Mahomet-Seymour Board of Education Meeting 6-21-21

001monday june 21st this time i'll let you my guests sign in everyone responds to cell phones remind visitors in order to facilitate affected me if you'd like to make comments about the budget read the visitor guidelines outside and get the public participation form to dawn um this is the budget hearing where we're going to the normal meeting at seven o'clock uh roll call please mcmurray here hennessy here mccomb here [Music] of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty is there a motion to approve the agenda is there a second second um all in discussion all in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed is there any public participation for the budget area well i have a lot of forms of the budget

002no okay so i guess they're the right now at 6 30 so yes it is right now yep my god how many we have you've got five minutes a piece if you need that long i'd like to make an investment after watching a lot of these from home yeah you have a really hard time at home seeing someone standing at the podium could we adjust people so that they can be better heard and seen um yeah i mean i think if we just like heather we weren't mom i can't see oh nobody can ever see people who have something to say [Music] so don will run the countdown timer i will try to warn you when you're somewhere around a minute or less if i can sometimes that's easier done than others uh but we

003will cut everyone out for five minutes if there's several we need and we've got 30 minutes allocated to this meeting so it's safe to say well we'll just see what happens um so first is stephen greenwood [Applause] good evening my name is steve greenlee and i'm a resident of muhammad ladies and gentlemen i invite you to take a trip with me down memory lane think back to your time in high school you're 15 years old in a classroom with 20 other kids your age your teacher is leading a discussion about a book that made you uncomfortable the other kids are saying things that are very different from the way you feel about the subject you want to speak up but doing so will broadcast to everyone in the room that you are different odd strange

004it feels like everyone is staring at you do they know what if they find out they will ridicule you call you derogatory names tell all their friends you know that some of those kids will corner you after school and beat you up for being different you heard them say so they bullied you in junior high you can't let them do it again you want out you must get away nobody can find out that you are not like them let me out now search your feelings do you feel trapped desperate oppressed this is how my student my daughter felt during the very first day of her summer english class and each day since she was afraid she would be outed now consider where you think i might be going with this are you bothered by the

005discrimination well my daughter was afraid that she would be canceled mocked as a christian who loves people loves her country and respects those who take an oath to protect and serve i am crushed that this has been her experience with our education system i value education i earned an advanced degree and have served over 30 years in the helping profession i desperately want her to feel the same sense of accomplishment and fulfillment that i have i'm afraid that this setback has the minister trust in the people that are given the great privilege of opening young minds to the many faceted perspectives of our community our society and our world to teach with an objective fair and balanced approach we received no notice that our student would be required to read a book containing sexually thematic

006elements violent content drug use and references and language that i would not normally read aloud in any venue the information was communicated directly to our student on a saturday two days before the first class there was no offer of other reading options i purchased the digital version and reddit covered cover while the book titled the hate u give addresses current socially relevant material it's done in a manner that risks feeding racial polarization and reinforcing stereotypes that ostensibly tries to refute the perspective of the author in the subject matter is one-sided peddling the simple propaganda and symbolism of division instead of promoting unity i am not convinced that even an experienced group facilitator could create a safe place for objective discussion and equitable presentation of multiple conflicting viewpoints what a difficult position for a young teacher

007since i've not seen a rubric the learning objectives are unclear i'm left to speculate that this is an effort to recruit unsuspecting minors into progressive political activism is this soft cell introduction of critical race theory a gateway it's a full-blown indoctrination into marxism and communism by the mohammed seymour curriculum is this an english class or is it proselytized let me remind you that the us department of education clarified in its guidelines on religious expression in public schools that soliciting or encouraging religious activity and soliciting or encouraging anti-religious activity are prohibited by the establishment clause public schools can either foster religion or precluded public schools cannot promote or obstruct any one viewpoint of the political spectrum our public schools must not segregate and divide children based on expressions of first amendment rights sorting them according to

008vaccinated unvaccinated mass unmasked oppressed oppressor does not enrich the lives of our students you don't remember we live in a great country and i will debate anyone who believes otherwise in my lifetime i have seen as united do not endorse this theoretical perspective that serves only to divide and destroy do the job you were elected to do safeguard our children shame on me for not being vigilant before this point you have my oath that is being rectified next up on the budget hearing is brandy campbell my name is brandy campbell this is my uncle jason campbell we're residents of muhammad [Music] a lot of people think jake and i have been sleeping together since freshman year but that's not true he wanted to wait until after junior prime it was a big deal jake rented

009a fancy hotel room that he filled with candles and flowers and bought me amazing lingerie from victoria's secret i wouldn't have minded something a little more spontaneous i guess but i know i'm beyond lucky to have a boyfriend who cares enough to plan every last detail is this okay jake's eyes scan my face or would you rather just hang out his brows rise like it's a quest real question but his hands keep inching closer i never turned jake down it's like my mother said when she first took me to get birth control if you say not too much pretty soon someone else will say yes anyway i want it as much as he does i live for these moments of closeness with jake i'd crawl inside of him if i could more than okay i

010say and pull him on top of me i kneel next tonight simon his eyes are breaking out of his head his lips are blue and he's making horrible choking noises nate dumps the entire contents of simon's backpack on the floor and scrambles through the mess of books papers and clothes simon where do you keep it he asked tearing open the fault the small front compartment and making up two regular pens and a set of keys simon's way past talking though i put one sweaty palm on his shoulder like that'll do when you go you're okay you're gonna be okay we're getting help i can hear my voice slowing thickening like molasses my accent always comes out hard when i'm stressed i turn to nate and ask you sure he's not choking on something maybe he

011needs a heimlich move or not a freaking medical pet nate ignores me tossing simon's empty backpack aside [ __ ] yells slamming your fist on the door do you keep it on you simon simon simon's eyes roll back in his head as nate digs around in simon's pockets but he doesn't find anything except a wrinkled kleenex then my mother went totally off her meds and started getting into her mind-altering substances yeah i'm the [ __ ] who deals drugs after they erect his mother but to be clear i don't sell anything except weed and painkillers my mother would have been fine if she'd stay away from cocaine for a while she came back every few months or so then once a year the last time i saw her was when i was 14 and my dad started falling apart

012she kept talking about this farm commune she'd moved to an oregon and how great it was that she take me and i could go to school there with all the kids and grow organic berries or whatever the hell they did she bought me a giant ice cream sundae at lens diner like i was eight years old and told me all about it you love it nathaniel everyone is so accepting nobody labels you the way they do here i sound like [ __ ] even then but better than baby so i packed a bag could stand this carrier waited for her on her front steps i must have sat there half the night like a complete [ __ ] loser before it finally dawned on me she wasn't going to show turned out the trip to glenn's diner was the

013last time i ever saw her thank you um this is not this is from a book that we do not teach it makes a point this is the hiding place that foie tin room this is from when she was a child in those days just after the turn of the century sex was never discussed even at home so the line that stuck in my head sex i was pretty sure and that whether or not you were a boy or girl and sin made tanta yons very angry but when the two together meant i could not imagine and so seated next to father in the train compartment i suddenly asked father what is his sex sin he tried to look at me and as he always did when answering the question but to my surprise he

014said nothing the last he stood up lifted his traveling case from the wrap over our heads and set it on the floor will you carry it off the training cord and he said i stood up and tugged at it it was crammed with watches and spare parts and he had purchased that morning he's too heavy i said yes he said and it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load it's the same way corey with knowledge some knowledge is too heavy for children when you are older and stronger you can bear it for now you must trust me to carry it for you and i was satisfied more than satisfied wonderfully at peace there were answers to this and all my hard questions for now i

015was content to leave them in my father's keeping we are asking our children through the curriculum that has been recently adapted to carry weight more than they should have to carry way more than they should have to bear the books that have been brought to my attention um that are being adopted by this district that have been purchased that are being put already into the hands of the summer school children and that will be put into the hands of our children in august are far beyond what our children should have it is beyond my comprehension um i am a certified english teacher there are fabulous books out there books that are not too weighty books that do not destroy their innocence books that are culturally relevant books that are considered part of our classical education

016and we are abandoning them is my understanding that we did not teach to kill a mockingbird this last year uh kel mockenberg is part of the western canon every kid in america just about has read for the last 60 years but why i didn't grab my copy i should have why did we read that book uh it has the n word that's what people get upset about well a whole lot of what we're bringing in has the n word in it and not it to any purpose other than to be crass now to kill a mockingbird talks about the different approaches people have but the bottom line the thing that scout teaches us in that book is that folks are folks there are good people of every color there are bad people of any culture

017there are good people of every social background and there are bad people of every social economic background and there are good and bad people that are religious some are good some are bad and they use the religion for good or for evil and all of those things are part of what that novel teaches and yet apparently we've set that aside and instead we have brought in books that you are going to continue to hear us read this evening and as long as it takes because we need to have a conversation as a community as to why we got rid of something like to kill a mockingbird and we brought in this stuff so with the time that i have this is just a little bit this one is called i forgot my poster frankly in

018love and it is about uh korean american teenagers living in california it was published in 2019 it is not a classic yet if it was only published in 2019 and i have a family that i'm friends with who are korean americans they live here in muhammad and i did not have the time to call their daughter and frankly i don't really want to let her know she's an adult now but i cannot imagine that their family who who runs one of our wonderful restaurants would like their the families that they that have korean-american families represented the way this book represents them this is two of our characters discussing a grandmother he offers me a fancy clear sealed bag containing four sesame rice cakes i can't bring myself to call them chaliot right now rice cakes

019they will be dude i'm so [ __ ] goddamn sorry my grandma was such a dick to you just now he says [ __ ] can be such a bitch-ass salty-ass [ __ ] sometimes this outpouring of heartfelt profanity fills my soul with warm orange light it also cracks me up i look at joy she's covered her mouth to hold her chuckles in that was your grandma says joy she calls me stupid all the time because my korean [ __ ] sucks now these are not words that i ever use in my home and we were not i don't know why we would emulate this i don't know why we've been handed to our teenagers i am so confused and i think that we deserve answers from our curriculum director and whoever plot this book and all the rest of these books you're

020going to hear about are appropriate for our children [Applause] [Music] um monica max can i can i just go together so i can hold the book while she reads sure and then we'll just check so we'll keep our content seymour school system and i am going to be reading some excerpts from the survey king which has been adopted into the sophomore curriculum so excerpt one she's in ninth grade sitting up in a row and a few seats over from dillard early in english class he rarely talks he's frequently absent she's heard her dad mention that dillard's dad got himself into trouble for having some pretty creepy porno on his computer and maybe that wasn't all this confluence of perverse sexuality and strange religion is titillating stuff in a small town well it is anywhere really

021it's made national news it's the hot topic for hacky late-night comedians who can't resist the low-hanging fruit of snake-handling jokes there are rumors that the porn was dylan's which would be somewhat less creepy since at least alert is a minor himself still people steer clear of him even the couple of friends he had from church passage two his father fixed his glassy eyes on him then back on the tv anyhow that's what you remind me of hanging out with that son of that pervert preacher and your dyche friend that big ass turkey thinking he's a duck passage three you plan on spending senior year with your dick in your hand his father asked no sir in my pants like normal you being cute no sir trucks inch toward his room passage four tyson grab madison's

022hand y'all can blow me we've wasted enough time with your queer asses they stalked off madison flipping lydia the bird over at her shoulder lydia dylan travis flips them the birds of their backs so my name is gloria cherry and i have been a resident of muhammad for 42 years i have been on and off involved with school board elections campaigns and attending school board meetings as pto president um i am here because i potentially now have grandchildren that might attend muhammad seymour so my daughter and i have figured out and enhanced that we better start speaking up now so that my grandchild does not have to put up with this um the other thing that issue that i would like to talk about is as a child psychologist because that is what i am

023by profession so i will read an expert from this book also and then i will make some comments it did thoroughly scandalize foreign tennessee when pastor early of the church of christ's disciples with signs of belief went to the state penitentiary and not for the reasons anyone expected everyone assumed to get in trouble someday for the 27 or so rattlesnakes and copperheads congregation passed around each sunday no one knew with certainty what law they were breaking but it seemed unlawful somehow and the tennessee department of wildlife did take custody of the snakes after his arrest or people thought perhaps he'd run afoul of the law by inducing his flock to drink diluted battery acid and strychnine another flavored worship activity but no he went to a riverbend prison for a different sort of poison possession

024of more than 100 images depicting a minor engaged in sexual activity and then monica already read you the other excerpts the thing that really concerns me is that if you all think back to your childhoods how many of you are allowed to just be children without having to worry is he gay is she a lesbian is she this oh her skin colors you know what when i moved to this community i was the darkest thing around i'm chilly i'm from south america and we were i was a minority i became a u.s citizen three years ago i waited that long and i never it it never made any difference in my life whatsoever but i decided that i wanted a vote and when i walked into my very first voting booth i could not believe

025how excited i was i had not ever realized how important that vote was for me which brings me to a topic of the election the past election you know i know the bible says the bible does not say that money is illegal evil it says the love of money and when i saw this last campaign i thought who is making a lot of money off of this campaign because so much money has been spent never before seen and then to use the republican party as an endorsement i don't think any of you had assigned any kind of paperwork that said which party you belong to how inappropriate and i really would like that on the record because i could not i was a guest the other thing getting back to what we're talking about now

