Bexley Board of Education Meeting - November 9, 2021

001[Music] i've had enough [Music] school district board of education general meeting for november 9th 2021. mr smith could you please call the royal master gardener here submitting here here just powers here [Music] our public comments section is responsive to our community's needs as well as the boards to conduct business orderly and efficient manner to that end we've asked that everybody sign in um before the meeting if you'd like to speak a public comment so um i will direct mr smith to gather that list thank you all right then we have a special treat tonight for our pledge of allegiance um we have some of our school district veterans and dr um yes please so we've got uh some heroes in the room and we love our staff members who are veterans if you would step

002forward and help us lead the pledge before our recognition yeah we'll do it right up here everybody in the stand please we'll put our veterans up here [Music] when you're [Music] one ready under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you thank you everybody would be seated except for our veterans yeah he keeps crying this is a really important opportunity for us to say thank you as a son of a vietnam veteran i have a 96 year old grandfather who fought in world war ii i just think it's really important we think it's really important that we honor and recognize the sacrifices and the service that you gave to our country and why we wanted our staff members here is because we think it's uh even more impactful and powerful for our students

003to be in the presence of heroes and to continue to learn from great people so we are indebted to your service we are thankful for everything you have done your selfless efforts if you would would ask that you stepped forward tell us your name uh the branch that you served in in your years of service uh that would be much appreciated we'll start with mr bragg so chris bragg i was in the united states marine corps from 2005 to 2009 and i served in iraq in 2007 in afghanistan [Music] the army national guard for 21 years retired as a sergeant first class valley uh u.s air force uh from 1979 right out of high school to 1985. uh worked out on jet business and uh kept them flying i'm bobby moore i served over two

004decades in the united states army um it's one thing that i would like to highlight to everybody a couple things as far as veterans are concerned on behalf of all the veterans around the world the recognition so there's something else that needs to be said there are a lot of homeless veterans out there are a lot of homeless veterans with mental issues there's a lot of homeless veterans out there that are complicating suicide so at your leisure i would encourage you to go to vda.gov homeless and read for yourself on behalf of the board of education and our staff and our community we can't thank you enough it is not a big enough token but just a small token of our gratitude uh november i believe it's the 11th this year my favorite day of

005the year is november 11th but it also saddens me that it should be every day it should not be an assigned day for us to show our appreciation and our love and our gratitude so thank you very much we appreciate it for being here thank you for your service give it up one more time [Applause] oh yes sir gentlemen we're into a photo with the board [Music] sure [Music] right three two one there we go [Music] thank you that motion carries can i also have a motion to approve our agenda for tonight's meeting in a second second thank you all in favor please signify any questions not much all right thank you so now we get to move on to more fun stuff and our awards okay thank you so uh cindy smith if you'll

006join us i'll put you at the post okay so cindy smith is uh i've only been here for about four months and i've already met a legend cindy smith has had quite a career and i believe you're only a junior yeah last spring cindy finished second in the women's varsity discus i believe division is one uh event with a throw of 131 feet 10 inches we also qualified for the state meet in the shot foot and finished 15th in division one with a throw of 36 feet five and a half inches which is unbelievable uh was a sophomore when she accomplished this so i just on behalf of the board of education we are so proud of the work that you've done i've had the ability to watch sydney in some different arenas and as

007amazing of an athlete as you are i think you're an even better person i appreciate what you've done to take my daughter in on the volleyball team and the basketball team and i've seen how you rally your teammates and i see what people say about you she comes from a long line of legends and i actually played with her uncle at ohio university and i would rather go up against him and that with the pads on than she's fierce she's energetic and you are an absolute team builder and a leader so we're proud of you if you would introduce who you brought with you today um i brought my mom and my dad those educators uh here have actually and we're thankful for the work that you do and we are proud of uh sydney

008so give it up one more i should have time on the other side of that line there the city was going to be here in the fall because of a volleyball schedule [Music] and now we're going to head outside feel free to join us or feel free to stay put our spacing doesn't allow us to provide the type of recognition we want we're going to sneak outside of the cafeteria we will be right back thank you [Music] oh yes um [Music] um [Music] um [Music] oh [Music] this [Music] uh [Music] okay [Music] not visually [Music] you might be wondering why i've got to do your head oh so uh here's what we're doing we do list all the amazing things that we said but what we've said is how proud we are of the work

009that you've done and if you would give us your name your grade and anyone that you brought with yet but it looks like your solo so name and brain hi i'm lynn mcdowell i am a senior um i brought with me i guess charlotte turner and lillian george who are walking with me from rehearsal oh nice let's give it up well done what are we doing here in here ready three two one [Music] 3a and board updates and that starts with me on superintendent llc committee um i really want to thank carly croswell um we have had lots of changes um over the last year in our district for superintendents and administrative assistants and and of course everything that goes along with kovid and so we've had lots and lots of work to do on

010policy and carla really sat down and um and jumped in with both feet for all of us um ms mineo was kind enough to excuse herself from the um policy update um committee so that miss powers could be bonds powers could learn some of this as this video about the board for next year so um we went through several hours with each administrator who's in charge of separate sections of the policy so that was ms abraham um miss westmorelando dr williams and mr smith and we broke down all of our groupings and revisions some we needed to remove some just needed an update you'll see that the ones that just needed an update from an ohio revised coach when the legislature has made a change so we want to know changing our notes change the

011policy language but we did want to add the reference those are under 4g which is we will just take as a first reading and we'll wait a second reading which we normally do the rest are on just for first reading this is the first time you're seeing them we'll have the opportunity to review them and we will have had the opportunity we will then be able to um if you have any feedback you can give it to the policy committee that's powers for myself for fine and or any of the administrators who are responsible for the policies that you're reading and then we'll look to approve them in next month's meeting in a second you'll also see we have one policy out for a second reading which is the itdk that we uh introduced for

012the first time last in last month in october um so those are our generalized updates um things to keep us current but you will also note that there's an important policy on that is a new policy that our ddi committee has been working on and that is led the policy part of it by ms powers and ms mitchell our dei board representatives and they've been working really tirelessly with our community and just practicing now to to offer something to our board that we might consider for approval again it'll be a first reading so we'll hear it we've all had the opportunity to see it um we've seen some feedback and we can discuss it tonight now that we're at a properly noticed meeting and i look forward to hearing what everybody has to say about

013it in this first reading but i also want to get some background and kind of again so our audience has an understanding of how we got to this place and of the policy are so i'm going to defer now to ms powers and ms mitchell who have um some comments on the policy which will be listed as e a e equity and education ms powers thank you ms known ada um so i apologize i'm going to read something because it's just been a week and i wrote it in summary in recent board meetings ms mitchell and i have been reporting on the work of our small group which is dr fine miss abraham mr braxton and the two of us to continue the district's ongoing work on equity inclusion and belonging and we've reported that

014ms mitchell and i have been busy working on an equity in education policy draft we receive valuable input on and revisions to the draft from mr braxton and i'm really grateful for that um the draft policy aea was provided to each of the board members as mrs known just noted in anticipation of today's first reading and discussion i want to provide a little background on the road that we have traveled to get to this point and to have the opportunity to bring this to the board tonight and for background i think uh ms mitchell is really important to give us that so uh the efforts of the district uh made began with an internal examination of our data um simultaneously we also began work district-wide to develop our team's capacity to to address the identified

015gaps in our district performance with that work we stopped talking about students as data points and began using a different vocabulary altogether we started talking about the whole child individualized learning opportunity gaps and growth we began to think about empowering students advocating for them in all ways and learning to recognize within ourselves when we needed to do better we began challenging and supporting each other through this work and while we've had a few bumps we have never wavered in our commitment and this work started back in 2013. the boards from 2013 to date began holding the superintendent to expectations of increasing learning goals and closing gaps we began drafting and implementing policy to support not only race equity but gender equity closing opportunity gaps and barriers that excluded children and their families in meaningful ways

016streamlining our processes and ensuring that no child was left out our treasurer fine-tuned internal electronic processes that reduce negative impacts to families this intentional this intentionality has created multiple pathways for students and families to experience a better vaccine additionally some highlights that motivate us to continue these efforts are the board as we as we know voted to hire the first in central ohio a role that was solely dedicated to dei and we saw multiple school districts follow suit [Music] the board sanctioned in 25 2015 the first ever bexley minority france alliance as a pto for bexley and working closely with this leadership to address issues supporting the ei work in our schools ford leaders adopted a gender identity and self-expression policy again the first ever in central ohio we went from optional professional development around

017issues supporting equity and inclusion and mandating it as part of the normal professional development days nearly four years ago and incorporating professional development into regular administrative meetings to set expectations for classroom and staff the minority parent alliance has hosted with extensive board support and increased administrative participation networking opportunities geared at attracting and identifying diverse talent and as a result the district has made incredible strides in hiring exceptional administrative and classroom teacher hires in our schools our school climate committees support work in our schools every day and provide resources and capacities to teachers and staff we have grown our support in our special education identifying more students with iup needs and 504 needs earlier than ever before counselors and behavioral staff continue to help educate and support our district teams around non-academic barriers and administrators and

018counselors have been engaged in critical work within the city of bexley to support improving police interactions with students and minors teachers and administrators have also led the anti-task force work bringing the needs of the leadership the the needs of the district to leadership early on before we even got to the point of everybody talking about it you so quickly from there picking up from there in june 2020 the board issued a letter to the community acknowledging the need to confront racism and to cultivate an educational experience that ensures that each student regardless of race color ethnicity religion and sexual orientation feels valued valued supported and free in that letter we committed to prioritizing district action and working in direct partnership with our valued community advocacy or organizations the city of bexley and other community stakeholders

019in our process shortly thereafter the superintendent established an anti-racism task force naming community members and stakeholders as well as district leaders to the group with our director of diversity equity inclusion at that time liaison smith in a leadership role there are a number of groups in our community that are contributing in significant ways to further equity in our district and the superintendent's task force was a place of collaboration a task force divided into three subcommittees and ms mitchell and i were each appointed to serve i worked on the policy subcommittee along with members of our district staff and stakeholders in our community in particular and after ms mr ms smith's departure is raquel armstrong provided significant and important leadership ms armstrong had been involved in the development of an equity policy in another district where

020she had served the starting point for the equity and education policy that we will review tonight was the policy that ms armstrong had worked on the policy subcommittee of the superintendent's task force put in hours and hours of discussion and ideation for a policy after reviewing numerous policies from other districts and discussing options that group recommended that an overarching equity policy rather than a policy related solely to race would be best and that was a grounding point for us we are greatly indebted to the work of that committee which provided so much thought and input when mr braxton joined our district he was immediately helpful in moving the work forward he has significant background in these issues and in discussing the work of the policy subcommittee with mr braxton he felt that it would be

021important for the board to consider an educational equity policy promptly in order to support and help frame other equity and anti-racism work in the district i am personally grateful for all the work of the members of the task force ms mitchell mr braxton ms abraham and of course dr fine who has been incredibly supportive of this work undoubtedly others would have written a different policy and while i wish to credit everyone who provided input i believe that miss mitchell and i will take full responsibility for what is in the grass so if you don't like it it's our fault and i do want to point out that this is not fast work it requires committed a committed level of persistence we purposely incorporated equity goals into the superintendent's goals since 2014 and we began writing

022our strategic plan in 2017 with equity specifically woven into each part of that plan it's been part of our hiring expectation of every leader administrator teacher and staff member to the point that we've even hired an administrator dedicated to ensuring our hiring practices continue to be equitable it was particularly important to me that this board see the culmination of many many years of dedicated work to growing and getting better and to have an opportunity to finally take this step policy is how the board speaks no other way the board policy that provides latitude to grow and develop is sound governance so it is broad for a reason it's broad so that the policy can allow the superintendent and the administrators to implement plans and programs and then measure that work and that success we in

