7.21.2022 Special Meeting and Workshop of the LJSD Board of Trustees

001all right we'll go ahead and call the meeting to order it's 5 35 uh welcome everyone and let's stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all right we'll go ahead and have an approval uh i'll entertain a motion for approval of tonight's agenda move to approve the agenda just imagine being picked up because if they can hear you first i can hear you get the eyes all right we have one action item before we move into the workshop um and that would be to discuss the reach academy we currently have um 20 21 students enrolled we have three educators the program will be indebted if we

002choose to continue we do not have anticipation of it growing prior to losing the principal the principal had reached out to the previous attendees and we've only secured 21 returning so we need to determine if we want to continue the program or if we want to terminate it now to allow the 21 students to find an alternative home to do online education be it through idla lisa pointed out that coeur d'alene has got their online academy up and going so there are options outside of idla but we need to decide what to do yeah i don't see that there's 21 on this list i only see 20 and two of them are duplicated so i'm not sure where 21 is coming from unless that unless there are additional ones that aren't on the list but

003just i think you're accurate um when i tried to confirm with her um she said she thinks it might be closer to 30 because there's some returning kids who just haven't signed up but she hasn't confirmed that so okay somewhere between 20 and 30. yes she's she they called every single family the 19 it sounds like have confirmed and they have 10 who are hanging out there who they either have not gotten in touch with or they haven't confirmed but all the rest of them have confirmed that they're coming back to school came to arson and chair thompson i put a email on your desk from leslie and it mentions that parents were told not to apply until august i believe i don't know why um that may skew the numbers my understanding is they

004were told i don't know that this is true but they were told that they can't officially apply but that's why we did that the same thing we did for kinder for the intent to register we did the same thing for reach which is where that spreadsheet came from so for all students in the district registration doesn't start until august 1st because we had to wait until summer school ends to roll over skyward right move everybody to a new so they did have the ability to to do the intent to return okay okay so in addition to having three brand new teachers to reach because none of the teachers who helped launch reach are returning we also are without an administrator at this point as well because they didn't show the quoted text yeah i don't

005know what made it very soon to undo that [Music] we have the final summer book club [Music] happening at john brown and they're doing pizza and she was getting a nice strawberry i don't mind that she got this i didn't realize it was that easy it must be very warm over there yeah we do it every year we're just sharing this around did you see it okay we're talking about reach yeah okay and whether we should continue if we didn't do this what would our recommendation be to these parents and students well we have idla is an option and they could they would still be enrolled through lakeland um so they could come back at semester and they're still working students if they wanted to and for each idla class has a teacher assigned to

006the class so there is instruction teachers check in um it's there the courses are aligned all the same state standards so that's an option um obviously they could come back to brick and mortar or um uh coeur d'alene has their program running for for parents who are i talked to one we have one parent who is her dog they've participated in the summer book level all five years that we've run it and she just really feels like her daughter is thriving in this online environment and would like to keep her in that and so we kind of brainstormed what that could look like and those were the two options that we were able to come up with we got bridge too right bridge is only for juniors and seniors the other little piece of information

007and i'm not trying to sway the board but we are also struggling to fill classrooms with teachers and we have three teachers who are contracted who are currently assigned to reach that we could move into some of those unfilled positions if have we asked if they are willing to do brick and mortar class i don't i don't think we've talked to them we didn't want to prematurely yeah yeah i just was curious did they apply for an online position so like when they applied was it specific for the reach academy um i know one for sure was and she was current she was a teacher for us over here in the classroom okay two or two were in the classrooms as well oh that's right so so um they just liked the idea of working

008remotely okay that worked for their families okay but but one outside person that she specifically applied for reach okay when she's out of district okay okay i hate saying outside person she's out of district yeah no gotcha there's definitely it definitely feels a need for a small niche within our community but um we would be paying uh when brooke figured it out roughly ten thousand dollars per student um for just for staffing as compared to a lot less than that yeah well and and it's not keeping itself afloat correct and that's where we're at that our numbers just keep kind of dropping we started higher last fall we ended much lower and then we've got an even lower number committed to coming back this fall so the trajectory has definitely been a downward trend since

009we started the other factor in this is and we've ran into this last year with three teachers we said two grade levels well the numbers don't evenly work out that way so i think you know the two three is like five or six i haven't looked at the list yeah in a while it's like five six and then um five or six kids and then the four or five is like 14 and then the other sixth grade is like five or six something to that effect so even that the numbers are pretty small um so even trying to absorb a situation and then you're back to the doing three grade levels which that was pretty hard for them to do yeah we can't do that right it's not good for teachers yeah i mean given

010our current uh financial climate in this country and no uh at this point no um i mean that we only have so much money right we have no uh levies or bonds or i mean we so i mean i i think unfortunately in my brain it sort of comes down to yeah and economically it is not a feasible operation basically yeah and we're not at the 400 students that it had a couple of years ago even at the end of last year we were at 77 and um like you're saying according to the end of the year numbers our highest numbers were um sixth seventh and eighth with third grade being the anomaly and the lower grades of 12 12 students 12 students 13 and 13. the others were 3 5 4 9 6. uh

011yeah i i sort of a hard decision but i yeah i feel really bad but you know i mean even without even if our the principal had stayed i think at some point we've been looking at these numbers you know well and then we're going to put them in side of a building that's already you know a school within a school kind of concept um and we already know all of the schools are busting at the seams as it is i don't know what these guys look like next door but that's that's where that's going to go right and to have a dedicated right section or portion of that school right but i know part of the discussion too is that um there was some question as to if some of these students needed more

012intervention it wasn't you know and that was part of what we heard about going here but i mean those students are i'm sure the district can even help them uh get those services if they if they need it you know yeah well they would uh if they were enrolled with lakeland and with doing idla courses they could they could definitely do some of those ideally courses online and then come to school for their reading class or their um the special whatever whatever they whatever it is um yeah and just a reminder it was three teachers and a para that's what we gave her so it's not just it's three teachers and a pair full-time okay so do we want do we need further discussion on the reach academy i guess i would ask the superintendent

013what her recommendation would be given all of those factors my recommendation uh especially based on the notion that when we started this that it was going to be budget neutral would be that at this point in time that we move away from offering the online unfortunately um and then we will work with those 21 families to try to make sure that they find a home and if they did idla they still stay connected and they could still be involved in extracurricular i mean they could still feel like part if they were doing that anyways with reach you know they would still have that community right now we have two people that registered that came from the iowa virtual academy so i don't know that they would go back if they came to read well that's

014different it's only one but ible right which is the same kid oh you're right it is the same yeah that's one of the ones that i was saying was a duplicate yeah idaho virtual and ideal idaho virtual is actually its own public school idla actually partners with school districts okay do we have any further discussion we'd like to have regarding reach no i do not i'm good mr jones okay would anyone like to bring a motion forward i move that we no longer support the breach academy terminate the program yes i also think about hearing a motion in a second all in favor say aye aye any opposed hearing none the motion carries that brings us into our workshop okay so the first item within the workshop aside from all of the curriculum is the

015sources of strength program so just so you guys know um i copied for you everything that miss hamilton sent so the letters for sos so it's all in your pocket i sent it all to you digitally as well but i printed it so that you can kind of sift through that so who is miss hamilton she's the um counselor the lead counselor from apple but the lead counselor for the district so uh everything that i've received regarding sos is right there but i also sent it to you guys last week digitally so now we i assume everyone received an email a while back from a parent it was questioning i i don't recall now since i read it whether it was questioning the total program or that at the elementary level or the secondary level

016i'm just bringing that forward discussion that she was questioning the entire program and wondering about any ties to critical race theory so one of the things that i've been thinking about with regard to just critical race um is we have a lot of people who've moved into our district from oregon washington and california and they're coming from states where critical race theory is being mandated in classrooms and um gender identification and fluidity and some of those things are happening and they are desperately not wanting that to happen here we've been using the term sel in our district for a long time long before critical race theory but when we talk about social emotional learning we're talking about teaching kids how to resolve conflict we're talking about how to teach first graders how to get involved

017in a game on a playground so as we're talking tonight one of the things i think we need to do just to help our parents is kind of re rename what we're doing um because we're not doing social emotional learning in the way that people are aligning that with crt and so instead of calling it social emotional learning which is a trigger for a lot of people i think we need to come up with a different term because we are truly just teaching kids how to get along with each other and how to regulate their emotions but how we're doing that is the question it's not just that we're doing it and that's not what scl is it is and we need to know how we how our kids are being taught to get along

018and to think more socially because that's that's the question right absolutely what are we using to do it yep and how is it going to talk so is this a curriculum the sources of strength the curriculum because it's teaching something right right so how long have they been using it since 2018. but it's never been approved by the board no and i've heard teachers talk about it being pushed on them you know counselors and administrators and you know like being forced to use it and they have to they push back against it and you know i just because they don't think it's good and right and um i don't know i don't know about i don't know enough about it so you guys are the experts it doesn't sound like it's that great if they

019all don't agree i mean i think you should i think we have one school that hasn't really fully embraced it and that and that school hasn't just because they haven't well it happened during clovid their their training was right when covet was starting so they didn't do the training and their struggle is more about how do you how do we build it into our already busy day they did have a presentation that one of our high schools did at their school and the teachers who participated in that actually were pretty excited about what they saw so i don't think it's at least what i'm hearing you might be hearing something different what i have heard is not that they don't agree with it it's just that they don't know how to fit it in and

020i'm not previously our principals were told everybody's doing it i'm told yeah to do something that wasn't approved by the board and that well they may not have taken formal action but there was definitely conversation at the board level and they knew that we had applied for the grant and had received the grants was that a federal grant no it was a state grant through state-run program and it was the prior superintendent and a pe teacher the superintendent supported the pe teacher in writing the grant the source of the street curriculum itself had one study um the department of justice and administration that looks at all of these throughout the country uh rated it a yellow promising meaning that they would never implement it and they found that it didn't meet what it was saying

021it meant the schools that it was implemented in and that it was trialled in were in new york georgia north dakota and somewhere else and most of those schools were a population of lower socioeconomic status it was targeted toward high-risk youth specifically it is put forth as a suicide prevention tool um and i guess it does teach that in a certain manner but what it does do just like that i watched the meeting that i missed the parent that came and talked and talked about the peer leadership what it does do and and we've had students before us what it does do is teaches the peers who are chosen by the adults to recognize certain behaviors flags triggers whatever you want to call them that are concerning and the peer leaders their students would then

