Adams 12 Five Star Schools' Board Meeting 5/4/2022

001start with role director assad lucas here director goldstein here director lockley here director mitchell here director potter here i will entertain a motion to approve the agenda as stated so moved second director assad lucas aye director goldstein aye director lockley aye director mitchell aye director potter aye go ahead and stand for the pledge of allegiance start with a superintendent update i will be very brief tonight it's a busy time of year as i think many of you know and some of the things that are most significant that are moving in the system are things related to your agenda tonight there are some things that in terms of budget preparation for next year we're asking you to start taking action on things like the five-star online lease for example or at least setting aside money for

002that continue to acquire buses and other things for next year so budget continues to move forward you'll hear more from susie about that tonight negotiations are done with one group and you'll be taking action on that tonight and we hope perhaps as early as tomorrow night to be done with our certified discussions there's a lot of hiring going on but really the the big heavy lifting parts of the system i've updated you on or you're set to hear more about it from members of cabinet tonight beyond that i'll just mention that at the last meeting one of the speakers asked that i read the book lawn boy i got a copy of it at the end of last week but i haven't been able to start reading it yet but i hope about next time

003we're assembled i can tell you what i conclude based on my own reading of that book so that's what i have thank you thanks all right director potter update all right over the last few weeks it's been pretty slow in my world we've had some emotional things going on in my family so i've been grateful to be there for them and my friends as well i was able to attend a pbl today at stem launch with these adorable little first grade students that taught us all about light pollution and it's always fun to get into the class with them and see what they're doing so thank you to them for inviting me out to their class thank you director lucas yeah good evening everyone um thanks for being here so uh i've visited a couple

004schools over the last well actually just two days had the opportunity to visit holstrom k-8 yesterday along with board president goldstein and just learning more about holstrom k8 as the gt magnet school in the district and how they are you know all the ways being innovative and in other ways that they're supporting our gt students and not even just at holstrom but even throughout the district one of the really neat things is colleen you're who's the principal also serves as the president for the colorado association for gifted and talented and so she's a huge asset for our district for our gt students but yeah a lot of great things happening so this morning i also uh visited leroy elementary and uh so leroy is one of those schools that has an effective needs program i

005got to learn more about that and then just toward different classrooms it was really fun um you know every time we walked into a classroom there were at least a handful of students if not the whole class would get up and come and run and hug the principal and who's a tracy stauffer and um so personally i will always hold a special place for tracy in my heart so when i started as a parent in the district with my oldest it was her first year as the ap at thorne elementary and so i did she's all her um betsy miller were all i knew as principal so but it was really it was great just to see the school catch up with tracy but um all the great things that they're doing uh i got

006to also attend this past saturday the adams 12 5k uh and fun run that was hosted by lisa reed and her amazing fabulous team they did a great job organizing it it was just a lot of fun to engage with families and students throughout the district the other cool thing about it is one of the special guests was jason romero who helped distribute the scholarships to students who received from the aim for the stars scholarship so that was really fun another kind of thing is jason romero if anyone doesn't know uh know of him definitely look into who he is so he's the first blind athlete to run acro he's the only blind athlete to run across the united states in 57 days yeah he's a he's a former paralympian he's just an amazing human

007he's a long time family friend of ours uh he and my father-in-law are best friends but uh the other thing is he has his blindness his eye condition for his blindness is the same condition as my youngest so um he's been a great support for us personally with that and then the last thing i kind of want to just talk about is our five star found a foundation here in the district so uh i'm the liaison for the board and for those who don't know who uh what the five star foundation is it is a non-profit that supports our district in many ways um you know their main goal is obviously to help with student success uh but i just want to share some highlights that they're doing because it's really huge and they just

008actually received a really big grant that i'll talk about as well but um so the foundation helps with our resource closets throughout the district if anyone knows what those are they're stationed in some of our schools just to help families in need they distribute clothes food emergency supplies hygiene supplies things like that and they've been utilized over 3 500 times so far they also launched the five star trial website which is connecting students to career fields classes and programs in the district to explore and prepare for careers and then connections to local companies that are ready to hire students and continue their career pathways the site also features students stories career statistics and highlights accessible meaningful career pathways for all they have launched the yes fund just last month and this is a small grant

009program that removes the barrier of money to help teachers and students thrive so just a few things that this has funded that the the foundation has funded with this is um they helped students pay uh for concurrent enrollment in ap chemistry they secured a jazz trio to talk about careers and play with the west lakes 6th grade band and then they match donations from the staff at north glen high school to help students compete in the hosa competition um who were unable to pay to participate so otherwise we've not been able to do that without that support um the other really cool thing is they are celebrating the first tiny house built by students who attend future forward in the construction program and then the house is being donated to access housing to provide stable

010transitional housing for young adults who are aging out of the foster system so then they are able to complete their high school diplomas and secure a college and career pathway they also just received a pretty big grant almost 3.2 million in the covid arpa grant funds a little over 1.3 are going to go to funding the resource closets a little over a million will go to funding summer explorers program in the district about 270 000 will go to funding employee health and wellness and about 487 000 will go to funding cover 19 response team health and wellness so yeah amazing things that the foundation is doing so another thing is if you're not familiar definitely look into them the great work that they do for our district and our students they're also hosting their annual

011event at the five star classic or the five star classic at topgolf on june 9th so this which will help continue supporting our district and then lastly i just want to say give a shout out to our teachers and district staff yesterday was national teacher appreciation day and we're celebrating all week from teacher appreciation week but you know educators and staff should be celebrated every day for their dedication and commitment determination and follow-through they show for students on a daily basis so their work is greater than just educating our kids for many many students they are a stable support that um our kids need to be successful and thrive and then personally as a parent i know that every single one of my kids educators have made a huge mark and i've touched them that

012they will remember forever so so thank you to all of our educators and this district staff for all you do for our kids and that's it thank you director lockley yeah certainly a busy time of year um i will just take a second to highlight i'm certainly excited as we move into warmer weather and have the opportunity to do different celebrations and activities outdoors i did get to attend the lions club relay that took place at north stadium on sunday which was a really cool event so approximately 20 or so schools third fourth and fifth graders participating in relays just a great opportunity to see hundreds of kids just excited to be out in the sunshine running around but certainly an opportunity for students to build and develop some of that teamwork a relay is

013sometimes a complicated race and definitely some executed it um a little better than others but um it was just an opportunity to see them run which was really great and schools really cheering on others there were definitely a lot of just really great athletes but a ton of just really great students being excited to be together and cheer on their teammates and other schools lots of schools represented not all of our elementary so hoping maybe in a future year we can get them all out there and all represented but was just excited to be out there and just to say a big thanks to all of our educators um it feels like we're at a time of year where things are starting to wrap up but i know that we've still got a lot of

014educating to do in the month of may and um definitely some assessments that still need to be completed as we um you know support our students and celebrate all of their academic successes this year thank you director mitchell i don't know if i can talk quite as fast as jamie but give it a shot um and just following on the assessments i you know we've got kids that uh everybody got their sat scores back today so some people are very excited um and then ap testing is starting and we're coming into a lot of seniors counting down maybe even the hours that they have left until they get to say goodbye so it is a very exciting time and and then i guess you know there's lots of seasoned um sports teams still going i

015just saw bands performing so i just think there's all kinds of culmination of the year and semester and just a lot of excitement and finishing up some things and getting ready for summer i did also get to go to holstrom and it really was a valuable and insightful visit to learn more about just how much work goes into trying to differentiate the instructions the instruction for these kids that have very different educational needs and it is a great place for learning these kinds of things and then being able to take that research back um to a broader audience and then to other schools in our district so i just there was a lot of great stuff there and it was really fun to see how excited the teachers were which is just about any building

016you go in and you get a chance to visit our teachers it's just great to spend time with them and get to see them in action and seeing their students responding and you know why they're here every day because to see those lights and that energy in the room um i guess that's that's where they get their uh rewards um i also did get to go to the legacy 2000 job shadowing fair that's the juniors um coming out with their work from this year where they've gone out and they've explored career opportunities for helping them try to figure out what they might want to do post high school and i just continue to be amazed at the um the skills that these students are demonstrating you can walk up and ask them a question and

017they don't even hesitate they just start you know telling you about their experience and are very engaging and animated and i can say a lot of kids i talked to were very excited about some of the things they learned and they did some really neat uh projects and got to really see and feel and learn about different career opportunities and then there's other kids that did two or three and said i'm really glad i had this experience because it really helped me find out that this might not be the right place for me and i think parents really appreciate that before you spend you know investing and um trying to get the kids into those opportunities to find out that that's not really what they want to do so um i think my daughter did

018three different ones and wasn't very happy with any of the three so we'll keep looking but i told her i said that can be your plan just exploring what's out there and all the different options so we're going to try that i also wanted to recognize the teacher appreciation week and i just think you know it's it really is a calling and when you see teachers in the classroom and what they do every day just the nurturing of our students and these children and even young adults and lighting that fire in them to create you know have a life long learning and interest and wanting to explore and and dig into things um i just think it's one of the most underappreciated professions in our country and yes our teachers are highly trained but i

019also believe that we underestimate that role of parents some that may stay home the village the managers that are you know helping these teens as they're in their first jobs and just i i just think that there's a world out there that we really need to recognize as our collective selves and how important that is and try to find ways i think financially we can do a much better job in rewarding them and but i also think that's not the only thing they're looking for and the only way to support them i think there's lots of different ways that and opportunities we can create to just show how much we support and how vital that work is to creating future prosperous communities and and a well-rounded society so i will continue to do what i

020can to impart that message and advocate the importance of well-funded well-maintained facilities and program-rich public schools so i think there's going to be lots of opportunities to have some of that dialogue i also wanted to shout out to our teachers because later in the agenda we're going to be talking about our adoption of a new literacy curriculum and this really is much bigger than just a literacy curriculum we're not just swapping one out and putting another one in place it really is a new way um with lots of different tools and techniques and um to think about how to teach literacy particular early literacy to children there's a lot of science and it's going to be a little different way of thinking we've had some things in our schools that approach it but it required

021our teachers to take 45 hours of training online through cde that we weren't able to pay them for those hours and and compensate them as well as you know that the amount of work that they were putting in but hopefully our teachers will begin to see the value in that training and this new curriculum and being able to put that together as well as where we will continue to roll out supplemental and other interventions and work that can support some of our most challenging students who really can't learn to read any other way than through this methodology putting this in our gen ed classroom gets it right in the forefront and will minimize the impact to many of these students who can only learn to read this way but all students can learn to read

022this way and it just requires that it be very explicit barely systematic and i just this is something that's been very important for my family we fortunately had the resources to go out and get this instruction for our daughter many families don't have that opportunity and don't have those resources and don't have the ability to take their children you know for these hours outside of the school day and so i just this is so critical to the you know the foundational learning that's required for students to have and be in place um by third grade so that when they get to fourth and fifth grade in those ongoing classes that they can read to learn and really engage in all this content and all the great enriched programs that we have so i just you

023know i'm going to appreciate our teachers for the work they're going to undertake in this next year i think it's going to be very challenging but hopefully it'll be very rewarding to see you be able to reach students that you haven't been able to break the code for and and find a way to help them grow and learn and and get on track as early as possible and minimize the possibility for the mental impact it has and the ability for them to maintain and achieve their lifetime time dreams so again i just i want to thank everybody for the work that we're going to undertake and the lift that's going to happen and hopefully again we'll be able to see the the work and the rewards come as we work through this in our district

024so thank you very much thank you i too want to recognize that it's a teacher appreciation week i find it kind of ironic that it's at the end of the school year when the teachers are probably pretty exhausted but everything we can do to just kind of boost them through the rest of the year and just to make them understand that we appreciate them all year is important um a week ago yesterday so um our ibs facilitators i do a little work with one of them on occasion and he needed me to step in so i went to fort lepton and i facilitated their negotiations and i had to say to them that i had never been to fort lepton and i have lived here for 40 some odd years but i really enjoyed going

