001good evening it is march 23 2021 i will call this court of education meeting to order at 5 30 pm thank you for joining us meeting tonight is being conducted both in person and electronically board members and some staff are meeting in person while members of the public and other staff are watching the meeting remotely community comments will take place in person for those who register to make remarks this evening okay with that i'll look for approval of the agenda uh boardman would like to maintain changes to the agenda this evening okay scene nine will proceed brings us to community comments and just the board members know looks like we have up to 10 people signed up to comment so far i think we have eight in attendance so um let me do this this
002opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline i call up each speaker one at a time and i will give everyone three minutes for their remarks this evening anyone who exceeds the time limit or makes personal attacks use profanity or identifies any student by name may be asked to immediately end their remarks with that tesla we'll call it first person and i have uh i'm going to say silent wellington to speak to us first welcome hello thank you for having me my name is silent without a t and my pronouns are they've been there i am here representing myself and i also serve as the lgbtq outreach coordinator for the alliance for suicide prevention of larimer county and i'm a volunteer for splash noco youth
003i would like to express my gratitude tonight for your equity diversity and inclusion plan and your resolution to recognize transgender day of visibility i grew up here in fort collins and attended peter school district schools for 12 years when i was growing up i did not know that non-binary and transgender people existed all i knew was that i didn't feel like i fit in and that there wasn't a place for me in the world because i couldn't see myself reflected back in it as a result i lived most of my adolescence with persistent thoughts and plans of suicide thankfully i survived this time in no small part because of having supportive friends and family which is not something every lgbtq plus young person has curriculum materials that affirm our many identities and represent multiple complex
004human experiences and perspectives like your edi plan proposes would have really benefited me as in lgbtq as lgbtq people especially when we are growing up we need to see representations of ourselves thriving making history and living long joyful lives your edi plan could help so many youth in our community feel like they belong and that their futures are possible as a volunteer for splash youth i see firsthand how inclusive schools can make a life-saving difference for a young person from the trevor projects 2020 national survey we know that 22 percent of lgbtq youth who experienced discrimination attempted suicide in 2019 compared to eight percent who did not lgbtq students who didn't feel supported at school were nearly twice as likely to attempt suicide than those students who felt their schools were supportive at the alliance
005for suicide prevention we recognize the importance of anti-discrimination policies that are inclusive of gender gender identity gender expression and sexual and romantic orientation and we support psd's edi plan to bring more inclusive curriculum and support for marginalized students and staff in our schools your edi plan is not a sexual agenda as some community members at these board meetings have characterized it to be it is a lifeline for students who haven't been able to tell their stories who may feel scared going to school and who need to see that our community values and respects them your edi plan is suicide prevention and on behalf of my younger self and the lgbtq plus youth that i serve i thank you for doing this life-saving work and i look forward to building a more inclusive community with all
006of you thank you and i brought blacks as a mail thank you for joining us okay and next up this evening will be kimberly chambers welcome hey there my name is kimberly chambers are you a chief of pronoun i'm the parent to psg's graduates a current and the current sophomore i'm also the executive director for splash lgbtqia youth of northern colorado the only local youth organization serving our kids in noco thank you for the moment to share my experience as an ally and an advocate for the students of tudor school district who are transgender non-binary gender fluid and gender non-conforming i've spent nearly every single day of this past year communicating with many psg students who fall under the same transgender umbrella as i mentioned they and they cooked or they didn't cope with what
007kobit threw at them i spent much of the the last six years supporting these students but never before this pandemic was it every single day it hit my radar that many of our transgender students felt quite a sense of relief when online learning was a necessary option much many appreciated the fact that the pressure they faced at school every day were on pause and they could feel more comfortable in their authentic selves while at home even when they weren't out to their parents this verified for me that there was still work to do with our young gender expansive generations ranging from second grade to seniors in high school the resolution that this board of education will make tonight will be the utmost importance to the students who are not counted and the students who will
008eventually need to return to in-person learning next year it will speak to our queer and trans students and staff members who easily make up 10 of our classrooms that they are seen and have permission to be visible in their own learning spaces the way that this board of education has handled recent transphobia is commendable and deserves acknowledgement our trans youth are exhausted from defending themselves and having this governing body create equity and inclusion policies and resolutions that name them specifically tells them that they indeed deserve the same safe place the same public education as their cisgender peers thank you for resolving that the visibility of our trans students staff staff and educators is what makes our district great and thank you for the continued work of the board the diversity department and the edi committee
009of community members to ensure that every student has access to learn splash would like to present this progressive pride flag to the board um in honor of you resolving that our kids honestly really matter in our classrooms so i'll leave that here so thank you for your time and thank you for your work thank you for your comments and for the pleasure okay and next step will be danny lawrence welcome thank you my name is danny lawrence good evening um thank you for the opportunity i appreciate your time and service for our community in consideration of tonight's discussion about equity diversity inclusion as a parent of a special needs student i again wanted to reiterate that denying parents the ability to openly participate in the special education advisory committee doesn't align with the district's goals
010about inclusion on the district's website there is a list of psp promises including inclusive leadership and creating a climate culture that includes family and unity how can the district say that they're committed to those promises while observing over email and the complete gaslighting of my very legitimate concerns about not being able to speak to the committee that gives recommendations to you all about special education furthermore on the district's website there's indications of the commitment to the principles of community included in the ideas of inclusion equitable access in a welcoming environment based on what you've read and what i keep saying do you think i feel welcomed silencing is a general rule doesn't give somebody warm and fuzzies it certainly doesn't give me apparent stakeholder equitable access i guess equitable access only applies to the 10
011parents that get the opportunity to serve on that committee picked by the district's integrated services staff even by our own printed materials for this school district all voices are supposed to be included while we're silencing the parents of vulnerable students so is the edi just a nice sentiment or are those just idealistic orders or does the district actually plan on implementing the philosophies that would make this a welcoming culture of inclusion and equitable access because if that's the case i know a great place for you guys to start finally uh for several weeks i've been making comments here behind speakers who are bashing lgbtq students rights i wish in your edi discussions i was seeing the intolerance of the hate speech that's displayed here twice a month by people who don't have children in the
012school district there are a lot of children here to protect with the equity diversity and inclusion proposals my gay student and visually impaired son are two of them and i hope each of you is taking that seriously because i know i am and we have a lot of great kids who deserve a safe place to go to school thank you so much thank you for your comments okay the next step will be this cake green welcome hello my name is kate green and i'm a 15 year old freshman at rocky my favorite color is also coincidentally i'm here today to speak on the ebi equity diversity and recruiting proposal not only as a student but as a member of the lgbtq community i've been watching the past two board meetings and felt we need to
013speak today especially as it is in the job item the idea that this proposal is being discussed specifically for the lgbtq inclusions at the public comments section is frustrating at the end of the day this type of education isn't only needed for students but also for teachers i recently moved here from arizona but i can compare two different schooling schooling experiences from here around up until the end of seventh grade i attended public school policies like this one were not in place so to speak but the teachers were still where lgbtq students attended the class i can remember two incidences in a history class and one in a sex ed class where lgbtq rights were debated debated by my peers brought up by my teachers i believe that if my teachers have known i was
014gay and were properly educated this might not have been a discussion as it definitely should not have been from eighth grade year through the winter break of my ninth i went to a charter school that focused on the arts their staff went through extensive training on inclusion lgbtq issues included this environment was one that i could correction i was not only included but halfway and i had many lgbtq friends of your celebrity i moved here with the intent of being exposed to a better environment one that i could be more included in and one where i can flourish again and i do hope that i was not wrong the fact is is that the fact that i need to stand here today and defend a proposal is proof that it needs to be implemented not
015only do i but other students deserve to be able to get an education in a manner in which we are included while you and those are discussing this issue go to work tomorrow i will be at school i mean that as politely as possible but i feel like this proposal is reactionary and not proactive i feel like it should have been implemented five if not 12 years ago i feel that we are behind and behind by a lot and again i remind you i'm going to be at school tomorrow i genuinely hope you all have a good rest of your evening thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak thank you for joining us okay and next up will be shirley and i'm gonna save lion and i get it correct good evening my
016name is shirley long and i'm a member of the school justice bsd campaign and i'll be speaking tonight on behalf of someone who couldn't be here my name is blaine and i'm a recent graduate of peter high school i spent all of my school years in the pooter school district system i would love to be here in person but my compromised immune system means i can't go out in public yet however i am having this letter read on my behalf because i know you will be voting on retaining sros in our schools and as a trans student this issue is important to me during my time at tudor i only had one interaction with the sro when i was a leader of our school's gsa or gender and sexuality alliance another leader of the gsa
017and i went to our school's sro to request request his help for some online bullying that was occurring against our club walking into his office there was an unspoken fear between us even though neither of us were consciously thinking it there was an understanding of the very recent history of hostility towards queer people from the police those sentiments don't go away quickly and are constantly reflected in the way police often fail to do anything about hate crimes perpetuated against the lgbtq community these fears were only amplified by the blue lives matter flag hanging on the wall over his desk seeing that so prominently placed there a flag heralded in direct opposition to the black lives matter movement made me realize i may not be safe in that office i wonder if he feels comfortable enough
018sending that message to one marginalized community what other beliefs might he hold against other such communities to those of us fighting to be seen to have our identity validated and humanized this flag is a symbol of all the ways that people seem to think that giving black and trans folks that recognition somehow takes away from who they are the police have power already they are seen as an identity and as a valor people so as someone who has been told my identity is not real over and over again that flag is nothing more than a symbol of their power over me and how it is used to oppress queer and trans people our meeting with that sro was short he couldn't or wouldn't do anything to help us claiming that unless a crime has been
019committed he couldn't do anything this made it clear to me that the sros are not there to prevent us from being harmed they are only there to do something once we have already been harmed we never asked him for help again even when our posters were torn down time after time and slurs were shouted at us in the halls i'm not sure what sros do to help students but for students like me they do not seem to do anything but make us feel less safe in our own schools and data also tells us that students who are not white not middle class not cisgender et cetera are the ones who get referred to them for discipline for behavior issues rather than address equity like you should be doing the sros only enforce white cis heteronormative
020and class privilege just like the blue lives matter flag boldly displayed sros are a symbol of oppression and control i ask you to consider how your values are symbolized to the choices you make on behalf of all of your students and most particularly those of us who already endure hate and invalidation just because of who we are thank you thank you for your comments okay and next we'll have serena trujillo welcome hello my name is renee trujillo i'm standing here as a community member and a representative of school justice poor school district i first want to start by expressing my gratitude for the opportunity to speak during this meeting i hope that you all have been able to contact and check in with your loved ones and community members who have connection to the boulder
021community also just want to take a moment to acknowledge every person who felt victim to this heinous crime including the officer and nine innocent people who lost their lives on march 4th 2021 you all received a letter with multiple testimonies from students of color who experienced bias fear and discomfort because of an sro in their high school you just heard a testimony from another student who experienced the same you have no way to control this type of behavior by an sro you have no way to collect information like this from students to document it or to act upon it the reaction so far to the student testimonies has been to doubt them and discredit them because they were not raised at the time they have been despite the fact that there is no system for
022raising such complaints or to state that an individual officer can and will change their behavior it doesn't matter how much training a police officer has or what kind of reporting systems you have in place you will never be able to prevent officers from engaging in behavior that demonstrates their bias against students of color lgbtq students and other vulnerable populations it is true that many persons in the school system may have biases but they don't all have guns or the ability to place a student in the juvenile justice system which we know can have detrimental long-term effects that ripple out into the entire community we call in kuder school board for the following information and actions we would like to know why this officer continues to have contact with students the district must immediately implement a
023confidential reporting system for students parents and staff to report racial bias and sro misconduct this system must be operated by an objective third party and must be transparent to the entire community while this action will serve to document abuses such abuses are inherent in the sro program the only way to prevent these abuses from happening and to protect our students from such harm is to discontinue the sro program thank you so much for your time and for this opportunity thank you for your comments okay and next step i'm going to pronounce this is that the cam ricardo jacques i believe welcome hello uh my name is ricardo jacques and thank you for the opportunity to speak here this evening as a community member and a young person concerned about the future for our black brown
024immigrant and lgbtq students i would like to make a simple pertinent statement it is critical that we listen to those in our community who are calling out injustice and systems of harm and this evening i'm specifically speaking of the presence of police in schools you as the elected board members hold the decision making power and responsibility to serve all the students including most specifically those of lgbtq and students with disabilities that are calling out on safe learning environments if we consider the history of police in our country the root causes of conflict and disruptive behavior in schools is something that the police are clearly not capable of addressing the figures on arrests and referrals to law enforcement show disproportionate targeting of black latinx and native american students this is just one aspect of the school
025to prison pipeline where some students are denying the opportunity to succeed and instead are pushed out of school and into the juvenile or criminal justice system while complete emotional and financial and social impact of daily police presence in school is not fully understood it is clear that students and their families are criminalized and the school-based arrests and referrals to law enforcement go up when police have regular presence in schools we all want to ensure a safe welcome welcoming learning environment and the good news is there are many exciting viable possibilities when it comes to alternatives to police in schools like staff strength trained to ensure safe and positive school climates community intervention workers peace builders transformative or restorative justice coordinators school aides or even counselors and other support staff most importantly it is our role
026as those not directly impacted to listen with curiosity and love and follow through with concrete actions it is not enough to have good intentions we must be accountable to those who explain and share their lived experiences with sros and the feelings of being unsafe or unwelcomed i envision a public school system that values students parents communities and as decision makers with a fundamental human right to shape their education in this education system schools are safe healthy and nurturing environments where every student has the possibility and opportunity to reach their full potential please vote to remove sros from our schools thank you thank you for joining us okay and the last person i have on the list is miss alexandria bishop welcome cool hi yeah thank you for the chance to speak today um my name
027is alexandria bish and i'm coming to the board as a concerned fort collins community member today i'm calling on the board to remove sros from psd and to instead fund student safety and well-being in other and more beneficial ways i did want to start off with commending you on the recent update of the district's equity diversity and inclusion statements and on the steps that you have begun to take in this direction on the district's equity diversity and inclusion webpage you do specifically state that you will quote develop and expect an inclusive climate and culture based on trusting relationships between students schools families and community and you also state that to do this you will quote ensure school-wide positive behavior models and non-discriminatory non-exclusionary discipline practices i point out these two particular statements because they are
028inherently contradictory to the presence of an sro program within psd schools as students and psd community members have shared with you sros do not create climates and cultures of inclusivity and trust in fact the west contra costa unified school district in california ended its contract with police and redistributed 1.5 million to efforts to support african-american student chief achievement in order to quote move their district away from using the punitive presence of law enforcement to a more supportive and restorative model that protects students from the threat of surveillance and police violence in their schools according to their board president additionally the open unified schools safety plans actually include eliminating their oakland pd or oakland unified pd because their analysis showed that an armed officer was rarely necessary and could be replaced by another trained professional if
