2017 - 4/10 Lawrence USD 497 Board of Education Meeting

001I'll order the April 10th 2017 meeting of the Board of Education. First item of business is approval of agenda. Move we approve the agenda. Second. Second. All in favor? Aye. And the next item of business is our oath of office with Jamie Shue. That's you. Raise your right hand. Repeat after me. I do solemnly swear. I do solemnly swear. That I will support. That I will support. The Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States. And the Constitution of the State of Kansas. And the Constitution of the State of Kansas. And faithfully discharge. And faithfully discharge. The duties of member. The duties of member. USD 497. USD 497. Board of Education. Board of Education. So help me God. So help me God. Congratulations. Just write jobs. Do I write how I normally

002sign it? That's fine. That's fine. How you normally sign it. Thank you. And congratulations Melissa. All right. Next we will move on to some special recognitions. We have several tonight. The first is the Lawrence High School Intertribal Student Advocacy efforts with Jennifer Otocany coordinator Native American Student Services. Don't even see me. Just come up. Yeah. Good evening. Ms. Sanborn asked that the Intertribal Club be recognized for their efforts. And um. their ongoing equity conversations. So if you want to speak to any of that before I say anything. I don't have anything prepared. Okay, that's fine. I just want to say, like, I was incredibly impressed with the advocacy work that your club has engaged in, making the schools and communities safer for all kinds of folks. But specifically the work that you did in recognizing

003the concerns that you had about the mascot that a different district's team was using that was offensive and working with the school district to have that removed from our facility. So I appreciate that a lot. Okay. So that's part of an ongoing conversation that we're having. Last year we held a student panel that was followed by a talk by a Native American artist, Stephen Paul Judd. I wanted to have him come and talk to the students about ways to funnel that energy, that expression of how we see ourselves in the world. That's part of staying engaged, accepting non-closure, right? So that happened last year. So that was in the past. So now we have new students that have moved up from middle school. We have had students graduate and go on to college and do

004other things. So we have a whole new crop. Same issues are being addressed. And so, like you said, they had an ask of their principal to remove an image of a rival team or another team, a mascot, which was a Native American supposedly image from the schools, from Lawrence High. And so the principal said, that's not a big ask. That's a possibility. This is something that we can actually do. So, sorry, I took my glasses off. That was step one. And then what? And then what? And then what? This is how one dismantles systemic racism. When a fixture or symbol of a flag has hung for so long, when even our Native youth become desensitized, what do we do? What else can we do to support them? See what kind of encouragement they need to

005speak up. But we, as Lawrence Public Schools, cannot just merely rely on them reacting to their world around us. We have to constantly keep looking around us and seeing what we can do to consider their perspective, to see what changes we can make, so that their kids don't have to say, hey, why is that thing still there? To paraphrase Hamlet, they have become, their voices have become, the actions and the purpose that was holding the mirror up to our nature to show our virtues and our contempts are false. Thank you. Ordinarily, we'll shake hands, so if you're interested and willing. But feel free. Okay, next we have the Kansas Scholastic Chess Association 6A State Champions, the Lawrence High Chess Club with Andy Bricker, Chess Club Coach. That's okay. Thank you. This is Isaac Lee, Jose

006Smolkowski, and Kiana Hajer-Bobby. Members of the school board and Superintendent Hayden, thanks for inviting us tonight. On March 18th, the Lawrence High School Chess Team won its second consecutive Kansas Scholastic Chess Association State Championship. The competition included 30 teams from public and private schools across the state. The team won this championship in come-from-behind fashion. Going from fourth place to first place in the final round. This final round rally included wins from Jose Smolkowski and Isaac Lee, as well as a crucial direct head-to-head win by John Ely against a member of the top team, and a draw by Kiana Hajer-Bobby against arguably the best individual player in the tournament. It takes a team to win a championship. Thank you for taking the time to recognize this team's accomplishment. Next we have the Kansas Scholastic Chess Association

007State K-8 Runner-Up, the West Chess Club, with Kyle. Kyle Kamarda, Chess Club Coach. Thank you very much for having us here today and for the recognition. This is the West Chess Club team that played in the K-8 division. They were the state champions last year, and this year they came within that far on that March 18th tournament. In fact, four of them won in the last round, pulled in one of those rallies. Unfortunately, another team also won four and got us by half a point. But I'm very pleased with their play all year. I've been thrilled with the... focus that we have from this team. Just a couple things I'll mention. Let's see here. Rita Joseph right there also was just playing in the All-Girl State Championship... National Championship yesterday. Got back around, what, midnight?

008Got two hours of sleep, and she's back at Corral at 7 o'clock in the morning. So I'm amazed at the focus from all of them. I just want to mention a couple things. I'd really like to to see these kids continue to play chess and move up into the high schools, both at Free State and at Lawrence High School. I am the Executive Director for the Kansas Scholastic Chess Association trying to grow that. And so I'll make a little ask right here. We would love to see more high schools grant varsity letters for chess. I think the amount of effort that these kids put in is equivalent to those in physical sports or in band or in debate and many other excellent activities that are Lawrence students take part in. part in. So I know

009there's a proposal floating around somewhere. I don't know if you've received that proposal or not, but when you do, I hope you take it very seriously and strongly consider this way of recognizing and encouraging our kids to continue, our students to continue to play chess at the highest level. So thank you very much. I haven't seen the proposal yet, but I look forward to seeing it. Next we have the Free State High Model United Nations Student Honors with Janice Fullerton, Free State Gifted Education Facilitator. Hello. I have two representatives from Free State today. Elliot is a freshman, and our team this year with Model UN was a freshman team. Elliot came up to me and wanted to organize a team, and he had all freshmen on it. I told him how difficult it was going

010to be up against juniors and seniors in Topeka. There's 1,500 students there, and Elliot still wanted to do it. So we met every week. Yay, Elliot. So we met every week, or they did, on Wednesdays, late start Wednesdays. And they competed and did honor to themselves. This year they won Best Position Paper of all the students that were there. So they represented the country of Cuba, and we had four students, Elliot Wisenar, and we had Rianne Walton and Boyan Boyack, and Bowen Boyack and Maxim Smith. So they did a really good job. Our officer, we had seven free-stay officers there out of 22. They also did really well. They were in charge of, believe it or not, seventh graders? Were you seventh? Seventh graders. She had 37th graders in a room for two days doing

011Model UN. And she did so well that the sponsors and the judges and the other delegates voted her best overall delegate. Natalie is an awesome student. This year she's drum major of the Free State High School Band. She's National Hispanic Scholar. She's a commended scholar. And she's trying to choose among some very selective and elite colleges and has not made her decision, which Ms. Fullerton is amazing. She's anxiously awaiting her decision. So, Free State High School. Congratulations to all the students tonight and thank you to all the teachers and staff that work with them. Next we have the President's Report. So tonight, well, first I want to welcome Melissa. It's nice to have a full board again. So, appreciate that. And then the next thing I want to just remind the community that the bond

012vote's coming up. They will actually be mailed. This Wednesday, April 12th. So you should be getting that in the mail by the end of the week. And obviously the board, you know, administrative staff, you know, in their roles can't recommend one way or the other. But obviously the board, we sure support this and hope that you vote yes when you do get it. If you are looking for more information on the bond, the district website has a whole lot of information. You can look at the master plan document. There's additional information. There's additional information on the mill levy impacts, student impacts, what the goals are. And there's also, if you want to go see a presentation, there's a schedule there, the remaining presentations that are occurring this month. And also Shannon Kimball and I participated

013in a Voger Education Coalition Town Hall yesterday on the bond and they recorded that. So that will be available at some point, I would assume, in the next couple of days. You can probably check out the VEC's Facebook page. So that's a great way to get that information. And you can also go to their Facebook page or their website and see that if you desire. Or Channel 6. And thank you to the Voter Education Coalition for putting that on. Next is the superintendent's report. So I also want to officially welcome Melissa. She got to spend a number of hours with some of the district administrative team last Tuesday. And she said, she assures me, she's not thoroughly overwhelmed. I think being an educator herself for quite a period of time is a benefit to coming

014into this board seat. So I want to welcome you again to this position. Several things to report on. New administrative hires. So we've been fortunate to attract some strong pools of candidates for building level administrative openings, including several internal personnel participating as part of our teacher leadership academy. We had previously. Announced that Shalita Middleton, an assistant principal at KCK, will take over the leadership of Kennedy Elementary beginning next year. Last week I announced the selection of Keith Jones, a former assistant principal at Free State High School, who is now working in Topeka, USD 501, as the next South Middle School principal, replacing Jennifer Besselo as Jennifer moves up to district office. And I think Keith may be here. All right. There in the back. Thank you. Good to see you. Keith, you always have something

015to say. I mean, you. No? Okay. It's just good to be back. Yeah. It's good to have you back. And then also, Jeff Harkin announced Friday a selection of Barbara Williams, who is an LHS learning coach and AVID coordinator and teacher. She has been part of the leadership academy this year. She'll be the next Liberty Memorial Central assistant principal. And I believe Barbara's back here also. Barbara. Congratulations. And Barbara takes over for Annette Cannoli, who's moving up to a learning coach position here at district office. So I'd mentioned in my end of week to you guys that board goals, believe it or not, is on the horizon. So we've been making excellent progress. But believe it or not, it's time for us to have discussions about feedback conversation and then planning for next year. So

016in the next month, I'll be meeting with a couple of our groups. Actually, you know, we've had the expanded district site council and we have an expanded employee advisory group that would serve us. It's really good representative groups to get feedback from. You know, that's just between those two groups that makes up almost 60 people. And a lot of those are teachers with as part of LEA organization. And we have some parents also as part of our district site council. So I'll be gathering that input and then sharing that with you by the end of May. And then we may start a little bit earlier on board goal setting so that maybe we have something in place by the start of the school year instead of end of September. So that'll be kind of the

