Forest Hills Board of Education Meeting - 4/20/22

001picking up i'd like to welcome everybody to the forest hills school district board meeting on wednesday april 20th opening items uh we'll do call to order mr bib here mrs jonas here dr rasmussen yes mrs stewart here mrs hausfeld here item 1.3 pledge of allegiance everybody stand please i pledge allegiance to the play of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice 1.4 safety briefing i would like everybody to notice the safety exit doors there's one behind the panels behind this group back here there's the entrance that everybody pretty much walked into and there's one behind us behind these panels 2.1 motion to adopt agenda i'll make a motion to adopt the agenda a second mrs stewart yeah mr bibb yes

002mrs jonas yes dr rasmussen yes mrs hospital yes 3.1 approval of minutes of the technology and facilities committee meeting on march 3rd do i have a motion to approve items we clarify is that a motion to approve all minutes to approve items three point one through three point four as presented thank you i'll make eye motion to prove three point one to three point four is presented again second mr bib yes mrs jonas yes dr rasmussen yes mrs stewart yes mrs hossfield yes 3.2 approval of minutes of the special board meeting work session on march 9th ah sorry that's a repeat my apologies 3.3 approval of minutes of regular 4.1 there we go thank you correspondence and procedure for public commentary the board is committed to conducting a meeting in a productive and efficient manner

003to assure that the meeting is completed in a reasonable amount of time while also recognizing the importance of a fair and adequate opportunity for public input in order to conduct an orderly and fair representation of expression the board will provide a period for public uh participation participation per policy p0169.1 at every regular board meeting public participation will be a total of 30 minutes each speaker will have three minutes time limit if there are more than 10 speakers individual times will be adjusted down to fit within 30 minutes the board does not discriminate based on individual content of the speech or viewpoint of the speaker if several people wish to speak on the same topic the time limit may be adjusted at the president's discretion 5.0 guest speaker student presentations good evening everyone as schools across

004the state of ohio consider closing one year and then beginning another there's always a lot happening with things like we're doing tonight which are celebratory and that's great and we're so happy so many of you could be here and that's very important we're going to get to that another thing that happens at this time of year is schools begin to think about the upcoming year boards of education begin to think about budgeting they begin to think about all the things staffing so forth and so on and as you all know we have a five-year forecast and we're consistently trying to be efficient and effective with taxpayer dollars while providing the best possible education we can for the students of forest hills school district so today we have a special guest and it's good for as

005many people that are in the room because this speech or this presentation will be given by mr tony pottergill and i've known mr potagill for more than 20 years now and during that time he has been a staunch advocate for public education in the state of ohio specifically districts like forest hills um he is considered to be uh or forest hills is considered to be wealthy based upon our property value and our personal income and so in his work and many years that i've worked with him on the executive committee of the alliance in my role and as tony as the executive director we've always maintained a very close watch on what's happening legislatively in the state of ohio and budgets across the state of ohio and how they are formulated and how they impact

006our school district so tony actually represents the forest hills school district at the state of ohio with legislators on an everyday basis all year long along with about 74 other schools that are like forest hills he fights for kids he fights for financial fairness local control of the schools over the years he's talked about assessment at the state level he's talked about graduation requirements unfunded mandates that come to school districts he's helped with report cards in the state of ohio to try to make them better for students and impactful for school districts tony is engaged on a daily basis as i said with elected officials and is often called upon to review the positives and the challenges of legislation in the state of ohio how it impacts schools so it is my pleasure to introduce

007mr potagill and he is going to share details regard regarding how ohio school finance has changed during the last decade or so its specific impact on forest hills schools at the current state of funding realities that we're dealing with and a little peek into the future so it is a great pleasure to have mr potterjoe with us uh tony uh thank you for being here and uh you're on sir so you coughed me off guard because i didn't think i was going first so that's uh as i'm sitting here thinking i wanted to hear all the good things first so so bear with me with all the guests and uh there's a lot of people to honor tonight so uh we'll go through this you know we're going to talk a little bit about school

008finance that i always start with because i'm an old elementary teacher so school finance is a lot like the a math book you know math there was a math book in it and it had uh there was a problem with the math book so do you know what the problem was it had too many problems so see i knew that wasn't going to go over well i just kind of knew that second graders loved that riddle they they think that's really cute but really it's it it we've been working on school finance for a long time um and we isn't fixed so i'm not here to come to tell you today that the the budget that you inherited in this next this round is a fix um they're constantly working on it and it and

009it will probably have another iteration and another fix and we'll talk about that in a few minutes so i i i'm going to apologize because we're going to go through a lot of stuff really really quick because i could speak about school finance for hours and that's not what you want to hear tonight so let's just get through i'll go through what i what i presented um and on this slide as i said we this has been an ongoing dilemma in columbus is trying to figure out how to fund schools what is the adequate level of funding necessary for schools and we we have had a litany of approaches and studies and way back even prior to what's on here in 9192 there were studies about school funding but since 91-92 you can see we've

010had the vojnovic administration the we had a panel of experts for the department of ed the duroth decision that you for some of you have been at this a long time had a major impact there was a funding task first associated with that governor taft had a blue ribbon task force there was a funding advisory commission from oebm and and recently we spent a lot of time and scott spent a lot of time on the fair funding group trying to work with the dewine administration and the house and the senate on revamping our current funding model so we've had a lot of bites at the apple lots of different approaches and we're still at it so you know there isn't i'm not here with solutions tonight just to give you kind of a status report

011they can go on to the next slide i can't see it so all of those reports all of those commissions would always boils down to is base cost and when we talk about base cost it's really what does it cost when you put when you factor in all of the inputs for a student in a second great classroom a middle school student a high school student how do you get to that how do you determine what it is that you put into that that bucket that gets you across and and like those commissions we've had lots of approaches of trying to do that trying to figure out what the inputs are we had and we've had an outcome we had an outcome based approach so you know how do you get how do you how

012do you figure out what you want at the end and what does it cost you to get to the end we had an inputs what do you need to put in to get you to the end we've had hybrid approaches we've had regression analysis trying to determine exactly the cost and then in the fair funding piece that we just worked on it was again an input model that was driving all of the factors that the people that were in that group could figure out would go into that that gets you to a base cost in all of those when we when we get to the end it always appears that the base cost component is always more than we want to admit that was the big struggle with the fair funding was you know the

013state's funding students at six thousand dollars per student but the funding models showing more like 7 500 or 8 000 and then it becomes a game to figure out how do you bridge that gap because funding that at the state level means a big input of dollars to get to that so where we are today with base cost is we're a little closer to the reality of base cost and i can tell you right now we'll look at what your per people cost is in a minute you know it doesn't cost seven thousand per student in forest hills fact it doesn't cost seven thousand per student in any district in the state of ohio but it's the it's the dollar base that the funding model is using that then drives the inputs which in this

014case with the fair funding are students so one student should equal a dollar and you should get a portion of that to fund that student at your level and the rest is local share so we've had a lot of conversations about base cost we do think that the work of the fair funding group was good work it captured a lot of the inputs i mean we could spend a whole night just not for funding about what all those inputs are but we believe they're they're as close as we could get to reality now the elena will tell you that the fair funding model isn't being funded at the full amount because it's being phased in so even today where we have a dollar amount for a particular student the state is not funding it at

015dollar amount because it's a phase in over a six year period of time now for forest hills we get into when you look at the next slide which is on revenue you know once you know cost then you have to pay for that right so there's two revenue sources for you one is local and you know and in forest hills that's really general property tax you don't have an income tax levy some districts do you have some public you have utility personal property you also had tangible personal property historically that was converted to commercial activity tax that had a huge impact on your budget if i was talking to you 10 years ago tpp would have been a driver for you and you've lost that because cha that state changed their tax policy so you

016really are reliant at the local level on general property tax which is your real estate at the state you you see your revenue come in two buckets one is unrestricted granted aid which was really the state foundation and there's property tax allocation that rolls back because you have things like rollbacks and other pieces and parts you don't control the state they tell you what you're going to get but those are really your own those are your two major revenue sources let's go to the next slide [Music] so here's the dilemma for you on base cost when computing base cost about the percentage that you receive back from the state they're looking at two primary factors one is property wealth the other is your income level in your communities and we'll look at those numbers in

017just a minute when they determine say that if the base cost is seven thousand per student you're going to be on a you have a number that's a it's a combination of those two that's a percentage that will get you a number from the state so districts that have low property wealth low income levels receive a higher state share versus districts that have high property wealth high income levels have a lower share or may have high property low income maybe they're in the middle you're on you have a little kind of a mixture of the two we'll show you in a minute you may not be as high in the property but your income levels are higher and that drives the percentages you receive back from the state and we'll look at those in a

018second so go to the next slide [Music] so total tax property for forest hills it's the way it's designed is by the number of kids divided by your tire tax taxable property level so you have 181 000 and change per pupil similar districts to you and i didn't put the list but they're they look like you their size of you are have have more property wealth 230. the state average is 169. so you're you're not too far away from the average you don't look as wealthy in terms of similar districts from a property tax property wealth standpoint from a median income standpoint you're at 56 similar districts are at 53 and the state average is 35. so the income component of those two things on base costs has a huge weight that drives your total

019if it was just property wealth it would look different but those two things are being combined and the reason they're being combined is that in the formula whether you believe it or not it's trying to say well based on your wealth this is if you're a wealthier district you can generate more dollars per millage to get you to the dollars that you need so when you look at those two things when you look at your base cost you there's nothing you can do to change this your income level is probably not going to go down and your total property wealth is going to kind of be the same but that's what's driving your share of the base costs and we're going to look at that i think it's on the next slide or forget there

020so i put the slide in because i don't want you to think because people always ask because scott says i'm in columbus every day and you know we're we're 75 districts out of 614 remember so we're we're the minority so fighting for funding it's really difficult sometimes because i always hear back well forest here's is wealthy sycamore is wealthy west yoga which i was superintendent we were wealthy i said come to my community and tell them how wealthy they are because they're not going to believe you but based on the formula that they define you as wealthy the formula even with the phase in i could i'm almost as surely tell you with all even lobbying down to columbus i don't think much is going to change scott knows the frustration we put it we

021put this formula together we're not even getting fully funded it's supposed to be phased in over six years i'm holding my breath about the next budget because the reason it's being phased in is because they controlled how much additional dollars they allocated to schools to get it to where it's at and even at the fully phased in amount it's not going to make a big difference on your revenue side you're going to be about where you're at so i i i don't people say well let's wait to see what the state's going to do i i just don't believe one that the formula may even hold in the next budget it could be frozen in the next budget we've had that before there could be a nominal increase in the next budget it could be

022phased in over a long period of time chances of it being fully phased in i don't think are very good and we don't know what the economy is going to do we don't know what the state budget is going to do let's go to the next slide so things to think about as you consider revenue sources for your district again the state foundation share for you is probably going to be pretty consistent of what it looks like in the five-year forecast i looked at your forecast most of your funding is coming from local sources so and raising additional revenue to maintain your programs is unfortunately in the foreseeable future it's going to have to come from local sources which is your local property tax because that's the the one piece that you have an opportunity

023to raise revenue with a page so just here if you get to the next page so what is your state revenue so you get about just over 3 300 per student remember this the formula says what's got 6 800. so you're getting less just about half of that and you can say well that's not much of the 75 members that i represent i have some down at a thousand dollars per student i have some under under a thousand dollars per student so tony since the last time you and i talked at the original uh powerpoint uh atlanta you and i had worked on adjusting the numbers for oh i'm sorry for 21. yeah i'm looking at the wrong i'm looking at my sheet so 3 500 right call your attention to the the new slide

024that was put in there 21. i was using 20 numbers thank you scott okay so i should look at the slides that would be well kind of a weird podium setup yes you can see the state average is 65.79 there are some districts getting more than 65.79 that's the average but it shows you kind of where you're at you're you're not getting the full 6800 back on the average noma gets the full six to eight hundred now in terms of your spend because i'm a former superintendent i've told i'm a former board member i look at forecasts all the time trying to match up revenue with expenditures you know when they don't match up you have to think about okay how do you raise it how do we control cost so under the latest cup

025report you're at about 12 470 per student which puts you under what similar districts are doing in terms of driving your program and you're under the state average so by large that's good because you don't wanna be leading the pack in terms of expenditures so you're not in essence overspending in comparison to other districts and you're not overspending in comparison to the average which means you might have less opportunities for reductions because you're trying to maintain your programs under your voted operating millage similar districts now remember this is all impacted by 920 so it's not what you're collecting it's it's devoted um you're at 71 the similar districts are 74. notice the state average is 50. so it's 50 because lower wealth districts rely on the state foundation share to fund the majority of their

