Board of Education Meeting: 3.10.26

001Good evening. I'd like to call this meeting to order Should I I'd like to call this meeting to order The required public notice of this meeting was sent to Community Newspapers Incorporated and Metropolitan Press on March 6 2026 and post on the doors of the district office Additionally meeting notices and agendas were posted on the district website and distributed to the city of Brookfield and the village of Elm Grove for posting Let the roll call show that all board members are present Will you please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Avi Muthu Pandyan? 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 so for those that are standing in the

002back We do have a few empty seats here in the front row, which I know is never the first choice There are also some seats in the lobby And this Is on in the TV in the lobby if you do feel the need to sit down But you are welcome to of course stand and stay in here May I have a motion to approve the agenda? I'm of approval of the agenda with reordering and deferring some items. I'd like to move agenda item 8a to number four so Just after the high school representative report 10 a to number five, which will be right after that and then Refer item 7b through e and 9 to the meeting on March 24th Second, okay. We have a motion in a second with some adjustments to our agenda.

003Are there any questions or comments about that? Sam yeah, I just would like to Understand why we're leaving or what's the thought process with middle school programming staying in there versus nothing else? My understanding is that we have requests to speak this evening about this topic Mary mentioned Christy indicated that at least as of about 15 minutes ago We have at least six audience members who came here to speak on that subject tonight I want to make sure their time is honored if the if the This should pass and the item you came to speak on is being postponed to March 24th You are more than welcome to speak at the community at the citizen forum period at the beginning of the meeting I don't want anyone to feel that their time is being disrespected

004by having come here. We've got a packed agenda. It was a packed agenda a week ago And we want to honor The time for the people who have come here to speak tonight to have the full three minutes that they each deserve Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Yeah, Jean we pre the motion and then we're moving 8a To be number four right after high school representatives 10a to number five right after that and then we're deferring 7 B through e and nine to the meeting that's scheduled for March 24th So the proposal would be the board president report and superintendent report up Between the high schools representatives report and the citizens forum and then we'll have the citizens forum our consent agenda action items and two discussion items Right to there's seven a

005and seven F will be on for discussion because we're only moving through Can I just ask one more question? I can support this motion, but especially if we make sure we prioritize For the March 24th meeting item Seven see the school start times which has been postponed Many times I'd like to make that a high priority on the next meeting. No, I did. Thank you neither comments or questions Sam why is the 9,000 policy? Why is that that one selected then to be remained on there tonight versus the other policies? Pretty would you like to speak to them? I was asked if I was what interested in? Deferring that policy to another discussion and I said no I am I I have a formal complaint about that because I'm confused as how that policy is

006even on the agenda Could you tell me how we got that to these and know when it was never agendized for the CLE committee? It was on the agenda for the last CLE committee meeting It was discussed at that meeting and the committee voted to move that forward to this full board meeting. I'm looking at the agenda item for the CLE and I do not see policy 9 1 2 5 on there Discussion was had during that CLE meeting where we as the members of the CLE committee Decided to create this policy. It was sent out in your board Doc's information Several days ago with all of this information and has been there since then I thought our policy is that we have to first go through the committee level meetings before and Have them

007agendize on the meetings because that would be proper Protocol, I think that's open records violation when we're having Meetings that we're talking about things on the meetings that weren't discussed or when agendized So I'm really confused as to why because I'm looking at the committee meeting right now And there's not a 9 1 2 5 on there at the last meeting and I don't see how on earth we have this In front of us today unless we violated an open records request. Maybe we can get some clarification on that I don't believe a public meeting violation has occurred Well, we are responsible to notify the community 24 hours in advance of things that are on the agenda. I'm looking at the CLE agenda Nothing is on there and now we have a new policy that's

008on our agenda here That was never on the agenda for CLE that seems like a very clear violation Just for my own personal clarification It sounds to me that no policy by this number existed before is that correct? Yes This is a new policy that CLE chose to create and if that's correct Then this would be a first discussion of the of that. It's on the consent consent agenda but It's not it's not so it is it is now entering the discussion action cycle So we'll get two shots at it, but but it didn't exist before so there would have been nothing to agenda I was at that meeting. No, that is not true. Excuse me. That is not the case. I have the floor I asked I attended that meeting and I understand that

009that policy was created new by the committee on that night How could you have agendized it if it didn't exist before? Everything that we discussed in committee level And board meetings are to be agendized that is the law and so this is out of the committee meeting and there was no Draft draft on the committee meeting. There was no policy saying that this is the new we're proposing This seems like a very clear violation. I Understand it's on this committee, but this was not on the CLE and our processes policies first go through committee They get approved and then they go to the main board and I'm looking at the committee notes I'm looking at the committee board. There's no nine one two five in there So how? How did I get through the committee

010someone some violation has been made here or against our policy? Mike CLE meeting we discussed this policy and the CLE Committee decided to vote this forward to the full board. There is no part of our process that was not honored How do you discuss a policy that's not agendized at a committee level if it's not on the agenda? We created a policy. That's a violation of The law that we have where what law are you speaking of? So what we'll do is we'll look into The committee level and and look and see if there was a violation, but it has been properly agendized for tonight's meeting Protocol was broken and the law was broken I think we've made it very clear from day one for what I've always been instructed by the lawyer That if

011you were gonna talk about something in a public setting on the agenda on a committee level, it must be agendized It's not agendized. It was not on the look into it. So I think this is proper agenda For tonight's meeting it seems to be pulled tonight or I will this is not right You're this is a violation As committee chair Was the discussion of the legitimacy of that conversation brought up at your committee meeting at any time? About the discussion you had and the creation of this at that meeting Where your committee was there was there any discussion that it was inappropriate to be discussing it on that night. Absolutely not. Thank you our committee had a number of policies that were that were on the agenda to discuss as we wanted to create a

012Board of conduct policy We determined whether or not that policy would fit in any of the other policies that are listed there When we determined that it didn't feel it didn't seem to appropriately fit anywhere We decided to create our own policy and then the CLE committee voted to move it forward to the full board So it is properly agendas for tonight's meeting and Sam I'll look at the process because it sounds like you're considering About the process and some legal issues there So it is proposed that we keep that on tonight's agenda and we do have a reordering of the agenda proposed Is there any further discussion on the agenda for this evening? Sam I'd like to make a motion to remove policy 9,000 out of the agenda Okay, we have a motion to

013border. We have a motion on the floor. That's been seconded Correct, but he's making amendment. Well, he said motion first. So let's be really clear on what we do. I'll be really clear I'll make an amendment to the motion to remove Policy 9,000 from discussion today. Is there a second? I'm a second Okay Is there any discussion on removing any further discussion on removing policy 9,000 from tonight's agenda? Okay, ready to vote on that. I'd like a roll call vote on that, please Okay, we're gonna have a roll call vote on the amendment Jean Lambert. Yes. Um, no point of order. Yes means yes to the amendment Then I vote no Mary Wacker. No Cheryl Mills Yes, free third yard. No, West Silla. No, Sam Hughes. Yes, Scott Wheeler No Okay, so that amendment is

014not adopted We're back to our original motion of the proposed changes and our adjusted agenda tonight any further discussion on the agenda Hearing none all those in favor of the agenda with proposed changes. Please say aye. Aye Any opposed pose that carries on voice vote. Thank you And that brings us to our first agenda item on our reordered agenda, which is the celebration of excellence. Mark? I'd like to welcome Brett Gretzmacher to the podium to join us for the celebration of excellence. Mr. Gretzmacher. Good evening, everyone. It is a pleasure and honor to introduce Victor Tan. Victor is a vital member of the FTC Gearheads team. We're proud to share that he and his team will be competing this weekend at the state championship at Beloit College. On the academic front, Victor's achievements are truly

015standout. He's a national merit finalist, and he serves as the BC class of 2026 salutatorian. These accolades have paved the way for his next chapter. He'll be studying business and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. To speak more on his research project, which is an award-winning one, Victor is joined by his mentor and BC staff member, Ryan Osterberg. Together, they'll present Victor's award-winning regenerative science. Victor, I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I really appreciate this opportunity to celebrate Victor. I've gotten to know him for several years now. I'm very, very fortunate to be celebrating the conclusion of my 29th year of teaching in Elmbrook. I really want to thank Brett as well as the school board for 29 amazing years here. Victor is a product of this district

016and a shining example to everything that we all do. Victor was awarded our Regeneron Science Award here. Looking at this, the company is really looking for students to do outstanding original research, looking for possible scientific impact far beyond just their little view of the world, shall we say, demonstrating leadership, passion, and creativity throughout not only their schoolwork, but throughout their career. And so, we're going to let Victor give a little high-level description of his research project. Yeah. So, hi. My name's Victor Han. This project started with a personal connection where my grandma was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2015. And then, over the course of three years, I've noticed how daily actions became difficult for her. And then, that's when I was introduced to the field of Parkinson's. And then, as I did more research into

017that community, I realized that there's a great, great lack of resource, especially early and accurate diagnosis. And people usually just don't have awareness of such disease. So, that freshman year in high school, I decided to take a step up and solve the problem myself. My goal was to create a low to almost no cost, remote, and easy to use and accurate tool to support early detection of Parkinson's without the need to essentially consult a physician. So, I started with a mechanical project with the help of sensors, circuits, 3D print, and coding. I was able to create this device that helped with hand tremor detection and muscle rehabilitation. However, its physical nature limits its potential to be used and spread in the community of Parkinson's. And that's why the second year, I utilized the technology of

018AI to essentially create an AI system that diagnosed Parkinson's through videos and audios. So, here in the video, you're seeing a clip of this AI system that reads the video output and essentially extracts data from the video. And then the data is further used in calculating some analysis results, which are clinical standards that physicians in hospitals actually use to assess Parkinson's. So, hopefully with this tool, people in the public can easily diagnose themselves and have a general idea of if there's a need to visit physicians or not. I didn't know if you were saying something else. Okay. Wonderful. Well, Victor, this is so impressive. I mean, it actually gives me great comfort to think that the rising generation is doing these amazing things and I may be the beneficiary of technologies and great ideas like

019this someday. So, again, thank you for doing that. I've got an award here, a certificate. It seems small in comparison to this amazing and complex work that you're doing. But I want to publicly recognize you and congratulate you on behalf of the Board of Education for being named the 2000. 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholar. And commend you for representing Elmbrook so well, yourself, for the hours and hours of hard work, and the people that supported you, your family. And so, again, just congratulations and I want to give you this. Come over here, Victor. So, Christine Westphalton, take a picture of mom and dad if you want to come up here. We'll get this copy. We'll get this copy. We'll get this copy. We'll get this copy. We'll get this copy. We'll get this copy.

020We'll get this copy. We'll get this copy. Mr. Gretzmacher, Mr. Oosterberg, thank you for leading. Victor, thank you for your amazing contributions. I can firmly tell you that in high school I was not working on a Parkinson's early detection device. So, congratulations. You're changing the world. Really well done. So, are there board members questions or comments that we have for Victor? Yeah. Sorry. Mary and then Sam. Mr. Oosterberg, thank you for 29 years. If you have one thing that you would tell us to do to make more things like this happen as you are moving on, what would it be? I don't know. I'm not moving on. Good. Oh, good, good, good. We've got a couple years left here. Oh, good. Oh, I thought I heard you say that. No, no, no. Yeah, all right.

021Well, then don't leave. It's the culmination of 29 years. But, you know, it's just been an amazing career here. You know, the people, the parents, the students, everything really culminates into just the best experience I could possibly ask for. So keep doing everything that we're doing. We'll do that. And, Victor, I'm so glad that all these people came out just to celebrate you tonight. But for those that came out for maybe more than one reason, this happens every time we have a board meeting. And it's the important part of what we do. We celebrate students and we celebrate achievements. And we don't get pressed for that. But I'm so glad that you're here to bear witness. Thank you, Mary. Took my joke. I was thinking it, too. Just wanted to say it. So the accuracy

022of that was super impressive, by the way. And it was neat that you did the mechanical version first and then used AI as AI became more popular, I'm assuming, and more accessible. How accurate would you project that this is right now? The overall accuracy is about 95.6% given the test data that we have. Yeah. And you had some other patients besides, you said it was your sister with Parkinson? No, my grandma. Grandma. Do you know other people that you were able to try that on, too? Or is that how that worked? Yeah. So there's legal processing. I was involved in order for my product to be used in hospitals or legal organizations. But I did try it on about a sample pool of around 200 people where they essentially signed a form for me to

023essentially try it on them. And then based on the real data set, it was still able to show above 85% of accuracy. Is this a patentable item for you? Right now it's patented. Under you? Yeah. Congratulations. Well done. And I hope you can help a lot of people. And maybe make a little bit of money to pay for all your college down the road. So good luck. Jean? As a lifelong nurse, I was in charge of the neurology unit at Frederick for about six years over my career. And I can tell you the debilitating nature, as you well know, of Parkinson's. My great aunt had it as well. And this is truly amazing and a breakthrough discovery for getting to folks with Parkinson's early. I'm interested to understand how long it takes to test. And

024when will it be available on the market? When do you predict? Yeah. So fun fact, it's actually already on market. It's currently published as a website called parkin.com. It takes about like half a year-ish to fully test out every single feature on the software. Because right now what I presented was a simplified version. The real version has different mode of analysis. It records. It can analyze. It can analyze your body motion. And it analyzes your audios. Analyze your hand motions. And also analyze basically a combination of your finger, your body motion, and your voice. So it takes about half a year to test across every modality that we have on the software. Wonderful. And patient, when you test it on a patient, does it take quite a bit of time to run the equipment and

025have a readout? The biggest bottleneck of the A1 model is the patient. The patient is the most important part of the test. And the most important part of the A2 model is the time it takes to essentially return the result. And right now we are or I'm working on optimizing that time. But it usually takes about 10 minutes to return the results. Perfect. Thank you. Excellent work. Thank you. Any comments? Preetha? Your interest in science, research, and development. And again, also understanding that you've learned how to protect your intellectual property as well. And that's wonderful to see. wonderful to see. So I again congratulations and can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you. Cheryl. Victor, congratulations. That is such a huge accomplishment. And it's an accomplishment, huge accomplishment to go to U of

026Penn also. And as a Penn State alumni, I want to tell you to make sure you tell people U of Penn because they get the two schools mixed up and really they're not comparable. I can even say that. Wes. Yeah, huge congratulations. Amazing work. And I guess the only real question is is there like a list of other like can you help us solve five other big problems? Awesome. Congratulations. Again, thank you for everything you've done and let's give them another round of applause. Just amazing. Thank you. Our next agenda item this evening is the High School Student Representative's Report. Mark. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. We're going to turn to both high schools to get updates. Our high schools are really busy places right now and we're entering into what is often referred to

027as the busiest time of year. Why don't we hear from Brookfield Central first with an update and then we'll turn to Brookfield East. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. It is a very busy time at BC, so there's a lot to get through. But starting with our academic highlights, our juniors are certainly taking a sigh of relief after completing their statewide ACT this morning. And in addition, our class was a good result for both the WIT Division. It was a great event. We had a great morning and they seemed to have a great day tonight! Thank you, Scott. Thank you. That's a great one. And then in addition, I would like to ask our academic reporters to join us for our program tonight. Thank you so much for joining us and we look forward to seeing you

028next week. I'm Claire Dockster. I'm Dana Porat. I'm Bruce Fogelman. I'll be your host for this evening's class. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Krista. Thank you, Martha. Thank you all so much. Thank you, everyone. And thank you to the students. Thank you, Fort. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much. State Career Development Conference, finishing with 14 state finalists, 18 top 10 finishers, and three state champions. At the end of January, Latin Club attended the Junior Classical League State Convention and Junior Aria Mardikar was elected to the JCL State Board. Congratulations are also in order for BC Science Bowl, who placed fourth and fifth at their state competition on Valentine's Day. And finally, I'm very excited to be here as a member of the BC Mock Trial Team, who was named the 2026 State

029Champions this past weekend and will be competing at the national competition held in Iowa this May. Starting out then strong in our arts highlights, the entire BC Music Department is still raving about how much fun they had on their Disney trip at the beginning of February. And additionally, Scholastic Art and Writing Awards were announced, with BC students collectively earning 13 honorable mentions, 15 silver keys, and nine gold keys for their works. On February 22nd, True Blue Acapella had the opportunity to perform with one of the University of Madison's acapella groups, the Mad Hatters. And in other choir news, BC hosted the 10th annual Choirpalooza Festival in collaboration with Wisconsin Hills on February 25th. And at that event, BC Choir Director Allie Hickman was named the Elmbrook Rotary Educator of the Year. This past weekend, BC

030hosted another successful solo and ensemble festival, with BC students preparing a total of 118 events and ending the day with 51 state qualifiers. Finally, from four activities, BC is excited to announce that the winter musical Little Women was nominated for 16 Jerry Awards, with four nominations from outstanding leading performances, eight for outstanding supporting performances, and four for production and direction. And then kicking off our athletic highlights for this month, BC Unified Basketball took on Brookfield East on February 17th, with all players leaving it all on the court. And BC Varsity Basketball is in the playoffs. From the basketball team, St. ynn McElroy, who is one of last season's top contenders as well as pr in the season. Get your tickets now! On February 17th, BC sent恐 überschr guitar owl war. And senior Henry Grittsmacher recently

031achieved 1000 career points. And after qualifying in every event, Boys deim was named our your athletes well as they continue to showcase their excellence at the collegiate level. Thank you. Is that it? Just a couple things. Great update. You took a lot of my thunder, so thank you. How about Brookfield East? What do we have going on? For sure. So at Brookfield East, I'll start off with arts. So the 2026 Scholastic competition also came out with 12 B East students winning an honorable mention with silver keys or gold keys. Congratulations to those students with tough last names I'm not going to try to pronounce for winning gold keys. So our vocal collective groups, which are Genesis, acapella, and unaccompanied minors, they competed and three members of Genesis won awards, with Genesis acapella placing fourth in

032the quarterfinal. The fall musical Pippin has been nominated for 14 Jerry Awards, and the Crucible was announced as this year's spring play. Soul Ensemble was also held at Central, but many East kids performed and got many state qualifiers. On to athletics. So again, the Barracudas, the joint team for Brookfield East, also finishes the runner-ups. And for the girls gymnastics team, Maddie Johnson placed fourth on the B. And Haley Schumann placed fifth on the T5 floor of the WIAA individual state champions. The girls basketball team made it to the state championship this past weekend. Maya Kovac was named the number one all-time leading scorer in Brookfield East girls history, with 1,541 career points. Three beast wrestlers went on to the WIAA individual state championship, with Colin Seifert placing sixth. On to activities. The Brookfield East forensics

033team won second place in small and large teams at the Port Washington tournament this weekend. Denali led the team next in pros championship, while Elizabeth Z.M. placed second. At the NSDA qualifier, a bunch of students qualified for the national tournament in Virginia. And then for BCU United, a fundraising club for blood cancer, there were several students who won awards, which were Alyssa Nolden for the patient support pillar, and Christina Alexander for the research pillar. On academics, the juniors took their ACT today, and the end of term three is a pro championship. The Brookfield East boys and girls are approaching, classes are finishing up, and we're leaning into materials before finals start. Thank you. Great update. Sounds like our high schools are pretty busy places. Pretty amazing, guys. We wanted to switch to the topic, which

034was going to be sports budgeting, and we've had a lot of different conversations over the years in this room about sports budgeting. And one of the first questions I asked you was to try to glean the perceptions that people had regarding sports budgeting. What did you guys find out? At Brookfield Central, we found that extracurriculars are usually funded by the club's fundraising, but also we wanted to ensure that everyone is able to participate in their clubs so the school does fund things. For example, buses are always funded to take students to their tournaments. However, if you want, say, a coach bus, that kind of thing would be an additional charge. And then how we found what makes people participate, we found that students are driven to participate in activities that align with their passions and

035offer unique opportunities. We know that BC offers a wide range of extracurricular opportunities, which makes it very easy for students to find something that aligns with their goals and interests. We also found that students enjoy building community through the extracurricular involvement and students seek to participate in extracurriculars that help them build their leadership skills. For additional clubs that we would like to see it was hard to come up with a few because we know that lots of students are involved in many things already. However we found that one strong idea students wanted was a pickleball club as pickleball gains popularity and lots of students are playing. And in addition to adding activities we also found that BC students would like to focus on raising awareness for current clubs as some of them aren't as highly

036advertised and we want to make sure that students are aware of all of our opportunities. What do we find out at Brookfield East? Similarly many students didn't really know how the budgeting process worked or how the funds were actually allocated so kind of based off that knowledge and for those who do have a general idea of how the budgeting process does work many do think that certain funds should be put towards more free busing especially for certain sports in the summer months although there are many shortages of bus drivers but they also understand that certain sports like football and those that generate more money through selling tickets often do get a lot more funding. Many students have the idea of possibly allocating funds for sports trainers more psychologists and more recovery tools and recovery education.

