001testing one two ladies and gentlemen we're going to start the meeting tonight so we're going to start off with a pledge of allegiance so i'd appreciate everybody's attention so good evening we have a very special person who's going to kick off our board meeting i would like to invite liberty view elementary 5th grade student oliver epps to the front to lead us good evening school board members superintendent american district staff and families please stand for the pledge of allegiance place your right hand over your heart ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Applause] that was wonderful we're gonna take a picture so go ahead and go back up there
002because mom's gonna need something for her scrapbook and our board president is also gonna join you for a pic oliver i know your family is here so give a wave if you're associated with oliver's family there congratulations you did a really good job all right we're going to see if i can get through this for some reason all of a sudden got a coffee and fit so we're going to go with special recognitions we have multiple to do tonight and it is always a wonderful way for us to start off our board of education meetings so this evening it's a pleasure to recognize two outstanding teachers in our district would karen stolman henderson and ann soba please come to the front [Applause] so ann soba blue river elementary fifth grade teacher and karen stolman henderson
003blue valley northwest mathematics and engineering teacher were selected to represent blue valley as candidates for the kansas master teacher award the program recognizes teachers across the state who have served the profession long and well and exemplify the qualities of an outstanding teacher anne's teaching philosophies stem from one word connections she firmly believes in the importance of building connections with students co-workers in the school community has done just that at blue river elementary karen has been at the blue valley northwest since 1993 a total of 28 years karen played a major role in the expansion of engineering classes offered in blue valley and has a passion for helping female students become interested in engineering karen was ultimately named a 2022 master teacher along with only seven other candidates across the state congratulations karen on this recognition
004as well as to both of you for everything you do for students each and every day congratulations [Applause] all right with lizzie boyle art teacher at sunrise point and kate a spanish teacher at blue valley north please come to the front [Applause] [Music] every year two blue valley teachers are selected to represent the district as candidates for the kansas master teacher for the kansas teacher of the year award this award sponsored by the kansas state department of education that's adorable no we love children we love children absolutely [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh that is precious sometimes it's about those moments that make it all worth it well this award is sponsored by the kansas state department of education and recognizes representatives of excellent teaching in the elementary and secondary classrooms of the state these two amazing
005teachers were selected from the entire district as blue valley's candidates for the 2023 kansas teacher of the year award as you know blue valley is known for its exemplary educators lizzie and kate are two of the best their dedication and excellence in teaching don't go unnoticed and we are so grateful to have those two educators for our students here in blue valley congratulations [Applause] i don't know if we're going to be able to top that because i don't know if the next ones are gonna have that kind of cuteness here but we'll give her a try so next it's an honor to recognize two student athletes in the district who performed at such a high level they were awarded for it would grant stubblefield and jaden wooten please come to the front with your coaches
006erin eim and bruce erickson [Applause] okay we'll go ahead and start with grant grant's i know what grant looks like and i have not seen him yet here yeah probably at practice you're right well he is an outstanding student and student athlete so we're going to talk about him as well um grant finished his junior basketball season at blue valley northwest this year helping lead the huskies to a 6a runner-up finish you know when there's team success individual sex success is soon to follow grant performed at such a high level he was awarded the 6th a boys basketball player of the year by sports in kansas so that's a huge award so we'll be sure to extend our congratulations to grant but now we also have somebody else who has uh something to put on
007the fireplace award you know you make sure your parents put it up there because it's big we didn't have just one but we had two um jaden was named the 6a girls basketball player of the year by sports in kansas those are big big awards if those of you who have not been involved in athletics those don't come easy as a blue valley high sophomore she helped lead her team to the 6a state tournament where they finished third she also led 6a girls basketball an assist and was second in points let's give her a round of applause congratulations okay i have to say something because uh you're the reason i had to go get new nails because at the state tournament blue valley high school girls played three games the first game they won in
008the last second with a she went all the way down the court and made a basket the second game they uh lost in double overtime and barely lost the third game for the third place and usually when you're playing for third place sometimes it's not a great game it was an amazing game they won in triple overtime so um jaden and her blue valley high tiger girl classmates did a phenomenal job and and i think the future is very bright for you jaden absolutely we're going to take a picture but a reminder that participation in high school activities and athletics is a valuable part of the overall high school experience and these two um these two individuals that we recognize tonight i kind of exemplify that so now we're going to move on to our
009distinguished service and excellence and education awards it's an honor to acknowledge two staff members these people go above and beyond each day in our schools and across the district with lisa barrett administrative assistant at morris elementary please come forward with her principal kim dufrese oh you want to bring your baby up [Applause] too yeah her baby is usually works our board over on the i.t side he helps with a lot of i.t stuff so his baby her baby isn't quite as the cute one we saw but you still got it going you're just a little bit older still start crying okay so and we're excited to recognize lisa barrett with a distinguished service award lisa has been with the district for 18 years so kim tell us what is so special about lisa thank you
010so on behalf of the moore staff students and community it is my honor to say a few words about lisa barrett who you have named as the april distinguished service award recipient as principals we always like to think we're in charge of a building but the truth is it is our administrative assistant lisa is the glue that holds us all together she opens doors in the morning she closes down the office at night she takes care of us all in any way we need just ask mrs mulholland our school counselor she is a good friend a loyal colleague a voice of reason when teachers or parents or even her principal is stressed lisa loves all of the students at morse you can see this by watching how she interacts with the kids and how much
011she knows about their families and their siblings she might be considered their favorite aunt she truly cares about their growth and happiness we are a family at morse and no one knows that more than lisa it is my privilege to work with lisa and help blue valley celebrate her evening as the april distinguished service award recipient congratulations lisa i think there is a whole slew of your fan club out here wave and we have in in addition to some current staff members we have a former principal steve frazelle here as well as russ cocaroota who was there for a year as an administrator and i think that speaks volumes that people want to come back and recognize you and so would you like to say anything lisa just like i it's because of them oh