029psc eliminates sros in this way and instead funds mental health and restorative resources for students this would decrease discriminatory discipline practices and also provide resources to students who aren't even receiving any support right now finally sros and psd do not ensure non-discriminatory non-exclusionary discipline practices because your data does show that students of color and students of difference are disproportionately disciplined this harms students of color and students of difference and it also harms students in the majority who may actually need disciplinary boundaries and support services but aren't receiving them ultimately the board has the responsibility to ensure the district is fulfilling their dei commitments to the psc community and so i think that the most important and biggest step that you can take to do this is to remove sros from psc and to instead fund
030student support in more positive comprehensive and transformative ways thank you for your comments okay tessa did anybody else show up okay so that does conclude community comments for the evening all right with that um i will bring us to item 4.0 that's board topics and committee reports and uh as i did for our last meeting i'll i'll launch this with just a brief update on the superintendent search process which is moving along quickly since our last meeting the job posting was closed that was on march 15th and psd received quite a pool of candidates so that was very exciting hya the search firm that psd hired to assist in the hiring process or the search process has screened the candidates based on the leadership profile that was developed for the district and pres and they
031presented to the board a slate of top candidates for us to consider interviewing last night the board met in executive session and selected a group of semi-finalists who interviewed and that will be done remotely and that will be done towards the end of this week and during the weekend from these remote interviews the board will publicly announce a group of finalists early next week and proceed to a second round of interviews that will be done in person although still in executive session around that time late next week the board will also host forums for staff members and forums for members of the community for each of the finalists and i would just ask that people stay tuned in we will be uh announcing those dates very soon and i actually don't know quite when we're
032announcing those but it'll be towards the end of the week that we'll do that next week so um that's kind of what i prepared as comments were there any questions or comments from other board members as to uh how that's proceeding i think board members all know what what's going on at this point and the schedules are out as of today right everybody's in tune with that okay so that's uh the update on the superintendent search wanted everybody in the public to have an opportunity to hear how that's proceeding it's going to come to a conclusion very quickly and by the middle of april i believe this district will know who its new superintendent will be so if everything goes smoothly all right other board members have updates or topics they bring up okay go
033ahead kristen and then we'll go with dj after that okay i just wanted to give a brief update on the the cac the community community accountability committee and um so civic canopy is the facilitation uh company that has been charged with engaging and connecting and facilitating the diverse group and to help us make thoughtful and meaningful decisions regarding sros and psd schools i wanted to say thanks to every person who has been giving up their thursday evenings to work on the community advisory council with the end goal of making recommendations to the board of education it has not been easy so thank you and it has been time consuming it's been every thursday minus spring break and the week before that's pretty much it so since october yes yes thank you since october so it's
034been a long haul so thank you for doing that the group has been challenged with the speed of the vote there are only three meetings left for the cac to come to some agreement as to what the recommendations will be and due to the narrow scope of the group's decisions important discussions such as restorative practices supportive school culture code of conduct and mental health just to name a few uh have taken on a lesser role than many members would have liked and right now where we are is the community engagement surveys the subgroup created they've been distributed to students parents in the community we're gathering the information and the cac will review it and we will also the uh sorry see uh the civic canopy will also lead the group in forming recommendations for the
035for the board to the board for delivery on april 27th so just to sort of summarize what we're learning on this that this is just not this is not just a question of sros it's a question of school discipline equity and dignity this group is made as acutely aware of the work psd still needs to do with discipline in each building and as a district what safety means for students individually and as a whole and restorative practices such as how do we do more for our students to keep them out of the judicial system and how can we maintain those practices once they've been established just to name a few so regardless of the recommendations the cac gives the board on april 27th pooter school district students and staff are richer for going through this
036process it informs us of the work we need to do big and small to truly rethink safety and inclusivity to this end we're hoping that some of the members of the cac might wish to continue the conversations that would focus on human dignity and equity as a whole in psd by applying to become members of the edac committee in the following year and we can get more information on that but you know in just just in summary it's been um it's been short it's been quick um and it's been narrowly focused and that's what we had asked for and what we're realizing and what we're learning is that and what we i think knew probably going into is that this needs to be a broader conversation and an ongoing conversation um but they're focused they're
037ready to go they're ready to deliver something on april 27th so that's pretty much it did you want to add anything to that yeah i'll just say that it's a it's a great group with some various perspectives everyone is working really really hard everyone brought concerns and in in every aspect both with sros in the building or without sros in the building concerns and and celebrations both with sros in the building and without sros in the building and they've done a lot of really really good work it is a it's a really big question um and so i don't think that um i don't think that the conversation is ending right we're going to continue um continue to have the the conversations happening and we look forward to um as a board digging into the
038information that they present to us next month okay thanks for those updates and before we push on i just want to make sure if any board members have any questions or comments relative to the work that's going on with the cac so we get them out there for kristin and naomi to present okay it seemed like a good enough update at this time okay one question on my part um just the could you just repeat with there's a survey that has been put out to the entire psd community is that correct and who prepared that i don't think it's the entire psd community it's a selection of parents and a selection of community members and it was prepared in tandem with um dr dwayne schmidt so you if my family received the uh the survey
039as parents and it came from dwayne schmidt as the email address so if you see an email from dr dwayne schmidt that is the survey a section of the survey does deal with coveted matters and different things about covid so if you started that survey and you didn't get to the sro question please make sure that you complete the entire um the entire survey it is very short and it only takes a few minutes to complete and the there's a subcommittee as well that had that um from the cac that put together the questions for that particular part of the questionnaire and then um i i believe dwayne just tweaked those questions from that subcommittee so yeah okay thank you okay dj you want to give us your update uh yeah i just want to
040talk about the legislative committee and first off the waiver to alter the tests have been sent into the federal government it's been signed by the governor and that's been done so hopefully you all hear something within a couple weeks um the second thing i wanted to talk about that we discussed that as we just heard with sro talk is there's a senate bill 182 which has been introduced which is titled school discipline and i describe it as as a big old bucket that they put a lot of stuff in and it has got uh stuff in there about having the state board require districts to report discipline data and break it down by different subgroups which that part sounds kind of good i think if we had a standard definition for some of those might
041be good but this thing then goes like i said it has a lot so i'm not going to go through them all but then it goes to uh procedures for sros and what they can and can't do in schools that they want to my personal feeling is this is probably going to get tweaked some here and so our subcommittee is going to send it to todd and see what his group feels about it a little bit too and to get more information about how cat casby and other groups feel i because you know we do hear it here in our district quite a bit but this has been a national conversation for some time and statewide too so i do want to bring it up that you know there is something at the state level
042that is looking to try to do something and i mean we want to be a voice to try to get something that at least is good through the legislator legislation the they are it sounded like putting it off for a couple weeks to get some more feedback a little bit uh so it'll be interesting to see if there are some amendments on there and oops i think that was the only one i was going to bring up today yeah anybody else from the subcommittee have something yeah if i could just piggyback on this bill i feel like this is an opportunity for us to again celebrate the work that our district is doing because a part of what the bill is asking for is for school districts to track um based on these subgroups of
043disability gender socioeconomic status ethnicity to disaggregate it so that they can look deeply into what is going on in their individual districts and so for me this was a moment to celebrate and say our district has started doing this work because we value it so much and we didn't necessarily need this bill in order to make that happen and we look forward to other districts following suit on their own or through the urgency of this bill okay good thank you go ahead nate yeah i just wanted to note that it's a 30 page bill with a lot of new language so there's a lot there to consider and and it may be that some of the practices we're doing as a school district uh you know it may be easier rather than more difficult to
044comply with some of this if the language survives so so it may or may not be onerous for our district to comply with we'll just have to see how it comes out and participate in the process thank you other board member updates or comments agenda items go ahead kristen this is slightly different i just wanted to go ahead and if i could just extend um as renee so eloquently stated earlier and community comments just extend our heartfelt wishes and thoughts i i don't want to say thoughts and prayers i'm tired of saying thoughts and prayers but just know that to the families that lost in friends that lost loved ones in boulder um this yesterday and also to the people who lost friends and loved ones uh a week ago in atlanta um but i
045think people here are feeling this acutely in boulder so to all of those who lost friends and families to members to the police officer who ran towards danger when they did not have to i just want to acknowledge their their pain their loss and i would just really like to say enough is enough i don't know what else to say other than if you do need to reach out there is the colorado crisis services there's a crisis hotline um one eight four four four nine three talk that's 1-844-493-8255 for support for anyone affected by mental health substance abuse or emotional crisis so if you need to talk to someone you can always do that but i just have to say enough is enough thanks thank you for making those comments kristen just hard to know
046what to say so much appreciated any other board comments or and items topics okay seeing none we'll proceed and that'll bring us to item 5.0 on the agenda which is the consent agenda so would anybody like to pull anything from consent this evening okay seeing none i would take a motion for the consent agenda go ahead nate i move that the board approve and adopt the recommended actions for the items on the consent agenda thank you and i have a second from kristen draper and jill i'd take a roll call vote please aye i thank you okay and that brings us to action items 6.0 on the agenda item 6.1 is the second amendment to the provision of child care services at pooter school district elementary schools between alphabet education inc and poudre school district
047r1 could i get a motion for this action go ahead nate yes i moved that the board approved it the second amendment to the provision of child care services at puder school district elementary schools between alpha best education incorporated and putter school district r1 and authorized the second amendment to be signed by the board president attested by the board secretary thank you do i have a second i have a second from dj anderson okay and to be clear rob and i just asked this be put as an action item rather than into consent just because this was an item that had had a lot of discussion uh in prior years it's there uh just to make sure it's present but that said are there any questions or comments regarding this there were a couple asked
048in in emails but if anybody um okay go ahead nate is this primarily an extension of the previous contract with the addition of a annual registration fee yes it is okay thank you okay oh go ahead i would just like to add i i appreciate just an opportunity to acknowledge uh that's new partner we're at uh you know about nine months in or so with them um i think scott and tracy could both attest they've been a wonderful partner coming through at a time when there was so much uncertainty earlier this year as we worked with our kids and tried to find the best ways to keep them safe educate them in a virtual environment dave mcclure the local director and judy knee who is the president of the organization have done nothing but support
049the district they've pretty much been the answer is yes what's the question so they have pulled their resources they have partnered with local nonprofits they have extended their staff i can't think of anything we've asked them to do that they haven't gone above and beyond on i just want to publicly recognize that i know they came in we had a lot of discussion about how that went last year and i appreciate it being here out in the open but i think the board should know that the system feels like they've been a wonderful partner very good i actually appreciate you guys taking a few moments to express that it's important for us to hear any other questions or comments by the way i believe this will be coming up every year right we'll be doing
050this as a one year extension every year from now on okay go ahead dj i guess i i would like to just to appreciate all of the work they did with the roller coaster of a year and i and i do also want to make sure that we as a board stay true to make sure that we look on it next year after they have maybe a more regular year to see how that process is and make sure that we acknowledge that there were people that wanted to make sure that we were doing the right thing for these kids so we we are going to keep that at the forefront and we will continue to watch very good comment i think that's a very fair statement after a real year we should slow down and
051take a look at it so okay any uh any other thoughts comments questions okay see none uh jill i'd take a roll call vote please dj anderson aye nate donovan aye kristin draper aye christophe naomi johnson aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye motion passes 7-0 thank you very much item 6.2 on the agenda is a resolution in support of international transgender day of visibility and could i get a motion for this one please go ahead kristen i move that the board support the resolution sorry adopt this resolution in support of international transgender day of visibility thank you do i have a second i have i'll pick carolyn for a second carolyn reed and um with that kristen would you like to read the resolution out loud for all of us resolution of the pure
052school district board of education in support of international transgender day visibility march 31st 2021 whereas international transgender day visibility which takes place annually on march 31st is was created in 2009 to celebrate the achievements contributions and accomplishments of transgender and gender non-conforming people and whereas pruder school district is committed to providing a safe and welcoming learning environment where all students employees and community members are supported regardless of their gender identity and whereas the board wholeheartedly embraces poor school districts transgender and gender non-conforming students employees and community members for the diversity they bring to our schools and workplaces and strives to ensure that they are seen accepted and celebrated for who they truly are and whereas while pruder school board administration and staff have committed to make pooder school district a welcoming community for all students
053and staff we recognize there is more work ahead of us now therefore be it resolved the board of education does hereby proclaim march 31st 2021 as international transgender day visibility in pooter school district and encourages students and staff to celebrate those who share their power of living their truth and encourage our community to continue the efforts of moving towards equality and fairness for all transgender and gender non-conforming students staff friends neighbors and community members thank you very much kristen and with that i'll open it up to any board comments possibly questions well i'll just throw in there if anybody is um wanting to learn more about this the csu pride center has um on march 31st they'll be doing um a um i'm sorry a presentation um on transgender and uh day visibility that you
054can join um so that will be i believe that is online and at the pride center at csu and out boulder will be doing transgender awareness week starting tomorrow and throughout the week so you can always look on their website and you can always go to nocoequality.org and you can do find some information there on on transgender awareness week as well thank you go ahead rob yeah i'll just say that i want to especially thank some of our public commenters tonight to that helped explain and and make clear reinforce really uh why it's very important for us to pass a resolution like this and uh to support the underlying truth of it the the underlying meaning of it in our in our words in our policies and in our actions so i'm definitely supportive of
055of passing this resolution thank you any other comments okay dj did you oh okay all right um in that case i'll just say uh a few things i first of all thank you uh chrisman for bringing this forward for us and rob i really agree with your comments i think the the comments we got this evening were were apt and profound and important for all of us i can't believe how the world has changed since my time here at pooter school district it is really really a different world that we all live in but that said i do think there are times that it is important we we call these things out people question this but it's still not a easy path for many of people in our society and i think that showing actively
056showing support and letting people know that our district is inclusive of all people and we're trying so hard to make a safe place for everybody in our environment is very important so i can't thank you enough for bringing the resolution forward and i can't say enough about how i support this resolution for our district so uh with that if there are no other comments i'll take a roll call vote please jill dj anderson aye nate donovan aye kristen draper aye christoph fev aye naomi johnson aye rob patterson aye carolyn reed aye motion passes 7-0 excellent we're already through the action items and we haven't even made it to 6 30. i'm doing really well so i'm curious what uh jill had time okay so uh 7.0 on the work session topics uh would be the
057work session topic 7.1 is an update on equity diversity and inclusion and for students and staff and i believe i'm turning that over to you dr lambert president fed thank you board following up on our promise to continue to provide updates on our work with equity diversity and inclusion and tonight has a little bit of a different slant what i'm going to speak about this evening are the action or the action steps that our staff and our students are taking i know that our work with equity is comprehensive and broad involves community parents and others but tonight the focus is on our students and our staff inside our schools uh give you a good look at where we're going our end in mind goal tonight is to get you informed with a succinct update i