023turn grow with our students as we build a community collective around the value system that our community has overwhelmingly said that they support [Music] whether you're mallard duck the mantras moves the castleham cub a middle school high school lion this will be part of who we are and our policy allowed the administration the administration led by the superintendent to develop those strategies that we will like i said continue to measure so we welcome uh this discussion with the board um as as you have already said ms snowden it is a first read so we welcome your thoughts and the concerns um any blind spots that we might have missed but we we hope that you will pass this measure in december as one of your going away gifts to the district so in order to

024get feedback on this draft and input ms mitchell mr braxton and i circulated the draft to members of the policy subcommittee that worked on these issues last year as well as to other groups in our district that are specifically concerned with equity and education these are stakeholder groups who engage the district on equity issues on a regular basis the bexley anti-racism project led by bexa students and graduates the veteran warning parent alliance vaccine pride bexley dei and the vexa special education pto to date we've received input i know that we will get more and i want to very quickly go through some of the issues i have shared all the comments that we've received so far with the board members and it had an opportunity to see them but i didn't circulate them until last

025night so it hasn't been a lot a lot of time to look at it comments include that we need to be sure that we have metrics and calculations measures of accountability on how success will be monitored and reviewed i think as alicia noted that's part of the plan that the superintendent and our administrators and our uh teachers would take care of and so our job as the board is to set the policy and then you know we move out of the way and let those folks do their job but we agree i agree that we need metrics and we need to be able to calculate there were comments about confirmation that the policy covers all everybody all staff all substitutes all students and the answer to that is that's that's the intent that this is

026for everybody in the district um there were comments about inviting ongoing community feedback on how it's going and i agree with that and that's part of what we view as what i view as being in the draft document to engage our stakeholders going forward there was quest there were questions about confirming that the focus is not just on academics but on all aspects of the school school day and include social emotional and developmental well-being as well as academics and that's my view of what we are doing as well there were suggestions regarding words and phrases that we could change or add and i've done a little bit of work on the draft just to see if we can incorporate some of that so i appreciate those comments as well um comments on definitions comments on

027a periodic review of the policy which i think is part of what is included in the draft but perhaps can be made stronger there questions and issues com seeking confirmation that this policy is intended to apply to all students i address that involves students in the planning process and i think that's a great idea for the superintendent to think about it as he goes forward we're certainly looking for input for students on the policy but also i think even um you know critical piece will be to get student input going forward um confirm that equitable allocation of resources and it is important we put that into the draft document and and we may be able to enhance that some but that's certainly part of what we envision clarify uh what it means to engage students

028teachers staff and administration and again i think that will be part of what happens in the planning process so as the equity plan is developed each year and then refuting here that would be part of how that's done and then finally there were a number of comments that go to asking about what efforts will be required how will the district address these issues how will the district achieve these goals and again i think that um that will be what is critical to the plan process as we go forward so i wanted to put those out there let the community know that we are getting comments let the board know how those comments are coming in i will continue to forward comments that we receive in our google form to the board as we move towards

029our final hearing on this if we can get to that in december thank you um just a few thoughts on that um i would i would anticipate that we will have out in one of our newsletters after finding the um proposal so that our community can see the draft language um and and then a link to the google docs um form the form that this powers is referring to so that we can collect community feedback that being said it is the work of the elected officials of the board to set and vote in policy so as important as i personally believe and i believe my fellow board members feel that it is to hear from people in our community about policies it's not the work of the community to to draft a policy it's the

030work of the board and i welcome comments about that but i don't want to give people the expectation that they're to send back our visions that we would incorporate because that's unworkable and not the structure that is set forth by our legislature so um i'm looking forward to reading the comments and having the opportunity to to vote on this next next month are there any other questions for ms paris or this um mitchell or doctor i'd appreciate the the information being provided along the way and i think it's it's important too to have that for board members that will be able to review and not only just the final draft of how [Music] yeah i just wanted just a quick comment just a huge thank you i agree many hours and years has gone into

031this work and it is a privilege to to watch uh this come together i know i've only been here for a few uh months but to hear the history and to watch the work has been an honor to be a part of that and please reach out to alicia or victoria to the board if you have questions as we move forward so thank you thank you all right so that is my section of my board report tonight and that will move us on to this thank you um just as a an endnote to that discussion uh i think it would be helpful to instead of emailing me or ms mitchell maybe i i'd love to have that google form go out as a link attached to the newsletter with the policy and the google form

032and then we can it just makes it a little easier to make sure that we're capturing all the comments and and you know then they can circulate among board members so i think it'd be really challenging for you to respond to that number of you know so we'll i just sent tyler an email we'll make sure that we get a system in place perfect thank you so my board report so sorry it might be a little longer than usual um i want to start by saying congratulations to our newly elected board members i was so embarrassed by the field candidates and i know all six of them will continue to support and make a difference in our district we are really fortunate in our district to have so many highly qualified individuals step up to

033run for this office there's you know it's not everybody knows what they're getting into and i'm really impressed that you know mostly pretty much they're going to use their other pandemics so i am really grateful to all of you and you're all here tonight and i really look forward to welcoming jonathan joanne and marguerite to the board in january i want to also thank dr fine and mr braxton and the vaccine public library for hosting our first community conversation of this school year it was really great to have an opportunity to hear questions from our stakeholders i really enjoyed doing that and i'm glad that we're back at it i appreciated the conversation and i i look forward to more and as an aside just back to the policy one more time um there are

034two more community conversations that are scheduled one this month one next month so the one this month is a good time if you have questions it could they could come up with that also um we will be looking at as um ms snowden says looking at a lot of policies tonight i think um i got on the policy coming committee right at the right moment to go through like you know other policies or whatever um i really want to thank along as marley did um carter croswell dr fein's administrative assistant for the work she has done to track and prepare changes to the policies where we're being was a huge huge task lots of people providing input and discussion so really was important organizations organized detail helped us immeasurably and getting to the point where

035we could think through what needed to be in these policies and make the changes i also want to give a shout out to the students of the bexley anti-racism project for receiving a 2021 minority business enterprise civil rights award really cool i've been able to participate in some of their meetings and i know that they've been really active and involved and working downtown to help talk to our legislature about what we should and should not be doing down there so i want to make sure that you know that we realize how much they're doing in the recognition they're getting osba conference i have been attending the osba capital conference the ohio school board association capital conferences sunday monday tuesday of this week i was the delegate for the district it was an honor to be

036in that role um governor dewine spoke to us at the delegates meeting he his main message to us was to just remind us that it's all about the students that the students are always and we we say that here often that's what we're doing that's why we're here and i was grateful to him for bringing that message back in the delegate assembly what we do in that is we look at proposals from the ohio school board association on how to amend their legislative platforms there was an issue this year a proposed change to the ospa's racism and equity plan to add sexual orientation and gender identity as two phrases in various places that would show that those were issues that the osba wanted to work towards supporting legislation that would be thoughtful about supporting people

037who could be discriminated discriminated against on those grounds so their their new plan was to say that they would support legislation that supported issues around equity including those groups and would work against legislation that did not do that it was a long discussion you have to have 75 of the delegates vote in favor and we did not make it and so i was really personally disappointed that we didn't get to that number we were at 72 percent so it's close um but it was a tough afternoon to not have that pass but i think that i'm grateful that the organization wants that there and i my guess is that they will keep keep working in that [Music] direction um quickly bexley wrecked the effects of records november meeting focused on revisions to policies related to

038events at their new venue a full report and a review of the proposed draft budget mike price specifically thanked our athletic director um eli wilberger for helping with safety features for the ice rink that the rec department will put up again this year so i wanted to pass that along and i want to also i did express in that meeting and and we'll say again tonight how much we appreciate what the bexley rec department does for us in our schools in particular with before and after care but they're incredibly supportive of our district and our students and what we do here so i've been really honored to serve on that board and continue to be grateful to them franklin county school board alliance this group continues to meet and continues to be a meaningful source

039for learning about what is happening in other districts members of that group report regularly on what's happening in their districts and they work hard to advocate in support of our public schools in ohio the school voucher program funding and curricular issues continue to be at the forefront of concerns along with issues around what's happening in the legislature the bexley kova task force had a special meeting on november 4th discussion included that coveted transmission numbers and vaccinally plateaued i know dr williams is going to give us a report on things tonight in general terms those numbers are currently neither rising or falling and remain higher than in many other districts in franklin county in response to a question one of the task force members noted that transmissions in our community are outside the community outside in

040the community and not traceable to the schools so i was grateful for that information back at that time the finance advisory council meeting was held on october 13th i was unable to attend and i'm really grateful to mr barno who attended that [Music] i think that's all i have thank you all right thank you that is a very full report we appreciate the work um especially your three days at the usda conference i always thought it was very informational right really helpful um first of all i'd like to congratulate mr baker on the state and this kid girl i know that that campaign takes a lot of time and effort and energy resources and mind space so uh congratulations to the three of you um secondly uh athletic board we were supposed to have a

041meeting tomorrow um we have some policies that need to be addressed and that was where it's being postponed so i have attended my last athletic board meeting but i do know that um some of the things that are on adopted coming up uh substance abuse and heart affects extracurricular programs and academic academic integrity issues will be coming up and also trying to look at facilities and issues with with klausen and other things are always in the background that dr williams and mr goldberger are working on so i'm sure when the athletic board i think the next meeting is in february i think it's going to move too so those discussions will continue along with some of the other things that i brought up last week a couple other things in regard to athletics i was

042just checking twitter to see if we have a score on the girls soccer game that started at seven no updates right now um final four awesome job by them and then uh both cross-country teams competed in the state meet again this year i think the boys have been four out of the last five years at the state meeting the girls have been there six years in a row um girls finish 14th degrees finished 20 is quite a become quite an accomplishment to get there my daughter runs too so that i was there for extra time but a couple of the board members they didn't have other things going on um miss powers and the snowden were there and of course dr fine was there mr goldberger so i appreciate that there was a lot of

043people that came out to some co-op just to support our athletes so it was a great race it's a lot of fun a beautiful day out too so and in regard to technology we have not had any technology [Music] tech meetings or anything like that but as always i appreciate mr pettit for his efforts and work that he does a lot in the background so every meeting i get a chance to recognize that thank you very much um i'm going to jump back in because i realized really looking at my notes i didn't i didn't forget um i did want to say congratulations for any board members it's it's a real tribute to you all that you've put in the time and effort to join this board and lunch i'm sure you will bring great

044things i'm very very thankful for your positive people in our community um so ms manuel [Music] yeah so the echo i think what was ours been mentioned thank you much gratitude to i think all the candidates who and the community who stepped up to take part in our schools and so i think it's i think it's important to recognize all the candidates you know stood up and counted and made their voices heard so thank you everyone for that um to mr obama's point i do have to like shout out to the students of our sports teams i'm having i'm glad mr broner's taking this phone because i'm having a hard time not uh the girls that's the girls soccer um scores and it's just just like just a pause too i think like we we

045just kind of like barrel on through but i think like last week was like you know we had a couple days off and that was like to mark like the end of like the first quarter so thank you like to all the staff everybody who has made that first like quarters like happen you know i mean this is this year is different than last year and it's looking good and i don't know especially i guess as apparently senior i'm kind of like feeling like super nostalgic and like looking back to the whole classes and saying wow there's a lot that's going on and there's a lot of wins so that's i think the whole entire team like should like be proud of what's going on so thank you all for that okay so those are

046my personal my personal thoughts um as a legislative liaison i'm going to just report really quickly that senate bill 229 housed in the summit and is now in the house for discussion and the highlights of that include they are looking into the statements assistance to address the need to provide schools with legal alternatives to maintain an education for students and it talks about extending the blended learn the deadline for the blended learning learning model promote learning and to students whose parents request the learning model and operate online schools allow quarantine students traditional schools to participate that online school during the period of warranty so it's basically they're looking at um it's a discussion that's moved to the house to kind of make sure that we feel like that there's a lot of support for the

047blended learning and the online so we'll see how that shakes out of the house and that's my report thank you very much 0-0 with 26 minutes to go in the first half miss mitchell yes i'm going to read my notes for bdf so that i don't mess up names specifically um [Music] oh i have the wrong one sorry hold on one second you're fine one to me i want too many notes well let me give you you know what this powers have one more thing okay um i have previously reported on pending ohio legislation that proposes to limit the teaching of certain events and concepts including related to race in public schools in our last meeting i reported on hearings where public testimony was provided in response to those bills i committed at that time

