YSD Board Meeting 8/22/2022

001the meeting will be um up on the district's facebook page probably the beginning part of next week and um are we ready barb it looks that way we're ready okay good all right so we'll get started with the meeting um we do have a pretty full agenda today um pledge of allegiance ryan would you do the pledge of allegiance in absence of a student i will do that and i will add the character word of the month since i missed it last time and suffered serious um repercussions for that so please join me in the pledge of pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice thank you madam president um uh august character word of

002the month is tenacious persistent in maintaining adhering to or seeking something valued or desired the trait is responsibility and accountability thank you and i get to read the um god that's loud i get i get to read the yakima land acknowledgement today today the schools of the yakima school district rest on the ancestral lands of the 14 confederated tribes and bands of the yakama nation the people of yakima nation inhabit more than inhabited more than 12 million acres across adams benton chelan douglas franklin grant kittitas klickitat and yakima counties today we honor those native peoples who are tied to the land through history legends and culture we acknowledge their descendants who live in the world today we thank the caretakers of this land who have lived here and continue to live here since time immemorial

003an acknowledgement is a simple powerful way to show respect and a step toward correcting the stories and practices that erase indigenous people's history and culture it also honors the truth as a school district we will continue to build upon our relations with the yakama nation and next we have items of board interest are there any members of the board who wish to share information with the rest of the board members no okay what [Music] are you on the right day am i on the wrong day um it's not the 13th my apologies um technology bandits got a hold of my computer this weekend i guess so reports to the board we first have policy 3131 district enrollment and effects with stacy locke thank you president rice [Music] so this report is out of policy 3131

004and is an update to enrollment so barb if we could put that on the screen thank you so what i have here in front of you is five-year actual fte k-12 and ale enrollment some of the key points that you can see and it will correlate with some of the information that was presented both in the inns report over time and also with becky and jake in finance is that we've seen a gradual decline over the last five years approximately just a fewer than 600 students in the last five years and primarily in special ed i think we're about one and a half percent lower in special ed and then about three percent lower in elementary and kinder we look at our five-year elementary school enrollment trend these counts are uh taken on november first

005the preschool dip that you see is primarily related to covid i can say that as we've opened the new early learning this year that our numbers are full and that's very exciting that kids are starting to come back from offline and being afraid from to come to school and so numbers are beginning to increase for in-person learning if you take a look at the middle school enrollment trend over the last five years again this is a november first count and you can see that it's basically remained steady over the last few years with a slight decrease and then if we take a five year enrollment trend for high school probably what jumps out is the 2122 where again this is a november first count but there were a lot of second year seniors that came

006back in 2122 with the impact of covid and again we had more options for seniors to get them caught up and to graduate and so a staff focused in that area there was a great concerned effort to get seniors on track and get them graduated and you'll see that when you look at the graduation rate here from last couple years when we look at the five-year alternative school trend we realize again with online covid that numbers did go up if you look at yakima online ridgeview group home statin academy juvenile detention open doors went up those others went down and yakima satellite alternative programs are for students who are either too young for open doors or find the content in edge annuity too difficult so we enroll them in yakima satellite alternative programs and these

007are students who need hands-on specialized assistance in order to find in and maintain academic success through graduation so patterns and trends i don't think that you'll see a whole lot of surprise here as we move forward again we have had a steady decrease of about three percent over the last five years we know that our students with disabilities and our english language learners were hit hardest during our pandemic we also know that our online alternatives and programs increased for enrollment during that pandemic when we look at the state of washington we see a similar pattern in that there was low enrollment in elementary schools over the last three years as well as their alternative options have increased and then enrollment was also down by approximately three percent in our public schools implications over the last

008few years obviously our school district allocations are based on monthly enrollment counts which you saw on the first slide state allocations do increase and decrease in real time and then federal funding is based on our prior year's enrollment i answer any questions for the board any questions for stacey i know that there had been questions early on about enrollment or declining enrollment and i don't know if in the presentations that came before this one if there were if your questions were answered or [Music] not i have a couple of questions um the yakima online um increase and enrollment the last couple of years does that include the new online platform is it called soul and soul or something like that soul yeah is is that inclusive of that or is that completely separate separate okay

009so these really are just our our kids not the soul kids okay and then um have we looked at and i know census data is is is you know maybe doesn't break it down the way we would but are are there any county-wide or statewide trends that show that um [Music] enrollment that the number of kids in the age brackets that attend school are is is going down or you know it's i guess it's just a three percent decrease each year of overall enrollment i'm just wondering does that correlate are there just fewer kids in yakima county now is is that is there a correlation there well i have to be honest i haven't looked at the census bureau lately so i don't know that i can answer that question but i can definitely find

010out for you i think what we're seeing is kids not coming to school during the pandemic which really decreased enrollment and now we're slowly seeing kids start to come back in especially at the elementary and at the early learning where that was where a significant drop occurred parents are just afraid to send their kids to school they weren't sure the implications of covid and long-term effects and so we're starting to and then parents are back to work now too so they are not staying home to take care of their children so we're beginning to see in fact kelly how many students do we have that that came from online back in person in the classroom was it about 70s 71. kelly can you please come to the microphone we'll put you on the spot yeah

011i know she really wanted to talk so thanks graciela [Laughter] i don't know if that mic is on or not can you please introduce yourself kelly um kelly riddle i'm the director of admissions and enrollment hi um so our numbers in kinder are very low um we have 75 spaces right now for kinder we oftentimes see kinder families coming now to enroll their students and next week so it's usually typically the week of school and the week after school is our heavy enrollment period but our numbers that that's kind of our our place right now and i'm not sure if that is because parents were very afraid during the pandemic that's a state observation a lot of parents were given extra funds to stay home with their families as well as a lot of families

012working remotely so i'm just not quite sure why we have that kinder uh low number right now i heard anecdotally that a lot of families decided to withdraw their kids from school and homeschool them do we do we track when that's the reason that kids withdraw from school we do uh take the information for families that are wanting to homeschool but we are seeing more students coming back to in person and less wanting to go to home school it's not as big of a number or an amount it's really not even to talk about it there's just a few families that are coming in to opt for the homeschooling piece as opposed to a larger number during the pandemic okay thank you no further questions from any other questions for either kelly or stacy have

013we looked at birth rates for those students who would be coming into kinder this year was i don't know what 19 8 2001 17. was that a low birth rate year do we know that one of the things we we don't really know sometimes until things start happening so that we start to see that all of a sudden we have this really low number of or with the spaces we have 75 spaces district wide and kinder so that does i have been thinking about that looking at that but we really don't know it until they come and enroll what it looks like and again it's till the end of the month until we really have our kindred numbers because people are trying to tend to be late in enrolling kinders and what kind of outreach

014do we do to for kinder families that maybe this is their first foray into public school what kind of outreach do we do to them [Music] to kind of say now's the time to enroll in school and bring your child we'd love to see them i would invite kirsten i know that we had a campaign and would you like to share for our kinders what that looked like it's hot huh sure thank you for having me kelly and i actually worked together as a team and brought together a committee to work on a kindergarten enrollment campaign this year so we worked hard on trying to think of different ways that we could reach our community and our kinders we went as far as sending posters and information out to all of the area daycares pediatricians

015anywhere we thought we could reach families outside of our own district we had billboards in place we made adorable little kits that were exciting for them to receive uh mr gonzalez behind us worked with us as far as getting laptops released if we needed to do that so we were very thrilled to be able to reach our community in that way through a campaign great thank you we also admissions and enrollment i we went out to every building set up a time in the evenings to uh go to every single elementary school spend a couple of hours bring bring the treat or the what are they called tote bags um bring the i brought my crew mckinney vento liaison as well as the registrars and we did not have high turnout um i do think

016we need to reassess that and look at it but i think um we tried to you know advertise and make a presence i think we enrolled about 100 students during that time in the springtime for all buildings i think part of the low attendance at that and we we do have a scheduled debrief on that for next year was that it was year one and so the timing of it was you know we were really on top of it and trying to get these meetings set up so now having a little bit more notice and some repeated value to that i think we will have some good attendance to those nights yeah yeah sort of like eighth grade or sixth grade orientation night only for kinders yeah yeah we learned from what we'll learn from

017our yeah mistakes this year yeah well good okay thank you for that i think it's important that we continue to stay on top of um whatever outreach we decide is appropriate to welcome our families especially those with kindergartners it may be their first time in school into the public school system so thank you very much any other questions for kelly or stacy okay just a quick one and i'm gonna have to answer today in terms of that percentage i think it was three percent right every year we're seeing i think that might be a question for our superintendent when what is that threshold when we start to impact programs budgets those type of things so we don't have to answer that now but i just something that i that comes to mind for me is

