001All right, so we'll see how much I can embarrass myself. This is my first time with the gavel. So let's see. So first, we've got additions, deletions, amendments to the agenda. We accept the agenda as presented. Is that the next step? Yeah. I'll second that. We're all new. Okay, we'll do a vote by unanimous consent. Any opposed? The agenda is adopted as presented. Now it's our time for community comments. Do we have anyone signed up? I'll take that as a no. Moving forward, our consent agenda, the 2026 April 14th regular board meeting minutes and confirmation of employment. I make a motion that we approve the consent agenda and confirmation of employment. I'll second. Motion by... Director Paysinger, seconded by Director Witowski. All those in favor, raise your right hand. Motion passes. Five to zero. Okay,
002reports. Facilities report. Otto. Oh, that's right. I like to find it out of the box. Good strategy. It's in a box somewhere in that room. Who picked it out? I mean, not to brag. Better than old carpet. It was very much to Zoff, Brian. I thought it was in the high school. Tell me. I thought after watching that, I said it's in the... No, you said it was still in the high school. We're all in May. Thank you. Okay, facilities. This is a month old, so it's a little behind. I missed the last meeting, so I tried to keep it up. Make it up to date. All right. I want to talk about custodial and then just maintenance work we've been doing and then the facilities committee. I don't think I'm talking about the facilities
003committee, but and then large projects and safety. That's my tip. Now I have to resist trying to scoop that up the whole time. All right. So Custodial, we had some professional training. Oh, yeah, I got, I don't know why we were talking about Ernest Shackleton. So I put Ernest Shackleton quotes all through this thing. So it's kind of a fun story. Did they? Yeah, they did. I was watching some documentaries about it, actually. Pretty, pretty cool. Pretty cool story. Anyway, I threw quotes in there. Just I don't know why anymore. I'll give you guys something to look at or read. Oh, yeah. We had professional training for the custodial department. This has been months ago now, but we had our floor wax suppliers come in and the manufacturer of the product and the people who
004sell us the product all came in and gave us some good lessons on how to save money and save time on waxing our floors. So they had them in for a... full day training us. We did spring cleaning over spring break and we were transitioning and are now in the middle of spring sports. All right. And that's some of our training. That's the day of training that we had. And you can see they showed us how to strip the floors better, talked about how we can save time using a burnisher instead of stripping three or four times a year. And you can see over there in the picture that half the floor has been waxed over there in the multi at the high school. And so in maintenance work, we are still keeping up on
005our work orders. My goal is to have our work orders either in process, like parts ordered or whatever, or completed within a week of them coming in. Usually it's only a few days, and we've been sticking to that despite being short of workers. That's a good quote now. When things are easy, I hate it. Great minds, right? Robert, our maintenance worker, has installed a lot of cameras, been super helpful for the principals, I think mostly here at the junior high and high school. We're keeping going on that. Mostly in the new gym, I believe is where the cameras are. They've been pretty helpful. Doing some faucet repairs. We're repairing exterior lights. Also around the new gym and around the CTE and the multi. And then, of course, we're always doing air filters. So we do
006those three times a year in our air handlers. We got lead testing completed. We had a few fixtures that needed to get retested, and those have all been tested and passed. So we get a little break, and then we're right back into more state. uh required lead testing i think coming up next fiscal year and they're lowering the limit too um so we'll be going through and retesting every every fixture in the district and that means when we do lead testing it's anything where somebody could potentially drink water from so basically we don't test the toilets but every sink that you could possibly drink water from it even in a bathroom we're testing all of it so um aeds we went through in uh We replaced a bunch of parts on those that were getting
007old, and they're all up to date. And what's with the grade school gym? Oh, yeah. Can we talk about the grade school gym? Yep. Okay. Sorry, this is all a month behind. We got the grade school gym. That's all settled. We settled. Yeah. Yeah, which is great news. And the landscape RFP is going out. We're requesting bids for a three-year contract for landscaping. And we're having our mandatory walkthrough next week. Tomorrow. Well, last week it was next week. That's what I was thinking. That's where I was coming from, I swear. Yeah. So this is underneath the... I call underneath the gym every now and then to check it out at the grade school. Not sure whose hands those are. And this is just going and replacing parts of the science classroom at the junior high.