058know we'll be giving a few of these before the end of the school year when we're done after we're after we're finished we just have about four or five slides here when those are wrapped up i'm going to invite mr john mckay to join us and then you can use this team with scott tracy and myself as well as john for some questions and answers at the end we'll make sure we leave enough time for that but if all things are good lauren let's get rolling on this all right i won't read this slide to you but these are the topics we're primarily going to review tonight you'll see a nice blend of things that are going on with our students things that are going on with staff as well as some of the practical
059steps we're taking to advance this work i know before we go off this slide i just want to make one comment i hear a lot in the system that this work is difficult that it's hard it's not it's the right work to do it's courageous work getting it all together organizing people and doing all those things in a 30 000 student district may be hard but this works not hard it's the right work to do i just want to get that message out there i know uh it's not it doesn't always make people feel comfortable uh make them feel vulnerable might make them feel awkward but at the same time this is the work we do on behalf of our students and staff to make a better community i just want to make sure we
060get that message out there but you can see the work that's out there i want you to pay particular attention to the last one that's what we're going to wrap up tonight on future policy considerations a couple things going on in the system i want to make you aware i think you'll be eager to hear about those and i want to give you a little bit of a timeline for that work as well okay all right we'll go on the next slide broke this slide down in two groups we have a student a staff equity coalition a student equity coalition and they uh will start with the staff first that group as you can see there continues to meet on a monthly basis but what i think is important for you to know right now
061is that group has divided itself into some groups to take on some particular issues particular topics for example we have a group working on equity and discipline i know that's an interesting topic for us we're paying attention to discipline statistics our staff are living that world and they have a lot of input on that to help make that uh process more equitable more balanced more transparent it's one of the groups that's working very hard we also have a professional learning group through equity diversity and inclusion and they're just working on various skills concepts things that are really important in this work some examples of that include culturally responsive teaching some of our restorative practices in pedagogy which has really taken off that work has been fantastic i really commend uh kate clifford john mckay and
062the team that are pushing that work for we've had a lot of participation in that and we also do another area in there that's really important is our work in reflective practices i think we grow and learn through our reflection and our staff are finding that out it's all really exciting stuff and then we also are continuing to advance our work on principles of community and we'll be sharing a lot more about that as we come into next fall we're really proud of that work a couple other areas that are really great or at least one in particular we have getting ready to start the process of staff affinity groups what a great step this is uh two groups we have going on right now with our bipac and lgbtqia plus they begin in april
063and we're going to have great opportunities for staff to work together to share common experiences and again for the whole purpose of trying to get the organization to grow to to help our students see themselves in our work and help our staff as well and to create a more inclusive environment been really proud of the work these groups have been doing and great leadership there and we're just getting started i mean we really are truly just getting starting as a learning organization in this work so really great stuff on the student side a little bit different we have a student equity coalition and it's been a great learning experience for us to try to bring students together in this particular world here in a virtual world as you know our students have been going into
064school virtually and so to get meetings together we've learned it's a little tougher to get them in those spots we had two meetings one where we only were able to get one student another one where we had i think five or six uh that's not discouraging we're learning along the way and so what's going to happen as we've moved into phase four those that are organizing that work are finding different ways to bring students together in person take advantage of coming back together that's great stuff the other part too is outside of the student equity coalition we have students doing courageous work outside of those boundaries in our schools they are advocating for themselves their classmates they are in teaching mode learning mode doing a lot of work so i don't want you to think
065that all of our work with students is limited to a coalition in fact there's a lot of great stuff going on in many of our buildings so students would make you very proud but here's just a couple of examples of the action work students and staff have taken since then we also have some specific examples at sites we call those site-based equity collectives so we go to the next slide we only put four up there but i can tell you that there are a lot more we just picked four that i thought stood out trying to give you a look at the balance across the system dunn elementary is doing some great work with students as you know dunn's in ib school has a lot of great experience of bringing students in as decision makers
066as citizens of the world they have really adapted well to this talking to their students about how they create a more inclusive climate and culture in the school so great stuff there fossil ridge has a really active student group and the adults in that building are working with students to create a council for leadership to help make decisions find balance very proud of their work as well great leadership of students and adults in that spot lincoln middle school penny steyers the principal there is leading some great book study work staff has been very receptive very eager and they're finding out the more they do the more they like that work and it makes a real impact on what's going on finally i want to recognize kelby benedict and the wellington staff and again these are
067just about four examples of many across the system but kelby has taken on this work with his staff and they have covered many things in fact i couldn't think of a better way to put it so up on the slide i put many areas because they're just doing many things they're studying pronouns talking about what that means with students they have a book study going on they're having very courageous conversations that can sometimes be uncomfortable so i just want to put a plug in for the wellington middle school staff for their courage dedication it's been great work up there as the next update comes i'll pick four other locations across the district give you some updates on that as well we also have some extensive staff professional learning going on in addition to book studies
068and other work like that we are really working with our gsa spectrum club sponsors to support resources what we have found is we're not consistent across the district we have some schools doing great work with that we have others that want to do great work and need access to resources and learning that's getting promoted right now we're bringing the coordinators together and trying to find that common ground and create more of a resource bank for them we had some great anti-racist facilitation training i know scott uh had took part in that i think about 70 or so our or so staff members took part in that uh that was a real success they did that virtually was over an extended period of time scott i'm not sure how long that lasted but how many sessions
069uh i participated in six sessions four in october and two that uh last week in the week before yeah and i know a lot of people have had some really great comments about what they learned through that it doesn't always the case when you go to professional development right you take a chance sometimes you roll the dice this work turned out to be fantastic i think testimony from people they felt like it was a really great start for them and they felt that they could be advocates for that work because of that training as i mentioned we have staff book studies people are opting into those they have choice they're learning about various topics for their own particular growth i mentioned the secondary school restorative practices work that's going on uh the pedagogy study with
070that and i think restorative practices we are just hitting getting ready to hit our stride with that work we're talking a lot about how that works going to get advanced who's going to lead that work what kind of resources we may need but we find some great promises with that now the last one on there is not quite cooked up yet but there are talks right now of us working with csu to start thinking about how we can partner together in our equity diversity and inclusion work i don't want to put out there that the module has developed yet but the desire is there the willingness is there and we're starting to work together and i'll keep you updated on that one that one's really promising we're excited about that to work with our friends
071at csu they have led the way in our community it's been mentioned and i don't know krista mentioned them and the work they do the outreach they are great partners for us and we can learn from them and so we'll take advantage of that all right upcoming action steps this is a one where we probably can have some discussion and i know john's gonna join us here in just a minute this is our last page i promised you a succinct update i'm doing my best on that one let's talk policy considerations for a moment there is a lot of work inside the system autumn is involved in this scott is involved in this and others about how we handle symbols of hate and the reason we i bring this up to you now is you
072can expect sometime in april maybe early may a proposal of how we can adjust our policy to reflect our commitment to putting this out we've talked about it for a while in fact we've tread water on it probably for a little for a little while i think we had some momentum going uh right before covid to push this forward and we didn't want to lose the initiative and so you are going to get a proposal from a group uh autumn will help work with that that'll ask for us to consider how we deal with symbols of hate the reason it's coming to you in april or may is it may have implications for the code of conduct if we're going to put it in the code of conduct we have to get that going we
073have to get that done before the spring we know it's an important thing there may be a few other ones in that work but the one i think you're probably going to notice the most is about symbols of hate we have places uh you can see that have done some of that work we'll give you some preview of that as we get ready to position you for that but we think it has some uh some real promise in the system but it's long overdue finally bias reporting i know a lot of you have been very interested in our work with the bias reporting mechanism that we're putting into place i want to let you know that that work is on track it's the right work we underestimated how much preparation a site would need to
074be ready for that kind of reporting to take place there's there's just procedures how things reported how are they handled how are they communicated to the principal how does the staff understand when someone makes that kind of report our parents and our students in that model will be able to go to the school website they'll be able to fill out a bias report incident report that'll come to a central location john can talk more about that when he joins us but it's important work and it's courageous work what we want to make sure we do is that we do it right our goal will be to try to start that work right around april 1st if we think we're not quite ready april 1st and we got to go april 8th we're going to do
075it we're going to do it the right way because we know we're paving the way for you know 45 other schools to do this work and we have some learning experiences from it you can see the schools we put there i know that scott and tracy john and others have met with those schools talk with them they're listening to their questions i wouldn't say they're so much their concerns but they want to do it right as well they know a lot's riding on that we're really excited about that not a lot of places are willing to take that step our schools are but again i just want to make make it clear that work is going to be difficult that is going to be a change for how things go and we got to make
076sure our sites are prepped for that but it's we're still on track we're not turning back we're going to do that we'll learn a lot from those five locations i know scott and tracy will be heavily involved in that work as well as john and his team and we're real excited about it actually we just like i said we just want to make sure we nail it right because it's a big thing and it's a great feature for our school district it's a great opportunity for us to take care of our kids take care of our families so we'll we'll try it slowly there until we make sure it's almost perfect uh i think that's about it for the slides i want to invite john to come in and join us hi john we made
077him wait over in the doorway until we were fully wrapped up but we got you a chair yeah we were kind of joking with you maybe you just have to stand there john and take some questions i don't want you to think you got to fire all your questions at john think of us as a team there are a lot of other people we're supporting with this group a lot of staff out there finding their way doing remarkable stuff so i'm going to open the floor uh president fed for any questions we may have you can direct them at any individual or just all of us and one of us will pick it up very good thank you you modeled crisp and quick very well there under a lot of pressure great uh welcome to
078the meeting john and let's open it up to board questions or comments go ahead dj and then carolyn would you like to share what bias reporting what that means to you guys and what you are going to test in these four schools uh that would be great i think i'll hand that over at first to scott and tracy they've been in some deep meetings maybe scott can talk a little bit about his experience with secondary and tracy could add in on that too dj i think it's a it's a good question because and i think what we'll learn is what what is the threshold to end up in a bias reporting because we have you know situations that are reported to teachers and and principals assistant principals all the time right there are students that
079come forward and we want to continue with that voice and we want to continue working through those situations and trying to restore and and as we continue to get better in that model we believe our schools will respond better this reporting tool is when situations get beyond that or when for whatever reason there may be something interfering with that a student a parent that feels uncomfortable going to the school the tool actually gives them a mechanism to report something that's happened to them i think about a situation we heard in front of the board a couple of years ago where there was a student who was experiencing some well i think there was swastika involved as i recall and uh some language that was anti-that student right so so there was and a perception the
080school wasn't responding and so this gives them a mechanism to report goes right to john and team and they will then dig in and try to figure out how do we build some capacity to respond and we'll be able to monitor what are we seeing what kinds of things are happening in our district that are rising to that level we have conversations with what are we seeing at the school but many times those aren't being reported or if they're being reported it may be to the board um or to dr lambert and so this gives people hopefully we will teach them it gives them a chance to to go to john and team and for john and team to work with the team at the school whatever school it's coming from to work through and
081model how we can handle these challenging conversations in a way that uh can get us to a learning opportunity for all parties involved this is a good start john or tracy you want to add i'll just add that as scott said it's removing a barrier to letting us know if there's a concern in the system that when we we know about it we want to do better and so that whatever mechanism whether it's coming directly to the school principle or to on the person of concern if someone's not comfortable with that we want to remove that barrier and this is a way to remove that barrier so dj i think the original question was what is a bias incident and so we define that as an act of threatening harassing intimidating that's discriminatory or hostile
082behavior towards a student or an individual in our schools that can be a microaggression that can be stating something using a derogatory word that doesn't uphold that student's dignity that can also be an act and so when we think about a bias we really think about just protected classes persons or groups based off of race and culture ethnicity religion national origin immigration or citizenship status sex sexual orientation gender identity gender expression or disability so when we talk about a bias incident reporting mechanism these are the types of um incidences that we would suspect would be reported to our department and really just know that it's really to provide families and students who feel they've been targeted a safe way to report incidents of bias provide an opportunity to respond with dignity so that we can
083uphold who they are and make sure that we have a restorative lens on this work you know we can't always take a punitive lens to this we need to be restorative in our practices and that's when we talked about restorative practice and pedagogy that it's an opportunity for us to restore that relationship it's a teachable moment we are in the business of teaching and learning we want to be able to foster that and promote that even when there's been infractions through discipline through identity through expression we want to make sure to be able to uphold that and really it's a systemic way for us to assess how do we respond to these issues with professional development this goal isn't to have gotchas this goal is to be able to work collaboratively with schools as a
084team to be able to uphold a student and a family's dignity so that's really the real purpose of our incident bias reporting mechanism thank you for sharing that definition that stuff out there i think that's important that we communicate that as much as possible okay carolyn so i i think that um dj's question kind of answered mine so maybe i'll ask a little bit of a different question then it says here you're going to be piloting this at blevins bolts fossil ridge high school right and lincoln and zach and so um what would that look like if i'm a student and i feel like i've been there's been an act of bias against me i'm a student how am i going to know where to go how to report it and what's going to happen
085to my report after i've made it i appreciate that question very much so that's part of the challenge of how to really start informing and be informed with as a system so there's going to be a couple things that schools are going to start experiencing so blevins my twins go to blevins they're both eighth graders right now so um first and foremost when we spoke with the student equity coalition and showed them this incident bias reporting mechanism they gave great feedback they had lots of great questions and they said we asked how do you want to learn about this and they said well through our teachers because our teachers are the ones that need to know about what biases are and it's a teachable moment for them and then we can actually have conversations about
086it and then we'd know how that's really going to transpire in our classrooms our hallways cafeterias so part of this work is meeting with principals we met with some principals this morning actually this afternoon and talked about some of the process that we're going to engage in so part of it is communicating first and foremost to the principal giving them some sort of form template that they can personalize to their school community that we have this bias incident reporting platform that we're going to be piloting at these schools then it's also being able to create mechanisms to inform staff and let them know that this is a learning opportunity and giving them guidance and opportunities to be able to then speak to students now we may not do that in the whole pilot immediately but