017plan. Some bond issue information here. Julie Boyle will be providing an update on the district's 2017 bond issue and the community engagement efforts around that. I also wanted to mention publicly that there's been some misinformation out there that I want to speak to a little bit around the 2013 bond issue. The ballot question on all, on this mail ballot and even on the 2013 bond. In fact, I think it's a little bit more than that. But the last thing I want to talk about before I go into that is a little bit about the bond issue. So I'll just go along with the story here. So place of the bond issue, I want to talk about this one. So I talked about the bond issue here. And I want to talk about this one. The

018bond issue is that there's a bond that's being issued to the school district. And the bond issue is that the school district is issuing bond bonds that are not to exceed $87 million. And then the bond issue is that the school district is issuing bonds that are not to exceed $87 million. And then it goes on to include the scope of the work to be accomplished. which was another $4.5 million-ish. So the total budget ended up being around $97 million for that bond. So all of the goals and the scope of the 2013 bond projects were met with those construction budget dollars. There was an additional amount of work on top of that that was identified during the assessment of all the projects. The additional scope of work was we used capital outlay dollars, our

0198 mil capital outlay levy, to perform that work. So the additional improvements that we identified included some facility repairs, included some furniture solutions that we'd been working on for the personalized learning, blended learning environment, and then also some general site improvements like our playgrounds. So the capital outlay fund is a revenue generated from an annual local property tax. I mentioned that. A little bit ago, 8 mils for the acquisition, construction, repair, remodeling, additions, furnishing, equipping school facilities, much like the bond issue but different funds. The annual board-approved four-year capital improvement plan identifies the ever-changing dynamic needs we see across the district, and that's approved, and you guys approved that in January, typically around January and February. The capital outlay fund does not generate enough to take care of years of deferred maintenance, including the 19-year-old.

020We're looking at the cost of the school building, the cost of the school building, and the cost of the school building. So the school board proposed the 2017 bond to address those needs and the needs of our secondary schools. Through that election, you know, that $87 million plus premium and interest could be used for those projects we've identified. The capital outlay budget could be used if additional items that we saw were necessary to complete or there was an opportunity to do that as we were doing those projects. So I just wanted to clarify that. We may have a board report on that at the April 24th meeting. I wasn't planning on doing that until all the bond projects were complete, but I want to make sure that the voters see, have those questions answered if

021they still are lingering out there. So several calendar reminders. Congratulations to New York Elementary for earning a challenge award for third grade reading performance on last year's state assessments. The Confidence in Kansas Public Education Task Force recognizes schools that are making a notable difference in student achievement. Despite facing significant challenge in their school populations. State Board of Education member Ann Ma will present this award at New York on Wednesday at 1250 during the school's monthly student success assembly. Board members are welcome to attend. On Thursday, we will host the KSHSAA 6A State Large Group Music Festival at both high schools and the Leeds Center. It's a wonderful event. Obviously, our kids are participating throughout the day. We're going to be doing a lot of work on that. We're going to be doing a lot of

022work on that. We're going to be doing a lot of work on that. The band's, orchestra's, choir's will be performing from 8 a.m. in the morning until 4.30 in the afternoon at both high schools and until 6.30 in the evening at the Leeds Center. Our fine arts faculty and student musicians are second to none. They're top notch if you haven't had a chance to listen to them. Very talented kiddos. If your schedules permit, I encourage you to stop by those performances. I plan to catch a few where I can. Lawrence Schools Foundation will dedicate a special bench to former superintendent Rick Dole. At 9.30 on Friday at the College and Career Center. This was a retirement gift for Dr. Dole from the foundation. So students in the design build class have spearheaded the project and

023the public is welcome to attend the dedication. Is Dr. Dole coming? Do you know? Awesome. Haven't seen him in a while. The foundation also is gearing up for one of its major fundraisers. The 27th Annual Foundation Follies takes the stage at 7 o'clock on Friday, April 21st at Liberty Hall. This is one of my favorite events. Dave Cunningham's favorite event too, I think. Doors open at 6.15. Tickets may be purchased online at the lawrenceschoolsfoundation.org. I appreciate the business sponsors who are supporting the Follies. A lot of our good relationships with those folks. Because of all the proceeds from the event benefit our students, our teachers, and our schools. And you may even get the opportunity to see me on stage. Which that should be well worth the money. Board lunch Tuesday begins at 11.30 at

024New York Elementary School. Our Employee Advisory Committee meets at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning here in this room. Thanks, Kyle. So next is patron comments. We just have one tonight. Gary Schmidt. I know technically this would fall under equity. And we put it at the end of the equity report. Since we have one tonight. But I thought I would give you the option. You can either do it now during the patron comment. Or you can wait until later to do it. If you do it now, it will roll into the board commentary. And since we don't have any other ones. You know, if we need to ask questions or make comments. You can wait? Okay. All right. So then moving on to board commentary. I just wanted to say I had the opportunity to attend Encore

025at Free State High School. I don't know. A couple weeks ago. A week ago. I don't know. My days are running together. But I just wanted to say I was completely blown away like I am every year. But I mean, goosebumps during several of the songs. I thought that watching like the students like embody the equity work that our district was doing. When they sang Glory was, I mean, breathtaking. The Hamilton song that they did. I mean, I was like, am I at Hamilton? It was so good. I mean, it really was amazing. And it's really good to see how talented our students are and how hard our staff work in order to help them get there. And so, yeah. Thank you to Free State for that performance. I had a couple things. I also

026wanted to share my thanks to the Voter Education Coalition and Channel 6 and City of Lawrence actually hosted the forum yesterday at the City Hall meeting room. And so, appreciate that opportunity to share with the community the information about our upcoming bond election. Also wanted to share that this weekend on Friday and Saturday, I attended the quarterly KASB Board of Directors meeting. For those of you that don't know, I'm a regional vice president on the KASB Board of Directors. We meet about four times a year. We had our regional meeting or our quarterly meeting at, in Olathe, Olathe Public Schools. The current KASB president is a board member in Olathe. So, we had the opportunity to visit an elementary school. And two of their high schools, one of which is their newest building that's opening

027in the fall and the other is their oldest building in their district. And then also their Olathe Area Technical Training Center. And got a fantastic tour, learned an awful lot about what they're doing in their district. Was really intrigued and pleased to see that a lot of the initiatives that we have been undertaking in our district around technical and career and college readiness. You know, seeing that mirrored in the work that they're doing and a lot of similarities on how those programs are playing out. Really cool to see their new high school facility that's opening next year. Was impressed that a lot of the ideas that we are implementing through the 2013 bond issue and we're talking about implementing with this upcoming bond issue. Were reflected in the high school that they've built. So, it

028was really neat to see how that plays out in the high school context. Since we haven't gotten there yet. Thank you. And so, had our board meeting on Saturday. The biggest topic of conversation really was the legislative session and where things are at with the school finance formula discussion. Had a pretty lengthy discussion about the specifics that are in the bill. Interestingly enough, the final version of the bill has not yet been printed. So, we've all heard a lot about what's in it. Recorded in the news and through some of the KSB publications, etc. But nobody's actually seen the language. Because they hadn't finished it and put all the amendments in writing when the committee was working the bill. So, I'm hoping that that will actually be available to us to see in print sometime

029during this three week recess. The legislature is in their three week recess right now. So, things will be a little bit quiet. But that would give us an opportunity to review that and maybe provide some feedback to our legislators. I think overall the feeling of the board of KSB was that there's a lot of good things in it. There's a lot of good things in that bill. But the worry is still that they don't have a tax plan that pays for it. They don't have a budget. And the amount of money that they're talking about putting in doesn't yet meet even the ask that the State Department of Education made. In terms of this is what we think we need to get to where we're supposed to be now. And the funding that they've dedicated

030to it isn't quite there yet. And so, there's some hesitancy to fully embrace the bill. And I think that's a good thing. Because it's just not as good as it is. Because it doesn't quite meet all of the goals at least that KSB had set out in terms of what they would like to see in a new finance formula. Just wanted to share that. If you have any thoughts, just share back with me. I'd be glad to hear them and pass them on. So, thank you. Thanks, Shannon. Thanks for your service on KSB. I know that's a benefit to us that you're there. So, appreciate that. Jill. This isn't nearly as weighty. But I did have the chance to judge the chocolate mix. I know you guys were invited. You couldn't make it at Woodlawn

031Elementary. And I got to say the kids did such a great job. And I felt like maybe some of their presentations maybe could be made to Paula. You know? But it was kind of neat to get in the classroom and see those guys work or make their speeches whether we should serve chocolate milk or not. And both sides had really good arguments. So, it's just neat to see them do something that kind of makes them feel like they're doing something. And I think that's a good thing. Thank you. And that kind of touches us all. Anybody else? I have one thing to say on that. So, I do think that I was unable to attend this last time but have attended the two previous years because that's a project that Woodlawn Elementary does with their

032fifth grade students every year. And I think if there's one thing as a board member that you can do to really grasp this concept of how challenging it must be for a classroom teacher to manage all of the ability levels. I mean, you obviously know this already. So, you can sit out. But I'm just. I'm amazed at how like you have kids who have like this typed double-sided three-page report that are poised and ready to deliver it. And then kids that really struggle with even putting the title on there and getting it together and ready. Some of them can speak eloquently about what their positions are. But, yeah, it really does speak to how differentiated instruction is necessary in every classroom at a level that I can't even imagine trying to manage that personally. And

033I was also hopeful because seeing the level of respect that they gave to each other when they're speaking. And obviously, chocolate milk is not the most divisive topic. But it was nice to see, you know, the civility in arguing sides. I wanted to piggyback off of what Vanessa said about the flexible grouping. I was able to attend the board luncheon. And I was pretty impressed. And I love the flexible grouping rooms. And I love that Deerfield had their Deerfield dens. And it just. Excuse me. It showed that importance of having that communication and collaboration across the grade levels. So, I was really impressed with that. Anybody else? So, next we'll have the consent agenda. Consent agenda items are those that are considered to be the most important items in the consent agenda. And we'll talk