008And this is about the water. Yeah, work orders come in. Yeah. This was fun. I crawled up above the grade school kitchen. I had to crawl down the ducting to try and fix a water leak in the roof that was coming through a pipe. It doesn't look nearly as cool as I thought it looked. Apple's very picky about what music you're allowed to use, so there's not a lot of selection. Oh, yeah, large projects. The reader boards are, we have our junior high up and running. That was a repair. And then we have our new high school reader board, obviously, out front. Stadium repairs were completed. That was, there's a lot of rotten wood and beams on either side. We still have, we still have to reinforce the walkway because we had somebody fall through,
009broke through a board. So I want to reinforce the walkway and make that a little stronger. But we did a lot of repairs this year on that. And then I added in the flood that we had here. And there's the junior high reader board up and working a month ago. And then the high school one working. And there's the new repairs we did underneath the stadium. And then, oh, yeah. So that's the one on the left is. is what it actually looked like. But the one on the right is what it actually felt like. Because that does it no justice. It was like this much water, and we were stomping around through here. What happened was the toilet, you can't see the supply line broke. And it went, we think, potentially all weekend long, just
010pouring out onto the floor. So that was completely soaked. And it was like about an inch of standing water. And then this room came to about here, completely soaked. But we called Rapid Response, who was the same people who helped us out at the grade school a few years ago when that flooded. And within two hours, they were here drying it out. By the next week, you can keep flipping through. By the next week, they had stripped the floors out. And then over the weekend, actually, and at the end of last week, they were putting an underlayment down and then new flooring and got us back up and running. So super fast. Super thankful for those guys. Definitely may have threatened them. Safety, we had WESD come out and lead us through a safety committee
011training. I think that went pretty well. Apparently, we've been problem solving. I don't remember what I was referring to, but I apologize for that. And we put drop-down window covers over this year. We've been putting those on all the classrooms, so those came in. And if you look on the right, there's a, that's kind of a tough one, but yeah, right there is the little red tab you pulled out and it covers the classroom window. So in the case of a lockdown or whatever, you can create that privacy, create that security. And that's all I got. Any questions? Yeah. Thank you. Hello. Hi. I was home not feeling great and not wanting to get everyone sick. So here I am. And I'm not going to do much talking today because this one isn't really about
012me, but about the amazing students and staff that have stepped up in ways that I've probably never actually seen in my career to collaborate and work together to keep our garden shed afloat. So we have some students that would like to introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about their part in the garden shed. And they'll give you, be able to answer some questions and then I'll talk a little bit more after they're done sharing. Good afternoon. My name is Eric Chinchilla and me and him work at the garden shed. We make sure that Everything is alive, knowing the signs behind how plants grow and everything. And these amazing teachers right here, Kelly Haskell, Charlie Haskell, and Mrs. Turner over there, they taught me a lot of things, especially Charlie Haskell. He has been
013teaching me a lot in middle school. But, yeah, this time of the year, we're just trying to sell plants around the community, making sure that everything is alive and, you know, well-planted and everything. Jackson Swartz, Good afternoon i'm Jackson sports. Jackson Swartz, Really, I do whatever needs to be done, I jumped in I moved dirt when we need a dirt move i've moved plants. Jackson Swartz, I learned the cashiering system really well I know where almost everything is in there now, and I can identify most of the plants in the greenhouse. Jackson Swartz, Today we brought each of you have plant so i'll go around and pass this out. Thank you very much. That's awesome. Yeah. Great. And I had someone came to tell me that the garden shed was amazing. Oh, yeah. The help
014that they got, you know, when they showed up, attitude of everyone, the fact that all the students knew. what they were doing and where to get what someone was asking for. Anyway, they were very impressed. So good job. Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah. We've been hearing a lot of compliments this year. So we're trying to strive for it. And John, if you jump to the next slide. Charlie in the quarter. Thank you guys. Really impressive. So on our next slide, we have just a little graphic I put together because I get. Yeah. Thank you. Oh, we have a video. I don't, can you guys hear me? It's a lot of volume. Now we can. Okay, so there's one final slide that just shows a graphic I put together because we get a lot of questions
015about where does the funds go. So as you know, every ASB activity has its own ASB account, the greenhouse included. So that is obviously... probably the biggest moneymaker in the school for a student-run ASB account. And so we look at it as a place where other ASB accounts or clubs or student groups that might need help with travel, for example, could access funds within that ASB account as well through like a process of saying, hey, we've raised... $6,000 for nationals and we could really use an extra thousand to help offset some costs. So that's a process that we're working through fine-tuning for next year as well just because we have made over $23,000 so far in the greenhouse so we want to be able to support all of the kids that have helped make that
016happen because there's such a huge crossover between Eric, for example, is also in culinary. Tons of our FFA students who travel are helping out in the greenhouse. Students involved with the Pirate Print Shop are helping out in the greenhouse. And they all have their own separate funds. And we work to help them build those up first. But I just wanted to be transparent with the funds because that is a question I've gotten a few times this year. And then just a few more quick stats that Kelly sent me. I'm not going to read them all, but I can send them via an email. The students planted roughly 400 hanging baskets this year, 10,000 annual perennial and vegetable seedlings. Everything with the exception of the geraniums and established perennials were planted from seeds. So students were
017involved in the process start to finish of planting seeds, getting them germinating and then transplanting into bigger pots and bigger pots and bigger pots. The hanging baskets were planted. individually mapped out by students. So they planted different plants into the basket and designed what they thought that would look like once it all started growing. So I think that's part of the reason we've sold so many of those because they have that customized touch. Cody's classes helped to build planters, helped to make the signs, helped to do commercials that we pushed out on social media. And we had about 150 different high school and junior high students that have been involved in the greenhouse, either through a class or through volunteering. So you can see. how far the reach of the greenhouse expands within the high
018school. So pretty exciting stuff and excited to watch it grow next year with our new Ag Hire. That's awesome. Yeah, it's great. Well, okay. Moving on to attendance and behavior. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Good evening. I'm Nicole Long, the assistant principal at the Junior High High School. And I'm Jeff Taylor. I'm the vice principal down at the grade school. And we are going to talk about our attendance and discipline systems, specifically around the work we've done this year around K-12 alignment. I know for me, this is my fourth year here. And when I started up at the Junior High High School two years ago. I mean, just not something we really did. I didn't have a lot of conversations with the grade school about what they're doing behaviorally or attendance wise.
019And then last year, going down to the grade school, kind of the same thing. You know, I wasn't going to go in my first year and start changing a ton of things. Just kind of getting to know the building, getting to know the building systems and kind of how they operate, which then moving into this year with Nicole coming in. really kind of gave us an opportunity to set bi-weekly meetings where we can start to really develop that K-12 alignment, you know, particularly around when, you know, our students are transitioning from fifth to sixth grade, ninth, or I'm sorry, eighth to ninth, you know, just so our students kind of have that continuity and they kind of know what to expect. on that there's kind of going to be non-negotiables across the you know across
020the board and hopefully there's some continuity with our parents understanding the importance of attendance um uh you know kind of it matters you know attendance leads to academic success if our kids are not here to you know gain all the knowledge from our teachers It's kind of all for naught. You know, we could have the best instruction in the world, but if our students are not in the seats to get it, it makes it pretty hard to make significant growth. For our behavior systems, just making sure that we have structure and that allows our teachers to be able to teach, allows other students to be able to be in class and receive that instruction. So we really kind of set out just to ensure consistency across K-12 and just really maintaining a clear, cohesive system.