022tell the student hey you know are you all right or what's going on no that's not right and if the student doesn't respond properly then they go to the trusted adult and tell the trusted adult the problem i see with that is that we're having kids be counselors and they're not fully trained to do that um so there's just and the other thing that bothers me about the whole thing is that i've asked over and over i was the one that originally brought it up because we read about it in the newspaper the second iteration of it is that constantly all we get is this we have never ever been allowed to see the program the person that was put in charge of the program i understand was specifically hired to do that coming from

023north idaho behavioral health um and uh i'm not sure who you're talking about uh the i don't really want to get into names but the counselor yes yes um i mean that's what we were told from the prior administration and that's how it was presented to us so i don't understand why every time a parent or and there's been other concerns because the people have come to me there's also been other faith-based organizations that have called the people specifically that never came to anybody so i don't understand that how to interpret the concern i've heard and i've had myself since the very beginning and it's never brought forth it seemingly is always hush hush and i don't i don't know why i don't know why if it's that innocuous and it's a great thing and

024everything and the other thing is is that some of these students who may deal with suicidal ideation or whatever we all know that there's a lot of other things a curriculum or friends turning you in right and the other thing that the author specifically states is his one of his main purposes is to break this code of um what do you call it a code of silence i think he called it it's right in his little synopsis is that a lot of these kids come from um horrific environments right they're environments of no food their environments of molestation incest their environments of no parent at home alcoholism drugs whatever i mean and these are kids i know specifically and some who have succumbed to that no amount of curriculum is going to fix that that's

025not the issue but yet we're i've been told this is what we're trying to combat with that this is curriculum doesn't do that right you know and i there's a lot of angst about the program and i know there's both sides um but we did reach out to the state department just to see if there is a recommended curriculum there's an alternative they won't recommend anything yeah well we're not we're not um we are not um well they do have sos on their website but along with some others but we are not mandated to do this the mandate for a suicide um prevention there was three terms prevention data and postvention whatever is all for staff the only thing that we have to follow would be the content standards for eighth and ninth grade well

026six through nine we'll say but specifically the content standard says at eighth and ninth grade that the student has to be able to um demonstrate how they would ask for help for a health read any any reason whatsoever and then in parentheses to explain that the standard says suicide blah blah i don't have it all in in front of me so there is no the only thing that that we have to have policy we have to have administrative wise which i'm sure administration already has their manual about how to recognize and all that not only that there are several supreme court idaho supreme court lawsuits that dealt exactly with this that are case law and whether there is the um sorry i just lost the word the um when you're when you're not mandated but

027what do you call the word when like you have to report it i can't think of mandatory reporting yeah but that's not it uh anyways whatever that term is you know where a duty duty there is no duty to report suicide so i think it's gone way above and beyond you know maybe what original intent was i don't know i don't know but there's a lot of things i find very concerning about it according to idaho code 33136 which is suicide prevention in schools it states that each public school district shall adopt a policy on student suicide prevention such policies shall at a minimum address procedures relating to suicide prevention intervention and postvention as used in this paragraph postvention means counseling or other social care program or other social care given to students after another

028student's suicide or attempted suicide to assist school districts in developing policies for student suicide prevention the state department of education shall develop and maintain a model policy or adopt an existing policy as a policy model to serve as a guide for school districts in accordance with this section and what is their policy i i don't know whose policy this is the state department of education yeah they have it's all on their website but we have all that but they do have a complete model policy for and model i mean they if you go to the the one page the state department of education they completely lay out everything um for this but i mean even the qpr training uh covers the the um requirement right right even that covers the requirement because um oh i

029was just what was the obligation for the grant was it just to purchase the materials and just and there wasn't like a a future thing of you to get the grant you have to continue with this curriculum for five years right no and there weren't any materials to purchase as far as i know first sos everything's on their website uh we just actually asked that question because we hadn't been able to get our hands on like a teacher's edition or anything like is there something that you have in your hands because i haven't been able to find anything and they were like oh we just put whatever's on the website they can kind of pull and then we talk through it kind of a thing the grant um covers the training and that was what

030the grant covered knows it okay and according to so now we go so now we oh did we put that back through this year paying the stipend for those who are teaching the sos anyways because last year that was the argument i brought up too is that this thing that was supposed to be neutral not cost anything now we weren't paying so maybe we didn't do this year i don't know i don't remember we took that out and we negotiated and i don't think we had it in last year because i had an issue with it last year um but 433 136 suicide prevention in schools title of the statute it says the state board of education shall adopt rules supporting suicide awareness and prevention training each year for public school personnel that's our that's

031our qpr that we do right and that's all we're required to do right so i mean and with respect to the minimum i personally believe yeah we should do whatever we can to help any child that is in that crisis mental state of mind um so i i mean i don't want it to appear that the board isn't sensitive doesn't absolutely because i i mean to know that we have this program in place and yet we still lost a student to suicide due to bullying but you know it's like the curriculum is not going to it's not the end-all be-all stable so i just don't understand why the district just you have a bunch of counselors with degrees write your own curriculum or write your own protocols and then we adopted they come before the

032board and we adopted but they all have to agree on the right way to do it you know not just one person gets their way you know it has to be a group effort you know i mean how many counselors you have in their district yeah so why can't they get together and write something up that this is our protocol for suicide awareness we have a suit we do have a protocol for um when a staff member believes based on something that a parent has shared our student that the student has shared that there's um a possibility of suicidal ideation there is definitely that protocol already is in place we have that i'm just saying like training as far as like like what we're teaching in the classroom um they're just a way of dealing

033with it for the district instead of having like you said some of the schools are doing it one school's not doing it i mean it should be a district-wide thing right it should be just we're doing it over here it's kind of like policies you know why is this why is this school doing it that way and this school's doing it this way you know doesn't make sense we're the same district it should be all the way across the world part of the curriculum also teaches the students and i mean they do um have certain like uh games team building games and all that kind of stuff that they do um so it does do that and there are some other parts of the curriculum so i think part of the intent of it is

034to teach students how to handle their emotions right how to you know know that today tomorrow is going gonna be a new day you know if you're anxious you know calm down breathe all that kind of stuff um and and those kinds of things i think are good right take a break walk away all that stuff i'm not too much into the visualization and meditation thing that's too religious i think to be passing on whether people want to agree to that or not um i don't know that we should be doing to that extent visualization and all those things but so i understand that and i think a lot of teachers do that anyways i mean i think they just classroom management community and our elementary counselors definitely teach the zones of regulations so that

035there we have colors associated with how kids are feeling and they're able to talk about what color they are and and then they they're taught box breathing and some of those things you're talking about so we we definitely have probably a more cohesive um approach at the elementary level um just because that's there we the elementary is their first exposure to school and so we're teaching them how to be at school and so when you come from a home where you have a sibling and maybe i'm five and my sibling is two now i'm in a classroom with 20 other five-year-olds and i have to figure out how to share and take turns and use kind words and sometimes there's frustration so that's just kind of built into the elementary setting at the middle and

036high school we don't have as much of that more often what happens is a kiddo who struggles with regulating their emotions ends up meeting regularly with their counselor and they're doing some some counseling school appropriate counseling to help them access their learning um but not a systematic teach to that all kids are seeing that's the elementary kind of sets that foundation you know i think the other part of this that comes into play i think is you know how much time how much classroom time is spent doing the kinds of things that are set out in the program and how much does that take away from core curriculum time at the secondary level um it doesn't take away from any instructional time they um i know at the middle school the kids who uh help

037at least at lakeland middle school the kids who help kind of plan the events and it's all about community building their events are they do that at lunch or after school timberlake at high school and timberlake middle school they're not losing instructional time for that either and they do a lot of timber lake middle school is probably the school that has really embraced this program to the greatest extent and it's uh they do a lot of evening events for families like a big family dodgeball night and it's just really about kind of bringing the family together and doing fun things as a family unit to support that nuclear family well and i don't have a problem with that that's that's great that's wonderful that's that's showing kids community and right enjoying each other and being

038well i don't understand how establishing that community connection even uh is part of the sos program that doesn't make any sense i think it's their intent to kind of bring the families and so they can kind of see what they're working on through sos so it's an informational thing but they always build it around something fun oh okay [Music] yeah you talked about from middle school and high school what about the elementary school in terms of time i am not as the sos at the elementary schools is is [Applause] invited and so they do counseling lessons and kind of embedded in their counseling lesson so i they they're less with sos in the elementary school and sos did come out with a new k2 program and the elementary counselors said they didn't want it so

039they wanted to stick with their second step and felt like everything that they do there was really addressing everything that they needed so they didn't ask to even look at the new program okay okay appreciate that you know the reason i bring that point up is over the years i you know we have become more and more of a social agency than what we used to be certainly and as that creeps in ultimately it takes away from the focus and the time that you spend on core curriculum and consequently then we begin to see slippage in those other areas and we have to guard against that i think because our core mission is to teach core curriculum and the other things are supportive and and worthwhile uh to to create an atmosphere where our primary

040goal can be accomplished is the way i see it i agree that there's been a lot of social issues it seems like any societal issue ends up eventually on the plates of the teachers right um and you shouldn't have to deal with that well i think the time yeah i think that is just sort of yeah where we're at in this day and age but to turn our focus to that where the teachers can't teach and we can't provide an educational environment and we become this social environment whether it's i mean everything's so mental health focused it seems you know like every decision is based upon that that we can't get our other things done we can't get curriculum done we can't get music programs implemented we can't get all these other things which statutorily

041we're supposed to be having you know um because you know we and i know we it has to be addressed it at some level but i i would have to agree that we have to maintain our focus and educational institution and that where our duty is to provide that thorough uh education for curriculum oh yeah probably from zones that was the other thing i think that sort of was also was there was a specific there is a specific um implementation process for this curriculum according to the author and and um everybody says you know this is how you basically get the buy-in kind of thing that the district never followed either i don't know any district that's followed except for maybe quarter lane um is now maybe but the buy-in was specifically it was supposed

042to be a whole community-wide presentation like there are supposed to be bodies in community to have this discus you know according to the author you have the community discussion then you have all the staff discussion and then the students discussion before it's ever even implemented and that never happened either you know um which i i think just raises more concern or makes people look at it more you know maybe than than other things uh what is your recommendation on the second uh the sources of that's a strength one um i i don't feel like i know enough i mean i know what i've seen at the middle school those are the two schools where it's been implemented to the greatest distance elementary's new timberlake high school does a little bit with sources of strength but

043not much in lakeland and mountain view have not done any so i know at the two middle schools those teachers feel pretty strongly about the program and what they see and how they see it benefiting the kids but what i don't what i can't speak to is um what the instruction looks like because i haven't seen it so i i can't and we don't have anything here for us to see correct right because we there is nothing we couldn't put our hands on anything on the dark web yeah so help me understand if if there's anything out there tangible that we can put our hands on or take a look at how how are our staff trained to they go to the sources of strength website and just whatever is on the website they call