025there i enjoyed meeting them and they enjoyed telling me something special about fort lupton so with each of them had to tell me something then we had our own negotiations the next day we're starting our marathon rounds where we're going for eight hours um on the last thursday i was commandeered to chaperone a field trip i went to cu boulder with thornton middle school eighth grade about half of them we went to the planetarium where we saw a show on arctic exploration and then we got to see the planetarium stars and we got to do something called the ice bucket challenge where you stuck your hands in ice water for a couple of minutes and they played some freezing song like um ice ice baby or vinyl ice was one of them another one was

026let it flo what is it let it from i uh frozen let it go and uh then you tie a knot because they wanted to show you what it's like to be in like this sub-zero climate and have to work and then we took a walk along um [Music] they have a scale model of the solar system at cu and so i was with my daughter she was a teacher and she's leading him and she makes me bring up the rear and i love my daughter but she's a little directionally challenged so we're if you if you know where the solar system is you get closer and closer to folsom field and the planets get farther and farther apart and you can if you look far enough you can see the pole for that next

027planet and right before i don't know jupiter or saturn she starts going to the left and i'm at the back of the line it's like no we have to go to the right and we got to it and um and the kids really had a great time with that because it's a real um hands-on display in a sense it's also replicated at the smithsonian air and space museum in washington dc and of course the person the people who designed it are from cu and then we got to try on some of the uniforms that they wear in the arctic to stay warm and then they had a green screen and you could pick out your background and i now have a picture with a polar bear and then they got to eat at the dorm

028cafeteria the c4c if you know cu at all it's a it's an excellent food court basically and um and the kids were like just in awe and one of them said to me they goes do they make all this fresh i said they do and i have to say the kids took a lot of food but they ate it you know you get kind of crabby about kids filling up their plates in buffets and not eating at all and i have to say that these eighth graders from thor medal i felt were just so well behaved they really got into the and they got into the feel of the college campus and and i hope that it inspires many of them to pursue that then see i typed this all up and then i left

029it on my printer um oh fi uh saturday i could not uh i i'm sorry i couldn't make the 5k but i did get to go to legacy high school for a tedx youth event that was um planned by jack borneau a junior over at legacy high school and if any of you know jack i think he was in fourth grade when he was on shark tank and one on shark tank and so he's a real entrepreneur and he's just an amazing kid i'd never met him i got to talk to him a little bit and i got to talk to his parents and then i also got to listen to a bunch of ted talks from kids and some of the concepts that they addressed one kid who was in the foster care system

030kids about gender identity kids about graduation requirements and then the way if you've ever seen a ted talk they go on for like 10 minutes and totally without a script it's amazing and it flows and they're really great and we have a lot of kids from adams 12 represented here um as long as other places but this was one of the first events that they've had and they really do hope they get to have more um then i got to go on monday with superintendent a couple other folks from learning services and um the cte we had a world champion in the deca competition the sheriff of mountain range kate uh morton and so we got to go surprise her and she was surprised and it's just amazing what the deca does over there mountain

031range um so that was that was fun i visited on tuesday i went to northstar and then i went to holstrom north star elementary um the principal grace taylor showed me around showed me all the different classrooms and what they're doing and all of them and and just gave me so much personal story about every classroom in that school and all the great things that they're doing there and some of the challenges that they have and one of the challenges i'd like to make note of is parking at that school if you can't get in the parking lot you have to park on the street but you can't park near the school because the neighborhood doesn't allow for it so i'm just going to put that out there i was able to find a parking

032spot then i went to hellstrom with with director um assad lucas and it was uh passion day basically and they were all doing their passion projects um we had um that's yeah she yeah she had to get the purpose there while we were invited on tuesdays some of the passion projects we saw uh one of them was crocheting crocheting is a very important uh activity to help with emotional stress so you know the kids at helstrom are all real high high achievers and and gifted and so they have a lot of those there was a class doing rube goldberg machines there was a class doing yoga uh there was a class making little robots so just all kinds of fun things for them to do on tuesday and then this morning i went to the

033pebc breakfast public education business coalition and our superintendent and a couple others were on the panel talking about some of the needs in our schools in terms of uh teachers and the teacher shortage and it's real and some of the things that ideas that for the business community of what they can do to help with public education and our staffing shortages and that then i went to arabica ridge where we gave nicole diaz the um nicole natalie nicole nicole nicole the um certified employee of the year she is a preschool works with kids with autism she got the certified employee of the year and then that's it lots of stuff i'm i was busy okay well that's what happens when you are retired you can do that all right on to board committee liaison reports

034we have the dac and the lr pack why don't we start with the dac i can take that one so um this was the virtual meeting for the month but the focus of this meeting was really recruitment retention and onboarding for the dac getting new membership and then getting resources together to um support um the members um they are actually working on a model that has kind of a membership team so members from the dac who are continuing on helping support the work of reviewing applicants and reaching out to folks helping them understand what expectations are what the involvement is what the dac work really looks like and they're also looking at kind of getting a list of kind of skills they need to fill out the work of the dac some of the reporting

035and putting things together requires you know graphic design and some of that work and you know folks who have potentially hr skills or you know different kinds of things being able to put together a list and share that with a community to get folks who have those skills to to make sure that they have a robust team of folks who um can fill out fill out the the needs of the the group so i'm just excited to see them really start some recruitment work and looking at getting out there and reaching out to a lot of different pockets of the community to fill out that committee and then hit the ground running because as we mentioned earlier in the year the uip moved up from january to october so that work a lot of that

036is really happening um during a time where the dac would normally be a little bit more quiet and so they talked about their summer schedule and so um it seems like they will be meeting at least monthly throughout the summer so that they can keep that work going so good work and and looking forward to continuing through the summer and then a new school year okay um lrpac or courtney did you have anything in wanted no i was not able to attend the meeting because i was healthily eating an avocado and sliced my finger open so i spent my visit getting stitches so i was not there last week sorry sorry um lrpac met two and we got the first blush of something that i'm not going to spend too much time talking about because

037i believe priscilla is going to talk about the blueprint our long-range academic plan and so we met as an lr pack and got to go over it and give feedback and all this kind of stuff and then we also had the blueprint 2022 meeting task force meeting which is kind of a offshoot of that with a few extra people but other than that that's what we did so our next item on the agenda is public comment good evening everybody the board of education welcomes public comment to learn about the preferences and concerns of the adams 12 5 star community the board thanks all individuals who have expressed their viewpoints in writing all written communication has been shared with board members to ensure everyone will have the opportunity to participate and the board's work is done

038in a professional and respectful manner the board wants everyone to understand the expectations for public comment the board requests that everyone remain in front of the stan the stanchions at the foot of the ramp and no one approached the deus unless invited by the board or superintendent our board meetings are open to all members of the public speakers are personally responsible for assuring their remarks and any items presented are suitable for an audience that may include students and children present or watching the live stream please respect student confidentiality and refrain from identifying individual students in your comments you are welcome to communicate directly with school staff and the board by email rather than in public comment if you have concerns regarding particular students audience members must permit the speaker to be heard should an individual

039or group of persons disrupt the order the conduct of the meeting at any time during the meeting verbal warnings will be given upon further disruption they will be asked to leave the esc if the person or group refuses to leave they will be escorted from the premises by district security officers once requested to leave re-entry to the building this evening will not be permitted disruptive conduct includes any verbal or physical actions that interfere with the board's ability to attend to the business on its agenda each speaker will have three minutes to address the board speakers will be called to the podium three at a time please wait in line there and when it is your turn use the microphone and and state your name and city of residence before beginning your comments if your comments

040or point of view have been stated by a previous speaker please state your name city of residence indicate your position and that your thoughts have been previously stated i will inform speakers when they have 30 seconds remaining with this sign please begin to wrap up your comments at that time speakers will be informed when time has expired please end your comments at that time neither board members nor the superintendent are obligated to respond to comments or input nor are they prohibited from doing so in the presiding officer's discretion time for public board member or superintendent comment may be suspended or increased or the meeting temporarily recessed depending on the nature of the comment or the length of the remainder of the meeting agenda public comment is the only time during the meeting that participants may

041address the board unless engaged by board members or the superintendent any handouts or information that you would like to give to the board should please be given to lee coca here to my right the board thanks you in advance for your participa for your participation tonight the first speakers are alicia covello savannah schneider and terese morin if you could use the microphone please and you will need to turn it on and wait just a second there you go it should be good all right thank you all right so my name is alicia cavello i am a resident of florin this is regarding stargate failing to keep students safe and i understand stargate is a public charter it's a little different under the district but i do feel that the district and the board do need

042to know with a particular student there's been multiple incidents where they've where the student has choked other students punched students used weapons against staff and students multiple times have done death threats for two multiple students and the administration there is fully aware my son was involved with two of those incidents to the major ones and as a parents i am very frustrated understandably so i would say that the administration hasn't done enough to protect our students and these things are occurrences are getting increasingly worse and basically one of the things that i wanted to mention is that the administration at the school has been told multiple times by students warning when this particular student was you know doing things threatening them harassing them antagonizing them going up behind them my son has told me he

043has he doesn't feel safe at school and that is heartbreaking he's been going to stargate since he was in kindergarten and i did actually even write the principle and i let him know because i wanted to ensure that my child was not going to be bunked with this particular student in an overnight field trip when i first wrote to the vice principal i got a response of i've i've forwarded your request well in the fall they had already assured myself and the other parents that our students weren't going to be put together and they were going to keep them separate as much as possible because they weren't going to basically redo this kid's schedule to keep him out of the classes with these other kids while i come to find out that one of the

044students that he choked his teacher assigned one of the kids he choked with him at the same table that's insane to me you don't know if that kid has any emotional problems from this anything i mean that would be like you're you're having somebody sit across from their abuser pretty much they're assaulter that's that's horrible so i was dumbfounded when i found that out um which kind of prompted the email and when i got the i forwarded your request it was like really it's not a request i'm demanding to know my child safe so i did send the email to the principal expressed hey this needs to be known that you know i don't want my child to be bunked with this kid my child's afraid to go to school he has to be on

045guard at all time he told me he makes sure he knows where the student is because he's afraid he's going to be bring a bigger weapon you know a knife or something and or a gun and there would be an issue obviously the principal did not even acknowledge my comments about my son being afraid to go to school my response was okay well he won't be bunked with it man can you assure you that a few weeks well literally a few weeks after that emailed a huge incident happened and you guys might already be aware of it but ma'am your time has expired thank you thank you for sharing hi i'm savannah schneider and this is hi i'm catherine berman we both signed up for times because we weren't sure if we had signed up

046so we're but we plan to speak together if that's okay um we are both teachers at thunder vista p8 and we are also the advisors for our gsa at our gsc meeting on tuesday our students collectively wrote a letter to the board of adams 12 5 star schools in the community we are the members of the gender sexuality and acceptance club gsa at thunder vista we are who we are not to upset people but because we don't have a choice we are strong and we are not ashamed gsa is not just for the lgbtq plus community but it is a safe space for all students this is our first year having a gsa and we are already a community a family we value the friendships we have made and the support we have received through

047gsa without a gsa students do not know about the lgbtq plus community and this can lead to confusion guilt and shame for lgbtq plus students we believe that the district should try to educate all students about lgbtq plus community and should support all students by having a gsa at all adams 12 schools here are some of our voices before i came to thunder vista my old school didn't have a gsa and there was no acceptance for lgbtq students it was confusing and i had to deal with classmates being homophobic gsa has given me acceptance in myself more love for my community and supported me in coming out to my parents 8th grader as a person who isn't really accepted by their parents gsa has given me a safe space and a community while i am

048there without it students feel like a freak or like they don't belong everyone can have a sense of belonging they can have a safe space to vent about their emotions and have friends they see that they aren't alone after all another 8th grader from a student who identifies as straight i want to support everyone regardless of their gender or their sexual orientation i want everyone at the board meeting to accept that people are people and if they identify as anything they are still people so don't treat them badly seventh grader i am a seventh grade student and before i came to thunder vista i didn't know who i was because i had no knowledge of the lgbtqia plus community i thought something was wrong with me as everybody else in my class seemed to know

