offer some of our classes uh virtually across our schools so the old I think the ATV like when if you were many of us that took our masters when you were here and the other cohort was at at a different school and you were on the big TVs um and so how can we try to do that just across our sites so these would be set classes during the day but it would be an ATV um or the the streaming in I'm I'm using I'm dating myself I might as well say VHS while I'm at it um what this has potential to do is offer some of the class so this has

170potential to get some of those smaller classes up to a a different CL cap size um it also has the op option to offer some of those classes that normally would have crashed so if if there was only 15 students that wanted um you know basket weaving and there was 15 other students at EAS idge though we could maybe combine those 15 students for a section of basket weaving so um we're hopeful that this can work that is also then travel time that may we do have staff that travel now and can they not travel and share time between schools in a different way so just being creative about how we do that the increased High School average class sizes from 33.5 to 34.5 um is on here and the again the media specialist and

171looking at the media center um so having those conversations with our middle schools and our high schools and then a reduction in time for the AVID coordinator that this puts them in line with our Middle School Avid coordinators are Point 2 of a teaching of a teaching position and this would reduce that from0 5 to0 2 to um this isn't the Avid elective so this is AVID coordination of the program so those duties need to happen and so we'll have to have conversations about who does those duties now is it um the achievement integration department is it teaching and learning how can we support making sure we stay on top of that National certification um that we're all very proud of with Avid so those are the high school adjustment recommendations are you going to

172talk about things that you didn't do sure um I some other things that we had conversations around the high school the discretionary FTE was a big one as well at the high school we talked about varying amounts so we we looked at $10 increases $20 increases $30 increases and so on um we talked about eliminating welcome desk readers but it was a little more difficult with the way that our high schools are laid out to be able to pull that off we talked about eliminating Avid coordinators and so um the compromise was to look at reduction in some FTE and our bigger one we had a lot of conversation about was reducing counseling positions um and knowing that we added counselors for a reason and so um and also coming off of this pandemic and

173just realizing that that that's that's not the decision we wanted to make at this time so um those were some of the big ones that we talked about for high school it's good to know you're not reducing counselors um I have a question with establishing the S washco online is that going to be eliminating or gradually eliminating the Northstar classes or how does that work um so we can't ever tell students they can't go outside the district um so even if students choose to register with Northern Star online they still have that right but we're hopeful that the appeal of of being with our teachers and especially students who are just trying it you know there's that connection to the school potentially um so we're hopeful that that's the result but we can't ever tell

174families and students you cannot register with them do you think they'll have um more variety of classes to choose from by having these um sashco online classes than we would if we didn't have that um you know Christine you have a little more example or a little more experience with Northern Star they're a full School uh I do think we'll have some unique offerings when it comes to like AP and things like that but um right I think um northern star might have more classes but I think the draw for our students is they're going to have their teachers that they're familiar with um in our school so they can you know go get extra help or whatever they may need so we're hoping to keep them in our district taking those classes so that

175our they can get to know the teachers and they have more access to them whereas Northern are online you don't have necessarily a person that you know or that you're familiar with so we're hoping to provide better service for our students what was the goal for that to be more of a first hour last hour thing so they could come earlier leave later or will there be a place if they have a midday class where they can do it that is definitely the goal in student schedules to have that first hour or last hour um that definitely is beneficial for everybody because as you know and and in the long range facility conversations they do they can stay on campus if they have that open section for that online class and so providing a space

176for students gets to be difficult if there's a lot so I have a couple comments questions um the class size of 33.5 and 40 34.5 why do we have a05 for I it's averages so when we look at that's how the finance department allocates FTE is that average so cuz I'm thinking when you're plugging them in because the way you describe Middle School you're like it shuts off at how do you shut off the right are they taking like half the CL they share the desk no like I just yeah cuz when you the way I guess if you wouldn't have described it that way for the middle school I wouldn't have probably I didn't have that question before but I'm like how does it I would guess that in Infinite Campus as that cap

177that I talked about when you're scheduling I would venture to Guess that high school's put 35 in as the cap for that school okay or for that class and then um the other one was about the the courses virtually um and it's more of just I like that idea um even if it wasn't a budget cut idea I like that idea I know that we've had a lot of kids talking about why can't I go to this school and take this class because they want to be able to do those things so I mean the fact that we're able to offer different things and I think what we did with um with the hybrid this year where the the teacher on like a screen then they can push the the computer out into the hallway

178and a student can still go out there and have like oneon-one I mean I think if one good thing came out of this Co stuff it's this this thinking of being able to do those um those virtually and just give these kids more options and more classes and then you know we may not have to get eliminate as many um things because we only have 10 kids sign up because I mean if we have 10 kids at all three sites you've got a classroom them and Katie I think that combined with talking about the virtual um soash Co online if we go back to our long range facility planning and we talk about you know the plan that we were at last March where we talked about a fourth High School what if we had

179a virtual enough students virtually that we wouldn't have to build another brick and mortar building well yeah and that we've had so many kids that have chosen the VA option and for them now I'm sure some of them may have had like a what am I going to do next year because it may not be an option but now we're you know we're basically somehow keeping some of that options open to them and we won't lose potentially kids that liked the online school that have to go somewhere else because we don't offer it right there is there is a difference between sashco online and virtual class you know that sashco online is that student who can choose the time and space for that learning so it's not designated an hour 1 2 3 4 five

180or six the virtual class is that where to your point of what's Happening Now with that synchronous or real-time learning so the teachers in front of them teaching it and it's not specifically first or last hour it could be second hour could be third hour so yep I totally agree that I think that staff were ner staff like to be really good at what they do and so I think they were nervous to try to do these things when we talked about them before but now that they had to do them because of circumstances I think they I'm hopeful that they'll feel more comfortable um with these options so so is the idea behind sashco online that it we eventually become sort of like U like Minon or something that's offering their own classes diplomas