012that i love going well every day you are the glue i couldn't agree more that holds more together every time you go into that building it just exudes positivity and you're the first person that we get to talk to so thank you so much for all you do for the students and staff and the families at morris elementary [Applause] i was gonna say i know the husband is here so i wanted to give you a wave i know we and you're cute too i want to leave you out all right now we're going to go up to their next person who is our excellence in education award winner with emily wilson please come forward with your principal nate winslow we are excited to recognize emily wilson sixth grade english teacher at harmony middle school with
013an excellence in education award this school year is her ninth year in the district so nate tell us why she is so special and a rock star well i'm going to do my best to give emily all the praise she deserves but she is a wonderful teacher at harmony middle school if i had to sum it up in one word it would be rock star and one phrase she's the real deal she impacts our building in so many different ways that there's almost nothing she doesn't do or no part of the building she doesn't touch she's a true teacher leader she serves on our leadership team she's a sixth grade team leader she chairs several teacher committees she's the first one in line to help us with professional learning and she's always supportive of our
014school goals that will positively impact kids in the classroom she's super strong instructionally she is very creative and how she plans her lessons her students are always engaged and having fun when they're in sixth grade ela or social studies many times they might not even be in the classroom they might be in the courtyard or in the pod up and moving and collaborating and doing things that they'll remember for a long time and then emily also does an amazing job impacting kids outside of the classroom she's an assistant director for our musical and for our fall play that impacts over a third of our building over 200 kids participate in those activities and her and her co-directors i don't know how they do it but every kid feels valued every student has a part and
015at the end of the day they have a ton of fun and they're connected outside of class um emily also serves as one of our cheer sponsors and when she took over the cheer squad two or three years ago has it been longer than that yeah five five it just seems she has tripled or quadrupled the size of the team so much so that i think they look more like a high school cheer squad than a middle school squad and we're having to order additional uniforms this summer to make sure they all have a uniform and then in regards to our culture and climate at harmony she has done a great job helping to enhance that with nest flex lessons which we do to build community try to reconnect the kids to the building after
016some of them were home all last year and then she has also started a sixth grade honorable t-bird award that we give every friday at lunch and she does an amazing job recognizing sixth grade students that display those positive attributes that we like to see at harmony middle school so harmony is truly lucky and fortunate to have emily and emily thank you thank you you know emily i've been in your classroom and i could not agree with you more every time i've been in there students are engaged and having fun and they're learning at the same time they don't even think they know they're learning they're just having so much fun but what really stands out for me is i think about any time i've been to an event at harmony i've seen you whether
017it is the feeder game at the stadium at our district stadium for football or whether it was the play or teasers for the play you're always there you're always involved and that means so much to kids that connection piece and we just couldn't be prouder of you and all that you have done for harmony so thank you very much and i know you have some family here and i'm going to let you see if you want to say a few words okay um well i just wanted to say thank you so much this award means so much to me um but honestly it could have gone to any one of my colleagues at harmony i work with an absolutely fantastic community um i also just want to say that i feel like grant stubblefield owes
018some of his success to me so just throwing that out there for that previous award i had him in social studies um and then just a big shout out to my husband dustin he runs the show at home as you heard i'm doing a lot of extracurriculars and i'm at school early and i'm at school late and i wouldn't be able to do it without you so thank you much love to you oh so sweet okay congratulations so next we are going to be recognizing our kmea three-year all-state students and i have to admit from the very beginning these students know how to pivot because they were given an email with a little typo in it that changed the time of their arrival for tonight by 30 minutes and they've quickly pivoted to be here
019at 6 instead of 6 30. so thank you students who are at the last minute we're made aware of that you changed and we're able to be here tonight for recognitions and we apologize for that our fault the other thing i'd like to say is janelle brauer is the person who leads a lot of this work district-wide and so she is the best person to recognize these students and i'm going to let her come to the podium and do that thank you for all you do you're welcome thank you for the opportunity to be here this evening to recognize the achievements of 14 exceptional blue valley music students these musicians were selected as members of the kansas music educators association all state groups which gives them the distinction of being identified among the highest achieving
020musicians in the state of kansas after a rigorous audition process in which students were evaluated on their ability to perform challenging literature for experts in the field they were selected to perform in the all-state ensemble for their discipline allstate band orchestra choir or jazz band these select ensembles meet in wichita every february at the kansas music educators and service workshop where their rehearsals and performances are an important part of the convention the students here tonight not only earn positions within the kansas all-state ensembles this year but they qualified during all three years of their eligibility kmea recognizes the significance of this accomplishment by presenting each of these students with a specially designed medal to honor them during the convention it is with pleasure that i join with you in honoring these outstanding musicians for those
021students who are present as i call your name please stand and come to the front to be recognized parents family members and teachers please also stand and be recognized as your child or student is acknowledged george shred blue valley high clarinet harry wong lovely north alto saxophone ethan guo blue valley west french horn john muldoon blue valley north clarinet please come forward varsha venkatesh blue valley northwest oboe irene oh blue valley north violin yenna moon blue valley northwest violin julianne zing blue valley northwest violin daniel cheng blue valley northwest string base anna baij blue valley high alto gracie hernandez blue valley west alto natalie pilicki blue valley northwest soprano kimberly gibson blue valley northwest soprano shreya batya blue valley southwest soprano thank you to our board of education for the opportunity to recognize these students
022this evening and for supporting the musical opportunities that have led to their success let's give them a round of applause several of our music teachers are here too we want to give a shout out to them so dan freeman daniel kirk um beth richie sullivan got it right okay mike garbuchi did i miss anybody terence oh taren durbay so uh thank you to our teachers uh for uh contributing to the success of these students and congratulations to you i was blown away when i was at kmea and i would pop into those um sessions and really it is such high quality music that that you are all playing and we're very very proud of you [Applause] and that wraps up recognitions for this evening so for those of you who would like to stay for
