001i like to call this regular meeting of the for sales board of education may 24 2021 to order roll call miss cropper miss joyce here mrs meyer here dr rasmussen here mrs taylor here dr heiss here please rise and join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all uh item 1.4 uh safety briefing we have exits out to our or your right we also have exits behind us we do have our security officers out if anything emergent happens look to them for help at this point i'd also like to bring up someone who's not here uh our office or sro bob goetke he is retiring now
002after protecting our children for 21 years so he has done outstanding things for our children and and i know we all are very appreciative of everything that he has done so item 2.1 motion adopt agenda do i get a motion i make a motion to adopt the agenda second ms cropper miss joyce yes mrs meyer yes dr rasmussen yes mrs taylor yes dr heiss yes item 3.1 through 3.3 approval of the minutes i make a motion to approve minnesota policy committee meeting april 12 2021 and 3.3 approval of minutes of regular meeting april 26 2021. second ms cropper miss choice yes mrs taylor yes mrs meyer yes dr rasmussen yes dr heiss yes item 4.1 correspondence of the board of education treasurer superintendent i haven't answered i have one board all right item 4.2 this
003meeting is a meeting of the board of education and public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business is not to be considered a public community meeting there is a time for public participation during the meeting as indicated in the agenda under public commentary individuals who like to share their opinions or comments concerning a topic on the board agenda should list the item agenda item or topic on a public participation sheet available at the entrance to the meeting room sign your name address telephone number and give the sheet to susan monk here and you'll be recognized during the board pro president during public commentary the portion of the meeting during which the participation of the public is divided shall be limited to 30 minutes unless extended now we already have 15 sheets 16 sheets
004so while in the past we've gone as long as five minutes i respectfully request that you limit your comments for two minutes you have some time to to adjust you'd like to send the full content to the board at its board at foresthills.edu and we will get the full content i'd also like to bring up one other thing is that we have a lot of people here and we have a lot of people who have very different opinions on a lot of things we all however are anderson township and newtown residents okay and we're good people i respectfully request that we act like the people that we are there's going to be a lot of people watching this and we can be respectful and different our opinions so again i i res i respectfully ask
005this is not a baseball game yelling at the umpire is not part of this game okay so let's listen to each other i could point point well taken is this better all right so yeah we're in constant fighting with the microphones and i also i'm glad to say that this will be the last meeting where we have to wear masks i think we're all happy about that so the um so along those lines sir that's exactly what i'm talking about okay let's let's be respectful here okay this is a board meeting to my they're up to 17. i want to go a little over so and and to my my colleagues on the board our last board discussion got a little out of hand so i also will respectfully request that as we know our
006last meeting went three hours we will have all the time to speak about whatever our topics are on our mind for this meeting so for our board discussion i would respectfully request that we listen to each other wait till they finish and then we respond and do it again okay so um let's keep the decorum here especially when we're talking about a lot of hot topics so thank you item 5.1 mercy health health recognition is yes like for donna lauber partnership development expert to come up with me we have a important recognition on behalf of the forest hills school district board and the experienceship program a recommendation is in place to recognize the following individuals from our community dr stephen fagans who is with us this evening mr j bowers and chris and ms chris
007giordello anderson high school teacher holly lowden and turpin high school teacher lindsey burton tonight we have dr fagans jay bowers for mercy and teacher lindsey burton forest hill school district is proud of the relationship we have had with mercy hospital and mercy orthopedics throughout the past year of covid their support and continued venue of excellence has continued to provide opportunities to our students virtually and in person the experienceship program has been successful because of the shared work of our teachers and the dedication of our mercy team over the past two years over 100 students have participated in the mercy health exploration program we want to thank you for being outstanding community partners and are glad that you could be with us this evening donna can you come up for a couple seconds please and we're
008going to start obviously here dr fagan thank you so much and then uh tonight mrs uh loudon was at the anderson latin recognition so we want to make sure we give her a nice round of applause as our teacher anderson we are going to recognize miss lindsey burton lindsay is one of our biology teachers and does a great job connecting our students with mercy and we want to thank her so much partners and what these were able to do this year was connect our students virtually and in person and we had lots of students who participated but really without your support dr fagan from mercy from ours thank you so much and lindsey for participating with the students thank you so much well dr fagens is here every friday since march of last school year
009excuse me yes march of last school year dr fagens meets with all of the hamilton county superintendents to provide information regarding health and wellness specific to covid19 and its impact not only in our schools but across the county state and the nation in addition to this explorers program and all the work that's done there in the coordination i want to thank you for that but on behalf of all of the superintendents in hamilton county our board of education and the fact that we are one of 24 of the schools in the state of ohio who was able to have face-to-face instruction this year absent of a few wednesdays i want to thank you for your leadership in providing us with that type of excellence so that we could in fact provide the best education possible
010for our students and the best health and wellness for our community thank you very much motion to command i'll make a motion to commend dr steve faggins jay bowers chris giardullo lindsey burton and holly louden for their work with the students in forest hills and present them with a certificate of appreciation ms crawford mrs meyer yes dr rasmussen yes mrs choice yes mrs taylor yes dr heiss yes item 5.2 superintendent updates thank you in a 2018 gallup web interview poll of 1982 united states k-12 superintendents 91 said that student engagement with school is their number one priority ninety percent indicated student hope for the future as the second most important priority and eighty nine percent reported graduation right rights rates excuse me as very important measures of school effectiveness all three components part of our
011professional development this year for our staff to help our students after more than 40 years of analysis the gallup organization suggests that engagement hope belonging and social and emotional competency are the most important factors that lead to student success and well-being so why is this important this evening because starting on june 15 2016 these topics were discussed during a four month process led by me to develop the district's current strategic vision endorsed by an advisory committee made up of community members and district administrators therefore the district's strategic vision striving for success for all students is the guide for all instruction all programming services and activities provided for our students and as such professional growth opportunities for staff are designed to provide developmentally responsive personalized learning and career pathway opportunities to enhance content knowledge and competencies
012of character citizenship collaboration communication critical thinking and creativity how many people are here tonight to express their concerns regarding critical race theory however nowhere are the words critical race theory included in the district's strategic vision critical race theory is not endorsed by the district ignore its administration and has not been emphasized in any way by our care team it should be noted at this time regardless of what is read digitally we do not have a care program we have a care team that helps design professional development and a team is made up of people within our schools crt means different things to different people as it is a very complex doctoral level theory the theory is not something we teach or explore in our classrooms and is not present in our curriculum so to be
013honest i'm a little caught i'm a little caught off a con off guard by the district care team's alleged work to promote critical race theory this year it is not collectively met this school year and therefore without question has not conveyed to students any of what is being reported on facebook indoctrination allegations are not true we haven't promoted crt and have no intentions of doing so our work has always been intended to better understand all aspects of our students that we teach we want to encourage students in relevant work excuse me want to engage students in relevant work in inclusionary environments and to offer equitable opportunities to all our district is fully focused on doing the work required to provide a well-rounded education based on research best practices and rigorous curriculum to all of our
014students in order to meet their needs and prepare each of them to be leaders to be self-motivated to be confident critical thinkers and critical cis critical thinking citizens that demonstrate empathy and respect towards others so what actually happened this year during the november 24 2020 meeting of the board our team presented information regarding one of four cultural cornerstones the relationship and wellness cornerstone we informed our board and community that staff members will engage in conversations about their own identity an important first step in discussions on our journey to implement a more diverse culture where students feel belong or they feel like they belong in an inclusionary environment that offers equity this is where i must pause and remind everyone that for our staff diversity is not just skin color or race it is all aspects
015of a student which should not be controversial moreover our students are individuals often times with complex needs that guide our practices there is no more important aspect of teaching than knowing your students and meeting their needs that's what our professional development across all four of our cultures cultural cornerstones is about because of the social and emotional stress the pandemic brought upon students and staff in addition to the reality of four student suicides since 2016 including racially oriented defacing of private and public property it was during the february special work session of the board that it prioritized cornerstone of cultural responsiveness and comp competency as important work that needs to continue it did not approve critical race theory in fact it is an established work plan within our school district cultural responsiveness and competency as such
016our team began the process to seek information from building leadership teams about their progress to achieve culturally responsive and inclusive environments and activities to better serve our students a video with opportunity to reflect and discuss progress toward belonging inclusion and equity was utilized by the district's care team consultant to ensure feedback to meet the board's expectations was available for 21 22 development planning the teaching and learning team asked that building discussions conclude prior to spring break to accomplish this some not all of our schools utilized a portion of one of nine remote wednesday mornings to seek information from staff wednesday mornings outside of the school day traded from monday tuesday or thursday friday staff meeting so that we would be fully engaged with students on full face-to-face learning and we would use the wednesday before
017school before activities with students to review these materials to be prepared for the upcoming school year at this point no further work has been completed none but last friday our board of education participated in a special work session where this topic was once again discussed and i appreciate those who attended that meeting i really do your feedback is important your voice is important and thank you for coming to that meeting based on our board's discussion i'd like to recommend the following this evening which came i believe from that meeting that we develop a comprehensive diversity belonging inclusion and inclusion strategic plan process you heard what i said a strategic plan to deal with diversity belonging and inclusion and this plan strategic plan i didn't say cultural plan didn't say crt plan i didn't say care
018plan i set a strategic plan to review goals and progress towards strategic vision success for all student priorities that is our district's vision one that reviews diversity and inclusion professional development materials and their intended use to influence priorities and practices one that includes wide stakeholder community participation and feedback for the first two items that i just read one that includes multiple forms of transparent communication regarding the diversity belonging and inclusion and inclusion overall process which would include things like web links and faqs and as a superintendent for everyone who is here i hold myself responsible for ensuring that communication about what happens in our classrooms with our students and for our students is communicated and i will say to all of you in this room i wish we would have done a little different job
019on that so that you were better informed i'm okay with assuming that responsibility but i'm not okay with being told we're doing something with children that we're not it should include frequent board of education progress reports in a room like this in front of our community so that everyone is aware of what's taking place this team should make recommendations to ensure that our diversity our belonging and our inclusion efficacy brings us closer to equity within our schools for all children the strategic plan should create a multi-stage multi-year inclusive of professional staff and student engagement progress evaluation metrics to make sure that we're on target to accomplish this i suggest outside of the district professional strategic planning expertise be sought to guide the superintendent and our care team and this strategic plan in its work based
020on my assessment of the current situation process transparency and communication will be just as important as the district's diversity belonging and inclusion efforts as this work is taking place i further suggest and recommend strongly that we continue to promote the other three of four cornerstones within our district we may push pause adapt and be flexible on this one but we must keep moving forward with our culture of learning so that our students are competitive not only in this county but across the world with our culture of collaboration so that our students are learning the skills and we are modeling the skills for them about how adults work together to create circumstances that are better for the children that we are responsible for we keep moving forward on this culture of wellness and relationship for some
021of the reasons that i talked about before yes we'll be talking about this particular issue but we have a lot of work in this school district to do with wellness and caring for children on their issues that they bring to us on a daily basis and we must continue moving forward with that we owe that to our children and we have to continue moving forward with our culture of innovation if we have learned nothing in the past year we've got to be innovative we've got to be flexible we've got to be adaptable we need to serve students in different ways than we have before put them in different types of arrangements different types of activities so that they can be prepared for the 21st century each leads to a learner profile or the learner profile