021you know, from, from the beginning to the end. So. Yeah. And so when we, when we really looked at what the, like the challenges or problems, problems that we were addressing and finding solutions to those inconsistencies between the buildings and we've like the first couple of meetings, we realized that it just wasn't consistent. It wasn't even. fully consistent in our own buildings separately. And so thankfully that was building systems is a strength of mine in particular. And so it was like coming in and figuring out how we can work with what was already in place and make it better. And then how do we align? And then, you know, clear is kind. It's like my favorite saying ever. Thank you, Renee Brown. And so that like, we wanted to make sure that everything was clear
022because that lack of clarity, it just. It led to inconsistencies that we noticed when we looked at previous year's data. And so that was kind of our problems and challenges that we went to. And then do you want to start us off on that one? Yeah, I certainly can. So here's kind of where, you know, part of what we developed this year. Again, under that K-12 alignment piece, some of the steps we've taken this year is down at the grade school, we're using a different behavior system for tracking all of our stuff. We're using, you know, Google's platform. And these guys were using Synergy, which kind of led it to be really inconsistent, like when we're pulling data. Now that we have it in Synergy, we can look at Oregon DataSuite. It's one of the
023tools we have to follow up on our data and follow up on behavior data as well as attendance data. And without us being in that Synergy system, that tool has nowhere to get the information from. So that was one of the first things that I actually got from Nicole. In one of our first meetings, I had her kind of explain to me just the system that they're using for all behavior. And then we actually ended up doing that, what, a couple months into the school year. And so we were making a change mid-year. which is normally not something that we really like to do. But I pitched it to staff first and they all kind of bought into it. They really liked the idea. And now it's really great because our teachers can input like
024a behavior referral into the system. And then I'll actually get an email, an alert that says, you know, hey, this happened. We can go in there, open it up, take a look at it, you know, determine whether we need to have an additional conversation with that student. It just really kind of closed that loop. instead of it just going to you know a database that doesn't alert someone and and you know maybe the maybe the proper eyes don't get on it and what's great about synergy is it also has like built in like you can put interventions in there so when teachers enter into the system they can tell us before we get it as an administrator, what have they already done? So they're able to put in there those interventions of like, oh, I've
025already called the parents. I've already done separate, you know, tried separate seating or having them moved or I've tried this. And so we know where it's already been. So we know where it needs to go from that point, which is really nice. And so that was a piece that I shared with him. I was pretty comfortable in Synergy. And so that was just something that we kind of. Yeah, no, it's been, it's been awesome. Another thing we did is we really looking at our K-12 alignment as far as our attendance protocol, which we'll get into it a little bit later, but the actual like specific steps, what we're doing, who's doing them. And that's kind of at a K-12 level versus. Oh, well, an individual's name does it here and someone completely different does it
026in a different building. And in the third building, someone else is doing it different too. So I'm just trying to get in alignment. So we know that this, this, this job lies with this position. So then if something along the line isn't working the way it should, we can kind of trace back to who should be doing it and, you know, quickly be able to get that working. And then. through working with Sean and Amy and the rest of the admin, we're really currently working on solidifying that IDT ideology, kind of how we want to go about just the parameters around our inter-district transfers and that verbiage and communicating that to families and all that fun stuff. And then the other piece is You know, we're using data to drive all of these conversations. We're
027not just, you know, showing up one day going, hey, I think we have a problem with this and let's create something for it. We're digging into the data and we're seeing that we specifically have issues, certain things, and then creating systems to help solve those problems. So through a lot of these conversations, it really also led us to start talking about like really clearly defining, as you can see, like the attendance protocols under kind of this next defined processes and shared language. So like, what is the language that we're using? Is it consistent across buildings? So that when we're talking about an inter-district transfer, we all know like what that means, what the process is behind that. Also, when we talk about attendance a little bit more, that also meant shared language amongst what does
028it mean to be a regular attender? That was a big conversation that by bringing us together and looking at our attendance data, we realized that there were some just. misunderstandings about like what what is being tracked and what is the state looking at and what are we being assessed on as a school and as a district. And so then that the behavior pieces led to conversations about MTSS. And we worked a lot with Eric because he has a ton of knowledge in that area and he's built some really great tools for us. And. I know the grade school got really good, kind of established some good systems down there. We worked at the junior high. Catherine, our junior high counselor, kind of took the lead on the junior high MTSS, which is our multi-tiered systems
029of support. So putting in some structures for student talk. Our ninth grade on track team is one that does it really well at the high school. And so now how do we like. get that at every level so that we are making sure that we're putting in these different levels of tiered supports for our students. And yeah, that was all I got on that one. Okay. So the big, when we, and we've kind of, you've heard these words a lot from us so far already is consistency, clarity, and then the proactive approach. So consistency is huge. We wanted when we not having an aligned system, you know, obviously creates inconsistency. And we were trying that was something that we really wanted to work on this year is making sure that it's consistent across all buildings.