023the rest of the meeting we absolutely want you here for those who would like to sneak out now is your time thank you congratulations okay our next agenda item is public comments um we want to welcome those who are intended to address the board or listen during open form open forum provides a time for individuals to address the board in an effort to ensure an orderly and efficient and effective and dignified meeting open forum will be provided for up to 60 minutes in an effort to give as many individuals an opportunity to speak as possible during the 60-minute open forum the board will enforce a three-minute limit per speaker after 60 minutes the board will close open form and proceed with its agenda items for the evening whether you plan to speak or just listen
024we're glad you're here because we care about the opinions and concerns of our patrons if you do not have an opportunity to address the board during the meeting you may address the board by email communication i have a few reminders about open forum that will help our speakers to have a constructive and positive experience when discussing items with the board when making remarks please be civil and use respectful language please limit the discussion to the relevant business of the board tonight discussion of matters related to specific student or employee or not is not allowed instead comments should be submitted in writing to the superintendent please remember to limit your comments to three minutes and avoid repeating the concerns of a previous speaker if you have questions that require response someone will follow up with you
025at a later time on behalf of the board i welcome you and appreciate your interest in blue valley as we strive to provide the very best education possible to to our students when your name is called please introduce yourself before beginning your remarks as a reminder we ask that all remarks are limited three minutes let's get started amy thomas is our first speaker hi good evening amy thomas um i'd like to first thank you each uh for your vote on april 8th to rescind all of the kobe 19 policies specifically the absenteeism leading to masking this was the right decision uh thank you to the five of you who voted to rescind these tyrannical policies and our children deserve that freedom so thank you secondly i'd like to express my great concern of the decision
026that this board made to retain pornographic books at our high school libraries i'm shocked and sad and frankly disgusted that anyone believes these books which contain sexually explicit pictures should be anywhere close to our minor children the fact that our district librarian who is advocating for these books to remain in the schools sends her children to private catholic schools should be all you need to know that this is the wrong decision for our children pornography is defined as printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings these books contain explicit pictures of people having oral sex they fit the definition of pornography access to these books should not be permitted in any of our schools and it was made
027very clear in the meeting that there's no oversight and no records of these books being checked out you are you're willfully providing pornographic material to 14 year old children according to the kansas law state statute 215510 um employing using persuading inducing enticing or curse coercing a person under 18 years of age to engage in explicit sexual conduct for the purpose of promoting any performance in a visual printed medium such as film photo either profit or the intent of a rousing or satisfying person's sexual desires is considered sexual exploitation promoting specifically is providing lending distributing circulating disseminating presenting displaying exhibiting this material sexual exploitation of a child is a felony punishable by up to 55 months in prison and up to 300 000 in fines if the child is 14 years of age and the offender
028is 18 years of age or older it is a level 5 felony punishable by life imprisonment and up to 500 000 in fines according to the blue valley board of education website your policy states the blue valley board will assure that the district abides by all applicable federal and state laws and district policies according to what i've just read and and just stated in the kansas law it appears as though the district is engaged in in engaging in criminal activity by providing this material how can you agree to continue to condone this criminal activity in our schools and what are you going to do to rectify it thank you [Applause] thank you amy our next speaker is tracy stein thank you tracy stein my name is tracy stein and i have four kids in the
029district i would like to extend my gratitude to all of you for serving on the board i cannot imagine the burden you must carry knowing thousands of families are trusting you to make all decisions together to benefit the greater blue valley schools the seven of you have the obligation to collaborate and make the absolute best decisions for 23 000 students hearts and minds now that is a heavy load which requires a unified district community for support i'm not here speaking for the right or the left i'm here as a community member who is longing for unity more than a political win we've heard from frustrated parents regarding masking critical race theory sexually explicit books pronoun identification transgender bathroom use and more this isn't a blue valley school district issue this is a nationwide issue however
030i have higher hopes out of this top-rated school district your belief statement in your policy manual says quote strong public schools require that the family is the first teacher and both the school and the family have an ongoing obligation to support continuous learning second quote strong public schools are made even stronger by community collaboration and support likewise communities are made stronger by outstanding public schools are you making each decision with these in mind i cannot unsee what i witnessed watching your special board meeting in regards to the two pornographic novels that you are that are in our high school libraries your vote of five two says nothing more but that five of you don't listen to your district parents concerns you made one of the strongest political statements that night when you dismissed one of
031your board's members alternative solution of just putting those books on an opt-in or opt-out choice for parents if we are provided an opt-in an opt-out choice for our elementary growth and development videos middle school suicide prevention workshops then why can't we have the option of protecting our children from sexually explicit materials in our high school libraries what is more concerning is that you are desensitizing the grooming of sexual abuse does exposing sexually explicit material to our children better than in any way does this have anything to do with their academic learning why in the world would you vote to keep the books without any safety measures in place for all children are you honestly comfortable with this in your hands to the district families listening the community divide on all the issues around these books
032gender identities and sex education is growing the school family relationships have been broken the family teacher relationships aren't the same and it's starting to affect our kids we deserve better we deserve parental consent we deserve transparency of the school curriculum in the books read to students starting in kindergarten the common goal of everyone here is to keep our kids safe learning and growing into who god created them to be we don't have to agree in what we believe but we have to respect it and in order to respect it we must accept the differences and find a common ground for parent choice there are plenty of parents in this district like myself who saw the public school as a safe place for our children to learn i will continue to be relentless and unapologetic in
