December 10, 2019, Board of Education Meeting

001okay we're all ready so will now call this meeting to order it is our December 10 regular school board meeting started late I guess ten after seven so let's start with a moment of silence please now if the members will rise to say the Pledge of Allegiance so I should have said thank you to all of you I know that not everybody came for the reception but but it's important for us to recognize our carat so thank you for being with us and the first item is just the agenda do we have any revisions I'd like to pull the from the consent agenda the field trip item number four and the tally Street upper elementary closeout number five to the action agenda okay so that that'll be done any other changes next we have a

002number of sets of minutes to approve we have the minutes from the October first meeting the October 24th work session and the November 12th regular meeting do we have any changes to the minutes from those meetings so they'll be approved as presented and next that brings us to our spotlight which is Decatur High School Wes are you Lena good evening y'all I'm Wes Hatfield interim principal at Decatur High School I'm joined this evening by Dwayne Spruill our Career Academy director Cheryl Nami and Deborah LeDoux our IV coordinators and instructional coaches and Kim Jones who is our head counselor so as we were thinking about what to come to you with this evening a conversation that we've started at the high school that has been born of conversations with parents with students actually with some board

003members with dr. duty really around where do our kids go after they leave Decatur High School what post-secondary choices do they make and so we're gonna spotlight for you this evening is a project that we have in progress I'm going to describe it to you in the amount of time that a spotlight is afforded so just know this will be a little bit of bell-to-bell instruction I'll make sure that I am thorough but I also leave us some time for Q&A so when we look at the problem that we're trying to solve we know that it is critical especially as students are reaching the midpoint of high school for students to be able to make good choices about the courses they take in eleventh and twelfth grade there are multiple avenues available to our students

004and we want to make sure they are prepared for and have appropriate access to the post-secondary options that they desire so our goal is to create a database resource for DHS adults to use an advising students and their families and to use that resource to positively impact on the decision making process for those families so what we did to start this work and what we have done to begin this work is we have collaboratively looked at and created a set of post-secondary categories that our students choose to participate in that they choose to move on to when they leave Decatur High School the categories that we started with are listed in the top five bullet points some things that you will Nazi listed here you will not see two-year colleges listed here yet you do

005also do not see a category for students who chose not to go to college yet I say yet very intentionally we are at the start of collecting this data and that those are two places where our datasets are pretty incomplete and so we address some of those needs and our action steps essentially what we've done for where the kids go is we group these by the final transcript request that kids make of us so to some extent this is self-report data if a student asks that their final transcript be sent to Morehouse we are making the assumption that that student is going to Morehouse they had a plan to go they asked for the final transcript to be sent there so that that is an assumption that we are making we also selected some preliminary

006data points to use for each student their weighted GPA we chose that because many colleges choose some kind of a weighted GPA as a way of making decisions about students it's not necessarily the way that we wait but we do some weighting and that weighting is based on college level courses that students take SAT is in there right now we will be adding a CT we've had some technical challenges with that but that'll be a part of our ongoing work the number of college level courses that a student has completed and the programs at Decatur high school that they have participated in the diploma program the career program whether they participated in a career pathway and whether they participated in work based learning again what we're attempting to do here is say this is what

007the range of students looks like that shows these options post secondarily what you do not see listed here again yet is information about race and gender for a couple of reasons number one we want to be really careful when presenting that data that we are not inadvertently identifying specific students so for example if in the highly selective University category we have had a small number of Hispanic students attend a university like that or a small number of black students attend a university like that any data that we put that is disaggregated might inadvertently identify specific students we also want to make sure that when we present this data set with race included that we are thorough in including all student backgrounds all student races appropriately so what we have created is a set of profiles

008for colleges and universities again the goal being to effectively communicate with our families to be able to show them this is what kids who have gone to these kinds of schools have done it Decatur High School so that you can make the best decisions for yourself and ultimately so that we can look at how all students are accessing our programs and make decisions about whether those programs are working for all students so I'm gonna flip through these relatively quickly and this is our four year Georgia University profile we did choose to include both the average median and mode of college-level courses because some interesting trends come out when we look at that so and then what you see at the bottom is percent completing one or more of or one of these programs there is

009some overlap career program and work based learning there's some overlap and students who complete those and career paths as well highly selective Gorge universities Georgia Tech Emory University of Georgia as you know Georgia Tech and Georgia over the course of the last 10 15 years have become more and more selective these are highly selective non Georgia schools these are historically black colleges and universities and nearby state schools and I should point out for the purposes of this these are nearby state schools USC is the University of South Carolina or as people around here would say the real USC you will get conflicting information so this is where we are in terms of creating these university profiles thus far to use them both as a communication tool with families but then to also think about how

010are our programs working for all of our students so we have a set of action steps that we've come up with that we want to implement this is a summary of those action steps dr. Jones is handing you more detailed information about the why behind these action steps and how we are moving forward to make sure that our families and students are as well informed and that they understand the nuance of the decisions that they're making and that they understand how the programs that Decatur high school can support them in reaching their post-secondary goals the first action step for the class of 2020 so our current seniors one thing that we want a gap that we want to fill in is making sure that we know exactly where every kid is going next what their

011plan is for what they're doing next year our counselors work with all of our students to talk about post-secondary planning but for those students that have not identified hey this is where you knew this in my transcript - this is where I'm going this is what I'm doing next we want to have those individual conversations both to collect information from kids and help them with those next steps in their planning we want to compile high school and post-secondary info specifically for our non-wide students free each graduating class for a couple of reasons first and foremost we want to know how programs at Decatur high school coursework IB programs dual enrollment work based learning all of these things are working for our non-white students so that we can do a better job of explaining those offerings

012to kids and do a better job of adjusting the offerings that we do have to make sure that all students feel confident and comfortable and prepared to participate in those offerings one thing that we do comprehensively for our rising ninth graders or sorry rising 10th graders that we want to extend further is we want to hold individual conferences with students to increase the number of underrepresented students in our college level courses one thing for example that we do right now many students take Advanced Placement u.s. history in the tenth grade students request their courses in the fall and then we follow up with kids who we think would be a good fit for AP US history who would do well in the course and our counselors follow up with all of the students who didn't

013request it based on grades maps course things like that would be a good fit we want to expand that and actually do that more before we do the course request process instead of after we've completed the course request process we also want to be able to disaggregate our student data so that we can give that to families in our small group conferences so they can really clearly see how participation in different kinds of academic pathways and programs supports them and whatever their post-secondary goals are number five is pretty self-explanatory we want to we're working with research and analytics to make sure that SAT and a CT data are very easily pulled for us and that should not be a barrier to doing this kind of work and we are working to eliminate that barrier number

014six we have to do a better job of collecting post-secondary data from students who do not go to college that is currently a gap in our information and we have to do a better job of figuring out where kids are going and whether they are choosing to not go to college to meet goals that they set for themselves in high school or they're not going to college and didn't have a plan that they were executing post secondarily and then number seven this is the budgeting time of year and we're considering how we can increase the size of our counseling department as we continue to grow because as you know from all the enrollment reports Decatur High School is still growing other schools are not in in their growth phase more Decatur High School is still

015very much in a growth phase and so we're thinking about how to manage that growth and continue to provide excellent service counseling services to our kids as our student population grows so with that we will take your questions thank you for this work mr. Hatfield I just have a question or maybe a suggestion in terms of how the HBCUs because not all HBCUs are created the same go ahead please finish in the note there's a highly selective school so not every applicant who may be accepted to say not every young lady who applies to Fort Valley might be accepted at Spelman and so as you all learn of creating these school profiles and making suggestions I wouldn't want a student who may not have the GPA and the scores thinking she can go to Spelman

016because she's you know this HBCU and so and then they've you know we got the HBCU state schools which I wish more students would consider because most of the time you know it is financially you know helpful considered the HBCU state schools question that we debated over to the point where I sent a message to the Dillard University which is HBCU the president and asked him how to term it because we had to term selective and illegal and then I got into a whole black everything which I don't wanna go with you right now with the ball but when I came back to and we looked at the list me and Sheryl talk I was out of town we talked a couple of times they started identifying kids like it would perhaps identify your kids

017if your own children if we did that so after that was recommendations what we decided was to keep the list compiled as one but also acknowledged that we know that there's a certain type of kid that are going to Howard Hampton and Tuskegee and we look at those kids we can all look the kids that say those are upper middle class kids and their parents can't afford to pay some sort of miserable tuition and so we kept them together but for our own purposes we do have them separated out based on kind of what you just said as far as those schools that are more selective or and the way I explain to my to my peers was that it's not so much as who they accept in all the time but it's kind of

018a what's the product on the back end where there are some that are a little more selective but then there are many HBCUs that are just open access if you want to come we'll take you where you where you are and develop you from there to wherever you want to get to so we very much appreciate that feedback as you can see that's an ongoing conversation because we want to make sure ultimately that whatever we put in front of kids and families is helping them make the best possible decision so thank you for sharing that I think it's great work that you're giving a road map not only to the kids but the families because you know it's their first child going to college or if they've never been to college themselves and it can

019be extremely overwhelming and you know even now you know as they enter high school just the first choice is like what do I do which electives should I take is there one that's better than another and how to make those decisions is it's so important to get the guidance and I appreciate that you recognize that not every child is going to go to a four-year college but that it's really important for the child to have a plan what to do after graduation so that each graduate can make a contribution to our society in our community so I appreciate your work thank you well I had one I also I know that this is needed because I've had parents come and say white this information available and so I think this will be this fills a

020need so thank you for doing that as I was looking at it I had a concern I mean part of it is just sort of that bit of my stomach I get back into this over you know all the anxiety of trying to get yourself into college and I started to feeling a little sick but one question that it brought up with me is that because it's so focused on the numbers and you know we and I wondered if at a minimum we couldn't fill out the profiles so that it's not just about the coursework from the GPA and the SAT it's also about your leadership profile and extracurriculars and I think that has a lot to do with who actually actually lands in the various schools so that was one comment it sounds like

021you understand it yeah the other is and it sounds like you intend to address it but the career-tech pathway needs to be representative as well and not just the college but it sounds like that's intended that our intention is to round out all of these profiles to be able to give kids information about all possible pathways after after graduation anybody over to my right so what you just brought up the sort of anxiety around college admissions is a very real thing and having worked at running front for seven years it starts when kids are 11 like I've seen it from the very start and so part of this is that I think at Decatur high school and in this community there's this emphasis on the things that are at the top and you GN Tech

022have become up there you know it's sort of all this what does it take to get into certain kinds of schools and so I think that part of the effort here is to show the wide range of possibilities for kids and the things that can happen for them as as a result of participating so I think that that is part of the goal and so our goal for this data set is to start including things like participation in sports participation x' and other kinds of extracurriculars just show just sort of the range of things that kids might want to participate in that will impact their outcomes positively as you do it so one one concern of mine and maybe it's a peeve or maybe it's a concern but I think it's very unhealthy that people

023have this sense that in order to get into X school to the school to my preferred school you know I'm gonna have to have like found a small state or principalities or something like that and so there's there's this anxiety that goes from the grades to the to the standardized tests to now all of a sudden even you know when I'm playing football or whatever I have to be you know all-district or whatever right and that's a concern it's especially I think pernicious when it leads people to just sign up for a bunch of stuff and so they're not even getting quality participation they're just they're they're you know you're just going through the motions and so somehow if you can communicate it about quality participation in quality activities that actually causes people to grow

024yes which is a challenge because you're making a date list of data points yeah so you have I don't know you have to find out how not to feed the feed the anxiety while at the same time providing the information that people when people need yeah I hear you so actually one of the reasons we started on this data set is because we have parents saying to us it's all so much information like how can I you know and so the caution is when you put data in front of people sometimes it has the opposite effect right it makes them think oh well now I see what I have to do right and so it is it's a fine line and we've talked to some parents and I think we're gonna be careful about how

025we roll this out I think originally or now our intention is to use it in sort of small settings and not make it some sort of widely published thing but it just gives us a database tool so it's not always about our individual opinions but more about something that people can look at tangibly and kind of find themselves there and probably the main thing is to counsel people through it exactly so that you're talking yeah and Kim will tell you our standard counseling to students is pick two things you're passionate about honest to goodness truth is that colleges are looking for a well-rounded freshman class so they don't want the football player who can also write code and run the journalism paper but they want a football player and a coder and a journalism student

026within that 300 or 3,000 people that they are going to invite for admission so we tell students do a thing and become an officer or a leader don't try to do everything and we just have to put that on repeat rinse and repeat I think another piece of that is real quick is the importance of including the voice of graduates and the student voice and what we choose to do you know how many of us know about the Honors Program at the University of South Carolina and the quality of that program well we've had some kids actually you know go to USC and be in that honors program and you know just having kids come back and share experiences and funny way to do that can also be more valuable okay thanks Ari I saw