034about that later. But I think that's a really important item. And I think that's a really important item. And I think that's a really important item. Consent agenda items are those that are considered routine and are adopted by one motion. Unless any board member or the superintendent requests that an item be removed, the item or items removed are voted on separately. And Shannon, I think you have some retirements. I do. I have two retirements to recognize this evening. I would like to thank Nancy Billgard for her 18 years of service and devotion to this community and its schools. And also Karen Phillips for her 16 years of service and devotion to these schools. Thank you for your service. And congratulations on your upcoming retirement. And I will go ahead and make the motion. I move

035the Board of Education adopt the items listed on the consent agenda. Do you have a second? I'll second. Any further discussion? All right. Janice? Yep. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Next we'll move on to our first report. And that's the Advancement Via Individual Determination or AVID with Leah Wisdom, Assistant Director of Student Services. Good evening. I am Leah Wisdom, Assistant Director of Student Services. And one of the things that I've been doing for the last couple of years is I've been working on this new report called AVID. So as many of you know what I do is oversee AVID. So I'm always excited to do this report. I will spend just a short amount of time reminding you some of the components of AVID. And then we'll go through sort of how

036we're doing, what we're seeing. And then I have three students here that are going to talk to you a little bit about their experience. So I know we want to get to them probably as soon as possible. We don't have necessarily any goals this year that have AVID directly written into them, kind of AVID is encompassed in them. So these two were the ones that really stand out to us to develop and align district expectations for curriculum instruction and assessment and that idea of raising achievement for all students and then enhancing programming and supports to meet all the needs of students. So those are the two that we really feel like AVID fits into. AVID's mission, AVID is an organization and their mission is to close the achievement gap by preparing all students for college

037readiness and success in a global society. And AVID recognizes that not all students want to go entire education but the idea that we can do our part to ensure that students are prepared should that be a choice that they want to make. So what is AVID? Again this is kind of a quick synopsis. AVID is a school-wide college readiness system. We oftentimes only think of the AVID elective class but I think it's really important to remember that we're training a lot of teachers to be able to use the inquiry-based strategies in their classrooms outside of the classroom. So we're not just talking about the AVID elective. It's also a really structured approach to rigorous curriculum. So how to really introduce rigor and support students so that they can tackle that. There is direct support structure

038for students who are in the AVID elective and we'll talk a little bit more in depth about that and then there's professional development for educators across the building and across the district. So the AVID elective student profile and you've guys seen this before but it's typically an average to above average achieving student who wants to go to college and they have the potential to go to college and they're able to do that. So that's kind of the structure of that. You know that's really important to have students that are in the AVID elective class and they are able to go to college and maybe not maybe haven't always enrolled in some of those upper level more rigorous courses. So the AVID elective class gives the support to those students to be successful in those courses

039that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise enrolled in and sometimes there's additional factors or criteria that would qualify a student or that we might look at for the AVID elective class. So it could be someone who's the first in their family to attend college. Could be someone who's of a race that's historically underrepresented or served in our four-year universities could be like low socioeconomic or there might be other special circumstances so those are the kinds of things we look at as students apply to be in the avid elective class they go through an interview process their parents go through an interview process there's a selection that takes place they agree to they agree to essentially have more work than other kids because the avid elective class puts more on them wanted to take a minute to

040connect this to a lot of our other work right so we i've done ci3t reports for you guys but as we think about our system of supports we have all these things that we're doing equity personalized learning and when we think about that school-wide portion of avid that's really about giving access to content for all kids right in that main part but then they have an elective class while absolutely not remediation is certainly something where we're thinking these are kids who might benefit from some extra support to be extra successful in those rigorous courses does that kind of make sense so the avid elective class i have like a sample schedule at the bottom and that's really what i want to focus on at the high school they have like avid curriculum two times a

041week and then they also do what we call tutorials where they have tutors come into their classroom and it's inquiry based tutorial so they're working with them on asking questions to get to their answer instead of like old-fashioned traditional tutoring where i might show you how to do what you don't know how to do so it looks very different it is inquiry based it's collaboration based by the time they're seniors you'll hear from some of them tonight seniors just start to focus on they move away from tutorials and start to practice like how do i develop my own study group what does that look like you know what is my organization strategy you know if they've been working on that all the years and then at middle school the same thing they have tutorials twice

042a week both high school and middle school have one day a week that's kind of reserved they might do avid curriculum but they also might be bringing in guest speakers they might go on college visits might spend time with goal setting and future planning so i can look different so the way like the avid elective class really works is about accelerating students um accelerating students who might be under achieving not because they're not capable but because they haven't been supported or pushed and they have the potential to be successful in those rigorous courses it also teaches academic and social skills that aren't sometimes taught in other areas or in other courses rather it provides intensive support with the in-class tutors that i talked about and then really strong peer-to-peer relationships that's something else that's a

043that's a focus in teacher to student relationships a positive peer group and then developing a sense of hope and personal achievement hard work and determination determinations in the acronym for avid so real quick again sort of a history just to jog your memory we started with avid just at our high schools in the fall of 2012 we had one section um maybe two no we had one section because we had joint freshman and sophomore s we expanded to the high schools the next year expanded more they had more sections we trained more teachers and in the fall of 2014 after like a year long of exploration with with groups with middle school groups we expanded to middle school and since then we've really just been implementing growing and implementing and so you can kind of

044see the growth here we started with 44 students and now in the spring of 2017 we have 185 at high school and 96 at middle so if you look at that kind of graph with the red and the um blue lines i just want to note that what we'll start to see like in the years to come as i do this report you'll see that staying pretty consistent because at some point you know we're not going to put everybody in the avid elective class we want to have kind of a certain percentage of the school so we're kind of hitting that unless middle school were ever to decide to add more sections but right now the way it is i expect those numbers to kind of look like that so approximately 280 kind of in

045that range i want to show you and be clear that this is from last spring it's our data from last spring and this is important we don't have it all pulled together for this year so i want to make sure you saw though last spring as we pulled this together we had 19 elective classes and what this chart shows you is the blue represents in middle and high school like for example in that first one that eight percent of our middle high school population identifies as hispanic or latino and 13 of our avid population represent or identifies as hispanic or latino same thing if you go to those who identify as black or african american eight percent of the middle high school population 19 of our avid elective students identify you can kind of go

046through and see that um for the trends there the female male i actually talked to you guys a little bit about this last year you may or may not remember but we continue to have a deficit so fewer males and more females that are applying and getting into the avid elective and that's something each site they work on goals and that's a part of all their goals how do we increase you know the male and female and the female interest um they've done a lot with being being conscientious about who who it is that's going to be the avid elective teacher so who it is that can connect with different kinds of students that you want to make sure are enticed and interested in taking part in that elective class and then the last is

047the free and reduced sort of lunch percentage wanted to take a minute to show you this data i mentioned tutors it is really important in avid that we have as many college tutors as possible so that students can see themselves in those that are there sort of working with them and then we have a lot of students that are in the middle and high school that are in the middle and high school that are in the middle and high school that are in the middle and then we have a lot of students that are in the middle and high school that are in the middle so about 70 percent of our tutors are current college students about 27 percent are other adults that are working in a tutor capacity and then something really cool that

048we've started in the last couple years is about three percent are cross-age tutors so we have seniors who go down and tutor with freshmen or sophomore we'd love to be able to send them to middle schools but logistically it's like trying to figure out that and their schedule hasn't worked really well but and then here this is our last year seniors so we had 28 avid seniors last year and it just wanted you to get a sense of you know what's going on in the middle school and what's going on in the high school and what's going on in the middle school and what's going on in the middle school and we how they did 86 of them had been an avid at least three years so they typically start as freshmen and go on

049so we want to see that they become like a family they stay with the same teacher they typically are with the same kids with the exception of some coming and going 96 completed four-year college entrance requirements 93 took the sat or the act 100 graduated on time and about 32 took at least one like ap exam all of them would have been in an ap course throughout their career but not everybody takes the same course so we want to see that they become like a family they take the exam and we don't have free states data but i did want to share with you lhs some of their current senior data and barb who we talked about earlier she's present in the audience thank you for being here she shared this with me so this

050year the 17 lhs avid seniors have completed more than 60 ap in advanced courses they've received more than 65 college acceptance letters from over 16 universities and they have applied for 110 scholarships and been awarded almost two hundred ninety thousand dollars and that's just up till now so that's pretty cool that is worth celebrating certainly um so just to get a sense of the professional learning that we're doing um you can kind of see who's all been trained in the district we have 15 and that includes building and district administrators some counselors a good chunk of counselors all of our avid elective teachers have been trained multiple times they go each year to get if they can sometimes that doesn't always fit in their schedule approximately 100 classroom teachers and all 14 of our coaches

051have had some sort of avid training and really what the avid training does on the that right side there i just wanted to focus it it really just takes research-based effective teaching practices to promote things like inquiry collaboration student engagement engagement organization rigor they focus in on cornell note taking and which is not about note taking right it's about getting back into notes and looking at them and that's how i retain information and then avid often um it also uh does the training like content specific so when i go to a training if i'm a math teacher i'm going to go to a training teacher i'm going to go to the math strand and i'm going to learn specific strategies for mathematics if that makes sense um and so this also includes some people who

052took part in culturally relevant teaching training so i want to just give a little bit of background at the bottom i kind of have avid culturally relevant teaching in lps and lawrence public schools it has been rather organic so i mentioned like each school each of the six the two or the four middles and the two high schools send a group each summer to the avid summer institute and if they've been before to like a math strand or a science strand they can pick another one and there are other strands and one is the crt strand they have two transforming educators and empowering students and um we had several staff go to that and then come back and we're reporting to their building administrators or they were reporting to us like this was really great