049exactly who they were and who what and who they were and were going through the exact same things that people described me on the other hand i felt not quite one gender but somewhere in between so when i came to gsa i was finally able to discover myself that's from another 7th grader when my closest friend came out i supported him even if i didn't understand the community but when i started to discover more about the lgbtq plus community i really enjoyed learning more about it i just wish i knew about it earlier in my life so while i still try to figure out what my sexual orientation is i just hope that we could teach students about this amazing community eighth grader i always thought i was straight but then i joined gsa the

050minute i heard the term bisexuality i finally had a term to describe how i felt about my life gsa has helped me to discover who i am and i am super thankful for that that's from a seventh grader i joined gsa to discover more about myself but with that i also gained a community the people i met through gsa have become such great friends and supporters they accepted me for who i was and not for who i was expected to be seventh grader when i first joined gsa i thought i didn't belong and felt a bit left out then i realized that it was a safe space for everyone and i started to enjoy it more and more now i come to every come every time there is a meeting and i enjoy learning about

051the lgbtq plus community and i understand that no matter who you are we are all family that's from a seventh grader as someone who just recently figured out who i am it is nice to have a safe place to go every week to let out any of my feelings it is nice to have people that actually listen to you and care about who you are i wish that everyone would accept people in the lgbtqi a plus community this place helps me a lot seventh grader upon joining gsa i feel that my confidence and my gender and orientation is much better gsa is a club for all sorts of people it is educational and a supportive group it's from a sixth grader okay thank you for listening to our students thank you for sharing i need

052to shorten my statement a little bit because as i walked out the door my eighth grader sent me her statement so i will give a very abbreviated peace of mind and then i will read her letter um it's really great could you please state your name oh i'm sorry my name is theresa moran and i live in thornton um it was really great to hear all the good stuff that's going on in the district and unfortunately that's not all that's going on the event at stargate made me dive into the discipline matrix for both atoms 12 and for stargate and they are frankly a joke the entire system is in place to protect perpetrators not their victims that's not okay when i look at this matrix there's nothing that is grounds for immediate expulsion including

053bringing a firearm to school that only gets a student referred for expulsion the way i read this assault my guess would be including sexual assault can have a potential referral for expulsion or transfer to another school if you were the victim of an assault or your child was a victim would you want them knowing that the perpetrator could be back or allowed to attend another school where they can do it to someone else in the age of online school there is absolutely no reason why crimes such as assault or possessing a weapon should be tolerated when do the rights of all the other children start to matter this is what my daughter wrote due to the incident last week i don't feel safe at school the safety measures are not doing their job to protect

054the thousand kids that go to our school one student's needs were put above everyone else i get yelled out for swearing at lunch but he brought a weapon assaulted two teachers vandalized property assaulted another student sorry i can't read her writing seemingly making no effort to protect anyone else it puts students staff administrators and people living and working nearby in danger he went off campus which means the danger existed outside of the school adults will just tell us to talk to the counselor but talking about how i feel with someone i barely know will not protect me from being shot when this kid escalates i love being at school and that has been taken from me these safety measures are making it worse by being useless i don't want the people i care about staff

055and peers alike to be shot or be put in life-threatening danger it is straight-up neglectful to do absolutely nothing if nothing is done i will not stop pursuing this personally as a student i will do the right thing because isn't that what you're teaching us to do it is hypocritical to teach us kids to do the right thing when the people in charge of our safety won't do the right things themselves thank you the next speakers are zachary nix logan walsh and daveon turner hi i'm zachary over snix and i go to thunder vista and i i know i live in colorado i think i live in brazil hi i am a transgender bisexual male who goes to thunder vista i go to gsa every week on tuesdays along with my fellow lgbtq plus students

056and we need gsa because for some of us is the only place we feel safe in a safe space we did not choose to be lgbtq plus just like how you do not choose your skin color and we need and we deserve to have normal rights just like all the other kids in our school and thunder vista is great in the fact when i came out and when i came out to my school my school was the first on board to accept me for who i am and they understood that it was not a choice to be born this way and it was just who i am and my seventh grade social studies teacher was the best about it she immediately told all the teachers my new pronouns and name she even this year just

057hung up a bunch of pride flags in her room she is the best teacher we will ever get and i'm sorry if your kid has to say their pronouns in class which only takes two seconds by the way but those two seconds meaning a lot to kids like me in the lgbtq plus community because at the end of the day we just want to be accepted and loved for who we are and who we love thank you zach [Applause] um my name is davion i'm i live in northland and i'm non-binary a musician must make music an artist must paint a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself what a man can be he must be if the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed he gets

058sick the writer of this is abraham maslow best known for his concept of maslow's hierarchy the idea that humans need five specific aspects to not only sustain their life but to thrive the way they want to thrive those five aspects goes as follows self-actualization the desire to become the best version one can be esteem the desire for respect confidence and stability love the desire for connections friendships and loving oneself safety the desire for security and stability and psychological needs the base needs of an intelligent organism here's a rhetorical question do you think kids teenagers and young adults are exceptions to this concept when i went to my past school i was lucky if a teacher knew my name i learned that many educators prefer content over character opting out of spending even just a minute

059or two at the beginning of class to check in with students according to abraham a renowned psychologist building relationships building trust letting people be vulnerable and express themselves in comfortable environments is crucial to personally thriving if one loves to draw and is pretty damn good at it why reprimand them for doodles on a study guide why refuse to grade a paper just because it went over 1 500 words why opt out of simply and genuinely asking students while doing attendance the timeline question of how are you now this isn't generalized vantage point is a fantastic example to show that teachers are passionate in teaching but as special as it is vantage point shouldn't be the extent of it i know all teachers have a passion for teaching i believe that all teachers should have the

060opportunity to show that passion for teaching outside of grading stacks of papers by no means should it be required but it should be encouraged actively encouraged because it strengthens community it strengthens students it aids education and it helps us take steps towards healing knowing we are not alone i don't have the space nor the power to institute rules or solutions in schools i know that but you do school board teach your teachers to build meaningful relationships and communities and i promise you the average test scores in district attendance will positively reflect that change encourage them to take a few minutes out of their class to check in with students to make sure they're okay that day let us heal and take mental health breaks because we have bad days and on those days some of

061us might just want to draw because an artist must paint and if you take it away our core personality will inevitably take a hit letting those personalities thrive will lead to better students better relationships and better communities in schools that is a guarantee look towards abraham maslow or the teachers of vantage point high school for proof or come talk to me because i'd be happy to show you that a school is a community of musicians artists and poets and more so help us build those communities thank you thank you davia was logan walsh present okay the next speakers are mike kepler christina ross and molly happs my name is mike you tricked me there my name is mike kepler i'm actually resident of longmont colorado i'm principal at coyote ridge elementary i just wanted to

062come i wanted to come all year and speak directly to the board and thank them for and our superintendent for their ongoing support i have been a principal now for 19 years and for the last seven years i've been at coyote ridge and i can say in adams 12 the amount of support that were provided at the elementary level is truly outstanding that includes coaches in our buildings sel assistant principals and soon to be gt teachers and through all of that i feel like our board and system is focused on doing what's best for the academic and social emotional well-being of our students and i brought a couple notes from students that i just asked today a couple fifth graders who are reflecting uh on their time their elementary years as they get ready to

063go on to middle school and i won't read their names from what francis mentioned kiter ridge elementary has changed my life as a student leader and just an overall person coyote ridge is filled with amazing people and staff the teachers here have helped me through a lot and i feel i can talk to them and still feel like i'm in a safe environment to me school is about being able to learn all the things i need to learn while still having fun and being surrounded with nice and inclusive people and i think kaido rich has done that for not just me but hopefully everyone else i think that coyote ridge is really impacting my life in a positive way and is helping me realize what my future might look like cody ridge has made me

064feel like i belong and that i can find my people even if it takes a little while also if you might have made a mistake or done something wrong they don't yell at you they help you get through the problem in a calm and helpful way i love coyote ridge as a place school and it feels like home and then from another student uh to dr mike i think kaido ridge has been the best experience of my life everyone at the school is so nice and willing to listen and help me and my peers every step of the way i think the learning at county ridge has been both helpful and rewarding to who i am today i truly think that if i had gone to another school what i like in myself would not

065have shown as bright as a light i see inside of others as well as people i don't even know the leader i see in the future and myself is strong brave and kind i hope that everyone after me and on will feel loved and safe at coyote ridge because i want them to feel what everyone should these six years here have changed my life in a positive way and the work i'm assigned isn't too challenging or too easy it's just right mike your time has expired thank you dr mike hi my name is christina ross and i'm a resident of thornton we are a stargate family and i know you're aware of the incident that happened last week there was also an incident in the fall that was pretty bad as well and of that

066my son was a victim my son was chased up onto a stage and had his head slammed against a wall three times by the same student we were given no support no follow-through by the school i wasn't even contacted for 48 hours by administration wasn't contacted by an sro until a week after the incident never encouraged to press charges and i feel like that is a total disgrace to a victim situation um we were never followed through on anything and we were very discouraged from pressing charges in the fall and i feel like we could be in a very different situation with this said student had we been encouraged to press charges or been really given the opportunity to and i feel like we didn't because we had compassion and compassion has gotten us nowhere

067it has not given this student the help that he needs or put them in a place where he is that is better suited for them and there's just a couple things i'd like to mention and that is that in the fall it was his fists and words and this time it turned into weapons he dismantled a pvc structure and used one of the pvc sticks as a weapon he was given a carabiner to use as breast knuckles what happens next time i feel like the student has no place at stargate admin has done very little to keep the students safe we were offered no safety plan um and sorry a couple notes here um if our normal kids were violent then they would um no longer be at the school and that's the sad thing

068is the student is more protected than any of the victims and we have a building full of that's a droid building i'm sure you all are familiar with our drape building there are many many things in there that could be used as a weapon and turned into a weapon so where does this stop for this student and i know that there are things in place even when adults had eyes on this student it didn't stop so i'm asking for your help in taking a stronger disciplinary role in what happens to perpetrators in the school environment thank you excuse me my name is molly happs i'm a resident of thornton also a stargate parent um i want to start off by saying my father was a high school guidance counselor for 32 years and has built

069many programs around the state so i understand the limitations that schools and districts have no school is perfect and i try to keep that in mind when things happen have realistic expectations um stargate is amazing i love the teachers but there are no checks and balances and the admin kind of does whatever they want would i have experienced with physical violence regarding my son at stargate he was first physically assaulted by a student in first grade at that time missy hitchcock was the elementary print elementary principal student got in trouble was held accountable missed recess for a week all was good next year same student physically assaulted my son again we were given to sarah muller to handle the issue and all that was done was she told my son and the student to stay

070away from each other which turned into my son not being able to play with his friends because the other student was he became on the receiving end of the punishment nothing was done next year another physical assault same student i let miss miller know that her idea didn't work but yet again nothing was done i had a teacher at the time who thankfully sent a note took it upon herself to send a note to the parents to sign but the admin did nothing i know of this same student physically hurting at least four other students nothing's been done it just continues this year i struggled my son was put in all classes with his boy i reached out to mr woldenstein i was told there was no documentation too bad i forwarded all my emails

071i was ignored i ceased mr henderson i was still ignored i finally involved mr gadowski who got things moving got my son moved out of the class yet i got in trouble for not following their communication pathways and was made very clear that i should have never involved anybody outside of the school i have spoken to so many parents who have stories like mine it is not abnormal the score forces the communication pathways down your throat and the last level of escalation is the stargate board who does what the admin does there's no checks and balances and the admin is left to do what they want or like me if we evoke other options we're told we're wrong the student involved in last week incident has had multiple other incidents that parents tonight have spoken

072to i have known this child since my son was in kindergarten with him at westgate my son was terrified of him then in westgate he was kicked out for multiple violence incidents i'm going to skip i speak today because this child is unsafe to be in a normal school setting and his history between westgate and stargate has shown that but stargate has zero policies in place to handle this student and to continue to allow this happen time after time i'm fearful of my son being there i'm terrified he will shoot up a school one day i guarantee it i'm asking you to put it in whatever policies in place that can protect our kids safety and not look at this as a one-time occurrence but a history of violence from a child that is at