022competencies that we seek for all students for them to be critical thinkers creative problem solvers empathetic communicators global collaborators engaged citizens locally at the state level and nationally and that they are always adaptable learners who feel cared for and finally as the process rolls out we must be mindful that staff members in this school district are working behalf on behalf of our students not personal agendas and they will need our support once plans are solidified and work toward the future we all seek begins thank you that's my report thank you any questions for scott would you like to um i just have a couple things i wrote up beforehand and this is probably a good time to i'll say my piece and then let's see if we can get some uh answers i guess okay
023so i feel like i've been asking about the cares program for a while it is a team mrs taylor said again it is the care team it is not a care program okay cares team asking is its purpose how does a care team measure its success how many children are helped and requested to see the materials and pushing the sh and pushing to share the information or the materials to the parents i have yet to receive an adequate answer from the administration i saw an email with pre-work from catrice quitter to the cares team dated september 10 2019. in the email is a link to an article titled identity work and educational justice one paragraph reads this is not about being a good or bad person this is not about feeling shame or by at
024biases and ignorance this is about educational justice our schools and educational institutions are perpetuating white supremacy this must change mrs monk i sent you um a pdf are you able or can we have that put up is it's just our website uh okay yes please so as that's coming up um mr prebbles uh he responded to a parent after friday's meeting and he wrote um from may friday may 21st after this special meeting there's absolutely no critical race theory agenda in forest hill school district regardless of grapevine unfounded and understands unsubstantiated rumors and perceptions neither the district administration nor its staff have facilitated discussions with students on the topic the crt scare is based upon national political conversation our work to help all students find connections belong and belonging is being misrepresented so uh what
025i've learned since being on this school board is that our superintendent is a very is very deliberate in responding to questions well this may or may not be technically accurate that no student has been directly taught care materials it appears they have been increasing incidents of students checking their privilege teachers are asking students to take to state their gender pronouns at school and teachers are calling children racist for supporting the mascot is this what cares teaches the teachers who in turn teach our children so i'm not necessarily for or against cares it's just that i can't get a straight answer about what the entire program is doing and the materials and information is not being provided to i don't believe to parents what is this showing us uh i will get to it so basically
026on this shows this is the forest hills website and if you kind of keep going down i gotta change my glasses so you just click i mean anybody can do this so you know forest hills and if you keep going down uh click on the equity and inclusion part this is kind of what it shows keep on going and then you know what it says having awareness of one's cultural but if you just keep going down i mean anyone can do this on your own i'm just trying to say uh so this is where you're teaching the the teachers and then in 20 to 22 you're going to move on to the students teaching that and i'm just trying to get an explanation i see stuff on here that is concerning to me versus what
027is being said and if you click on some of those links um and if you go down a little bit further it goes to here the justice for teaching and tolerance and if you keep reading all of that kind of stuff i mean the website shows we are talking about racism and cultural justice and and equity and things like that so let's have a consistent message and if if it is being taught to the teachers and in turn taught to the kids i think as parents we should know what's going on i want to see that if a survey is sent out i want to see what's in the survey before my child gets to to read the survey and answers no no no no no this is not this is not a public meeting
028it's a meeting held in public let's keep it that way all right so let me just this is you know my point uh how do we open all this to parents how do we get all the information what are we doing and how do we make sure all the parents that want to know what's going on are able to um be included in it and so let me iterate i don't know everything that cares is doing but i feel the p that parents have a right and an obligation to teach their own morals and guide their own children and one other thing i did when we went for virtual wednesdays that was in the november meeting and the administration said you know our teachers need some uh some some relief okay i get that so
029then we went ahead and did that after january coming into february the cases drop consistently and i said we need we need to consider not doing virtual wednesdays anymore these kids need to be in five days a week and i have three different dates on here there are wednesdays january 27th february 24th and march 24th that it looks like we had training on this on virtual wednesday so i told you this on friday i was a little bit picked off going i want my kids in class i did not understand or did not realize that these training sessions were going on where my kids were at home mrs may i respond yes as we fully disclosed on friday and as i reiterated this evening remote wednesday time was not the to the student's instructional time
030was not used for this work and i i guess i'm okay with having a debate but i'm not okay with the same question with an answer that is consistent every time and as i said on friday thank goodness these days are behind us with coved because we'll never have to debate this again i am hopeful we were in the worst circumstance that you could possibly be in as a school system and a nation the school district was in session 75 and 75 percent in session more than 75 percent of the schools in the state of ohio if you took out every single remote wednesday we would still have more instruction than the minimum standard in the state of ohio and i am 100 percent in agreement with you that anytime we can have students in
031the classroom we should do that there is ample evidence throughout this entire school year regardless of the debate or how the plans came about that our students were in school and so i i struggle with the same question time and time again because i've provided the answer and in any documentation that you provide me we take it off this subject i think whether i'm in a baptist church or a catholic church or any other church and i'm worshiping there are going to be words that are in those churches that are consistent among all those churches and so these words that we're talking about they work across theories and across venues the information that you're talking about is brought to us by a consultant and there are times when consultants who work in other fields at
032other levels in theoretical arenas have that information that has not been used in our school district in the way that is being suggested i'm not going to suggest that the words don't appear or the things you might not find something like that but i can't continue to debate over the rationale behind what we're doing and the negativity surrounding what we're trying to accomplish for students and my question is what are you going to do to now development series in every aspect of our program and this one because it is a politicized charged topic is causing people to come out i appreciate that and i will continue to do everything i can as i said earlier to be clear and responsive but none of the people in this room have come to talk to me about
033we're doing what we're doing with innovation professional development i've not seen anyone come in and talk with me about what we're doing with our instructional methodologies regarding professional development so we have to be truthful about the subject matter and how it is influencing this particular board meeting we are not here to promote critical race theory and if you happen to find a word or a link or a video then i would ask you to think about where kids go every day all day in our schools every day all day in our schools i can design a bomb if i go on here find it and i can do that during my algebra class now let's really be honest with each other we are not promoting critical race theory we're educating young minds and we're trying
034to educate them in a way that provides them critical analysis of many different types of information that come in their direction that's what critical thinking is about problem solving is about collaboration is about so i appreciate your comments and i am in agreement with many of them but i'm not in agreement that we were on a track to do something in an ideology that is not consistent with what this community wants for their children so my question again is how are we going to make sure parents get more robust information and how do they get involved in the committee around the cares program well in most situations when i've brought information to the board they give me a set of directives and then that happens so how does the board want me to involve the
035community how does the board want me to influence this process i brought you a recommendation it is the five of yours responsibility as the policy makers in this school district to inform me how you want this process to be to move forward and that i will make that happen because i believe that this body will come up with a good plan and good directives because i believe that this body regardless of what anybody out there thinks has the best interest of students in mind all five people up here all five people and so when you collectively come up with uh edits or recommendation or not recommendations but directions for me i will make that happen certainly will gladly yeah so the beautiful thing about that to me is that the five people at this table
036actually do have different thoughts and um when i woke up this morning and i'm just going to be really honest with you all here i was scared to death i didn't want to come tonight i've been through a lot of really difficult meetings in my four years on this board and i was hopeful that this one would not be like that and about halfway through the day um it honestly hit me that it was a privilege because to have diverse opinions in the same room and at the same table is an honor and for this community to have the the opportunity to talk together and work through this in a respectful way is a good thing and if people in this country did that more we wouldn't be having the issues we had last year
037so the result of our meeting on friday where we discussed this at length was that we all kind of agreed to hit not pause on this cares advisory board but to reevaluate it and to make sure that there were enough different voices on it that all of the viewpoints were being addressed and when we talked about this in our boardwork session in january you all will remember this i talked for a few minutes about respect because to me that's one of the best things we could teach the the kids right now is respect and empathy because they leave these schools they're going to be meeting different kinds of people of different countries different races different backgrounds different incomes that's life and this program i will testify for was put in place to do that race
038is a part of that but it is not all of it so you know it's it's been um so difficult but also enlightening to hear everyone's feedback for the past two months because it all has value everyone's afraid both everyone's afraid that something bad is going to happen and that's not the point of this program um so you know i don't know what the exact next steps are but our intention after coming out of friday was this needs to be looked at and all voices need to be considered so that's on us to figure out what comes next that's accurate just a quick comment um you know i understand just like elizabeth said we all have different opinions and that's that's an okay thing but it's i think it's the way we present those those
039opinions that that we need to be careful about you know we can have our opinions we can share our opinions but to have people screaming at you you know saying things it's just not a nice look it's not good for our district we have a phenomenal phenomenal school district i'd put it up against any district in the state and that's you know thanks for all of our administrators not the board because we don't do it all we do is vote make decisions but the people who run this district my uh greg uh brian i mean i could name you all and uh you've done an outstanding job so let's just try to be nice to each other that's all just be nice listen and i think it'll work out um yeah okay so one of
040the things that came out of our our session on friday was that yeah there was obviously a lot of of uh lack of communication there was a lot of when we were going through the the care program as it started was uh in response to some of the things that were happening in the district we had two suicides which is horrible we had we had racial epithets scribbled on lockers horrible not acceptable so that's what we came up with uh so the thought was is none of us here want teen suicides i'm fairly positive that none of us want racial epithets on on scribbled on lockers that's not who we are okay but it's it's part of our society and it's something that we decided we need to do something about and that's what came
041through i would venture to guess and i may be wrong but two months ago no one knew what critical race theory was i may be that's why i said i may be wrong i get it so so when this came up though so we we had a part of the the care team was to have an advisory council that that could look at the information as it came in before it got to professional development before we taught it to the teachers and incorporate it into the program now to be fair with with kova and that's what came up hasn't met in like a year and a half two years and that was one of the things that we talked about at our work session was that that may be a supervisory oversight committee very similar
042to what we have with our business advisory committee where we have people of all different walks of life in our township our people our neighbors that are there that give different perspectives and it's it's great it's very good it's very open it's very raw you get a lot of different feedback and that's one of the ways we guide our district forward as far as financial stuff and property and that type of thing so i see that here as being an excellent way a guideline on how we move forward with something like this everyone here wants student wellness our number one goal is not education it's safety of our kids okay education is important but we want our kids to be safe in school okay we want student wellness we want our kids to not harm
043themselves or harm other people these are the goals that we want okay now how we get there that's the the details that that we all want okay and i get that so so my recommendation would be that we we evaluate this it's been two three years now four years this is a great time to reevaluate any program is to take a look go back to our our goals on what we want from this okay critical race theory not part of it but when these things come up okay i thought they cut me off um when these things come up that's where we have an advisory committee that is truly diverse okay meaning all sides of the spectrum here that people can go in and dig in dig into the information that's coming from the esc
044from our hamilton county partners and look into the stuff and evaluate it on what we need in this district okay and then that way the stuff that gets to us is exactly that is what we want for our kids so i like the idea of a reevaluation we have an advisory council we have i guess first we have a steering committee to to evaluate the program to make sure it follows what we want for our children and then we have an advisory or supervisory uh council that that made up of stakeholders both in in the district and in the township that evaluate the information as it comes in and then that way we're all and then with regular to your point regular communication um transparency a great word uh communication with um with our parents