027the microphone moving thank you I think this focus on that transition point between high school and college and career is incredibly important and you know it's hard because you do everything you can to prepare and then they're gone but trying to reach beyond and and use that as a feedback loop to see what we could do better is is very important I appreciate you putting the effort into this I did want to ask I might have missed it are we looking at students who go into the armed services yes absolutely are we looking at students whose parents and/or guardians might not have had the college experience and giving them the additional supports because those sheaves of forms and FAFSA and financial aid packets and stuff can can convince you to go different paths you know

028it's kind of it's overwhelming so are there supports in place for students who have and some students are doing it on their own and I don't know how we are currently reviving our College advocate program and what that is we're actually changing the name to post-secondary process navigation supports we kind of find some kind of way to make that cute but that's what it is whatever your post-secondary is having individuals with expertise or experience in those areas working with families to help you complete the FAFSA to help you get in contact with college admissions with career individuals with apprenticeship programs and things of that nature to make sure we make those connections I really appreciate you changing that from you know that was what was missing from college to post-secondary because we all have known

029somebody or somebodies who've done the four-year college thing gotten their degree hung it on the wall and then did something entirely different and so yeah the college and career thing was the one of the last things and then I guess financial aid and scholarships for those students who need that what type of supports are in place or being developed and that does that go into the same post-secondary right so we'll have those individuals assisting the counseling department assisting students and we also currently have once per semester perhaps uh individuals from the Georgia Student Finance Finance Commission and financial aid officers from colleges coming in and helping student students and families parents mainly because that's who does the FAFSA I'm helping the parents complete their FAFSA thank you so much all right thank you okay we

030have to sum it all right now I need to prepare a script I haven't done it so I'm going to do this off the top of my head and this is not directed at our public commenters I'm going to start doing this before every meeting but I ask you to we live in our public comment to three minutes per speaker and it's a time to address the board about basically board business which you can think of as matters of policy that the board acts on it's not a place to air specific grievances about specific employees or specific issues that would be better resolved in other forums and so if you start venturing in that territory from where we sit it's hard for us to tell where you're going to go so please don't be offended

031if I raise up a hand and ask you to pause while we figure out if this is appropriate for board comment or not and if if I do that I'll ask you please not to be offended but just to take a breath and and we'll figure it out there's some other rules the rules are posted at the back but but for now I think that'll do and so our first commenter and one rule also is that if you please when you come to address the board if you tell us who you are and obviously your name but also your connection to the district just so that we can understand how to how to put put your comments in context so the first is maybe grodd's and Marnie Marnie godson pardon me in his defense it

032does look like an M right there so my name is Marnie Watson I am a community member I have a graduate of a son who's graduated high school last year and an 8th grade daughter I stand humbly in front of you taking the lessons that I tell my kids they get three strikes when they leave something at home I'd love to change clothes at my house and didn't have time you run home I appreciate this time a couple things have come up in my mind to share in my short period of time being up here my intention was to come up here one bless you and say thank you for the work that has been put into the Student Center going back several years it has been great let me back up so I am

033a parent I'm a community social worker and we're a variety of hats in town primarily working with youth in different capacities so I want to preach or give my appreciation for that piggybacking on what was already said I also want to give my appreciation how the orientation process for upcoming freshmen has gotten better and better and I we just recently witnessed that in our house we heard dr. Jones voice and West's voice on a PowerPoint explaining the process which is a big improvement from years past and helps ease the anxiety of students and families speaking of anxiety yes that is real not just in speaking of college process but a variety of things that are going on our community which then brings me back to my gratefulness for the Student Center the main point of

034me coming up here is in my opinion it's taken a long time to get the configuration of the Student Center as to what it needs to be to work to city and I know that things are being done for that I believe there's been some approval I tried to stay at the last board meeting meeting until you guys got to budgets but it was like such a long a long time and I tried to look to find the information and I couldn't so I'm just putting out in the open that you know I would like to see that go as quickly as possible we're hindering additional things that could be done with those students in the population and one other point to mention and I'm trying I'm gonna try not to get teary-eyed I think

035I got that out when you were talking but I had planned to come for the last several weeks or so to address you and ironically I've had and I'm not gonna say in what capacity because it'll can give away maybe who these students are but weird three different hats in this community professionally and I've had two students mentioned to me that if the Student Center wasn't there that they feel like they may not be here and that just tells the story you know we lost Bryce last year which was a student I worked with and I just hate to see more and more time go on where we don't have those walls we don't have that space for students Thank You Molly Davis City Decatur I'm coming as a co-chair of the Beacon Hill black

036Alliance and just again we feel like it's our responsibility to continue to sound the alarm around issues that impact our children we really believe that there is a need for community engagement around understanding where we are with PBIS and I know that it's been explained in this space but we think that there and we're prepared to do it again so that we can all know where we are on PBIS in each of the schools and what the plan is and community members can have clearer understanding also what the plan is around a cheat the achieve closing the achievement gap obviously the the recent article that discussed the decline of closing the gap scores at Renfro and we recognize that in all the other scores it looked like they either increased or they were level but

037that still was appeared to be a very significant decline in in that area and what does that mean because it's it's you know in the newspaper is printed and and community members don't know what does that mean what that particular score in that decline and then what are the factors that caused that decline so we just again are here we well continue to do the work collaboratively where we can get the word out get clarity ask questions they remain a lot of frustrated parents and upset parents across the district around issues of equity and the achievement gap and and as well as just the way their children are being treated so we just want to keep that at top of mind as we continue to press forward and move into 2020 thank you and and

038just so you know Molly the state has let us know there was an error in the formula for the middle schools and so we're waiting to see if that impacts our score or not and then we can share more about that once we know okay now I think we're gonna jumble the sched the agenda just a little bit to have the equity spotlight I'm afraid the cakes gonna wear off I thought maybe we should jump to the kids it's not okay kids if we jump to Glenwood right now okay all right let's do that hi I'm Christy beam I'm the principal at Glenwood elementary and at Glenwood we are dedicated to disrupting those practices that have led to that disproportionality here in city schools of Decatur and around the United States schools have long been

039considered a microcosm of society and as such the words of justice sotomayor speak to the urgency and importance of making immediate and impactful changes in our schools we believe that it is imperative in order to make significant change that we engage our community as a whole we have parents staff members and students that are focused on the critical need of changing the practices that have negatively impacted our black students we have several parents and staff members that have stepped up to lead this important work first we'd like to hear from dr. evoke wave a bow quake Hamilton chair of our PTA diversity equity and using committee dr. Hammond good evening my name is Ashley ebo Quay Hamilton and it is my privilege to serve as chair of the Glenwood elementary PTA newly formed diversity equity

040and inclusion committee my family and our new to City of Decatur as of this past summer and my oldest daughter is a kindergartner at Glenwood we are really thrilled to be here at Glenwood and in our new community and you might be wondering how a person who's new to the city and new to the school became the chair but for me it was pretty simple when I attended the first PTA meeting of the year and I learned about the committee I immediately got so excited I think my husband was next to me and I suspect we have to be a part of this we are an American family who is of African descent and we also our kindergarten daughter has Down syndrome and special needs so it was really the fabric of my family that

041motivated me to want to be all in when I heard about this committee it doesn't always saddened me that such a committee is needed but I truly realized it's important so I think all of us at some point in our lives have probably inadvertently unintentionally excluded people with our words with our actions and not even trying to be malicious and most of us have done that but I also know that sometimes things are done intentionally and so I think my belief is that if we just all treated each other how we would want to be treated then that would probably solve most of society's issues but that's idealistic and that's not the way of the world that we live in so I think that it's very important that we learn to meet people where they

042are and that we promote change that will be beneficial to everyone so diversity equity inclusion have always been important to me for as long as I can remember being able to conceptualize these topics I'm a physician by profession and I chose the field of family medicine and specifically primary care very early on in my education after learning about the disparities that exist in health and healthcare in this three amongst different groups especially those that affect communities of color and so right now I'm actually working at a federally qualified health center serving patients who are under medically underserved underinsured uninsured because they do also need and deserve equal access to high-quality health care so similarly when we were researching moving so City of Decatur and city schools of Decatur at the potential new home we heard

043and read countless stories about the educational and socio-economic disparities that exist here in this very district and so those things really motivated me to want to do whatever I could to help promote change in this setting as well so to that point I would like to share with you some information about our what we call our di committee because diversity equity and inclusion is a tongue-twister and takes a long time to say but including information about our mission and our goals and some of the work that we've started to do and have accomplished thus far so we had our first meeting in October with twelve people in attendance and we have met monthly since then we had our third meeting last week and our committee now has over 20 members from all different backgrounds our

044mission is to promote and enhance spaces where everyone is appreciated and celebrated diversity and inclusion are not one in the same so many institutions are made up of a diverse population as is Glenwood but that does not often equate to everyone in that community feeling like they actually belong so our di committee wants to do its best to change that our goals really fall into three main categories and those are needs assessment building community and promoting inclusion so our specific goals number one is hearing the voices or needs of all of our families at Glenwood elementary school so to that goal we have developed a survey which will be distributed to all of our bloom of families with a goal of learning about the experiences of the people in our school community and so that

045we can help to promote changes at the school level and maybe even at a school district level where needed number two we want to be intentional about modeling and promoting the building of meaningful relationships at our amongst members of our diverse school community we as a committee wants to be good examples of making the effort going the extra mile to engage with people who maybe we would not have felt comfortable with engaging with before because real change will happen by breaking down barriers by eliminating bias one relationship at a time and that sounds really cliche but it's true and so you know you're most afraid of the thing the unknown and so once we just get to know each other a little bit better I think that that will help to promote change number three

046we want to host events that foster a sense of community and show an appreciation for the diverse fabric of our school so we are really excited so say it's multicultural night but since the slide deck was made we have changed the name to blue in wood culture night that we have coming up next month our theme is we are Glenwood and our goal is to showcase and get to know our respective cultures of our fellow Glen with families so we're really excited about that events coming up on January the 26th number 4 promoting conversations in our community on the topics of diversity equity and inclusion so we've talked about having maybe a glim wood Elementary dinner and obviously this is inspired by the Decatur dinners that take place here also an event maybe similar to

047the piece and pie event that Talley has had and I believe Winona Park has had one as well and actually had the pleasure of attending Talley streets event a couple of weeks back and that was great and number five we want to promote inclusion and diversity at all school events so this might sound like a simple goal but I think that this one is arguably the most important because not many other things can separate a school like having events where some people don't feel like they're included or like they really belong and so from what I've learned about the school historically certain groups have been very poorly represented or virtually absent from many of the events and a committee wants to try to identify why that is the case and then work hard to promote

048improvement in that area we are also very appreciative of the efforts of the PTA board and of our schools leadership to the goals of our di committee so thank you dr. bean and thank you to the PTA board for all of your support in efforts I hope that this gave you a nice glimpse into our Glenwood the Dei committee thank you for your time in your ears I'm really excited about this committee and about the work that we've already just started to do so if you have any questions you can feel free to contact me my email address is there and I have an in addition to my kindergarten I have a four year old and an almost three year old so we'll be at gluon for a while so I'm really excited to see

049the progression of how things go without work here so thank you again thank you so much dr. bell Queen okay and next we will hear from our staff member Miss Amelia cop she is the co-chair of our school equity team hello so what I wanted to talk to you about right now is how we kicked off some of the equity work at Glenwood we decided to focus on whiteness because we found that just by having conversations with staff that that was needed and so on October 7th our staff participated in a discussion focused on article titled 10 myths white people believe about racism the article was originally intended for a faith-based community but dr. banks from city schools of Decatur graciously agreed to adapt the article to be more appropriate for a non secular group

050the facilitators for this session included dr. Pam Epps who is a licensed psychologist and practices in Decatur she also goes to ochres Presbyterian which is a church that I attend Reverend Elliot Robinson who was a former Glenwood parent and he also has a podcast that's called creative tension if you haven't listened to it it's worth listening to there's a lot of history in it that is very eye-opening for many people and I encourage you to listen to that also another person who was a facilitator for this session was Charlie cop who's my husband and he also leads racism workshops at Oakhurst Presbyterian Church and the purpose of the session was to begin a conversation about whiteness with our staff during the session each small group did a close read of two myths and wrote down

051their thoughts and discuss them with a small group and after that each group posted their thoughts around the room for others to see in a gallery walk and finally we closed with a big group discussion and some takeaways we had after that discussion included a new vision of the difference between not being racist versus becoming anti-racist and an understanding that our impact does not always aligned with our intentions after the training we asked staff for feedback about positive experiences with past equity trainings and overwhelmingly the responses included time for open and honest conversations small group work hearing different perspectives and grappling with issues together the feedback we received will lead our future work with equity at Glenwood finally we will hear from our boys and action team good evening my name is michael scott glenn

052with boys in action has been a mission to build school communities a support through strong role models who use mentoring to encourage and empower black and brown boys it has been an honor to have families and trust us with each of these young young boys thoughts their hopes and their dreams it is my greatest honor to stand alongside them and their families in ensuring the best possible life journey for them hello my name is Jonathan Holloman and I'm part of boys in action in being part of boys and action this great thing to do for me because I've been one of these little kids before and thinking back to my youth I needed help I'm a product of a single-mother household so I jumped right on it when they asked me so I'm grateful to