037For our athletes and other when you're talking recovery you're talking about sports recovery? Yes. Okay. But also for clubs to have the resources. Additionally for different levels and motivations for participation there usually got two types of responses for community involvement and college applications. So as Ellenbrook emphasizes the participation in extracurriculars to foster community many students loved it. They find that they have another avenue to find friends and to foster a family but also a lot of students love to capitalize on the opportunity of being able to use sports and clubs for the college applications and to open up avenues for scholarships and other tools. And similarly to Central we also had students saying that they wanted a pickleball team. We currently have FPLA which is Future Business Leaders of America but possibly having the opportunity

038of DECA at our school and end issue also maybe having a batminton or rugby team. But once again we have hundreds of clubs, hundreds of opportunities. So yeah. Thank you. Participation rate at both high schools exceeds 90% so thank you for all that you guys do, it's pretty amazing. Well done. Any questions from board members? Sam? Thanks Natalie and team there. Tell me a little bit more when you say that the some of the spending seems excessive, is that talk about the football? Tell me a little bit more about that. I didn't hear you say anything about that. Yes, so some of the students, once again, how we conducted, we kind of send out a survey all throughout STUCO for them to respond. And a lot of students thought that because of maybe the generation

039of the buzz and the different selling of tickets, that some funds might be allocated more towards certain sports, such as football, when it could be given to other sports and other clubs who may need it, who generate their own money a lot of times. Thank you very much for the information. I appreciate understanding the breadth and depth of clubs that we have in our buildings. I wanted to know if we're going to start, think about starting a DECA club at East. Do you look across town to the Brookfield Central DECA club and take some sort of lead from that, or is the adversarial nature between the buildings take hold? And maybe you want to go your own direction. Do you know? I think we have an FBLA club that is, I think those clubs are

040pretty similar in what they do. So I think if we just transition that towards a DECA model, we could have enough students in both schools to have separate teams. Maybe the adversarial nature will make them better. Yeah, okay. Fair enough. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay, well, thank you for a great report. And I know you're busy. We can see it on the screen, so you're certainly welcome to stick around if you want to, but we understand if you need to go. So that's. Not a problem. Thank you for being here tonight. Our next agenda item on the reordered agenda is the board presence report. So welcome to our regular scheduled March board meeting. This agenda is unusual in the fact that we have tabled many discussion items and changed the order of other agenda

041items like this report. This is so that we could listen to almost two dozen of our constituents and community members share their feelings and or concerns about the history rock celebration at Brookfield Central last Friday. This agenda is so important to us. We have a lot of questions about the history of the city. On behalf of the board of education, I want to acknowledge that this event has been divisive for many in our community. I want you to know that we hear you. We will be meeting with the administration to discuss the event and the next steps. The process will begin tonight. I plan to give a more specific update at future board meetings. I would also like to address my fellow board members briefly. Not only do we follow Robert's rules of order, but

042we expect respect and decorum as we navigate serious issues and passionate viewpoints. During the citizens forum and other citizen comments, I remind board members that we will not engage in conversation with those addressing the board. During our regular agenda items, I will make sure everyone gets a chance to speak before someone speaks again. I ask board members to address me as the chair when you want to speak and wait to be recognized. Please limit the crosstalk and interrupting others. And that is my report. Our next agenda item is the superintendent report. Mark? Thanks, Scott. A few celebrations that I wanted to highlight before I get into a couple other items. First of all, congratulations to all of the students that are pictured here and all of the students listed here. Brookfield Central hosted the Bee

043Festival on February 21st. The History Bee, Geography Bee, and Science Bee. The grades that are written there and displayed there represent where we were first place or qualified for nationals. Pretty amazing. Also, congratulations to the Wisconsin Hills Middle School National Science Bowl State Championship. And congratulations to the Swanson fifth graders who were awarded first place. And congratulations to the Wimta book trailer contest. To have two teams is pretty amazing. And the Battle of Books winners were the wordy Lemonheads. Congratulations to all of them. BC student Sam Slowick continues his festival domination with the motion picture award that he won recently. As was mentioned, we had a teacher recognized by Rotary for Teacher of the Year, Allie Hickman, who is a graduate of Brookfield Central. She was also named the 2000 World Book Award. She is

044the 2026 Elmbrook Rotary Outstanding Educator. Each year, the Rotary Club names an outstanding firefighter, outstanding fireman, firewoman, fire officer, and a teacher to that award. And Allie is this year's recipient. And thank you to Brett Gretzmacher for joining me at Choirpalooza to share that surprise with Allie, who was caught off guard. Choirpalooza was the event that we did that announcement at. You can see some pictures here. It combines Wisconsin Hills and Brookfield Central choirs. And we end up with over 300 singers on stage. It is an amazing event. It fills the house up. Our Director of Library received the State Excellence Award from WMTA. Congratulations to Kay Benning for that award. If you've been following the alumni spotlight, you'll note that Class of 1990, Jen Bweg, Hoffman was highlighted as the alumni spotlight. That's some

045big hair, Jen. And we're going to talk about the And finally, we had a mock trial state championship that was referenced in the Brookfield Central Choir. Congratulations to the staff involved in that. We're going to talk about the event that was referenced in the Brookfield Central report. That's their second state championship title. Wanted to spend a little time talking about the event that occurred at Brookfield Central called Rocks, History Rocks. It was originally told to us that it was School Rocks. The picture on the top is a picture of the stage where we had the event. That is the keynote speaker from the Department of Education. Seated in the front row are the gray haired people, including me and others. There's Rocks. There's Rob Hutton in there. There's Adam Nealon, who's a state representative. Rob

046Hutton's our state senator. Mayor Ponto's there. Brett Gretzmacher's there. We have a couple dignitaries in that picture. The bottom picture is a picture of the placards that were used for part of the trivia event. The trivia event was facilitated by Matt DiPello, a long time history teacher at Brookfield Central. The placards were used to indicate the answer or the response that a student was looking to provide to the crowd. There was reference to some items that were handed out. It had been indicated to us that there would not be any swag from any organizations there, but it ended up being History Rocks shirts handed out to trivia winners and hats handed out to trivia winners. In addition to that, there was a display of artifacts that I want to spend time talking about. The display

047of artifacts were brought to Elmbrook and Brookfield Central to help honor the historical references that were made throughout the different events. You can see in the picture there in the background, in that plastic case that's in the middle, that's a cannonball from the Revolutionary War. You see a picture of a book to the cannonball's left. That's a Bible that was brought by the Puritans during their arrival in what would become America. And there's a variety of artifacts to the right, including the far right, which is, I believe, the golden ticket to the original Willy Wonka movie. All of these artifacts were available to students, primarily during lunch. If they had access to the cafeteria before that, they could have seen that there. Mr. Gretzmacher was able to work with the people that were putting things

048on display to identify a QR code that was inappropriate for use, and he asked and was granted the permission to remove that QR code from their display. They cooperated with us. We worked very, very hard to make this a nonpartisan event, and for those that were in attendance, we had Brookfield Central PTO parents there. We had parents from very interested families that were in attendance. I think we delivered on a nonpartisan event, and an event that honored and celebrated our country's history, and also honored and celebrated our students. Continuing on, we did update families. Mr. Gretzmacher sent an update out. In this update, this is the email that goes out to every family at Brookfield Central on Sunday evenings. You'll see a series of different hyperlinks that are in blue. The hyperlinks include a link

049to the Department of Education webpage, a link to the comments made by Murray Bissette, and a link to the comments made by the speaker from the Department of Education. A link to my comments and a link to Mr. Gretzmacher's comments, so anybody could see those comments that were made during the ceremony. Also note that the closure for Pilgrim Road continues. I know that is a bee in everybody's bonnet, but we are seeing progress as the northbound access to Fieldstone Drive is now open, so you can get to Dixon Elementary School through the back entrance off of Fieldstone Drive. You cannot exit and go southbound on Pilgrim. You can go northbound on Pilgrim to Fieldstone. A reminder that we have an election on April 7th. We have Area 1, Area 3, and at-large seats available. Every

050voter votes on every election on every seat. And then the art that's in the display in the back of the room is from the Wisconsin Hills students and Mr. Knuth's art class. So thank you to Mr. Knuth and his art students for wonderful displays of art. That concludes my report. Are there any questions? Sam? Thank you for the incredible successes in the school. And exciting. I just wanted to dispel I was unfortunately not able to make that event. But rumors were floating around that swag, the Bibles were being passed out, and Momster Liberty shirts were being passed out. I just wanted to make sure that that was not the case at all. I can confirm that was not the case. Good. Sounds like an incredible celebration that we get to celebrate 250 years. So thank

051you for that. Thank you for the update. Other questions or comments? Okay, hearing none, we'll move on with our agenda. Our next agenda item is the Citizens Forum. This is an opportunity for members of the public to address the Board on items that fall within the purview of the Board but are not on tonight's agenda. If you would like to speak and have not yet requested to do so, Kristy Westphal, to your right over here, Kristy, raise your hand, has got additional sheets. Just fill out your name, whether you're a resident of the district, your address, and what you would like to speak about. There are a variety of rules and expectations. On the back of the sheet, which are also up on the screen currently, I'll highlight a few of them. Again, those wishing

052to speak should register with Kristy. You'll be allotted three minutes. The timer will show on the screens. It's big. It's colorful. It can be distracting. Don't let it be too distracting. It changes colors as you get closer to three minutes, and at three minutes, the microphone will automatically cut off. That is not intended to be rude. It's just your three minutes is up, and it's time to go. It's time for you to be done. We do have a lot of requests to speak, and again, do want to honor the time, you know, share time with those that want to speak and continue on with the board meeting that we've got tonight. I will call people that are going to be addressing the board, and I'll also say who's on deck, and that's just to facilitate.

053So it's not a certain place to stand, but just so you'll know, if you're in the middle, you can kind of make your way to the edge, and that will help the meeting move a little bit further. You can talk a little bit more smoothly as you make your way to the podium. Your public comments should be addressed to the full board, not to individual board members. The board will not engage in dialogue with participants during this time, and that's mainly because these items have not been vetted or agendized to be discussed tonight, but could be on an agenda at a future board meeting. Please avoid profanity. Speak respectfully. You know, all those kind of civil expectations are in place. If someone is disruptive or disorderly, booing, clapping from the crowd, just try to keep

054that at a minimum because we want to hear what the speakers are speaking. Their time continues to run even if you are clapping or booing, and so, again, let's be respectful as people are speaking. If someone is disruptive, they will be asked to leave the meeting. Also, Board Policy 1312, Complaints Concerning District Personnel, describes a process for resolving complaints about specific district personnel. So if someone is speaking about that, we won't address personnel issues tonight, but there is a separate policy for addressing that. With that said, our first request to speak tonight is John Cotton, a resident of the district. And by the way, I will just apologize in advance if I mispronounce names. I appreciate your grace and understanding. The next person on deck is Emily K. Yeah, KV. Emily K. We'll just call

055her Emily K. Is on deck. So John, a resident of the district. Thank you, John. All right. Good evening. Members of the Board, thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is John Cotton, and I'm here to address the History Rocks Assembly held last Friday at Brookfield Central High School and the broader need for clear, consistent, and policy-aligned procedures for reviewing external instructional content. My remarks are not intended to oppose any particular program or viewpoint. Rather, they focus on process, transparency, and adherence to existing Board policy. The very mechanisms that ensure assemblies presented during the instructional day support student well-being, reflect civic pluralism, and align with district standards. Umbra's own policies published in the district website provide this framework. In particular, the 6,000 series policies titled Instruction govern curriculum, instructional materials, controversial issues, and

056assemblies conducted during instructional time. These policies exist to ensure that the instructional content is accurate, balanced, age-appropriate, and aligned with the district's educational mission. Assemblies such as History Rocks can be impactful. High-energy presentations that rely on storytelling and emotional engagement can be effective, but they may also lower students' critical filters. When delivered during the school day, students may reasonably perceive such content is endorsed by the school. For this reason, advanced review and transparency is essential, not to restrict ideas, but to ensure consistency with policy and to support an inclusive educational environment. After reviewing Board policies relevant to this responsibility, I've identified four areas that merit attention. First, controversial ideas. District policy 6144 requires that civic and historical content be presented in balanced, impartial, and objective, with an emphasis on developing critical thinking rather than promoting

057a particular civic or ideological identity. While the Brookfield Central presentation was reported as benign, History Rocks has generated controversy elsewhere. In Illinois, a February 5 event at Genoa Kingston High School featured presentations by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and Turning Point USA's Erica Kirk. Students report receiving comments. Students were wearing bracelets imprinted with, quote, We are Charlie Kirk, end quote, and were offered Turning Point USA backpacks. Media were not allowed into the school and were staged in the parking lot. Other districts in Connecticut and Alabama canceled planned visits following public concern. These incidents were documented in a February 18 New York Times article, contributing to understandable Elmbrook community uncertainty when the program was announced to be held locally. I also note that Policy 6144 addresses 6161.1 textbooks related to materials and technology, which doesn't seem

058to appear in the current policy library. Second, promotional and political, religious, and commercial events is an issue. I see I don't want to overrun my time. Third, advanced notice to families. District Policy 1111 commits the district to timely, factual, accurate, and objective communication with stakeholders. In this case, notice was sent by email less than 48 hours before the assembly. Several parents reported being unaware of the event. Given the national significance of this program and its placement during the school day, this limited notice was sent to families. This limited notice was insufficient and inconsistent with the spirit of the school day. Please conclude your remarks. Please conclude your remarks. Thank you, John. Our next request to speak is Emily Kay. She'll pronounce her last name for us. A resident of the district and on deck is

059Sally Anlin. Hi, my name is Emily . I'm a parent of two Elmbrook students who will be attending Brookfield Central High School. I'm also a public educator with 17 years of experience in education. My content licensure is in secondary education. I have a master's in administration. I'm here tonight to express my concern regarding Brookfield Central's decision to host the history rocks initiative. And to request that the board make policy changes to ensure that our outside initiatives align with the nonpartisan, academically sound standards that Elmbrook is known for. Elmbrook is widely recognized and we clearly take pride in being one of the top schools in the state of Wisconsin. Our families trust that our district values academic integrity, rigorous scholarship, and balanced education. That is why the decision to accept the invitation to host the event

060is concerning to me. The history rocks initiative through the Department of Education has been developed to celebrate our country's 250th anniversary. However, I'm deeply concerned that the America 250 civics education coalition, the 50 organizations behind the history rocks initiative, are widely known for promoting politically and ideologically driven interpretations of our nation's history. These organizations are also known for their efforts to promote the history of education. These organizations include America First Policy Institute, Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, the 1776 Project Foundation, and Moms for Liberty. Many historians and educators have raised concern about the accuracy and the ideological framing of the material produced by these groups. I'm also concerned that this was not contextualized or expressed to our students during the assembly. I have questions regarding the research and vetting process used before accepting the invitation

061to host. Were the materials or content reviewed? Before agreeing to host by administrative leadership? Were district social studies teachers or leaders consulted? From the outside, it appears that a program supported by politically affiliated organizations was allowed into our school without the level of scrutiny we would expect from a district of our caliber. As both a parent and an educator, I strongly believe that our students deserve to learn history that is grounded in credible scholarship, multiple perspectives, and critical thinking. not programming that promotes a particular political narrative so tonight I urge the school board to provide clarity to families what was the review process and in the future what policy changes will take place to ensure that outside initiatives align with the nonpartisan academically sound standards that we as Elmbrook families and Elmbrook is known for

062thank you for your time thank you Emily our next request to speak is Sally Anilin a resident of the district and Michelle Arts is on deck I want to note that we started our meeting with the pledge of allegiance that ends in justice for all so good evening board my name is Sally Anilin I'm a long-term breckwood resident and proud mom of two Elmbrook graduates both excelling and in no part because of the foundation this district gave them at Brookfield East I am here tonight because every child who comes after them deserves the same hosting the history rock tour on extremely short notice with no meaningful opportunity for parents or a community to weigh in was deeply upsetting I genuinely respect dr. Hansen in this district accepting a request from a federal official may not

063have felt optional and I empathize with that but that is exactly why this clear process and transparency matters so much now what we witnessed is a recognizable pattern small encroachments as routine arriving fast with little to no time to react it is precisely how institutions are reshaped before anyone realizes what happened and we cannot let that happen here I emailed each of you and I want to ask two additional questions directly because I hold myself to the same standards and facts of primary sources we expect of our students first I have heard central students were not permitted to leave through the nearest exit and that leaving meant being marked unexcused parents are routinely notified and given a right to opt out if this did not happen I need to understand why second pointing families to

064social media for transcripts is not transparency it is the opposite of what we teach our children P's publish the full materials on an official channel it is appropriate for our students to understand it's appropriate for me to hear you were elected to represent every child in this district equally without exception every color every faith every family providing a platform for organizations by their own mission statements explicitly exclude and divide you are not representing all of our children you are choosing and we all know what is said and what is not said but what is left out that tells the whole story I'm asking you to honestly look at the whole picture through not just your own eyes but the whole picture because if you are the child you are the child you are the system

065you are the institution you are the structure you are the structure you but those of your neighbors as well there's a real opportunity in front of us civil conversation across differences let us be the district that proves otherwise and shows exactly why we have earned our reputation this moment could become exactly what a civics education looks like bring parents students and educators together do a real critical analysis of the content model civil discourse that is what we teach our kids more than democracy of some touring program could ever do Elmbrook is better than this and together we are more than capable of it thank you Sally Michelle Arts the rest of the district is next to speak to us and Alyssa V is on deck Sally that was hard to follow thank you for that

066my name is Michelle Arts and I'm a parent in this district and I want to start by saying this is not about politics but this is about trust and whether this board is going to ensure that our community's voice is heard going forward the history rocks tour has been making national headlines for months before it arrived here please join me in welcoming the first class of the district and the first class of the district to the stadium protest walkouts cancellations Connecticut Alabama are on the record and the superintendent felt it necessary to send families a letter promising the school would not tolerate partisan politics at the event which I appreciate Dr. Hanson but it is an acknowledgment that you knew that people knew what this stores reputation was according to the district's own letter to

067families a former brookfield police officer now is the tours head of security personally called to ask the school to host it central was not chosen by academic merit or by civic recognition And when you look at how schools are chosen across the country, you can see this tour is built on personal networks and not educational criteria. There was very little time between the announcement and the event. And with less than 48 hours of the announcement, this community sent hundreds of emails to many of you, gathered nearly 800 signatures on an amateur petition with concerns about the events. One of the fundamental problems here is that the assembly took place during school hours. And while it was technically labeled optional, when a politically sponsored event is scheduled in the middle of the school day, inside a

068public school, opting out means missing class. And that is also not a meaningful choice for students or families. The board doesn't need to create a new standard because it already has one. I want you to remember in September 2009, when President Obama addressed the nation's students, parents in this very district raised concerns. Superintendent Gibson at the time chose not to. He said, quote, to honor class time throughout the district. And further explained the decision was made because, again, quote, because we have no opportunity for prior review to determine if it relates to curriculum, is appropriate for all age levels, and is nonpartisan regardless of political party in office. The standard was set there in Elmbrook 16 years ago and it should still apply today. A principal at another Elmbrook school clearly understood that when their

069school was also invited to host the same event and declined. Stating they did not think it should have political activity on school grounds during school hours. So why doesn't that standard apply across the district? I'm not asking the board to micromanage every assembly. I know you can't do that. I'm asking for a reasonable, consistent policy that protects students and gives principals clear guidance. So my two specific asks are adopt a clear policy on outside sponsored speakers. One that addresses any organization, regardless of political leaning and ensures that sponsored events with a political agenda are not held during the school day. Two, establish a community notification input process, aside from just emails and random petitions. So when a significant community discourse arises around a school event, there is a defined path for parents to be heard