048to continuing to track and report on these bills to the board and i'm supposed to be getting updates but for some reason i'm not so i checked periodically and last week on october 7 one of the bills house bill 327 was amended among the changes the amendment removes the provision that would have prohibited prohibited requiring a student to advocate for or against a specific topic or point of view in order to receive credit for coursework and replaces that provision with one prohibiting a student's grade from being negatively affected by the student's refusal to exp express belief in or support for a quote divisive concept as defined in the middle there are numerous other changes many of which relate to a change from prohibitions on the teaching of certain things to the promotion of the enumerated

049divisive concepts changes also add a definition of promotion as i'm quoting seeking to advance or encourage support of a partisan philosophy or religion by indoctrination coercion or furthering divisive concepts by teaching an individual or group to accept a set of beliefs in a one-sided biased and uncritical manner and there are changes being made to these bills i think they're um you know i think in response to all of the effort to say what's um uh should you know to all the responses to these bills um i don't know what's going to happen with them i was in a legislative session about um these bills with dr fine over at the lsda um conference and i i don't have an update on what's going to happen next so i just wanted and now and no krystal

050says like no crystal balls um interesting thank you for continuing to [Music] education foundation uh is uh preparing to um award the 2021 bexley high school distinguished awards um the recipients this year dave schattenstein class of 72. uh brett kaufman kaufman class of 93 natalia bedner 01 ina simakovsky i practiced that i want to make sure i said it correctly uh class of 89 and dr john cracklin class of 65. he will be joining us with a reported message because he won't be traveling to for that event on november 22nd the recipients will receive their awards and make remarks at the pre-lunch time assembly for the bexley high school juniors and seniors the assembly while not open to the public attendance is limited but we are planning to videotape the assembly so um folks who

051can't be there can at least see it and then an informal luncheon for the recipients and their guests will follow in the community room [Music] um let's see and then we will host a cocktail reception from 6 p.m to 7 30. november 22nd at the gorgeous carriage court at jeffrey mansion um as part of the distinguished alumni celebration so you guys went out for that um just recently because i actually just are so that's my report for bef uh the livingston avenue corridor um committee and work did host um an opportunity for community members in the livingston avenue order uh to come and speak and have some questions answered i was working so i wasn't able to be at that meeting but i will be at the next um next one and then we did

052receive responses from the police interaction policy youth interaction policy i am not sure when those will be made public for everybody to review but as soon as they are i'll make sure that you guys get a copy of them um we would like to see a little bit more participation and you know everybody loves to weigh in on a survey when they want to weigh in on the survey but we need that information to help us um hopefully draft really solid policy for the community um so that's all i have today one more thing for us before you say that all right i did want to thank the candidates i you know wow i have had an opportunity to run a couple of elections and i know that that takes a lot out of you

053mentally and emotionally and your families are all invested um congratulations to all of you congratulations to everybody who you've been thought to run take a breath breathe because january you get to hit the ground running and you know luckily you have an invested uh group of board members that um you will be able to call at any time we we often um reach out to former board members just to help process information that's not weird that's not unusual we encourage you to do that and we encourage for anybody who's ever looking to run for office to reach out to board members so congratulations i'm super excited to get you here and get back to work so enjoy your holidays and breather sorry go ahead um one other thing that what that means and this is

054maybe more personal but alicia's son is assigned tomorrow to play basketball at ashland university and we have another yes katie jew soccer player is going to sign tomorrow as well fantastic [Music] tonight so that is the conclusion of our board of course for this evening dr fine you're up yeah just to thank you for everybody being here it's a packed house i see some awesome students that are beavers who are taking notes possibly for coursework to see if this is what you want to do if we can ever help it anyway please reach out to uh myself i'm sure anyone on the board would be willing to support your work if you need a couple more lines for the paper but thank you for being here huge thank you and shout out to our candidates

055jonathan baker dr baker marguerite jade joanne pickerel and larry is here and a thank you to larry and pat king and eric zanner it is not easy it takes its toll on your family it's the first time i've watched a campaign from this chair and i'm thoroughly impressed i'm thankful for the work that you all did it is not easy but i'm really excited for the work that's ahead and i appreciate those that did not get elected that are still all in and will be part of the process so thank you also i want to take a moment to recognize some students it's been a crazy busy october early november uh have seen some it makes this job the greatest in the world to be able to watch our students do their thing our staff

056members from our athletes to our middle school plays our clubs orchestra our choir our cabarets marching band the jazz band we have improv shows and many more that i've probably missed and failed to mention not to mention our girls there playing soccer right now in our cross crew and to watch bradley and her classmates if you've never been to a state cross country it does not matter what your colors are you are cheering for every child which is coming across that finish line and it is an emotional experience but i'm really proud of our bexley group and we had a great turnout to cheer them on i do want to go speaking of athletics into a really exciting opportunity with a athletic facilities update i've talked about this last couple months last month we continued

057our preliminary discussions on a partnership with the jewish community center for additional updated athletic facilities we left the meeting energized about the possibility for our students and community to have better and bigger spaces that give us more flexibility with our scheduling land in the immediate vicinity effectsly as you know is sparse and definitely is not cheap by improving upon this land we can essentially save the acquisition costs of property and exchange for the jcc having access for their programs as well it should be noted that we have floated the same idea with other potential partners over the years we plan to start initial conversations on design and layout at the same time of drafting language on a long-term lease agreement there are still many questions to be answered with a few critical ones outstanding but

058we do believe the collaboration between our two groups can find resolutions that are mutually acceptable financially we have resources in our permanent improvement fund but we may also have to look at fundraising and finally this opportunity would positively impact the well-being of our students by creating additional practice and game space that would reduce late nights for our student athletes to the limited facilities in bexley if you've ever had a child in our sports system you would know that this is an incredible burden on our students that we would love to address we look forward to community feedback uh and we will include board member participation athletic booster uh participation as well as our coaches we will continue to update our board of education members and community as we learn more about next steps and a

059big shout out to dr harley williams kyle smith our treasurer has been a huge piece of this and eli goldberger our athletic director this is a really big deal and a really important opportunity that we are excited to see where it takes us so an open dating discussion [Music] you're getting an update i did i did zero zero 15 minutes ago same yes please so we're going to have uh our first presentation of the evening a few months ago as you remember dr boyle and mrs abraham provided an overview of student data and the three areas of focus for our work for the 21-22 school year as you recall we're focused on a sense of belonging wellness and academics this evening mrs sam mcmasters the legend our director of student services will provide an overview

060of data captured in the most recent administration of the panorama social emotional competency survey which was given to our students in grades 4 through 12 and share how we further nurture the growth and development of social emotional skills in our students this data is a valuable source of information the students reflect on their social emotional competencies school support and the school environment we further appreciate mrs mcmaster's leadership of our school counselors and their work with our students families and teachers sam sam and i'm just going to interrupt you for one second as you get started just for people who are following along i probably should have made this amendment in the beginning this is item 6 in our agenda so we're moving it up um because we want to hear from you now and you

061know thanks thank you everybody else's masters thank you well thank you um i am excited to have a conversation tonight about our work in the district with social emotional learning and mental health which overlapped with much of the discussion that you've already had this evening so as we talked about equity as we talked about inclusion as we talked about uh working with intentionality and addressing the needs of the whole child those will be some of the things that you will see that will filter throughout this presentation tonight i will try not to take too much of your time but it's so important for our district to address these things what's important to note is the state of ohio did not have social emotional learning standards until 2019. those rolled out in the summer of 2019

062we know nine months later we were in the middle of pandemic and coming out of the issues that we've addressed in terms of accessing education over the last two years you will often hear conversations about we need to be mindful about the mental health of our students we need to have that in the forefront as we as we talk about the things that we're doing related to academic learning and how we're addressing social emotional needs of students the collaborative for academic social emotional and social emotional learning says that when children have those five competencies that they are then able to that what we see in the schools are improved academic performance improved behavior outcomes and improved school environment there's a wealth of research and knowledge out there that says that these things are important when

063the standards rolled out in the state of ohio they were rolled out with a disclaimer that said these standards are meant to be integrated into the daily activities of the school and districts can decide how to implement them and how to modify them to meet the needs of their students what we have actually have determined is that this is not something different it's not something else that we are doing but it is integrated into everything that we're doing across the board whether it is policy work whether it is academics whether it is how we are structuring our school day and so tough so in 2020 the ohio department of education updated their uh standards as well as castle updated their information to say that social emotional learning can help address various forms of inequity and

064can empower young people and adults to co-create gardening schools to contribute to safe healthy and just communities what we are currently seeing in bexley is an increase in students who are visiting our counselor office with reports of anxiety and an increase in students who have repeat visits to our counseling offices we've seen an increase in our students refer to nationwide children's hospital clinicians within our district an increase to our referrals to outside care and an increase to hospitalizations for students with significant mental health concerns when we think about why we're seeing some of these changes it's very difficult to say what the causation is for those increases what we can say is is that we have a better handle on where our students are meaning we have improved our collaboration with our nationwide children's clinicians

065with our school counselors we meet on a regular basis they meet weekly in their buildings we meet monthly as an entire team we are tracking things in a different way than we have in the past so that we are able to see where are we seeing some of these changes in addition to that we've changed our counseling model at the high school in which every each of our four counselors has made an extended effort to make a connection with every child on their caseload during the first quarter as a the result of that we do believe that some of our students now have connections with our adults in the buildings particularly our school counselors where they were previously viewed as counselors who work on scheduling and identify you know the college pathway and what are

066the courses that i should be taking to now they are seeking out their counselors for more mental health or social emotional learning needs so that's exchange i'm sorry to interrupt i i've heard from people that i know that were in these fields the the demand for the services like nationwide children's hospital where uh counseling and stuff their theirs are their difficulties with back up with getting kids in and delays and being able to get appointments and i mean maybe you don't know that no it's a great question yes and i think that's uh considerably seen in all mental health capacities across the state it is not a school-based mental health problem right but i will say that we do not currently have a wait list at our high school level which is a good thing

067where in the past we were seeing a significant wait list where we had six or eight kids at a time who might be on a list they do prioritize the students based on need but i also think because we've changed our collaboration model with our school counselors with our nationwide clinician and with our special ed mental health clinician that we have a better we have a better method of collaborating with one another so that kids are getting seen quicker in the past yeah that's probably the better better question to ask about how we're doing that um so we talked a little bit about the panorama data that dr boyle and dr abraham have presented back in the beginning of the school year and this is just a reminder on why do we use the panorama

068what did we see from it and then that link to the district commitment plan so we do get the panorama which is an assessment it's basically a survey that we give to students in grades four through twelve they answer questions related to those social emotional competencies and we specifically look at sense of belonging in our school climate we use that data because it does provide us then with links to tools and strategies that are research-based to address any concerns that we have within the district it also is linked directly to our commitment plan as we talk about our sense of belonging and our wellness goal for students this is where it overlaps with our equity and inclusion work it overlaps with our curriculum audits that we're doing and addresses that idea of the whole child

069when we looked at our comparison data we'll look at these in grade bands and that's because they are administering grade bands grades four and five have a little bit different questions than grades six through eight although they all fall under the same categories same for 912. we have to remember when we look at this chart that are the percent favorable you can't compare those to each other because some when students answer questions favorable responses are preferred in some and not others depending on how the questions are worded so we don't want to look at 76 favorable responses and say well that's a lot higher than the 49 so you look at each of those separately and as you read that across the first chart just says what was our percent of favorable responses the second

070one is compared to other similar school districts nationally and then what were the changes that we saw from the spring the spring panorama was administered right before we returned to in-person learning and this one hasn't been extorted since we've now been back in for a whole quarter it was administered at the end of october we do want to what we're looking for is for those green dots to be in the fourth and fifth quintile we'll see that in the area of brit across the district that has been an area of focus for us and continues to be we did see some decreases in student responses related to self-management items things like controlling their temper remaining calm when they're bothered by other people but we saw huge jumps in focus or questions about staying focused and

