Board Meeting 5-24-21

001this uh meeting of the West Sal Milwaukee School Board to order uh Mr Keller could you please lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you very much uh susette can you please call the role yes Mr Burns here Mr ustra here Mrs Kaiser here Mr Keller here miss deal here Mrs car here Mr sikic presid Mrs J here president Lee here proper notice of this meeting has been posted in accordance with the open meeting laws of the state of Wisconsin are there any modifications or additions to the agenda uh I have nothing this evening okay all right so we'll move on to public

002comments as a reminder speaker will be limited to a comments of 3 minutes the board cannot discuss debate or act upon any item made during the public comments portion of the board meeting follow up two public comments will be made by The District staff prior to and or at the next regular board meeting uh do we have any public comments in no okay so if you are in Zoom if You' please put your name and chat and I will call on you uh individually so that you can provide your uh public comments you can unmute yourself uh we'll start with Leah Zacharias hello hello can you hear me yes okay we can hear you so okay thank you I'm requesting that the mask requirements or Outdoors be removed immediately it's hot and humid and the

003children are returning into schools that don't have air conditioning I'm also requesting that within the the next month the Schoolboard begin discussion and come to an educated conclusion about mitigation procedures for next school year so that parents can make educated education Arrangements based on the school board's decisions thank you uh thank you very much Lee and could you please just state your name and address for the record maybe not okay for everyone else if you could please make sure to state your name and address just before uh giving comments it's just for the record uh Angelo tenorio everyone um my name is Angelito Torio I live at 2147 south7 Place West D Wisconsin 53219 and I'm an elder person here in West Dallas I I just wanted to introduce myself talk a little bit about

004my background and also talk about um the importance of uh recognizing API history mon um here in West Dallas um so a little bit about me a big part of my story I'm the son of immigrants um my mom and dad came to the US from the Philippines and hoped are finding a better life they came to Wisconsin and they came to West Sal because they fell in love with the community here and the schools and this is where they were able to able to afford to buy their first home and they decideed to raise me and my siblings here in West Dallas and um from an early age my mom dad really instilled the values of giving back to the community serving others um when I was younger I didn't know what that meant

005um but I really discovered my passion for politics and government and and organizing and empowerment when I did my undergrad M sorry about my dog Alber want to say hi um and um and at W Madison where I did my undergrad studied political science that's where I really saw the importance of who we have as our elected official really matters like who we have representing our values on on different levels of government whether that's the school board city council or State office or in Congress or the White House who we have as our elected officials matters and that's where I really got involved in in politics and government so I worked on a number of political campaigns I now work for an environmental group called Wisconsin conservation voters so we do a lot of advocacy

006um when it comes to the environment clean drinking water clean energy and Civic engagement um making sure that people have access to the ballot and about a year ago well over a year ago now I I decided to take the leap of faith myself um and like many of you scho members um I decided to run for office in my hometown in my community and to make wasal the best it can be um and and it's been absolutely incredible serving our great community and like I was elected as the first API Elder person here first Asian-American Pacific Islander um elected official here in West Dallas and uh earlier this month um our mayor mayor Divine proclaimed um API History Month may as API History Month here in West Dallas and and I think it's really

007important that we when we look at American history we recognize that API history is a real part of American history and it's really important for us to recognize both the successes and achievements of aapis of API people here in the United States but also recognizing the pain that the API Community has felt um in the United States with the history of xenophobic policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist policies Japanese interment um and also recognizing the pain of the API Community today um the recent surge of hate crimes against the API Community um and while doing this also celebrating the work that so many API folks have done across um United States across Wisconsin and across here in west Dallas so I encourage you all as we close out API History Month

008I encourage you to do some research um about incredible API folks in our community U learn more about um what API people have been doing here in West Dallas um and thank you for thank you for allowing me to speak before you today thank you very much Mr scenario um right now I don't have anyone else signed up in chat for public comments is there anyone else a last uh opportunity if there's anything you'd like to say okay seeing none I will close public comments and we'll move on to the superintendent report Dr lexman great uh thank you everybody and good evening um we will start with 7.1 our returning to school Plan update that we do each of our regular meetings and Dedra has that um up on the screen for everybody um and

009so this is our update for our May 24th school board meeting um like we do a little bit of an agenda um so I'll again remind everybody of our guiding principles we'll check on our health metrics and things seem to be again going in the right direction and then I'll talk a little bit about where we are with uh mask requirements and this is um a topic that is coming up um in a number of school districts and in fact tonight is actually covered on the Evening News um we weren't listed as one of the districts talking about it this evening but apparently it is a theme tonight um and and again we'll touch on it as an action item a little bit later in the meeting and then a little bit of where we

010are going forward in terms of next steps my glasses are fogging so this is going to get really fun um so in terms of our guiding principles right so we stay focused on um safety and well-being uh learning that works for all being responsive and flexible and that's a little bit why we're talking about the Mas require um for outdoors this evening and then again um is it practical for us to be able to implement the things um that support the rest of that work in terms of our external Health metrics right we um have been monitoring and using as guidance uh Milwaukee County data and then West Dallas West Milwaukee data and as of May 18th right we're always about a week behind um in what the health department sends over you'll see that

011we're trending in the right direction except for the West Alice West Milwaukee positivity rate um went up just a tick right so it's um not a uh a shift to be concerned about but the fact that um we've changed kind of color bands uh for the first time going below yellow um in the west Dallas West Milwaukee burden status um so those are I I think important indicators and again we want to use this moment to remind everybody to continue to follow the mitigation practices if you haven't been vaccinated we encourage people to get vaccinated because that is probably the most important strategy we have to have our lives return to some sense of normal as soon as we can in terms of our internal health metrics um it tends to be pretty steady um

012our internal positivity rate moves up and down but just by small amounts and so we think that's really encouraging so I think it tells us we're doing a good job with our mitigation practices in school we're not getting big spreads and we've actually had a reduction in the number of um students in particular that had to quarantine in the last week so you see from here um just two positive um Active cases among staff and just two close contacts that came from that so both of those were work rated um and then for students there were six positive and that turned into 130 close contacts but if you remember a couple weeks ago um we were above 200 in the close contacts meaning students that had to quarantine um and only four of those were

013actually School related so again I'm encouraging that our internal practices seem to be serving us well and then in terms of our mask requirement so we're U proposing a change and I'll talk a little bit about it here and then again a little later on in the action item um but there's a couple quotes here just just about um maintaining mitigation practices right so we're not suggesting that we drop all mask requirements right it's simply the outdoor mask requirements um that that um we're attending to and because the CDC guidance is pretty clear that we should be maintaining our mitigation practices especially in school uh and so the the reason that we're suggesting um the board should consider a change for outdoors is we know transmission is lower um in Outdoors um many area school

014districts have or are likely to make similar changes this evening um the city of Milwaukee is ending its Health Emergency on June 1 of 2021 and so we think that's a a date to make the shift just because that's a date that's already out there already being communicated that people are paying attention to and it gives a few more days um for folks that want to get vaccinated to get their vaccine or students that have gotten their first shot to get their second shot and start to develop um some of the more permanent immunity hopefully um but the mask requirements would remain the same indoors and on school buses if the board supports this um change a little late later in our meeting and then in terms of next steps um what we're going to

015do is continue to monit monitor State guidance on kind of earlier start to the new school year and now any changes that may come from the CDC regarding uh mitigation practices for summer school for recreation and then obviously um we're very curious about the fall of what mitigation practices may be recommended um we do know that the CDC does not intend to provide any more school-based guidance between now and the end of the school year so that'll take us through the middle of June and we anticipate sometime after that they'll come out with updated guidance for schools uh and then we'll come back to the board possibly on June 14th if there's new information that we want to consider and make any additional changes but at this point um if the board supports the the

016action a little later we would continue to have without additional board action we'd still um have masks for summer school for indoor Recreation um and for the fall unless we make additional changes so that's the returning to school update any questions for me on this item have we had a lot of students um opt for the in school vaccination clinics so it has not been um the the numbers we had hoped for okay um there's certainly some um that have but but what we've learned is we announced all of this and so this really came back from Matt ler and his conversations with kids and a whole bunch of students at hail told him well they already had their shop or they had their first one um and so that's that's encouraging it doesn't mean

017we shouldn't do the vaccination clinics um any opportunity that we can provide to have young people get access um and we'll do the same thing if you know the um research supports that you know the fiser in particular can be used in younger kids we now that we have the routines we know all the paperwork we'll be ready to go um to offer vaccine clinics for younger kids as well any other questions I just wanted to say one thing uh more about the The Mask uh change that's being suggested um the reasoning also does not include any safety concerns that students have while while wearing masks some of that information has been floating out there um but really you know the American Academy of Pediatrics the CDC um they all have no safety concerns with

018students down to two years old um being able to wear a mask for as long as we do we have mask breaks throughout the day that they're able to uh continue using so this is really not in relation to any safety concerns but really more concerning the the fact that the transmission is much lower outside we have a lot more vaccinations obviously are happening and so that uh in in my mind anyways makes it seem like something that would be okay to do at this juncture thank you yeah so then I'll go on to 7.2 which is our legislative update for this evening so the GOP um looks to Federal money to boost districts with in-person instruction so um the GOP has been looking at how to reward schools that have been providing in-person instruction

019um is one of the more significant questions facing the GOP control joint finance committee as it begins work on Governor Tony iver's budget in Earnest the committee has already signal plans to scale back the budget significantly for what iers has proposed the latest round of Co money also includes nearly $108 million that's earmarked to address learning loss pay for summer learning and fund after school programs the committee may be able to account for in-person instruction by Distributing a portion of those funds um though there are requirements that the money be used to benefit certain groups of students including those experiencing homelessness or in foster care um Republicans all Republicans also could weigh their options on using State money as part part of their approach to rewarding districts for in-person instruction so we're going to watch

020that closely I mean we did shift to in-person instruction towards the latter part of the year but um we're definitely watching kind of how um these dollars start to be um um proportioned and and you know it it's more than just the joint finance committee it has to go through the legislature has to be signed um into law by the governor then um hearings have been set for bills on transgender athlete participation in high school sports so a pair of companion bills aimed at barring male to female transgender athletes from competing as girls in inter Scholastic sports are moving forward with hearing set for May 26 but currently the WIA has a policy on transgender participation in high school sports and it's that policy that we follow under that policy which commits to ensuring that

021transgender students have opportunities to participate in WIA sponsored Athletics students who are born male but self-identify as being female have to have a full calendar year of medically documented testosterone supress suppression therapy in order to be eligible they must also provide documentation to their school from a physician or psychologist that affirms their consent um their consistent gender identification and expression provide medical docu documentation of any hormonal therapy sexual reassignment surgery or counseling and provide documentation from F friends family teachers and others that demonstrate that the students's consistent gender identification and expression and then the school uh makes a final decision news reports have suggested the proposal would likely face an almost certain veto from um Governor Tony iers should have passed the Republican controlled legislature and there's nothing at the federal level um at this

022time to share then um 7.3 our Board of Education recognitions for this meeting so at Central High School congratulations to West Bas Central softball team who named the Journal Sentinel team of the week on May 11th 2021 the team is off to its best start since 2008 and is now 62 on the year so good luck to the Bulldogs at dokey Project based Project based learning High School Samantha Cooper and deante Torres each received a $1,000 scholarship from the First United Methodist T of of West Alas and then at shared Journeys um shared Journeys received a $3,000 Grand from the rotary club to purchase child car seats pack and plays and backpack diaper bags for students are incredibly grateful to the rotary for their support EST Rodriguez received a $1,000 scholarship from the First United

023Methodist Church of West Dallas and estral Rodriguez Rodriguez um Tanya F Fel Feliciano and cayb Boon are the recipients of the David Condon shared Journey's $500 scholarship Awards David was a former student who passed away and we have yearly Scholarships in his name and then from communication and community relations special thanks to senior director Mrs stelle ninan and our friend friends at ACL Labs at West Dallas Memorial Hospital for the generous donation of school supplies we're very grateful for their support then from leadership and learning the West Dallas West Milwaukee school district is proud to announce that Nathan hail high school math teacher Donna covich has been named general education of the Year by the Wisconsin Council of Administrators of special services and we went out to hail and surprised um Donna in the middle

024of teaching um and all the teenagers immediately put their heads down when all these adults came walking in with flowers and balloons and they did the exact same the exact thing teenagers would do in the mon um but it was fun to celebrate Don I was very surprised um and just really want to recognize her and then finally the West Dallas West Milwaukee school district is proud to announce that Caitlyn Windler Director of Finance and operations has been awarded the George Gray new school business manager of the Year award for 2022 from the Wisconsin Association of school business officials was so we have some now it's official official sorry it's not a big checke h00 business managers and professionals that that she as a young bus professional has been recogniz this way we certainly know

025the work that she's done in our district has made a difference to us as an organization and mostly to our students and families congratulations I just want to say thank you so much to our school leadership team our board for trusting my leadership and especially our business office team because we could not have done all of the work that we've done without them so thank you um to our whole West Dallas West Milwaukee School District y I'm highly honored thank you so we'll go on to 7.4 um so just some quick updates and information items there were no public comments on May 10th so there's nothing to follow up on there um our facility Master planning continues um the fact he met on May 8th and again again on May May 18th and that was

026to review Elementary and Intermediate School design Solutions so some possible solutions um and um The Proposal coming forward will likely um mean we're moving to eight or nine elementary schools of similar size and the whole concept of getting all of the elementaries to be about the same size would mean some would need additions and some um significant remodeling but it really starts to leverage some economies of scale just some practicality of having about 4 50 students rather than under 200 um and it it reduces some operational costs and then it also reduces the need for traveling teachers which I think is probably one of the um highlights of um when you get to about 450 you can have a full-time art full-time music full-time fiet teacher that stays in the building as part of the

027community and with our deeper learning work that gets to be more and more important because we want the specialist to be integrated into the projects that um the the core teachers are planning and and enging with kids around and if they're traveling back and forth um it just doesn't facilitate um those moments um and so but those are still things that the board will take up um as recommendations come out of the big Community Committee um the next steps include cost estimates of the various projects and I think it's going to be eye openening um to see what it costs for us to get our buildings you know the way they are now with being old maintained but not up to date get them up to date and to turn them into the kind of

028facilities that support the teaching and learning we're committed to I think will be surprising in costs um we're working to finalize recommendations to the board by the end of June and what I'm anticipating now is this is really going to be a very highlevel master plan I think I went into this thinking we'd have a one-time solution we'd go out to a referendum question once and we'd be able to fix everything if you know the community supported us and I think the challenges are much bigger than that and so I think with the board will um have in front of it is to consider how do we spread this out over 10 15 20 years or even more and then where do you begin really becomes I think the question for all of you uh

029and and I think the committee will send forward lots of information um and then look the board for some guidance on how we want to kind of take next steps and move that forward um so we're also in the midst of planning for next school year it's not just the long range facility planning but planning for next year right now we are assuming that that we're starting the school year as a normal school year right we have to have some set of assumptions to build our plans around and we're starting there I know um speaking with u Mary Pat who's her music curricular lead she was very happy with the fact that Beth put out the calendar like we always do at this time of year and says start putting all your concerts in right

030so that was very exciting for all the music people like oh we're gonna have concerts again um and if if it changes will it adapt and adjust like we have been but right now um we're going to uh work on the assumption that it's a normal school year um which means you know we'll have inperson learning five days a week um so this um the Wednesday is still um in intermediate schools that's still a check and connect days very appealing especially to the students um but we're assuming we're going back five days a week we're also next year launching our project based learning Virtual Academy um and so that is now in kind of final phases to put together all of the mechanisms that actually make it operate as a school uh and so with

031the big announcements of some of the leadership changes Ryan Johnson has that as part of his responsibility to get the details built and then again we're encouraging vaccinations for next year um and then um our leadership openings that I just touched on so our director of communications and community relations with Beth retiring so we're doing first round interviews this week and it's a pretty interesting pool of candidates um um some local but also some national we posted on better team we posted on top school jobs which is kind of the National Database where um uh people looking for leadership positions in K12 education go um and so we have an applicant from Tennessee we have somebody from Florida in the mix there's um a couple that are K12 communication experience a good number that are

032highered communication experience um some not for profit um background and then some Private Industry background I had a good conversation today with Joe Donovan who runs Donovan Group which is a Consulting Group that helps um K12 schools and school districts with communication strategies and crisis communication so get some good coaching and kind of what to look for and what to ask and how to approach it especially if we're interested in talking to somebody that doesn't come through a traditional kind of K12 path and so it was very helpful for me to spend you know a half hour with him today um then the Director of Human Resources the principal at Central High School and then the assistant principal at Lane Intermediate School may be going up right now if not those will be posted tomorrow

033and we're doing the big National postings for the HR position and the Central High School position as well and then just a little anecdote from um I visited out visiting schools again which is just absolutely pleasure for to be back in schools um so I was at purging Elementary School and as it almost always happens when I'm in the Little's classroom right away because I'm tall right compared to the littles and right away it's like who is that um and so they always have to try to explain that this is the super intendent and little girl goes well what does that mean so Steve Harris the principal was trying that she was Pro and they try to explain that well he's in charge of all of the schools in West Dallas he's in charge of

034every single one of the schools and little guy's looking at me and he goes so you mean like you're in charge of horse man too and I said yeah even horse man he said well then do you know my [Laughter] brother I was like oh that's and the teacher saved me um in it but but I share that because it it reminds me that as hard as the last 16 months have been and as hard as the decisions that we'll be facing in the coming months there's all kinds of moments of joy that still happen in schools and in classrooms and even on zoom and I think it's important for us to try to call those moments present um in the difficulty of the work because that's why we're here right it's really about those

035moments of joy that happen that actually turn into learning and success for kids so I just thought I was going to save that and share it tonight um with all of you and that concludes the superintendent report that's great thank you very much Dr luxman uh move on to the uh board reports starting with 8.1 review of The Board calendar uh so tonight uh May 24th we have a regular board meeting followed immediately by uh two workshops one on College and Creer Readiness the technology plan overview and financial stability and employee engagement looking at the compensation model which I'm uh very excited to share with everyone else here on the board uh so after that on June 1st there is an employee recognition event at the new brillin uh Hills Clubhouse uh and all board

036members are welcome to come it's from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. to recognize our amazing staff um some uh that are unfortunately leaving us but uh well-deserved retirements as well as um other staff that we're going to be honoring there tonight for their uh support and dedication to our district on Monday June 14 at 6 p.m. we have another regular Board of Education meeting followed by a workshop a proposed 2122 budget and preliminary tax LY number two then on Monday June 21st we have a board workshop with the consultant Melissa Matarazzo and the from the hon Consulting Group at 6 pm and then on Monday June 28th at 6m we have another uh regular Board of Education meeting uh action on proposed 2122 budget and preliminary tax levy okay all right now we're going to go

037into 8.2 the board committee report starting with College and Career Readiness Mr ustruck so our committee had two topics that we tackled at our last meeting on Monday May 10th um topic number one was black studies course two students from Central and one from hail presented to our committee on why they think it was essential to offer a black studies course and we all agreed it was was a good idea and and it was their ideas uh so that was really important uh to them also two teachers from hail and two teachers from Central with the help of Steve Carr presented materials for the course adoption uh including the resources we will use for this course uh and our committee supported bringing this course forward for next next school year uh and we'll be voting

038on that later right yeah um and and then we also had an update on the co-curriculars so Shelley came in and presented the current state of sports and some of the plans she had been working on with the two High School athletic directors uh the committee supported a survey to all high school students that Shelly presented to GA more information about why or why not they participate and uh we supported considering adding a graduation requirement of participating in co-curriculars we will do more investigation on this over the summer so we want to make it a requirement um and we will our next steps we will share the results of the survey at a future commit committee meeting and plan for our next steps in an action plan to increase Equitable participation in co-curricular activities all

039right does anyone have any questions for Bill or the committee if not I'll move on to the uh the next board report which is uh myself um this will be my last uh report here as the chair of the finance committee as we uh move on to our new committee members which I'm looking forward to see the work that they do so we actually had two meetings last week uh we had one on Monday between 5: and 6 and then that just wasn't enough time so we' have another one on Wednesday uh to discuss all the things that uh we needed to talk about uh so the majority of the meeting was spent on Monday talking about the uh crossing guard so um historically the city of West Dallas uh provided the funding for the

040crossing guards for our schools uh and that U we were informed was not going to continue and so now that is our our cost to Bear uh for our schools and so we discussed the RFP that was put out um to look for a company that would we would utilize for the crossing guards uh we talked about trying to do it in house uh seeing if we could have people um even doing like extra Duty you know like a supplementary contract situation but we realized that it would be difficult to do and if someone was out for some day then we might be without a crossing guard and so we decided for the cost benefit analysis to go with the company and so that will be starting uh next school year with us and then

041the thing we didn't have time for was discussing the compensation model which we'll talk about in a workshop later this evening uh we spent a good amount of time on Wednesday discussing that going through the model uh and you what the committee had decided on there was a compensation committee that was made up of of teachers uh staff uh and uh Caitlyn and Jeff both did a lot of work on that to make sure that what was being proposed in the workshop we're talk about tonight is going to be feasible is going to be something that staff wants uh and something that hopefully we can continue long term uh but we also talked about the fact this is probably going to be a work in progress as we start getting into the meat of this

042uh and actually implementing it might find out the things don't work out exactly as we were thinking or maybe there was something we weren't exactly anticipating when we do it so it might be something that we revisit um you know annually as we go through the process of that so um that ends my report for the financial stability committee any questions no all right uh for 8.3 are there any board member reports of community events that you uh have attended or will be attending that you would like to to talk about um I just um wanted to just give a shout out to West Dallas Central um I was able to do lots of spring cleaning over the past few weeks and I was able to donate eight bags of clothing to our community closet

043so um it was a really easy process I pulled up the to Central on Wednesday opened my my back trunk and they they got it all out so um I just want to remind people that we do have Community closets and so it is open to the families here in the district and if you need clothing or food or resources just um reach out to your your school principal or your counselors at the schools and we can help you out with that but it was a really great event the kids were really excited that people there was you know people actually lining up to drop things off so um I just wanted to give them a little shout out for that yeah that's great thanks a lot Amy anyone else have anything they like to

044share if not we will move on to our consent agenda this evening so we have 9.1 the approval of board minutes 9.2 the employment summary 9.3 the supplementary contracts and 9.4 the financial summary does anyone anything separated out if not we look for a motion motion to approve second we have a motion in a second any discussion all right all those in favor I I opposed all right that passes and now move on to if we could interrupt for one second we have a team member with us this evening evening who was just approved in the employment summary um our new coordinator of culturally responsive practi culturally relevant practices excuse me Alyssa is here so just wanted to welcome her to our district coming to us from Denver public schools um and give her the

045chance to introduce herself as she is now going to be a district-wide leader in our district good evening everyone my name is Alyssa Raj so honored to be with you tonight and get to see you in person meet some of you in person and good even to everyone who's online um as J mentioned I'm coming from Denver Denver public schools and I'm so excited and honored to be leading culturally relevant practices across West Salas and West Milwaukee and I really am excited that um of the impact we can collectively make by integrating this across all of our schools in the district so thank you for having me and it's a pleasure to meet you all well thank you very much congratulations looking forward to the work you're going to do here in our district okay