033my efforts to keep families engaged and to create a unified district community once again in the words of abraham lincoln a house divided against itself cannot stand bring your best for those trusting in you thank you thank you tracy the next speaker is oxana teichlich the next speaker is jeff nessl my name is jeff nessel proud and still somewhat stunned father of elijah the current prom king of blue valley north because it was used by hillary clinton the phrase it takes a village which is actually an old proverb is scoffed at by many which is sad because those of us with special needs kids know it does indeed take a village of neighbors teachers and school administrators among others to help with our child my son elijah has been lucky to have a variety of
034people interact in his life especially early teachers like miss amy sue miss penny mrs norber mrs go and mrs everhart and later instructors like mr hale and mr oleg along with principles like dr ostrowski and chris legleider who got it these individuals understood the complexities of a child on the autism spectrum and went that extra step to make his life better and for all the teachers and administrators who i have not mentioned i'm sorry but you understand because you get it your only agenda was to make sure all the students were treated with respect and dignity i'm thankful elijah got the opportunity to thrive in this type of environment it is why i bought a house in the blue valley district over 30 years ago because it was the best district in the area that
035is why i am saddened by what is occurring now in blue valley and what awaits other students especially those with special needs who come after elijah teachers and administrators are being usurped by parents and board members who due to outside influences and money are pushing their own personal agendas and kids regardless of whether or not is in the child's best interest insisting you know what is better for the kids like some members now do instead of treating the professionals plan and teacher curriculum is only the height of arrogance but also stupidity years ago i was asked not to speak at a pto meeting as my comments were considered inappropriate by the president of the organization why because my comments mentioned the variety of policies that were not beneficial to students as well as the idiocy
036of certain elected officials who supported them i know you will find this hard to believe but i agreed not to say anything yeah true not because i was wrong i wasn't but because it was the right thing to do for my child my personal agenda was not more important than my own sons i hope this is a lesson some members on this board as well as some well-intentioned but misinformed parents will learn personal agendas fueled by national groups that do think nothing of lying and funding candidates who follow their lead don't care about the kids in our district and care even less about the divisions and destruction they leave in their wake it is destructive and is destroying our wonderful public schools and is up to all of us but especially you representing blue valley
037to make sure it doesn't continue it means you need to put your personal agendas aside and let the professionals the teachers and administrators who have been trained and educated in this field do their job thank you [Applause] thank you jeff our next speaker is jenny cox the innocence of a child who determines what innocence is who determines what a child is ready to see hear or experience how do we decide when a child is ready to set aside old ideas for new ones or put another way who determines when something else is prioritized over innocence kansas state law helps us determine this for our children under the age of 18 38 141 in part it shall be public policy of this state that parents will retain the fundamental right to exercise primary control over the
038care and upbringing of their children so it makes sense that parents are to be informed of what students are exposed to especially if our culture still believes sexually explicit material is not acceptable for children to see and ideas beget ideas emotion begets emotion are we verifying emotion and ideas kids already have or giving them ideas and emotions to have what ideas and emotions do we want to flourish there seems to be a disagreement at the very least some of us parents within blue valley are concerned once we became aware of sexually explicit books in some of the school libraries how can concerned parents be listened to what could be a solution we need the opt-in opt-out policy for parents there are already other information permissions for parents in place nurses office photography permissions field trips
039transportation etc other schools are already doing this i have a link in an email already sent to you on a school board i'm sorry already sent to you on a school in illinois that is putting parent permissions on genderqueer for students under the age of 18. so how do we determine what is it objectionable and in need of parental permission so let's look at current policy so in part due to time restraint policy 4610 appropriateness of the resource for the age of the student with whom the resources intended to consider emotional development ability level learning style social development absence of vulgar language sexual explicitness or violent imagery in this school board is the school board violating their own policy it's worth exploring we are questioning books that are too sexually explicit for children that is
040our litmus test that is our discriminating factor period and we ask what is the purpose of having this material in high school libraries since we know hi simply no schools are not in the business of fostering sexual exploration and that they are in the business of teaching course subjects there is no purpose it may be said that a book that is not explicitly about sex or porn is fine rated r movies are often not explicitly about sex but let's say baseball for example however it can be rated r because there are two three sexual explicit scenes i have emailed each school board member a list of books that i believe break current policy i highly encourage you to look these up focus on how much sexual explicit material is in them but warning you can't
041unsear and read any of it and neither can our children another question to ask are these books literally challenging providing education in the areas of our subject i believe blue valley is treading on legal shaky ground thank you jenny irina weaver irina weaver i was very disturbed by the blue valley book hearing result on march 24th i'm wondering what values the book the books like genderqueer and fun home add to our children's development how to masturbate how to have an oral sex how to penetrate vagina with the finger how to use sex toys even the vendor mccain believes genderqueer is not appropriate for younger high school students you don't adhere to your own policy like mentioned before selection of learning resources 4 600 absence and vulgar language and sexual explicitness i wish this school board
042and blue village school district would spend the same amount of energy on improving our children's academic success do you know that ku lower their requirements for graduate leslie air that should be huge red flag for everyone yet your worries are to preserve sexually explicit literature at our school libraries it is not your job leave it to deploy playboy corporation the porn industry and the recent addition to this list disney we value the innocence of our children once the innocent is gone it cannot be restored it should be up to the parents to decide if they want to expose their children to pornographic material also parents should have direct involvement in what books get selected for the library however you took these rights away from us and continued the grooming process of our children and here's
043a reminder that's a definition a wikipedia definition of child child grooming is befriending and establishing an emotional connection with the child and sometimes the family to lower the child's inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse child grooming is also regularly used to lure minors into various illicit businesses such as child trafficking child prostitution cyber sex trafficking or the production of child pornography and also on personal note i saw that you and gender you're going to approve the membership with national the national school board association i would consider not to join them because just recently they went against parents which is unacceptable thank you arena next speaker is sheri mckenzie hello my name is sherry mccants and i'm speaking on behalf of three parents we all have kids in the blue valley school district a couple