030Because that consistency and clarity to me, those two things go hand in hand, right? If we are clear and consistent, students know what to expect. They understand the expectations. They are better at meeting those expectations when they know where that line is. And then we also are really consistent with our staff and just what we're communicating to them and what we expect from them in terms of their interventions at the classroom level. really clear with staff on how to handle situations. So that way, so like at the junior high, high school, and I shared it with Jeff and we've been working on, this is kind of one of our next step things is how to have a really good system in place in each building of like, when this happens, who do you contact? Is
031that a tier one? Is that where you're managing it within your classroom? Is this a tier two behavior where you need to now refer it onto the next level? So that way. teachers feel confident in what they're doing in their classrooms, but they also know that they have the support outside of the classroom so that they can continue teaching the other, you know. students that are in their classes. And then really being proactive. Like I'm, I don't want to always be triaging. I mean, sometimes that's the nature of our job. And that was kind of what it felt like at first in the first probably month or so in my position in this new one. But then once we kind of had these systems in place, it's way more proactive. You're able to, we saw
032a decrease in behaviors pretty drastically once we knew kind of what to expect. We set the expectations. Teachers had the supports that they needed. Students had the supports that they needed. So that was kind of a big piece for us is just how do we continue to have that approach district wide. And kind of the big overarching piece is that like what's changed in this last year is that shift from like individual decision making. So like us just making a decision because we're like triaging to really a system driven approach. Like how are we using the system effectively so that we're consistent and how we're addressing attendance and how we're addressing behavior. And I think it's really I mean, it's made a difference in our buildings over there. I can see it. Daily. Yeah. And
033if students really know what to expect, it really sets them up to be successful. For sure. So, yeah. And I'm just going to touch on some of the behavior systems that we're currently using. Nicole touched on our revamped MTSS, especially down with grade school. We had a great system before in CST, which is child study team. But again, kind of getting into this K-12 alignment mindset, worked with Eric Blasios and really, really honed in on a new system that is just, again, along with everything else, just being super consistent and pitch that to our staff at the beginning of the year who had known the CST system from before. You know, so it's kind of a hard sell because they were comfortable in it and confident in it. They'd done it for, you know, four
034or five years. And so, but they went with it. And I've actually got some compliments here in the last couple of weeks where they're like, oh, we didn't know about it to begin with. But it really showed just through. you know, the first full year of really rolling out the purpose of it. They saw the consistency in it. You know, they saw that you're having, you know, four to six weeks of consistent data and really kind of guides where we're going next instead of, well, that didn't work. Let's try this. Let's try this. Let's try this. Again, it's really gathering that data that will tell us, you know, what the next step for the students will be. It was really good. So it is multi-tiered systems of support. Yep. Yep. And essentially there's three levels
035to it. There's a PST, which is problem solving team. That's typically grade level. It's the teachers lead that. So basically if we were both second grade teachers, this would be our problem solving team. So we would, or I'm not, I'm sorry. It's not PST. It's grade level team. Sorry. GLT. I'm sorry. That's the acronym. It's been a bit of a day. Yeah. So GLT, so it's grade level team. So we would come together. I would say, hey, I got Johnny here. Looks like he's struggling with this, this, and this. And she could say, okay, well, I know, you know, have you tried this, this, and this? And so we're just kind of coming together to collaborate. Between the two of us, if we come together, we come up with two or three things that we
036might try, and then we want to track it. And then we have that specific data that we have. And then we would bring that and say, okay, well, Johnny's really not making the progress we need. And so. maybe it's time we go ahead and refer them to tier two, which that would be SST, which is our second set. That's our tier two. And then from the same, it's kind of the same concept. We would go four to six weeks, gather that data. Typically when you're in tier two, you go about two cycles. And if you're still not seeing the progress you need, you would go and then go up to tier three. And then you're starting to look at very specific interventions that are very student centered. Just put that one student. Again, you're collecting
037more data, another four to six weeks, and you're bringing back that data and says, well, this student still isn't quite, you know, accessing the content that we need them to do. Maybe we need to look at a different avenue, whether it's an evaluation or whether, you know, it's a different intervention. And does every tier add more specialization to the table? So your grade level in the tier one is essentially every student in the school. It's every student has access to tier one. And again, if your student isn't making adequate progress with those supports that all students have access to, that's when you would move them up into tier two. And then it starts to get a little bit more specific towards, you know, trying to identify what interventions are needed. The next piece is again
038another school-wide. initiative, which is our PBIS, which is positive behavior intervention. And again, that's another tier one that all of our students have access to. Down at the grade school, we use the pieces of eight. And if you ever see us giving tickets out to kiddos, they get the opportunity to purchase things from the student store, whether it's be a teacher for a day. And it's just really recognizing students doing what they're supposed to do. So. We had the emotional growth classroom. That was a very specific teacher in that room. And she worked specifically with our tier two students. So again, students that are in that SST process is one of the interventions we use to specifically work with those students. And then the last one is the wind room, which stands for what I
039need. Essentially, it's a space in our building in which we have a staff member in there and they get to come in there. We got a crash pad and just other different things, kinetic sand. We do some heavy work in there where they pick up stacks of paper and set them down. It's just whatever they, it's basically what that student needs, you know, whether it's just a break space, whether it's a quiet space, whether it's get up and do something physical, they call it heavy work. And so. That's kind of the behavior systems we're currently working with at the grade school, up at the junior high school. Just really working on that consistent implementation of the behavior matrix and disciplinary action. Again, just like Nicole talked about, maintaining that clarity, maintaining that consistency. Again, if