053the d EF and the PTA at gröna elementary for sponsoring the things that these gentlemen are going to speak about so let me introduce the boys we have Eli hi my name is Eli next we have Nazia Eli was a second grader he's kind of a one of the leaders we put the second graders that we have to lead because they're going to move on from tally and when they go to tally they're gonna be like hey they came from Glenwood boys and exhale mr. harmony and mr. Scott I call them both and I feel like they know me I like always calm as it was in the first grade yes we have every we made helpful bags for homeless people toothpaste toothbrush soap can of food gum hand sanitizer and lotion now we have

054a slide show from our team mr. Holloman may come let us learn and make us gold pigeons and do fun stuff like about what action that we get to learn new things I need you to go to filter and when people come in we get to make new friends and we want to coca-cola and they happen machine when they just have to press buttons and then their soda came out and they didn't have to put money and they are a really nice all night cafe and then we went to Morehouse on college where dr. Martin Luther King jr. went and we got to we got to eat there and learn about him the inventor of the CP soup Lonnie Johnson my favorite thing is that about boys imagine is is going on field trips and

055doing fun things I like that we get to we want to coca-cola and we got to learn about it and it's really cool the thing I like most about boys and action is that is that we get to learn about historical people and we went on a field trip and we went to the world of cooking more house and though we didn't go to the world of cook we went to where they actually made cloak and they put it in the world of coke and we got to get our own slushies I mixed mine with all three and and we got it and we got hurt or and they're like these bottle cap things on the top that that would flip and spell coke and stuff and they had this like water thing that fell

056and spelt stuff and made pictures and then we went to Morehouse and and they're in their cafeteria was bigger than our you know bottom school for and and I'd really like mr. Hallman mr. Scott because they're always supportive and kind and help us when we accidentally do something wrong hi my name is Eli you know what's fun about boys in action you can learn about college and learn about cool stuff and everything it's awesome man boys in action so thank you thank you to mr. Holloman and mr. Scott for taking this on and leading our team thank you as they said to D EF and PTA for sponsoring the events that and the work that they do with the boys and thank you to CSD and the board for supporting our work thank you and

057I just wanted to tell Li Messier and Elliott that they did a phenomenal job you guys are great it's great that they are meeting some wonderful Mentors I'm just very impressed it sounds like a very robust effort all around so thanks for everything thank you thank you this was incredible um thank you for sharing it and I did have a question for you Amelia many times when you when there's a diversity discussion racism is usually the topic of it and I think sometimes racism throws people off because they're like well this doesn't really apply to me because I'm not racist and so I appreciate the title being whiteness because maybe some of the guards come down from the word racism and kind of bring people where they are so how would you describe what what

058that means in the context of the of the course that was given we just we learned about the fact that we as white people have traditions and culture and that because it's the dominant culture it's not discussed and so it's just a continuing conversation and so we hope to continue working on this and this is that was just the beginning of this conversation we really did love having Pam EPS there who is a psychologist and that's one thing dr. beam and I have discussed a lot is the fact that in some of this work it can bring up trauma for some people and it is nice having a licensed psychologist present when you are having some discussions where it can get real sticky and so one thing that everyone kept saying is they really did

059want to continue having these conversations but they really appreciate having those in small groups where they feel trust that that's really important so we're trying to honor that and continue in the work that we're doing and use that in our planning process thank you I have one request for dr. Eva quite handsome that you mentioned that you're collecting information about and also creating programs that will feel more inclusive and I wonder if when you learn as you learn more about what those activities and events could be if you could share that with us I think that's something that all of the elementary schools could benefit from and I'm interested in having a bigger conversation about how we will collaborate between now the different equity teams that we have at all the different schools to bring

060our lessons together so thank you we'll definitely share and I just want to also add that the other elementary schools have been very helpful so many people because our committee is new and I'm new to the area so I didn't have the connections and added new people and so the other committees that the other schools have really reached out and been very helpful and even people here dr. Mary banks met with me and one of our other committee members before we really got started up to help so we really appreciate that as well thank you thank you so much it's very important work I do want a bridge to the de F's beyond diversity training that's coming up February 6th and 7th and encourage you all to go to the DFS website Decatur Education Foundation

061slash equity and you can sign up for that two-day seminar there and it gets into many of the things that Tasha was talking about and being able to create that space at the table where you can have the conversation and keep it going thank you thanks everybody really appreciate it so let's see I guess we should circle back to share comments or superintendent's comment I don't have any comments tonight let's keep it moving all right I feel like I should I should I mean there's a few recognitions too I'm gonna try to zip through this but first we're proud to announce that DHS in Claremont were named title one distinguished schools for 2019 this means that these two schools are in the highest performing 5% of title one schools in title one targeted assistant schools

062I suppose that's within what is it a nationwide thing isn't that's a great honor congratulations on that catered to paydirt Decatur debaters that is hard to say broke some records this past weekend by placing in two tournaments at the gladiators debate at John's high school John Sena Vonda son of Andy and Aaron lamb KITT Sanders and Maddock Thomas we're quarter-finalists in the varsity policy debate and in the a UDL competition at best Academy Decatur one first that was the team of JJ barber and kaya Desai and second athan Ethan Joyce and Vince saris John apologized for getting the wrong who tied for the first place sweepstakes so again this is a great honor and a big accomplishment we're proud of our students we wanted to recognize the fav voices of fifth avenue choir who performed

063it the dakhala decatur holiday tree lighting a big congratulation to DHS student Alex Wagner alumnus happy Harold and DHS teacher Jennifer Gonzalez the last week renamed 2019 Decatur hometown heroes by the Decatur Business Association that's a particularly great honor and and it's particularly like having our people out there in the community and being recognized for their service to Decatur I know that there's at least one that we need to recognize mr. Truong whose band was selected to perform at the what does it the Troy state it's a great honor and the band was selected based on a very competitive selection process and so we congratulations to the band one more oh I wanted to recognize Courtney and Sarah who have put together Sarah Jones our communications folks for the excellent work on the what is

064it called the staff other school to the district dispatch and the staff scoop are two new news letters for us and so this came into my email the other day I thought my this is a just a very informative good professional newsletter it's really proud of it so good work court needed to put that in here that's all I have for the superintendent's are for the chairs comments and I think we now move to consent items and we have we have three that are still in consent which is the personnel report the school nutrition report and the financial report do we have a motion to approve those three consent items so moved on favor aye chair votes aye so the consent items 1 2 & 3 pass are approved so development report on informational reports

065I don't think we have any discussion but we did ask to move it there in case we ever want discussions anybody want to discuss it light this brings us to the enrollment projections report all right so Heidi is going to walk us through the enrollment projections if you looked at the agenda earlier first thing this morning it still had our draft reports and since then we did receive final reports and it looks to me like you have them at your table here and we've also uploaded them to the board item for those who are interested in seeing it and then Heidi also updated her presentation so if you have the older materials you'll want to look at these newer materials instead Heidi hey good evening and so what I've tried to do with this summary

066is to summarize the two reports you have there there's a lot of data and a lot of information we have a projections report which basically looks at the next 10 years and what students to expect and then a yield analysis which looks at our different neighborhoods and our different types of housing and lets us know what what kinds of how many students per unit of housing that we can expand seeing and hopefully can expect so the the big picture summary is over the past 10 years we've increased by almost 3,000 students based on survival methodology our enrollment is projected to increase slightly and then decrease over the next ten years and you can see that very top line when we got the original reports Dave and I really couldn't believe that we really weren't going

067to maintain we couldn't see kindergarten dipping so we kind of went back and forth with cooperative strategies on developing an alternative look at it and so that alternative way kind of keeps our numbers pretty steady without a dip which we kind of like but probably the truth is somewhere between between those lines and those sort of look at all the different methodologies what they did in the enrollment projection they looked at a lot of different data population in public and private schools DeKalb County population estimates school age population housing data development building permits live birth data survival ratios from our enrollment and our enrollment history so there's a few different graphs and what I think is is interesting here as you can see when you look at the building permits the types of multifamily is

068really increasing single-family is decreasing so are the kinds of new housing is changing a lot um the live birth count is going down which is interesting and as you can see our historical enrollment has been going up and it's kind of tapering off looks to be tapering off so before you go on Heidi I'll just emphasize that whole piece about the kindergarten enrollment is because of that live birth count going down so the way you traditionally do demographically you look at my live birth counts and then look five years later to see who's going to enroll in kindergarten and that gives you a ratio and we've known for quite some time here that that is not a very good predictor of kindergarten population because a lot of people have their children outside of Decatur and

069then they move into Decatur before kindergarten and so that's why we asked them to look at projections an alternative way that we feel will be much more realistic in terms of what that kindergarten population will look like and once you have the kindergarten population fairly accurate it all builds from there so that's why you see a difference in the two methodologies and it's something that has been a challenge for cooperative strategies all along because we are very unique in that we are so small and most of the births happen outside of Decatur so so what's the alternative method so the alternative method is looking at the trends and kindergarten population and we've noticed that over time we have been fairly stable in kindergarten enrollment and so therefore we used that as the baseline for kindergarten

070moving forward because we have not we kept predicting dips and the dips didn't come and so the kindergarten has been pretty stable I know this would be too much but ask the question it seems like you kids like you've got cooperative strategies who's got this this collecting a lot of data about our system could they not have some kind of the model that would look at the housing stock who's in the houses and where they are in school in other words or you know it's um probably gets saturated with kids and the kids are moving through the system because they've moved in and they're not going to move out till there until I graduate but you it'd be interesting to know how many of the how many of the kids that are suitable you know

071we've got a yield projection family you understand yeah I do understand what you're saying that at some point the sponge can only hold so much right and and by looking at how much it's holding today you could kind of get a sense by where the empty houses are and I do think that will become realistic once we have been built out and at this point we're adding so much more residential space whether it's an apartments or condos we're not even close to that point yet where we'd reach some kind of a capacity and if you look at this slide what they did for the alternative kindergarten was they averaged four years of kindergarten cohort to predict it when you look at the moderate they have a weighted average survival ratios the low and high are

072based on statistical distribution and then the recommended is based on sort of they're looking at all this all of this data and our history and making their recommendations so what I've done in this presentation is try to put some things next to each other that I kind of wanted to see together but like so this was the recommended that they originally came up with which was showing our kindergarten numbers kind of going down and so that was where we we asked for a different look and so they all turreted shows them kind of staying the same across and then that this survival ratio goes up the the problem with this one though is that certain classes end up changing quite a bit in size and so I think at the end of the day when

073we figure out how to exactly use it we're gonna have to split the difference a little bit and figure it out so like when you look at the total district together like basically the difference is the recommended shows us having a little bit of a dip whereas the the alternative kindergarten shows us staying about the same and when you look at them together I think the one on the bottom is the the one on the bottom is the alternative kindergarten one you can see the numbers when you look across at kindergartner higher than the top numbers and then they kind of they go up in that way but when you get up into Decatur High School it's the numbers are pretty different and so I think that that's where we have to sort of look

074and see is that really gonna hold true or what is what are the actual numbers we have and kind of look at both to figure to figure out what to use so I think we still have some work we just got these this morning we still have some work to do to figure out what do we think is really gonna work what I did before you go on Heidi the other thing I'd remind you is 10 years is a really long time to project you're projecting about kids that aren't even a thought and their parents mind yet right and so looking out 3 years 5 years that's a little bit more reasonable 10 years your margin of error gets considerably larger so just keep that in mind as you're looking at projections also so what

075I did what this last slide was just look at the the top line is what the recommended was in parentheses is what the alternative kindergarten was and I put it in red if there was a significant difference between the two numbers and you can see it's like kindergarten I think those red numbers are probably what we can expect but then when you look at like 12th grade at Decatur high school you know if you look at the 11th grade class and how many are currently there you know that's likely to be the number you know so I think it's probably gonna we're gonna have to sort of figure out which number we feel like is is gonna really work based on how many kids we have and just the two numbers but we do have

076what is nice is a lot of the numbers especially at k2 where we were worried about it are very similar between both both just kindergarten is very different and then the totals are a little bit different so that's the projections and then the yield analysis this is like just the one side summary and what they've done is looked over three years and looked at the number of students that are living at different types of apartments and they they actually if you look at the report they went into looking at every little development that's in our development report and they have a yield for those but as you can see that when you look at the bottom for the student yields you can see the actual numbers of students but then how many per unit of

077housing and so what's what's interesting about this is when you look at the different types of housing you see single-family housing have the highest yield and then it goes down with different types and so I think I was a little surprised when I first looked at this data when I was looking at the development report at how few how low the yield is for condominiums that's just an interesting can I ask about that yeah when were those condominiums built are those ones that are have been here for a while in the reports all of them lists all of them so some of them are newer in Summerland I have and that's why I'm asking the question I think we need to consider the fact that some of the ones that are more legacy condo buildings