087what we will do is communicate to parents and families and students about what a bias incident is or bias is first and foremost the thing that we always want to foster is relationship between school and home we want to always i'm sorry yeah and also between teacher and student so if there's something that's happened we want them to still go to students or to teachers to their principal to their counselor and foster that relationship within the school and in the community if they feel like there isn't a good way to report that that's where a bias incident reporting mechanism is really useful or if they've addressed it and it didn't really quite sit well with them this is another opportunity for them to be able to come and speak and have mutual accountability that's what
088we want accountability to our community and for us to be able to respond appropriately with dignity so how would a student know we would be informing them about what a bias is where they could access it there will be a link on each individual school website that they'll be able to access it and then they would be able to fill that out and it would come to us we are working in collaboration with school contacts so we've asked every school to identify one person to be able to work with so it's not a we're going to solve it for you it's hey we had an incident come in we're going to contact the contact at the school and we're going to say how are we going to team together what do you know you know
089we're going to have lots of different experiences with this so some principals or contacts will say oh i've been with that family a few times already or they're going to be saying i haven't heard anything about this or this is really challenging to me i'm not really sure i thought that we'd already talked about this but obviously we didn't fix it and so how are we going to go into that conversation and that problem-solving process then okay thank you uh kristen so for those um that don't those those incidents that don't get to a bias report they do work it out with their teacher or they work it out with their principal or whatever in their building do we have a mechanism to track that because i think that also is a learning experience if
090we have x number of certain bias incidents happening that we're fixing in school and that's good but we can sort of pass that along to other schools and say this is something that we have an unconscious bias so this is happening more than we thought of did is there a is there a tracking mechanism for that and then therefore a learning mechanism for that later on so i think my initial reaction is one of the incredible things that happened in the collaboration with principles when we're speaking to this is they said can i self-report if i have something that's come in and either i need help with or that we've worked on and we see as a recurring theme can i report so that we have some way to be able to track that hey
091this is something that we need some support with because that this data will help identify it's like a part of a needs assessment of being able to identify how we need to allocate resources to professional development to programming to staffing all of those components based on what we're responding to now do we have a natural mechanism within our schools that haven't been reported to us if the school doesn't report not necessarily but we do have mechanisms related to positive behavior support we also have mechanisms within synergy so there are different opportunities but that's part of the learning that we're going to embark in and i don't know if scott and tracy would like to add any additional information i i would just add that that part of the the one of the the opportunities for
092growth for us and this this is more related to restorative practices but the two go hand in hand right because as we're restoring um synergy right now does not have um a plethora of opportunity to put in restorative practices that you're utilizing right we have all these the our typical responses behaviorally and we're building out what the restorative practices bank if you will would look like and that is a way to say here's an incident and and document that as we do now with any behavioral incident we deal with and here's how we responded so there there will be mechanisms to track it's tough because which conversation rise to the level of tracking and you know it it there's there's some uh some opinion you have as a professional as to when does it get
093to that spot but i think it an awareness and tracy i think said it right as we start to identify and make aware um through this model also then through training that we've got to do on the back side to help prepare our staff both to to teach about the reporting mechanism but also how we responded and repairing which lives again with the restorative work we're doing so i the the things are kind of hand in glove naomi this all sounds really wonderful and i just want to say thank you so much for the work here i feel like we've got extremely well-meaning staff and students in our district and a lot of the microaggressions or things that come up people would say oh i didn't know it was just a joke how are we
094front loading to say this is teaching you both staff and students and not if i get called in to dr lambert's office to talk about a bias incident it's not like this is a mark on your permanent record giant red x but truly like john you were saying a teachable moment to make me a better person it seems like that's a very delicate um situation to front load all of that i know they may have something to add to that naomi it's a good point because i think if we're going to grow and we tell people to be vulnerable we have to give them a safe space to be vulnerable and so i think john's mentioned it before a couple of times tonight this is we're a learning organization and this is learning just like
095anything else that we do and if i think if we have people who feel like they can't learn and it's not safe that's not it's going to defeat the purpose it's counterproductive to what we're trying to do i think one of the hardest parts of moving forward here is for people not to feel like i got you to feel like like you know like you said i didn't mean that you know there's a difference in it was just a joke that only goes so far but for someone who legitimately is in a learning position we wanted to use it as a teachable moment for growth so i think it's about the mindset going in that message is very clear to our people you know in in a learning mode we're going to continue to use
096this as a growth opportunity now of course in any situation if people don't learn or we have challenges that's when we'll take different kinds of steps but i think we're going in with the best intentions i really do and and i hear that in our with our principles i hear our principals wanting to be learners too it's not like they're the only experts or somehow that they'll hold that over staff that's not the mindset at all at least not the ones i'm talking with i think it'll be a challenge to keep that that place because people will feel like maybe they got in trouble or where they are but that's not the approach we're going to take and that's that i think what what dr lambert just said i think is pretty critical and we
097heard that pretty loud and clear from the principles right i mean they're they're stepping in they need to be provided a place to step in to be vulnerable as well recognize we're going to learn and grow as an organization and we'll walk that alongside the administrators and and we're going to be doing our learning they're going to be doing their learning and it's going to help ultimately for students to do the learning as well but to be able to do it in a safe place and you're right naomi to not have it be held against any adult or any student as they're doing their learning and giving an opportunity to to speak to to repair themselves as well as the other side i guess the only thing that i would add newly is um there's
098this concept of coaching for equity that you have to build people up and not tear people down and you know it's aligned with a comprehensive approach the work that we're doing here can't work in isolation it can't be incident bias and not have restorative practices so the work that kate clifford leah hager kate kanine you know jenny putnam there are so many incredible stakeholders that are doing really courageous hard work and we see it even we've always talked about how the things outside of our the walls that we teach within impact what happens within those walls and you know most recently on you know you would be remiss not to mention that we we do want to stand in solidarity with our american asian pacific island the community here in psd and when you think
099about that one of the questions that one of my team members always asks me is what are you learning and unlearning because it's going to take our system some time to unlearn and to do that what are the visuals that we're representing for our american or asian american island pacific community what are the different words that we're using how are we celebrating lots of different components because they're a minority within our community how are we centering their perspectives and listening to their voices about what's it like to work here what's it like to learn here right so those are the types of experiences that we really need to be courageous in engaging in and that's where incident of bias can't go without restorative practice without culturally responsive without anti-racist facilitation training it is a comprehensive
100approach and we can't do it in isolation so it's going to take some work but we are definitely committed to action thank you all of that sounds really great and i i know that in in this thinking we expect that at some point a staff member or a student probably both probably multiple of both will feel defensive about being called out on something that they did not realize was a problem and i am excited that we're talking about educating and growth as as a part of this because i think that this is yet another opportunity for us to really um dig into our mission of creating some excellent future citizens for our world thank i'll you the question in um one thing that came to mind through the the slides that um i was wondering
101if there's any of any of the data we're tracking today that might help us create an outcome benchmark or a way to see if we're getting results we were hoping for as we're talking about all these various mechanisms we're going to train into the system we're going to educate teachers we're going through all these procedures and i i was reminded that at some point through this complicated year we saw some information that indicated there may be biases that teachers are having with regards to disciplining students and that came out relative to sros and so it gives some indication that it is in our system so we may have data are we going to look at particular data sets that we might track as we do this question the answer to that kristoff is yes we
102are currently monitoring that and call it disproportionate outcomes we have um with whether you're looking at your your in-school suspension out-of-school suspension detention expulsion and who where where's it coming from from sites to um to out asking the sites to think about where's it coming from in the building right what what teachers are having the most referrals um and and that data is as i think naomi talked about earlier right is data that we have now unpacked we have in visuals that are fairly easy to interpret and some of that you saw as part of the monitoring report last week that will be outward facing so again as a district we're working to unpack and try to be transparent with what we can we're not going to be as transparent as where the where's discipline
103coming from in a school or even school specific outward facing right now but inwardly we're having the conversation about where are our disproportionalities not just in terms of discipline in terms of what are opportunities for students too all of that we we believe will help us to think about and get at root cause for some of the disproportionality and outcomes which ultimately is what we're after thank you carolyn did i see your hand up yeah so i was just looking on the adl's website for hate symbols because my next question was going to be to you how do we identify hate symbols and i guess i'm finding out here looking at the adl's website and so like how do we educate kids on how to identify hate symbols or are those conversations happening so they
104talk about hate symbols you know hiding in plain sight and i i think decoding this is is part of a part of the process of helping kids to identify these symbols so i just wonder like will that be part of the education process that we're going to be going through here yeah and i think earlier in the year one of the things we talked about was we brought in a program from the adl called no place for hate which empowers students to have a place in how do we teach and monitor what's happening inside the schools um as as dr lambert talked about we also are working on language around a policy for us um and our challenge will be potentially there's a you know a couple pretty easy ones to identify that i think
105many identify as symbols of hate but is there a principle in a building pepe the frog was one that popped up a few years ago that that you'll probably see on the adl list as we speak that wasn't always there but became a symbol for that and and so we worked with our staff but it's always changing right i mean it's sort of like uh back when i was in the classroom what was considered gang paraphernalia was always changing right if you selected a color they moved to a different color and it was there so so there's ongoing and so in the language we'll create um carolyn we're going to kind of toggle between a list like that that would support a building if it was being used for um if the symbol was showing
106up in in such a way it will be hard to teach all the students what all the symbols are because they're again always changing so that that's going to be a challenge for us but but helping to build some capacity with our leaders and helping to build some capacity and taking a strong stance on a couple things to start with i think is a good first step for this district naomi yeah if i could just piggyback on that for a second i really don't want to get in a situation where the district is playing whack-a-mole with hate symbols because um just like gang symbols as soon as we say we've identified this so we're not going to allow this anymore something else pops up to take its place so that again highlights to me the
107importance of laying the foundation of equity and inclusion so that we can always point back to that and it's not about just getting rid of pepe the frog but we're you know we're focused on the the big picture as well yeah you're absolutely right naomi it's that that proactive approach um really lends itself to culture and climate the reactive actually can do damage to culture and climate so i think that's where we speak to the intent versus the impact right and so um you know i think that ideologies matter more than symbols and so what is the thinking behind that so that's when we speak to how are we what are we learning and unlearning and that's why the restorative practices and pedagogy is going to be so important we don't want to list we
108don't want to just have so many things but there are some pretty obvious pieces that we need to be able to address to be able to have inclusive environments that aren't going to be triggering and harmful to kids identities we want them to feel safe and so for that we do need a symbols of hate policy to be able to have a standard of practice and then to be able to learn and grow from i don't think that we want guacamole we're not compliance people data tells one part of the story the story is what really matters we can compliance people in federal programs with title one and all of the things that we oversee we can say you have to do this and this and this that's never actually changed the culture in the
109hearts and minds of people so that's where i really appreciate your statements and your questions because it really is about changing the id the ideology the thinking and really that's going to get it gain a further better student experience down the road all right i'll go with kristen and then dj so following up with that and especially for that better student experience um have we considered um having some of the students particularly the the secondary students take a look at the code of conduct and help us um when we're rewriting that um yes i think that ultimately my vision of some of the things that the student equity coalition could potentially participate in um would be something like that but um you know i don't want to presume what the student equity coalition wants to
110be uh kelby benedict myself and kate clifford have been the three facilitators that have been participating and working with student equity coalition that we've had very success so you know as we've had intermittent attendance that's not a reflection on students it's probably more reflection on the adults trying to facilitate it because um kids show up where they find meaning and so we're going to have to be able to have accountability for that that being said there are students in our system that are i mean they're all doing incredible work we've got clubs we've got groups that we could actually bring in and start looking at that and that's something that we would intend to do to start saying what is your experience with the code of conduct and have some reflective assessment about what we
111need to think about in order to have a better experience with that great dj i got three things here one i want to go back to the hate symbol policy aspect and just i really appreciate what you said there at the end john and and i don't want it to be a whack-a-mole system but there are i think it's very clear in a majority of this of our society there are certain symbols that we agree on that are just shouldn't be out there and i think it's great that if we can get that into a policy and get something that we can have a um backbone about and so i'm so happy to hear that and uh and i am excited to see what we can come up with and we can work with on
112that um second thing was uh i want to offer uh especially to the equity and affinity groups if they ever want an ear of the board i'm sure there's multitude of us but would be willing to come and listen if they need to feel heard or may not share anything in that in that environment and safe space um and then third i i guess i take this to leadership is that um this is a great movement for our district and we gotta not forget that we also need to take some part of that too and find time to discuss and and look upon ourselves a little bit too so they make sure that we are you know seeing the changes that are out there i i think uh christophe you said it so well earlier
113about the differences of when you were in school and what's out there now and i just think that we got to make sure that we set time aside for ourselves to um engage a little bit in that work for our and look at ourselves so uh yeah those are my three things thanks great thank you good comment dj go ahead rob yeah so one of the one of the tensions in our school district around a lot of issues is what's sort of centrally mandated or this uh and what's uh up to the schools to implement or decide and i guess i'd like to understand what your perspective and plans are with regard to that tension that uh with respect to the edi uh implement policies and implementation i i would start by saying some of
114the things we talked about tonight have been asked for by many buildings across the district they're not going to be open for interpretation and they're not going to be side-by-side decisions they really can't be when you're talking about culture and climate and i think restorative practices is a good example where that wasn't that wasn't something that some of the middle schools and high schools did all of them all the secondary schools participated and in that launch if you will many of our central office departments participated as well that is a district focus and we have some work to do in that arena right as you ask about that that question rob that that does interfere with us from time to time or maybe often and uh so but as we think about equity and inclusion
115it's not going to be optional can't the work we're going to dig into can be optional i think the one one thing i would add to that to that question like scott answered it just exactly right um the world you'll see some differences will be as principals find growth opportunities right not so much interpretations of expectations but each of our schools will grow i mentioned earlier how proud i was of wellington middle school to take on some of the tough topics they've taken on i think you'll see principals leadership even staff teams make some determinations about where there are growth opportunities at their respective locations so you may see a different books being looked at or maybe different topics being done but as far as expectations of how we do this work as scott said
116it's it's very much a systemic plan not an individual school plan kristen so to that end does that mean that all secondary schools now have uh some sort of gsa or spectrum club they all can they they don't all have a school sponsor club yet but they're all moving in that direction they all have the possibility to do that as we speak okay and they're all school sponsored not student sponsored the there are schools sponsored across the district they don't all have school sponsored at this moment and there's a couple rationales for that right they got to have an adult in the building that will take that on but i think we're moving in that direction and we've made a lot of great strides in the last couple years to move from when we couldn't