044it a field guide i think is what shannon just said to us and so when they go to the field guide it will show them the different lessons that they could use with the kids she said it's not really lessons like it might say here's some games that kind of a thing but they have to go through a training to do it and so some of that just comes from the training um submitted then there's training time set up and so are we beyond that now um so if you go to elementary or any of them there is curriculum and there is actual uh lessons but the lessons are all social so the lessons might talk about how you feel at home how you feel the day who you feel safe with why they have

045stories that they go through i think there's one about the train i don't know it's been a while since i looked at it but there are definitely lessons this was the same the author even wrote a nice two-page letter that was given to the board based upon um my bringing it up um also what the author did yeah oh yeah and why they went directly to the state department of education and i was uh named and uh yeah it was quite the ordeal there you go the regulation railroad um the talking circle the other thing with this is that you know if you get students in a talking circle or a circle right and this is just happening in a classroom environment and you have students that have maybe not the greatest home life or

046had had something happen to them or whatever they don't want to sit in a circle and talk in front of all their peers about how they feel and what's happened to them and we could be you know not only that i have to agree it just puts the teachers or whomever in an awkward position or even the counselors i think i just see a lot of i see it being just opening a door yeah talking about it and in front of their peers it can open the door to bullying giving giving bullies ammunition against those kids i don't have a lot of problem with some of the concepts you know that are talked about to you and some of the uh activities that you might use given a teachable moment right but i think that's

047really the key to it rather than saying we're going to have a curriculum at such such time where everybody's going to do this thing i'm i'm not comfortable with that but i am comfortable using the ideas and the concepts when you have teachable moments and that's what most teachers i think end up doing i would hope you know if you have kids who have a conflict all right you're going to teach some conflict resolution by doing something with them right but other than that you're not going to spend time talking about conflict resolution i would suggest not not def by the time they get to middle school and high school they should definitely kind of have an understanding of how to do that now counselors are different counselors might bring three students together who have

048a common problem and you know and do some work with them for example or something of that sort but that's basically in a private setting it's not a classroom setting so you know those different things i think we should just bring back pe like a real pe class in recess more than no instead of walking the track have pe classes that well we had schools that took away a recess so they could get stuff done we had little kids sitting in chairs all day well that's what i'm saying though when you're when you're doing activity you get oxygen you feel better i mean there's way more benefits you feel confident just doing like the presidential fitness awards that we used to do that was in pe class you did you know you tried to do

049as many pull-ups or push-ups they're still doing that yeah but i feel like like pe classes turned in to dodgeball or go walk the track or you know not i don't know i just think that a lot of this stuff could be avoided if you made kids exercise a little bit more during the day you know not kill them or anything but you know run a mile or something that's walk a mile interesting table there you pay 25 grand yeah is that their pricing yeah we didn't pay any money it was all grant yeah so they're supposed to do training according to the author they're supposed to do training every year every school that has it is supposed to have an on-staff trainer that does the training and they're supposed to follow i mean they're

050if the whole thing was implemented there is curriculum and books and all that kind of stuff so that's never been purchased yeah it's like 3 000 materials per school well it says curriculum right on here so it's never been approved so yeah i don't even know well by the state's definition by statute it is curriculum regardless right right on their website it says curriculum no i know i heard it it's supposed to be approved so right you don't you're a troublemaker ramona i guess i guess i know all right to be in trouble trying to get to the bottom of things and when people tell me other than i already know it makes me question why you know so let's take an either or if we were to approve this program for use would we

051be obligated to do the kinds of things that are outlined here in terms of training and curriculum materials and all those costs and that sort of thing we haven't been so far so i would say the answer to that is no we haven't sought additional training so originally through the grant some of those things were paid for and i assume can you scroll back up a little bit the only thing that was paid for the grant was the training and then we didn't buy any of the materials right there and the training did that go as a one person who became the trainer of others no it was just the whole the trainer came in training the whole staff okay and then in each building there are a couple of people who have taken the

052lead uh on the implementation of sos and they um as a school they can decide what they're gonna what their focus is going to be for the year okay now you mentioned for example we have at least one elementary school that has not embraced it because of whatever reason but if they were to want to do that at this point what would that entail training training this company yeah so we would have to that's that's the problem is curriculum is comprised of 12 units containing several lessons each okay there's that nice sel that you were talking about here yeah historic practices mindfulness that their their the way they're using seo is different than the way we use right yeah that's okay but if we want to do character dealing we should call it that character

053building we're gonna teach you you know make sure that everybody says you know oh excuse me or you know don't all bombard for the door right because we are obligated by statues to teach morals right so yes that is right but this is not that it can be but it's not only that and that's my concern and there's nothing we've done a lot of things over the years i know you know teaching good character traits you know teaching matters teaching teaching the six pillars trustworthiness which is appropriate once again particularly when you have teachable moments but you know for example i can remember going by spare lake elementary and they have all these signs you know around the building and then what you're supposed to do to behave yourself probably well when we're teaching character

054especially at the elementary level they'll pick a trailer to focus on for the whole month yeah and they'll then they'll so they'll talk about it at the beginning of the month and then the kids get to practice it for a month when they they get commended when they're actually utilizing or showing demonstrating that character and that's not necessary thank you in the classroom as you uh yeah pass quietly from one location to another and so on so far you know i mean those those are the things we've always done eight hours people have tried to put structure to it i guess in a way that they can make money that's the way i see it okay so do we need to continue um discussing any more about sources of strength okay i do not i

055don't have anything okay let's do it um and because this is a workshop there's no action being taken on it tonight so um let's move on to the second step elementary guidance curriculum and we do have those materials there here [Applause] jesus i do have a question on this um what we received here it has units one two three and four for each grade k through five but we also have a child protection unit grade five but we don't have that unit over here so that's a separate thing that second step that's how heather explained it to me and they treat that differently because that's the notification that's that notification a month in advance to tell parents they're going to do that child protection unit so i think it's in addition to an additional piece

056of that okay that's how i was just okay and i'm are there any other units that aren't targeted there could be we that's just not what we use okay that's all we use is the program itself and then the protection okay second step could have it we just don't use it okay or we haven't purchased it okay gotcha this is my understanding okay [Applause] so i thought we changed the whole um idea that um well this is the first time we're seeing this but i thought everything within the district was supposed to they had to make a choice opt in or opt out like if we got away from the whole opt-out only thing didn't we do that last year i think with just some policies we but we haven't changed i don't think we've

057changed we haven't touched everything i suppose so okay um so we for example we did talk about like with the um the sex head which is we've always done it's definitely an opt-in but where we haven't been doing it consistently was in the high school health class because it's part of their high school health standards and at that level we have not had we haven't had parents opting into that particular unit which we discussed in policy and we changed right but i think though when we discussed it because even when we went through the whole video thing it was would they either opt in or they opt out it's not just one because if it's if it's just an oversight if we didn't have a permission slip saying you got to participate you didn't participate

058that's was how we were how we were doing it so right but when it's an opt out if you don't have the permission slip to opt out then the assumption is they're opting in this is not an opt-out this is truly for at least for the sex ed it's an opt-in without a permission slip from me saying that my daughter could participate in that she wasn't allowed to watch the video right but we don't have that same here so we send out the letter an invite in it it's a month in advance and um is that is this the one and then parents are invited to come which several do and they've even been several have come and watched the actual lesson and if parents want to opt out they 100 can and to my

059heather said um only i think there's single digits that actually have i mean probably under five once they see the lesson but that is the child protection unit is the one that they alert parents and invite them in okay but the rest of the second step curriculum is separate from that and there isn't necessarily a letter that goes out other than the counselors corner kind of the newsletters of what they're talking about and they kind of give just like the teachers do this is what we're covering in our lessons for the of that week okay i thought so we need to bring that before the board because i thought you decided that everything's off in or out there's no because the thing is is that parents don't see it all so we don't have kindergarten

060here oh here's some sources of student books oh they actually printed the field here's the element elementary this right curriculum is this is the kindergarten one right here oh okay yeah oh i just saw this great thing in there oh and it looks like there's some posters there's different yeah there's only fourth and fifth grade in here in that box looks like the whole thing is here here's second and third grade she told me she didn't mix it all i want to see what this one is oh see and here's the other thing is that the you know when it comes with the resource material we don't know what's on that either like electronic or download oh they can go online it looks like i can get stuff and do training online right um okay

061thank you you didn't have to do that we can't which one they're the child protection books they're saying right on time oh you're amazing [Applause] there's there's posters and songs mp3 songs to stream there's a bunch there is another song that i really don't like oh a no-no song and there's a bunch of pdfs too it looks like and then there's a bunch of download material um just keeping in line with what bob said how much time is taken out of elementary uh academics for implementing second steps uh 30 minute once a week only on invite only it's not a mandatory okay and by only being invite into the classroom from the teacher i mean most of them do it and often stay in there because but uh some teachers depending on their schedule it's

06220 minutes sometimes so it's really and just to um i just want to clarify a lot of what we're teaching through second step actually is aligned with the health standards for the grade levels so it's it also is kind of their health time okay together [Applause] so we've been teaching these concepts through our counselors since i taught first grade and so you those of you who had kids who went through the system you might remember care cat counselors used to have a little kitty cat puppet called fair cat and that's how they were that's how they delivered their lessons and it truly has been 31 years that we've been uh teaching these health concepts okay in uh counselor and teacher together there is one in there i just chose not to test it because pull

063it out that's interesting because they state that uh they don't feel it's appropriate to use anatomical words in reference to body parts but yet one of the lessons says to well let me identify your body parts and name it but if you read the second sentence of that paragraph any reference to anatomy as explained as private body parts anything your swimsuit would cover even if curriculum at times uses more descriptive language so the curriculum says it but the teachers don't use those words they use other words right but what i'm saying is on this particular assignment there's a there's a body and it says name your body parts and list them off over here so hopefully we're not using that yeah maybe we're not using that lesson because of this that's your handle arms and

064legs yeah that's all i see feet feet and hands we could have a tummy we could have a tummy to draw eyeballs on [Applause] is it goes back to the societal issues that end up on the place of teachers yeah it's just the scenarios i mean the scenario stated i just which one is it oh it just it's just amazing it's not a curfew thing oh do [Applause] uh oh yeah oh no i don't think that's just a you thing okay i'm gonna read it out loud please do scenarios pretend this is your dad's friend your dad's friend trying to touch your private body parts when you're in the bathtub he tells you it's a secret here's another scenario we'll pretend an older kid touching your private body parts in the changing room after soccer