044of weeks ago this board had a special hearing on two sexually explicit and some may say pornography books the books are fun home by allison bechtel and genderqueer by maya ko bibi i encourage every parent who is listening to this meeting to get on any browser and type the title of these books add the word explicit and search in images this helps to get to the information quickly please look at the images and imaging how this content would be rated if it was a photo what about a movie are these appropriate for a 13 or 14 year old because this is the typical age of the ninth grader these books were voted on five to two which means they remain on our shelves these two books are not the only sexually explicit books in blue
045valley libraries i found 10 different titles in all high schools three titles are also available in most of the middle schools so kids as early as 11 could read them apparently in the us we rate movies but not books i checked several rating agencies everyone agreed that the two books described earlier should not be recommended to anyone younger than 16 or 17. the books currently in our middle schools are rated 14 plus but these agencies yet are available to 11 year olds it is extremely concerning for me that our blue valley district choose to expose our children to the vivid descriptions and images of rape sexual violence pedophilia and pornography why do they need to deprive kids from innocents once you read these books you cannot unread them once you see these pictures you cannot
046unsee them as a blue valley parent i oppose the district's decision to expose kids to these books without parental consent i hope the board will either remove the books with explicit sexual content from the libraries or move these books to the special library section that would require parental permission i have another topic to share and it's a teachers sharing their personal lives with their students recently a child shared that her entire social studies class hour was spent on her teacher telling the class about his divorce and that he intermittently uses wife or ex-wife as he is adjusting to this she was told they were they were three weeks behind on where they're supposed to be with their school work and she doesn't like to hear about his personal home situation it makes her uncomfortable this
047is not the only class where teachers are sharing about their personal relationships this is not a complaint to pick on teachers in fact we really like the teachers the point is that her daughter has certain goals for high school and beyond and is concerned that with the past couple of years plus experiencing classes like this are not progressing her academic learning and bettering her studying habits now this is a perspective a middle schooler regarding her level of discomfort of an adult discussing their personal story of divorce i feel that what should be used but should be used is academic and not social thank you [Applause] thank you sure jacob osborne i'm jacob osborne members of the board good evening in the last few weeks we have seen the lawrence and olathe school districts announced drastic
048budgetary measures in response to steeper budget cuts that both districts leadership teams allege no one saw coming it is not quite clear how lawrence found itself in such a position in regards to olathe however their leadership at least saw seven of their 20 million dollar shortfall coming for they knew the kansas board of tax appeals would be reducing the extraordinary growth fund mill rate as the district's rate of school openings tapered undoubtedly blue valley is in a vastly different position socioeconomically than those other two districts nevertheless the best leaders are those who prepare for the unexpected i urge this board to study these failed cases so that blue valley may learn from them the warning signs of eminent collapse in an effort to prevent such dire budgetary cuts as both olathe and lawrence have done
049at the very least the district should ensure the budgetary office is tracking the extraordinary growth fund mill rate and its projected decline date ensuring that both are taken into account when calculating future budgets with that said i urge the seven members of this body to ask themselves this question when planning for the future whose absence is going to be felt more by the children it's the teachers librarians paraprofessionals these are the people who directly impact the lives of our students undoubtedly this board shall one day face the reality of such a choice and when it does so i hope the administrators are asked to shoulder the burden equally now on to the proposed mathematics standards the board shall be voting on tonight these proposed k-5 standards are inappropriate for such young students for example one
050assignment given in the presentation you shall see tonight regarding three-dimensional shapes asks what makes a good puzzle how could a fifth grader be able to answer such a vague question another is what strategies for solving these puzzles have you and your partner come up with uh whatever the teacher taught us they're fifth graders they're going to do what their math teachers tell them moreover these mathematic lessons appear to call for students to self-reflect self-affliction is something that most adults have no desire to do say nothing of k-5 students especially over a topic such as math then there is the reflection itself four of the six reflections are social emotional learning based what does this have to do with mathematics another is for ela out of the six reflection questions only one pertains to the content
051matter how does this make sense so thank you for your time and for my concerns thank you jacob the next speaker is dasha teichlich carrion baumgarten hi my name is carrie ann baumgarten and i'm here as a community member um first before i read what i have to say um i'd like for a clip to be played so you can hear something there was that ant that stood up to me yeah but we could forget about him yeah it was just one hand you're right it's just one and yeah boys they're puny hmm puny say let's pretend this green is a puny little ant did that hurt no well how about this one are you kidding how about this [Music] you let one ant stand up to us then they all might stand up those
052puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life it's not about food it's about keeping those ants in line that's why we're going back does anybody else wanna stay [Music] it's just one aunt just one parent just five parents i'm here today to remind this board and every board of education in the state of kansas that we are growing in numbers not just in the blue valley school district but olathe shawnee desoto and gardner and spring hill us puny little parents outnumber you one hundred to one and we are not resting until our requests are acknowledged respected and honored we are on every single social media site that you know of and some you don't working together to ensure the safety of
053children in the schools the very fact that you continue to deny and ignore the requests of the very people that put you in your positions shows arrogance narcissism and betrayal of the seat you sit in to represent your community according to the merriam-webster dictionary pride has six meanings within those definitions it identifies inordinate self-esteem and proud or disdainful behavior or treatment the pride you display sitting here today and all the other times is abominable you have been attempting to indoctrinate innocent lives with things parents do not agree with while your seat comes to an end being a parent and fighting to save the innocence of those children does not thank you carrie anne that wraps up our open forum for tonight on behalf of the board of education i'd like to thank our participants we
054appreciate that each of you took time to share your thoughts with us please know that the board and the district administration took notes during open forum and will follow up as needed with participants we're going to take a five minute break for our closed captioner uh motion to adjourn um we're going to resume our meeting now i'm going to call the meeting to order first item on the agenda is receive reports from board advisory committees i will start the diversity equity and inclusion committee met for the final time this year on april 7th in this room uh we had two different topics um the first one dr kelly wessel was in and i talked about the social emotional learning standards that have recently or not recently but that were approved by the kansas state board