040students know what to expect when they do something or when something isn't happening, they have a much higher chance of being successful. She touched on that discipline flowchart. One thing that they're doing that I really like that I want to bring down to the grade school is when you're talking to MTSS, it's always color based. So like your tier one is green, your tier two is yellow and your tier three is red. And like I said, the flowchart that she uses where, you know, she can give to staff that says if this happens, you know, this is a green probably classroom managed. You know, if it happens a second time, it could. drop into yellow. So they use that flowchart again using the MTSS color and then I know they've done extensive work on their
041ninth grade on track this year. And basically what that does for our district is again being more consistent in our responses across all grade levels. So attendance wise, one of the things that we like I mentioned a little bit earlier is that like one of the first meetings we realized just our understanding of our attendance data. So that regular attenders. So like. What that means are regular attenders defined as a student who attends 90% or more. So when we look at our attendance data, we really want to look at our regular attendance and not our daily attendance. Because our average daily attendance looks phenomenal, looks great, because on average, our kids are there. But we, what we're... What we're assessed on or what we're looked at by the state is that regular attender, which is
042the percentage of students who are at 90% or higher. And so that once we really like we all understood as a team that that's that's where we need to focus. It really kind of gave us some targeted things to look at. And at the start of the year, we were really, really hard, like sending out letters home of like establishing the expectations for attendance. I worked a lot with our team, which included our both our attendance secretaries, junior high and high. And then myself and Robin and Jamie and the counselors and like just sending out messaging so that parents also and the families understood what do we expect. as a district. And so that was good. Then we and that's kind of the interventions by level, like our attendance team, one of the things we
043did target that I feel like this was our win. was tardies that's probably the most like the system that we're using for that is working and kids know like they're doing better they're improving on being to class on time because like I've never heard that sentence in my entire life yeah then we have for tardies is working just so everyone knows at the table like that is one of the hardest It's one of the hardest things to fix in a school system. It is so hard. I mean, you all know I was at a really large high school before. And as a classroom teacher, it's always something like, why can't they figure this out? And then, you know, when I got into this position and I'm like, OK, let's just try this. And we're like
044and so Jamie and I were like, yep, this sounds like a good one. And we put it out and it just. It just worked. I don't even know. It's just really consistent and really easy for us. And I think honestly, that's where we found success is finding something simple that we could focus on. And so that, that to improve something. And so getting kids to class on time has been, we've seen drastic improvements at the junior high and the high school level. So that's, that's been our like little golden nugget. We still have a lot of work to do in attendance. I will tell you right now, attendance is still something that we haven't quite figured out some of the. the bigger concerns, which you'll see when we look at our attendance data real briefly.
045And so I think that one of those first steps, and it was kind of later in the year, and sorry, I know I'm talking, I'm going to just go ahead with this one. Is again, like that systems things we looked at, we, it started with just the 10 day drop protocol. Like, how do we, how are we monitoring kids that are not in there? And it made us really, really evaluate what we were looking at. And it was more like, this isn't just about a 10 day drop. This is just attendance in general. How are we monitoring on the daily basis students that are absent? And so we both just went to our secretaries or attendance secretaries and asked like, what do you do currently? Walk me through it. What's your process? And so we
046gathered that data. We gathered that information. We looked at a protocol that was already started in design and how can we make it better? And also the piece that was missing is that like responsible staff, because it wasn't clearly identified. Again, that clarity and consistency, who is responsible for that task? So that way we know, because that's kind of what we were finding in all of our conversations is, well, I thought it was so-and-so that did that, or I thought that was this person, or I thought that was this person. And so really just identifying who's responsible and making sure that it's a role and not a person. Because I think when things, people shifted this year into different roles and responsibilities, and that I think made it a little muddy. And I think it's
047super important. Anytime that we're going through and relooking at system. It's not that it wasn't getting done before or it wasn't that it just it didn't live somewhere. You know, now everything that we created lives somewhere. It lives on the drive. It lives with the district. So if something were ever to happen, the work that we have done is there. So whether it's, you know, someone else steps in that role or, you know, whatever it is, we're creating things that are here for the district and here for our students to remain here. There's a system in place. It's not just a person. It's not just, oh, well, Johnny left. So along goes everything that he did or she did, you know, it's so it's really been a big focus of ours to create something that
048lives, you know, and it's really hard to see up there, but, you know, you can look at, you can look at responsible staff. It doesn't have a name in there, but it does say attendance center, you know, and it does say admin, liaison, you know, there's specific roles in there. And so hopefully. you know, like I said, that work, as long as it's being implemented and followed, it's created. Yeah. So this was our brainchild that we're hoping next year we can implement with fidelity so that we can see where it still needs some revisions. So that's kind of our next step in terms of that. A little bit of data for you. So here's kind of currently where we're at. Again, it's really small. It's really tough to see. But on the bright side, how
049we talked about with that MTSS triangle. Ultimately, this is kind of what we want our triangles to look like. We want green to be obviously the biggest part. And basically what that says is. 88.4 on the far left we're looking at grade school basically 88.4 percent of our students have zero to one incidents so like referrals and then you move up to the yellow a little bit 7.9% of our students have two to five incidents. And again, going up to the very top, which would be the red, that'd be our tier three students are still tier three kiddos. 3.7% of our students have six plus incidents. You know, so when you're looking at these triangles, That's kind of what you're looking for. You want the bulk of our students to be in the green, right
050where we want them to be. You know, if the bottom was red, you know, that would be a bigger square. If you don't want inverted triangles. So it shows me that, you know, we're kind of, this is what we want. Junior high, I'll just kind of run through those numbers real fast. 88.9% is 0-1 incidents. 2-5 incidents is 9.7%. 6-plus is 1.4. And then last, over at the high school, 0-1 incidents is 94.6%. 2-5 is 5.1%. And 6-plus is 0.3%. So again, I would say overall, this is exactly how you kind of want your behavior triangle to look. Yeah. And then attendance. This is where, again, this is our focus for next year. Like we've created some really good systems in behavior, but attendance is where we're still problem solving and figuring out how do