181yep okay but we're going to be better yes that's definitely the model um they've done a good job over there and so we certainly reach out to them for resources quite a bit so and then with students so for sashco online and feel free to tell me to be quiet um but for students who would want to take like there's six periods in a day if a student wants to fit in a seventh class is this would be an opportunity to do so so if we do that as a district we aren't getting funding for that hour so then the student would have to pay to do that well I or I'm leaning on Christine because I know she's had this conversation because it's happened and hasn't happened and right so we can't go over

182the six classes as Kelly said we don't get funding and then then it then it's how do we play for the teachers to teach that class if we're not getting the funding for the students to take that so that's where it comes in and then we can talk to Trish Trio more in student information but um full-time for our students is six classes okay the other thing that could happen eventually is as we're looking at our our Alternative Learning Program is looking at it to be an Alternative Learning Center and if a student enrolls in an online class through the center then there there is the 0.19 that's attached to them so that additional funding so it's 1.19 I believe that would come with the student who's at an alternative Center versus because they know

183that there's that before and after school component to Credit Recovery type of stuff zero hour is scheduled within that teacher schedule so there isn't a cost to that teacher because we lose it somewhere else so we lose those seats in in another part of the day and I think you're having a conversation about zero hour right we're not sure how much longer we can provide Zero Hour simply because of the we we can't afford to lose the spots during the school day for students so the um the $20 activity fee is that the the M like everything you know like hockey and or is it just activities including all it chess club okay hockey everything do we provide um financial assistance for families that they okay fighting scale yes and so then that would so

184then those families would not be impacted they would not be impacted okay all right we will move on all right I um our next two items are those bigger items and and in the event the board does go forward with these there's certainly other actions that need to take place in terms of resolutions and things like that so I'm going to turn it over to Julie to introduce the the school closing option that we've been talking about I know these conversations uh aren't getting any easier and school closures are definitely difficult yesterday Dr brookens and I addressed the Crestview staff face to face to share the information about Crestview being the elementary school that was being proposed to close um as I shared just minutes ago um I talked about that long range facility planning

185that got paused in March um if people were paying attention at that point we had some drafts on the table talking about moving our elementary schools that were significantly under capacity at the southern end of our district doing a three schools into two a two schools into one so I think for the community to understand that the conversations around the sizes of our schools have been occurring ing what some may not realize is that we have 16 elementary schools that vary in size from 250 students to 800 students and all the way up to nine or it has been up to a thousand with Liberty Bridge the difficulties and the complexities um one couldn't begin to imagine until you actually are doing the scheduling if we simply took Specialists music media art and fied and

186we took about the allocations that would go into a 250 student School a three a 400 a 500 a 600 you have a lot of extra pieces and so we've talked about the amount of time our Specialists may spend in a car not teaching kids and so I think for the community to understand that as a district as we've grown as we've changed our elementary schools right now range in 250 to over 800 students and those ranges create inefficiencies when it comes to Staffing across maintenance across nutrition services across every area of Staffing that goes into one of our schools in reviewing the work um done previously cresview Elementary is the school being recommended for the following reasons cresview is centrally located and allows students who currently attend to be assigned to a nearby neighborhood

187school that is currently operating under capacity as shared earlier the consolidation of an elementary school allows for more efficient use of Staff it does not mean that the thresholds of our class sizes would change I know there's already been some conversation on social media around uh it means that our class sizes are going up as we've talked about middle and high school there are thresholds to class size those same thresholds hold true for elementary it does not mean that because we are consolidating sites that class size is going up our class sizes would remain the same in terms of threshold after studying further there would be no increase in school bus routes or transportation that does not mean that students would not be transported uh We've also heard heard already that students would not be

188transported that is not the case um I believe in talking with Dan um in transportation that because of the uh highways and Roads that students would cross that all of the students that we believe would actually be um in line to receive District transportation the closure would save around $1 million um and as part of our longrange facility planning process earlier we did talk about other needs across the district where our schools would be repurposed um and so we would have to go back to that long range facility conversation and talk about what that repurposing would look like but I can tell you that as part of that work we talked about the need for additional pre spaces we talked about Federal setting for special education we talked about repurposing for our Alternative High School

189and so again these two conversations between long range facilities and now the school closure they're kind of merging together so I think just to bring the two together um at this time I'm going to turn it back over to Kelly just to talk maybe just a little bit Kelly I didn't share about the schools that we would be going into and then the impact over three years um so as Julie mentioned Crestview was the school that we ultimately landed on um the the central location the the options for that school and where it's located and what we need for programming in the future uh students at cresview would be reassigned and I know um Dan Hines has been working on this already to Armstrong Elementary Hillside Elementary or Cottage Grove Elementary and so um working

190with those schools and getting to Julie's Point um closer to capacity and um being more efficient with our resources and so the the number you see is certainly an estimate um you know we don't plan to repurpose the building next year specifically we want to make sure that that's part of a purposeful conversation and what happens and what goes there um with with closing of a school I if this is an option that the board does move forward with in this process then we would then you would pass a resolution that would direct Administration to to follow the timeline that would include having public conversations with crestw families um and then making sure families are aware of where their child is going and and what that means and um we certainly want to make the

191transition as seamless as possible um as welcoming as possible they are there are children in South Washington County children and so um transitions are hard um unfortunately I've gone through this in in a different district and and it's a very personal it's very personal when your school closes um but in the in the in an effort to try to truly set our district up for really good conversations in the long range facility planning too um to already have this on the table as a building that we're going to look at repurposing in some way shape or form I think can help move those conversations along as well so um this is no way I I my heart went out to to Julie and Tyrone as they went and talked to the cresview staff um my