046uh now we'll move on to the action items for this evening uh item 10.1 which is the covid-19 mitigation practices changed outdoor mask wearing requirements Dr lman yes um thank you so as um I shared in the returning to school presentation we're recommending a revision to the mask requirement um and again for the you know the rationale that's already been stated that Transmissions low um uh the uh City Milwaukee dropping it's Health Emergency June 1 and that area districts are also considering um similar approaches and so that as it gets a little bit warmer and kids are outside that we feel comfortable uh making the recommendation that we can change our outdoor mask requirements again not changing anything indoors or on buses uh and so the requirement would then read all students unless on a

047specified mask breaker approved medical documentation staff families and visitors are required to wear face masks in school buildings and on buses and then we we include if an employees alone in a classro or an office with the door closed and face mask can be removed so it's the only exception and so um we're hoping the board will um consider this and hopefully support this and we'll then start the communication and forward with it on June 1st does anyone have any questions about this Jan so this would be um not just but like um before school when the kids are lining up and anytime you're outside except for when you're going on you go to the bus and you put it back on so it would be um anything so anytime a person is in a

048building or on a bus um The Mask should be on mask is on right so Outdoors it would also mean that um masks would not be required at um completion ceremonies and graduation right just so that we're clear about what what this all means we're still um for graduation we'll still be practicing social distancing and families will stay in their seated together and the students on the field will all be spread out but they're Outdoors so if the board supports us they wouldn't have to wear masks Jeff so oh I'm sorry so if there's a physical educator taking his class outdoors and they're lining up inside I'm not being critical I'm just asking the question when they're inside they have to have their masks on when they're lining up they get outside correct that's that's

049exactly right and when um we talked through that we were going to be proposing this tonight with principles last week and said start thinking about the strategies for how you especially the littles how you going to keep track of the masks because right now it's pretty easy they stay on their face right but when the they go outside they're going to come in and like I lost my mask so we've already started talking about um how to manage that Brian and just for clarification I know you mentioned for commencement the plan with this that would mean no face mask would be required however if we do go to a Rain date and we do end up inside then just to be clear that face mask requirement would still be in intact correct y absolutely thank

050you other questions so when it comes to our sporting events as well the ones that would be held outside so in our you know our Spectators are now not required to have to wear masks if they're up ating outside and our players would not be required to wear masks if they're participating outside is that correct that's correct and then just for anyone who might be wondering I did I know we got a lot of communication about this as a board um you know is there a reason why we're deciding not to move forward with any changes to our indoor policies I know that the CDC still requires um on public transportation buses included to our mask so that's not something that we wouldd want to change anyways because that's still a CDC requirement but for

051indoors some District dists are doing that so is there reasoning why we're not doing that as well yeah for us it really is the CDC guidance on for schools has not changed even though they have um changed the general guidance especially for fully vaccinated people but for schools it has not changed and our local health department is very much um support has been very supportive of the practices that we put in place uh and so I think to try to continue to align with their guidance make some sense for us until there's you know different guidance from at the CDC at the kind of national or federal level so that's why we're going to recommending we continue with the indoor practices as the currently exist all right and we would anticipate that would go through

052the end of the school year because there's not going to be we're not expecting any new CDC guidance before that time correct okay any other questions or comments if not I would look for a motion move to approve second moved and seconded any further discussion if not all those in favor I I opposed all right that passes move on to 10 point2 approval of Neola policies is second reading 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 7,000 8,000 Dr lexman thank you oh I'm sorry clarification for June 1st would start that outdoor mask change that that's correct okay I just want to make sure that people know that there is a not tomorrow June 1st it's not immediate to time for more vaccinations and for planning and stuff like that too since this is going to be new

053for our schools so yes yes um thank you so uh board's aware that we've been working on you know the update of all of the policies for I don't know how long has it been best two years five years right the the dream has been five years in the making that's for sure um and the reason that um we we took the step to go with Neola is that you get kind of a platform that you can bring all the policies up to date almost simultaneously um and they're all vetted through their attorneys and aligned to the statutes and all of those kind of pieces um were really important to us um and previous iterations of the school board um we've been operating with some policies and if the board approves this some of those

054this this evening those policies now go away and get replace but we've been operating with policies that date back in some places to the 70s to the 990s um and it's hard for school districts and school boards to keep policies up to date without having kind of an outside service that really does the detailed technical work and so um the board committees have worked through all of the um detail work and careful reading of the policies they were brought forward to the board um a month ago um and so under our current new me of policy that now governs the development and approval of policies that gets held in first reading uh at the board level for 30 days and then it comes back for a second reading which is really the approval step so

055that's a step we're in this evening but I do want to mention that um one of the things we asked especially for new board members is that if there were questions about um the policies that that 30 days was the opportunity to ask those questions and brenon I want to thank you for um having done a significant amount of homework on policies which is pretty cool um and as I shared with the um the board on Friday and I just want to publicly that you know brandan raised some I think really important questions for us and and I think questions that are consistent with the kind of work we're trying to do so do we have alignment um in the policy language between kind of what um is being approved or considered for approval this

056evening and things like our mission vision and in particular our Equity non-negotiables uh and I I think that is um work to come I think there'll be some very interesting conversations for board committees so a little bit of the plan is that you know we we move kind of all of this hopefully um forward this evening so the vast majority of new policies are now in place and then Brendon will work with um board committee chairs and directors to surface kind of um specific policies that maybe could be adapted a bit so we have better internal alignment and I think it'll be a an interesting and um productive exercise for us I think we'll learn really okay as our we committed to this work so I think that's good news for us so I just

057wanted to make that kind of clear publicly that um this isn't the end of the policy work but it it is an important big step and then there's kind of refinement that'll be ongoing so with that I'll answer any questions any questions for Dr luxman about the policies yes Kristen uh one of our policies still States Columbus Day as being observed when I was under the understanding that it should be indigenous people's day so the reason it still says Columbus Day because that is the statutory language and a board doesn't have the opportunity to change statute unless you start getting involved with your legislators legislators um one of the things that I think we'll revisit that in the um conversations around you know that's the observance day policy which is an odd one for the

058state of Wisconsin actually um to revisit either I want to convince Richard from theola that we could put Columbus Day in parenthesis it's still there and have indigenous people's Day lead or if if you know from the lawyer perspective we can't do that put it in the rule okay that as a practice we celebrate indigenous people's day so there's different ways to adapt I think what the the rules will provide some flexibility for us okay thank you any other questions all right before we rule on this I would like to State and thank all the Committees for the work they went going through these policies one by one obviously especially the directors who did a lot of line share of this work going through meeting and and working with niola to figure out what language

059would work best for our school district and uh then all of our committees looking at those policies reading them bringing up our own questions to make sure that it was something that we thought would be useful for our district as well so I just want to express my gratitude for that because it is definitely a lot of work I know there's going to be a giant sigh of relief if this has passed because it's been a lot of work and a lot of time and effort put into it so thank you everyone for that that effort and I'd be looking for a motion so moved second motion and seconded any further any further comment all those in favor I I opposed all right that passes move on to item 10.3 the black studies course approval

060uh Mr rer I can't see you are you sitting there you so I'll keep trying to lean and stay on the microphone and stay on the zoom no um but uh good evening again everyone and it is an absolute honor to be presenting this to our Board of Education this evening for approval um we have some students that are here they're apparently gathering in the lobby who are going to come up and talk to us as well so they'll be here in a moment um and several of our teachers are either joining us online or we'll be in the room as well to talk about the process but um as part of our Equity belief statements as part of the work that we've been doing around creating Equitable opportunities for all students by expanding the

061offerings that we have by encouraging students to take advantage of some of the offerings that we do have in our district as well as making sure that many of them are being um reflective of the demographics that we are serving reflective of the beliefs that we hold in common as a school district this course um came to us as an option um a year ago February and as a committee we had met about it and talked about adding it into our course catalog and then the world decided to kind of uh go into what it did for a while and shutdown happened and all of those things so the work still continued at the school level and with some of our students from our black student un Central with some of the students that we

062work with at pale as well as some of the staff um but normally the way our course adoption process works is that we bring courses forward in May for not the following school year but the one after that um and that was under our previous policy so now with our new policy it says that we will bring courses forward periodically throughout the year and so it would be atypical for us to recommend a course for fall this late in the season during the school year but given the fact that this is a course we've been working on for some time many of the students that will be here to advocate for putting the course forward our seniors this year and we wanted them to know that their voices have been heard and we are honoring

063that work even though many of them won't get to take the course as they won't be here with us in the fall um we thought it was really important to go ahead and move move the course forward for next fall even though again it is late in the season and so we've met with um Aon Norris to make sure that we can support the course with the teaching staff within the resources that we have allocated we've done quite a bit the team has done quite a bit of research around the resources that are available for a course like this we've consulted with area experts on developing a course like this it's going to have a lot of input from our students as well which has been really important for us to honor um we talk

064about empowering them and getting them ready to live life on their own terms then it means we have to be ready to listen to them and take action on some of the things that they also ask us to do and so that's where it became really really important to us to move the course forward for next fall um even though again it's um an odd time to be doing that so I will pass it over we have a couple of our teachers with us now and I think we'll have students with us shortly hopefully um but I'm going to pass it over to Mike and April Ellery from Nathan hail to kind of just share a bit of where the course for them started years ago and why it's so important to them for us

065to be moving it ahead now again even though it's out a sequence hi good evening good evening do you want to talk please um so Michael and I are both teachers at Nathan Hill High School I'm in the English Department and he's in the social studies department and we both teach well we we used to both teach freshman level and AP level um the last couple years I don't have freshman anymore but I still have AP um but we've been at the school long enough that we often do a lot of kind of informal collaboration and a number of years ago we started thinking that maybe we should make our collaboration a little more formal and we should think about proposing some ideas that we might have for um you know co- teing and maybe

066even co- teing some classes and it really began with me kind of trying to bring more social studies um cross-curricular things into the English curriculum and work with the types of um like programs and Exhibits that my husband was bringing in from different areas um for example can you talk about what you body in yeah um some of some of youall on the board have been around long enough um maybe you've experienced and attended some of our uh exhibits we used to host uh A History Day at the uh the 7 Street Building U we've hosted exhibits on uh emit till and Freedom Summer we did one on Frederick Douglas and Emancipation Proclamation um we did one on uh fair housing um those was our most recent one and uh the inspiration for some of

067the activities April's done including what I believe she presented at the uh State schools yeah my panel 61 project was really born out of um Michael bringing in the fair housing exhibit um a few years years ago so um we all almost always informally worked together and we just thought we need to we need to make this bigger and we need to um you know bring it into our classroom bring it into our school and kind of get our students on board with um working together as well and then I guess more recently than that because a lot of our units took um a focus in like civil rights um and even local Milwaukee history that is where we started playing with the idea of really wanting to bring a black studies class into Nathan

068hail and we knew that Carrie was doing um some of this work over at Central and we wanted to make sure that hail was kind of you know in on it as well we just thought it was a really worthy thing um the kids have been wanting it for a while and seemed really excited about being asked about their ideas for it and so that's kind of kind of how it was born I guess you could say if I miss anything and then Mike and April while we have you for a second until our students arrive is Carrie uh Carrie will be here she's in the lobby she's just waiting on a couple of the kids um but while we have you guys can you also talk a little bit around the blacked Humanities course

069that we'll be bringing back to the board in June for adoption for fall of 2022 because it ties closely to this one as well so um you know a few years ago when the the district began to embrace um Project based learning um there there was some sort of uh survey or whatever you know that we were encouraged if you had uh innovative ideas to maybe break the traditional model and and you know propose a co- te standard-based with community outreach um course you know put it out there and April and I gravitated to that um and thought that it kind of was a natural pairing with what we did um between you know the social studies and the English but I'm I'm also kind of a wannabe English teacher kind of and I'm a

070wannabe social studies teacher so so um and you know just the opportunity to do some some cross-curricular work um but also when I was in high school um a long time ago at Kay in high school there was um a course called Humanities and you could take it for like social studies credit but for semester but you could take it for a year in order to satisfy a fine arts requirement which was part of a which was a way for uh non-artistic people like myself to uh earn the honors diploma that that R offered so I've always um been attracted to something like that a cross-curricular class interdisciplinary strong community outreach component um and and I saw this uh this is kind of a vehicle for that sort of embrace of our pbl and some

071of our Equity work as well so um we've talked about and and I'm sorry to go on about this but like also years ago before the federal government cut funding for it um Nathan hail benefited and I and I suppose Central at the end benefited from um G lman Institute of American History out of New York city hosted uh junior historian forums um through the teaching American history Grant and it access to topic material and they brought in a scholar that did staff development with teachers but then also um the next day a session with students and it was hosted at wwm or Marquett or you know various universities around town uh and it was it was excellent we did it as an extracurricular activity and uh I worked collaboratively with some of the upper

072level Spanish students at Nathan hail on a Latino history course and um there were several on on African-American history and those are just like really exciting opportunities that I I wish we could have fit into the regular classroom uh instead of being these additional things that uh obviously limited participation so this also seemed like an opportunity to do that bring in um other voices uh through the window of of history and literature and um music and culture and and a lot of the other um influences that might be left out of traditional classrooms and I think it's such a great time for it too because there are so many um organizations that are excited about collaborating with schools now and excited about collaborating with students and you know Service Learning and like this is a

073really exciting time I think for Project based learning and for um cross-curricular classes around topics that are kind of maybe non-traditional for the regular school like structure or system um we're just really excited about it and looking forward to being able to build so for the course that we're proposing for fall of 2021 that one is a half credit social studies elective specific to Black studies our team is going to work on one that is a half credit social studies elective for spring that is focused around latinx studies and then the humanities course will bring forward for the fall of 2022 um within the next uh probably sometime in June um to propose that course to also be added to the catalog to open up more and more of those offerings that are student-driven and

074student l um and incorporate all of our Equity beliefs as well as a lot of our work around the deeper learning work um and we have some special guests with us in the audience as well tonight so I'll ask um Carrie and Miss Hansen and our students to step up to the podium if you don't mind and just share a little bit around why this course is so important to you okay hi um I'm Carrie Hansen I'm a social studies and Avid teacher at West Dallas Central um it's very nice to see you all and um I'm joined with Mr rice as school counselor at Central as well um and I think we may have some of our students in the zoom um I'm not quite sure and some may actually be showing up still

075in the next couple minutes we'll see um but most importantly I'm Jo By Zoe King who I'm going to let take the microphone because she is the Visionary behind this course uh she had a really strong desire that she shared with a lot of her students to make this course happen and um really there's nothing I can say that would be more important than what she has to share just about her experience which um has been wonderful at West AL Central she's actually our honor Cup winner of this year which we're very proud of and she's just got all huge list of accomplishments including going to Madison next fall and we're just very proud of her so I'm going to let her go ahead and just talk a little bit about um her vision for

076the course which she is kind enough to share with you even though she will not actually be taking the course um but she's got some younger siblings and lots of friends who will benefit so do you want to come up hi everyone my name is my name is Zoe King I'm a senior at West Salas Central High School um and I am the President of our black student union um we've been talking about having an African-American studies course at Central um since I got there miss Hansen and I it was both our first year together at Central and immediately we knew that it was something that we wanted to create together um by the time that I graduated high school um so we developed the black student union as a way to sort of um

077carry our mission um through and I just want to say thank you guys for being here to hear um and listen to us students and uh just take the time to develop the course that we feel like is necessary um and essential moving forward um I think our vision for a course is really just to make students all students more aware of you know what what it is to be black in America and learn about African-American history um I think that it's not only important for black students to learn about African-American history but all students um I think that hopefully the goal is to send um students out into the world to be well-rounded and in order to do that it's important that they get perspectives from all different cultures and all sorts of people

078that they're going to come in contact with in life um so I think that's the goal is to just create an understanding um between the black community and all under other communities and I also want to say that it's important that we are involved in the process of creating in the curriculum because we can't have anything for us without us involved so thank [Applause] you good evening I'm Nate rice I'm a school counselor I'm it's I'm at Central I've been there six years and I was over at hail for 14 and um this project or this initiative to try to build an African-American history or black studies class I think is powerful um because we have so many areas where our kids are taking like an introductory class like maybe they take psychology and then

079they take AP Psychology they take chemistry they take AP Chemistry so this would be like a class that I think is consistent with the mission of the school district to create opportunities for students to learn in-depth deeper learning is something that's important we understand you can do that in an individual like a US history class for example and you might decide to look at some African-American history issues but that's not going to give you what you can do if you have 90 class periods a semester long course to go in depth to learn more about your history as an African-American but for our white students our L latinx students our Asian students all our students it's such a powerful inspiring history that I think our students the more they know about it the more inspired

080they're going to be the better they're going to be prepared to interact in our Multicultural Society so I strongly support the class um and I appreciate the support of everybody to get it to the board level so thank you to the committee and uh hoping to get a thumbs up tonight thank you any questions from our board members Jane so I'm just it's fascinating so I just want to hear a little bit more about so are there any other courses like this for high schools we have the are we piloting this have we looked at any other high schools that might be offering this and and then we put our flare on it how are we how are we building this um well there are quite a few high schools in our area that have

081a similar course um or have a either the humanities black course or a black studies course a latinx studies course that's um becoming more and more common within our area um as well as a push to review some of the um history course in general to look at the curriculum that's being presented to look at the views of different um races and cultures throughout time to make sure that it's not completely a eurocentric approach to that work and so this is a big step for us in that direction um but there are quite a few and then there's also I don't know if April and Mike or if Carrie and Nate want to talk about there's some collaboration with some of our University experts as well whove been doing this work for a very long

082time um and they've been having conversations we have somebody with us G that would like to speak um so we have conversations a lot about with those individuals around some of their expertise and how they bring that into the field with us from the start of the organization and she is um a professor at w Milwaukee she's actually worked with a lot of the teachers in our district who attended WM um and she's here and I don't know if you wanted to say a few words or you don't have to so this is Dr Johnson and she could just introduce herself thank you so much uh Caroline I want to thank uh thank uh the board of directors and the superintendent and all of the support staff who have supported to this point uh the

083development of a course on black studies uh I have worked with uh others here at at Central for the last year or so most uh specifically during black history programs presid providing presentations and other information around that topic I have um uh been involved in education all of my life not only at wuwm but I taught third grade that's how I started so my whole life is about education Public School Ed education so I saw the enthusiasm of the students here at Central about many things and wanting to see some types of changes some changes that would reflect more diversity within the school so it's been my goal to work with them in any way I could to help them develop a framework for having that happen so I've been at WM a long time

084uh my um I work in Department of Ed policy and Community studies and uh certainly most of the courses I teach deal with diversity Multicultural education race relations Etc so I'm here to support in any way I can the development you know help those who are working with the develop the framework more refine I think the framework and to continue you know working with with the schools to help get that uh propelled and really moving in in a positive way are there any questions you need to ask me thank you for being here tonight thank you for having me are there any other question questions or comments regarding this course no no all right well I'd look for a motion move to approve second wanted it it's been moved and seconded any other discussion if

085not all those in favor I I opposed all right that passes thank you very much can I just say something real quick yes Kristen um I got I was I attended the Black History Month that the black student union put put on and just so impressed with uh Miss King over there you're a wonderful young lady and I'm very proud of you and I hope the all the work that all the kids have done toward this is just phenomenal so uh lots of great things going on in our community so thank you thank you all right uh we will move on to item 10.4 international travel to sagol West Africa spring of 2022 I have Miss Miss rmer yep I am here um and our teacher has brought this next opportunity forward who was here

086last board meeting um with our trip to France is also here this evening to talk about an opportunity for our students to travel to senagal West Africa so I will pass it along to her for allowing me to join you tonight and this is especially exciting after this African-American studies class approval this is just super um Sagal is near and dear to my heart I had gone there when I was an undergraduate and I was at a non-traditional college and our instructions were pretty much choose any country in a so-called developing third world as I was doing crosscultural Communications and I chose Sagal thinking was French speaking and their first president had been been a poet Leopold sengar and he was very active in the formation of negritude and I thought how could I go

087wrong and it was the experience of a lifetime and even though it was so many years ago it's something that I've never forgotten and even though we've done fabulous trips to France which I'm so grateful for and the kids are signed up and excited about that this trip to go to senagal is something that is just a dream and I think our kids will so benefit from the experience of arriving in Sagal in Western Africa and we're going to be going to a pilot village where there are Street children but an NGO got it started as a little village so that these kids were able to form working together and making their life's worthwhile and moving forward with their life we'll be going to La Rose which is this pink lake um we'll be going

088to gore Island which is known as where the slaves from all of the African continent pass through on their way out from there it's become a UNESCO heritage site um there's other Villages where we'll be meeting with people which is what's so exciting about this particular trip is through forum and we specifically emphasize wanting to have contact with the people wanting to have traditional experiences so we'll be doing things like making btig which is a fabric it's used with wax to make designs that's on there having a chance to do boutiqu having uh meals with villagers um we'll travel around going to few different Villages going to S Louis which is one of the bigger towns or cities with um colonialism um homes and things that are left over alongside mosque and things Sagal is

089primarily a w of speaking country the official language is French the national language that everyone speaks is wof but there's tons of other people mandinka Pearl fol a whole bunch of different people that are in Sagal um there is a chance to go to a bird sanctuary there's a chance to go to the desert as I mentioned there's a chance to go to Glory Island um there's also a chance to be involved with African street art and going to the African village of Arts where they have different things going on there um and then again there's the Wildlife Safari that's at a private Wildlife Reserve so it's just a trip that I am so excited about and for all the p and I've been blessed and fortunate to make happen in my life this is

090just a trip that I think will move kids our kids beyond their years and insight and wisdom like just beyond anything and everything and it so fits in with our vision of the district in the deeper learning and growing and developing the students to be all of who and what they are and be and we as a community together can be that I really sincerely hope you will feel positive about this trip it would be for spring break of 2022 I have traveled with Forum this organization before and they are fabulous um everything is safe they take precautions um so everything I have total trust and confidence in them and again just the chance to be in senagal and I remember the first time when I came back my first impression I was driving into

091Chicago with some friends and suddenly I thought oh my gosh all this electricity I just couldn't believe there was all this electricity and all this electricity that was on and it was staying on all night and it just seemed like such a waste of electricity after people who didn't have electricity and seeing that they did it and now this is going to be several years later and we're fortunate that we'll be going to as I mentioned some of these Villages that are um un protected and they've been developed to serve their population and we'll meet students we get to meet students um go to school so it's really a super opportunity that I hope we're able to afford for our students for our children thank you so much for your time and consideration all right

092anyone have any questions yes so it this is open to both Halen Central and dokey and dkey and um and so around how much interest is is there um to go to this do we have is this a um an um a large group of kids going do you are you taking a CL before you go how does how how do we get the kids interested and involved and how do we um you know frontload them for something like this we'll get information from Forum we can talk it up we can travel with as many as as few as six students and as many as up to nine um or 10 or more there's really There's No Limit it's just the way the pricing goes as a matter of fact is the more students that

093go the more inexpensive everything becomes because you have larger quantities and I think that from just even in my Global cultures classes I'm at Central during the morning and West in intermediate in the afternoon and in the global cultures class when we mentioned senagal or West Africa the kids are all excited thinking about that then so I think that it's the opportunity of just speaking it up and talking about it and sharing it and promoting it is a way of letting kids really consider that wow this is an option this is a possibility this is something that I can experience I think will be a way of frontloading it and really energizing students around this and especially It just fits so well with this African-American studies class and it's just fabulous I think it's just