117have that where it had to be school uh school student initiated so now we have many schools sponsored across the district thank you rob yeah so i just want to follow my question a little bit i i understand i think i understand the answer that i that i was given i appreciate it um to the extent that there is programming for example associated with this for students i'm talking about although it could be for staff as well frankly is that is the decision about what programming is appropriate a site-based decision because we've had that discussion previously on other topics right mental health and and bullying and some of those other things and i'm wondering how that uh how those answers intersect with this topic i'll tackle rob i think i think it's nuanced um and
118i i would i would cite no place for hate um as a example of programming we brought in but we didn't bring into all secondary schools this year because the adl to have capacity to bring into all secondary schools but the expectation would be all secondary schools are giving students that opportunity to have no place for hate which gives students a voice and empowers them to take some ownership into work as we as we look at and i think the board has challenged us to look at best practices we've got to be able to identify and monitor what practices are we having success with before we ever set forth and said this practice is one everyone will do and we're not there yet we're not in a place where we could say this is way
119better than other practices we can see promising practices but i don't know that we are far enough along in the work to say this practice is head and shoulders above others i think about sel programs we have many successful sel programs in this district i think about several different ones just at the secondary level and so if at a moment in time we were to say we're throwing out all of those and everyone's going to go with ovaeus which happens to be the program that clp middle school is using and having success with clp middle school would feel like their time was used well and the other schools that spent time getting their program up and running having success with would feel like they're moving backwards a couple years because they're starting over we were
120very intentional when we brought in restorative practices to say this umbrella lays over some of the sel work you do um and this is the the expectation we have is that you will have these types of practices and oh by the way as you look at whether you're talking about ovais or second step or discovery here's how they co-exist work together and we'll have the same conversation i think when we start thinking about what it looks like at elementary right because we have so i think it's nuanced rob i think we gotta be mindful about what are the outcomes where are we seeing successes monitoring successes rather than saying we have to unplug everything you're doing and start over all with the same program of which the needs in every building are aren't exactly the
121same either so we it's a nuanced conversation but i think you can see um some moves as a district that we're saying here's some guardrails or here's some common expectations and within in that you need to move and do the things you see will work in your building and then we've got to monitor that so rob i guess i would just add to what scott's saying i do believe that it's nuanced but it's not unpredictable so let's think about the fact that let me use eld as an example we have eld programming in every school we have emerging bilingual students in every one of our schools every single school has a responsibility to serve our emerging bilingual kids they might schedule it a little bit differently what we want to do is be able to
122through our eld action plans which we've gotten away with gotten away from the last couple years because it occurred last last spring and going into the spring we still have that concept but it's not necessarily the same because we've evolved with our schools our vision would be that our schools would have an understanding that looking at equity diversity and inclusion in their school performance framework in their improvement plans and in the things that they need to be able to report to what is the data showing them and what is their climate and culture showing them that they need to attend to so knowing that i would expect that each school then would be able to speak to what is it going to take in order to be able to respond to the data and the
123experiences that their kids are having how are we assessing what experiences kids are having so it may not be uniform but it needs to be articulated and be able to be spoken to and led by that school leader now that being said keep in mind that one of the things that is really vulnerable for school leadership is not knowing where the district stands so we have an obligation as district leaders as well to be able to state here's our standard of practice and this is what we believe is important too so that's when the board has been articulate about the fact that we want to work towards a district end related to upholding students dignity we've talked about our principles of community we've talked about all of these different components that we really want to
124foster and promote in our district when the district has a vision the schools know where they can fit into that and we can have mutual accountability of how we're going to respond to it to make sure that every school is upholding and being inclusive of all the students in their community but our schools are different we have schools on the south end that are different than our midtown schools that are different than our mountain schools than our wellington schools so we want to have a standard practice that we're attending to that it might just look a little bit different how we're implementing responding to it in individual schools one of the challenges i think we have at the board level or at least also speak for myself one of the challenges i have at the
125board level with these kinds of things then is how do i get a an understanding of how comprehensive the implementation is across the district right and it's not just with this issue right i mean there are other issues where we have these kind of as you said scott we've certainly heard before you know different schools have different needs and i believe that and how do we know from uh where we sit that those needs are all being are all being adequately met right i mean how do we how do we get a handle on that right because i feel like on some of the sel stuff historically i don't really know where we stand now but on some of the iesl stuff historically we did have different programs in place uh and i didn't know
126that we had programs in place and effective programs in place in all of them right i i just it just for me anyway it was always hard to get a handle on on that answer frankly and and i'm not saying we should take the simple solution just to give us a way to get a handle on it i'm not saying that but it but it does present a little bit of challenge and tension as we discuss it uh as we try to internalize how successful we're being and where where we might need to uh exercise more influence or devote more resources or something else rob i appreciate kind of pinpointing that and i do believe um affective education is harder to monitor it just is right it's hard to know we could have uh programs
127in every school but they might not be effective and so we could be doing implementation super well but they're not hitting the mark and it's hard to measure that i think we've been pushed by the board and with work by staff we are doing a better job of understanding how students are doing with their social emotional development in our district than most we actually ask the question annually how are students doing so i think that's a measure for us to evaluate going forward but i also think it is going to be powerful for us to monitor monitor what we see with disproportionality as you have started to see a week ago that is going to be telling for us going forward how well do students feel like they belong because if they're in the discipline
128cycle they're not likely feeling like they belong and they're telling us similar things in the connection survey so i think monitoring those things is going to be critical going forward and i know that's uncomfortable because it's it it is data that we get once a year but i think it's going to be important as we make this shift that that is really what we're that's the that's how we analyze the response results of our work it's hard to analyze the actual work you got to look at are you getting the results you want and this work is not going to be overnight it's not going to be we're not going to change and become a restorative practice showcase district in in 12 months it's not going to happen so but but i do think we'll
129see results will change okay and i'm going to start asking this to wrap it up so final comments go ahead yeah this is my final comment thank you um i think that all of this work is really really good i think that we are you know taking intentional steps to making large systemic change and i really appreciate that i've recommended a podcast to a lot of you nice white parents by the new york times which deals with nice white parents trying to make equity decisions in their schools with more multicultural students spoiler alert it didn't go super well so my question is how are we ensuring that we are hearing from our marginalized communities as we are trying to make these plans to best support them both in the planning and in the evaluation naomi
130i really appreciate that question um you know i was in a team meeting yesterday actually talking about how we start doing our needs assessment as we start to transition out of this school year about what families need for next year in those conversations we start talking about what are their experiences like the part of inclusive leadership inclusive leadership is not trying to uproot the whole hierarchy of how institutions are founded it's really about engaging in the process of how are we inclusive in the process of making decision making and how are they informed they're informed by the stakeholders that we serve and so in the past the good old days of pre-old kovid right we did parent academies we had parent engagement workshops we had opportunities we had what we call caffecitos with our family
131liaisons where they'd come in and bring in families and we'd just have conversations and have discussions where we could then hear from our families now that what that's we're talking about our latinx community when we think about the work of equity diversity inclusion we need to be purposeful and diligent about expanding that i had the opportunity right before spring break to go and talk to ciac about equity diversity inclusion and start to hear from their perspective and their voices what are the things that they are needing and on trying to understand and what was what was great is that you know they've got incredible stories and are willing to share those with us um and some of them are recurring themes transportation after sports or things and it's really hard things that we've heard before
132but it's a temperature check and kind of a well-balanced assessment of what are the recurring themes that our families need as it relates to equity diversity inclusion i think that it is going to be multiple mechanisms of trying to listen differently and create different mechanisms to do that so we've got some work to do we don't have all the answers but we do have some natural mechanisms to start hearing from our diverse communities you know i think kristin you asked about our gsa spectrum clubs it is an opportunity for us to develop more but one of the things that we want is some sort of district leadership gsa or spectrum club um that's not unbeknownst to us it literally is about time and bandwidth to start to create this work so um we'll get there
133i think um what we ask of our community right now is continue to give us those ideas continue to challenge us and ask us questions so that it'll make us better that's part of the process of being inclusive dj uh scott you mentioned a couple times about the no place for hate and i was just wondering if it doesn't have to be tonight because you might not have it but how it's been going to implement it and how well it's working in those communities a little bit i i have heard from other school districts some of that have been working on it so i'd be intrigued to find out how well it's doing and how well it's uh hitting the mark we can get you some feedback that's on maybe friday update great okay so
134uh i think based on the depth and the length of the discussion this evening it's clear that this is a topic of interest and dr lambert thank you for actually stepping forward and doing the presentation this evening i think that shows how much it's being taken seriously by our administration so thanks for presenting and bringing uh this team in front of us to do the discussion with us i really appreciate it very nice and thanks john for joining us it's good to see y'all thanks john all right uh are we still good keep marching forward okay uh item 7.2 on the agenda is the 2020 2021 school year update and i'll turn it over to you dr lambert hey thanks again i know it's the moment you've all been waiting for as we get to
135this point in the meeting and i think the thing that's always in question is who's going to go first tonight on our school update and i thought of creative ways to do it and all of them sounded kind of silly so i'm just going to go with tracy first they're going to provide tonight's update on the current school year as you know you have opportunity after that's over for some q a they have a couple of brief focused topics they'll mention and then the floor will be open for anything you'd like so i'm going to turn it over to tracy thank you dr lambert president fab members of the board um real quick just an update that on the friday before spring break all of the schools receive their student-based budget plans and so they're
136going to be working on that allocation and just want to honor the work of dave montoya and the budget design team who really took the opportunity to get a lot of feedback from principals and from departments about how we could look at student-based budgeting differently and the allocations went out in a new way this year in terms of the funding model was distributed a little bit differently with a little bit more money going toward elementary and those schools particularly the elementary were pleased with that allocation and how responsive that budget design team was and how supportive they were of recognizing the need to support our early learners and so they're going to be working on that and brett parsons and i met with the smaller elementary schools the ones who are projected to be under
137300 to make sure that that new budget design model that was pushed out works for them as well and so we're going to continue to work through that process and get feedback from those schools since we've made a change to that sbb allocation this year so that's kind of the big news out in the system for schools that they're going to be working on those budget plans and be submitting those in the next week thank you great and i just have a couple of uh bullet points as well as you know i think we were together two weeks ago but really five school days and and really only one um or two now school days with everybody so secondary has been spending their time getting ready to have everybody back in uh exciting to say
138that uh feedback from the principals this morning is uh buildings are full buildings feel full and if you talk to students if you have a chance to get out ask students what they're feeling they'll tell you the classrooms feel full the hallways feel full and the the principles this morning as i asked them to give me a ballpark for what it felt like in terms of percentages of students obviously they i did that on the spot and they reported between 80 and 85 percent of what it felt like their attendance at the middle school level for yesterday was 92.2 percent which is exactly the same percentage we had a monday monday the 8th so the last monday we were in school but with a students and b at home our attendance was exactly the same
139and our high school attendance yesterday was 88 percent down about two percentage points from what it was uh two weeks ago on monday when uh half the students were in half students were out so the wondering we had about what percentage would show up um i think there was some nervous energy and i had heard stories i think some of you had as well of you know ap classes where four students were coming when only half the students were there that's not what materialized yesterday and today and knock on wood that continues that we see students showing up we also had if you recall we had we've given parents an opportunity to talk to principals and go on a remote learning track if you will already in the first two days of being back we've
140had students that asked to be remote learning that have showed up in person so we'll continue to monitor that and see how that lays out the second thing i wanted to share is is uh you know where we just started fourth quarter but really thinking about how do we culminate the year and there are some things that we historically do with the secondary to culminate the year one of which is fifth grade to sixth grade transition feeling like that's pretty important pretty critical we're not ready yet this year to say we're going to do sixth grade visitations and bring all the fifth graders to the sixth grade schools given we just added all the students but the middle schools are are knee-deep right now in planning how they can virtually get students excited about moving
141to the middle school and then we have at the high school level we have other things like uh prom is a good example where last year was off the table working closely with the health department right now looking like we're going to be able to do some kind of um at least a senior prom likely be outside likely on a football field um possibly with shifts we haven't landed there yet but that kind of planning is in place and the culminating like 8th grade celebration to end the year graduation we talked a little bit about two weeks ago i told you we have landed the plane we have not quite landed the plane we've got another meeting with with the health department thursday but it's looking like we'll have two of our smaller programs that
142will be inside on wednesday i can't remember the date but we'll have to wednesday to thursday to friday to saturday is what it's looking like and the thursday friday saturday graduations all will be at french field and so that's what it's looking like it'll land we haven't been able to get enough attendance to do say the ib convocation inside so that looks like it'll be a french field again like it was last year and it's looking like pca will also be a little bit too big to be inside and so they'd like to be out on the football field too that allows them to have a few more guests as well so still working out those details but that that culminating how do you kind of end a school year where we didn't get to
143do any of that last year this year we have some of that in planning and good momentum around those kind of celebrations that's uh that's the update for tonight so scott i assume you're working out the weather as you plan outdoors i know tesla helps quite a bit on that front so if you just work nicely i heard the snow for the rest of year was came down a week ago or so so i think we're good to know i mean that's a challenge for us christophe no doubt outside the weather could be a challenge um in may you know we're going to do similar to what we did last year nine and one um and you know we'll have to have some contingency plans which we're still working but yeah weather we can't control
144quite like we can when we're inside although if some of you remember my first year in this job we almost had graduation cancelled because of snow even at moby that year because it was broke some trees and so it's hard to say but hopefully it'll be nice cross your fingers we're due for some good weather then great and um honestly i've been excited and thinking hard about march 22nd and opening all the schools to students i i was pretty excited and anxious to hear how that was going so thanks to the three of you for the work and pulling that off so with that i'll open it up to board questions if there are any go ahead dj scott do you know about a percentage or how many students are doing the remote you said
145there's quite a few that showed up but do we have numbers how many are no it's at each school it's a little different i'm trying to think what i saw in the notes today like rocky has 40 that have formally signed up fossil ridge is well over that i can't remember off top my head what their numbers are i think that'll land for us more uh officially you know the week or so we'll know who is destined to stay in that arena and who's not but it was different who formally had the conversation and who did not right so that's so we have to monitor a little bit and we're still super early but i have to just admit i did not expect that uh i would get this the feedback that the participation in
146classrooms felt as full as they did i i anticipated we would have some pockets where you know large groups would say we're not going we're going to still stay remote and that doesn't seem to be where the energy was it seemed like lots of excitement to be back in school and uh i think that may help us kind of bridge that and continue to bring kids back but we'll keep monitoring i can confirm that the drop-off lanes are quite busy quite more full i had drop off yesterday for my daughter at preston the first day back and yeah we were waiting for quite a while but um i know they're working hard monitoring that too and i can just attest just in that communication that amy's been pretty transparent in saying we'll monitor and watch