192heart goes out to to jod Houston and the principal and all of the staff at cresview they have worked extremely hard at that school um for many many years and so Jody said something that's really resonated with me and that think of now that staff and all of their hard work and everything they've done and how they can distribute that in other schools now and become part of other teams and other schools and so um it's certainly not an easy decision to close a school but um I think that through our process we've put forward you know a good option for the district when it comes to to having to do this so so a couple years ago we did a boundary adjustment for elementary and so there were kids who went to other elementary

193schools who were boundaried into Crestview and then now we're going to get boundaried back out um do we know how many kids will be affected by this like cuz I know we try to minimize the disruption for children I don't know not I just know that they would be going into fifth grade and there was three neighborhoods so I'd have to talk to okay that is certainly something simy that we could get that information um I think if we did our year calculation correctly you're right those students would be fifth graders now um no next year I think would be next year fifth graders yes but it's three neighborhoods and I talk to Dan and see which kids live in those neighborhoods yeah and Trish could probably pull that from us because we keep track

194of those attendance boundary changes too and that's also something that's part of that hearing process I use the word hearing but it it's something where we have to present all of our reasons for the the school closing and it also includes what students are going where what are the demographics of those students um gender any special services they receive you know um it's important Anna is already thinking about what does that mean for the special service you know special services that these kidss are being dispersed through um so all of those things need to be done um it and it's something that happens after that resolution starts but we can certainly get some of those like twoyear question of those kids that have already made a transition um making sure that we know who they

195are and what how many that is for you um and then the other one other question I had was around Title One funding so you had mentioned that Crestview is a title one school um and that we get funding so what happens to that funding because wherever they go unless they're currently a title one school I don't know that I well maybe there is I don't I don't know if the concentration of Crestview kids that would potentially go to those schools would be enough to make those schools Title One school so what what happens to the the designation or the dollars it it could go a lot of different ways um it could go that we have more schools that now are designated title one that doesn't necessarily mean more money because it's based on

196District free reduced lunch and so it would mean that we would use that money in different ways because instead of three schools we now have four schools um so it just depends on and some of the schools that these students are going to were right on that bubble of qualifying so it depends on the population so we will know that going into the process um and working with Mr Rano the title and coordinator to to make sure we include those schools in the conversation so and I think um the compensatory Ed dollars follow the students right that percent percentage will follow the students and then the title dollars we would relook at those schools based on that percentage and then that would be determined right now we've had those three schools that were named who

197received title $1 but there have also been years when we've been able to go down to an Armstrong or down to a Hillside and provide a 0.5 FTE using title dollars and so that will all be you know relooked at based on the percentage of free and reduced lunch oh I have a question about the apartments that are being built like what down the road from this I mean was all of those numbers of potential kids from those schools or from that building taken into consideration yeah the formula for the the neighborhoods um included that development it's still a guess we you just got to use old history to say who's going to live there but it's based on the type of how here is but that we did do our extensive study as part

198of the long range facilities looking and working with the cities and plotting everybody out and how many people we get per household and single family Etc and so Dan Hines has used all of that information behind the scenes every time I drive by new building I called in and say are they are they in the computer yet yeah well yeah cuz I know that the apartments were not even thought at the time we've been updating we we got the software now we can do it ourselves we up okay yeah and again that that that's an estimate there's lots of things in the transition that we are still unsure of and so didn't want to inflate that to a point that was where you wouldn't but it could be you know up to 1.4 or whatever

199it might be so but yes interesting observation for sure any other questions all right our last item I'm gonna turn it over to Dan to talk about this oh and the last item is probably the easiest one to explain and and if hardest to do and the hardest to do if you were members of CAC like simy you probably heard this 24 times now simy I don't know um and you're all welcome to join CAC too I just want to put that out there um no we have uh the state has a a regulation on how much you can ask for in a local operating Levy and we call it the cap and that cap will increase every year um the Statewide cap will increase every year based with inflationary increases um we have an

200operating Levy out there that produces $2,260 per student legislature has made Equalization laws and changes that have helped many districts and helped us so they've converted of the $2,260 per student they've converted $724 of that to what's called local optional revenue and the short story on that is you don't have to go ask for that money ever again um you can reduce it voluntarily but you don't that 724 is always going to be there so what you have left what we have left is $1,536 60 per pupil unit um because of the L move in and if you try to remember all the elections we had over the years it's really been simplified now that we have $380 188 that we need to renew that expires fiscally in 2026 that amount would require an election

201in the fall of 24 to hit the 26 well we'll get money in 26 so we could do one in the fall of 25 renew that amount and be okay the rest of the amount the 1,3 uh $1,155 72 per pupil is two years later so you're really in pretty good shape until the fall of 24 for a trial balloon uh fall 25 last chance on the 380 and then the fall of 206 for a trial balloon on the 1100 and the fall of 27 for our last chance that's what you have in front of you now so we're in pretty good shape there we we had the elections over the years in 13 15 and 17 and at first glance we thought well we're going to have to renew every 10 years but since

202L came along it really helped us out a lot the other side of it is the 2260 per pupil that we're receiving we could ask for up to $380 per pupil more based on the cap um well last year was 330 that raises every year to the cap we're suggesting as a recommendation to increase our Revenue to have a referendum election to ask for $330 more per pupil unit now whether we want to revoke the other ones and renew them so they last longer or if we want to just do the 3:30 and then do another election in 25 24 25 that's those are discussions we can have but as far as those renewals will not bring you additional dollars this $330 per student which isn't by the time we do this will not we'll