094wonderful a wonderful fit other questions DJ you had mentioned that there was like a special deal that's why part of the reason why it was coming forward earli or you know uh sooner than normally it would um was there some sort of uh discount or something that was being given as WIS was bring brought forward the French seure Community is a small community and there was a French teacher who was organizing a trip to for a spring break and it was going to be for educators and it was not during our spring break time and then another French teacher friend had organized this trip through Forum before Co hit and they were unable to go so the trip has basically been in place it just didn't have students using it and then I thought oh

095my gosh our spring break this would be fabulous since it's already been put together and it's a wonderful just the contact with the people and the experiences of eating together and enjoying life together is just um very exciting yeah and um I had shared with Noah and Brian normally we again this is coming up quick as it's next year spring break we're usually a good year out when we approve any kind of international travel um but there was this opportunity for a trip that had already been organized and planned and was set for students that we just didn't want to miss out on in order to offer that to our students and so it's coming up a little quicker will be highly encouraging they do have a lot of and it's in um onboard book

096for the public to see as well as for the board to review they have a lot of covid um precautions built into the trips and built into those pieces and then we'll just be highly encouraging our families to take the insurance for the trip just in case for some other reason that you know things aren't where we thought they would be by next spring and travel isn't for some reason safe to do right with it being a shorter turnaround are there going to be enough uh fundraising opportunities to make sure that this trip is accessible to those who do want to partake with there's always donors choose writing a grant I've done that for trips before there's always restaurant options where you um work with the restaurant to get a percentage of the food I

097think that there's different um options that we can work on there GoFundMe pages that the kids can do that's one of the things that with the France trip was an option for the kids to do like their own GoFundMe page um so I think that it's March 2022 and I think that getting started if we get it approved we can get it out and move on presenting it before the school year ends even though we're speaking a couple of weeks that's a chance to open it up so that the kids are aware of it and then the way they're working their payments they're not accepting the first payment even although you can make monthly payments but the first payment wouldn't be due until September 30th 2021 so there's the whole summer to start before even

098having to start making payments or they can start sooner so I think that we'd be able to work around it and I think that fundraising is something we can certainly work on doing and kids doing already jobs or babysitting or lawn mowing or the those sorts of things can be putting that money towards this goal now okay thank you any other questions if not look for a motion Mo second a motion and second any other discussion all right all those in favor I I opposed all right that passes thank you very much bringing this forward sounds like a great opportunity for our students and all the best of luck for fundraising so we can get them there all right I'm going to move on now to item 10.5 the englage English language arts adoption grades

0994K through five Mr rer um well and I think this is my last one on the agenda for the EV so this will be the last of getting to hear from me for a little while um but this is our 4K through fifth grade ELA adoption we had our Workshop around the adoption last week um and this is the opportunity for the board to support the action to adopt the resource that includes the resource would be a six-year cycle for us that includes all of the workbooks all of the trade books all of the text in the hands of our students as well as all of the online resources and the professional development for the teachers the embedded professional development as a separate line item we'll also be looking to purchase the book rooms but

100those are um not a renewable every six years cost that's a one-time cost for us um and then the resource would be renewable should we choose to continue with it after the six years um and we have priced it out to be um for plenty of materials for each classroom in our school district across all of our schools um as well as ensuring that the resource is super flexible in its use so that it aligns to a deeper learning work as well as um includes quite a bit of culturally relevant text so that our Learners can see themselves in the text um and so we are looking tonight for board approval to go ahead and make the purchase all right anyone have any questions I just have a quick question on the quote don't we

101have 11 elementary schools oh yep good question Amy we do but we had purchased one book room as part of the pilot so that we could um see it and make sure that it was a resource that we needed so one of them is sitting partially in this room with some of the boxes that are along the wall and partially in our office at the back so our teachers could actually see it and play in it and look in it before so that book room will get Shi to the other Elementary other questions only question I had was also about the quote it said it was only good till May 14th the pricing I presume that um yeah I don't know why that's a good question no I I'm sorry I didn't catch that on

102the quote um our W is actually on the zoom with us this evening but yeah the quote is certainly good through this evening um should we go ahead and approve tonight okay as long as that's true any other questions if not look for a motion move to approve second all right we have a motion a second any further discussion all those in favor I opposed that passes right and thank you for that and now I get to answer all the teacher emails who wanted to know how quickly they could get their hands on the resource um and yep they've been coming in Fast and Furious for the last few days and so now I can reply to them that we're going to go ahead and place the order so they are very thankful and our

103Learners are thankful for your support all right well I'm glad that we're able to provide that for them um now move on to item 10.6 policy revisions to number 535 rule staff reduction enforce procedures first reading uh Mr Thompson uh good evening everybody and thank you for this opportunity uh I am here uh following up on conversations that we've had in our board committee and it's in regards to uh the reduction Force Matrix which is criteria that's been established for for many years and it gets implemented when there needs to be reductions in staff and so there is a maor matx that we follow and uh it's built on points and what we've seen over the course of years is that as we're looking at the Matrix and how apply applies to some of our

104employees in each of the sections we're seeing that there's opportunities for ties and so this year for example there was a tie after we went through the first two criteria which is uh Educational Service years and then the most recent uh performance summative and when that's the case then we go to the next set of criteria which is past performance history uh degrees or lure additional degrees or lure that uh an employee might have and then what's written in the current Matrix right now is involvement in the school or district school district community and that's an opportunity again to earn x amount of points well when there's been a tie past practice has been that you go to date of hire as the final Point um to break that tie and in our board committee

105we had conversations that that was a practice that's been used but it's not included in this particular rule for the reduction in forc Matrix and so I'm here tonight um with a proposed change to the reduction en Force Matrix and that change would be to take out item five which is the uh involvement in the school or District community and put in writing that we would then be using the date of hire as the final criteria piece instead of what we have currently and so as we go through that Matrix the person that has the least seniority would be the one identified for the reduction position that we are working through with the Matrix and so um like Noah said this is the first rating so it's held for 30 days and then we come

106back for for a vote but that is the the uh the proposed change in regards to the reduction of force Matrix questions if no questions then I would look for a motion so moved second second so moved in second any last minute discussion all right all those in favor I I opposed that passes thank you very much Mr Thompson okay now I'll be moving on to item 10.7 the 2020 2021 budget amendments Miss wiler thank you no so we talked in depth last week about some changes that have um that we've seen in our budget this year so there were a number of them some of them due to co some of them not we saw um reduced cost in transportation and utilities we saw a decline in enrolled students with special needs which ultimately

107um means we have fewer costs in fund 27 we're able to utilize our flowthrough grant which is a Federal Grant and ultimately that reduces the transfer that we have to make from fund 10 to fun 27 so that frees up some budget dollars within fun 10 and then another sizable piece of our savings that we saw with fun 10 General operating budget this year was we were able to utilize some of our um achievement Gap reduction funds and move some of our salaries and benefits of Staff who are eligible onto the AGI Grant so from fund 10 onto the AGI Grant which then freed up those salary and benefit expenses within our fund 10 budget as well so the total projected amount of the savings is about $6 million and so we are looking to

108make budget amendments for current budget in that amount um and the breakdown then of those funds would be to transfer $2 million from fund 10 to fund 46 and fund 46 is our Capital Improvement fund so those would be for future Capital Improvements per our plan that is currently adopted for fund 46 which we can um change with future board approval and then also reflected is additional $4 million going to fund balance which the board would then um commit to to a designated purpose which we talked last week about retirement benefits and that also would happen at an upcoming board meeting um via an action item any questions anyone have any questions about that yeah if not I would look for a motion move to approve second we have a motion a second any further

109discussion if not all those in favor I I opposed right that passes thank you very much m wler all right that concludes uh our portion of the regular board meeting um we will adjourn for five minutes and then we'll come back for our first Workshop we are Jour all right I'd like to call this beanie back to order we're going to go into our first Workshop 11.1 college and Creer raess technology plan uh Mr hangle if you would all right uh good evening and uh thanks me to join you today there's some I got some friends on Zoom who are also um going to help me out if we have any questions and through discussion and Caitlyn's over there too if she needs to jump in at all but um just wanted to uh talk

110about the tech plan so this is something that we do every three years you can see um we're working on through 2021 to 2024 which seems uh so far in the distance at this point it was a little interesting when uh we were doing some conversations this afternoon about talking you know when the next plan comes up in the summer of 2024 for 2024 to 2027 so just trying to make all of those things work um we do have a number of uh people on our committee that you can see here they get their their moment of Fame so we have um we have some principls we have some deeper learning coaches we have Innovation coaches we have our district um District admin we have tech department um and Gary was on when he was

111um a school board member as well um so you can see kind of our names there we've been we've met uh as a whole group uh we started meeting in January and we met as a whole group I think three times and have had some further conversations as as we do some breakouts as intermediate and high school look different than Elementary and and things like that so huge thanks to these people for kind of being the sounding board a little bit for uh whether their department or their building is they're collecting information and and getting that to um to us as well so huge thank you to them um so we started with our why um and really looking at like through that lens of Technology how are we achieving Equity through deeper learning and

112you can see you know our mission there we are really focusing on um that that deeper learning part but how does technology provide us an opportunity to go further with our students and really get them on that path um to living life on their own terms so we identified really three of our Equity non-negotiables that that this work really lands in um engaging students in authentic and rigorous learning through our curricular materials um instructional practices and assessments that are free of discrimination and bias and our culturally responsive as you know technology is really the gateway to uh accessing a lot of our curricular materials and um things that we've adopted over the last in this position for five years so over the last five years and really improving our instructional practices whether we're in a

113CO year or if we're outside in a normal year um and also uh our second Equity non-negotiable you know those deeper learning competencies driving instructional planning increasing those Equitable opportunities for all students um there's some pieces that we've talked about in our in our plan that's coming up a little bit later but just super proud of our work uh as a committee and our work really as leaders that includes you guys as well as school board members and as principes and coaches and and about how our conversations were centered around providing Equitable access for all students um and what that looks like all the way from the from the East end of town all the way to the west end of town um and then also obviously analyzing our data in order to support that

114resource allocation and funding we don't want to be wasteful with those funds aligning our district policies and procedures um to our equity non-negotiables and creating that piece for all so that's really where we started we looked at the Strategic plan I know that you guys have looked at it before um but just identifying we went through some of the pieces in which we touch on in the in the technology as well um and then looking at uh in our first meeting we talked about like what's going well so in 2017 um we adopted our current technology plan and that one uh was really an adoption of a new one from the 2014 to 2017 plan so that plan was um about 65 pages long it had a lot of um things that we kind of

115took out in the 2017 plan and kind of got to like those nuts and bolts of like how are we going to measure success what does it look like how do we know that we're being successful um and then identifying some of those opportunities for growth too so that was important for us to to continue that work as we do in our continue Improvement Cycles whether it's School Improvement plans or whether it's Department plans or whatever that looks like but what are those things that we're doing well and then where do we have opportunities to continue to align our resources to that mission and vision of our school district so um you know this was January so uh we were it seems like it was ages ago at this time uh but everybody was really

116really proud on our our nimbleness and our ability for planning in the pandemic uh I think back to when uh Marty had sent me an email I think it was March 5th it was like a Friday afternoon at about 5 o' he sent me an email he's like hey I think this Co thing is like starting to become a thing um we should probably like get all of our like how do we get users and usernames and passwords and to get those out to families to be able to access all of our online um all of our online content because we are already had a number of trans uh platforms that had transitioned to be online so it was really just the communication to families so I started looking up this covid-19 thing and I

117was like man Marty was like really on this because the only things I could find were those schools like in Washington and Oregon where it was like oh we're going to close for a half day we're going to wipe down the desks and the kids are going to come back uh the next day um so really the our our this ComEd had already recognized that we had already owned things like Alex that was an online platform study sync was being piloted in a number of different areas we had Lexia we had DreamBox we had a lot of things where we could really shift and and be in that Nimble um and agile uh phase um we also recognize that we are it was in the last um the last tech plan is that we wanted

118to provide 247 access for students um to curricular materials and um we achieved that obviously through Skyward and now through schooly um as our learning management system um also uh we're doing well is purchasing software programs that allow for student and teacher interactions and Communications you know things like Zoom um and having those platforms that are available for teachers um we've been pretty in I know in in our department leadership and learning we've been pretty uh flexible as we've identified here is the openness and flexibility to purchase new apps and programs to use with devices so as people have found things that we've decided like oh yeah that would be something really good and un for uh Universal for all of our students we purchased those um for for staff so some things that uh

119people identified were Cami which is a PDF editing app um or extension for Chrome which has been um really really well received at the secondary level where students have been taking Chromebooks home and they're not able to edit PDFs um like kids can do at an iPad where they can just take a screenshot and write right on there um gizmos has been an online um you heard about it last week in the science group online lab simulations so uh being able to support that as well so there's been a number of different things that um that we identified this year as doing well um and some areas in our room for growth uh is that our we've identified that our technology is not necessarily equal at all Sites so um we talked about this back

120in 2017 um you know as we have different buildings that have different ways that they spend their building budget so they've allocated their building budget differently um as I sent out some spreadsheets in looking at um like our projector usage which we're going to talk about a little bit later is like how old are projectors in our buildings and do they have an Apple TV do they have speakers it was widely varied all over the board so we really want to um identify that and help support those areas so um and even in sometimes within buildings the classroom to classroom comparison is not um where we wanted to be um in terms of being equal for all of our buildings we've tried to uh identify um like how much of a building budget is going

121uh to support a technology needs um but it it varies so much we couldn't put a normal percentage to it because um and the other thing that struggles is as as some of you know I was a principal of a small school and if it didn't matter if I taught or if I was a principal of a small school or I was a principal of a large school a projector goes the projector still costs $429 and when your building budget is $25,000 sometimes that doesn't get replaced whereas your building budget is $400,000 it's pretty you probably have two or three of them laying around so that is um a real piece that we wanted to address um moving forward also um I mean this is always I think this just speaks to our teachers in

122general being really like sponges for their own learning and really doing this efficiently and appropriately and Equitable for all of our students is to build that technology Literacy for um students and staff um that professional development being able to use the newest tools being able to support that being able to um you know provide that first class education for all of our students um obviously you're going to hear this anytime is aging Technologies so things like Chromebook batteries and char Chargers and the condition of what the devices are in um like I said this is goes back to that first bullet point of having the technology available at all Sites um that's kind of that equal equal and Level Playing Field um another piece was some of the software like Premium Accounts so we have

123a number of we always get a number of individual requests for different um Premium Accounts where it might not necessarily be appropriate for us to buy that for everybody body in the entire District um but a lot of times teachers are spending this money out of their own pocket and we really obviously want to avoid that so being able to level that playing field for for all the classrooms across the district and instead of um you know like I I'll use Matt as an example Matt always calls me right around this time is like hey should I buy another another um card of Chromebooks and um I'm always like well you know let's look at you know like what what's the decision- making process behind that knowing that a card of Chromebook cost about 10

124to 11,000 and if we were appropriately um supplying schools with with that technology which is our goal in the plan then that money could be freed up to pay for some of these Premium Accounts which teachers wouldn't have to pay for out of their own pocket um also streamlining some of our districtwide uh purchasing accounts that we use um with common School funds as well just so we can make sure that we're maximizing those discounts we do do some um group discounts and things through P one that we get a discount on which is we just want to be able to like be all on the same page as like okay who's ordering Brain Pop this year okay it's nine elementary schools well let's make sure we get a discount for that so we can

125maximize um our dollars and then um one other request that we've seen a lot of has been more recording equipment in buildings for things like podcasts um teachers are using this to record students reading for their FMP levels um so the kids can see growth kind of in like an online portfol fio over the course of the year they want to be producing they want to be creating they want to be doing voiceovers for things so um we've also talked about uh what does that look like we just sent out some equipment through common School funds that we purchase out of our district common School funds account that will um help push this in this area so those should hopefully be uh coming in soon um and just for a historical piece uh in 2017

126when we had our last tech plan we had 88,200 students and for next year we're projected to be at about 7500 students so you can see that there's obviously going to be less devices that'll be um be needed but that's kind of the number about 7500 is what what I I've been kind of working off of um and then just to give you some background on our current devices so right now um we have uh 4K as a per decision of the last technology plan uh has shared devices so it's about a I would say one to three um maybe in some instances one to four in some instances one to two again if dist if buildings have been purchasing um devices out of their own budget um and those are iPad 4s which are

127probably about um six to seven years old and even minis which is are even older than that um and then in our 5K through fifth grade uh most of our devices are fifth generation iPads and sixth generation iPads uh Lane is is um one to one iPads and those are mostly fifth gen West Milwaukee is a combination of iPads and Chromebooks in a one to one and then FLW is um about a 092 to one so not quite as many devices and I'll talk about that here in a second not quite as many devices as they have students and then 912 um is Chromebooks which is about 08 to one um and these the Middle School those decisions are were in the last tech plan of what the preference of devices were um based on

128staff that were um were at those three intermediate schools the one of the the huge barriers that we're running into is the funding sources of where these came from so um in some instances they're common School funds common School funds has certain rules and regulations where you can only check them out like a library book for two weeks so um we have a number of Chromebooks that are purchased in common School funds uh leadership and learning has bought Chromebooks tech department has bought Chromebooks building budgets have bought Chromebooks and iPads um the tech plan bought a bunch of Chromebooks and iPads so there's all these different funding sources and and we've purchased them with Title One funds in the past and they all come with um you know those different rules obviously the common School

129funds is being the most restrictive um because if you look at a building like FLW they have about 1100 devices for 900 let's just say 950 kids but like three or 400 of them are are common School funds so you can check them out for two weeks you're checking out a cart and then you have to bring them back and then somebody else is checking it out so it's not um not necessarily an ideal situation so um what we want to do is we want to streamline that get that in the tech plan um and then so we're not going to have some of those issues that we've had in the past and this is really um coming off of the heels of 2017 when we had a failed referendum right yes so in 2017

130um you know when we had our last tech plan go forward the budget was um you know quite I wouldn't say lofty but the budget was like where we would get everything purchased out of fund 10 and then um when the budget or then the referendum failed we had to kind of make do and and come up with new funding sources and the the life of a Chromebook being about 5 years we're kind of coming to the end of some of those obviously you know 2017 2022 um so we'll talk about that a little bit as well and then um we've also got a number of platforms like I said we have things like Alex study sync um you know Scholastic is going to have uh an online component Discovery Ed is a purchase that

131we've also had um using common School funds but then our our newer ones schooly as our LMS um having zoom and then um Camy as a PDF compor those three things have really been like the MVPs um in terms of platforms for Co um so we had uh staff computer refresh in um winter and spring of this year and um I think when we originally had started talking about this in our Tech plan meetings is there was an assumption that the average classroom Tech um would have a mounted projector with either a hardwired connection for uh teacher desktop or a teacher Dell laptop or an Apple TV for a teacher um MacBook uh a pair of corded speakers and then you have a array of extension cords and power cords for charging um and as

132we've seen more and more purchasing of that over the past by four or five months um in aser funds for buildings um I think that became less common the more and more we got into it we're finding that a lot of classrooms still don't have mounted projectors they don't have have speakers um Apple TVs are 10 years old and are no longer being supported by Apple so um that's really kind of what our our Baseline what we kind of wanted to set um again so uh kind of our current status and this is up to um we use our our uh Destiny as a asset management tool and a destiny can only be as accurate as someone scans in and scans out iPads so uh the numbers that we have in Destiny um we have

1335,134 iPads in fifth and sixth generation and they currently just released the eighth generation Apple did um just a short time ago we have about 4,560 Chromebooks um with support ranging in expiration from 20 uh September of 2021 uh September of 2022 and then 2026 so with that 7500 projected students we have like 9700 total devices but again a number of those are um are those common School funds and it's really we're we're relying on the destiny piece in order for that to be accurate and we find in know in a lot of situations it's not necessarily 100% accurate especially as we've moved devices around from building to building this year just to make sure that um you know when school came back that kids would be one to one and have that device as

134home so as those devices are coming back in the building in the next um a lot of schools are they're coming back this week um and next week we'll start to see not only the number of devices that are coming back but also most importantly for our concern is the condition of the devices that are coming back um so yeah there's like a real balance especially in the secondary as per um the 2017 Tech plan and and what we had observed from the board at that time was that in the secondary we did not want to go one to one and so um there's often times where you we purchase a cart of 30 Chromebooks and a class might only have 24 Chromebooks in the cart or I'm sorry a class might only have 24

135students and so you have six Chromebooks that are kind of sitting there for that hour that's where you get like a number of devices that are higher than the total number of students this also includes teacher iPads as well so that's about 400 different devices so really there's a difference of about 15 to 1600 um and I would assume as we start to get those back in and everything is scanned and accurate just as we do that for all of our books at the end of the year to make sure that we have accurate counts um you know that Gap will kind of close a little bit as well um so in terms of our elementary priorities as we kind of split these off in a little bit um Elementary was really looking for our

136a continued use of one toone iPads but also to include 4K um um as soon as we did like a one to two one: three one to four in 4k in 2017 within that year um we heard from 4K teachers like okay that might actually be good to um to have those in one to one that way you're not sharing um in station rotations and things like that so um including 4K and then um replacing aging Hardware things like projectors and Apple TVs like I said we have um there'll be some slides up here but our Apple TVs that are originally purchased we think back to about 2010 or 2011 they were not they're not supported by Apple after 2015 and they're no longer able to connect to the iTunes Store after 2018 so um

137that's where we see a lot of especially when we were in hybrid there's a lot of lagging there's a lot of connection issues and um so that's something that we wanted to to address and also currently uh we in elementary we have have keyboards but usually those keyboards are only used for State Testing so um you know in addressing some of our 21st century skills things like keyboarding and and and like the things like that um we had a number of different breakout groups that were identifying like the kids really don't use a keyboard until almost sixth grade when they get a Chromebook in some instances or at least using that like repetitively so addressing things like keyboards and styluses um some of the 4K teachers and kindergarten and first grade teachers had talked about

138like just getting kids to write with a stylus on their iPad it's just you know working on that F motor skills um is going to be really important for for our kids so um increasing those number of keyboards and styluses that are available and we have like I said we still have a small number of keyboards as we typically only buy those for State we've only bought those for State Testing which was in about 2 16 I want to say those are still we still those are the ones that we use um we've bought ad adaps from when they went from iPad 2os when if you remember you had the old huge 30 pin connector now to the lightning connector um we've just bought adapter so we want to increase that um number as well

139so uh a couple of different numbers here in different scenarios and um you know looking for some I guess you know some discussion from you guys and some feedback from you guys as we as we go through this um you know there's the idea of the left side is kind of like how we've how we've done in the past is we've tried to operate in Cycles we don't want to go out and have to buy all of our devices in one year and then all a sudden four years later when it's time to replenish like all a sudden we're buying a whole new set of devices because you know budgets are sometimes unpredictable as much as as great of a job as Caitlyn does um it's hard it's not it's not easy so being able

140to um in this option um hold on to our six gen iPads which are um Bruce you want to help me out on let's see if Bruce is there what year we bought those in 2018 I heard Bruce unmute but I cannot hear Bruce I can see them okay so uh we'll safely say 2018 um obviously there are six gen so they're two years out of um out of where whe they're on the eighth gen now um and so we would like to hold on to those devices in this option and typically what we do is just filter those down to 4K and to like kindergarten kind of however many devices we can get out of that we've also had some discussion of you know when a device breaks then the student would maybe get