045with our stakeholders with our township so that when this comes up it isn't found out through different channels no we have people that have been looking at it for months i said no this is this is what we base this on and that you know a paragraph out of here well that wasn't incorporated we saw it we know about it it wasn't incorporated into our program we don't have that now but i see that as a as a great way to move forward with it my question to you or the board really is if students are in class and a teacher tells them you know check your privilege or says things that are just not comfortable what are they supposed to do what do parents do and what do kids do thing that would happen
046if a student threw a milk carton across the cafeteria we have a code of conduct when these things are witnessed we investigate the situation we bring the students in and adults who are in the middle of that we try to get to the bottom of it to the best of our ability and then we apply consequences some like the word discipline but we like to use the word consequences discipline is one that folks know and i'm you know so okay and then we work with the students to ensure that after the consequences or after the initial thing takes place that we are in an educational mode with them so that they can grow from that moment and they can move forward and not be ostracized so to speak because they made a bad decision as
047a young person i think that's what we would do with anything parents email they contact us all the time we try to get back to them as quickly as we can if anyone emails or contacts me you should be aware that the first person i go talk to is the one i wish that you would and that is to go to the principal of the building so that they can work back through the system because they are closest to the students and have a clear understanding of not only the situations and the schedules and buildings but they are aware of who these students are because they work with them on a daily basis and so to not push it down to get it off of my desk but move it to a place where the
048most informed people can work with students and families is what we would do if it is a staff member as we discussed on last friday and we have associated or we have agreements contracts with our employees we have ethics laws in the state of ohio we have moral obligations to ensure that if anyone is doing anything in front of the students that is inappropriate in a way that is harming them that we eliminate that as quickly as we can and just like a student we work to mitigate the issue investigate the issue and then we apply consequences that are appropriate and then we move from there so so bottom line for everyone here okay we don't promote critical race theory we don't we're not teaching it we're not going to teach it and to help
049allay fears of that we're going to have a a way that you can check okay with web links with evaluations with what's going through that being said we are committed to student wellness we're committed to it so we're going to continue to to work on student wellness and getting us for our students have a sense of belonging in the school to feel cared for here and to promote their emotional social and educational health that's what we do so we're going to move forward okay we're not moving forward critical race theory it's not part of it the student wellness is all right next up we have public comments we are up to 21. so i am going to ask we would like to try and keep this in for 30 minutes i i brought up two
050minutes i do not mean to be rude at two minutes we have to cut you off and keep going our last meeting was three hours why not to have that this time okay so we're here we'll hear we'll certainly hear you at two minutes i'm going to interrupt you it's not personal it's not rude it doesn't matter what you're saying it's not important it's not that it's two minutes okay and we're more than happy to again email for or a board at foresthills.edu you can have the whole transcript so i'm just going to go in order of of what susan told me in the order of numbers here so first one is jamie lay it's intimidating up here my time start good evening everybody my name is jamie lay and i am a parent of
051two forest hills school district students that attend sherwood elementary school in nagel middle school we have lived in this district since 2013. i have worked within our district as a substitute teacher and volunteered for countless events through the sherwood pta i read every single correspondence that comes home from the school i read every newsletter every pta email every district email so it came as a very big surprise to me that forest hills district has been working to integrate the critical race theory even though you said that it's not but if there's a wink and a nod of critical race theory in this through the care program since 2017 for the district's website i have not read anything about this program in any correspondence sent to parents in the last four years i am very concerned
052about this i wholeheartedly believe all should be included no matter who you are especially at school i believe in learning about other cultures countries religions and regions it's actually a lifelong passion of mine my concern is with the murky agenda of the care program and the lack of transparency i've seen the equality versus equity fence illustration that the district is using while a nice idea it's not rooted in reality when you have equity situation no one sees over the fence equality allows for each person to be given their opportunity and then to use their own personal agency to succeed or fail i have a personal story where this happened to my son my oldest son could read at a very early age the district that we live in princeton we went to the kindergarten open
053house and i asked the teacher what she was going to do for him since he could already read and she told me that the district wants all kids to enter each grade level to stay about the same area so he will be my helper that is equity equity of outcome is not fair to anyone that's great for students who are struggling but unfair to students like my son in conclusion forest hills school district needs to be more transparent about the care program the district needs to spell out exactly what is going on in the classroom that we pay for with our very high property taxes if this program proceeds and i hope it doesn't there needs to be direct correspondence from the individual school and teacher on what aspects are being taught also just like
054sex said child abuse and surveys there needs to be an opt out option for parents thank you and well done next up we have sue wood in 2017 forest hills local school district created an advisory team to strengthen our district's competency in diversity belonging inclusion and equity out of this advisory committee the acronym care was created care stands for competency advocacy relationships and engagement the goal of the care team is to ensure a welcoming and safe environment for all students i don't understand why anybody would oppose these teachings which give teachers the tools to help guide our students towards empathy respect and a stronger moral compass our district has had too many incidents that show some of our students are not learning these important life schools one of these occurred a few weeks ago at
055nagel how do the individuals targeted ever feel safe in our schools again how do the targeted students parents feel safe sending their kids back to this environment i applaud the students who reported the images but are they facing retribution from their classmates how are they being protected what about the students who viewed the photos and didn't feel they had the tools to report them how do these continued events affect the sensitive compassionate students within our buildings do some students feel utterly helpless and hopeless do these events contribute to the suicide rate in this age group what are the long-term effects of this behavior on this targeted students and the student population witnessing this behavior unfortunately these are not isolated events we need to continue teaching diversity belonging inclusion and equity the care team is vital
056in helping create an inclusive learning environment for everybody where everybody feels welcome so thank you to all the teachers staff and administrators who are participating in this work these continued horrific incidents tell me that this work is vitally necessary in our schools and our community thank you next up is erica czesak right when i look around this room i am surrounded by white faces white faces who again want to tell people in this district how they should feel about diversity and racism i find it very interesting that the same people who are wearing critical race theory shirts also seem to bring save the red skin shirts it is a continuation of the same racist behaviors that we are seeing over and over again and i am hearing the board say that we don't want to
057talk about racism when did cpr and teaching cpr make children choke when did making teachers aware of what choking looks like make children do it when did teaching children to look for the signs of abuse mean that their parents started to abuse them to understand what racism inclusion and diversity is is to understand how to role model it not to necessarily be racist i hope that for the sake of this community we can get past this we look like fools to the rest of cincinnati up thomas hagedorn thank you hello uh i'm tom hagedorn 2626 royal woods court i've been a resident of the district since 1975. i'm also involved with a citizen group called stop critical criticalcriticalracetheory.com so if something looks like a duck walks like a duck and quacks like a duck i
058usually believe it's a duck if you look at all the concepts and methods and procedures of critical race theory and then you map that into the care program if you took that and it's in there if you took that out of care program there wouldn't be a whole lot left uh there's a virus among us i'm not talking about covet 19. virus i'm talking about is critical race theory critical race theory is racist it's marxist it's harmful to adults and children i'm concerned they may be it may be impact infecting our schools through the care program i've looked at the board's website on the care program and also a lot of other care materials that have been attained other under some freedom of information requests some of this material is very offensive to me not
059just relative to race but also concerning gender sexual orientation and sexual identity many of the resources suggested are very left-wing and have received a lot of criticism including the now infamous 1619 project one of the one of the items on there was authored by a racist and only refute a few of a few of the resources so care does not appear to represent the values of our community our state or our country one of our national mottos is e pluribus unum out of many one not the other way around um i respectfully ask the board well i guess what i'd like to say too that's last time i'll talk with anybody about this at any time thank you next up is john metz you can you can do the three seconds hi uh i'm john
060metz i have a boy who's at south moore turpin i live over in some of the states this today when i was outside one of your people talking to me said that in school they are having students apologize for being white and i was quite surprised i was wondering who they would be apologizing to um but anyway um what i wanted to talk about today uh was my own history okay my three of my four grandparents were born in europe my grandmother my mother's mother came over as a orphan at 13 and my father's mother and father both came from hungary my dad's my dad my mother's father seems like he had a nervous breakdown during depression lost his job and never recovered my dad's dad was a pipe fitter and my dad worked with
061him until he was about 20 he hurt his back and then he became working for the um he became ultimately buying supplies and then became the leader of the group then during the war they had a job doing pipe fitting for uh wooden um mine sweepers in cleveland um and my dad became the boss of that he never got an upper the the ball the main boss it owned it made a lot of money never actually that my dad uh become the partner he promised um but my dad became one none of the company became the c sales director and i was able to go to uh saint heads high school in cleveland some of you might know that um and go to college i was always expected i was going to go to college
062black people did they have the opportunity did that help me black guy coming you know grandparents maybe came up from the south as former sharecroppers didn't go have education didn't get anywhere so you know talk about white privilege we have it right thank you next page next patient nick next up amy richardson hi my name is amy richardson i have um three students in the district i'm also running for school board in full disclosure everyone here is so concerned for kids which is awesome i love parent involvement like many who've already expressed their concerns for crt i have them as well and i am against that i have some concerns about care i appreciate the fact that you're going to look into that and redevelop that however i don't know if it can ever get
063out from under that dark cloud i do want to see socioeconomic economic excuse me social emotional emphasis in schools it's super important especially with the incidences that have been happening here at nagle in some of our other buildings we want our students to thrive academically but we want them to do so socially and emotionally as well and quite honestly most of our students have the support from parents like you but many don't and we have to meet those students where they are and in order to do that we have to have programs that address those things so i encourage that we move forward with looking at programs that will address that in addition to transparency and communication transparency not just what's being taught to students but what the teachers are learning as well i think
064that's important for everyone and people have expressed that here today but i know as a community we can do better we can come together on different sides of political realm on different sides of ideals we have to do better because our kids are watching us thank you thank you next up ellen buscani [Music] i i'm here because of what happened a few weeks ago with some of the discussion around the care team i'm a mother of three forest hill school district alumni including a student with significant disabilities we've lived in the district since 1997 and my older typical children even having a younger brother with significant disabilities needed and received the um educational moments that you described um they had my my son a little bit more than my daughter i mean even with having
065a child with disabilities in their own family and and having our instruction as parents um children are learning they're they don't always make great decisions and so the more that we can equip our teachers our school staff our churches the community the reason we moved here to anderson township with the with the proper training to be able to guide our students and help them grow as as strong productive empathetic and caring people in society the better i urge you to strengthen the care team to support the care team and and do everything we can to raise thoughtful compassionate and successful citizens um in addition to the great education that they received here my older two children i would say are relying more on their ability to get along with a diverse group of people than
066anything else right now my daughter is working as a manager in chicago public schools my son is working for the cincinnati park district they're interacting daily with people very different than the people they grew up with and please strengthen this program thank you thank you there's lisa staton or staten you can start my name is lisa staton i have two children that attend the district and i just wanted to share my appreciation for the care team and our district and everything they are doing to further diversity inclusion belonging it's so important for all of our students and i'm so glad that we have the district and the team and i'm just looking forward to strengthening it and glad you guys are working with that thank you so much thank you next up sarah go hi