078could have a different population than apartments that are being built and populated today right and I think we will continue to track this to kind of see what it's looking like but it just it gives us a good idea I think the other thing that that is a little bit i opening is every every unit of housing doesn't have a kid in it and that's important for us to know in terms of and to your point Heather the like the lists of all the apartments if someone could help us kind of categorize those we could definitely make that one of the variables too because I'm thinking of um when they were completed you know if they were completed ten years ago it could have attracted a different population than if they were completed today and

079also depending on the location so and on page 17 is where this chart is that she has up here in the yield analysis report I'm the thinner one and just to remind you those are the numbers that we've been needing for those spreadsheets we've talked about for a long time we had some four apartments but we didn't have them for all the others we were just guessing and so this is really awesome to have the actual data they geo coded all of our students and they and Heidi put in a tremendous amount of work to get this figured out Heidi was going through figuring out parcel by parcel what's happening like the amount of work that went into this is unbelievable but it is so helpful so it's going to be really informative as we

080as we look at both internal projects and annexations in the future will be very helpful thank you and you will be able to also look at it after it's after our new construction it comes online and see how close we were and make adjustments and that's going to be very interesting yes apartment higher than we had thought well so what they did is they do it at for all apartments and remember we have started looking at those around rooms and it's 0.37 students per apartment which if I had if I had bought anecdotally in terms of how many like if we looked at all apartments I would not have guessed that high like that's higher than I would have expected and then the other interesting thing on page 17 is the question that came up

081earlier I can't remember from whom but those are a bunch of planned projects and using those ratios how many students are you expecting and so you can see where that's looking like Amelie Decatur and which i think is the one right down here right 122 potential students from that one development so fascinating so Cortland is over on North Arcadia and yeah that's the one that's half built now yeah and our because and already has students there as of right now it's probably would know Courtland the Courtland Decatur East isn't that the one that is where we were thinking of putting an ECL see we have this is incredible and this is great work and it's gonna be very valuable and useful do we have the capacity with the geocoding to do this in-house or is

082this a continued relationship with cooperation we might at some point we are working on that it's actually one of the budget proposals is to put together a tool that would allow us to do a lot of this type of work in-house but as of right now we would need to use them it takes an incredible amount of effort for a lot of the details that people simply can't fathom how difficult it can be to get good data and good information and the valued to talking with the city and not shooting from the hip motional ii but being able to present a factual logical case and to talk with our legislative representatives when they throw things at us at the 11th hour it's going to be very useful so thank you for all the work that

083went into this thank you and have we shared this with the city no I just came today looking at the story I will share it with the folks that are the committee that Noll and I sit on and actually you know the fire department is really interested in these kind of projections too so that they can plan for you know knowing where the kids are because that's a different kind of service that if they have to get kids out of the place and that kind of thing and I will be sharing those with Andrea thank you it's really exciting because ours has not seen this rate of multi-family density growth ever so it's really a big change and so it's nice to feel like we are ahead of the curve in terms of understanding and

084been able to predict the impact it will have on our schools I also appreciate you all adjusting the kindergarten enrollments because it just has never I mean we have thirty to forty percent of the students show up who weren't wouldn't be in those those studies although it does change from year to year I'm not sure can we go back to the fifth draft which had no oh could you perhaps discuss why we switch from historically we've done I can guess that the answer to your cohort rate survival ratios to three year cohort survival ratios I mean I think in large part because we had consecutive data to look at three years because we've been doing that and so um just to kind of get it and I think this is a cooperative strategies are the

085ones who have made that decision about what cohorts and they don't look at a straight if I am not mistaken it's not a straight three-year average it's a weighted three-year average and so they want to see what that trend is without ignoring what has happened in the past and so that's part of their methodology that they found creates accurate projections I know that the the the further you draw out that if you went to a five-year ratio you could then miss the curve basically it smooths when you do that any money so if there's always so much of it's an art more in some ways not just a science forever in figuring out how to tune the numbers and I really appreciate it you all have been very good for a very long time and

086those one percent here and one percent there adds up to a lot over ten years and getting these numbers as accurate as possible what's been very valuable well the other thing that isn't always visible is when we share these with our principals and they'll look at them in terms of their school for instance rain so Heidi shared these numbers and the principals will say yeah Yeah right that is not gonna happen right like I have been in this school for 15 years and I guarantee that is not going to happen you know and so we get some of that first-hand knowledge that we then incorporate with the projections with that like boots on the ground knowledge and that's then when we start figuring out staffing for instance so that we can have the science behind

087it but also the reality of what our people who work with these kids every single day know about them and their families and all those kind of things at any point you know for example 137 students for Cortland Decatur so do we think that that could potentially affect our our borders our boundaries quite possibly by possibly like our attendant zones and things because everybody in the partner would have to go to the same school so then if we have to make some adjustments it would essentially be and that is such a good segue into our next item because we're gonna talk about facilities master planning next so that is exactly why we have to kick off facilities master plan so yes thank you thank you thank you all right so these planning know you want

088to give us a quick overview of the facility's master planning where we are with all that thanks Heidi I'm gonna be fairly brief tonight because we've planning on and you'll hear in part of this report coming to you with a much more robust piece with cooperative strategies and our whole introduction for the board in January so what I wanted to do is give you an update we've we've engaged cooperative strategies to work with us in this process I met with our advisory group we've had two meetings so far specifically focused on on the facilities planning and it was pretty unanimous that we felt as a group we needed to bring someone from outside in to give us the right support to get done what we wanted to get done it's a pretty robust process of

089we've as we've talked about before the great part about using cooperative strategies is what you just saw they are doing a phenomenal job with our projections which is really going to drive one major portion of this process they've also worked with me and my team to come up with a great configuration part which is a which was really part of the last segment of the Geo bond facilities planning piece when we were talking about what to do with the elementary so they've got a lot of data and experience in historical knowledge with the school system to help us with that so we're bringing them in wheat Thursday night we kick off with our first meeting with the Advisory Group we'll be doing a Skype meeting saves a little on airfare and time for sure we'll

090be working to get that group ready as the steering committee for this process we will then come back in January on the 14th at the board meeting to do basically the same thing with you guys that'll be the Board of Education kickoff piece a lot of information a lot of educational components to that and they will come in and work with me to give you that presentation meanwhile while they're here we're trying to do as much good use of their time as we can we'll also be conducting focus groups with some of the groups that you all have identified and that we have identified to get selective input from and specific focused input from on the 15th we will have our kickoff first full community meeting and that meeting will consist of they call it

091the futures conference but really it's a it's a meeting design to educate the community about the process educate the community about what is going on in this field how this relates to facilities and then gather input in a community-wide setting will also concurrently be launching a survey that will stay out there for a little while so this is kind of a - really packed days of community input and time with you all and Tom the superintendent we move into February and we'll have another meeting with the advisory group to work with cooperative strategies that will continue in another meeting in March the idea being to begin to put together those options the idea is this work will focus around taking those projections taking our current inventory in the state of our current inventory and it

092said educational adequacy and figuring out what kind of things we can bring to the board for options in in the future that will culminate with the second community meeting on March 26th and that's where we will begin to put some ideas out there and say okay based on the feedback we've gotten based on the input we've gotten based on our data based on our projections etc what do you think give us some feedback here and tell us what direction you feel as a community we need to head with this then we will go back in April and May and work again with the advisory group to develop a June 9th final report with those options for the board of education one of the things I wanted to do tonight just briefly is kind of give

093you a visual or an idea not a visual but an idea of what this final report will be and its really three main parts the first part is going to be capital project options and I think that's what the bulk of this this piece of planning is going to be with community input with what we're doing with the advisory group and that's really the piece that you're you're most familiar with and thinking about looking for that we'll have things to address the facilities needs whether those are additions renovations replacements new construction temporary classrooms whatever that those options can be to address our student population and and in actual building needs the second part of the plan will contain a piece that my team and some of our district personnel will put together for deferred maintenance

094HVAC upgrades security upgrades energy and if energy efficiency upgrades things that are the scheduled pieces that we've looked at in all of our facilities and say okay we need a new air conditioner on this the top of this elementary school so we're gonna put that into this plan and that aligns a lot to what we've been doing and will continue to do with splice dollars the third part of this will be related to any of those additional community facility requests we've had a lot of requests out there that aren't related to hey where are you going to put kids when we continue to grow through this and how are you going to manage that these are requests of you know we might like to have this upgrade in the athletic facility or we may not

095want to have a outdoor amphitheater for performances whatever those kind of requests are that will be the third part of this report that comes back in so the idea is that this this report will really capture all of those facility pieces that we've we've been trying to say to groups hey we're going through this process we really want to get that information to the board but we want to do it in this nice package so that's what you should expect for the June 19th final report one of the questions came up earlier today and I think I answered it incorrectly I think maybe it was Jana who had asked about focus groups happening during the day and I had missed that part and so could you talk a little bit about that of like who

096are what are those focus groups and what are the opportunities for people who can't come during a day to participate for the focus group work yeah like what are the focus groups so the focus groups are I'll give you one example would be the city facility folks I think that's a great group that for us to sit down with because we can talk a lot about the city planning in that and really focus in on okay how do our facility needs fit into that another focus group would be we have had a number of athletic boosters come in and say hey we would like to put this up or we would like to do that kind of project that's another piece of that work so the opportunity for scheduling over large periods of time is

097fairly limited but our goal is to get representation from those groups that we've been engaging with whether it's city groups whether it's internal groups teachers administrators or whether it's these external stirrers and supporter groups will have a group of SLT folks we have not developed all of those yet to send out the invitations so is the idea the focus groups are focused like yeah right to a particular like category of like you said city people or teachers or whatever and the big input where like just the concern taxpayer who wants to be able to have input on it that's that's the futures conference yes evening is that correct that's the evening and we're trying to plan that well after work well after getting kids home and feeding them and such I imagine we will probably

098start about 7 or 7:30 that's what we've done in the past we've had great turnout and we will also put up a sort of matching survey piece that will allow people to go online and do that and so for those of you who participated in the boundary setting process with cooperative strategies you may remember at the DHS cafeteria we had that big community meeting and lots of stuff set up around I imagine that's probably that's yeah that'll that'll look more like our meeting to but yes yeah it's very similar process it's very similar to what we did with the with the grade band piece as well so for a general just taxpayer interested party they'll have they'll will be two stakeholder type meetings plus the survey for their opportunities to provide input yes I hope

099that answered and are we planning to do maybe a work session around this versus just support them yeah it wouldn't be a bad idea and we may want to play it by ear depending on sometimes in these processes it just becomes super clear like there are not that many options right like you have to go this route you don't have any other so I think maybe let's kind of see how it goes when we kick it off and then we can decide if we want to dedicate a work session to it you in when you were going through the schedule yeah then I see the June 9 date when your plan is to have a final recommendation but there's at least one other point where you said that you might come to the board I

100thought yeah I think that's what we're trying to to feel out I think that will be January or February before I really have a good feel for what that looks like and and behind the scenes I've been talking with cooperative strategies about how do we best engage the board the process because there is gonna be some work outside of that and we can certainly smell like a March kind of yeah and we can certainly do up I would say March April is much more appropriate to engage the board at that point a big thing we had to figure out was when can cooperative strategies be here because that's where the the gist of your expenses is having bringing people here to run things and so we can definitely we could even make this a standing

101item on board meetings just to give you an update of where we are with things do if we wanted to go that route I mean it may be advantageous I think the April 16th date is a Thursday off the top of my head and that may be something that we can adjust to have them in for two days instead of one day flying one day come to board meeting come in the next day do my my advisory group meeting and then they jump on a plane and go so that's there's some flexibility in there I mean and as much as it makes sense we can attend the community well I plan to but what I remember last time I I think I would recall that sometimes their what they came to the board to present

102was just a week like yeah of what was that the community meeting is so that's not really necessary if we could make a point to attend the community meeting unless there's something additional you know because it would just be a repeat of know if it's you know if it's duplicate of we could that's a great thing and I think that's a that might be an easy way for us to skip having to have extra meetings that are repeats but just to be super clear as we get into January February as we start going through this process if you all feel like hey we need to schedule a work session we've we've built in some time with these folks to be flexible with that and I'm glad to work with that and we can make some

103adjustments especially on the advisory group meeting weeks that's where we can kind of push things back and forth I typically meet with that group on Thursday so that's why I've kind of scheduled those as Thursdays but so we could either piggyback on a Thursday where I can move it to a day that works for everybody here and those work sessions sometimes tend to be more productive because there's more of an absolutely to presentation and I can always come in and do a work session with you without them being there we can and if we need to have some questions and follow-up things like that I can do that or even your Skype idea as well yeah they're very they're very flexible with us who is the Operations Advisory Committee so this is the same group