141a Sixth Gen um and we can have those kind of in our um our stockpile of um I'll just use the term extras for lack of any better term as you know they often um you know it's nice to have a few on hand in case of a breakage or screen crack as those um are fixed so that would put us at about 2,519 new iPads um and some conversations that we've been having a lot with not only Apple but there's also thirdparty companies that um have started to look into this is our cost for that iPad is uh $294 and then $34.95 for the case so in as we have a few board members that were around in 2017 we talked a lot about in 2017 about our cases we used to have um

142essentially what was like three sheets of leaf paper wrapped around an iPad anytime you dropped it from maybe more than six in that iPad was going to break we were in probably a range of about 5 to 10% of our iPads were broken at any given point um so in 2017 per recommendation of our Tech plan committee and per approval of the board is we really wanted to purchase some rugged cases which has been an absolute game Cher especially now that kids have been taking them home because we typically see uh across the you know 4,000 iPads that we have um anywhere from about maybe 1% breakage rate for the year um I think Brandon has been keeping a spreadsheet since about the last three years and he usually fixes about 125 to 150 devices

143every year out of 4,000 so this has been an absolute game changer for us it's probably been one of the best Investments that we've that we've made in terms of Technology um hands down so that looks um that STM case is just um if anybody has their iPad um that's the one that you have on your case it's got the um magnetic yep Jane has hers it's got the magnetic piece on there really nice Corners Amy has hers over there thanks Amy um and so that's been um you know that's been a lifesaver for us it's not only saving Brandon time in fixing it but it's saving downtime for kids we don't have extras um and that's been a positive so Apple the AC in the second line um is for Apple Care so this

144has been a new piece for Apple has obviously recognized that they want to you know make a little bit of extra money and so their apple care now has been um including more coverage so they actually Now cover basically any break AG on an iPad is covered by Apple Care and you can you either have to run it up to the store or they'll send you a new one it also covers broken Chargers and broken charger cables so we have been um doing some digging over the last month or so and will continue to do that is kind of estimating what like what is the return on our investment for that it's $50 per iPad so you can see the overall cost just for the elementary is about $134,000 um and so we're trying to

145cost out like what do we spend on replacement screens time and effort charging cables charging blocks because what we're finding is often times it's not that the charging block and the charging cable is broken it's actually lost so then we're charging a fee for a lost charging cable versus it being like frayed at the end so Apple Care obviously does not cover l charging items um and so that takes our total as you can see from 328.50 for a device with a case up to 377 um you know adding about $134,000 into that cost so option two um you know same number of students but that would be selling back all of our devices and so we would need all those devices and you can see those different costs there it's the same per device

146but you're adding essentially about 200 you know $70,000 in um in those instances so that's kind of our um our Elementary uh iPad replacement and then um again like we talked about this importance of providing Equitable opportunities not only for um for staff and students um but for anybody really that's entering our building is um making sure that we have Apple TVs for teachers and students to connect to in classrooms that's how they project in a in a classroom so um there and and like I said some buildings have used building funds in the past oh let's see since they've not been selling them since 2015 the past six years to replace um some of the Apple TV first Generations so um you can when I look at the spreadsheets of like here's the projectors

147and here's the Apple TVs and here's whether or not you have speakers you'll see like oh yeah that was clearly like an Apple TV there's two or three in a building it was like either had a little bit of budget money left over or an Apple TV broke and they had to replace it um so as we've kind of gone through that we're looking at about 220 Apple TVs they also um if we we'll figure out how to get Bruce in but um if we uh we can it it works on not on Wi-Fi but it actually works on Bluetooth so there's less congestion on the networ this was a big issue when we were in hybrid when teachers were um you know zooming and trying to play sound through a Bluetooth and and everything

148going on at one time um and then uh this the projector piece so this has kind of been like a little bit of a moving Target for us so if we look at um the projectors there's what we have a standards um sheet that uh Bruce compiles with FR and Kevin Clark and um that is kind of like here's here's our standard so we look at the projectors that ar ar necessarily at that standard um and this would be a maximum replacement at elementary about 240 projectors they run about $422 each some of our projectors that we have right now don't even have HDMI ports for us to plug an Apple TV in so that's obviously like not going to work um so again this is like a max amount uh the actual would have

149to be based off of need and and so um and and this is something where you know you might see as I've looked at um projectors you might see a projector from 2015 but it still has 40% of a lamp life left we don't want to take that down and just throw it out just because we're like hey we got to get new projectors because we need the MC 372 VX um in some instances the the um the projectors are that old where they don't have an HDMI um and so that obviously needs to be addressed because the teacher won't be able to project or they have to go through multiple steps um some of the other pieces that we're trying to work on right now I'm going to be doing some testing in some

150classrooms tomorrow is um well if you look at our projector over there by Dr lexman in the ceiling you can see that when we mounted the projectors there's two outlets so if you're trying to plug a projector power for a power for projector power for Apple TV and power for speakers that doesn't necessarily work out so we're trying to figure out um what our best solution is going to be for that the new projector that we've been looking at replacing with these have like a two watt um speaker the new ones have a 17 watt speaker so I'm going to go be going to some classrooms that have those tomorrow and um like listening to the audio and seeing if that's actually loud enough because otherwise um we'll have to run um some audio into

151a different uh Outlet um and again some of the older projectors they don't have audio out so it's not like you can just plug a speaker in there and then play um sound so um and then we talked about keyboards keyboards um we I just took a number of 25 students or 25% of our total students so if we had um What We R off of 3,242 students we have about um six to 700 keyboards right now but supplementing that with another 800 keyboards um for the State Testing that'll hopefully loosen up on um the testing schedules as well because right now the testing schedules are really set by how many keyboards you have for when the kids are doing writing and things like that not necessarily educationally what we believe but it's based on

152the um on technology so um for our elementary budget again we've got this range for this iPad replacement obviously and then um you see the total is there so you're about 1 million to about 1.4 um million when you add everything together is there any have un what we have figed out okay just hit this one any questions on any questions on the elementary pieces yes Jan so just um we so in the in the middle school we I think at the elementary level most of the discussion is always around the some of the content creation pieces and so um you know that ability to being able to um create some content to make those iBooks and things like that those things that come with the iPad and that power that comes with that iPad

153versus um I think in middle school a lot of the discussion is like okay this is like it's more business um it's more for word processing obviously the iPad doesn't have a keyboard attached to it um and then we still do have iPads for um middle schools we'll talk about for teachers to check out we have shared carts where the kids can um I think there's like each School usually has about two carts and then like music Innovations uses an iPad because they use Garage Band so there's been this um you know there's been a lot of those conversations around like what that looks like and a lot of the elementary schools still do have have Chromebooks as well um because they purchased them for State Testing um or have purchased them in the past

154and we've talked about actually as a solution because you know we're going to have a whole bunch of or a whole bunch of Chromebooks that are just going to be phased out not supported and when they break they break um like what would that look like if we push those down into the elementary school so they would have some of those opportunities because we had some fifth grade feedback um on our Tech plan um committee where they were like it would be nice for the kids to be able to access a Chromebook in fifth grade where they can use both of those devices right um and so they understand that like you know there there are multiple options out there um just like when you are ready to buy your own personal computer it's kind

155of like what you feel comfortable with and and you kind of weigh your pros and cons of each so just to from our perspective when we were hearing this plan we asked the same question because it seems like if you're just going down One path it's simpler for repair and all that sort of stuff inste dealing with two different some sometimes very different Technologies but the reasoning that we were given is that the things that are used in elementary school are more adapted towards the iPad the apps and things that are only available on iPads and then when the staff were uh queried about what they wanted to use in intermediate and um High School it was based on the need there that's why some intermediate schools are only one lane was uh was the

156one that wanted to iPad and was was a hybrid for um uh FLW and then it was Chromebook was the thing that they wanted to have for the high school level so that's kind of how it landed in the plan that we have uh right now um the same thing for the one:1 versus not one:1 again at the time um the discussion was that staff at the high school level felt that it wasn't needed to have a one to one at the high school level and that's why we didn't do that uh where it was more needed in the elementary level so that's how it was presented to us and board members Brian Jeff Heather uh bill you know we were all there for that discussion and it was a long one I remember uh

157to go through this because the technology spending was a was a big issue early on in the district a lot of breakage and things like that and um the the cases that were brought up was one of the major things spending more on the cases to hope that we would protect and I'm happy to hear that that investment has worked out to try and prevent that because we had a lot of breakage or just flat lost like poof gone iPads not not found or heard from again so that's the sort of thing that we were trying to hopefully to to fix and that was a question I had is how many are just flat missing like what's that replacement cost we're looking at for iPads that or or Chromebooks that never return uh in terms

158of like what our what we paid like if it just going missing yeah do yeah do we know not what we pay but do we have any sort of a number oh like the number of U actual devices yeah because when we're talking about kids taking stuff home that's another thing we didn't want to happen we made the policy it's going to stay at school to prevent that sort of breakage and loss um so I'm just wondering obviously we were forced into letting kids take stuff home with Co so are we having a similar problem that we had previously before that are we seeing a good amount of kids still coming back with their devices they're taking it back and forth um so we saw far we saw far less loss and damage than we

159anticipated we knew there would be some and we built some money into eser funds in order to compensate for that we won't have the final numbers on all of that until the very tail end of the year because the iPads and the Chromebooks especially for the kids who chose to stay virtual they still need them obviously all the way up until the last day of school um so we're in the process right now know lots of times um a fee for a Chromebook or an iPad ends up in someone's account until their senior year when they furiously try to pay it off in those couple of months right before graduation um and so this is that time when you know it's hard to always tell kind of what which ones we're going to get reimbursed

160for where are we working through it with families and then how many we're going to get back this year it's something that our Innovation coaches and our Texs at each School site are currently working on like what was the actual number so we'll have that to report in a board update um over the course of the next you know before July but right now it was the one report has been it's far less than what we thought it would be um and that we're um ready for the loss and breakage we assumed that we would have this year with okay sorry I kind of hijacked J do you have other questions just one more about 4K so um Adam I think you said this but I I was just not clear so 4K we voted

161uh you know in the last plan to not go to a onetoone iPad did we change that because of covid meaning that we wanted all kids to be able to have that um because I would I I think I'd like to open up discussion about having one toone iPads in 4k I mean unless it for covid-19 absolutely we would need to to to do that but otherwise do you how much use do you think the iPad gets in 4k and what changed your mind to go to a Ono one so I think um one of like no point out like when we were in 2017 making the LA the last plan like that was a way where we could cut some we could cut some pieces out um we put like I said we we've

162got like iPad minis I think those are almost 10 years old the only you can is get on the web that's it like the only thing that works on there is Safari or Chrome no apps work on it nothing like that um and so I think that was where we we push those down you know that was obviously a tough decision and we heard some feedback within that first year from 4K teachers of like it's you know with them trying to type in their own usernames and you know you've got three different usernames in the back and it's just time that is um obviously they're teaching that um you know and building that into their routines but lot of management in terms that's that makes sense that's what you referred to before but I needed

163to hear that again yes I agree with that okay now I'm I'm good I'm clear in in 2017 I think we cut our Tech budget in by a third um is like a number that's kind of like sticking out of my head and that was one of the pieces where we were like okay well if we can not purchase 400 devices then that's you know a savings of a couple hundred, mhm other questions okay so I'll FP the secondary one second oh yeah I just I you mentioned the um Apple Care and you were trying to figure out the time I presume we're going to get that figure at some point about how much time and breakage you're paying before we come in the next great great thank you and it' be good to know

164how many lost Chargers versus broken Chargers too since I know that is a major issue and um you know we did use Esser funds to purchase a number of chargers so it's you know those are going to come back to us so it's like okay so you've got this $49 fee but if it covers the Chargers but we have boxes of them sitting around you know is that really worth our our cost to be able to do that right exactly right thank you anything else okay perfect um okay so our secondary um priorities that we've identified through our committee is um you know one to one Chromebooks or one to one I should it really should say devices but again not using that common School funds that's what's really um getting us right now um

165in terms of those restrictions on common School funds uh our projected enrollment for secondaries is 4,231 students but yet we are again going by Destiny we have about 5,200 devices um and like what does that look like in a shared model where um you know one of my questions that we have still lurking is is one to one at secondary and do the devices go home that's where um you know some discussions on that as well um and because like I said in in some schools you know like I think about hail but to if you add up devices of uh Chromebooks iPads they're at like 1.1 devices to one student so but it's just again not necessarily where we need it at at every single time and they have a number of iPads that

166they have purchased or we've purchased through the last tech plan that um are used for things like using Garage Band and some of our music classes and um and things like that and and they use them in some of the Arts in order to do some digital editing and stuff like that so um the continuation of some of our digital tools that have been so helpful things like schooly which we've signed on for um for three years uh Camy again that PDF editing gizmos um the the interest most interesting one has been Zoom um we've had a very large request from secondaries to still keep Zoom uh profiles for teachers because they can use it for meeting with parents um helping kids oneon-one where if a kid can't stay and and and you know a

167huge thank you to all of our staff that are doing this because above and beyond but kids who are like I got a quick run to you know pick up my brother at FLW I can't stay after school but I can jump on Zoom at you know 3:45 when I can get home and we can go through oneon-one or whatever that looks like um a lot of teachers have been using this for like parent teacher conferences because um I won't get into a debate about that but um I'll just say it makes it easier uh IEPs people have been able to attend in IEPs we've been able to um you know tackle a lot of Transportation issues um and it's just been really like a thing where we sit around sometimes and say like why

168didn't we ever just do this via Zoom like I think about leadership and we have people who drive from schools 25 minutes away and then you're driving 25 minutes back you could have had them zoom in the whole time um and so uh one of our other pieces has been um kind of un trying to untether from some cords um have some less cords at the high school it's a little bit tough because you have um our high schools have dowels for Teacher laptops in which um those are still corded and hook up to a projector um that way but sometimes maybe the cord wasn't run to the right place um it might be misplaced in the school and so they might be locked into like a weird spot in their classroom because they're tethered

169there um speakers as as as odd as I found this when I was looking some of the secondaries there was like some buildings where 50% of their classrooms didn't have speakers for their computers um they were either being checked out from the library or they were just being borrowed or they were personal speakers that they had purchased um so that was a piece that was identified as a priority and then um also uh charging carts for devices um especially like in the Chromebooks there's a number of uh charging carts oh there's one right back there by Mr Sage um those charging carts are about 13 years old and I think they weigh just a cart alone weighs about 100 pound um they're probably worth about4 or $50 in recycled metal um but a number of

170those have been gotten rid of Again difficult decisions in 2017 where we wanted to replace the carts and that was another thing that we said like okay we could save you know $100,000 by not replacing these carts and some buildings have taken that in their own building budget and said okay we for some of the new cards and some buildings still have some um some of the older cards so there uh obviously you can imagine that in a classroom um it takes up quite a significant amount of space the other ones the newer sleeker um like black ones are about I don't know probably a third smaller than that um and they're a lot easier to get to the cables and things like that because they're actually made for smaller devices those were made for

171a computers like this one right here um so those are our priorities for uh second so um when we look at the life of the secondary devices we have this 4231 students projected in 2021 uh we have three different models for our Chromebooks the Chromebook 11 which goes out of service in September of this year so by out of service just means it's not supported anymore so if there's updates they won't be able to update um and then once they break you're not going to be able to be serviced anymore we have 496 of those devices and then um the 318s we have those are are done at the end of next school year the 2021 2022 school year we have 3,111 of those devices um and then the 3100 those are ones that we

172purchased just this year um and that would be we have 647 of those devices so obviously our immediate need um and recommendation is to replace those 96 devices they're 268 I think maybe 260 each about 200 $240 and then there's a licensing fee as well so um you're looking at about $133,000 for that replacement and um we had some conversations this afternoon around this idea that sometimes you know companies in the technology world just like to Spring things on you like nobody ever knows there's a new Apple iPad coming out until the day that it comes out not even there people can give you a heads up um is that we we're looking at the 318s in which we have obviously a significant amount of our Fleet still being good for next year but um

173the devices that we bought this year are good for five years so we were thinking like if we didn't purchase those right now we might be able to they might come out with a six-year supported device and why would we jump into something like that obviously that's going to be a large amount um why would we jump into something like that where we don't futes and we know that they're going to be good for a year um so that's kind of uh and obviously you know the June 2026 ones will be in the 2024 to 2027 plan um like we said um we've got some intermediate High Schools they're all fifth generation iPads um you can see the device numbers there F has 12 104 those are mostly shared devices um Lane has 584 again

174with their students being one to one West Milwaukee a mixture they have 87 wack has 64 hail has 84 andc has 5 again this is where Destiny tells you um how you can only be as accurate as Destiny is because it was we were having some conversations where you're like there's no way that doy can only have five IPS um some of those devices might have went elsewhere but again once we get that stuff back in and scan we can get an accurate count and get our eyes on all those devices so um we're looking to replace about 221 shared devices and those are a little bit more expensive 394 for each device with 34.95 for the case so that can actually allow 10 different users to log into an iPad so a class like

175uh in seventh grade we have music Innovations they use Garage Band a cart is very good for for that purpose um and then other kids can check it out over the course of the day because part of the piece is we are uh and developing the plan is to minimize the amount of time that they're just sitting in a and that's a real delicate balance um and then replacing those ethg with 32 gigs 636 devices you can see the cost there so you're looking at about $36,000 there is a decrease because Lane is expecting a decrease in enrollment next year down to 510 so we need 74 less devices um in those in those numbers and then um those secondary supplemental materials again things that are have proved to be MVP in terms of um

176the co world but people are now used to that and they want to keep those those pieces um schooly um Camy is $3 per user so it doesn't matter if it's a teacher it doesn't matter if it's a student um we' be at about uh 4,000 users that numbers seems a little bit well actually it should be about 4500 so about $13,500 a year um and again obvious threee contracts we can usually able to negotiate a little bit of a a discount Zoom for 500 users is about $750 cents per user per year um and then again kind of that worst case scenario like in the elementary projectors um we just don't want to be you know we look at a number of these projectors and maybe um due to decreased enrollment a room hasn't

177been used for the well all of our rooms haven't really been used in the last year that saved a lot of lamp life on on projectors but if you've had a room that maybe was um you know when hail had 1550 kids a couple years ago maybe it's not used as a classroom every hour now obviously that's saving on the lamp light so we don't want to take a projector and just say just because it's a 2016 rip it off the wall and throw it away we want to look at those lamp hours on there and making sure that we're being again going back to our Equity non-negotiables going back to a strategic plan that we're being fiscally responsible so worst case scenario is about projectors um and that's again bed being able to have

178HDMI inputs um three and a half those sound Jacks so we can actually attach speakers to them it's about 102,000 and then um like I said before I was surprised at this number of there's about 185 secondary classrooms that don't have speakers in them between the five secondary schools obviously that's probably a pretty generous cost um that we approximated for a set of speakers being $100 um and then uh charging cards we still have those old metal charging cards that are out there that we'd like to replace and those are about $1,000 a piece so when we look at our secondary budget um with that initial replacement of 496 Chromebooks um we're looking at about $628,000 questions any questions can you share this with us yes absolutely thanks what would we do with the old

179carts probably recycle them they would just be we couldn't yeah sell them or um there's probably almost I mean we can investigate that that's you know we always do look for um we look for opportunities to um you know to to recycle them or to sell them off if there's buyers um you know might who maybe want maybe somebody wants to hang on to them in a school um you know we wouldn't just throw them out just because we're like oh we got new ones let's throw it out um just like uh the like the in the Chromebooks the secondary market for a 5-year-old Chromebook you get like four or five dollars for um it's basically nothing other questions okay I have no sorry usually I go first but but now I go last and

180so I apologize for that it's it's not nice I I apologize um so with the changes that we're looking at we don't want to use common School funds for these purchases so what is the plan for the devices that we've used common School funds for that we're not replacing so a lot of those it's a good question a lot of those are the um 3 80s that was 3,11 devices because those would have been ones that we purchased in 2017 so um we actually had a conversation today about um you know maybe opening up the conversation of if a student um and I'll talk about this a little bit more at the end I sent out a survey that Tech plan group uh last week talking about like what was our thoughts on sending devices

181home or keeping them in schools um as you know opening up this conversation four years later and it was at the secondary level 50 there was a big push and I'm so proud of all of our staff members who went out and talked to others there was a big push in well it's not Equitable if we have all these online platforms but yet a student doesn't go home with a device and um do we need to provide that device for us for a student DJ brought up today if these devices which in the past we typically just say okay we're replacing 496 devices we're just going to recycle them what were what if those were the devices that students were able to and take home and if it breaks they pay a um just like

182we would assess to anything else that way we are still providing um the opportunity for a device to go home if it is like we absolutely have no device at home because we are asking um no one of our goals in the tech plan is 247 access for all of our students so like what what would that look like um so we use those so it's okay to use it in that instance because it's checked out like overnight essentially uh yes it's like a library materal okay and some of those um we're looking into the grant of um you know with some different grants they all have different stipulations and like is it is it labeled common School funds for five years and then once it's the fifth year the sixth year then it's wide

183open um again the idea of pushing some of those down to the elementary schools um having them available if probooks Break um you know and that way you're not having like oh this only had 28 Chromebooks in it um and I've got 30 students and I'm waiting for waiting for a keyboard or a screen or whatever because as you can imagine many of those pieces are hard to find right now um so being able to have those pieces on board as well um and even in some instances where we have you know 32 or 34 in a classroom and the cards only got 30 those devices could be used to supplement in that instance as well also understanding that it's only 500 devices right right okay and um those might you know if we're going

184to say that 5% you know are broken or not coming back or whatever that looks like um you know we'd be at like 450 and then there's all kinds of other things that you can use account School funds for that we've been using to purchase technology up until until this point um so additional tax for libraries there's all kinds of on Research platforms there's all kinds of things that are eligible to be used in the C School funds if we no longer use as much of the C School funds dollars to supplement the tech plan as we have been for the last couple years okay I'm just wondering because I know that a lot of times at the secondary level for Chromebook carts anyways there would hear that you know they didn't have like when

185we were doing Alex they didn't have enough because one person had the cart other person had the cart and that became a problem and I know we put money in the budget when we adopted Alex for purchasing more Chromebook carts right was that from common School funds quite a few out of of that ad the budet and then schol and was based way they hadu at one of the schools that didn't C that end we just correct so if we went to one to one that goes away because each student's bringing their own device to each class presuming that they bring and if they didn't bring it then there would be a Supply in that class for use that's what we potentially could some of these of okay so that brings me to my next

186question because um parents have a choice of signing the the agreement that states that if this gets damaged or broken that they're responsible for it and I remember hearing of some parents who didn't sign it and said no I'm just going to not do that so if we're going back to one to one presumably so so that people have access to this stuff at home because they're supposed to be taking it back and forth but we have families who do not want to agree to the the agreement how is that managed um yeah and so what it turned out to be in a lot of cases and Beth and I have actually been working on this one quite a bit is some of it is in the way the form was so you say yes