067hi i'm sarah mago and members of the board i have a parent a graduate of the district and i have two students currently in the district and as the school year comes to a close i want to say thank you uh to each of you on the board everyone in central office to everyone in the buildings to all that you have done this year to keep our kids in school safely the entire year that is incredible and that is something to celebrate you have served our community you have served our community well in a year full of difficult situations i know many parents and community members would echo this statement thank you for seeking information from health care experts to make informed decisions with the best interests and safety of the students and staff at
068the forefront thank you for your due diligence and your genuine care for the betterment of our community thank you i hope you remember that you have overwhelming support from this community um the loud voices speaking out in protest many of them are not even community members so please remember that that you have support from this community and teachers in the building please remember you are our greatest asset you are supported by this community thank you the next person is kim wennicki good evening board scott my name is kim winiki and i am the mother of an amazing 10 year old boy he is smart funny so compassionate and caring and he's just a loving kid and he has autism and he has been on an iep since he was three years old entering the forest
069hills school district the words belonging inclusion and equity are vital to my son's success and development in this district i'm also the mother of two other little boys they're just as amazing they're smart they're funny and they too are loving and compassionate children and the words belonging inclusion and equity are just as vital to my other two children i have the opportunity to learn about the care team prior to covid the work that they're doing is incredible they are giving tools the tools that the students need in their toolbox to get the work done that is what equity is all about that i want to thank you personally for your leadership and your direction this past school year it has been difficult i appreciate everything that you've done in every hard decision that you've made
070elizabeth forrest leslie dede you guys have made really hard decisions this year i'm so proud to be a part of this district because of the four of you thank you very much next up is kathleen schneider hi my name is katie schneider i have lived in this district since 1986. i feel like everybody was throwing that out there i graduated from forest hills and i currently have four students uh sorry three students in the district i have one in anderson two at summit and i had a preschooler who was extremely excited about joining his brothers at summit next year as of 4 20 2021 we were told a unilateral decision was made without parental input that preschool would all be at sherwood for the foreseeable future we had a spot at a preschool on salem
071and relinquished it when we were told we were accepted to summit preschool our neighborhood school with my high schooler graduating this year none of my children are offered transportation next year that means i'll have three students to transport to two different schools without assistance from the district this changes my daily time requirement from roughly 10 minutes to about an hour with this change i had a conversation with mrs buckley and she stated preschool is financially stable in one or two schools parents make decisions based on information that they are provided in some cases there's an unexpected need to pivot for health or safety this is not the case here we made decisions and plans based on confirmation at a certain school it's not acceptable to change the location after parents have made plans we deserve
072a seat at the table when decisions are made we were offered a chance to ask questions but not impact the decision that had already been made this consolidation should be postponed such that parents can make informed decisions regarding the location of where they want their children to go to preschool in conclusion consolidation of preschool should be postponed to 22-23 and not next year thank you thank next you is uh kristin colonic gala nick kalanick okay that sounds a little bit better sorry that's all right countdown is brutal hi i'm kristen kalanick i have two elementary age students in the district and i am also a graduate of turpin high school i came here tonight to support to speak in support of the care team and to say that my children have personally benefited from the
073work the team has done through the consideration and support provided to them both in wilson and at the trailblazers academy i want to call out a special thank you to karen kramer and john farmer for their support and special care for my child and their challenges in this year's fifth grade va class the care team provides a foundation of skills so that teachers can model inclusive behaviors that instill a sense of belonging in students the care team is teaching the practice of empathy and the reason that the practice of empathy is so important is simply this measurable results when teachers model empathy students learn the practice and well as well and our community benefits students met with empathy are made to feel that they belong and have lower stress levels which leads to measurable classroom
074engagement and fewer sick days higher academic achievement and better communication skills they are less likely to bully others they are less likely to display aggressive behaviors and have emotional disorders children that practice empathy tend to have more positive relationships as adults and have a stronger sense of community and as a hiring manager at a local aviation company i can tell you that we both screen for and promote empathy and tolerance in the workplace the care team helps our teaching staff create stronger student outcomes better adults and a stronger community they do this through tangible and measurable results that bring value to anderson township i am grateful for the team i am glad that you guys are looking into it but i'd like to see it stay thank you thank you next up is wendy strickler
075hello everybody i am wendy strickler i want to start by thanking you all and all of the teachers this year for everything you've done to keep our kids safe healthy and learning i stand here as a mother of three a former employee and a school psychologist doctorate in school psychology so i have some knowledge on this topic i'm also the one who helped to coordinate and lead the care work for 2017 to 2019 in this district so i'm very passionate about seeing this work continue when this work began it began to a large degree around the mental wellness conversation in this district there is clear research that when kids are connected to school when they have authentic relationships with their teachers and with their peers that there is reduced anxiety and reduced depression that is
076a clear need in this district and we can't know our kids if we don't know all parts of our kids it was also part of the strategic plan and i can tell you from my lens at that point we were dealing with issues elementary through high school of issues of anti-semitism anti-disability anti-race anti-gender anti-students who didn't speak english there were bad things happening our kids were not being nice to each other and it needed to be addressed if we want our kids to be able to collaborate in a multicultural world if we want them to have empathy there was a need there and per catrice's article there is also ode available data to suggest disproportionality in our discipline and other aspects that would suggest we need to look at this through a broad lens and
077understand it that said the day we started this care work was from a very broad level and i said to the original teams i stand here as a woman a mother a white middle-class christian abled educator canadian you name it those are all part of my cultural heritage and i'm proud of them my kids also bring cultural connections unique personal characteristics legitimate aspects that are part of the mix of diversity in this district that should be represented and should be understood and if we think teachers just understand how to do that on their own we're wrong because none of us understand what we don't know until we have the opportunity to dialogue so we need to allow that opportunity to move this work forward thank you next up mark ragsi close braxton ragazi good evening
078i'm mark ragasea my pronouns are he him that wasn't very painful uh thank you and i applaud you for what has to be one of the most challenging years of any school board in any district ever i know that you've had a number of decisions and was mentioned fear for tonight i want to thank superintendent prebles for laying out what the curriculum of the cares team is and the ambitions and goals i noted down the development of a comprehensive diversity belonging and inclusion success for all students and i applaud you for the importance of safety obviously this district has seen its unfair share of suicides which is an appalling reality that we have to deal with and i applaud you for taking it head on i also would like to applaud you for highlighting the
079importance of equity and inclusion i am an employee of procter gamble i'm a purchasing director there i work on global supply chains i work across the globe every single day i interact with multiple cultures i interact with varieties of people of different sexual orientation i have employees that have different views than mine and the ability to have empathy understanding and inclusion is important in this world this world is a diverse place even if this room is not the world is and i want my my four children that are students of uh forest hills to be able to function and thrive in a diverse world so that they can achieve anything that is put before them and so any steps that you take include their safety to bring them to adulthood their education and their ability
080to interact with the world around them i applaud you and thank you thank you nicole whiting um hi my name is nicole whiting um i have two children in the district um at maddox and at nagel and i just want to reiterate what's already been said um there have been some wonderful speakers up here in support of the care team thank you everybody that's here thank you to the board thank you to the teachers i have been past president of the the medics pto so i've had the pleasure of working closely with the admin and teachers there and they've been wonderful again i just like to thank you for forming the care team and doing this very important work to ensure that every student feels safe and welcome at school the social media incident at
081nagel last week has shown us loud and clear that this work must continue when i received the email about the incident i was very happy to see that students did stand up and report the incident this is exactly the what we stress with our own children at home every day they were probably tired of hearing it however when i did learn more from close friends of the nature of the incident i guess as a parent i would like to have known a little bit more detail that it wasn't just a social media incident it was hate speech directed at children just as a parent i want to be able to have those very important conversations with our kids we already do but um so yeah my husband and i are trying to to our best
082to help our children navigate the world of social media and focus on the good that's there because i know there is a lot of good but i also have a seventh grader and i know these kids they're struggling there are kids that are hurting and they need to learn that everybody's different and have empathy for each other so please i hope the care teamwork continues and thank you so much thank you next up gail roma yo roma okay chris roma okay dan salcedo just go yeah go ahead go ahead and then then i'll bring you up they just called me hi i'm dan salcedo an anderson resident since 1990 having moved here with p g and having raised seven kids in our township i was an executive of p g then shell pennzoil then diago
083prior to opening my own business that i run here in anderson about a decade ago i did that and now not that it should matter at all but i'm also a diverse resident as a mexican-american who sought out and fought out for the american dream as a first generation american i'm counting on each of you board members to please listen to my key points so you can open your minds to the recommendation i'll make and frankly since i wrote this earlier in the day i didn't realize some of the recommendations your own making i'm supporting so here's the thing i attended the emergency board meeting this past friday and some of the remarks were things like what we keep hearing it's got a significant point about the safety and wellness we keep hearing that and
084i'm all for that let's also say that care is a team not a program right with some help from an advisory council that recommended actions which could help equip all the teachers with tools to enable them to deal with any student whose safety and wellness is being compromised yet for the last year year and a half they haven't been able to help or meet or what have you but still this esc person was able to go and have meetings with material that probably wasn't properly vetted or even seen or even approved by the district or by the district um but also clearly articulate that on his watch any and all laws ordinances standards of the federal state county district would be fully complied with absolutely no wiggle room and i think that's really important here
085so we make sure we stay on point there leslie made a point as an academic she's written papers on crt and therefore is certain that care that in care there is no crt yet there seems to be a lot of uncertainty across the board if that is true therefore here's my recommendation similar to the pool issue which elizabeth took point on the other night and said let's have a board committee go figure out what's happening here and come back with a recommendation i strongly recommend a board can be convened to address the care team options from top to bottom so that both the purpose and the practice of care becomes transparent and strictly in accordance with the primary goal of providing safety and wellness stroke every student will win 100 compliance with all laws and
086ordinances thank you thank you next up gail roma thank you as a resident of anderson township and forest hills since the early 1980s i'm appalled at what i see going on here this evening i really really am and i'm actually ashamed to be part of this district but that being said i'm going to yield it to my son who actually has his children in this school district right now mine have graduated without all of this hoo-ha that's going on all right chris roma how's it going everybody i'm 44 years old i've been in the district since seventh grade you guys can do the math it's whatever could be i don't know eight nine ten years old somewhere in there lived here my whole life went in the navy decided to come back to cincinnati after
087honorably discharged back to the school district to raise a family got that family got a child right now at turpin high school so a lot of what i'm going to say up here doesn't really involve the cares or crt it's more about trust and communication transparency so mr prebbles you mentioned in the beginning of the meeting you were for transparency and learning for the cares for good communication with the parents i recall hearing that was one of the first statements that was said please tell me why we found out about the camera in the girls locker room from our daughter and not from staff i think that's a pretty good issue why did somebody put a camera in the girls locker room for swimming and diving kind of makes you wonder where the communication fell
088apart there doesn't it [Music] with regards to communication to your staff trying to keep them informed why is it that when my daughter went to a counseling session with the counselor she had no clue what she was talking about it took five days after our daughter came to a meeting here with no parents at turpin high school only for the swimmers to be told that there was a camera found in the locker room that's good that's good communication isn't it folks shouldn't we have found that out maybe by coaches athletic trainers principals vice principals superintendents that seems a pretty important issue to be talking to the parents doesn't it thank you so how are we supposed to trust your communication now going forward when we have no idea how this incident was resolved mr rama