026i think that we need to realize that childhood is such a short time sometimes it seems long but really when you look back i've raised four children and now i see my grandchildren i have more time i have more patience and i have more money to be a good parent and i look at what's happening now and we are sexualizing so many things and making children aware of things that are not childhood things if you put a black child and a white child together they'll play without ever thinking oh i'm being appropriate now they don't think that it's just another child but all of these different things do you wonder why there's an escalation of suicides of young people because these books don't bring hopeful topics into their minds we are putting such horrible thoughts

027into these gifts bias and not only that i said this earlier you know what makes instance so wrong it's the level of power adults have a power over children and our job is to protect them when we sexualize so many of these things and allow them to come into their minds we are being not very good stewards of our children and that concerns me greatly i worked at a children's home for six years and almost every girl that i had in my cottage had a history of being sexually abused you know i learned an awful lot of how subtle that topic can be in children's minds so anyway um that is my concern and i don't have children right now in the school system but i may have children in the school system or we

028will have to choose another venue to put our children in because i would not tolerate this for my grandchildren or my children i would have tolerated i know i still embarrass my children thank you for having us tonight i'm reading a very short excerpt from they both die at the end on behalf of a that's an friend song all right it's a very short one okay that way i'm not stuck at home starting 1 000 piece puzzles i'll never finish or masturbating because sex with an actual person scares me there's more now i'm reading from one of us is lying you guys see the latest they just what i asked with a sinking feeling sometimes the best thing about baseball is the fact that you can check your phone while you're playing there's another email

029with the tumblr update leah swipes a few times her phone and hands it to me i take it reluctantly look at the screen at louise reads over my shoulder time to clarify clarify a few things simon had a severe peanut allergy so why not stick to planters in his sandwich and be done with it they're contemplating how to kill this young man i've been watching simon keller for months everything he ate was wrapped in an inch of cellophane he carried that goddamn water bottle everywhere and it was all he drank but he couldn't go 10 minutes without swinging from that bottle i figured if it wasn't there he'd spent uh heat default to a plain old tap water so yeah i took it i spent a long time figuring out where i could flip peanut

030oil into one of simon's drinks someplace contained without a water fountain mr avery's detention seemed like the ideal spot i did feel bad watching simon die i'm not a sociopath in that moment as he turned a horrible color and fought for air if i could have stopped it i would have i couldn't though because you see i've taken his epipen and every last one of them every last one in the nurse's office my heart starts hammering and my stomach clinches the first post was bad enough but this one this one's written like a person was actually in the room when simon had his attack like it was one of us lewis snorts that's [ __ ] up another section what the hell addie jake wars i don't even think just take take off out of the dining

031room and through janae's kitchen thank god that she had a back door i conversed through heavy steps pounded behind me so instead of going for cooper's carving straight into the dense woods behind janae's house i fly through the underbrush in a panic dodging bushes overgrown roots until my foot hooks under something and i tumble to the ground and it's like a gym trap all over again knees torn breathing gone the palms raw except this time my ankles twisted also i have branches crashing behind me farther away than i would have thought but heading straight for me i get to my feet when saying away my option one thing's for sure after everything i heard in the living room jake's not leaving these woods until he finds me i don't know if i can hide and

032i sure as hell can't run i take a deep breath and scream help at the top of my lungs and take off again trying to zigzag away from where i think jake is still getting closer to janae's house but oh god my ankle hurts so bad i'm barely dragging myself forward i managed to scream once before jake clams his hand over my mouth you little [ __ ] she says hoarsely you brought this on you you know that i sink my teeth into jake's palm and he lets on animals sound pain i drop his hand lifting it just as like just as quickly as to strike me across the face i stagger my face aching but managed to stay upright and twist in and attempt to connect my knee to his groin and my nails to his

033eyes jake fronts again when i make contact stumbling through i break free spin away my ankle bunches buckles and his hand locks around my arm tight as a vice he pulls me toward him and grips his heart by the shoulder for one bizarre second i think he's going to kiss me instead he shoves me to the ground kneels down and slams my head on a rock my skull explodes with pain my vision goes right around the eyes edges and then black something presses my neck and i'm choking i can't see anything that i can hear you should be in jail instead of nate adding jake's gnaws as he closet her hands but this works too a girl's panic voice pierces the pain in my head jake stop leave her alone the awful pressure breezes raises

034as i release this as i gasp for air i hear jake's voice low and angry and then i shriek i thought i should get up right now i should reach my hands out feeling for grass dirt behind my nails and i screamed to find an anchor i just need to pull myself off the ground and get these starbursts out of my eyes he ends up trying to kill her why am i here today because the protocol is that i would fill out for my daughter to not have to do these books and not be in sophomore english class but that would be for one child what happens for the other children whose parents don't have the time to be involved and their children come home with this i'm telling you that if these books go

035to our schools we will not have enough social workers to take care of these children thank you for any of you watching at home um if you are sorry if you're a member of the law enforcement community please go ahead and hit mute i thought that i could read this and i can't so i'm going to ask you to dr paul please read the underlying portions of that and again this is from the hate you give just the underlying portions on this page please [ __ ] that crop cop a guy says gripping a baseball bat kill them over nothing the king lords and gd stomp out the front window then somebody yells flip that [ __ ] the car stereo loudly plays a record scratching sound then ice cube says [ __ ] the police coming straight down from the

036underground a young end got it bad because i'm brown this is not a peaceful assembly an officer said on a loud piece speaker says disperse now or you will be subject to arrest the original battle cry starts up again [ __ ] the police talk to police people hurl rocks and glass bottles of the cops stop throwing objects at law enforcement the officer says exit the streets immediately or you will be subject to arrest the rocks and bottles continue to fly continue to fly [ __ ] the police [ __ ] the police devante continues to shout ponte man come on says seven i ain't scared of them [ __ ] the police there's a loud pop an object sails into the air lands in the middle of the street explosive all the fire oh [ __ ] devonta says when i stood up here

037i stood up here upstairs that we expect our kids to read this type of thing especially those that have police officers as parents those kids are afraid right now after you got done reading that i'm just angry i'm angry at each one of you for approving this curriculum and spending my tax dollars on this trash there is no reason why anyone including me as an adult should have to read this you're taking the power that the teachers have and you're forcing our children if they would like to attend muhammad seymour school to read this garbage and there is no reason for it there are so many good books out there and you do it all under the guise of we have to be politically correct we have to be inclusive you know what my black

038friends would be offended that this is the way you are portraying the black community it is ridiculous we live with all of these white kids around here many of them don't have a lot of black friends and this is what they're going to think no it's garbage my kids will not be attending school choices good evening everyone yes i'm joyce stewart and my husband and i have been here for about 35 years and mohammed and all three of our kids did graduate from here and we have a granddaughter in third grade now she loves school she loves her teachers she loves absorbing everything about school and i have another little girl that's going to be starting kindergarten this coming fall she too loves learning so i do have concerns about curriculum i don't know if

039it's called curriculum but these novels for extra reading perhaps but i understand in reading groups these will be read and i guess this does this is relevant for the budget meeting because it means that our monies that we are giving is paying for this and i find that rather disturbing um and i have a couple of short sections to read and this comes from the book the hate you give and i thought it was rather awful until i heard the others and i mean uh this is mild in comparison even though this is something here that i would be very troubled if my child brought it home and showed to me i think also i am concerned that one person has wield so much power about the curriculum that's my understanding especially about to kill

040a mockingbird if a parent can complain and one person decides to remove a book i just couldn't understand why that wasn't brought to the school board and then i understood that well there's some kind i guess now that's just not how you do it you don't want to take waste your time or something to review what the kids are gonna have and so then to find out that what to kill a mockingbird is being taken out there's so much good in there um so that does concern me that one person wields so much power that is concerning to me so i will read these two short excerpts and let me tell you this is not easy for me i would never i have never spoken to my children like this for anyone in my life

041and so this is definitely outside my comfort zone not even now like check this he points at me which means he's about to go into one of his khalil philosophical moments pacsad but stood for the hate you give little infants [ __ ] everybody i raise my eyebrows what listen they hate you the letter you give little infants [ __ ] everybody t t-h-u-g-l-i-n-e meaning that society gives us as youth what society gives us as youth it bites them in the ass when we wild out get it damn yeah see i told you he was relevant he nods to the beat and wraps along but now i'm wondering what he's going to what is what he's doing to [ __ ] everybody as much as i think i know i hope i'm wrong i need to hear it from him another

042short one but that moment grabbed my hands and i flashed back to that night it's like i suddenly really really realized that chris is white just like 115. and i know i'm sitting here next to my white best friend but it's almost as if i'm giving khalil daddy seven and every other black guy in my life a big loud [ __ ] you by having a white boyfriend please look at these books and reconsider i don't care if every other community in this nation decides to buy these and have their kids read them we can be different we can raise our kids to a higher level of respect and dignity but it's not with this kind of reading thank you and thank you all for having us here tonight really appreciate it and we can sense that

043your your ears are open to what we're seeing here because this is a burden um we came here years ago for the school system and we've truly been blessed by it i'm reading from a short excerpt from this book dear martin happy birthday man bros i'm glad you made it yo listen like's going on he's definitely been drinking too there's this fine ass black girl here from decatur prep and i was thinking you guys could wingman it for me and [ __ ] homegirl's got the fattest ass i've ever seen and i think she's my news i have a good chance of getting her upstairs you feel me dogs he nudges jess and greens on a positive note this is why we're here citizens speaking our hearts tonight muhammad seymour community unit school board meeting as elected

044representatives we make decisions that will affect our school and community we take the responsibility most is prior to our monthly meetings each board member is responsible for studying all the information at his or her disposal we are committed to proper preparation and making sound decisions thank you for your time i believe as everybody that has to speak during the budget hearing you all for your comments and investigation um heather wherever you are tonight i bring back the 2020 2021 budget um mainly for a couple reasons it doesn't have to be revised this will be the second time in my career that i have revised it once in 2010 when the state decided not to pay and and then now because of our code class when things go from one fund to another it is hard

045to adjust the budget internally you can't you cannot do it this is just something to make it easier for the auditors basically um so there aren't as many questions about where the money is being spent so there was a lot more money spent in our fund 20 which is our o m fund because of all of the preparation we had to do of the buildings so you'll see um there is a a positive and a negative between o m and education that's just showing that i asked the auditor if it would make a difference she said we wouldn't be written up for it but there'd just be a lot of questions i'd have to answer into the differences um i also since the last budget i just did large things i did not change any

046little items you know i did not go into salaries or anything like that but i just uh made sure that since we approved the risk plan i went ahead and put some salaries that we could possibly take out of o m um according to our risk plan also added for the additional boilers that we have approved and put in our 400 000 that we got in our grant those are the only changes that have been made to this budget but it's just to make it clearer for the auditors to look at the differences do anybody have any questions or anything questions forever pleasure of business will come up later on tonight yes this is the time to ask any questions hearing none have to do anything else to present at this point yeah there's no

047questions on the budget for government entertainment motion to adjourn the budget meeting so is there a second discussion all in favor during the budget meeting say aye all right oppose we're returned at 7 20 from the budget meeting we are 20 minutes behind and getting into the regular meeting tonight we'll go ahead and take a five-minute break and then we'll begin the regular seven o'clock citizens thank you i think we have our board members in the room so we're going to go ahead and begin this is the regular meeting of the bahamas you know board of education it is 7 27 pm on monday june 21st i'd like to remind everyone to sign in found cell phones to remind our visitors to facilitate an effective meeting we ask those who wish to make comments to

048the board we're going to visit their guidelines complete public participation form and get those to dawn public participation allowed only to the participation portion of the meetings other than those times the meetings are not interactive with those in attendance have a roll call please land please the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all board members you have had an opportunity to look at the agenda for tonight is your motion to approve the agenda so is there a second second is there a discussion in favor of approving the agenda as presented say aye i am opposed thank you board members you've also had an opportunity to look at the items on tonight's consent agenda tonight's consent agenda improves minutes of

049previous meetings it includes bills the treasurer's report personnel changes surplus items and closed minutes from previous meetings does anyone wish to take anything out of the consent agenda for individual action discussion can you tell me how how the high school library books are determined to be do you know the library to take care of that like is there is it a protocol or is it like a publication game or they have a way of doing it there is a reading process that they go through it has to do with circulation and um in the age of the materials and the condition of the materials what happens to the books when they go to surplus so a couple of things can happen to them if um if they're not usable they can be discarded sometimes they

050are put out for other teachers to put in their classroom libraries or first sometimes given to you know students might take them or whatever but they're not um um but yeah otherwise some of like these uh spanish textbooks will be trashed because they're just beyond usable with age and do we ever consider donating them to some like orphans treasure box or one of these places around here that takes books to so anything that's not picked up like that then yes um there are a couple places that they look at donating those items murray yes macomb yes uh item six is donations dr hall i hope we've been introduced yeah yeah we have a new hire that we want to introduce before we move to donations good evening um i would like to introduce uh brooks

051davis this evening um he will be a new uh spanish teacher at our high school because our program enrollment is growing so brooke davis is the incoming spanish teacher at the high school he graduated from muhammad seymour high school in 2016 in sweden attended the university of missouri from which he graduated with a degree in romance languages with an emphasis in spanish and a k-12 teaching certificate also in spanish um this fall will actually be his second semester teaching full-time due to the fact that he was able to teach last spring at a high school in missouri while completing his student teaching brooks is physically active and is excited to explore the coaching opportunities that they get settled in at the high school in particular he's become an avid pickleball player during the pandemics brooks