055of education and how blue valley has uh implemented those within blue valley she also highlighted something that anybody could go and look at which is on our district website under a site called the learning connection where there is a short of video around what social emotional learning is in blue valley and how we go about teaching that the second half of the meeting included time for the committee to discuss family and community engagement specifically of how do we expand our diverse families and making sure that their points of view are represented within the community when we do a survey or when we solicit membership on committees and that and that sort of thing and the committee gave us some great ideas but their number one thing is we have to make personal asks to our
056parents um through our schools but they also gave us some community um outreach organizations to work with and to intentionally work to do that and then finally um that since it was the last meeting of the year we ended it with thanking um everybody for being a part of this uh reminding you know the patrons who are on there that their two-year term was up and that they could certainly apply for another two-year term and we also thanked our students and wished them well and that's it for the diversity equity and inclusion report i think the other one that we have is kyle hayden who is going to give the report on the finance committee the finance and operations board advisory committee met at 7 30 am on april 7th via zoom the committee received
057some general district updates from patrick hurley and amy teissling director of business operation jason gillum and i presented on the work of the school start time committee and recommendations for changes to payrider bussing jeremy mcfadden director of finance presented the quarterly bond progress report jeremy also reported that the district was assigned a credit rating of aaa stable from moody's and was signed a credit rating of double a plus stable from s p global both those ratings were unchanged from 2020. director of accounting and payroll nathan mull presented a summary of the district's investments since march 31st jason gillum provided an update on transportation and facility rental fees for 2223 charles rathbun director of food and nutrition services provided a financial update and presented the recommended meal prices for next year those two items are on
058the board agenda for approval tonight jason gillum and jake slobodnick presented the bids and contracts also on consent agenda for board approval finance and operations committee meeting is scheduled for may 6th thank you kyle thank you dr merrigan the next item is the um approve the agenda for the april 11th 2022 regular board of education meetings published other board reports sorry about that let's go back to uh receive board uh reports from board members and the superintendent on items not on the agenda tom yeah just real quickly i've said it a thousand times or last year or whatever i love normalcy so i love seeing a packed house tonight and all the awards and and the teachers and their families and people cheering um love seeing all the activities go around the great theater performances
059i know several folks went to see footloose or probably stole your thunder didn't it um seeing our teams or bands and cheerleading down at disney performing and then all the state championships going on our choir performances i know there's a big thing this festival this week in regards to that so again it's uh it's it's been great been great for for this community and great for these kids so that's all i got thank you tom jody yeah i i would agree with tom it's really nice kind of getting back into at least what we thought was normal you know before seeing more activities um did want to give a huge shout out to blue valley southwest and footloose performance which was absolutely fantastic i am constantly amazed by the talent our students have but knowing
060it wouldn't be possible without great teachers they know how to give our kids the tools they need in order to be the beautiful people they are so it just it touches me every time i go to a performance so absolutely loved it i wanted to um just a note for the ability showcase that's coming up on april 29th um i would encourage everyone to go it should be a really fantastic event um night of lights is also coming up blue valley ed foundation heck of a lot of fun if you want to volunteer for it i know they're still accepting volunteers so but a great kind of community-wide event here in our district and then the women's giving circle um we meet twice a year with the blue valley ed foundation and and uh met
061i believe it was last week is that correct and uh they were um they were awarded their grants i know many of you know this but i thought i'd do a quick little shout out for the one that was chosen so it's called their they they voted to fund all black blue valley middle schools for a creative work studio so it's going to touch be able to touch you know all of our middle school kids and all the kids coming through so it's going to be really exciting um they had talked about stop-motion animation uh project um with that and um you know i i my kid actually submitted a stop-motion animation um scholarship um had a scholarship opportunity in middle school and submitted a project and and actually got a scholarship for college with
062that so there's a lot of things you can do with that so it's pretty cool i also wanted to do a quick little shout out i was able to attend um i was invited to do a tour of uh school in goodland kansas and st francis kansas it's a bit of a drive for those who haven't been there um but the kids and the staff there are doing amazing things also i'm just so proud of our public schools here in kansas um it was just such a great experience and i had a kindergartner teaching me how to code so i hope they they're not testing me on that at this point in time but but they did an amazing job so katie thank you jody hello i actually know where goodland is that's that's my
063neck of the woods um it is very far very very far um so i ended i think our tour of the schools at blue valley north in ote blue valley north got to see the girls garage which was super cool um and their new gym beautiful dr ostrowski is so full of life and ideas and you can see that he really wants to bring some life into the tech area of the school so that's pretty cool ote was bright and cheery as always just like i remember it great teachers got some hugs and the principal awesome we went to topeka and um met there got to hear some really good q and a for you know districts across the state really and it was just mostly the big three olay fish on a mission and
064my takeaway there was uh we've got some ways to go but i think we're on our way you know trying to get things trying to get kids what they need that sort of stuff so um i wish i could have gone to footloose oh yeah yeah so but that's all i have yeah okay thank you thank you kitty amy yes um i did a lot of the a couple of the same things that these three have talked about so just to reiterate that i also wanted to give kyle a shout out for the finance and operations committee i think in terms of patron participation good discussion and just the desire for the patrons to learn more and be helpful it's been it's one i've been a part of i think my whole time on the
065board and uh i just enjoy that time so much so good job kyle just on how you lead that group um i also have to say congratulations to the kansas jayhawks and christian brown at blue valley formerly of blue valley northwest so some of us have been wearing blue for a number of days now but it's exciting for blue valley and exciting for k.u thank you amy gina i'll echo that amy rock chalk um i just want to first of all congratulate blue valley northwest band they went to a winter park ski music festival and they won a superior rating best in class and grand champion overall which is amazing so i'm really proud of them for that i also want to thank tanya and other johnson county superintendents who've been pushing hard to get