026cost because raising a mill in a very small district doesn't get you much in terms of dollars back so we have this conversation in columbus i remind your representatives that we are stepping up to the plate our members in voting the additional millage that they need to run their schools and it's not it's not an unending pool of dollars to go continue four there and we need to get more credit for the fact that districts step up and fill in the hole um because the state's not giving you the total that you want now this last piece so tax efforts that's how they compute tax effort remember they're looking at your wealth versus how much you're voting your voted millage is state average is one which means that's your your capacity similar districts are at

027.668 you're at 0.5 so i could if i was to say well you have some capacity in your district to raise this more revenue in relation to your peer group but your community may not feel that way so um what you would not want it to be the opposite where that number was 0.9 and you were significantly over significantly over you're under expenditures and you're struggling to maintain programming um this would say you have some you have some wiggle room to catch up to the pack or you just haven't gotten there yet because it it's not your time to fill that hole in from a local standpoint all right go to the next slide i'm going to look at this one too so when you when you look at it and elena i know we'll

028work with you on the forecast will the state foundation money continue to be phased in can we expect some increases at least nominally to help the district going forward we didn't talk at all about transportation funding we worked really hard to carve out transportation funding as a separate line item because that would benefit you if you can get dollars per kid per transportation and not have it folded into the formula that isn't there yet we're still working on that so those are things to watch i certainly would pay really close attention to your forecast i was taking a look at i know that the district sent it to me about when those kind of those lines cross of spending versus revenue and you know when you get to that point of you don't want to

029get to the point where you're in fiscal watch fiscal emergency you lose local control you're forced to make expenditure cuts that maybe you don't want so that's that's the conversation around the forecast that you'll have next next month and then you really have to have a conversation locally about you know what's the level of local support needed to maintain programming the the good part of that is because you have most of your dollars locally you control your budget you're not waiting for the state to give you dollars to be funded or if we get in a budget country which we had in the past where there were significant cuts you'll survive those greater than a district who's a low wealth who can take a big budget cut because they they can't raise it locally so

030i think i put a couple more slides so i i ended with a quality slide um so i don't want to just talk about school funding because it'll get you depressed right so the the alliance for those of you don't know we were the alliance for adequate school funding because we were an offshoot for doroth for the districts who were wealthy at the time and we wanted to be part of the conversation in 2010 we changed our name to the alliance for high quality education one of the things we asked ourselves collectively was what are we fighting for and what do our communities really value in terms of quality because if we're really good districts we do really great work you it's here today you see you're going to hear it about the successes but

031what what are what is the community really judging you on so i i could have we got lots of slides so i just pulled one out and i will tell you this this is what you're being judged on well we spent a lot of time on money a lot of finances but balancing the budget cutting programming in the end what makes a quality district is this your staff you have a high quality staff delivering high quality instruction it goes a long way to getting the community behind you if you really want to fall quickly behind don't hire the best teachers don't train them don't give them the supports they need that will be the death knell to any district so your judge every day and i would tell teachers in this room when students go

032into your room they go home and talk to their parents that you're being judged every day about the high quality of instruction you deliver for your kids and you have that here at forest hills so that's number one number two is the breadth and depth of what you offer we asked that question about well it's the is it about the basics well we wanna we offer the basics that's great you better offer the basics and you better offer a lot more than the basics people want their music they need music programs they need art it's the depth of what you offer ap courses opportunities for kids in the classroom west yoga where i was at we had we offered lantern i went there as why are we offering lantern the private schools didn't offer land

033i had the number one latin teacher in the state of ohio i had more kids take latin than took french spanish combined he was a great teacher he kept kids in the building so it's what you offer is what it's what forest hills is unique about is the breadth and depth and then finally the last piece is what do you do outside of the classroom we forget about all the other activities so is it the mock trial team student council the athletic programs your band your choir all the activities that you do k through 12. those are the three things that we have consistently heard back these and these are statewide surveys they're not about parents they're about community members in general so i always try to frame that in my thinking when i sit

034down as a board member now about okay what has an impact the teachers that i'm hiring the program that i'm offering and the experience that the students are getting and if they're all those things are there you will have a high quality school district so i'll stop and open up the questions what's the biggest hurdle for the finance from the from the bureaucrats in columbus what's what's the biggest hold up so the question what's so what's the biggest hurdle part of it is to get them to understand what the true costs are and willing to at least allocate the dollars to that level i think we've we made a good case what that should look like we haven't gotten them to the next step um so that's traditionally been a difficult because in the end

035you know it's like coming down here i had to stop and get gas i didn't i didn't debate with the you know with the gas station what the cost of was on the pump there is a cost to what you do and you know you can't change some of those things and you can't just believe it doesn't exist so there's a cost to transport students there's just a cause it's the driver there's a bus there's transportation there's mechanics there's parts i can tell you what that cost is doesn't do me any good to tell you that i'm only going to pay you at 50 of that that's really not fair um so that that's traditionally been and the other hours for our organization has been quite frankly they view you as wealthy and you should

036be able to raise those dollars locally and it is really not part of what they think they're giving you enough uh going forward when you talk about this new funding model when is it effective and then how long do you see this funding model being to go on so if you look at your forecast it'll be this year's and next because remember on a two-year state budget they tell you what it is my assumption is you've pretty much flat lined it going forward in the forecast because you can't see years three four and five because the state hasn't created those budgets yet that's the one of the problems with doing the forecast you don't know what the state funding form is going to look like going forward and traditionally treasurers have simply lined item out

037and say okay if we're getting 16 million we're going to get 16 million i'm not going to anticipate we're going to get more i'm not going to anticipate a cut so we're in the first phase of a three budget phase so we're in years one and two this the state will consider the budget next year for will be years three and four which will be what is the time will be 24 and 25. and then there'll be a 26 and 27. and you know a lot will depend on if we if if governor dewine is still governor dewine and who's in the legislatures and that's why we're in columbus all the time because you have to maintain those relationships and talking with them because what we've lost a little bit in columbus over my decade

038of working down there you know as much as people like sometimes term limits if people turn every time that churn happens we get people in columbus have no idea about school funding and getting them up to speed to understand what's going on in their districts is really is really a challenge especially in the house because those those two years go really really fast i have more of a comment um more than anything my big takeaway from all of this is essentially that we need people in columbus that respect and value and understand the importance of public education in a state and that means electing state representatives and governors that not governors plural but a governor that understand that understand that importance and are able to actually fund it and if i'm correct ohio is only

039one of two states in the united states that has a operates this way i believe do you know in terms of how we fund or how we how we're structured we don't we don't have levies right total texas is different right you detect you submit your budget in some states you submit your budget and right that's what's getting the auditor funds that that's right our system is you create a budget you have to you have to validate that and share that with your community because you're held accountable for that spend and and get them to understand what you need and then that they have to validate that at the at the ballot box so um you know on the one hand i don't mind being held accountable for what we do i never felt that

040way as superintendent that i you we should be able to justify what we're spending our dollars on and how we're spending them and why we need additional dollars and you know then it's a personal decision in your community whether you can do that or not so i don't think that's going to change um i will i will agree with you i think we need i always say this god knows i'm going to say what i'm going to say probably i will say to you i will advocate for all students even though i'm advocating for you publicly what we advocate is the alliance we believe should be in the best interest of all students because a strong community has a strong public option strong private options and strong parochial options and in some places they have

041charters too that makes up a strong educational system the only caveat i would say is i've never i can't find a community when the public school option isn't strong the other options tend to go away and then the community gets hurt in the long run so we really have to advocate for all kids when we talk about this public school piece because they're they're all our kids and i can tell you just from experience in my district i don't know what is here i had about 15 percent of my students that would go out to private and parochial and in any any given year five percent of those students came back and i lost five percent back it was always was around 15 but they were going back and forth and i would it doesn't

042help me to diminish those kids coming back i need them to come back strong because they came back for all kinds of reasons and i wanted them to go strong to where they were going so parents had an option and they can move their kids wherever they go and be confident that they were going to get a high quality education so my sense is that that's what you have is you've got lots of options here you got to you as a board have to keep this option the strongest possible for the students that you're serving because you never know when they're going to go and come back and they do they don't always stay in one spot and so that's what i would i would challenge you to think about it that way that and

043i we that's when i talk to legislators that's exactly what i tell them they're all our kids so let's fund them all support them all the right way thank you i appreciate it um take away from me is um the base cost for school for students in the state of ohio is significantly higher than what state would suggest even with the funding work that i've been working on um there is no inflationary mechanism yet built into the state funding model and therefore the distance between the local share and and the need widens every day because of inflation and we are in a seven and a half to eight percent inflationary cycle which means that curve or that distance is growing stronger every day uh we don't see uh based on your conversation and others we've

044been involved that the state is going to have a bundle of money waiting for us to assist us and the common knowledge in the state of ohio legislature is that we are a wealthy school district we have high property value and we have high wages and therefore we are more self-sufficient according to the legislators than other districts across the state and in situations like this we always come to a place where the decision needs to be made are we going to increase our ask of our local community once again because of all of these factors or are we going to change the model that we have and changing the model in a school district where 84 to 86 percent of your costs are people because they are serving kids that means you're automatically looking at

045programming as well and i would say in this school district my experience has been this is a generous respectful of schools community that provides resources when asked and they have been a big part of the successes of this school district it's unfortunate that the deck is stacked a bit against us uh and we have to continue to work the best we can to be as efficient as we can but have these very important conversations this isn't about ours our you know how many administrators and how many intervention specialists and all that this is about a model that we have to deal with and so those choices that we make to deliver the best services possible for children becomes very delicate when you're talking about resources coming in and expenditures going out and so i'm glad

046that you were able to come and kind of give us the backdrop of all that talk about legislation right now the conflicts there and what we're looking for in the future i personally having been involved with fair school funding model now for four and a half years do not believe based on what i'm hearing that is going to be fully funded where we thought it would be and so as we look at that over the next few years in potentially a recessionary period coming up a lot of stress on school districts like this one so um i appreciate the fact that you came and i appreciate the fact that you were invited by our board of education to provide this information thank you so much well again and i appreciate being here and i at

047some point come back and be more than happy to talk about how the alliance works in you know your best interest and you know you're one of 75 and it's important that you know while you have some really good representation and we do use the your your the influence down here about our membership we combine that with members in columbus and members in toledo and members in cleveland and akron because it's really never one legislator that can move anything and so the beauty of our organization is that we we only may be 75 but we're strategically located and we have we've we've created a lot of influence in columbus so you know at some point we'll come back and talk about that as we build this next budget as well as the myriad of other

048things that are always kind of brewing down in columbus so thank you and i appreciate being here thank you [Applause] okay moving on uh 5.2 beehive literacy program now the fun starts thank you for being patient good evening everyone i'm michele salstead i'm the principal at summit and i just wanted to take a quick minute because i know we have a lot going on to introduce tina brophy who's our reading specialist at summit has been for many years and julie dunning who's also been a teacher at summit for many years but this is her first year as a reading specialist they're going to be talking to you about something really special that's happened at summit for our students and our parents this year but i want to take a minute to say very quickly tina

049approached me a couple of years ago prior to cove in 2019 with an idea about how she could help kids and help parents with reading and literally spent hours countless hours and time planning and preparing with the the staff at summit and really this was above and beyond it wasn't something required of her position but she wanted to really help parents understand how to help children and it's been a great project so i'm going to turn it over to them but i just wanted to really recognize and acknowledge tina and julia has jumped in this year and helped facilitate these meetings so they're going to talk more about that so congratulations to both of them [Applause] first of all thank you for having us tonight it's nice to be able to share some exciting things

050that have happened at summit so as michelle said this idea started before the pandemic and it actually stemmed from a class that i was taking i was charged to think of an idea that to create an implement in our building that would help promote literacy for students and as i thought about that i was thinking of two things family involvement and early literacy because those are both really critical factors for students academic success down the road so i also know that great ideas come with collaboration so as mrs solstad said i reached out to her in administration shared my idea and then formed a committee within our building and a lot of the committee members are here they've been really instrumental in helping me with this idea we work together to just figure out what

051do we want these nights to look like for our families initially this kind of started the discussion started before the pandemic we really wanted the knights to be kind of paired with children where parents and their child would come together the first half of the night would be teachers instructing and giving them strategies and teaching them ways to interact with their child on early literacy skills and then the other half of the night the student would be doing literacy activities either with other teachers or possibly utilizing the teacher academy students at anderson but then the pandemic kind of hit so we we revamped and we decided it would be better just to focus on parent education so our group decided that we would um focus on pre-k through two because early literacy is such an