018what is a threshold and when do we start to start thinking about whatever you know the consequences of a decrease in enrollment in the school district we did open the non-resident enrollment for high school we added a couple more weeks to that this year and like i had six this morning that i worked on so those are trickling in if you will so i think that's we look at discipline attendance and grades but i think there's probably about 25 students that we've looked at from outlying districts uh over this extra time that we've opened up that enrollment piece trevor i appreciate the question director navarro we do focus on looking what we can do to maintain and bring more students in to our system so i would not be able to come to you today

019with a definitive threshold what that would look like on the other hand i can tell you that the efforts of seoul are our expansion to the k-8 online school the development of a homeschool co-op are all opportunities that we have to bring people back into the district or into the district in another manner that will fund uh positions so i'm happy to say that we're always considering what it can look like to maintain in other ways to make sure that we have support staff and other other items in place to serve our students but we'll have to look at this establishing what that threshold can be is the decline three percent each year or is it three percent over the course of these last what five years it's it's three percent over the last five

020years okay yeah all right yeah it's right around 600 students over the last five years i think i read somewhere that across the state it there the average across the state is three percent from last year or from the year before that um and we didn't see that that kind of a decrease this past year no we did not okay i'd also just like to go back and talk about that threshold item because one of the other factors that we're not talking about today is what it looks like with our ipd increases when those flow through from the state and what that does to negotiations and then the amount of funding then shifts it's kind of a moving target so when you're asking about the implications of uh population dwindling it also then is in

021conjunction with where are we at with our different labor unions and how does that then coexist uh and how do we maintain it's it's really tricky so i think having that definitive number uh would be difficult in factoring in other items that are simply in flux year to year it doesn't mean we can't have some some parameters maybe a looser guide okay thank you anything else okay stacy kelly thank you kirsten thank you for your for your um on the spot information um this is good this is good information for us for the board to have in their back pockets when people start asking about enrollment decline and that sort of thing okay next now [Music] we'll get to where i was before and you all were were not um items of board interest the

022first number here is um reports from members of the board does anyone have anything to share with the rest of the board i just want to share when i commend the superintendent and the staff that organized the opening events today i thought that was such a fun event to be a part of and it was very inspiring to hear superintendent green's comments and our keynote speaker mr cruz is his presentation and speech i thought was very very good and i um it was a little overwhelming to walk into the space and you know two thousand people were were in the room and nobody was masked it was a little bit nerve-wracking but it was such a fun event and um again i thought the staff were very engaged throughout the entire presentation and um it

023was a lot of fun so great great job on that do you want to elaborate on that at all well i i held back uh director of villanueva i was going to have everybody stand as you walk as you walked in but i i refrained um i appreciate that i i credit really goes to our teaching and learning department and the work that they put forward in establishing not only our three key levers but then building an opportunity for us to message that collectively to our staff across the system and making it very clear that we're in support of principles and their work induction mentoring coaching and then also developing professional learning teams into professional learning communities at the building and district level uh so uh we have a very clear definitive um focus now

024uh laid out and uh i think that the messaging that i would have is that we are becoming laser-like uh in in the things that we value and put our efforts towards because we know that it uh leads to great outcomes for students so i'm excited about to see where where this goes in the next year and by all accounts the event this morning had some uh wonderful kudos across the board so i was able to speak with some other of our negotiating units and teams out there in the hours afterwards and people were very positive about the feel i myself have participated in welcome back opportunities here in the yakima school district over the course of my 11 years as a teacher in the district uh way back when i think uh ben was

025the superintendent when we had them when we could hold them in an auditorium that's right and uh this one i i think took the cake i did have a couple people that had shared and i had the text messages of my 30 years of education this was the best opening day that i've seen and again the credit goes to our teaching and learning and the work that they put in and making this happen dr rodriguez would you like to add anything i usually prep her ahead of time but i cut jenny no i just was like that's that's um i'm a little bit speechless that's quite an honor to have a veteran educator make that statement so i just would love to recognize dr ellis is here she's my right my right arm but really

026our entire department did a lot of work and coordinated with many other departments here at central services to make today happen the t-shirts were kirsten's idea and we we worked together on those and yes almost uno so it um it was a good day [Music] i'd also add that our principals did an excellent job in bringing their staffs together i think you saw uh lewis and clark jumped out with their purple shirts and you saw other other buildings that had already kind of unified and it's nice to see that kind of pride and one-upsmanship within a healthy environment where they're happy about who they are and how they come together and work and i think we're going to see some very healthy outcomes in in those areas we're excited about uh bringing to you in

027the in the next couple of weeks our our new staff members and presenting those teams to you great looking forward to that okay norm or ryan do you have anything to add about this morning no i think that's pretty awesome today okay very nice morning we haven't had an opening day event for at least the last five years at least and um a couple of those years were we know why um but it was it was exciting to be amongst that many educators and school district members of our school district family who were excited about school starting again that's nice okay good discussion next we have the superintendent's report mr superintendent so director villanueva is pretty smart she took that off the table so i won't have to elaborate on that so we're going to

028move along very quickly she's figured me out uh the update i have then aside from the kickoff which was just shared is that we have some dates for open houses so they do start this evening i believe we have seven different open house events uh and i'll be attending a couple of those along with my team after the meeting today so we look forward to going out and participating at adams mlk roosevelt mckinley lewis and clark washington and yb tech are the ones on deck this evening aside from that uh the other items that i have for you today are about our city ysd joint meeting and i believe that's next monday monday and the way it's uh shaping up uh the city is really interested in uh breaking bread with us as well so

029we're looking at having an hour ahead of time and there'll be a i believe we're 3 30 to 4 30. it'll be our meeting and then from kind of a transition period of 4 30 to 5 where we can grab a meal we'll have something here prepared and then we'll start the regular session uh there'll be a longer presentation in which we have a an individual coming to share data around a joint program that we participated in that'll take around an hour and then the other item on the agenda will be an update uh in conjunction with chief murray it'll be sarah cordova from our safety and security around [Music] handle with care our handle with care program so those are the items i just want to make sure you came with an appetite next

030week so we look forward to that in addition we have two more items to share one is around electric buses so i know that that was a topic of conversation so i was going to ask director beckett if his tesla came in yet i'm not sure not quite keep checking so we have applied for grants in the past and obviously the one that you approved last week in the funding was for three buses and we have there's a lot of funding out there for grants and so we're looking at the opportunity to pursue some more of those and have buses come in but i certainly wanted to give you a heads up seeing that there was some conversation about that that uh for going this route of bringing in electric buses you'll see more of

031those uh opportunities come before you as a board so at some point it might be good to have a longer conversation before that next uh request comes forth if the board is so moved okay so just a heads up in that area and then the last item that i would share with you is we have some wonderful calendars that we would like to share with you today that have been shared with the community so as you can see uh kirsten fitter aka vanna white is coming up here to the front to share a little bit about the calendar and uh the excitement around it so would you please on all right well thanks for for giving me a little bit of time at the mic um superintendent green for our board members that follow us

032on social media we've had some uh families chiming in as they are receiving their calendars in the mail this week and they've been really excited about it so i wanted to make sure that you knew all of the different elements that are included in our calendar and then i have one to send home with you today as well so um in the mail this past week we have sent out the 2022-23 school calendar and i'm going to share some kind of exciting things that are in this the first thing that you see is a magnet that is attached and we have howie our care character for the health and wellness education center it is a magnet that they can simply take off and put on their refrigerator to remind them that we do have health

033and wellness services at 331 north first street available to them and so that's a quick access for that we're not sure if any of you are dog people but we do have that yes i was going to ask if they're like is there a is that like it's not a real dog not yet one more for the house howie is a border collie inspired by um several several of our staff members who lovingly have border collies um i'm going to skip just a little bit so you can see it's an 11-month calendar and it's branded with the yakima school district branding but we have incorporated some student art we have the character education howie appears throughout the calendar and remind us of to wash our hands and to get our shots and to go to

034the doctor so lots of different things there we have some digital qr codes that are throughout so that you can scan with your cell phone and get directly to more updated information but the entire calendar is bilingual and bicultural in that you can see that august starts with english we have august and then augusto is secondary but if you switch to september the next month then spanish is the lead and and english is secondary so it carries throughout the calendar in that way so we have an 11-month calendar july is skipped since we are focusing on the other things sometimes in july but we have information on parent square so all of our families can get connected in parent square we have a 98 contact rate with parent square right now and we think that