053it benefited from this a lot everybody should have this and we heard it a lot i think kyle even heard it when he was out in the spring you know talking to different teams and so he came back and said you guys need to figure out what this is you know why are people so excited about this so kevin and i both attended um felt like yeah we can see why people are really this is resonating with people so we brought it this spring to lawrence that strand so that people didn't have to travel for it we had limited slots because it was certainly a budget constraint in terms of thinking about who could attend so we tried to prioritize and we brought that for about 45 people and all the coaches that hadn't previously

054been trained took part in that um so that we can that included elementary coaches we want to be thinking about how do we bring elementary teachers back in to the school and how do we make sure that we have the right equipment for the quality of life for our students and so i think i think we're going to have to think about this a little bit later um we are planning future sessions we're going to schedule those dates soon and we might be able to do in this summer but we're looking at having in district trainers so we use somebody from avid to come in which was great um except we already are doing a lot of equity work and we want to make sure we're connecting to that and having somebody in district who

055has um some of some of those skill sets around the protocol that we learned through courageous conversations will it addresses issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation. It talks to teachers about enhancing curriculum to make relevant learning connections. And then when participants leave, they have resources at least, and I've had an experience that would allow them to develop multidimensional lessons and thinking about evaluation and assessment differently with kids and expanding some of those thoughts around equity and who that involves and how to bring those people in. So I want to make sure I notated that. The previous numbers reflected individuals who attended that as well. So I won't hold back anymore. I have three AVID students who are going to talk to you a little bit about their experience. Brian and Madison are from LHS,

056and I don't want to steal any other story, so I'll let them tell you, but they are going to talk together, and then Safi's going to talk about this. Welcome. Hello, my name is Brian Dominguez. I am a senior in AVID. I originally joined... freshman year, and I'd like to just talk about how much of an impact this has made on me. As someone who didn't really... wasn't very much of an extrovert during middle school, and me not having so much emotional support, especially when it came with friends, to just go on and achieving more personal achievement, I couldn't really decide what I wanted to be when I was younger. But when I joined AVID, I realized how much of an impact that made on me as I met these people there and... slowly after

057these four years became more of my family. I consider them a second home because if I ever need anything or if I need help with something, they're always there to help me no matter who they are. I'm always happy to help. And as someone who is a first-generation Hispanic student, neither of my parents went to college, and I never really had the resources. Some of the students have to just know what the college experience is like. I never... none of my... my father only went to high school, and so did my mother. And... I really helped emotionally and physically a lot when I was able to join AVID as these people were helping me and actually pushing me to become more of what I wanted to be, and not just telling me, oh, do this

058or do that. Like, there's lots of personal achievement that I achieved throughout these four years, whether it be pushing me to take an AP course or going to the College and Career Center, pushing me to do more programs such as that, just helping me achieve more of being a student and what a model student should be. And I really did... all these four years, I won't regret a single year taking it because it really did change a lot of my outlook, especially when it comes to the college level. I feel far more prepared than I did ever. If I do... if I weren't to take this program, I wouldn't know where I would be right now currently. But I'm just glad to know that AVID had my back, especially when I needed it the most.

059Good evening. My name is Madison McKinney. I'm a senior. I've been in AVID for four years. AVID was like the first program that I really committed myself to at Lawrence High. And over these past four years, there's a lot of times that I thought AVID, like, should have given up on me. Like, I wasn't doing a good enough job in my classes. But that's not what this program is about. This program is truly committed to helping students succeed in high school and preparing them for the college level. I always dreamed of going to college, but growing up in a very racist town, there was a lot of times that I didn't feel that was possible. But moving here has really helped me. I've always wanted to grow as a student, and AVID has helped uncover

060the student that I've always been. I've just had trouble finding. And over these four years, AVID has really become like a family. And together, we've learned and grew as students and individuals and as future leaders of this world. So I'm very appreciative of AVID and all it has done for me in these four years. Thank you. Well, my name is Safi Knight. I am currently at Free State, now Lawrence High. I'm currently a junior, and this will be my third year fully as an AVID student. 2014 was my freshman year, and I walked into this classroom not knowing how close these people would come to me. I thought of AVID as different teachers, but the same kids. And when I found out it was the same teacher, it kind of felt safer, and it was

061more... I don't want to say safe space, but it was more, like, comfortable. And we did these little activities called creative writing and stuff, and it just kind of brought us together. We've been on college trips. We've been on college trips. We've been on college trips. And it just helps us because I think of AVID as a path, and they're not the ones building the path, but they're also there helping me and teaching me how to build my own path, and they're not doing it for me. Currently, we're looking at colleges, and we're going on college tours, kind of, as I say, on the schedule. Some colleges offer AVID scholarships, and Free State often, like, focuses on that. So some days we look at scholarships and we learn. And one thing I like about AVID

062is that not only is it a place to go to study, is that not only is it a good family place for us, it also teaches other kids not to give up on their dreams. As a first-gen graduate in my family, it's kind of helping me show my younger brothers and stuff that you can never give up on a dream. And AVID's there as kind of, like, helping me and holding my hand, not literally, but they're holding my hand and walking me along the way. So I just want to say thank you for giving us the opportunity to have AVID through the public schools, and I continue to hope that we have AVID. Thank you. These guys, I think, are the best. Thank you. I think all of them have actually spoke in other venues.

063They've spoken to teachers. We have some, I don't know if it's any of these three, but have spoken to students at Kennedy, students at other schools, and shared a little bit of their story. So thank you for being brave. I can't express how honored I am to be a part of a program that allows me to be an impact on students in our district in that way. So thank you for sharing your story. Real quick, I just want to tell you moving forward, our plan is to sustain our AVID elective enrollment, if not see maybe a little growth. But I kind of just want to say thank you. I want to talk to you about those numbers. We want to sustain that and continue to make it great by keeping up with the focus professional

064learning, ensuring that the teachers are getting what they need to be successful. We have great AVID coordinators and great AVID elective teachers. So keeping up with that tradition. And then really increasing our use of the strategy school-wide so that while not every student might need or benefit from the AVID elective class, they certainly can benefit from this idea of how we build relationships and how we utilize the students. And so we're working on building that and how we utilize strategies of engagement to get all of our students engaged in curriculum and content. So those are kind of our goals moving forward. I think that's kind of it. Do you have any questions for me before we move off? Anybody have any questions? You're right, Rick. So you talked about you want to sustain this. I

065know there's an application process and it's pretty intensive from what I understand. Do you get the sense that we have other kids who could really benefit from this, but we can't accommodate them? Yeah. And I realize this all comes down to budget. But if budget wasn't an issue, I mean, where would you ideally like to see this go in terms of number of students? Because I worry that there are some kids who could really benefit, but we can't accommodate them. I'll answer that in a couple ways. I think I would be crazy to say we don't have students out there who would benefit from the AVID elective class who are not currently in it. I think there are students. And that sometimes it's a case of I don't, as an individual, I don't want to

066make that commitment to the AVID elective class, because there is a level of commitment. And you're right. The application process is asking students and parents to consider, you know, what we're asking them to do. And determination is part of the AVID elective. So if I don't really want to be there, I'm not going to be very successful in that environment. So I think there's that. If budget weren't an issue, I still would say that we would only have a limited number of students in our AVID elective class. but I would really hyper focus on training as many teachers as I could in those strategies look more locally because we travel for some of that and so it limits how many people we can take how many people take part and As you develop those individuals

067as experts and we have several in the buildings Then they can come back and share that with their teams or with their staff but I think what what these guys will tell you anybody who attended avid CRT that just happened a couple weeks ago the main piece Of feedback we got was that was some people said was the best training I've ever been to and it wasn't just about content It was about delivery It was just a really good training that models good effective practice and when you get to take part in that for two days you know you You internalize some of that and then you can turn around and use it. So I think that's where that is I do think there's room to continue to really focus on recruitment And we've done

068that so Barb and Kaya Matson at Free State both go out to the middle schools They sometimes bring students with them to talk to the middle school kids about what avid is so that they don't have a Misrepresentation in their mind of what it is they can and they can see kids that look like me that you know what I mean That are being successful in that environment and say okay, maybe avid is something that I could try So I think those are some of the ways that we're kind of trying to tackle and address that recruitment is huge Really huge two things one. I just wanted to thank the student in your stories. It is incredibly powerful And I am so appreciative when you come before A public group like this and share your

069personal stories. So thank you The question I had you mentioned about in-house training So is it does avid allow you to have a train-the-trainer model? Like our people can be trained to then do the avid training here or is it will it require that involvement of bringing somebody in from the organization to do this training? Yeah, so One thing I love about avid as an organization is they really do make most of their training materials available to like I have access to All of them so I share them out with Avid coordinators and other people who want to do so we do we actually do several of the trainings at like our district PD days Sometimes the coordinators do them with staff and they have access to the materials that avid uses but the CRT

070strand specifically Because it is you want that content delivered. Well, it's not something that just anybody can do But we do have a couple people in district who will be trained to do it and then we can offer it in that way The only negative side to that is it won't necessarily Like if you attend what you're a teacher you attend it wouldn't count for you It's like I went to avid for two days because you're not officially getting it through avid but we can train which is which is what? What we want it's achieving the goal that we want. So thank you for the question You mentioned the More work I guess to do to for integrating the CRT with the rest of our equity work Is that does that fall under one of

071those basically moving forward bullet points? Is that something that we're? Continually, I guess yeah integrating those Absolutely, that's that's huge and in order to make that meaningful connecting it back to what teachers are already learning through courageous conversation So that is a part of that sustainable piece and moving forward. Absolutely questions Thank you. Thanks so next is Native American student services with Jennifer a talk knee coordinator Welcome back to the Jennifer talking the hour. I have slides. I sent them somewhere origin No, I have a self looking up a stretch Ha Madhavika and Anani it's a Jennifer talk me. Hello everybody here tonight. My name is Jennifer talk me I'm the coordinator for Native American student services. I've been in this position since 2007 I am a graduate from both universities here in Lawrence from