051we get better at this. We have ideas. But what this is showing is the regular attendance rate. The grade schools, regular attendance rate. This was just like a week or so ago when we pulled these. Is that 76%? It's actually 77 today. It's actually 77 today. Great job, Jeff. And I think, and he, and theirs has taken is on the upward trend, which is really great. And I think that that's due to the fact that I know that they've been really working on some positive, positive interventions. Like they did like class. competitions where they were, you know, like which class can have the highest attendance rate. And so then kids were motivating other kids, like coming to school and making sure they were there. And so there was like pizza parties and some other little
052celebrations for them for that, which is really great. And I think that that creates also a really great school community and kids are holding each other accountable, which is really cool. Dayton's kind of a competitive place. I'm really, really, really tapping into it. The next, the next level. We allow booing in our professional development. The junior high and high school are sitting at, I mean, junior high is at 65% regular attenders and the high school is at 59%. So my math brain definitely would like to consider that month where like we had the flu that went through and I would love to pull that month out and see what our regular attendance rate would be. And so because I think it would be a little bit better than that because we did have a lot
053of students absent due to that and gone for long periods of time. I mean, even our I was the last principal standing during for a whole week. And that was unique to Dayton because I was working with Yamhill County Health at the time to say what. percentage of kids we need gone before I have to close school down. It was definitely rampant here. Yeah. Um, but it's still, it's still would probably only bring us up, you know, a handful of a percent. So that is definitely our area of concern. And, um, we have lots of questions more than, um, answers at the moment. Um, I'm really hoping with kind of where our vision is going for next year as the junior high, high school, um, admin team, we're really wanting to now We focused a
054lot this year on our staff culture and creating a positive place there and supportive and that is working. I am so proud of our staff and it's just a wonderful place to be. And our kids, now we want to like, how do we infuse our kids with that same culture and really try to bring that up because we feel like that's the next step. It's like bringing the kids into the mix and so that they want to be here and they don't want to miss school, right? And so what's kind of that next piece? So that's our goals kind of moving forward in terms of attendance and also tightening up our attendance protocol, our inter-district transfers. In the data, we did see like a lot of our chronic non-attenders are inter-district transfers. So like, how
055are we, how are we mitigating? How are we supporting those families to get their students here? And so that's kind of the next piece is, is what do we, what do we need to do to, to really invite them back in and get them here on a more regular basis? Yeah. And I know like specifically down to the grade school, it's just been. I had went to a basically an attendance workshop at the WSD and there was a presenter there. And what she said really kind of stuck with me. And I had never really thought about it, which I don't know why. But basically she talked about how to to affect real change in attendance. You really got to kind of have a mind shift away from. Well, attendance is the attendance team's job. You
056know, when attendance is really it's in all of us. It's every single one of us at the school, including the students and their friends. Right. You know, treat your treat your classmates right. Treat them well. And literally every single staff member we had. So I remember when I came back with that, I actually spoke to the staff and I said, guys, here's the deal. You know, this is this is an us thing. You know, yes, I will be the one that is kind of like the front of it. But also. I need your guys' help. And we have so many teachers that do an amazing job as it is. They have their own classroom incentives, you know, that they do for attendance. And it just, I think it really did, really did kind of help.
057help start to change that mindset. So we just put up a few things, kind of next steps. We've already touched on a lot of the next steps as we've talked to you guys through this. So, you know, continuing to review these systems, make adjustments, really calibrate. I think that that's kind of our next piece to looking at. Having more of these real discussions, especially about attendance and clear examples of expected responses and coaching and feedback. I think that that's going to be the next big piece, too. And then communication. fine tuning how we're communicating to students, to parents, to teachers across the board so that we can, again, like Jeff kind of talked about, like, how do we increase this partnership amongst everybody? Because this is an all of us thing. And so we want
058to try to bring in all the experts for that piece. So absolutely. Yeah, that's it. Questions. Great, guys. I have a couple of questions. Did you have questions? I think statewide and probably nationwide, that's such a huge issue. And so that was very encouraging that here we're making a difference. Yeah, thank you. Everyone's looking for the silver bullet. Yeah, I wanted to commend you. I mean, just basically say the same thing, commend you on the tardy part. And I had a couple of questions for you. What is our state requirement? goal on regular attendance 90 percent of students are not a regular percent so 90 is what so like even when we look at our data like synergy gives us some really nice reports as well as organ data suite but um where it'll do
059the color coding so the green yellow actually it'll go green orange yellow uh red or green whatever those colors and so we can we can really look at targeting And so the green is 90% if students have a 90% or higher, like they're attending 90% of the time or more. And so, yeah. That we got, this is really great. We've got some movement to do, but. I forgot where I was going to go with that now. Oh, do we provide busing for inter-district transfers? We can't, no. We make their home district get them here? No. That's one of the inter-district transfer rules is that they need to figure out their own transportation. Yeah, I mean, there are. conversations that have been had with first student where if a student can get to a certain bus
060stop that's in within our district boundaries or whatever that you know the first student will pick them up but even that's kind of pushing the envelope that feels like a support gap from both sides the sending school and the receiving school really it's like you just kind of get lost in this no man's land and good luck getting there yeah and i think that that's kind of what we're seeing too is that they're the even just the process and follow-up with those families being more consistent again about reaching out to them and so developing a system that yeah again we know like who is responsible to like be reaching out flags us before it becomes a habit on their part exactly able to intervene and provide support and help now I'm trying to figure out
061where the proactive piece comes in. We have inter-district transfers that are coming from Vancouver at this point. It seems unreasonable to ask us to go that far to get a student. We don't get 100% of their ADM, so maybe that school should pitch in and get them in. That's what I'm thinking. Thank you. Thank you. I just want to say too, like I couldn't be more proud of these two and like a lot of our staff this week. I know it's been a hard week for them and yet that you, I think you hear that their eye remains on the prize and they're completely invested in the work they've done has been just stellar. So I can't thank them enough and for being the steady during a really hard week for them and a lot