066our special education fully funded at the mandated level i know it's one of our priorities as a district so i just wanted to mention that and that i also had the ability showcase down for april 29th so reiterate that it's going to be a really cool event they feature artwork and performances by a really cool group of kids so i hope everybody can make it to that otherwise jim it's to you thank you gina and jim i i sat in on two committee meetings in the last week one i i took uh tom's place when he was out fishing and um and that was a health and wellness committee and the a number of the uh district nursing nurses and uh coordinator presented i thought that was extremely uh you know as fact it was
067fact filled um there i probably had a lot of takeaways but one that i would note in a in a difficult labor environment it sounds like our nursing team has done a really good job at being able to find and retain uh school nurses and they went into i don't know if they make that that uh presentation public i suppose it probably is somewhere anyway it's a great presentation because it goes into a lot of detail in terms of what the school nurse's functions are and the scope of services that they provide you know it's great information and while let's see the day before or day after that i can't remember my days we had the special education advisory council meeting which um was the last one of the school year that uh was i
068mean there must have been 40 people there and so it was a great community engagement there was a presentation there by uh johnson county mental health in terms of the services the range of services they provide but the the thing that i found especially interesting and it will touch on what tanya you're going to do a legislative update here mark schmidt took some time to just engage in open dialogue about in particular the open enrollment piece of legislation so maybe i'll save the rest of my comments for what feedback i heard when you talk about that anything else jim is it uh dr marion uh yeah i have a couple things a couple of events this week that i wanted to highlight um on wednesday evening of this week of this yeah this week there
069are two different events the first one is that blue valley high school has an open house and that open house is from six to eight and that's anybody in the community who wants to come in and see the extensive work that has been done there around our bond um our recent bond so remember all the mobiles are gone and they have a classroom edition they have a new gym that was inaugurated with girls basketball during sub state and they also have a new performing arts edition which was inaugurated this past weekend um with a play so community members are welcome to be there students will be there to give them tours and you can just stop in any time between six and eight also on wednesday evening at hilltop learning center is an event put
070on by our drug and alcohol committee and it's entitled off script and it's a discussion with some community leaders there as well around drug and alcohol abuse and really what's happened as a maybe as a result of the pandemic and just within our teenagers so that would be another great event to attend also on wednesday wednesday is a busy day um we have large group music kmea at our schools here in blue valley so the choir is at blue valley north orchestra is at blue valley northwest band is at blue valley southwest and they perform throughout the day both students from blue valley schools as well as olathe and shawnee mission and some other area schools and and they will receive ratings on those performances so again big day on wednesday i also want to
071give a shout out to aiden shaw aiden is a senior at blue valley high school and he is a basketball player and he won the darina award did i say that right kyle yeah so the darina award is the top basketball player in the metro area and that would be the third athlete this year who has gotten the top in their sport remember julia meisner from blue valley west got it in golf mikey paulie got it in football and now aiden just received this in basketball so that's a big honor that was just happened last week and then i want to give a shout out to my seventh grade students at prairie star middle school on friday they served as travel agents they had a project and i was their customer and so i went
072over and they had researched a potential trip to ireland that i said i wanted to take and they did a fabulous job it was a great experience and then finally the last thing so officer reindell has been at i think almost every board meeting for six years missed one one board meeting in six years and his last day with us is friday so this is the last board meeting he will be at and so i just wanted to give you a heartfelt thank you i know you're going to pursue kind of a dream career flying he's a pilot and so we don't have any pilot jobs in blue valley so i don't know if we could keep you but we really appreciate all that you have done you have been such a strong connection in
073our elementary schools and such support to both the students teachers and families so thank you officer reindell [Applause] and that's it thank you dr merrigan thank you officer rydell we appreciate all that you've done for us and for being with us through all these years i guess the good news is we've got about six weeks left in the school year um you know i want to thank um certainly all the parents for their support and the hours of volunteer terrorism that they participate in to to support the district i want to thank the staff for always going through the extra mile remind everybody that you know this is a still a challenging time we're working through the pandemic and working together for the benefit of all the kids is what is required and what's needed
074to get us through this quicker as opposed to later i want to thank the superintendent for work on the legislation i know we went to topeka last month and met with the johnson county delegation and we did provide some some testimony and some written positioning on how critical special education funding is for our budget going forward and we are going to have to have some some budget conversations but special education and the excess funds that are available throughout the state are important and they can make a difference throughout the state for every school district as we continue to provide those services and cannot emphasize enough how it's being underfunded and that um we would ask the legislature to actually fund at the legislative rate um the other thing that uh i'd also like to announce
075on certainly on behalf of the board we're going to be looking at next month we're putting together a board committee on communications where we'll provide a structure and a format for parents to provide input and feedback and interaction with the board on a regular basis with that said um the next agenda item is to approve the agenda for the april 11 2022 regular board of education meeting is published i've moved the board of education approve the agenda for the april 11th 2022 regular board of education meeting as published is there a second second motion by tom second by jody is there any discussion seeing no discussion all in favor raise your right hand all opposed same side same side same hand motion passes 7-0 next item is approve the consent agenda for the april 11th
0762022 regular board of education meeting is published do i have a motion i move that the board of education approved the consent agenda for the april 11 2022 regular board of education meeting as published do i have a second second a motion by amy second by tom any discussion just one comment because one of the speakers mentioned a the national school board association and the controversy that occurred last fall um with the uh a letter that was written and at that at the we were a number of us were at the national meeting um a few weeks ago and the new president make sure i'm getting this right new president addressed what's that executive director addressed that controversy and and said that they were committed to um i guess what i would say is a