070and for the board to respond. That is all mistakes in my time. Thank you. Thank you, Michelle. Our next request to speak is Elissa V. You can pronounce your last name for us. A resident of the district. And up next is Elizabeth Hamlin. Thank you. Hello. My name is Elissa Vopraskis. I am a current parent in the Ellenbrook School District. And the reason that I am here today is that I do not disagree with any of the statements that you have heard from the community members thus far. I would like to note that I do think that class time should be reserved for instructional purposes. And all assembly materials should be properly vetted ahead of time before they are used for class time. Before we take time away from instruction. And before we take time

071away from instructional time, which is regulated by the state, there needs to be a transparent and equal process so that parents, educators, and students know what to expect, know that they will adhere to our standards. Regardless of who is in office, regardless of what anyone's political or religious leanings are, we need to have clear guidance and consistency. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We do have concerns based on what we have seen from other locations, what they have brought into these, excuse me, what they have brought into these presentations before. And while I think it is commendable that our administrators did everything that they could to make sure that this was a nonpartisan event, I think that the given timeline was not appropriate. And so

072I look forward to that. And, again, I also hope that you guys will feel at ease and that you will just have a good time in the coming months. And I also hope that you and your families, your friends, and your classmates will have a good time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And, again, I hope we do not serve as an arguable or based based. timeline was not appropriate there was not clear communication to begin with that said that students could opt out of this that parents had the option to do take their students out of school when initially presented it was stated that class time would be used for these classes and this is what would happen so my concerns are really around transparent communication clear processes and that

073we allow every student to feel safe heard and respected in their instructional time and when they are when they're in school the administration and staff is responsible for these students they should feel that the administrators and staff are there to take care of them and aid them in their instructional goals and make sure that they are shaped into good citizens for the future and that's all I have to say thank you thank you Alyssa an extra request to speak is Elizabeth Holland a resident of the district and Kim Hawk is on deck good evening my name is Elizabeth Hamlin I'm a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and private practice in the community and I'm the mother of two Elmbrook students one of whom is a freshman at Brookfield Central and I'm here also about history rocks first

074I do want to express appreciation for our superintendent and BC principal who attempted to keep this presentation apolitical I appreciate that unlike previous stops on this national tour neither Linda McMahon nor Erica Kirk were present nor was turning point branded swag distributed in a mandatory public assembly so thank you for that however I stand before you today to reiterate my objection to this assembly and to ask the school board to keep anything like this event from occurring in Elmbrook schools again and I have the absolute pluses of the event that it was a huge waste of time spending time and energy to develop this new project and I want to thank all of you the students who were involved today and I recognize that's my first attempt to do so and I want to thank

075the school board for the fact that they made us a part of this project but we all know that this is a $6 million project and that it's a big deal for the school and for the community and I want to thank our students who were involved in this project and I will not at all forget to say at the end of this presentation I want to thank the students who made the project the most important Schools Club for America, the offshoot of Turning Point USA, were allowed to speak. I'm concerned because I believe that our school's administrators should have known, had to have known, how controversial the decision would be to bring this tour to Brookfield Central, and nonetheless chose to do it anyway, very quickly, without community input and with limited oversight. I

076also want to share my dismay about messages from both the government and from the school administrators using phrases like, quote, just history or just civics to describe this assembly. I want to remind this board and this community that there is no such thing as just history. History is written by someone with specific perspective and specific intent. Some groups are emphasized, other groups are relegated to the sidelines. And let's look at recent history. The current administration has demonstrated a clear desire to wield history and civics and to be a part of the community. As ideological tools to elevate their interests at the expense of women, people of color, and religious and sexual minorities. I am quite sure that the award-winning Elmbrook schools, with its amazing educators, has a full complement of fully qualified history teachers, one

077of whom we heard from earlier, who can set U.S. and world history forth with nuance and context. I ask that in the future we leave this to them. I call once more on historical context to say, . When it comes to letting the Heritage Foundation-led remnants of the Department of Education into our schools, even for a simple assembly, let us recall the Aeneid. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth Hamlin. And sorry for pronouncing your last name wrong. Our next request to speak is Kim Hawk, a resident of the district, and Kelly Frank is on deck. Kim. Hello. My name is Kim Hawk. I am the parent of two Elmbrook students. Like many other community members, I am a student of the Elmbrook community. I am a member of the Elmbrook community.

078Each year, I am engaged in everyone's mission in the community. I am so proud of my family, dear members. I am here because I'm concerned about the events of last week around The History Rock's presentation. It was put on by the Department of Education, guised as a celebration for our country, organized by partisan groups. I want to be clear. I have no issues with our district and our schools celebrating our country. My two children are proud military children. Their father has served our country for over 20 years. We know what true patriotism looks like and feels like. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Well, I can understand the desire to back a program by the Department of Education. Just a small amount of research would have shown our district leadership that this is anything but a

079nonpartisan program. And unfortunately, we currently live in the reality that our federal government is very polarizing. Anything backed by far right-wing politics has no place in our schools. All students, no matter their background, should feel welcomed and supported at school. This whole situation could have been very easily prevented with a little forethought. This is why I'm asking the school board to create a process to review events like this put on by outside organizations so that in the future, Elmberg can prevent school leadership's personal politics from entering the school day. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. Our next request to speak is Kelly Frank, a resident of the district, and Angie Pingel is on the line. Good evening, everyone. My name is Kelly Frank, and like many other people in this room, I am also a parent

080in this district. I have two alumni and one current student at Brookfield East. I'm speaking tonight out of care for our schools, our students, and the trust that families put into this work. Last week, the district hosted the History Rocks Assembly. My student heard about it, not from the school, not from a district email, but from other students. And that alone should have given us pause. There was very little communication. Parents were given limited notice and incomplete information. We were not clearly informed about the organizations behind the content, organizations that many families understand have partisan and religious ties. Through our own research, we learned of those ties and participation of deeply divisive participants in other events. We also learned of the events that had happened, which reasonably raised concerns about the event last week. I

081would expect that similar research of this board would have identified those same concerns and caused you a moment to pause. Public schools belong to all families. When outside programs enter our schools, neutrality and transparency are no longer optional. They are essential. What happened next that I do want to spend a little bit of time on is talking about how the students reacted. Students at both schools made the decision to walk out during the time of the assembly. They organized peacefully, they stood together, they asked questions, and they made their voices heard. As a parent of one of the students that helped organize that at East, I could not be more proud of the students that stood outside in the pouring rain for over an hour. And I thank them for their time. These students demonstrated

082exactly what we would hope that education instills. Critical thinking, civic engagement, and the courage to speak up when something just doesn't feel right. They didn't disrupt the classrooms. They didn't act disrespectfully. They participated in democracy. I do want to say this very clearly. Our students should not have been put into a position where they felt the need to have acted. To protest. To be a part of the conversation. To be a role model in the environment. To be a part of the conversation. To be a part of the conversation. To be a part of the conversation. I am asking the board to reflect on how this happened to prevent this from happening again in the future. We are looking for better communication, full transparency, careful vetting of outside content, and a firm commitment to keeping

083public education free from partisan influence. When we get this right, we don't just protect trust, we model integrity. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Kelly. Our next request to speak is Angie Pingel, a resident of the district, and Nicole, I think it's Janen, is on deck. Good evening. My comments here tonight have absolutely nothing to do with History Rocks. Good evening. I want to be very brief, and I have two things that I want to mention. And I want to mention these because they're going to come up again later in other business items that I'm going to speak about. The first one is I want to thank all of our great parents in our district. Our district excels because of us, and I don't believe that we're getting enough credit for the success of

084our district. Secondly, I've seen copious amounts of social media posts about keeping politics out of our schools. Whether you lean red, blue, or somewhere in between, we've certainly made it clear as a community that we want our schools and our board focused on academics and not partisan politics. Thank you. Thank you, Angie. Our next request to speak is Nicole. Cronin. Cronin, thank you. And Jordan and Morgan, you're on deck. All right, thank you, everybody, tonight. Sorry to bring us back to the History Rocks event. But I think this is a really great opportunity to just think about how we as a district and community want to be able to do this. We want to work with differences of opinion. I understand it was seen as an honor to be the only school in Wisconsin chosen.

085It's great that the History Rocks event was fairly neutral in the end, while we've seen the other events that people have discussed. I honestly don't like cancel culture. I hope we are all allowing our children to hear different opinions and views and to engage with civility in difficult topics. We clearly live in a politically divisive time and community, and listening to each other will only benefit us. We honestly move to Broadway, and we want to thank the University of Brooklyn and Brookfield for the beautiful diversity of this community and the excellent reputation of the schools. We wanted our child exposed to views you may not see in our home, no matter how hard we try. And I'm proud to live in Brookfield and want to see us continue to excel. I wonder if this event,

086for example, had been one on, say, reproductive health, that was neutral, not to discuss anything divisive, but was hosted by a neutral sounding group and sponsored by, say, Planned Parenthood. Would this not be an issue to many in the community? Or honestly, if it was just a matter of how we can make sure that we're not just a group that's being held by the community, but that we're not just a group that's being held by the community, but that we're not just a group that's being held by the community, would this not be an issue to many in the community? Or honestly, if it was just the same event by a left-leaning federal government and sponsored or created by a left-leaning organization? Because we have to worry about this stuff in the reality of our

087current time. So I guess my question is what many others had. How do we manage this in the future? Multiple people have requested a clear policy, and that is also my suggestion. Is there a neutral way we can vet events and track if they are politically in nature in some way, and allow those assessments to be available to parents and students if we're really interested in them? And I think that's what we've requested. Because if we were to allow the Department of Education event, we would then have to show that the Planned Parenthood event was also acceptable. So who gets to decide? Do we allow some but not others? How do we decide which? Who vets them? Who decides what is not considered political? Do we only hold political events at after-school hours or open

088to parents? Or do we say, let's embrace this? Sure, they're welcome. And we'll hold an equal event with opposing views at the same time or the same day, put them back-to-back, and create an event around the ability to engage with the content with the support of educators, teach civil discourse in real critical thinking life situations where they will have to engage with as soon as they move into adulthood. So if these policies exist in some way that I'm unaware of, my apologies. But it seems like a process and policy with full transparency would have cleared up a lot of confusion for the district members and made, honestly, the job of the board and administration much easier. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole. Our next request to speak is Jordan Morgan. And Laura Dee is on deck.

089Hi. My name is Jordan. I am a member of the community, an Elmbook parent, and I'm up here today to talk to you about the events of the History Rocks! tours. I'm going to sidestep a moment with I am a little bit concerned about how Dr. Hansen presented it because they seem to have omitted the fact that the American Journey experience after the main presentation was held and I was there and handed out stickers, including one of an exploding rat. I'm also concerned that when mentioned the QR code, nobody gave it some context. It went to a video which then links to Moms for Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Centers has labeled an extremist group. I am glad that this was a neutral event, but I also want to make you guys aware that

090by hosting it, while knowing that Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, Moms for Liberty, helped develop the materials, they don't do this out of the kindness of their hearts or for civic duty. They do it to get attention and exposure to the younger generation. The road to extremism starts with many neutral first interactions, which expose them, like a young vulnerable person to them, give them a sense of community, and then slowly causes creep into extremism. This is what our board and what Dr. Hansen has agreed to do. You whitewash these organizations. I have a bunch of issues about the way that it was presented to the public, the fact that over 850 people in less than 24 hours signed a petition saying, hey, we don't want this. Let's take a step back. I'm concerned because

091of the lack of parity from 2009 when Obama wanted to speak to students about staying in school. Jean Lambert was on the board at that time and felt that it was too political. And so I don't understand how political, how that was okay to say no then, but we didn't say no now because there is precedent for our district. And I'm hoping that there is some accountability here. Because there are a lot of people in this room that have lost trust in this administration and feel like we've been repeatedly lied to. Omissions, obfuscations, falsehoods are all forms of lies. Thank you. Thank you, Jordan. Our next request to speak is Laura Dunmire, a resident of the district. And Beth Cleary is on deck. My name is Laura Dunmire. I have four kids in the Elmburg

092district, all at Burleigh Elementary. I'm also here to speak about the assembly that took place last week. I think the thing that has stuck with me that I want to start with and has been mentioned already is I see all the effort that went into making best efforts to make sure that the content that was presented was relatively neutral, would not be offensive. The part that we can't ignore is that this was hosted not only by the Department of Education, but also advised by groups that are part of the America 250 Coalition. Those groups include Moms for Liberty. It includes Turning Point USA and the Heritage Foundation, among many, many others. It's important to understand and acknowledge that those are all organizations that very publicly, very proudly embrace the importance of and embrace divisive policies

093and missions. And so for the school district to host this assembly during school hours that was supported and directed and programmed partially by these organizations, in addition to the Department of Education, that adds to, it breaks a sense of trust and community within our Elmburg school district. I appreciate hearing Mr. Wheeler speak at the start of tonight, saying that it is the goal of the school board to discuss what happened, evaluate how we got here, what we're going to do moving forward. That is my ask, is that that happens in a very heartfelt, thoughtful way with the administration, with the school board, hopefully with community members as well, that they can be part of that process. I think transparency moving forward and a better system in place to handle these situations is very much needed

094and I appreciate all of you taking the time to listen. Thank you. Thank you, Laura. Our next request to speak is Beth Cleary, a resident of the district, and Joseph Riggs is on deck. Thank you. My name is Beth Cleary. I'm a parent in the district, including two BC students and an alum. I'm here tonight to voice my concern about issues before us that are bigger than one high-profile assembly. The History Rocks event raised serious concerns, but what concerns me even more is the larger pattern behind it, a long-running effort by outside political groups to influence what our children are taught and to politicize local school boards. Elmbrook remains the one and only district in Waukesha County whose board has not been politically flipped. In 2024, WWM reported that conservative political groups had helped elect

095majorities on almost every school board in the county except for Elmbrook. That did not happen by accident. It happened because families here have worked hard to support thoughtful, nonpartisan leadership and to keep politics off our board. That is why this event matters. The Department of Education's America 250 Civics Education Coalition includes groups like we've been discussing, Turnpoint USA, Hillsdale College, Moms for Liberty. They're not neutral educational organizations, far from it. They're groups with clear ideological agendas and documented records of trying to shape curriculums for the future. They're groups that are not just trying to influence school governance and public education debates in highly political ways. For example, Hillsdale College has promoted its 1776 curriculum as a model for school. Critics have argued that it presents an overly sanitized and celebratory version of American history. In

096South Dakota, the American Historical Association objected to standards rewritten with help from a Hillsdale professor, warning that the process was politically driven and that Native history had been scaled back and marginalized. If you want an example of that in our backyard, we have a short discussion in an article from the Wisconsin Examiner talking about the Lake Country Classical Academy at Hillsdale Charter School that the Ojibwe tribe had once sponsored and then severed ties with after they had learned that their own history was not being taught in the curriculum. Turningpoint USA has openly pushed patriotic education as a counter to teachings that more honestly address slavery and racial injustice. When honest history is treated as anti-American, students are not learning how to think critically. They're being given a filtered narrative. And Moms for Liberty has been

097tied to organized campaigns to remove books and challenge materials dealing with race, racism, gender, and identity. Education Week, citing PEN America, reported that conservative parent groups, including Moms for Liberty, were responsible for at least half of the documented book bans. Whitewashing history does not only happen by rewriting curriculum, but also in our libraries and supportive books. I'm asking what you've heard before, the three things. Fully vet outside programs for political and ideological bias, communicate transparently with families for controversial events, and recommit to keeping our school and this board nonpartisan. Our students deserve honest history, not political branding, and this community deserves a school board that protects them. Thank you, Beth. Our next request to speak is Joseph Briggs, a resident of the district, and Lauren Sanders is on deck. Hey, I'm Joseph. I'm a here

098as a parent. I'm an Elmbrook student to raise concern about that little thing from Friday. I'll try to keep it brief as to not be redundant, but I also have concerns about it being partisan. I'm not a political guy. I'm what they call a political doomer. I don't like either party. I don't like to get involved in it. But I do think this is a very slippery slope that's not going to stop with one side and could come from the other direction in a couple of years if someone's worried about that. I think by doing this, I think we can really see ourselves as the gatekeepers of what affiliations are acceptable politically, religiously, and ideologically for our kids in a public school. At the very least, this at least happened at a high school level.

099Students are very intelligent, definitely smarter than I was in high school. I do think they can discern whether a program like this has an inherent bias or not. However, if the floodgates open on this, it could happen at any level. What makes this more concerning to me, though, is the appearance of the political conflict. There's, for example, a member on this board who on their own Facebook page promotes some of these organizations. When school board members publicly align themselves with politically active donor groups that can benefit from access to our schools, I think parents have every right to question whether students' interests are coming first rather than someone's personal political gain. So basically, if a board member is completely bought and paid for, which it very much appears to be the case, and they're not

100going to be able to get a job, then it's pretty sinister to watch them also use the name of God to do so. I don't think you have to look very far to see which one it was. Our schools and children should not be open for business. Thank you. Thank you, Joseph. And our next request to speak is Lauren Sanders, a resident of the district. Hello. I'm an Elmbrook alum, a mom of three young children, two students currently in the district. I'm a firm believer that our district's educators understand the value of teaching our children honest history and ensuring that every child can see themselves reflected in our American story. But unfortunately, the History Rocks! event that was allowed in the district raises serious concerns that those standards were not upheld. Organizations affiliated with this

101event have very clear stances and publicly available statements from founders and leaders that reveal beliefs and values that should not be promoted to children in our public schools and positions that our district should not stand behind if we truly intend to represent every student in this community. Some examples of those statements from leaders of those organizations are things such as, Reject feminism. Submit to your husband. The Civil Rights Act was a mistake. And marriage is strictly the union of one man and one woman. This America 250 Coalition's own launch video claims American education has been dimmed over the past 60 to 70 years. But the reality is that my own children, children that are in this very district, might not even be here today if the world these organizations describe as a better time still

102existed. And my children would definitely not have been able to sit in classrooms alongside many of the classmates they learn with every day in our schools. So are we considering what it teaches our children when district leaders align our schools with organizations that stand by statements like that? How can I look at my own children and explain that leaders in our district stood by an event affiliated with organizations like PragerU? One that created a video for kids my children's age where cartoon Christopher Columbus tells the students, being taken as a slave is better than being killed. No, I don't see the problem. If we're going to commemorate America's 250th anniversary, let it be done with honesty, expertise, and respect for the diverse students sitting in our classrooms. And honestly, for the teachers working every day

103to ensure that all of our children are represented as well. As a mom raising children who are part of the next generation of students here, I will say that our children deserve better than adults who are willing to look the other way when discrimination and historical revisionism are packaged in a way that they can't be seen as patriotic. You cannot simply slap lipstick on racism and call it patriotism. The parents here are much smarter than that. My children and every child in this district deserve to learn the real history of this country, the struggle for civil rights, the fight for equality, and the voices of the people who work to make America better. That is the story our schools should be telling. Thank you. That is the last request I have to speak. Is there

104anyone yet that has not filled out a form with Christy that would like to speak in our citizens' forum this evening? Okay. Thank you. Seeing none, that concludes our citizens' forum. You're welcome to stick around. The rest of the meeting will be exciting, I'm sure. But it does bring us to our consent agenda. I'll start with asking for a motion from board members and then ask if there are items that board members would like to poll. We do have a request to speak about the admin contract, so if that's not polled, then we will take that request to speak before we vote. So can I start with a motion? Jean? I move approval of the consent agenda as presented. Is there a second? Second. We need a second, and then I'll ask if there are

105items that board members want to poll. I'll second. Thank you, Sam. We have a motion and a second. Are there items that board members would like to poll? I'd like to poll administrative contracts renewal. Anyone else? Okay. So we have a motion to approve consent agenda items A, B, C, D, E, G, H, I, J, K. That's a pretty lengthy list. Any further discussion? All those in favor of approving the consent agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. That carries on voice vote. We do have the administrator contracts pulled by Wes. We do have a request to speak before board discussion, so we'll take that request now. Angie Pingel at resident of the district would like to address the board. Angie? Some, but I don't have enough for everyone. Good evening. I'm Angie

106Pingel, and I want to open tonight by saying my comments are not a reflection on our superintendent. I'm not a superintendent. I'm the superintendent or his performance. My comments relate solely to the fiscal responsibility of this board and your fiduciary duty to taxpayers, particularly when operating referendums are becoming routine in other districts, and as you contemplate a capital improvement referendum of $85 million to $100 million. Interesting facts from my Internet search regarding compensation in 2026. The mayor of Brookfield will earn just under $138,000. The Wisconsin superintendent of public instruction will earn just over $146,000. The governor of Wisconsin will earn just under $166,000. And get this one, the mayor of New York City will earn almost $259,000. How much will taxpayers shell out for our superintendent's salary? I estimate it to be nearly $250,000 after