071on goal setting and persisting through problems when working on a goal so those are some of the responses from the fourth and fifth grade we'll look at the six through eight competencies in the six through eight you'll see increases across the board again decreases we're seen in self-management items again about controlling temper remaining calm and bothered by others being just again on staying focused and persisting through problems so i think it's just important to think about um the increase in focus you know we can make guesses as to why these are students were back in person learning when they took it this time so staying focused on the classroom setting where they have more structure is possibly one of the contributing factors the fact that when they took it in the spring they were in

072a classroom full of students full-time when they were in school half of the students were here so being bothered by others being annoyed by others is not a surprise when we think about kids are now back in the study together after having a year of that disruptive learning on the 9-12 competencies so what we saw were decreases in interpersonal interactions such as interrupting others listening to points of view and controlling their emotions again pulling kids back into a high school setting in a full classroom they have skills that maybe they didn't practice when they were at home or in a small group we did see big jumps on this um ask questions about staying focused when working independently and completing work in a timely manner likely again due to school doing schoolwork at school versus

073at home in the past when it was taken in the spring distractions still challenging across the board for all three great exams that we saw when we look at this next section this is our school climate and sense of belonging so our overall kind of pictures the numbers are estimates of our percentile rate nationally compared to other suburban schools at that grade band and with low rates of poverty there was a drop at the elementary level and sense of belonging from spring but it was matched with an increase to our national comparison so while we went down in the spring our percentile or our in relation to other districts similar to ours are we our percentile was higher [Music] generally students were reporting a more positive environment they did note that teachers may not be

074as excited about teaching as they were when the students reported it in spring but i think that goes to our climate that is that's what we're asking students for feedback and our students are saying we're recognizing the stress that educators are under that their teachers are under right now certainly as students got older there was an increase in the number of students reporting those items when we looked at our sense of belonging for our student groups by race generally favorable responses were within five percent of each other for all groups in each area at the elementary level [Music] we do see about a ten percent discrepancy between white and hispanic students and black or multi-racial students at both the middle school and high school level school climate was more varied with different groups reporting higher

075rates and favorable responses at different levels at the elementary level black students had the highest favorable rating by 13 asian students have the highest in the middle school by 23 and hispanic students at the high school by 10 percent the one exception is that black students in grades 4 and 5 reported more favorable school climate than any other group so those are all things that we want to take into consideration as we analyze that data and what are our students telling us about what's happening in our buildings and so as a district we take this big picture data we have data that's being analyzed from the building level we have our school counselors who are looking at student level data and we're really in a position now where we want to ask ourselves what are

076the things that we need to do to continue to move our work forward and hassle puts out four components of successful sel programming the first being that foundational support they really look at districts creating a three to five year plan for the implementation of a scl modern social emotional learning model that multi-year plan fosters collaboration among departments we think about our teaching and learning department our diversity equity inclusion our gifted our special education all of the things again have to be you have to collaborate across departments in order for this to be effective [Music] the second component of this is strengthening our adult sel competencies and capacity and that's where we work with the adults in our buildings our administrators our classroom teachers providing those professional learning opportunities making sure that our administrators are well

077versed in social emotional learning and what best practices are in the buildings it's important that we're also well-versed in cultural competencies and collective efficacy across the building the next section is about promoting social emotional learning for students that is the implementation of those standards and benchmarks supporting those evidence-based practices and integrating social emotional learning into all district priorities that includes academics discipline response to intervention multi-tiered systems of support across the board for our students and then the last section is about reflecting on data panorama is one piece of data that we use we have to use other pieces of data our academic data our discipline data our response to intervention data part of our commitment plan was that every response intervention plan that we wrote would address social emotional learning of the student even if

078a child had an academic needs we wanted to make sure that our building teams are addressing social emotional learning that they are talking about students strengths about the connections that they have with adults and how we're integrating that into a plan for success for each student many many people support social emotional learning in the schools and this is just a list of some of those people in addition to our teachers and administrators our school counselors who are implementing direct instruction in classrooms they're meeting with groups of students they're meeting with individual students we have nationwide children's clinicians through our image grant we are a very fortunate district to have a clinician in every single building they're not full-time in every building but we do have someone in every building we also have a special education

079mental health specialist that's only allocated towards students with ieps who have social emotional or mental health needs last school year we hired a work-certified behavior analyst and we have two and a half school psychologists who support this work as well on the next page it talks just a little bit about some of the work that we're doing and how we want to move forward so as we're reviewing our district seo programming we want to focus on both prevention and intervention as we analyze what's happening that prevention piece is our positive behavioral intervention and supports which you may see through our board policies you'll see those requirements the household the new hospital rules that came out this past summer we talked about our classroom tear blind counseling instruction that happens in the classroom and ongoing data

080reviews that are happening at the building level in terms of intervention it is that individual intervention group intervention that is in collaboration with our nationwide children's clinicians and our school counselors and also our crisis response and how we're addressing prices across the district and then some of the additional things that we are doing across the board um that ongoing review of panorama data the collection of that trend data which is that counselor visits referrals to a higher level of care we started that in the spring of last school year so we're still modifying what's the best way to collect information and how we're using that information we're also looking at that planning for prevention the coordination across the board the coordination of services we are starting our hope squad at the high school so our

081parent and student orientations are happening this week actually on wednesday and then this also overlaps with the work of the school climate committee in september our school climate committee worked with our buildings on micro-affirmations in october they did a session on calling in and calling out and addressing and interrupting biases from november through january our school climate committees are working with teams on restorative justice and building community within our schools so all of the work that we're doing overlaps and intertwines with the work of social emotional needs of our students so that's where we are currently we are we do have put together a social emotional learning committee for the district which includes our school counselors our school psychologists some of our mental health specialists to really look at how we structure and support services

082in the district while there is a wealth of information out there a wealth of research about program programming for social emotional needs about teaching the competencies there's very little guidance on how districts build supports and structures and put them in place to be effective and that's really where we put our efforts and emphasis over the last six months and that's what we're working on moving forward and that is all i have for you thank you very much any discussion for sam uh mr mcmasters i just want to thank you and the team for this report and the work that you guys have dedicated over the last year year and a half as you're building this model when i started on board in 2015 it seemed like social emotional learning was a talking point things we

083talked about and to see how much we've evolved to a point of implementing a strategy [Music] is really really inspiring and i'm super excited to see how it how it grows and continues to support our students so thank you i just want to add to that one of the questions that i had for this mattress rashi while i was looking at this before she presented it tonight i thought about panorama as a way to look at an individual student and help that student and i wondered about these comparisons that compare this year last year and so it's not comparing the student to the student and that student's change is talking about what's happening in the building and in great bands and it was helpful to me i want to make sure i'm saying this right

084because i'm quoting back what you told me but that while the counselors continue to have the individual's information and can use that along with the administrators in the building this permits you to look at how the buildings and the um you know great bands are responding and what we can learn about what's going on in school climate and behavioral issues and and growth on these issues that you've gone through for the building and look at that as a different measure to help guide what you're doing right okay thank you that was really helpful to me so much and i'm really grateful for this work it's at the heart of what we've been focused on and it's super important thank you um i would just want to highlight again thank you for your work and i

085know this is something that we have focused on the great score just knocks me out every time i see it um and so i just wanted to see that i saw it low again um i know it's something we're really working on and i was about glad to see the middle school went out for points even we are still at the bottom of the percentile um so i know we're going to keep working on it but i think it's important for our families to understand that that's something that we see consistently so you know we can do what we can do in the school building but it takes the whole village to change um to change lifestyle approaches to something like grit and so i would look forward to i know we've worked in the

086past and try to do parent institutes and i'm sure that that would be a positive one to get something to be helpful thank you sam i just want to add one final thought again some of that data tells the story of what our educators are going through as well yeah and that's why i love that the folks that are in the front row and maybe in other spaces and throughout the room we need great people we need people that are passionate about children and students and finding ways to advocate for them and be empathetic um because they need us and we need them as well so i'm again thrilled that you're in here and in that work because we need great people thank you sam much appreciated to you to jill and dr boyle thank

087you very much um so continuing dr fine with your reforms we will move uh quickly a zero zero a half update uh yes we now are gonna ask dr williams to join us we're going to continue to have a a conversation around our covered protocols as you know we've had lots of updated guidance we've had a cup since the last time we were in the room together we've had a couple of updates that we've sent out to you so we've asked dr williams to share and provide an update to those changes explaining our current procedures as well as provide current cast data additionally dr williams will share some insight into our current policy of masking students during recess and then at the conclusion of dr williams i'll make a recommendation about uh recess and then

088we'll open up for discussion just so i'm clear do the board members have access to this on the list yeah thank you i do and actually it's available for everybody so if anybody at home or an audience is flying along it's at the bottom of our board dock that's where um it's coming should we look at the one that was sent to our email or this one this one this one yep thanks sorry about it okay well whoops let's go back one all right i think i want to start off by saying this is something that i want to share with everyone in here and it's it's probably going to generate more questions than answers i've had the luxury of sitting down with the doctor fine and other supervisor calls we get a chance to

089process and talk about things and what is but there's a lot of synthesis that goes into this everything that we're gathering here and it's not just as simple as you know i wish it would be what's the guy you say i mean the guys is sometimes it contradicts itself sometimes the ohio department helps you to contradict cdc and things we do and so we do our best to take a look and see what the guidance is what are the legal advice we're getting as far as we would definitely put our district or students in keeping them safe and protecting our district 2 for our liability and things like that so i'm going to i'm going to i have 10 slides and i'll cover what i think are the key points of the things that i

090probably have learned in the last two weeks so the first thing is that the ohio department of health and franklin public health officials still they still identify vaccination and mass usage as critical components to ensuring a safe school environment in a recent meeting with local public health officials and central ohio superintendents [Music] they reported maps rick masking recommendation will likely remain in franklin account uh until the county moves into a moderate transmission rate for as they described it at least for four consecutive weeks and that and for them the modern transmission was defined as above 50 cases per 100 000 and a 5 to 7.9 under eight percent positivity rate again this could a change though since conversations occurred these conversations occurred before the announcement of the new guidance came out so like i said

091things are never just completely lined up perfectly but that was a conversation that we were hearing at that time and i think so the reason i want to point it out is that the new this guy's the new guidance is about quarantine it's not about masking guidance it's not about vaccinations it's about quarantine earlier there's a conversation that i was getting there doesn't seem to be a blending they thought this was about masking it and this really is not in fact if you read the guidance it says they still value vaccinations and masculine and this this new guidance from odh and this is where it gets kind of fuzzy again it only applies to school settings [Music] exposures that happen in school settings and which is that we'll talk about where that makes sense and

092where it doesn't make sense but um but there's other things that come into play and we're going to talk about uh excuse me here i'll go back one more i'll go back to the reward so on october 25th the odhs issued new quarantine guidance for the exposure to occur in school settings for school related activities the oda reported this change in guidance was based on findings from the growing body of state national experiences as well as information learned from a warren county pilot study and does not apply to household exposures and exposures that occur outside of the school setting or school-related activities now that sounds crystal clear but it's not in one way it is in other ways it's not we also have to talk about how house bill 244 came into play on october

09313th it's not said that basically we can't discriminate on our actions uh for between vaccinated unvaccinated students and we have to kind of treat the same we have to treat all the same so a lot of our procedures and guides that we put in place and ensure that we're following uh house bill 2-4-4 and so while house 244 while in effect again that could change if fda approves the other vaccines uh that once that happens that this this law goes out it it dissolves so while it's in effect it requires schools do not discriminate between our vaccine and vaccinate staff and students such as the public school we are not permitted to require those who are unvaccinated to take infection control measures such as masking testing or quarantining and different from those measures required persons

094who are vaccinated and due to this to the new guidance and also the new guys the other guys we got from the public health official was saying that schools we don't really have the authorization to quarantine we our our level is uh exclusion for like medical emergency in the past what that one might have been applied for if there was a child of lice and we would we could exclude a student from school while they were getting that taken care of and things like that so we're trying to process and gather and synthesize all this information in there and i think it and so uh i think it's important to note that even in this new guidance of receiving is that franklin county public health has said they are the ones who will be a