187to everything and a bunch of the forms as you fill them out electronically and the way that that form in particular was was just there was lots of families who said no they didn't want the device who didn't actually mean know I didn't want device so once we called all of those families and said hey did you know this is what you checked on the form about % of those families said no that's not what I meant and we Pi that we do still have some families who say nope I want no responsibility for this device I don't want it in my house I don't want to take it home I don't want my child having one checked out to them in any way shape or form and historically when we were in person then

188we um make sure that there's a desktop available to that student in that classroom or we create some kind of access for that student where they're not taking the personal responsibility for the device but then how do you guarantee that they have that same access at home well that is the challenge when the family doesn't want to accept their responsibility for the devices that then it would be on them to to try to provide access and most of our families like I said who originally said no I'm not going to take a device at home most of them once we called them and really explained what that meant and that you know devices aren't easily breakable and those kind of things or especially for the iPad they come with this case it's making them far

189less breakable um most of the families say oh okay then I'm okay with it and go ahead and sign the Forum and accept the responsibility we did not we had very very few families who the families that we had this year in particular who said no I don't want one that was mostly because they had one at home that they were willing to use instead okay do we have something in place if that's not the case so this could be a large financial burden for a family for instance and they don't want to take that risk because they wouldn't be able to do it but then they also also don't have a device at home and I I just worry about the equity of that for someone who a family financially concerned about taking on

190that risk and their child then losing missing out on the ability to do that stuff at home because they don't have anything at home either so do we have some way of being able to deal with a situation like that so I have to imagine there might be some of our families in our district who fall would fall into that category yeah there are occasionally families who do fall into that category and they work with student services team member where we try to figure something out lots of our families also use our Public Library if that's their case as well um as that's open and has some access to computers for students so we used to have quite a few more students using the public library for that purpose than we do now that they've

191been taking devices back and forth to home but we have in very unique circumstances we have worked out some sort of arrangement with that try to make it more accessible or that student and the family work together so that the student can stay and do homework and work some ta SCH so that they have access to what they need but yet you know the family doesn't feel the commitment have to take okay uh so we mentioned cases about iPads but cases for Chromebooks were not mentioned are they not required I don't remember we don't we have not purchased cases for Chromebooks and they're cool they've been not breaking okay um so we mentioned the two different storage options for the iPad um at this juncture what's the need for the larger storage is it just

192because apps are getting bigger or what's the use of it yeah if you do a shared a shared IP you have to have the bigger I see so it allows you to have if it's an iPad that's for a shared class or if it's an iPad for a particular class at the high schools like there's a medical terminology class that the software comes for iPad so Haven that course used has historically used it for then you can have if you have three sections of that course you don't need three sets of iPads if the IP is big enough to enable the sh okay students come in I log into it I have second hour I log off of it Adam can use the same iPad and it third hour use it third hour Jack can

193use it fourth hour whereas if you don't have that much memory then I have to have my own ad has his own and has has to so are the two different op based on if we're going to go one to one or not is that we're looking at or are there still some big ones we' need for some classes like you said medical terminology yeah we use the bigger ones so then they can be checked out to multiple classrooms so if I was let's say I want to check them out for my art classroom they can sign in art and then if I'm using they can sign in if I'm using Anatomy they so those can be passed on to anybody through the whole building so just those are the specialty classes though right because

194if we're one to one then the regular other classes wouldn't need that yeah and some in some cases um like some you know whether some content creation maybe the kids are doing an online book or something like that Book Creator the teacher might check out the iPads for an extended perod of time at the high school or the second that's okay all right a student could have a Chromebook checked out to them and then still need to use an iPad for particular things so those we want Shar prises like Adam you don't want a cromebook and an iPad right no that makes sense and then lastly the lamp FL we talked a lot about these projectors I mean obviously lamps can be replaced as well I know that the bulbs can be quite expensive depending

195on the um you know the actual projector but so have we looked at all I don't know how much do you know how much a lamp replacement would be Yes actually some of them you cannot replace oh really because that's smart on the projector compan they they sell you a projector which you Cann replace um and so are these new projectors those kinds no the the new ones are and some of them also they have to they're like you have to take apart the whole housing you can't just do it by hand but the newer ones you can do by hand the bulbs are about $110 for each but on the the actual projector itself like these as I can can see this one like this has an audio out andm some of our older

196Pro they don't anywhere in speaker so put speaker no I understand that completely I just want to make sure for you know the cost benefit analysis between purchasing a $400 projector versus a $100 lamp you know we could you know get four more years out of it or whatever Adam was saying it's going to be an interesting job for the team is to actually check the hours you can check the so that is part of what the team going to do we that we ar reping something that doesn't right and you said the new ones we can replace the bulbes yes okay keep all right I guess that's all the questions I have so you can uh you can continue thank you so much um okay so um you know really our total uh our

197total budget kind of again we've got some different scenarios in there with um replacing all of the iPads worst case scenarios with the um about 1.6 to2 million that should get us obviously a projector is going to last longer than four years some of the projectors that we have now that are still going are six years old and going on seven years um and then we the plan is is that uh in typical fashion we usually keep our iPad complete for four years so this would get us to whatever year that 2025 um in which Esser would still be available for us to update new fleets of of iPads and ch um so we' actually get like two cycles out of some of our funds because it would be the first year vess the last

198year vess um to maximize those funds as important obviously to in um you know projecting forward we wouldn't need new Apple TVs in three years we wouldn't need um projectors you wouldn't need you know your cam and things like that would still be there but some of the hardware speakers um that stuff is not in you know in that Master Plan it's really kind of getting everybody to like the power level um and then moving forward from there and and again too with the purchase of you know those 3,111 Chromebooks at the end of next year being the first year of a threeyear tech plan those should last us until the end of the next in 2027 I'm just going to clarify one quick thing um goes through September 24 so that last so three

199years so 21 22 is next year that's year one 22 23 is your 2 23 24 is your three 24 25 is your four and so we can purchase through September 30th 224 for assets so that's the beginning of the fourth year which we can get then that next round iads in and PR books um and we won't need at that point the Apple TVs and projectors but we can get squeak in next other items in um so some questions you know like what are we going to do with all the old devices so we talked about that a little bit um this idea of not just you know like taking the 400 Chromebooks that we already have and just throwing them away but pushing like what does that look like does it push into

200um you know some spaces where kids might need a device to take home they go to the elementary school still some conversations around that um and then also uh the the iPads that we currently have like they still do hold a significant value it is um I've worked with apple just personally in terms of their buyback um but they are as you can imagine there are school districts that are still scrambling for devices because they're not readily available um so BuyBacks are super high right now they still hold a really good residual value for a fifth or sixth generation iPad um and so apple has a projected now we're also looking into other companies but apple has a projected residual value and this is if we were to sell back all of our devices so

201this is obviously not this is what they've caugh us at I've corrected them and said well no we might be holding on to you know 736 devices um but all of them being a grade so perfectly in great shape which we know um but anywhere from about 550 to 786,000 so in aade I think sixth generation iPad right now gets about $175 and then a bgrade um is 85% of that c grade is 70% DG grade 50% and f grade which is basically a broken shattered iPad gets you about 5% so even a broken shattered iPad um is you know like8 um can we see uh the cost comparison because you had those two different options one was um keeping the six generation ones and one was replacing everything and then um looking at how

202much we'd get for selling them all and see if that by selling the six Generations versus keeping them if it makes up that cost difference and I understand that that this is highly dependent upon how many are in what grade but um Ball parking it that would give us I mean by the time we get to the point of actually talking about this for approval I think that' be helpful okay um yes and then um yeah and like I said we are also looking at other parties this was just Apple's quote that they had sent us um but we're looking at other groups and um how what that looks like so um and then again Chromebooks you know offering them as whatever that looks like kind on that projectors um you know we just looking

203at recycling them they probably don't have a lot of residual value again although we investigate them if they do um because if you're getting 200 rid of 200 projectors and they give you 10 bucks a piece it's still $2,000 you know um and then um we also have a number of teacher devices from the refresh MacBook airs and Dells that are currently be being given to long-term substitutes and interns but also maybe you know having some conversations around um like what that could look like for support for classrooms in science where we have um as you heard last week they're looking for some equipment but the computers that we run the equipment on don't actually work um so like pushing into some of those spaces in the labs um some things in media Visual Arts

204and Music as U you know we've seen uh the MacBook airs and MacBooks being used in a lot of those different places for things like gr band and Book Creator and things like that but like how can we get creative with those um as well in this time and then again like our our things that are still kind of lurking that we'd like to get some um advice or discussion on or thoughts from from the board is you know half care that's an additional cost um and then things like Elementary speakers we' T um you know we talked a little bit about the electricity how we only have three or two clubs we but to have an electrician come in and wire all that um versus getting like an extra long cable what does that

205look like um and then devices going home or staying at school that one toone conversation and then um we also are looking to add in a little bit into the budget as you can imagine this is a large undertaking getting all these devices back um removing the asset tags off of them that a WM cleaned up taking them out of the cases uh you know this is something that we were are looking to kind of add a little bit of budget to and pay some people for our own people hopefully but of course for fee companies will do that for you um they call White Glove service um and so they can do all that as well as and set up your new iPads but we we've talked about like you know having some of

206our technology um and our Innovation coaches um like what does that look like in in terms of put up Allie we are going to look at um getting some quotes on like what it would cost a mount of projectors we still have a number of projectors that aren't mounted in a lot of our buildings so what would that you know what's the cost on that um as we used to have we used to do that in house but when you're talking 100 projectors over the course of the summer to get mounted that's the other um piece that we're kind of investigating is um when you replace a projector it has a different throw so a different focal distance from your old projector so like you know playing around with we're getting some samples of the

207the newest standard the BC 372 what happens if we take down an old one from 2015 and put up a new one is that going to be a bigger picture where now it doesn't fit on the board anym can we adjust that we don't want to be also moving all over the place if that's add add so one of the things that we really wanted to get a sense from our board about is the idea of devices going home or staying at school um elementary teachers were fans of them staying at school we know if we are sending them home in a one toone fashion that's a very different what we've had in the past and it was through the tech plan last time that our board felt really strongly that that should not be

208supported the device is going back and forth home to school um but we're in a much different place now than we were then and so we just want to get some feel from the board as to whether or not we should pursue the conversation around whether all devices could be going home and coming back each day or if we would like to keep those devices at school and then figure out a mechanism for to the kids that don't have a device at home to use and therefore need to use one from school in order to make the technology assess what do you guys think Kristen I think part of that is talking to the teachers especially Upper Elementary fourth and fifth grade teachers at my school we don't send them home at fourth grade the

209fifth grade students do from that point on um I definitely think we need to speak to teachers get a wide sense of how many fourth and fifth grade teachers would want it to go home and perhaps as a districtwide we say third grade and under it needs to stay here and we'll work out the equity issue from there but um yeah my point of view maybe I was just going to say as a a parent of a second grader I'd prefer I've had not to come home um I think that with the younger grades I kind of agree with Kristen um I think for the most part I don't feeler kids really bring much home anyway that would need to be addressed on an iPad um at least homework wise um but I definitely think

210there might be a system for our fourth and fifth graders I know um they tend to do a little bit more with the I want to say the Project based learning and some of the um at least in my experience um I feel that that might be something that we might want to look at that for older elementary school kids but um I don't really see it as a necessity um unless it's like like we said individuales access to technology um but that's just my experience with my own children so my only concern would be if we have a split classroom that might be a three four split how does that work do you only give fourth graders but the third graders in the same class they don't get to take an iPad home that's

211going to be their situational thing other comments about that do we know really how we're going to shift our instructional strategies now that we're we've gone through this Co issue because dependent on what teachers are going to want to do with the technology how they're going to change how they interact with that technology and have their students do it do we really have a sense of what is the most appropriate thing at this time because do we really know where they're going with the technology that we're using um we do know that the expanded use of a lot of the technology will still stay there right and some of what the creative ways that our teachers are getting our students to use pieces of the technology to create and produce and make things that we

212have teachers saying I'm never going back from that I'm always going to want right the students to be showing their learning in different ways which is part of our strategic plan so the pandemic sort of helped us move some of that work along in an odd way but um so those pieces yes whether or not we can create a system where the student can check out their device to take home in an evening if they need it versus just the assumption that everybody takes at home every night of the week that's kind of what we're that adds some more burden to the school and to the teacher to say yep you're taking your home you're not the next day who took them home who didn't so that's where usually having an All or Nothing rule

213makes it a little simpler in the whole grand scheme of things but I would say the access to the technology for the learning pieces in the evening has increased and it likely will continue to rise at that rate as we go forward other thoughts so from my perspective regarding to stay home or take them home um or or have a checkout system for some of the younger kids I definitely think that I would want to know what teachers in those situations would think is more burdenis um either trying to make sure that they brought it back every day or keeping track of the kids who did take them home for whatever reason and then making sure those were back I don't know and so um I'd be interested to know the answer to that question

214I do agree um from my own experience with my kids that when they're younger there seem to be less now obviously now my my daughter who is in second grade does bring hers home every time she does do stuff on him but a lot of times she's just following what her older brother is doing anyways who's in fifth grade so if it was just a second grader I don't know if that would would translate as as well but again this year is a hard year to compare to other things um so so I think that helps because the direction that I think we're hearing right is like third grade in sorry done no behind the pole it's hard to yeah no yeah I can talk real loud but not through pole um yeah so I

215I mean I think my understanding is let's speak with teachers and see what their feeling would be on this thing for for younger kids or even for fourth and fifth graders um but yeah maybe third and Below would stay put except in extenda circumstances where it was required and uh the upper grades would be back and forth uh if that's what the staff thinks that would be the best use of those devices Y and I think that would extend all the way up to to secondary you know until till seniors in high school if for some reason like well they don't they don't ever use them for these things or they do whatever happens to be I think that would be the best thing to look at it and then we as a district has

216to come I think we need to evaluate this breakage loss system if we're going to go that route um on a continuous basis if we're like oh geez things are way worse here we're only in November or something like that so I think that we need to have some sort of idea about that as we go and keeping track of that and then let the keep the board apprised of that so we know like what and we budgeted this much money for breakage and loss and this is how much this is the percent we've used at this point in the year as we go forward in case we need to modify that um that plan yep um there are also all kinds of devices you can now buy that we're not proposing to at this

217time that are more like um you know how stores have that you can order it online you go up to a locer enter a number and you can take out your purchases um they have those with like a fingerprint ID for kids checking in andout devices in and out of schools that you can leave in a place to make them accessible for like after hours you know like a I don't know computer ATM or something but that kids have to have a security code and they have to have signed it out and um so there's ways to do that that are really secure if as we get further down the road there's more of a need to make it less Management on the staff's part and easier for to get access as well any other

218comments or questions BR yeah I just know with me uh again with a personal experience like my son who's in uh FLW he's actually expressed concern because he can't bring his device home now I guess they changed that for his class and he said okay well what happens if I can't go to school what happens if um you know if they have to be quarantined or whatever the case may be he's like I don't have access to my stuff at least not as easily I mean we have devices at home um but but it's a little bit more cumbersome when you're using the same device every day so I think they've especially at that older grades they've developed kind of a routine and a habit over the past year um so it's going to be

219interesting depending on how we move forward how they're going to adap to that Bron I think another thing that we might want to think about too is whether or not we want them taking them home not because of the educational component but because we want to also teach them how to disconnect when they leave uh because that's one of the big things in the business world is people are not disconnecting from the job when they go home and so then they're working all the time and do we want to be endorsing that for our students and training them to do that in third and fourth and fth grade or do we want to look at how can we um develop their skills to actually step away from and be like all right I don't I

220don't need this right now I I go do something else that was that was brought up when we uh surveyed the tech plan Committee of someone had some some concerns of like I I feel like maybe the kids just do need to unplug for a little bit it's been a year of screen time and it's been a year of learning like this and maybe that they do need to get a little bit of a break and a little bit of a rest assuming we will also see some of that same sentiment when we when we send out something District w i could make the case the other way you know I I keep thinking you know Learning Happens anytime anywhere uh 247 there are kids that are night owls that work really well at you

221know after dinner and they you know that's when they really want to get in there and research or use that technology and you know I could make a case either way I really could um but my gut is um kids need to have access to it so yeah stay before we bring the tech plan forward for approval we'll get some more information from a broader audience of teachers and consider maybe a stopping point where the youngest of grades probably don't need to take the device to every night but perhaps that there's a system for the older grades to do so um whether that is them out for the students who actually need them for a reason at home and that helps encourage that use it when you need it but maybe not all the time

222you know don't just assume that you're going to use it or be on it all the time in the evening or whether we make that more broadscale depending on the feedback we get from staff I think that's reasonable okay um and then Apple Care do we want to pursue that is again at a cost but then it helps us quite a bit on the breakage I need to know more about it I I mean did you say you were going to look into it more um Adam and and give us the stats you know we're kind of looking at a cost of about $175,000 I think it was to protect all the devices um I don't have the numbers off the to my head but I can tell you we have not spent $175,000 on

223replacing broken screen means replacing charging cables and charging blocks um that also covers our we have Max for the adult Max and we'll get some more information on that is there uh warranty for the Chromebooks like what if a Chromebook breaks what do we do for that do we have can us that's like half of our devices right yeah uh Bruce is here warrant can you guys can you guys hear me yeah AIT of delay yeah I was just wondering because we have apple care but we have like equivalent amount of chome so we must have something for those I presume okay that gives us dire to forward uh oh one more thing we are also looking at too is um we're trying to get in contact with uh some local school districts to look

224at um like having kids be trained to like actually fix broken Chromebooks like replace a screen rep Place keys and things like that um where they could possibly earn credit um and obviously that'll cost in like labor um and the kids are getting a great experience and being able to earn you know we would get them trained either by Apple or Google or whatever the training that needs to be so they're certified um so we are also investigating that so that might be something that might come forward um you know in the summer to kind of have like a a couple interns at schools um helping with that work as well I had one more question it was regarding the funding for this which I know we're planning on using Esser funds for it so

225with the Rumblings at the state about uh the fact that we're getting Sr funding and how that might be then resulting in reduced other funding uh what happens if something like that occurs um so ultimately then what we have to plan for is that in 2526 so this PX last four years through the 2425 school year and that is a September in which we would reup on iPads and Chromebooks so we are long term in many ways right now in our budget and this would be one of them and youd have to make sure that in the 25 26 school year we have like this we're adding these costs back into our budget okay but what about for this coming school year because we would be using whatever is decided for this coming school year

226right and what if they reduce the money that we're supposed to get from the state by the Esser dollars that were you know or some amount of those Esser dollars my concern is you understand my concern which we to cut our budget if the state reduces the revenue to schools to match yes what we've been issued by Esser do we have the funds in the budget then to pay for the TA plan really the question so we're still working on balancing our budget I guess is what I would say for next year um and we're not quite there yet and we have some options so will we know by the time we have to decide on this Tech plan what the state budget is going to be no that would be amazing but I do

227not anticipate that so there's a so there's a possibility I just think it's important this is not a small amount of money um there's a possibility that we could approve this you could purchase it and then we find out that the budget is slashed significantly and now we have to make Cuts elsewhere because we've already spent that money yep um and that's going to be I think a little bit of the reality with few of the things that we have tied to our SRA dollars and that's what we just we do have to be really mindful of that there's no question about that um but that's the other reason we haven't really spent more you know we're trying to do the things that we know our needs the tech plan is a need for us

228every so many years regardless of whether we had Esser or not we would have been building this into our general budget because that's the need we are being a little bit more generous in replacing some of the things that teachers really do need in their classrooms knowing that we have the grant funds available to us right now but yes will that mean if that happens no will we have to make some super hard decisions going into next budget cycle it might Y and that's a reality of kind of how we need to be planning right now as well okay and don't get me I'm not saying that we don't need these things anyway shape or form I just want to make sure we're all on the same right we were less conservative in what we

229were agreeing to do this time knowing that some of it could be funded by the gr dollars that we've been issued and or you're right we have to be super mindful of that and we made a choice then that we're going to have to live with should something else happen with the budget any other questions or comments is this I'm sorry do you have more no okay any other questions or comments for the tech plan so when will we expect to see this coming forward to us so we'll um we'll get out the pieces that were that were questions I'll email out the um I'll send everybody the um the presentation as well and we'll be back on June 7th June um for some action on this and then obviously you know that um we'll

230want to get those ordered probably June 8th um because there's still like a four to six week lead time um at least right now on some devices so you know things are still very hard to get a hold of so we're hoping to get them in you know mid to late July um and then get them all all worked on and ready to go for the school year come um next September that's the other reason adding something to the budget to actually get the devices in an inventory just so important last time it was um Adam and Chris who ended up doing a lot of the tagging and driving them around town but they are going to also be busy teaching micro credential courses all summer so um there's only um so many of us

231to do some of that work but that's the expediency of being able to get it all out and properly inv in the system and all of those things to be accountable for it that is important that we might need to add some help for that for the summer okay so that just told me our next board meeting is June 14th so therefore we won't be back on June got it all right right thank you very much thank you appreciate it uh oh okay all right let's take a quick three minute break uh for bathroom duties and what not and then we'll move on to our second workshop for the evening the one that's going to be uh great for you guys to all hear about so all right we will move on with our second

232Workshop uh with Miss whitler and Mr Thompson so once again good evening and we have a light topic that we're going to be talking about here for for this next Workshop but uh speaking on behalf of myself I'm truly excited to be at this point to be able to have a conversation with the board tonight uh in regards to the work that uh our compensation committee has done over the past year and a half um the topic of compensation for the three years that I've been in in Human Resources the topic of compensation has been at the Forefront and it's been very important and so um again this is a really exciting time I believe um that that we can have an idea or a proposal coming forward uh I want to thank the board

233before we get started for the opportunity and the time tonight and also for your attention uh as we kind of work through uh this model and the intent of this presentation is to cover very in depth from the beginning um and working to the point where we are right now and so before we get started thank you for for your time and attention so with that I will uh get started and so uh my slides there's a lot of words to them but you don't need to you don't need to read I'll I'll paraphrase and summarize but before we get started uh in getting into the nuts and bolts of this of this model I I first wanted to thank our committee and uh I wanted to thank our committee for their commitments for their

234collaboration and their focus as I previously mentioned this they have been working on this model this proposal uh over the course of the 1920 school year and then again the 2021 school year through on top of that this is a huge topic of utmost importance through on top of that they've worked through a medical pandemic they've had to change their own instructional practices because of changes in online and in-person learning and then just kind of working through their own frustrations with the compensation model that's currently in place and so I did want to recognize the work of all committee members and thank them for for their participation in time so just to give the board a little background of of our committee um and I do want to thank Ann and Amy they're in attendance

235with us right here they are part of the committee um and so thank you for being here tonight but just to give the board a little background we had uh roughly between 20 and 25 total members for this committee I have 19 members uh listed here 19 members that consistently were part of the meetings that that we held um and just to kind of talk about experience uh through this committee and through the the membership I guess of committee members we had high school Intermediate Elementary School all represented we had perspective from student services from special education from instructional technology to our Specialists and even um some of our atrisk settings so I think it was a pretty good cross-section of of all the curricular areas uh in our district and in regards to years

236of experience which is important and you'll see why in a few slides from now but in regards to years of experience this committee the experience in the teaching profession range from roughly three years to 30 plus years and the members of our committee had from a bachelor's degree to a master's degree so that's just a little overview of the committee so what we wanted to cover right now is just uh what is the ation model kind of consisted of or looked like over the past five years and so um kind of looking at this view looking down back in 2016 in March of 2016 uh there was a new compensation model that was implemented and that was performance pay and so that particular compensation model was in effect for the 16117 1718 and 1819 school