065soccer practice the older kid tells you not to tell your older cousin he likes you to sit on his lap he rubs his private body parts on yours and tells you not to tell a friend of the family who babysits you every week he gives you a toy when you let him touch your private body parts he tells you not to tell anyone one of your favorite adults at school touching your private body parts when you're lying down in the nurse's office the person tells you not to tell today you learned another rule let's say it together never keep secrets about touching and then goes on if someone tries to touch you and tells you to keep it a secret who should you report it to have you know adult mom teacher blah blah blah

066so this is second grade [Applause] while i don't disagree with the scenario talking to your children about it i don't know that that's great for a classroom setting and i would i mean especially you know i keep thinking about all of this happening in groups you know where all your friends are there and you know teach i mean i just how awkward would that be you know um that was the issue that was in the newspaper there was a little girl i can't remember now was last year one of the school districts but something like this happened i can't remember what it was but it it you know triggered a little girl that was in the i think it was a classroom setting i can't remember now darn it but yeah i think that's quite

067a lot for second grade now this other one i was looking at it was well and that's you know that that makes me concerned too because four imagine a kiddo who hasn't come forward and told a parent and all of a sudden they're having to you know to pretend or imagine this happening and it does trigger sure mom could have opted out but maybe mom doesn't know right that her kiddo has gone through something like that right to opt her out of the class now this one about make sure you you know we don't play with guns we don't play with fire make sure you wear your helmet when you ride a bike all those kinds of things but i think those conversations well i mean i would hope that parents in this day and

068age are having that conversation and i know a lot of them are not right i get that but i don't know that the school is a place to have that i don't know either way i think that that's definitely something that parents should be aware of to you know to know that they're and like you said they do send home a letter and and the parent can come and opt out if they don't want their child to participate um or opt-in right right right also they give the same lessons in uh kindergarten also okay a lot of well they're using the puppets still the puppy puppet all of these are done i guess with the puppy puppet um yeah so they're teaching here you know a hug if they're supposed to tell whether it's safe

069or unsafe a hug is safe kick is unsafe pinch unsafe handshake safe push unsafe slap unsafe holding hands safe safe touches help you feel loved and cared for unsafe unsafe touches hurt your body you need to refuse unsafe touches so this is with a puppy and a snail here puppy and snail with a story about using the ways to stay safe and remembering the touching role uh snail and i were staying at our neighbor's house last weekend he had a good friend or he's a good friend of our family who babysits us sometimes he's a lot of fun to play with and snail says with his head down but being at his house last night wasn't so fun puppy sounding sad says yeah the games he wanted to play were not fun snail while he

070was giving us a bath before bed he said we were going to play a touching game teacher hmm what kind of touching game snail he touched puppy's private body parts teacher to students recognize is it okay for the man to touch puppy's private body parts and then in parentheses no it breaks the touching rule if you agree put your thumbs up to puppy what happened next puppy i was very uncomfortable i knew he was breaking the touching rule snail so puppy and i were assertive we said no at the same time puppy then i said don't touch me those parts of my body are private snail he stopped touching puppy but then he said we'd better keep it a secret or else he wouldn't take us to the park anymore so this isn't as extensive

071as the second grade but this is first grade teacher to students do you think it's okay to keep a secret about someone breaking the touching rule no in premises the rule is never keep secrets about touching snail puppy what did you do puppy i told my mom she said thank you for telling me puppy it's not okay for him to touch your private body parts i won't let him babysit you again teacher thanks for telling us your story i'm glad you reported to your mom it's important never to keep secrets about touching but it's never too late to report so that's not as expensive as the second grade i just know but there's a second one the letter uh is an informational letter it doesn't say anything about opting in if we're going to keep

072this part of the program in place i would recommend that we change that letter so parents opt their kids in not off to them yeah okay and then that's in line with the success yeah i don't know i i just don't know how i'm not sure how comfortable some teachers would be using some of that right this is apparently not coming from teachers it's only coming from counselors is that correct and the counselors have been teaching safe touch since i taught first rate um the scenarios are a little bit more explicit than um but we but we've always talked about your private body parts or the parts that are covered by your bathing suit and nobody has permission to touch your body parts um i think they go off script a little bit and not

073use it they don't go into great detail i have been present for several of these k-8 up and they don't they don't go into detail they also don't try to call out they just really talk about it and with not an open discussion per se there's not a lot of you know back and forth it's just really like because not to have kids be pulled into i have to have a conversation about this but more of just uh you know you need to be mindful of this and again there have been several parents that have set in on it and then after they do it they're like okay i feel better about this but i've seen it at betty keefe i've seen it at garwood and i've seen in that twin and it's pretty much

074the same across the board so and when i was principal in the five years i was principal we had i had two girls who after these lessons disclosed privately to the counselor that that was happening to her and so the parents were called in and they obviously were not aware so it can be helpful to kids i think it empowers them to know that the right thing to do is to tell somebody that's the entire point of the lessons um we could certainly ask our elementary counselors to look at those scenarios the scenarios in particular and maybe uh rewrite them so that they actually mimic what's being done in the classroom instead of having this language out there if that was something the board was interested in i think that would be appropriate well i

075am curious though because i mean we have the mou with kootenai health because we don't have counselors in every building well then why do we have the kootenai health mmu we have school counselors in every building okay not mental health counselors in every building so our school counselors are not trained mental health therapists okay a little bit there is there is a difference they're counseling their counseling is specific to helping kids work through issues they're having to access their learning and when it becomes more than just that then there then there's a conversation with the parents and maybe a recommendation for a referral for outside counseling okay and that outside outside counseling can happen within the school right with them yeah so then do we have kootenay health at every single school uh do you

076mean heritage health or yeah um no so um thank you the therapist that's where we ran into problems that's why we looked at lake city because i want to say it's ethel there's two sites that don't because they just don't they can't the two facilities can't find therapists so at one point we did and then the turnover you know across the nation is happening and so that's why we looked at trying to come up with another okay facility to support because they're trying to find therapists but at one point we did but um and i guess it's they share buildings so it's not one but every building we try to get every building covered but as of late that hasn't happened because there's just not enough therapists out there right why don't we just refer

077these families outside i mean why is that happening in the school you know when these kids are pulled out of classrooms or away from their peers no matter what it's for whether it's for reading or you know counseling or whatever you know the kids around them notice that you know and it does mark them you know and i don't understand where the schools became mental health facilities you know why we're even doing that i mean it's yeah i don't disagree with what you're suggesting on the other hand i think my understanding is that you know if a student is having so much so many issues with so much trauma or whatever the situation might be that is truly inhibiting his ability to function in school sure then this is an alternative that we turn to

078in order to try to curve that back to a situation where he can function properly in school oh yeah and i don't disagree with that i just don't know the question is why why is it happening in school right well there are probably a variety of reasons yeah because now we have all i won't say all but now you've just introduced this mix in into the rest i just don't know how much disruption or you know uneven flow is happening with all these students especially when we heard that now we've identified so many students that there's this waiting list they can't even fill which is even more concerning to me like why do we have all these students who need not just counseling but you know the behavioral health uh uh you know kootenai behavioral

079health i don't know it's just the answer to that is society yeah yeah in all honesty the changes in society have brought about that kind of behavior difficulty right than younger kids right right yeah no and i i absolutely agree i think social media and all kinds of things have played into that and caused more anxiety and stress and anything then you know but um i would just say as far as where you said marking kids our kids are moving from classroom to classroom so often anymore that nobody nobody really knows where anybody's going because our teachers are flexing their kids are grouping they go to different teachers all the time the one thing that having the heritage health in the buildings does help us with one for our families who are low socioeconomic status

080who struggle with just getting getting someone there um it allows for that and then we've also found that for those kids who are going to even if we didn't have it and they were going to continue to go to counseling they're missing less instructional time because we don't have the transportation to you know picking two kids up a half hour before the appointment so they can take them to the appointment and a half hour back and we absolutely have those kids that are you know leaving wednesday at one because of but and i don't know if i'm accurate this is what i was told um this started from parents asking so parents would come and say i'm struggling my kid needs his stuff i'm struggling and with us not having mental therap you know health

081therapists and our counselors being school counselors and so then heritage health kind of started and was willing to help out parents and come to the school site like it i mean the kids were always there it was just this was a way to help those families not necessarily orchestrated by the school but again i wasn't a part of any of those conversations but that's my understanding is this was more about am i a parent i imagine parents that don't have the privilege to be able to leave work to take come pick up kiddo from school take a grandchild yeah don't just don't have the ability to do that to transport kiddo you know during the week right when heritage health would be open or any other counseling service business hours yeah there are some trade-offs

082there in that regard and i always kind of go back to the to the crux of thing if if we can assist in ways that helps the student become better prepared to work in school then okay if we're doing it for some other reason then we ought not be doing it because it should focus on whether or not we're helping the kid function properly in school so we stay with the court of the program it's it's really no i don't know it's offering mental health therapy which is different but as far as the concept and why it's at the school um we have orthodontic orthodontists who bring their mobile orthodontic right unit to the school um to take care of the kids racist tightening on campus and parents sign off and allow them to do

083that so see and that's an instance where i would say okay that's fine after school i would not accept doing that during school time well if we don't if we don't allow that the parents are coming and picking them up and they're missing instructional time it's a different world mr jones constantly but you know i just go back to my original premise and that is that if tightening a kid's braces helps him function better in school okay but i don't see how that would happen now there's a wire [Laughter] and they're not paying attention because this hurts and i can't focus on what i'm supposed to be learning because it's hurt you just clip it off it just hurts yeah the concept is called community school and the concept was sort of around but actually

084pushed as um a uh platform uh during the uh federal administration uh prior to the last one we just had so that would have been during the obama biden years and the idea was that everything happens at the school mental health happens health happens dental happen everything that the school becomes the family unit and the child relies more on this this the school becomes their their hub their family hub and the family and the parent is sort of pushed off um and i mean anybody can look it up and read about it and that's what we've watched happen little by little by little by little yeah exactly um and that that's my i mean it is what it is and that's part of my concern is that you know when are we going to be

085focused like you're saying orthodontics thing i think is cool that's great i remember when i was a kid the dentist would come and we'd all chew the orange or red tails right so you could learn you're not rushing right all those kind of things like i'd get all that but i would have to agree with you too that our society has become so much dependent upon the school and how much time are they losing and i know they're picking up the kid and leaving but the kids still leaving you know i mean i think we have to draw a line somewhere to say we're going to do this and we're going to yeah we can't do all things for all folks right we always can't do that and and then suffer with the criticism of