089thank you next up is susan erickson hi everyone it is wonderful to see so much passion in this room we are all here because we are passionate about our children in our community um however we differ on a few things when it comes to transparency which you spoke about and communication resided with you i sent you an email over two weeks ago regarding this issue i followed it up with another email a week ago i still have no response so when the district isn't forthcoming with information it makes us question what the motivation is in regards to the propaganda that was sent out to all the teachers that was required reading for that miss taylor spoke about earlier where they spoke about educational justice and one of the quotes in one of those articles is
090our schools and educational institutions are perpetuating white supremacy when that type of propaganda is going out to every single teacher in the forest hills school district what are we supposed to think if white supremacy is truly being indoctrinated into these schools are they talking about nazi germany ku klux klan are they encouraging people to join these groups because if that is the case it needs to stop right now other than that please give me an instance of how white supremacy is overriding our school systems and that's where we come to critical race theory if the board was not aware of the information in these propaganda that was sent out shame on every board member you guys should have approval of what a consultant what a consultant sends out to every single teacher it should be
091approved and i am just horrified that this went out to every single teacher that's all i have to say oh wait teachers should teach science arts reading writing arithmetic and fine arts educate the students students should have mentoring through peers good evening um i was inclined not to comment any comments steamy but superintendent prebles when i heard your opening remarks i actually took some comfort in them uh when you talked and some other people just recently mentioned about the need for additional transparency and openness about the cares program because apparently according to you some of the problems that or some of the innuendo that's out there is based upon a lack of information and so if that is truly the goal and truly the purpose of the board in the administration that is a good
092thing because for you to simply say it's not critical race theory by the back door is one thing prove it by the documents and let the record support it however when you say that what prompted me to come up here tonight was viewing what happened at this last board meeting the last regular meeting in the board i was able to view it online and what i observed were two board members attacking members of this community who sought simply to get public records about the cares program about the consultant from the educational services center who was working on in the cares program mr ass museum went so far as to accuse those people of heaven and general everybody i am i'm speaking do not interrupt me during my two minutes please if i can reach i'll
093give you 15 seconds extra but you're you know you were to re you were to talk to the entire board and not single out i'm talking to the entire board because when i see one board member attack three members of this community with shape with the accusation the epitaph of shades of racism and the rest of the board sat there and did nothing that doesn't promote openness that doesn't promote transparency it was a subtle way to try to stifle people from getting information ms rasmussen was doing it it's wrong this board should reject those tactics of miss rasmussen when she accuses when she accuses people in this community of shades of racism either the board accepts that epitaph or rejects it if you want openness and transparency this board needs to reject it here and
094now thank you tyson butler hi my name is tyson butler and i have two children in forest hills at wilson and uh next year i have three okay so i just wanted to make this is only my second meeting by the way so i i'm noticing how crazy things get in these deals and it's just a little bit much for me but i just wanted to be professional about this real quick and just honestly say there's issues that i already see here so people are saying that they don't understand what cares is right that's your fault you guys failed on that you did not make it transparent to us as a community to help us understand that okay as somebody that studied child development cognitive studies i grew up learning and loving children so i
095ended up becoming a football coach college football coach so the point to me that i'm that i'm hearing is this when you talk about equity and things of that nature um you know being polynesian african-american i can say that my kids in this in this community don't see race at all they see friends that they want to play with they see friends that they want to go to town it doesn't matter it doesn't matter but here's here's the point here's here's the biggest point i wouldn't raise my kids to see race that's the point that's the point so we were talking about equity and things like that i don't i don't want you guys to get caught up on this wave of like oh equity equity look equity comes from home okay equity comes from
096home now if you don't want to teach everybody at your house that's cool it doesn't matter to me because i'm going to raise my kid through christ through family and respect for his elders period and that's all of them but the point of this it comes to this you guys failed because you didn't let us know what cares is now there is terminology within cares being from california myself four years removed i moved away from cali to come here so i can have family values all right thank you thank you you know so when it comes down to it i just want to be able to make sure that you guys thank you make sure come on just i'm going to get here beeping but thank you at the last point i'll just say this
097look make it more transparent for people and we want us i want the foia or for that um for the consultant i want to know what they're paid thank you sir and i want to know everything about him thank you sir there's nothing racist about it thank you next up is heather haas um this is my first meeting here and my name is heather haw sorry i've lived here i don't even know my husband bought the house in 1999. um i am the mom of one of the very few brown kids in this area he is in the second grade and thank god he has a teacher and the principal that he has because every february everybody's pointing to him he is not included and it's not the teacher's fault it's the fault that he
098is different and everybody points that out and nobody here i mean how many people here have a kid in the school district that is not white hey let's not let's again oh i'm sorry i'm sorry you're okay you're okay everybody wants to take care of the kids and i get that but there is a problem here and the cares team is so important because i can see it in my second grader from my teacher and my principal because i know i can go to my principal like i did today and say hey i heard this and she was like oh no no this is what happened oh okay fantastic but somebody has this care scene is too important see my kid is so singled out every day i mean luckily everybody loves them and he's
099fast and he's funny but if you don't see his color you're not seeing him if you don't see i mean you're not seeing sorry i'm not good at this i'm just so passionate i wasn't expecting this there needs to be the care team for my son so he can go and be productive and do awesome amazing things and to think that somebody doesn't want my son to be included or ex just makes me want to move because he has to be included he is important he's just as important as all the other kids he just is different so thank you thank you you everyone for your comments uh we will move on to item 7.1 candidates for graduation mr prebles i'd like to make a motion to approve the granting of diplomas to the candidates
100listed in the attachments and any students who enroll in anderson or turpin high school after this date subject to satisfactory completion of all state and local requirements as noted for graduation the 2021 candidates for graduation from anderson high school are submitted to the board of education for approval subject to each student's meeting requirements as set forth by the forest hills board of education there's an attachment for that 2021 candidates for graduation from turpin high school are submitted to the board of education for approval subject to each student's meeting requirements is set forth by the forest hills board of education and there is an attachment there for you both high schools will use the cintas center for graduation ceremonies on may 31st 2021 turpin high school will graduate its seniors and celebrate them at 11am and
101anderson high school to celebrate their seniors at their graduation ceremony that will that will begin at 3 p.m i recommended the board approve the granting of diplomas to the candidates listed in the attachments provided and any students who enroll in anderson or turpin high schools after this date subject to satisfactory completion of all state and local requirements as noted for graduation and there are graduates at anderson high school and there are 303 graduates at turpin high school and i congratulate each of them and their families both of my kids are graduating so i wanted to make that motion on record so i want to make a motion to approve the granting of diplomas to the candidates listen the attachments on for both anderson and turpin who enrolled in anderson turbine high school account uh schools
102after the state subjected to satisfactory completion of all state and local requirements as noted for graduation okay can i get a second second ms cropper mrs taylor yes mrs meyer yes ms joyce yes dr rasmussen yes dr heiss yes and i say this every year congratulations to all the graduates you still have a week though so don't do anything in the next week i want 316 and 303 at least on monday item 8.1 request to advertise for bids mr broadwater good evening item 8.1 is a motion to approve the request advertised for bids for the stated projects as presented as the board remembers on friday night's work session we were asked to proceed the first bid will be for anderson high school partial roof replacement within that will be alternate for the summit elementary in
103turpin high school and these are partial roof replacements in both of all three of those the second bid is the anderson high school partial parking lot resurfacing and that will be the two items that will go to bed if you recall we also discussed maddox elementary we believe that pricing will be below the bid requirement so we do not have that on there to request for bid so the superintendent recommends the board approve the request advertise for bids for the stated projects for item 9.1 human resources report the board has the human resources report within that we have the head custodian job description as you recall we did have a head custodian retire when we have new replacements we try and update those job descriptions as we go the administrative assistant to the athletic director
104job description you'll see in tonight's board minutes that there is a resignation there so we are updating that job description the fte account the chart is included and there is no increase in ftes and before we recommend i will turn it over to mr prebbles members of the board in that report i just put a piece of gum in my mouth um seven years seven years seven years seven years in your style it won't happen here [Laughter] um that was not that's yes it won't happen i'll be 75 at that time i'd like to to bring mention to greg sears he is the assistant superintendent in the district for teaching and learning mr sears has accepted a position in another school district to be a superintendent and i would like to remind the board that
105we now have two gentlemen recently who have been appointed superintendents in other school districts so the forest hills school district is an a place that is well known throughout the state and not only in this state but in another state for the level of competence and expertise that its staff has and in mr sears situation certainly the king school district will be getting a great leader and so we're very thankful to have had greg with us for the past three years during his time here he actually started out in a situation where he needed to rebuild our central office team the teaching and learning team at a time when the district was making reductions and so his uh level of competence to ensure that the right people with the right skill sets were in positions
106of importance and in were positions to leverage opportunities for students uh worked out very well for our school district and so uh he put the team together greg is one of the architects not the only but he is the leader of the architects of the cultural cornerstones that we've talked about tonight all aspects not just the wellness and relationship the learning and the collaboration and the relationships and the innovation that it currently exists in our school district has been advanced significantly since greg has been in that role as teaching and learning assistant superintendent one of the things that greg has done has brought connections from across the country national for national folks throughout the country to help us with our professional development to influence instructional strategies in our classroom to develop competent flexible adaptable resilient
107learners critical problem solvers and he's done also a great job of influencing the professional development for our teaching staff in instructional strategies and those things that help teachers help students with the many things that take place in the classroom one of the most significant things that greg has done in in regard to our district from my perspective is that he brought central office closer to the buildings and what you would find if you talk to our teachers and you talk to our administrators in the building what you would find is that mr sears and his team fooled with other directors that are represented in this room have made a concerted effort to get into the schools and find out what students are doing how our instructional practices impact their learning and their growth they have
108weekly walkthroughs through our buildings they have professional development designed specifically to address the needs of students within buildings and they monitor those things and provide coaching opportunities as well as guidance to our teachers and to our administrators as far as helping our students and he also was one of the architects along with mr meese for our school district's technology sustainability plan that will be implemented over the next year to ensure that students are connected throughout our school district regardless of where they are their social economic status or not having the ability to to connect and so we are losing a great educator actually has become a great friend to our school district into our administrative team and i think he has done a phenomenal job in the teaching and learning department of organizing and providing
109a structure that we will utilize for many years to come and i appreciate greg your being in our district all that you have done uh your profession the professional relationship we have and and i know that people need to go other places because it's opportunistic for them in this case it was opportunistic for us to have you with us for three years and to take advantage of your expertise and your leadership and i wish you well at king's they've they've found a great leader so thank you very much for everything you've done for our school district and uh i would echo everything mr prebbles just said mr sears it's been a pleasure working with you and and i know you're very very student-centered and probably the uh happiest moment is when your daughter was accepted
110to the ohio state university and became a buckeye fan instead of the uk but congratulations so with that the superintendent recommends the board approved the human resources report as presented thank you item 10.1 math course course of study mr sears item 10.1 before i start i just want to just take a quick second just to thank mr prebbles for his guidance leadership trust support along the way we've we've certainly done a lot of really strong things hopefully it'll carry on in the future i want to thank the board for your continued support your kindness your openness to some ideas that we've had to do things a little bit different um just appreciate everything you have provided me personally um and also for our team um and i have some of them here they're going to