052important factor in development and if a child has a strong early literacy then their academic success later on is is going to follow we decided that each night would have a focus or a different topic but would still be an early literacy topic we wanted to provide parents with support and strategies and ideas and materials and tools so that when they left they could go home and promote literacy with their home and in their home with their child the rationale really for this is i know all parents want the best for their child sometimes it's hard to know how to engage them or what's the best way or what are the best strategies so we kind of wanted to bring the ideas of things that we're working with students at school on and share that

053with families so that we can work together to best improve their child's literacy so with that in mind we also wanted to provide materials for families so that they would have them at home and be able to use them so we wrote a i had the help of two our psychologists and our esl teacher and i wrote a grant to the forest tales foundation and they were really generous we got so many materials and it it was it's been amazing we have a lot of multi-sensory items for students we were able to send magnets home and to work with words we have sand and sand trays we have a lot of books it's just been a really great great thing so during this time we've had four nights we can go to the next slide

054and each of those nights we're teaching parents how to use these materials and just they have time to ask questions they have time to interact with each other it's really been a great experience we've had about 71 parents participate not in each meeting some came to one some came to another we also know during the pandemic it's been really tough for families and some may not feel comfortable coming personally to an in-person meeting so we wanted to create a way that we could involve all families so we created a google site so that families that couldn't come could still engage and get the information and on our google site we have we had four nights this year so we had the re recorded presentations for families to be able to watch we had the slides

055so that they were able to click on the links we have a video section so that it might be a teacher modeling different activities or strategies within their classroom or it might be just a video that we use during our presentation for families on that topic and then we have a section for parent resources so it's kind of a way for families if they want to go back and look at information too they have that after the meeting so julie is going to share with you some of the different nights that we had okay so um first off i was very lucky to come in and help tina with this she had so much of it planned already but then we were able to collaborate and come up with i hope what were uh some

056pretty um helpful nights for the parents um the first night our topic was reading engagement our goal really was just to help parents understand how can we establish at home a routine and a love for reading so as you can see in some of the pictures here we talked about setting up a little cozy nook you know setting up a routine when are we going to do our reading having our supplies there having those ready one of the fun things we did and this stemmed from our virtual academy the year before was adopting a reading buddy and so you the kids you can see have a little stuffed animal they got an adoption certificate and we talked about how you know a real pet needs food and it needs water but a reading buddy needs

057to be read to every night for about 20 minutes and so they adopted that pet and they were you know they pledged that they would read to that pet for 20 minutes so that was one of the materials that went home that night um we talked about the appearance of the importance of a parent reading to a child that cannot be overlooked and so we helped parents understand that importance but also showed them some videos of um you know what that might look like and the discussions that you could have in the vocabulary building that you could do so that was our reading engagement night and as i said the reading buddies went home but also some books went home that night and then our next night was all about phonological awareness so we were

058first off helping parents understand what that is so phonological awareness if you don't know those are activities you can do with your eyes closed so it's all about hearing sounds so we taught parents what that was first then we taught them some activities that they could do with their child we actually had them get those materials out and practice so it was like we were the teacher or the parent and they were the child and they were practicing they worked at tables with a with a peer and they practiced as well um there were games that were sent home that came from the florida center for reading research sound beads to help with hearing sounds and pulling a bead for every sound that you hear so again materials that we were able to have because

059of the forest hills foundation on our next night um which was probably one of my favorites was working with words so this is where we really take that phonics piece now so before we were hearing the sounds we could do those activities with our eyes closed now we're we're attaching the sounds the written letters with those sounds so it's the traditional phonics that you might know about growing up so we had really great materials that night so they had boxes of sand i was amazed at how much the parents enjoyed the boxes of sand so they were writing and practicing that tactile writing letters writing words we showed them activities they could do with that with their children magnet magnet letters and how to use those we practiced um bumpy paper writing on bumpy paper

060just feeling that with your finger or with an eraser using a mirror to look at your mouth uh when you make certain sounds dry erase boards so great materials went home that night and parents had a chance to practice with those then our final night was supporting your reader and just sort of a culmination of everything so now your child you know is sitting down next to you they're reading a book you've learned all these things to do before that and after that but what happens when you're sitting down with your child and actually reading a text so we talked about how to coach your child but not to tell them everything we talked about the importance of wait time we did activities where i was the child reading and the parents would look at

061the mistakes that i made and how could they coach me through that and notice what i did well but also help me and then connecting that to what we had done before so now oh made some errors maybe i can go back to some of those word work materials get that sandbox out and practice those so um we got really great i think feedback from the parents they loved it and so moving forward on our next slide we are hoping next year to bring this district wide and so we we've already met as reading specialists we meet every tuesday anyway and we've been already in the planning stages of what's that going to look like district-wide how can we get parents whether that's one big meeting at nagle for a few hours on a saturday

062or whether that is individually in buildings but everybody on the same page doing the same thing so we're really excited about what that means moving forward and we're really excited about the participation that we've seen and what we expect to see moving forward and that concludes our presentation [Applause] tina and julie thank you you you made tony uh soothsayer it's all about teachers in some of these situations so thank you so much for everything that you've done to help and also the expansion across the entire district that is great thank you so much appreciate it next up item 5.5.3 international travel presentation [Music] we are back we just want to share some great exciting news here in forest hills is after two years of no travel international we just came back from our first international

063trip uh from germany austria and switzerland we also had another successful trip that came out of ecuador so it is with a great pleasure tonight that i'm going to have a couple young men here um zach stevens lowen and scott are going to share some information with you about some of their successful journey good evening everyone my name is zachary stevens i'm currently a freshman oh no junior junior at anderson high school um i first want to express my sincerest thank you to mrs lauber for nominating me on my path to ef tours my first tour was in the eighth grade we traveled england and france and just recently we traveled germany switzerland and austria they were beautiful countries so um back in january mrs lauver asked me to mentor a group of freshman students

064and i took that opportunity instantly because i'm involved in many leadership clubs and camps i've attended but i've learned my leadership skills there but i never attend applied them up until this trip so thank you for that opportunity here i have a video silky was our amazing tour guide um what stood out to you as far as our teachers our students and our learners through this entire tour i think the teachers are very well prepared in the students as well and after two years of public break and i couldn't work such a long time it was the best group to start with because they were so interested so in engaged and eager to learn i mean i'm with since 16 17 years now and i had the feeling in the last years and students become

065more dreamy and sleepy and uninterested and i get this empty look and peaceful they gave me all the power i mean i need power as a teacher or a presenter that i said i feel my messages arrive at the other side and i really had the feeling the message arrived and this was really great for me and it makes my job easier just to give the energy back i get the energy when i get the energy from the group so i really love the group and i would love that in every group every group is like these students so i would love to have these groups more often thank you to the teachers and for the students travel is important to learn about new cultures and see new things that you wouldn't see in america

066is there anything you would like to share with someone who is thinking about traveling um i think it is important to travel i like for me going on this trip is something that i was so excited to do ever since what is your wow moment of the day my wow moment of the day so far has been seeing hitler's eagle's nest major history why do you think travel is important because you can experience different cultures and it's fun to see the world why do you travel because i love it i love to meet other people what kind of things are you learning on the tour i'm learning how the united states is a whole lot different from europe and the rest of the world as a whole and both good and bad ways and just

067learning global culture my wow moment of the day was seeing salzburg and a place where mozart was born lots of european history things in europe are a lot older than i thought they were and i'll say it's a lot richer history than i've ever known before as independence and self-care we were allotted free time throughout the day to explore the big cities of europe and that really gave that that was a good feeling um it was we had to be responsible and self-care of course we there was 20 boys 20 freshmen on the trip and so we all had to take care of ourselves another thing was it brought the learning learning from class it brought it to life it gave it purpose and meaning everything from history class it it helped a lot bring

068we visited hall um the um dachau a holocaust concentration camp and that was that was very sad but that brought it to life um i would like to introduce scott and lowen um hi i'm lowen and me personally i've always been like a visual learner and um you could like read dozens of pages of a textbook and maybe get a couple pictures here and there of the places but it's no no we're even close to actually going there like walking around these european cities seeing buildings that are like hundreds of years older than the country you're in right now is just something that that i never get to see and it's very cool um having a tour guide walk us around telling the stories of these uh buildings their history and their significance is it

069helps me a lot more than just reading pages of a book um and then um there were these like massive cathedrals which had like some of the most incredible architecture and artwork i've ever seen in my life and i've like seen pictures of the inside of cathedrals before but i never realized how truly like large they were until i actually went into one and i've always i've always liked learning about different cultures and traveling personally i've done my i've done it my whole life and our tour guide was german and i got to hear her like her life story some as well which was very great to hear um and you know traveling's been always been a part of my life always and i hope i can continue doing that uh my name is scott

070kumar uh just first thank you miss lover for leading the trip um for me personally it's probably one of the coolest experiences i've ever had um i have family in europe so i have been there before but the way it was it was organized it was really cool and easy to travel around europe um and it definitely inspired me to travel even more and it's become something i want to do when i'm older travel to different cultures and see the world see what else i can get from it and it certainly has made me appreciate what i have here in the united states specifically like going to dachau it was very depressing but inspiring to say that i can appreciate what i have now and be grateful for what i've been given it was really

071fun just to learn about different cultures and having a tour guide walk us around and even another tour guide walks around different cities that may have needed a different tour guide for that is really helpful for my learning experience there and i thought it was it was really cool are there any questions thank you by the way you need a chaperone next year or two or three did you guys get to use any of the german you've been learning in class were you able to i'm learning mandarin so germany i'm sorry you take german did were you guys able to use it and understand everybody a couple of my fellow other travelers they did order often like off the menu and things everything in german so that was really cool to see how is it

072to experience something so vast and like you talked about the architecture and the beauty without your parents with you just what's that experience like at your age not to have your mom and dad or your you know parents with you guardians with you when you're on such a distance from home my parents every night [Music] i travel to europe a lot with my family and this time though like i was able to learn and just not walk in a cathedral but with our amazing tour guide definitely so it's really an experience an educational experience very much so which is important for this conversation as well it's it's not just go over in sort of vacation but there are many specific things that you see and interactions that you have that are connected to what's happening

073at home in your classes as well as the school in other aspects and it what i hear is it broadened everybody's knowledge of not only the united states but the world so exactly that's important yes thank you gentlemen thank you thank you i'm going to give these guys just a moment here one thing i want to make sure of is that you really understand is that the parents of these students make a big trust in us as educators and on the trip we had a phenomenal group of parents i don't know if some of their parents i think lauren your parents might be here but this group in particular these guys have waited almost three years to go on this from the time that they were recruited to come in and their parents were a

074hundred percent supportive to me and the other chaperones the other thing is we've got to see firsthand the we had a lot of discussions and i think they would tell you we saw a lot of ukrainian support we actually had the opportunity to meet some ukrainians that were refugees from other from ukraine while we were in mutin and it was really great for them i think to have that experience and to see how europe was dealing with something on a global aspect so um i want to make sure i do a great shout out to the young men obviously support from the board and from our district administration but also really our parents without that support and trust these kinds of opportunities do not happen so thank you [Applause] fender sir a tough act to

075follow three three amazing young men to come up here and speak as eloquently and uh and and intelligently as they did and at their age that's really impressive because it can it can be daunting to stand in front of a group of anybody let alone a full learning comment so amazing job to those guys um i'm here um i think the next three or four agenda items um so i will be quick as possible uh with these but want to make sure that each item gets the importance and recognition that it deserves the first item i have for approval for the board tonight is a graduate travis ralston is a student who has finished his requirements to graduate and we talk often about how there's no one-size-fits-all approach to education some folks are ready to

076graduate early some folks need more time and it's important that we understand that and so tonight we have a graduate who is graduating slightly different time than than his peers and so with that in mind the following student has completed all requirements for a diploma from anderson high school that student is travis ralston the superintendent recommends the board approve the granting of a high school diploma to travis ralston i'll make a motion to approve granting a high school diploma to travis ralston second mrs stewart yes mr bib yes mrs jonas yes dr rasmussen yes mrs hospital yes okay i'll just jump right into 6.2 if that's okay at this time i'd like to invite my counterpart and informer assistant principal mr spencer up to the front of the room as well i i look around

077i don't know how many of our students i didn't mean that as a sure can't put me in detention today all right uh but but we have something that represents both high schools so we're both going to be up here and kind of jointly present this to our students i'm not sure how many are present tonight but i think when we get to the point we'll call the names and if you are here please come up to receive your recognition what we're honoring here at this portion of the board agenda tonight is national merit finalist status which is an impressive impressive honor times a million one and a half million students every year enter the national merit scholarship competition the top .01 percent make it to be able to call themselves finalists of that award