147and we may have to have some iterative changes that go on as we move forward but um but i know they're working on it and and transfer drop-off pickup was a touchy subject that when we opened elementaries and if you talk to the elementaries they'd say a couple of weeks and then things kind of level off people figure it out and we'll see the same thing at secondary likely well my second question kind of goes off that is is the buses situation the i was a little taken back by the article that was in the colorado and that our our numbers were not going to be able to increase at all do what is the situation there or are we not going to see that at all this last quarter be able to go get
148a little bit more students on board yeah we we have seen uh added students almost daily in fact i just got an email just before i stepped into the board meeting tonight from jake saying they just added two more 111 student rocky students so they're they're still working with the schools trying to figure it out that's a hard one also because as it is at the beginning of a school year you don't often know how many people are actually going to get on the bus we're in that mode right now of trying to figure out how many people that we've assigned are actually going to get on what seats do we have open i just asked principals again this morning to pay attention to what buses look like they're coming with open seats and we'll
149continue to fill up the seats we have available and um we're i think close to 40 drivers short right now so you know it is a pickle for us and and uh and we talked today in our meeting about uh work we we can help do i think all of us anyone listening can help think about bus drivers now but also for the fall um because it's going to be hard to get that all replaced between now and then so um i know jake and his team are working hard to get people on thank you did the three foot the new guidance from the cdc alter anything with regards to the busing it didn't it didn't impact bussing as far as the procedure is going right now okay i was wondering about that during those
150other questions go ahead naomi yeah so i um have a little bit of extra time on my hands so i was actually able to visit all of the comprehensive high schools before spring break and it was a very different story at every school this is definitely one of those every school is individual when i was at fossil julie said her numbers of students who weren't going to return were was close to 20 percent whereas when i was at rocky craig shared that he thought it was closer to five percent so every school had kind of a different um family situation um that they were working with but while i was at the schools i did want to share that when i went to rocky i saw two things that i thought were really amazing and
151there was one concern that was shared yes so dj's daughter was there amazing um also the choir was out in the commons all over the rocks and just spread out as far as they could be so that they could sing together still in their masks and you would be amazed at how well the acoustics worked it was it was really nice to be able to walk by and listen to their their lovely singing the other thing that i saw was in an integrated math class and these students were working to build bridges with straws and some other little hand handheld devices that would hold a certain amount of weight but before they did that they learned all about geometry they learned about magic triangles they learned about squares they built a triangle and they built
152a square and they saw which one was stronger so the inquiry learning the hands-on learning the innovative teaching practices are still happening in our buildings just getting kids to school is only one piece of the picture but then once we're getting them there people are figuring out how to make sure that we're providing authentic and enriching education to the students it is really a very beautiful thing to see i also visited a very small tech room and this is again one of those where there's not a lot of really great alternatives and the teacher in the room is doing his best to figure out how to support all of the students because it was a very small narrow room without any windows and since they have computers they're all kind of sitting right next to
153each other so they're trying to put up clear shower curtains and they've got a hand a box fan with a hepa filter on it to help help to circulate the air so we're they're trying their best to be as creative as possible and there were also some concerns about when they went into phase four what that would look like great thank you other questions or comments okay thank you for the update this evening okay i'm 7.3 is border visions to policies bsr 4.0 4.1 4.2 0.3 and 4.4 and this is a first reading and i see your name on it dr lambert but i was just going to quickly uh put out there i don't quite know how long we'll give this it's one of the first times we're really kind of reviewing a board
154policy for a while and and seeing this but uh so i want to give it a enough time that we can talk through it but also remembering that that we can do a second reading before we bring it to action so we'll just see how that goes with that i'll turn it over to you thank you very much president legal and policy councils prepared draft revisions to board superintendent policies for discussion as president fed said this is the first reading and revisions of the policy will be placed in front of the board for approval at a future meeting so i'm going to turn it over to our legal and policy council this is autumn aspen and she's prepared to do the readings and take questions from you autumn it's all yours we can go through
155a discussion probably of each policy just to make sure we can get that discussion for one policy before moving on to the next so we can start with bsr 4.0 which is the general board superintendent relationship policy and this policy basically states that the board's sole official connection to the operational organization its management and staff its achievements and conduct will be through the superintendent and with this policy i'm proposing a change here which is adding that first paragraph which you see in red and this language basically states the kind of just more general high level goals for the relationship between the superintendent and the board and also discusses the distinction between the different roles that the board and the superintendent have i don't know if you've all read through it if i want me to
156read through the changes as we go through or just kind of open it up for discussion i don't think you need to read it out loud actually i i think i'll open it up for discussion and uh i know oh is that a hand okay um looks good to nate okay i know um thanks um rob did you want to make any comments on this one okay um are there any comments on this one looks good thumbs up okay so this one could apparently come back as an action item then very good i'll let you proceed okay well that makes it easy for that one the next one uh lauren is 4.1 which is on unity of control this policy discusses that only directives of a quorum of the board are binding on the superintendent
157and with this policy there's three proposed changes for the board's consideration and discussion the first change discusses that documents that are approved by official board action will not be amended by the superintendent or district staff without further board action the intent for this change is basically directed at contracts and documents like that where once the the board approves a contract for example any amendment to that contract would have to come before the board again without any revisions by staff unless the board authorized the staff to make further amendments to that contract and the the next change is in number three which that section states that if board members ask for information from the superintendent the superintendent could refuse those requests if the request would create a lot of amount of staff time or funds or
158if it's disruptive and here the proposed change based on some feedback from the board discussion at the retreat would be to add a sentence there that says if the superintendent does refuse that request that they inform the board member of the reason why and then there's also a sentence after that that states that the the board could then direct the superintendent to fulfill that request if there's a majority of the board who would like the information and then the the third change for this policy is an edition of number four which states that nothing in this policy is intended to limit any board member's right to request and receive school records under crs 22-32-103 and that statue states that each school director shall have access to all school records at all times so the this
159edition doesn't really add or change any rights that school board members have it just is more of a there for a reminder or to ensure that nothing in this policy is intended to restrict that ability that's in statute okay thank you questions comments dj i'm not a lawyer and i don't play one on tv and i'm also english would not be my best subject so i have this question about the very first sentence here about uh only directives of a quorum should be from a quorum of the board because it just didn't make sense to me the way that that part was written first part uh second part is does the part in red which i i i liked but with your um your explanation the thing that just kind of went off in my
160head was the situation we had last year when we were trying to figure out money in our budget where we approved we approved a contract but it wasn't filled at the time because we were putting it off to figure out our money situation and then money was moved around so to me i would take it that that would still need to come back to the board with what was read what was written here but with your explanation now i'm thinking maybe it doesn't and so i guess i just want clarification on on a process you know if we approve something it's not done or it's moved to a later time how does that fulfill into that that category i think that's a good question there could be some potential changes to that first sentence to
161address that if needed but i think part of it would be if the board makes the decision and if it i guess if it's more just a timing issue if it's delayed but the decision actually doesn't change it's not amended then i think this language would still hold for that okay it would more be if if there's a decision by the board and then there's something that needs to change with that they'd have to come back before the board for that amendment okay you didn't address whether it should be of or from um i just when i a quorum is they yeah because the quorum is you got enough people there to make the make it official yeah and so only directors yeah so i think buy would work if that change make sense yeah
162we'll uh vote on that all right other questions or comments on this one no i'll just say uh i appreciate very much the the the way you took the input from the retreat on the particularly the i mean the first part's fine too but particularly on the three and four there and how you threaded that needle so thank you okay i had one uh question comment about number four based on what had caused trouble in the past and i you actually said there's um we're already covered by statute what i think was not covered was uh prompt and unaltered and i was wondering if there was a way um if it makes sense to you know add that it seems obvious but um i think what board members were looking for was was um reasonably
163quickly receiving uh materials and what's that a timely manner a timely manner and without need for edits or commentary you know any of the things that might slow it down from being brought forward i i think that's what okay go ahead carolyn and and i think that what goes along with that is is um i gotta ask for a document and when i got it it was redacted which really shocked me so what about a superintendent or taking um taking it upon themselves to redact things in a document so maybe in unaltered or pure you know no no need for commentary you know something that would address that and i i just throw that out there and see what others say i could i could look at some language like that i think there there
164may be some reasons where redactions would be appropriate or maybe the document was redacted for another reason but i can look to see if that could be addressed i think what also could go in that number four is potentially that language of having the documents provided in a timely manner or prompt unless there's a reason why it couldn't be and then maybe there's just an explanation from the superintendent of why the document couldn't be provided in a reasonably quick time frame if that makes sense okay yep that that would probably hit it so oh go ahead naomi yeah in number three the last sentence a decision by a majority of a quorum of the board is it a majority of a quorum or is it a majority or a quorum it's a majority of a
165quorum so as long as there's a quorum present of the board then it's a majority of that quorum okay okay so we'll we'll have you review that but if if it's quick and easy we could bring it as an action we'll kind of see where that where that lands so okay um so i'll turn it back over to you okay and the next one is bsr 4.2 and that's accountability of the superintendent uh this policy basically states that the superintendent is vested with the full authority over accountability for management and staff and that the board should not give directions or instructions to persons who report directly or indirectly to the superintendent except for the district's legal and policy council and with this policy there's one proposed edition and it's a new subsection a and that
166change discusses that the superintendent could direct requests for information made by board members to members of the superintendent's cabinet and then they could respond directly to board members as long as the superintendent is properly notified or copied on those responses okay go ahead nate and then rob i just happen to think i wondered whether it would be helpful to add appropriate members of the superintendent's cabinet or other staff because it might be directed to someone other than a cabinet member but it's fine with me that it comes back through a cabinet member yeah i suggested that also that we had other relevant staff here it's at the direction of the superintendent anyway so i don't see why that should be a problem and and we have examples right now where that's happening so i i
167would hate to have it so the superintendent says the cabinet member the cabinet member talks to the director the director has to talk to the cabinet under the cabinet i mean it's just nuts it's a well-run system there uh yeah it's a system all right i think an example that could be we had a we had a member here tonight who is a director but not a cabinet member but he's talking about a really important topic to all of us and there may be times for q a in that area so he would seem to me to be a relevant example to what you're requesting like what nate's saying too i think if i can make some changes to that language then to include i don't know if it'd be other relevant staff or appropriate
168district leadership or something to that effect to make it a little bit more comprehensive why not anything else on 4.2 okay okay moving on to 4.3 which is nature and delegation to the superintendent uh this policy just has one proposed change and it states that in some circumstances it's determined by the superintendent it may be in the best interest of district staff and students for the superintendent to coordinate with the board on decisions that would generally be delegated to the superintendent as organizational means this is in the section discussing the executive limitations and which decisions are made by the board versus superintendent so this provides a little bit more not really flexibility but just kind of solidifying that option there that the superintendent could coordinate with the board on some of those decisions that would
169generally be means decisions dj or nate i'm sorry i looked at nate and called dj so therein lies the rub that i think is the issue um i'd i'd like it to be couched in a more collaborative rather than tension it seems to me it kind of assumes that there's a tension there and there may be but i would like it to be something like in some circumstances as as determined by the superintendent in consultation with the board it may be in the best interest or something like that i mean because i think on big decisions even those that are means decisions it's in the best interest of the district to make sure that everyone's on the same page even though the superintendent is responsible for the means so this this to me seems like
170it sets up a tension that i would rather have it be more of a collaborative relationship i appreciate that comment and i think this language it was a little bit of a struggle to just craft what the actual outcome that was desired would be in actual language for policy discussing if it is in consultation with the board just the piece there is a little difficult to word because then it would potentially require a board to vote to allow it to happen because it's the board acting as a whole entity not individual board members so trying to figure out a way to craft that language where the superintendent could coordinate with the board without having more hurdles and steps in in the way to actually get that teamwork working i think another piece there is uh
171i think that that was it for that piece carolyn and then i can see there was there's been a couple of times when um there were decisions that were made that were probably were going to be made by the superintendent but in the end weren't and one of them was when they were contemplating closing schools and the board actually did take a vote it's my understanding because they thought it was important enough that they that they should be making that decision because they felt accountable to the voters and i can think of one other time since i've been on the board where there was some tension about whether the superintendent would make a decision or whether the board would and i think we ended up deferring back to the superintendent but that was on whether
172or not we would take medicaid so there are times when um there are important decisions i think that are being made and especially like something like taking medicaid because it was a large dollar amount that the board felt like maybe they should have some input so i guess what i'm getting at is how can we get some language that that represents that that acknowledges that that there's going to be times where they're going to be important decisions that that the board might want to give input on and i think that's what we're struggling with here right right i think one option would potentially be to look at the executive limitations and if there's some language to add in there where if the board would like the option to take some decisions and make those decisions
173themselves and that could be in the executive limitations policy rob i would i guess i would say that if we were to take that approach that requires multiple votes too right it requires a vote to add it to the executive limitations and then it requires a vote to to actually decide on whatever it is closing schools or whatever it is right so so i'm not sure that that really changes anything in terms of how onerous if you want to call it the process might be i actually like the language in consultation with the board i think there are two things about that one of them is it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't say that the board makes the consultation to me does not necessarily imply that we have to take a vote on something right
174i mean i know i remember for example when we talked about the medicaid thing we talked about it extensively in dinner sessions for the most part and i felt like you know whether or not i agree with the ultimate decision i felt like there was consultation going on there right and so people were getting a vibe and if somebody wanted to take it to a vote we could have done that but we didn't do that okay so i think consultation is actually a good word there to to to help with that and yeah so enough said that's my mate i'm wondering if it might be best just to eliminate the clause as determined by the superintendent because um because i think the rest of it implies that you know there's a decision made among the
175superintendent and the and the board about whether that consultation would take place knowing that there are decisions that would be generally delegated to the superintendent could i i actually think that might work another thing i was actually roughly okay with as determined by the superintendent because the superintendent still uh is beholden to the board but uh given what rob was saying i i was wondering if rather than in consultation which i still think how do you consult with the board it's hard to do but if it was in consideration of the board it might uh you know explicitly states that the superintendent is doing it uh while reflecting on what the board's thinking but after hearing nate i would also consider just removing that and it probably gets closer it's less explicit which i think