111speak in just a minute probably the best team i've ever been a part of in any situation ever and it just tremendous professionals kid-centered great leaders and i am better for being around each one of you for the last three years so i appreciate that so now to the fun part make that short and sweet we have a 10.1 is a math course to study adoption and 10.2 is the course of study materials combining these two together as these are first readings of the math course study and also for the resource adoption just i've as this is a first reading it's a complex two years worth of work i have two folks that are going to provide a little bit more context and a little bit more information just to summarize the highlights of of
112what a math course of study is and where where it's gone but over the last two years we've had approximately 46 members of a team engaged throughout our district with its teachers administrators along with the hamilton county consultant that has reviewed the carefully reviewed ohio's 2017 learning standards for math analyzed the national council of teachers of mathematics practices principles of action and standards for mathematical practice as well as careful attention to current learning theory and best practice for what needs to take place in forest hills in addition other resources such as the college board articulation of advanced placement courses and content and learning expectations through the ohio department of education model curricula have been analyzed developed and aligned what you will hear from these folks in a very brief presentation is alignment rigor and intense
113teaching practices as we have amplified the role of mathematics in our district as we move forward so i'm going to bring up our who's first here our associate director of elementary teaching learning mr bob buck both of these pieces are again these are first readings all of the information presented is available at central office the course of study as well as the resources as well so bob's going to talk and then the our middle school associate director kim pence is going to also talk about some of our resource thank you good evening board uh the main rationale behind this work was done collaboratively just like greg said it is to enhance the pre-k alignment of math instruction to better support the progression of our learners k through 12. student opportunities to pursue pathways in which
114in starting in the elementary grades will create different paths through algebra 1 geometry and algebra 2. these opportunities will increase the number of students that will be taking algebra one possibly in the seventh grade and then more so taking it in eighth grade this would also pursue students in the eighth grade taking geometry what this would also do is entering high school students could earn up to two college credits before even stepping into one of our high schools a major difference in this is we are formalizing back to algebra geometry and algebra 2 instead of the in 2019 the board approved instead of the math 1 math 2 math 3. and then we also wanted to consider just instead of what we're currently doing is some standards are missed by advancing kids into algebra 1
115and 8th grade we're compacting all of those standards all the way down to 4th grade and that work will start next year these pathways will increase our 7th and 8th graders taking algebra and geometry as middle schoolers this will also as a student possibly entering a high school in will be taking algebra 2 which will increase the electives in different pathways once they're in their junior and senior year of high school so ask a quick question when my daughter was in middle school i think they were cycling out right the math one and two i thought we did that we did these will now align with the resources so now we'll have an algebra book a geometry book and a um algebra two book okay so what are you doing then the resources will now
116align with um the algebra and the standards that we have okay good evening i'm going to talk a little bit about the resources so in 10.2 again in addition to approval of the new math course of study we also have provided a list of resources that we're looking to adopt in 2016-17 that is when ohio in response to some concerns around what the quirky look like they wanted to address the learning standards for math in ohio and there were some adjustments that were made based on requests from educators in the field and at that point that is when we decided as well that we should shift back to that algebra geometry algebra 2 and go back to the traditional pathways what we've done since then as we have taken the last two years to review
117where we are as a district and with with the work that we've done to align and sequence we spent some time vetting a number of materials and resources we used a hexagon tool which is a scientific method often used in academic settings to help us look at what are the things that are going to help us show evidence of success with materials that shows that that we have sustainable supports and training that are ongoing that it's usable for our teachers really looking at the need that we have for our students and looking at student data and whether or not the resources fit with our philosophy and so what we've done is our elementary teachers even though they've gone through all these materials they decided to continue with the origami materials that we have been using
118for the last several years this will be another six year license they will be digital in nature with consumables as well but they will continue to use those and what's shipped this year is that middle school has already been using cengage and big ideas the high school through algebra 2 who will also be using those same materials so there's going to be alignment and sequencing through those materials they are digital they align very well with the technology supports that we are going to use in the district and with our one-to-one initiative it will be seamless for us so we again with aligning those resources to support student student progression through algebra ii we will be able to increase those opportunities for students in more advanced math and science opportunities moving forward we're going to continue
119to work in plcs to support the development of common assessments so we can continue to monitor monitor our student growth i wanted to say very quickly to my work brother brian is leaving us but he did a significant amount of work to support the math work that has happened over the last two years so i want to make sure to thank him for everything that he's done are there any questions as i was looking at this it looks like we're increasing the rigor of our math program like significantly so now uh potentially while more people in the calc bc it pace that makes that as more availability because they can start earlier and work their way through we do and we have entry points throughout so that if students who move into our district we
120have contacted the curriculum to give more opportunities to more students right thank you uh can is there a way to we have the 2015 and then the 2021 is there a way to just get those two pdfs like on the website so people can look at the change yeah what i mean that way you could say hey this is what it was this is where we're going which i think is a positive change i mean yeah i don't see anything that way they can see it and the other thing i just wanted to comment is if you look at the course courses that we offer i mean there's a lot in engineering and science it's all math-based so this is going to give all these kids more opportunity if they can get all this math
121in and they like it and they enjoy it they have so many more things that they can take before they even get to looking at college and it just helps them understand what do i like what do i perhaps want to do i think this is wonderful thank you thank you right when we got to new textbook adoptions right the fun part item 10.3 is a motion to prove the school fees for the 20 122 school year these have been presented and the under the board has had this just some highlights of the just to navigate through the school fees a little bit the elementary school fees have not experienced any change since the 2009-2010 school year so the elementary school fees that we have the 40 dollars in preschool and 45 dollars in k-6
122have not changed since 2009 and 10 so there is a recommendation due to inflationary costs and the resource costing more that there would be a five dollar increase for our k to six and a ten dollar increase for our pre-k school fees um so that's just to note that middle school school fees would stay the same next year just without the fee option for technology device rental and i know that's something that was maybe outlined that we will no longer be offering as part of the one-to-one program that students will not be renting a fee for 50 a semester for next school year all students will be provided a device from a high school perspective and i want to commend brian robinson and our high school administrative team for doing significant work to align and
123it's been a board priority for a number of years to align the work and the fee requirements from anderson and turpin so the the numbers are very similar in what the experience the student experience is from anderson to the student experience for turpin so the vast majority of the courses and the fee structures that have been established have stayed the same and there's been significant work from brian and the high school administrative team to make sure that those are those are aligned even closer so feel pretty good about where we are as far as school fees so with that superintendent recommends the board approve the attached school fees for early childhood elementary and middle school as well as the fee scheduled for high school for the 21-22 school year thank you next up uh item
12411.1 five-year forecast treasury report five-year forecast and treasury's report we could just take a minute to get the powerpoint up there we go the ohio department of education requires school districts to submit a five-year forecast for our general operating fund of the school district the first submission of the school year is due in november and the update is due at the end of may and it's the update we're going to be talking about tonight next slide please a forecast is generally prepared by looking at past trends accounting for all known activities of the future and making predictions about what may happen in the future a forecast is not a roadmap where that shows where the district is going but it's a planning tool that must change and remain flexible as our financial resources and instructional
125needs change this year has brought many many financial and instructional changes and as you can see on the slide it's been quite the financial and instructional roller coaster this year next slide please as we prepare this forecast we must make assumptions about future revenues and expenditures as we know there are many challenges to forecasting in a typical year but again this past year has been anything but typical i present this slide every forecast just to remind us of the many variables that we have limited or no control over that determine what our future revenues or expenditures will be the first two challenges alone state revenues and property taxes are very material to the forecast as they alone comprise 98 of our revenues i'm not going to go down through here and read each one two
126you've seen this chart many times before and you are aware of the forecasting challenges next slide in order to prepare the forecast we have made the assumption that we will be in our building we will be face to face with instruction over the weeks ahead and certainly by june 30th we will be receiving clarity to from the state as to what we will receive in state revenue in the next biennial budget in addition there's a lot of conversation around the state house regarding dedicating revenues to programs supporting learning loss due to the pandemic while we were in person majority of the time and do not believe our students have experienced any significant learning loss we could still be mandated to budget our funds in additional areas as determined by the state and that would certainly
127require some adjustments to our forecast again the five-year forecast is a living document we have to remain flexible when we look at it tonight and it will likely become outdated once we know what the biennial budget is going to be and what's and if there are any future mandates decided up at the state house so we will continue to revise this forecast and bring it to you just as we've done in the past when we get more information i always like to put the conversation in context of the overall budget the five-year forecast only includes the general fed which is highlighted in green on the slide the general fund accounts for 80 percent of our total budget in our current fiscal year on this i've also highlighted our fund the sr fund funding yellow we
128will be talking about this later in the presentation as we will be projecting moving some expenditures from the general fund to the esser fund moving those expense expenditures from the general fund to the esser fund will lower the expenditures impacting cash balance in a positive way in the five-year forecast as you can see on this slide our may financial forecast cash balance has improved significantly from the november forecast our revenue outlook has improved and our expenditures have been reduced leading to a cash balance that is in compliance with the district's cash balance policy through fiscal year 2023 the next couple slides will detail the changes in revenues and expenditures that moved our cash balance in a positive direction revenue considerations so in the spring of 2020 the beginning of the pandemic the governor reduced our
129district's budget by 1.66 million annually earlier this spring a year later the governor began to restore those cuts earlier than we had forecasted those cuts being restored in our budget that has had a major positive impact on our bottom line even with the restoration of these funds i want everyone to know that our state budget cuts were significant and our state budget cuts due to the pandemic total 2.3 million to date in addition our local revenue loss in the general fund has just totaled under 1 million to date which brings our total revenue loss due to the pandemic to 3.3 million to date most of our local revenue loss was primarily due to our lack of all-day kindergarten during this year the other thing that impacted revenues in a positive light is the hamilton county
130this was a triennial update which increased property values within the district there was quite a significant increase in the valuation of property which is good news that a property valuation increase was just over 13 percent for our 2021 collection year but i do want to point out that the district only receives a small tax increase due to inside millage voted tax levies are decreased so as not to increase taxes on increased valuation the dollar increase impact while we are happy to have it was less than one percent of our total taxes and definitely not the inflationary increases that's needed in this day and time moving on to the um expenditure impacts from november to may i just want to point out that the may forecast still includes the over 250 000 in staffing attrition reductions
131that we implemented at the beginning of this year and also it still includes the 60 000 in building budget reductions which begin in fiscal year 21 our current fiscal year and are included in the forecast throughout the end of the four class caste one thing that we have is sr funding the state and federal governments recognize that the pandemic has put school districts at risk in terms of being able to continue to offer the same level of service which was offered prior to the pandemic due to revenue loss this forecast includes a partial use of our grant funds for continuity of service in our general fund the forecast projects moving 2.4 million from the general fund expenditures to the 507 esser fund in fiscal years 21 and 22 and moving 1.8 million in fiscal year
13223. so we are using partial amounts of our cares funding to continue to be able to offer the service that we were offering prior to the pandemic this has been a good year as always our departments and building budget managers answer our call to save money whenever possible be very judicious in their spending and combined all the building budgets and departments had a positive budget balance are projected to have a positive budget balance at the end of this year of 2.8 percent which added just under 400 000 to our bottom line so we do appreciate the work of all our department managers the principals assistant principals and everybody out in the building who has led to that savings and again we will continue as always to search through expenditures for uh cost savings up looks