086what i can't join and read right right yeah exactly i remember so one of my kids had problems and the counselor called me and i took him to the doctor why why is that why are they going there yeah well if it's that important right then you take you stop what you're doing you get off work and go take your kid to the emergency room and or kidney health or whatever and then they get a they get a look at it and they go i don't belong there and get a little scared and go back to school it still happens that still happens yeah okay yeah not all parents come yeah and they're ready to be beat then yeah exactly they need they need counseling we do have those students too in the district that

087are living with family members or grandparents or you know trying to so i i do know that but i think i guess another question i have is that that's sort of those scenarios like i just mentioned have been elevated to the norm and i'm just not convinced by the census or any other thing we see happening in our community anymore that that is the norm it may have been the norm once upon a time but i mean we've even losing title status of our schools i mean the the median income in our little area has skyrocket i mean i don't think that's the norm and i think we've lived under that being the norm so long that we still function that way i mean i read online some of the teacher sites where they can

088go and ask to fund a project or whatever and almost every one of them it makes me want to cry start out with how they are teaching at this rural impoverished school where you know blah blah blah i mean it's just not true anymore it's just not true about our our community anymore um so i think that's another thing we really need to understand is that is that our norm still you know because it i don't i don't think it is well we always bend to the fuel that's the problem you know the like like the the school thing that we discussed earlier the reach we we cater to a small group of people you just don't do that you don't just because you want something doesn't mean everybody else has to pay for it

089yeah you know right right one one other thing then i'll lay this aside but here's another and this this lesson isn't necessarily bad um of course it's another private body part thing but the thing it here's what the stadium says so first a big person should never it says who is an example of a bigger person that says mom dad teacher my big sister uncle babysitter but then down here it says a bigger person um it goes into you know how to identify a bigger person and then it says you know should never touch your body parts except to keep you healthy so i don't know that that's yeah i saw a little conflict yeah yeah anyways i just think that parents my thing is this is that i just think the parents need to

090be aware and if the parents sign off on it fine yeah i mean they're not my children right i can't make that decision and that's not what i try to do but i i am very much for the parent being aware sign the form you sign the form right and then if the parent comes to us and says hey my kid learned this or came home and told me about this right right but we never um you know sent the form then you know shame on us kind of thing and then if we do have the parents like we've had lately um emailing or what have you to you know uh voice their opposition to a certain thing or what have you i think we do need to pay attention to that and not try

091and um explain it away to them you know or cause them to understand because you know the professionals think that this is the way it should be because once again the bottom line is it's not our kids you know it's their children that they entrust in the district's care every day um and i think most people see it as a safe place to be right is school no yeah that's the intent right this would be a safe place right so outside of the personal like personal body safety is there anything in this program that causes you any stress or anxiety because the rest of these lessons that i'm looking at a line with the health standards [Applause] i don't know i mean i'd have to go through and read everything but anything off of um

092i guess i didn't how did i miss that the feelings and the based on the outline i don't i don't have any real heartburn but you know that's without looking at the specifics of what might actually be discussed and if we continue to approach these topics uh as a part of the health curriculum you know i find that inappropriate well the parents have access to the curriculum and they sign off on it and we have policy that says if there's any lesson in here that a parent doesn't want their kids to participate in they just they can opt them out and we can find an alternative lesson for them so that that's always there also yeah i didn't see that in that but we had the parents who had raised the concern about um safe

093touch being the doctor got a shot from the doctor yeah but i didn't see that in there so i mean there's all kinds of things i don't know that they i think what they were saying because i think it it actually was based on what you just read aloud that um a big person can touch your private body parts if they're keeping you healthy and and the doctor was an example of somebody who might have to do that and the parent was didn't feel like that was appropriate because she didn't feel like she would want a doctor touching her five-year-old daughter or whatever so she that that was what she was raising was she talked about specifically about vaccinations vaccines oh yeah and then a shot from the doctor is a is a safe touch

094and in their family it's not because they don't believe in vaccinations so that was a that was a different that was difficult okay so you know we that's the thing is i don't know you know i mean there's just so much right you can't read every little thing you can't know every little thing i mean i don't know that the parents can either you know um so they certainly though could come in and read through the teacher's edition right to kind of scan the lessons and see if there's anything that's this will all be available we'll send out a skyler and this will be available for 30 days and then they can we even talked about at the beginning of every year specifically to what the counselors use and health standards sending that out of

095just like hey please come to you because it's new people are coming in just not knowing that piece like they know what their teachers are using but and so that it's just some awareness specific to that and understand what the standards are and how we compare to the or how we're right how we're teaching so it's just an annual thing we kind of send out a please come view so not only do they have this but then at the school side they have the same but oh yeah it's kind of again i was like this is this are these my back feels right your back yes i don't know that they're any better for me i'll just have to bring it start bringing a pillow no because our meetings aren't as long anymore so we

096don't need to worry about it well do we need to continue talking about second step because we do we need to move on to i think i think i'm good yes i do think that parents need like notice like you're saying but i think it needs to be more than just the sky alert or whatever it means to be i think we need this type of thing needs to be in my opinion out there so everybody's aware because they're just not aware or they don't understand what's going on when you raise that question i um i i was i did some thinking and suggested to michelle that um because we're going to do those quarterly flyers home that um at the end of the school year we highlight the budget workshop date is this date

097and it's from this time to this time and this is an opportunity for patrons to interact with the board and get and ask questions about the budget and the curriculum workshop is on this date so if we could schedule those prior to the end of the school year and that will go out to every single home in the district yeah i don't see i mean those are things that have to be done on an annual basis anyway so i don't know why we couldn't just pick a date and say this is when it happens and then everybody sort of knows you know we can make that right but that's a big part of the flow that's a great plan yeah so it i already actually have put it on we have a kind of an

098ongoing document that we're using and under the fourth quarter newsletter home that's those are the top two bullets so cool good perfect and i think that's what a lot of it is it's just a matter of communicating you know with making them aware right with the community you know yeah not just the parents but everybody because everybody talks about schools now you know nobody used to pay attention to half of it but they do now i shouldn't say nobody because there were people in years gone by that did come look at the curriculum raise concern so are we good to move on to i ready i am okay so in front of you and i can pull some of the books but i've mixed them in because i needed the so that they would be

099there i gave you a list of everything that was flagged this is a list of the stories and so if you clicked on those links you actually got to see the story and the books are here but this is a list of the things that were specifically flagged um and then why they were fact and the comments because like there's two books that there's probably there's a lot of things marked and it was done by one person and so um i just wanted you to see all of them so that you can kind of see and we did the other thing i gave you is what our curriculum review process was and so everybody that asked to participate we gave them three different colors and said mark them based on that and please read every

100single box letter word story everything i did alert i ready that we were doing this and they have come back for grades three four and five and changed several of the stories i would have had those for you but i didn't get them until yesterday and then i didn't get back until last night so i did check several of the stories and several of them have been changed at this point there's probably only three i would recommend that we just no go there they're not good stories we don't have them the other ones it could be a parent notification kind of thing um but i just wanted you guys to see what people wrote and then um and then you had a copy of all of the stories and we can absolutely pull some of

101the books so you can look at the stories in real life what what is the color coding so color uh bright pink was crp the orange was sexual or inappropriate content and then blue was just overall concerns so like if you look at the top there's there's a couple of first grade books that are just accompanying kind of mentor text to go with first grade and there were some discussions like with earthworms and with butterflies and moths and it talks about mating and so the mom that read it she said i don't you know i don't know that'd be appropriate for first grade but some other people would feel like it's fine so we just marked it as a you know that could be there's a story that was highlighted because it talks about reality

102um uh like social media stuff nothing bad but it just talks about it and so you know we tried to just really be critical of it could somebody else see this differently so and you know i reached out to everybody that's on on the curriculum committee and then parents that i spoke to just on the side i asked them to participate so i tried to get as many people as i could to read the material i just want to say this to both you and lisa i really appreciate all the work and all the time and all the effort of all this very very much so so i know it was a lot and everybody that helped i know it just doesn't pop together and it is adding to your already long day so thank

103you it wasn't really i feel like this was a really good process and that lynn put together uh one i think it it sends the message to the parents that we do really value your feedback and we're interested in what you think and we don't want to make these decisions in a vacuum right and um so i also really appreciate the time that people put into reading these materials and writing them absolutely absolutely um and they read everything like from cover to cover even little just little boxes that had you know teacher note kind of a thing because there were definitely comments so um and this may be a process that we are going to need to use moving forward as we're adopting new textbooks because as we've talked about before we're never going to

104be able to adopt a textbook that doesn't have elements of crt or some of these other things that we're trying not unless you'll find discarded materials right something that was written prior to 2020. um so it would be helpful once we identified a program that we were going to adopt to kind of go through the same process and have parents help us identify if there are things within that textbook that we either want parents to opt into or that as a district we just say this isn't appropriate we're not going to use it did you happen to read any of these marked things did you read the butterfly one i did that's um [Applause] depending on the tone you used when you read it it seems kind of ironic i mean that's like whoa it's

105for first grade so i can read it too ready no um what was orange again orange is uh gorgeous inappropriate developmentally inappropriate and i gave you ramona i gave you a copy of this that has the color coding on there so okay i know i gave you guys lots of papers but i just wanted just so you know the naomi's two which is the start of the fourth grade one it's right here that story was removed it was marked and it's been completely removed and i double checked in the new reading manual it's no longer there they completely took it out okay um because we aren't the only district that right right has been raising some concerns and this textbook company has at least been responsive to those and i have i mean i feel

106like i'm on a texting basis with the main person and so i've just been really transparent and so have some of the other districts and i just so they knew we were going through this process and i said you know even if it's just for us you know we're literally going to rip some of these stories out if they're not fixed so um the one story that i think is really inappropriate that i would say i would love for us to just say no go on is the last shot and the parents said omg sexual there's a reference of and it sounds like it's kind of just trash talking between two kids in a basketball game but it's highly it's really inappropriate um so that to me would be a it's not even a pairing

107off it's just no we're not doing it okay it's just a short little paragraph but it's super inappropriate um which one is it it's a naomi's two i'm sorry it's the last shot the last challenge naomi's two was removed the last shot i would say no i mean again i know it's not my decision but it's not appropriate um the other one so the entire grade five the whole unit five which is all of the um kind of slavery unit they've revamped all of the stories the one that everybody was really concerned about was resisting slavery and they've made some significant changes i just haven't had a chance to do word by word yet because i just kind of asked about that um so that would be another one if it's not and i just

108again haven't had a chance i started it and but i didn't get them until i didn't get until today because they didn't come until yesterday um because i asked her to send me if you have new books i would like to see them and i'd actually like the parents then to read those three new books because you know i mean i know some of them are the same and they highlighted what was changed but you really do need to say word by word um but specifically in this story what they took out is where it specifically says white people and it said that probably four or five times they took that like that verbiage out but i haven't been able to word by word yet so that would be another one that i think we