176is the concern of board members go ahead nate well i think regardless of what you call it the medicaid decision was to me a good example we did have consultation between the superintendent and the board you know in a series of meetings about what we were gonna do what the superintendent was gonna do and the board had the option of of directing the superintendent but i think i think it worked in the end so sorry i just want to make sure i'm processing what the suggestion was it's to take out as determined by the superintendent so we're essentially using the uh the verb coordinate as opposed to consulting right we're just saying that the groups are going to coordinate together is that what you're you're promoting there or in consultation that's right i think the
177only concern with that is if you take out the as determined by the superintendent it makes it a little less clear and i think a little bit more vague of what that exactly means in which circumstances because then it does have the word may in there but it just may not be clear of who initiates that and then it may take away from the superintendent's ability to make decisions on those means because it won't be clear of who makes those decisions all the time or who could make those decisions so one thing i'm trying to process as quickly as i can i think the objective of the language should be to help us all work together as best we can and i'm trying to think about how this it can't be absolute i think there
178are times where we are intentioned and maybe that's what this is trying to acknowledge and maybe that in itself helps um but i'm struggling to to determine whether one form of this or the other would would do better to to you know i think medicaid is a good example um it it became obvious that there was a lot of discussion about board members it certainly would make it would behoove the superintendent to consider that and to consult at that moment and it may happen uh with or without so i i'm i'm just speaking out loud thinking about my head good okay robin and todd now go no i think that based on what autumn is saying by using consultation and not taking that out you get both needs met use consultation well i think if
179that's what if your goal is that like autumn is saying you want to make sure the superintendent retains that position to make those calls and at the same time recognizing the value of consultation partnership uh good discussion to lead to a good decision i think keeping everything there and doing in consultation gets to both of those at least it seems like to me so how about we put it back you reflect on it sounds like we're kind of landing on some form of consultation and we'll see where that that goes so great discussion i think that's why we're doing this tonight so okay okay back to you anything else on that policy or moving on to the next one okay uh bsr 4.4 is on monitoring district superintendent performance there's a one proposed change here
180and the intent was to clarify what is meant by a reasonable and prudent person i think there was some discussion at the retreat that just wasn't entirely clear and i attempted to make it a little clearer but maybe made a little bit less clear even so the as i was reading through this it seemed to me that the standard already implies an objective standard for determining whether the superintendent is reasonably interpreting the board's policies so that was the reason for adding that sentence about it being an objective standard instead of a subjective interpretation and um i welcome any comments and feedback on this part let's go with rob first and see where this leads so go ahead yeah so so i i i think we may i i may be challenged in terms of legal
181you know like dj said i don't i'm not a lawyer not play one on tv i did go to one semester at law school for what that's worth not not much but but the the the challenge i have is when i think about the words objective and subjective right i i objective to me is two plus two equals four right i mean that that's an objective fact right when i think about is the superintendent in compliance with uh uh sorry yeah uh in compliance with a standard or executing on something and and we and we ask is that reasonable is that a reasonable interpretation somebody's got to make a judgment about whether it's reasonable or not there's no third party there's no book you can go to to say this is reasonable this is not
182reasonable so who makes that judgment call a majority of the board makes that judgment call it's in our language when we talk about monitoring reports you know i move that the superintendent has made a reasonable interpretation and there's another clause to it i forget what it is but but you know and there's an option that says the superintendent hasn't done a reasonable thing you know and we don't ex you know choose that option at least we never have and i've been on the board but it's there you know as a possibility similarly you know since this section talks about uh performance i think if in the broader sense of the of the superintendent you know it's it's a judgment called the board as a whole whether the superintendent is performing reasonably or not right so
183i guess when somebody has to make a judgment call that to me in a lay person's suit is is not objective in some in some sort of hard fact kind of way right it's it's a judgment call right which to me is inherently subjective and so why am i going through all this i'm going through all this because i think that claiming claiming that it's objective somehow feels to me misleading for lack of a better word right yeah well no seriously and i and i think that's a source of some tension actually or it can be a source of some tension right um so i don't know and and i and i know from my limited law you know from watching law and order or whatever that there's that there's that there is this thing
184called the reasonable person standard right but who interprets what a reasonable person the judge in i think in those circumstances give some guidance about what's reasonable right in this case there's nobody else but the board so that's my concern with the addition that you've made here i i feel like it's made it more confusing um i'm i'm actually fine with that i think the the the changes without the last sentence uh are pretty clear it actually says the board is the last arbiter and it also says it's the reasonable person standard so um but it clearly states that the board is is the arbiter in this in this situation and i think that's as objective or subjective as you're ever going to get i i i actually think it does confuse things to add that
185last sentence i would be fine without it so nate i agree i think the last sentence could be eliminated or the new sentence can be eliminated and if we really wanted to go full hog we could put in there shall the board will always judge with the reasonable person standard situated as is she or he because that's part of the reasonable person standard situated as is she no i think it's fine without okay thank goodness go ahead rob so i'm i'm i don't know about that but i'm good i'm you know fine so if we eliminate the sentence i'm i'm good with that you know even though it still says the reasonable person standard i do have a sort of a broader question here which is not really i don't think a question i mean
186you can talk to it autumn i'm not saying you shouldn't or you can't i just think it's a broader question than a legal question and that is as i think about what a superintendent does or doesn't do decisions that he or she makes right i think about is what that person doing in the best interests of the district in the best interest of the student right of the students and the staff and the district as a whole right and i struggle with wording like this right in that context right because as a board member when i make a judgment call about like i said whether it's a good thing is going on i think about what does that mean for the district right and i don't know how to whether that can or should be
187that kind of value statement can or should be reflected in these policies but i think it's the reality of how at least i look at my job as a as a board member you know what's going on here and is it the right thing for the for the students in the district i'm repeating myself sorry nate i think in this case we could we could say that reasonableness is a substitute for what's in the best interests of the district because if it's not in the best interests of the district then i think we'd say it's unreasonable so okay so i think you heard eliminate the last sentence other changes are good or pretty good i i actually think um that that language is pretty real and represents quite well what we're doing so okay and
188that's the last one we had any changes on right uh yeah so um the last one is just 4.5 on superintendent compensation i think there wasn't any discussion at the retreat about making any changes there so i didn't make any changes if there's some discussion we can have that or if there's no changes needed then i don't need to discuss that one okay so then should we try to bring all these policies back on consent or as an action uh or do you want to do another reading one more time sorry i i think uh i think we can i think based on what we've heard here and i think what we've agreed to we should bring them back on consent and if somebody wants to pull it we can pull it but i i
189don't see that's my feeling okay let's try that i think that's a fair we're pretty close it seems like so let's try consent and as rob said we'll put them if we need to so okay great thank you thank you autumn i appreciate it yeah nice work okay um so finally that brings us to item 7.4 and that's the next update on the superintendent evaluation instrument and uh dj and carolyn i'm turning that over to you so all right i i'll start off with um we we had put two things in the packet and the first one was the uh draft questions and and the questions that we uh we copied and kind of uh changed the order a little bit of of uh how the questions and the artifact evidence sheet kind of goes
190together uh and so we thought we'd just because there's a lot going on um we thought we would just try to focus on the questions and if are these the right kind of questions that we should be asking but keeping in mind the the other timeline with the five parts is still what we're looking at we're still looking at doing these questions which are out there and then having the superintendent's goals evidence of performance and feedback on performance and then the culmination of all of that put together for the final evaluation summary so i think we just kind of wanted to open it up about these questions and rob had sent some questions about some questions about the questions uh to us uh which i thought were really good and one of the things the
191overall part of his question i think is something that we need to think about and address as i pull up his questions here um is you know do we want to be more direct with the questions that we are asking and evaluating or do we want these uh this you know small batch of questions to kind of be a little bit more broad and we can pull in stuff that we want to into those into this part of the evaluation carolyn you have something to add so when we were looking at the different evaluation documents that different districts were using one of them that we were really interested in both of us separately pulled up the oregon document which was nine questions each one receiving a evaluation mark of one to five i believe and
192that one seemed like a big improvement on what we were doing because they were just the nine areas of evaluation however um other school districts nearby to us like weld county use like uh like four questions are almost like prompts to get the just to get board members to think about how has the superintendent being doing and been doing in the past year and uh their reasoning or the reason they liked that was is it gave each board member um time to expand on how they thought the superintendent was doing and i think that um kind of the questions that rob was asking today um kind of go in that direction there there are four ques or five questions i believe right rob five that kind of encompass like how is the superintendent doing and
193then it would be up to the board in doing the evaluation to to discuss what's been going on in the past year and decide if the superintendent has met or not met the um the i don't know if you want to call them goals or has been able to accomplish the um things in the question like had the superintendent improved on time graduation you know yes or no and maybe the board would talk about it and and then put into the evaluation that they didn't maybe think the superintendent had met it because on-time graduation had gone down but also gave the board that more open kind of concept give the board i think an opportunity to to explain why whereas for me the oregon one what i kind of liked about it it pointed you
194towards the documents that you would use and the data you would use to measure whether or not the superintendent had accomplished the goals so on one hand i like the open concept of just asking those five broad questions but i think the devil is in making sure that when you're doing the evaluation that you're using data and not subjectivity like i like the superintendent and i don't want to say anything you know bad so i'm going to give her a passing grade on this because you know i i think she's tried hard whereas if we look at the data maybe we would see that no on-time graduation has not worked or or we haven't closed the gaps or or maybe even on the some of the things that that we've really succeeded in we don't
195we don't even call maybe we don't call those out as good as we should or we don't acknowledge them like we should so i think that that's the conundrum we're in do we take and have something that's more structured or do we want something that's less structured and i think the other thing we have to think about is what how does this survive this board and how does this get handed over to the next board like is it going to be successful okay those are fantastic questions and i know rob is just begging to get in and then kristen so they'll open it up to discussions so i'm calm he's calmly ready to engage here so yeah no um so i guess my my feeling so so the the kind of questions i mean i
196don't know who's seen this thing i mean i know todd and we have but i mean the kind of questions that i'm talking about here i'll just give a couple of examples of them you know is the superintendent demonstrating sufficient and the right leadership and vision for the moment in which the district finds itself in the eyes of the board in the eyes of the staff in the eyes of the community is the superintendent running the operational and financial sides of the district in the best short-term and long-term interests of this of the students it says here but maybe it should be of the students and staff i mean i'm not saying these are perfect questions but i can tell you that the reason i sort of came to these these general questions is and
197i i'll acknowledge that kristoff and i sort of cooked up the last superintendent evaluation document by basically borrowing it from washington state and so um anyway so the reason i came to this conclusion is because i found myself particularly as we went through various uh evaluation cycles i think of questions like these and i think okay so here's a thing that i want to bring up it went well or it didn't go well or whatever how do i fit that into this washington document right how do i where in there does it fit right um the washington document and and i'll get to the oregon one in a second but the washington document did provide some prompts caused me to think about some things differently so that was that was good i mean but there
198were things that i just knew were happening or weren't happening and i wanted to say something about them and i had to figure out where to put them and and that that just seemed not helpful to the to the conversation that i think really needs to my experience both in business frankly and on the board having worked uh you know here for five years uh or so is it's a conversation that's important to the to to really getting the the uh the performance evaluation to be effective right and it has to be authentic and we have to have the courage to say things that are that aren't going well and the the the foresight and the foresight is maybe the wrong word but the the presence of mind to also call out the things that
199are going well but at some level that's on us whatever document we're using right either we're going to do that or not we can we can sugar coat things with any document or any set of questions so anyway i think the oregon document is better than the washington document because it's simpler but i think it still suffers from the same for me the same problem quote unquote which is that it tries to itemize things there's a big long list of stuff right and i'm still going to be wondering where do i fit in you know the the thing that i think is most important given where the circumstances the district finds itself in so i just tried to come up with broader questions that cover all areas of the district that i think are important
200and i don't say that i haven't missed one but and i agree 100 that we need to pair that with data and some of the stuff that you guys have called out specifically you know some of the 1.0 results perhaps some of the uip stuff feedback surveys some of those kind of things absolutely ought to be part of in my view ought to be part of this evaluation process right but i think we can find those data i think we can associate those data and any other artifacts with these kind of simple questions rather than the more complicated multi-part thing that at least that i view the oregon standards to be so i would say great on the great on the timeline great on the let's get let's get clearer on the document or sorry
201the evidence but let's ask the questions in a way that really allows us to have the conversation and not get wrapped around the axle of a document that's my view okay it looks like dj wants to respond before you or do you want to jump in quickly yeah i just go ahead because i don't want to come across necessarily defending it completely because because i'm open to coming up with something but the the part that drew me to this one was the fact that it wasn't as scripted it was so like uh you know uh standard one is visionary district leadership is really the is the big umbrella and so your first question to me would go perfectly right in there and so the thing i liked about this one was that are each individual
202ways that we interpret that a big umbrella and if we needed ideas there's descriptors and then there's artifacts that we could look at but what is it in us that we see in these these eight standards and that's what drew me to this one is that gave us the flexibility to have our own voice in all of these uh and then as one part of the five things because i think that's important to be able to get out there and so that that's what drew me not to say that those you know the questions you have i i like so i mean i think they could work in there okay kristen oh okay kristen okay caroline i just want to make one more one talk about one more thing that's really important about the the
203oregon one is an important part of it is that the superintendent receives it at least a week beforehand and she feels she or he fills out their own self-evaluation and brings and sends it to the board before the board does their evaluation so it really encourages also the superintendent to think about how they are doing so i think that that's nice because you get that feedback and that helps you think about also what has the superintendent done this is a chance for the superintendent to explain what they've done and how they feel like they have succeeded or even for the superintendent to admit the area where they think they need to work i did like that part of it too that invites the superintendent to be part of the evaluation process and i don't think
204we've had that up really i mean i think we've not really had that robust kind of way to do that beforehand so that's one other thing i did like about it so yeah and i really like the idea of a self-evaluation followed by an evaluation from the board i think that helps tremendously one of the things that i'd like to see and i liked the standard one the visionary district leadership at broadview but um i think what we need is a is a what and a how you know just simply speaking what happened um the gap was you know the graduation gap was uh decreased by 1.2 percent then the how how did that work um was it through collaborative planning was it through you know a demand from you know you know so then
205you're talking about how that happened was there um you know working together was there a feeling of everybody was in this together or was this sort of just a top-down demand that it was going to happen and is that going to be able to work continuously is that do we think that's the way to go for that yes we may have seen something you know happen some movement but is that the way we want to see the movement so it gives us an ability to see the data but also then talk about the data of a how did that happen and do we can we see changes on that um so that's something that i would like to see is including that data and then the how on that okay not to burst your bubble
206uh but um because the other process the other the other thing that i've kept in mind quite a bit is um how do we make it manageable and manageable for us and also manageable for you know the superintendent and the other data points that we want to bring in uh i i think that would tell a great story and i think that that could be uh interesting if maybe we could pull that we might be able to pull that into um their their personal goal and then they explain how it will happen and we can get that i i i don't see um i guess i want to bring us back to into you know for tonight we were really we're focused on you know the question part so if you're seeing this to be