203be below we'll still be below the cap um we'll produce an extra $6,600 per year now we would have to do to have money and I'm sure simy remembers this um by the time the money comes in even to get money in year two we'd have to have an election in the fall of 21 we want money if we can wait till year three then we we'd have an election in the fall of 22 if we have election in the fall of 23 it will not be in this three-year plan um that's really that's really the whole deal on operating Levy um obviously you can ask for any amount the most we could probably ask for by the time this happens would be $350 probably more per pupil I have to look at the new

204calculation any questions on or discussion on this it's I have one about CU I know there's like this process and these steps that we have to take before we can get on the ballot so at what point do we have to say yes we're going for this to be on the B I believe it's July okay it have to count backwards but generally we we pass the question uh the uh ballot question in July okay because I know we have a Schoolboard election in this year and since we have to pay I mean it I would rather not pay the following year if you already if we're already paying to be an election so I wasn't sure when the dates were 2022 would be the governor's election then too so if so this is just

205if we don't Index this to inflation correct this is that could be a Poss yeah this dollar amount this do so um and by IND does index to inflation really mean index to whatever the legislature sets the cap to or like no it's based on the I can't remember the name now but the some kind of governmental like the CPI or whatever it is yeah but they don't use the CPI they use some kind of yeah something else okay index deal but um that's all determined each year by it's already set by Statute what to use okay and I didn't you know thank you I didn't mention that you could ask it to be indexed to inflation so that will automatically go out go up without voter without a new vote right now the other

206monies we have the5 13660 you know is not index for inflation so the way that the the way that this has been structured the suggestions from the from the steering team um the way it's been structured is that to hit our financial Target the operating Levy is not critical or I mean if we if we didn't do the operating Levy uh if we didn't do that we would be short because it's 23.1 and this makes up like 13.2 okay those are the two years that's I was going to say it's not years right it's not a there is some option in the fall of 21 or fall of 22 to impact this but th this is without the recommendation that's currently listed that it would go from that 23.1 that we talked about before to

207the 9.9 Y and I think having been part of many uh levies and referendums um that's not a guarantee right um and I think that we need to think about that if our goal is the sustainability and the long-term health of the school district um we are really putting um a heavy ask on our community I think in particular at a very difficult time um and so I think something that we need to think about balance balancing the adjustments that have been brought forward with that option of a potential Levy um I do think it would be a really big ask and so it's just I think when we look at the numbers it's like oh that that looks great but I think the effort and the work and then um the commitment by our

208community is huge correct yep correct yep and I can run I can have them run taxi packs on different amounts too yeah and that's I guess that's one question you know we did put the long-term facility on hold but we also know that that growth doesn't seem like it really slowed like we thought it may have so I think we're kind of coming into sort of a perfect storm here and that we have to cut but potentially we're going to have the growth where we're going to need additional I thought we were Through The Perfect Storm but um I would say that as we've had this conversation that certainly long range facility has come back up I mean you can drive drive through our community and see the houses going up um we're not 100%

209sure who's filling those houses we've heard from one of our cities that it's people moving to different houses and then who's back filling some of those houses but I think certainly as we look at our community we are a growing Community um and so we want to make sure that we're planful um too as we grow with our space and Facilities and both of these last two items so the school closing and the operating Levy would take an additional action on your behalf so when you're when you're talking about them on the 21st it's yes we want these is part of it and the school closing takes that resolution to direct us to to begin the process and then as Dan mentioned the levy would come later in in the process so yes you're saying

210yes we approve these you will have more conversation about the school one we're going to have to move pretty quickly on but the the levy one we we would have conversation on so any other I guess last questions on any any items and then kind of as you know now obviously we've talked through all of the proposed cuts and or enhancements and so um why don't we take just one more poll then so just to see as a package how we feel and then um if there are any sort of specific items I guess that you feel like you probably could not support um obviously Administration probably needs to know if that is um a majority because clearly we need to go back and decide however amount much um of a cut or enhancement or

211what have you it was if um there isn't support then we obviously need to go back and find another option that we can support so um and Tracy I think I think that's a good idea um one thing just to comment that while on that original projection chart it showed $12 million year one you can see that when we talled it all together um we really landed at 10.9 yeah so I I don't know exactly how I mean I I don't know if we should just go you know maybe ask each individual is there any specific item that you really feel like you cannot support I don't know if that's the best way to go maybe I think Administration would appreciate knowing at this point if there are any items that you feel so strongly

212about and then it's a good time for board members to hear their each other's voices in the room because you don't get that opportunity unless we're in Workshop form okay so I guess do you mind if I start with you Melinda is there anything that you really feel strongly about and then maybe we can see how everyone else feels and um have additional discussion I mean the two things that I feel the strongest about are the um breeding recovery and the orchestra band thing but I know the orchestra band thing is something we can talk about and if we can get some type of sing similar to choir um I want to learn a little bit more about the um reading Specialists as opposed to the reading recovery what all they can do to kind

213of match up to that more um obviously I hate the idea of closing a school but I understand the necessity of it so it would really be those two things okay so radio recovery orchestra band um and is it a hard stop or is it I can I mean you kind of said it but or would it be a two where would just like a little more maybe discussion or information a two okay and is there anybody else who feels either the same as a two or um actually feel a one don't support at all or you know how do other people feel about the reading recovery orchestra band piece is there anybody a hard stop that you would not keep it on the list our most so okay so I guess why don't we