035that has happened this week in large part due to the calendar coming out we also have attendance information and you'll notice that on every month we tell them how many learning days are taking presents in that month so the green days are the learning days in august you can go in september and see all the learning days there and then at the beginning it gives you a chart on how to remain successful with that attendance nice yeah and then after you get through all of the beautiful art and the months we have our school directory and there's qr codes and urls that go directly to their school calendars that tell them everything that's happening and all of the open house dates that you just got are in here as well so any question oh and

036i should uh pay a special tribute to one of our sponsors that helped us produce this which is gisa that has the eisenhower and davis debit cards nice so i'll give each of you one of these do you have any questions i just want to thank go ahead no go ahead oh yeah i think we maybe are going to say the same thing just when i thank you for that that work kristen i think that um having uh delivering something to families that they can put their hands on and see and all the information and tips and you know the the funness of how we and providing kind of those health um reminders i think are really fun so um i'm hopeful that this will have a positive impact on attendance overall in the district

037so thank you so much for all that and thank you for uh getting us a hard copy too of course i know that um putting those types of things together is a labor of love because you've got to love it in order to do it um so thank you for the time that you and your staff spent putting that together it's it's going to be a great value for the school district families thank you thank you it's our pleasure okay anything else yeah last thing i just uh uh i forgot at the beginning to excuse uh assistant superintendent anthony marietta is in negotiations at this time so i did excuse him from this meeting uh and that i'll turn it back over to you okay thank you kirsten all right um next on the agenda

038is a discussion of the equity audit this is something the board had asked for and i see mars marcelo as perched and ready to ready to launch here [Laughter] um we do you want to lead into this i would love to to lead in absolutely so let me make sure so marcelo uh scandalary uh is here with us today uh you may recognize him as our equity program manager and uh the reason we have the board discussion on the calendar is uh director navarro had requested time to have a conversation with the board so we have some items prepared depending on how the board would like to proceed we did share a slide show on the or slide show on the equity audit previously so we could go back and recap that presentation if the

039board would like to go that route we also have attached the yakima school district equity audit report itself but since this is a board discussion we wanted to leave that opportunity up to the board as far as how to proceed uh whether to go forward with a powerpoint to go through the equity audit itself or to start addressing questions just from the get-go depending on your you know your pleasure any input from board members on preferences for proceeding raymond since i i was the primary board member that had questions i think i would like if the board is okay i do have a list of questions and some thoughts i'd like to share maybe we can start there and then maybe not expecting answers to all my questions but maybe just a general response and

040how just to help me understand so i'm really trying to understand the equity audit the direction we're going and you know the purpose and and so forth and what we're measuring and and so forth so okay so since you're the one with the question sure so uh since that is the question i think that uh when you're talking about the purpose of the equity audit i think we might go ahead and go back to the slide presentation because i know that that does address uh the purpose they're in so i'll turn it over to marcelo to take us through a bit of that yeah and maybe i'll do a quick run through and then just uh put a pin in any questions you have or stop me if you want to stop me but i'll

041try to go kind of quickly through it to kind of see what sparks your interest or what answers questions you might have and i did update this quite a bit so if you're looking at the stored version it won't be updated but if you look at the live version then it's updated yeah um and so uh just for context uh as a district with a large ell sped migrant and latino population and free and reduced lunch students we engaged multiple stakeholders from aaron jones ers inside education leading educators to do a multi-prong to look at our our district and how we can serve students better in diving into some data points that would serve while we're doing that work you can see that our district is 80 percent hispanic latino students and almost 70 percent

042white teachers and that bridges over to our building leaders also who are predominantly mass majority white and looking at the outcomes of our latino students and our ell students and our migrant students they are achieving below levels of other demographics and above levels of other demographics depending on which demographic you zoom into um and at the end of the slide it's kind of like a resource bank of kind of state data you can compare to this but by and large we're we're lower than the the state data or higher in cases of exclusion you can see kind of the the programs and characteristics students aren't necessarily more highly excluded as in suspensions or expulsions as compared to yakima district where those minority populations are experiencing more suspensions more expulsions those who are homeless or have

043military parents or are section 504 so some of those inequities that we saw in our system along with our graduation rate compared to peers across the state and within our district the disparities in those graduation rates and sorry it's a lot of data and i think you can zoom in where you want to think more about you know how are ell students doing how are migrant students doing you can zoom into each of those and see the outcomes but the the large story is that there are inequities in the academic outcomes for our students compared to peers across the state and compared within our district between income levels and here you can see especially in loud is that we have about 20 percent of our students go to and through a four-year college within eight

044years of graduation um so about one in five um and that is lower than the the state average which is a little closer to forty percent um and and there's our state so we're looking at 34 and then another 13 getting their associates and that's at the state level um and uh and about 90 percent of those are persisting through that first year of college uh and looking at that broken down by female and male we can see our our female students have a slightly higher um completion of college within eight years of graduating high school and you can see the disparities in between different ethnic groups from yakima and again at the end of the deck you can go to the state and see that we are below the state and most if not

045all of these um and and so there's that disparity or inequity between us and those other districts across the straight state and so an engaging insight to look at that and give us ideas about why is this happening what in our system is happening compared to other districts across the nation and across the state they dove in with a document review of all of our documents a quantitative review stakeholder review which was taking out small groups and talking to those teachers uh community members students um and then finalizing that with uh with the executive council um and so that was the the root of it and i can go pretty quickly through this this next actually could you back up just a moment to that other one uh and my memory uh not too long

046ago it just happened today when we uh spoke with or we listened to dr cruz and those in attendance will remember that he uh started with the design of of school and who it was meant to serve and one of the things just as a recap is that uh i remember him saying no offense ladies but the system was not designed for you and he said it was not designed for me as a person of color and he said even some of our white males here that weren't land holders at the time it wasn't designed for them and the thing that he addressed where he you might remember he talked about the four ps and the four ps being policy uh practices procedures and then he added the fourth which was personal mindset and so

047he was talking about the opportunities that we have within our system to see where those inequities exist so that we can then of course address what those inequities are and i think what marcelo is showing you at the current moment is that those inequities do exist and then if you go back or forward to the next slide that you were talking about i believe it was the documented process review there it is so when we had people come in for the audit it was to determine where we are as a system um just in the definition of audit but looking at the funding uh of how we how we fund uh and allocate resources in our system uh they took examples of external communications and community meeting agendas they looked at our policies and curriculum

048materials uh and that's just in the document document process review so i each one of those talks about the different components so when we you know we we obviously had spent time as a board not only coming up the strategic plan but then actually working on an equity policy and then revisiting our definition of equity which was the condition that would be achieved if one's group membership no longer predicted in a statistical sense how one fares equity is the outcome not just the access to opportunity so to monitor and determine where we are in addressing policies practices procedures and personal mindset we have to know what that baseline is and where we're at and how we can then address each of those individual components to make sure uh that we're crosswalking uh the equity policy

049and strategic plan and other of the documents to make sure that we're uh closing uh everything within that statistical sense and reach that point where it doesn't matter your socioeconomic status it doesn't matter you know what side of the town you live on it doesn't matter if you're male or female because we as a district have addressed all of the policies practices procedures and personal mindsets to eliminate that opportunity gap and he also reminded us that all means every child who will become an independent adult yes and the definition i love the definition that he gave was at or exceeding grade level every every year at the end of every year very very nice message around equity and those supports in place back to you yeah and so looking at uh the insight audit they

050they put it into these five buckets and we can dig deeper into any of them if you want but uh for a quick overview of the the 60 page report uh distilled down to about five slides they gave us recommendations within each so for one example within structures systems and resources uh establish a district-wide focus on equity that is incorporated into the work of all departments and schools so actually integrating the work of equity into everybody's role so that everyone is an equity officer and the effectiveness of that is instead of having an equity department or a singular equity person everyone within their own position knows what um what most would serve students within their position if you're in transportation you know best um how to make transportation more equitable so if we put the

051charge on each person and support them in that then we will move forward more quickly more effectively than if we centered it on one person or one position so that's just an example of one recommendation from them and if you go through each domain you can see each of the recommendations if you want me to drill deeper we can uh and then looking at those domains if we cross reference them with the equity policy that the acma schools has passed our climate and culture leadership and partnerships talent recruitment and retention teaching and learning which were the four pillars of our equity work there's a lot of crossover between those and they gave us a lot to work on within each of those buckets and this is our equity definition that kind of centers us in