073a school that is not equipped to handle this behavior ma'am your time has expired and no policies in place thank you so much thank you [Applause] the next speakers are tammy wilkins kim davis rebecca l noor together and then kathy henson you'll need to turn the microphone on and then wait a moment please okay my name is tammy wilkins i'm a thornton resident i've lived in this community my entire life i'm a former former graduate of north gun high school myself i am now raising my five children that all have all attended stargate since kindergarten one graduated three years ago and one will graduate from stargate this year my daughter is a freshman at broomfield high school and i have a sixth grader and second grade student at stargate my kids have all had have

074been wonderful students and we have had great experience at stargate i am grateful to stargate for their wonderful education i am here because i am concerned about the recent safety of our students and staff at stargate with a child that is crying out for bigger help i think something bigger needs to be done for him this fall my son in sixth grade was involved with a student that recently recently had the most recent incident also my son was heard on a recorded device telling his friend that he was his friend was being choked and he was pretty much saying fight back punch him back because of this my son was suspended we talked about what better options he maybe should have taken by going to administration or staff um and you know we didn't fight

075back i'm not one to gossip i i'm grateful for what my kids in the education and adam's 12 my entire life and i come from a family of teachers but um you know and we all felt we were being compassionate by not doing anything further because we did put ourselves in this family's shoes hoping that things would be resolved but i'm here to say that i think and i am concerned that something bigger and more regretful might happen with the community so that's why i'm here and after after seeing this video and hearing more about this student i feel my son and my students and the students there are not safe with him around i feel like he needs bigger help i feel after watching the video if he had a gun he probably would

076have used it that's how i felt and so that scared me and i sure hope he can get help and i'm praying for that because i'm that that's concerning so that's all thank you thank you hello i am kim davis i'm speaking on behalf of rebecca elmore um elmore we are both stargate parents she writes i'm writing to address stargate's handling of last week's violent outburst from a student as well as adams 12 response to this type of violence in the past and this incident the child who hit a teacher student and swung a pipe at adults was allowed to do so because stargate has a fully enabled this child and condoned his conduct in the past for better clarification when speaking of this child i will address him as a privileged child or pg

077the pg has had a very long history of death threats to other children hitting punching choking children and sending one to the hospital and acting violently for years now children do not even report them anymore to teachers or staff because they know that the current administration at stargate will do nothing about the conduct it's hard to sweep under the rug that this pg had an uncontrolled outburst when he deliberately put a carabiner around his knuckles to punch somebody and after years of outbursts it does not mean that pg has the right to continue its target to terrify students it is not private knowledge that this child has identified as 2e or as having additional needs but having additional needs mental health issues physical disabilities or any other classification does not give a child the right

078to repeated violent outbursts at school i lost my place sorry conduct abiding children and families are being required by stargate and adams 12 to ensure violence and extreme stress and their academics are negatively affected in other words stargate and adams 12 are participating in abuse of children because they do not want to tell a family that the pg needs to go find an education outside of stargate because of his repeated actions and the trauma he's inflicted after the incident last week the pg attended the art show in the evening the very same day of this incident a different child who was in the same situation would not have been led on the grounds in fact they would have been expelled after a second offense and the abuse and trauma to abiding stargate children would have

079been minimal the pg and his family did not have more rights to an education and safety than my conduct abiding child through though a charter stargate still falls under adam's 12 in several areas i am letting stargate and adams 12 know that you have allowed this abuse for too long and continue continuing to do so i will need to respond with all the legal and constitutional avenues given to me as well thank you so much thank you good evening superintendent and members of the board i'm kathy henson i live in thornton i have two boys in high school here in the district i've been listening to some meetings recently and i also participated in one a couple i don't know six weeks ago or so i know i'm the first one to acknowledge how passionate

080and emotional parents can become when it comes to school and our children and i wanted to share a quote that i read recently that resonated particularly strongly with me it's uh by the poet gerhard frost as from his poem entitled the goal in parenting and teaching let this be our aim not to make every idea safe for children but every child safe for ideas and what i've mentioned before when i've spoken addressed the board is how much i appreciate your efforts and support of our staff to create spaces for all of our students across the district and how important that is for them to be able to access their information in education because they feel safe in who they are and accepted and know that there's a place for them because that's how they're going

081to find their place in the future and i think that so much of what they learn is aside from our academics so much of what has helped my kids become who they are are the relationships with their teachers and the free exchange of ideas with their friends in the classroom in the lunchroom on field trips and i value that so much and i think that our public education education system is is our hope for the future in that our kids can become resilient and navigate situations that they will encounter out in the real world and that that's so important for us to prepare them for that and i just want to say thank you and especially acknowledging all our teachers this week and for teacher appreciation week and i offer you my full support in

082continuing to expand our our schools into spaces for everyone so that every child can find their place in the world through their education here in adams 12. thank you thank you kathy that concludes public comment this evening are we good to go for a little while guys so lori i may just jump in and offer some information given what's been shared here so i know a number of folks here talking about stargate related disciplinary concerns so a few things that i would share one is that under its contract stargate just like our other charter schools has the final authority to make decisions about discipline we're often consulted to do threat assessments we're sometimes consulted that there's a special education connection to the incident there can be legal consultation both between the charter schools legal council

083on our own but in the end the charter school leadership gets to make a final decision so i wanted to point that out the second thing that i heard was criticism of our policy both at the district level and at stargate for referring a student to expulsion if there's been an assault or an incident with a weapon i would submit that same languages in place in all 14 000 plus school districts in the united states or something very similar in terms of practice i'm certain that it's similar because the supreme court requires before you expel a child that you give them a hearing it's so it's not a summary situation where dr kepler as the principal concludes that somebody has a gun in their possession at school and expels them for 365 days the u.s

084supreme court for many years has said that students have a property right to go to school and before they can be expelled and denied that right they have the right to be in a hearing to engage legal counsel to have a neutral third party hear the evidence and so what typically happens in those cases is that a student's initially suspended because we've had some brief opportunity for the student to give their side of the story about what's gone on the administrator makes a conclusion about whether there's a preponderance of evidence that supports the student violating conduct code or law and then we set that for a hearing either between in front of an attorney you could have an administrative law judge sometimes we have retired administrators who hear those cases and ensure that the students

085give and due process so that's not an adams 12 thing it's not a stargate thing it's a united states supreme court requirement that we do things in that fashion one of the things that can complicate quite a bit what happens in student discipline cases is if a student has a disability the individuals with disabilities education act requires that before you remove that student from more than a total of 10 days within the course of a school year that you conduct a hearing in which a team of professionals knowledgeable about the student their general education teacher people who are special education providers the principal all come together and they review the students behavior and determine if it's a manifestation of the child's disability and oftentimes those findings conclude for students who have behavioral disabilities of emotional

086disabilities significant affective needs that the disability has caused or prevented the student from controlling their behavior i'm not using the exactly right terms for this it's been a long time since i've been involved in the nitty-gritty of this and in those cases short of some pretty limited circumstances you cannot remove the student from the school setting beyond the 10 days during the course of the year there are some exceptions and usually the amount of physical harm that needs to happen to a student is a much higher level of harm than what most parents and staff members would anticipate in my experience to support removal so that's some of the legal context that applies here i know people often don't like that it's been one of the more challenging things that i've dealt with in my

087career both as a school attorney and a superintendent but it's a common challenge throughout our country and public schools throughout our nation where you have these kinds of conflicts that emerge the other thing i would just add is i think stargate it's ironic about two weeks ago i received an anonymous letter that was purportedly sent on behalf of a large number of parents at stargate who claimed that administration was being too punitive and too harsh in its disciplinary consequences for students and indicated that they would soon be engaging with the board to advocate for more restorative practices to happen at the school so i think stargate's probably in a similar position that many schools are in that we have parents who have very different ideas at times about what kind of discipline is appropriate in

088the school setting i've learned quite a bit since the weekend about the allegations that many of you talked about today i've learned more here in your comments tonight we'll be sure to have our legal advisors and people involved in next steps of dealing with student discipline issues at stargate bring those facts forward but i just think it's helpful for some folks to know that whether it's stargate whether it's adam's 12 or whether it's any of the other 178 school districts in colorado we have these federal laws in terms of due process and in terms of special education that often restrict what we could otherwise do in terms of discipline so just want to get that out there chris can i ask a question real quick sorry can you help me understand it maybe this will

089help some parents as well i know that we have some privacy laws in place but a lot of concern that i have heard already is we don't know as parents when the student is going to be back and that is kind of causing an uneasy feeling and so what can be or cannot be communicated i mean how how are these people going to know if they can feel safe or what kind of conversations to have around their student so i don't have a good answer for you right now courtney my interest is always to allow parents to make informed decisions about their child and their participation in school and their safety i'm also mindful that there's confidentiality things that sometimes restrict quite a bit what we can say i don't know if our legal counsel

090here tonight has any answer off the top of his head but we're mindful about this issue and concern and we'll find our best path forward uh in accordance with the law to share what we can thanks okay is it okay if we keep going for a little while can i take a minute just a break for a minute please so then let's take five minutes yes oh crazy thomas foreign yes um yes is yes don't is is either way um foreign we're going to go ahead and get back to our meeting thank you for letting us take that break our next item is mill levy oversight presentation 5c expenditures with the fact members and susie dion good evening um i'm going to just do a quick introduction uh we've got kathy henson and neva martinez

091here this evening to do the presentation you received in your board packet at powerpoint that goes through all of that they're going to then just give you some speaking talking points and updates instead of going through this slide by slide hi i'm neva martinez for all the new board members i am here today to talk about how we have updated our process this year this year we had a completely new process and through that process it created a lot of operational awareness of the district in the different areas and it was it allowed us as committee members to better understand each aspect of the monitoring report and really have a direct impact on what was being said in our own observations as well one of the things that really pointed out is we had a

092lot of guests come in for throughout the throughout the year from different areas of the district and the one that i really enjoyed was the presentation done by the it department to talk about 21st century learners and what they're doing to help promote that and some highlights from that meeting that i really enjoyed hearing was that they have done a lot of community outreach to those students who have qualified for reduced lunch and helping them get it services that they need and setting up some help desk type programs to be able for parents to come and ask questions as well as educators and what they've seen and i thought was really important i wanted to point out is that the questions they're getting are more about how to use the applications which really showed that

093educators are better understanding their technology and they're asking better questions which will subsequently help with preventing any cyber attacks because they're more aware of things they're clicking on and the devices they're using so i just thought that was a really great presentation and i wanted to point out that the i.t department has done a really great job this year thanks hello kathy henson again from the finance audit committee one area i wanted to speak about very briefly briefly are the investments and funding allocations for the learning services department with the from the 5c bond and obviously we've made a big investment in education technology which was put in hyperdrive due to the pandemic those are very necessary and valuable investments now that we're back in person full time we won't be leaning into those quite

094as heavily but they'll still have a lot of great applications in the future we were able to we've been making great updates and have new curriculums in math and social studies an investment in new literacy programming at the elementary level world languages and also our career and technical education of course those things were kind of already underway before covid19 interrupted learning and one thing we've definitely seen is that our investment in education interventionists academic interventionists will be even more critical as we are trying to fill in some of the learning gaps that have now occurred as a result of the pandemic one program that was delayed and not able to get started because of kovid is the new teacher leadership program which is going to be really beneficial to staff they'll be selecting teachers who

095are identified as highly effective with very positive outcomes in the classroom uh to become mentors for their for their peers and there also will be two coaches hired at the high school level to help coach our staff to become even more effective hoping to build a culture of peer support throughout the district so that we are we are attracting the best and brightest retaining them and also helping develop them into the best educators they can be and have the best outcomes for our students and of course there'll be a continued emphasis on social emotional development and mental health support one of the things i wanted to also highlight is the functional areas that we were presented with throughout the year showed no major changes to report to the board it looks like everything has been