078and finalist is the end line there is no round after this this is the best you can possibly do in this particular competition the national merit scholarship competition is based on performance in the psat and this award is given to students who demonstrate the strongest combination of accomplishments skills and potential for success and rigorous college studies our two students from anderson high school are adam barrett and andrew capner i didn't know if i saw either of them tonight but we should still give them a big round of applause [Applause] as kyle mentioned this is the best the brightest not only of turpin and anderson high school but in some of the best and brightest in the country and i think i'm going to request at some point to sit down with these individuals and see

079if they can help me better understand school finance 20 22 years as a school administrator i'm still trying to figure it out and i i think maybe they could maybe assist me so at this time individuals from turpin high school if you're here please come forward joshua blavitt foster finner lauren ferguson jonathan lee jeffrey logan claire mingle matthew osterlund alyssa ward and patricia wells i personally as they're handing them the certificates want to congratulate these students for this high honor i never really knew what parents were thinking until i became a parent and the worries and the concerns and the support and the unconditional love that takes place between the day you arrive home and a accomplishment like this today has a lot to do with your parents your siblings and your family and so

080for the parents grandparents and others who are in this room that are significant others to this the success of these students i personally want to thank you as well for everything that you did again thank you all congratulations to you but i do want to also ask would the parents please stand up or at least wave to us so we can give everybody a round of applause here [Applause] and to add to that just the continuous support and encouragement you've given your students and obviously you've instilled some great values in them as far as hard work and focus and dedication determination um and the and the ambition to do their best at all times so again i reiterate what mr prebbles has said the superintendent recommends the board commend the following students who have been

081named finalists in the 2022 national merit scholarship program for their achievement in distinction and a certificate of accommodation be presented to them i'll make a motion to commend the 2022 national merit finalist as presented a second mrs stewart yes mrs jonas yes mr bibb yes dr rasmussen yes mrs hospital yes [Applause] i'll leave eventually i'm sorry uh but i've got i've got more amazing amazing young men and women to [Music] recognize recently we sent several students to the west point society leadership and ethics seminar and when you hear west point in the title you get a pretty good picture of what kind of a high-caliber seminar this was and the student athletic leadership team is a program that we have at anderson high school where student athletes who are interested in learning more about leadership

082and growing their leadership potential can join this club it meets weekly before school and they learn throughout the year from guest speakers to small group activities about how to grow and develop as leaders we were given the opportunity uh the fortunate opportunity to select three from those roughly 100 students who are partici uh participate in our assault program three students to attend this seminar at west point or through the west point society i should say these students were selected for this top-notch leadership training through their impressive mark that they've left on the teachers coaches and advisors that they work with through their competition on the field the track in the gym in the weight room wherever the athletic world leads them through their outstanding marks in the classroom and through being really impressive young leaders

083within our school system so at this time i'm going to call three individuals up who were granted special recognition certificates from senator sharon brown and congressman brad winstrom so we have two certificates from them we also want to recognize our staff member who who uh we chose to attend this leadership and ethics seminar i'm not sure if she's here or not but the three students that that represented anderson high school and represented us very well at this seminar audrey baker sam mizukawa and payton santorelli if you guys could come forward [Applause] you and our staff member who also received recognition from those local politicians was mrs heather morenzy who's a health and pe teacher for us in anderson high school i don't believe she's here but i'd like to give a round of applause i'm

084on here but i know a lot of other people are too so i don't know if you guys wanted to um i'll make a motion to commend the participants of the west point society leadership and ethics seminar and a certificate of commendation to be printed presented to each of them i'll second dr rasmussen yes mrs stewart yes mr bibb yes mrs jonas yes mrs hosfeld yes mrs hosfeld and board members the next part of our agenda is our volunteer recognition we've talked about many things in our school district excellent staff certainly great students and families supportive community representatives from the state who come to share important information with us and we also have tonight some very very important people to introduce to you and they are volunteers in our school district these are individuals that

085basically when the phone rings they're back at the school within a few minutes or they're organizing something and they are doing many many many things within our schools to support our students to support our staff our administrators basically just to ensure that forest hills is always looked at as that hallmark district across the state of ohio and country for the many good things that we do with kids and the value of our school system would not be what it is without the individuals that we are about to introduce so it is a great opportunity and a great pleasure i would say for us to introduce you to a few people who are volunteers in our school district who do many things for us and mr fender because his school starts as anderson will be our

086first principal to present volunteer so thank you to everyone who we're about to introduce as much as i know she's going to hate this at this time i'm going to ask mrs michelle trigg to come join me up at the podium being a first-year principal of a top-flight high school presents a lot of unique challenges what makes addressing those challenges so much easier is having amazing amazing parent volunteers and support from people like michelle some of the things that really come to mind when i think about the incredible work in fact we were in a meeting what three hours ago after school i want to say putting an event together for our seniors to send them off on a positive note after kind of a rough four years of high school is that michelle is

087very conscientious of how people are feeling around her and making sure that everybody is better at the end of the conversation than they were at the beginning she is extraordinarily welcoming to everybody into our school community myself included tireless work ethic understands the big picture of what it takes for a school to to hum and run and and be a positive experience for others one of my favorite highlights of the year and this has been going on for the last few fridays well more than that now probably the last seven or eight fridays michelle volunteers her time along with another parent to come up to school and push a treat trolley around for our teachers giving away snacks water soda little pick-me-ups during the day and it's dur school has been tough the last several

088years not gonna lie about that it's been tough but the little things like that the selfless efforts the thought and care for others help us all get through it and she always makes sure that they're sweet and salty and there for me which i really appreciate sweet and salty guy and i couldn't i could stand up here for the next four hours and tell you the great things that michelle does but i know we have eight other schools that would like to brag on their person as well so i'm gonna keep it brief and leave it at that and just say thank you so much to nichelle for everything that you have done for anderson high school and everything you continue to do for anderson high school [Applause] mr spencer sir thank you monica mcgrew

089and i knew she was going to ghost me because she does not like the opportunity to be up front here so that just means she's probably watching um on on youtube and that means there's no holding back now with her not being here so but what a great night i mean a night where we've been able to recognize a new graduate an elite group of students that are again our best and brightest in the country and now to recognize an elite group of volunteers in our schools that really go above and beyond to help our students our staff and in just our school community to do whatever they can to help and monica grew is just that she's went above and beyond uh to do the things that are best for our students most volunteers

090will will want to help out and be part of the school because they have a child at that school and they want to be they want to know what's going on and they want to be part of their child's experience and no doubt in my mind that's part of the reason why monica has has volunteered over the years but well beyond that i can attest that for several years it's not been just about her child it's been about all students all staff and doing whatever she can to help and make it a better place for everyone and whether this is helping leading a group of volunteers for picture day whether it's after prom you know whether it's student appreciation events or staff appreciation events senior week activities or spearheading to drive for a new electronic

091sign for mercer interpret she was committed focused dedicated and again to make sure it was something that helped all all students monica began her time volunteering at wilson and was uh and started out being a recipient of the same recognition and now she ends her time at turpin with her last child graduating it's a little premature but i'm confident that it's going to happen in receiving the same recognition it's well deserved and monica if you're listening to me on youtube just know that the door is always open and you're always welcome to come in anytime to help and be part of our spartan community thank you very much monica mrs eshlerman welcome good evening i am excited to invite jill ragasi up here with me to celebrate her as our volunteer of the year as

092i'm chauffeuring in her students as they finish their tennis match and their track meet tonight i will say that as her first year as pto president i'm super excited that we've got a lot more raga sees to come which means i get a lot more ragasy um in her first year as pto president jill has led the most successful fundraising campaign that we have had at nagel at least in the time that i have been here and most likely for many years even before that and what i love the best about working with jill is she doesn't try to take things on by herself she does it with the team jill is so collaborative with the administrative team with our teachers and with additional parent volunteers she has strengthened our pto volunteer opportunities bringing more

093and more people um and a diverse group of people into our building to be here for our students she brought student-led grants to the pto this year so we had groups of students presenting at pto meetings as to ways that they wanted the pto to spend the money that has been raised for them jill has been laser focused on supporting our kids it's through the the student-led grants she helped to add some money to our e-sports to a recycling program and then when we have more money she says well we have this other money can we do a social sure and so we've got an awesome event coming up any any nagel families out there next friday are blue out which is going to be an awesome social event we have increased our soar store

094and the efforts that we have going on at our source store to that is part of our pbis program changed it up and adjusted as needed but students are spending their sore credits and they're excited to earn those and to be able to spend that and we couldn't do any of these things without jill's leadership her collaborate her collaboration and more than anything like i said her focus on kids so joe i so appreciate everything that you have done for nagel and i'm excited that you'll be around for a while [Applause] mr trailer nope oh no no air no my mistake we're going in alphabetical order right okay i'm sorry hi everybody kelly i'm sorry i'm heather holly principal at air elementary i am so excited to be here tonight to honor and recognize emily

095west she is our volunteer of the year um emily is phenomenal she is truly the person behind the scenes so i know she hates everything about this tonight um but she really does orchestrate everything that the pta does she's kind of our glue we have a lot of new young parents in kindergarten and first grade and they're leading things and i'm like how do they know how to do all this stuff and then i find out emily's in the background helping them and she takes none of the credits so she is phenomenal and instrumental in everything that we do um so i did ask a few of the teachers just some comments that they would like to share so some of the things that our teacher shared is that there is no task too big

096for emily they said she always jumps in right away she always has a kids first mindset she works for all kids not just her kids she is a parent that you can always count on regardless of the crazy request and i'm joy o'brien i'm the assistant principal at air and we get the honor at air to have emily's children we have vera in the fourth grade and george in the third grade so we decided to ask vera what she would say about her mom and she vera is the best she says her favorite thing about her mom that her mom does to help her school is all the planning for the walkathon vera is also impressed with everything her mom does for teacher appreciation week vera said she would even wake up like super early

097to take care of the teachers during staff appreciation week vera also remembered that her mom even helped our school during the covet shutdown by joining the virtual pta meetings so we just want to take a minute and honor you emily thank you so much for all you do for our falcons [Applause] mr trailer sir so i think it's really important that we acknowledge that what makes us be able to spend less than most and achieve higher than most are the people that these people represent and that's our parents our community our families and the great kids that we get to serve every day so i have the distinct privilege of honoring stephanie um and i talked to stephanie earlier tonight she's one of the smartest people that i've ever met and here's why some people

098are street smart some people are book smart [Music] but it's rare when you have both and stephanie has the ability to look at a situation and just see things differently than everybody else what would take normal people weeks to organize and put together stephanie can think about for about an hour and come back and say i got a plan and she's got the people lined up to do it people just want to work with stephanie because she listens she's respectful and every conversation you have with stephanie begins and ends with our children and we love having stephanie on board thank you [Applause] mrs davidson good evening hello it is my honor to recognize um colleen reed as our volunteer extraordinaire she's the pta president at mercer elementary school and she is so focused on students

099and our staff and she's just been absolutely amazing to work with you know this year you've had to be flexible um with our planning because of course we started the year six feet apart we were masked we weren't allowed to do anything and so as the pta president you have to be pretty creative to figure out how do you fundraise how do you support kids how do you support the staff and so i was sitting with a bunch of kindergartners and we were talking about like your favorite thing this year and then one little boy says my favorite thing was getting my picture taken with who day the blow up and i'm like who did the blue and i'm trying to think back through what that was well being flexible colleen heard we had spirit

100week and the pta voted to give each of our kids cookies and she showed up stood next to the blow up and passed out cookies and kids got pictures taken and they passed out beads and it was just one way of servicing our kids another example of how awesome she is is um she has an incoming kindergartner so we have kindergarten open house and she i turn around is standing at the volunteer um table passing out lollipops and selling spirit wear while we're trying to have her visit the kindergarten classrooms and and be a mom also so we just really appreciate all that you do for us and thank you so much [Applause] mr hamilton sir all right good evening board and all of our guests and i would like to say before i introduce

101uh my volunteer kinda like steve said you know what makes our district run is our volunteers and as i look out here maybe you're not recognized tonight but i know and i can see how many parents we have and i know you've been in all of our buildings i know you've spent time over the years whether you have kids in the building or not so from the bottom of my heart thank you for all that you've done even if you're not recognized tonight you help make the district what it is so thank you so tonight i'd like to recognize our volunteer of the year melissa snyder so um so what can i say about melissa melissa likes to have a lot of fun i'll just start with that we have a good time at sherwood