109say no unless it has changed radically is that the one that was part of it was posted online yeah yeah so that one definitely needed change yeah what's the name of that one doctor um it is resisting slavery and i again i will read it line by line and i can always just bring that excerpt when we have it the next time we meet but wow they really wanted to emphasize that didn't they fifth grade liberty and justice not all caps okay but that is so the new book they um they've changed multiple stories in that entire unit five so it's seven or eight or nine stories they've changed i just haven't had a chance to find this one i want to see what it is but i'm not it says fifth grade most companies

110do they change stuff like this or they just say here you get what you get and don't throw a fit and that's what initially when i told them um you know they're like well we do washington montana and i just said well i'm just telling you we may not adopt it because the entire state of idaho is not supposed to be doing crt so um if there are stories we will flag them and remove them and they have been really responsive like i have just i mean i again have been super communicative about the concerns and so and she was super interested in the stories that we flagged so i communicated to them these are all and the one story that ended up on social media i sent that to her like how is this

111not like yeah you know so so they have been really responsive but that's not normal i mean i i don't anticipate that several of those science companies when we do a science adoption are going to be that accommodating right right we could be wrong i could be wrong but i don't anticipate that that's not normal the brain or the last shot is a poem and yes it needs to be cold oh yeah that's right horrid i think is that the one that just worse than the kite runner um i should have read that out uh that one this one i haven't read the kite runner but this one i read it and i got through two lines and i was like i feel icky and you take a shower and it's a fourth grade story

112yeah yeah look at this please don't read them out loud there but people watching don't know what it says oh this is true what's what about this one on the hypocrisy of american slavery have you looked at that it's four or five it's the last one um i read i didn't read through all of it um the feedback was that it's fine but it is from their point of view mcnasty yeah the problem i have you know everybody's prepared to acknowledge that we had slavery and it's not a good thing but the piece of that that seems to me always left out it wasn't only you know slavery in the south it was an issue long before white man ever came to this country there were slaves the indians used to sell slaves back and

113forth from one tribe to another for eons that rarely ever gets talked about and what the meaning of that was for example and how that fits into the irish yep are you reading the last shot oh yeah that's terrible i read it and because i didn't see it before and so whenever i was like oh i just i can't even page two is ridiculous yeah i mean that is definitely so i wouldn't even want high school kids to read that well i mean yeah what i guess the thing is what educational that's what we ask yeah what are we learning right now what is the author saying it's like let's not go there as a teacher i wouldn't touch that with a tenfold no and then if it's in the book and the book goes

114home and the parents are like what or you have a new teacher who thinks that they need to just turn the page and teach everything that's in the book yeah so but the nice thing about these books is that they are consumable and it's really easy to use a you know a box cutter or whatever and slice out the pages we don't want them to have access to and i in my mind you know if we move forward with this uh that's part of the you know first staffing feedback please remove this story take the story out yeah that's intense the other i mean i guess in lisa and i haven't really talked about this but i just think it back to the transparency piece when we get to those units like the fifth grade

115one the whole slavery unit it's like nine eight or nine stories there no reason why you can't just do a parent notification of that we're going to be entering into this parents can come view it you know just to make sure that people are feeling comfortable about it i mean i don't mind like the earthworm story i just don't know if it's appropriate for first grade i mean it's not a bad story i'm learning a few things about worms but great water the lawn really well i don't wish to do that but i'm reading about it in the book they're right there yeah this there's a whole bunch of stuff here on what see appears to be climate change issues and there are a lot of interesting comments what's your take on that um i

116don't i don't know um i mean i read several of those and i just you know from a teaching standpoint i feel like you're gonna you're gonna talk about the science side of it and you're gonna give all the options um i don't necessarily know that kids have enough background to hear an agenda of some kind like the teacher is just going to present it as you know there's water pollution they're not going to get into the minutia of what political party you're on and those kinds of things um some of these stories it just talks about it and so i don't know that kids or a teacher will read it through that one just reading the comments it sounds like the you know the rains are themselves slanted from this person's perspective they are

117yeah and you know did that come through to an extent that you know maybe we're doing a little bit of indoctrination type stuff from this person's perspective i would say he would say that is this mostly from one person that's all for one person oh okay there was only one person that read fifth grade okay so the naomi's two has been pulled correct yep it's been removed i would still double check that though with the new book she sent me it is it's not in there but i'm terrified were there any other stories that were pulled that had been flagged that you're aware of um i have this um no that's the only one that was completely just they've removed the entire passage and then they made edits to the entire racial history uh for

118grade three unit four and then the whole grade five unit five so they didn't pull any stories but they did a re-edit for grade 3 and grade 5. okay so yeah the the liberty and justice not for all so which one unified yeah unit 5 liberty and justice not for all is definitely uh crt project 1619 i mean it's all woven right in the first number one and number two to begin with the u.s constitution did it name white people or men only and it states that it does that specifically says that um yeah we can't teach that it's not that's part of what was changed though so we now we now our work is to go in and see what what the news stories look like and if they've been sufficiently changed so the

119ones that are in bright pink or whatever that is yeah which is crt indicative of some crt elements are we excluding those are including those or we just need to fight are we i'm sorry but i didn't mean to cut yeah they just weren't sure if the story was could be a concern i mean i asked everybody to be really critical through those that lens and so they marked it so it so there looks like four where whoever read those said they didn't have a comment they just weren't quite sure that there wasn't crt in it so it wasn't so blatantly obvious to that person that they were able to identify what it was but they they weren't sure in kind of our review process what again we can change this but what we talked

120about is for a level one we would say this is a parent notification it's just gonna go out prior to that lesson being taught level two would be an opt-in or an opt-out whichever and then a level three would be a complete removal so that we had a varying kind of okay but i mean remember only one or two people have read i mean i try i we did all of the math we did all of the reading we did all of the writing so this is not a proportionate amount of it's one or two people reading like one person read the entire fifth grade reading or reading math and writing you know one or two people read third grade so i didn't have enough volunteers to have 10 people read each of them so

121this is reflective of a couple of opinions so but i i would assume that yeah those that are flagged for one reason or another you go back and take a second i am and i can't find any of this and it's driving me nuts what are you looking for um the social poet um diego rivera keeping the music alive all these i cannot find it well they might have been they might have changed the stories you might have the new book is that the flag book or is it the does it have any stickies no it was just late so you have the new you have the new one okay so the new one still has the new one hasn't the justice for all story in it well you should you have the other fifth

122grade one with all oh there's the music alive okay so where which way do i go for music i don't have any books no no you don't have it no oh you have the teacher's edition so where's the fifth grade one um did they come back did we it had a lot of sticky notes oh here it is okay diego rivera someone borrowed it to look at it okay i'm getting there they're they're um so you have the table of contents just a sticky one that's interesting because the comment is revolutionary who is dia rivera and it states uh during the great depression many american artists were commissioned to paint murals in public buildings i think they knew the answer to the question that's why they asked some famous muralists from mexico perhaps the most

123famous mexican muralist of all was diego rivera so it says who he is in the story i mean i don't understand what that well there's more to the story and it does talk about him being a revolutionary um it was a great story jeremy teller according to the story so what did you say about this bye okay well it says he often painted revolutionary events and leaders who were fighting to change things in mexico so people there would have more rights and freedom but that's not true he left he loved to go to europe to learn how things and then he went back to europe after the fighting was done he was a dodger well that's my whole point and the story is that it's an accurate yeah and he was a revolutionary but he

124was a communist revolutionary socialist story doesn't mention that nope i know i think that's the point i think that's why i think when they wrote revolutionary who is diego rivera first i thought what do you mean you don't know who diover rivera is but i i think i get the question was more a rhetorical kind of thing is they i think they knew the answer that's why they brought it out but i don't know the on the social poet social hard work is social that says hard-working quote immigrants did he fought and died for workers rights he didn't so it's about woody guthrie well i mean one thing see i need a new one i i changed my lanyard so the safety conference that we went to it's very interesting that's uh that's not a

125safety first lanyard it doesn't have a breakaway so you could hang yourself with that it's not osha approved you're supposed to have a breakaway in case you catch your neck comes on it'll break away you're catching it on the table and you did it at the entire time so maybe i need another new lanyard because this one is it's not quite long enough my other one like dangles down on my knees it's really annoying i need to get you a pretty one oh pretty much specifically some turkey just really just for you just meats rebecca got it for you to get the turkey and i i mean this is just from a noobs perspective i know typically from grade to grade to grade you build on what you've been taught so i mean respectfully this

126story is at is this at fifth grade okay so it's not going to be every detail about this person but is the is the is the focus more so that you know even what they're providing may not be accurate or is it because they're i mean to give a dissertation of his life it's going to be a book i would think but maybe that's just my i don't know so this is reading and right the way that the standards are written like this this what they're reading about in first grade they don't build on those topics in second grade it's truly just first grade appropriate stories that they practice making inferences looking for details to support their their answers citing text evidence and the standards that are for the grade level so right but on

127our like history components that you learn in reading you're going to build on those i mean you don't not diego rivera because he he's in fifth grade it's u.s history and it's mostly we get through like the early we're lucky to get through the civil war okay by the end of the year so um these are just historic this one is a story about a painter and there's some history tied to it i while i was listening to you guys talking i just was thinking like this textbook really embodies what's going on in our country right now um because prior to 2020 we read stories like charlotte's web with our readers and um on top of spaghetti in our first grade book and yeah you know where down by the bay and some of those

128kinds of fun things and so this is i'm having a hard time with this just because i feel like there's no way to get away from the little jabs politics that are going on in our country um i don't i just i don't know where to go with this like i said write your own she's a doctor like your own curriculum yeah they have the same degrees as all the teachers in the district so our teachers would tell you they didn't go to school to learn how to write curriculum so they don't want to do that that's what there is that's a job title yeah yeah in college you know yeah there's amazing there's a master's in curriculum so this is i just want you to know i know that this is not gonna be

129it's just not an easy decision because right if we don't if if if we don't go with this program any other program that we look at moving forward we're going to be dealing with the same issues so how do we how do we well yeah uh i well i think we have to broaden our scope of looking i mean like we all have time to do that right um but i think like you're saying more of a classical perspective and i don't mean classical in the sense that some people use the term to go back to the classics kind of thing but more of a classical uh wholesome approach right right and they are out there they they do exist um i yeah i would tell you the best breeding program we've ever had in