096maintained and working properly according to everything that we've received and from all the presentations that we had and i did want to highlight that we do one of the observations we made was that we are keeping our commitment and our promises made in the mill levy to the voters and there's nothing additional that we would like to report today oh do you guys have any questions for the finance and audit committee anybody any questions i just want to say thank you both for being part of the committee being the board liaison to have such insightful and uh meaningful comments and feedback so thank you both thank you thank you thank you nevi and kathy all right next we have amy baca alert from ce president of cea do her quarterly update for us all right

097hello good evening it's good to be here with you all as to this week is teacher appreciation week and of course want to appreciate and thank all the amazing educators who um i think earlier this week i was testifying on a bill and said you know over the last two years our educators have shown heroic efforts but it's really heroic efforts in non-pandemic times as well our educators are always going above and beyond to educate our students and so while of course it's nice to have the you know little lunch or the cupcakes and the things like that that show appreciation we've been really committed in talking about what are the systemic things that we can do to actually impact the lives of educators um as we know as i've shared with you before we

098are at a crisis point um in our profession with you know a major shortage that we have seen the effects mr gudowski spoke to a lot of that today at the pebc event about what that has meant for our districts for our students the substitute shortage the you know bus driver shortage all of those things and so what i wanted to share with you all tonight about our ca work is a fiscal project that we're working on because as we know and chris spoke a lot to this today as well our funding is a significant challenge for our ability to appreciate our educators and to pay them a living and sustainable wage and to keep them in the profession we hear often from our teachers who are working two to three jobs just to make

099ends meet that's not healthy that's not sustainable we are over 3 600 below the national average in per-pupil funding in colorado a current senior has never experienced a fully funded education in colorado um due to the budget stabilization factor the mechanism the legislature instituted to basically underfund our schools every single year in order to balance the budget and we could go on and on with the statistics we are the worst in the country for starting pay for educators we have the largest pay gap um in the country lots and lots of statistics for us not to be proud of as coloradans so i think many of you know over the years we've come together in various coalitions working together as school boards and districts and community partners on funding fixes at the ballot because that

100is the only mechanism we have in colorado we are not we are not like other states where their legislature can institute something like a sales tax and put money towards education the only way we can increase revenue in colorado is by a vote of the people and that is a significant challenge as we've learned over the years so last the last attempt that we made at the ballot you may remember we actually didn't make it to the ballot because we were unable to gather the signatures it was during covet and that was a barrier in in and of itself but we paired up with a lot of national um partners to do some deep analysis because we obviously have not been successful at the ballot yet to date so with at part of that analysis

101led to the creation of what we call the together we thrive table which is a coalition that has come together that is really looking at a long-term path towards a sustainable funding fix or essentially a ballot measure so that coalition is made up currently of labor so cea seiu afl-cio as well as community partners una which is united for a new economy coppa the colorado people's alliance great ed colorado together colorado which is a faith-based organization and then some of our policy groups in our state the bell policy center and the colorado fiscal institute and so we are using a lot of that analysis in the national research we're connected to national partners um because we really recognize that you know that definition of insanity you can't keep doing the same thing over and over

102and expecting different results so we're really in the um kind of base building and education stage right now to really educate our voters and help people understand taxes are complicated and in colorado we have a lot of laws that make them even more complicated to explain to people and to really get people to understand and so i wanted to share that work to just kind of let you know that it's out there you'll hopefully be hearing more about it have opportunities to engage because this is going to take something that chris i think did a wonderful job today calling on the business community to really partner with us that this is going to take us all to solve these problems that we're facing in education if we want a world-class public education system we have

103to fund that and support that and it will it will take all of us coming together to do that so that is what i wanted to share tonight i never like to take a lot of your time because you have very important work to do but i'm always happy to be here and answer any questions that you may have anybody have any questions so i've been dialed into this whole um the fiscal fix too so you know i'm always committed to doing what i can to help support that so i look forward to uh this season thank you thank you good to see you all thank you you too thank you it's always good to see you too amy all right next on the agenda we have blueprint2032 priscilla good evening board members it's my

104privilege to just give you a really quick update on where we are in regard to our blueprint 2032 work as you heard president goldstein refer to her to in her public comments we've had the opportunity to meet both with our lrpac our long-range planning advisory committee and the blueprint task force in the last two weeks i'm going to focus on the blueprint task force and what we accomplished during that meeting so we really had three specific goals um for that meeting and one was to review with that committee and we kind of recap our fall work with them we did that intentionally because we needed to prepare them for the activities and tasks of that evening and we had not met with them formally since november so we dug back into much of the results

105of the community survey that had gone out as we began to talk about the academic visioning work that beau is leading in his role as chief academic officer we also highlighted for them some of the lessons learned that had come out of that november meeting and specifically what we learned from that task force was a need to approach the work differently traditionally long-range planning is done in a very facility-centric manner you look at the needs of your buildings you deal with that first then you talk about your academic vision and what we learned from that task force was a desire for us to do it differently to focus on what is it that we want for our students as we think about the commitment that we have made to our community and to our parents

106which is we will prepare students for the next phase of their life whether that be a four-year college and university experience a two-year community college experience in industry certification going into the military or directly into the workforce and the committee was clear start there work on your academic vision and then let's talk about the facilities so this really provides us the opportunity to engage with our community in a very different way to talk about what is it that we want for our students to best position them for their future and then how do we think about reconfiguring our buildings to ensure that our spaces support our academics we also then have the opportunity to present the task force with some options and ideas for them to help provide input and guidance in prioritization and therefore

107timelines with all of that and therefore once those academic needs are identified we can really get into continuing with the data and reviewing all the information that we have about our facility conditions utilizations and how that supports the programming use from there we really moved into an opportunity for beau to present version 1.0 of his long-range academic vision which is directly aligned to the data that we receive from our community our elevate plan our equity goals and really feedback that we had also received from lrpac he was very clear that this is 1.0 and he is not sure how high that number will go because since we are having the opportunity to bring all of these different viewpoints in at the beginning it is then our obligation to use that input to continually refine it

108and again that's very different than most school districts approach this work he also talked with the task force about a graduate profile that he will be working on and this is really exciting because in in addition to the academic expectations or graduation requirements of students it really talks about what is that profile of the student as they leave adam's 12 what are the cognitive personal interpersonal competencies that we want these students to have it's more of those soft skills they're directly aligned to some of the board ends that i remember us working on years ago but that's a great piece because it's really what is the foundation for these students as they are leaving us as human beings so that was exciting as well so we spent the bulk of the time really focused in

109on five different priorities participants had the opportunity to really dive into three of the five and really have some very good table discussion mo has all of that information over the summer we will continue to work on that and then reconvene in the fall so the other thing that we talked with the task force about was really kind of letting them know what our plan is moving forward and what that timeline is so our ultimate goal is to be able to present to the board of education a plan in the spring of 2023 and for that to happen there are four specific things that must be accomplished one is the completion of a long-range academic plan the second is the completion of a facilities assessment and that is currently underway the third is a creation

110of new district educational specifications that will occur once the long-range plan comes into focus and the final one is the development of a new academic and facility options that we can put forth to the community for their input and then bring to the board so that was our opportunity to meet with that group of people and we really look forward to the work that will occur over the summer and beginning those task force meetings again in the fall happy to answer any questions you might have anybody have any questions thank you thank you next up a budget update from susie i see her running over with her laptop i needed to sit closer to the podium um so this evening i'm gonna do the update is gonna be just a little bit different um there

111has not really there have not been any changes um since the for the current fiscal year the 22-23 fiscal year that we've been looking at but there are some adjustments that i think we need to discuss for fiscal year 2324 and some of that comes in also because as part of our monitoring report that you will get in june 2.3 we're required to give you a three-year forecast and so uh i was in a meeting just about two weeks ago the colorado school finance project meeting and we got some information they think is important to share so for we've been talking about inflation for that they'll be using for school finance for next year is 3.5 the assumption that the calendar year 22 inflation by the end of this calendar year which would be used

112for 2324 right now that estimate is 7 percent for inflation the reason that is important also is that impacts base per pupil funding so base will be increased by inflation so that's seven percent as informational um calendar year 23 in which would be used for 24 25 fiscal year is looking to actually go back down to 3.8 percent so there is a a bit of a blip i guess i would say for calendar year 20 calendar year 22. but one of the things that made that when we that impacted this year so earlier on we talked about for fiscal year 2223 that we were hoping for a larger buy down of the budget stabilization factor that did not occur due to the fact that there is this concern about the additional cost due to inflation

113and how that might impact what the state will have to fund by increasing base by seven percent so it was it was bought down less than originally anticipated it was supposed to go down to about 261 million and and we're looking at 321 million the original recommendation also from the joint budget committee back in february was taking fiscal year 23 2324 that budget stabilization factor down to zero and now that recommendation is holding the budget stabilization factor at that 321 million dollars so with this um there is along with the the district is still looking at having declining enrollment we're still using five-year averaging but unfortunately we've kind of hit the end of that bennett real benefit of that five-year averaging and we're seeing some larger declines so with both of those impacts we are

114looking at a year-over-year change from fiscal year to 23-24 of a reduction of 765 funded pupils in that uh we still would see and with a seven percent uh cost of living and a 321 million dollar budget stabilization factor we we would see an increase in our per pupil revenue we'd be slightly over ten thousand dollars over um almost ten thousand two hundred dollars but when we look at that that increase year over year without fewer number of students we're looking at about 14 million dollars whereas this year we were looking at over 18 million dollars so that same comparison it's significantly less in that 23-24 fiscal year the other thing to point out is we had almost two point plan this year almost 2.9 million dollars for the additional funding for special education senate

115bill 127. that bill was only funded at 80 million dollars and when fully funded we know that total cost is 94 million dollars my hope is phone 2324 they will put that additional 14 million in so i am right now when you do see uh forecasts for revenue i will be including almost 800 000 in a revenue forecast with an assumption that they will fully fund senate bill 127 with that additional 14 million dollars no other changes are anticipated for that bill until fiscal year 24 25 when then those costs will increase by inflation we do not get inflation in the 23 24 fiscal year you also received a detailed list of where we see some additional expenditures one thing um i would point out is that um anything that we have in any fiscal

116year that is a one-time that has the potential to be recurring so for example in fiscal year 2223 the current budget has five gifted and talented advocate dosa positions that we had to put in one-time funds we would expect to move those to recurring dollars so out of that 14 million dollars we'd automatically take uh we would put in those five gt ptosas other things that we'd also be looking at is if we needed to bring the bond staff that had been paid for by the bond the general administrative staff that we're temporarily putting in one-time funds if there is not another bond approved by voters during the 23-24 school year we will have to find we'll have to use recurring dollars out of that 14 million to fund that staff as well so very

117quickly based off of that list of expenditures that 14 million dollars is spent with step step equivalent and a handful of items that are going to be required to be funded based off of where we've built our budget in 2223. the other thing also to note is that fiscal year 2324 is also the end of sr3 and our plan for some sr3 spending and so items also that are in there will be funded that year but then as we're looking and you get that forecast also for 24.25 i'll be having to move any of those staff out of those federal funds in finding a home in the general fund for those any questions color commentary so the color commentary would be these kinds of future projections showing that we have strong headwinds around what we'd

118like to do in terms of compensation and programming and support are not uncommon what is going to start to become a greater and greater challenge for us as the downward drag of enrollment declines and less benefits from averaging so that is there are a number of things on here that may break hopefully to a more favorable place maybe the legislature does wind up having resources to buy down the bs factor i saw something today in chalkbeat where some are saying given the governor's latest proposal around property taxes perhaps they'll do some of that next year you never quite know there are some items like health insurance where we've been very fortunate for a long time now not to have a 10 percent increase but i know from peer districts that most of them have had

119a year or so recently where they've had increases of that magnitude and we've been able to avoid it so at some point your luck runs out so i think it's helpful to see this the most important thing for me is to make sure that we're accounting especially on the staff side for future years about things that are either funded by one-time money or with that we might need to curtail if ongoing revenue doesn't come in the way that we want i think oftentimes people just kind of lose track of these items forget about them and then they rear their ugly heads later on after you've already adopted a budget and someone says oh we forgot about x y or z so the part that i appreciate with susie and team is that they keep good