052got engaged in june and is looking forward to getting married in the summer of 2022 he considers himself a christian and is excited to be returning to muhammad seymour and the bulldog this fall so join me in welcoming thank you [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] i was recently informed by my siblings that they are now unwilling to wait for me to go to dinner okay donations all right we have two this month um one from brian clark from the state farm good neighbor program thank you brian to the high school for uh his cash for our boys track and field program and the amount of 500 and thank you state farm as well and then the mohamed rotary club a donation to the district is cash donation of 750 for our mckinney-vento homeless fund so we appreciate

053the generosity of both of those donations for a total of 1250 dollars um dr hall is in the donations is there a motion to approve those donations as presented thank you is there a second is there a discussion on donations other than a thank you very much to the folks who did that you made those all right roll call vote please hendrix hennessey schultz yep mitch yes all right um it's communication time is there anyone here for the pto msca they were here earlier in closed session i think they're gone anything from the foundation wrong good visitor comments for this meeting thank you very much okay elizabeth handy everyone you've got five minutes if need five minutes my daughter cora is joining me today um she just got done with the fun run so she's

054a little bit hot and sweaty but as we were talking a little bit about some of the curriculum that's coming up she wanted to share an experience with the board and let you know how your choices of curriculum impact her life um so right now i'm in eighth grade and when i was in sixth grade i had a book recommended to me by a teacher um and i am a very sensitive person especially when it comes to things um that aren't really comfortable like just don't make me very comfortable and um i was reading the book and it seemed innocent at first it had um a few bad words but i just kept reading the book because it was a pretty good book um and then all of a sudden as i was reading it

055it moved into a really inappropriate scene that just made me super uncomfortable and i like broke out into tears and like um it was like it was like really late at night because i love to read um and i just was not expecting that at all in a book and i still think about it today and it just makes me extremely uncomfortable just the topic in general and so i really try to look for books that i know aren't going to have things like that in it and that i won't have to worry about that and it just concerns me that if i pick up a book i'm not sure whether or not it will have something that i'm concerned about reading or that i want in my mind so um i'm just really especially

056been trying to find books that have been recommended to me by friends i know um feel the same way about books like that and just to keep my mind clean so that i don't have those thoughts going through my head [Applause] my number one job as a parent is to protect my children i trusted you you betrayed me next is gloria this public speaking thing is not a comfortable thing to do just so that you all know that i shake quietly afterwards but you know what as a clinical psychologist you know a lot of things i've learned about principles of our people and i think that they need to be understood by others because a lot of times we just don't know why people do things the concerns that i have about the books number

057one whether you know it or not you're rewriting our children you're putting sexual thoughts in kids minds that they're just not prepared for and the other concern that i have is the language you know part of this effing everything i just learned what a f means i didn't know what that meant until yesterday as [ __ ] and that's the key thing that kids use you know they'll say whatever expression and then it's a f you know it's like it's as big as a f it's it's as cute as am okay i don't get that kind of language but what's behind that language and why would we condone it in our books is it cussing simpler is a language of anger it's the type of way to speak to express anger and if we're trying to promote

058respect for our administrators and our teachers and our other students and colleagues and you know what are we teaching that it's okay to be that angry and to expressive whenever you feel like however you feel like and i think that part of our jobs as parents is to teach our kids self-control and we just don't go around talking like that i mean if another adult came up to you and started talking like that what would your thoughts be this person needs to get a life or this person needs to go somewhere with a cleaner language or something and that is why i just think that we need to be very very careful what we put in our kids minds and that that's my those are my main concerns about the books that we're reading and

059by the way i do have a list of 100 books that all time classics that children should read because they really do promote good morals and good teachings about equality about being kind to others and all of those and you know what i'll find it and i'll make a copy for all the boardrooms just to look it up thank you for having us tonight and i was actually excited to come here because i know that you're reasonable people who have children who work in the school and um what i wanted to say is all of us come to muhammad or a lot of us when i talk to people because of the schools right we feel comfortable we go these are great teachers right they're going to go into class and i don't need to

060panic i don't need to look through the curriculum with two things home or whatever like i'm looking for fleas or whatever i can trust these people and um so when i came home from berlin i was really excited because berlin is not a very conservative place and so my kids had gone through a really really difficult time um and so i was shocked when my sixth grader came home with seed folks and i don't have the excerpt to read to you tonight and i apologize for that um but one of the characters is pregnant and in this passage she is contemplating how do i discard this fetus and she goes through and she talks about it it's very very graphic and we won't get into legends which i found very disturbing but then in eighth

061grade um my daughter was very disturbed as you start ellie b zell's night is a wonderful book for people who are capable for an adult for you or me looking into this topic i really appreciate his writing and it's won several awards but very quickly in the beginning of the book you have ss soldiers taking a baby throwing it into the air and shooting it for target practice and it was extremely disturbing um i know for my children and so when the topic came around i was thankful we said to emma you know why don't we see if there's another option what if you read the hiding place and her teacher was very accommodating and she said okay you start with the hiding place and it was very interesting i didn't lead emma on this

062at all and she's sitting one night on the floor and she's got the worksheet for ellie gazelle's night and it's got what is the theme of this chapter what do you learn in this chapter those kind of basic ideas and she said just take it for the hiding place and do it and emma about an hour and goes mom i can't believe this you have to look at this look at night it's despair god is dead there is no hope you know society is just imploding i forget exactly what it was so don't quote me i'm sorry she goes look at the hiding place god is there there's hope i can make change in the world i can make a difference she goes mom i can't believe that the same topic is addressed from such

063different viewpoints and so i'm asking us how are we addressing these topics that do need to be addressed right we need to talk about social issues it doesn't matter if you're a christian an atheist a buddhist i don't care if you're gay or sexual whatever you are this is fantastic that we talk about these issues the question is how do we address them and is it age appropriate for our children as i was reading through these sections of these exercise books i've been reading through them for about nine months or so and a couple nights ago i'm sitting there going i'm already desensitized to all this cursing i found myself just sitting there and one of my friends leaves leans over and goes would this be hilarious let's just talk for a minute like they

064talk in this book and he's like hey [ __ ] war would you bring me a beer damn you [ __ ] go to your room i hate you i'm gonna kill you and i started laughing because the reality is i would never talk to you like that ever it's so comical i know you don't talk to your children like that in your home and as a teacher i would never let a child talk to me like that in the classroom so why in the world are we giving them these books you know and the kids don't know any better so they don't come home i remember saying to one of my kids hey i just read this book you read last year what'd you think about it goes oh it was bad i was embarrassed but i wasn't

065going to tell you mom and i go buddy you can tell me he goes yeah yeah it's a bad book and i thought you'd be mad about the language you know i go now you can tell me this is a safe place we can do better for our kids and what bothers me is this new novel list came before the old board and i'm really glad we trust our professionals we have some great professionals in our school but it is not micromanaging as a board to take a minute and look it's helping the professionals do it right it's safeguarding our children because they're fantastic so that's all i got to say thank you so much for being here i really do love this community oh i want to say one more thing real real quick

066another thing i'm sorry i'm going on and on is there four books in a row that are very anti-comp and i really do think it's important to address abuses by authority because there are a lot we have a situation in our community one of the most caught those boys is for eighth grade and it talks about several black boys who have died and wrongfully died and i'm really glad their experience is told however one of the ghost boys in particular has a dialogue with a young girl of a cop a young white girl a young white girl of privilege a beloved 8th grade girl that we have this year will have to read that book and i wait for her because it should not happen [Applause] thank you my name is steve greenlee thank you

067for hearing my comments earlier i appreciate it um i'm going to give you a little bit more of my experience with my daughter uh this was the book that hate you give she read my daughter's 16 just turned 16. the main character of this book star the 16 year old girl from chapter 5 page 39 of 199 in the pdf version she says this falling around isn't new for us and when chris slipped his hand in my shorts i didn't think anything of it then he got me going and i really wasn't thinking at all for real my thought process went out the door and right as i was at that moment he stopped reached in his pocket pulled out a condom he raised his eyebrows at me silently asking for an invitation to go

068all the way all i could think about was those girls i see walking around garden heights babies popped on their hips condom or no condom [ __ ] happens i went off on chris he knew i wasn't ready for that we already talked about it and yet he had a condom he said he wanted to be responsible but if i said i'm not ready i'm not ready i left his house pissed and horny the absolute worst way to leave my mom may have been right she once said that after you go there with a guy it activates all those feelings and you want to do it all the time chris and i went far enough that i noticed every single detail about his body now his cute nostrils that flare when he sighs this soft brown hair

069that my fingers love to explore his gentle lips and his tongue that wets them every so often the five freckles on his neck that are the perfect spots for kissing more than that i remember the guy who spends almost every night on the phone with me talking about nothing and everything the one who loves to make me smile yeah he pisses me off sometimes and i'm sure i piss him off but we mean something we actually mean a lot [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] i'm crumbling my 16 year old daughter heard that on audio i feel bad for the teacher she didn't want to read it my daughter sitting in a classroom with mixed boys and girls melting into our seat i hope this has made you uncomfortable because it made me very uncomfortable for me

070to stand up here and say those words in a public forum it's very uncomfortable and i'm gonna go home i don't have to pray a lot about it i had to pray a lot about it before i got here she came to me before she started the classes dad what am i going to do we've had tough conversations and i want to have those tough conversations with you and make a commitment to you that i'm not here just to make you uncomfortable drop the mic and walk out the door yeah i'm here to start the difficult conversation we can do better than this i want to make sure that we do better than this we owe it to our kids graduated one kid daughter is a junior now i'm gonna have a grandkid in a

071couple of years start to go to this school i'm gonna be here for a while so i hope you get used to seeing his face because we're gonna have those conversations we're going to talk i'm a reasonable man but every day that i go to work and deal with kids from broken homes from troubled lives hopeless helpless i want my daughter to have compassion for them and this does not give her compassion for them it makes her shy away thank you steve what are we doing what are we doing i over here 16 years ago my oldest was going in eighth grade uh he reached phil montenberg he had a good education i subbed paid attention i was a little surprised the outsiders was a sixth grade book it's a high school book i was

072not happy that outsiders was read by sixth graders i figured out quickly talking to my younger kids they were reading it but they weren't really getting most of it so okay it was all right it doesn't belong in sixth grade i didn't make a book seven years ago i was blessed and privileged to take uh maternity leave for marissa frank's i talked from mid-october until christmas time to prepare for that assignment i read everything the kids had read until the day i walked into the room that included uh a thousand splendid sons the kids at that time i do not know what is the deal right now but the kids at that time only read 15 chapters if they were in honors and 11 chapters i believe if they were regular it was the first

073year there was an honors program for sophomore year the teachers were figuring out we as a district didn't own the books we xeroxed them and handed them out a chapter at a time the children that were more advanced of course went out and bought their own copy because they wanted to read the whole thing so i read this book had the whole book in my head by the time i walked in a couple weeks before marissa went on the journey leave i was going to the extended time you know the the shortened day when kids go home and the teachers meet because i wanted to be ready to go and i was questioning it i said why are we doing this why why did we teach part of the book why did that you know

074i asked a lot of questions and later that day i got called the principal's office i thought he wanted to talk about my start date he wanted to talk about why i was making why i was making waves why was i questioning it i said i simply i'm trying to understand and in the meeting i'd had with them i had gotten a little bit of a better understanding but um they said common core you have to have a modern author and uh other countries okay i gotta tell you and i was gonna read it i pulled it on my phone i'm not gonna read it it's gross that book covers everything from suicide murder um infant loss uh wife beating um because it's afghanistan it's forced rape marital rape um it's it's gross it's an

075awful book and it because the kids only registered them out there isn't anything redemption redemptive about it they can't even get to the point where the characters do anything but i believe i was placed in a position at that time to protect two students that i knew in particular who i was working with in youth group who i knew had both been sexually abused and both of them came to me and said should we read the rest of the book on our own and i said no do not read the rest of that book on your own you do not do it but then when finance time came along uh and i love our english teachers it's not i don't know whose fault this is which is the bottom line question we need to ask

076ourselves but they came and they said well here's the final on the final there was reading comprehension and they had pulled the next two chapters that the kids hadn't read and put it on the final the first one dealt with the marital rape because the kids hadn't read that yet and that was on the final and they had to read it and answer questions about it and the second chapter they had to read and answer questions about was when the this young woman finds her husband's porn stash and in the porn stash the women are in muslim prayer poses this is what we handed them for the final now some of it had been blacked out for the final but not all of it and i thought my children my students are going to read

077this i'm going to lose the girls here the boys here while they're taking their final because this is traumatic information i blacked out more because none of the questions really pertain to it anyway and i asked then what are we doing and i couldn't get a good answer so my daughter who was going to be a sophomore i homeschooled her english that's that year i kept your home we read ancient greek classics and had a wonderful time what are we doing who is making these decisions who thinks these books are okay who thinks that book is okay i don't care that illinois board of education has kids reading my nephews up in arlington heights had to read that whole book why garbage garbage garbage i'm sorry i love books i love literature i am not

078a book burner i am not a band this book i am going that's what i said earlier this is too heavy for children they are not college students they are high school students they are junior high students we need to i want to know who chose this stuff why is it okay is this ms ronald are you the one that did it who thinks these are okay did you read them did you pick them did you approve them who put them on a list and purchased them why did we pay for them why are why does his daughter have to go to school tomorrow and keep this up poker no she's gotta graduate she's your credit right what is his choice where are our choices i'm just flabbergasted what are we doing and who's responsible