107he receives the same percentage increase as the teachers, and that rate has not yet been publicly released. I also reviewed the superintendent contract and the most recent employee handbook to come up with a total estimated cost. My calculations suggest that his total compensation will be around $3,000. I also reviewed the superintendent contract and the most recent employee handbook to come up with a total estimated cost. My calculations suggest that his total compensation will be around $363,000. And this amount excludes his post-retirement health care for nearly 10 years. Using today's cost, that is an additional nearly $26,000 per year. I also used DPI salary data. I pulled Elmbrook's most recent compensation data for full-time teachers. I calculated the average total compensation for the first year of the school year. If that was $8,000, the average total

108compensation for teachers, full-time, would be $108,000 a year. If that was $8,000, the average total compensation for the first year of the school year. If that was $8,000, the average total compensation for the first year of the school year. I would have given the superintendent a full $300,000 raise. I also know that this is going to pass without discussion, but please stop touting fiscal responsibility. I also know that this is going to pass without discussion, but please stop touting fiscal responsibility. In the straight You owe the Florence County iorg by lovely travels away to trimいて counting the roles that parents students and most importantly teachers have in our success it isn't because of one person thank you Thank You Angie Wes administrator contracts so I'd like to make a motion to divide the to divide

109the question for 31 administrator contracts everyone but the superintendent and so have those considered separately so as you're making a motion that we take the administrator contracts item F and divide them into two separate items approving the 31 administrator contracts everyone that's not the superintendent and then one for the superintendent yep okay so that's the motion is there a second to that motion I'll second okay thank you have a motion in a second now we can discuss questions or comments about the proposal should we just vote on the 31 first and then discuss or how do you want to know first they should they have to be divided right so the motion here is to divide them I don't think you'd have a motion to divide them you would that's not any further discussion I

110just wanted to provide some context from my perspective on it it's really to me about I'm sorry just a mission I don't want to waste time the motion is to divide and I think we should just yeah why did I yeah I don't know if people want that so I was just providing context so yeah so I moved to divide and to me it's just about best practice from my perspective because I view and as a first-year board member my first look at this it feels like there there are two different pieces here from a procedural perspective I think superintendents the only one that falls directly under our us the board versus all the other administrators flow up to the superintendent so I think that's a little bit different in the viewpoint and then I

111think there's a historical precedent that at one point we used to always at least I've talked to a few former board members that the superintendent's contract was a separate item even if they would be approved concurrently on the same day or agenda and so it seems like the oversight we have over both are a little bit different because there's going to be different responsibilities with the superintendent being our employee the one that we hire so I just want to provide some context as to why I look to divide the contracts Any other questions or comments before we vote on the motion to divide these contracts all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye aye any opposed thank you that motion carries so now we have two approvals to make um um ,

11231 administrator contracts everyone except the superintendent and then the superintendent I would move approval of the administrative contracts and senior leader contracts all contracts in this item except the separated superintendent contract I'll second you have a motion and a second any discussion all those in favor of the motion please say aye aye any opposed thank you that carries on voice vote Now can I get a motion for the superintendent contract On the approval of the superintendent contract as presented Is there a second second Thank you have a motion and second. Is there any discussion superintendent contract I I have a comment have the Discussion part of this clearly we can't discuss contract details but given the fact that we have a meeting tonight where the result of that discussion should be considered I would propose

113propose an amendment that approval of the superintendent's contract be moved postponed to the March 24th agenda I will second that motion so you're making an amendment to the right one to move the approval of the superintendent contract to April sorry March 24th our next meeting and that's so that all voices can be heard any discussion on that Sam two years ago I brought before the board the fact that I thought the policy the contracts were too early and that was in February and I thought to give us one more month to understand the performance of administrators and and superintendent and unanimously I was told by everyone on the board and those of you that were on the board at the time that we're putting this this feeling of fear we're creating an environment of distrust

114with the administration and and now we're doing this to the one employee we have that we have you know you sat in a meeting and and both of you or all several of you sat in our meeting and and begged that some of these additional benefits be added on and how incredible job that mark has done point of order we shouldn't be discussing individual elements of our closed meeting that involved contract decisions I didn't talk anything that took place we just talked about the history of a couple of years ago so I think that this is disingenuous that we're we're pulling out Mark Hansen's contract outside of this and I can only relate it to one decision he was made and I think this is incredibly damaging to our school district I think this is

115you know we have a superintendent of the year that has worked hard that has dedicated his life to the to these students and I think that's a big part of this and I think that's a huge part of this and and you're now holding this over him and threatening in a form of threat which is not going to bode well to his staff that love him and adore him and appreciate him so I will not approve this motion and I think it's dangerous and I think it's disruptive to the entire school district I wholeheartedly agree with you Sam I think that each person during the course of their career makes a decision well makes thousands of decisions and to have an incident of last week that suddenly gives us pause over the many many positive

116impressions and positive impact that our superintendent has brought to our school district whether it's through hiring of top-notch teachers and top-notch administrators and curriculum renewal that is it's relentless his pursuit of quality for our students and our staff is second to none and I think it's very unreasonable to say we should delay approving this contract when we're gonna have a conversation we're gonna go through what happened last week and how can we prevent that from being hand happened again how can we prevent that from happening again we're gonna come back in two weeks and this contract I would expect is going to be approved and there's to me it's a it's a a display and it's a commentary and I don't think it's warranted and I won't support it either I have a question then

117we are convening a special board meeting at the end of this meeting to discuss this again to discuss again I'll read this considering employment promotion compensation and performance evaluation evaluation data of a public employee I think it is premature to go ahead and make a decision before we have the meeting that we noticed yesterday that we're going to have that's what I have to say anyone else Wes yeah and I appreciate the comments from Jean and Sam and Preeta and Mary I think you know all this really helpful I guess for me I I'm I think it makes sense you know I think it's really helpful I guess for me I I'm I think it makes sense to me to postpone it and I think for me it more comes down to you know and

118it's not for me about any events about last week because I've had a chance to go back and understand our history in our district more since then and it's really raised to me that there could be the opportunity as you know you know whether it's policy like in the contract it contemplates future policies that may be considered and understanding how those all align and how we all are on the same page on that front and it was you know it is something that I've never thought about when it comes to contracts and as to whether in today's hyper partisan climate whether district image or if there are other things that I never thought about before that we would think about as terms in a contract and so for me it was really a highlight of

119looking back at our history and a number of events not just last week's but I think we've had other prominent speakers from the state that have come that have created some questions for people and so for me it's more of making sure that everything aligns from you know leadership perspective we're on the same page with policies and if there were any terms and I don't know what those terms would be and maybe you would come back and say oh we have to make sure that we come back with the same contract but if there are any terms that would need to be thought about for the times as things have changed in history so I feel that there's some disingenuous comments with saying that this was this was moved to the board you know we

120agreed as a board in a term this meeting that said scheduled for after this was on schedule until yesterday. And now we're saying, you know, you're stating that, well, I need to look at the whole situation. Well, we had this before us before. And I think it's, to me, this is an example of cancel culture because Mark did something some people don't like and now we wanna cancel. This is the hypocritical that happens and it's like to call this out what it is, it is that, it's cancel culture because you don't like how a decision that Mark made that was nonpartisan. So I just, I appreciated, Wes, your comments on separating the superintendent contract. That makes sense to me. Mark is the employee that we hire. He's the employee that we evaluate, that we work

121with most closely on the administrative team. So that makes sense to me and as I understood from you, there's some precedent in our district previously for doing that and I tried to recall in my early days on the board, it may have been that way that we approved the superintendent contract. I believe it was when I first came on the board 11 years ago. So that made sense to me but for me, the question here on approving Mark's contract is a contractual one versus a performance issue. So when there's an HR issue, there can be performance things. If an employee is not performing well and I'm not saying this is the case but, what's the word I want, the hypothetical, hypothetically, speaking, if an employee is not performing well, they're put on a performance improvement

122plan. You don't really go back in and change their contract. Their contract outlines the contractual things of their employment. In fact, you know, the numbers that Angie Pingel was sharing with us, you know, there for example is a potential amount that Mark can earn in a bonus but the bonus itself isn't specified in the contract. We work on that bonus separately because it's a performance issue. The bonus is just an up to amount. Again, it's contractual. So for me, I don't know. I don't desire to change anything in Mark's contract. We have had this vetted by a legal team from Buelow Vetter. It has been through iterations of the board. It changes slightly over time as Mark makes various requests year to year. As the board changes a little bit year to year, we have

123this conversation. There definitely have been tweaks and small changes to his contract. But I'm comfortable with the contract that's in front of us and I don't see a need to delay the approval of the contract. So I'm in favor of approving the contract this evening. If there was a performance issue that we wanted to talk about with the superintendent, we would take that up as a performance issue. And again, that's a separate conversation. It's a separate thing as we work with employees as any employer would do. I've had that happen in my time where I've had to improve, set goals, change things. That's been a performance issue I've worked with my employers on. But it hasn't affected my contract as I've been in a teaching contract. So for that reason, I am in favor of

124voting for Mark's contract this evening. Thank you. Thank you. Back to Jean. And then I'll ask if there's any other board members that would like to speak before we vote. Jean? I would echo your comments. And I would also like to talk about the policy aspects. Policies are created outside of the contract. And there are administrative policies. Well, we have a policy book like this that we have pared down slightly over the years. But they are outside the contract. And if we need to create policy or amend policy or whatever it is, we can certainly do that in the weeks and months ahead. But next month, coming back, I don't imagine any policy issues will be coming into this contract. And I, again, would state that moving this contract to next meeting is performative rather

125than substantive. Cheryl? I agree with separating the superintendent contract from the rest of the contracts. However, I would agree with Jean in her comments that she just made. And Scott's. I think that we have to separate the contractual from the performance. And that is already separated in the contract as it is. I have a question for you, Scott. You made a reference to having consulted our legal team. Has that happened in the course of the last few days and not been shared with the board? No. No. No, Jean. Would you like to just talk about the point of contact you used Buelo Vetter in the number of times, even in this particular contract you've consulted? During the formulation of this contract, once the board meets, I work through Pam, who coordinates with Buelo Vetter, for

126legal team review. Legal team then looks at the request that Mark has made and how we have amended that request. And then they would give feedback to say, this maybe isn't going to work the way you intended it to because of these types of if you're talking an HRA or an HSA or a 403 B or whatever you're talking about and that resulted in some changes that you will see in the contract this evening with respect to how our conversation went around pulling funds back and was then moved to liquidated damages instead and that's part of legal's help to us as we're trying to craft something that seems fair but but that there's some elements that may be negotiated over time or that may be reduced over time depending on performance and such so that

127we're getting to the finish line with something that is reasonable from a legal standpoint reasonable from what we want and also is responsive to what mark has requested so I talked with the lawyer and then I get with dr. Hansen to review you here's how it looks is this still acceptable from what you proposed and we responded and the lawyers reviewed so that's been part of the contractual process year over year as we navigate this I in the last few days no okay because I fully understand everything you said Jean that wasn't my question my question was about in the course of the time in which we've added the closed session that is coming up this evening and in I guess in the in the realm of what we've been talking about that that predicated

128the perhaps the separation of this item out has there been conversation with legal counsel about some of the assertions about about the application of policies outside of the contract and Scott I hear you saying there has not been a decision on the basis of the the application of policies outside of the contract and Scott I hear you saying there has not been I just want to make sure there wasn't something that I hadn't been made aware of that was discussed thank you no and the reason for that is the board governs as a collective group of seven a majority of the board has not requested any kind of review like that or change the contract anything else before we vote on this Sam you requested a roll call vote on this this will be a

129roll call vote yeah so we're voting on the amendment or the the motion is to delay this contract until March 24 I'm looking to make sure I say the right day March 24th yes that is what we're voting so if you vote yes there would be a vote to delay it a no vote would be a vote not to delay it and then we will the second question would be whether or not to approve it tonight if it fails and if I can just mention you mentioned Pam just so everyone else knows that's our assistant superintendent of human resources yep okay so Cheryl Nelms I vote no not to delay that's enough so that's a no the amendment okay Wes Silla yes Sam Hughes no Mary Wacker Jean Lambert no Brita Curriara yes and Scott

130Wheeler no four no's three yes's okay so that motion fails to delay the superintendent contract vote so it's I'll make a motion to approve the superintendent contract that was already on the floor right yep yes it was already on the floor Jean made the motion yeah yeah and was oh I'm sorry yeah and that was so that was in there so we already have them the motion and for any further discussion on the superintendent contract before we vote on it okay this is also a roll call vote oh I just want to emphasize that like I think it'd be really important and part of the contract like said here and after policies as part of that contract language so I want to make sure that's really clear that I hope that that includes focus on

131creating policies that will address any situation that arise and so so that that I hope that that becomes part of it going forward Sam that's that's board work that's not superintendent work so that's what we do right so but to clarify what you're saying that the superintendent that those policies like those whatever policies as it relates to this as you know like what we've heard a lot tonight that you know when that here and after policy is created it will also always apply to the superintendent contract so that's a good point and I think that's a good point to that as well I'd like to get clarification on that I apologize I'm not following it's already in there the the the obligation to follow policies that are currently on the books in the handbook any

132future policies that are created that is all it's all in the language of the contract already and if policies aren't followed that would be a disciplinary process we would yeah which is also describing them so thank you I see that that is addressed any of their comments before we vote on the superintendent contract okay roll call vote Christy West Silla yes Jean Lambert yes Bretha Kordyarra yes Cheryl Mills yes Sam Hughes yes Mary Wacker yes Scott Wheeler yes seven yeses okay superintendent contract is approved and that concludes our consent agenda one second our next agenda item is our first action item of the evening which is the 20 year facility plan specifically the survey approval so turn this to chris chris good evening i'm looking for a really short agenda item tonight so for those

133of you who are wondering how long chris thompson's going to talk for it's not going to be long so but i do need to give some context here so during our last meeting in february presented an update on our work towards the development of a 20-year facilities plan beginning with several needs assessments the board of education and administration have spent the past eight months visiting our schools discussing options with our architect and construction experts exploring finance options and prioritizing our facility needs the outcome of the work to date is an opportunity for the community to provide feedback via a survey on two different financing plans that support the partial or complete renovation at two or four of our schools ultimately this feedback will inform a final 20-year facilities plan that will include all of our

134schools and the school district and the school district will be able to provide feedback on the plan and will be presented in may and june for board discussion and action since the survey was discussed on february 24th we've made several edits to the content which provides helpful context to readers of the survey regarding the facilities planning process facility needs and finance options but we have not changed any of the questions i've received a few comments and suggestions from board members which we will consider making before the survey goes to print and arrives in households by mid-april all elmbrook staff will receive the survey and can choose to take it online or return the print version additionally our families and all elmbrook staff will receive a digital survey option via email i do have a few

135answers to questions that arose from our conversation in february specifically we've added language to reinforce the anonymity of the survey in the opening letter even though there's a unique code assigned to every survey the code is not known to our survey provider school perceptions and all responses are anonymous also we wondered about the importance of having staff who are not residents participate in the survey while non-resident staff survey results will get reported out separately the primary benefit of staff participation is to build awareness among our staff of the needs and financing solutions our community community is considering and to give them an opportunity to ask questions via the comments both the print and digital versions of the survey allow for comments which will be synthesized by school perceptions and reported along with the survey data

136to the survey community the survey will be submitted to the board of education at our regular board meeting scheduled for may 12th with that update with that brief update i should say i'm happy to address any questions you may have or seek your approval through a motion thank you so we do have a request to speak before board discussion we'll start with that and kelmer canyon a resident of the district did i get it right okay a request to speak to us and then we will entertain board member questions comments or questions or a motion go ahead great thank you board for the discussion tonight a few of my questions have actually been addressed but i um i guess i would just like to ask that during your discussion you explain what the next steps

137would be after the survey and how the proposed building changes would or could be modified based on what was extended to for public consumption during the survey discussion in february there was talk about how the responses would be tallied and weighed specifically i recall that elmbrook staff would not count the same way a community a community member might might and i think that might be like the non-resident staff but so i'd like some clarification and confirmation of this and i point out that there are many community community members who are also schooled and are still staff of elmbrook schools as paraprofessionals myself included and it would be wrong to dismiss the responses of staff or weigh them differently thank you so much for your time thank you ann with that we'll take uh chrissy you

138want to say anything about them unless you want me to can i put a motion on the floor so we can then just keep everything in the discussion okay there you go so we'll take a motion to approve the proposed building and then we'll move on to the next item of discussion thank you so i would move um approval of the 20-year facilities plan community survey as presented second i think you have a motion in a second discussion and questions jean i'd like to be really clear about that um that non-resident staff will be stratified out of the anyone who is a resident and part of the community that will be surveyed that that's what you said just previously right correct okay and the survey is weighted to be representative of the community and so

139resident staff members are counted for sure but school perceptions will weight residents who are not staff or do not have children differently like they represent about 70 of the households in our community so the survey will reflect that distribution based on the responses they get and the demographics that are selected so that's certainly all resident responses are included and considered when you say weighted what do you mean weighted so if you look at if you look at our community about 70 percent of households do not have children in the district and so they will take responses then for households that identify as no children in the district and make that subset of responses about seven they'll weight that as 70 percent of the total so they don't because you can assume that more of our

140families will participate in the survey many of our staff will also participate in the survey so results could get skewed if you just went by total one one for one um representation i follow you now thank you appreciate you explaining it like other questions come just uh cheryl uh and i apologize for not sending this to you um prior to the meeting but um since there are so many factors that contribute to the mill rate and um the whole way through the survey we talk about the mill rate is it possible to also put in the survey the principal and interest of the 62.1 million that the actual expense that we paid the the actual expense of what the 85 million plus interest would be and the 100 million plus interest and an explanation on

141how you're going to keep the tax rate the same for the 85 million so you want me to put the historical 62.1 was our high school referendum in 2008 with the interest and the interest that we've paid on it yes and we already have in here that we've refinanced six times and saved three million dollars over the course of 18 years and then yes probably the mill rate the forecasted rate does include principal and interest in the 56 cents right but i would just like to see it as another way of showing what the the principal and interest in a dollar amount versus with the mill rate it would just be a total dollar amount yeah it would just be a form of transparency sure we are we will make changes in the next like

142i said in the next week on the context so i feel like what you're approving tonight is the questions we'll we'll refine the look the graphics but but so we can make changes to the kim mary um you kind of answered half my question but i want to respond and just clarify um that if we were to make a change like cheryl is recommending i would want a board vote on that because we as as chris explained we do have the principal and interest cost calculated into the estimates we're giving the community um i think school perceptions wisely wants to keep this readable and not get into the weeds of a contract that we won't have until we actually have if we get there a referendum with an interest rate and a and a contract

143basically so it would be speculation i think anybody that has a mortgage has seen that number of this is the amount you pay back and it's not the amount of the mortgage you signed up for i think that's the understanding of borrowing with interest so i don't think we're withholding information by not spelling out the details and the information that we're providing but i think we're also implying that we're not paying attention to the details of a of a plan we have yet to approve and i wouldn't want to see that in this survey my other part of that question chris was it i did hear you then at the top of our presentation saying there are still changes that will be made to this survey and i want and if they're contextual maybe you

144can tell me what they might be because if we're approving this but it's going to change i'd like to know what's up for change before i approve it we have to go perceptions Jean suggested a small change really differentiating on page three the difference between the 71 million dollars that is district funded as part of our capital maintenance plan and annual budget savings targeted towards maintenance versus community funded a hundred million dollars so there's a way I don't think what Cheryl's suggesting that's not going to change the graphs because again the dollar the 56 cents is remains the same it doesn't change the questions if we can find a smart way with school perceptions to show just the principal and the interest total that is something we discussed with them before and I know they've

145done it on some rare occasions I would say but it does confuse it's just more numbers and it's hard to keep track of all the numbers that are in there and so when you're trying to simplify it and you're only asking two questions really two main questions which is great but we'll want to do it simply well thanks and that's that's kind of pivotal to what we're approving tonight because it is a to me that's a more substantive change than just context so I don't I don't want to slow down this process I really don't but I'd sure like to see the final version of what we're approving before we approve it and my other question really thank you and thank you for your time to be here today we have a question from a