104that sort of worked with me through the last gosh four years to deal with things like sustainability projects the the solar stuff that we did over at Renfrew they also work with me to talk about facilities projects things they worked with us with the configuration piece the great configuration piece and the elementary stuff so it's just an advisory group that I've had together for with operations it's pretty pretty diverse I've got some folks that are experts in the field one of the one of the folks that sits on it is works at Emory and it's insane in sustainability we have some members of the Decatur sustainability board on the team have some architects and engineers on the team so lots of folks that work in this industry so that I can pull from those resources

105and get some good stuff and then just some parents thanks know I think Heather even was on there for a minute all right thank you guys did you kick her it off break she took another job or something thank you so we have the two action items that we pulled from consent so the first one is field trip and I did invite the folks from DHS here so they I shared some questions with them ahead ahead of time do you guys want to kind of jump in and hit on some of those questions that we shared earlier and then we may have some more beyond that absolutely so we have a practice over the last several years of advertising international travel opportunities to students the first trip of significance that we really started many many

106years ago was our German exchange in the intervening years we've had trips to Costa Rica Spain France Canada Mexico and recently a trip to Ecuador when we advertise these opportunities to students that are international travel opportunities often we work with the travel company to try to get one or more trips comped contrast that to the way that our close-up trip to Washington DC operates we're essentially when we advertise those trip that trip we advertise that as we want to know who wants to go and we'll do our very very best to find money for students who cannot participate either at 100 percent or 50 percent of the cost of those trips so we bring this trip before you this this trip to Canada in the spirit of thinking about potentially how we want to handle

107these international opportunities that come up going forward with this company in this trip mr. Spruill and Miss wells and I have worked with the company with the which company reservist Jump Street travel to think about ways that we can provide scholarship opportunities for students to participate in the trip they have essentially said if you can get to you know this threshold this number of students participating we can do one free trip and they've also said you know we can work it so that students who are able to pay can can pay more money and then if X number of students are able to participate we can get another trip so essentially we're looking at for this trip if we were to get 28 students to participate being able to provide opportunities for if 28 students

108were able to pay on a percent of the cost were able to participate we would be able to get experiences for two students that were fully comped and then you know if we had other students who had needs that were not a hundred percent needs we could you know adjust that and flex that accordingly the way that the close up typically works is there is a strong partnership between the DC trip and the Decatur Education Foundation they do fundraising absolutely but a significant percentage of and the cost to that helps support kids who might not otherwise be able to take advantage of that opportunity does come through D EF I'm joining if you want talk a little more about the the DDF process there so good evening again with the df' process generally the parents

109will contact me directly so I literally the only one that knows outside of dia and then I'll give Gill a number and she will come back with yes she never said no so we did with Miguel this year ma'am is Hathorne field about just funding in general because of the the amount is is over $30,000 is what she provides for close up and yes that money could be kind of divvied out in other way so I'll give you example we talking about two comps where as closely we have 86 kids going this year in February and 24 to 26 we're getting some kind of funding when I say some kind I mean 25 percent 50 percent 75 percent or up to 90 percent for most that are going or getting that 90 percent so we

110can definitely look at how we use those funds we initially talked with her I want to say September October about getting a lump sum for the high school versus close up getting this amount of money she has also expressed that she does see the benefit and being able to send our kids to the nation's our nation's capital to have that experience and in discussions we miss half after your email doctor did earlier it was kind of that we talked about 20 minutes ago I was driving back from our meeting and it's the whole thing of how many kids the most bang for the buck is always gonna be closed up because of the cost but then you know do want to use other things or other students and that's kind of the struggle that that's

111presented to us and you know in just getting general direction on how we want to do that so there are funds and kids are going on trips it's just not as many if you look at the numbers going on international trips as we may have supported by the coastal trip to DC and that kind of skews the a little bit and I think what this really gets to is the heart of the core purpose of our work at school and the opportunities that we want to be providing for students and whether we should be advertising and coming up with opportunities for students that some students may not be able to participate in on the basis of their economic situation choices choice but what should we be investing our energy and as teachers as administrators I

112have traveled internationally with students numerous times because one of the things that we do as a district is administrators accompany these international trips they were amazing experiences for the kids and the adults that attend Dwayne's have the same experiences Jeanne Johnson's gone trips Jessica Strom has gone on trips dr. cross has not yet had the privilege but we also recognize that there are significant limitations to can participate in those kinds of activities and so if the core purpose in city schools of Decatur is that we shouldn't be that finances shouldn't be limiting student opportunities then we need some guidance on how to proceed with requests like this because miss Wells is in a place where she's really done a lot of work to try to provide some economic meaningful economic assistance for students who might

113not be able to afford this trip but we also understand the flip side of that which is well-intentioned work well intentioned hard work may still be you know leading to these same kinds of persistent challenges of unequal access to programs that are ultimately being advertised inside the school so I'll jump in there Wes and share my perspective of the conversations that have happened with the board and around this table and at work sessions and that is that the let's let's use this trip as an example if we feel that this trip is valuable enough to offer right and we feel that it is a great opportunity for students then we want to figure out way to fund it for any of the students who should be going right who would be appropriate because of their

114level of French understanding or it would be a meaningful experience and our first question we would want to be is who should be going on this trip if funding was not a boundary who should go okay and the second question would be and now how can we figure out how to pay for it right so I appreciate the the work with the travel company for instance to figure out that at least having one scholarship slot is more than a lot of school districts have done in the past and and more than sometimes we have done in the past so I appreciate that and I think what we want to do is take that to the next level right I am not have those economics be a barrier and so this is one of the reasons

115for that student fees fines and and whatever charges administrative regulation of collecting all of this kind of information this is a perfect example of why that effort was started was to understand alright we think there are you know 50 kids a year who should be having this experience and we only think 25 of them can actually afford it and some of them need 25% support someone will need 50 cent 4% support whatever right and so then that goes in as a request like through the budget process we just did for instance and so we can look and see can we fund that internally do we need to partner with the F do we need to find some other options so I think I speak for the board and what I have heard is that's our

116philosophy of how we want to approach that and not let those finances be a barrier yes second that we have had a lot of conversation about this in the past because when we rewrote our policy manual that was one of our one of our goals was to was to pursue equity to the extent feasible but what we got to was that we don't want to lower the bar we don't want to take away fantastic opportunities for students because as you said international travel is something that's just completely opens up your mind and relates what you're learning and especially if it's a foreign language or you to see different culture if you get to connect Washington DC with your American government class I mean that's what makes learning come to life and so we're not saying

117we shouldn't do these trips because not everyone can go that is exactly the opposite of what we're saying we're just you know so I really want to emphasize that we're not saying let's lower the bar we're saying let's let's keep the bar high and let's see how we can help the you know be more thoughtful about how we choose the students and help them get there but I think I heard two different things really I think I heard you say if we're gonna offer the students we want cost not to be a barrier to participation that's what our policy says I think I heard you say that if cost is a barrier but the experience is valuable enough we want you to offer the experience and we will offer as much assistance as we can

118I think those are two different things can the trip happen if there's any student who would like to go but for whom cost is a barrier i I think the and the way I've explained it to others is until you have been told by all of the available sources of funding until you've put in a budget request and been told no and until we've asked TEF and been told no and until you've looked for the grants and been told no at that point you have not done to the extent possible given an equitable allocation of resources now once you've been told no on all of those things you've probably been told no because there's a question of the value of whatever the thing is all right I was gonna go to that next but and

119and they're like I would hate to see the close up funds frankly spread around because that's such a valuable experiment in his experiences and theirs experiences and that's a really dynamite experience that like you said you get a lot of bang for the buck I think it's not a comment on this trip it's a comment on close up and so one of the things is that you sort of belt-tightening in terms of which of these experiences that we're going to reach for it may be that it may be or an enriching let's make sure that if we're doing it let's make make sure that it is extra worthwhile or maybe we can change the frequency with which it's right is another opportunity of maybe we can't do something we like to do every year but

120we can do it every other year or something like that and still hit kids but I'll just remind you I want to read policy 1.3 because it hits right on this so we say to the extent possible given an equitable allocation of available resources knowing a student subgroup based on race gender or socioeconomic status will indicate nothing about how they are likely to achieve academically how their behaviors will be managed or what opportunities they will pursue within and beyond our school system and to me this is exactly what we're talking about is is that could use a great precision statement because I think that gets at to it at the highest level so the vision statement says we will build the foundation for all children to be their best achieve their dreams and make the

121world a better place the point I jump to the vision statement is their dreams and so I'm actually somewhat in disagreement with the close up even though I value close-up and I might want to mentor or lead my kids down a path to close up over some other opportunity I think it's important that this be the students dreams and the students goals and the students objectives I'm very wary of funding that the grown-ups put down one path or another I also want to say that you know my questions are about shining light on the access to barriers and breaking it out on exactly what 1.3 does but I have to set the context that if the the end effect of the board is that teachers who are already going above and beyond the call of

122duty to organize these things and even make these things happen in the first place if we're the straw that breaks the camel's back then we're not supporting you well that's the whole point of the collecting all of this information ahead of time is so it doesn't become a burden of the person who's developing the the opportunity right they may not even know who what kids are getting financial aid right the whole the whole concept is that they develop that whatever that opportunity looks like and they don't even have to think about risk part at all so I guess the underlying think I'm trying to get to is I don't want our work to become a burden on the people who are doing who are creating those opportunities our work needs to support making those opportunities

123equitably available to Deeks fullest extent possible and just to be crystal clear nor do we want it to be well then let's not do these things right and and that is that is the danger and what can happen in these instances which is why we want to make sure we know about Reni's in enough time that we can do something to help so the questions are inform us so that we know where to look and it's not you know expect everything to turn on a diamond be soft tomorrow but if we're aware of it we can start to to do the things that we need to do to be more supportive and make it more possible I'm closed up and when I take your point about closed up and I really don't intend to make

124a comparison between any specific field trip and any other but I do think that close up is a particularly well thought and intensely good experience not all of the field trips that are presented to us I have that same opinion of and so some tend to go more toward a vacation in a foreign country and others are very clearly cultural and experiences and I mean there's just a grade and we can see it and there's some that I look at and I think is this really worthwhile and is if we're gonna and so I do think that if we start looking about at funding these things fully which I agree we need to and but we are going to have to think about the trips were offering I just think that's a thing so we

125don't actually have a board policy that requires this to come here I'm not sure it's just been tradition so if you want to vote on this you can I don't think we really have to I think that we're ready to start working on the putting more of a process in place because at this point you may require remember this was one of Bruce's things was looking over the field trips and evaluating them and things and so I think we can revisit as an administrative team kind of this process looks and where we can get involved in time to help support financially so that it doesn't even become an issue and that's something we'll look at yeah and I think it's a it's a partnership because we we need your help to understand how many students

126want to go and you know what is the the need of the I'm glad I'm glad you brought that up because dr. Holliston and I had a conversation earlier today about this and putting the need first as opposed to the idea first right because our process in the past has often been let's come up with the idea and then once we get the idea approved by this body right then we go start looking at okay now which kids want to go alright because that's just the way our process has been perhaps we take a step back and say okay what are our student interests what our student needs and then plan from there and I think that in all of this that's kind of distilling it down that's a part of you the essence of

127kind of what everybody is saying like let's see what's going to provide maximum benefit to kids what kids want to do most and then put a process in place that respects the the student voice and in that process in the meantime I don't want these opportunities to come to a screeching halt I want them to continue but I think we need to continue to evolve in our process and see some significant change just in in how we are able to quantify and qualify you know the need and the desires of the students but I I want to go back to just saying that I think it's an excellent opportunity I would ideally like for all kids who want to go to be able to go I think we need to be be mindful that we

128didn't get we won't get anywhere immediately or in a day so I want to encourage the work to continue and I want to encourage the work that we're doing here together to get to this point where we have policies and procedures that that enable and make it easier for teachers do these great experiences because we've heard from students who have had experiences and in other countries and they come back energized and enthused we've also heard of significant efforts by teachers to get students to go on these trips who haven't had the means and what an amazing impact that has had on lives already and I've seen those students and teachers out in the community fundraising for those needs we're fortunate that we have D EF I think we can be creative I think we can

129be thoughtful about how we do this some is Wells thank you for organizing that is really appreciated I'm still hurt that my daughter signed up for French because I was hoping to practice Spanish with and for the next 40 years but I'm getting over it so probably so thank you for your work on this I know it's a lot of work putting these together so thank you thank you it's 9 o'clock so we still have a couple of media items to discuss we should turn it let's move on so we've got the tyler street construction closeout you have a printout we couldn't put anything in the agenda at the time because noah was still working with the construction folks but buffer beatty but he did a great job and got that all closed up and

130so do you want to just give us the big 15,000 foot level overview of that i'll get 30,000 okay perfect absolutely as part of the project we as customarily along the way will be doing some things this project timeline as you guys remember was very lockstep and we were jumping over hurdles of rain and everything else we also entered into an agreement with the city at the beginning of the project construction had begun to go back and do some improvements along tali street in exchange for them doing improvements along Columbia we had the trees that came down in the in the process of the storm and then there were just some various scope changes that we needed to address so Balfour Beatty and I have worked diligently since getting the school open to go back