133like we're missing a pie chart on the other side you i don't know why it's not coming up but there's actually two pie charts and they are not showing on the screen but um just to tell you what it depict i just want to point out that in districts such as ours there continues to be a movement of funding from the state to the district i wanted to i that what the charts compare is the state revenue that we received in for our fiscal year 19 made up 32 percent of our general fund revenue here in our fiscal year 21 due to the generous support of our community and also due to the state funding loss that has dropped our state funding share by 5 to just 28 our taxpayers provide 70 of our local
134funding here in forest hills and we consider ourselves very fortunate to have the support that we have here next slide breaking down some of the budget this uh slide also represents the breakdown of our expenditures for fiscal year 21 23 was spent in salaries and benefits that's down i'm sorry 83 was spent in salaries and benefits that's down two percent from our typical and normal 85 percent because of the movement of expenditures to the esser fund purchase services continue to make up 12 of our general fund budget supplies and materials make up two percent capital and debt services make up 1.5 percent and other makes up 1.5 percent this slide also depicts the change in the improvement in the cash balance and what i wanted to do was to reiterate the flexibility of the five-year
135forecast to quickly change based upon state and local decisions the slides are in board docs if you want to follow around from that the point that i i wanted to make is that we are watching some information very closely um that should be coming shortly that will affect our forecasts either negatively or positive that information is of course the state budget also there is pandemic money at setting at the state of ohio that has not been allocated yet so we we have hoped that we might still get some money related to the pandemic and we are also looking closely we know there are a couple bills in the house and senate that may bring about some unfunded mandates that will restrict our ability to prioritize our expenditures and probably have a negative impact on our
136bottom line yeah one more one more so looking at the five-year forecasting and closing force hills remains an excellent return on investment for our residents our district consistently receives the state auditor's award for our financial practice and spending per pupil which is a financial benchmark calculated by the ohio department of education for all school districts in the state shows our spending per pupil is ranked 12th out of 23 school districts in hamilton county we are two and a quarter percent under hamilton county average and i did share this information with you tonight at the table on one side you see our comparison of spending per pupil so that's the total amount we spend per pupil along with every school district in the county and the county average and if you would flip that page over
137what you're going to see that within that spending per pupil we direct 73.7 percent of our spending directly to the classroom which again the average school districts in the state of ohio spends 68.4 percent we direct 5.3 percent more to the classroom than the average school district in the state of ohio and also more than the average school district in hamilton county so again we think we have a good value for our residents up on this screen you'll see our residential tax rate and again forest hills is less than the average hamilton county school district residential tax rate of 42 42.8 percent we're 13. and i should mention that we are very grateful for the support of our taxpayers for anderson township residents 54.9 of their tax bill funds the district and for our newtown
138residents 56.9 of their total tax bill funds our schools the remaining percentage of a resident's tax bill has been levied by other entities such as the township and hamilton county returning to this slide we're also very proud that forest hills continues to be a high-performing district and once again turpin and anderson high school are among the top right schools not only in ohio but in the nation the 2021 u.s news and world report top high school reports ranks anderson and turpin in the top 4.4 of high schools in the state and in the top 6.5 percent of high schools in the nation so we're very proud of our high schools and again our district is among the top 10 in performance on the latest information on the report card which of course is 2019 we
139know that we did not have that information on our last report card so all in all um forest hills remains a good value um for our residents any questions on the forecast yeah i just wanted to make a comment so we had like 2.3 loss due to covid because we had less revenue come from the state they they cut it back from us however we got s or funds that covered that but you cannot because you have fund accounting right so i lost my revenue but you can take your expenses and move it down you can't take it and move it up to your revenue right so that's how you actually get it yes yeah so we really covered that loss just in a different way and then we got an extra 2.4 nope 1.8
140out after that that we can carry forward that's how i understand what you just said yeah yes yes and um allowed to use for continuity of service but you're right the accounting is a you can't show it on the five-year forecast and it is gonna um it is gonna have to be footnoted in our trends going forward because it will kind of upset those a little bit any other questions item 1.2 treasures report uh moving into the treasures reports for the month of april um item a presents a long list of donors whose gifts totaled just under 23 000 last month as always we are appreciative of these gifts item b is the cash activity statement which presents our revenues and expenditures and board funds through april 30th item c presents the general fund our
141five-year forecast receipts by month and fiscal year to date ended april 30th items d and e present the expenditures in the general fund for the month ended in year to date ended april 31st with 83 percent of our fiscal year complete at the end of april we have spent 80 percent of our appropriations with an additional 3 percent encumbered and spending as we heard about in the forecast is actually tracking a bit under budget so we anticipate finishing well within the appropriations that you set out at the beginning of the year the april 30th bank reconciliations and investments are presented in agenda items f and g appropriation details presented in agenda item h and the anderson logo refunding brand details presented in item i i respectfully request that the board approve items 11.1 through 11.2
142i as part of the consent agenda containing items 8.1 through 11.2 can i get a motion to approve i'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda negative second second ms cropper mr joyce yes mrs meyer yes dr rasmussen yes mrs taylor yes dr heiss yes and 12.1 board discussion listen um well i do want to follow up on our meeting from friday um about just quickly the pool we agreed to form a board committee to present a recommendation for what we should do with anderson pool we have enough information at this point and we feel like we could use community input on it because it's a pretty significant decision so i'll be reaching out to figure out how to do that should people contact you or you kind of have to put something together
143and then i don't even know yeah i'm not sure how they're formed i remember learning about them in our classes in the beginning but there's board you got to do it right like you got to document everything and so i need to study up on that before i even get started so i will do that um i did not speak about the care team earlier because i really wanted to take a moment to listen to what everyone had to say on the board and in the audience um i'm sorry i forgot about that guy so on friday mr previls was asked several questions about a situation at one of the elementary schools and eventually it got to the point where he had to be very specific and say that that particular situation involved a transgender
144student there was an audible gasp from the audience when he explained the purpose of the care work and how some of that came into play in that example someone said but but like 90 percent of people in our community don't have two moms or are transgender kids or fill in the blank something to that effect you can watch the video i believe mrs taylor's husband recorded it um what what i am stuck on and what i have been stuck on is that audible gasp and the fact that who knows where what the where that data point came from but that was the data point that was given out ninety percent what about the other ten percent that transgender kid could be your neighbor could be my neighbor but it's just a kid just a kid
145i'm not willing to throw them away or say that their feelings don't matter simply because they are different in 10 percent we've got what 7 500 students here around that so we throw away 750 because they might have two moms or they might be transgender or they might be something else that isn't the norm that's the importance of the care team and the work it it's so that teachers know how to talk to their students how to make sure that they do in fact feel safe and when they do they can learn and feel free to learn feel free to ask questions not not feel like i can't even raise my hand because here i go i'm going to get singled out again i don't i don't care if my arch nemesis has a kid
146who is trans i will fight for that kid's right to be in this classroom and learn that it doesn't matter they're kids and that was just something that really really struck me in my heart as a parent and as a board member 90 i mean 10 and that matters um and you know wendy beaderman who you who led the care team for a while spoke during the public commentary and touched on some of the research that shows that when students feel that belonging and that engagement that they learn better that they succeed better and i know that i don't know the research she cited but i know in higher ed the same thing exists the same and i'm dealing with adults in my particular job but the same thing is true and understanding how they
147feel understanding their needs and knowing how to respond to things let me share a story that just happened last week with my little second grade daughter who's told me over breakfast one morning mom these two boys in class called another girl a burnt chicken nugget and i it was chicken nugget day at school i didn't know i wasn't sure where she was going with this and she said she told me it's because she's black and the teacher in that situation has to know how to have that conversation in such a way that is not mean or aggressive or anything and yet still make both kids feel like hey euro this is a safe environment we're gonna we can talk through it we can work through it that is some of the most important things to
148me about the care team and i know that from my own experience as well just of being a person who is in a classroom with students when terrible things happen in this world and not always knowing what to say and that is important um did i'm sure everyone heard the addition of the math courses right and we're increasing options um that doesn't really sound like we're harming students um by discussing equity or giving more options there's two ways to look at that but adding things is what we're doing that is we're not taking away things so there's that the several people talked about the situation at naval if you are unlucky enough to know those details you know that it underscores the importance of the work that we're doing here and the very bizarre little
149allegations made our and i want i want the community to know this our consultant it was we did not just get freedom of information act requests at the district that's not all it was anybody can do that it happened it's been happening forever that's not the thing the thing is that this woman felt she felt her rest because she was getting messages on social social media she was getting phone calls at her job not at the district at her job she was her boss received calls as well she felt that way so a white person does not get to tell a black person that they should not feel harassed by their actions or scared or afraid that is how she felt and that is her experience so i mean i can't help anyone there with
150that if they can't understand that like that is her experience and she was unnerved by what happened she wouldn't even know really truly if we had a foia request sent to our district office half the time we don't know unless it's like something very very specific it was the other things that frightened this woman and i'm not here to tell her not how how not to feel she feels how she feels period um and again i go back to the fact that all of this this hatred this all of this this anger it just underscores the importance of the work that we are doing the math example that everybody up here was thrilled about sure does not sound like a negative or nefarious use or discussion of equity um and as a parent not as
151a board member i am thrilled with the work that we're doing related to the math things or related to reading i personally have some involvement with the reading situation right now and it's it's great and it is absolutely not taking away it is meeting kids where they are so they can get them to where they need to be so it's just really frustrating it is hard it is very hard to sit up here and hear things that are not true no one no one started a program with any without anything in mind other than to help kids um and cherry picking one or two things is just frankly it's harmful and if you listen to a lot of what we all want we want the same thing and how i i think that it's very
152important that we do have more access to information if that's what makes people feel comfortable i'm i'm absolutely all for that i think we should do that and mr prebbles discussed the strategic plan related to that earlier this morning we talked about some content that we could get up you know relatively quickly like a fact sheet and some other resources um so i'm just really thankful actually that we are doing these things and at the end of the day people up here and the teachers in the buildings care about kids and they know what this is they know what this is and it is not what it is being painted out to be um so after april's board meeting um you and i talked dr heiss and i impressed upon you though that allegations of
153harassment were made from two board members about people in the community and these allegations need to be looked into and taken seriously if harassment did indeed happen to an employee or consultant of the district we should be investigating a potentially more if this did not happen we should not have two elected board members publicly accusing and threatening constituents without providing proof either way can you provide an update to the status of the alleged harassment of the cares team diversity consultant patty we told you we said we didn't name any names and if anybody in this room wants to fill out a foia you should be aware that your name is public record it's out there it's out there question is we have a household policy can i finish i told you we said how she
154feels you do not get to tell her to not feel scared she felt scared i said that in the meeting she felt like she was being harassed she felt like she was being scared you're taking it to a a very different place and have fun with that but the reality she's getting her chance to talk she let patty talk she felt that way she was unnerved she was unnerved by people calling her boss contacting her on social media and all of that she was unnerved and it is the update is this it is up to that person to decide whether or not to file a hostile work environment claim against this district that's what's that's the next step it's not that's the next step that is what would happen and that is up to her
155she's also in a very tough situation because she actually really loves coming here and doing the work here and doesn't want to hurt us in that way but to your original question that is the next step is for her to decide whether or not she wants to file a hostile work environment claim that has not happened so there's the dilemma you can't accuse people and then you don't have the proof i mean you have a documented process and that and if we believe in our documented process it should be uh used so i mean is it fair to make allegations are you serious right now you you think saying that katri that she felt her they were posting her picture out there patty she was unnerved she was unnerved i understand the rest of that