102but it's always about what's best for kids when you walk into our building you just have you just you just feel that there's a culture of support uh for our students and for our staff and just for the overall community and that starts uh with the leadership that we have as a part of our pto so melissa serves as our pto president i mean she's really unique in her role because not only is she the pto president but she's also one of our building subs and she also did a long term sub this year in fourth grade language arts so she got to know all of our kids in a lot of different ways but that just speaks to the service level that she wants to provide to the whole community so when i think

103about who we are at sherwood and what we believe we believe in building positive relationships we believe in service we believe in helping kids and staff and our community grow she is all of that and she has supported all of that so thank you melissa [Applause] mrs saulstead welcome back schwartner it is my great honor and privilege to introduce holly centers as our pta volunteer of the year um holly is not our pta president but after you hear all the activities you she has done over the years you may think that she has been a room parent for many years she's been our enrichment coordinator she co-chaired the book fair for many years and helped plan back to school bashes she's assisted with not only the school musical but our running club as well she's

104actually been out there in her sweats and running with the kids and it's been amazing she often volunteers to help in the media center one of the lasting gifts and really kind of a really cool thing that she has done and left at summit she kind of spearheaded led the creation and maintenance of a summit pollinator garden that we have out in front of our school this has received national wildlife federal federation certification and it's often a site for the students to visit during science and other other outdoor class times and that's something that will be with us forever and we love that um another behind the scenes thing and i heard kyle i think talk about this at the high school um that like not everyone even knew about that it was her they

105wanted no recognition but throughout the coveted years in 2020 and 21 when nobody could be in the building especially when we were shut down she would often bring huge baskets of snacks and treats and things and just drop them off outside the office you know wave to us in their mask and you know just say this is for the staff you know there was no special occasion anything she brought those goodies and you know she is also the person that will just randomly buy her whole grade level team you know coffee from starbucks and um other unexpected kind of special treats she's constantly a selfless strong supporter of our students and staff at summit one of mrs leslie harbach one of her son's teachers shared that holly is always going the extra mile to support

106staff and students not only does she volunteer a time but she's always so appreciative of everything staff does each day for kids she said thanks holly for making us feel so special and always appreciate it i brought her son sam down to the office today first told him he wasn't in trouble then i said your mom's getting a really special award tonight i want to hear from you about you know how that makes you feel and i actually kind of previewed earlier in the day because you know i didn't want to put them on the spot and here's what sam said i really like it when my mom volunteers at school it makes me feel happy and excited to have her here and to know it makes me happy and excited to know that she's

107here to know that she did all this stuff i'm proud that she is helping our school so holly our staff really appreciate you and it's a privilege to present you with this award thank you [Applause] mrs storer okay can you guys hear me okay all right i'm excited to recognize tonight dr sarah flora as our wilson parent volunteer of the year dr sarah flora is a dedicated parent who is always willing to lend a helping hand in addition to being a fabulous mother to three incredible children she also serves as a family physician overseeing and teaching family practice residents sarah is passionate about mental health causes and is dedicated to supporting the overall well-being of our forest hill students sarah has given her time expertise and energy to many activities at wilson including our wilson

108running club destination imagination teams and ski club wherever there is a need for volunteer support sarah is the first to raise her hand to help our wildcats not only does sarah support wilson at the building level she has also given countless hours of her time for the benefit of the entire district she has been instrumental in spearheading the all in for it for the big win food drive each fall to support inner parish ministries along with other community resources in addition she has been steadfast in her dedication to the forest hills foundation for education 5k each may even through our coveted years she made sure this important community event continued some fun facts about sarah she loves tennis unicorns and rainbows in talking with her son he shared that sarah spends a lot of time

109and effort volunteering and she's really dedicated he shared that he really enjoys it when she helps us out with things because it makes him feel more comfortable we are incredibly grateful to dr sarah flora for making wilson and the forest hills school district a wonderful place for kids to grow and learn thank you sarah [Applause] mrs housefeld members of the board i'd like to recommend that the board commend these volunteers for their dedication and service to the students of forest hills and a certificate of commendation obviously has been presented to each of them thank you all very much again i'll make a motion to recommend or to commend these volunteers for their dedication and service to the students of forest hills and uh the certificate of common commendation uh be presented to each of them

110which has already happened second mrs stewart yes mr bibb yes mrs jonas yes dr smithson yes mrs hospital yes next up the item 7.4 is the oaesa which is the ohio association of elementary school administrators at the central office administrator award it is great again great pleasure to introduce mr mark jones he is the associate executive director of the ohio association of elementary school administrators i would also remind uh the board and our administrators that you have worked with our school district in the past on significant things related to the classroom and teacher effectiveness so thank you for coming back and working with us in the past and for the exciting news that you're about to deliver absolutely we have developed quite a relationship and we sure appreciate the help that forest hills has given

111to our organization as well as he said i'm mark jones i'm the associate executive director for the ohio association of elementary school administrators and we represent almost 2 000 administrators from the pre-k through eight level from all across ohio we we represent principals assistant principals central office individuals everybody from below the level of superintendent on down who's an administrator working with pre-k through eight students we try to get out at the end of each school year and recognize some outstanding individuals in outstanding buildings and we're very selective about this i will tell you the process that we go about to determine our hall of fame schools is it involves a recommendation a nomination we send a form to the schools that are nominated it's an extensive 14-page form where they try to lay out everything

112that they that they can think of to describe what they're doing for their students we have a group of principals come in and read all of those applications and they pare it down to no more than 10 that get visits and then we take another group of principals to the site and actually visit the schools and verify on site that what they put in their application is really happening and we limit it to no more than 10 this year we limited it to just the top five schools now this is really strange to have two of the top five schools from one district but i gotta tell you from sitting here listening it doesn't surprise me a bit this is a district that has a culture of overachievers of high performers and we commend you

113for that in fact i believe this rounds out probably all six of your elementaries now having earned this award in the past several years so we visited sherwood elementary and i would like to have dan hamilton come up and dan before i hand you the award how about if i just read i won't bore you too much but i'll read some of the comments from the visiting team when we visited sherwood elementary we're so impressed by the positive attitude of students and staff it was clear that they understood and believed in the mission and vision of the school that's one of the first things we ask our visiting team to look for we tell them try to find evidence try to find artifacts that everyone has a solid understanding of their mission the associate superintendent

114commented that oh don't worry everyone here knows our focus is and knows what it is and they know where we're going that's thanks to matt and dan they are the artifacts [Laughter] one ancient and not so ancient the other yeah i recognized i said oh that guy over there he must be the artifact yeah one area focuses on design projects and they are visible throughout the school another cornerstone of their work involves the culture of learning this was evident in their use of plcs and the teachers could speak enthusiastically about this effort student achievement was outstanding and student work was displayed throughout the building there was a clear emphasis on innovation design and creativity when we spoke to the students they were able to articulate several different ways that sherwood works to develop their unique

115skills and qualities one example of that was seen in the student created designed and led outdoor learning space it was clear that sherwood teachers loved their school and their students one commented that it just feels like home we do life together in short what's happening at sherwood represents what we all hope for when we send our children to school and it's clear that you deserve this honor of hall of fame [Applause] we're giving them just a token of our appreciation here tonight just a a certificate that he can put on the wall but when they come to our conference in june at uh up in columbus we'll have a large plaque that will be a lot better than that that you can put on the wall outside our second school from forest hills is summit

116elementary so michelle solstead come on back up visiting summit elementary school was a true pleasure it was clear upon arrival that there is a great sense of school pride the front office secretary was warm and welcoming the day started with a visit to a morning plc meeting the teacher-led meeting was collaborative and it was clear that all thoughts and ideas were welcomed and teachers were eager to share the results of implementing instructional strategies to improve curriculum delivery summit strong was a common theme all stakeholders referenced when speaking about summit elementary school summit strong was the pride shown as the pto vice president raved about the support that the parent organization wanted to share with the school community the students exemplified the theme of summit strong when they explained the unique nuances of student artifacts pointed

117out newly remodeled building additions and beamed with pride about the inclusionary morning meetings as the superintendent talked about instructional leadership signs of admiration and appreciation were glaringly obvious with examples of how summit elementary has continued efforts to improve student achievement to the level it was before covet 19 pandemic struck at the end of our visit to summit elementary there were some definite takeaways number one the development of students who could authentically articulate how students are empowered through student activities and personal reasons about why they love summit elementary school two clear cornerstones of the district's vision are embedded within summit elementary's instruction instructional focus to impact their student achievement three summit strong pride was everywhere in every stakeholder that shared examples of culture and climate in the in the building and four the openness of sharing

118leadership to collaborate and support each other makes summit elementary a special place to work and certainly deserving as a hall of fame school for 2021-22 [Applause] it's all yours and i have one other award to recognize we recognize schools but we also have a few individual awards we typically have done an assistant principle now called the second in command award we also recognize our principal of the year but we realized here just before kobitstruck that we have a large number of central office administrators and through the work of a committee because we had some downtime during kovid we developed a central outstanding central office of the year award and this is the first one we've ever given first time and i would like to call up erica thompson [Applause] erica is being recognized as the

119outstanding central office administrator for 2022 by oaesa congratulations and i won't i know you're short on time here so i won't but you know this is the the document we got back from the team that came and visited with her after she got down to the point where you know she was one of the finalists just four pages in 10 different areas where the visitors went on and on and on so if you don't mind i'll read one or two erica represents the highest professional norms and ethics again all members of the interview team teachers parents central office colleagues spoke to these attributes very evident in her delivery and interactions with all that she was well loved and well respected we repeatedly heard the sentiment that erica recognizes and empowers others and makes them feel

120seen the interview team described erica as the cornerstone of the of a team with great gentleness at listening and empathy she listens and helps find the common ground erica drives everyone else forward colleagues described erica's ability to see the big picture and attend to details and finally here erica is a very positive educator and her message spreads to all she works with and helps build healthy long-lasting relationships congratulations eric [Applause] so at the beginning of the evening tony was very clear in saying mr potlejoe was very clear in saying that really if you want an outstanding district it's about the people and it's clear to us up in columbus the forest hills has some outstanding people i hope all of you recognize that and never forget what you have here in this community it is

121unique thank you very much thank you mr jones and you may come back anytime you wish you too mr potter joel can i do them together all three items um i'll make a motion to let's see uh commend ms thompson for her achievement and distinction and a certificate of common commendation be presented to her and also commend sherwood and summit elementaries for their achievement and distinction and commendation be presented to each of those schools as well second mrs stewart yes mr bibb yes mrs jonas yes dr rasmussen yes mrs hosfeld yes mrs hosfeld in item 8.1 superintendent updates and my update will be brief tonight but i believe it's extremely important may is mental health awareness month and the color for mental health awareness is green and for those of you in the audience thank

122you for participating we're all wearing most of us are wearing a green ribbon the anderson mental health collaborative is asking local businesses schools and community organizations to create a supportive environment around mental wellness by going green for mental health and here's excuse me mental wellness excuse me here's how that's happening business organizations in our community are asking employees to wear specific types of outfits wearing green pictures are being asked of them to put on social media putting messages on their building signs to inform the community of the importance of mental wellness the school district our participation in the process or in the month is going to be to pick the day and we have done that where may 13th will be green day throughout our entire school district where students staff and anyone who's visiting

123would i ask that you wear green on that day to celebrate this month we will be posting pictures on our social media at go green for mental health and our uh placards or our signs in front of all of our schools will have specialized messages regarding mental health month we also ask that individuals and families if you're not involved with the school you take advantage of some opportunities to gather friends and family to wear green throughout the month or to wear a ribbon to indicate your support make a sign put it in your front yard let people know that this is the month chalk your sidewalks kids like to do that with specialized messages about mental wellness and mental health positive messages on your car uh please make sure they're big so that we don't

124have accidents but nonetheless uh put some messages out like that and be creative uh try as many things as you can to inform the public and and your loved ones and others that this is a special month so that is my report this month uh i wanted to keep it brief because of all the celebrations that we have but we're very excited as a school system to participate in this uh effort and so thank you for all who have helped organize this i think we're going to hear a little bit more about it a little bit later on tonight but that's we're involved in in the schools thank you scott next up is public commentary we have seven guest speakers this evening first up is kevin micheq on deck will be glenda smith good evening