131and really put all of our paperwork together get everything closed out and get the so what this ask is to basically do a cumulative change order with them for one hundred twenty seven thousand five hundred dollars to address the trees to address the Talley Street streetscapes which we had anticipated being somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars so we did pretty well there we've also reduced a lot of the cost of the tree planning and things so that's what this is about it's just to close the project out and the dollars will come from our budgeted contingency funds that we had within the twenty two five budget so just to be very clear this does not take us anywhere outside of the budget we've done quite well I was sharing with

132dr/dt this morning how well we've done on this project and and not exceeding that budget and really staying way under it for this project and I know as a school district that hasn't had an opportunity to build a lot of buildings recently I'll just share a little anecdote from having built a lot of buildings in another district not that recently it is not easy to come in within the budget like that and so that is tremendous work especially with the tight timeline and the rain delays and all of those different things to cut me in on time and on budget is really exceptional so it's it's awesome work so kudos to you and your team in their shape thank you we're a bit spoiled because the district has a very good track record and come

133again on at or near budget after this is closed out what are the final bits and how much remains of the 2016 go bond so from the go bond the go bond is exhausted and and we are using additional funding that we've gotten from DOA reimbursements to go beyond that I don't have the exact figures right in front of me but we've done really well fitting 83 million dollars worth of stuff into the seventy five million dollar go bond dollars we've we have not had to use much of our contingency dollars that's been great we've been able to really budget conservatively and meet those budgets so I think we've done a good job of fitting into there but we have completely exhausted the geo bond we still have some money in the bank also still

134have some bills to pay so and I would guess probably buy maybe when we do the final reports at the end of this fiscal year we'll be able to really wrap up the reporting and the geo bond I would guess and be able to really show folks all right we're here it is I all the pennies have been counted this is where we ended up I would guess somewhat and that probably early spring would be a better guess only just and and for everybody's knowledge here we still have some some things going on at tally Street to finish up so I want to give it the true test but I can I can get us real close to there before that if you want to see a report and go down that road but it's

135been it's been great we have not had to use much outside of what we've gotten from the DOA and that was not my expectation when we headed into this and I will tell you we've been able to pull some rabbits out of hats and work with some great vendors to make this happen so thank you guess what resume or approval on so they have a motion to approve the change order of 127 is it what is it 120 $7,500 all right so discussion items for the monitoring reports this is the item that we tabled from the last meeting and it surrounds the our attempt at jumping into the full policy governance mode whole hog we've talked a little bit about maybe we bit off a little more than we could chew I shared with some

136of you at various points that it came to my attention that some of our administrators were having to spend 30 or 40 hours putting the report together and we talked about how is that really how we want folks using time right or do we want them planning out all these things we want them to be doing and so that's when we decided to kind of pause monitoring reports temporarily till we can have some more conversation and so I think we just need to figure out maybe a little better how we ease into the monitoring and I think one way we could do that is maybe figuring out what are the things we care about most like what are the question we really want answered right because eventually the monitoring report touches on everything right whether

137or not it's something you're really interested or not it hits every single thing in that policy manual and maybe the way we can ramp into it a little more is come up with some key questions to answer you know how are students doing or how are you know staff how what kind of staff are we attracting to our jobs or things like that things that have come up and if you look at some of the questions you've asked over the over the months and years maybe those kind of things are where we could start by focusing there and then once we get our feet under us with the whole policy governance and moving that forward we can start to ease into a more formal annual monitoring report cycle but that would be my suggestion but

138of course we're open to whatever the board wants us however you want us to approach it but I was also thinking that we already do a lot of good reporting on a regular basis throughout the year so one early step could be once we decide what our priorities are let's take what we're already doing and see how it fits in and that can at least give us a straw man to build on so one thing we could do to start with is we could make up a list of the typical reports like the one you got tonight the enrollment projections for instance and you always get it the academic achievement reports and some of those kind of things we could put together kind of a framework of things that are just a standard part of

139the school and things that we do and see where there are holes maybe I'm trying to plug those holes let's see if the gaps match the priorities and then focus on those I mean I'm comfortable with that if that would be a something you'd support it Louis well one concern that I have is that we do a lot of reporting and talking but it's all kind of ad-hoc about the topics at the top of mind and it's not necessarily systemic and for the policy governance framework to work we've loaded it in there with things that we don't intend for us to be top of mind mm-hmm we don't really intend have to talk too much but it's important that it be done and it seems that for this to work we have to have a

140systematic review just to make sure that the points are touched and what you're doing and if we were resort to kind of the just ridiculous it gonna do it all at ha and we're just asked the questions were interested in no that's not what I mean sorry let me clarify what I mean is let's brainstorm let's spend some time you know at a work session or something in brainstorm those ahead of time so we can put them into a schedule and make sure we're answering them on a regular basis not just top of mind what do I care about today I think that makes sense I also think though that my preference would be to do that but to have a wider to cast a wider net but to expect much less in terms of

141the report okay so that it looks like what's happened in the past is it we've thrown out some vague phrasing and y'all come back with 30 hours worth of detailed quantitative measures that are misinterpreting what we we failed to communicate and therefore you know it was kind of a wrong path and we don't need that is that the waste of everybody's time but there is some level where we've said have a plan we need to make sure that there's a plan and then that box has been checked and so that there's some accountability one of the biggest things that I think on the board where we where we slip is when we don't actually follow up yeah so easy you have to follow up this is the one opportunity to make sure that this stuff

142is getting followed up on mm-hmm and so I think it's important to have a report even if it just says we're doing it I mean you know that maybe that's not quite adequate right but I get what you're saying without all the quantitative stuff I don't that stuff doesn't speak to me as much it's just an indication that yes this has been being done this is how we're doing it if you want to know more ask us well and maybe not maybe not always with all the quantitative stuff but the quantitative stuff where it's really needed it's often needed an awful lot of efforts gone under stuff that's not needed and so I think that having this discussion about ok where do we want to get you know dig down and where do we not

143right makes a ton of sense I just don't want to skip the sort of routine check-in that yeah that's been done that's been done well will there be a conversation about what is needed yes and that's that's what I'm picturing is this helps like hearing these thoughts because what we can do is go through one look at those common reports we already do make sure those are valuable still and and meaningful and we continue doing those to figure out where those holes are what are the questions you want to be able to answer about how we're implementing things or what's happening that aren't covered by those reports right and then three look at things where we have very specific policies like I can think of one that at some point it says something like have

144an equity action plan right and so make sure that we have on the calendar when you are going to hear about the status of the equity action plan for instance and so we can go through and we'll we can go through the board policy and come up with kind of a proposed calendar of what that all looks like from using that approach for it and bring that to you and see if there's if there's things we've missed reasonable yes and it's a similar thing there's the equity action plan there's that one that we used to spend so much time talking about that some plan that the federal the wellness plan the wellness plan but just making sure that that kind of thing doesn't fall through the cracks so that we could definitely do that if

145you're okay with that we can try to bring it probably January maybe February at this point let me double check I'm just thinking with holidays I don't want to over commit but sure okay you know when we talk about the the initial early attempts to get the baseline reports in place it was inevitable that there would be a lack of clear communication on our part and misinterpretation of our lack of clear communication it's almost like Cool Hand Luke but I think as long as we keep working at it and we're making positive progress it will eventually resolve itself and so what seems like a really big problem in the inertia of getting over that first hump I think will smooth out and become easier over time so I think it's easy for me to say

146today I think the back and forth about what we actually you know one of the points is you can do a five-year strategic plan that you put on the shelf and look at once every five years or we get to the point where we're annually revisiting what are our strategic priorities how are we communicating those strategic priorities where does the regular reporting need to be tweaked so that we can focus even more on achieving results and the strategic priorities so you know if if if I had a you know a magic wand there would be some type of a dashboard that did the data reporting and just got updated much like the Development Report of folks in the back are kind of laughing at you because the our conversation Monday a cabinet was exactly that

147is that we are going to start leveraging one of our tools to track things like the equity action plan of the district Improvement Plan and the wellness plan and all those plans to make sure things are actually happening because we have the same frustration you have that there are times that it's so many different people with their little pieces that it's hard to keep track of but we have tools to do that and one of those tools is it's called a portfolio and it's a way to look at all those plans and just see are we meeting our milestones that we said or not and where are we now meeting them and who is it that needs some push or some support or something different or whatever so that's that's why there there's some giggling

148going on back there that's exactly the conversation we have yes when we would we do things I this goes into the follow up aspect there's the installing something there's the what you plan to do what you plan the budget to be and then there's the what you actually got to do by the time you got around to doing it because no plan survives you no impact with reality and then there's the rise first contact and then there's what the actual budget was and at a certain point what we want to know is what's the effect size wasn't worth doing is there a way we could do it better and I think that we failed to close that loop effectively in many ways and I I'm not trying to to be negative but I think that

149I don't think we really closed the loop on the dyslexia stuff we don't know what the effect size of the orange gillingham training was I hope it was good you know good intentions but are we really measuring what we planned what we did and how well it worked if the if the monitor reports can get to the point where stuff like the development report is just being plugged in there or you know the enrollment data that comes out at different times of the year is just being plugged in there and then we can have the conversation about you know have we move the needle what do we need to do exactly good so the plan is what we're gonna discuss the schedule at the January meeting mm-hmm I'll shoot maybe February but I'll shoot for

150January yoga all right so our next item for discussion is senior homestead exemption yes so senior homestead exemption just a quick note we did find some typos and things in the original report so they have fixed those and we put the updated version on here and you may recall at the work session we had some questions about that tableau tool they did find a couple errors in that when we had asked them to go back and recalculate some stuff they had missed two possible scenarios to recalculate and those happen to be one of them that we latched on to and so they have fixed that and I checked it and when you do for instance the 80 year old what was it 80 year old full exemption $40,000 or whatever you get zero across the

151board because that's an existing exemption so it really is now showing the change in potential cost and then I shared some of the the questions I can pull them up again if we - but some of the questions that we had talked about at our last meeting that we needed to discuss as well as the I found the charge for the original committee that we had put together just in case we wanted to use any aspects of that that charge as we go through and talk about what a committee might look like that needs to work on Senior exemption stuff so and so first the first question is are we clear I think we are we do want to commit well that I think I don't know that that's clear I guess we need to

152talk about you know what would that look like how would our approach be what kind of communication are we doing first of all we've also talked with the city about collaborating with them I mean maybe this is not our committee maybe this is our joint decision with the city of how we approach this certainly could be so we do agree that there should be a committee I don't know we don't know I mean I don't know that we have talked about it at this phase I mean what is our next step I thought that at this meeting we were going to discuss a parameter about how much we felt it could cost I thought we left for what it is worth I thought we left the last meeting this with the presumption that we're gonna

153have a committee although that was a presumption that was never actually discussed okay aware of but that and we said if we're gonna have a committee so that's an F we're gonna have it they've gotta have a super clear charge and so the way that we close the discussion is that we could talk about what that charge would be we don't need to start there we can say should we have a committee and you know it's my thought that that the committee is probably a good thing if they have a charge and I think that we should before we charge anybody I think we should set the fiscal impact that we're comfortable and in my view a committee would be left to think through the different configurations of a homestead exemption to come up with

154the committee thought was good good is it there's the committee a joint committee with this are we having I guess our joint conversation with the city does that span this committee I'm very personally although I think cooperation with the city is is very important and I understand that we've already talked about having a joint process it's also our tax revenue think we need to it needs to be a committee of this board involves the city and that's my opinion yeah I guess that could you that we would have a charge a specific charge and then a committee working on our portion of it that then informs the joint conversation with the city of the findings that could make sense and if so what does you know what does that committee look like is it community

155members is it in the past we someone gave us the idea that we latched on to and so for I think it was first for the superintendent search that maybe the we can identify groups that we think should be represented on such a committee and then ask those groups to figure out who the representative should be so that we're not naming people but instead we're just naming interests or groups and then let them figure out who that could have put forward and then how does how does that committee of Lea's with the board how does that committee liaised with the board when how has that worked in the past I mean when you were talking about committees we've had right we've we've had it'll require the facilitation of central office staff for information or you

156know facility to hold the meetings and those types of things and but it's gonna be really important that we get the charge correct because it's really easy for committees to go sideways spend a lot of time on things which aren't clearly you know the clearly stated intentions of the committee and so I think we need to I hope that we can get back to the the impact cost as a group and how we're going to prioritize how we want because you know we've exceeded the anticipated impact cost woloson revenue from taxpayer dollars and so we need to better focus that where it will have more of the intended impacts how we state that as a charge to the committee you know I know that I recently received the information you sent about was it Forsyth

157and some of the loopholes that they had experienced with these types of exemptions and somebody also recently brought up to me the idea can you limit the square footage of the house so there are a couple things that GSU hasn't necessarily we haven't even run past them well and I don't want to start going down a rabbit hole either I feel like we have we have specifically hired experts in the field to give us some guidance give us a tool and giving us basically three variables and so I'd like to keep it some keep it simple focus the charge on what what variation of these three variables best reflects our goals which were to curb enrollment by by allowing Siegert seniors to age in place that being our goal we have X dollars we are