052this work into the superintendent's point this is about making sure that nobody statistically has a different outcome based solely on their group membership and that all groups are achieving at that same level and then looking at kind of a summary of those really it's about building capacity within the district and also providing supports and providing groups um and that work plays out in multiple ways currently in the district that we're pushing for this year and to give you an idea of what that actually looks like leading educators currently is doing professional development with our teachers on more equitable practices for english language learners or migrant students or students who you don't share the same background as in learning their stories and bringing their stories into the classroom and having themselves see themselves reflected in the

053curriculum and in content a focus on professional learning within the plc structure and as a whole district we are committing to that collaboration of teachers to better serve their students because each teacher knows best how to serve their students and so providing them the professional collaboration to improve as professionals and then building up a teacher group we're creating two teacher groups this year to come together as teachers of color who usually move out of the profession quicker than white teachers to create a support group there so they can problem solve and discuss what what it means to be a teacher within our district and within our state and within our nation and problem solve how they want to better serve students and better serve themselves and there will be multiple groups that are meeting around

054equity work in the district and it will be there is no district mandate on what this looks like it's teachers talking about what their practice looks like and what's happening with students and what they want to see and then a real focus on student voice if students are providing feedback on the system then inevitably the system is more equitable if students are telling us what they want and they're changing and pushing policies and pushing change in the district which we've seen this last year and the year before then inevitably outcomes will be more equitable and so that work is happening through our student advisory fellowship which we received the college spark grant for and then also doing student voice circle work at schools across the district so you can kind of see this is what

055yakima believes equity is is being more responsive to the identity of our students and our teachers learning more about them and supporting them in ways that they tell us they want support and so that's what it looks like currently and then moving forward it's really about creating more cohesion around what those supports look like and a longer term plan for what they look like um so that we see the progression in a three-year cadence or a five-year cadence um and setting that up as a whole district uh and so that's kind of like a 30 000 foot overview um and then we can kind of drill down where we want more clarification or have specific questions or um open thoughts okay raymond you're up i'm not going to speak that fast for sure so part

056of my my difficulty with understanding the report was you had the domains right and under the domain each domain you had there was a summary and insight summarized what um some research literature pertaining to that domain right so and then offered recommendations did the the review the evaluation then offered the recommendations so i didn't always see that the correlation between that research and what they were claiming to the recommendations okay and i'll point some of that out here in a minute so and i didn't think also i didn't think they went deep enough they went more surface in terms of identifying any issues with equity within the yakima school district and that's just how what i'm thinking what by reviewing the report now if you go to domain number one structure systems and resources right

057so one of the things that they said and i'm quoting from that summary right the shaded summary of at the beginning of the report that insight educational group inserted and one of the things they say that districts must intentionally design organizational structures and routines that support the success of historically underserved students otherwise schools may function as sites of oppression right and rather than places of opportunity so we just saw the data on our students so does that mean the yakima school district is functioning as a site of oppression right i don't know that they put that there so that makes me wonder then if if if we're doing that okay so that that's just a a side question also they said that the act or a district must rely on fundamental systemic change throughout the

058organs organization as well as the anti-racist police and action of individual educators and leaders so and then they identified some of the areas we need to work on which i don't know if they correlated with that those two statements or the summary that they had for the domain and they had some recommendations uh focus on equity incorporating all work of departments in and schools so as real general for me infused equity in the work of school-based instructional leadership leadership teams to ensure equitable practices so for me it's like i i really need a research question there uh what what is it that we really want to to dig out with this domain right so for me it would be how do the school and school district policies impact hiring practices and managing financial resources why

059do why do district policies exist right and what is it that they are designed to do to whom and and why see that for me that's more information that would give me more information in terms of are we being equitable or not in the district and then um how do policy our policies because we've talked about equity meeting meaning uh policies right that were developed like you dr green you mentioned that policies and education was developed for for a certain population of students not the current students that were served so how do the current policies impact learners families in the community and i don't know if that this domain or the recommendations answered that um so to what extent does the yakima score this recurrent policies reflect diversity equity equitable and inclusive environment how about

060leadership what what role does equity play within the day-to-day administration of individual schools and the school district to me that's more and more that's information that that would be useful for me what about a policy implementation impact how how is it currently impacting our students can we say that it's impacting the perf their academic performance i don't know but i think that's what we're trying to say indirectly maybe i'm maybe i'm wrong there but if we're saying that policies exist to support another population of students and our students our primary students our students are partly of color and they're not succeeding then something's wrong with our policies i would think right so that's kind of where it's just leading me to more questions again are is the academic school district functioning on a site of

061oppression like the this this um this group this uh well i forget the name of the group but um that they mentioned in in their summary and for me would be important to know what specific departments and schools are implementing equity well you know and which ones aren't and what are the reasons for that right i know we have some schools that are really low performing and what's going on why is that is it inequity is it systems is it policies uh what are all those things that i would think that would be better information in terms of of figuring out if we're at where that could be now number two insight educational group so it's culture and community so we need to develop a culture of racial competence anti-racist climate right asset-based approach approach

062that a culture that mitigates potentially harmful effects of policies and practices on staff and students of color see so what are we doing with that right and they talk and i would think you know what dress i know we've had conversations about student dress and hairstyles and all that type of thing is that something that's getting in the way of teaching uh kids in the yakima school district so how about restorative discipline i know we have a plan in place for that it doesn't mention that let's see and some questions i have let me jump in for just a moment i know you have a lot of questions but i i really appreciate the questions that you're coming up with and i think that in a large in large part the report the audit is

063doing exactly what it should be doing because it's surfacing so many of these questions from you and your perspective which is what we needed to do across the system so when you're many of these questions you're asking those are are further are further down the road and things that we need to fetter out and and determine when you look at at the system that we have of you know of our definition of equity and wanting all students to achieve regardless of who they are and that's not happening we that is evidence in itself that we have inequitable practices occurring and if you're looking at we want to find out which school is doing it well and which one isn't that is a key indicator for us right there that you know the ones that are

064doing it well are the ones that are exceeding that standard when we talk about all means all at grade level or beyond so i i wouldn't expect a a higher level audit report to get down into the finite detail of which you're asking i think that is the step that we need to now take as as district leaders is to determine okay let's take this across the system and look at what are the policies that are working what are other additional policies that we may need to make sure that you know things are uh equitable across the system or that the supports are in place so i i do think that this is actually the work that's happened in the equity in the audit is certainly not going to be at such a finite level

065but it does give us that opportunity to ask the questions that you're asking and figure out how to then come forth with those answers and change the system kind of goes back to the statement i know you've probably heard it before being in education every system is perfectly designed to produce the results that it gets so you know to to put it pretty bluntly coach bill parcell says your record you know you are who you are you're you are who your record says you are and that's currently where we're at is we want to know who we are as a district and we're comparing that to standards either across the state or internally we see where we're at and where we need to to to be more successful and to do that we have to

066make sure that we're putting in the supports uh whether it be a school level uh a team level a plc level or even an individual student level so that they have what they need moving forward it goes back to again to to dr cruz and what he was talking about when he was mentioning going into a situation where we went into the pandemic and we're talking about the uh one-to-one devices and he walked us through what that meant for his family and his three girls and how he was able to get online and get the internet that he needed right away and get the computers that they needed right away well that wasn't the same for every individual and we certainly did not experience that cons in the same way across our system so that

067was an inequitable uh event that happened in the lives of of our country but also then of course in our city with our students in our district and that that's just one small example so i i see these questions that you're asking is something we won't be able to come back right away and say okay here are your you know laundry list of answers to each of these components but it is something that we can come back and revisit and say okay director navarro this is one of the questions that you surfaced this is what we've been able to uncover and how we're addressing this across our system and where this equity audit came in revealed that this was an item that we're now pursuing so i just wanted to insert that because i know

068you have well that's what i expected from this um this report is those are those details not like again i believe that the recommendations and the summaries were very general yeah and i i then for some reason i didn't understand that from there we would do a deep dive well i think i think it's probably the definition of a high a higher level audit versus a fine because the the type of audit that you're the detail that you're asking for i don't think there's any way we could have been afforded uh an audit that would have taken us to that that level of detail and and if equity is our top priority then we should probably find a way to do that then i believe so but let me continue sure okay so in terms