237years and basically uh the performance pay was was based off of a teachers summative year their third year through working through educator Effectiveness um and basically depending on their evaluation meaning the number of effectives or distinguished ratings that they received determined um in reality compensation that they might get at the end of the year also during this time with this idea of performance pay uh our teachers were also getting um CPI added as well at the conclusion of the 1819 school year our district leadership at the time along with the board decided to end kind of this performance pay model and the reason the reasons for that being that it wasn't showing quite the academic growth that it was intended to and also kind of creating this extra level of stress and competition in a

238sense in buildings and so after the 1819 school year that model was ended so that brings us to the two most recent years years and so over the next two two school years our teachers uh have basically been receiving CPI as an increase to their salary for the past two years um in the 1920 school year only our professional educator employee group received an end of the year payment uh that was earmarked by the board uh and then in the 2021 school year this past school year uh all employees received the end of the year payment uh that was ear marked by the board but for the past two years that was that was the salary that our professional educators are receiving mainly just through CPI one of the components of Human Resources I had

239the opportunity that when staff members left our district I had the opportunity to conduct exit interviews um not all employees took me up on that but through the conversations that I had and this this look came up time and time again in our in our board committee conversations this idea of compens ation is a driving theme um of why people uh at the time you know were looking at other options and why they were leaving our district so when this committee started working um a year and a half ago they they started to kind of hone in on criteria that they wanted this new compensation model to accomplish and so started out with seven points and those seven points are listed for you so the initial work of this committee was to come up with

240a a compensation model that would be easy to explain that would be predictable transparent it would encourage professional learning a big one to track and retain our teaching force it would be competitive with teacher salaries in our area and again that has been a topic um that has been brought up for multiple years and then finally the last last point that um was part of this initial criteria was just coming up with a model that would be sustainable over time we don't want to come up with a model and in a year or two have to freeze things because the the particular plan wasn't sustainable so the process uh for phase one and this was under the leadership of Dr lexman um the compensation committee when they first originated and gathered they used the process

241of investigation and Analysis to evaluate very ious compensation models that were out there that other local school districts were kind of using and some examples that I put in there were the steps and Lanes performance pay professional educator leadership pay um and at the time my in kind of working with the committee this year the Walkera School District kind of just seemed to be a district that people wanted to look more into and learn more about and so the larger compensation committee broke into smaller groups and in those smaller groups each group researched a particular compensation model and then they presented out to the larger group and through that work through that conversation through that dialogue our compensation committee was able to start prioritizing positives and negatives of the work that other districts were doing

242to help formulate a plan or at least the start of a plan for what we can do in West Dallas Westman so after that first phase of research and presenting out and having conversations we then move into phase two again of the work that Dr lexman was doing with the committee and so this first point was kind of a revision of the criteria that that they were working towards so if you recall we started out with seven points now they focused the committee focused in on Four Points again to move the the pay closer to the average in our area to attract and retain professional Educators this idea of transparency and then sustainability and so continued continued meeting continued researching having the conversations I mentioned that Waka show was a school district that there was

243particular interest in and wow um what I tried to do is just kind of give a a quick summary of kind of the the highlights of the the wesaw school district and so basically wesaw had a steps and Lanes model their vertical movement was on a yearly basis based upon educator Effectiveness and what was interesting about the WKA show model is that employees had to get a specific number of effective or distinguished ratings in order to move uh in the wera school district they had their own teacher development program where new staff members coming into wesaw the wakaw school district had to earn nine credits and then um in regards to credits paying for those was at the cost of teachers themselves and so that was kind of the idea that WKA Shaw had moving

244forward okay so that was Waka shot and then the committee started looking at the C school district and so again I will enlarge this so with the cut model the cut model was working with uh the micr credential system along with badges um the idea in K is that it uh their motto was meant to reward teacher leaders and what was interesting is in C in C they had a teacher committee that basically kind of oversaw the micr credential system so it was a committee that reviewed the applications reviewed the finished products and this was a a three-year commitment by those staff members that were part of that committee and in regards to sustainability and paying out CAD worked it out that their micro credentials had to be completed by January of previous year they

245they completed in January and then they wouldn't receive that pment until the next school year so that was kind of the time frame that cut Ahad established um They too had annual bumps for years of service again a big component of their motto was educator Effectiveness and then what was interesting is when they implemented this particular model uh they stopped with post-employment benefit packages for new hires and so an interesting kind of decision that was made there so that was the work of this committee through phases one and two and then Co hit and Co put a big pause on this entire process so that leads to February of 2021 and what I just kind of called the restart so in February the HR department took over the work of or continued the work of

246this compensation committee that they began last school year and so once again we started meeting via Zoom uh the original plan is that we started meeting twice a month um but as we work through uh a March April May we started meeting weekly um to make sure that we were able to get something together before the end of this year um also as we started kind of this reboot through kind of the leadership and collaboration with Miss Windler we now started looking at the kettle Marine School this year district and the whitness school district and so again K Marine again focused on micro credentials their opportunities to earn micro credentials were through District offerings various online platforms and then teacher created ideas uh the employees in Kettle Marine do need to get everything preapproved before

247they go through the process their range of value for a micro credential ranged anywhere from $100 to $600 and that was dependent my understanding on the rigor and the student impact that um the staff member took away from that in K Marine they also work with CPI and again the kettle Marine School District does not offer post-employment benefits to its new hires and then I'll just go into the the whitel school district was the last school district that we kind of worked with and met with kind of learn about the steps that they were taking so again whitn not micro uh micr credential system staff had to apply in January for the next school year uh staff participated in programs over the summer and the school year this is this is the only opportunity for

248movement for employees in the Whitnel School District so they didn't have an annual bump their values also range from $100 to $600 They too had a teacher verification committee made up of 10 teachers they received a small stipend it was a two-year role instead of a three-year but they reviewed the applications and then they reviewed the completed micr credential proposals uh there's no movement for years of service and again retirement benefits um were eliminated you have question hour at the end anytime uh when you said you met with the districts for example C wh who met with them did somebody from those districts come into the committee or was the committee able to ask them questions or was just Administration were you talking to administrators from those District or teachers that were on the committee

249Ador thank you so for this next portion um I want to play a a 4 and a half minute video and if you recall we pick up the conversation in February and we're looking at these other models and what these other models offer and kind of the struggles that they might have had and so we're talking and Dylan Brown who is part of this committee is a teacher at L Intermediate School he just kind of like at the end of a meeting kind of summarizing his own words kind of like what he was interpreting this plan to be and so I put that was like a huge aha moment for me hearing him kind of talk about it and so what we did is we had him do the a video and kind of talk

250through what his thought process was and so this is in March shortly after the committee kind of refocus hey my name is Dylan Brown and I wanted to put together a quick presentation to talk about uh an idea for a compensation model that I've just kind of been kicking around I'm calling it credential-based steps and Lanes so our goal has been at the compensation committee to create a competitive compensation model that first of all rewards staff for experience and time that they've put in in west Dallas we also want to incentivize professional development uh as well as things like master's degrees we want to be able to accommodate unique salary situations like difficult to fill positions and we want the whole thing to be as straightforward direct and easy to follow as possible so that's

251where this credential based steps and Lanes come in so it's a pretty simple system and it's not unlike many other steps and Lanes programs that you're probably familiar with um steps very straightforward they're based purely on years of experience the longer you've been in the district the more money you'll make every year you stay you see uh a steady increase INE in compensation um and we also wanted to be able to allow for longevity bumps which we described as relatively significant increases in pay that would come at the number we've thrown out as fiveyear increments to reward people for sticking around so this is an example of a step system uh in this system we start at $42,000 as our starting pay uh every year in this this example uh we move up by $500

252until year four between year four and year five you would see a $2,000 raise something really significant to hopefully get people to stick around until at least year five credential-based Lanes reward staff for ongoing professional growth so we award credentials and as teachers obtain them they progress to new Lanes with more competitive annual raises so again in this situation you see five hypothetical Lanes here starting on the left with someone who has received no credentials someone who's brand new to the district and then moving up um as they obtain credentials they see pay raises based on the number of years that they've been there and how many credentials they've obtained again all these numbers completely made up this probably still seems very standard very straightforward um but where it gets interesting is that these credentials

253may be awarded at a variety of increments contingent upon their contribution to the district so things like proac training pbl Boot Camp or committee work that might be an hour here and there or might be a weekend they might allow one or two credentials um depending on the hours of work you put in whereas we can also use this credential system to account for things like master's degrees so a master's degree might be worth five or 10 or some huge number of credentials um that makes a significant impact and moves someone over in a land uh we can also use these credentials to accommodate new hires into hard to fill positions so if we're having a school psychologists come in and we don't want to start them off at the same rate of pay that

254we're starting anyone else because it's a tough position to hire we could say they're coming in at 10 credentials and with that now they start in a much more competitive pay scale uh I like this model because I think it's flexible it's competitive and it's easy to follow uh Additionally the development of it is relatively simple we start uh up in the upper rate corner here we figure out what the most we would be able to compensate a very valuable very experienced teacher would be uh and then we also start in the bottom left here with the absolute starting pay with those two numbers now we can determine how many credentials it takes to move there and how we fill in the chart again all these numbers are just made up uh but those two

255starting points give us a lot of Direction based on our budget uh which helps to make this a really sustainable system so to sum up um the credential based steps in Lane system steps are guaranteed and predictable annual increases in Pay solely based on a teachers year in the district however teachers can move into a more competitive pay schedule or Lane by acquiring credentials these credentials are awarded by the district and they can come in various increments to recognize teachers ongoing commitment to the craft this is obviously just sort of a sapling of an idea it's not very fully formed um but I think that by using these credentials uh in sort of a point-based system we can accommodate a variety of situations while also creating something direct and sustainable and so what what Dylan

256did is he planted a seed and it kind of led to uh conversations uh moving forward for our committee so things started taking shape so components of the compensation committee's new model um that we started talking about was this idea of various categories um one of the categories uh were the continue CPI increases another category were small yearly increases another category some type of microc credentialing system and then you heard Dylan mention in there this idea of longev longevity bumps and as we talked about that as a committee we were focusing on fiveyear increments so years 1015 um not really landing on a on a monetary value but in his example it was like a $2,000 bump once you reached that longevity point and then another question that that we addressed that came up in

257in committee work was how do we place our employees into a new model um and so that became a driving force of of the work that I started to focus on and do so this next portion of this presentation is going to be just displaying a lot of data and charts to the board just so that you can see what we viewed and what we worked with as a compensation committee so one of the first one of the first things that we talked about and I believe that this was an aboard update so after getting all of our professional educator salaries and putting them into the appropriate year of experience this is the chart or graph that uh we are able to pull from this and what's important to show here is that of our

258professional Educators 71 72% have 10 or less years of experience um of teaching in our district another area that we talked about that is going to have an impact on our district are the number of employees that have their master's degrees so looking at this uh starting in column B you can see that's our first year teaching staff so those hired this year out of 64 new hires this year 26 came to us with their master's degree so 41% so then you can see your 2 three 4 we have a lot of master's degree knowledge with our with our staff so this particular this right here was the starting point of all the work that we did and so when we started working every employee in the professional educator group their salary was listed per

259their years of service in the west Dallas West Milwaukee school district and what I wanted to highlight to the board are the discrepancies in some of the salaries in the same year range so if you look at year one the maximum salary of a first year teacher in our district is $70,000 in that same cell 42760 in year two the minimum $3,837 roughly $800 in our year three sale 78220 compared to 43 83 and so there are massive discrepancies in the salaries that that people are making based on how they were hired in previous years or what the process was or what the procedures were and so that started some really good conversations with with our committee and as um a director's team I mentioned uh I mentioned this opportunity for our committee to really

260be part of the conversation and their voices were important you can see Dylan did that kind of summary of His thought process well as we work through uh the months of work I put out one my intent wants to put out more um Google forms for uh members of the compensation committee that maybe weren't as uh talkative during our sessions to be able to the opportunity to to weigh in on some of the conversations that we were having so this was the first check-in that I did with the the compensation committee and this was hitting on the the areas of the main categories that we had talked about so of the 19 regular committee members 10 filled out this survey and so the first question that I asked is um do you agree with this

261idea of small yearly bumps and what I try to communicate here is 80% said yeah they agree with it eight people two people said maybe but no one said no moving on to the second question do you support this idea of longevity bumps that years 51015 again nine out of 10 yeah one person said ah I still need to learn more but again no one responded no I don't support this do you agree with uh do you agree that micr credentials will be the means that employees can move along the salary structure and increase their salary again 60% six people yes four people maybe again no one came out saying no I disagree with this and then uh the last question provided a little more opportunity on so if we go down this path of

262micr credentials what do you feel would be appropriate in order to receive credit for completion and so you can see 70% at the time felt that just completing the hours and credentials was enough to be rewarded or complete the micro credential and then the other ones was just were just one person's response but uh the need to show how learning is impacted student learning in the classroom it should be completing uh I think it should just be completing the micro credential but it has to be preapproved and and then completing the hours and the credentials and writing a short summary of The Learning and so again the feedback the contribution the voice of the committee and kind of developing uh the paths that we were starting to go down okay so here is the first

263step of the work that we did okay so again and this was a common theme that we talked about with with our committee is we can do anything but we can't do everything okay and so the first step that we took was to try and find a common entry point because of the discrepancies that we are seeing with the salaries of our years of experience so again if you can think back to that chart that had year one year two year three and then all the salaries listed down it what we did is we labeled each position I as to what it was so if it was High School Math middle school science psychologist speech we then labeled it as does that person have a bachelor's degree or a master's degree we then labeled it

264because they were put into these cells based on West Dallas West Milwaukee years of experience but then what we learned is that we had we had employees coming to us that have many many years of experience in other districts and so we labeled once again does this employee have four or less years of total experience five to 10 years of total experience or more than 11 years of total experience okay we have always had kind of hard to fill positions and so when we talk about hard to fill positions we're talking about some of our special education positions our content specific secondary positions our CTE positions and so another way that we kind of broke this information down is we labeled or identified if it was a hard to fill position or a normal to

265fill position and then finally as we were finding out the averages for each employee we identified that if there was an outlier or a salary that was $5,000 more than the second highest salary in that in that path then we would take that out as an outlier but it had to be $5,000 or more otherwise we kept it in to find the average for that cell path so hopefully this will show you what all that meant and this first example is starting year five so this is year five I'm in my fifth year of teaching in the west Dallas West Mory school district and I have a bachelor's degree okay so you can see right here here are all of the salaries of our year five employees here are the positions that they hold the

266yellow positions are identified as those harder to fill positions okay so an EB an EBD self-contained classroom a physical therapist okay so that's why those are highlighted yellow what I then did is I looked at the average years of experience between five and 10 years so for example this person this person this person I took their salaries and put them all right here that's what AG is the normal to fill position Sal and what I did is the highest salary was 50895269 $4 6,714 so then what we did that's the average of that particular expertise so then we looked at all the salaries that were below that average and that's what this information is right here the proposal of the compensation model is that any salary below the newly determined average would get that bump

267and be placed at that average to start the compensation model so for example all of these employees right here would get roughly a $1,300 bump not a not a one-time payment but I have my contract at the end of the 2021 school year and holy cow to start the 2122 school year it's $1,300 more because I was moved to the average of that cell if I was than the average of that cell then I just get placed where my current salary is I don't make less I'm already making more than the average and so I just get placed at where my salary is so that was also done for 11 plus experience and so again you can see here we have 13 we have 16 and we have 19 that are in kind of the

268normal still 11 plus years of experience this time we did have an outlier because the highest salary was 61,200 compared to 46 and 47 so 67 or 61 was removed found the average of these two salaries to be 47,2 33 so then this individual will be bumped $367 to the average of year five in West bachelor's degree but I have 11 plus total years of experience and then for each year it's communicated right here what is the cost to the district to bring those employees up to the average of that particular year and then this was done for every year from year one through year 30 plus for a bachelor's degree and then it was also done the same method was done for master's degrees so we have a path for bachelor's and we have

269a path for master's degrees and I can explain more examples we can look at more examples I guess at this point are there clarifying questions so here here is again year five now I have a master's degree so here again are this the individuals that fell into that category here we have a cross categorical position which is at the high school level which is deemed as a hard to fill position that's why it's yellow another High School hard to fill position a third hard to fill High School position and then physics was identified as one of those content specific secondary licenses that was hard to fill so again master's degree looking at between five and 10 years of experience so we have this person we have this person this person again we find the average

270there's no outlier because we have 49 to 47 it's only 2,000 the average comes out to be $49,800 if you're a year five with a master's and so person right here would get about a $1,600 bump going into next year if this model is moved forward same thing was done for employees that have 11 plus years of experience again no outlier because we have 50,000 and we have 48,000 so the average 4,842 and then here's the bump that these individuals will get and I want to draw your attention to this green box right here what we did after finding the average for those year Windows is we went back and we looked at the the the deemed hard to fill positions to see if they were above or below the average that we just found

271and if they were below the average they too got a bump to the average so this particular person although it was a hard to fill High School cross cap position they get a bump of $79 to the average for a fiveyear masters do you want to pause for questions jeffe yeah so that was a lot to unpack and this was revised probably five or six times so at first it was just all year one people then through conversations it was well that's not fair to have bachelor's degrees and so then we had two pass well then we looked at four less years of experience and then five plus years of experience well now we have people that are at 28 years of experience so then we broke it down again to like another we try

272and get and notl questions are coming at this point do we will we have a comparison to what other districts are making yeah we we can get that information and that's a point that so one of the ceria points was to get closer to the average of surrounding districts and I'm going to I'm going to walk us through um some information when Caitlyn and I met with representative from be they have a really cool that we can compare our district to any other District in the state of Wisconsin and we can compare salary we can compare benefits in the total package and we're going to go through that um but as we were talking again as a director team and the compensation team when we're looking at other salaries it's not comparing Apples to Apples

273and it was kind of like a bump for us because sure we can look in Greenfield the average salary is whatever number you want to think but their average years of experience is 15.6 ours is 10 and so that's where it's not comparing Apples to Apples but we can get that information we're just comparing straight salary you're not including total benefit package and will go through that other questions yeah Bron am I reading that correctly where for the the average for a fiveyear 49 years 492 is I would be years with the master then five more years of experience is only worth $500 49 so that's all we're gonna that's just where the average is right but that's where we would bum whoever's there so we're saying the average person with five or six more

274years of experience is only more to us EXP you and I guess I would on that that I personally don't see that us this is purely current of employes that's just the way the came out 11 and I'll add to that that one of the goals of the committee is to prevent that from like that's not having a predictable model ended us up with the averages looking like that right so part of the goal of to bect and so that analy but that is kind of where we've sat up until right now another one just so just so that I can understand so this is just to get everybody on an evened FL field so this is because of the um the way that we it wasn't equable so this is just a one time

275thing then after you do this then will there'll be um more of more increments so I guess what Brendan is saying Brendon do you see that that then from there as you move to another every it might be more but this is the just the even just the starting point to get everybody Equitable but I don't see how averaging and inequity can make it all Equitable so I mean because that right there if I was if I'm coming to look at this 100 bucks per year of experience that I add on top of that does not seem Equitable to me it's a snapshot in time I mean this is the data that we have based on when people were hired and what the market rate or whatever the external factors were at that point in

276time what we're going to see is that that changing so yeah there there's some inequities I guess when you look internally because based on the data there we're not valuing people with more experience the way I should be using the mic the way that we should um or that we would have liked to um but this is going to fix that um I mean it's a starting point and we're still going to have concerns and I think what we're going to talk about a little bit more as we go along is that this is something we're going to have to watch that we're going to have to monitor that we're going to have to make sure it's having the design desired effect for us um but this is again just that snapshot of the data

277of where we are before we start that step and Lane process to see where it takes us next yeah and that's fine I think though that we need to be really clear on that we also need to maybe look at how we can be more flexible because that would keep our average years of service down under 10 years so and that's not what we want I know I agree it's one of my concerns as well I I think we should there's I know a lot more to this so let's keep on going I think some the questions may get answered as you go along so the the next slide that we have up here is this Beed model that was was just quickly referenced and so what this right here is and I don't know

278how to enlarge this but this is between the Greenfield school district and the West Dallas WWA School District okay so you can see on the bottom years of experience and then on the left is salary in $20,000 increments okay so what we're looking at right here is 2021 data and we're looking at salaries and this line right here is the average as you go with years of experience and then the increase in in salary so comparing and the only feature that you can do here is it makes the West Dallas triangles darker and so you can see here's the starting point when we're comparing an employee in Greenfield and an employee in west Dallas just salaries this is what it looks like compared to the average then what you can do is I can say

279okay now I'm going to look at some of the benefits and you can see that there's now a change where we have a lot of our employees going above that average we still have below and then finally when you look at the entire total compensation it's not out of whack and so when we go back to comparing other districts when you look at the whole package we're not that far off I can I can do other is there a particular School District that someone wants to see I do have tosa hopefully this is going to allow me to so what's supposed to be happening right now is that you're supposed to get a drop down menu of all the districts what I can so what I can do is I can uh well Caitlyn or

280D are talking I can kind of play around with this and hopefully be able to bring up other other models okay so the the be model and then the point here that if the current salary is higher than the average then you just get placed so this is a a visual if I'm hearing this for the first time okay I as I as the professional educator can kind of walk through this path to find out how I got placed where I did so start out again with the local years of experience and then I asked I answer the question you have a bachelor's degree do you have a master's degree if I have a master's degree then I go to the Master's Degree side now do I ask myself is my position deemed hard to

281fill or normal to fill then I go down that path then do I have four or less years of experience five to 10 for 11 plus years of experience okay now I go down that path bam that's how was placed on this new model so this is just a visual hopefully where people can walk through their own situation to figure out how they were placed on this first step okay so now this is getting into the other components of this proposal so the first step was to find the average now we have categories we have CPI which is what we have now and committee we talked about that this has to be approved by the board on an annual basis and so our committee understands that CPI would be an increase to base or this

282would be an increase to base wage not total salary and so in Caitlyn's Department of figuring this out it goes on to the base wage not the total the salary okay we then have another C of this annual increase okay if approved this would be a small yearly increase for returning year after year this increase would be an increase to an employees a teachers total salary then we have micr credentials again this was developed by the professional development committee this would be a supplemental increase to Total salary so we have CPI which is a base then we have annual and micro credentials which would be growing year after year it gets added to their yearly salary year after year okay now this model once you get placed provides employee flexibility it provides individuality and transparency

283because it's kind of like you have your own ladder it's going to be uh a nightmare on our end of tracking because an garer is gonna have her own path Amy graph is gonna have her own path and so I determine what my path is going to look like am I going to take micro credentials or am I not going to take micro credentials and so really the placement piece gets you on your ladder you determine what your is going to progress so just a quick can I ask a quick question so on that model so every T every teacher would then get that was it the CPI if we did an increase but then with that annual increase would that then be it says profession returning professionals is that going to based off of