158willing to spend and we have been given guidance from the experts on that these three variables are the best way to legislate this kind of exemption and we have a tool that shows us based on what age and what exemption amount and what income were income requirements we place on it how we could in different ways meet that goal and so what variations of those best meet the desires of the community within the parameters that we set and the goals that we set out to accomplish and part of the questions we came up with I pulled up from our November 12th meeting was what are those goals and we've got into the talk about how much senior stability is the goal all seniors 90% of the seniors like what can we define that how much

159enrollment growth control is the goal right none of the senior homes turnover less than 10% turn over like what is the goal I think if we're gonna charge others with working on it those are good questions I think and then the one being what's the budget of impact we can live with I think is a really important parameter if we charge a committee with doing this work and then the last ones we had asked where should there be a sunset and if so how long because it has come up that five years is too short to actually change people's behaviors as is what we've heard from some seniors and so we had talked about that maybe being one of the questions for the committee but I do think if we are going to charge a

160committee we have to get pretty specific and some of those things so that they know what the parameters are that they're working in I mean ultimately the committee will give a recommendation on these things and then it will be up to the board to discuss and decide but you know if we hadn't had the sunset we wouldn't even be having this conversation now and we would be in a really difficult position and even looking at the current projections when you put in some of the require recommended or it's suggested scenarios you see that they increased significantly over the just the five years so personally at this point I'm I'm thinking that we would need to consider having a sunset because there is not a stable amount the amount that we will have in the you

161know cost and the tax exemption in 2020 grows significantly over the five years to 2025 even when we use this tool so it's a it's a moving target and we have a changing demographic and we yet we don't have very many years for which we can study this data and so I still think it's it's young in terms of how much we can analyze the effect and the impact cost focus the conversation can we find out where do people stand on the sunset I think it needs to have another sunset No okay so we're working will our charge will include a five year sunset and we now all agreed I understand that the charge needs to be worked out there's a half the sunset in five years those five years have to be the number

162we could propose a longer sunset for it suppose because I was just I thought the comments from the one family at the last board meeting was that it wasn't enough time five years and so if we modify it we're doing it in five years you know still may not be enough time to you know really assess maybe at sunsets in seven years but in five years we will have ten years of data so that's why but it but it's possible that we may change right now is changing at sixty-five it's a seventeen and I think not to speak for him but the way I understood their point was your data you get won't be fully accurate if people don't feel the sunset will still be there it's not gonna change their buying and selling behavior

163I think was the point those folks were making that five years is too short even if it looks likely it will be renewed you still when when you're when you're making a decision about purchasing or selling and things like that it might not change your behavior I think was the point well cuz really I think the point was is really in like three years right we're analyzing data from three years decisions you know we got to make a decision now about what happens you know that's worth my view of it is that five years is awfully short I'm not sure that people I mean people don't plan on five year however as Heather said there's still a whole lot of uncertainty now if we if we if we have a limited it would depend on

164the certainty with which we could limit they well you know one option that I haven't explored but I intended to was to see if there's a way to limit the total cost of the exemption so that we're actually guaranteed that the cost doesn't rise above 1.2 million and you had a little bit of a float in terms of the dials in other words like then you would you were retroactively lee prorate it for every taxpayer I'm just I can't imagine how that would work I understand like the money would run out but then how would you allocate that or maybe it makes no sense but so if you can't do it then it just seems like we need a five-year sunset because we've got our students I think I think that matches that and watching

165how our projections go how our enrollment goes I think that they should match so five years I think is I think that's a good amount of time it is interesting to when you think we set our millage rate every year right and a millage rate is a big variable for people as well so I think there's something that's something to consider too I think people bake in an assumption that things are going to remain the same and so even though it's not certain I think it doesn't I'll say this I mean in five years the 65 year olds will be seventy and they'll get another fifty thousand in tax exemption so I mean there's there's that too like because what I understand is that the the exemptions are stackable and that for example if you

166had a you know an exemption at at sixty-five let's just say at fifty thousand dollars by the time you turned 70 it becomes a hundred thousand dollars by the time you become 80 with the you know if you're under the income limitation it becomes full so with time also as people age their ink their exemptions would be stacked can I put out two possible goals that we could discuss right we we settled on the five-year sunset one person commented that I think if we have if we're doing the senior homestead exemptions and the the public perception is that we're actively trying to make Decatur more attractive for seniors to age in place then I think those those see those not seniors who are here now know that that tweaking it so that it's you know

167not going over an anticipated the tax revenue is not too much is not going to change the perception that Decatur is trying to be a place that helps their seniors age in place particularly for instance if the message agreeing with you've been interrupting I'm sorry no David's point about people making decisions to move or not move I think that's more about moving in than moving out and and I think if there were like some messaging that went with it which is that it's our expectation that the budget impact is X and and yes you can expect an adjustment at the five-year interval if the impact is X plus whatever we're still gonna allocate one point whatever you know we've got this much allocated for tax relief and it might the adjustment might be infighting increments

168but people will still have certain some assurance as much as you can tend to continue it at that level and I think if we stick with that number it'll be easier to me to keep that promise okay so what what is that number well can I do the two Eagles you want to do goals before the number yeah all right because the number is about how we get to the goal just a question that's good the first one I'd say is from the senior side is that we want the percentage of the senior population not to decline well now you're going into quantitative so we're the same goals too too broadly stated goals which is agent place number one and there but I'm trying to put a number on it that you couldn't quantify it

169and the other one making percentage-wise are count wise when you say not to the clock I would say percentage-wise because that's more flexible in the sense that that you know the the demographics of the city and the proportion that are going to be kids in the school system tax revenue expenses I think but how do we know if if we have a certain if we go over the percentage of seniors leaving Decatur how do we know why they're leaving like how do we know if they're leaving because they weren't for the community to solve what can the oh that's a committee question okay which Garrett will be eligible to survive go back though to the report into to our primary intent of the exemption which is stated clearly here and it says the primary intent

170of this exemption was to improve the balance between school enrollment and tax digest growth that was my next one says providing tax relief to allow low-income seniors to age in place was a means by which CSD hoped to slow enrollment growth so our goal when you're focused on this schools is is balancing the enrollment and the tax digest growth and we felt that providing the tax relief to the seniors was a means by which to do that yeah the authors wrote that but the authors did not ask me I don't know did they interview other board members with the intent of the I would say that came out of the discussions with Heather and GERD and I I think that conclusion statement but I think that as I understood it it was a dual goal

171and they were both important one is that we wanted seniors to agent place and to provide tax relief to seniors were being pushed out there pushed out to was to stabilize enrollment and that we did feel that we I know that in my thinking it wasn't necessarily and that doesn't mean that that's what we are doing when we renew it but just i but i but i don't think that we can take anything from what's stated in that so but i think i think that's where we get into the joint conversation with the city because i think that as a like if we're talking about strategic planning and from our perspective as a whole as a city the conversation about seniors is a joint responsibility between the city and the schools because it's it's one

172tax bill and it's it's therefore a responsibility because we both have an impact on the seniors it's not one sides more responsible than the other or needs to provide all you know the bulk necessarily are all the tax relief it's that will be our joint conversation okay so I mean I do agree that as as as a city collectively that is important and has been discussed and it has been a part of our strategic planning for the past ten years and it's likely gonna be a big part of the conversation now as the strategic plan goes forward for the next ten years and I feel like we are a part of that so that the city schools of Decatur is clearly a big part of the city's you know the whole plan and like I

173said we're all we it all comes together as one bottom line on you know what's the total on the tax and it's our cumulative impact that will be felt by seniors I agree but in I agree I guess my question though is if we're going to so my preference for this thing would be that we identify a number and then essentially loosely state the goals which I would put as two and I'd point out that according to the report we're not achieving either of them and so it's really just a bit of money that we're making available and at that point probably the tax relief for seniors would loom larger than curbing enrollment since we've concluded we can't and the main reason why I can continue this is actually the tax for the boy come

174up with the 1.2 number when we started this was first proposed I did some brilliant spreadsheet work and came up with the three quarter mil or $750,000 at the time in fact which was based on the available data which was scant and before I don't remember something changed in the digest or something but by the time we actually adopted a resolution that budget impact was 1.2 so we thought it was gonna be that's what we thought so that was a projected impact it wasn't in the beginning it was three-quarters of a million and then before we went forward with it we knew what we thought there was gonna be higher and we and we said 1.2 and we knew that we still didn't know but nonetheless that's how it came out well and I just

175wanted to go back to what we were talking about the report did conclude that so far with the data that that we have they were not able to see any correlation in the buying or selling behavior of those that qualify for the exemption nor did it alter the growth in enrollments in CSD so you can ask well if we're not achieving our goals then you know what what do we how can we have a charge to achieve those goals if we're not believing that we're going to achieve them the way that we have been doing it so far however I did find it very interesting that in the end of the conclusion the report they did point out that the they were unable to to rule out and it's an open question it says as

176to whether income limited age-based property tax exemption policies likely to alter the path so perhaps the you know the the if if we're focusing on the lower income which they weren't able to disprove that is potentially a situation where we could have an impact on seniors to be able to age in place where we might actually be able to make a difference so right it's just that that was an open it was still an open question and there wasn't enough data to examine that scenario so do we believe that if we allocate funds for a tax exemption policy that targets the lower income seniors do we believe that that could have an impact on our in curbing our enrollment growth by preventing those seniors from perhaps having to move out and sell their homes that

177then would get torn down and turned into you know larger homes with more kids that was still an open question so it I just want to point that hadn't been completely ruled out right going back to the well what I would just my concept of the thing is not to tie the hands of the committee too much in terms of those goals and they're loose they're generally stated and honestly I'm pretty as far as I'm concerned would be reasonably happy if we're comfortable with the fiscal impact to leave it to a committee of our constituents to say what makes sense what's the right if we're gonna provide this amount of tax relief what's the right way to go about it and so let's get the right income limits I mean it's gonna come back with

178you know turn those knobs and what do y'all think is the most fair keeping these objectives in mind yeah can I ask you a question to qualify that 1.2 million that were referencing that was in 2016 it's 2020 that was when we talked about adjusting that for the the time are we talking about growth in the digest average growth in the digest are we talking about CPI inflation what if we did it based on either growth in the digester a percentage of a mill you know growth in the digest would seem to keep the same with emotionally locked right I would be happy with that yeah so so if the magic number was 1.2 million what proportion of a mill was that in 2016 and that would be the don't do it in terms of

179dollars and do it in terms of yeah and then I want to point out that when I when I say number like if I were gonna throw that number out that would be the number at in 2025 not in 2020 well I think the advantage of doing the Mills is it it adjusts automatically with the tax digest if it was one mill and in 2016 right it'll still that proportion will still be the same in 2020 and 2025 okay so that would help would be protect us from what we're seeing which is that the cost well know the cost in dollars would still go up right right so proportionately it would still remain the same because we'd be we'd be gaining more revenue because that would also go up we'd lose the same amount of

180proportionally the same amount of revenue from the digest right but I'm thinking that a lot of our costs don't proportionally the digest doesn't grow with inflation either it goes faster so far it might actually go down right right I'm just thinking I'm trying to think about how that relates to our our fixed costs or our operational costs and like would we be feeling more of an impact from it should that number in dollars significantly increase as compared to our costs because we don't I'm just well we're talking I'm fine so we could just define it in terms of dollars and recognize that that dollars could have to change but for the purposes of the committee it's a little easier to think about it in terms of dollars maybe unless it combines the solution space if

181they come up with the solution space where the wording is mils no no they can't use that so am i hearing correctly I think that because we know from the report that we didn't really achieve the goals but we're still having the conversation about the senior exemption because it's not just about those goals it is about feeling like it's somewhat the right thing to do because we know the burden of taxes on seniors and so maybe we don't even need the goals in the charge is that what I'm hearing correctly that if we put the parameters on a five-year sunset not to exceed something in terms of mils or dollars and an expectation that it's a shared responsibility with the city that those alone are defining enough of a limitation that we don't even need

182to include the goals piece well originally were allow seniors date some place and control Ruhlman growth basically I still feel like it's important to state them and maybe we don't need to prioritize one over the other but I think it's important because there there wasn't the conclusion definitively based on the income limited the the population that had a limited income and how that could still potentially be measured in the future there just wasn't enough data and there were data constraints right now I still think it's important to say why why it could be and should be important to the school system otherwise I just don't even understand how it would really I still think that there's also a difference between as Garrett was saying earlier like attracting seniors versus retaining seniors and that might impact