146comment from Ann Kellmer because I was kind of on that road of what are we going to do with the information when we get it are we as a board going to receive a presentation from school perceptions okay so we will see the person there and their results in those results obviously will determine how are facilities plan comes together so that discussion commences again on May 12th after we get the full report from them and they will be presenting it themselves you know before it goes to print yeah if there's a way to do that around without approval that'd be great that would be additional approval I don't know if Scott if you think that requires some kind of amendment pending final approval of the final I would be happy to amend the motion that

147way but the final approval would require a meeting and a vote so then your wait the next meeting is in two weeks from tonight right right yeah we didn't have a meeting on the books when we were putting this together I mean I think we can come back on the 24th and go the 25th to print and I think we'll still make our target till then well if it's not too late then to approve it on a final final final on March 24th I would amend the motion to say that we'll just table it then well we'll postpone it we'll postpone this action to the March 24th board meeting so we would just table it then yeah we'll postpone this action to the March 24th board meeting So we have a board meeting. We have

148a motion to approve. have a motion to I will withdraw my motion I can do that and then I would make a motion a new motion that we that would be with the permission of the seconder I don't remember who the seconder was okay so with Jean's permission I will withdraw the previous motion and I will move that we take action regarding approval of the survey final on at the March 24th meeting of the board is there a second to that motion okay so we have a motion to approve the final survey March 24th Chris I just asked that if there are any other edits they come to me by Thursday well yeah like the day after tomorrow trying to get that finalized Sam first of all I I don't I won't vote for that

149motion I think this is your typical definition of bureaucracy of wait and wait and wait and I feel like we've seen the rough draft we've seen some minor revisions I don't feel like we need to wait another two more weeks to look over this I mean just give Chris permission to make some more minor changes and then vote on I we're not the experts on on writing up these these surveys and we've hired a company to do it so I think we're just delaying it so second I add to that I'm in agreement with Cheryl and I have to me a creative way would just be an asterisk and and say that projected interest in this loan is an additional interest in this loan is an additional interest in this loan is an additional 65

150million or whatever I feel like that would be honest and I think that's the truth of lending statement we get when we buy a house we actually get to see what we're gonna be paying over those 30 years or 15 years depending on however you finance that same thing with the car so I do feel that that's a transparency that is completely deserving of the community and I would 100% support that so I would just like to see that as an asterisk underneath the projected hundred million and the projected whatever the other $85 round was I think this is the struggle here I disagree I wouldn't include that I think it's useful information but I can cut things a lot of different ways like if I were to go back to 2009 what would the

151projected costs of doing what we did for Central and East do today we're not going to put that information in here which would color I think the perception of of whether that was worthwhile or not a worthwhile investment and so until we like until we know what that interest rate that's going to be we have not as far as I know we've done a lot of with that interest that's going to be we have not as far we have not as far as I know we've done a lot of with that interest that's going to be we have not as far as I'm aware made any decision as a board as to what we're gonna exactly do based on this that I would not be in favor of adding expected interest costs at this time

152because I think there's a lot of ways you can cut the information Jean then I'll make some comments I'm okay with the the asterisks talking about the total cost you can say something like it's estimated I mean it's an estimation we don't know the interest rates we don't even know if a question would be approved by voters I'm so many ifs but for me we did have a question this got me thinking what what are the next steps what will the board do with this I just want to clarify Chris I mean we put out for example some plans some architectural plans that are pretty conceptual meaning they don't have HVAC design in there we haven't you know looked at all the electrical needs and where every single thing is going to be but they're

153conceptual and they're conceptual and they're conceptual and they're conceptual plans and so for me as a board member the purpose of this survey is we've done a lot of work to figure out that our buildings have some needs if especially we want them to be ADA compliant or if we want large spaces updated if the gym is too small those kinds of things and so we know some general cost you know some things we want to do and that's in boxes on the survey you know divided by school meaning here's some things that this money would do but this informs me as a board member is this the right work like are we considering the right things who is the community supportive of this because of the community is not supportive of a community investment

154in schools we've got to be thinking of different things and finding different solutions because there are some things we need to do in our building that are major things but you know we're not gonna wait till we ask a question to voters to figure that out so correct me if I'm wrong Chris but that's kind of the purpose of the survey is to give the board information so we can move forward with next steps getting a motion to vote. more specific and moving along in this process. Is this the right work is kind of what we're asking. Do you have any comments? Right. I mean, you haven't decided on a referendum. You're deciding on a survey. So, I mean, to put a truth in lending kind of disclosure out there, it's ahead of the game.

155You know, when we get, you know, if you decide to go to referendum, then I think in the materials and information we provide our community, we include what you're talking about. You know, but right now, I mean, I think most people will just want to know what does it mean for my taxes? And that's what we've communicated in the beginning. I mean, you may disagree, but that's my opinion. So, but again, I'm looking for clarity if we don't. Well, personally, again, I don't think, you know, the asterisk approach I think is good. I think we can give some additional numbers, but it does get confusing. There are a lot of numbers. So, I'd like to keep it simple. Again, simple to make it transparent and kind of focused on the right things. So, the asterisk

156approach I'd be fine with. Or we could leave it off. I mean, I'm good either way. I want to be transparent with the community. Sam? I guess if this goes to referendum, it wouldn't necessarily be part of that question on the referendum, right? Is that ever done in other historical referendum questions? So, I'm not going to die on that hill. Mary? Yeah, I just want to be clear of what I'm hearing from you, Scott and Sam, because, we aren't the experts. We hired experts. They gave us this. They didn't include that. And we're saying, I'm not an expert, but I think we should add an asterisk. Concerns me a little bit. So, I'd like to have them understanding that what I do hear as consensus is a clear survey that we know is not the

157final verdict, if you will, and whether or not it is in our best interest to put more. So, I don't want to be a You know, we're not the experts, but we're going to change one thing here and one thing there is what we've been doing. I want to fall back on the fact that we have experts who are not only going to put this together with their knowledges, but also bring us the review of what it says without messing with their formulas. Any further discussion before we vote on the motion, which is to actually vote on this in two weeks? That's the motion. So, one further question or comment. I don't think it was in here, and my apologies if I missed it, because it seems like we're really focused on the mill rate

158as a big piece of all this. And so, the one piece of transparency that I thought might be helpful, and maybe it's not, was the expected appreciation that might, because am I wrong, that mill rate staying stable, there's a built-in appreciation? Is part of that process? And wondering if there would be a way to acknowledge that we, you know, we've used the last, if it's five years or whatever, so people can understand. And that doesn't make it simple for people, but if people want to know, well, how do I expect my mill rate to stay stable, that we use the last five years or whatever many years. So, that's that transparency of we expect this level of appreciation in housing values. Can I clarify? Are you, so are you asking for? Appreciation of the house,

159you're saying? Yeah. I'm with you now. Yeah. Scott? Not appreciation of Chris Thompson. No. Scott, are you? We're of the debt. I appreciate it, Chris. Come on. I appreciate Chris. Yeah. He got a new contract. Show some love tonight. He got a new contract. So, are you looking for more detail in the survey about all the things that impact the mill rate? Just, it would be like if there was something to acknowledge, like that mill rate. There are other things that impact the mill rate. There are. A hundred percent. Yeah. So, do we? And it wasn't to say this is what we should do. It was just a point of question because I know that the mill rate is a central figure as part of this and part of that calculation is, I think there's

160a built in level of appreciation. I would just say that we would want to just be really clear on the assumptions. Yeah. Period. Yeah. Let's not talk about the percentage of assumptions. Yeah. Let's just say these are the assumptions. Yeah. They include interest in principle. Yeah. That's what we're basing off of. And we'll do the best to save taxpayers' interests down the road like we've done the past 20 years. What I see here is a good synopsis of our financial background, which tells the history of how we've done things. I don't want to get into a lot of crystal ball gazing because we can't assure the accuracy of that. Well, again, I'll just add that I do agree with Sam. I think I can approve this tonight. You can add in those small details. Those

161don't significantly change. I think it's a good synopsis. I think it's a good synopsis. Because the question, the format of asking open-ended responses, that was a big one for me. We're going to be able to receive those and read those as a board. That's going to be key for me. How the surveys weighted, very similar to how a political survey on the phones weighted where they try to gauge what percentage of voters they're talking to and they base it on the last election. And this is very scientific in terms of the formulas that they go through. And insurance companies use this to calculate risk in certain areas. Again. These are mathematical things that a lot of really smart people have developed over the years. So I am comfortable with the survey that we've got. Comfortable

162making these few small changes. You know, we can make them. We could leave it how it is. I'm just comfortable. Because the question for me, is this the right work? Is this something the community would ever support so that I keep working on the right question? Like, am I in the right forest? Building the right road? Or do I need to switch to a different hill and be working on something else? And so I think that's a good question. So this survey for Scott Wheeler gets at that. Those are the key questions for me. I don't want to lose sight of that. It's in here. I'm going to get the information I need from the way that it's written. So I would be okay approving it tonight. For audience members, I know we're going to

163be facing some difficult weather in the event that we have to evacuate this room. You head to the bathrooms, which are located right off the lobby. That's the interior storm safety area. Everyone's looking at their radar now. Yeah. It's fine. It's just a little rain. Okay. Jean, and then we'll take the question of whether we should vote. Defer. Defer to the. I'd just like to reinforce the fact that if we vote on the 24th of March, that you have enough time to do what you need to do to get it to wherever it goes next so that there isn't a time of the essence for a today moving in. 24th would be our deadline. You can do it. Sorry, no storms. Look at that. You don't like doing it that late. I'm pretty sure we

164can. Okay. I mean, whether it hits the 9th or the 10th. I mean, you have 20 days to complete the survey. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Any other comments or questions before we vote? The motion, again, is a motion to actually, in essence, table this conversation until the 24th and take the vote in two weeks at our next board meeting. Postpone that table. Yeah, postpone. I know. I said in essence, but it's different. Okay. So delay the vote. Am I saying that correctly? Postpone the vote to March 24th. Okay. That's the motion, to postpone it until March 24th. It's been seconded. All those in favor of the motion, please say yes. Yes. Yes. Those against the motion, please say no. No. No. I vote a yes. Okay. That's four yeses to three noes. So the motion

165carries. We'll vote on this on the 24th. All right. And that concludes our action item for the evening and brings us to our discussion item. And I know we have people that have waited for this to address the board before board discussion. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I just want to go back to Emily Greiber. And then, Emily, you tell me the appropriate time when we'll take public comment. Is that Emily? Yeah. So, like, do you have a presentation first, and then we'll have to take public comment before the board discusses? Yeah. That'd be great. Okay. Lisa.

166Thank you. Dr. Rettler, right? I believe she. She completed her doctorate? Yeah. Dr. Rettler. Approaches the. Okay. Okay. Thank you. All right. Good evening, everyone. So we are here tonight to talk about. a three year long project we've had as a board goal and I wanted to start just with a little bit of background information that was provided to our board during our September work session but I think it's relevant just to review that first of all as I said we have a three year board goal because we recognize some opportunities with our data story at the middle school level and we this project has been really committed to something that we value in Elmbrook some of our values of academic excellence of belonging and engagement and so what you see up here is actually

167a celebration we've been working at this for a very long time a lot of hard work by our educators by our administrators to start to move the needle on our our data story in a positive way so what you see on the left hand side are some of the key progress action items that have happened to date I just want to highlight a few of those because again this is a lot of change that has happened at the middle school level and a lot of thinking that goes around it and a lot of doing things differently the first thing is we updated our ELA curriculum to align more with science of reading and implemented a yearly fidelity goal and implementation plan that we co-create with our literacy leaders and the intention of that is to

168ensure that all of our students are growing in word recognition in language and in reading comprehension and that is helping move the needle in addition to just the ELA curriculum we provided intensive training for our entire staff regardless of what content area they teach in what that means science of reading what does that mean for an elective teacher what does that mean for a science educator because we all own literacy and we also deployed an early warning system and the intention of that is to ensure that our students are proactively receiving instruction and that they're getting their early intervention based on their needs and we're not waiting for them to fail and that again takes a lot of hard work by teachers by counselors by our administrators by our interventionists and so forth so a

169lot of changes happen and we're really positive we're really proud of our positive data trend and it's truly a celebration and I know I shared that in our September board work session but it's it's relevant for tonight as there's the potential for more change and we know that change is hard so at that right now that in our third year we have the goal of finalizing this this last piece the middle school schedule so why is this important and when we talk about the middle school schedule it's a structural support that can help us get to our next best and we know that we have been talking about this four years with our board and we you know we brought different prototypes to you in 2024 and 2025 we had board work sessions on different

170prototypes and they really just ended up in a stalemate we couldn't decide what direction we needed to go and that led us to asking for guidance from our board about what are the key strategies that our middle school admin should be considering that really you value in terms of what our middle school programming should look like so at that time we had a lot of work session in November and the board discussed and then prioritized these two strategies to guide our admin and how to design the schedule the first strategy that was discussed and prioritized was to prioritize across grade level also known as a junior high model elective experience in seventh and eighth grade that provides more student choice with elective courses aligned to identified career clusters and the second strategy was to prioritize

171deep sustained instruction in English language arts by adopting a schedule with longer instructional periods in ELA and with adjustments in the other areas that still maintain alignment to best practice. During that discussion and then subsequent discussions with our teaching and learning committee, many of you were saying we wanna know more about the student impact and going through and working through this, it always has been about the student impact and ensuring that we also have an engaged workforce. So on the slide, what you see here, looking through those two strategies, this just clarifies what is the potential impact on students. Increasing student choice and engagement by maintaining course offerings. We know that right now, some of our electives, because of a grade banded schedule, we need to cancel some of those electives. We have great opportunities

172with programming and we want to ensure that students have that choice. The second piece is looking at students being able to start to explore their interests and their strengths as it relates to career clusters. That helps inform not only as they go into high school but after high school, what happens. The third is supporting that social growth and collaboration that we know is so important, especially at this age and they want social connection, our middle school learners. The fourth is providing dedicated time to ELA, as I've spoken about, aligned to science of reading best practices. And the final piece is responding to student needs in real time so we know that they have that access to daily core and daily electives. So as we went through this process, it was a lot of thinking, a

173lot of discussing, a lot of looking at what the best practice research said. And on the left hand side, you will see the recommendation that we're putting for your discussion tonight. 96 minutes of English language arts daily, 64 math daily, 46 for science, social studies and electives daily and a 32 minute resource. The rationale for these instructional minutes, it adheres to the board strategies that you prioritized. It also, the adjustments in the instructional minutes balance our literacy priorities while maintaining the ability to maintain and preserving the instructional integrity of all subjects. It aligns to the best practice literature on middle school scheduling, high performance benchmark districts, elementary, their daily minutes are 105, and then science of reading best practice. And I want to expand a little bit more on some of those. We've seen this

174chart probably over a year ago when we brought some other prototypes forward. But this chart indicates the alignment of instructional minutes to research. We looked at peer reviewed journal articles on middle school programming and middle school schedule. We looked at peer reviewed literature on literacy and belonging. And we also looked at high performing benchmark districts to come with these ranges. And so the proposal that you see in green would align to the optimal time allocations for best practice per this research. And again, I just want to emphasize that our fifth graders come into sixth grade with 100 and five minutes of literacy. And then as they leave to go to high school, they have 90 minute instructional period of English. That is by semester. So that's a little bit different. When I say we looked

175at our benchmark districts, these are two of the districts that we were very intrigued with. And we had various connections with people there. We also had site visits. And from this, we were intrigued. We know we're a high performing district. We know we work really hard to get there. This is the first time in a long time that both middle schools are at significantly exceeding, which is exciting. When we look at Whitefish Bay and Cedarburg, it still makes us wonder. Their overall report card score is still more advanced than ours. When we look at their middle school target group, their achievement and their growth, we're like, what are you doing there? That's getting at. That's getting at. That's getting at. That's getting at. That's getting at. That's getting at. That's getting at. That's getting at.

176That's getting at. This type of growth. Our target group, just to kind of reframe that, that is essentially, it's like a mini report card. And it looks at just the bottom quartile. There's always going to be a bottom quartile. And so we want to ensure we're growing the bottom quartile. We're doing really good things. But we're curious as to how is Whitefish Bay and Cedarburg continually doing that? When we look at their Wisconsin Forward science and social studies, the percent proficient, we're seeing a lot of improvement. With the model that they are using, they are still pulling in really great results for science and social studies. And what that model looks like is they have about 89 minutes or 87 minutes dedicated to their core. Science and social studies are every other day. We know

177from past prototypes we brought to you that we weren't okay with that and that we wanted that daily connection. And that's part of how it led to what we're putting in front of you today. Moving on, we want to give you an example of a student schedule that's aligned to those two strategies that we prioritized. So, from a student seventh and eighth grade lens, you can see that the student would have a 96-minute, a longer English language arts period. And I'll show you in a moment what that could be. Okay. So, we've been able to give you a sense of what that would be like here. So, I was just going to give you a hint of what could potentially look like. This schedule also prioritizes ELA and math periods. They're longer than the others

178so that we can provide that differentiation during the class time and during resource. It also is a junior high model in which students could be taking their choice electives with seventh and eighth graders together, supporting their growth and their identified career cluster. Okay. discussions I believe it was Sam had asked I want to understand this better from a student perspective when you're you're showing up at a in a 96 minute instructional period because many of us when we went to school it was a lot of lecture you sat and you took your notes that is not at all what this looks like especially for the learners that we have in front of us so this is an example of how that time could be divided I want to point out the routines at the top

179again this is not a lecture every single time you're moving from routine to retreat this is essentially prioritizing predictable structures and routines that are aligned to the science of reading so for middle schoolers protect particularly the generation we have in front of us this predictable structures is extremely important it helps lower the cognitive load of what am i doing next what do I need to get there and so forth it helps lower that cognitive load so that they can focus on the content when they get into that course so they start potentially with the 10 minutes of explicit word study that leads into their reading and language comprehension where they're diving deeper into complex texts you visually on the screen you can see that there's a brain brain breaks I mean you want to ensure

180that you have that in there and then they move into writing it's integrated and then there's differentiation small group and targeted practice at the end these routines exist now they just don't happen on a daily basis because of the times that we have so we're trying to create that flow and integrate those literacy standards into that 96 minute period and also ensuring we have the time to differentiate for our students who who need that this actually reduces the transitions when you think about students getting up getting their their bet or their materials ready moving through the hallway going into a totally different content area having to retune their brain to a new subject this is all packaged in 196 minute block versus getting up shifting and having like reading separate than writing i know years

181and years ago that was something that we did so looking at it from a potential staff schedule you can see teacher a would potentially be an ela teacher obviously and that they would be having those three instructional periods plus a resource plus prep and collaborative time teacher b it says science it also could be elective for the science teachers they are teaching and seeing their students daily they are teaching five courses plus supporting and resource plus collaborative time and prep and then teacher c is a math teacher and math teacher the resource is connected to math but it doesn't mean that the math teacher is the only instructor in resource we would have other supports that come in during that resource time and the math teacher is teaching three courses a day plus their resource

182plus their prep and their collaboration time um we know change is hard i can say you're gonna have to be a math teacher but if you're not you're not gonna have to be a math teacher with a hundred percent confidence that our building administration cared deeply about our students care deeply about our staff and this slide was added to be very explicit about what is the change so when you're looking at an ELA teacher the change is 64 minutes to 96 minutes in it for a instructional period it's teaching four classes a day to teaching three classes a day daily less students per case load for math same thing four to three courses daily it's less students per case load science and social studies it's less minutes per day it moves from 64 to 46

183minutes it's more courses per day four to five so that increases their students in their caseload for electives it's five to six courses daily and increases their students per caseload for special education and interventionist teachers and they in this model would have access to students throughout the day during resource because resource doesn't happen at the same time as it does now it happens multiple times throughout the day so they would have increased access to students who need it the most other things as it says in one of the strategies in seventh and eighth grade this is a junior high model we had talked previously about ensuring that our sixth grade still has a house model we know we want that transition from a fifth grade to a sixth grade to be very smooth and moving

184from a small community to a slightly larger community and that's something we're committed to and this then for our seventh and eighth grade junior high model would include electives and lunches being combined with seventh and eighth grade as I've said many times we know change is difficult and we do if either way the board goes we we will we have planned support we know though for an ELA teacher it's okay now I just have more time how do I teach 96 minutes and keep that engagement keep that energy we have a lot of good tools in our toolbox already AVID has helped us with that but we still need to support that through coaching through training through seeing other sites in action who have these longer blocks for math we continue to work on in