095good thing or a bad foreign because i think i will say i don't understand where it's taking pressure off of our school and our nurses because they have worked mildly to protect our people our students here they've communicated with parents in our community and most of them to be honest with most of the exposure notices we get we are not getting exposure notices from school we're not having spread happening within our school and i attribute that to the masked wearing and people that are taking precautions as opposed to to my knowledge we haven't had one case that was spread at school yet but we get a lot of household exposures outside exposures family vacations stuff like that we've had a lot of cases i think we've done 60 cases so far at least um most

096of which have been at home quarantine has been self-imposed or working with the school district on that they've been self-imposed when they contracted it so we've had a lot of family positive cases this year so two or three in a family two or three in his family whether or not it was someone brings it home from a business trip or conference or something like that so um so let's talk about what the policies are what what is the new mass to state policy what what does that really mean and i would say that this policy or this new guidance has been very well received by schools that were masked optional to start the year and a lot of the massive optional startup school years ended up going match required now you might start seeing a

097transition back to mass optional against some of those for some of those schools the impact of this guy from mass requires schools is minimal and that's my knowledge as i said we have not seen any spread occur in our school so this really does not it's not going to really support our efforts that we're doing right now because we're seeing the benefits of our masking and our mitigation strategies are working currently but nearly all identified closed contacts that come from us from parents reporting um that are exposure to happening outside of school like i said this year we've had approximately sixty-four deposit cases and not probably not surprising sixty percent of that sixty have occurred at the elementary level while twenty percent have come from the middle school about twenty percent come from the high

098school the biggest impact is new quarantine guys and as well as the the the information we've got this legal advice we've got house bill 244 the nice we've been from franklin time public health is that the district we are no longer requiring students to self-isolate or determine we use quarantine whenever there's an outside or outside exposure household exposure um in those situations now um we are communicating with the parents and again most of the times we're hearing from that's how we're learning about these students we're learning about the exposure from the students and families and then we dropped the letter that was a template from franklin county public health odh that basically gives parents some guidance now they've gotten the choices they have now is that they can mask to stay but they can choose

099to sell isolate i'd say the first couple weeks of this time i think we were 100 percent of the people who are in that vice post contacts or identify themselves as close contacts chose to self-isolate in the last week and a half i'm starting to see that flipping in where families are opting to implement their mass to stay option and report to school [Music] and so and we're asking parents when they do this and kind of let us know so that we can help and and remind students what should occur but this is all sent to them into an electronic communication each time when students do stay in school when they say i'm a i'm a close contact i went to a family reunion or my dad came back from a vacation and tested positive

100they can return to school students may return to school under this new guidance if they're asymptomatic two they have to self-monitor for symptoms for 14 days following the last date of exposure three they must agree to wear a mask at all times except while getting your drinking of course while it's school for 14 days following the last day of exposure and four those were mainly the state guidance that we've added our fourth guides is that earlier in the beginning of the year when we were getting restart guides they said we had to have a minimum of three foot foot of distancing while eating in the cafeteria which helped a lot of schools go back to having all students be able to eat in school um we are working with parents and parents in your comeback

101school please keep at least six feet of the distance between you and your peers when you're eating and it a lot when we go outside it's it's it's quite simple and i think that's one of the nice things that will happen in the state once covered leaves because i think you'll start you'll continue to see our students eating outside i think that's has been a kind of a silver lining or something that we that we never did that we like doing now and if you go to the middle school high school you see them spread out throughout you know well maybe not the middle school so much but the high schools the picnic and always every day they go outside the front and payouts and things like that and so we've we've also opened up

102this environment here we put tables in here and we put chairs at six foot apart so if if students want to come in and bring their friends in with them that they're not going to say you have to be isolated you have to you know face the corner and don't breathe in so we were confident and everything we've done played to keep six feet apart and they have the option to even use this facility as well at the elementary school that's been designed from the start of the year to keep students six feet apart indoors and outdoors every day so that's really not going to be a major impact and we think that our middle school and high school students understand this virus and how it spreads so well that they will uh certainly not

103want to spread that with their peers and we'll honor their six foot lunch because it's going to be very difficult to watch 800 students or how many students are in here wherever they are during lunch time so they'll be just the education and reinforcement of what we need students to do to keep themselves and other people safe as well [Music] now with outdoor recess um you may recall the original franklin county public health guides that we got at the very beginning of the year stated that corn schools door mass required identified closed contacts were not needed quarantine if they were exposed if the exposure happened in school and so we followed that and we wrongly interpreted that exposure during outdoor recess [Music] we talked about a couple months ago if there was an exposure happen

104outside unmasked recess or pd class [Music] we felt based on opening up ohio stadium for football games and and uh we thought that was safe outside and we got challenged on that contacted franklin county public health they said you're you're wrong the way you're interpreting that this guy's only implies that they're masked outside so we came in and we had a conversation much as we're having right now and we asked for the board dr recommended that we go to a require mask recess pe not to argue the science or not the daniels but just to keep kids in school and i think the more reluctantly uh put that in place uh i'm going to say reluctantly that i think we were all defined as outside they could go unmasked but we wanted to keep kids

105at school so that decision was made now this guy just changes that a little bit so we're going to come back today and ask [Music] to go back to a uh bricks i think dr finally making a recommendation we moved back to that's optional uh whenever we're outside for recess or pe and um and so uh outdoor recess is what i have here on my notes here uh it would not have students so okay so we i gave you the history now the new guidance now allows students to return to school the exposure occurred while the student was outdoor unmasked during recess or pd as long as the student again follows the same procedures they are symptomatic they've got awareness so if you're a close contact now you were masculine if you allowed that we

106agree to make it a optional and they become close contact they don't have an option anymore if they want to go outside whenever they have to wear a mask if they're going to be at school and the same thing for our lunch procedures and things like that again we never want students wearing their masks under high intensity activities such as pe mind calls or for athletics and things like that and so i think based on this new guy instructor finally asking the board of education to send the master requirements for outdoor media and recess tonight test and play um justin clay and this new guidance students who have been exposed to either an in-school or out-of-school setting will be permitted to continue participating in athletic f theater extracurriculars as long as they are asymptomatic and

107wear a mask while at school start to see a theme here students involved in high intensity activities are not required to wear a mask and so an athlete for example who identifies in close contact would not need to wear a mask while they're on on the basketball court or wrestling man based on this new guys and um i think the message we're going to be sending out is about you're going to take care of your team too because you don't want to be easy you can take chances with you by impact other players on your team as well but they have that option and basically it's a testing protocol that we're gonna implement as well and that is as long as we keep getting the tests that we want from the state and we're ordering

108uh tesla just over 500 more and uh and we're trying to stockpile so we're prepared we probably have 500 in the reserve right now [Music] and uh we're ordering more but in this testing procedure um once we get notified that someone's been exposure they get a test at that time and then they have to test it and if they're positive in any kind of step then they're they're excluded they can't participate but if they're asymptomatic and negative they can still continue to play then we test them again on days five through seven after exposure and if there's negative uh they can test out a quarantine status after day seven or on day eight and then we will we're gonna we're gonna test our student athletes to one day competition and so if they're in between

109that eight day window and i work we're just going to give provide tests to our students on the competition to make sure that they're not possibly exposing other teams other members of surrounding communities for this as well so they're working with nationwide children also to make sure how this will work ideally i'd like to have our athletic trainers administer the tests here um i'm working with dr john smith at nationwide their out outreach manager we have a meeting scheduled for today and he had a chance to do some emergency we're going to talk tomorrow right now we're he he's he's concerned about testing environment getting is a possibility of contamination i'm concerned about ease of access to test readers from our trainers and our students not having to go to nationwide to take a test

110so we're meeting tomorrow and i'm hoping we've come to a place where our athletic trainers are able to administer the tests here for our student athletes and not require that they go nationwide take multiple tests and i'm confident we'll come to that and hopefully we'll come to that agreement i also recently knew you saw vaccines for ages five to eleven have now been uh optimized uh to that word is authorized not really approved um so the 5's represented in the cdc the result of the studies that involved about 5 000 5 11 year olds which showed the vaccine to be safe and 91 percent were protected from contracting symptomatic human 19. as with the adults it was found that children with underlying health conditions were found to have the highest risk for getting infected and

111recently an advisory committee to the cdc voted to recommend finders silver 19 vaccine to children age 511 and the cdc director has signed off on the committee's recommendation dr wolinski has publicly stated that the science behind decision is sound in clinical trials vaccination was found to be nearly 91 affected and preventing close to 19 among children ages 5 11 and the side effects were mild self-limiting the american academy of pediatrics also issued a release supporting the cdc advisory committee's decision and the fda has authorized a vaccine for children aged 5-11 and it's important to note that authorization does not mean the vaccination is approved for children emergency use authorization allows fires to provide safety effectiveness data after tracking trial participants for an average of two months instead of the usual six months parents are encouraged

112to speak to their child's doctor about the vaccination and what might be best for them with that we've been working closely with the city of bexley and nationwide children's hospital and i've agreed to host a vaccination clinic for that age group on thursday november 18th from 5 o'clock to 8 the casting camp complex right here in the cafeteria uh information details are still being finalized i'm sure i'll be working with tyler and on the communication dr final try to get something out of some details out to the community and that option later this week [Music] as far as recent data in our local 43209 data the past two weeks we've had 44 cases in our zip code that equates to about 154 per 100 000 case rate of 154 for 100 000 past 30 days

113though it was it was it was much worse so we're starting to see good data trending in the right way that we were 138 cases in the past 30 days with the case rate 484 per 100 000. a very uh powerful piece of data is that here it's in our 43209 where it's 65 vaccinated at least with the initial vaccination and that's includes even those who are ineligible to be vaccinated um so i think the goal um we've been hearing a lot about 70 percent and we've reached that and even though the 12 year olds are included in that they don't you know part of that number they're calculated in there but they haven't had a chance to be vaccinated yet so that could have climbed i think um quickly it's over 70 but we'll

114see as far as our uh positivity rate as i said earlier there the public health officials were hoping to get it below eight percent it's uh to get back in the moderate range the goal is three percent um but you get the moderate range of eight percent and uh they're eight and we're at five point five percent so that's that's a good sign as well [Music] we're also in a consortium of local school districts that work with a project of ohio state university and their research and they call it cats it's acronyms for cats but basically it's a school-based data collection analyzing and that gets reported out so we get to see how we're doing eventually but i also get to compare that information with other how other schools are doing and what are they

115you know seeing and trending in their schools and so i put i just put a couple things on here because one thing you know you don't go into looking at data and you say well this is what i hope i see you just kind of write down you oh this kind of caught my attention our case rate is getting uh this is it's lowering as you can tell it's still the crew the approved rate um for this would be just our students just the students that are in our school and four three and two and i as you know includes other people as well not just in bexley so you might see a difference in some of the numbers but what's interesting on the right-hand side is we have 17 other school districts in central

116ohio that are part of the study and i only like to see how we're performing where we rank with comparisons other to the other school districts and you can see that early in the year we were we were you know there were probably not before there were three school schools that were doing a little bit better than us uh one and then the week of nine 8 and 9 22 there was only one other school that had better case rate data than we had at the time and then there were three schools a week after that and they started seeing some trends that weren't so good but other schools were having cage rates that were a little bit better than ours so i don't know exactly why what that means but um i just found

117it interesting i thought i would put that up there at least to share that information because it struck me and i don't know i don't know why uh last but not least some district reporting this would just be our reports the reports that we get and we get collected ourselves and like i said this is mostly through parent information that gets reported and you as you can tell a month ago 90 or skip a couple months ago we were 35 close contacts and resulted into eight covalent positives students and then this is all students by the way and then the next week we had 20 close contacts identified eight again positive cases um the 10-7 the two-week period between october 7th and october 20th we had 13 closed contacts and then out of 13 i