069of let me see and i'm almost done here so in terms of domain number three equity and educated workforce page what's that which page yeah which on the equity audit i'm just trying to follow domain number three did i say so that says that most schools do not effectively recruit and retain educate educators of color teachers of color tend to leave i think you mentioned this the profession are transfer schools at higher rates in white educators and there's a 10 a trend to place higher percentages of teachers of color in heart to staff low-income schools with less experience leadership and fewer professional development opportunities so that's what the insight educational group included in their summary under that and they recommended a staff person office of talent management to to to work on some things and

070so again you know that kind of sparked my my ques what is an effective teacher is the ysd effectively recruiting and retaining educators of color i mean who are we focusing on and when we go out to recruit what are the current school district recruitment hiring onboarding and retention practices so those will tell me more about eq for being equitable or not what are the percentage of teachers leaving or staying in the district which ones are leaving which ones are more likely to stay those type of questions right um which percentage of teachers because this all correlates to the performance right or the academic achievement which uh uh are we placing like as insight indicated that most schools do or school districts do place teachers of color in the heart to serve or the staff

071schools are we doing that i i don't think so but they didn't refer to that but they listed that as one of the critical areas of it of being inequitable um or having an inequitable practices so and then they said something about a low percentage of teachers um means that a district cannot provide excellent educational opportunities is that i'm not sure what to do with that because we do have a low number of teachers of educators of color so does that am i can i say that that's why we're not having excellent educational opportunities or academic achievement i don't know so those are just again i'm just they're just sparing me to have more questions and then this one struck me particularly kind of i don't know i just didn't know what to make of

072this but um for me i know we have a mentorship program why provide that for educators of color in the early years only right as per if somebody came to me and i'm a very sure teacher say hey we have a mentorship program i might think i'm not prepared enough or competent enough while my white counterpart teacher doesn't doesn't have that or doesn't have to participate in that program does that mean that person is more prepared or competent we have mentor we have mentoring across the board for all educators so but but this this specifically says having it doesn't say for all educators so that's my thing is why not have uh and if we do then that's that's fine so but i just i thought that was kind of kind of strange and then

073the four is professional growth um it talks about and their summary talks about dismantling systemic racism develop the racial consciousness of educators i'm not sure what what what that means does that mean implicit uh dealing with implicit bias or or uh stereotypes and i'm not sure so i i think if we can define that a little bit more um professional learning that has to critically examine individual and systemic biases so that teachers can improve their effectiveness and working with all students um so those are and then the last one is curriculum instruction and learning that something about racially conscious curriculum and teaching practices are beneficial to all educators and learners educators must reflect on systems biases and practices that lead to inequitable outcomes and there's a tendency to fix students right the teachers must be

074race conscious promote student voice all the things that we kind of we said so uh just some questions uh to what extent do the yakima school district curriculum and instructional policies practices cultivate an equitable work and learning environment um and what ways can the district support changes to school and classroom curriculum practices what about academics how do teachers deliver instruction right um then talk about that how do how do teachers and staff interact with the students what about instructional material discipline how about working with fed students accommodations and assessments all those type of things classroom management all those things that are not at the 30 000 foot level those are more in the weeds right and curriculum right how how are um let me see let me get back to what extent is the curriculum

075culturally responsive and representative of diverse cultures to what extent is our fidelity to and accountability for it for implanting culturally and linguistically responsive curricula and to what extent our students and families see themselves represented in the curriculum so those are some questions uh what are the greatest needs and opportunities we that we have right to increase equitable outcomes what are some strengths in the districts i didn't hear a lot of strengths that were outlined that things that we're doing well already in the district so and then you know how about programmatic equity what does the data show in terms of student access and enrollment into ap honors level courses advanced are highly capable and ib program what are those are there any gatekeeper courses or programs that keep them that that determine whether they go

076into those programs what is the gpa to get in what are the other criteria do they have to have a parent referral do they have to have a certain gpa do they have to take certain classes the recommendation by a teacher i mean all those things for me is what show will give you more information in terms of are we being equitable in terms of those programs so in nutshell that's that's what that's kind of what i'm thinking i know that's a lot like very large nutshell yeah it's a very large one a whole bag of of that so but you know as dr green as you mentioned it dispersed some more questions on my part and again i thought i was i was expecting something in more detail i've seen i've seen reports from

077other districts and they were in very much detail they broke down all the stats in terms of academic achievement uh everything kind of the things that i talked about and so that that's what i was expecting from from this group and not not expecting a plan to figure out if we're being equitable or not or or providing equitable education to all students so um i'm not sure where where i go from from here on this but that's those are my current thoughts and and my my questions thank you well i think raymond you've given us a lot to think about some of which is falls appropriately in board work in our overview responsibilities in our policy setting and so forth some of which falls within the means area which is what the superintendent is responsible

078for um if i got the sense that you've written down all of your questions if that's the case then you could share those with the rest of us and send them to the superintendent um i think maybe at some future date we parse through those and just determine which ones are the board responsibilities and which one are staff responsibilities and then um kind of send staff off and to do what they do and we take care of the stuff that is our responsibility as part of this this audit report there are some things in there i think that are that do fall within our arena um but i wondered how that how that sounded to you sounds okay sounds like a plan i i think that the one other thing that's that's complicating this whole

079process is the definition of equity seems to be changing evolving every year right first it was about equality everybody gets the same everybody then it's like everybody gets what they need to be successful now it's dismantling of systemic racism right and then we had the training with wazda and they're kind of going a kind of a different direction including some of the the parts of our definition but really kind of uh i don't know so it seems like they're going a slightly different direction so i think that's complimented complicating some of this right i'm still my reference is the equity training that we did as a board right and and i know that uh aaron said that the the writing or the readings that we did was more this style right and more flexing and

080more in your face type of thing so i know that with the with the was the equity audit or the equity definition they they then talk about dismantling racism and and anti-racist um in institution all those type of vocabulary words or terms uh they they didn't really talk about those so i'm just wondering you know i'm thinking the board ready to look at that they did have a book yes that um aaron recommended that we do a book study on yeah i think that would be an excellent start for the board um i don't know how the rest of you feel about it i've read that book i would highly recommend yeah it's it really takes a different step than just addressing racism it really talks about empowering kids and students so it's it's really

081a real much more positive yeah yeah because was the attach the self-sufficiency part to it right and so that's the part i think that we're missing so how do we foster self-sufficiency and encourage that within our students not just say it's the system or policies or systemic racism or whatever you know the terms are currently so but i think we're off to a good start and and this is all good and exciting things for me i really love this stuff and i i really appreciate the superintendent and the team uh doing this audit and going this direction and really um and entertain my my thoughts and my my questions right but i really like the direction we're going because we do really need to address the the academic achievement our students because it's been too

082long that they're that the numbers that their achievement has been low right and so we need to do what we need to do to help correct that so thank you you have anything to add yeah martha i wonder if one option for us to consider could be including the equity policy the board equity policy as part of our policy governance cycle it's not currently in calendar for regular review um so that i think that that could be something for us to look at when we can determine whether it's an annual review or um every six months or once a quarter review what whatever that cycle is but i think that would be a good opportunity for us to for the superintendent and his team to review this with us and and what the plans are

083i think to to hear what superintendent greene's comments are that this is kind of step one and step two then is if equity is everybody's job then um each department head or whatever then my the next step might be that they begin to dig and produce that kind of data and so a regular review of the regular policy governance review of the board equity policy might provide that regular and ongoing opportunity for us to keep tabs on the progress of equity within yakima schools i think we certainly can add that is a 0-500 to uh though in fact everything in the zeros and the one thousands should be on a review cycle for um board policy review um i know in the upper thousands 14s and 15s 17s those are kind of quasi-operational but they

084are they do cover responsibilities to the board so we'll take a look at that and um i think that's that's another good start for us ryan thank you president rice just a couple of observations first off um thank you mr scambler for the additional info um there were extra slides that you presented tonight that weren't in our regular packets i'm hopeful that maybe we can see those down the road could send those to barb she can update the board doc's file for us thank you see you're on it thank you so much barb thank you that's great um because i appreciate that that's it's great data um the second observation i i in my short nine months or so here i've really only seen one school presentation where they talked about student voice from the

085perspective of how students uh perceive some of these conversations we're having within their daily life and work within the school building and i thought that was really really telling and really interesting um and um i have it at home i couldn't even tell you which school it was right now but i have it at home i remember thinking that was really kind of neat to see and i'd love to see more of that i know that there's been some of that work done um so that might be really helpful for us because i feel like a lot of this conversation has always been adult driven and um in some ways political driven so it's nice to see um that student voice added into it my third observation i think kind of sort of echoes something