185differentiated instruction to support our student needs for science and social studies it's going to be huge with pacing if this is the decision we know that they are going down in their daily instructional time and we need to re-look at the pacing of our approved curriculum continue with differentiated instruction electives same thing differentiated instruction for sped and interventionists same thing and then in general all of our other providers such as our counselors it's going to change their workflow as well but we I've again I have 100 confidence that we are going to do right by our staff so that we can deliver with our students this is another way to look at some of the change want to get at why the proposed change matters um missed opportunity for greater instructional depth with our current

186schedule the shorter periods limit ability for daily explicit routines and it's the daily piece of that of word study grammar comprehension and comprehension in writing in English language arts missed opportunity for cohesive interventions students right now may be pulled out of core out of our English language arts class to receive intervention or out of electives something that they enjoy to receive intervention with our proposed model that would be extremely minimized the third piece is a miss opportunity to reduce elective cancellations we want to maintain five for example we've had to cancel many because we can't run it the grade banded schedule makes it difficult we can't combine those courses and it doesn't hit our threshold as an example and there are missed opportunities in our current schedule for more cohesive staff collaboration right now many

187of our elective teachers and our interventionists and special education teachers cannot participate when we have common planning time to really dig into what are the student needs because they're they're serving students elsewhere this schedule would have a different approach for cohesive staff collaborate corrupt collaboration excuse me and right now it's a missed opportunity for increased staffing flexibility we know that with our current model about two to three teachers per grade level are usually teaching more than one content area so you might have an English teacher or ELA teacher who's a also teaching a social studies you might have a science teacher who's also teaching a math our math teachers already teach you know multiple courses they might teach pre-algebra and algebra and then I would say about half of them teach at all grade levels

188so this would provide some staffing flexibility it's difficult for staff right now for a science of social studies or an ELA teacher to teach at two grade levels we could still keep them in their main classes because they're already very much a part of our in their main content area and teach at different grade levels a little bit easier regardless if this board decides to move forward with the schedule or not we want to assure that we will continue to focus on the the four bullets on the on the right because we know that's the right work for our students a strategic focus on responding to student needs through differentiation and we don't just mean students who struggle we mean all students a strategic focus on science of reading aligned in all content areas not

189just in ela a strategic focus on writing and leveraging that collaborative structure because we know we're stronger together and we want to ensure our our educators are collaborating together so just regrounding us in the why this three long this three year long program analysis has really been about instructional excellence different learning opportunities and belonging for all students what we're hoping to accomplish with this structural change is what you see on the right a more positive trend continuing that trend and getting an even greater trend maintaining student choice in elective programming providing more intentional opportunities for extension enrichment intervention maintaining integrity of our curriculum in our instructional frameworks increasing staff flexibility and their capacity to meet student needs and maintaining budgetable and their capacity to meet student needs and maintaining budgetable and their capacity to meet

190student needs and maintaining budgetable and their capacity to meet student needs and maintaining budgetable and budget neutrality with staffing so with that i'll turn it over for questions and i do have i'm sorry i should have introduced them um kelly and matt are here our principals and we have over there and we have lindsay and we have liz our associate principals all play a key role in putting this together and obviously thank you before we take board member questions we do have some requests to speak so we'll take those and then board member questions and comments so our first request to speak is larry horn A resident of the district, Lori. Good evening. My name is Lori Horn, current Brookfield resident and also educator. I'm here to urge the board to reject the proposed middle

191school schedule change. The Teaching and Learning Committee proposal highlighted growth in math and ELA. While that's a celebration, it omitted a critical trend. Science and social studies scores are declining, as reported on the WISE-DPI portal, for eighth grade over the last three years of available data, according to forward test scores. Why are we cutting time from subjects that are struggling to bolster subjects that are already succeeding? The proposal ignores the actual problem. The decision to decrease the available time was supposedly based on best practice literature, yet no citations were provided. The impact of cutting daily instruction from 64 to 46 minutes is staggering. It means that after three years of middle school, our students will have received essentially only two years worth of instruction in science and social studies. Beyond the numbers, consider the classroom

192reality. It is really difficult to facilitate a safe, meaningful science lab experience in 46 minutes. Our high school offerings prove that this community values these subjects, with AP courses in science and social studies outnumbering math and English nearly three to one, according to page 16 of the most recent high school course guide. We must align our middle school priorities with the excellence, and the excellence of the high school. I urge the board to reject the proposal as presented from the teaching and learning committee, and please do not decrease our students time in these vital subject areas. And I will leave my data if you'd like to look at it. Thank you, Lori. Our next request to speak is Jose Galvan, not a resident of the district. I have to state that. Jose, you're good. Good

193evening, members of the board. My name is Jose Galvan. I'm an eighth grade social studies teacher, and a building representative for the Elmbrook Education Association. I'm here tonight to speak on behalf of the educators at Pilgrim Park and Wisconsin Hills Middle Schools. What brings us here is the proposal to increase ELA minutes by 50 percent while cutting science and social studies minutes by nearly a third. We're speaking up today because we want what is best for students, and it comes down to three main concerns. First, cutting science and social studies is a step backward. This reduction effectively removes a year of instruction in these subjects. This undermines the very foundation that helps our students succeed in their future AP classes and their launch strands. Second, literacy belongs in every classroom. Elmbrook is rightly committed to

194the science of reading. That research tells us that real fluency and comprehension are built through engagement with complex informational texts, the kinds that students tackle in science and social studies. We cannot improve literacy by cutting it from half of our core subjects. Third, this plan abandons the house system. Houses are the heartbeat of our schools. They provide students with a sense of belonging, and they provide teachers with insight and agility to respond to students' needs. Our students are successful because we treat their social-emotional needs with the same intentionality as their academic ones. By working together, we've created something special, schools where high academic achievement and student well-being go hand in hand. On the surface, this proposal appears to just move minutes, but by doing so, it risks dismantling the community and the academic balance that

195makes us special. We therefore ask the board to carefully consider not just what is gained, but also the incredibly important things we stand to lose by this proposal. Thank you. Thank you, Jose. Our next request to speak is Tom Friesmeyer, resident of the district. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Tom Friesmeyer. I am a Pilgrim Park teacher, and I have a parent of three of the three boys, two at East, one at Pilgrim Park. I'm in my 21st year teaching social studies and my ninth year here in the district. I love working at Elmbrook. I love it for all the same reasons I have my boys becoming products of the school district's exemplary education system. I'm concerned about the proposed change to the school today's schedule, which

196includes an ELA block of 96 minutes. I've been in the district for the last 10 years. I've been trying to get my kids to be paid for a two week day for my last six weeks. I know I've been doing it for a year, but I've been getting my kids here twice. These steps are a relief. The last three years I've gotten is the amount of work I've spent on the school's education system. That does not mean that we aren't getting our students back on track. And I am not scared to say that I can't. I can't. I can't. I'm not. I am not. I am. And I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. that have

197never been a part of my previous teaching experiences. We regularly engage in analyzing student work. We've implemented early warning system for struggling students. We regularly work with target groups. We are now an avid school. We've aligned our writing rubrics and implemented reading instruction in all subjects because of our knowledge of the science of reading. These are the reasons our performance is now record-setting. To be honest, though, we have yet to master these strategies and still have room for growth in those areas. Thus, we haven't reached the summit of the work we are in. I'm not qualified to be an expert on the effectiveness of a longer block of ELA on resulting testing scores. I've heard that other higher-performing districts have these extended blocks, but what they do not have are our educators nor our students

198in our community. We are unique in that fashion. And thus, non-comparable. I do not believe that the extended ELA block and less science and social studies instruction can coexist with all the successful new strategies that I just previously listed. Why should we go down another road when we are seeing success on the road that we have not yet fully traveled? The change in schedule disrupts many of the established initiatives or negatively affects the capacity of the teachers to do all things. We have already invested in and are just beginning to do so well. This change in the schedule and effectiveness will destroy our ability to help all learners effectively, including those high achievers we work to extend. The students we share in the house system are at greater risk of being lost in the shuffle.

199The work of the science and social studies teachers have done within their content and implementing real-life application of reading will be devalued and lost in these shortened periods. We are already great. Thank you, Tom. Our next request is from Dr. Tom. Our next request to speak is Pradeep B. I am not going to try to pronounce the last name. You can pronounce it when you get up here, resident of the district. Good evening, all of you. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to come here and talk. My name is Dr. Pradeep Bhagavatula. I am a professor of dentistry at Market University School of Dentistry. Along with my wife and some of the other parents in the school district, we coach and train students and children to participate in science competitions. They go to Science

200B, Science C, and Science C. We have had good success with that. I am here to share my concerns that my previous speakers have shared with you. We want the board to reject the proposal because cutting science time by a third may not augur well for the children and their futures. To that effect, I have created and circulated a petition, which almost 60 of the parents in the school district have signed. I turned in that list of parents to the board. I also turned in a longer format of my presentation today. We do, as all parents, acknowledge the importance of having strong literacy skills, the ability to understand, read, and write English is very important. But at the same time, we want to draw your attention to two data points, which my previous speakers have

201already done. One, even with that 64-minute instruction, we want to make sure that the students are able to understand and read English. Even with that 64-minute instruction time, the scores for English have seen a significant improvement. So it does tell us that that 64-minute instruction block is good for us, and we can go through and continue on that path. The second data point that I want to draw your attention to is the school is comparing our benchmarks with Cedarburg and Whitefish Bay, and we are more than 10 points below them with science. And if you are 10 points away, and you decrease your score, and you decrease the science curriculum further, it's only going to lead us on a different path where our students are not competitive in the current job market where there will

202be a lot of science-related jobs out there. And the second thing I wanted to make sure I mention here, middle school is a place where students start developing keen interests in science. They like biology, they like physics, and that would probably lead them into advanced placement courses in the high school and then into STEM careers. And science is not just about science or careers, et cetera. It teaches us a very important life skill, which is critical thinking. And unless the children start thinking, start questioning, all of the things that we have seen today as part of the presentation, there were a lot of people talking about how the students organized and they were questioning an initiative that happened in Brookfield Central last week. So all of that comes from questioning. So please, please, please, even

203if the board were to vote today, I request you to have an exit ramp. Please try to evaluate the outcomes of what has been done. Try to have an exit plan to roll back to wherever we are. And also, maybe... Thank you, Pradeep. Our next request to speak is Julie Hargraves, a resident of the district. Hello, everyone. For those who don't know me, my name is Julie Hargraves. I'm a proud parent of a seventh grader at PPMS and a fourth grader at Dixon. I'm also the current treasurer of the Dixon PTO and an assistant coach for the Elmbrook district-wide science B club that Pradeep just mentioned. I'm also a software engineer who has had a lifelong interest in STEM. I want you to imagine this. Maybe you've already had something like this happen. Your child

204bursts through the door after school, eyes wide with excitement, words tumbling out faster than they can speak. Mom, Dad, we grew pea plants in class today, and mine is the tallest in the whole class. Can we plant them in the backyard? Oh, my God. These are the moments I live for as a parent. We saw earlier today the Parkinson's research, all of the kids in science B club going to nationals. My kids don't just like science. They love it. It lights them up in a way that few other subjects do. It's hands-on, it's discovery, and it's wonder. And right now in middle school, the exact time when curiosity peaks and identities start forming, that spark is everything. But if we cut science instruction to pour more into ELA, we risk extinguishing that flame. I've watched

205my children come alive in the lab, asking questions, failing experiments, and trying again, collaborating with friends to solve real problems. Science isn't just facts. It's where they build resilience, where they learn that mistakes are part of discovery, where they feel capable and smart. Reducing these precious hours would steal those joy-filled confidence-building experiences. It would leave them less engaged, less hopeful, and research shows engaged students are far more likely to feel optimistic about their futures and earn better grades overall. Beyond the joy, these skills are life-changing. Critical thinking, analyzing data, problem-solving under uncertainty, these are optional extras. They're essential for navigating adulthood in a world shaped by science and technology. When kids tinker, question, and experiment, they develop the grit and curiosity that fuel innovation, careers, and informed citizenship. Cutting science short-changes them at the very

206moment they're deciding who they want to become. It tells them their passions don't matter as much as test scores. ELA is crucial. We all know strong reading and writing open doors. But we don't have to rob one to pay the other. Our children deserve a balanced education that honors both literacy, and the wonder of discovery. Don't dim the light in their eyes. Science is the foundation of our society. And it is the one thing that is changing faster than anything else. Our children don't have the luxury to learn it later unless we want them to be too far behind. Critical thinking, logic, the scientific method are what build our world today and is still building it. Thank you, Julie. Our next request to speak is Carleen Friesmeier, a resident of the district. I'm a last

207minute add. I come with three different backgrounds to this district. Number one, I'm the very proud wife of a teacher for Elmbrook. And when he tells me something is important and could be problematic for his students, I'm listening. And you should be too. Number two, I am the mom of three sons who will all have completed their education through Pilgrim Park by the time this would be enacted, if it were enacted. And I still feel that strongly, that this is a bad idea. And number three, I'm a physician assistant in emergency medicine, and I'm a giant science nerd. And I love science. I participate in the district with Launch Medicine and Healthcare all of the career days and feel very firmly that the itch for science knowledge starts at a very young age. I also

208stand in support of the house concept. As a mom, how reassuring it is to me to know that there is a small collective of teachers who work together and know my kid inside and out. So when there is something traumatic or all the things that happen to all of our kids, there is a small group of teachers who are focused just on my son. What is most concerning to me, however, about this new proposal is the lack of formal involvement by your teachers. I hear you say this has been a three-year process. Most of them were unaware of this until last month. That is a problem. I was at the gym tonight with two teachers, one at East and one at Dixon, who had no idea what I was talking about. When I talked about

209coming to the board meeting. If you don't think it also affects the teachers who have these students earlier and later, you are misguided. But most problematic is the middle educators who did not have a formal involvement in this process. I am not an expert in middle school education, and respectfully, neither are you, but these people are. And so we need to ask them and involve them in their process. You have experts right here. Please consult them. Thank you, Carleen. Our next request to speak is Alec. I should put on my glasses. Shoemaker, sorry. Not a resident of the district, but here tonight. No, I read that every time. Pilgrim Park. I am also the department chair as the language arts department chair as well. Co-chair, sorry. I believe that every kid should be growing and

210learning and reading and writing, but I do not want that to happen at the detriment to social studies and science. I think today you saw what our science and social studies curriculums in middle school have done for kids in high school. We have a kid that is, we have the geography piece, a kid helping with Parkinson's. There are great things happening. My worry is that if we cut those, that we will then be sending kids to high school that do not have the background knowledge to excel in high school as well. And in elementary school, kids are not taking science and social studies classes every day. To improve in reading comprehension, you need to have the background knowledge to do so. I think that could also impact the students at our schools. I think these

211teachers are doing a great job. We just were sent an email today that Pilgrim Park had its highest report card to date. So there are a lot of great things happening at the middle schools. I would like you to consider maybe having more teacher perspective on this and moving forward. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Alec. Our next request to speak is Elizabeth Tice, a resident of the district. Hi, my name is Elizabeth Tice. I have three kids at Burleigh. I also coach robotics. So when I was looking at slide eight when we were comparing Elmbrook to our benchmark schools, I noticed that we had, you're showing the science and the social studies, Wisconsin Forward proficiency. And Elmbrook is lower, even before potentially reducing minutes. But the ELA proficiency is missing. And I would

212be interested in seeing that. ELA and math, before we put so much more into it, I'd like to see how we compare. Another thing that is interesting, although this would reduce the minutes of science, is that those other two schools have larger blocks for science and social studies. And I wonder if there is a reason to that and maybe would be interested in diving deeper into that. Although the proposal as it stands does not include that here. I also believe, and I don't think you said it directly, but the question would be, will we have fewer science teachers in the school since there will be fewer minutes delivered? Another question, will the ELA curriculum need to have a major overhaul to fill that time? Or are we just moving interventions and extensions into this larger

213block and just diving deeper into existing curriculum? I think that's a missed opportunity, especially with talking about the breadth of technical literacy and technical fields. As Elmbrook tries to prepare our students for the future, I think one thing I as a student, and looking back at the ELA curriculum from a few years ago, that may be missing and is an opportunity for improvement is looking at fields like law, the medical field and engineering fields, and are we really preparing our kids who are going to enter those fields properly with literacy and those sorts of technical documents? I think that this is going to be a hard sell with the number of parents in our field that are in STEM fields. And you can see that by the parental support of robotics and other STEM extracurriculars.

214And I think especially this is a hard sell because the data presented here doesn't back that up. So thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth. Our next request to speak is Lisa C. Okay, I'm going to do it. Campanetchi. Did I say it right? Campanetchi. Campanetchi. That's right. They call me Ms. Camp. No snapping. You're going to distract me. I'm a last minute ad because I was inspired by my colleagues. I've been teaching for 22 years. I've been teaching in this district for 20 years. It's my birthday. I've been the most influential teacher. I've been recognized for that for three years as a middle school teacher, which I'll tell you, you're sitting in a sea of high school teachers in that banquet. My concern is connection. And my concern is depth as a science teacher. I want

215you guys to picture five people that you know really well. You two. Then I want you to picture 10 you know really well. 20, what makes them tick? What does their face look like when they're upset or when they're cute? I'm curious. Now picture 50. Now picture 100. We do that every year. Over 100. No, no, no. I know it's a good point. My point is you're going to ask us to go up to about 130. And I am really bad with names and you can ask my students because I'm like, that's 100. And then that's 20. And then that's whatever that percentage is more. You can ask the math teachers. 25, 20% more. That's a lot. And why do I know them so well? Kelly, I love Kelly. She's like, Lisa, your thing is

216connection. It is. Because I get them for so long during the day. And if I have 45 minutes in and out, in and out, in and out, plus more children, I will not get to know them as well. I'll want to. But it will be a cost. And so I just want you guys to be aware of that. And I'm going to ask you to think about this. And then the depth. As a science teacher and with this amazing curriculum that we've adopted, I have to stop bringing up ideas. Yes. But we have to keep learning. They're so excited. As I was looking at Lisa's, sorry, Dr. Riller, she earned that. Her presentation and the reading of like, I was like, well, I didn't know that they were doing this. Like other teachers. I'm like,

217I can do that. If you want me to do the reading things that they had on there with allocated time, I was surprised that we weren't offered the opportunity to say, could you do this in your science class? Because the answer is yes. I could have articles. I could have these things where they have context and enrichment to add to our curriculum. Thank you. Happy birthday, Lisa. I failed to mention that Lisa is a professor. I failed to mention that Lisa is not a resident of the district. Like I did on all the others. But Lisa did survive my kids at Pilgrim Park. She survived the wheelers. So thank you. Happy birthday. With that, that concludes our comments on this agenda item. And I'd like to turn it over to board member questions and comments

218at this time. Wes. One question and my apologies if I missed it. And maybe we don't have an answer on it. But do we know in Cedarburg or Whitefish Bay, do we know if they've ever transitioned to a longer period of time? And was there, did we see a dramatic increase in their scores after that? Or is there data to kind of show the before and afters of a change? We don't know. I'm sorry. We don't know right now when they switched to their three block. So we just looked at their last three years of trend data. We don't know. And I think we're going to have to do a little bit of testing. Thank you. Christy. I want to thank everybody for hanging in for this conversation tonight. I thought I was doing you

219a favor by keeping you on the agenda. Maybe you would have rather waited two weeks than stay this long. I remember the original presentation. I saw a lot of the positives there. I saw the work that's been put in by our administrators. I have learned a lot from your presentations tonight and your comments tonight. And I've learned a lot from emails I've received. I've gotten a lot of questions now. I've been a teacher. I haven't been a teacher for 20 years, but I've been a teacher and I've been a teacher of all ages. I also am a Pilgrim Park grad. Yay. So I was in school at the time when there was an English social studies block that was long. And we were fine. And I know that scheduling is really hard work. And I

220know that it's really one of the most complex Rubik's cubes that administrators and administrative teams have to deal with in a building to make sure everything fits. I am the mother of a middle school teacher. And I'm a mother of a music teacher who has hundreds of students in her caseload. And I know that that's different than having half of those students in a caseload because it's grades. It's not just faces. It's grades. It's recognition of improvement and all kinds of things. So I hear you all. And I do think you're the reason our students succeed. It happens in the classroom. That's where the magic is happening. I have some questions. It's a discussion tonight. And so I don't expect all these answers to come tonight. But I would like to hear answers to these