072Haskell and KU I Am located in Centennial, which I lovingly like to call the island of misfit toys building You're welcome to come visit me anytime This all right, sweet that looks weird. Ah Aha, I will roll. Okay, so I Don't normally go into this a little bit, but I want to talk about a common question that I get which is what do you want? to be called Right. So my first response to that is why? Why do you want to call me anything? Are you identifying everyone in the room by race or only people of color or people with glasses? What's the context of this and that's not to say that sometimes it isn't legitimate to call people or Isolate race because that is after all condition to right so If you're writing a

073grant if you're writing a paper if you're being official, it's American Indian slash Alaska native. That is the official thing, right? However, I am one person I am not representative of all 572 federally recognized tribes I'm not even representative of my own tribe Which is Comanche by the way So there's a myriad of different ways and means that folks like to be called For example when I'm texting sometimes I'll say native at the end and the eight and the V I'll do that be feeling kind of fancy and modern The first time I heard First Nations was in 1994 I was in Australia in this Canadian Cree woman came up to me She said are you a First Nations person and I said Yeah, I am. Oh So it's first time I'd ever heard that

074and now it's like really common but back then that wasn't very common term so I do want to point out the difference between a colonized name and a name for ourselves So for me our colonized name would be Comanche, but we call ourselves nomina So the Navajo Nation might say Navajo on paper But they call themselves Dena or the Adawa tribe might be Adawa but on paper that on in their souls They're Anishinaabe and so that's the difference between a colonized name the name for ourselves So I just wanted to go through that just a little bit to share some of that Craytous Conversations Protocol defines race as color culture and consciousness as indigenous folks sometimes The color or the consciousness and culture might be equal or even supersede our color however as people of

075color we are also political entities and that we're citizens of both United States and our sovereign tribes Okay, just a little FYI there Now back to personal local and immediate okay, so the I Wanted to share some information with you about our graduation rates I don't like to say dropout rates or drop-off rates because that's looking at things in a deficit way I like to look at the positive so the national graduation rate is 2016 numbers But the national graduation rate for Native American students or AI slash AN students is 48% nationally and That is putting together reservation schools boarding schools at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian education Urban Indian schools, which is Lawrence is actually considered urban which probably only time Lawrence has ever considered urban as in regarding Native

076American populations and rural schools So that's the national rate the Lawrence self-identified number is people who check the box when they enroll and That's what they self-identify. So I have no control over what people say they are. So that's they enroll That's what they've checked that box. So that's what that 83% is However, the nice number are Students who enrolled in my program, so they've either shown me No, they had not either they have they've shown me their tribal Identification we make copies of it do all the things required for our grants to serve those students and that's that number the hundred percent number So for the past three years, we have a hundred percent graduation rate for Native American Student Services students but keeping it a little more real here it It takes 7,000

077Native American high school freshmen to get one Ph.D. student, graduate, one Ph.D. graduate. So out of 7,000 ninth grade Native Americans, only one of them will get their doctorate. So this information is from Dr. Brayboy. He teaches at ASU. And I just wanted to share this kind of ongoing thing we have about retention and attrition. So you see our national picture. Okay, that's really depressing. So I'm going to do some positives and highlights here. Last summer, we began a summer enrichment program for kids leaving kindergarten through fifth grade, so our elementary students. And the last time I spoke at the board meeting, I'm required to do this every year, so the last time I spoke, I talked about moving from a tutoring model, which we had been doing in the past, which was what I

078inherited, to moving to. And I'm going to talk about this in a minute. But we're going to talk about what we really can do, what can I offer that's unique to what I can do, and my point of view to my students, and that is mentorship and Native American culture. And so providing that is shown through best practices that that retains students. So since we no longer tutored grade school students, we had to replace something we're doing for our grade school students, right? so um we did the summer academy and it was great we had about 25 kids show up it was for three weeks half days and they did a great number of things edge is like what i called the academic enrichment and pride is what i called the when they learn self-advocacy

079and learn equity danika more help us with the equity piece we had a um over over 15 folks help us out as adults with it you can see some of the things that we did when making choices about our activities we looked at the medicine wheel which encompasses the physical the mental or intellectual emotional and spiritual parts of ourselves so we wanted to have a whole balance so that's why we included safety stuff creases is an acronym for the ice sheet program at ku they came and did some free science lessons for us so that was fun i spoke earlier about um our native student voices program that we had last year with steve judd and we had a lot of people that were interested in the science of the medical system and um let's

080see we also continued our our scholarship our scholar recognition where we um recognize with certificates and a nice potluck dinner um all our elementary kids who had perk of attendance and our secondary students who've achieved the honor roll for the past year and it's a really great event over 200 people come it's held at south you're all welcome to come um hopefully you got the invitation last time and none of y'all came that's okay um but i did hear from somebody who told me they weren't coming so i'm going to go ahead and get started um i'm going to go ahead and get started so that was yes you told me thank you um but you're welcome and it goes really well and the encouragement it gives the students to see that they're not the

081only ones around is is so great um the number one reason why native kids drop out is because they feel like no one at their school cares about them that's the main reason it has nothing to do with academics or um money or subjects it's they it's a feeling it's an emotion so if i can take away that feeling for them if i can provide at least one person or one opportunity for them to see that folks care about them i'm eliminating that obstacle and that's how i frame a lot of what i do i grew up in the texas panhandle and western oklahoma my dad was in the oil field industry so we bebopped back and forth so when i lived in texas no one knew what i was right so i was like

082i was like that brown egg in a sea of white right but when i was in oklahoma i was like one of lots of little indians running around so i'm i know what that feels like and i know how it feels to to experience that as a child so for example free state is about three percent native and lawrence high is six percent langston hughes there are five kids out of the 500 or so students there that are native that's one percent of those kids are there and then a broken arrow is another example where there's 15 percent american so that shows there's a wide range of experiences our students have so looking forward i want to remind you all we're solely federally funded i like to remind people that some school districts match the

083federal funds that we get that title seven gets this one does not we received two federal grants title seven which is from the department of education and the other one's called johnson o'malley from the bureau of indian education or bureau of indian affairs um it's a little worrisome with all this federal budget stuff happening that that will have a program next year and i'm not sure if it's going to be a program next year um yeah so the other thing i want to talk about and i have some quotes here i want to get them right so i want to be very clear so one of the things in um the courageous competition protocol is passion practice and persistence and passion is about the level of connectedness to the equity work right and it's defined

084as strong that one's passion must be strong enough to overwhelm institutional inertia and resistance to change and this passion morphs into practice and that is defined as the essential individual institutional actions taken to effectively educate every student to his or her full potential now this concept pushes me personally to use evidence-based programming to meet my students needs where they are finally the persistence piece is defined as the willingness of a school system to stick with it despite slow results the paradoxical nature of courageous conversations is what is so attractive to me actually about it it is simultaneously asking me to examine myself and forge a personal journey which will in turn affect a systemic change persistence calls for each of us to exercise a seemingly oxymoronic combination of patience and urgency now those quotes are

085from the courageous conversation field guide it's the new blue book that was published in 2015 if you want to read it again look at it this is what drives me to reach all of our kids it is personal for me at nas we make decisions all the time in the future we're going to continue to make decisions about what we provide we will keep all of these things in mind thank you for your precious time thank you for for your report jennifer um oh do you have any questions yeah i did have one one question um you know the slide that you went through that talked about um follow through for student and higher education how many students are in higher education and how many students are in higher education and how many students are

086in higher education and how many students yes make it past that next level to get to their masters or their phd um as part of the of the services that you provide in your program do you track what happens to the anecdotally i don't have i try to we don't the district doesn't really do that right but i have oh probably anecdotal stuff of about half of our students and so i can probably get a rough idea what most people are doing i'm not gonna yeah spot and ask you for that i was just i was curious of what you're doing and i'm not gonna put you on the spot but i'm just curious of what you're doing and i'm not gonna put you on the spot whether tracking that information like was a requirement

087for you as part of it no no it's just what i do it's just what i'm just nosy yeah no no and which is great and um and i i imagine that with the success that you've had with your students here that um that you're helping them beat those odds well it's not just my success the um when i talk about the different urban indian centers lots of native folks move to away from their home communities for lots of reasons people my theory is that native folks move to lawrence for education one quarter of all my families at least one parents in college and half of those it's either a single parent or both parents are in college so that's a huge number of people who committed to education but it also affects the uh

088instability of like moving back home and back and forth and and living in rental and moving once a semester and all those kinds of like things like that so i'm not gonna get into that but i'm gonna talk about the things that affect that so that affects lots of things so yeah centennial misfit toys come find me thank you and next is the may 2nd bond election with julie boyle director communications i was trying to think of the words to sentimental journey but i can't remember what they are but um other than that i do want to take us back just a little bit um it was december 14th of 2015 when the board contracted with gould evans associates to start the facility master planning project that led to this bond election and they brought

089you their work um during two work sessions september 26th and october 24th earlier this fall and then you voted unanimously to authorize and call for the 87 million dollar mail ballot election um on january 9th so three months ago yesterday so i'm here to talk a little bit about the bond election and i'm going to talk a little bit about the bond election and about what we've been doing for those past three months. I've not had much to do. I've just been sitting around, actually, which I hope that you know is not true. I was here on February 13th. I shared plans of how the district planned to meet its responsibility. It is our responsibility to inform the public of the bond election and what's in it and what it means. And I talked to