086that um raymond said earlier as far as the equity definition um i can't remember a time when we haven't discussed this when whoever was discussing our equity definition paraphrase it in some way shape or form which tells me as an outsider coming in that maybe your equity definition isn't as understandable as it could be and i know this is probably settled a gospel in some people's minds but i would just encourage the board to maybe think about i'm really really looking at that um again and making sure it's something that really does explain exactly what we're trying to say um because i think there's i think that just saves a lot of a lot of time and and potential heartache in the process but random observations thank you thank you ryan norm actually i do

087have a couple comments um i think part of it comes back to what we talked about today as professional learning communities and how it isn't we create in a sense an overarching policy but how are our teachers going to implement that at the student level directly working with students how well do they know their students needs what are they doing to address those needs and another illusion i'll just use one example of one little piece of curriculum for example one of the things that dr cruz mentioned today was kids of poverty come to school they enter kindergarten with much lower vocabulary than kids that have been read to talk to had other kinds of experiences that we would typically classify as maybe middle class or class experiences so for example the last research i read

088is that typical vocabulary for a kid entering school of poverty is maybe 800 words and it could be less if it's an english language learner the typical vocabulary of a kid that comes from an environment where they're read to talk to addressed in in using language all the time maybe 8 000 or more words so already kids are starting with this huge disparity and one of the things i'll kind of kind of go in circles here is but i'll come around to it um when i was teaching element working at elementary one of the things that we did and this is while where professional learning communities come in we were having some kids that were just not making it in fifth grade and this was at whitney elementary school and what we did was we

089identified so you're having to look at the data you look at what kids are not performing what kids are performing and in this case we did take a deficit approach we wanted to find the kids that were struggling the most so we found the eighth the five or no we found eight eighth grade boy eight fifth grade boys that were struggling the most eight fifth grade girls we just identified them and then we said okay what's missing for them vocabulary they don't know what's going they're sitting in the classroom words are flying by their head they don't know what's going on so we got a little grant and we did after school vocabulary development and we took those kids and we used anita archer's vocabulary strategies for made it fun kept them after school sent

090them home on the activity bus we took those kids for like 10 weeks or 12 weeks and we pre-taught all the vocabulary they were going to have in their science lessons their english classes and their math classes so that they went into the next week they had been pre-taught the vocabulary they were going to be hearing in their classroom well guess what i wish we'd have written down this study not only did those kids perform better academically their behavior problems on the playground significantly reduce their behavior problems in the classroom significantly reduced and and they all perform better so it's that's what we do is we take you take your plc you identify your kids what's going on with those kids and you address it you you strategically address it and that's that's to me

091is equity you find out what's going on what do we do to address it and that's at the kid level and so if we have our plcs doing that we give them the tools to do that and get rid of the idea well these kids can i love the concepts he had this morning of well you're just not going to get away with there's no hope for these kids you know or you know they come from poverty they can't learn or love will fix it all our love will fix it all no i'm a big proponent of climate in schools and safe emotional growth and development and social emotional learning but bottom line is how are we addressing their academic needs and are we doing it strategically and at with detail and so that's a

092that's kind of how you know this stuff is is 30 000 foot level and it needs to be there as our overarching thing but what are our teachers doing that they have a sense of they know what is equitable for kids and that they're being able to produce it for them and so that's that's the key i think well the other part of that too is having a conversation with their superintendent's mother and with one of my former reading teachers and i said every teacher at every single level in the school system needs to be a vocabulary teacher they need to and they need to be checking for understanding all the time because that's the key kids need to know you you can't sit in a classroom and hear words go by you're gone if

093you don't know what those words mean english or spanish and by the way a bonus with these kids is when we taught vocabulary we also ask them what is that word in spanish a lot of them were english language learners some didn't know so we also we're teaching vocabulary in spanish and english so that's my story from the past but i think that's that's where we we have to get it to the level with kids is what do they need how are we going to deliver it to them that's the solution because if the words go flying by and it takes you even 15 seconds or 30 seconds to kind of dredge up from somewhere what that word means to you yeah if you're transferring then you have lost what was said for the last

09415 or 30 seconds and you can't you then continue this this downward spiral of not being able to catch up thank you norm it wasn't right forever yes could i i would like for dr rodriguez to take us through uh the theory of action and the alignment with the ysd equity policy when you're looking at defining high quality teaching and learning okay so she's uh thank you barb for projecting this on the screen for us all uh dr rodriguez thank you superintendent green so i think lots of wonderful questions and i think the value of having done the equity study that we did is that we're having this conversation here at our board meeting with all of our directors and a lot of the work that we've done over this last year as you know

095has led us to those three key strategies or three key levers they crosswalk with our district strategic improvement plan which as you know is a is a 20-page document with a lot of pieces but we were really thinking about what are the strategies to get us to all of those strategic outcomes we also cross-walked it with our district equity policy that was put in place a little over a year ago and so i apologize for those with color blindness sitting next to me but um but we did color coding crosswalk so the theory of action that we developed in the teaching and learning department right was that if we implemented these three key strategies of professional learning communities induction mentoring coaching and principal supervision and we provided access to high quality tools and those are

096called out in the graphic that you saw this morning right these are cross-cutting tools of high quality standards aligned curriculum curriculum maps and standards-based unit design then teachers will implement those foundational practices which are also cross-cutting and called out in that one page document that yes we did laminate so yes it's forever around culturally relevant pedagogy dual language pillars and inclusionary practices then that will lead to equitable positive outcomes for all students and and it is that outcome so i hear what um was shared around our definition and it is a little wordy and it talks about statistically blah blah so i completely understand the comment about our equity definition but the important part to me is that last sentence of our definition which is that it's not about access it's about outcomes so when

097you think about the outcomes for our kids and getting to those academics love is important we're not here to say love is not important but love can sometimes lead to inequitable outcomes for kids if we think let's just be nice right the kind thing to do is to hold people accountable to the bar to grade level standards or above and to hold our staff to to achieving that equity is about getting down to the individual student need and the only way to do that is for the people who know that child best which is their family and their classroom teachers to be able to address what those needs might be so it might be vocabulary it could just as easily be one of a thousand and ten other things and the folks who know that

098student the best are the best equipped to design a response a response and an intervention for that student to get them where they need to be so we did crosswalk it i just thought that would be helpful for you to see that those three key strategies really do line up directly with the statement in our equity policy i don't i don't know if that's helpful but i wanted to share thank you jenny raymond one last thing i i just want to be um make sure that our superintendent and staff understand that this is not an attack on the district or leadership or anything okay so these are questions that were spurred by this equity audit i understand that that you all are doing the best you can with the resources we have considering the pandemic

099and so forth and so on um i understand that and i commend you for the the work that you're doing it it's hard work my frustration comes from being on the board for 17 years and this on test scores right and for some reason and and a lot of it i believe has has is beyond the control of the school district right we and so i just wanted to make sure that that our the superintendent they understand that it's not a personal attack it's not i'm not saying that the district is racist or teachers or races or any uh that okay so i want to be very clear on that well thank you for that if you were trying to offend me i missed it so i i think next time if you try i

100i never take it that way so i appreciate that i don't think my staff does it okay yeah well i just don't you know when there's rebuttals or there's um presentations after then it seems like but i just want to you know i just want to be clear that about that so again just thank you for all the work you guys are doing and i know it's it's a arduous task to to get all our students across that finish line at higher uh test score so but thank you for that and thank you for indulging me absolutely i can't speak to the last 17 years and uh i certainly thought we'd be in a different situation when i was hired three years ago uh but we had some interesting things happen in our in our

101world during that time but certainly uh would go back to actually i i think of uh i ran into hector uh at hector mendez who is he here the other sector and he has his uh his little tag on and uh as i was talking to hector i read his tag and can you reduce that tag on below your name yeah and and i really love uh that we're shifting the word accountability to be something that's an expectation in our district and it's not a negative word we want to be held accountable when i came into this district that was certainly something that i hungered for and i i take very seriously the mantle of leadership that i hold and i i don't want to be in the same situation that you're describing after 17

102years because i i know that what we're doing now and moving forward and the levers that we have in place and you saw the kickoff today the common now terminology and experience that we've had as a district that we can now refer back to that we were never able to do over the last three years gives us that language and that expectation when we say all students that we're talking about grade level and beyond and we've just you know we've come to that common understand here i'm doing uh his context this context right here everybody do this yeah context so you know it's it's exciting the the situation in which we find ourselves the hard work that has brought us to this point um i i lament that we're having this conversation after 17 years