130the district was the hope the first time we adopted houghton mifflin reading when i was still teaching in first grade the the text that our kids read it was a rich text written by real authors um and it worked it was books that they could go into the library pull off the shelf and so they had little snippets experts from okay um some little snippets from charlotte's web or little house on the prairie or um some of that that doesn't exist anymore now we're writing stories to try to hit home whatever the agenda is and it cracks me up so do you guys know the truth behind this photograph right here it's always iconic for the dust bowl it's called the migrant mother it's the lady with the two little kids well it was found

131out years later that had nothing it became the icon of poster child yeah exactly and that but it wasn't that wasn't when a picture has nothing to do with what they but anyways the other reality for us right now is if we don't figure out how to make use of this tool um what are we doing yeah we don't necessarily have a great reading program the what we i mean we still have our textbooks that we adopted seven or eight years ago uh collections and journeys the collections was the six through twelve my journeys was the k through five all hope mifflin um our middle and high school people have been fine with their collections book our elementary teachers can't stand the journey's books um why because again they for whatever reason the pro this

132it didn't they don't have these kinds of stories where people are writing their politics into the stories but they instead of taking excerpts from quality literature and putting it in front of kids they just they've got people like like dave is saying just go write your own program so it's people who are not published authors who are writing stories for kids to practice reading but they're not necessarily interesting um they're not well written and so it's not a great tool but at least that one doesn't have all of the politics that are embedded in this one so it's not an easy answer at this point but last night i did include for you the unpopular data and my email to you so our you know if you look over i sent you all the historical

133we'll go into more detail but if you look at our historical data we continue to go down yeah in all measures which is probably due in large part to not having quality quality in the hands of our teachers well because they're being tested based upon that standard and we could be giving them a great education right and we they could be getting a quality education based upon what we knew works but being that everything has changed then the tests change it says oh no you didn't cut it you didn't meet that right because then our third graders have to type a two-page essay yeah type it they have to type it it's computerized they cannot hand write it it's they have to type it they're eight-year-old eight-year-olds who type like this well my son can't

134even write so i'm sure he's happy he said that she don't want to say it you can't write he can't write his own name and bring it out nice you know because i got rid of cursive you know we still teach it they just only do it in third grade everything remember practicing person for like hours right but when you go out into the working world nobody hand writes a report anymore well that's okay but you know to say that because of that fact we shouldn't teach kids certain basic skills it's not necessarily the truth and we are teaching them those skills but they i don't think they use them as much as they used to use them after they've learned them because you're not using them all right then when they have to write

135something out like an application or something and they don't want to do it because their handwriting is terrible and they don't have a pdf they can fill in well the other piece of that is you know kids at younger younger ages are you know have access to phones and texting and all that kind of stuff and and that's that's really detrimental to learning good writing skills because you think all kinds of shortcuts you know texting back you should see spelling texting is definitely impacting it's so pretty once again society is pushing us in a direction that we don't want to go and it shouldn't be going right we're still being pushed back i mean there's other curriculums there's you know and this could be i guess controversial too but we could always look at the

136heritage foundation which goes more and we don't have to take everything but maybe they're reading it is more of a classical kind of approach to education as far as the text and all those types of things it's more neutral i guess you'd call i mean i would think it was more neutral we wouldn't have to do this i don't think and then there might be things i was sad to see that um and he can be controversial too but dr ed hershey does the common knowledge uh curriculum and and but i think unfortunately this last year they sort of went down the slippery slope but he he has some great books and they had great curriculum too and most of it was free they would come train help you adopt everything um there is a

137couple of schools in spokane that use pieces of their stuff um and he's an educator and everything else i mean he's been around forever he's um he wrote a few good books one of them was called how to educate a citizen and i agree with a lot of what he says even though he has an odd background but um you know talking about us getting so far away from removing your hat when you say the pledge of allegiance you know the whole patriotic kind of back to our yeah no you so the the other thing um i guess just as a reminder that this is actually considered a supplemental resource because we do currently have the old adoption because where science is the next content area that we're going to adopt and then ela comes

138after that so it's just a matter of do we want this in our classrooms do we just want to stick with what we've got even though at the elementary level it's just not not great but those are our options when we get to the point where we have to make a decision do we have any teachers that have because of their dissatisfaction with the current series gone about trying to supplement with some of the more traditional stories and that sort of thing we have teachers who use novel studies and so those are the novels that you saw last year um that we have novel sets in the district so where the red red fern grows charlotte's web yeah which is great because you're putting great literature in front of kids but but what is lacking

139when if that's the only tool those are the tools you're using is how do we make sure that the teacher understands which standards they're teaching through that novel and how are they drawing those standards out are they is it just let's read i'm going to ask you some comprehension questions that's nowhere in our standards anymore the standards are about i'm going to ask you a question you need to be able to cite the text evidence to to tell me how you know that that's the answer so if we are not paying attention to the standards one of the things we talked about doing is going back and looking for they used to create back in the olden days when i was in the classroom you'd buy a set of novels and you would get a

140study guide that went along with it that the teachers could use so we talked about looking for those to provide those for the novel sets that we do have in the district to at least try to ensure that we're going down the right road because it's great that our kids are reading good literature and they're enjoying reading but we need to make sure that they're critically thinking about what they're reading and they can make inferences and they can identify the author's purpose and all those comprehension things that we're responsible for so we definitely have more teachers teaching from novels than we've ever had because of the disaster i don't think we should discourage that i've been encouraged but it's just hard for first year teachers without a study guide or a really good teacher partner

141it's really hard well yeah and we're teaching a lot and all the basic skills uh you know any primary grades but once you get to you know fourth grade enough then theoretically you know you have reasonably good readers at that point in time and you can begin to launch into some of that other stuff it's just knowing how to figuring out how to do that and staying on top of that because it's a it's work it's harder work yeah yeah absolutely listen we don't have a cake already a lot of time yeah it requires you to read it first yeah and as you're reading each chapter thinking about your standards okay and what are we going to do around the standards in this chapter it really does require a lot more intentional work on the

142part of the teacher versus getting a script essentially you know if you pull an anthology it spells out what questions to ask i mean it's it's pretty scripted for you and we have the tools i guess for a first year teacher you know the tool is the journeys textbook right now it's not great but it provides the script provides the text but even for our veteran teachers it takes time to put those units together and be thorough so if we can find the study guides that's kind of that's one of our one of the things on our list of things to do we have one of them yeah and some of the standards are so broad it's like okay what does it mean and what does it look like when the kids are right right

143yeah yeah just looking through some of them well i i think yeah i mean i know there are things out there but i don't know that they're gonna come from you know just the typical publishers because like you said they they have they're following the whatever the narrative is i don't even know what the narrative is they have to bet to be marketable in all 50 right states right and there are some states are requiring them requiring teachers to teach crt which means they've got to provide that tool for those teachers and then we've got a state like idaho where it's illegal and now we have to weed through all of that so it's going to be challenging and we are just talking about supplemental text right now not a full-blown adoption right i think

144when we get to that point we need to look at some of what you're talking about a more classical approach to what we're asking kids to read i guess the other thing i would throw out there is if we decide not to go with i ready for supplemental i would still advocate for the stand-alone assessment because otherwise we have no benchmark assessments for for reading outside of k3 we would have no measure and it's a standalone it's not tied to a story you know it's it is just testing the content standards so and we can i mean we can read all the story that you know it might have a writing prompt and there's a story attached to it but we can vet that piece but if we wouldn't have another measure for especially for

145five well in six seven and eight so um how's that work with common core because i already come to court right uh well they actually so they have common core books and then they just have content standard books so it's not pushing the same thing but the assessment is aligned just to the standards so it's our specific standards like it will name rl5 and so it's a test question specific to that standard so it's the way we ensure that the standards are being taught and it's a benchmark for us to gauge how we're doing on those specific standards i'm just saying like all that's a lot of that stuff says common core on right but now there's a new bill that says they're not going to use common core anymore well so idaho adopted the

146common core standards right and then in this just last over the last like two or three years they've had committees looking and so they um have gone in and made some changes to the standards that we've been teaching to and they've been renamed the idaho content standards but there are still a lot of standards in there that were part of the common core standards and i know common core has has gotten a lot of bad publicity but the one thing that i will tell you that it's done for us is to have some some continuity across the country with regard to what our fifth graders learning what our fourth graders learning actually does help kids because when we get kids coming into our district and we've always had a high bar so it doesn't matter

147what state they come from they're typically behind when they come to lakeland um but they used to be significantly behind simply because we weren't teaching the same standards at the same time so it is helpful to kids that there's some like we're all teaching inference and author's purpose and some of those common comprehension type strategies and uh so that has actually helped that was the intent really behind or at least one of them behind that so i don't always renamed our standards and they're the idaho content standards so they just renamed it but it's still kind of common they've made some changes to it took some things out added some things but um and these materials are aligned with those standards whereas the base curriculum is not necessarily aligned it it's a line because that

148that was published after common core standards came out so they're aligned it's just that the stories are not really well written and they're definitely not interesting for kids when are we going to adopt uh get into the position to adopt a new series um you want to know the sequence i can't remember if we had social security it was science this next year social studies and then ela so three years but that's not set in stone if the board feels like they want to tackle ela before we tackle social studies they're certainly in the series we have is eight years old no no that's definitely our social studies series is probably twice as old but that being said there's a you know part of the standards it's a non-fiction component so a lot of the

149ela is an integrated approach so that non-fiction is going to be historical for the most part for science for science yeah something to eat well i would love something to eat what so you know [Laughter] all right so um what's next on our agenda are we good with moving off of i ready we kind of seem to have a understanding that we have problems absolutely yep very much concerns okay so then oh this is our last item it is the curriculum handbook oh wait till you see this you guys are going to love it i like this color this is lynn's this is lynn's brain kind of spilling onto paper it's great i love the way her braid works it's okay to say it's a little scary no it's really good so i just you

150know it in doing policy we've talked a lot about just kind of what our quality control is and where where are we housing things and you know as we've made various documents and so i'm just trying to and this is not obviously finalized this is the first time you guys have seen it but as we have created things instead of having 20 000 different owners and it's found in one like i'm trying to contain it all in one area and so then you know in my mind at the point when we get through some of this and we know what our curriculum is and we don't have to spend so much time vetting the actual materials then we can start looking at some of these pieces and you know making tweaks and edits and you

151know do like you know this curriculum review process do we like this right is this good do you want to add something and you know and again i get right now we are still spending so much time in the minutia of the curriculum but hopefully at some point we can get to just you know when we go through adoptions do we like that process do we want to tweak it you know because last year was the first time i did one and i kind of just was the last year it was the first year we all did one together right so it was you know well i hope everybody likes this process your pants and yeah yeah you know um just starting to so then we can we're all on the same page with whatever