118self-identified those contacts we had nine positive cases um and then we've had and so you'll see we had ten close contacts the following two weeks we had sixteen so in one week time overlapped we had a lot of we had new people and other people have to give us encoded positives that ended up friday throughout the two weeks prior to that um [Music] i'm sorry i think i might have thrown out way too much information i'm sure you got a lot of questions and uh with that i'll close my and answer any questions you might have at least try to answer the questions [Music] as soon as i can so we appreciate that dr williams i am very thankful of the work that goes into this especially with our staff our students our families our

119nurses your research and your process i'm not going to summarize as i was going to i thought you did a great job of providing a lot of information as a result i am recommending the board to amend the resolution to recommend but not require mass during recess and pe as a result of this new guidance we are committed to the safety of our students and will continue to update families and board members of any new guidance from health officials and we're happy to hook discussion at this time um dr williams told me will the family have to schedule appointments for the vaccine clinic or will it just be open yeah we'll we'll um i think again this plan is in the final as i envision something in a letter with a little schedule of time

120there'll be a link length of the schedule and we're also working with transportation trying to find transportation for the outer limits of our community if they wanted a ride and they can request a ride and we'll find a way to make sure that we get the family here for those that want to get it um and that communication i'd like to say we should go well those are the two big big parts that i failed to mention that we are we want to make sure that everyone who wants it makes that decision to get the vaccination and they have access to it can i just ask a whole question about that clinic um is is we're just vaccinating five to eleven-year-olds in that clinic or is there an opportunity for older in our community we

121um we're gonna it'll be anyone in this community in our in our community as well as any of our staff members whose children uh dr williams on your slide number 10 you said you weren't sure what led to the lower better case rates and i was just curious how many of those districts in the cat's pool of 17 are masculine i have to go see it's hard to tell i was trying to look at that data myself and figure figured out that there were so many schools that were started let me tell you how many were started i think i could find out for you who started out as mass optional but then a lot of schools two or three weeks into it when the match required i don't know their status now i said

122i make a lot of i think a lot of schools based on the conversations i'm hearing other superintendents talking on the coast called is that i think a lot of superintendents now we're going to go back and consider going back to mascot like i can't i can't give you exactly which one of those [Music] some of that i wonder uh dr williams has shared that we have not seen to our knowledge we've not seen community spread within amongst our our this the schools we are aware of several cases that are occurring in the household and that spread is taking place there so that doesn't necessarily show us that our our masks if you compare that to schools that are master or unmasked uh we are seeing a large proportion of our students especially coming from

123our elementaries that are coming from the home and so to see as few of students that are in quarantined tells us that hopefully legion to believe leads me to believe that the mass are working to lower that spread any other discussion points just to follow up what ms mitchell said is there is there something in the cats [Music] when you get those when you get those every get those every week on wednesday and wednesday do they provide they don't provide the information about which schools are messing and it's right now yeah what they do is it's those seven is it 17 17 districts there's a report out it just shares the information it gives a specific graph for your district you can see the other districts uh carla croswell my administrative assistant had worked earlier

124in the school year to identify who was masked at that time but i for the most part and i'm not gonna that's probably foolish to say but most of our districts went towards uh mandatory masking i can't speak to all 17 but that may be something we want to compile here soon yeah and the reason i asked just you know especially it looks like i did do some research on some of the schools and a lot are adopting the mask to stay or master play whatever you want to call it did they a lot of our districts are now doing that and again what we talked about back when we amended to do the masking part of that was the discussion surrounding keeping the kids at school that's right and and i think dr williams

125mentioned this you may have mentioned it part of that requirement was okay if your kids don't have a mask on and they're exposed and they're out of school for 14 days that's now changed so that dynamic as far as what the basis of that policy was part of what we're doing now yeah this policy and i'm really thankful that the board and reluctantly i think we all reluctantly voted or recommended to mask at recess and outdoors pe outdoor pe when it didn't make a lot of sense for the sole purpose of keeping kids and students or keeping students in school now this gives us the ability if you are close contact umass at recess for those next 14 days but it does allow us to keep kids in school without having students mask at recess

126we still recommend it or i still recommend but would not recommend requiring so then the next question i have is and maybe this is something not for for us even in december but you know we talk about this a lot is where is that stepping off of okay now we have the state of play the most important thing is keeping the kids in school and if we have these policies for that now yeah when did we get to that point especially and i'm not asking you to give me an answer right now because that's something that's really important as a board member now and then this community library as a parent but that's something that's really important too to a lot of people here that you know when when we can stop doing it because

127we have a presentation from this mcmasters about social emotional well-being and all the things that we're talking about it does the mask i do think of that so i appreciate that question i'm glad you asked that or commented to that i love what dr william said in the start of this that this new master stage has to play is about quarantines and not about masking we want what everybody wants which is we want our we want normalcy and we want students to not be masked one thing that i think dr williams shared is ohio department of health and local health officials have kind of an offering that they've recommended that doesn't mean that's exactly where it'll stay the next time we have a conversation with them we are well aware that families are curious to

128see what this brings in terms of our current masking mandate we will continue to dig in with health officials and our area superintendents and our watch team and our board of education to find out what that what that off ramp will be should be i think right now i think what the guidance we've heard is continue to ask let's take full advantage i'm thankful that we have a district that was able to move as quickly as we did to create a site for our young 5-11 to be vaccinated that's a really important step to this process and i'm interested to see where we land yeah and and i and i don't dispute what dr said but i mean it obviously is intertwined because again about the last time we had a resolution on asking outside

129was yeah was to keep our kids in school and so it is intertwined with what this policy addresses so it's not like you have to master we're recommending optional but it is all intertwined into what we're trying to accomplish in keeping our kids in square and doing what we can to eventually not have to be asked right while keeping them safe yes yes i have a quick um just point of clarification dr london can you um explain or dr fine the the um my understanding is that the test to play really also applies to all of our extracurriculars and for us as theater but my understanding is that the theater students since they're indoors will keep their masks on yes in keeping with our indoor masking policy yes thank you and to follow up to

130that the intense physical activity you're not defining they're not defining that i've seen some of the musicals jm that's some intense physical activity i for us in our conversation is to gain competition and game practices and so i think you know the plot convinced that the the activity is at that um yeah thank you all for the conversation about the science i was hopeful that um once we have now we have the opportunity to have um younger children vaccinated that'll be another important step for for us um getting us closer to getting the mass stuff in the school so thank you very much i just have two more hours of my life here no about 10 minutes ago i received an update that wyoming was up 1-0 the last piece victoria i already mentioned it

131just a reminder to our community that our second community engagement in november i believe november 19th will take place via zoom uh it will be at noon we are trying to provide different opportunities throughout the day to provide opportunities for people to be involved we will send out that link to sign up again here soon i'm assuming with our upcoming newsletters and jill abraham our deputy superintendent will be joining us at the next session so we look forward to connecting with more community members that is all i have thank you thank you i look forward to that all right so unless we have that i'd like to um entertain a motion to approve items um under for our agenda and we can have any further conversations after i have a motion in a second so

132can i have a motion to approve items for a through i summon thank you thank you all right any questions or comments concerns about these issues for today i just i since there's so many policies first of all some fun stuff there it looks like but secondly um under g though those were those are first insect waiver of second reading that we're adopting as policies and then another h is just the first reading yes [Music] process no then i'm not blamed and like i said it's it's a lot of stuff and i appreciate it because yeah go ahead sorry i i just want to reiterate i'm so thankful for the crew that's dug into that that's been a process a great process for me to go through with alongside our board members and our our

133leadership team and [Music] this is not how it will look as we move forward and just from a clarifying clarification um we receive updates regularly um as policy updates for law changes whether it's a minor word choice or um and just with the the complete overhaul of leadership changes that we've had covered um you know eventually like many districts across the state are um really in this mode of trying to make sure that their their policies are compliant and i was happy to hear dr fine that we are not one of the bad actors um but my competitive spirit would not allow me to not recognize that there are some that are years years delinquent in policy so it's a great reminder that what also makes us unique is that we have a fantastic board

134and i'm excited for our board members who are getting ready to join us that we take this very seriously it's it's who you are who we are and um we make sure that the policies that we approve or that you approve are uh what we live so i am thankful for our community i think i mean right the ospa often suggests things and and i think we're careful about making sure that they apply to our specific situation and sometimes that requires some modifications yeah and weren't some of these like in g part of the ea contract as well that we can do it just um i will just note her with word powers following along with all of this that there will be um we pulled off a couple of our a under a with

135aca n-a-c-a-r-a-c-a-a [Music] and a-c-a-a-r and those who both come back that are all come back to the first reading in december we were just a little unclear of exactly um how we wanted for those so you'll see those again next month and we will get our update from ospa in november so there will be new ones coming our way or december i'm sorry for yes but we'll get that uh later on this month okay yeah so there'll be more there will be one that's great and then we'll give our new board members opportunity to approve those under second ratings yeah that's this is the three board adversary homework for uh all right of each of these policies policy manual um okay so we have a motion and a second to approve items for a through

136i if there's not any more conversation or questions mr smith can you call the role yes miss powers yes mr bardo yes mrs mineo yes yes thank you all right so we're moving on to our pressure report [Music] all right we'll take a five minute break we'll be back augustine and that means mr smith you are on thank you [Music] i don't have any been at conferences but when there's a speaker they hold up a sign that says five ten minutes ago um i've instructed ms abraham to hold up the sign when there's 30 minutes left 15 minutes less than five so we could have used that for dr blues no seriously as quick as i can than five years sure um so first i'll just highlight a couple items on the agenda first is

137um the the monthly financials i won't spend any time on because the forecast i think overrides that this month um but the monthly financials have been updated to the five-year forecast of this one so we had been previously working against maine's forecast and our monthly variances um we have a bus replacement purchase coming for your approval that's coming out of permanent improvement um and then the other thing i would highlight is um inc kind of related to um [Music] sorry it is item uh 5g invoices over 3000 uh this just highlights um the costs well it highlights one and we didn't have a purchase order in place before the expense we haven't had this in quite a while but uh this also highlights the the cost that um the increased cost of facility usage that

138we've seen from the city of columbus and it is one of those entities that dr fine mentioned where we've we've tried to enter into a long-term lease or through facility or fields and have not really gotten too far with it so i just really wanted to highlight that but really the important item for me tonight is the five year forecast if we could have that up there and slide so the the new known since the last time i've provided an update uh since may is we do have the the final numbers for fiscal year uh 21 which i did present and talk about in july i won't repeat any of that but new nodes since may is we've negotiated agreements with both of our unions for three years which includes the two and a half

139percent in increase in base wages that does not include step increase wages so that beats inflation staffing updates we hired 23 new additional teaching staff members or i would say i say teaching i say in other words bargaining unit members in the teaching ranks eight of those are new ftes in the teaching ranks 15 of those 15 of the 23 were either retirements or resignations that is a significant increase in new staff within the district more than 10 in that teaching bargaining unit membership significant that impacts the forecast as you know because the average um let's just say resignation wage was 80 000. the average hiring wage was about 58 to 60 000. so that does impact us on a little bit of savings [Music] in 22. yeah 15 resignations and or retirements we had

140i think maybe six retirements [Music] net increase of eight now if you'll recall last year was a freeze because of budget state budget cut reductions which uh we all made that decision as a governance team 16 17 months ago yeah so so some of those ftes came back online that that's part of those eight additional increases oh okay so not not all of it was just due to staffing or enrollment but a lot of it was kind of back filling that those freezes from 17 months ago also new knowns is medical insurance rates for the next two calendar years which straddle fiscal years a 5 increase in medical insurance or medical insurance cost us about 5 over 5 million out of our 40 million dollar budget somewhat significant uh we are capped for the next

141calendar year at 12 uh which could also be lower so this year calendar year 22 we were capped at nine but we as you can see got five percent so we always negotiate that or try to negotiate that down um every year [Music] the new known well sorta is state funding i'll go into more detail about that so we'll go to the next slide um unknowns in the blue state funding still kind of unknown so it's going to hit twice i guess but i'll talk about that coping 19 is still an unknown not only with um social emotional like we've been talking but also just staffing etc enrollment is something that we continue to watch we were a little bit lower last year because of because of coven and families deciding to use other options