103and i commend you for sticking with the board uh for 17 years because i think i would be frustrated beyond belief uh living what you're describing and um i i know that we have the right people assembled across our system and i'm looking forward to the outcomes that our focus and these three areas will will achieve and so yeah thank you for certainly thank you for your questions i echo what dr rodriguez shared in saying the beauty of of what we have is we're now having these conversations that weren't out there previously so thank you thank you raymond for kind of pushing us into this into this discussion i think it's been a valuable discussion and will help frame our work for quite a while now so um thank you for that are there any

104other comments before we move on okay uh next we have comments from the public on agenda items [Music] we have one um from a dear friend hi bunker boy did i pick the right meeting to show up yes you did i want to re i want to remind you um and those who are watching that we do have some protocols for public comment the speakers will be treated in a respectful manner the board does not typically engage in dialogue at this time or respond to items that are not on the agenda the audience is expected to give their attention to the speaker and the speakers are asked to sign in prior to speaking introduce yourself and state all affiliations with the district if you are commenting on agenda items do so during the first comment

105period and use the second comment period for items that are not on the agenda keep comments to three minutes speak only once in each agenda item refrain from discussing the performance of an employee or the interpretation or application of the district's labor agreements including grievances and refrain from making derogatory comments about individuals good i'm phyllis bunker frank i'm a retired speech and language therapist who whose first job was with esd 105 i was pleased to have my career at the hearing and speech center but also serve on the yakima school board for 12 years and i think every one of those 12 years we had an opening day that made the work worthwhile and i'm so pleased to hear that you had that experience today i'm just jealous i wish i would have been invited

106um you in 2000 of your closest friends i'm sure the parents the parents and i would like to hear that there were i mean we have we have faculty that are we have people that were there that are parents of kids in our school district but i i'm also hoping that our um organization people were included and if not this year than next year but my minutes are going so um raymond i have been following the equity work uh wasda i've been following your internal work here in responding to the new requirements i was on the met with insight when you did the school the district improvement plan and um raymond i really appreciate the level of detail with which you read the report i read what has been posted so far and what i've

107been able to to clean out of it so it's not going to be surprising that one of my simplest long-standing stance about the most inequitable occurrence with our kids and learning is that we have a school calendar year that is depressive raymond you mentioned the statement that did the descriptions describe us as a depressive district instead of one of opportunity and i know that you all have done a lot of thinking i've pushed it along the way but i know superintendent you are finding ways to grow the reflection we have a school calendar year that plans for loss that plans for disconnect that plans for interruption and i know you've been working at ways to massage that and change it but quite frankly thousands of our kiddos are coming to school next week having been

108away from their sites of learning for 11 weeks and it just has to be viewed as something as inequitable at the large percentage of students who are pre-reduced lunch as a district that is district-wide in terms of uh getting the benefits for poverty i just would urge you there isn't anything in the wazda scripted training in what i experienced and what insight led in school improvement planning that brought to the surface the barriers that are imposed by the traditional calendar year so i just asked you in closing to maybe look into what reflective questions about what happens when kids come back to school after being away from 11 weeks and and maybe a few hundred i think we had i asked someone uh the superintendent i haven't heard the final report yet but you had

109about 600 kids who were in summer school but what do we know what are we looking for in their learning what are those grade level standards what is loss with our kiddos what's happened to their vocabulary norman over the summer so i hope that you don't mind that i that i send each of you the article that i wrote that appeared in principle magazine washington state principal magazine norman you didn't get a copy because i didn't have your email address entered correctly but it is why balance the 180-day school calendar year and it was written on request and it is in their digital magazine so thank you and keep the fire alive on the calendar thank you bunker and we'll get a if you could leave that can you leave that copy with barb oh

110sure and i can send the electronic as well yeah barb will see that we get that we that we get a copy and staff gets a copy as well thank you for being here okay nobody else signed in bar okay um next we are on to approvals our first approval tonight is for building improvement plans this was tabled from last week's business meeting [Music] it is an action item brought to us by dr rodriguez and you gave us some background on it last week um there are a lot of them and i don't want you to go through all of them yes we'd be here till tomorrow um so if you could just give us you know a little highlight and explain to us what we will see look going forward that would be great

111sure happy to do that thank you board president rice so you have before you uh request for approval of the school improvement plan so these are last year's plans as we talked about last week there's no fiscal impact this work is part of our school improvement planning process which is both annual and ongoing these are really considered to be living documents so you get to see them really at a snapshot at a place in time they do evolve throughout the year with the work of our building principles and our instructional leadership teams so the majority of these you are seeing the end of your version which really is the reflection on last year and it's their starting point for this year so you'll see the 2223 plans coming to you here probably early winter and

112so you'll see some changes that are made based on the work and the training that folks have had over the summer and as we kick off the year the plans do guide the continuous improvement cycle which is tied to the annually established goals this is something that is required by our state for schools that are improvement there are additional pieces of work and support that come from the office of superintendent of public instruction many of you know dr pam ansing who her last day was friday with us here in yakima and she did significant work around our school improvement planning process with all of our buildings during her time here in yakima school district you do have the live links to each of our sites plans and again as discussed last week i'd be happy

113to bring different format or different information if that would be helpful to the board as we need to bring these to you for approval annually per requirement from ospi thank you the board is being asked to approve the 2021-22 school improvement plans as submitted do i have a motion so moved second another by graciela second seconded by ryan is there any discussion i just i just had one question at what point reading through the plans i didn't see where the data was on the results of their goals does that come as part of the next plan or you know i'd be interested in seeing and i'm not gonna have i wouldn't have unrealistic expectations in terms of the kinds of interruptions we've had but it would be nice to see the results of their plans

114too okay i appreciate that we moved this agenda item to the next week i think it's although it is something that is in in the weeds um it's you know if the boards have been asked to prove it's from my perspective i think just having more time to read through all of that um so having additional time is helpful so thank you anything else what would be helpful for me is maybe having a rubric of some type so when i review this i can say okay yeah they're they're addressing equity they're addressing this curriculum whatever or hr whatever so i i think for me that would be helpful that way i can again review them say okay yeah i feel comfortable in because i'm not going to know everything about them because there's some acronyms

115abbreviations that i don't even i didn't even know what they were pointing to or what they were about so but yeah so that would just give me a good frame of reference to better understand and to make these decisions right to a producer okay thank you for that anything else okay we have a motion on a second for the board to approve the 21 22 school improvement plans as submitted you're ready for the vote all those in favor say aye all right opposed abstentions carries 5-0 thank you very much and thank you dr rodriguez for you and your staff's work on pulling these things together and thanks to the building staff too because i know this isn't this isn't a light lift to do these sorts of these plans next we have approval of payment

116for commodity food processing and handling fees for the school year 2022-23 this is going to be the stacy lock show for a few of these approvals thank you president rice yes we're going to talk about food for the next four action items here so the requested action that the board of directors approves payment for commodity food processing and handling fees to ospi food distribution for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs for approximately 325 000 for the twenty two twenty three school year the fiscal impact is three hundred and twenty five thousand dollars the background information is the board of directors requires all purchases over two hundred thousand to be submitted for approval these purchases are required for the child nutrition department to prepare meals thank you we have been asked to approve payment

117for commodity food processing and handling fees to ospi food distribution for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs for approximately three hundred and twenty five thousand dollars for the two twenty twenty two twenty three school year do i have a motion so move second move by norm seconded by raymond is there any discussion does this include the um the snacks the i forget what the name breakfast fruit no not breakfast program the vegetable fruit snacks yes that's coming next oh it will be a little beautiful okay i should pay attention prove okay um is there an other discussion okay all right if you're ready for the vote all those in favor say aye aye opposed abstentions carries 5-0 thank you next we have approval of groceries grocery cleaning and paper supply purchases for the

118school year 2022-23 stacey lock thank you president rice the requested action that the board of directors approves the purchase for grocery cleaning and paper supplies from us foods for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs for approximately one million five hundred and fifty thousand five hundred dollars for the 22 23 school year the fiscal impact is one million five hundred and fifty thousand five hundred dollars the background information the board of directors requires all purchases over two hundred thousand to be submitted for approval these purchases are required for the child nutrition department to prepare meals these purchases are authorized by using an inter-school agreement through the puget sound joint purchasing cooperative of which the yakima school district is a member thank you stacy the board is being asked to approve the purchase of grocery