090you about who needed the information, both our internal and our external audiences, and what information we plan to share. And tonight, I just wanted to update you briefly on how we've been sharing and continue to share bond election information. Again, these are the two pertinent board goals. The first is about community engagement around our district priorities, and the second is about facilities planning, and certainly the bond election is one of our priorities. These are some examples of our informational outreach, if I could find a visual way to represent those. Since face-to-face communication, I believe, is always best, I wanted to share with you that of the 50 presentations we planned to staff school families in the community, 36 of those have been completed by you, several board members, by the superintendent, and by Tony Barron,

091the executive director of facilities and operations. And I believe Superintendent Hayden has completed 25 of those presentations during his road show that he's been on. I won't read the entire slide to you, but I did want to point out a few things that you may not have known about. I hope that you received either Friday or Saturday this mailer in the mail that was sent to kind of remind people, the ballots are coming, the ballots are coming. So I hope that this was sent last Thursday. I hope that it arrived Friday or Saturday and gets people ready to look in their mailboxes. I also recorded a video. I also recorded a message and email, sent an email to all of our staff and school families on Sunday afternoon. I always laugh at myself when I

092get a call from USD 497 Sunday afternoon. What do I think? I think something's going on. It's bad. And it was me. And I just had forgotten that I had scheduled it and I'm getting a call from myself and thankfully it was not an emergency. But it was important, very important. So thank you. Thank you. Also, coming up this Wednesday, time to go with the mailing of ballots is this piece that you all have at your places. And both of these pieces are in the back of the room with the agendas if anyone would like a copy. This is our district quarterly newsletter and this edition is all about the bond election. And we, it's a partnership with the Lawrence Journal World and they will insert it into all of their newspapers on Wednesday. As

093well as the Crave. If you're a non-subscriber to the Journal World, you do get the Crave and it's your coupons, your Wednesday coupons. Our insert will be in Crave if you do not subscribe to the Journal World. So it's there for everyone. I'm told that's 13,000 Journal World subscribers and 29,000 non-subscribers who will get that in the Crave. So it will be everywhere on Wednesday. I trust you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I truly want to thank our staff for their efforts because communication is everybody's responsibility and this has been a great team effort to really get the word out. Also, the local media, the newspaper, TV, and radio station have shared information about the bond election. Joanna Lavacek did a very

094comprehensive piece on the Lawrence High Bond Project this weekend. Rose Clare with Six News, who could not be here tonight, has done several TV, interviews about the bond election. Kyle was on KLWN this morning talking with Hank Booth about the election, and Shannon will be interviewed by Hank next Monday. So all of our local media are also partners in getting information out to the voting public. And I think Marcel said this earlier, but if you have not had the opportunity yet to hear a presentation live and in person, we do have some coming up. Earlier tonight, Tony was at Kennedy at 6 o'clock giving a presentation. But tomorrow, three schools, Cordley, Deerfield, and Sunset Hill, will be hosting presentations at 7 o'clock, and those are open to everyone. Pick a school that's closest to you

095or one that you've not been in and that you would like to see, and you can go to those. And then next Monday at 7 o'clock, Sunflower Elementary School will be hosting. And those are not just for that school community, they're for everyone. So we invite everyone to go. If there is a community group, and now I'm speaking to the public, if there's a community group that has not yet received a presentation and would like one, there's still time. I will schedule one of these lovely folks to come out to your group. You can just call me at 8325000, and we'll get that going for you. But please don't delay. As Marcel said earlier, ballots are being mailed on Wednesday. So watch for those arriving in your mailbox. If you're a registered voter, probably starting

096Friday, maybe Saturday. This is what the envelope will look like. It will say official election mail on it. So don't throw it away or get it messed up in your junk mail pile. It is important that you look for that. And this is the sample ballot. This is what your ballot will look like. It will be folded up into that envelope. It's one of those self mailers. I always find those hard to open. You have to fold and put in all that stuff. But this is what the ballot will look like. It's a single question. You will mark dark in the oval, black or blue ink pen. Yes or no. Yes if you support the question. No, if you do not. And then you'll fold it and put it back in the envelope. In the

097back of the envelope you must sign. And that just indicates that you are the one that has completed your ballot. And then you just simply mail it back. It's a postage paid envelope. You don't have to have a stamp. You just put it back in your mailbox. You don't have to have any of that. You just put it back in your mailbox. You just sign. mailbox and do that so it is received by the county clerk's office by noon on May 2nd. And I do have some instructions here. I just thought I would share a few. If any voter needs assistance, they're unable to mark their own ballot due to sickness, physical disability or illiteracy, you may request assistance in voting. If someone assists a voter, there is a place to sign on the back

098of the envelope. It's called a statement of person assisting voter. So you just sign that on the back of the return envelope. They do mention that power of attorney does not authorize someone to vote for another person. But laws do provide for assisting voters. And then on the actual ballot, if your dog ate your homework, if your dog chews up your ballot, if you tear, deface or make a mistake, wrongfully marked, you are not eligible to vote. If you mark any ballot, you can return it to the election office and you will receive a new ballot or a set of ballots if you're a family that has lost them. And Jamie Shue was here earlier. He reminded me to watch the county clerk's Facebook page if you're on social media. And they will be sending

099reminders and some tips and things starting this week. So that's good to know. Okay. I am going to recommend because I'm... I'm kind of a conservative person as far as mailing it by April 25th. That's a week in advance of the deadline. If you like to live on the edge, you can mail a little later. But just to make sure your vote counts, I would mail it by April 25th. Don't live on the edge. But if for some reason you do miss mailing it back, you know, it gets lost somewhere and you forgot to put it in the mail and it's after April 25th, you don't feel like it's time to mail it. There are several places you can hand deliver it. You can hand deliver it to the clerk's office at the Douglas County

100Courthouse. That's at 11th and Mass. You can hand deliver it to the county treasurer's satellite offices. If you're shopping at the 6th and Lawrence Avenue Dillon's, there's a treasurer's satellite office there or over by Home Depot and Best Buy across the parking lot. There is a treasurer's satellite office there as well. So either part of town. And then the clerk's office. Okay. Okay. Cool. The coolest thing is this is a picture of the drop box. If you forget and you don't want to get out of your car, you can drive into the one-hour parking lot that's south of the courthouse and just drop your ballot into this brown, I think it says, county business depository. But you must do it, again, before noon on May 2nd to have your vote count. So those are some

101things. If you forget to mail it back, we think it's easy to mark it, sign it, mail it back. But if you forget, there are some additional ways that you can get your ballot in and be counted. I think that's it, unless anyone has some questions. I don't have a question. I just wanted to share. I forgot to mention this during my board commentary, that I did do a presentation for the Lawrence Association of Neighborhoods last Thursday night and thank them for inviting us to share information with their association and then they have the opportunity to share that back with their neighborhood associations as well. We have talked wherever. We're more than one person has gathered. So, appreciate everyone pitching in and doing that. Any other questions? Thanks, Julie. Mark it, sign it, mail it

102back. And then finally we have the equity update and board policy committee recommendations with Anna Stubblefield, assistant superintendent education support and equity, and David Cunningham, executive director of human resources and legal counsel. Good evening, Anna Stubblefield. I'm trying to get my view slides to. Good evening, Anna Stubblefield. I'm trying to get my view slides to. Good evening, Anna Stubblefield. I'm trying to get my view slides to. to come up but struggling. I think I changed it for portable. Is it coming? Well, I'll talk and if it doesn't come up, I'll try to set it up. I was just gonna give a brief equity update on some of the things that have occurred since our, I'll pull it up over here. Oh, okay. Magic. On some of the things that occurred since the last time I

103provided an update. First, I just want to say Vanessa and I had an opportunity to attend the School of Social Welfare Day at KU and they brought in Shanti Butler. I may be mispronouncing her name but she provided an excellent opportunity for the individuals there and I appreciate Vanessa inviting me to attend with her but it was about white privilege and then also questioning around social justice which I didn't get to attend that part but Vanessa and I will connect but it was a great opportunity and there were several district employees, counselors who attended that on their own just for some CEUs but that was a wonderful half day of professional development so I appreciate attending that with Vanessa. As far as the district's equity updates, a couple of things you've heard about tonight. Leah

104talked about the culturally relevant teaching training that we are being more strategic, and I think that's something that we will be focusing on as we get more information about how we provide it and get it to all of our teachers. We are, as Leah mentioned, planning possibly having one this summer and then a few next school year and strategically trying to get that training to our teachers based off of the positive feedback that we've received around that. Another thing that is in process and also in existence, is that we created an equity group for students at Free State and then they're in the process, if they've not already done it, because I may have missed some updates, they're going to expand that to LHS and Lawrence Virtual School and have a district student equity committee

105and as we revamp our equity advisory council in the past, we've always had student voices so we will make sure as we evolve that there are student voices. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. As a part of our equity advisory council. One of the things that we talked about the last time was updating the bullying and discrimination link and so all of our secondary schools currently do have that. We will look at it this summer and streamline it and clean it up a bit, but right now there is a link at all of our secondary schools where students or others can report anonymously or they can identify themselves via that link. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The one that I've mentioned a

106little bit, we have the creation of two advisory committees. One is not new. The equity advisory council I found out and I've forgotten that it had been around in some shape or form since 1986. But every, I guess, couple of years it would revamp itself. And last year, Dr. Dole, we were in the process of revamping. So last year was the first year since I was in the district that it was not a formal committee. We were trying to figure out how to actually leverage more connections to the school. But given some of the recent activities within Lawrence, we decided that we will revamp and have the district committee but also have some things available for parents and communities at each of the schools as well. So and I'll talk a little bit more about

107that. I'll talk about those two in my next couple of slides. The other thing I did want to give an update on recruiting, Samarie Devon and I and several other district administrators and we also tried to connect with some individuals in the community. Samarie and I went to Harris Stowe, which is a historically black college in St. Louis back in, it was in March. It was over, I think, our spring break. And there they, in the school of education, they probably had about 20 students. And again, it was probably not a lot of students. So I think that's a good thing. It was well over educators, it was probably 60 school districts there. So it's not as many, it's more recruiters than actual students. Samarie and I also attended a fair in Pittsburgh where it