284is that just be like because they're coming back or we going to has some type of like um like they'd had a good you know you know if we have someone that's coming back that maybe they're on a and we're going to get to that okay okay so to to answer your question now remember this is only for a professional educator employee group okay so we're not talking about educational assistance or other employee groups this is just professional Educators the annual increase would be just for simply returning the next year okay we do have a component of I think what the question that you were asking that we'll get you in a couple slid okay all right okay so um micr credentials is where myself and our leadership and learning team um kind of came

285in along with working with our professional development committee um and the compensation committee had suggested that we pursue the Avenue of microc credentials it's pretty common in our area to have some kind of micr credentialing system the things that we were asked to do as we looked at what a microc credentialing system could look like were to make sure that it wasn't tied to the educator Effectiveness system so that it wasn't based on performance in the classroom that it was based on things that were accessible to our teachers that wouldn't cost them additional dollars so like in many of some of the districts that do a microc credentialing system the teacher has to pay to take the courses and then they get the credit in the micr credentialing system so we wanted to be sure

286that none of the options that we have proposed in the catalog we at a cost to the teachers um but for many of you if you're not familiar what is a microc credential and it is an opportunity to take a professional development like course that is personalized to you where you get to create your own Journey you get to choose the things that are interesting to you based on career goals gaps in your skills and the specific needs of your learners it can be flexible so you can sign up to courses that align to your schedule it's performance-based so it's not usually sit and get you don't just go to a class and and sit there and listen they're awarded based on demonstrated Mastery of a subject matter and a reflection of a shift in

287your practice and then there's opportunities to demonstrate our goals of our strategic plan right which is this shift of practice towards Equity through deeper learning for all learners ERS so the goal being that if this is tied to our overall package that it would be things that are aligned to the goals of our strategic plan right one of which is to retain employees but one of which is also to move instructional practice to where we'd like it to be so that we're closing opportunity gaps for all students and really accelerating some of the learning all of the learning for everyone um so micr credentials what they're not based on the national definitions is what we do for District professionalized professional development so that's on a micro credential when somebody comes to a required professional development

288activity um it's not additional activities that receive additional pay in proac training which we've heard a couple of times came up by the um professional development committee as well um and it's not recordkeeping of like safe schools or mandated training that we're just required to do as part of our contractual obligations so those are what micr credentials are not so we started with what what does it mean in west Dallas West Milwaukee to have then a micr credential and so the first one is what is microc credential same things I just talked about the next one is how would you go about choosing a microc credential and this is something that's been reviewed with the compensation committee as well as we work with a team of um teachers one teacher from each school and a

289professional development committee because again one of the goals of our strategic plan has been to expand the amount of opportunities that teachers have to give input into the the um things that affect their job every day so all of last year well two years ago and then this year we didn't meet with them as much we met with a team of teachers to say what do we think is the most effective districtwide professional development and then they would go back to their schools and get feedback from their colleagues and come back to our next meeting and say well I told a bunch of people there was going to be some planning time and they were mad that we didn't plan more and then I told a bunch of people we were planning something and they

290were mad that there wasn't more planning time so I said yep that tends to be right like you're never going to you can do anything but you can't do everything so we worked with this team of teachers all of last year so we brought them back together to look at what some of the offerings were for the districtwide professional development tied to micro credentials to be sure that it was aligned to the things that are actually the teachers are telling us yes that was good professional development it helped me move my practice didn't put anything in there that the committee didn't say was really good and then the committee gave us a bunch of things to investigate some of which there was no way to get set and ready to go for this summer some

291of which we were able to add to the plan um so that's how these would be chosen each year is that there will be proposals from staff that take something that they say hey this really have moveed my practice and then they would fill out this form to say on my own I want to say this isn't offered in the catalog but here is how I would like to I did take this interesting professional development that I did through the association that I did through Nea that I did through something else and I'd like it to count for my personal pathway and those are in here and those will be considered by our director team so there's a form for that for consideration a lot of tabs open here um and then there is um

292so those are the forms that are in there and then we are going to offer this catalog of courses this summer and into the next school year um so this same website explains all of the kind of things that I just talked about and then it goes into the courses that are being offered which are right here um so these were the courses that when we met with the professional development committee they had said I asked the question tell me the professional development you've taken in our district so again that it's not at cost to the educator that has moved your PR practice the most and they generated a list and this then we compared it to the list of things that we would have offered in the summer again for professional development whether we

293had micr credentials or not and they were really similar lists so we thought good we're kind of on the same page with what some of the teachers are asking us for that committee then went back and spoke to their colleagues they came back the next time with a couple of other suggestions we did that a third time we refined some of the selections they went back a third time asked for input from their colleagues and brought that back I'm still getting emails now from people on the PD committee who said hey some of our teachers just came across this thing could I take that I got two emails today from teachers saying hey this is a real passionary for me I take this course every summer because I'm just interested in it would I be

294able to apply that for micr credentials right so some of those will continue to develop and evolve Jane did you have a question on that so what if I'm a teacher that would like to lead a um micr credential would I get micro credentials for that yeah that's a really good question so this summer these are all going to be taught by the people who have taught them in the past are mostly from our leadership and learning team so there's an opportunity for us to run a little mini University all summer long um once a teacher Masters the micr credentialing then there's got to be either new courses that we develop each year to continue to expand our work or once they've taken enough things on Project based learning that they would be considered to

295be eligible for an instructor then we'll consider them for an instructor and pay them a supplement to do that but we don't know exactly what that's going to look like just yet because I'm sure everyone would want to do that right and not continue developing their practice and taking micr credentials so that's a balancing piece that we have to figure out just yet so but if you paid them then that wouldn't be because then it wouldn't corre because then you can't count it for a micr credential if you already get paid for it in another way y all right um so for this summer it is all people who either already receive a supplement to be a lead in this area it is uh you know Adam is going to lead all the Project based

296learning boot camps um so this is an example of what one of the courses look like looks like this is Project based learning boot camp we're offering it four different sessions this summer the professional development committee asked us to be asked that they be grade level specific this summer usually we offer them much more broadly um but they ask that they be grade level specific this summer so there's a 4K through fourth grade session a fifth through eighth grade session a 9th through 12th grade session and then we left one that was for fourth through 12th grade Al together because what if you just couldn't make the other one you know people have plans and they're doing things in the summer this course includes 14 hours of in-person class time so you actually go somewhere

297and you do Project based learning um there's about six hours of asynchronous class time and then there's some self-directed work that goes in it so if I looked at this and I said oh this is really interesting to me I'd really like to sign up for it I click on this button and it takes me to a sign up um for each one of Sor right again lot of tabs here um for each one of the courses that are in here all of that information is in here so it tells you exactly how many micro credentials it's worth it tells you exactly how many what the requirements are for the course two of of the courses that are in here are self-paced courses one of which we offered this year during the school year and

298one of which is new to us because we also know that we have a lot of employees who have young families they have kids at home they have other jobs that they already do in the summer like work Summer Fest or all those things which won't be in the summer this year but that historically they've always had a job that they do in the summer they do whatever so we wanted there to be some a couple of options that didn't actually you you require you to come in person or from syn for some synchronous time so that we could honor the fact that we do have some employees who just aren't available during the day and then during the school year we'll also offer a couple of the courses so that again if you were

299somebody who the summer just isn't a good time for you that will'll offer some of the courses during the school year as well so that you'd have ample opportunity there's opportunity in this catalog for every one of our professional Educators to take three micro credentials between now and the first time that they're eligible to do that because you're up you can take up to three each year so there's enough spaces in all of these for about, 1500 micr credentials altogether so deeper learning course is the one that's worth three it has the most hour requirements it's going to be offered multiple times so if those all filled up the Project based learning Camp boot camp all filled up if Co plan need to co- serve if every one of these filled up every professional educator

300everyone in that contract would be able to take three in the course of this next year um we didn't want there to be a limit on like oh I would have taken my three except they didn't have enough spaces for me to take a course so we just wanted to be sure there was enough Jeff do you have a question on that yes is it does it cost District Personnel to get the micro credits no no and then what what is the payback I take a micro credit what's it worth to me uh I'll get to that one in just one second okay there's a whole sheet on that one in the manual as well Christ do you have a question on that yeah and there is there opportunity also though for a Michael credentials

301outside the district yep that would go in this course so before you took something oh got you okay you would submit this and at our director's meetings we would say yep that aligns to the work of our strategic plan so we categorize the work of our strategic plan into kind of four buckets so that there is that opportunity if I said well I've already taken a bunch of those or hey I'm really interested in just I work on this in the summer it's really expanding my practice for this reason and then if we had four or five professional Educators who said to us we all took this one course together at Wei or whatever and it was amazing and it was perfect it was exactly what we needed then that's one the PD committee would

302then consider adding to the catalog for the following year so everyone could take it sounds good um it's how we'll learn more about what people are choosing to take on their own time as well and that's employes yeah if they've chosen to do it and it's not in the catalog then they pay for it themselves if there's a fee for those but we're offering enough that you could do micr credentialing without it costing you anything okay yep um and as a just a reminder we've been offering these very similar summer professional development courses for the last two summers so this will be our third summer and doing it and we filled the classes most Summers so we've already had you know 200 or some odds about 250 staff members who have taken one of these

303courses in the summer most of which weren't paid some were paid an hourly rate and most of them weren't so we have some people who have already done some of this work um so I will jump ahead to that one the requirements for completing the micr credential oh sorry real quick question because you said that many of yeah you said many of these classes were filled in the past yep um so that raises a slight concern for me what happens if you have more demand than spots available then I just have to add more courses which is why we also can't be in charge of iPad deployment this summer yep perfect that's what I wanted might be adding more courses there is enough space in there now there is not enough space for everybody to

304all choose the same thing yeah right so obviously there's a limit you know I can only offer so many things and there's only so much time in a day because we also have to do our day jobs as well as teach all these courses so we're trying to find the right balance for that but if we had an overwhelming response for something we would figure out how to add a sexual okay um and then this summer all of our deeper learning coaches are paired with one of our leadership and learning team instructors as well so that we can continue to grow the number of people who can offer the courses to solve that problem as well awes both of those things are happening right now great yeah and Noah you might have to just shout

305my way if somebody behind the poll has a question okay um okay so then what's the requirement to complete the microc credentialing it's to complete the coursework to show up um and then there's a follow-up session so if it's a project tuning where you get together with a group of teachers and you say okay I'm trying out my first project hear me out give me feedback or if it's a session where you get together and say hey what parts of that really are working for you or not intended to be half an hour 45 minutes one time follow-up session and then the educator writes a reflection um and this part of the work we felt was really important because the professional or the compensation committee asks that it not be tied to your evaluation right

306and so there but there had to be something that says it's actually creating a shift of practice that helps us meet the goals of our strategic plan the reflection is going to be reviewed by a panel of people that's just made up by a committee that does that work as well they'll look at it twice a year and it's really is your reflection complete um so I can jump into there's a self-reflection document um and did you answer these questions how has your instructional practice shifted based on the course you took have your how of your learners become better collaborators communicators problem solvers more self-directed based on your shift of practice what evidence do you see that you're creating more Equitable opportunities for all Learners and how will you continue this professional practice in future

307years so the committee does not say oh Caitlyn your reflection was A+ and derer yours was a c right that's not what they say they say check did we answer those questions yes or no if you answered them in your way and your style and your format what works for you then yes you get that done microc credential complete if you don't if the committee says boy I really just didn't get an answer to question number three you just get it back with the opportunity to resubmit it if you want to to apply it for the micr credentials and that reflective process was really important because again then it's not tied to it's not an evaluation I'm not your evaluator if I'm on this panel that reviews these I'm really just saying was that complete

308or was it not complete to finish out the cycle um okay and then the compensation that goes with those so first and foremost like I shared we've had a group of teachers who have already been voluntarily doing some of these courses over the last couple of years so in this first year we wanted to honor that work and say we don't want them to redo all those courses because that doesn't really make a ton of sense right so what they would these are the courses that we've been offering for multiple years on the right hand side here co-planning to co- serve this one I can actually make bigger so people can read it um co-planning to co-s serve the deeper learning course Project based learning boot camp the second step class and the mindfulness class

309the most recent ones not the ones that were done as part of of District ypd so for ED professional Educators who have taken those summer of 2018 summer of 2019 summer of 2020 um they will get to the opportunity to do a follow-up session and write their reflection the team will meet to review those Reflections in January and then in January the professional educator will be compensated for those retroactive micr credentials assuming that they did the follow-up session and did the reflection okay so and we kept attendance on all of these and I've looked at all of them and we know who got paid for which ones and who didn't so we have all of that information to make sure we don't miss anybody um so that's the first step that those people would be

310paid one micr credential is worth $100 two is worth 200 and three is worth 300 what's really important to note about those dollars is that those compound to your salary right so what's worth a $100 this year is worth exponentially more than that 5 years from now 10 years from now right so if I did the micr credentials each year and added that in it compounds into my overall package and CIT Lin will talk a little bit more about that when she gets to the dollars portion of it but that's a really important piece of that it's not I'm going just get a check for $300 that's the frustrating part that people had with our performance compensation system is that many of those people like you were saying Brendan in that 8 to 10 year

311band they had received performance compensation checks for many years that aren't reflected in that salary amount right but they were also one-time checks that get taxed at a different rate and then it doesn't feel like you're contributing to My overall salary because it wasn't being compounded into that amount so these are yes Jeff what are the hours involved in a one and a two and a three so we reduced the number of hours involved as we started to see the dollars come in right so originally we were told it could potentially be this much and then the more you run the numbers you can do anything but you can't do everything so up to the one micr credential is up to 20 hours and that includes the time we think it'll take you to take

312the course participate in the after session do some planning and write the reflection that's all of it um the second micro two microc credentials is some up to 39 hours and then anything over 40 hours is the three micro credentials so on if you were calculating it on an hourly rate you might say boy that doesn't money that's exactly what I was thinking I figured um but that's where the compounding piece of it is it's add your salary it's not and it's going in your wrs and it's doing all of those pieces like when you heard about many of the compensation models but then stop paying anything to your post-retirement benefits this you get twice really because it compounds and it's also in that benefit that we offer in west Dallas West Milwaukee that again

313many of these districts that went to models like this dropped um okay so then an example of how that would work so let's say I never took any retroactive I didn't do this before I wasn't interested when it wasn't tied to compensation I didn't have time whatever my reason was so if I'm signing up right now and this sign up actually goes out tomorrow morning um because we have some competing things going on I have to get the dates out to teachers before the model is actually approved or the poor teachers are going to get this model and be like well now it's too late for me to sign up for the five classes I wanted so In fairness to our staff that has been locked in their homes for a year and has worked

314tremendously hard and had the hardest year ever we're not springing it on them and then saying well now you're really only eligible for a few because we get you out the dates so late so to honor our Educators we have to get the dates out there and plus if I have to add sections if I have to do all these other pieces with the people I have currently to be able to teach the courses I need more time than a few days notice like we needed a lot of time to put all of this together so far um so right now the sign up will go out tomorrow again like I said this is summer professional development we would have offered if the board chooses not to approve the micr credentialing plan it's still summer

315py that we would have offered and so um but sign Up's going to go out um so the professional educator registers for summer course worth either one they might take three one credit courses they might take one in the summer that's worth one mental and take one in the fall and one in the spring because that works best for their schedule they could take one that's worth two in this first summer or one that's worth three it's three total for the first for that year um that are the max you could take more courses but you can't use them towards your micr credential and then the professional educator completes the inperson synchronous and asynchronous hours they complete one follow-up session and submit their reflection the team will meet twice a year so in January will

316meet to do a bunch because we're going to have some staff who want to do their courses this summer who don't want to wait until May to write their reflection they just kind of want the cycle finished and then they want to know yes what you did was good nobody wants to wait until May for something they did in August to find out yes it was approved or no it wasn't so we'll meet as a group that is a different group than any of these other committees this committee will be made up by a group of people who meet together for two years to do these so we can be consistently reviewing the reflections and then we'll elect a new committee that reviews the reflection pieces um so that team meets in January and then

317again in May um they will review it either send it back to the person for revisions or um let them know that the microc credential is complete and then in September of 2022 the educator would get that dollar amount added to their supplemental increase to their total salary for the following school year right so if I'm taking micro credential courses this coming up Summer and I finish the cycle I'll see that money into my salary by next September okay and then if I was new so let's say I get hired at the end of the summer I'm still going to have the option to take micro credentials during the year so that I could still get on that cycle and be eligible for that and then it just keeps repeating and again we'll have to

318continue adding courses because at one point every single one of our profession Educators would have taken their deeper learning course which will be amazing for our students and amazing for our teachers and amazing for you know for everyone involved that's a good problem to have that we're going to have to think of something it'll never be something that's not tied to a strategic plan that takes our work one step further um but it'll be courses that we'll have to co-design with teachers once they start mastering some of these courses so that we can make sure we're always helping them to grow and learn in ways that are meaningful to them not just random that we pick up to hit the numbers that are assigned to the micronal system um so that same person would follow

319that same cycle so we wanted to put some concrete examples in here um so that they again it was evident and it's clear what could and couldn't happen and then that will all go as part of a manual I saw you that time Brian um that will all go as part of this manual each one of these is a link so that it has very clear explanations it links right to where you sign up for courses it's all kind of put together in one place it says whether something's eligible for a retroactive credit or whether it's not um and the letter that goes out to staff about signing up for these I'm also going to host a couple of Zoom sessions over the course of the next week just open sessions at times when I

320know teachers are available just to answer questions because this is new to all of us and although I've spent a more hours in these documents than I care to count um it's new to other people and so we want to make sure that we're able to answer the question questions that people have about courses and hey it doesn't work for me to take one in the summer do you know for sure when they'll be offered in the fall no I don't yet right some of that depends on the people teaching the course and some of that depends on when it's good for our professional Educators to do that we don't mind doing Saturdays or Sundays or whatever in our department that doesn't you know we'll adjust ourselves to be able to do that if that's

321going to work for teachers then a big one that came up is proac training it's not in the catalog proac training um for those of you who don't know is our deescalation and then our seclusion and restraint training and right now Educators can go and get like a a hourly rate to attend that it's two Saturdays for six to eight hours each Saturday to do that based on our certification to be able to offer that you can only have so many seats in each course so anything where I can't offer it to everyone at the same time didn't go in the catalog because if 200 people signed up for that I'd have to say no to 80 of them you know say no to 120 of them right so we didn't put that in the

322catalog but the um PD committee suggested that we make it optional whether people want to use that as a micr credential or get paid for it going forward that one we still have to decide once we see the schedule for pro training for next year because that one you've heard a bunch of times kind to come up as a request of the compensation committee and the PD committee to consider okay Brian okay I apologize if I missed this but um is there a limit to how many classes teacher could take over the summer um it's three per year that you can use for advancement to your total salary so you could take as many courses you can take more than that if you want to but it's three per year and you can't stockpile them

323I can't take oh I've got an easy summer this summer right I'm going to take nine and then use them they have to be timely you have to take them within those and by by three you mean micr credentials not classes correct three micr credentials so some courses are are worth one and you might take three some are worth two you might take a two and a one some are worth three so that you could just take one course and be done with it so even best case scenario um it's going to take a teacher two years to really be able to move over that lane so no it should just be one year um because again the courses are designed you could take if you take one three credit course I'm sorry I'm thinking

324yep yep right and you finish it throughout the school year then you're really like they were talking about you're designing your own path if that works for you but that course is obviously going to have more hours than taking three one credits but we're trying to work it out so that if I was somebody who wanted to take three one credits cuz that's what works for my schedule that you're going to have availability to take a one credit in the summer one in the fall and one in the spring we're trying to design it so everybody can do the three in a way that we can manage and yet makes it reasonable for staff to access because if it's not accessible then it's not really a very good system yeah I had the 5105 in

325my for the years of service so that's what why I to get that for a second okay any other questions for me on micro mine is a lot easier to explain than Jeff C all right let's move into phase three all right how many phases half yeah all right so moving into the finance piece and the sustainability so um basically uh I'm listening here the few things that we'll talk through and really to fit into our overall budget and then sustainability wise what does that look like so we'll start by looking at our overall budget and it is made up of various funds so this is just regular old school district accounting and what I want to look at is the fund 10 and fund 27 piece that is about 90% of our total budget

326and these two funds are essentially the cost of educating our students so fund 10 is our general fund so our general operating expenses special education is fund 27 and per state guidelines we have to keep our different buckets of money in um different funds or keep them all separate so taking a closer look at funds 10 and funds 27 this is well I'll refer to in the next few slides is our total pie so this is our total um again our cost of educating students and we break it down then by the various categories within our funds 10 and funds 27 so we have salaries and benefits as the majority of our general operating dollars and then the next largest bucket is purchase Services purchase Services includes things like Transportation student tuition utilities professional development

327um payments made to vendors and then another big chunk of this purchase service category is open enrollment out so I'll talk through what that looks like um for our district um coming up here in a few slides so I even I hesitate to put long projections on a screen at a board meeting because they are wrong um but I just want to show you that um basically projecting what our Revenue looks like moving forward so this is our Revenue limit history the blue lines and then the green lines are projections moving forward and again projections are simply a best guess with the information we have at the time so right now we don't even know what next year's Revenue will look like because the state legislators and governors so working through that process so projecting

328five years out is this is inaccurate data that I'm showing you it's just a projection it will change um but we have to make assumptions when we do projections and so the assumptions that we have Within These projections right now is a $50 increase to our per pupil within the revenue limit each year going forward so that's um in all of the green years a $50 increase to our per people within the revenue live the last two years we had a $200 increase and then a 204 so in our calculation a $50 increase really is almost like zero it really doesn't do much for us when we start seeing $150 and up that's when our Revenue really starts showing um that line wouldn't decrease as much or might even um Trend steady or go up

329so again this is our total revenue limit our total dollars that we get from property taxes and state aid and ultimately I think this is this is probably a little bit um worst case scenario here but I think ultimately what what we're going to see happen with our Revenue limit is that it will likely become a steadier line um but not necessarily going to continue to grow so we'll look at now our major expenses within our bu in our budget we looked at our PI and what some of those large expense categories are so breaking it down even further we'll talk through three of our significant expenses within our budget we have our open enrollment out expense we have our employee benefits package and then our retiree benefits and um I know I mean compensation

330as a whole is is a little bit touchy to talk about and I know um enroll into a different School District so they enroll out of the West Dallas West Milwaukee School District when a student open en rolls into our school district we receive funds for each of those students when a student open enrolls out of our school district we have to pay the school district in which that student is now attending the kind of Ideal scenario is that we have a similar number of open enrollment ins and outs so that your revenues and expenses for those two areas basically Net Zero we have to remember when we have a student open a rolling in there is a cost to us as well because now we have to educate that student that's another student in

331our classrooms we have all the supplies equipment computers etc and we also have to make sure that the student has a teacher so at some point open enrollment in also costs dollars um but the goal is um at least a net zero impact of our open enrollment ins and outs I and what we're seeing here is over the years our open enrollment out number of students we should keep in mind that we took significant intentional action about five years ago to change the way that we were controlling our open enrollment um in number we used to have um and this I know this one is just outs but we did used to have a significant additional number of students open aoll into our district and it wasn't in a financially sound way we were adding

332more and more staff rather than having just filling up to our current Staffing levels with open enrollment in um so going back to our open enrollment outs um we also have taken steps to um work with our open enrollment to start limiting this number of students who are open enrolling out of our district and one of those steps that we've taken we know that we have about $1 million worth of students who open a roll out into a virtual school um and this is obviously a big changing environment for everybody with covid-19 um but as we look at this next slide with the impact of the corresponding expense with open enrollment out um that one of the that first big step for us in in opening that charter school is starting to hopefully limit this