214do the fingers so with the reading recovery and or orchestra are you the one two three or four I don't know if we can do them together because I have different feelings on those two got option okay and I presume it's the reading recovery piece Okay so why don't we just look at reading recovery at the moment so how are people feeling on reading recovery Okay so we've got three with two and three with three and one with four okay so um the majority would be fine with it and we have um three though that really would like to have a little more discussion on it okay and in particular how the reading specialists or what does that mtss look like and how do we make sure we don't exacerbate that achievement Gap and okay

215yes yes exactly okay okay awesome and then for orchestra and band what is uh how would you rate that okay so we have six at three and one at four so the um EX level is you know we may not completely agree but we understand that this um the decisions may need to be made and obviously you're going to work with um the orchestra band people and make it work and just so just bringing some ideas on what could that look like and what is that what are potentials for sixth grade okay okay all right and then the other was the closing the school so I think we should probably do the um census on that consensus on that as well because those were the three items right okay yeah okay all right let's do

216the school first and then we'll we'll come back if that's all right just to close this one out all right so what how are people feeling about the school all right hang on here okay so one two three four at three one at two and one at four so okay so we do have the majority that um are supportive of keeping it on the list and Simi what additional I guess information or discussion I think I'm just um I think this is the one that's the hardest for me because it's so um it's it's so immense like the impact of this is so great and I and yes reading recovery and vir like I I feel like this one is just really big for all those kids right and I especially feel for like if

217you're if you've been going to Crestview since you were 5 years old and now you're nine or 10 and you're you kind of you know and then this year's also an imperfect year you don't have your whole like kind of your last year to say goodbye to the school and all that kind of stuff I realize maybe this is a little bit like I I tend to be a pretty data oriented person and I I'm apparently having a lot of feelings about this and feelings aren't necessarily conducive to data driven decision-making but um I just want to make sure that you know and I I I know this is really emotional and I just want to make sure that if we do go this route that we're providing families and the kids you know I

218I um I appreciate what um Julie had to say about or what you had to say about jod and what uh Julie told me earlier about the staff and how um graceful the staff were at Crestview um but you know you're like you're only nine ones right so I just want to make sure that we are um thinking about those families or how we can help them transition I think the closing school can be I mean maybe not if you're like six maybe it's not traumatic right cuz you're you don't know any different but um maybe it is and but I think for some families and for some students it can be very traumatic and I want to make sure that we're thoughtful with how we help them say goodbye and I remember Katie was

219it you who was telling me like a school that closed like 40 years ago or something right and people still are are um upset so and I know Crestview has been around for a long time like I remember when the Time Capsule Crestview was opened a few years ago so it's you know there are a lot of people in the district who have a lot of memories and a lot of connections and so I just want to make sure if we go this route we do it very like with a lot of emotional intelligence absolutely and going through this a couple things for example we did um like reunions through periodically throughout the year like we having crestf reunion and we're going to do a family fun night and so doing things like that having

220spefic specific Crestview welcomes at other schools trying to Cluster Crest View kids in sections at a new school so um you know those are just a few things that come to mind in terms of as we planned previously in doing this that those were some things that come to mind so um I'm hearing that just even also providing that data of where kids are going who you know and making sure we're we're knowing those kids and I think for me it's just like this is such a final decision right like we don't do the levy in 2020 well there's always 2022 or there's always 2023 or whatever right or you know you cut printing costs you don't cut printing cost this year well you can do that next year but like this is just really

221it and so I just want to make sure that if we go this route that we are I I mean you know what I'm saying I'm you know I'm not telling you anything different but it is a big deal and that's why there's big processes involved with it the hearing and having all of those specific timelines and place so your your feelings are not you know they're definitely Justified if that makes you feel any better I believe it was six teaching FTS um and that's that you know that doesn't mean it's six teachers from Crestview remember we have the bidding process that we'll need to go through so um it it was six teaching FTE this this figure or the figure that the million doll included those teaches FTE the administrative services or so the

222office Personnel things like that custodial um also just having the plant you know keeping the plant open the school open um those are the main savings that we looked at in there um Health Services health services so and we're not sure about special head it'll depend on where they go and so will some of those you know if the if the building is repurposed do we know how much of those costs would potentially come back plantwise um having a person there cleaning it was like 200 not that that person gets SP 280,000 or so to keep the plant yeah just to keep the building like just to keep it warm we could do it for a lot cheaper than that I mean that number 280 includes the custodian right right right we can keep the

223lights on and have a maintenance guy check it every day or whatever so that's what will happen like if if we do go that route that's an expense that's fixed that expense won't go away right just the we repurpose it right like so just next year because we're not going to do anything with it so it'll be very minimal because the heat will be turned way down and and um there will be hardly any electricity used um but if we were going to use it for something else I mean obviously depends on what moves there something else would not be used then who knows but to to run the Heat and water in electricity in a normal year it's about 220,000 so my reason for a two was um I guess a lot of it

224is we talk about the growth and we talked about additions to other elementary schools and things and so I'm very concerned about falling into the Trap of nearby districts where they close schools and then oh gosh you know we need to reopen that school because we shouldn't have closed it and I just like simy said this is very permanent and um and unfortunately it's not always permanent I mean and that's that's the point of it is yes the building is still there but I don't want to be shifting kids continuously because oh yeah we shouldn't have done it so now yep we're moving these kids back um and making more shifts for these kids than they already have gone through and will be going through again um and I just I know that growth is

225slow right now but what happens if kids come back if hoses go up if building goes through the roof again what does that look like what are we going to do um and so I guess that's where my further discussion comes from is I want to make sure if we do that this is a permanent um move not a well right now we don't need the school but in two years we might need to open it up again so sorry you'll all be shifted back and torn away again right now we're anticipating the pressure points in K Grove to be um gray cloud um Pine Hill and possibly K Grove L depending on what's going across the street from it um we're seeing lots of houses we're just not seeing kids enrolled in school so