221things. And my first is how were classroom teachers included in the construction of this plan? I did not realize that maybe we could have done more there. But it sure sounds like we could have. And I would like to know exactly how that was done. That's a question. You want to take them one at a time? Okay. Yeah. Do you guys want to come up here, too? So we at the beginning of this process, Matt and Kelly, and I'm talking three years ago, Matt and Kelly had run two different sessions with all of their staff to get their feedback for a potential new schedule. And we used those themes through every prototype. The prototypes that we showed you in the 24, 25. Board work sessions and the one that we came through tonight. So when

222we in September decided, given your direction, that we needed to create another prototype, the one thing that we did is we took some questions to our teacher roundtable to see would this make more sense, would this make more sense. And it was we didn't have a prototype developed. We were using their input to help develop the prototype. So we had essentially about a month and a half to come up with a prototype. We didn't take it back to the staff and say, do you like this? That wasn't our intention. We were really diving into the research that I explained earlier. In December, I know that both Matt and Kelly had a staff meeting where they regrounded in the direction the board gave us at that September work session. The two strategies to use when developing

223a new schedule. And they talked about some of the successes. And I think that's what we're going to be doing. So we're going to be working on some of the successes that I shared tonight with our three-year journey with this. In January, they have, I think, three different times communicated via their staff newsletter. They've also been working on when they connect with department chairs, what are things they're hearing, what are questions. But, no, we never took it back to the staff to get like a like, do you like or not like, because we could anticipate there's always going to be perceived winners and losers with that. Okay. So they're prototypes, but they never saw the outcome is what you're saying until we actually had this plan with the minutes. I didn't say. Where's the gap

224here because I'm hearing they were included, but I'm also hearing loud and clear that they weren't sufficiently included. I'm saying that there were steps that we took to communicate. Okay. And there were steps, which is different than obviously getting feedback on the prototype. Right. Okay. They had steps to communicate. Thank you. Let me go on to a few other questions. I remember listening to the approval of the new science, the relatively new now science curriculum, and how it is very experience heavy and what an incredible positive that is. I now hear that the ability to fully utilize that wonderful asset is compromised when you're trying to do something in 46. Right. That really concerns me. 46 minutes isn't 46 minutes of teaching. You don't start the minute they walk in the door. There's transition time

225on both ends. So it's less than that. And I think that's something I would be concerned about. As far as the science of reading and the ELA needs, we have yet to see the children who started in the new curriculum in elementary school even come to middle school. Okay. To know where they are performing. They may be performing great. Much better than our previous metrics. And this may then have been an overreaction to needing to add ELA time because we're not comparing, you know, the over and downs grade by grade. I've got children in my family who are fourth graders at Dixon. They will be at Pilgrim Park in a couple of years. They will have had the benefit of three or four years of the new science of reading curriculum. So they may be

226flying at that point. And yet we're still going to give them even more in middle school, which isn't necessarily preparation for the high school curriculum. So I'm a little concerned about that. And as a teacher, and I was an English teacher, reading instruction, when I was at Pilgrim Park, there was reading, language arts, and literature as separate disciplines. So take that for what it's worth. But reading proficiency at some point should be transitioning to content reading. So I appreciate that there sounds like a willingness to have worked creatively and proactively with transitioning some of that ELA work to what will be the work of their future. Content reading in high school and college. And God forbid, like I had two grad school where I had to read things three times a week. I'm not sure.

227I had to read things three times to even understand what I was reading. So there may be some room to tighten up the ELA time. Again, I'm throwing you a curveball because that means going back to maybe the drawing board with the schedule. But if we can work to make both of those things hum, because this is a huge addition of ELA minutes. It's huge. And it may be so large once we find out the kids don't have the need for the growth that we saw when we looked at this a year and a half ago. Right. Or whenever it was. We may be or more. We may be able to actually address some of these what I think are significant concerns about shortening time in social studies and science. I think that resonates and

228again, and I haven't hit the one that resonates with me the most and that is belonging. My kids went through the house system at Pilgrim Park and Pilgrim Park was hard to go through. My oldest daughter was there when there were trailers. Because it was so crowded. The house system saved those kids but for an opportunity. And they were seventh and eighth only. They didn't even have sixth grade there then. Because there were too many kids. But the house system is kind of like we've talked before. I've talked to Mark about this. One of the great things about this district is the sense of belonging to a school. Our kids have my little Dixon dragons. They love Dixon. Right. They love Mr. Sadowski. And they feel the same way about me. They love me. They

229love me. They love me. They love me. They love me. They love me. They love me. They love me. They love me. And they feel the same at Swanson. They feel the same at Brook El. They feel the same at all our elementary schools. And that is such an incredible community asset to feel that good about your school. The house system is how kids feel like that at Wisconsin Hills and Pilgrim Park. And I don't really want to compromise that. Did I hear that sixth grade would still have a house system? Seventh and eighth would not with this plan? That's what we discussed in September when the board said they valued a sixth grade house system. Okay. And then the strategy was a seventh grade. So we followed the strategy. Sure. So I appreciate that.

230And we probably said that. But what I'm hearing tonight is that there's greater, perhaps a greater value on maintaining that through seventh and eighth grade than I might have previously thought. So that's something to be considered. The higher case load, you know, and I'm looking at a science teacher who's going to teach five sections in a day. That's grueling. That's a lot. And I think that's something to be considered. And shorter periods of time, that's when you're looking at evaluating more students on high-level intellectual work. I think that's something I would hope we could find a better solution to. So I'm skeptical at this point that I could approve it as it is. I really need to hear how we might more creatively address some of these things. And I'd sure like our classroom teachers

231to be part of that decision. Finally, just two quick things, more of a board thing. First of all, there was a fleeting reference to start times as something we're talking about. Start times have nothing to do with the program discussion. They are separate. And the start time task force never and intentionally excluded discussing program. So one is not dependent on the other. I want everybody in the community to be clear about that. And secondly, I heard tonight that there's a petition that was submitted. I heard earlier today in our earlier discussions, which seems like a really long time ago now, that there is a petition that has been submitted of 850 names. As a board member, I want to see, I haven't seen either of those petitions. And I'd like to see those petitions. And

232that's all I have. Thank you, Mary. Jean and then Sam. Thank you. I appreciate all the work that's gone into this and the long amount of time you have been working on this. I would appreciate also the support. I appreciate the snapping and all that, cheering and everything. Please save that for the next speaker. I would be interested to understand if we're going to move from the health system to the junior high model in seventh and eighth, what sort of FTE impact that is, if there is an FTE reduction that is part of that, and perhaps as we've heard about the number of students and the amount of time that teacher or the amount of sections that a teacher has during the day, if there is any rearranging of that. So is there any kind

233of FTE impact to changing from the house to junior high and seventh and eighth? So the net overall FTE impact would be neutral. But there would be some shifting within teacher certification. So we would have some teachers, one or two at each grade level, one or two, I'm sorry, in each department, that might teach science that may need to shift. But we would need to teach math because we will have more math FTE and less science FTE. The same would be true for social studies. We would have less social studies FTE, more ELA FTE, but in the end it would be neutral. Does that answer your question, Jean? It does. It does. But I think I was impressed with the conversation around the number of students and the short amount of time we're in contact

234with them. So that's something that gives me hope. Yes. Social studies and science would be five sections. ELA and math would be three. So when you think about, we average a class size of around 27 students in each classroom. So you can do the math there. Okay. Thank you. And then one other question that I have has to do with when and how we'd evaluate this. What metrics would we use to look at the success rate and at what points in time would we be looking at them? Yeah. If this is approved, we would be creating an information center. We would be creating an implementation plan. And some of our key performance indicators that we use, such as student achievement, we would continue to use those. In addition, part of that implementation plan, we would

235have different fidelity goals that we wanted to ensure were being met during the implementation stage. So for sure there's strategic planning around the implementation. And also we would continue to use our student achievement data. Okay. Thank you. And I think that's all I have. Thank you. I want to say thank you to Lindsey and Liz and Kelly and the lone guy, Matt, for all your work that you guys have put into this. I appreciate that. And I think it's really also super impressive that all the teachers have come out tonight in support of each other, in support of just to voice their concerns. It certainly is a reflection of the love for students and the love for the district. And I do truly appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. This was originally presented to the

236committee in January. Does that sound about right? The first draft was presented in January. We had a discussion phase, an action phase. And now we're here at this as well. As the chair of the committee, I have heard zero concerns by teachers. I have always my personal cell phones on the website. My email address is there. I'm, you know, I would love to have heard about this prior to this. would have loved to have heard about this prior to this meeting to be honest with you because I'm a little blindsided by this I what I've seen and heard I it seems like a really good idea and I would highly encourage teachers and the team to contact me to help educate me so I can have an understanding as well here's where I bring into

237this today and what I've what my history tells me and and my understanding is is that I approach education with you know the the classical trivium approach and that's something that as well as has really resounded well with me you know Dorothy Sayers wrote an article in 1947 talking about the lost tools of learning in that she breaks down the three stages of learning the grammar the dialectic and the rhetoric stage rhetoric stage the the grammar stage is really absorption phase of of the grammar stage is really absorption phase of of the grammar stage of the eld where kids you know between primarily K through fourth grade do the majority of absorption they're not thinkers you know of course they have unique thoughts and all of that but they're not gonna help participate in that

238so you you're filling them with rote knowledge and it's in those phases you might teach them math facts and phonics and some schools Latin declensions and you know history timelines and that's where you would really learn that because the memorization gives them the ability on their own would hit the rhetoric and the dialectic stage to be thinkers and use the knowledge of years that they've learned that knowledge to transfer it into that argument. Part of that and really the dialectic stage typically is between the 11 and 14, so you're fifth through eighth grade and that's where you begin to introduce science and you begin to introduce social studies to of course pique their curiosity and they start to give them some of the facts from that science as well. This is where I've come from

239and I've seen it implemented with extreme success across the United States and schools are seeing some major improvements. I get, you know, there's also a concern with the way we've done things have been really comfortable and I get that fact that sometimes when changes are brought they're hard, we don't like it and you know we certainly can come up with a lot of ways why we don't like that and it makes sense. You know when I first was presented to me I was against it. I was against this because I thought this was more of a block scheduling thing and you know and I realized very quickly that that's not what this approach was. I would not at all be, I'm 100% not in favor of block scheduling for certainly not the middle school and

240so I would never be able to support that. But when that was explained to me and I saw the higher focus on ELA which is the cornerstone and I, you know, someone said tonight and I apologize I don't agree fully with that that I don't agree fully with that that I don't agree fully with that that I don't agree fully with that that I don't agree fully with that that I don't agree fully with that that I don't agree fully with that that I don't agree fully with that that that science is a foundation of our society. Science is important, it is extremely important. The foundation of our society is thinkers and people that have the knowledge to explain and understand and the critical thinking learned by you know how well you've learned facts and

241how well you've learned information to be able to have that thinking. Some of our greatest writers to me have been our founding fathers, people early on in history which you're like where on earth did they learn to write the way they write? It's impressive. the thinking abilities. I mean, I was listening to the Hamilton soundtrack today because I'm so inspired by what people like that were thinkers. And so what I see in this programming is focus more on the core subjects that the students of this age need the most. And I really believe that the science and the foundation that you guys have brought, it makes sense to me. I know you've done your homework. I know it's a big push and a big ask of all the teachers in the school district, and I'm

242also very open to hearing more information. I am not dead-set on this at all. I am very open-minded to hearing more. I would love to hear more. I would love to learn more. But right now where I stand, this makes sense. I know Kelly and Matt have done a lot of work to bring this here. I know their love for it, for students, their desire to help them learn and understand. Okay. Great. and to be good citizens is really the desired outcome. So what I've seen so far, I would say I stand in support of this, and I would certainly be open to hearing more feedback that maybe I'm missing something. I'm open to saying I can learn more. And, again, science is important. I'm an engineer. I'm passionate about, you know, I remember in

243fifth grade learning how to put a battery together, and that sparked an incredible interest in me forever. And I also wish I would have spent a lot more time learning to write better and learning to read more and become that deeper thinker and understanding poetry, things that didn't happen until later in life because it wasn't at my school at the time. So I appreciate the work. I'd love to hear more, and right now this is where I would stand on this. Thank you. Cheryl? Thank you, and thank you for the presentation. I thank the teachers also for educating us. I have had teachers reach out to me since the, since I guess the February meeting must have been when we passed it on for board consideration. And since then, I have had teachers, and I've

244met with Lisa and Emily about some of those questions, and I really thank you for the time. I have one question. I received an e-mail from the, Elmbrook Education Association with a survey of how the teachers were feeling about this proposal. And there were 94 responses, 74.6% rate of response. And it appears that there was a high rate of, of disapproval. And I was just wondering if you have seen this survey, or is this something that you have not seen? That survey was shared by a board member with us yesterday. So that's the first time we heard of a survey. We were not consulted. It was not collaborative to work with our building administration. So that was the first we saw of that survey. Okay. I would have some more questions. And if, if we

245could have possibly listening to, or talking about some of the results here. And further discussion on what some of the teachers shared with us today, and the parents. Wes, anything? Not really anything in particular. It just feels like there's a lot of, I don't know if it's miscommunication, whether it's just people not feeling heard. And it, I don't know. It seems like there's a lot of questions that remain to be answered, I guess, a little bit. So I'm struggling with the, like, I know we usually go discussion action. I'm struggling how that moves forward without more deliberation. And so I think, I don't know, I feel like it seems like more time is needed to really ensure that everyone's heard and that everyone feels comfortable. And I think about it more in the change management

246context. And I appreciate all the work. I mean, clearly this is, I mean, as I was thinking through the presentation and working down the slides, I was like, oh, it's next. Oh, it's next. So I really appreciate all the work that went into it. Clearly took a lot of time. But it, it feels like there's, I don't know, it feels like there's a disconnect somewhere. And I feel like it would be nice to hammer that out before moving forward at this point. Thanks, Wes. I'll share a couple of comments. I do have a couple of questions. One, does this change at all the elective minutes or the number of electives kids can take? I mean, I know there would be some opportunities. You said something about electives. Yeah, this doesn't change the programming that we

247have for electives. What happens now, because of the grade-banded schedules, oftentimes we can't run when a student, for example, Latin. If we have seven kids. In seventh grade sign up for Latin, and then there's 12 kids in eighth grade. We can't combine that because of the grade-banded schedule. So we have to cancel Latin. And ultimately what that does is that if you don't take it in seventh grade, then you're not going to be able to take in eighth grade because we don't offer the second half of Latin in eighth grade. So that's just an example that I was sharing that we have great programming, but we have to make, you know, fiscal decisions of canceling electives when we don't have, when we can't hit the threshold of students. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

248Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Thank you. And then implementation of this wouldn't be fall upcoming. It would be the following fall, right? Right. So would there be, would it cause a, you know, significant delay if we took a, I mean, I know our goal is by April, 2026. I mean, I hate to miss goals. And there certainly is an election going on. There could be, there will be, it'd be at least one new board member, right? So it's more people to bring up to speed. Does it set us back if we take a couple of months to make this decision

249or vote yes or no on it? Like to have more discussion. Yeah. You know, it's been talked about tonight. So I guess we're looking for guidance from you. So this was a goal that was set by our board in 23, 24. We looked at our, our data. Our board was very concerned with our middle schools and they wanted us to really hone in on that. And so our team has been working on that since 23, 24. We've come with a variety of, of changes that have been made. We've seen really great results. We've also come a number of times with different proposals that get shot down, quite frankly. So when we came to you in September, we, we really wanted to make sure that we were hitting the mark. So we came to you with

250some decisions that we wanted you to help make on the front end. So that when we came to you with a proposal as we did tonight, that we were hitting the mark on the, the, what you're asking us to do, which was a middle, a junior high model for seventh and eighth grade. So that we could encourage students to participate in a variety of electives. It allowed for some math programming decisions. It was going to create more opportunities for our kids. And then also with instructional minutes that we stay within the research, those minutes. And so we, we delivered on that. And I guess I, like what I would really need to know if we're going to continue to work on this, I just, I guess to what end, I don't know what solution we

251bring forward that, and what we're doing right now is, is working. We are getting great results. Our teachers are doing amazing. Yeah. We're doing amazing things with our kids. Is what we're doing, is that good enough? Is the point some of our teachers made, like we're on a trajectory? Do we, do we wait and see? But I think for our team to continue to explore the amount of time and resources that have been poured into this work, I guess we just would appreciate some, right, like some guidance around what that would look like. Sure. So let's go ahead and hit the mark. Let me finish my comments. Yeah. So I'm going to be fully transparent, and Lisa, do not send me a hate message. Where is she? But. Right here. What? Yeah. Don't, don't send

252me any bad emails over this. So I've been a part of this journey for three years. And I also want to say publicly, I hate moving the goalpost. It happens sometimes when we're doing board work and as the board president, you know, when board members start shifting their positions and so we've done a lot of work. So I'd like to say first, thank you to our team. It is so much work. And thank you to the teachers that came tonight because it's, it's given me positive things. So I'll be fully transparent. When we first started this three years ago, I'm a science teacher. I'm a middle school science teacher. I did not want to cut the middle school science minutes. I was pretty against it. Then in the fall, you asked the same question and

253I'm teaching currently at a charter school in Milwaukee. And the science minutes that we get, we teach are 45 minutes a day. We're using the same curriculum that Elmbrook's using. Okay. I love the curriculum. It's so great. But I'm on, I'm on that 45 minute schedule and math and ELA are 90 minutes a day. Social studies and science are 45 at the school at which I teach and I see it working. So I'm being, again, fully transparent for the teachers in the room to understand where Scott Wheeler was. I said, I'm interested in this and I don't want to move the goalpost on you. I don't want you to feel like it will now. He's being more. He's being wishy-washy. But now I'm wondering, just echoing again some of the comments I've heard, I wonder

254if there's this time to get some more questions answered and to do a little more thinking. My position hasn't changed. I'm at a school where I see it work. But I'm a science teacher. I mean, I know, I know that feeling. So when I hear the teachers talk about the love of science and I see it in kids and my teaching load is about 100 students. So I get that connection piece. Which is something I didn't consider. Right? So if we're increasing these classes. I mean, when I see it on the screen tonight, when I'm looking at my laptop and I start to see, oh gosh, if that were my schedule, I mean, five classes a day. Is that enough prep time? I mean, I'm starting to think, to see it visually a little differently.

255Again, not changing my mind because I don't want anyone to be irritated or feel like I'm a wishy-washy board member. And certainly my other board members are like, Scott, you said in the fall. Because I did say that in the fall. I am at a school where it works. This kind of schedule. But I would maybe like some time and some more discussion. Meaning I'm not sure I'm ready to vote on it in April. And that's why I'm asking the question, what if it is delayed? And again, I understand that we're going to have at least one new board member. Potentially three. And so does that like throw a wrench into it? Like trying to educate new board members and bring them up to speed because I don't want to lose the momentum of the

256work that's been done. I don't want to brush that aside. I just want to consider. That's where I'm at personally. Okay. So it's a tricky answer. If we need to continue on the schedule, then I need to do, I have a lot of work to do in the next month to get ready to decide where I'm at on this issue and how I can vote. Again, I see it working. And I know that we've done some great things. But I probably need a little more information on the benchmarks. Some of the questions about the scores. So understanding better how it's worked for them. Is that the reason behind the test score increase? Because there's a significant difference on the forward there. So does that help? Or how long have they been on it? Is it

257a long enough trend line to say? Because we've also got the elementary. It's a good point that I hadn't thought of that we've got those elementary students coming up in the science arena. So all the comments that have been here, I really want to appreciate, say thank you also to my fellow board members for asking good questions. For the teachers for giving me a lot of things to think about. I've been taking notes. I don't know if I can process it all in one month and be ready to vote. That's where I'm at. Yeah. I think that's fair. We wanted, when we met in September and we asked our questions and what we needed to deliver on with this board. Correct. We wanted to deliver on our strategic goal for the district with this board.

258Knowing that's going to be different if we don't move forward in March. Understand that. I don't want to move forward with something that we're not comfortable with. But you're moving goal post point. Yeah. Right. And that captures what I was trying to state. The frustration you're feeling? I get it. I understand. Yeah. Okay. And if it's status quo is the answer, then status quo is the answer. But I don't like to continue to bring new ideas and never will everyone be happy with an idea. Right? Correct. There is no perfect model. If there was, everyone would be doing it. Thank you, Emily. I'm out of ideas. You're out of ideas? I'm running out of ideas. Got you. Okay. Mary. Well, if that's true, then that's a vote for the status quo. So in my mind.