156way you promise you i do get to feel harassed you don't i don't i most certainly do no ma'am you don't okay don't get to tell her she she shouldn't be scared you don't get to tell a black woman she's scared okay so the point is this there has been no follow-up nothing has happened so you have no idea whether it's true or not there has been no claims of harassment filed with the district okay just because there were no claims filed doesn't mean it didn't happen well that's absolutely true that's why i want to know whether what we discussed last month to patty's point that but guys again no this to patty's point that there yeah there is not there have been no claims so there has been no investigation because there's no claims
157that's that's the answer to my question thank you well i mean the only other part is you have to be very careful about making allegations like that you really cannot be doing that as a public person should we talk about that then actually because at that at that same meeting at that same meeting miss taylor you said you in your rant when you said that i sent through you and then you went on well she did say that she did you're right sorry i shouldn't say rant but in your speech you said that i censor you which show me some proof of that show me some proof of me censoring you one two you said i accused you of illegal acts and that was proven false by everybody everybody that was interviewed no one no
158one including the person from the state supported your claim and yet you made that allegation against me again after you spent four thousand dollars of taxpayer money because your feelings were hurt and then you made that allegation at the meeting last month okay so perhaps you can take your own advice i'll give it to you the only thing i wanted i guess responded i did make a file a a harassment suit i don't believe it yeah let her finish please well i don't believe it was properly um uh investigated dede actually got to abstain from even making any comments which is not really a full investigation so whatever that's kind of where we are but if if we are having harassment we do have a policy and we probably should be if you're talking about
159the cares team we should be making sure people are not being accused of things that they aren't if they are doing things improperly that they are held accountable to it i think that's what we just talked about for hours at this meeting it applies all across the board many victims do not report many victims do not report and i didn't even say harassment i thought she was scared first of all go back and watch the video okay okay guys okay i said there are shades of racism all over this because that is how she felt and you as and white people do not get to tell a black person that they are not experiencing that like if they feel that they feel that period and a story but no all right is there anything else
160like to say there's nothing to say all right any other board discussion next up we have a proportion of the board of education the anderson township economic development committee report nothing we meet tomorrow a finance committee report we have not met foundation hills foundation report is this the last one or you get one more all right okay good evening everyone um forest hills foundation for education our board met in june i just want to mr prebbles when you started tonight you talked about student engagement hope and belonging that is what we promote at the forest hills foundation and all of our programming and our approved budget uh for the 2021 uh 21 22 school year we will be funding robotics teams at anderson and turpin which we've been doing for a few years now esports
161for high school students and that program is really taking off we're very proud of that and to be funding that destination imagination after school tutoring and activities at nagel including buffing home which is a big part of belonging because students have a place to go have activities that they can do after school which ties into everything we've been talking tonight we will also be sporting mental health initiatives including panorama the district's uh social emotional survey that we'll be giving to all students starting next year there's a pilot going this year and we'll again be funding a an additional school-based therapist so that no student has to wait when they need to talk to somebody finally we have upped our teacher grant budget we will be awarding thirty thousand dollars in teacher grants next year our
162budget is aggressive uh but uh we feel with the support of the community we can get there our new executive director stacy gillard is very confident that she can we can reach our goals so with that um next year should be off to a good start so that's it thank you thank you can i make a quick comment about just that part when you talked about surveys in the district just putting out surveys i kind of i did ask can you have those surveys sent out to the parents in advance because if my kid's going to get a survey at school i'd like to see what's in that survey so i just think it's important to be able to see what the content is before you your kids get it okay that's a great point
163and that happened okay for real your perspective on making sure that people the individuals are aware that their students are going to undergo or participate in a survey i think is good and so i don't want to have people clapping that i'm in you know discord with you that's not that that is true i agree that we should we can do that that was a good point that you brought up it was done and i think that's a good practice and so that is true that is actually what happened yeah okay next up 13.4 human resources committee report not matt legislative liaison report uh what's going on now we're still awaiting passage of the house bill 1 which passed was flying colors that did address the fair funding formula something that has no passion among
164anybody here but it is very important there is uh there is one interesting thing that came up was uh our own uh senator uh steve wilson uh was passed there was a senate bill one passed by a vote of 32 nothing which would require students to enter ninth grade for the first time on after july 1st 2021 to complete at least one half unit of instruction in the study of financial literacy and this is i just bring this up as is you know this seems like a slam dunk right i mean we all of our kids should have financial literacy that's that makes sense this also those a a great example of an unfunded mandate and that in order to do this well a partially funded mandate two teachers right well so and so i
165actually contacted steve wilson and and said well you know you said it was funded as the or we all hate unfunded mandates every politician says they hate it but then it's amazing when they get to it you know my idea is always if you have a really good idea for us part of the good idea should be that you know how to pay for it that should be any good idea has that so they said we're going to pay for the extra training that would go on to it which is like about three thousand dollars well one of the issues is that we don't have teachers that are waiting for another class to come on so there's only a couple ways to accommodate mandates like this and one would be the most obvious one would
166be to add a half fte at both of our high schools in order to provide for the mandate well that's a hundred and four thousand dollars thereabouts or each year not the three um so these are things and i'm not debating on whether or not we should have financial literacy i i agree i think all of our kids should know how to balance a checkbook and have basic financial literacy as they come out of high school um but we've had this in the past too where they had us check bmis which seemed like a pretty mundane thing well to get 7 500 kids height and weight checked is a amount of time that is that we have to put in that we have to pay for so it seems like oh that we'll just check
167to make sure just to get a sense of how big our kids are for this on the state level but those are hours of work that we're not doing other things so i just bring that up as is they said they're still working on funding though for actually paying for the teachers to teach the classes um but you know what we already have a class and i wonder if part of that curriculum can be put into an existing one because then you make it more robust you kind of they need it anyways i mean it's kind of and it's not clear what their mandates are going to be so but yes that would be and there are there are a couple ways you can try and incorporate it in we looked at it a couple
168years ago too to try and incorporate into some of our career planning classes as well which are pretty jam-packed too but but on the other hand you know i think i saw a lot of nodding heads i mean basic financial literacy would make a lot of sense coming out of high school is to be able to have that so all right moving on to policy committee report second reading uh yes uh i'd like to make a motion to approve the change to the policy as presented this is second all right these are neola changes yeah they're just nailed okay one's a replacement ones are minor revisions all right can i get a motion to approve the second reading of the policy committee report or these policy new policies i made a motion you made a
169motion audit yeah man you're way ahead of me all right miss robert mrs meyer yes miss joyce yes dr rasmussen yes mrs taylor yes dr heiss yes safety committee report we've not met a teaching and learning committee report we have not met technology and facilities has not met since our last meeting boris tells teacher association report so donna here i want to say good evening president heiss and if you would please don't start the timer don't tempt me okay it's been a long relationship for us uh first of all behalf of the teachers this evening and what a great time of year for us it's may it's may 24th and what a year a difference you know just difference today from this past year of virtual and remote and not being able to celebrate the
170great things that we do here in forest hills today we're celebrating the dedication of our school community students families administration bus drivers administrative assistants support staff and our teachers we are forest hills school district we have accomplished mass wearing hand washing dust cleaning quarantining social distancing covert shots cleaning desk virtual and dual teaching whatever that was for many of us our school community came to school and promoted learning thanks the focus is and has been student learning and growth and growth is personalized to each student that can be in lots of different formats and this year a lot of that growth was centered around students being able to come to school and be here to learn and allow our teachers time to help provide that support and a very challenging situation tonight the last meeting
171of the 2021 school year the association would first want to give a small moment to say thank you and celebrate the work of assistant superintendent greg sears i know uh superintendent prebles said many great things about you greg but i'm from the association and for me personally thank you and we do appreciate all the time and energy i know for me having you as my supervisor was challenging but you seemed like you know you grew to the occasion so thank you also i know that we also have director associate director brian robinson who will be going to fort thomas that job within itself is probably one of the most challenging jobs here in forest hills handling two high schools he did that with a lot a lot of skill and i will tell you i
172dare to know anyone that works as hard as brian does in that role he's done an outstanding job fort thomas is lucky to get you we know where you are congratulations fha has four major accomplishments during this past year or does not sound like too many but in the big picture i know there were many many one we worked collectively through all of june and july of last year to be able to come up with ways to get back to school and work together to make those things happen mousse technology trying to help make sure everybody understood what they were going to do and then as things happen always trying to make those accommodations superintendent prebles and assistant superintendent mike broadwater cannot thank you enough especially mike mike every day you and i have had
173many many conversations to help support staff and students get through the day at school these were challenging challenging things number two our teachers as students we provided a safe school environment there were days looking and tracking the numbers of coveted quarantining social distancing that were beyond measure and it was daunting work administrators taking the time to do that calling parents connecting trying to help kids stay abreast of what was happening in the classroom those are challenging things with the support that we had we were able to make those things happen for our students number three is completing our support to the state finance superintendent preble spent much of his time trying to get us to that place and help support getting school financing in the position for those of you that are here this evening
174i know there are a lot of people here with lots of different questions but school finance is a very tricky thing in the state of ohio scott's work and the dedication of our teachers in our school community sending emails lobbying and being active will help make change in schools like our own here in forest hills for me personally it was being able to achieve grant monies that were brought into the association our association's funds are in excellent condition and in good standing we will finish up a four-year grant that was received and we'll be able to continue our work with literacy promotion in elementary schools during the upcoming school year staff across the district will have the pleasure this coming week unlike the last year of saying goodbye to their students we also get to
175celebrate at the centos center our graduation which is our culminating event of all the hard work that everyone does teachers and everyone but also our parents having our parents know that all of us are here to support students and the final day of graduation it's not just the high school as mr spencer mr felves would tell you it also thanks our elementary teachers and middle school teachers and everyone along the way i am so proud of that and being here tonight is really important for us to think about what that work means feca supports the work of superintendent prebles assistant superintendent sears assistant broadwater as well as our administration and all areas of the district's cornerstones and the district's vision which is to help students become the best that they can be feha supports the
176work of oea and is also a solid advocate of public education i know my talk about that a lot public education is a right of students and it's something all of us have to be able to work to create that education creates a safe inclusive learning atmosphere that eliminates barriers to learning public education is always in a turmoil often because of the demands that are upon it we should be very proud of the work that we do and focus together as we enter into the next year of the ways to improve and make our school an outstanding place for students but also a place that our community is very proud of are there any questions well thank you thank you for for that and for i think all of us are excited for monday some
177of us more than others monday will be a good day yeah so thank you have a good evening okay there is no executive session tonight so we have uh you know the big event is on monday uh donna said it well it is a culmination of 12 to 13 years of people going through the district and that is a wonderful wonderful program i'll say that some of the things that the district has done with that we learned from kovit is some of the parades and some of the different ways we've done that we had to do last year that are coming through it just i've really added excitement to the end of this year and i appreciate our our principles taking some of the things that we learned from covet about getting together and appreciating
178some of the little things like just getting into school uh especially even this time of year so congratulations to all the graduates um our that's on the that's on the 31st on monday our next regular meeting of the board of education will be i believe in the cafetorium here on june 28th and it will be mask optional all good can i get a motion to adjourn i make a motion to adjourn i got a second second ms cropper mrs taylor yes mrs meyer yes miss choice yes dr rasmussen yes dr heights yes thank you thank everybody for coming and for hanging out rio goodness executive session you