142but we've we've seen or picked up additional enrollment back uh as always the biggest unknown in revenue is the income tax and we'll talk about that so next i'll talk about state funding or formula funding and this is the most basic view that i can present to you with state funding as you know since being on the board state funding is pretty complicated and it's gone through a major overhaul in the state by any budget so that first top line is formula funding revenue second line is additional aid items also revenue so additional eight items would be preschool special education transportation special ed transportation what we used to call student wellness uh the next two things transfers and adjustments are mostly expenditures so when we and expenditures where the state pretty much takes the money

143right away from us and those expenditures are usually or mostly special education related to scholarship students or open enrollment students out which are very few that primarily related to special education so in the past in column fy 21 we'd get the revenue for those special education students or scholarship students and then we then we would see a corresponding maybe not balanced ballot corresponding but a corresponding deduction or expense that we had to vote that we had to book in the new funding model they've taken away for the state essentially will pay those special education scholarships that the funding does not come through to us and the expenditure does not come out of us so when you look at the what i'm calling the rough variance of the forecast the state as it has accounted for

144that when they've calculated our revenue um they pretty much said when they were looking at state funding they looked at that very bottom line and said it said in fy 21 your net was 3.8 million dollars and pretty much kept us full um you can see the variance is about twenty two thousand almost twenty three thousand dollars uh to the negative but that's [Music] that's probably due to enrollment variances and some other transfers and adjustment variances that are still happening so in all when the state redid this budget they committed to keeping us whole or on a guarantee if you recognize that term there's one thing that i have not seen so let me back up and say we've not seen how this formula is working yet as i reported last month the state was

145optimistic in having this formula sent to us in october they've delayed it to december so we've done our best guess at how this formula is going to work in the forecast um i would say right now my biggest concern is um [Music] which i have not have not seen or we'll see how this flows out is a 10 was holding on catastrophic costs catastrophic costs is a program for an application that the state or the schools apply to the state for extreme costs for individual special education students obviously students have needs some needs are higher than others and the state allows for a reimbursement for that in this new formula the state is withholding 10 of our revenue um at least this is how i've read it and seen it's been talked about 10 of

146our revenue for catastrophic costs is that too offset it's to offset these applications so previously the state funded these applications at around 50 [Music] they believe that this new withholding would help fund it entirely or in a better percentage [Music] so what does that mean for us our applications in the past few years have ranged forty to fifty thousand dollars of those of those applications if they are withhold in complement fy 22 380 000 we could be at petting laws not sure how that's going to work if it's 10 of special education categorical funding that's a different number um so that formula support line has a lot of sub lines to it um so that's my biggest concern with the state funding and we'll see how that shakes out i've not gotten an answer on

147where what line that ten percent will be calculated [Music] you don't know if it's going to hit the formula support i don't know if it's going to hit that top line of 3.8 million dollars if we're looking at fy22 or if it's going to be one of the sub lines within that because there's in the formula there's many many calculations and many different lines underneath that that get up to 3.8 my hope is it's going to be on the special education realm and not on the very top right very bottom frequently [Music] and would we get that applaud back you know yeah we would so if yeah if if we applied for um 50 000 and received 25 we get we would hopefully get the 50. the other thing for us in particular because we

148are one of the few districts that are guaranteed the same level of state support is how this 10 percent impacts the guarantee with it with being on a guarantee so we don't have bad answers so just fyi dr fine and i were at this event yesterday one of the things that the head of the school you know k-12 school subcommittee of the senate said was that it's a priority for him to get rid of these guarantees wow so we know it's [Music] the new formula did uh adjust the number of school districts on the guarantee there's very few now compared to what there was and kyle can you refresh my memory again who qualifies to be able to get it the guarantee pretty much says you will not receive less money than what you received

149the previous year right or whatever benchmark year they're talking about saying that changes depending on well no so next year that that's that's not a guarantee for us next year it's essentially a guarantee it's a bridge over the two biennium budgets it helps districts who are maybe losing enrollment rapidly or their demographics are changing rapidly in this room the opposite of that is a capped district we were a cap district a couple years ago because of our enrollment process so it was was increasing so much so we've we've been in a since i've been here we've been guaranteed we've been capped we've been in the formula [Music] um so this is just a quick uh glance at the changes on just a few revenue lines from may to now you can see property taxes very

150little change um the income tax which will talk about uh a change to the positive and the unrestricted state granting a that's the state funding change [Music] go next um the income tax again the biggest wild card we'll hit a few slides on this but i've tried to line up the fiscal years um one on top of the other uh or the same fiscal year on top of each other from may to 21 so there's a shift because of the fiscal year that 8.4 in the top is an actual number for last year if you'll work well we'll talk about where we are in october but you can see we've we're increasing the income tax forecast in 22 on out the next slide [Music] comparing the october payment of the income tax you'll see october

1512020 stands out like a third sore thumb or yeah we'll say something and and that is due to the irs tax filing due to coven last year so july is usually our biggest collection a lot of that revenue was delayed to october because of that tax finally but if you ignore that which i did in the second bar from the right taking 17 to 19 three-year average the october 21 payment is still doing very well against the three-year average b4 building [Music] next slide looking at another way again october standing out um but october 21 still trending higher than the average in any other year on this chart i'm sorry for the the small picture here graph but uh fiscal year 22 is grayed out and is on top of all the other um this

152is the cumulative collections of so july and october cumulatively you can see in green for fy21 where like i said we were low in july caught up by october a year ago but even now our october is still trending very well um all right so this is uh the summary chart which i has a lot of numbers on here but i like to focus just on the blue uh lines for for tonight line 6.01 is the excess of revenue over expenditures so this tells us do we have a surplus do we have a deficit where are we this is also a line that we look out look at see when we discussed levies uh how much what what would these what would it raise to eliminate the deficit the very bottom line 15.01 is our

153cash you've heard me over the years talk about how important cash is going back to the income tax collection slides um if we were not to have cash on hand and we were counting on that july revenue we'd be we'd be hurt so again um cash balance for the everyday person looks large but for us uh we do need that to be payroll because we essentially have just a few paydays a year and a lot of big payments come in july if if those are delayed which they have been and we've seen now because of code um we do need cash on hand and essentially need payroll but um [Music] this just highlights that uh again 6.01 we're going to expect it to be in deficit spending next fiscal year but we have those cash

154reserves and 15.01 to survive [Music] and we'll talk about cash balance or cash on handed days and slides next slide so graphically uh as i have always said or have said for now a few years um revenue is relatively flat because of house bill 920 where we do not receive inflationary increases on our property taxes that's evident by that blue line um we did keep income tax relatively flat just because of the uncertainty that that's assumed to increase one percent but you can't really see that graphically because of the the budget size but expenditures in red um relatively flat from 20 to 21 because we kept we had some budget neutral or budget cost measures between the two years but expenditures usually increase going back to the first slide of increased salaries and benefit costs

155that are are always there and then the green line just our cash balance as the as the red increases its size above the blue line the green line um any cash balance on or um ending the cash balance on true cash days in other words if we were not to receive any revenue how many days could we operate uh on our cash balance so again going back to that that piece of if revenue is delayed can can we survive on our cash balance and how long how would it be so last year we ended at 208 this year we're looking at 207 um the going uh saying is 60 to 90 days for a district like ours who relies on the income tax i would say i would i'd say because we have seen the

156income tax dip we haven't seen you don't see it in the charge church because 2017 was the low year 2016 was higher than 2017 so if i provided more graphic a larger graph you'd see 17 as a low point over a five or six year period so given that that i mean i know there's million other factors that changes a lot coming out in them but looking at it that way you're talking about eleven somewhere in 2425 to just looking at the cash balance part um that's what we're just saying yeah i think um [Music] yeah many factors yeah including many many factors including it um looking at cash balance and 6.01 the excess of revenues yeah that would probably be a year to to keep an eye on yes and we talked a lot

157about that because [Music] things how they fluctuate especially with their income tasks we've been pretty lucky with them and how that would impact you know because especially when we did about when we did levy that's what was that two years ago um you know we did we talked about probably having come back in three years but yeah that was just keeping us wherever we were it wasn't necessarily giving us a slushman to operate on the it's interesting as we start to talk about like dr um pine was talking about the athletic fields and i was mentioning off the top here trying to find more space i know that we're talking about facilities and um we really wanted to talk about in last year wouldn't have it um but it will start to be something that

158we'll look toward um and it it's really great to see that we're in such good financial health moments so that we can have those conversations from a place of strength and hopefully be more visionary about it you know than if we were [Music] at the other end of the spectrum so yeah and more strategic too because of the bond issues as opposed to levy issues and permanent improvement and all and all the other things go with it yeah yeah so yeah so i think the next step the the advisory council met in october elect was reported and they saw probably three drafts before this final one as i've as i've said before like this this goes through several graphs and i kind of run through it a couple of times because you have a million

159different things going on in the numbers so they'll they'll get an updated uh version they'll get this tonight or they'll get what we talked about tonight yeah and then we'll have a conversation again probably in february after our january income tax collection because we did communicate two years ago that we would be back in 2022 i think the group the board the community probably is due for an update of are we coming back in 2022 are we going to push it off i think there probably needs to be some official uh or soft recommendation from the committee or advice advisor i had that time yeah because we talked when we did 2019 we started talking about in january yes we we started talking about it real early because it had been nine years at that

160point well but i do think um just because we made a commitment um with the last levy cycle that at minimum we should be telling them this story so that they fully um our community fully understands and appreciates what that what that looks like instead of coming to them in two more years saying oh it's been forward five years um i i just felt like that was a lot of education and i'm so glad and grateful that our community supported it but i think if we're telling this story early while keeping the commitments that we made two years ago um i think it'll be a easier ask um because people understand it and they'll still be engaged in that decision from two years ago and we made a commitment at that time also to try

161to get on a more regular cycle and not be coming out with nine mills and you know right but but i think marlin makes a good point that we're going to have to think about levy and facilities and trying to figure out how to um yeah and give our community as much information about what that might look like as possible so that they have all of the information about what funding is needed for the various things that we need to do or what to do as a district any other questions for mr smith [Music] just behind the scenes thank you to kyle i'm really thankful to have a treasurer such as kyle i've watched him rework these things over and over we've met and i'm really thankful for the work that you do and the

162demeanor in which you do them for thank you in your charts and for anyone that doubt that will follow along there are on the public content for on board docs there's some really good looking charts there that that real that are very clear to understand where our income is and basic charts more detail if you want to dig into that [Music] as kai would say exciting reading yeah that's why they could be last so but it is very helpful for the public too to see where what we're talking about when we look at these numbers and the work that does go in behind the scene on behind the scenes of putting this together because it is a requirement twice a year to have these five five year forecasts and the differences that that can happen

163just in those six months is can be big so thank you um any mr smith you have any other comments on that question no not unless there are questions any questions can i just make a comment about um bus replacement purchase request so i had a question that i shared with um mr smith about it because the the new bus cost ninety four thousand dollars and the old bus is being traded in for two thousand and so i just had to ask like is that the kind of kelly you know is that the right number and i think he gave me a pretty funny response which is that i've had to ask you know everything i've asked it for 15 years and i think i need to go in the business of repurchasing these either

164for cabins or a demolition derby and school buses yes but apparently the value goes down really quickly because the cost of the maintenance goes up at a certain point at a really high trajectory and that explains that standard fee so we decided to do the trade-in we can try it on our government the public school works site to see to gauge it in the past from colleagues they sell mainly for scrap so unfortunately yes that is a true picture i appreciate it i just wanted to ask the question because it seemed like such a big difference but i was convinced that it's the right numbers i appreciate it because just on the foot follow-up i was curious to start the very um before our fleet what what's the usual schedule of replacement do we just