259But that has not been presented to me as a board member in the two years I've been on the board. And I was on the TLC for a year. And I hear your frustration, Emily. I totally. What hasn't been presented? That the status quo is doing a fine job and that this might be disruptive enough that our experts recommending to the board, you are the experts. We're looking for your recommendation, not just to have you follow one piece of a goal about ELA. I certainly would never have seen this decision that way. I'm not sure if I missed that in the presentation. But I'm hearing a board mandate that this was what we wanted. But we didn't have all the information to know what the consequences would be until we really heard from the sources.

260And now I have. So I sense your frustration. I understand it. But when you know more, you have to adapt. And I guess, you know, this originally came through in 23, 24. I wasn't on the board until 24. So I may have missed the front end. We had a different TLC chair for two years of those three years we've been talking about this. She's no longer here. So we have had changes to the makeup of this group. And that may have changed. We've rolled out science of reading. And we still don't have longitudinal metrics to know that we might find ourselves having gone, oh, we kind of overdid on the ELA minutes. Is that fair? I mean, to be talking about. Well, and I would say, like, the presentation started with all of the highlights

261of all the amazing things that are happening. Right. Like, the point was we're not broken. Correct. Correct. And this isn't a criticism of the status quo. So to say that I was hiding that and that we're trying to bring it into ELA. No. Oh, no, no. No. That's certainly not my intent. Not at all. Not at all. But we were presented with a lot of new information tonight. And I feel I was presented with a lot of new information tonight. And I would feel that I wasn't being responsible in my role here if I didn't take the new information into consideration before we started. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it wasn't before we started. And I just feel we should be taking all of that information into consideration before we locked ourselves into what is

262a relatively significant change. So I don't think, I mean, that's why we're still discussing it. We haven't locked into a plan yet. And if we're not deadline driven in the next month, I guess we need to look at this versus the status quo. and talk to our teachers about that and get some information from the people who are delivering the instruction and that's the new piece for me Mark is asked to speak Mark Why don't we go ahead and make a commitment to meeting with each board member me Lisa Emily and Matt and or Kelly depending upon their availability to answer your specific questions prior to so we can stay on track with an April deadline I think it's important that we don't slow this down in anticipation of the new board but we get

263your questions answered We have two board meetings between now and then two so we can have some more discussion next board meeting and bring it to the table on April 14th I think that's reasonable Well to be clear I'm not suggesting we postpone this until we seat a new board that has nothing to do with this decision for me it has to do with what I see is an outpouring of information from our educators and how that factors into this that's a new dimension to this that's not waiting for new people to be sitting at a table so I appreciate the offer Mark but I'm not sure that'll get me where I need to be Well let's work towards it I mean and Mark meeting with people and as we meet with people if there's

264some barriers we can overcome we'll figure it out Thank you everyone for coming tonight and staying so late and don't get too wet you walking outside or you could stay in here and listen to us talk about the 9,000 policy series this would be pretty exciting so our last agenda item yes I like to make a motion to table the agenda item until next meeting it's 10 o'clock at night here and we've got another meeting we need to attend to and this isn't time-sensitive Is there a second to that motion? Point of order table or postpone? Table or postpone are different things I apologize thank you for the correction Postpone So we have a motion to postpone We have a motion to postpone agenda and if you're leaving just certainly talk but maybe in the

265hallway just so we can finish up in here so whisper in here and then like move to the hall to finish your conversation Second point of order a postponement requires the time to which we would postpone so are you proposing to postpone to March 24th? Okay yeah March 24th so we have a motion to postpone until March 24th 9,000 policy series is there a second? I second I'm gonna vote for the board discussion yeah but we'll take the motion first and then discussion we have a motion in a second we do have a request to speak on this topic Angie Pingle a resident of the district has requested to speak we haven't voted on that motion do you want to wait until we vote on the motion? If it's something we're discussing then we we

266wouldn't have there's no discussion so I would say that's irrelevant we probably should vote first and then decide I don't know what she's going to say It's usually best practice to make the motion and put it on the table before we start discussions so have a motion in a second to table so now we're discussing to postpone to postpone thank you mary for correcting me yeah postpone yes comment so so the yeah i just right but i'm trying to answer the angie's question which is she wants to speak on the motion which isn't the motion that's on the floor right now yeah that's why i said something great this policy was brought forward from the cle committee because it was deemed worthy of discussion this is a policy regarding board member communications whether individual or

267for speaking or is speaking as a representative of this board this is a timely discussion and when we brought this forward i didn't think that recent communications would have me very concerned that we don't have a policy or have not considered it i think it is really important to discuss and i am not in favor of this policy i think it is really important to discuss and i am not in favor of this policy i think it is really important to discuss and i am not in favor of this policy any other discussion on the motion okay roll call vote all right the motion is to postpone this uh discussion of the 9 000 policy series to march 24th march 24th mary wacker no pritha corriera no jean lambert wes sella no cheryl milnes yes

268sam hughes yes scott wheeler no five no's two yeses okay we got a motion on the table angie or we have a discussion on the table since it's late i'm going to be brief at our last two meetings i raised what i believe is an important and time-sensitive issue that corresponds with the current election season i requested that this board consider adopting a policy that prohibits partisan political endorsements our school board positions are supposed to be non-partisan and if there is one thing our community agrees on it is that partisan politics do not belong in our schools and through our school business the cle committee met to discuss this proposed policy which seems to me to be broader than necessary and still doesn't prohibit partisan political endorsements by sitting school board members if this policy

269is adopted partisan endorsements will continue to be allowed but will need to be accompanied by a disclaimer that the statement is not sponsored by the district and is a personal viewpoint while i appreciate the effort of the cle committee rita i don't think we're quite there yet i'm sorry to say that i feel as though my comments are being used to advance a different purpose than my intent in the words of a former school board member what problem are you trying to address and does this policy affect your school board i'm here to prevent future instances where sitting school board members use their elected positions to attempt to influence voting in other political races which can create the appearance of a conflict of interest between your non-partisan obligations as school board members in an allegiance

270to a candidate from a political party does this policy address it unfortunately no finally i'm not trying to infringe upon your right to free speech go ahead and do what you want but leave your official enbrook title off those endorsements thank you thank you angie rita kicks off on our discussion policy my computer has died it apparently decided to retire from the board before i did it's gone it's okay i am not going to log into all the things i think i well i mean i can discuss what our policy what it is right here yes so um our cle committee met it was with the charge to just thank you thank you angie uh to uh to decide if we wanted to create language in an existing policy or to create a new policy

271regarding board member communications um the language that's here i hope espouses how we as a board feel about board member communications individual or as representative of the entire board and again I believe that the language here clearly delineates how a board member may communicate with respect to speaking for the board and representing the board's point of view I do not feel that we have any right to infringe about anyone's First Amendment right however when we are speaking for the board it should be authorized by the board and so again any board member that chooses to communicate with a member of the public saying we the board feel this or we feel this speaking collectively for the entire board should be held accountable and I hope that this my intent with this policy was to you

272know I don't know if I'm saying this right but I think that the board should be held accountable and I hope that this my intent with this policy was to put something in writing showing that and again we are here for discussion I welcome the viewpoints of every single board member here as to why we would or would not need such a policy and what you feel about this one Questions or comments Cheryl My one comment is that I do not agree with the process that we went through with this policy we entered the room at the CLE meeting and the policy was just written you know typed out on a piece of paper we were given it then we didn't have any time to pre read it or really think about it and that

273I don't believe that was a correct process I think that it should have been attached to the agenda so that we could adequately prepare for the meeting i think this policy should go back to the cle and we should review it and have a discussion after appropriate review i'm looking at board policy 9682 that really speaks to most of this i would say in terms of i don't know if you want i'll just quote it we don't have to look at it maybe but each board member has an obligation to ensure they don't violate open meetings laws through participation in electronic communications that involve multiple members of the board so copying the whole board unless you're the board president is out and the any form of communication that isn't part of your official business no

274that's not part of your business no that's not part of your business no that's really electronic communication sorry um but the other piece is unless the board members performing a legally designated duty or responsibility or expressly authorized by the board individual board members shall not purport to speak on behalf of the board or speak in a manner that purports to obligate the board to a particular course of action so it would seem like this language is cared for would you agree mostly by what i just said or there's pieces missing and we might need to tweak this i think the implication of the language is here but i believe that this particular policy the standalone policy could potentially be referenced in several other policies so to have it in its own policy we may reference

275it in several of the others that were listed including the social media policy having it be a portion of another larger policy it gets lost exactly um jean i also just looked at 9682 and the practice refers only to email so it's it's not as comprehensive as the proposal in front of us my other question to cheryl and anybody else from the cle that would have this concern is we discussed earlier tonight about the appropriateness of this being on the agenda and determined that the chair determined that this was correctly noticed and we've all had time to review it for this meeting so that would include chair you so if we're going to send it back to committee my question to anyone that wants to do that is what part of it do you want

276to send back to committee what are the specifics in this policy that you think need to be reworked because we've all had a chance to look at it now i i think the breadth of the policy i think we need to uh tighten it up can you give me examples of what you're looking at because that doesn't help me answer my question about what if we just say tighten it up we're not really giving the committee any feedback to say what we want tightened up i i think that um if we were doing this about political endorsements we need to speak about that and that's really not in the policy that was not the intent of this policy to speak specifically about political endorsements it had to do with board member communication and whether or

277not one board member can choose to speak for the entire board while i do respect the viewpoints that have been brought up by speakers regarding political endorsements that was not the intent of this policy sam to me i know what this stems from this from from my facebook post i put on there and i gave my perception of of what was going on with the board you are incorrect and uh preetha responded and tell me don't speak for the whole board so maybe i'm wrong but that was kind of the the context of that um this being pushed through is again an incredible sadly disruption to what uh to the community um i think that this is very clearly a um political motivation to get this pushed through before the end of election march 24th

278when there's two or three weeks left of the election time um and to try to silence board members from having opinions um this was not written at all to uh the the policies clearly in place that you know and i believe from my perception is it's followed extremely well i've never seen anyone speak on behalf of the board i've certainly never spoke on behalf of the board i've issued opinions and that's 100 my right to do that i will continue to issue opinions um and i think that right now you know to push this through right now is just a disruption um it's gonna it's gonna pay play poorly in the community um and on top of that this is this is you know it's just it's not a a policy that is even necessary

279um and it's frustrating and i and i i do clearly think that there was a an open meetings violation that took place on this um and i think we need to really look into that before we move forward on that i'm really concerned by that because this policy is not at all on the agenda there's no rough draft on it um if this was brought to the meeting and and in a format of to present to the meeting on paper that's the violation of the of the meeting as well um so i i just think we need a cool down on this one and uh postpone this until um send it back to the committee so we or at least to the lawyer to get clarification on that because that that's that's important to me

280i guess um i appreciate all the feedback that i'm hearing um i think it'd be really helpful to understand because as far as i'm more like we we weren't for certain to have a march 24th meeting at this point so i don't know if it would be i think the soonest we would have thought this would have been adopted would have been april um after the election i think um but i could be mistaken that's just what i understood to be the case um i think it'd be helpful to understand if there are certain aspects of the policy that are really um you know you find very challenging or overbearing or whatever it may be because i'm i'm definitely happy to hear the feedback on that i i know that i've personally i've i've seen

281circumstances that i'm unsure as to where they lie when it comes to some of the posts or anything like that and i don't really follow social media i don't really like that stuff generally um i like it less than that that'd be great not you me i spent like eight years um but um so like i can see that there could be a need to provide some clarification um on some of these things that i think when we were talking about it in committee we weren't certain that i think the policy was it 90 96 82 i think gene you had referenced i think there were a few things that we thought maybe weren't covered and maybe that's a fair or unfair or unfair characterization um but it'd be really helpful to if there's certain

282aspects that you think that um we shouldn't we shouldn't be including in there because it at least from what i was saying it all seemed relatively straightforward and and just understanding the gaps would be really helpful to to figure out like from my perspective if we need to take it back to to committee and and make some more revisions do you know why this wasn't posted on the cle agenda i know i mean when as cheryl said i mean what she said is was my experience too so that's all i know about it that we came to the meeting it was there and printed out for you yeah i don't know if that's done but can you just corroborate there have been times when we've had documents hand walked into our board meetings so it's

283not outside of the realm of our practice especially at a committee level to be bringing information into a meeting to be considered but but the item is on the agenda we're looking and well and at the committee level we're we're still those are all works in process anything that would require action comes twice to the board so if it was hand walked in and the committee discussed it and voted to bring it forward to the board and it was properly noticed on the board i just want to put to bed thecusasb with your opinion the decision about whether this is a legitimate or illegitimate agenda item to me there's no question that it's legitimate it's legitimate on tonight's agenda because it was properly noticed on tonight's agenda however i don't know about the cla meeting

284and i would probably want to get a legal opinion as i went back and looked at the 올�y agenda for the last meeting the 9 000 series is posted for discussion so what you recall it is series during that time because if you look at if you look at the agenda it actually sell always says what items of the policies were dealing with and I think the general 9000 series would allow this agenda item to have been discussed as part of the 9000 series really yeah I don't know I wasn't there well there's no rough trap posted on there was no policy that existed the discussion included a discussion of whether or not we should add language to any of the plus policies that came forth that day that we thought might be associated or

285whether or not we should create a new policy that was the discussion that resulted in the creation of this new policy at the last meeting so you were discussing certain policies yeah I mean if you look at it create a new one yeah you look at the agenda we had like all the policies were on there there was therefore yeah so there was a number of them on there and practice statements included yes this was proposed language so yeah well I guess I don't I'm a little bit of a but I just want to maybe share my comments and thoughts and what the committee might consider first of all do you have a CLA meeting before our April meeting before our April board meeting you do we have a pretty thick policy manual and I'm

286always interested in simplicity and transparency so we can out the dress code and let's talk about let's do elementary separate from middle I mean you could we could get crazy with that I am thankful to Jean for bringing up 9682 so my question is why can't that be edited I know our policies are on a cycle but any committee can bring up any policy you can put on the agenda any policy anytime so if this policy which is titled electronic and written communication if it needs to be broadened to include social media I mean the last time we looked at was 2024 the the but the it is electronic but the perhaps social media needs a paragraph perhaps if there's a few things that we really want to emphasize I just I will be honest

287where I'm at I hesitate to create a new policy when language a paragraph to you know an issue brought up by a constituent could be added to an existing policy where it fits and maybe the four policies you were looking at weren't this one and so it didn't seem like it fit as well so you create a new one but this I see a lot of synergy between 9682 and the proposed policy I like the clarity but I wonder if we should rework the policy we already have on and that's what I would ask the committee to look at I would say take a look at this proposed policy tonight that one and what could it be done to make it into one so I appreciate that that particular policy does speak to written and

288electronic communications what it does not speak to is a board member going to a meeting and representing the viewpoint of the board and speaking again I would like to have clarity in any written communication in any communications from our official school board emails replying to constituents that a board member is speaking from his or her own policy and personal viewpoint rather than speaking for the board by not having a clarification statement I think that it it muddies the waters as to whether or not you are speaking for representing the board with your interpretation or not sure so I hear you saying that maybe you're talking all communication but then the example you cited was written which again to me would be 9682 so if we need to add a paragraph that says change the title

289so if we need to add a paragraph that says change the title so if we need to add a paragraph that says change the title so electronic written and oral communication or just simplify it Board of Education communication then would you then reference a particular section of a policy in another policy or would you how would you do that let's reference the policy and go to Board of Education Communication let's have a communication policy if we feel it needs to be broader I'm just saying it can include endorsements in fact that could be a paragraph in here at the communication how that could be communicated it could be I mean I'm just saying we have policies where we have paragraphs about you know different topics and I don't think it would get a lot longer

290I think a lot of what's here can be simplified and or combined I just be interested in the committee taking a look at combining them thing that I would like to say is that we also spelled out what to do for board members who failed to adhere to this expectation very clearly and I think that's important to see I'm not sure That could be added to the policy we have existing that's a piece that's missing Agreed I disagree that that's the way to do it Sam I just want to add a few things to this as well I I think that this policy is will create a chilling effect I think for us as board members on what we do and what we say out in public you know you could say the intention isn't

291that way but it's it's written vaguely like even you just mentioned Preethi that if you're in a meeting you need to say that well what have I you know where do I stop if I'm talking to my wife at home my Connie just you know my my comments right now or a reflection of me and my opinion and not of the board you know where does that word is it stop before I know it's exaggerated I agree I'm totally agreeing an exaggeration but that's the point of like how vague this is like what if I'm at a fundraising event and I I share what I think is going on in the board and someone you know says oh you didn't say first that you are not a representative of the Board I'm I you know

292at what point does any of this end and and and and then additionally what if I say something like you know I'm disappointed I'm not disappointed in administration I don't like what they're doing on this policy or this this curriculum is that now me saying I'm representing the board because now I'm speaking you know publicly that I don't agree with this here and then then I can be publicly censored by the rest of the board and make it a big public ordeal I just think that we're really treading on personal rights and our freedoms and our ability to function well as a board member and we're trying to solve a problem that just doesn't exist and I'll ask one more question to preetha in the committee and then Mary did we look at it in

293light of the 2021 Supreme Court decision do we get a legal opinion to make sure I've been that specifically addressed for communication and freedom of speech so that might be one more thing to look at in terms of the new policy yeah okay Mary anytime we're speaking about the board leaning one way or something like that yes if it's public we should be prefacing with I am one vote of seven I do that all the time I hear you do that all the time I think a lot of us do that all the time not everyone does that all the time and that's what I think this policy specifically addresses and will there be tweaks that's why we revise these every few years but I do believe that this policy covers ground that no other

294policy does that 96 82 spends a lot of time talking about records retention and in the has a separate practice statement that's very detailed that one may need some work but when I look at this there's nothing I disagree with here so I'm not sure why you know yeah could we go through our entire policy book and make improvements we sure could but tonight we are presented with this policy so I'm still going to reiterate my ask that what is it in this policy that requires anything to go back to the committee or is there is this as it's written despite the conversation we've had about it being walked into the committee and all of that is there something of substance we can be talking about here to say oh I don't agree with this

295send it back or work this paragraph send it back to the committee because I haven't heard that yet I'll make a motion to bring this back to the committee and and then the study the what the the Supreme Court decision is so we know we're doing this legally oh yeah well you can make a motion to send a discussion item back I guess you don't right I make a recommendation i'm surrounded by Robert rules experts around here thank you I got this out two to follow I was I thought Mary would be proud like to send this back to the committee anyone else what does the committee think about taking it if you've got a meeting for April well I have nothing substantive to go back to this committee with what changes would we like

296other than we just want more time does it mean I would say I think one of the struggles we had and this is why I thought this was really helpful is like looked at the policy seemed I think for me personally it seemed like relatively benign agreeable and maybe there's things that are objectionable to others understand that but I didn't really nothing glaringly stood out to me and that's like you know I was one of them that voted in favor and coming here because I was looking to hear the feedback as part of this process a little bit to understand more as to like is there stuff that I'm missing that is more objectionable that you know like I'm just not seeing so I think I think that's the struggle I have is I don't

297I'm happy to take another look but I don't know how that would change where we're where it's at right now. Right now is really my struggle more than anything else. So I asked Mark how long it would take to get a legal opinion he says he can get that in a week we get the legal opinion and then can still be put put on the agenda for I we're not putting on the agenda for March 24th yeah I'm not sure I said the right day because we're just using that night for things we forwarded from tonight's agenda already so this would just follow the regular cycle of being on in April so it would not be before the election but we'll get that legal opinion and then we'll get to the next one. And I

298do have a question. Okay. So this will just go back to will we continue a little bit more and we'll have this and we'll come back on more later this week and I think it would be good if that would not be all right but to Now if I don't have questions or again Board Members are feeling at that point that it needs to go back to the committee or there's some glaring things then that motion can be made in April. I'd like to get some clarification onto the policy state said what's what is determined Who is determined who determines what's false and misleading and right now it seems that it falls to the Board president. volunteered and I think that's a lot of power to give to one of seven individuals of what they

299determine as false and misleading. the leftovers are the responsibility of the Just實ah too do that one more time see if I could maybe shift the topic at misleading. Great so we have a plan of action there that's our last agenda item I'll make a motion to adjourn. Second. I knew you're gonna do it all those in favor of adjourning please say aye aye thank you we are adjourned