125congratulations to all the volunteers and winners of their awards it's really wonderful it is an exceptional skill system um part of our exceptional school system is obviously because so one of the things i focused on for last 18 months was our five year forecast for those of you who are unaware this was published november 2021 by the last school board okay in that we're good to go this year and we'll have a balanced budget next year we'll see a shortfall about 4.8 million dollars a year after and that carries forward which leads us towards our comments about no school funding from the state and shortfalls at the educational level cuts in schools and kids programs all of these programs are going to be need to be looked at there is only a limited amount of

126mud money although we are a wealthy community and we are very getting community examining our options are going to be long hard bought conversations all right we don't need to make as a board any decisions this year because of scott's change in positions the board will need to focus on hiring a new superintendent this summer that superintendent will need to come in establish his staff set up his priorities with this board and develop a new budget by november of 2021. that budget will then drive our funding forward for the next four years so from my mind it's a little premature for me to get highly concerned about how much money we could potentially lose knowing that we're going to go through such a significant personnel change at the top and again i congratulate scott on

127his new position but it is a concern for all of us here because what we're significantly talking about here cuts in salaries or staff that's 85 of our 88 million dollar budget 75 million dollars of our annual budget is staff and staff benefits all right 13 million dollars is not a lot of money to cut 4.8 million out in a couple years you know the fact of the matter is we're all gonna have to put a little more skin in this game and when i say all of us i do mean staff as well as our neighbors as the property owners the homeowners all right everybody's gonna have to take a hit here we can't ask the property owners to shell out another five million dollars a year for 17 500 households in this township

128that's a little hefty all right that's asking a lot from our neighbors and our families to give up so that we can continue to fund high-flying programs times are tough we need to tighten up the belt for the next couple years make sure we get our fiscal house in order all right that means hiring a new superintendent this summer thank you thank you glenda smith up on deck is matt gale hi i'm glenda smith and i'm running for hamilton county juvenile court judge because hamilton county juvenile court is 30 years behind the rest of the country and 12 years behind the rest of ohio and juvenile justice reforms that are that reduce juvenile violence reduce racial and ethnic disparity and reduce racial profiling while keeping the community safe i've seen the impact of these reforms

129and i would like to bring them here one such reform before the ohio legislature is house bill 500 which abolish abolishes a mandatory bind over mandatory bind over is when a juvenile commits certain crimes and probable cause is found that juvenile is automatically transferred into adult court we know from the numbers that juveniles that are automatically transferred over to adult court had commit a crime 38 percent more than juveniles who have committed similar crimes but remain in the juvenile court system now the theme for tonight has been our children and that's why i'm running because these are our children and you can go to glenda4judge.com to learn more information about the reforms that have been around for a very long time thank you for this opportunity to speak i've really enjoyed my time here this

130evening thank you [Applause] matt gaul next up after matt is tom hagedorn hello my name is matt gaul and i'm the band director at anderson high school and tonight i have the distinct privilege of representing not just me and my music colleagues but also everyone here in this room over spring break we learned that the forest hill school district once again earned the namm foundations award for the best communities for music education this award brings with it a lot of rigorous qualifications including criteria like funding graduation requirements music class participation instruction time facilities support for the music program and community music making programs applications are verified with school officials and reviewed by the music research institute at the university of kansas research into music education continues to demonstrate educational and cognitive and social skill benefits

131for children who make music after two years of music education researchers found that participants showed more substantial improvements and how the brain processes things like speech and reading students who are involved in music are not only more likely to graduate high school but also attend college as well everyday listening skills are stronger in musically trained children than in those without it later in life individuals who took music lessons as children show stronger neural processing of sound young adults and even older adults who have not played an instrument for even up to 50 years show enhanced neural processing compared to their peers not to mention social benefits include conflict resolution teamwork skills and how to give and receive constructive criticism um let's do the numbers as they would say on npr in the morning if you

132ever listen to the marketplace morning report um in total 738 districts in the nation were awarded this prestigious designation 47 of those districts are here in ohio and then five of them uh of which we are one uh are here in cincinnati uh we have won this award five times since 2017 and that's as far back as i was able to dig in the archives to figure out how many times we've gotten this award um but uh it shouldn't be missed that music here in forest hills is definitely a top priority which is awesome and then i'd be remiss to not mention my colleague toby biederman who took point on this uh it's a 62-page application uh to send in so thanks to him for all of his work on this and then thanks to

133the school board as well for all your support thank you tom hagedorn and martha veeman on deck good evening this past east this past sunday was easter celebrating the resurrection of jesus christ as we all know now christ was generally considered to have been very gracious and peaceful but if you read the gospels he had his moments he called out the jewish leaders of his day in very harsh language and he went into the temple the very sacred place for the jews and he was so angry he overturned the tables of the money changers who were cheating some of the people who came to worship there now i don't have a god complex but i am a christian a follower of christ i'm here tonight to metaphorically overturn some tables many of us myself included

134use the christian bible as our moral rudder for our direction if you're as committed to diversity as you claim then you should also consider the values of the many bible-believing christians in your district but you don't instead this district in many ways puts its thumb on the scale to favor and support a secular set of values that frankly repulse me those values align perfectly with left-wing socialist ideology i'll look at just one example christ and the bible teach that each person has enormous value regardless of their particular identities whether it's race gender class it doesn't matter the individual is has value yet one part of the care program clearly sought to divide the district into various identities or groups one set being blamed as oppressors the other is victims by the way what does that

135do for the mental health of those teachers and children who are assumed to be part of an oppressive group do you want proof listen the board agenda item on wellness november 25th 2019 look at the slides from the teacher and service day april 2021 review the materials from the recently postponed racial awareness day at turpin attorney general dave yost has issued an opinion describing the type of training that could be considered illegal this poison has no place in our schools this was a big issue last year a lot of the people who voted for the four for forest hills for the school board expected to see change big change so what happened apparently nothing i've listened to parts of the board meetings this year i've heard almost nothing about this issue even after the news

136item at your work work meeting sound of crickets when one does there's few comments you know a member might say something nobody is commenting back you know the board discussion section i don't know what that's for i don't hear a whole lot of discussion so i sure hope that some of you will provide answers tonight thank you martha beeman on deck will be wendy strickler biederman hi i know that everyone here cares about our community's children and we want them to be safe we want them to feel loved and to reach their full potential yet in these politically charged times we often don't agree on what these things mean nor on how to get there so we're prone to fear and mistrust i just listen to somebody characterize me as a socialist because i have

137liberal values i am not a socialist he characterized um programs in ways that uh i thought misrepresented them i was disappointed that diversity at a was cancelled at such a late moment that there was no replacement and as of last night i hadn't heard that a replacement date had been chosen and students put a lot of work into that and those who were opposed to it could opt their children out so i'm disappointed um i also have seen fear and mistrust in recent conversations about sexual abuse prevention in schools many rightly asked what age-appropriate training would look like but some didn't even wait for an answer before saying that such training should be banned now we have gene schmitz hb 616 which purports to protect k through third grade students by preventing instruction about sexual

138orientation and gender identity she states that this these topics are political and wants parents to have a say of course there are parents who disagree with her point of view and think that these topics are important to be discussed in ways that are age appropriate and would say that her bill is politically motivated so let's take a step back for a reality check sexual abuse prevention and sexual orientation both revert to sex we all know that young children think sex is gross they learn how babies are made they count how many children are in the family and say oh they only did that many times so what is age appropriate education on these topics it's not about sex it's about love belonging and safety young children can learn to say no when to unwanted physical

139contact they can learn that families come in many forms and children can feel free to share stories about all the adults in their lives that are important to them whether it's two mommies a grandparent a mom and a dad however it looks children can learn to respect the identity of their classmates including transgender first graders yes such children exist let's keep in mind that educational institutions have great policies in place to protect children thank you wendy strickler biederman and last up is judy goldesky thank you too short talk next to it is that possible too short i'm not sure um i wanted an opportunity to come and express my concern over the postponement or potential cancellation at this point around diversity day i had sent an email to the board and since i have not

140heard back wanted to share it today in the hopes of of getting a response i would like to express how sad and disappointed i am to hear about the postponement of diversity day at turpin i very much look forward to my turpin student as well as my future spartans having the potential to participate in this activity i'm extremely disappointed for the students who prepared for the day and the educators who gave their own time to coordinate schedules and experiences to help our students grow several years ago i volunteered as a chaperone at this event it was a day that helped our students in the context of a safe and supportive learning environment to think about experiences outside of their own thereby developing better world knowledge and empathy world knowledge and empathy are life skills needed

141in the 21st century not to mention they help to foster civility which is a skill sorely missing in many adult interactions these days i would follow up tonight just listening to some of the different presentations and our three speakers who recently participated in the german experience and point out that you heard that one of the most impactful moments for them was visiting dachau i guarantee that was a somewhat traumatic emotional experience i guarantee that was angst ridden and yet i didn't hear anyone up here expressing emotional trauma i heard them expressing an opportunity to learn and grow and have a better understanding for our world and our history and that's an important part of what we can offer outside of the limited experience that is anderson township when we offer these opportunities to think outside

142of our own world view that's okay it's not bad and it's not dangerous when it's in a supported educational environment so please let me and all turpin parents know when this event will be rescheduled it's an important opportunity that should not be missed for students who choose to take advantage of it thank you thank you wendy judy goldeski i feel like that's right in my face my daughters are graduates of turpin high school and we were very pleased with their academic education however we were very aware that forest hills was and still is overwhelmingly white and christian in less than two months our seniors will be graduating and a year later our juniors will be leaving they'll be joining the workforce the military or going off to college and there they will be expected to

143work study socialize live with people whose religious beliefs they're not familiar with who come from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds who have different skin colors who have different family traditions turpin's diversity day offers these older juniors and seniors a wonderful opportunity to learn about the experiences values and customs of groups of people that they may not yet have associated with what a fantastic way for them to gain this helpful knowledge this program has always been optional students who wish to attend must have a permission slip signed by their parents this year at the very last minute four members of our school board voted to pull the plug on this day it turns out that about a month ago the board created a second form and this form requires not just a speaker's name but a

144summary of the talk state standards that the event aligns with and school district objectives that this event meets in my experience when a new protocol is being considered a committee meets to generate the initial idea input for teachers and administrators modify the plan at that point it's often tried with a small group as problems often emerge that are unanticipated and finally when all are satisfied with the procedure it's rolled out for the entire district as a teacher i can't imagine being asked to supply all the information that this form requires it's cumbersome and overwhelming concerns voiced by principles were ignored and this form was put in place very quickly without any modifications i have no idea how many sessions were scheduled for diversity day but i would assume it would be at least 10 to

14515. i can't imagine being able to ask being asked to supply all that information on such a short notice diversity day had already been approved by the building principal had been in place without complaints for at least five years was highly anticipated by turpin's upperclassmen and was happening just a couple of weeks after the rollout of this form it would have been appropriate and gracious for the school board to grandfather this event in you chose not to do so as you the school board consider how you implement new policies i hope you will regard the experienced well-educated talented administrators and education educators that are part of this district please make sure that you make them partners in your decision making thank you [Applause] 10.0 business operations john eckert all right little steph and just to

146keep with the trend mr fellows i did not clear the room this time not everyone got up and ran soon as i called my name but you are running out of time yes yes well bonuses i have one very small item today for the agenda it is the approval of the district premises rental fees they've been updated recently just to bring us in the comparable with the rest of districts in the area so at this time i'd like the superintendent to recommend that the board use the district use premises jesus peace that the superintendent recommends the approval of the district premises fee schedule for 2022-23 school year in the consent agenda rob fellows all right good evening and i too am going to keep my report quite short i would like to start with item

147a retirements and give emily dorsey chris carletti and thomas mann uh a a nod for their service in forest hills and wish them all the best in retirement as they move on uh emily and chris have been at anderson high school for a number of years um 20 years and 25 years in the district uh uh collectively and thomas mann with transportation for seven years so we wish them the best item b there are a number of resignations uh for the board to approve this evening item c a couple leaves of absence for next year certified staff leaves of absence there item d appointment employment personnel items and i'll i would just kind of highlight in this section items e f and e and f that we have some incredible individuals scheduled to join our

148organization next year filling in some vacancies over the course of this year some of them have been filling leaves of absence this year and they've they've had a chance to kind of been working in the organization we've had a good opportunity to see them in action and we're excited to offer them a position next year um and and others were hired kind of last minute at the start of last school year and typically in that in that kind of a situation we would have them on a higher resign contract and the position of course continues to need to be filled and so if it works out for that individual it's a really great opportunity for them to spend a year in the organization give us an opportunity to see how they do in the classroom