079and how can you defend it i want to hear public defense of all this if you can't get up and publicly defend it then get rid of it tonight this evening pull it we have other books in a closet somewhere at that high school that can be pulled out tomorrow for our children to read thank you okay or communications it's time to report a chance to comment we'll start with dr schultz i was going to have no comment tonight but i think i just need to say that i find somebody for tonight of calling especially the permanent nature of the texts but um i can't not say something first of all i'd like to thank you all for coming and sharing your thoughts with us we are a community and we are supposed to be

080making decisions together we talk a lot about curriculum on this board and whose lane is what we spend more time talking about who's staying in what lane than we do about addressing what it is that we are supposed to be doing uh for my personal opinion what we are supposed to be doing is providing education for our children in a safe space that is guided by adults they do not have fully formed brains it is important that they have guidance i have had concerns i have expressed concerns as a parent i haven't expressed concerns as a board member i have asked for more information time and time again i can't seem to get it when i want it um i don't know a lot on consent agendas and things like that uh because i feel

081like things are stuck in and we don't have a chance to sit and talk about the things that are important to this community and i took this job and asked you for this job because that is a value that's important to me and i wanted to come and be able to do it i'm sad because i don't feel like i've had that chance uh i'm trying uh a board is made up of more than one person uh it's important that we come together but when we spend more time fighting about rules than we do about actually having enough data to have important conversations i think we trip ourselves up and tonight i feel pretty tripped up um i have not voted for these books because there were things in consent agendas called books this level

082r2 r3 it's not enough information for me uh i've asked about curriculum for me a book is a tool i need to understand the context of that tool not just as a board member because i'm responsible for approving curriculum but as a parent because i have to teach to the guests of my kids at home so i need to know what's being discussed with them so that i can bridge those gaps and i can talk about where things that they hear might be a little different than what i think because that's called educating parents if i do not know what is going on with my children i cannot do that i can't do it as a board member to approve and i certainly can't do it as a parent so i appreciate your bravery for

083coming tonight those passages made me uncomfortable what i'm more comfortable with is this is a tool i don't know how it's going to be used i can't weigh in on whether these books are good or bad because i don't know what's going to be said around them yeah it's a hammer if we're in shock class and the hammer's being used to hammer the nail into the table great if the hammer goes to gym class and i'm swinging it around as a bat i have a slightly different perspective i don't know how to assess the tool without the context i personally think we as a school board owe you parents and teachers for that matter the context i don't know how we give these books and [Music] i can't seem to see the curriculum i don't

084know i don't know how the teachers have it either i ask questions i'm told to stay in my lane quite frankly i don't know why they're the lane we're a community we are supposed to be protecting children i am trying i hear you i appreciate you i want to work with you and i'm sorry i just don't know what else to say but thank you for coming today [Applause] yeah i want to say thank you to everyone i came tonight i know that wasn't easy to stand up and say those things it wasn't easy to hear um as a parent it was very uncomfortable for my kids to be learning reading so yeah again thank you all for coming tonight i appreciate your time uh i'm gonna echo the thanks to everybody i feel like

085i'm usually pretty well-versed in young adult literature in the past i've taught multicultural literature for teachers at the ui so i feel like i've read a lot of these books but everything that you guys stood up and talked about other than the hate you give i've never even heard of until tonight so i'm very thankful that um you brought that to our attention um you know one of the things that like many of you that i i'm proud of but yet sometimes kind of i feel like i have to hide is my christianity and my christian values and just like megan said you know we need to be as parents we need to be covering that gap between what we want our children to know and learn at home compared to what they're hearing from

086society and we're working really hard in our house to make sure that our christian values even though they conflict with what society says you should be doing those christian values need to take priority so thank you to all of you um i don't recall seeing a list of these um that i voted on so and i think lord did you say it was a previous story so that makes me feel a little bit better but still i'm feeling a little uncertain about it so thank you to all of you for doing that um in that same uh context of being involved and hearing your voices i did want to say thank you to the bulldog blueprint committee or our group the conversation we were there when was it a couple weeks ago and it was

087just it was really neat to kind of walk around and hear our community members weighing in on things that they feel are going to be important in this next stage of education for our kids it was really nice to hear different ideas and different perspectives and things that i was like huh i never would have even considered that so if any of you have taken part in that thank you i encourage you to take part in it if you haven't um but you know and thank you to the facilitating team who's taking care of all of them um i'll just close a couple things in a couple different areas echo good work from bulldog blueprint we just finished the first semester on that and that will prove to be very valuable and worthwhile moving forward

088we just see where this discussion takes us in the fall and where we in the district go from there uh regarding the information that was shared tonight um i'll agree with meegan that the context does make a difference i know you all think me and i never agree um i i will say that you know just as it was presented tonight i've found a lot of that personally to be appalling and inappropriate and and we'll we're going to take a look at all that and see what is going on okay max can i ask a quick question because i wasn't here at this meeting who voted yes for that i i can't tell you well they can tell well what did yes for that and i just wondered can you guys read these books or

089like when you voted yes okay um so you've got a commitment for me um we're going to look at this i'm going to make a specific comment tonight as to what that involves i had this was not in this form on the agenda tonight and i was not prepared to give my stock to that ahead of time but we will so that's that's what i'm prepared to say right now in the moment off the cuff on that okay um so we are at financial update heather smith um just wanted to let you know everything is online and you guys have noticed from between the budget and actuals there'll be even more in line when i start comparing the new budget um of course you know we haven't i'll be doing some transfers this month for

090torque the ones that were approved in the wrist plan so that'll make that more online um we um we are at a good state i want to thank the treasurer the county treasurer they made their main payment this year on time which makes a huge difference so we are in better shape than you know we have been the last couple years just because of that and because of the grants that we've had coming in so um i am currently working on the new budget you guys are going to be budgeted out but i start from zero and so i basically starting every account from zero and moving people up so that hopefully um by the end of july we can have a finance committee meeting before we put everything on display so um any questions

091or anything about anything that questions on the finance report heather i have a quick question sure and maybe you can point me where i can find it or maybe you can tell me can you share how much the district has spent on the two grievances and the charge that the msca as well i would actually have to look up those actual bills okay so but i can get that for you it's around 27 000 okay thank you another questions for heather all right superman reporter dr hall thank you um i too want to offer my thanks to everybody who spoke um i know that those were difficult things to read and i could hear and see the emotion and the concern and you are heard so just thank you for coming and just want to

092acknowledge the difficulty in doing that it's difficult to stand at the podium and speak no matter what you're saying and i know that those were difficult words and passages to go through and express your feelings about what's what's going on so um there will be more discussion about that and um that's what these four meetings are for so public comment is part of the process to hear from our constituents so thank you i'm not going to go into too much detail about my superintendent's report that's in the board packet other than to say we did have our second bulldog blueprint community engagement session almost two weeks ago and um for the summertime had i think pretty good attendance a lot of people are not around and kind of disconnect from us in the summer time

093understandable we're really looking forward to the fall and picking that up again and we're going to have some coat our facilitating team co-chairs here in july to provide an update so looking forward to that and then mr benedict provided some information in there about a branding process at the high school so i'll let people read through that but we're excited about the um where that's taking us and the work that he's done with his students and staff thank you any questions for dr hall okay moving into regular business under new business item one is approve revised 2021 budget heather [Music] you approve the revised budget again it's not a requirement it's just something that'll make things easier on the audit end when it comes to our um k response recommendations will approve the revised budget

094as presented is there a motion to do that i'd actually like to move to amend the proposed budget to include a thousand dollar bonus uh to the payments payments to the employees in the district all the employees eligible to join the union and the building level administrators um for this is for this year right now 2021 that ends this month that's the money is in this correct yeah free money will begin july 1. there's no extra money in this budget one and two which we've already approved the budgets the sr3 is what we're working on now which we will will not be allowed to be submitted until after july 1. we don't have any money left over from one and two yeah okay i still think it's important that we talk about bonus payments for

095the employees well and we can discuss that as something that'll come later in this meeting we've been doing a lot of getting a lot of feedback from everybody on the sr3 because it's such a large portion so um you know we we're identifying now and we've gotten feedback from all the staff and everything uh everyone so that is something that we will be planning from now forward until we write the grant after july one and that's something we can go through as well and i know um i wasn't here for all of them but we had meetings with the board members i don't know if you came in or not but just to just discuss all the feedback from everybody overall take a vote on it we just have to dig withdrawn actually and then

096doesn't have to be taken discuss that recently previous meeting i don't want to withdraw it i'd actually like to vote please okay so the discussion on the amendment emotion member promotion is to include in the 2021 budget a thousand dollar bonus to every employee who's eligible to join the union plus building level administrators eligible to join the union which i believe with encompass uh custodial staff bus drivers i make sure that everyone who's been employed but not substitutes i didn't know exactly so to be clear there is not money in the budget to pay for that not in this budget it'll have to be something to discuss for the 21-22 budget which the promotion is to put it out of this budget so that's what's on i just want to make sure that ford understands

097there's not money to pay for that do you have an idea [Music] thousand 300-400 just my understanding is about ten percent of the us for money that we've been given i think it depends on how we compartmentalize the us or money and so if you're telling me that there's no way to do uh compartments we've moved it in the past so i'm a little uncertain as to when we can move it when we can't again out of this budget the 21 20 or we have already it is june now that budget ends this month the new assert iii budget that we'd have to amend in iowa's would not be amended in time or you know or that's a one or less or two could not be amended in time by the end of this month

098sr 3 which is what we've been meeting and discussing that is where you would want to um recommend something like this because then we can put it in and submit the budget because we don't get to just spend it we have to be approved by isb before we can spend money okay then i would like to use this to show my intent to do that in the next one so the vote will be helpful for that okay so we're discussing the revit the revision amendment the proposed amendment to this that we that we pay the bonuses there's a further discussion on that yeah it's a bad idea but if we don't have money to pay for that no that's fine but here's the problem is when we get down here there's just discussion here um

099under the us or free funds and so what i don't want to do is get trapped in the in the web that we always get trapped in as to not being able to make a motion because it says discussion and not action if we're willing to open that up to action then i'm more than willing to pull this and make this motion at number six i i am personally not opposed to considering paying some employee bonuses i i would like more than a spur of the moment at the meeting to think about that i'd like to be able to think have some time to ask staff i'd like to investigate some ramifications of this i'd like some clarification on who's eligible under the language you presented there's a lot of work that i would like

100to do on this that we're not going to get done tonight so if if the intent is to approve that tonight on the spur of the moment with no notice and no leg work i would vote no on that but i'm not opposed to the concept and i do want to add also to your point about other ram applications i know that did this recently and they're paying a great deal of penalties because that also included retirees there you go for imref and so we'd have to figure out a way you know in the future with the sr3 funds and not all of the sr3 funds have been committed right now it's just looking at the funds and what we have and everything we're not tonight when we discuss so3 we're just discussing what we

101have it's not it doesn't even equal the total budget so there's time for us to put other things in here you could talk to monticello they gave bonuses and found their way around yes and i know a school district that tried that as well and they got a scathing letter from imrf about trying to deceive the retirement system because what they did was they added days so you can yeah you can do something like that but then you could get a lot of trouble with the retirement system so i think i think what i'm hearing is there is interest in pursuing this and it would be money that would need to come out of the s or three funds which we don't even have a platform available yet to start entering a budget for sr3

102but i'm not hearing that this is going away just that there's a lot of ramifications and aspects of this to discuss and it deserves more time then perhaps we have tonight but it's also not on the agenda as an action item it's on an agenda as a discussion item so i think it i'm i'm hearing that there's interest in having more more discussion about it employee compensation is typically something we talked about in closed session here we are negotiating employee compensation i want to make it very clear i'm not negotiating compensation i am suggesting a bonus okay that the board would give to employees and employees are welcome to turn that down this is not negotiation in any aspect this is and i'm happy to pull this motion with the understanding that i would like

103to be able to remake it under number six so that it's on the record and we don't lose track of this random discussion oh i don't think we're going to lose track of this now because we've got 400 employees to remind us so i'm not too worried about that but we can we can do that if you'd like um i'm going to reiterate the fact that i i will vote no tonight on this it's not an action item it's not an action item and our attorney has in the past advised us that items that are put on the agenda as discussion items shouldn't be turned into action items awesome actually i don't believe it where it is right okay i i'm perhaps lost got lost in the discussion i thought we were talking about turning

104number six into an action in action it's a 400 000 expenditure that i think deserves more thoughtful and discussions it's not going away it just deserves more time it's a big chunk of money okay [Music] it's covered relief money from the federal government specific to schools okay okay thank you we might consider two just dropping action and discussions we've had two attorneys tell us it's not necessary for our agenda and that might solve a lot of the issues we have it's just to drop those um words on the agenda which are not how much you always told us shelley said we didn't need it and jeff frank told us shelley said we don't need it but if it's there you should follow it but she said we didn't need it there just you have to

105follow it so how does the public well the law says that you need to put the specific topic of anything that's coming up for action on an agenda and they actually have had several cases that i've read recently that it has to be very specific like you can't even say we're going to vote on ordinance 22. like that's not a topic you have to put the topic on the agenda but as long as the topic that it says the general topic in the law is on the agenda then that's something you could do and what it does is it would give our board the opportunity to discuss things and make decisions together now i'm not suggesting necessarily these big things we could still say we don't want to make these big things but if we