226it's it's a little harder there but and I think the other thing that we've talked about through facilities and previous boundaries is that then we have to be able to look at our district completely different and we have to take away the um Community divide between woodbery and Cottage Grove are that line to say that we need to be able to shift kids and they may not go if they live in Cottage Grove they may go to school in Woodberry or vice versa they live in Woodbury they may need to go to school and Cottage Grove and so I think that is another debate and more questions about where kids go to school and then how much more Transportation cost might we be incurring to move kids to where the openings exist because through our

227facility conversation I don't recall exactly but I want to say four out of six of our southern end schools were under capacity by 200 um uh for sure 150 students and so you're right Katie and I'm glad we're having the conversation I think it's wonderful that we like this is a big deal and I think from what we have seen in terms of the capacity and where the growth is occurring fine to keep the schools open but then we're going to have to have a different look at how we do boundaries moving forward if um because it does mean and it looks funny in a School District but were two different two different large communities that we would be adding on to a school in the northern end of the district while closing and reshuffling

228kids in the southern end of the district and so that takes a different mindset from our entire Community about how how and where our kids go to school um we had not identified any schools up to that point um we were certainly in conversations um and so some of these same talking points thinking in terms of the ability to redistribute kids and what would make sense with the size of the school um there were other options on the table as well but nothing had been defined um and I don't believe anything was ever communicated we just we got hit we hit pause on that and again on the 21st I know it's ideal to to know this but on the 21st you'll say you know Administration needed to go through this you will pass a

229resolution at a later date to close the school so the 21st will be Administration go through the process but you still have to pass a resolution at a at a later date to close a school so not that that makes it feel any better because then it goes back to the drawing board because where are we going to get that million dollars from but you know it it is a process to do and um you definitely are investing in a in a long Curr conversation so and I think the reality is probably at some point we're going to need a school right I mean at some point I mean our the potential of our district is I said if schools could have wheels yeah that would be ideal especially the way our community um is

230formed and where we see the housing you know we'd like to be able to push schools to where we need them and so there's that central location and unfortunately that's just not the way that it is I tell do that all the time I could make it all work out if I can move kids every year y there there you know Dan I you know we kind of we talk about that but that is real um you know we're talking about moving certain kids and maybe it's not in every year but just that ability to staff when we have those schools of 250 300 350 you know some of our class sizes I'll give you an example we have 30 students one section or two two you have 40 students two sections right you have

23150 students 25 and 25 and now we're kind of right where we need to be and so there's that designation you have 30 students okay that's really about 1.5 teachers back to Katie's Point what do we do cut a teacher and so keep in mind that that's just for The Home Room classroom teacher you have Specialists that are supporting you have special education El teachers that are all trying to help support that and so the sizes of our schools because of that range really have an impact on the efficiencies of our staffing and perhaps there's another way to address it but that's what we we have right now all right um so Pat had wanted to look at both so secondary the secondary increase are there really 35 kids in a class in the secondary

232I mean science math I just think that's yes I've taught them yeah I think that's awful but all right so I guess um should we look at them separate so how are people feeling about uh the increasing by one at middle school so actually oop sorry um before we start talking about numbers or whatever I'd be interested to hear actually from you Louise as a middle school teacher sorry to put you on the spot um I was wondering why I got um just what it you know what the impact of teaching 30 whatever 30 and a half or whatever it is like what the impact of having that additional kid is or what it's like in terms of being in the classroom I mean I I've heard from my own children what it's like from

233their perspective but they're not I mean there's 19 other thousand other children in the district so it' be helpful to hear from you and and I and I'm going to say this it's it's not the one right it's not the one that went from 35 to 36 oh I'm sorry can you to use your oh is it on oh I'm sorry I didn't see it okay yeah um it it's not the one that goes from 35 to 36 it's the it went from 30 to 38 um if that makes sense so um certainly in places where um schools um my my brother happens to be in a small community and he was very upset about the class size is going to 24 yeah so that just couldn't be done so certainly that that class size

234I I I taught in the district more than 20 years I never had a class under 32 I student taught with 36 so that that's been forever the the reality for me when when I look at these are five pages of budget adjustments there's there's not a line item on here that does an impact a program I value or valued staff so if we got rid of all these and you gave me five more pages I would say exactly the same thing we we know this is a great district and we know we have great programs and we know we have great things and yet we are here um the idea of you know with Crestview in particular is a school where I was the way on so I got to see that staff in

235person and I know how well they work together and I know that when you mentioned what rang true with you Jody Houston I know that staff to be the kind of people who will go forth and and share their expertise they are incredibly professional um the the concern with class size always to me is that the number of students impacted is huge the number of students impacted as huge the other concern I have is okay so you got 33 to 35 because you can't have half a student um um what if how are are there any like waited for if you have special ed kids in there needs or something because I can't imagine having 35 kids and eight of them are special needs or 10 you know and I know how that can happen

236because as a special ed teacher in my past I always had this one teacher that could teach math better than anybody and just got those kids and so I'd put all my kids in that class and I know know that people do that because they make their own schedules a lot of times when you're in special ed so I'm just concerned for the kids and the learning and uh I mean can our scores be better if we have lower class Siz what is the latest research on that I guess I would like to hear about that and then in the Middle School I've have just as many concerns with but I can't imagine going over 30 in a classroom but that's because I'm from a rural area my experience is there and they'd scream if