149and move toward a limited contract so there are some really great folks that we're excited to to welcome into the organization starting out some starting out next year and others continuing into next year let's see we have item g special services appointment you can see a number of different things coming on from camp kern home instructors tech instructors course of study anticipating some additional work beyond the contract for individuals in language arts and science this summer item h a lot of coaches as usual i we have a few student teachers set for finishing up coming in in these last six weeks to kind of get some field experience item j a list of volunteers which we love and appreciate as we have recognized this evening and the last item item l job descriptions those are

150attached and i know that the board has had a chance to review those and some are just kind of anytime we have a posting of a position it's an opportunity to revise and make sure that the job description is aligned with the responsibilities at hand that concludes my report any questions no questions thank you thank you rob teaching and learning curriculum good evening i'm here to present 12.1 which is a motion to approve the services agreement between education elements and our forest hills school district this is to support some work that has started back in 2019 it's for continued support around learning walks and the development of common expectations around the portrait of a learner the greatest purpose for our learning walks is really so we can support the instructional leaders within our district which

151is our principles and providing immediate and consistent feedback to our teachers by the end of this year all of our building principles will have started learning walks within their schools with their building leadership teams next year our hope is to allow teachers to start visiting other buildings to see teachers within their professional learning communities this will allow for teacher reflection calibration and alignment and ongoing discussions about how we can grow as a district and as we can see that tonight we're a pretty great district we just in addition we plan to work with at elements to provide content specific professional development specifically in the area of language arts so that as we start to move forward next year with our training we'll be working really closely with our teachers about how we promote literacy using

152personalized learning strategies this contract supports bi-weekly phone calls with the teaching and learning team so it helps us in building our capacity and it's also going to provide four and a half in-person strategies and three virtual touch points with cornerstone teams which is a group of teachers for each building this is a contract that is has been significantly decreased it has significantly decreased in cost john i think we're just tired i think that's what it is since 2019 and this is paid through title ii funds not through our general fund so the superintendent recommends that the board approve the attached education elements services agreement for personalized learning any questions good evening student teaching and learning student services and programs has five brief agenda items for you this evening two international exchange students and three domestic

153trips items 12.1 is an international exchange student the administration of turpin high school is requesting your approval for our student loras nils kombach from germany their hope is to have her attend turpin high school for the 22-23 school year a resident host family has been selected for loris and she will be sponsored by afs intercultural programs we've reviewed all of the information is required in board policy and isn't is recommending that enrollment for items 12 for item 12.2 i cannot speak this evening either i'm tired also 12.2 is our student also requesting permission for turpin high school amanda autran cavacante arahu forgive me if i've mispronounced amanda's name she's coming from brazil she will be a student at turpin high school as well her host family has been selected and she is being sponsored by

154the council on international educational exchange her information is also be has been reviewed through board policy item 12.3 we have a overnight trip request for from for both buildings anderson and turpin high school they're requesting permission for 14 students and two chaperones for the from the educators rising to travel to washington dc this summer june 24th through the 27th to attend the educators rising national competition and conference there's a 730 dollar cost per student transportation will be provided by great oaks for this trip and this will be airfare for this trip item 12.4 we have another overnight trip anderson high school is requesting permission for six of their marketing students and one chaperone travel uh to atlanta georgia for their deca international career development concert this is upcoming in this april 23rd to the 27th

155there's a 460 dollar cost per student they'll be traveling by bus and it's being supported by great oaks and item 12.5 is the last trip this evening anderson and turpin are requesting permission for this trip 125 students will be attending with 10 chaperones this is our forest hills marching band they'll be traveling to orlando florida february 9th which is a thursday through tuesday february 14th to the disney world magic kingdom parade performance there's a twelve hundred dollar cost per student transportation and accommodations will be provided will be provided by music travel consultants i should add in terms of these trips each time when they come for review we do also carefully review the fact that our students can afford these trips and that there are fundraisers and other additional supports for these families if they

156cannot if they are unable to participate the superintendent is recommending the approval for items 12.1 to 12.5 as noted in the agenda thank you betsy the next item is 14.1 good evening 14.1 under technology we have one item this evening this is the copier lease document management agreement with comdoc this is a 30 36 month lease for equipment that will cover all copiers in the district plus maintenance plus maintenance of all the current district printers in the district it's a 36 month lease which will begin once all of the equipment is in inventory there are supply chain disruptions that we're dealing with right now we expect this contract to begin on july 1st are there any questions no questions superintendent recommends the board approved the 36-month lease for copier equipment and printer copier maintenance with

157comdoc incorporated with start date effective once all equipment is in inventory thank you 15.0 treasurer first item on the treasurer's agenda is the annual resolution to accept the amounts and tax rates as determined by the hamilton county budget commission this particular resolution is actually prepared by the hamilton county budget commission and it is their certification to us of our voted tax levy rates and the effective tax rates given the impact of house bill 920 and the dollar amount of the to be raised by each levy by passing this resolution we are accepting their calculation of the levy results and certifying that we do need these taxes in order to operate the authoritative source for this action is in the ohio revised code section 5705.34 moving on to the monthly treasures reports item a presents a

158long list of donors who those gifts totaled just over 25 000 this past month and as always we are appreciative of these gifts and the treasures department does send a letter um thanking those donors for their gifts at the con once you approve the donations moving on to item b this is the cash activity statement which presents all revenues and expenditures in the board funds through march 31st 2022 item c presents the general fund our five-year forecast receipts by month in the fiscal year to date ended this past march 31st march is always one of our higher cash flow months due to the receipt of the final sell settlement of spring tax collections from the county auditor items d and e present the expenditures in the general fund uh for the month and the fiscal

159year to date ended march 31st as we talk about every month expenditures in the general fund are very stable throughout the year with 75 of our fiscal year complete at the end of march we have spent 73.6 of our appropriations with an additional 4.4 percent encumbering so spending is tracking within the appropriations which are approved by the board the march 31st bank reconciliations and investments are presented in agenda items f and g i respectfully recommend that the board approve the treasures items 15.1 through 15.2 g as part of the consent motion which contains items 10.1 through 15.2 g i'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda a second mrs jonas yes mrs stewart yes mr bibb yes dr rasmussen yes mrs hosfeld yes thank you atlanta 16.0 board discussion um i had a few

160things i wanted to talk about so we are four months in and we have um been learning a lot over the last few months and i know i'm ready to get some work done i hope you guys are too and i know it's not always easy to have discussions when we're up here but this is part of the job and for discussion is where we're supposed to get work done so i'm hoping we can have some dialogue tonight um so i'm going to start off talking about the levy i'm very concerned about opportunity a cost associated with prolonging a levy we need to move fast so we can plan for next year waiting to propose a levy might be fiscally irresponsible as it will require a higher millage amount and may not last as long

161we can look at future efficiencies and way to write the financial situation as a reduced spending or such as reduced spending and budget planning every year we prolong mean significant staff cuts larger class sizes and a higher levy amount this entire situation could potentially spiral out of control and if i'm hearing things correctly from the administration we need a levy right now and we shouldn't be waiting until next year but what i would also like to see is a district move into more long-term financial sustainability such as consolidating down to maybe one high school or consolidating some elementary schools maybe both selling the central office is another option as it's prime real estate and we might be able to do this immediately to help curtail some of the financial burden another option that we've talked

162about is potentially eliminating all-day kindergarten or going back to offering half day we're losing money in this area which means we can either charge more per pupil or eliminate it altogether and then i know many people in this district have been through financial financial hardships over the last year with rising fuel prices and realized inflationary pressures so adding extra costs through a levy could put a lot of strain on families in this community so i'm open to looking at all cuts that don't impact the classroom but i think this is something that we need to be discussing out in the open with everyone those are my thoughts i'm a board committee to look at redistricting reconsolidating however we want to do it i don't know how everybody else feels i'd agree to that be a

163long-term plan for that yeah i agree we are looking at all different options nothing is off the table so i mean that shouldn't be a surprise to people we've been in many meetings with administration and scott and just learning as much as we can to make the right decisions and we're putting a lot of time and effort into it so we want to make sure that we're making the right decisions and everything that we're talking about i like the idea of putting together a committee so that we can kind of consolidate some of um and get public input and get people together so that they can have their input as well and just kind of move forward with that to kind of piggyback off of what katie said about long-term solutions have we [Music] where

164are we on the business advisory committee and starting that up we do need to get some more people to join okay because that might be an important piece for our long-term growth will we reach out to people atlanta how does that process work um i do have some names that i've got a couple names that i've gotten from the principals of folks who may be interested i think we could maybe put it on the website to see if there are community members that are interested so and i have asked a few of our vendors who are parents in our district as well i thought that would be good so we do have a few more people signed up could we put maybe like a target date on it to maybe sure i mean i'm not

165sure what you guys think about that but i mean and it was one of the things when we first got on that we really wanted to get started again so maybe at the end of the year we could start something like that i know we've got like six weeks left to school so okay we can look at dates maybe that's something we can do as a finance committee okay that sounds good um i'll give my comments thank you katie for all of those items um i share your same concern about delaying a levy because we are going to have to come back and ask for money highly likely the following year and that's going to be a significant number um so a larger number not the same millage and i think that's a pretty big

166ask from the community um as far as consolidation and these things you know this has been talked about in this district for a very long time right and we the board was presented with some plans to consolidate and shown different options from external folks um i i really struggle here because we're gonna have to ask for a levy we're probably gonna have to ask for more money even to to facilitate that ten years ago i really think maybe that was the time um we just rebuilt to new or built to new wilson's brand new i struggle with seeing how this all comes to fruition without putting a financial a heavy financial burden on our taxpayers from an education standpoint i also have really big concerns about you know these mega high schools olin tangy is

167an example now today if we consolidated turpin and anderson our numbers would not be that significant i think the number that i was told was maybe around 500 to 600 graduates in one class um so i'm not i think it's in that range is what i was told but take a look around everything's being developed left and right we have families continually moving in we're only getting larger so we would be headed that direction i can't predict when i just know that that is something that we need to consider at the same time in my life and my just true who i am what i like to do when i have to make tough decisions is have every single option laid out and that includes the bad ones the ones that i don't like or

168that i don't want to see so i'm perfectly fine with the idea of saying or you know forming a committee or whatever it is to review all of those options even the ones i don't like because they are an option period i just have really strong concerns about what that really looks like in the long term when i met with you know the team that talked about the consolidation there was also a comment about potentially needing another bond and we already have the bond before was way before my time even and there's still distrust over how that was managed so we're talking about a levy we're talking about taking away elementary schools probably because we have six you know which you know i don't want to lose my elementary school and i guarantee every person

169every parent probably doesn't want to lose their elementary school um and maybe there are going to be concerns about a single high school right like well one quarterback one star of the school play you know i those are you know ancillary issues that we'll have to discuss down the road i think but i think that if that's the direction it needs to be methodical it needs to be very transparent and there needs to be a whole lot of discussion because that's a significant significant change in impact and i it's just it's hard for me to see it today that's all i'm saying um but like i said about the options lay them out on the table let's go through that process if that's what you know you all intend and we work it out what's

170on the bed i was just going to piggyback off what you said with looking at all the options i think that i'm interested in looking in the option of consolidation just to see if it makes sense financially financially long term um and if it doesn't then it doesn't but i want to see all the options because one of the things that is concerning to me is that i don't know that this district can sustain levies every three years whether that's the way the state is you know how things are formulated here but um looking at other options and outside the box that just what else can we do to help that financial burden in this community would be good that's the benefit of the board form committee it's open to the public so they'll be

171able to see everything that's going on every discussion we have and every piece of information brought to us sounds good um i wanted to ask scott where we are on the diversity day rescheduling has it has a date been selected and is the programming going to be the same or dave i don't know i'll respond to that unless dr rasmussen my recommendation on the discussion that just took place is that a community forum would be great in something this vast in something this serious i would suggest again i won't be here but i would suggest that the board research a specialized organization that does that work on consolidation or organizational restructures so that it's led by experts who are working with our community who are able to navigate very difficult economic financial waters because they've

172done it before [Music] so again because i may not be here does not mean that i do not care i care greatly and i am hopeful that we consider that there are experts that do these things enrollment studies housing studies what's happening with major industries in the area what type of growth are we seeing you know all of those types of things when you consolidate what are the costs to do that or not do that so um again it's not my um i don't want to be presumptuous nor do i want to be argumentative disrespectful in any way i would caution that this needs to be done in such a large district with an expert working with you and your community uh as far as the um rescheduling or the diversity day someone said tonight