207if you're seeing that to be part of the questions i think it's too consuming uh so uh that that would just be my my first reaction i'm willing to hear things ideas rob so i agree with the idea of a self-evaluation document and i think that is not that doesn't necessarily imply the oregon standards you can apply that in the concepts of in the context of the questions that i post as well um i i in addition to my concern that or i'll put it in a positive way in in addition to the as i said earlier i think the questions that i posed or or ones like them are likely to are more open-ended and allow a broader set of issues and concerns to be more clearly and praises frankly to be brought more
208clearly to the to the surface than than the oregon question structure if you want to call it that i think also the other thing i want to say about the oregon piece is that it feels process oriented the the descriptors for example under visit visionary district leadership i'm not going to leave them read them all off but the first few words in each of the three bullets are leads a collaborative process leads the diverse stakeholder involvement implements a continuous improvement plan right where has got results in that you know maybe you can sort of see it under continuous improvement plan or you know implements an improvement plan i guess it's not an improvement plan if things haven't improved i don't know but and i think you can see i mean i could give examples elsewhere
209in this document of things where it talks about the the superintendent puts in place structures which is an important part of the job don't get me wrong i'm not saying that's that's not important right but i'm saying results are also important right and that gets to the whole data question we were talking about so so again well yeah so that that would be my other area of the concern so i i would i mean i don't know how we're going to structure this conversation here but i would propose substitution i'm liking the conversation i want to make sure i get naomi and nate involved as well to the extent that go ahead i um so i like the oregon one it seems though that if we were to maybe with our forces combined use some
210of the questions and then the thing i really like about the oregon one is the descriptors linked with the artifacts i like that the superintendent will get this evaluation in august so that he or she will have the opportunity to collect those artifacts so that it is an authentic evaluation as we're moving through um whether we have eight standards that are more broad or five specific questions i like the questions i'm i'm wondering how we might be able to do some kind of combination here with with the artifacts and the one through four and the because each one of the one through fours also has a section for comments so maybe we can steal that part and the artifact part and then use some of the more broad uh questions nate go ahead yeah i
211kind of like the dion sanders approach you can play offense or defense both so i think we can use both in some way that doesn't make it too unwieldy okay um oh go ahead i was saying that and i think that gets to the the how that i was talking about so the what is already what you know it's the rating and then it's the descriptors and the artifacts that's the what and then that gets to the how um when we're talking about the comments of you know like what we've seen you know with the collaborative learning or the you know whatever it might be but it gets to the how which is i think something that needs to be seen too absolutely i like that okay maybe uh rob let me let me jump
212in for just a second and then i'll turn it back over to you so um i actually was coming somewhere where you were naomi which is some blend i've got to tell you um going into this where rob was ending up with his questions was closer to what i would like to see happen i i've noticed uh in in leading us through these uh evaluation things definitely the washington was cumbersome and i see even the oregon one heading that way so if the if the language and uh what do they call the the uh the parameters or the metrics line up nicely and i can read the language and it doesn't get in the way of this discussion then i'm good and i felt like some of rob's language was closer to what i feel
213like we want to and what i've felt like is the quicker we got the superintendent and the board discussing the comments and getting to the meat of the discussion the better it was the more time we all spent trying to decipher the language and line stuff up and see if they'd done this that or the other that didn't have anything to do with this the worse you know we were getting to the point where we were just running through these check marks and they were completely random um and then there was some of the behavior that carolyn worries about and you know is all over the map so feeling wise i prefer the five questions but i i think there's some real value in the oregon one that we could try to keep and i'm
214wondering if we could edit that language and then i also have the question of how we're going to land the ship um so you know whether the two of you feel are going to feel comfortable leaving tonight you know doing the next reading whenever the next you know in the next meeting or something and you know how we're going to do that so dj and i did talk about this today after we received rob's email with the questions and we both said we could live with that you know that that would be great and then i think the only concerns we had were the ones that we said is like so how do we marry up the artifacts to that you know sorry the artifacts and so and then my like i said my concern
215also is is that you know handing this over to different board members we want to make sure it's something that can kind of survive this board i mean they can always choose what they want but when they come in they're going to have to use what they have so i think that we can take the questions we can marry up the artifacts line them up um i do agree rob that this is something we can give to the superintendent to fill out right and maybe that's the great maybe that's the brilliance of this when we give the superintendent these questions you'd also give the superintendent the ability to expand right to to really expand on how they feel they've done so maybe maybe there there is i think there is a way to do that
216and what i'm hearing from everybody is that's what they would prefer is that right yeah and one more thing i was going to jump in and then turn it over to rob was you reminded me one of the things i liked with where rob had headed with his questions it feels closer to something that the future boards can edit as they need it's not so pernicious and difficult it's just simple and clean and they say wow we're missing this add number six or edit the language right it feels much simpler to me to to clean up and edit and i'm not saying the oregon one couldn't i think this edited version will probably get us there but i just think that thinking forward like that making the next revision easier or the living document aspect
217of it easier would be really nice sorry rob go right ahead so rob before you do that so do you have i mean i like all those questions is everybody okay with those questions and then is there anybody else that would like to add anything in there i think we give you some flexibility with the questions and what you had to do editing so so yeah i'm i'm i'm game for seeing how to marry that stuff and so i'll look for what you guys come up with next in that regard um one quote one broader question that i want to ask and i don't really know the answer to it so i'm really just throwing it out there and that is this rating scale business right one of the challenges that we one of the
218things that we thought anyway was good about the washington thing is it tried to describe what was meant by one to you know i they didn't use one two three four they used basic you know proficient uh not good and terrific you know i forget the exact words but but the point is that there were descriptors in each box that said what that looked like now those descriptors didn't always have meaning to us in our context so that was definitely a problem but they tried to give some idea right and and so i don't know what to do necessarily with one two three four right because in the same in without any description at all you know it's really how do we interpret two for example is that like below average is that what that
219means or improvement improvement needed one is like things are really in the tank and you got a serious i mean i don't know what does any of that mean i guess is we could so maybe that's something that needs that needs to be thought about we'll never agree on this stuff i never agree and and in the end it's still going to be a judgment even whatever we put under those descriptors right as we as we saw as we work through previous evaluations you know it's always a judgment call uh subjective as we get back to the other language about about you know whether something is is proficient or it isn't proficient for example but but that's just the challenge we have seven of us doing this job of evaluating one person okay so dj
220so in the in the whole workbook that we would put together it does list that it would list that it would say four is accomplished three is effective two is developing one is inefficient but one of the things that we have talked about a few times and we talked about with uh dwayne which was great to have his insight a little bit on that too is uh we don't like the idea of trying to you know average the numbers and and and we lose the fact that we have a two sitting out there um and so we um we talked about you know either you know doing the range aspect of you know you got something you got in here to start that conversation well to start a conversation and and go into it um
221one other thing and i'll talk about with the oregon one because that's i already visualized that one but you know if if we handed that to all seven of us and all seven of us raided and then also uh had our comments uh one of the things that i had talked to adam too was about how can we share all that data with the superintendent as as you know this is our feedback but it's not our summary you know it's not our public summary so that they can see the different uh views that we might have and and we were discussing you know how that comes into being um you know shareable and not so you know things like that i think it's important that we don't lose our individual voices but we also still
222have one voice as a board in there and how do we how do we share those so that they get an idea of every you know what their opinion is throughout the district or throughout the board yeah so go ahead and nail me i like the idea of a range i dislike anything that we would do with averaging because that's not helpful as we know from standard space grading um and i i don't think that the artifacts i'm not exactly sure that we need to pair up the list of artifacts because this is not an exhaustive list and there is a lot of opportunity for the superintendent to read the question and say here's how i'm meeting that it might be helpful to have a couple of possible examples of artifacts but i don't think
223that we need to try and match up the two pieces exactly i think it's more conceptually um that we like it and as we're doing this range i think it would be very easy to have two areas to that one that says that here are the areas of celebration and then another that says here are the areas of improvement because we should have something that the superintendent can improve on in every category i'm pretty sure that we're not hiring a demigod so we want that constant improvement um and i think that if we are intentional in that then we will get that year after year i agree with the artifacts i'm going through in my head with this talk right now and i i don't i mean there there's a couple here and there that
224we could put together easily with it i um i do think it is helpful a little bit um i actually even pulled the one from there's a michigan one that even has a bigger list and kind of and it's it's kind of a it's almost um a good list for people coming onto a board to look you know just kind of be able to glance through that oh there's that kind of data or is there's that kind of information out there that i could look at to get a picture of part of the district so yeah i kind of think that even if it's still an appendix in there it still might be helpful just to have that as a something to ring a bell in everyone's head that oh how could i and then
225you can choose you know maybe if it goes into one of the five questions or six questions down the road i still think that might be helpful to have out there i preferred the word examples to artifacts anyway the tone of artifacts strange to me but better so i i liked what you guys were talking about so go ahead carolyn um so i was just wondering if our acting superintendent dr lambert would weigh in and i think that your voice is really important here um you've been here a long time you've you've kind of seen what we've been doing and then you're a superintendent moving to a new district and so i'd just like to hear from you a little bit about your impressions and your experience even where you're going um do you want
226to speak to the evaluation you're proposing or just the process in general karen uh both if you don't mind yeah no i think you're on the right track on the evaluation i've been fortunate enough to be in the meetings with you and dj and dwayne and and uh and autumn and those have been really eye-opening i think the changes that you're making as far as the interactions are good specifically something naomi said right you want to create a situation where the person can grow they can learn along the way they can get feedback process it you're the in many respects as the seven of you you're the eyes and ears in the community for the system in many ways and so i think that feedback is really is really strong i i really believe um
227the way you're getting that set up is is positive speaking in general um you know i think you've you've broken away a little bit from that traditional uh evaluation model that's just that one point in time you talk about it and forget about it i don't think that's ever been your intent one of the things i like where you're going and i like this in other districts you're looking at it as a continuum right you got this set up and you check points and you move forward you have checkpoints and you move forward i think those are really strong ways for a superintendent not to let a long period of time go by without good feedback or if you don't have something formal and they move down the line and they don't know it and
228they go four months into it you've got four months of stuff to kind of regroup and pull it back and try to fix it if you see something right away and that person has that opportunity for more of a formative feedback where they can act on it and that seems to be a real priority in the model you have so that stands out for me i really like that i also like the opportunity to i know we haven't talked about it too much tonight but one of the features was as you look at accountability measures in the system right we talked about gaps we talked about performance growth some of those key measures that your your you've popped around i think we had about five to seven of them if i remember correctly the last
229time we were together being able to pull those into a dashboard type thing and i know we've talked about that allows the superintendent to engage with you with that data in front of them and talk about it and keep it ongoing that's a feature i've never really seen before in a superintendent evaluation not that sophisticated i really encourage you as you look at those key measures put those in we already have a great format for that work that duane has set up in power bi and all these data that we're talking about are already accessible to us we're not creating new things get those together and i would again strongly encourage you to keep having those quarterly type points where to say how are things going let the superintendent have the opportunity to show that
230that's data that they want to have i think that's really important i know a lot of you believe in that so i keep on the right track on that one i think superintendent evaluations are evolving and i think as we come through covid we're learning a lot about leadership at our levels and what we value you know um that that work has has changed our perspectives we when we came in here and talked about our work we predominantly looked at academic performance uh business finance those type of things but now we're really starting to look more i think uh holistic at the system and one of the things that's standing out right here by getting feedback from community getting feedback from others and not just one type of group and looking at that i think
231is just going to make for a more robust evaluation that you're going to feel better about so i really think you're on the right track i'm not sure if that's what you're asking for but i've been encouraged by just watching the work i thought the last meeting we had was a real breakthrough the key measures piece and some of the other stuff so yeah i think you're you're right where you need to be as i look at other superintendent evaluations that i've participated are been privy to or going to participate in uh i think those features i'm pointing stand out a little bit for you i'll i'll i'll give you guys a little taste because we weren't we didn't go into the data part tonight but uh he's talking that uh doing came up with
232uh six keys key stone measures and targets there you go keystone uh is what he talked from the it's it's from the summary list that we have on our d e one uh report and so uh there were one two three four of those that are measured three times a year and so when we do our quarterly uh check-ins it gives us an opportunity to have the superintendent uh give us a conversation about those and present what's happening in and talk about it uh especially with making a dashboard that we could easily then see the data and the the ways that it moves so that was something that's uh really exciting i think that that will help the conversation go also dwayne did get us our community partnership questionnaire to us last night so we
233do have a draft to that to share out and maybe after we get through this week of uh busyness we can dive into that together could you uh where where do we see this key stone measures uh it it's um oh it's not in the it's not in okay i was uh i don't no i didn't it was uh it's on my timeline sheet now but it wasn't on that the one that got sent oh okay so all right i started to understand because this got passed around and it's not in the it's not in the data you presented yeah not yet so so that one just has the highlighted versions of which ones they are okay and then rob has a question yeah no i think i think we've got i hope we've got
234good directional guidance here i think the challenge is the second thing you asked about kristoff which is how to land this and particularly how to land it in a timely fashion right because the reality is here that well at least the way we've been doing it to date right the superintendent evaluation process slash instrument has been part of the superintendent's contract right and if we're on track and lucky by mid april we're going to have a a new superintendent for next year and presumably a contract with that person or at least be working on a contract so somehow we need to get from here to there in a really concrete form and i'm just wondering whether you guys are yeah i thought the way that i read the contract it just had to have the
235dates of when we were doing it not necessarily the actual stuff is that right in the past sorry it's really a lot it uh but i think we've also said um that it can be a bit of a work in progress that we can we can amend or whatnot because i i think to rob's point we should try to land this with some reasonable urgency but at the same time the work you guys are doing is just too awesome so i i would recommend we maybe get a next reading at the next meeting but not necessarily have to settle it quite yet if that's still suitable so sure sounds good okay okay anything else go ahead carolyn so i'd just like to thank rob for writing those questions you know uh when we got the
236document from weld county we kind of talked about that but we wondered if that was going to be too loose and and not have the things that we wanted and i'm just really glad for the group work here you know for rob sending stuff out and for naomi's input and everybody else chipping in on this is and i think we're heading in a good direction now i agree with todd that these check-ins these regular check-ins and these key measures are going to be much better for us than what we were doing and thank you also for the work you guys are putting into to bring this to fruition because it's it's been a lot of work i know you've done a lot of research and it's going to be more work to get it in
237a nice package so thank you in advance for that i guess dude yeah i agree thank you and what a what a great meeting really talking about the board superintendent relationship and then again the board superintendent relationship through the evaluation tool really interesting stuff so if there are no other comments for this evening i'm just going to say i think we have three weeks between now and the next meeting and it's going to be a very exciting three weeks a lot's gonna happen between now and then so stay tuned and uh with that i will adjourn the meeting at 8 49 pm a full 13 minutes off from will j from when jill predicted oh that was good you