120track of these items so that we can deliberately discuss how to fund them or how to reduce them and that we can keep you all on the loop too i just hope in the end that we get some more revenue and beyond beyond what's projected or next year's going to be a challenging year anybody else have any comments or questions thank you susie okay on to the elementary reading resource i would entertain a motion to adopt the district's selected instructional materials benchmark advance and lexia power up for district-wide use as recommended by the learning services department so moved second all right okay gang you're up good evening board members it's nice to be with you again tonight we are back a pre-request to provide some follow-up information to the presentation that was made two weeks

121ago regarding our pending resource adoption for elementary classrooms in adams 12. i was not here two weeks ago so i do appreciate the opportunity to call out the work of this group behind me along with a handful of others on our district literacy team who did tremendous work this year on a very urgent timeline managing a lot of things simultaneously work happening at the state level going out and visiting uh work that's underway at a lot of other front range districts engaging a variety of stakeholders that got us to a point tonight um to move forward with a request for resource adoption that we think is representative of what we need in our classrooms aligned to our commitment to the science of reading and well-vetted and anticipated by our stakeholders particularly our teachers and administrators

122here in adams 12. so we tonight are going to not rehash by the way i think we win the award for most attachments in board docs tonight when i looked at it we added one more from what we provided you last week which is this powerpoint where we're going to touch on a few pieces we're going to give you some more financial details about this resource adoption we're going to share what we know right now about first steps with implementation and professional learning for both administrators and teachers some idea of what the early stages are going to look like for that work we'll talk a little bit about uh parent engagement opportunities and notifications some pending work that we hope to have with an outside consultant and then of course we'll be happy to take

123some questions so i'm going to turn it over to the stars of the show here going to take you through the information we have tonight all right good evening board um just a little bit of a refresher last time we were in front of you you'll remember that we brought two resources for you both benchmark advance and lexia powerup both of these resources are on cde's approved advisory list and both aligned to the science of reading benchmark advanced is one of the core reading resources and then lexia is a supplemental resource and included in your board docs are how both of those scored with our 6230 committee and then also the comments from that committee and both were unanimously brought forward by that committee process so you can certainly um refer to those in all

124the numerous board docs that we gave you this time around um included this time as beau mentioned we have some financial information for you we are requesting with benchmark advance three just a little over 3.9 million for purchase of these resources in all of our elementary schools and k-8s and when you're in your board docs if you click on that dollar amount it gives you a little bit more depth and detail about exactly what that will be including at each grade level but there's a summary as well on this slide it is both the print and the hard copy of the resources in the first year for all of our elementaries and k-8s and then we also receive benchmarks phonics program is on the supplemental list and we receive that as well as part of

125this program purchase in kinder and k1 we're planning for 25 students per classroom which fits with what we have worked with matt shafer and our projections department in able to see that we'll have enough resources both for all of the student consumables and the my reading my writing consumables for our students and then when we get to grades two through five we're planning on 30 students for those consumable texts and then we also you can see in our purchasing we receive all the decodable readers and there's 39 titles of decodable readers in kinder and 72 titles of decodable readers when we get to first grade so we're getting quite a few texts and quite a few consumables for students as part of this purchase and part of this package and again the consumables are part

126of the ongoing purchase that we'll receive year after year as part of the six-year package so when we were negotiating with them we're getting quite a lot because of the six-year agreement when we look at funding sources how we anticipate paying for this because this is a pretty hefty dollar amount we do plan on taking 3.5 million from our elementary and secondary esser funds the emergency school relief funds and then 500 000 from our curriculum and textbook account that we have here at the district you'll notice later that we would like to if we receive this grant you'll have on our your consent agenda the opportunity to um approve consent for this grant and if we receive it it would offset 500 of or 500 boy that wouldn't be a lot 500 000 um of

127this total expense which would be outstanding so we're really looking to offset any potential expenses that are associated with this because it's a pretty hefty purchase as i mentioned also included as we were negotiating with benchmark advanced we receive some professional development that goes along with the resource for the first three hundred thousand dollars that we spend we get one free day of professional development that is provided and that's included up to the first 25 days of pd now that sounds like a lot but it'll be you know utilized pretty quickly because we like to keep our pd sessions small and meaningful for our teachers and so we'll you know pair many of those professional development opportunities or days together for our teachers here in may which trina will be talking about and also in

128august for our teachers so that they have again small pd sessions meaningful opportunities to engage around the resource and how the resource can be implemented in their classroom and really how to have the appropriate professional development to support the science of reading in implementation but then we also have negotiated that any additional professional development days that we would ask or or need them for would be at two thousand eight hundred dollars so you're going to hear trina here talk about um what our plans are for implementation of professional development thank you kim good evening members of the board great to see you again so talking a little bit about professional learning i think one thing that's important for you all to know a value that we have on our team is the importance of curriculum

129and instructional materials but we value more how the teacher uses those materials and that curriculum in their classroom and as such all of our professional learning that we have designed so far really will be in service of supporting teachers and principals as we move toward this implementation not just of the resource but the evidence and scientifically based reading instructional practices and so in may we have our initial educator training which i have to give kudos to benchmark because they've got the trainers in place i've probably met with them for about four hours and they don't know for sure that we have approved them so a little shout out to them for being so flexible with us but we are planning k1 sessions second grade sessions and three through five sessions next friday those will be

130live virtual sessions that we've planned collaboratively but they've really taken the lead based on their resource and their experience in knowing what will set teachers up to be most successful now so that they feel confident as they can coming back in august and really digging into the planning we have then a principal meeting well i shouldn't say then the day before that we have a principal meeting where we're going to get into some beginning conversations around the vision of the elementary literacy block talk about some high level look fors how that's connected to this idea around leading for equity we don't want our principals to feel like we have all of these siloed initiatives but rather how do these come together in service of increased performance and growth for all of our students we'll talk

131about expectations for resource use our current thinking in that space and then we'll share some daily schedule recommendations which we have shared with you in your board presentation we'll talk about master schedule implications as there are always a lot of considerations when we think about serving students who are multilingual learners thinking about students who might be on ieps or need intervention we want to be really thoughtful about what are we pulling them out for and why are we pulling them out for that and then we'll also talk with principals about our initial professional learning plan and then connected to this ongoing read act training updates linked in this presentation is our most recent communication to ensure that everybody is getting the information about how to submit their documentation where to submit their documentation what the

132timeline is so we'll we'll have another go at it with principals on that thursday and then june 2nd or june 8th principals get to choose they will attend a session we're calling it a literacy leadership session with their instructional coach and we're going to go a little bit deeper we'll spend half the time really thinking about the high level learning around evidence and scientifically based reading practices what to look for how to set up the conditions in your building so that teachers feel psychologically and physiologically safe to start to take those risks and be in a learner's stance and then we'll spend the next part of the time thinking about the resource and digging into the resource material so that principals also have at a high level here's what i would expect to see k5

133across my classrooms here what i here's what i would expect to hear as teachers are planning and here's what i would expect to note and notice from students as they're in classrooms so that's kind of our high level piece coming up soon and then as we thought about professional development continuing we do have a session tentatively planned for august 10th that is prior to our students coming back and those sessions will again be grade banded so we'll have k1 together again second grade fifth third through fifth grade we're going to do 90 minutes again live virtual and then there'll be some supporting planning documents and some structured time for teachers to work in their buildings directly connected to what that professional learning is instructional coaches and administrators will also be part of that and supporting

134what that will look like we have two early release meetings every month will be dedicated to reading instruction it doesn't mean that every teacher will be coming in on those wednesdays and only talking about reading what it means is there might be opportunities for schools to say hey we need some more support from benchmark advance we're really focused on our reading instruction time this second wednesday we have five or six other schools that need the same thing we band them together and then we can provide that just-in-time support it also might mean that building leaders are dedicating that time for data-driven instruction conversations where teachers are beginning to bring some of the student work directly connected to implementation looking at through a pretty facilitated protocol are students making growth yes great let's keep let's keep

135going no they're not what do we need to adjust and how do we ensure that we're catching catching that sooner before the gap widens even more it also might look like that just in time support based on what we do with instructional leadership teams so just just knowing that we have that very predictable routine that will start in august and continue all the way through next may we also plan to host some huddle calls that's an idea that's come out of adaptive schools and it's really centered around if we have problems of practice popping up across the system and there's some that are in common and we know that it's not something we would do with our instructional leadership team a whole school might not need it we can put out a virtual huddle call

136and have a group of teachers come together and meet with you know a reading expert an instructional coach someone on my team someone on marie's team to work through that in common problem of practice before school after school if there's any common planning so we're going to give that a go and and see if we might get some traction in that space just to make sure teachers are getting what they need when they need it and then we have plans for our digital literacy partners and they'll participate in some professional learning that's very specific to the online and digital resources available on the benchmark universe platform we don't want any educators in the system feeling like they have to go back and implement every print and digital resource that's available to them right now and

137so we'll work closely with all with our digital literacy partners to ensure that we have a slow and responsive implementation there and that we're meeting the needs of our of our buildings and our individual teachers and then as always that sub subsequent professional learning is needed we will rely heavily on feedback from our teachers and our principals in terms of what we might need to adjust add revise to ensure that we have a successful implementation so moving into the recommended instructional minutes for our literacy block i won't go into too much detail here but obviously happy to answer some questions we did not change the amount of instructional minutes dedicated to literacy we at the elementary level in particular have to be really careful that we don't take away important math instruction science instruction social

138studies instruction the sel time lunch electives and so we didn't adjust any of that time in terms of what's available what we did adjust and align to was the instructional model and framework that lives within benchmark advance and that really is a nuanced piece that could be different for some of our educators in that there's a lesson where the teacher maybe has the whole group teaches a very direct lesson for 10 to 15 minutes and the students have immediate practice time right after that then we come back the teacher teaches you know maybe some vocabulary does a read aloud and then the students go back and immediately practice that is different than the traditional i teach all of my whole group reading for a prolonged period of time and then students have literacy stations or

139literacy centers for 45 minutes and so there'll be some adjustments and some conversations that we'll have in that space we do have places where teachers are already practicing and trying that out but it might be new for some of our teachers when we think about progress monitoring year one of implementation as i alluded to before our main goal is to ensure that we really have that safe environment for teachers to be in the learning zone and really understanding not only the resource but really understanding that thinking about the instructional vision so that they can adjust their practices as needed based on the needs of their students and based on what we know about evidence and scientifically based instruction some anticipated data sources will be that of walk through data where we're walking through as teams

140or individuals with building leaders with instructional coaches ensuring that we have implementation with integrity and also calibrating our understanding of really what does that mean to have high quality instructional practice aligned to those evidence in scientifically based reading reading instruction and then we don't know what we're going to call this yet so we call it implementation advisory committee not sure what the name will actually be but that's really when we think about getting a feedback from everyone who is part of this big project how do we ensure that educators voice principal voice learning services voice continue to be at the table to and guide and inform what we need to do to ensure not only successful implementation but that we're getting at what our students need what do our educators need what do our students

141need to ensure that we're moving this work forward and then we'll always be analyzing our data assessment data as my friends in the assessment department continue to tell me it's not a typical to see an implementation dip in that in the performance date of the first year we don't want to not going for that but it's it's not atypical when we think about subsequent years we want to continue we were on kind of on track for this we want to continue to decrease the percentage of students that score below that significant reading deficiency cut point as set forth by the state and we also want to continue to decrease the percentage of students scoring below that cut point at a rate that's greater than the state and then continue our increased growth and achievement metrics

142hard to put in number there until we see where where our data falls on map in grades first through fifth and then c mass grades three through five and then we'll continue to really um deepen our own understanding around the bench the assessments that live within benchmark and make sure that we're really thinking about how to use those with intention and thoughtfully so that we're not in this assessing all the time in the absence of teaching and we'll leverage our ongoing professional learning and utilize assessments to to also help us progress monitor the effectiveness of the implementation good evening superintendent chris godowski on board i want to talk to you this evening about our process and engagement with parents throughout this process from the onset with our reading advisory committee we have engaged with parents