108was over 800 candidates, which means you had a larger pool of candidates of color and also lots of special ed teachers. We do have some headway there with some possibilities of people and we were just trying to finalize some things. So, yeah. and Samory was at Haskell. I don't know if she was there alone on Friday, but we do have a pretty strong partnership with Haskell. We actually host all of their student teachers and all of their education candidates before they even start their student teaching. Most of the Haskell students are typically in our buildings for about two solid years, so they build some strong partnerships there. And a lot of them do go back to their home communities, but we do, every year we get an opportunity to hire a few of the students

109if they don't choose to go back home. And we also hosted our own career fair. Samory organized that here in the district, and then we were able to attract students of color and other students, and that was pretty successful as well. So we have been making efforts. We have been making efforts around the recruiting staff of color and others who are committed to our equity work this season. For the district equity leadership team advisory, that's Delta, this group will meet for the first time next Tuesday, April 18th, and it will be from 4 to 7. This particular group was for parents of students of color. What we wanted to take into consideration, because when we put it together, we put out the initial application, we got well over 70 applicants. And so we wanted to

110get persons of color, gender diversity. We wanted to have some representation from all of our school attendance area. And then we wanted a group that represented like New DeLawrence, been in Lawrence a while. So that's kind of how we went through that process, and we appreciate all of the individuals who took the time to complete the application. We did a lot of work. We contacted 23 community members and just are waiting to, not necessarily hear from all of them, but we want to make sure that they all want to accept the position. And if not, then we can, if somebody says I can't, then we can have some conversations and possibly replace them. So that our first meeting will be on April 18th. The Equity Advisory Council, this is the revamp council. It's always been

111in existence. And Melissa is going to join us on Delta, correct? I think we invited. Okay. Okay. So the Equity Advisory Council is, we carried over some of the traditional positions that have always been on there from some past, but we've also expanded it. So this group and what we're going to do with Delta representation is actually we're going to invite anyone from Delta to attend Equity. And we'll let people self select, select if they want to be a part of both or either. And as we, this is organic and new to us. So these groups will, if you've been a part of them in the past, will be the Equity Advisory Council is larger than it has been in the past. But as many perspectives and voices that we can get in the room

112to discuss, you know, the things that have come up and to formulate action steps and plans, that will be more of a benefit to them. So we're going to have a group of people that are going to be part of the district. So this is a list of the positions that we wanted to make sure that we had. In addition to that, I think we added approximately 20 more community members. And then any Delta representative that wants to be included. We know that as we, every time we started this list, we recognize, oh, we didn't think about this group. So there may be some groups that are not reflective. And we invite you to reach out to myself or Don Downey if the group is not represented. And we'll figure out. We just, the groups

113that we heard from and then groups that we had connections with in the previous years is who we wanted to include it in this particular council. And what this council's focus will be, we have lots of groups that are, they're isolating specific marginalized groups like our LGBT groups, LGBT groups, our LGBTQ group, our special ed group, our Delta parents of color group. This is where all of those groups can come together and we can look at the intersectionality of all of the marginalized groups and talk, discuss and figure out action plans and steps for what comes up for the group. There are two board members that's typically on this group. And so I don't know, like you guys can talk amongst yourself and figure out who will be there. The first meeting for this group

114is actually right before the next board meeting from 5 to 6. I know it's in only an hour, but in that particular, during that time we can kind of figure out what our direction will be. Everybody will get to see who's in the group and then formulate a plan. In the past this group has met as often as monthly to as little as quarterly. But those are some of the things we'll, we didn't, I didn't feel comfortable are those joint meetings. I didn't feel comfortable dictating. We can figure out what the group, which direction the group wants to go. And that, Can I ask you a quick question? Yes. How do you imagine the student groups interacting with the equity, the community equity group? Because it doesn't appear that there's any students on the list,

115but I didn't, I just want to clarify. So in the past we have worked with the two high schools and now that they're, they have an equity group, we have worked, in the past we worked with the two high schools and they typically have had representation for the two high schools. So we had representation from either like student council or some formal group in the administration would represent, recommend them. But now that we have the equity groups who are formulating them, we would tap into those and then the students would be included. In the past they were just a member of the group and offered us their perspective and experience around whatever was being discussed at that time. But they will be included in this. We're just trying to navigate and figure out. There were

116some students that we did contact that actually took the time to apply that I think we did invite to the first one, but then we'll work through their different groups to figure out who needs to be there. Both of these meetings are actually open meetings and so if somebody showed up, we're not going to like say, no, you can't come in there. I guess you can definitely come to those meetings. Other questions? If not. Go ahead. So typically the board president would make the committee assignments. Do you just want us to email you if we're interested and then you'll make that assignment? Or have you already thought about who you want to? I've thought a little bit. I know Jess has already expressed a strong interest, so I think she's one of them. Beyond that,

117it's who's open. I don't know if anybody, Melissa or Vanessa, I know either of you two, if you've expressed, if you have a desire, but anybody that wants to. You can let me know. Okay. Thank you. If no questions for me, I'm going to turn it over to, yes. Just would it make sense or do you feel like there would be a need to maybe reach out and have someone from the Muslim community represented just kind of in today's political environment? I know we did some stuff at Southwest Middle School last year. We had some, we had some meetings with some of the leaders and we had some kind of education and some. Yeah, we definitely can. We may have someone from Delta and, but we can, if there's a formal group, if somebody tells

118us, we can definitely reach out to them and invite representation there. So we'll look and follow up. I remember we met and we talked and I inquired a lot of information, but can you reiterate, we talked about the purpose of this, Delta and why there was, it was just parents of color, parents of students of color, and you kind of elaborated on that, if you can just restate that. Yeah, so in our work with PEG, that is something that they have done a lot of research around. Typically you don't have space or a place for parents of color to interact with one another and to provide that. And so we have a lot of experience with that perspective to one another. So that's why that affinity group was specifically for parents of color because their

119experience, when you look at our data and the national data, there is some definite challenges and some disconnects there. So tapping into that particular group to address concerns from their perspective is the purpose of the Delta group. Any other questions? Okay. We'll go to the next one. We'll talk about policy. All right. And Vanessa, please feel free to jump in any time. I wanted to just talk with the board for a few minutes about the policy. Vanessa and I, along with David Cunningham, have been working in the policy committee since 2013, or 2016, I'm sorry, 2016, talking about our policies pertaining to this all really started that happened around that incident and some follow-up that we then had also with students in the policy committee. And so we had a discussion with the policy committee

120in the spring last year at Free State High School talking about their experiences related to that incident, related to some other things that were going on politically, nationally that had filtered into the experiences they were having at school, and also talking with them about their experiences of microaggression. And so we took that discussion we had with those students, and Vanessa and David and I have worked on redrafting our harassment and discrimination policies. And so that's been a very good conversation. We've had a lot of input from, we did some changes to the policies. We sent them out to staff and to our district equity and leadership team and had several iterations of those policies. Also had done some work on how can we address the issue of microaggressions that the students shared with us. Danica

121has been working on that. Has been involved in that. We've ramped up training for our staff around the issue of microaggressions in response to those conversations. So this has been an ongoing process. We've reached a place where we feel like we've made some positive changes to those policies, but I want to emphasize that we don't feel like this is the end of the discussion around these policies. We're going to recommend to the board that they just now, but I think that it's really important going forward, especially as the Delta group and the equity group and the equity advisory council get up and running and decide what their agenda is going to look like, that if they wish to have an opportunity to take a look, we want that to be there, additional things in these

122policies. So we've done a couple of things. We've rewritten our discrimination and harassment policy as it relates to staff. And in that process we actually collapsed two policies into one. We're making GAAB and GAAC into a single harassment, both racial harassment and sexual harassment. We then took that language and made sure that our policy in our student section mirrored this to our staff policy appropriate. I mean, there are a few differences, staff versus students, but on the whole we wanted to make sure that we had a consistent and articulate message. Our district views issues and how we handle them. Then in addition to that, as we started working through those policies, we decided we also needed to look at the policy that we're going to take out our complaints policy, and that's KNA, which is

123the third policy that's coming to you for review. KNA, we basically scrapped the old KNA and David rewrote it. And it's, I think, a much more clear and understandable set of procedures. It mirrors the graphic that we shared with the community several meetings ago in regard to if you have a complaint that you want to share, and here's the process that we've done for staff. So we've now made sure that our policy aligns with and supports our practice. So that's the general scope of the policy changes that we're bringing to you tonight. This is our first step in policy. Next meeting. So welcome feedback from board members and the community if you have for us on the rewrites of these policies, and we would have an opportunity to make sure our approval is complete. Yeah,

124thank you, Shannon. That was great and I think completely summarized the work that we've done. I wanted to point out as well that the way that our district policy manual works, our policies tend to be overarching, kind of large, high level, here's the gist of the situation. And then we have general administrative practices that support that, that administrators use. And there is some more detailed clarifications on what this policy means when the rubber hits the road that are involved in those documents. I know, I'm sorry. I know I'm part of a district LGBTQ task force working to kind of craft some of those guidelines for how we can better support LGBTQ students in our district that would work as, you know, the gap language behind the strong prohibition against discrimination and harassment policies that we

125have. And the same thing could happen as well if the district equity team wanted to put more language together around racial justice or how we can better support students of color. And so, you know, because it's interesting. We looked at and researched a lot of different opportunities that other districts use to kind of support this kind of language. And each one kind of has their own system. You know, there's some, the Minneapolis school district has some pretty compelling language. It's part of their district policy manual. But they don't really, I think they use their policy manuals, they use their policy manual more as that general administrative procedure kind of book. And we obviously didn't want to revamp our whole system to target and tailor this policy in a more deliberate way. And so, yeah, I