106were to come together and all of us were to decide oh we would like to do this then we would have the flexibility to be able to do it within the discussions that we have is this the conversation we can have with our evaluation yes that was kind of a day that i said i couldn't either so okay so right now last i heard we had a revision and a second on the table is that still on the table i will remove the motion for this evening but um i i'm quite tired of getting boxed in by two words on an agenda and i'm hoping to write the high pass are you comfortable removing your second one i am but actually the robert schools of order requires you to ask unanimously if anyone in them

107or is anyone objecting that's correct as long as everyone agrees for it to be removed sensing no disagreement we're back to the original question the superintendent the recommendation we approve the budget revision as presented is there a motion to do that is there a second second further discussion i just want to ask that we commit to having an action item on the july agenda to address uh meegan's um idea uh and we include any kind of impact or plans for how we could deal with imrf or any other conditions like that so we can have a well thought out discussion regardless of whether what issues might arise between now and then i would say yes let's just commit to it all right any other discussion on the budget please yes nick murray yes tennessee no

108hendrix schultz president yes mccomb yes heather let's talk about insurance um who we contract out to look into our different insurance needs besides health insurance they have given us renewals for all of our insurance it did go up quite a bit mainly due to our forklifts comp claims which we're hoping that's just based off the last year's law runs so we're hoping that those will decrease over the next year so they can go back down um we just had an extraordinary year and then also um the fact that we have more equipment we have also with the sr funds we have been purchasing quite a bit of equipment so we want to make sure all that is covered they gave us two options one was just a slightly larger deductible um but you have the

109larger the drupal has more cyber insurance it has a million dollars uh which is the other option is to um do a lower deductible but then we only have about a hundred thousand dollars in cyber coverage and talking with our privacy manager jared over there um a hundred thousand is quite not quite the enough for cyber coverage um so we're opting i am recommending to opt to go with the one with a little bit higher deductibles you know one thousand to five thousand uh to have the million dollars of coverage in cyber coverage yes okay so the recommendation that we approve the insurance option two as presented is our motion to do that um discussion on the insurance do we know and jared might be the best person to ask um the the updated um

110digital or whatever you want to call it uh insurance does that cover us for ransomware attacks that's why it was increased to a million dollars okay because 100 000 if something were to occur we don't know what the what the ransom will be if it would be anything at all number one um what would happen if we were to be sued by this by a party or whatever so by upping into that million dollars we're we're seeing ourselves in a better situation um fingers crossed never happens but we're seeing a lot more ransomware taxes and is it is the company willing to pay those ransoms or is that just the cost whether we want to discuss that public cloud okay good question sir um any other questions on this for heather or discussion yes chief

111yes hendrix schultz yes mcmurray yes tennessee yes macomb yes track a little bit more fun item um the high school track right now is not usable for events so we cannot host any track events here um i mean in the whole blue dot bull print blueprints we will be addressing um long you know longer term solutions for all of the stadium but for right now we need to make our track usable um we had one bid did put this out to bed um the other vendors that did ask for the big specs they were not able to do it um to actually get it done so it would it is i recommend to approve um the low bid the only bid um for 69 997 from midwest track buildings to come in and make everything

112good they're also going to put in some areas for the walkway so that we don't have this continue to happen okay recommendation the board approve the bid as it is presented is there a motion to do that second second discussion how are we paying for the performance so i understand that we need to track that but i you mentioned this i would like you to expand further we have the blueprint company where we're going to make facilities decisions and we're supposed to get the report on that in five months and yet i mean i don't know what they're gonna come back and say maybe they're gonna say tear down the whole stadium and build it somewhere else i you know i have no idea what they're gonna come back with and so and a little

113concerned about spending all this money to just fix the track when there might be a bigger well there may be a bigger vision in the future but this is just because i mean i don't know earliest we would be doing any kind of yeah that's a great question yeah um and so um please recognize that this is this is a short this is like the shortest term fix knowing that um there probably is a much more extensive comprehensive comprehensive uh repair of the track that needs to take place down the road i mean this is like a like a five-year band-aid realistically um getting a recommendation from bulldog blueprint late this year or um early january um that you know that's step one of um just gonna guess like 100 steps in terms of carrying

114out a long-term facilities plan so while there might be again we don't know how bulldog where bulldog blueprint is going to go or what kind of recommendation that we're going to get but if there are athletic facility recommendations in that it's going to be a couple of years before that comes to fruition in the meantime you know this is a facility that at this point neither the junior high or the high school track programs can yeah there's a there's a large crack in it and it's just it's not certified isn't the right word for instance the ies and the ihsa won't permit us to have a sectional there for sure but then we're just to the point of even having track meets there it's not not okay i think when you look at another year

115or so for bulldog blueprint to come to a conclusion and any funding to be put in place and then you've got a bidding process of a year you've got construction um about a year or two on top of that but also with the bulldog movement who knows but probably not everything was going to happen at one time um so i think the fact that this was kind of a five-year deal to get us through is the thought of that um and then at the end of that time um you know we're probably not odds are pretty slim that would completely walk away from that facility um even if a new facility is built um so it makes that makes sense to keep it usable and safe in the last several years so some money for

116this coming on next year's budget um actually yes so because i haven't been approved so how does uh the condition of that track compared to the condition of the track at the junior high oh it's dirt generous dirt yeah yeah it's not it's like a pathway so you need to run around yeah we can't happen what's the timeline heather like how long um i just know that i mean we've already gotten the biz and the bids are um they're considered firm for 60 days so i'm assuming that we would start it at least commit to starting for the next 60 days the goal is to have it yeah in shape for we want to get it get it started as soon as possible yes so you said it's being paid out next year's budget what

117funds is it coming from okay well we have um what i will do is i will go through it piece by piece there may be some that can come out of torque because of the safety issues that colleen mentioned but then also our capital projects okay we also have some um some money from our advertising oh yes i forgot yes about half of the things you paid for through the advertising structure that we have okay and that's helped us to repair some that's gone to other facilities at the high school repair scoreboards that type of thing thank you doctor we forgot about that yes uh mr hanson already promised all good questions any other questions or thoughts comments yes the phone yes dr ramo approved child development textbooks so our child development class in the

118cte department received a grant from the education for employment to purchase materials for the classroom the teacher determined that the best use of the materials would be to purchase new textbooks current textbooks are over 20 years old and so what you have there is a proposal for the new textbooks and so i know this was on for discussion last month and happy to answer any questions you might have to customizability i know this was presented last month has this been available is that a question yeah yes yeah absolutely most of the very few are sending uh hard copies anymore but we keep it and we're not able to publish a as you can imagine a login and password to put out there but when people come in we load up a chromebook so they can

119preview materials i have a question so those materials are not available online we have to come into the school to get a login and password yes does the public know that i sent an email to parents i believe i put it out on social media too i'd have to go back and chat it's actually federal and state law and our policy that any member of the community can request any instructional materials whether in paper or electronics so if the board votes through then you would be able to come up at any time and see any material but we would have to come in to the building yeah that's the way that it is that's an acceptable way to provide access because i know way back in the day they used when they had hard copies

120they could have them at the library or just different places i'm not imagining that no you're not and then when we when that occurs we do that but more and more resources are not coming in that format anymore i understand but i was just like you know so the general public like you know retirees people like that we would go to the library we would see them and then we could review them and we could talk to our children about them but now we we don't get parent emails right well and but you're welcome to come here and we'll set you up too okay it's a lot of stuff okay well thank you how have the board has some order reviewed the books i didn't read the book i'm sorry you did it you didn't

121i did is there anything else i have not had a chance to you know i haven't had a chance i did not i i said earlier just a book without understanding the curriculum around it i haven't looked at it but i would be more interested in seeing the whole it's just a tool i'd like to see it in its entirety but i have enough to see that okay other questions discussion on the textbooks oh i'm sorry all right i asked one more question all right yes we're discussing i thought we had mo yeah i mean as far as i mean obviously after tonight's conversation and stuff i mean what would it mean if we were to like table this and have another chance i mean i know we had a chance to since the last

122board meeting but because of our practice of having a board meeting to discuss and then a board meeting for action so they already gave us an extension to allow for that perfect thank you [Music] good could be well normally we take a recess about 90 minutes in and we're going all around because we didn't start at the setup i mean just move this to the end of the agenda that's what i'm saying and then take the resuspend so we can just continue all the business we're done with the business take a little recess anyone who wants to look at it again and then come back and vote at the end of the meeting i mean i i trust mrs pike as well on a personal level so someone will share that when i talk to

123the part is not adjusting the curriculum it's only the textbook that she's using for that so i just want to be clear that the actual content of the course is not dangerous i was just trying to accommodate justin's request if she can't do that okay so is there a motion to approve further discussion [Music] yes yes hendrix mcmurray yes macomb yes number five staff positions dr hall thank you um so i'm requesting the awards approval this evening of the staff positions that are listed in the board packet these have been discussed for the last couple of months and there's probably more that could be on the list but these have bubbled up as right now the higher priorities of our needs right now um they're being funded through a combination of either s or three

124funds or um our tier money which i'm thankful that we are going to be getting this year we did not get that when i say this year i mean for fy22 we did not get those funds for fiscal year 21. so i'm happy to go through and answer questions about each of these positions or any any of them or any combination of them i've had the chance to talk with some of you about them but these have come about through discussion about um the best ways that we can support our students and families and where some of the gaps are in our personnel in terms of the assistant principal at mohamed seymour high school that's a position that up until 2003 there actually were four administrators at the high school and then an administrator left

125in that time period and that position has never been replaced yet our enrollment has grown significantly since that time um other things on this list are again addressing areas where we just have kind of gaps in service or being able to appropriately support um the various places and and people that need the supporting of these positions in terms of the information technology specialist um we are this this would this would begin to address what i think is a drastic shortage um in jared's department jared is kind of a one-man show um or there's he does have two yeah there's like one and a half other people um uh which is an extremely low number of of personnel um in a district technology department our size um so getting him some some more health is crucial

126and um some of those other positions on there i'm happy to to talk about if there's any any questions so um again these have been positions that have been discussed mainly among our leadership team some of these were suggestions that came from our staff as well we did ask our staff for some ideas on the expenditure of sr3 funds so it's been a been a journey of discussion and collaboration bringing this list to tonight so when we um um hired mercedes we hired her to do our district 504s and so i noticed we're now hiring a bible coordinator two years later but i thought she loves artistry she oversees them um she can't possibly go to every meeting and she will continue to oversee this person who would be the coordinator but we continue to

127have the numbers of 504 plans grow and it's it's to a point right now between marissa our counselors at the high school and our social workers who also have a lot of other items and tasks on their plates and serving our students we're just to a point where we feel that we need this position that's a good question are there other questions lindsay i know one of the concerns of adding staff is the burden of evaluation on administrators yeah so i just did a quick tally who who will first of all at the junior high high school slash ltn pe is is that a reasonable expectation to add staff there with the administrators that are already there like is it will they be able to handle that additional those additional evaluations and then secondly who

128does the evaluations for the district employees so like some of the some of the employees are uh some of the positions are district positions so um that's a great question and i appreciate you asking so the assistant principal at the addition of the assistant principal at the high school would help that person would be a trained evaluator of licensed personnel so we are that that is a definitely a concern as we continue to grow that our our buildings are all very large and um you know three of our buildings just have two administrators and we continue to add staff um both licensed and and non-certified staff all of whom need to be evaluated but the process for evaluating licensed staff is really pretty expensive as you all know and has gotten you know each each

129person um it's hours of investment of time it's a really important process that that our administrators engage in so i think the addition of these staff is going to get disbursed among buildings so district level employees are might be evaluated by christine or nicole or marissa so those are the levels that they go there in some cases heather as well so thank you i see that you have a k-5 instruction approach how utilized is our current k-5 instructional coach thank you it's a great question so i'll speak to that in terms of throwing vote coaches we just added instructional coaches in the um the 1819 school year was the first year that we had instructional coaches the the instructional coaching model is one of the most effective ways of improving instruction and um and it's

130it's also a a opportunity for teachers to engage in reflective conversation with the coach about how to improve and so we are still growing and i would say that that's going to be a journey in terms of how much the instructional coach is utilized so every year more teachers become involved in coaching cycles we do ask that our first and um and second year teachers utilize instructional the instructional coaches so those folks are already doing it um so we added we added the instructional coaches that we have now in the 18 19 school year 19 20 school year got you know cut short obviously we missed a quarter of the school year and then all of this last school year we were on a completely different different schedule um and so i would say that

131that had we not had the interruption of the pandemic we would be further along in our journey of infusing coaching into our culture of teaching and instruction so it's going to be a um a growth process in terms of utilizing those those coaches and and having our teachers take advantage of that our coaches do um a lot of other things besides just engaging in coaching cycles with our teachers they observe classrooms they're very involved with technology they assist teachers not only with instruction but also with the implementation of of technology in the classroom so it continues to be a growth and process but again instructional coaching is one of the most effective ways to improve instruction and if you if we go by the evidence-based funding model it's one of the positions that we are

132most short on in our in our school district if you look at if you look at the instructional based model we are really really really short on instructional coaches now i don't know that we will ever have seymour with the level of professional coaches they suggest we do um but we can certainly make the case for the fact that we're way low on that number right now somebody knows more about instructional code you know i guess what i'm wondering is given our current situation and from what many of the elementary school teachers say that it might be more beneficial to add something like an interventionist in math or something like that at the middle town or to you know i mean we know some school districts have shifted coaches to interventionists especially in this sort