062of other people. So thank you. Thank you. Okay, moving on, we have the superintendent's report. So Dana said in our meeting today that we only have three Mondays left, and I think all of us kind of panicked a little bit. But as we move into the final weeks of the school year, I want to begin by highlighting several positive developments occurring across the district, despite the financial challenges we continue to navigate. We recently completed the hiring process for both a new agriculture teacher and a head football coach. I'm excited about the leadership, energy, and long-term commitment these individuals will bring to our students and programs. Additionally, our greenhouse program, as you heard, has experienced an exceptionally strong start to the season, generating more than $20,000 in sales within the first few weeks of operation. This
063program continues to serve as a strong example of authentic student learning, community engagement, and CTE success. Our preliminary state assessment data is also beginning to come in and early indicators suggest we are seeing some of the strongest academic growth the district has experienced in recent years. While there's still additional data to review, the initial trends are extremely encouraging and reflect the hard work happening across our schools. And as everyone in this room knows, this is also our week of our annual May Day celebration, which is Thursday. And especially during challenging times, longstanding traditions such as May Day serve as important reminders of the strength, the pride, and the connection within the Dayton community. And finally, I want to publicly acknowledge our teachers and staff following Teacher Appreciation Week last week. The progress we're beginning to
064see across the district is directly connected to the consistency, resilience, and effort of our employees. I mean, I don't know if you were listening to Jeff and Nicole, but our teachers have... pivoted and learned new systems these last couple of years, just so many times, exponentially more than teachers are typically asked to learn in a year or two. And their morale has only increased as they're seeing the results of their efforts. So I can't give them enough credit for that. Regarding the budget, I know I emailed everyone as well as the staff, but just for public record, as the board's aware, districts across Oregon continue to face significant financial pressure heading into the 26-27 school year. After continued analysis and confirmation of revenue projections, shout out to Jan Bunn, Dayton School District will need to
065reduce approximately $2.4 million from next year's budget. This does include, though, reductions that we already absorbed this year by intentionally leaving some positions unfilled to lessen the impact on the upcoming fiscal year. Throughout this process, the administrative team has prioritized preserving programs and positions most directly connected to student learning and district goals. Areas of focus have included early literacy and core academic achievement, support systems for special education and multilingual learners, preservation of career technical education opportunities, and maintaining direct student supports wherever possible. In order to minimize the impact on classrooms and student-facing services, the district's focused reductions heavily within the administrative and operational structures. Current staffing adjustments include reduction of district office staffing levels by approximately half. returning staff and closer to historic levels, reduction of administration, administrative positions across the system. A reassignment of
066several licensed staff members into direct student-facing positions aligned with district needs and licensure areas, and a small number of classified and licensed reductions in force. There are also selected reductions in hours, stipends, or supplemental responsibilities of our staff, and much of the budget was absorbed through use of natural attrition, retirements, and unfilled vacancies. At this time, impacted staff are in the process of being notified directly. Final staffing recommendations and organizational updates will continue to come before the board as timelines and personnel processes are completed. While these conversations and decisions are difficult, I remain confident that the district is approaching this work strategically and with a continued focus on protecting the long-term academic progress and stability of the organization. I also wanted to hand out, this is a historic... um or longitudinal view of our ending
067fund balance over time i think starts in 1996 to 1997 um And just shows our revenue each year, the expenditures each year, what our ending fund balance was on those years, what percent of revenue that ending fund balance reflects. And then ADM is the average daily membership. So the amount of students we have. And then weighted is some of our students who come with more significant needs and require more resources have a weighting to them. So you'll see the weighting that is assigned. by the Department of Education. And then you'll see that total state school fund formula is basically our local tax, local revenue subtracted from the actual revenue. So what you'll see, the state actually gives our district. So if I read this right, how much money we get per student appears to be
068higher every year, including last year. Yes. Right? Yes. So we're getting I mean, even though we're having fewer students, we're getting more money per student to teach them. We are. And the cost of staffing still is disproportionate to the increase in revenue we get for our students. So we also don't have the years 2020 through 2023. And I don't I know that there was a switch over to how we the approval versus cash. So I don't know if that's reflective of that, but. Yeah. And we have, we also have not this coming up year, but the following year is when we expect to take the biggest hit on our purse. So we're anticipating that as well. Currently, Jan has worked the budget to maintain the ending fund balance that we have here. But this is
069this is a similar position that the rest of the districts in the state are in. And so we are petitioning the governor to use some of the rainy day fund for education because we are considering this a rainy day. Even I know Sean and Jan went through. They were turning over couch cushions to look for money and, you know, even the cost of the cost of goods, the cost of transportation, everything is increasing and not a rate that our cost per student or revenue has increased. It's just a situation. And enrollments down. And enrollments down. As we talked about last time, right? Yep. And enrollments down. We did, you know, last year at this time, we were SANS business manager, but we did know that. hers was coming for us and Dayton School District had
070side accounts that were protecting us for one more year. Stephanie did reach out to the city to ask for the housing updates and we'll send you that via email because that was one thing in conversation with the city we had anticipated that by this spring our enrollment could be at least stabilizing if not increasing by a little bit and the timeline for that was didn't it didn't come through for us but it's still anticipated. to come to date. And so we are hopeful. We also continue to have a large amount of inter-district transfers. And we've mentioned at the last meeting, the opportunity for exploring online education, but just making sure we have tight parameters that still fit within our value system and the school district, and not just doing that to play a money game.