119cleaning and paper supplies from u.s foods for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs for approximately one million five hundred and fifty thousand five hundred dollars for the twenty twenty two twenty three school year i would entertain a motion sell move second move by norm second seconded by graciela is there any discussion seeing none all those in favor say aye aye aye opposed abstentions and carries 5-0 thank you next we have number five which is four uh four i can't keep things i really do need to get new glasses i think i have new glasses that's why it's not helping it's not helping me that you have new glasses it's helping a lot approval of purchase produce purchase for the school school year 2022-23 stacy lock thank you president rice requested action that the

120board of directors approves the purchase of produce from spokane produce for the national school lunch school breakfast and fresh fruit and vegetable programs for approximately six six hundred and seventy six thousand dollars the twenty two twenty three school year fiscal impact six hundred and seventy six thousand dollars background information the board of directors requires requires all purchases over two hundred thousand dollars to be submitted for approval these purchases are required for the child nutrition department to prepare meals thank you stacy the board is being asked to approve the purchase of produce from spokane produce for the national school lunch school breakfast and fresh fruit vegetable fresh fruit and vegetables program for approximately six hundred and seventy six thousand dollars for the 2022-23 school year i would entertain a motion second it's been moved and seconded

121is there any discussion okay seeing none all those in favor say aye aye opposed abstentions carries 5-0 thank you next we're looking to approve the milk purchase stacy thank you president rice what child new nutrition program would be not be complete without milk so here we go requested action that the board of directors approves the purchase of milk from spring book brook farms for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs for approximately 537 thousand dollars for the 22-23 school year fiscal impact 537 000 background information board of directors requires all purchases over two hundred thousand to be submitted for approval these purchases are required for the child nutrition department to prepare meals these purchases are authorized using an inter-school agreement through the west valley school district of which the yakima school district is a

122member thank you stacy the board is being asked to approve the purchase of milk from springbrook farms for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs for approximately 537 thousand dollars for the 2022 school year i would entertain a motion for approval so moved second move by norm seconded by graciela is there any discussion quick question do we provide non-dairy milk options to students [Laughter] [Music] those of us who are now lactose intolerant are wanting to know the same question in mind too i believe so but i'll check on it for you okay you know that's something when it comes to equity maybe that we don't think about very often i think studies show 80 percent of latino people are lactose intolerant um and so that would be an opportunity to maybe redo some bathroom

123time too [Laughter] i will definitely look into get that information back to you anything else okay if there are no other questions although we'll take a vote all those in favor say aye aye aye opposed abstentions carries five 5-0 thank you okay now it's going to be the dr darling show for this one uh we are being asked to approve to contract 13 school site coordinators dr darling yes thank you so we are continuing our existing relationship and expanding the relationship by adding nine more for a total of 13 for the school year our community and schools partnership the site coordinators are responsible for they meet with usually between 24 and 26 students and they handle these students one-on-one and their families and so the students um the site coordinators worked jointly with the the

124staff at the school especially the principal hector had it at his building last year and they really target those kiddos who need that extra one-on-one support and also to engage their families in the learning process and so we're asking that the board grant permission to coordinate 13 school site coordinators through community and schools of washington the estimated amount of 806 000 the 23 school year okay the board is being asked to grant permission to contract to contract 13 school site coordinators through communities in schools of washington and the estimated amount of eight hundred and six thousand dollars for the school years twenty two thousand twenty two twenty three is there any dis i need a mo is a move to approve thank you [Music] that's late in the day i was up pretty early this

125morning who seconded that graciela okay it's been was moved by ryan and seconded by graciela to approve this motion is there any discussion i do have one question i notice in the proposal that it's being paid for by esser funds is there a plan to continue this program beyond our esser endowment that we absorb this into our budget wonderful question we are exploring those opportunities there's no definitive source at this time but we're grateful that we have some other opportunities to extend this beyond the september 2024 expiration date or esther funding so the answer for that currently no and yet we're taking this leap of faith knowing the importance of this position and how it impacts our buildings if you have any further questions i would look to invite hector mendez up but only if

126you had further questions i just i just had one question and maybe you know this um i noticed that there are six elementaries that are part of this cadre of thirteen and i'm wondering if there is um plan if there are plans to expand that to the other elementaries as well this year we asked them how many more can we have and they said nine oh so they're there and they initiated a couple years ago in the tri-cities area and this is their first time in our region so they're they're we're kind of their guinea pig for this part of this this part of our state our esd and so we're getting as many as they can have capacity they will let us have and we're pushing them to get them bigger so okay we're

127we are confident that as we expand and continue to find um sustainable funding they'll also be able to increase the program okay great thank you any other discussion or questions okay hearing hearing none um all those in favor say i i opposed abstentions mary's 5-0 thank you oh next we're back to dr rodriguez approval to contract with imagine learning thank you this um you're going to have deja vu so we've already approved this you as a board have already approved this but we are changing the funding source so this is a purchase we've discussed previously but we are moving the funds from levy funds to title funds we are near the end of our fiscal year as you are aware and now is the time when we want to ensure we've used every uh every

128dollar that has come our way and that we don't send any money back so we have enough in carryover actually from coviders when we did not spend as much to be able to cover this contract out of our title funds okay all right um the board is being asked to grant permission to contract with imagine learning llc for the 2022-24 school years and the amount of and 990 two thousand seven hundred and ninety seven dollars and thirty six cents to provide one a digital platform to support the math for kindergarten through fifth grade for all elementary schools and any additional student needing age appropriate math in middle or high school and two a digital platform in support of language and literacy for kindergarten through fifth grade ell students it for all elementary schools i would

129entertain a motion for approval second move by norm seconded by graciela are there is there any discussion or are there any questions procedural questions since this has already been approved are we not approving the source for the budget or are we approving this the awarding of the contract a second time i think that's that's what we're doing is approving the awarding of the contract the contract calls out the source of the funding doesn't it no well it doesn't hear right no but the contract itself okay but i i heard that this is before us again because the funding source has changed [Music] so i just want clarification so our legal expert bob no thank you the uh my understanding of this item on the agenda is to change the source of the funds it was

130previously approved we're just asking that the the board acknowledge and recognize that the funds are coming out of title 1 and not levy so we just want to make sure you guys are aware of that it's itemized on the physical impact on the on the letter in the board packet the fiscal impact is in the amount of that money it's itemized that the fiscal impact and the amount of 992 et cetera funding sources title one and there's an asterisk that says funding source moved from levy to title one are you asking that that be included in the motion i was just just asking about what we were actually doing so okay it's been clarified thank you all right any other questions or discussion hearing none i would entertain a motion for approval we already did

131that okay um okay all those in favor say aye aye aye opposed abstentions carries carriers 5-0 i really do need coffee i think okay [Music] and the last approval item we have today is approval to dispose of surplus surplus property where oh you dr green yes i was looking for jake i'm sorry i'm glad you felt that too because it was not a barb of course it wasn't uh thank you yes uh i neglected to share with the board earlier that uh when uh assistant superintendent uh marietta was at negotiations uh jake is with him and uh we do not have becky with us and i think we need to give her a little leeway uh we know that she's uh leaving here within probably the next week so we're going to miss her greatly

132so i'll go ahead and take this the request before the board is permission to dispose of surplus property throughout the 2022-23 school year so the requested action is that the board of director declares equipment supplies furniture and other district property obsolete and or surplus throughout the school year and that these items be surplused through the most advantageous process to the district no cost impact the background information is that this rcw 28a 0.335.180 authorizes the board to declare equipment supplies furniture and other district property obsolete and or surplus so this will allow the district to dispose of surplus to the most advantageous process to the district which may include heberlo's auction requests forbid safe sale to the public gifts or grants of the surplus items to other public or private schools or any other commercially reasonable

133process which satisfies the above referenced rcw okay the board is being asked to declare equipment supplies furniture and other district property obsolete and or surplus throughout the 2022-23 school year and these items be surplused through the most advantageous process to the district i would entertain a motion for approval so luke moved by graciela seconded by raymond is there any discussion hearing none those in favor say aye opposed abstentions passes five zero thank you okay we've reached the second opportunity for comments from the public and no one else has signed in so mr superintendent do we have a need for executive session we do not okay all right thank you for that um is there anything else for the good of the order all right i think everyone is anxious to get out of here and

134go home all right seeing that there is nothing for the good of the order meeting is adjourned and we will see you back here next monday at 4 3 30 for our board meeting and then at five o'clock for our joint meeting with the city council and their providers provided right yeah they're good okay and it'll be in this room yet i'm not can you