133of time of program and learning and so many people have said we're short on interventionists our kids are scoring lower on their testing and so i'm not saying i don't think coaches are valuable i'm saying if there's one position out there what is the data we have that says a coach would be better than an interventionist especially when this moment our coach is not being overutilized or fully i think your point is is well taken i think um that i would offer a couple of things that and the board absolutely should consider this the more interventionists did not bubble up on the list of of needs we do have four interventionists um in in this building um interventionists tend to work with they do work with kids on a very like small group one-on-one type

134of model so and those those are students who are identified as um having academic gaps that need to to be filled and need the work of the interventionist potentially an instructional coach reaches um far more kids by by working with the teachers to improve instruction so but i i don't disagree with what i've said interventionists are valuable too yeah i totally understand the coaches but if if we're not in capacity in the first one and we add a second one it seems like a little bit of wasted capacity until we get into a culture and i agree with you it's culture it's you know once the culture grows then it seems like that would be a good time to add another person not when we're actually having excess capacity here and a big need over

135here can i can i just comment on that um you're gonna see if you have one coach for 50 teachers typically the ratio would be one to what 20 teachers if you have one coach to 50 teachers one of them one of the key components of effective coaching is building those relationships you're not going to be able to build those relationships if you are supposed to be interacting with 50 teachers i also worry about judging the efficacy of coaching on really essentially six months because the coaching didn't actually start until the 18 19 school year then we were cut off and then last year i was one of the coaches who who actually got pushed to an intervention position and i'm glad lindsey mentioned i was able to work with last year i don't know

136maybe 20 students the year prior when i was actually an instructional coach i worked with every single child in our building we had 400 we have 450 students in our building and i was able to be in every single classroom so i think the piece that is really important to remember is that interventionists while are very important they're only there for a certain targeted group of kids whereas instructional coaches are gonna be able to touch every student in the building through their teacher and through their um instructional interactions and i do think it's it's fair to say if we have this culture going on right now is adding one really going to change things i i mean i'm the wrong person be sitting here everything for this i would advocate for even for coaches just

137because bringing that ratio down you're really going to be able to develop those relationships and develop that culture i think right now we're putting there's losers to be able to put one in each building right yeah there'd be one in each elementary building and then the two um 612 coaches would would generally be separated between language arts and math that does not include them in any way having access to other teachers or teachers having access to them is that outcomes so at least when it comes to building relationships with teachers it's just hard when i hear about people saying there's not enough room for the interventionist to help kids that need help eternally kids that need help at those levels balancing it out with with whatever we hear it's just it's just a matter of

138limited resources and how we allocate those best as opposed to having a value statement on what it is i mean i'm sure the coaches are wonderful i'm not in any way disparaging what they're doing just it's not the culture here yet and so it seems like we need to understand why that would be the best use today not next year a whole new round maybe that would be a better time to add someone in any questions on the job coach or any other positions as long as i'm asking can i say something i recently retired from rancho city schools and we had we've had instructional coaches for years and i can tell you they are phenomenal and i think you need more what did you say the ratio is usually 20 although because right now

139no no right now it's like one to fifty oh it's over yeah it's more like 165 right ratio would be 20 and then i would ask dr hall i mean if you have a lot of new hires you really need these instructional thoughts because i know dr hall just talked about this evacuations your principles are spread so thin trying to do evaluations for all your new hires they don't have time to do what back in my day and you're not as old as me that's what principals did you know that they coached their new hires they don't have time to do that so i'm advocating for you hire more historical coaches i'm sorry dr hall has to figure out how to pay for it that's why heaven is [Music] again this is just guidance but

140our evidence-based funding what we get our tier funding from they kind of tell us what we're in need of and what we don't need just for it's just numbers but they're telling us with our current enrollment that we are minus 13.87 coaches i'm not percenter the 19th percent we don't have any spaces so we can't do that and having the teachers say if we only had a math interventionist then the four interventionists could work on reading and these people could go to math and i just feel like i'm just trying to balance out the idea that we should hire thirteen coaches and twenty four quarters [Music] our local yes environment is different yes right like christine could tell this we have way more many more iep students or special ed students than some other districts

141so she might need more resources there and we might be a district that you know i don't know the one thing i hope would make you feel better about interventionists we look at that data all the time and so if you read um the folks who really do deep and peer-reviewed research on intervention so markshin would be a great place to start um you know 80 to 85 of your students in general should be meeting in the general education classroom tier one you don't provide intervention to anybody beyond that so when we're looking at the numbers of kids we're serving we're making sure 80 or 85 percent of our kids are meeting with that initial dose of vitamins right and then if somebody is a little bit sick then we might come back and that

142person might get tier two and that might be just a general antibiotic we give to everybody and then tier three is something that's much more specific and maybe it's a weekly infusion of some kind just to sort of frame that in a medical model model but when we're looking at that data we are not underserving kids we are actually over serving a number of students and probably need to reallocate some of the intervention services that are being provided and just to be clear students who are at the 20th percentile are in the average range that's not the bottom 20 that's the 20th percentile that is still the average range okay so when we're talking about intervention and we're talking about we can't serve someone at the 20th percentile we're talking about we can't serve somebody

143who is reading or performing math at their grade level in the average range i just want to be really clear about that because it's it's easy for me to misunderstand it's taken a long time for my for these school psychologists to make sure i get it right because 20 the 20th percentile feels or sounds really low it's not the bottom 20 percent it's if there's a big difference i hope that helps a little bit um again and i have to look at that data we can't entitle anybody i can't even begin to say we can provide intervention unless 80 to 85 of our kids are meeting or exceeding with the general education curriculum otherwise we couldn't move kids through the entitlement process for specific learning disabilities in reading or math so that date is being

144evaluated all the time other questions comments on either the inter or the job coach instrumentalist part of this or any other positions i mean one of the stipends so one idea that um that has come out of um well let me uh the first part of that question is easier stipends for professional development in the past we have um in the summer time we have paid for the registration for teachers to participate in professional development and and now we would be able to actually pay them a stipend as well to attend because since we have the esser money so want to be clear that that um that might not be able to continue after the sr money runs out but it's something that we think that we think um can offer and it would be

145a good thing um we know the teachers sometimes need to find child care in the summertime if they participate in child in professional development and so just something to to help out in in that way and give them some money for attending in the summer time as far as the case management idea um these stipends would be for teachers at the junior high high school to have a caseload of students that they would personally connect to and support and monitor throughout the school year these students will be students that are identified as being academically at risk already on the df list or some other piece of data that would tell us that they're experiencing some difficulty or perhaps they have attendance issues and then these case managers would work and connect with the counselor our

146new counselor at the junior high and then our counselors at the high school and social workers as well we do know that we had more students on the df list at junior high in high school this past year this isn't to say that we expect that to continue but um this this um these funds are aren't meant to be used for academic support and this was an idea that um came from one of our assistant principals pat bailey i think and we want to want to give it a shot i think it's a great way for teachers to kind of have a small group of kids that they're working with and monitoring how did you manage the imrf limits with the stipends um okay so if people are currently employed so um so these would

147be trs employees um and so we do have to monitor and be very careful of trs employees who are receiving the retirement incentive and um so they essentially know that they cannot receive stipends so that they they know in advance that's a i mean we want to say there's a disadvantage to receiving that we can't exceed um that six percent or there's there's penalties that none of us none of us want to pay um so the stipends are really okay for um anybody else who's not in the retirement pipeline i was just curious because going back to our conversation about bonuses and things like that yeah so that that we'd have to be kind the same thing we'd have to be cognizant of that same thing is true with irf employees as well who were

148receiving advertising so that's a possible strategy yeah although this would not this would not be in these would not be iron employees sure i i meant here as i wrote it's the same obstacle it's just different systems exactly one thing that i just want to say is i think we need to keep our eye on this information technology specialist we keep adding technology to this district and i think we um are under employed in that particular area and we're asking too much of apparently two and a half people uh two and a quarter people um and i i think this board really needs to keep that in the front of our brains and as we move forward i would like to make that area a targeted area that we are intentional with filling because we

149can't keep adding tech and expect one or two people to be able to to manage that so i think that is an under seen very vital role that we have to be intentional about filling yeah i thank you for that i appreciate that recognition and uh if you want to add more i mean throw some on tonight we were already 15 coaches i will just say that um not just specific to um to that position to adding a technology position but we we are just in a situation of like the rest of the world right now of really really struggling with finding people just to interview and um so i'm what we're finding is that candidates come to us and they will have multiple offers on the table and so um ball's kind of in

150their court and if you're looking for a job you're kind of in the driver's seat right now we just lost a great candidate um to fill an open position with with jared so um that's just a challenge top to bottom not only with that but in particular i think the technology that's that's hard to find so that that does seem to be though just kind of how the world is working right now so we hope that that can maybe kind of get right in the next i know you were joking but i actually do want to know i wasn't joking this position is actually more like a day-to-day person it's not necessarily but that's the most day-to-day operation of like repairing devices working with classroom teachers to to support their technology this is more of

151a person who's going to see our skyward management oversee our state reporting oversee data manipulation in terms of you know i was math or whatever tool we utilize for assessment it's all more about the data so now i'm more concerned because i think you need a good supposed person to know so we do have an open position for another versus person um so we're looking for africans [Music] right now that is primarily my role uh in terms of what i'm taking on in terms of like overseeing that data manipulation um we're looking for somebody who that's what they do right so from a nuts and bolts perspective right now we're okay um you will hear from me it might mean more um really i'll tell you i still want to be intentional with that area

152because i do think we keep adding and adding and that doesn't come up very often and they're hard jobs to fill and they're people who have lots of options and opportunities so sometimes it's hard to keep them as well so okay okay um we've had significant discussion is there a motion to approve the new positions that's outlined some moved here is our second second motion a second is for further questions or discussion hendrix hennessey yes schultz no nick murray yes lamb yes keith yes macomb yes we've been here an hour and a half now we're going to take a quick comfort break in about seven minutes or so please plan to come back thank you show we're back off recess at 9 17. and uh we're at item six on the agenda esther three funds

153dr hall in heaven um so what we provided to the board tonight was just a basis for um discussion um these are these are ideas that have bubbled up through a staff survey that we did as well as through multiple and what seems like many discussions at our leadership team and so this is just the beginnings of some of the ways that we'd like to expend these funds we do have um until september of 2024 to use the evidence iii money and so you know this is going to this is not something that's got to be decided immediately or even in the next couple of months it can extend out over the next couple of years so what you have in front of you is simply the starting point we are trying to address some

154facilities issues as well as some furniture and equipment items as you can see there's a fairly extensive list from from our buildings um i already talked about some of the staff positions um i'm sorry where's the list um in email oh but that's well um let me get you so i had i i did email it to the board probably almost three weeks ago so i hope you had the opportunity to um can you project it i am yeah i gotta find it that first possible okay getting closer here so i will say this um it is not very large i'm going to do it this way and i thought i had gotten it into the board packet so i could print it so i'll start though and we can print out some copies that

155would be great um so i've made it clear throughout the document that this is this is nothing that's that's final it can be subject to revision and change obviously there's a fairly large item that the board wants to discuss in in july and so just know that it's flexible but there are some things on here that we really would um do want to start moving toward so this is our at the bottom when you get this you'll see some different tabs well you'll get different spreadsheets and there's facilities and then furniture and equipment and then also staffing so we've gone through the staffing piece pretty much under facilities we do have expenditures for quite a lot of equipment that needs to be either added to or replaced um bipolar ionization air purification in each building

156the idea of possibly building some outdoor pavilions for like an eating area or outdoor classroom area retrofitting drinking fountains throughout the district so that they have bottle fillers on them and then this last item um is a fairly large dollar item it is kind of the re retooling of the high school control system for hvac and steve curtis is in the midst of working on this so that you know this is something that would need to go out to bid it's a obviously close to potentially three hundred thousand dollars i'm also just asking everybody to keep in mind that everything on here is is a you know pretty good estimate but nonetheless an estimate of the cost um but this control system at the high school would really um bring consistency and bring um the

157controls under you know basically one umbrella and be a non-proprietary system um that would be much simplified and that um you know could be easily worked on and repaired so that's one of the bigger items on the on the facilities list the furniture and equipment list is there's quite a bit here and it's replacing furniture and equipment that either just is old or needs to be replaced or we need more of it there's some i know the junior high some cafeteria tables and then we have quite a large list on here for the high school science department in terms of the labs in particular chemistry labs and we um i knew a few years ago the junior high teachers were removing desks from road to room testing them out to see what it would be

158have we ordered new desks for the whole junior high i know that they said that the kids weren't fitting in the desks and the computers were sliding off and so they were testing out like a desk and a chair that came together so that students could fit better her legs could fit under the desk and i know that they did that and i didn't notice i noticed in some other desks but have we already done that i don't think so and and i appreciate you bringing that up um i will i'll circle back with mr mills on that it's not on this current list but again that's that's something that we've heard that too that um and a lot of teachers have have just moved away from individual desks to to tables and um and

159individual chairs and so that's also a transition that's that's been made too so let me ask about that it's not it's not currently on this list would it make um can i i just want us to consider that um as we mentioned earlier tonight that we got the facilitating team coming out with a recommendation in november i want us to be careful that we don't um spend much money on furniture that we're gonna replace whatever building we built because i know that that's what we like to do we like to buy new furniture yeah we need a new friendship typically in new [Music] so that doesn't bui we couldn't buy some new stuff but but you're right that's a consideration yeah i mean i know this money doesn't disappear it's going to be around for