126think it accomplishes what we set out to do, which was to create a broad, clear guideline that sets a vision for what we expect in terms of the way that our district handles acts of discrimination, harassment, hazing, or bullying. Yeah. I don't think so. Okay, go ahead. I thought it was there. I move that the Board of Education approve the review of the referenced policies for possible final action at the April 24, 2017 board meeting. I have a second. Second. Janice? Oh, do you still have, all in favor? Aye. Okay. All right. And now we'll hear from Gary Schmidt. Thank you and good evening. My name is Gary Schmidt. I'm a student. My name is Gary Schmidt. I'm the co-chair of the, where is that time machine? I'm the co-chair of the Racial Justice Committee

127for Justice Matters. Justice Matters is an organization that exists in this community to give voice to the voiceless. Our role is to surface and lift up concerns that are already present in the community. And we appreciate the opportunity to address the Board tonight. The Lawrence Public School District has acknowledged that it has experienced episodes of racial inequity and has taken a number of positive steps in response to those problems, creating a community equity council and district advisory board that we just heard about, expanding racial equity training, revising the compliance of the Racial Justice Committee, and expanding student support for the community. The Los Angeles City Council has replaced the original school board with the school board in 2017. That is in my vision for a new school board, which will be the last and only

128coming school board. And we will change and redesign the school board. In my personal view, the school board is a great school. It is a great school. It is a good school. I'm a proud school board member as well. I mean, I just want to be a part of this. And I think that the role of the school board is46. I'm a proud school member, and I think that before I was a member of the school board, I was a member of the school board as well. And so, I think that the role of the school board is really important. The school board is really important to me because it is its role to take care of the deserves recognition for their efforts. And we are all in agreement that more can be done to

129help the children of color in our schools. Justice Matters has spoken to parents, staff, students, administrators, education experts in search of a path forward. And we have found what we feel is an answer that has the power to transform our classrooms and school environments. Restorative justice replaces a punitive system of discipline with one that heals and builds relationships. These practices are being used in schools across the nation in cities like Oakland, Denver, Chicago, San Antonio, Baltimore, Jacksonville, and Wichita. And it's changing the cultures within classrooms. By building strong relationships, we can build relationships that are inclusive and inclusive. And it's changing the cultures within classrooms by building strong relationships. And it's changing the cultures within classrooms by building strong relationships between students, parents, and teachers. This approach has saved 8,700 suspensions in Jacksonville since 2009.

130In San Antonio, a pilot restorative justice program saw an 84% reduction in suspensions in the first year. That said, we understand that this is a new idea. So we're not asking the school to change the rules. We're asking the school district to commit to anything they haven't had a chance to explore. We're asking that the district consider adding a pair of steps in the equity journey that it has been on for over 10 years. And these include a visit to Wichita West High School to see how restorative practices have improved racial equity issues there. And a follow-up discussion. And a follow-up discussion. Following that exploration with West staff, a follow-up discussion with Justice Matters and the Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution, also known as KIPCOR, to discuss how restorative practices could help in

131our classrooms here in Lawrence. We believe that a site visit for which Justice Matters will cover the costs could take place before the end of the school year. We also spoke briefly with Marcel Harmon earlier this afternoon, and he expressed openness to exploring that possibility. So we're working up a list of dates, and we'll open a Doodle to gather availability from the board. That link will be emailed to all board members and Janice Dunn. Ideally we'd like at least Board President Harmon, Superintendent Hayden, Assistant Superintendent Stubblefield, and a member of the board to be able to visit the campus. So we're working on that. We're working on that. I appreciate your attention. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm going to turn it over to the policy committee that has been researching restorative justice to

132join us, but we'd welcome any others that would like to attend. Justice Matters is willing to make the trip with whoever's available and hope that, whether it's one person or 15 people from the district. We hope that we can be in dialogue with district personnel about shaping the itinerary as we move through the month of April. We appreciate your attentive attention. Thank you. in listening to our comments tonight, and we are encouraged by your interest in this potential solution. Thank you. Thanks, Gary. I think I'll just share. Since our discussion, I've thought about it some more than this afternoon, and I am open to this. I think there is some real potential here for the district. And as part of that process, certainly seeing it in action makes perfect sense. My concern is just from

133a timing standpoint, and thinking through having district staff and administrative get a chance to wrap their heads around some of this so that they can develop the appropriate questions that they want to ask when we make the visit, and having the board also kind of think through, is this for sure something maybe that we actually want to put on a board goal for next year? Okay. And so if that's the case, does it make sense to try to do the trip now or wait and do it after we had made it a goal and do it at the very beginning of the fall? You know, those are just some thoughts that I had this afternoon thinking through this, and I'd actually like some board thought on that as well. So I'm curious, because I like

134the idea of investigating it as well, but I'm curious if, is it necessary for school to be in session, or is that, you know, are we in a situation where it's necessary students are there, or are we really going to be asking questions? I think it's important to have some questions of administrators on the ground to kind of find out how it functions in the building. And if that's the case, which I suspect is probably the case, then, you know, kind of pushing it out into the summer months might be something that gives a little more time for our team to be ready to ask the right questions. Because I do agree that if we go next week, we might miss all sorts of information that we would want to have asked if we'd had

135a little more time in our administrative team. And so I think that's something that we might have more time to think about it. You know, just as a, I mean, I think, Marcel, your comments are, I think, very good in the sense that I think you want to have an understanding of what this is, because it does help in terms of answering, you know, or formulating questions and really getting a better sense of it. That said, we have, we've done field trips before. We, not all the board members were here, but we did a field trip to one of the Kansas City schools when we were looking at the International Baccalaureate Program. And it was really helpful during that visit to actually hear not only from the administrators, but from students. That was a, not

136a different perspective, but I think a very complimentary perspective. So, you know, so I'm sort of torn in terms of, you know, doing it right away, or the summer, or maybe waiting until the fall when we've had a chance to really explore it. And I'll say that I think it's an intriguing concept, and it's certainly something that I think we're going to want to explore. So, you know, but I think keep in mind that the student perspective is going to be important as well. So I think if we did put it off until the fall, it's possible that members of the equity team, after having discussed what restorative practices are in the first place, might want to join and be a part of that discussion. I think that's a really good point. Vanessa? So I

137do think restorative justice is more of kind of some basic tenets and ideas about kind of shifting a focus from punishment to healing when it comes to issues that affect people that are emotional and concerning. And I think it's, yeah, a best practice. I think it's way better than any other system in terms of coming up with a strategy to move people forward when ugliness and discrimination and all of those things happen, which happen frequently in our community and communities across the country. But I think that different organizations, different districts have very different ways of operationalizing that within their buildings. And so I don't know that it would be, I don't know if taking a turn or a trip to west and seeing the program would be able to tell us yes or no, this

138is exactly what we want to do here. Because I think it varies a bit from place to place. I think it's a good idea and I think that it would be valuable to visit and I think we could do it now or over the summer or in the fall and get benefit no matter when we do it. But I do think, I think it would, it's not that much unlike the shift in focus I think we've done with a lot of our behavior work in the district. With the CI3T program we're shifting our focus from punishing when kids do things that aren't acceptable to educating kids about what acceptable behavior is and recognizing when kids are doing what they're supposed to. And so I think that our district is primed and ready for this kind

139of thing just because of the type of work we're doing through the equity work and through the CI3T work that is very much getting people willing and able to shift their lens with which they operate. So yeah, I'm incredibly interested. I would love to attend if a field trip is available. Yeah, so I think that's all. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a good idea. I just, for me I think I feel a little rushed. I mean it's just my gut, that's my initial reaction just thinking through what staff and everybody is still trying to accomplish through the end of the year. I'm a little concerned about rushing it and not getting the full benefit of that visit. Right. And our general rule is to do new initiatives through the goal setting process in order

140to give people time to complete the work we've asked them to do last year. So I mean I would be comfortable honoring that process as well. I think that allowing our district that, you know, following that strategy allows for deeper appreciation of those board goals in a way where staff know that's what we're going to expect of them and not pile other things on. Right. Throw some. Right. Throw some. Throw some. Throw some. Throw some. Throw some. Throw some. Throw some. Right. Throw some. Throw some. Right. Throw some. Right. Right. The good news is we're going to start that process much earlier this year than we have in past years. I think that's a great change in our work structure in terms of getting out ahead of what we are going to expect staff to

141take on for the following school year. I too am looking forward to looking at investigating this. I think and I had shared when I met with representatives of Justice Matters that, you know, Vanessa and I have talked about this. As we have worked through this past year plus that we've been working on these policies, countless times we've said, wow, at the end of the day what we really need is a set of policies and procedures that allows education of the students involved in the incidents that we're trying to deal with so that we're supporting the victims and we're educating the students who've done something that is outside of the bounds of what their behavior needs to be in our schools. And that's what we're about. We're about education. It should be about education instead of

142punishment as much as possible. And so this just kind of brings together those conversations that we've already been having in a way that's like, okay, this is a next step forward. So but I would like to get staff and superintendent's input on what we're doing. How to make this investigation be effective for us. So. I want to point out one more thing and that is in the policy review committee as Shannon and I have gone through the policies that were up for review tonight. We did talk about how the new KNA complaint process could fish tail completely perfectly with a restorative justice model. So it's not the complaint process and the process to kind of go through wins. It's the process to make sure that something happens could easily be built on to with a

143restorative justice focus. And I thought that merited consideration. Any other comments? Thank you Gary. All right. Well thank you and we will be in touch and hope to work with you on this. All right. Appreciate it. Do we have a motion to adjourn? Motion to adjourn. Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Meeting adjourned. So aye. We do have a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Meeting adjourned. So aye. We do have a motion to adjourn. Second? We had to reschedule our meeting Saturday with my husband. Yes. Then I had to reschedule her take.