143and have them come alongside us and part of that is just really important for us for parents and families to have an understanding of as we engage as this work we really want to look at the resources and think about how are these resources supporting you and the work that you're leading with your students and your children at home in this parent communication process we have had opportunities for the materials to be available through our 6230 process where families were invited to come in review the resources as well as provide feedback along with that we thought it was very important as we make this transition to implementing our new resource throughout our system to have families be engaged in in-person opportunities so we held evening opportunities where families were able to come in meet with

144vendors ask questions take a look at scientifically based practices alongside the curriculum and really begin to think about how these resources would support their students at home also throughout this process we have been able to think about how do we include information on our website to update and send out communication as well as we are working on developing a principal toolkit which will provide principles with communication to send out at the school level along with classroom teachers to be able to send out classroom level information to families as well additionally we're really excited that benchmark advance has weekly newsletters and communication to families that would provide ongoing communication with regard to the learning that their students are experiencing in over 13 languages so we're very excited that this resource provides that access and entry point

145so that we ensure that all families and all students are able to have that partnership with students families and school we know that you've also received this communication and this powerpoint ahead of time so for your review we have continued collaboration with our adams 12 kid group and we're very excited to continue with this work good evening my name is heather gracias for those of you that i haven't had the opportunity to meet i'm the executive director of special populations it's great to be here tonight i want to talk to you a little bit about our lexia powerup program this slide indicates the financial expenditures that we will be using for students with disabilities we have selected the silver package which includes our 500 student subscriptions some support for district my district team in looking

146at data and analyzing trends across the district and then some school success partnership subscriptions which is when the lexia folks come and meet with our schools and dig into the individual school data and help to problem solve so this is just a little bit of information on what the district-level partnership and school-level partnership looks like so there's some technical setup a strategy meeting which happens before implementation of lexia a success planning meeting which really helps the district and schools to identify what this looks like and sounds like whenever we're implementing it gives us access to alexia academy which is webinars that our teachers can take and district level staff and then national live online which are asynchronous on-demand pd opportunities so this is just a description of the district level and leader and educator level

147supports with the time required a brief description and the professional learning and support that's offered to both the district and school level teams one of the things that we're pleased about with lexia is the kind of loose and tight approach to their professional development so we have the success planning meeting we move into implementation down to the bottom and have the lexia academy and national live online back up to do a little bit more professional learning as we continue our growth in utilizing this program back down to having those supports of lexia and live online then we have the success matrix strategy meeting which is when we actually look at the data from our students at a large system level and at an individual school level and then provide more professional learning to our teachers

148and other educators and then back up to having data reviews to look at how our students are doing so we're excited about this different level of support and professional development throughout the first year of implementation in student support services we create professional development plans that have two areas of focus for the next year one that is the analysis of data that serves as the foundation for our instruction for the rema for our students with disabilities and our second focus area is that students with disabilities require cohesive and coherent instruction that's intentionally facilitated collaboratively by adults who leverage strengths so those are our two overarching focus areas and then our learning targets for both elementary and k-8 learning specialists as well as secondary learning specialists is really focused throughout the year on deepening our knowledge of

149the science of reading and leveraging those instructional resources to give our students a full continuum of intervention that they require so as far as the lexia professional development plan we'll have a half day training with lexia on august 10th for our middle level and august 12th for our high school level and then the first erd of the month for elementary and second erd of the month for our secondary folks will be surrounded with assessments how to utilize the resources and then how to reflect the type of goals that our students need and the services that they require within their iep so our hope is to weave the information that we're giving given with lexia as well as instructional practices the data that we require to make instructional decisions for our students and then how we

150document that in an iep we will have coaching cycles by our two instructional specialists for those buildings who are implementing this and then for any teacher that is needing more individual support our instructional specialists will help to provide that for them so as we progress monitor the use of lexia we will be using the information that we gather through coaching cycles um we too have instructional checklists that our administrators and district level staff can utilize as we walk classrooms we have to report quarterly on progress towards all iep goals so that will be another avenue for us to look at to see progress towards the implementation of this resource we are very hopeful next year we're going to be focusing on content of ieps and what develops what makes a high quality instructionally sound iep

151and so our hope is that we will start to see this type of learning reflected in present levels and evaluation reports and goals and services for students with disabilities we'll love to see explicit alignment and collaboration between general at our general ed colleagues and student support services specifically on the knowledge that we've been given the assessments and resources that we have at our fingertips and then we have at the district level a team that's called csri it's the continuum of specialized reading instruction team and this is myself my directors and coordinators and our instructional specialists we meet weekly to really analyze data look at what we have as far as our continuum what's working what's not and where our focus needs to be so we're excited to continually continue to progress monitor this work we

152know that we have a lot of work to do in this area so we are going to continue to look at the components using lexia and develop our specialized literacy lesson components we'll continue our orton gillingham training that we have about 104 teachers who have completed that will continue offering we will continue to look at the data that from the lexia implementation and determine if we have a need for more intensive resources you have learned from the last board meeting that this is a what we call an orange level resource not the most intense but something that we believe will make a big difference for kids with disabilities but looking at the data will help us to determine if that's if we have a need for more intensive intervention we need to continue to look

153into vocabulary and comprehension resources that are aligned to the science of reading and writing resources that are also aligned and then finally i believe that we'll need to look at research and exploration into mathematics assessments and aligned uh resources and lastly the ongoing and continued progress monitoring reflective of what our students are telling us through the data that they give us as far as parent communication we really enjoy our partnership with the adams 12 kid group and we'd like to continue that by reviewing resources they partner with us and looking at the lexia program we will review our data and give regular and ongoing updates on the work that we have at the district level and continue to get feedback from our families our iep processes will inherently involve parents with our quarterly progress reports

154and then progress in partnership with our families in the development of ieps we have what's called a seac which is a special ed advisory council where we do give updates regular updates to families who participate in the initiatives that we have in our department and then we meet regularly with our arc advocates to give them updates on um the work that we're doing in our department and they give us feedback on how we're doing and what they see in the field so we look forward to continuing that okay back to me we also have a value as a system and have enjoyed the benefits of partnering with outside consultants over the years and i recently had the opportunity to have a very pleasant phone call with a consultant who i won't name yet because we're

155just dating right now um or maybe not even that it might be like pre-dating first name and the second bullet there so you're not so good at like secretly that's there that's thanks you just blew it because that's her but thank you sir um all right so this unnamed consultant who may or may not go by the name of heather she and i had a very uh great conversation it was broad it was open she has a lot of content expertise but i really liked her humility and that she's never been an educator and talked about things that um she is not his expertise in and i think i saw some potential where we could really leverage the content expertise and talk about the journey that we're on and we plan this heather and trina

156and kim uh marie's got some new work to do so we're gonna let her attend to that but the rest of us are gonna go meet with this quote unquote heather and uh explore our potential partnership over lunch here and we'll have an update uh for you on what that looks like before uh our summer recess so you asked for an update from this team you get an update from this team i will tell you and i hope you see this too i have tremendous confidence in our ability to execute this plan and make good on the shifts that director mitchell talked about during her public comment this is a resolution about adopting resources this effort is around making good on our commitment to continuous improvement as a system we know there's room to grow

157in terms of our instruction our teachers know it they're up for it they're ready to go we have many who've already completed the 45 hours more that are on their way to doing it and i feel enormously confident in our ability as a district to start down this road and do it thoughtfully and make it stick and on that point i think i'm going to spend some time some others are going to spend some time with our teachers tomorrow and they are rightfully going to give voice to both their commitment to this work but want to make sure that we're well aware of all the other things that we ask them to do in taking care of those social emotional needs kids they're still learning social studies resources that we just rolled out this year

158and probably didn't implement as well as we would have liked to if we could have all been in person and not virtual we want to make sure we do this well and not at a surface level and do it deeply so when trina talks about creating the conditions where our teachers can be safe in that learning zone because we're not asking them just to use a new resource we're asking them to think differently about how they teach how they teach students to read and to do that well and for it to last you have to have the grace as a system to let that shift happen over time so i hope that resolution was a resolution to go forward because you can see we knew like procedurally we had to get a thumbs up for

159you tonight but this is big work and we have a whole lot of dates lined up so i hope that we get the rose tonight and we can be off and running down the road with this work because time is short and we're ready to get after it questions comments shocking nobody first else when you ask all the questions so um well first off thank you very much for the update for tonight because i think it was really important um for us to hear and and to hear you all articulate your plans i think there's a lot of great information in there that you've included that definitely addresses a lot of you know the scary parts of the transition and so i do appreciate you putting in that time um i just the expectations for

160resource use can you share any of that tonight or is that yes i i can start and then you can chime in um i'm not prepared to share another document with you but when we talk about expectations for use it's sort of what i alluded to before we don't want teachers thinking that they have to use every print and every digital tool that exists every single day so we'll start off with exactly within the framework when we're teaching whole group reading when we're teaching foundational skills when we're in small group when students reading independently here's the expectation for what you're using within the resource for the first semester or for the first quarter and then we'll begin to layer on some new components as people get used to that first layer so that's what we

161mean when we talk about expectations for use as beau just said we have um elementary teachers that are feeling the like gosh i'm still trying to get my social studies going and now science and now reading and so we want we don't want it to be because of compliance we really want a deep commitment to this work and we want implementation with integrity so that teachers really feel like gosh this is making me better and when i'm better my students are better and they learn and grow so that's that's in general what that means when we have the expectations flushed out happy to share them so but it it is implementation using the benchmark and sort of their pacing of each day and what their guiding the only laura the only thing that is different

162is we actually have more time in our literacy block than benchmark so we have 170 minutes in k2 and their highest like pacing guide is 150 which gives us a little bit of like oh good we can breathe a little bit teachers can feel um like if their transitions aren't really tight it's okay so yes within benchmark here's the resources teachers resource guide student materials teacher materials try out this digital component this one thing so yes and then so and like when i've looked at our curriculum before it sort of has the daily everyday and so that is all going to be in relation to benchmark it's not going to be the things that we have in there today and and benchmark has some supplemental materials embedded in it and so the supplemental materials will

163be the benchmark that comes with the new resource yes so benchmark advanced 2022 has the phonics component embedded within the core resource benchmark 20 phonics 2022 is also a standalone that is included on cde's website approved advisory list so if there were districts that didn't want a core resource they could just buy benchmark phonics but it's included for us and that's what's used for the phonics portion of the lessons okay um and i'll try to be quick that's i'm okay trying to circle the ones today well one question i had was the adams 12 kid group and are the is there work that we can do together to try to help more parents get connected to adam's 12 kid group and i to me it almost seems like we need a broader that's pretty specific

164in support of dyslexic students and it has that title in it but for building some of the supports and helping parents understand you know more about science of reading and its generic application for more just struggling readers that we aren't trying to identify or label as dyslexic just trying to create a group of parents and it can include the adams 12 kid group but just to build that and help parents you know learn more about that resource and and get connected with that group and it's been hard because we've been virtual for so long but yes one of the things we've been working on as the team that i think ties to your question is we're trying to find more ways to invite parents into the work being a part of committees being able to

165raise a hand and say i'd like to participate in that i think there's a lane as we move into this work if you're passionate about literacy because your student has dyslexia because your student struggles from some other way because your student loves literacy and you as a parent want to know more about how it works i think there's opportunities to do that we're really lucky to work with joe's team who is excellent at helping us find new ways to reach out and connect so i think you're right i think the broader umbrella around it's it's more than just dyslexia and still maintaining i think the unique perspective that that group has for our work is something for us to talk about as a team uh which i think we're at a space to think about

166what would that larger tent look like that we could start sending some invitations out for thank you and the lexia when i first thought we talked about it it was for secondary but then tonight you talked about elementary and i was so are we going to be using it k through 12 or lexia will be for 6 12 um but i did want to highlight the work that we're continuing to do at the elementary okay so that's more about assessments and ieps and chord general yeah an hd word that was an approved resource is 412. so we will be slowly rolling that into the mix okay um and then i had are the staff that are going to be trained in using lexia and using that are they going to take the cde 45-hour class