237they had 25 in an elementary so and so I think that we need to think about as we talk about class size because having been a principal in a large school there were many years where fourth and fifth grade were at 32 and sometimes 33 students and so again those are all things that impact our budget and so I think that conversation and it's not a comparison but it is a fact that our threshold for uh fourth and fifth grade is at 32 I think maybe I'm looking at Dr B it's a little been a couple years perhaps even 33 and I can tell you that in our larger schools where we have more ability to staff and more efficiencies there are sections in our school district right now that have 32 or 31 typically

238fourth or fifth grade students and so again that's the p i mean the district has x amount of dollars and understand that we're spending on a lot of different things but we still are getting these class sizes and so I think it's just something to be thinking about that that's the thing are there are there classes that tend to be more like bigger than others are they all just like the core class like my kid science class with 38 kids in it there's definitely purpose in those that are bigger than others in scheduling I mean I I'm going to guess you certainly have those you know half two situations but um there's definitely purpose in clustering of special ed kids and looking at back class size and clustering at to you know that intrinsic motivated

239learner that would typically sign up for a type of class and um but it's not perfect science that's for sure and so I think to to Louisa's point we're at the point where that that one it certainly makes a difference um to have a huge impact on on student growth I think you would have to go down to to the 24s and 25s yeah okay and that's what the research would say you know Hattie who does all of the that class size is very low but what he but but the things that make a big impact like relationships and teacher Collective advocacy all come with smaller class sizes you know but they're so small that it's at a point where to have that conversation would be you know it's a lot of money to get

240to that level to that 23 24 so uh one of the things like we talk about is like personalization of learning right and so when you have 35 kids in a class and your class schedule is let's PR pretend it's not a pandemic in your class schedule is like 45 minutes theoretically that's like a minute per period per kid right um as part of this would this include or would this would we be able to without spending money give teachers more tools to help them personalize the learning with more kids in the classroom I think that was our journey with our devices you know utilizing technology to mobilize personalization and and how can we do that make making sure it's a tool that changes the way we do things and not just something that replaces

241a worksheet type of conversations um that takes an evolution that takes a lot of you know planning and thought in it and it's I mean it is really hard to be a teacher right now like that that's just fact and so I think all of those things is is ideal and I think even evolving thinking about practices we use in elementary for example small group instruction we do it all the time in elementary schools but do we have that practice in our middle schools and in our high schools and and can we have that practice and so I think it's that it's that personalization Journey that we started a few years ago that began with technology because it's a tool that can get you there but there's still a lot of work to do and

242and providing that training and opportunity for teachers to practice and do it so all right um I guess do you want want us to to I guess I'd like to see where the board is at with class size okay um if you want to do it by middle and high school I can just to give us some idea okay um so yeah let's gauge on Middle School first I guess going up by one so let's see here telling me I've been sitting too long yes yeah hours before I came all right and then um so high school okay got it all right um so the majority would support um keeping it on the list um with you know obviously none of these are easy decisions but um would be in favor of keeping it on

243the list um all right so I mean uh we he from pad and Melinda simy did you have any others no the crw I mean the tun raise in the crust pleas nothing additional Dara hit mine okay all right so yeah so you have the I think there were one two three four five five that we had on there we talked about reading recovery orchestra band Crest View and then class sizes at the middle school and high school yes yes and so I mean just I guess one last thing I'll just having been through this obviously I don't even know how many times a lot um I will just have to say Obviously we've cut a lot over well the 21 years I've been on the board and um some of these items of course

244have been on here perpetually right and so we've cut around them so unfortunately I I mean this is the way it feels of course is that we don't have anywhere else to go I we're you know certainly we've looked at other other options but um you know I think Louise said it the best is there's just nothing we can do this is you know our job is to educate students majority of our budget goes to our staff and when we make Cuts unfortunately that's where we make Cuts I mean there's just only so much you can do so it's never never ever easy um especially with this big an amount even for a school district our size I mean it I know I was talking to Lise earlier it's just it's disheartening because you you

245know we work so hard and then you have to make really hard decisions and it just feels difficult I mean it's hard because you don't want to affect um the families you don't want to affect the staff we don't you know it's just really hard I me we all want the best for our students obviously and um so I just wanted to say appreciate the questions the thoughts um you know just being open about these Cuts because they're not they're just not easy and thank you I think the administration appreciates the dialogue and the conversation that we're able to have um and we're hopeful that as we continue on with these workshops meetings that this is the format um hopefully at some point we can actually go back to a circle and have more of

246a dialogue so we don't have backs to each other but um we're hopeful that we'll continue those types of conversations so thank you I will close real quick just wanted to make sure everyone was aware about next steps and so as far as communication goes tomorrow um Pepe and his team already have a an email ready and drafted that will go out to staff so that they um most have all been had had conversations are aware of this but but will send an email tomorrow um we also are going to plan some virtual information sessions and those will be done using zoom and we had talked about feedback and how can we get that and so our goal in those sessions will be that there certainly will be an opportunity to chat to the host

247so it won't be a public comment type of situation but it will be a chat to the host that our director of ARA John ler will take and put into qual checks and summarize in a way that you will get feedback from all of those sessions um and so we have the staff on Monday and then we have three Community Information sessions at various times so in the morning at noon and then at 6: p.m. um and then again on the 21st is when we'll be coming back to you with this list and some more information um to have the conversation on potential action and then pending action you know I we've talked about it and I know you're aware but we will be very purposeful about bringing relevant stakeholders in and having conversations about

248how does this change the way we're doing things and and yes it's it's not ideal how can we move forward though in providing services for our students so um we will definitely put together implementation teams that will be part of that and in our in our work this year we've tried to strengthen adult so we start our meetings with welcoming inclusions and we try to end with optimistic close we're not as good as optimistic closes as we are as welcome inclusions but I wanted to try to optimistically close and say that there is some awesome creative thinking happening out in the district and when people had a chance to submit ideas this is some of the work some of the ideas that came through that we were like awesome let's have more conversation about what