333number of students who do open a roll out of our school district so um that $1 million doll who worth students who attend a virtual Charter School elsewhere um you know could come back to our school district and even um have you know additional students open a roll into milwa School District in in the virtual charge school capacity so the piece of the pie that the open Ral out expense takes up is that purchase service and the uh salaries and benefits within our school district are about 67% and the purchase service piece of rpie is greater than many other school districts and a large portion of that is because of our growing open enrollment out expense so that purchase service piece continues to push on the other pieces um for space within our overall high

334or overall Revenue so the next big piece of our budget that we'll talk about in terms of expenses are employee benefits so here we have an example this is a real example from a teacher from last year so this is 1920 data and this individual had a salary of $663 these are the actual benefit costs that our district then paid for on behalf of this individual for health insurance Dental wrs psycho Medicare and longterm disability and when we add them all up the overall cost of this total salary and benefits package is $100,000 so this employees benefits were about half of this employees salary so a significant portion of our total compensation package is we have to take um benefits into account um this coming fiscal year so going into 2122 we have a health

335insurance rate cap of 8.5% which equates to over the um one fiscal year is about $55,000 that our district will have in in additional expenses um and when you take that over a calendar that's a calendar year that's a million dollar because our health insurance benefits are on the calendar year um so we only see half of that increase in FIS schal year but if we see that increase of 88.5% that's 515,000 more dollars in expenses that we have as a school district to incur and go ahead Jeff y questions an hour or later no fine I think I know the answer but I still want to ask if health and dental those are family plans both yes both those y good question okay um so okay so when and currently right now individuals pay

336for health insurance employees pay 10% and then our school district incurs 90% of the premium cost so when a health insurance plan would go up so let's say next year it goes up by 88.5% and the current cost so this last sorry let me back up currently on the screen we're looking at 1920 costs so our health insurance cost is 22780 in 1920 in our current year it's 25,31 and of that the employee pays 10% our district p is 90 if we increase by 88.5% for health insurance next year the employee portion goes up $215 on an annual basis and our District's portion goes up by almost $2,000 so now an employees total compensation package increased by $2,000 and we haven't even talked about the salary so um ultimately the point of this slide is

337that our compensation is a significant piece of our overall budget and of a um employees benef or total comp and once again we see the piece of the pie that our benefits takes up is obviously the benefits slice so finally we'll talk through just briefly retire benefits um and I've mentioned this set a number of times at this point so we won't go into much detail but the West Dallas West Milwaukee School District we are in the 99th percentile out of all Wisconsin school districts in [Music] um so up there in in the state and annually we spend about $4.2 million on not at this point so um just important to note that this is another big portion of our expense budget and once again that's that benefits piece so again that piece is also

338pushing on the other pieces for room in the pie and here we are focusing on salaries which is another piece trying to push for space in the pie and if you recall a few slides ago we looked at that graph with those scary green lines that weren't as high as the blue lines of the past um and so we're working on increasing another piece of the pie the salaries uh additional Revenue at this point that we know of so like we've mentioned a few times we can do anything but we can't do everything and we continue to have the various pieces of the pie continue to challenge each other for space and in order to increase compensation because we don't see projected increase in Revenue that will have to reduce costs elsewhere and very important

339points to note our budget is currently in Flex at this point in the budget cycle for the next two years because we the state works on a banial budget so the state repeats the budget process every two years we're currently in the new budget cycle for 2123 and working through the budget Factor so we don't even know what the revenue factors will be for next year much less 20 years from now um and it there are some big pieces in the budget that the legislators that the governor has pushed for we have no idea where the legislators will come out on that um we'll see with the co Esser funds if we'll have redu State funding but one of those pieces that maybe has some traction is the increase in special aded reimbursement rate which

340would be a significant portion of our budget so if the special ed reimbursement rate went up to 45% right now we're at 28 which I still think is a hefty jump we would have about two a little over $2 million in additional Revenue so there are some significant pieces of the state budget that we have to just wait and see unfortunately um how they play out for us to know you know how much additional Revenue we have in the next two years and really we have to P this game every two years as a state moves through this budget cyle and because of all of these various things especially in the early years of our compensation model we should plan for an annual review of the model because we're going to be adapting it at

341this point without even the state budget will not be finalized by the time we I'm semi count it the state budget will not be finalized by the time we approve our compensation model so um thus the annual review I think is extremely important not just for the financial piece but for all of the pieces that we talk through we've vetted so many different ideas and went through so many different iterations and I am confident there are pieces that we haven't thought of yet so um we will continue to kind of track those as we move forward and make sure that those are the things that we were reviewing on an annual basis so we'll take a look at the draft of our model so we will start in this section so these are our total

342cost projections and right now in our model in our draft model we have a maximum annual increase of with micro credentials of $300 and an annual increase separate from that $200 so a maximum an ed professional educator could earn outside of a CPI which is separately board approved is a $500 increase annually so what that looks like in terms of cost microc credentials add a a teacher FTE so our total FTE count of our professional educator group is 640 Educators and that add a $300 each maximum would cost us $192,000 additional e year so just like the pieces in the um in an individual salary would be compounding this twoo would be compounding and on our budget so $192,000 would be needed next year and the following year $192,000 more dollars would be needed and

343then a simple equation with our annual increase with a teacher FTE total of 640 and an annual increase of $200 that's $18 ,000 that would be needed annually additionally um to support within our budget and then CPI is an even greater piece of that puzzle and this is just the fund 10 piece but our total fund 10 employee compensation and I used a 1.5% just as a kind of starting point to show what CPI would be next year CPI is 1.23 so that's set in stone at this point um going forward we have no idea but for next year it's 1.23 um but just to kind of going out um what 1.5% would look like that's $543,000 total that would be necessary budget so when we add these up we have Micro credentials we have

344annual increase CPI and this is the one that we have spent a significant amount of time tonight talking through is moving our Educators up to the average based on their years local years of service their bachelor or Masters and then their total years of service and when we add up moving everybody that's below the average to the average we get a total of 300 about $385,000 so adding all of this up for next year we're at about $ 1.25 million the the three categories of um outside of CPI at up to $75,000 and this one point this 1.144 is the 14.4% I call the percent benefit so that's our P our Medicare and our wrs that's calculated on top of our salaries and so what what this means then is that our three categories outside

345of CPI will cost us $800,000 for next year in our budget we have CPI separately so right now we have this um built into our budget this is built into our budget as this looks right now this is assuming that every educator takes three microc credentials yep it ISS assuming every educator takes three microc credentials so we'll look at an example of what this actually looks like for an individual so this example here um is for a new hire so a year one somebody who starts with us next school year and again we have the maximum annual increase for micr credentials at 300 and the annual increase at $200 the total salary is our base wage which is the base wage plus CPI and then as in all those supplemental increases annual increase the micro

346credentials and at this point a master's degree is still in that supplemental increase column although we're looking into whether we're able to put that into our base wage at this point the Masters is still reflected in the supplemental increase so we have a new hire year one is 2122 they're starting next year with us one of the implications of moving everybody to the average is that we have a new starting salary for our year one Educators So currently I want to say 42,000 currently 42,000 is currently our starting point that would be moved up to 43,2 25 which is the average when we find our current year one Educators so the new average the new starting point for educators would be 43 to 25 and on our chart here there would be no um CPI

347as starting a a new higher and there would be no annual increase or the micro credentials in year one but during year one we're going to assume this person is earning micro credentials so this person we'll say is earning the three micr credentials every year and what we see on the bottom in the purple is that the CPI is Multiplied and we used a factor of two for you're moving forward as that is probably realistic um for a CPI increase so moving down the bottom um the bottom row in the purple we're seeing the year before times the 2% increase so the bottom is this the base wage which is the base wage and then CPI is added to that each year and then moving up the left side we see the compounding impact of

348the supplemental increases so the $500 that you're seeing here is made up of $200 annual increase plus a $300 micr credential so if that educator in year one is earning the three micro credentials in year two we are adding the $200 annual increase plus the $300 micr credential for a total of $500 plus the CPI increase which in this example is a little bit under a thousand bucks um so this educator moves from year one at 43 225 to 44590 so every every year um with the CPI if that moves forward with you know separate board approval on an annual basis and the maximum annual increase an educator could move up um nearly a thousand dollars and that's all based on you know factors that could change each year CPI could change each year um

349and based on an Educator's own uh desire to earn those micro credentials so each year this shows the compounding impact so each year let's say the micro the educator earns the three micro credentials um and you can just see how that compounds so year two they're earning the $500 your three they're actually earning the 1,000 so it just follow us over um year four they're earning $1,500 because each year they're earning 500 more dollars and so this ultimately just shows the compounding impact of what an educator earns and their total Sal and if I just scroll to the right here this is reflecting um a year 20 employee in our current model at 72471 and I do have um reflected in here as an example in year nine the educator earns a master's degree so

350then in year 10 that is reflected in a $2,000 increase with in their supplemental so um that we would see in this cell right here so that's why this one kind of jumped significant amount um and so this is what ultimately in our model an educator who earns the three micr credentials maximum each year would earn assuming a 2% CPI year after year um in year 20 any questions year 11 is the year after oh that's not right just add the we get the I'll what do think do that but good then on this one compared to that we for that scale 11 just cp91 people so what what is interesting is and I think we touched on this just briefly is that an an educator who's been here um it's it's really hard to

351show Apples to Apples because of the performance comp and those additional pieces that we've had over the years that haven't adjusted a base weage a base salary so we've had the performance comp in the last few years we've had the the onetime payment so a year 20 individual who's let's say somebody who's in year 15 at this point and um showing like reflect comparing that to what a year 15 on here looks like a year a year 15 individual's current base might look lower because those year aftere um payments haven't been added into their base salary doesn't mean that they weren't compensated they you know over the years if they R to the fin comp or if they were here the last two years and earned um the additional the onetime supplemental increases that were

352not added to those base wages um those they're not reflected in that in that base total no I I get that it's just like I'm looking at it for long-term earning power for our teachers and and those things not accounted for those things not in there if you're going into a job and it's like well this is my base and I get this one piece and I get this one piece that's nice but it never compounds buying power for yourself as your salary as you know a professional so it's I think it's something that we need to kind of consider as we're looking at this so you're you're referencing the um kind of initial placement the initial salary the bump to the average as we've been referring other questions do you have more examples Kay

353I can go I'll just looky just an example of somebody who's returning so this is an example of a current year six meaning this year in 2021 this individual is a year six employee next year this employee is a year seven so the year six average is 46 884 so next year we add on CPI and then we add on $200 because this individual is returning so that that's that annual increase from this year to next year receive so this person you know if probably reflecting that they're below the average they're going to move up to whatever that whatever that difference was from where they're at now up to that average and then add in the CPI increase plus the $200 and this person becomes 48021 for next year and then next year they earn

354the three micr credentials maximum and we're seeing that $500 now from one year to the next in terms of the $200 annual micro credential and seeing that reflected throughout and then here once again now I'm concerned that all my formulas are wrong when I have on the master's degree but um this shows the $2,000 increase again this I think I just had kept it consistent somebody who was earning a master's degree ATS during their year nine um yep so an individual earned it their masters finished earning it during year n and then to the $2,000 during year 10 so um this is what that individual would look like at year 20 as an example any questions so just complete the Pres presentation got three short slides left okay before I ask everyone for their final

355thoughts I want to make sure those are they're Final on the home stretch I can un any just do this and then all right so getting to the end of this presentation so there were tough conversations as we work through this process s there were tough conversations that that occurred as we kind of worked through this process so going back a couple hours earlier when we heard Dylan kind of give the summary where he talked about longevity bumps that was that was something that the committee had talked about up until about the end of April and then we started having conversations of you know what the longevity bump really isn't an incentive for me to to stay for the five years 10 years and so the conversation of the committee went to uh what would

356happen if that category had more money if we if we got rid of the longevity bump and added to the annual category what would that look like so then Caitlyn went through models and we kind of talked about that so where we landed as a a compensation committee is we eliminated the category of longevity bumps at this point and that was something that we talked about that part of our focus is to retain and attract staff and so you've heard through the conversations many times already this evening that this is something that we're going to analyze we're going to keep reflecting on it and if we're noticing that we're not accomplishing that goal of retaining staff then we'll come back to the table and relook at this idea of longevity um longevity bumps but as

357of right now the committee felt it was important to eliminate that as a category and then Focus just on the annual the micro credential and CPI uh no so the next area that we talked about is if an employee is on a support plan they would still need to possibly be assigned micro credentials or classes that they would need to take however because they're on a support plan they would not be able to be compensated for that um until they' be off that support plan and so that was uh another piece in regards to the micr credentials master's degrees we've had some interesting conversations in our committee where if I already have a master's degree and I go for a second master's degree what do we do with that or back in the 2016 compensation

358model there were approved master's degrees or lures and so for example um getting your administrative Masters isn't recognized in getting a $2,000 bump and so somebody who got their administrative master's degree they could apply for some of their classes that they took in that program they could try to have that become an equivalent to a micro credential and get credit that way so they may not get the $2,000 bump but then they could apply classes if they fit to the micro credentials for an increase through that and then finally uh category amounts and this is uh this is a Hot Topic today our our compensation committee met last week Thursday and it was kind of like our final meeting and in that we kind of talked about the different categories and at the time I

359communicated that the annual bump was $400 and because this is is a fluid situation and there's a lot of factors um you've heard the communication tonight that that is a $200 annual bump So within a matter of days that changed um but those are examples of the tough conversations that we've had um and the realities that that we've faced as we've kind of worked through this process okay getting to the criteria going back to the original criteria as a compensation committee have we moved closer to the average salary in our area I think the committee would say we're getting closer by the strategies or ideas that we presented tonight will this model attract and retain professional Educators again the feeling is yes and this is something that we will analyze on a yearly basis to

360see if we're accomplishing that is this transparent and is this sustainable and so so really focusing on those key criteria points um I feel that the the compensation committee has done a really really incredible job of coming up with a plan that addresses those and uh yep when you had to go from the 400 to the 200 was there any push back by the committee yes there was there was questions um as to why that value was different um in conclusion the last slide here tonight again the con compensation committee is recommending the following compensation model to the board uh with a hopeful implementation for the 2122 school year and again this is focusing on the professional educator uh employee group so that includes teacher counselor psychologist social worker nurse otpt speech Innovation uh staff

361on leave of absence and that's directly from our handbook but the proposal is to bump those below the average up to the average of their West Dallas West Milwaukee years of experience CPI which gets approved on a annual basis by by the board an annual increase of $200 for the 2122 school year um and kind of what we've talked about with this committee is if this gets implemented we don't know what we don't know and we're going to be learning as as we kind of work through the implementation of this model the micr credential process with a maximum of $300 a year and what Caitlyn referenced that new starting salary of $3,225 where does that starting salary rank with area schools um High middle low it's midle thank you again thank you for your attention

362as you work through this all right so that is the entire presentation um many many many months of hard work from all aspects of of our Administration on our staff we're part of this committee uh and so we're going to be asked if we're going to approve this or not so what do we have for discussion on this do we have questions do we have concerns what are we looking at here I might have questions but I'm GNA ask susette I I want a hard copy I want to be able to read this and adjust it this is really hard to sit here and read and really comprehend it okay you know I I would like to even suggestion that when we have workshops like this that we get hard copies at least on board

363book so we can read it before we come here at least have a little Baseline to go from okay and if we know we're gonna have two long workshops we should probably break them up we have weeks between our next meeting we could have moved one of these later so that we had more time because I feel pressed and some of us work at 4 in the morning so I literally have like four hours of sleep so I would agree with other we have a lot have had a lot of workshops recently between our last two meetings that we've had um but there is some time you know strain on this one which is why we wanted to get it out and it is very complex I we've had some Workshop nights where our Workshop

364was a half hour that night yeah how soon are we looking to vote on this 14th so the 14th was the the original because that's the next time that we were um scheduled to meet for a regular board meeting um there is actually a question about having a special board meeting particularly to pass this item because there are some time sensitive pieces that go along with it as deer was mentioning getting the pieces out to staff so they have time to sign up planning their you know summer vacations and so forth and so on and they're obviously going to be interested to know if this is something that we are going to support so there was question about actually having it on the 7th or sometime before the 14th to only pass this if or

365if if that was something that the board was thinking that they were going to do so Kristen um I guess like my two questions and I I really don't want to keep us here longer than we have to but I guess my questions are if we're giving like when did the retiree benefits go into place that if we're offering people percentile in retire benefits for the state that's not good enough to keep great teachers here and unfortunately I think either we're not selling that well or it's the like people are going to look at their salaries when they're young teachers and determining what they're going to do with their future in your 20s I know I didn't think about my benefits package as much as I do now in my 40s um I guess that's

366just I want to keep either we do a better job as a district selling to people and reminding them like we have this really great benefits package or is it not enough and we need to then reallocate or re look at these how we're doing this so and that's been a lot of the conversation around moving to the defined benefits package for retirement as well because it does help address that right it takes moving quite a mountain to get to that system which is hav done so yet but we agree that you're after a certain number of years in our district you would be foolish to leave but the middle ground is where we do have people who do need for compensation because they're not as worried about the retirement and they're more worried about

367the daily income they have young kids home even kids col and all that's how you adjust for that is getting to that piece and that just well we made some smart moves tonight with a vote to help us start making a plan for that but we're just not there yet because it takes quite an investment to stop one and start another at that same time sure that's that's why ideally what you want to do is you want to have that starting point where you're going to hook them you're going to get them to the district and there's enough incentive to keep them around for those first few first few years until they kind of do see the value and those other benefits and they get to that point where it's a little bit harder to

368leave um it's about being as competitive as we can with the other districts early on and by early on I don't always us me that first year because that first year A lot of times I think teachers will take and I don't know this from experience but you'll take you're looking for your first job so so you'll take a job um just based on hey I've got my first opportunity it's about being able to keep them there after that um and making sure that you're competitive to those other District so I mean from what we've heard tonight are are we in general I know that you know we don't know all the details of it but but on the basis of what we understand is this a general positive a general negative back to the

369drawing board you know we kind of have to have to have a feeling on this because there will be some movement that has to happen and so if if the the majority of the board right now is like I don't think this is what we want to do for our compensation committee that tells us a lot about what needs to move forward from here okay other right in the middle okay anyone else I just keep questioning as as you went through the check boxes the sustainability or that's my only question because otherwise I think it's so well thought out and I think it really speaks to us honoring teachers and and um I see the benefits of everything except the sustainability part and you talked about those the piie and salar already 60 some percent

370of it where where will we get that money and we have so many unknowns so that to me is my only how we would need to discuss that before we can actually vote it through um and just as a reminder the night has is being recorded So for those like you'll you can go back and rewatch and yes death to get hard copies of the things they think is realistic but you could also go back and rewatch any parts of it as well it be posted but when you zoom in on that stuff it doesn't come in clearly right so you still need for sure Heather but to be able to have it in your hand and also listen to the conversation again that's what I was referring to right here's my question kind of

371thinking through this from this point forward um I would imagine as people get hard copies and rewatch this they're going to have questions and we're not going to be in a in a format where we can easily discuss that so as you get questions sent to you um how are you going to disseminate that information that might be helpful to the rest of us that could potentially spur other questions does that me to go on a Friday well or do we we do something internal with leadership right now as a um shared um document for f hes just in kind of how we've been managing behind the scenes the whole kind of pandemic process and so that might be a tool so that you see each other's questions and our responses so you're not asking

372you know three of you asking all the same question you're like oh Amy asked that okay got that one here's my question so maybe we launch that and I don't know do we need to come back on the seventh and have another workshop on this this is big us we could if it's noticed that way I think I think that makes sense um that that type of format I think that will help everybody and make sure we're getting the information that we need that others might have thought of um from their questions and we're not repeating things and we're not bombarding Caitlyn potentially with the same question 10 times um yeah I think something like that would be awesome yeah we can get that out everybody connected to it tomorrow maybe yeah if we do

373notice it as a second Workshop to visit this and then if the board feels comfortable on the seventh moving forward we can notice it for possible action and if not then we come back on the 14th um yeah I think it's worth the time to figure out to get this as close to right as possible and I'm being intentional about that because we're never going to get this 100% right that's why you heard a couple times tonight we're going to have to revisit this every year for a while um until we smooth out all the kind of bumps that are going to come in this road what are what are the big hangups the dollar amounts per year or or you know like my biggest hang up sustainability and we get to a point where

374we can't we get to that decision making like what do you cut to keep the model because you're not going to go backwards we're not going to pay anybody any less we're going to you know you're going to get this this year oh we can't do it so you're not going to pay so we're going to have to cut and and take something off to something else so you know we can't sustain this what CPI layer of something that we look at yeah CPI is is is a flexible option um the amount we all pay into our premium share for healthare um that's a big dollar amount and then um the other the other one and I ha saying this my job is to answer honestly class size so if you want to really cut

375in a school budget you have to reduce the number of people right um that's hard to say but that's the right it um right so you're trying to create other Revenue kind of within a budget those are the big buckets that you have to you have to go to your big buckets in order to do moves like this you know move a million and a half dollars into compensation um and for next year we think we have this figured out but it really is sustainability piece is how do you keep it going um is the the challenge of it and there was talk about this obviously at the both committee levels um regarding this and there was discussion with other districts that have these types of models and trying to figure out like you know

376how are they able to sustain it and part of it is as people who are higher up on the ladder leave and are replaced by people who are lower down on the ladder you know the cost difference there is where savings are made um but one thing was brought up that you know we have 70% of our staff is 10 years or less and one administrator thought oh you must have really cheap health insurance then but no because of the retired benefits that we're also still holding that isn't true so it is something that obviously we'll have to be holistically looked at um you know if we move forward with this compensation model we're also going to have to to look at moving to that defined benefit so that we can get those things more

377balanced it can't be all one way um so we have to get that figured out and that will probably be something else that's discussed to try and keep this as we move forward because you're right we only have so many dollars in the bank and there's only you know at this point not looking like it's going to increase by a whole bunch in the near future so um you know that obviously is that's my biggest concern too is always sustainability I don't want to have a three-year program that we have to junk because we can't afford it anymore there no point to it so people need to have some um confidence that this is It's a long-term plan to attract and retain teachers that's the biggest thing for me and so if they are attracted

378for three years and then leave because we can't do it anymore I don't think that that has salv anything at all so does any else have any questions but I think we have a plan which is to everyone review um if you can make sure to get this sent out to everyone and and ask your questions um and then we will plan to have a workshop at minimum on the 7th uh to only discuss this and then uh we will notice it so that if after that Workshop time is completed we feel that we are going to move forward with this that we can go into Open Session and do that does that sound uh okay to everyone here did anyone else have any questions or anything else they wanted to say if it's a

379workshop it's open anyway right but we have to notice it for action I guess so yes we're not going into close I'm sorry yeah yeah I'm sorry so we would then take action on it out of the workshop and like it's happened in the past if we decide we're not going to do any action we justos end the meeting had that before we just end the meeting without the action right I just think we have to notice that so the public understands that we might have action if there other questions thank you so much for sticking it out here this evening I would entertain a motion second who we wait all those in favor I I opposed we are