167or so as you know they're not required our instructional specialists are taking it um and we want to be able to pull forward a lot of the learning that's appropriate for 612 and integrate it into our erd schedule and then i knew there was one other thing so when you talk about the iep work and trying to work on you know what's going to be in the iep and assessments and how you might measure and progress monitor i was wondering because i don't think read plans are in your yeah they're not in your you know under but it seems to me that there's probably especially in the early grades where read plans are some of them keep going on past that and i don't really know how that works but um but in the work

168that you're doing for k3 with ieps and sort of sharing that with the read plan and seeing what synergies there are and how we can because i think parents your child might start first on a read plan and eventually move to an and just having that continuity between it won't be so foreign to go from one to the other or however they're crossing those boundaries yeah i i think that it's critical for us to be in alignment between general ed and special education and be able to clearly articulate to families the type of plan that their student is on and what's involved in those plans okay and i think that's well the one last question and if you don't know the answer that but so benchmark advance is going to be our core resources there's

169some supplemental materials in there as far as tier two and three and sped for k k-3 what are do we know what those tier 2 3 and sped resources are that are going to be utilized in support yeah so i will be finalizing a document that outlines all of the resources that we'll have available for special education do you want to address the tier two so tier two there's actually two there's some in-class supports that exist within benchmark advance and then students that are pulled out of class because they're on a read plan at their earliest age k and one our interventionists are using letters when it's appropriate they're training for morton gillingham or the training that they've had from the science of reading based on what the needs of the students are okay and

170i will thank you again for entertaining on my questions and for providing all this additional information i think is very helpful thank you our pleasure thank you anybody else oh yes anyone else sorry don't go anywhere because we still have to vote oh yes i'm waiting for this call to vote francis director assad lucas aye director goldstein aye director lockley aye director mitchell very very very very happily aye director potter aye so i think if the rest of the board would like to join me in a round of applause for these people for all the work that they've done give it a standing ovation you definitely have been very thorough in this endeavor so i look forward to seeing next year how this goes all right next i'm going to entertain a motion to ratify

171the 2022 2023 classified master agreement changes tentatively agreed upon through the negotiations process as presented and we have paul and milo so move second good evening we're back uh no new presentation we shared information with you last time paul you want to give an update about the ratification yep so we have our ratification vote is complete it was 307 votes yes to seven votes no lots of great feedback a lot of appreciation for the district and in that investment in the classified employees so um so with that we just say thanks for the partnership thanks for the collaboration and uh we appreciate working with you okay any questions comments call the vote director assad lucas aye director goldstein aye director lockley aye director mitchell aye director potter aye yay congratulations okay next i will entertain

172a motion to approve funding to replace 10 20 year old school buses four 77 passenger diesel-powered mountain activity school buses with storage capacity at a cost of one hundred forty eight thousand six hundred and eighty three dollars each for a total of five hundred ninety four thousand seven hundred and thirty two dollars two type a multi-function buses at a cost of eighty two thousand dollars each for a total of one hundred and sixty four thousand dollars and four type a wheelchair multifunction buses at a cost of eighty eight thousand eight hundred 800 each for a total of 355 for a total investment of 1 million 101 113 000. 932. wait the dollar is closed so i moved second paul or pat just call me paul uh we're both offended sorry guys well paul's a better

173golfer [Laughter] well uh good evening board and superintendent godowski let me be the first this this evening to also offer you a happy may the fourth so happy may the fourth be with you see i knew director likely would appreciate that um so we applied for a dara grant last year dara is a diesel emissions reduction act we applied for that grant last year and were not successful and we were successful with seeking a grant this year so what this does is it allows us to save 20 thousand dollars per bus but it still allows you to buy diesel buses so there's a reason that you see um there's four buses here that are diesel buses but they're they're cleaner diesel buses than the ones that are 20 years old we need those buses to

174be diesel because those are the over over the road buses that we use for trips to like grand junction if we go to wyoming our propane buses don't allow for under like storage under the buses for athletic gear so that's why those are diesel buses and then the other buses that we're purchasing are all part of our non-cdl driver program which has been really successful for us and has allowed us to basically serve students and and all of our routes without having to cut routes and reduce that which is if you're used to hearing the news stories every fall you talk about you hear about the shortage of drivers we have those shortages as well but we have implemented this non-cdl route program and it's been very successful so this updates those buses and keeps

175us in the transportation business are there any other questions anybody have any questions just a comment that if bo got the award for the most attachments i think this would get the award for the longest recommended recommended action that doesn't contain uh state statute but it sure contained a lot of numbers i'll take that as a win director hassan lucas aye director goldstein aye director lockley aye director mitchell aye director potter aye okay um five star online academy lease i will entertain a motion to approve the encumbrance of three million six hundred and thirty six thousand eighty six dollars and six cents from capital reserve to allow the seven year eight month lease of 1865 west 121st avenue westminster colorado 80234 to comply with tabor's requirements for multi-year fiscal obligations so moved second okay so

176we talked about this a few weeks ago we did pursue a shorter lease and the landlord was not interested in actually responding at all to our request to talk about a shorter lease which is not surprising but they did meet all the all the requests we had so our increased request for tenant improvement work was was met and so we're feeling very good also the square footage rental price the rental square footage price um was also agreed to so the negotiation went a little bit faster than we thought because they agreed to the terms that we proposed so feel like this is the next step for us finding a permanent home uh for five star online academy questions comments okay laura so i just wanted to clarify with patton with phil tonight we encumber the

177money for the duration of this proposed lease term but the lease itself isn't yet negotiated so do you anticipate the lease will come before the board at a subsequent meeting or is there some delegated authority for me to sign with notice to the board i just want to make sure we have clarity about how that will work as we currently stand i would say the lease would come back to the board for final vote if the board would want to amend the current motion and give the administration the authority to negotiate and execute the lease we could take care of it right now is there a motion to amend doesn't laurie have to read this whole thing again if we bring it back no we could just add um i'm happy to amend the motion

178to allow amend the motion to give the administration or give the superintendent and designees the authority to negotiate the terms of the lease and to execute the lease on behalf of the district is that your motion yes that's my amended motion what he said do you have a second second is there any discussion so actually there was already a motion on the table what we need is just the original motioner and seconder to agree to the change and the motioner was jamie and the second was laura i agree to the amendment and i second the agreement to the amendment it's called a friendly amendment okay director assad lucas aye director goldstein aye director lockley aye director mitchell aye director potter aye all right thank you pap thank you i just want to point out that

179that motion was almost as long as well so i'm practicing my literacy skills next motion to approve the purchase of up to nine thousand student chromebooks two thousand staff devices and one thousand student tablets to replace end of life devices and allow the district to continue the edtech one-to-one program at a projected cost not to exceed five million sixty four thousand three hundred and seventy dollars funded by an efc federal grant of three million six hundred and thirty four thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars and an annual device refresh allocation of one million four hundred and twenty nine thousand four hundred and twenty dollars so moved second hi hello this is like karaoke hour for me so if i start singing tell me to stop um last year this is our sort of annual device

180refresh dir last year we applied for an ecf grant which is a federal grant for um school connectivity uh or basically connectivity for students and devices for students to help support remote learning conditions that also applies to teacher devices so we were successful in that grant and getting 6.7 million dollars back from the federal government some of that money was spent with the devices that were approved last year because it took them forever to grant to finalize that grant for us we got that award in uh late january so this is the devices for the next school year and that grant will apply to basically all these devices um they were all covered by that grant that grant provides for four hundred dollars per device for student and staff devices the gap that's the um

181the 29 which is the district funded part of that is for the staff devices which cost about 1100 instead of less than 400 so questions anybody i just is this i know we talked about our refresh rate is this an alignment with that or is it higher this year because we had more funds or i didn't want to have to go look for the document to figure out what we had sort of set is the annual refresh refresh for devices or yeah i thought when we did all that when we went one to one we sort of then said you know what where the life expectancy was and what the rolling yes so this this is in line with that refresh rate so uh essentially this is to replace end of life devices so these

182are devices that were purchased uh before covid so uh the chromebooks are like five years old at this point which is pretty much past end of life we're planning based on depending on which level is using the devices for a three to four year replacement for chromebooks which is pretty typical in k-12 and so this is in in line with that these devices were purchased well before the essers devices which is where the bulk of our chromebooks came from at this point i have a question um it's been hard to purchase tech is it getting easier yet no it's um we've we've gone from what happens in the tech world and certainly with devices i think we're in better shape than with some of the other components that we need to buy we know that

183the devices that will if if this is approved will put in that order quickly and really what's happening is as the models come in they're getting sold so that like the bulk of that that model uh group will get sold from the container or whatever um and then they're gone and then what happens is the device manufacturers are coming out with a new model with a higher price and so we're chasing prices and that's one of the drivers for i know we added this after the sort of cut cut-off date for the agenda but for the staff devices that's our big worry is that that inventory is getting low for that dell model that we want to buy and we're worried if we wait for the next dell model it'll be a couple hundred dollars

184more because that's sort of what we're seeing in the market anybody else i was just i was really glad to see the staff devices in there i know that's something that was a real need so thank you for doing that um and i just had one other question and it's sort of related but um i think i saw where we're going to allow students to keep their devices through this summer but is it k3 2 k2 and i just wondered what their rationale was for why those guys so k2 the sort of the profile that we have in the district right now k2 devices stay in the classrooms and so the k2 kids won't take their devices home over the summer just to support the model that we have they take their devices home every

185night anyway there's a little attitude within the schools to to adjust to that but that's why that group is not in the take home your device over the summer group i'll just you know this summer may be okay because we really haven't started to work with that kind of getting students in k2 and their parents may be trained to utilize some of those resources to support summer reading and online and i think in particular for english language learners if they don't have english in the home that having those devices and being able to do audio books in the summer time might be something to consider in the future but sure a couple things i'd add there is any parent of a kindergarten first and second grader can request this summer if they want to do

186that i would agree with you director mitchell that i think as we roll out benchmark advanced as we add more newcomer and multilingual supports in our system [Music] that will see more potential for opportunities for our youngest learners to make good use of devices over the summer part of what's included in jeff's statement there is we also need to continue to support our kindergarten first and second grade teachers in their dexterity in using those devices there's a delicate balance with our youngest learners around the just right amount of time on a device and on a screen and when to really leverage it powerfully and not kind of revert to some of the things that the pandemic forced upon us that were less than ideal for those young learners but yes i think conceptually i'm with

187you the other thing i would add to that as we spent a lot of time this year trying to find the right device for those kiddos too obviously a keyboard driven device is a little bit challenging when we're trying to teach students that with manual dexterity and things like that so we've worked a lot with mary beth and the itls team to try and really zero in on what is the appropriate device for that age group as well knowing that there's some challenges with asking up someone who's just learning how to spell how to to type in the words to log in so that's a component of that as well thank you director assad lucas aye director goldstein aye director lockley aye director mitchell aye director potter hi thanks jeff culture and climate survey question

188we're going to revisit we were talking about the question about um grievances do we have any suggested wording i did want to let board members know that i added the email that myla had sent you can find that down at the bottom of the agenda item in executive content um this board have any input or questions or comments is this something where if we want to approve this we can make i can make a motion and vote on it or something we vote on or i don't think you have to vote on i think there's just just more informal discussion and feedback to myla and to myself about uh if this meets the mark or not and not something that we'll actually implement until next year okay so we good with the recommendation thanks marlon

189thanks so much okay minutes i have a motion to adopt the minutes of the regular board meetings of march 16 2022 april 6 2022 work study session april 6 2022 and april 20 2022 work study session as presented so i moved second any discussion questions director assad lucas aye director goldstein aye director lockley aye director mitchell aye director potter aye all right consent agenda i will entertain a motion to approve consent agenda items e2 and e3 is presented so moved second any discussion or questions director assad lucas aye director goldstein aye director lockley aye director mitchell aye director potter aye all right on to future agenda items and calendar um our work study session may 25th and then we have a little bit of reception at the may 25th meeting just a note we're having

190our regular our second meeting a week later because of graduations comments questions any