165wait until they fail or get through the peterman contract there were two that were grandfathered in that were above the ten-year mark that they grandfathered in uh at the beginning of the contract is it ten years and so many miles or is it ten years ten years just flat correct [Music] um okay thank you all so i need um i'm going to split up a boat on the item five we have a board member who wants to abstain from item e so can i have a motion job items five a through d please of dawg [Music] second thank you all in favor please signify by saying i are you posting a sign i i do want to vote no on um [Music] okay let me get to that um sorry that's okay and the invoice

166is [Music] thank you all in favor please signify by saying [Music] separately i'll do that um can i have a motion to approve items 5 f h and i so thank you all my favorite please see the club any questions that motion carries can i have a motion to approve i am 5g please so thank you thank you um all in favor please subscribe any posting sign i booked out thank you um that is the conclusion of our uh voting for up five a through today all right and we've already covered item 6a um previously so that moves us on to our public participation [Music] um do we have people sign up for oh gestation yes all right so given that i will say that although under state law the board of education is not

167required to offer public comments during our regular meeting we do open the opportunity to hear from our community members as such we encourage your participation within certain parameters part of the start of the need we ask that you sign in once you've done my phone please state your name and address please limit your comments to five minutes for our board policy finally we know the public comment comment is just that it's the public's opportunity to be heard it is not a question and answer session with the board we look forward to hearing your comments but for for policy we will not respond public comment and meeting or as individual board members you can be assured we are actively listening and taking notes for future reference and review so given that um if you want to

168start with our [Music] 2444 fair avenue i would like to just begin by saying that i want to thank my parents and my wonderful friends and my amazing teachers for supporting me and through that in my hard work that's how i earned my son finalist status but i wanted to say that i earned this without feeling supported at school i was harassed and bullied and stopped for four years and i never felt like i got the support i needed from the school i i've always been anxious but it just brought it to a level that i've just never experienced before um [Music] i spent four years in fear anxiety got so bad at one point that i did try to take my own life and the school was made aware of this and i never

169felt like they did anything to really help um [Music] the admin the board the superintendent were all aware they all had power to do something to help me and they didn't and the worst part is that i'm not alone um so many of my friends and i was trying to come up with numbers before this meeting but i just couldn't help because there were so many so many of my friends have done some sort of self-harm act due to stress and a good number of them due to bullying as well so many of my friends have tried to kill themselves as well uh some of them well actually most of them have been bullied here at vaccine have felt like they've received little to no help one of my friends is still being actively bullied

170after years and getting no help [Music] our schools gets judged mostly on test scores how many aps we offer and i think that's wrong i think we need to look into how our students feel because i know i would have done a lot better on testing things like that and just being a person and doing what i wanted to do if i had felt safe and supportive your own school and i know that my friends would have felt that way as well um [Music] some of it was due to bullying that didn't stop and so it was just a lack of resources for students to actually access for mental health it is i know from my friends that whenever we've gone [Music] to look for help we tend to get very vague answers like try

171this vague coping strategy nothing real and i remember yesterday i was reminded that um about the signs of suicide assembly i remember my sophomore year when we did that i remember talking to my friends about it and i said that i answered it honestly and they said that they didn't because they knew that there was nothing the school was going to do to help them and so they didn't think it was worth it in their life and i remember thinking at the time that i thought i should have lied to and now i know that at least my voice is the statistic here at bestly but at the time i really thought it and so sorry it just really hurts to think about my pregnancy you know the [Music] in some ways i feel like

172a lot of them might not have been here today if um things have gone differently and it's just very difficult for me to think about i'm very difficult for you to know that there's people out there who can stop it and have chosen not to i just want to make sure [Music] thank you very much [Music] a lot of species [Music] um i'm a lot of spectre i also have been 24 40 for a fair i probably should have let someone go in between i didn't know exactly what she was going to say i i guess i just want to say i'm very very proud of my daughter i'm very proud of her for earning one of the less than 17 000 spots for seniors who are designated as merit finalists but i'm more proud

173of her for having the courage to walk into this room which is quite frankly formidable and save a piece and i i guess what i want you to hear as you're seeing these presentations from this masters and i mean i've been an active listener of the board for years and i've seen the presentations and i've heard the buzzwords and i know all this the data that's collected but what i don't think you're hearing is the students they are talking they are with themselves and what we need more than anything is we need a board and a superintendent that is willing to place as the number one priority for this district a culture of safety security and support and we do not have that we don't and we can put all the ap classes in the

174world out there and we can put all the merit scholars in a room but these kids don't feel good walking in this building and i've listened for years and i'm begging you to finally finally address that and talk to the students that's your data point thank you oh one last point i understand the procedures have changed we need to sign in prior to the meeting however most of us don't know what you're going to speak about the debate and might have questions that arise as you hold the meeting so i would ask that you might consider allowing people to sign up for public speaking at the time of the public speaking in case something's arisen that we didn't expect or we have a question on thank you [Music] that's all thank you all right um

175so that was item 7a we're now moving on to uh other matters that may probably come before the board and the first that i'd like to ask for a motion to consider is item five i'm sorry eight day and i have a motion to approve item eight agencies which is our advantage universal mask requirement [Music] um any comments or questions this is what we've discussed before with thunder it is what we talked about [Music] this is specific to masking whereas before the discussion was on right before stuff right so it's how the new quarantine affects our playground um outdoor recess and program so that we tell the we're under teacher staff students and visitors in our school settings so nothing's changing other than just the school settings is school board meetings theater all of that

176stuff is that yes so universal masking in all school settings except while eating lunch or outdoor physical education class or after a recess um regardless of vaccination status and then that last line is also new students attending school i mean it adopts a mask to stay testify piece yeah it's the final four pair but there you go right there is there is a distinction and the whereas clause as well making this amount from our earlier resolution that incorporates the odh guidance on october 25th with the mess to stay tested by so that's that that was my question just about the resolution itself is the school setting definition we're talking we're not talking about because there was some confusion before about what school settings meant is that just in class or is that on all campuses

177everything that takes place right activity indoor no everything is in our own school settings except while eating lunch for another physical education or after recess so can you just help me understand maybe from a clarification standpoint when we have school-sanctioned activities that occur somewhere else but their our policies follow school-sanctioned activities do they not well i don't think so because for example when our kids go to play football somewhere else we have to abide by bad schools yes so but those our students are still expected and families are still expected to abide by school district policy even when they go [Music] i think i'm not maybe i'm not understanding but it's just around these policies around masking and um testis to play the way i understand it is that we we can only set the

178guidance for this building our district our campuses our campuses so you know i was thinking about that exact same thing when when the mayor effectively announced an asking policy it didn't affect us we had to make our own decision because there's that when we step off this campus his you know the city's guidance takes over and when we step back on this campus our guidance does and i think for me that's a way of thinking about what happens when our students leave if they're on our buses the federal government says they have to be masked by jurisdiction but when we go over to you know play basketball in somebody else's gym we're guests in their building and then we follow their guidance that's why i'm thinking about it so the revision is this we're not

179revising the definition of school settings we're correct we're just revising the state of play or the mass estate that's the plus yeah and recommending mass at recess versus requirement so so this is off the recess but this is like to illusion your point like conversely like so we don't we can't require that anybody wear a mask when they go to a different gym for a basketball game but we do request that people wear masks when they're in our gym so it's weird yeah right okay so it's that it's the office exactly like you know we can't [Music] when they're in their house [Music] you know that i was a little hemmed up with that whole experience with um [Music] you know when our students are participating in activities that take place somewhere else that we're

180funding their or their funding their participation in um and that is a sanctioned activity what protections especially when we have the hospitality workforce you know overriding that has um uh expectations that we don't create discriminatory situations how how are we protecting students who very well may not be vaccinated it may not be their choice for example and we're engaging in in places where their rules create discriminatory situations how do we protect themselves i feel like that is these are not throughout throughout these conversations we've made the distinction that the school is compulsory and our students have to be here by law to get an education and so i feel more strongly about asking and and rules in general about asserting those for for our students but when they're not when they're in optional programs then

181i feel less inclined to be um as involved or not i think the only pushback that i have with that because i understand that and i don't disagree is that if we prioritize social and emotional experiences for students when our our response fact is well you don't have to do this and yet at the same time we say we value their participation and extracurriculars and all of that it just it's a thing i think we have been thinking about we can't just i think we're absolutely thinking about it and i think dr fine has been really uh and unfortunately weighing all of the factors i mean this gets us me back to the place where i've been in the last 18 months that we don't have great choices in this right i mean we're there's

182still a pandemic and right and [Music] so there aren't perfect choices i absolutely value the health and well-being of our students but i can't i can't change everything i don't have a magic wand for this right so my question was going to the school settings because our last meeting where we approved the change that we indicated that universal mass control teacher staff students and visitors in our school settings as defined by the franklin county school code by guidance of august 10 2021 we specifically put that in there and that was my question about the definition of the school settings right because school settings if we're going by the to nasa state whatever it's called yes um as are we changing the definition of school settings or going by what franklin county called the franklin county

183school covered guidance he's saying and i'm asking that just another technical issue but it's an issue as we move forward we are not changing the definition to my understanding of what they did not change the definition what has been the change in talking with joe mazzola and other health officials is with the new mass to stay remember when we made that vote it was to keep kids in school correct because of the class settings the way they defined it now with the mass to say if a child is exposed to recess on mass they can stay in school uh that's why the change of the definition of classroom setting doesn't impact us any longer now that we can mask this day so the definition of classroom setting is still intact from my understanding technologies [Music]

184yeah and this guidance isn't the case dr fine that this guidance was um partly to help with this exact problem yeah mass to stay was developed as dr william said it started in warren county some schools were really struggling to keep students in school not all schools were had universal masking the way that we did it was a way to keep kids in school this was the opportunity when this came to us to eliminate the masking at recess which we all thought didn't make a lot of sense because they were outdoors right it didn't make a lot of sense because they were outdoors because being inside a building and outside are very different in terms of transmission correct and that's what i asked about it's a great question setting you know because it has it's

185just more of a i appreciate lessening the massive restrictions myself but they understand the dilemma that we're all in trying to figure out what exactly who's to find what is in school settings that's that's i don't need to be a stick in the model i want to make sure that i'm voting on something that i understand what what's being defined as the policy i wasn't trying to imply that you didn't uh have social emotional um the well-being of the students um i didn't need to clarify that i was really more or less just trying to understand and i think sometimes reminding the difference between compulsory is also helpful but really trying to understand the impact of these decisions um when our students leave the building and what does that what is the school setting and

186what is it and how much of is our obligation to protect them so um i appreciate you doing the latitude to inquire are any other questions or comments on items [Music] all right and all in favor please signify by saying aye aye any opposed name sign thank you that motion carries um so our last item on our board agenda tonight is our board meeting location as you all know we've been talking about um as we see tonight and previous nights that um this space is a little crimped for what we're looking for and not as inclusive in some ways as we would like so we have been looking at the city hall as a place to start holding our meetings and i think so you will need to make a decision about that by our

187next board meeting or at our next board meeting because mr smith will need to make a notice change so to notify the public of our of our meeting um and i think that's going to include some it's going to necessarily include some conversation with our new board members of dates that will be helpful my but my recollection is um that we thought we would start here on january 1st and then or january 11th when it currently ran and then i can't remember why i think it really is the 12th day that's why because we were going to keep the date i'm sorry we're going to keep the date that has been noticed as january 11 and that is the same time as a city council as a medium so what we're going to try and

188do is work with city council and see if we can't find um they meet every other week we meet just once a month so we'll reach out we'll have we have we've met where we've reached out some preliminary options to mayor kessler and he is already looking at calendars and seeing what's possible great so if that's where then also send information to the new board members which we've done and it sounds like we've all landed on some spaces that are a possibility moving forward okay great so um i think that is more just a conversation to keep everybody updated on it is there anything else that's great okay just an update on that brad pettit has actually a gentleman was in here from [Music] another option to see how this space he said he would

189have that space or that quote backwards within two weeks right so that's something we can report out then whatever meeting all right perfect um really not it's my understanding of executive session tonight um so that means just one final of dancing bear the lions lost one to zero an incredible season they were so exciting to watch um all right then can i have a motion to adjourn please thank you