071But You know, these last few days and these next few weeks are going to be hard for some staff who may be reassigned to positions that aren't their preferred positions. Ultimately, I am proud of the work our administrative team. has done to have as minimal impact to our staff as possible. And when you see $2.4 million, that is a large chunk of change for a school district our size. And yet we're talking about, you know, four to six staff who are impacted or who have been impacted this week in a way that is impacting their employment. So it's not good news. It's not news that I ever wanted to have to share. And I also am really proud of our team for getting in front of this because we have a plan and it feels
072good to have a plan. Do you think you're done with your cuts or do you think? I have no reason to believe there are any more. We're in our last conversation with Jan. Now we're at the, can we find any money stage? We knew what money was leaving us. We knew what. bills were getting higher, more expensive next year. And now it's just looking at, you know, are there any encumbrances that we had thought we were paying for and in fact were not? We didn't have that expenditure or plans that we had to spend. We've had a spending freeze since February. So, you know, it could be that some of those encumbrances, things that we were planning on spending aren't, in fact, going to be showing up in our ending fund balance, but we'll have
073that to roll over for next year. So Jan is, we're getting texts at 11 o'clock at night, 12 o'clock at night, and I'm not stopping her because she's on a roll. She's really... going through it with a fine tooth comb. And I appreciate that because when we're talking about people's livelihoods, it matters. So. I mean, is there any discussion at the state level about trying to help and fix PRRS? Is that, I mean, it has been in the past. Is there? I've heard a lot of discussion about it being a crisis. I haven't heard a lot of ideas at the table, a lot of frustration, a lot of, you know, requests for, things to be legislated, but I haven't, and we've had, you know, people from PERS come and speak to superintendents to explain what's
074happening and why and the impact of side accounts running out and how it all works. But I haven't seen anything that gives me hope yet, but given so many of us are in this position, I imagine it's a problem people are pretty desperate to solve right now. I'm just curious. Yeah. Sorry. I don't have any better answers for you. That's it. Well, I just want to say thank you to all of you and all of you. I mean, it's not an easy task. You guys are handling it efficiently and with grace and thanks. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, I think it's especially hard because we're, we're finally seeing the traction of the work that we've been putting in. And, you know, there's not a single person on our leadership team that hasn't been just, you
075know, working. working nonstop to make it happen and with passion and dedication. And so, you know, it's hard when you're trying to make two plus two equals 16th and you just can't do it. So. Pulling everybody to come in as a team and everybody worked together. And then at some point we don't have enough money. Yeah. Some of those people. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. That was not. Not a great position to be in. Lots of, lots of districts. Yeah. Okay, so next item on the agenda is our scheduled board events. So next regular board meeting is Monday, June 9th at 6 p.m. through the boardroom. Tuesday, excuse me. Next budget committee meeting is going to be Tuesday, May 19th at 6 p.m. through the boardroom. Amy, will we get... The cuts you're talking about, I
076know in your message you talked about you're meeting with people directly, and I want to respect that. When you're finished with that and everybody kind of knows what's happening, can we get a list of what you're cutting? Or will it come with our budget message or? Yes, it will come with not specific names. But I can give you a list of the shifts and the reductions of certain programs or positions. That's really what I'm interested in is like how, where we are seeing effects closer to kids. That's what I'm most interested in kind of finding out. Yeah, thank you. Happy to. No business on the agenda. Board reflection. Chris? I don't have anything specific other than I really appreciate all the work we're getting on attendance and tardiness. And it's all so wonderful. And seeing
077through transitions our garden shed really doing well. And I'm excited about that. And I'm really nervous about this budget stuff. Yeah. I guess that's it. Thanks. Just nervous about the budget. I really was so encouraged. Behavior just, I mean, I think statewide and potentially nationwide, but I mean, I hear stories of teachers, you know, being hit and kicked and, you know, things thrown at them. And not being able to remove a student. And, you know, it's just these sort of scary stories. And to have them come in and say, you know, we're seeing improvement. We're implementing these things. And, oh, my gosh, it is actually working. It is just incredible. And I am encouraged by that. So good job, team. Once again, I just wanted to say thank you to the entire staff. Well, thank
078you then. Anyway, thank you for all you're doing. It's not easy. And just for my part, yeah, thank you to staff. Thank you for really working through a very difficult time. Let's try and maintain continuity where we can. I think we've got a lot of people that have done the work and hopefully we can find opportunities for them where we can. Yeah, that's all I got. I just want to add one more thing. Sorry if I'm allowed. It was really interesting, the response from the staff. And it was, I don't know if there's anything more reflective of the growth that Dayton School District has made in terms of our culture and our professionalism and our level of trust. Because when the hard budget news was being delivered by either myself or by direct supervisors. the
079staff enlarge their response and I'm paraphrasing obviously is we're all here for each other. What can we do? How are you doing? How can we support you? And there was not an us versus them feeling between anyone at the district office and licensed or classified staff. There was not a any kind of large wave of anger or frustration. It was all a feeling of we're in this together and we are going to all try to work together to get out of this together and we're here to support each other. And so to me, it's like it was really a hard week, but also really eye-opening on how far this district has come. Awesome. If there's anything else, we will close this meeting. 712.