173in their comments and i think it's important that the board voted to eliminate the day that is not an accurate statement there was no vote by this board of education to cancel or postpone diversity day i met with administrators teachers in the district and collectively we took a look at where we were with our processes and with that day and we decided to postpone and i delivered that message to the board that's an important factor here okay that needs to be that needs to be clarified so it is scheduled to be rescheduled i talked with mr spencer today he's been working with the staff members and working with those who are interested to review the day review the activities review the processes related to the activities and to align those things and provide for the

174board a presentation or a document that would suggest what the materials are going to be what the activities are going to be and what the recommended date or dates for reschedule are i'm just gonna have a clarifying question um so you're saying that you had the concern did did you receive complaints from parents or guardians who had signed a permission slip and said their child could participate i had concerns how did this come to the to our table essentially like many things do through email concerns telephone calls questions text messages social media in my role as superintendent i need to be you know in in a fast-moving environment with a lot of different you heard them tonight perspectives on content standards requirements policies procedures to move forward with something with that amount of questioning and

175concern did not seem in my opinion to be the best thing to do but was that from the parents that is not a po that is not a cancelling of the event which is played out in this community unfortunately because that's the way things happen here sometimes and so the story is told by those who aren't the storytellers so if you're asking me specifically who called me i'm not going to tell you that because there of were students that had given permission because in my emails i didn't have a single one not from parents that had opted in that's the clarifying question and point that i want to understand were they upset were those parents that had made that choice for their children upset because they did not have all of the materials to review

176can't answer that question because i don't know not everyone tells me or reaches out to me personally are there any more discussions about the levy or consolidation or anything not from me no but one of the on this topic one of the students who wrote us an email asked if i would read it today um they are as dave knows hard at work right now preparing for their theater performance that's coming up so i just want to read it really quickly it's actually quite long so i don't know i don't know if and the concern that i heard was he received a sing a singular response and yeah is that better is that better thank you so to whoever to whoever this may concern the importance of diversity that's what it's titled the forest skill

177the forest hills school board recently canceled turpin's diversity day we all know to be cleared it it's rescheduled they're in the process of trying to reschedule that so just to make that clear the announcement of the cancellation was made shortly before the end of the school day the day before the event was supposed to occur i along with many other fellow students was shocked to learn about the decision and even more shocked to learn as to why exactly it happened the board's purported reasoning as far as i know was that no specific information about the event was provided to parents and students who wish to participate a student coming as a student coming from a very different background when compared with the majority of students at turpin perhaps i can clear up the advantages of

178having such an event and why the board's objections are misguided first i should introduce myself i'm going to not say this person's name because i don't want that person to be targeted i'm a junior here at turpin i was born and raised in india until i was about nine years old my upbringing was very different from the majority of my peers when i first moved to the united states i had to learn about the culture and practices of the people here in order to adapt i believe however that my experiences with multiple cultures have been an integral part of my understanding of the world a lot of people in the u.s do not have a way to connect with other cultures which i believe is a shame and should be redressed educating oneself about the

179multitudes of cultures all around the world helps people understand how diverse we are i attended diversity day last year i did so knowing that turpin is lacking in diversity that is not a jab at anyone it's simply a statement of abject truth turpin's lack of diversity can cause people to be ignorant about cultural differences largely largely due to a lack of exposure diversity day was a chance to reverse that and i wanted to play my part in sharing my own experiences during the event my group discussed the lack of diversity the lack of understanding between cultures and how misunderstandings may arise that lead to potentially offensive or rude comments that stem from ignorance among other things i thoroughly enjoyed my time at the event and i was able to learn about others experiences and interactions

180with various cultures i was looking forward to participating again this year and sharing my experiences with even more people there were some powerful moments from last year's event that i look back on even today something i hoped would happen again i was shocked and disappointed to learn that the event had been postponed the board's reasoning was to me uncharacteristic to forest hills their claim that the event was postponed due to lack of information is indecipherable the goal of the day was stated in the title racial diversity awareness day i've heard and my sources may have it wrong that the board's decision was based on fear of critical race theory being taught that notion is frankly absurd it's my sincerest hope that the board is not so blinded by contemporary politics that they rescind an opportunity

181for the students of turpin to learn about and appreciate each other in order to remain neutral i will neither oppose nor defend crt but if it is indeed being used by the board to postpone diversity which i doubt then perhaps i will have to explore the political side of things after all i believe that education should not be influenced by politics i further believe that completing completely ignoring one side of things i.e trying to avoid talks of racism in order to avoid the entire issue which happens to be racism and ignorance rather than crt is immature and it's certainly not behavior becoming of the members of the board no matter what one's personal personal beliefs may be one should receive information about issues that are important the information should be presented in an unbiased manner

182crt based on my limited knowledge is a discussion of racism in today's world it's an idea challenged by many conservatives and i welcome the challenges it's my sincerest belief that this issue should be discussed in a civil manner something that diversity day not only provides the opportunity to do but encourages students are free to hold whatever beliefs they have but diversity day provides an opportunity for us to explore our viewpoints find shortcomings because they are most certainly shortcomings on either side and for us to evolve for what is the purpose of education other than allowing us to think for ourselves i know that i'm not alone in my disappointment at the postponement of diversity day it's an opportunity many of us needed and it's an opportunity many of us want why else do did so

183many people sign up for for the event please put politics aside if indeed that is the cause of postponement and allow it to happen we need more understanding in today's divisive landscape um and i i know that was long and i apologize for the time but i felt very strongly that that student's words needed to be shared and those students need to be heard um and i'm sure they're not watching a board meeting on youtube but if any of their parents are i found out about this the same way most of you all did and i just want to sincerely apologize to all of those students that put their just hard work and time and energy into trying to make something happen and to the staff that supported that and i'm just i'm deeply sorry

184about that and i look forward to it being rescheduled and hopefully attending myself so so since i was asked directly the question [Music] i care deeply about kids i know that you do and clear direction from this body is needed in this arena so tell your administrators and tell your community what you want from this type of activity because there's great concern about the direction and as an administrator who takes their course of action based upon the direction of the board it may not happen tonight but i think there needs to be clear direction given to this school system about your position on this and how you want us to navigate moving forward thank you questions i'll add something to the diversity day discussion i found out about it the same way everyone else found

185out about it i was not contacted beforehand about a decision i wanted to make one way or the other on a side note to that i would say that if you knew what you were signing your child up for and it's an optional activity i would look at that the same way i would look at i know there were republican and democrat clubs in the high schools and if a republican club wanted to go on a right to life walk and it was an optional opt-in experience i think they should be able to do that and saying that that means the same thing would have to be able to happen on the other side so if you knew what you were signing your child up for and it is an opt-in class or activity i

186think that is up to the parents to decide what is best for their children and what is best for them and i think that goes to both sides on any activity now if it was something that was being discussed across the board in an in-class environment i think that everybody needs to know also what's being presented if it was some type of auditorium discussion or something like that so those are just my feelings i think parents need to be aware and ultimately have the choice in what's going on for their child i'll say like i said day one and i don't want any politics in the school letting left not right we're here just to educate and that's it do you think diversity is political no i didn't say diversity was political i said i

187want no politics i didn't have anything to do with diversity day we're on that subject so i'm trying to asking you a clarifying question he asked for direction i gave him direction you don't so bob bibb doesn't want politics in school that's your direction to scott and he should take yours only no i'm giving him was at the end of discussion we'll move on [Music] on nagel real quick is it possible to have smaller teams is that an option or would that i think that would be directly related to staffing smaller teams fewer teams smaller team less less students to illest students per team so more teams less students potentially yes just when to clarify i don't know if that if that messes up i guess you would i don't there's a way to do

188that without splitting up the classes if it's not it's not class teacher student ratio per teacher will go up okay so i guess i'm thinking like for advisory and things like that i think that this is going to require never mind a smarter mind than mine um but anita and the team as working with rob and working with kim rob on hr type stuff with staffing kim with numbers of students and and curriculum and so i think in that that's a conversation that we can definitely dig into a little bit more as we get into our hr committees and our teaching and learning committees as the board continues in this conversation about education quality of education and staffing related to that i'm not trying to avoid the question i just don't have a specific it's

189a complex question a number for you at this time okay moving on to reports to the board of education 17.1 technology and facilities that's all right thank you 17.2 forest hills foundation hello everyone i'll be very quick i know we've all been here for a long time so i will be very quick but um i just want to say who is ready for the best day in may yes everyone's got their green on tonight just uh it's for mental health awareness but it's also for the race and i just want to share a quick story i promise we'll be quick um i've had the pleasure this week of going to all the running clubs at the run at all the elementary schools this week and if you want to have like just a fun day

190and see some excitement go to the running clubs these kids are pumped for the race like they cannot wait to get out there they've missed it for the past two years they kept asking me why why why and all i had to say was covet and they're like oh yeah yeah code cancels everything so it's just going it's going very well we have over 600 kids registered for our running clubs which is just incredible so they're ready to go the excitement is building in all the buildings and around the community i think too we have surpassed our fundraising goal i'm just very excited to say that our goal was a hundred thousand dollars which i didn't i must be honest i'm going to give that up to stacey um i didn't think we were gonna

191make it and we have surpassed our goal and continue to bring in donations every day so really our community is very supportive of this race and of our schools and of our kids and again stacy always says this is for the kids and this is exactly for the kids this is what our community needs right now they want to come together they want to help our kids so um you can still get registered for the race um it goes up five dollars on april 30th so if you haven't registered please register now we have over 1600 people registered and that is a big increase from past years so i think we're going to hire a goal of 2000 people and it's going to be wonderful also i know there was some concern at anderson high

192school because of is that day we have scheduled a second event a event on may 5th cinco de mayo come celebrate with us we're going to meet at clear creek and do your 3.1 miles there and then go to big ash brewery and have a post race or your pro post race or pre-race celebration depending on which side of the you are on so please come celebrate with us we're going to give a lot of fun things away um just kind of pump up the excitement and be happy that we have a race and we have our community coming together as one so if you have any questions everyone knows my email or where to find stacey so that's all i got and i wish you guys a great night thank you very much can

193i ask you real quick what time is it on may 5th um it's gonna start at five five to nine sorry i should have said that i had slides but i didn't even use anything you're good i just wanted to oh it's up there you see it now but stacey always gives me slides it's a race does the race it's ingrained in you oh it is yeah i've got stickers if anyone else wants stickers i can drop them off at your your place you've got lots of stickers and bracelets still so um i'm sorry does the race start at five or does the race the race sorry the race starts at 4 30 and we're gonna send out instructions you'll meet at um if you've been at clear creek they have field numbers and you'll

194meet at field number 11. okay we'll have balloons and then we'll start running and then head to big ash afterwards thank you walking too walking strolling whatever you can do to get through 3.1 miles so i think that's all i have um thank you anybody else have any questions for me no all right thank you all have a great night thank you all right we're at 18 executive session i think we i think we missed a report oh the teachers 17.3 for sales teachers association report i'm sure that was an oversight you were already here all right john hit the timer [Laughter] you're go all right first of all good evening at approximately three hours in i'm right i'm ready to go i want to make sure that i let amy i think rain out

195here quicker but three areas of tonight our celebration of success uh organizational support and membership update um i know from the association we definitely want to celebrate the forest hills 5k as we're coming back into real zone here i did want to tell you that the students during our last week on during travel when we talked earlier we walked 60 miles last week 6-0 so i know that the team at central office is saying donna you have to get out there and walk no i can't i'm exhausted celebrating our success tonight you heard several great opportunities at the district and those are just a few i want to congratulate summit and sherwood and the teams at those buildings as well as our own teacher erica thompson on her award forest hills is a place to

196be it's a great school district we do great things and as we come together and i did appreciate the conversation that the value of what happens is with that classroom teacher obviously i have a great interest in that second tonight is talking about the respect of the organization the association respects the board's policies and we're here to support those and to make sure i work directly with the superintendent the assistant superintendent hr director and all of them and making sure that our teachers and our staff work collectively to make sure that we abide by those policies and we're here to help support that i want to make sure tonight as lots of people bring up lots of different conversations that the most important thing is that we are always working together for the betterment of

197our students and our school community thirdly is the association will be celebrating its first in-person major membership assembly on may the 10th the association will have that evening we'll be celebrating all 450 members will be invited out and we have fundraising and as well as celebration of raffles to proceed so with that thank you any questions none no questions thanks thank you donna now 18.0 executive session pursuant to a high revised code section 121.22 g1 i hereby move the board to jordan to executive session for the purpose of considering the appointment employment promotion compensation of a public employee or official i will also note that we will not be voting on anything tonight do we have a second a second didn't hear you sorry uh mr bib yes mrs stewart yes mrs jonas yes dr

198rasmussen yeah this is hospital yes