160a few years so i would say let's not say no to this furniture but some of this furniture let's say let's wait till the facility to see what facility does we can do that um the list from the junior high is mainly associated with lunch and being able to first of all have kids eat have more seating outdoors but also um i believe the plan is to continue to continue to utilize the wrestling room as a lunch area which we did out of necessity this last year because of covid but it actually kind of turned out okay to to to spread kids out but we they were eating on like individual desks and tables and we just want to move toward um cafeteria tables with that so wow thank you it's okay [Music] oh thank

161you another thing and don't get me wrong i am all for spending money on science materials go for it but um do we have any worries about the rationale we need to have to use esther money on bunsen burners oh i think um i mean it's definitely part of the learning experience definitely part of teaching and instruction so not not um that's a great question but i think um yeah whatever that was called well you first do a budget so once we get everything ironed out to what we think it will be we'll go in the budget and then people can start once it's approved you know people can start ordering it and everything yes and then you always have um amendments so as things change you know all right so you know as as

162your needs change or your ideas change you can always do amendments as long as you haven't already spent the other month okay for the control system at the high school i remember talking about that quite a bit at the facilities uh committee meeting um my understanding is that would primarily be for as you say controlling the system um have we considered um making updates in that building or other buildings to improve uh filtration systems and and basically prepare us for the next airborne respiratory type illness um so we are we are doing this bipolar ionization air purification which is just a couple notches above the um high school control system so you're correct and the high school control system is not it's it's the brains of the operation i guess it's the best analogy i

163can come up with right now um but then um we did put um this ionization system into the um abandoned course rooms at the junior high high school like late fall and um you know not not knowing that we would then have more money to do that we decided to to expand that so that's and this um steve's not able to be with us here tonight but this is better than the like the merv 13 or 14 filters which are are going to have a my understanding is those are going to have a really long term um like annual costs on that they're going to be those are going to be quite a bit more than this and i think i'm just not the expert to speak to it i would encourage you to call

164steve if you want more information on that yeah the river filters to replace them every year was a whole other expense that we wouldn't be able to continue sustain after the grant is gone so there's 12 is that 12 in each building or sorry it's so small um it is yeah so these are the freestanding units versus something that you because i put one in my house and you attracted to the furnace bruises there are some that have to have a propulsion system that have to blow through and then i believe they're freestanding ones yeah too think you're correct and i think that the these these are attached to our air circulation system somehow they're like installed they're not free-standing okay so does that does that work when we so it's my understanding that it

165only works as you're blowing air through so when we don't have air conditioning in buildings and we don't we have months where air is not i mean are we always pushing the air through all the buildings or yeah we need steep [Music] i think one of the main one of the big things here that we just could get like the thumbs up to to move ahead on is this high school control system and steve's already started to look into it but um this would be an opportunity to um explore that again it's it's there's a there's a lot of leg work to be done with that and it eventually is going to need to be bit out and come to the board for approval that we'd like to or there was another option to actually

166like efficiently update the whole system and that it turned out that like efficiently updating the whole system was because of the savings of electricity we weren't actually going to spend any more money or something like that i mean this is a long time ago so i don't exactly but i seem to think that there was something about one person wanted to just update the controls and the other person wanted to update the whole system and we'd have to go back and look at that [Music] if the board wants to hear like what's the best option to move ahead on what's the best way to do this i think other than just from here listening discussion with general land board we're doing something steve needs to figure it out yeah i agree with that i think

167for me in general with respect to this money um i see a lot of facilities i don't want to suggest that bookcases and desks aren't important but this is money and we have had an extraordinary year where our staff stepped up and my priority would be figure out how to appropriately recognize the staff first and then have all of this important stuff be uh secondary to um doing that if we're having a prioritization uh the other thing that i have been thinking about is if there's money to that can be funneled towards students and learning is there a way to give teachers the option to start to put some of their classes asynchronously online you keep talking about kids having gaps and it seems to me that if you had teachers who have taken their

168class and asynchronously synchronously put that together it would allow students to go back fill their own gaps it wouldn't require such a labor-intensive uh part on the teacher and then that would be available moving forward and so i think that if there were some money that we could put towards giving people stipends to do that type of work there's a two-pronged benefit one um the teachers can do it if they want to uh it helps us bridge gaps and it also helps we have kids who go out for medical reasons and you know having a teacher having to figure out how to figure out what pieces of work for each of those students is pretty labor intensive so if we move towards what is becoming uh the go-to model of kind of flipping the classroom

169asynchronous learning at home lesson planning and learning more functional you know hands-on in the classroom then that would also afford us opportunities to meet kids where the gaps are and so i think there's some discussion to be had about teachers who want to be able to do that if we could fund them being able to do that then that seems like a win-win to me as well i wonder how much of that has already been done i feel like a lot of them i feel like a lot of it might already be done i don't know i mean i think that's a great question i would like to know the answer to it i'd like to know if the staff would be interested i know that all discipline that doesn't you know sometimes i don't

170know how it makes sense it may make sense more of the junior and high school level when you have but even younger kids when younger kids if you are going to start putting that together in an asynchronous model um there's benefits kind of across the board and so if we have this one-time money that is a one-time it would be more i mean obviously the creation of it could be paid for and funded with this one-time money and then it would evolve over time but i think it would uh help teachers and that they don't have to personally fill each of those gaps themselves uh it makes a lot of space for kids who um you know there are kids out there who will go and find it on their own if they can and

171so if it's there and organized that seems to need to be um a win-win so i'd like to talk about that and using the money in that way as well because i think it accomplishes a couple of goals for us are teachers still providing input oh input into the how the estimates might be spent i know that you've been gathering ideas and speaking with leadership and because when they submitted it they had teachers names by it so anyway you could tell that so i agree with what being said and once again having great facilities is wonderful and making sure we have desks in classrooms and bookshelves is wonderful and i think we should do it but i also would want to make sure that we focus a lot of the money we have on what

172happens inside the classroom instead of just what the classroom looks like sometimes i think we get so tied up in facilities and physical things that we forget about maybe ways that we can support students in learning so one of the questions that i had that i think ken also had was about the class size how to get to level one or level two or what that entails and um let's say i love the spreadsheet that you put together kind of documenting here's how many students are at each grade level here's how many sections there are here's the target class size um you know i know that these are going to be you you put in there these are compounding costs but even to get to the level two target class size is 180 thousand dollars

173which when we're talking about a half a million dollars 180 that doesn't look like let's do that so you know i do wonder about maybe how would that affect our budget long term what would that look like down the road i know that with this current that the students who are going into first grade i know that's going to be kind of our anomaly in the district and those teachers will probably be kind of shifted to other grade levels as needed as that small group goes through i wonder how that would look um oh thank you um how that would look down the road so that's that's another i mean you know we've had lots of conversations about class eyes and um i don't know how that would look on a continuous that that would

174be my worry with that yeah we so that's a 180 000 there that's per year and that's going to be compounding um so heather's probably doing the math in her head space is certainly a consideration here if if you if you went to um level two then that's through that is there's no more space in the future inside the building even after you do yeah right yeah um and so there's there's that concern and then um there's again just that that hundred and eighty thousand is um so hundred eight thousand three positions yeah right your money it's just you know tier money is supposed to be guaranteed because this last year nothing's guaranteed especially when it comes to this thing because they decided you know not to do it but once you have it they

175don't take we've got a lot of issues then right yes so we can so you know i mean i would hope not we are still you know in tier one at least last i knew because we're only about 69 percent funded meaning you know at the level of what the state thinks that we should be that's what i was quoting from earlier is the things that they think we you know need but um it's never guaranteed but it's also just the fact that um you know spending our tier money now or you know as we get it knowing what we're gonna need that's obvious i hate to get in the position of adding these and then having to do that yes so so if we do all of the um ideas that are listed and

176estimated here how much s or three months do we have remaining um right here and this is um everything that the new members that we uh offered tonight um was 473 000 now that's for one year so again you know what we're hoping is that future years you know cheerleading yes do we think we're getting to your money this year yeah we are yes yeah well not for fy21 really but you know right now as i was showing um right now we only have 1.2 million land uh we are thinking we're gonna go over two million so we you know we could put two years worth of it in there just kind of let you know what one year looks like two years will be a little bit more just with the raises but not

177that much um and then the facilities is 412 and for 342 so all this together that's on here just one year of the new hires is 1.2 million so but there's room for us to so there's room for us to do the 180 the 180 hoping that again though we're doubling that on to the 472 hoping that we're going to have future cheer money to cover all of it right and i know like with era back in you know people did that and there were a lot of cuts after era i mean just in general just because it wasn't sustainable in future years us be able to do this i also would like us to consider class sizes in 612 because there's been teachers who have told me they've had 39 kids in one class

178in these past two years and you know we've gotten emails from teachers talking about having 30 plus kids in a class and several of them being kids that need um special assistants and so well i i 100 for trying to reduce these numbers i feel that we shouldn't neglect the 612 numbers as well that's a great point um so for so last year um in 2020 the board approved new positions for the junior high to address class sizes and we added three teachers junior high for that and then um in march of 21 you approved teachers for the high school to address class size at the high school so it's not um it's not going unaddressed um so yeah we're doing it i just think we're going to add extra people let's look at all

179of our buildings so the other thing is that um we're at this crucial point of no space i mean junior hasn't have any space so we will continue to put teachers on they'll be traveling teachers and it's it's just gonna continue to be a challenge we can only do so many of them i'm not sure but i don't i don't i mean we want to equitably address class size um in all of our buildings but i do feel that we've we've looked closely at the junior high in high school this is the past 10 years and then as as we have addressed class size k5 too when we reach these when we reach our targets across all sections we do add teachers you can see that we're watching third grade very closely we don't know

180um you know it's it's early in this this process and um really hard to have a crystal ball and look at what's going to happen in late july or august it's really hard to hire people then but we also don't know who's moved away and so the numbers here on the side actually i think kindergarten's at 2 15 now so it's it's growing it will continue to grow is it i don't know is it possible to do like a study session or a deeper dive or something to kind of look at when you add a section what that means in other areas so for example you're going to add three let's just say you can try for example you had three sections to link the trail how does that affect the special schedule how does

181that affect the number of planned times that specialist teachers get how does that affect evaluations like we were talking about earlier with administrators that's what some of those notes are in purple there just that when you do that's a great question when you do add classroom teachers you have to be cognizant of what your encore or special teachers schedules look like and can they absorb it or do you need more and then yeah the question about continuing to add teachers um without adding administrators and you know middletown prairie and lincoln trail are huge elementary schools with only two administrators evaluating and every you know every time we hire a teacher they come into the non-tenured track which requires as it should more more time and attention from our administrators so you know all the the

182new teachers are kind of like more intensive in terms of time um and i mean that in the best possible way but it's just that it's a big investment so yeah we can we can look at that i think we're we're okay for for this coming year i cannot speak to what would happen if you if we added three teachers to lincoln trail though so i don't i don't have the answer to that so that would be interesting to see what that would do to the special schedule and all that but it looks like we might be adding one anyway right we'll see it's not there how if we were wanting to add these positions to reach the second tier i think is what we called it um level uh how much lead time do

183you need in order to be able to hire someone i mean is this a decision that we would need to make at the next meeting are you working for this year this year that's what i'm asking if we were thinking for this year yeah we have to do in july and we'd have to we'd have to hear from from magnum and ryan that they could make so i will just add that well this is actually that would just be a living trail yeah um so that's three more classrooms that would require three more sets of everything that a classroom requires which is going to be another fifteen twenty twenty two thousand dollars in terms of uh so there is uh there is esther money but just know that the teacher alone is not the only

184expense there's you know entire thing right there's only two people well i'd love to see what the impacts would be and and maybe try and make a decision for next time um but yeah i get there's a lot of moving wheels here and certainly to try and make this kind of decision without meg in the room i would want to talk with her look at some other information curriculum households um so um we have heard from nicole that we have a district practice for curriculum approval so i've just given you this um the old the policies that we actually currently have which are written in um non-underlined font um and so i took the song our wording from the policy um approval section for the first two sentences and i added a third sentence to

185try to reflect what we said our practices in the district because she pointed out to us that while we have it as a practice you don't have it as a policy or and so um because i know you just don't have a copy so what it says is curriculum and curriculum revisions will not be adopted at the board meeting they are first introduced further board consideration will be given as a subsequent meeting after the opportunity for community input in order to provide the opportunity for community input the superintendent will notify parents and guardians of any proposed curriculum or curriculum revisions including providing public access to such proposed curriculum revisions a minimum of 30 days before a final vote will be taken by the form so it's just to reflect what we say our practice is

186which is that we don't vote through curriculum on the first time we see it to give people an opportunity to talk about it and then we make it publicly available in those 30 days so that people can see it so my intention here is that this is just to reflect what we say our practices but just to formalize it so this is just a suggestion for how we write this i want everyone to feel comfortable with what it says and be able to be on board with um having some wording to match our practice okay so the antennas reflect current practice right so i believe that this states what we sing our current practices dr hall and nicole christine had a chance to look at them no i just got it i haven't seen okay