249this could look like it was just really hard to try to quantify it for this budget process and putting a number on it um for you to see so expanding our virtual programming at to your point like we've we've learned to do things differently increasing our Partnerships having a process that we could potentially increase the families that complete the free reduced lunch application um you can read these the ones on the right have to do with a lot of our teaching and learning programming so continuing to explore our potential of having our own fed setting for program within our district um evaluating how we're using social social workers throughout our district and are are we putting them where they need to be that multi-tiered system of support theme based preschool immersion or nature-based or whatever

250it might be um literacy practices making sure we have strong core instruction um evaluating all of our choice programs are we off in the right ones for our families and and are there is there other potential and then I think we've been talking about it for a few years our biggest one the the high school redesign our you know 15 16 17 18 year olds are needing different things now from us and so what does that mean for our high schools so all of these came through in that process and we're really excited to have more conversation about it so if there's a silver lining I offer that for you and um my heart and my you know where your heart and head are I empathize with you and um please feel free to reach

251out to Dan or I or or any of us obviously for questions but we will definitely bring back that information that you've asked for so thank you for your time tonight thanks for hanging in there with us and Dan didn't even tell any bad jokes so not too late no just thank you for for all the effort happened to get to this point so um all right um 8.0 we don't have any discussion items 9.0 action items will be on the January 21st agenda 10.0 our reports and comments and 11.1 is our superintendent's report thank you I'll keep it brief I'm exhausted and have to go to the bathroom so with that um we are excited about our elementary students returning to school in person beginning with K2 on January 19th and 35 on February

2521st our leadership team is also in conversations about our secondary students and creating a transition plan to get all students back in person learning tomorrow we will have an instant command team meeting and we will be discussing any new updates from mde mdh and our County Health officials this includes things around vaccinations um the virus uh the super spreader or the virus that's spreading uh more quickly um so getting some updates on some of those things with our incident command team but mostly the focus is on any questions as it relates to trans transition of our elementary students in and then beginning to have that conversation about onboarding our secondaries um and I also want to close by acknowledging um if the pandemic weren't enough if budget adjustments weren't enough um I feel like as

253a school district we need to acknowledge that um in conversations yesterday and today staff and students are sharing thoughts feelings and reflecting on the images and violence that occurred at the US capital I would like to acknowledge that we are all still trying to make sense of what occurred our staff is prepar prepared to create a space for conversations we ask for your support as we work to create a school district and community that respects and values other others and so with that that concludes my report much uh School Board member reports we with Katie I'm going to pass because I'm with Julie right now yeah sh uh let's see I attended the um M New Year celebr C ation which was a beautiful cultural celebration it I it appeared to be it was online

254of course and it appeared to be well attended and the costumes and the dancing was um was amazing I recommend if they do it again um people should attend we had one at the at at Mitchell Hamlin um before the co thing hit and it is just a wonderful celebration of um of life I would call it so that's it that's all I Sharon the food was amazing too but I didn't get to sample any but the parent did say he would bring some down the food was amazing too thank you uh Pat Uh just one announcement um I sent each of you the email to the amsd and that's a pre um pre- legislative session where they're going to be talking with the governor and the uh other education people and what their plan

255is for the legislature this spring so and we have opportunity to put give input on what our needs are in the schools and I think it's pretty obvious we need money thank you Louise um checking in with um schools I'm all continually impressed with how they're meeting students needs with creativity and certainly through an equity lens it's it's nice that the Committees are starting to meet again so I got to meet the curriculum advisory committee and the ambassadors um NSB msba has put out some things with Equity training I think um as good as it was Wayne and James have nothing to worry about still great um I had a good time as well at the virtual um New Year's I I did appreciate a former student leading the dance and seeing my new moves

256was um interesting so thank you Simmy yep I was also at the M New Year um I turned off my camera for the dance because nobody needed to see that not not need to be broadcast um and also checked in with my schools and just it was really great to hear from the principls about how I know there's a lot of concern in the community oh sorry I know there's a lot of concern in the community from parents that kids are behind or not meeting standards and a lot of you know the principles basically shared with me that there are a lot of kids who are doing really well and it's a testament to the teachers and the students and parents and how hard everybody's working and how well everybody is working and um so

257I'm just really uh you know I'm really excited for kids to go back and I really hope that we can figure out a way to get secondary kids back and it has nothing to do with my having secondary kids thanks Melinda so I Che my schools to excuse me and um the one thing that I heard from all four schools which is just really refreshing is just how much flexibility there is between with the staff and just the hardworking and just you know willing to change things day after day so that was something I really liked um I attended a really great Equity training through msba and I was just going to share a quote that I thought I just really liked this quote and what um the trainer said is diversity is a fact

258inclusion is an act so I really liked that um I also attended the M New Year um loved seeing the different dances and um the singing so that was really nice um other than that oh the uh youth advisory meeting um Wayne and James LED that um I did the high school one and it was really um interesting and enlightening to hear the kids involved um Talk sharing their input about how their school can um make things more inclusive for them thank you um yeah I am going to pass to just a lot of um new job and holidays but I realized I forgot to read something initially so I'm just going to read it now so and it's pretty obvious at this point but in an effort to remain TR transparent this Workshop meeting

259is being streamed and recorded due to the topic of the budget adjustments on the agenda our future um Workshop meetings however will not be streamed or recorded but um obviously are still open to the public so I apologize I was looking at a different agenda so um with that 11.0 our future meeting dates um we will be meeting again January 21st and then February 4th and with that we are adjourned