152our right procedures are i know it's awesome idea it's great thank you yes perfect spot everything's there everybody knows where to go where you know um yeah who was the last person to touch it and what was changed and i kind of envisioned here specifically like i can see this once you guys are good with everything there isn't any reason why this isn't on our website you know as a pdf and then those links are all pdfs i mean right now it's still at the early stage but once we've said that then there's a page with all of this stuff and it's where people go because i even have the curriculum directory and you know but i'm even trying to build i noticed last year you know for our special education and even for our

153title programs they're using all of the adopted materials but not everybody has the same materials so some person is using vmas some person is using connecting math and again that's going to always be the case specific to kids but they also don't have access to all of it so i mean some building wrote a grant and got some additional things and so trying to just get a pulse on who has what so that if i have a you know a student with dyslexia and i need a specific program do we have it in the district is it accessible to me because some of those programs are specific to a singular student you wouldn't buy 15 of them because you know so trying to house a place where what building has what as far as some

154of those really individualized programs so you can better share utilize those resources but when you don't know you don't know so one of the things we were wondering from the board's perspective under the kind of where that curriculum adoptions information is as far as our curriculum directory we could print out a list of every single book that we own in all 10 of our libraries it would be about 15 000 pages front to back i mean it's massive um that we could put in a binder but when we talked to the middle school librarians who are kind of our lead librarians for the district now they wondered if we couldn't if we couldn't create a library a district library page on our website and have a link to destiny which is the search engine and

155any patron could put a title in and search to see if that book is in our library any book yeah rather than doing yeah why reinvent the wheel if it already exists then yeah that makes sense and they kind of wanted to you know personalize the page and put some additional things in there but we just thought this would be so great that they you could you would be able to look at any you know well and it would help like if i'm like hey do we have this book in the library and then i have to go to you and then you have to go to someone else and so if i could just type it in and go oh we do yeah right yeah that would be yeah that's awesome very helpful battle

156of the books you know these are the battle of books this this year put a team together yeah um because that's where lakeland's going to host it and so um so anyway they wanted like that they thought that would be a good idea but they wanted us to run that by you oh yeah they were super excited about it oh i bet that's a great idea every once in a while would that identify which library is here exactly and if there's more than one so it will like you know hands me to tell you to pull it up and it says like the high school like high school yeah and then i think it even gives you how many copies of it you have we have instead of printing and then you're sifting through tiny

157little script so i will ask them to work with dane to create their scroll down i am curious if it's a necessity i don't know that's why i'm kind of throwing it out there and looking at the board approved curriculum um and you've got it segregated reading writing math social studies science um what isn't there is what school it's being utilized at is there a need to have that there well most i mean we kind of said if it was approved and if what we didn't have like if five schools wanted to use it we just put it under the one that asked and then said it's available to the five okay i mean i could specify who's doing what that's kind of what the district curriculum library is is trying to build some of

158those those are the bigger programs though okay um i mean well i mean i'm i'm just curious do we think there's a need for it because if if what i hear you telling me because i just know that when we get the pages and then it's specific to the school and then this has no school affiliation the piece you just said i did never knew was that say a book or something is approved for twin legs it is available to all of the elementaries i did not know that and to make that you know we just instead of having all five apps with the same thing right now our list gets even longer right we just said okay you all want it we'll put it on one okay no so um okay so sometimes we

159said all schools but you know if two people ask i just put it under one and so that's a good um that's something good to know because i did not realize that which it doesn't matter one way or the other i just um that's really [Music] cool yeah i love that idea central location webpage on the website that's awesome i wish and i wish we got more notification from the school the board or myself more notifications from when the kids win all these different little things they're doing because i just read one and i don't even remember what school it was i read it yesterday and i thought it was a quarterly press but it might have been something else about one of our schools the kids competed in i want to say math but

160it might not have been math anyways they won some competition and they did really well and i just remember i'll have to if i find it again i'll see everything the link to it um but there were one of the schools it was some competition here recently in the last month or so i think i don't know if it was outside of school or it seemed like it was a club some kind of club question yeah i would like to be able to focus for the board a little bit more on the academic uh successes that yeah in those academic clubs because i you know our athletes get a lot of press time but our our scholars don't always and so i really bring that to the board's attention the lakeland legacy award winners is

161that what you're talking about it just came out on june 15th aston key for colin kelly richie thomas yeah i did see that that was one thing but there was something else because i did yeah i did see that one but there was something else yeah of course because they go to the state region and i don't even remember what i was reading and i will say when we've done our alp nights um we did three this year for our you know upper echelon they were very well attended um and it's a family night so we did you know we did a crime lab and like science you know kinds of stuff and uh law enforcement came and did a little lab about fingerprinting and what that looks like and how you dust and all

162that kind of stuff so it was kind of a you know a little the kids had a super great time but it's a family deal super well um attended we did three this year um so make sure you get invited to those yeah that would be great yeah that would be awesome because we just don't know right right now yeah yeah we'll just make sure those end up on your calendar so that you yeah that would be great you know that's happening yeah they're super fun nights the teachers do a really great job we do a different theme each time and it's fun we're excited about the library yeah very excited yeah and i love the curriculum handbook then what you've got going here that's just awesome because i did the same thing with our

163data for next week yes and then you know it's not lost and but i guess i know we didn't make any decisions tonight so on here there is sos there is second step there is i ready ela like i know we adopted right i ready map but so if we're gonna make changes to that i you know there are three things that we have denied thus far to library series and then the thrively from last week so i started uh denied on here as well so that people don't have to go searching awesome um so the moment we had those two then i it's the very last one if you go to the very bottom the arrow yeah the very last tab at the bottom yeah i can't see sorry right right there so denied

164curriculum and so i just put them in there so that people don't have to try to figure out and it's just there's clarity attached to it so this just helps everybody yeah there were there are a few other books that we have said no let's go ahead and pull those off so i don't know but did they ever come to through the actual supplemental curriculum or was it which other ones did we say now i don't remember there was um pull it up because i don't remember the name um it was the uh charlie and the mouse no yeah not not the charlie joe jackson series it's not that one it's um because that was no easier to find it this way did it have mouse in it i think so it would be in

165her library books those are the only three that charlie and mouse we denied that one yeah i thought we did i can go back and look and when we sound familiar to me when we brought it to you and then look at the the board deal so charlie and mouse i don't remember that and there was concern about um gender ideology in that book i don't remember any of this oh okay sorry no don't be sorry i i think it was on our midnight board meeting i'm not sure is there any others that you think of i just knew that that one was a okay so we'll look up charles it might be easy to look through your parent notes to find kind of when that would have been come when it come up so

166to help us find the board name we're going to see if anything thank you june 15th that's when we denied it that's when we talked about it it was what it was talked about a motion to approve supplemental resources with the exception of the shredderman series and the charlie and mouse series so did i get the wrong one i think i grabbed the wrong one we go back to denied curriculum yeah cause you have charlie i have charlie joe jackson yeah so i just grabbed the wrong one okay yeah i didn't i didn't remember that one but it could catch you go through a lot yeah yeah yeah good memory why just when i pulled up that title and like that's something okay thank you i'll switch it out perfect thank you and then you've

167had some opt-ins specific to some secondary books right shell your memory is amazing you suck once in a while like get a little sparkle you knew it was the midnight meeting too that's what it impressed me and you knew why we didn't improve it yeah i just looked up the review and i was like there it is well i do appreciate all the work that we have to do tons of words all of it curriculum happening it's amazing we're getting our feet embraced a little kind of bit these little things dialed in that's right one step at a time yep just keep going we don't know how to stay still so we are hoping to bring to the board at the august board meeting some our request for pilots for the science textbooks for this

168next school year and i anticipate that we will have to read through them carefully with a fine tooth comb my hope is we have we can have some parents that participate in the monthly meetings but they'll take a grade level and go through the pieces as well yeah half of half of our committee must by statute would be non-educators so even if we have teachers who are parents or parents who are teachers in another district they still count as a teacher okay they have to have no ties to education so it will be a little bit challenging for us to get enough parents to participate yeah my mom's reading some curriculum and chris read some get some retired teachers to do it can't do curriculum for you for adoptions he's going aw shucks don't even

169bother reading it because you can't your voice doesn't count i'm gonna look at the pictures [Laughter] make sure there's no mating worms rebecca did a really good job on that i didn't know that's what they did i never really cared no yeah no i forgot like cool i don't know that i really want i bet you that's probably a really that would be a high interest rating passage for first graders because they're fascinated by bugs so i picked katie up from daycare when she was yeah she's not even probably right about two and she was telling me about how her and her friend doug warms up in the playground and i said what do you do with the worms and she goes [Laughter] yeah oh wow i have a couple stories and i'm not going

170to tell them because we're still recording oh yeah thank you yeah so the committee the new committee says has to contain a membership of half of which is persons who are not public educators or school trustees and shall include parents of a child or children attending a school or schools within the district all meetings of the committee should be open to the public any member of the public may attend the meeting and file written or make an oral objection to any curricular materials under consideration blah blah and then we know the rest of it we have to have all of the curriculum on hand um and available to the public the titles authors publishers of all curricular material being used in the district and of course the public has a right to inspect the instructional

171materials except student tests obviously used in the district schools so we have to make sure that half of those people include parents and whomever else they don't really meet them do they don't they just coming and getting material and taking we met monthly oh we like the math oh okay and actually the parents who participated oh the math that's right you did adoption they they actually they had a lot of voice and had a really great perspective to share so i felt like it was helpful yeah it's just the teachers felt like it was helpful too yeah it's just that we typically have so many teachers who want to be involved in the adoption of the materials that they're going to be using yeah that we have to be able to match one to one

172yeah and for one every teacher where we might have to limit the number of teachers some can we try to have every building represent that we're going to cover all grade levels well you know this is what we're thinking there's no reason why we can't also vet it through all the teachers just to say you know give us your feedback from an educator perspective so if we're not able to have multiple on the committee then i mean because we can't i don't want a person even though the statute says what it says i don't want to proceed with the with the focus that those that actually have to teach the material don't have a say in it and we we have done that in the past where we've kind of whatever the programs are we're

173looking at we have moved them around the district and they've been housed at school so teachers have time to peruse the materials look through the teacher's guides so we have done that and some of them have even been willing to you know take on a lesson while it's in their building for you know a couple of weeks just to get a sense of it because just looking at it is not the same as actually trying to implement right [Applause] all right do we have any other dialogue that we want to have over the incredible curriculum handbook looks good yeah i think it's great all righty well then with that being said we can battle out and close the workshop everybody ready it's me it's 8 57.