187it seems like it so like i said the first two sentences are just right i mean our policy common thing says policies won't be approved and i just changed it to curriculum um so that's sort of our standard and then just to say this obviously we're not voting on it tonight it's just right i i just want us to develop it together rather than just to just say um you know we're going to provide the curriculum for 30 days before we approve it so the public can see and we're going to let them know that they can see it during those 30 days how often a year do you think that our curriculum is revised or changed like this that we purchase stuff that gets sent out for review um i would say i don't

188know three times a year maybe depends yeah it just depends like this last time typically we wouldn't have any materials right now but that grant came up um so i mean that is one consideration like what happens at another time if we get a grant and maybe the board meetings are 30 days apart between the first and second reading um but um typically by the time it goes through all of the typically those are the processes no that's okay typically we try to get all of it because we it has to go through other committees first and those goodies only meet four times a year so typically would be once in the fall and once in the spring i feel like there's typically one major adoption here the major area that we'll be doing that

189year but then the rest of it is kind of if something comes up like this did or there's a new class that we're having so does a new textbook automatically imply that the curriculum has [Music] that's why that's changed the second part instructional chairs right that's the textbook so they're two separate in our current policy so we just add them together right there's two there's two pieces of this i mean to be fair we do this this is not because we don't i mean nicole asked us before about the french books and i it's just that we should keep our practice and she just gladly did it right and when we asked lindsay that let me just play devil's advocate here i think i'm generally good with this um but let's say there was a

190grant opportunity and for whatever reason the parameters don't we can't make the timetable work is there a provision for us to do an exception in that situation if that was to happen and the last time that was the issue we were able to make it work with the grant we have added a duty to the school board that ken actually posted when we first came on board that the school board can make an exception to their policy so if the board voted to make an exception to their policies we have the right to do that and so if something came up then we could vote to make an exception and be able to do or we could decide well we're only going to have 15 days or we're gonna you know we could do a

191week but this just sets a clear expectation that we do this the same every time and it's not a question is there any legal guidance we don't legally have to do any kind of yeah okay but we are very common yeah it's just common common practice common practice has been our practice for a long time as someone mentioned earlier you know back in the days when we had physical packages everything we put my display in our office and at the library is there a situation that you can think of that wouldn't allow this to happen well it kind of happened with these child development books actually so um they were just notified super late of this money and it was really restrictive on what they were able to use it for but i thought it

192had been on his way from foreign out on a real great opportunity yeah okay my recommendation would be now that we've got this presented for the staff to just lower it open for the rest of us to mull it over to see if there's any thing we're not thinking about tonight and then we'd bring it back so are we going to consider this the first reading here tonight and then we'll bring it back to another meeting for adjustments in the vote is that your thought that's my fault yeah okay can you email it tell me oh i can't yeah sorry i don't know it's great [Music] going is to our conversation earlier with all of our speakers so when we're talking about instructional materials would that then be like all of these novels um like

193how did that work i don't know so typically in the past it would be something that would be used by everybody i think most of those novels are being used in lit circles so students have choice so not every student reads every book not every book is part of every class because i think we get into i'm not a pose i'm just explaining how we've done it in the past the tricky part is we don't want to get i don't want to get into approving every meet allow for every class or every um let's look at a book or anything we purchase like we just purchase a lot of books for small groups for a lot of different things all the way through from well yeah and then transition i got back from my i

194think that if you add a book to that material that's not really a curriculum change that's just another resource that's partly real if you write it like have a unit that discusses the role of government in people's lives that would be a curriculum change because you're teaching you material you're teaching different materials but that's not a particular instruction but down here on instructional materials so we could differentiate in terms of a district-wide decision like if the vertical team comes up with these materials then those come to the board if you know or if uh even if it was like an entire grade level like this entire grade level decided every fourth grader is going to read this book then that's in my opinion an instructional material at a district level but if mrs smith just

195wants to read you know mr copper's penguins right exactly then that's an individual teacher rather than a district you know well i mean because we only have one vertical team a year or two or something right so if they were to pick the science books for the vertical team then we would approve the best comments science falls right if the math team does it if social studies picks new whatever i didn't want to hear then we would approve those things i mean but that's actually not in my proposed change that's the first sentence which is already there right so we already have as a policy that superintendent recommends to the board for conservation adoption materials [Music] um okay so here's here's something i'll bring up every once in a while our meetings are not 30

196days apart we're definitely pretty much like 28 days apart so why don't we say 20 i think we probably should yes or maybe like a minimum of 14 days minimum or for 21 days yeah just to cover all bases yeah or or at maybe say at the next regular board meeting i'm just trying to think about it the approval isn't the next board any possibilities yeah yeah okay i will i don't think it's for this policy but i think we also need to re-examine how we get information out to the community about things being on display i think we might have some gaps that we need to fill just based on some of the feedback tonight about if you're if you're just if you're not a parent in the district there's no real way for

197us to get that to you so i think we need to think through what are the other ways that we can communicate to grandparents to retired teachers to other people who have an interest about how when materials go and explain how and where they access well the washington board members reward meetings um here's a question jared if if i am not a parent and i still want to be on skyward emails [Music] you have to have an attitude okay we could always do some opt-in mailing lists all right back in that arcade system we had before skyward you could you could get on your own although you'd also never get off them either and start to inform people that if you're interested in this type of information this is how you opt in for those

198notifications and then we're at least one step farther again that's what we can hire a technology specialist to take care of again i thought it was by law the schools had to have a curriculum curriculum in every building that any parent could walk in should be able to get out of the spot is that not so anymore we'll defer that to the call um i i have to check the school code honestly i'm not 100 sure okay anything else i could do at this point tonight number eight update so is everyone good with that if i change 21 and then we're good yeah yeah what's what someone's got a brainstorm in the next couple weeks um in 1998. um so i believe at our last meeting we briefly touched upon the options for what moving

199ahead we're calling off-campus learning um remote learning has a certain connotation related to all of last year so we're trying to move away from that because are not going to be offering remote learning as it was offered in the 2021 school year we do know however that there could be um a small number of students who do need to learn in an off-campus setting and not in a group setting and so this is the document that's in the board packet is just kind of very broadly outlines that and we are also um in process of developing then um a a form that parents would take to their physician um that then would be brought back to us that would indicate that the child cannot receive a vaccination and cannot be that there's a condition that

200is contraindicated by being in a group setting um and then we will work individually with those families to set up what they would need we anticipate that this would be some of our families that currently have students on homebound instruction who cannot send their students to the school even under pre-pandemic conditions we'll call it and there could be a few more but we don't anticipate this being um you know being a large number of of students so um you know we want to work with those with those families but also um you know the state board of education has um said that in-person learning is a priority and that's that's what we should be focusing on and what um our students should be doing is coming to school in person so this is the option

201that we'd like to add for the small number of kids who might need an off-campus option will we include the siblings of students who have they would be here for i mean they wouldn't that student wouldn't have enough doctor because it's the sibling that's compromised from our approach was that every every student would need a doc the doctor's note saying that they can't be in a group setting and that they can't get a vaccine do we know what the off-campus learning will look like or is that going to be like a case like um well i do think it needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis kind of as as it is now for those students well and prior yeah prior to the pandemic but um it i mean it can it can look

202like a a homebound teacher which is an hour a day um working with that student either directly or indirectly we now know that there are ways to meet like through google meets and zoom and that type of thing we want definitely want to meet the educational needs of the student and so we want to take each individual student situation into consideration many students i don't know if i i don't know if it's accurate to say all but many students who require homebound instruction again going back to pre-pandemic have ieps and have very specific educational goals and a case manager that works works with them to make sure that instruction is delivered thanks do we have any idea when we're going to hear from isbe about some of the other issues that parents and community members

203have been emailing us about masking and vaccines and all that no we have no idea what we're going to hear three days before so i'll so i'll just put this out there don't kill the messenger um but at this time today 10 10 p.m june 21st um masks are mandated for the school year for next year that mandate is by that comes from idph and isb that's a suggestion it is not a suggestion it is not a recommendation it is a mandate now today at this time does that regardless of vaccination status yes i'm gonna predict that that's that's going to change in some way but i would have no idea to say what that is right now and i i understand that people i again understandably would like for that to be different i

204do too um i i get that but i also think it would be very premature for our board to decide to do anything counter to that we do have the board myself have a responsibility to protect our district from liabilities um the insurance bid that you approved tonight that bid was done under the auspices that we would follow guidance from ivph the bid was centered in that thank you so um you know we we got a statement from our insurance company today that said it is our expectation with this coverage that you follow those mandates i just want to acknowledge that i understand that's not the message that people want to hear right now i'm just verbalizing it and i i can appreciate that there's a lot of different opinions about that that has been

205the last 15 months with the pandemic um i think that our attorneys would also recommend not going against that mandate and um we have a lot of time and space between now and when school starts and so i i um i wish i knew when there would be movement or action um but that's just not the space that we're in right now and um i i wish it were different or more clear but we're still just navigating everything that's what's going on well we know from experience that obviously the direction will change since it's closer to school starting is really high odds and it will change more than once is high um are there still options available out there like some schools did this past year where they outsourced education completely yes instead of just

206this homebound they just said this that dimension or commercial unfortunately we'll do our education um that only asks them because i i think as we think about this which we clearly can't make any decisions if we want to think about the possibility if they give our district the choice that we might want to make some way of giving students who are uncomfortable a choice to be completely outsourced in order that we be able to make a choice to be unmasked right and to still protect people but obviously not if it's abandoned in terms of you know we're talking about what we're doing with students who can't come to school could we give them a complete we heard from a parent who said my kid can do more than five hours of school a week maybe

207we can sign them up for something where they get 30 hours of school a week yeah so um that's an excellent question and the answer is yes we could we could consider that what i would say though is that if if we were to um utilize a third party to outsource our instruction to that that becomes 100 separate and is is not ours to manage like i would recommend to the board that we hire someone to over oversee that we cannot do what we did this past year 100 and thank you um and we also we we also the other thing that you know in talking with other districts who did that there were varying levels of success there were things that went well there were things that did not go well it is not

208muhammad seymour teachers teaching it and um so people have to be very open to that and when we when our teachers were were teaching our remote students this past year whether it was synchronously from grades 6 through 12 where they had their own remote classroom um the the our teachers wanted to to do that they felt that they were going to deliver the quality product and i'm super glad they did but it was tough and we can't do it anymore um so it just would have to be a completely separate entity i know that one thing that some districts dealt with was they outsourced to a third party but then parents would be calling like you know their the english teacher um to say hey this you know can you help with this kind of

209thing and our our teachers need to be freed up from having any obligation without our administrators too so open to that um we could use esther money for that but man it just has to be like its own thing what would that only be people who wanted that and agreed to it yes and thought that was the best option for their situation but i just think about these students who say like the woman that said to us my kid could actually be educated more but maybe she can have a choice you could have five hours a week of homebound or we could sign you up for this and then we would just feel more free to make decisions if we knew there were options for students yeah that felt good is it usually a per

210student charge yes and you know you're not going to have the selection of classes that would like it for high school kids that kind of thing so um but that would just be something i guess that if we offered that families would have to just weigh what what that looks like but yes per student charge because also that this could be for everyone but if we start to broaden our willingness to let people take a class that we offer at parkland online instead of in our building and we would let them have credit for that that also gives people more options to make different choices that they're more comfortable with within their family so i think there's some opportunities to look at what our policy is around dual credit around people who say i found

211an equivalent class i'm more comfortable with this um so for example um this mask i have a headache right i'm a headache i'm wearing it because i think it's important that we remember that there is a subset of people that have to wear these masks and so we have to keep that in mind and if i would like to make a choice that i don't have to wear this mask i would like this board to consider all of the different avenues that make that available for people who have to make those decisions so there are other opportunities to open our policies in other ways um it may not be accessible to everyone but it certainly offers more choice so i think we have some opportunity there as well to rethink um our willingness to accept

212an accredited online high school if someone takes that step even if it isn't in a class that we do offer at home seymour if the methodology and the delivery is more in line with what they need we can accommodate people in that system as well maybe not financially but for people who want to make that that different decision i think that's the way to you know alleviate classrooms and kids in classrooms and spacing issues there's a lot of different things that that could afford us i think really opening all of those opportunities up as we go to the next school year understanding that i mean my worst nightmare is they say you decide you're not smashed that to me i mean i'm kind of terrified of that to be totally honest because then we will

213have a subset of people that come at us i think the liability um exists on both ends if we haven't opened up enough that people are free to make the choices that they're comfortable with so i think there's other ways that we can look at that and we probably need to start thinking policy wise right now so that as we go into the school year people understand what that looks like so when we do decide whether or not we're mandated people know what they what they can do in lieu of coming in mass and that's your only option thank you well we'll continue to wait for information when we get it it will probably change so i'm doing a webinar tomorrow with is being about this very just school reopening so i don't know if

214there'll be any i kind of doubt there's going to be anything really decisive or shattering but let's see this time we need to go into closed session negotiating matters employees appointment employment compensation just from performance expenses employees individuals consumers independent contractors in part recreational educational setting responsibilities of the public body or people council republican body including testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee individual citizen and a contractor in a particular recreational educational setting or a volunteer however a meaning to consider increasing compensation to a specific employee but value is not that doesn't follow um is there a motion to go into closed session for those two breathing so okay close to the second second second key fall in favor of going into closed session say all right all right those opposed all right thank

215you we're going to take just a couple minute break i'd ask everyone to keep it to a couple minutes um because we've got a