183how a committee thinks about where the funds should go that's an interesting point because one of the because the goals do change that conversation because if your goal is the curve enrollment and the complaint is that we need to prioritize Aging in place over people the goal is to curb enrollment it doesn't matter and so let me just throw this out there if the goal is to curb enrollment the committee may find that the way you curb enrollment is by having the exemption applied to wealthy people not poor people that's exactly right - and we thought about that at the time so they could potentially say only provide the exception to people who make over $100,000 a year or to whose homes are over eight hundred thousand dollars a year because they don't have kids

184you know what I mean and they're moving in whereas a low-income senior won't move in because they won't be able to afford to so I do think we have to think that we may be surprised by what comes out of that - we might I mean I guess I sort of might I think those are really important because I do think you come to different conclusions I also think that if we set this out - committee of our constituents it's not going to come back like that mm-hmm and and the point and if it did we could say well no thank you right I'm trying to back up and think the higher level and I think maybe the the the goal related to the seniors is we don't want to force anybody out because the

185city and the schools are growing we don't want to and if that's how I remove my cold blinders by putting that in there and then the the big thing about the seniors versus enrollments and the tax digest is really step back another thousand miles or whatever we want to smooth out fluctuations in the housing market we don't want to go through a five-year boom followed by five thirteen years later a five-year bust we want to do things that keep the distribution of the available affordable housing the small houses stable I mean it can change a little change a lot we what we don't want is to go through another ten years a blockbuster growth or a huge dip in enrollments so what we're trying to do is is smooth things out I don't know how

186you capture that one thing that I think is missing is we're not charging the committee at least at this point with examining I mean basically we're in an arms race to be the most attractive place to be and the incentives we give or don't give are gonna be matched that we're not they're not happening in a vacuum soda cab in Atlanta and all table and all the surrounding places that can offer these types of exemptions unless we figure out what they're doing and how we compare and we continue to study that over time we're just kind of throwing darts with blinders on and we have to realize that if we up the ante others are there's a cost to doing that we overshot the mark and others may follow us and then if we don't

187get this in line quickly we're all going to lose considerable tax revenue without achieving our objectives and the last thing is whatever we do we need to leave enough of an incentive in there so that we're never caught unawares of how many seniors are actually in Decatur again so if we don't at least leave there's at least a little breadcrumb there's got to be a big piece of pie keylime you know something good that's going to incentivize us to get 90 plus percent of this we don't ever want to find out they're twice as many seniors as we thought there were as homeowners and you know just also a big picture you know when I think about how much this is costing our school system right now and I think about our priorities and I

188think about one of our priorities being paying our teachers competitively these go hand in hand and do we as a community value paying our teachers competitively compared to the metro and area you know all the other school systems in the metro area I mean that has a lot to do with also maintaining everyone's home value and keeping Decatur an attractive place to live and own a property over time ironically I just happen to know that amount from our study last year cuz it was part of our budget discussions and it's 1.3 million dollars what is the amount to be more competitive in our salaries right because we're not the most competitive 1.3 million per year right now and you know that that to me is a core component of being and continuing it to be

189an excellent school system so we I feel like we we have very serious stakes at you know we must consider our exposure here because that is something I would like to do better I would like to pay our teachers better and so probably should I had the budget discussion before we had this discussion because it might have impacted it looking at what this is costing us and and that's why you know I want to be sure that when we come up with the number that we're looking out five years because it it increases and I'm also comparing that to what our other priorities are as a community so maybe part of what we could do because you don't necessarily have to have this decided tonight right so part of I believe our plan for our

190January work session was to be looking at budget type things and one of the things that we're looking at is not just where you want to add things but also where you want to change things right so maybe it would be more appropriate to have that discussion of what amount are we comfortable with as part of the overall discussion as we look at budget because like you said every decision we make about dollars impacts other things and so maybe we just make that part of that discussion at the January work session a very hearty work session but you're right because we saw last year that we had to increase the military which increased everybody's taxes who was not exempt so when we talk about you know affordable housing and housing being affordable taxes are a

191big part of that and we you know we have to be cognizant of you know how much however much we say we will exempt in the senior tax exemption means that everyone else will pay that much more and so again we need to consider all groups and and balance that because ideally you know wouldn't it be nice if no one had to pay taxes but we all have a responsibility for shared for shared services and community and things like it having excellent schools and all you know the other city services that we all contribute to you know even you know you can look at federal level programs that we all contribute to so it becomes a philosophical conversation there as well but but when we break it down and just look at our budgets I

192think that's a great place to put this conversation because it impacts it impacts how much we can increase teacher pay it impacts how much we have to adjust our mill and across the board what programs we can support or not support I think that makes a lot of sense for this is not really directly responsive but I think that in thinking about it what I would suggest as goals think there would be my goals when is it I think I would frankly stop talking about curving enrollment since the report says it didn't work and maybe that maybe there's more in there maybe there's not but the way I would look at this who said I do think that there's a philosophical justification for some tax relief and I people who have means I think do

193have some obligation to continue to pay at the same time you know the idea that you have to continue to pay forever is sort of disheartening to and it seems appropriate that at some point you get some relief so I've got I support that as a goal and my my goals would be number one ensure that school tax is not the reason that seniors cannot age in place and and you know notwithstanding the business about attracting seniors which is it really is about not disrupting people are not making taxes the reason if they have to move in my opinion and the other would be to encourage age racial and income diversity indicator which in fact is one of the goals of our system and of our school system that we have to have a diverse

194community if we're going to raise the kind of kids we want and Tax Policy is part of that and I think it becomes a question of how much of our revenue can we spare is it appropriate to to give over that and I think it's not zero and we need to make sure that that number is is the number that we're comfortable with so we don't raise the millage to cover it and then we're gonna raid some knowledge to cover it I mean it's one thing well we're either gonna raise it or we're not gonna lower it but if we're spending the money we don't have the money which means someone's paying for it don't you which was kind of contrary to our messaging last time but I just think we need to be clear

195about that okay cool so maybe wait on figuring out exactly what a charge looks like till we get that dollar amount sounds like we have to but I think overall keeping it very specific and and like going back to my point about not letting this become like this isn't we're not going back to square one we've been given some pretty clear guidance three variables that are have a track record of being used in exemptions they're understandable by the community and there is something that can we can also reasonably get through legislature as well and they they're under I guess you know I wouldn't want this to go to a committee and then come back with like options that are so extreme or creative that they can't possibly be legislated if you know what I mean

196you know the thing is is that it's not and I've actually asked the Georgia Municipal Association Pompeo parents and community members has provided some information but I asked the question like so what are all the options because I still don't know what they are I told you I looked into the one which is can you favor people who've been here longer than other people in the answer is no right you can do things like let's freeze for tax purposes the assessment so you could enact a freeze that when you buy your property for school tax purposes it doesn't increase the assessment doesn't increase you have to go at it through the backdoor no different you know there's a way to make that happen but I really haven't looked and I it doesn't appear to be

197readily accessible but you pointed out that in Forsyth County they put in an exemption that says that if you get kids in the school system you're gonna pay the school tax which obviously makes a bit of sense I didn't know you could do that and in I'm all for that right maybe the way to handle that is to say that at least one of the options that the committee presents has to use the parameters from the tableau tool well that means that they could explore they are encouraged to explore all feasible options I'd love to get someone actually passed to any committee which is maybe the way to do it but I'd love to have someone actually thinking through that and finding out what's possible I keep asking the question but it's it's not easy

198to answer yeah well I guess I think that informations out there about what other counties are doing we can certainly look at that but I think we did ask that question to Georgia State we did we did ask them in our in our RFP we did not we did not dictate what the criteria were to be and we asked for them to come to us with the suggestions so that you know we we did solicit that input now are there other are there other like additional criteria we can add perhaps looking at what other people are doing is certainly I think it's clear that these are the three most commonly used there's no that's what they did and I'm sure that they know that that's just because of the most common and so hard to

199study the uncommon things but they do exist and so there there are some out there the Forsyth County exception is one that we ought to know about we do now figure that out and so I want to make sure that there's other things like that the we we don't that we don't just miss I mean I think I I agree I think we should definitely look and see what's going on around us to see that we are compatible with that and that were within reason and thinking you know other we don't have to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already caught you know thought of a different way or a better way but had been doing it for years yeah but we were open to that I just want to I just wanted to

200make sure that was clear that we did not dispense it right yeah we did not provide limitations or say we want you to tell us mm-hmm the answer to these you know specific variables we didn't give them the variables we asked them to give us what caught my eye on when when the question they addressed the question of favoring people who stay longer than others I didn't like their answer because they answered it saying we don't think it will achieve your policy goals I thought well first off you don't really know what my policy goals are but number two there's a stronger answer we just can't do it and so I felt like that maybe it wasn't their strong suit I hope that we will continue to study the impact while it might not be

201a goal for the committee to study the impact on the relationship between senior move-out and student move-in because I don't want us to completely remove that from the radar we may not have achieved the objective but let's see if over time especially if we if we're able now we know where every senior a dress that has a homestead exemption is we have geo coded addresses for students if we connect the two things together we can measure senior move outs and student move ends so it's not ten and five should we should we move milk yes we I think we only have one well we have to talk about future date those and we and we also have to talk about budget priorities yeah we have a January work session so I'll just share with you

202as you know we did the initial requests that folks put in for budget we call them budget Improvement requests which is where budget holders within the district can put in a request for additional funding for various things and I have shared with most of you if not all of you that we really pushed hard this year to say don't come back to us later and say I wish we had asked for this like take the time really think it through and if you come back in you know September and say hey I need another teacher or hey I need all these supplies the first question is going to be why didn't you put it into the budget improvement request process well it worked and we got a hundred and like over a hundred that totaled

203two eight million dollars and seven point seven million of those requests were recurring annually so just to give you a feel and that's because seven million dollars of them were personnel so either giving increased salaries to people or hiring additional people or whatever that does not include the personnel needed because of growth so if we were to add teachers because you now have to have two kindergarten classes instead of one for instance that's not what this is about this is about needs like we see a mental health crisis amongst our students and we need to increase our counseling staff it's not about having more students it's about having students with more needs that aren't being served that sort of thing so just to give you a feel of the scope we'll get into a much

204more detail at the work session in January but it is significant there's a little piece of those probably shouldn't have gone through this process and will be handled through like SPLOST funds as facilities requests some things like that but for the most part they're all very legitimate needs and so we've gone through an initial process of evaluating them through a rubric that we developed and we'll share those results in January and then we can start deciding where they align with the the board's priorities and not so does that have the January meeting set yes it is is it work session right yes it's on the calendar January 2018 does that process include what would you sunset what it does although I think there were only two proposals that included that we encourage people to include

205it because that would make their proposal more viable if they could show what could be sunset as part of it but we're also then going beyond that in trying to brainstorm because some of the proposals do lend themselves to sun setting other things so I'm anticipating that work session being very significant considering that we just added this conversation to that and I'm wondering if we should start earlier than seven yeah how early does everyone feel comfortable meeting I can get there at six okay let's say six I'd rather finish earlier than later so what time are we thinking yeah I'll make that work well there were a couple more things on future dates Jana you had emailed a couple things of potential topics so if it's okay with you I can work with Lewis and

206and Tasha and we can figure out where those fit some of them will actually fit with that current earlier conversation of when we report out but I've got that list and it'll make sure that we hit on those and then Heather you had sent something about the NSBA conference so and I want to apologize that the future dates are all in the past which either pointed out we totally missed updating the future so we decided that was just really you know out there but anyway so the NSBA conference is April 4th to 6th in Chicago and so that's something we may want to talk about the say April 6 April 4th through 6th the registration is discounted if you do it before January 10th so I'm thinking maybe over email we should figure out if

207it's something we want to go because we could save a little bit of money I just like if we had I wondered if we had used up our stuff our budget we've have I mean we've used most of the budget but then again we never really plan out that budget very carefully because these things do come up and we figure it out as we go so it is something that we could accommodate within the budget if the board desires to go there from my part on this I've used up a little bit of my middle budget or my personal budget as in terms of the group trips I thought that taking the two trips bit much this year you know because we did Colorado plus Philadelphia right and I also have missed because we did

208those trips which were very worthwhile thoroughly enjoyed them but we haven't had as much of our retreat and the retreat time is also valuable but more deliberate and so I would think that we might pull back on that and instead do what we did previously and send folks who want to go but not try to make it aboard why sure think send to people that and the SBA or whatever if that's what people want to do and then plan retreat time you know I wouldn't mind going to this conference just because I have not been to the NSBA yet and it was something that you all had shared we didn't know if that's right I haven't been that's be a one so and I thought it was really if folks are going I would be

209happy to go to like if it's on the weekend I don't have to ask for time long yeah that's good and this is like that on steroids so I how about I send out an email just so you all have time to check with your family and stuff if you need to make plans to figure out and then we can yeah and don't forget to include James is that a work session what the one sorry the one you were talking about for the budget January 28th the budget one is January 28th oh do we want to bring James in on that there is not another work session right now and then no the next time we're together is at the January meeting January 14th that's good when we do an hour all right that's all

210I have on the agenda that we adjourn so thanks everybody thanks Carrie some take some cake if there's still some kids