077is a position or a stance going forward to be non-partisan in their in the in what they provide recognizing that there's people all over the the map in terms of where they might fall politically and to um so i think it's at least important for people to know that the the organization has taken that particular um you know made that that statement they've made some changes to it at a senior leadership position and um it's just noted because it did concern a lot of people that i that i'm aware of i'm glad you noted that and apologized at the same meeting as well yeah so i'm glad you know that jim thank you tom and jim anybody else have any other comments on the motion to approve the consent agenda see none all in favor
078raise your right hand all opposed same sign motion passes seven zero now we're going to move on to new business a new business is the sale of the series 2022 a bonds mcfadden our director of finance is going to kick this off good evening board uh i wanted to introduce two members of the bond sale team who have joined us here tonight dave arderberry is the public finance managing director for the stiefel nicholas kansas city office he's going to share some information with you on the bond process and the results of the bond sale from this morning and also available for uh questions if the board has any on the bond resolution is kevin wempy kevin is bond counsel with gilmore and bell so he's available for questions if there aren't any um thank you
079jeremy and good evening everybody david arderberry with steeple nicholas what i wanted to do if you don't mind is just give you a little brief update of what we've been up to and when i say we i mean us as the advisor to the district and bond council and staff since we visited with you at a work session back in march first of all as as kyle had mentioned the district did have its rating reviewed by moody's and standard and poor's and the rating was affirmed um with moody's aaa rating and s p double a plus rating so that's always good news when you can have excellent ratings like that maintained and kyle and jeremy both did a really good job of presenting the district to the rating agencies and responding to all those questions
080so so that was good news another thing that was done since that meeting in march was um the the disclosure document for the issue the preliminary official statement it was reviewed and it was finalized and it was distributed to potential bidders around the country we also made sure that the sale of the bonds got posted onto bloomberg and onto the bond buyer each of those news agencies has a daily list of competitive bond sales and then finally on friday and thursday of last week we called around to a lot of the firms that we know historically have been on the district's bonds just to make sure they're aware of the sale and and see if they were planning on bidding and we could tell from those calls that we made last week that we were
081going to get a good response at the sale so all that led up to us actually taking bids today we met in kyle's office at about 10 30 or so and pulled up the online bidding site and we could see that there were about a dozen firms lined up to bid but as is the case on this type of issue something this large the bidders wait until literally the last seconds to submit their bid so we could see with about a minute to go there were one or two bidders but there were 12 people lined up to bid so we we were holding our breath and finally about with about 30 seconds to go nine other bids popped in so we ended up with a total of 10 bids which is a great result and
082i think you should have in cop a copy in front of you yes of of the the results and this is based these bids are awarded based on the lowest true interest cost that's the the tic that you see there and based on the lowest true interest cost the best bid was submitted by morgan stanley and company with a true interest cost of 3.105145 percent um we reviewed their bid it was mathematically correct it met all of the bidding parameters um they also provided the good faith check that was required so um this is a good conforming bid and the results of that bid the interest rates have all been incorporated into the bond resolution that you'd be you'd be acting upon next um so real good result the thing i was particularly pleased with
083if you look at those top four bids the difference in interest cost between those top four bids is less than two one hundredths of one percentage point so real really tight bidding i also provided to you i think i don't know if it's on the next page or the back side of your page just i thought you might be interested in seeing just a little bit of a history of other recent new money bond sales this doesn't include refinancing but bonds issued for new projects that the district has done over about the last decade or so so you can see them lined out there there's six of them and ranging in size from about 47 million dollars to 125 million you can see the true interest costs on each bid the number of bidders and
084then a couple of indexes indices um for for bonds the the mmd index is a an index of tax-exempt municipal bonds and then the 10-year u.s treasury rate um the thing i would mention about this graph is that if you took it a weighted average of all of the interest rates here over the last decade that number it doesn't show up on here but i calculated it to be um 2.62 so the district on average has been borrowing money over the last decade at about 2.6 which is a i was at very nice rate even though this so it was a little higher than that historically you've got a really nice average so um welcome any questions you might have and kind of rush through things quickly and i know some of you haven't been
085through a bond sale before so i'd be happy to answer any questions you'd have or any issues david real quick thank you for spending time and waiting i'm here for buyers you know you have to do a lot of the boards so obviously the last time we had a sale was right i think a couple months after cobia began right they had that low interest rate and that's just the way things were going we're about a point higher now that's just with the interest rate hike right the nature of things going so i'm kind of talking a lot here but the same time got 10 healthy bids it looks like yeah yeah the the the fact that the rate was higher on this sale than it's been on previous sales has absolutely nothing to do
086with investors view of the school district in fact with the 10 bids i would say you know you're getting as good or better participation than you've ever had in the sale of the bonds that that rate is solely a function of the overall market for interest rates right yeah with some solid folks obviously been been on these uh credit rating in regards to you know obviously we're still rated the highest you can correct or close to or of any district so that obviously at the end of the day helps a lot with the percentage rate we get here oh yeah yeah lower the credit rating the higher percentage rate we would get on these bids most likely right yeah exactly yeah right okay um the olathe did a bond sale recently what was their do
087you know what their interest rate you know i know they approved a sale of um they had a good fail i haven't seen the results of their sale yet i think their election was just within the last two months or so my guess is they might just be gearing up for it and have the sale within the next month or two because i don't think i've seen the results jim used a little bit of a lag from them passing it with the voters and a little bit of a lag so are we on our so we're on our since our last bond referendum are we on our second sale here yeah yeah this is um this is it's um the bond issue amount was 61 million 835 and that was the remaining authorization from the
088january 2020 election um the january 2020 election was um 186 or 187 million dollars um the first 125 million of that is what was sold back in 2020 you mentioned earlier um and this is the balance of that and jim your question might be what percentage they get compared to their bond rating i'm not sure if that's yeah i just was just initiated the what i thought i had seen but i i read a lot is that they were choosing we the way we a point that i made this morning is that this bond sale relates to a bond that was approved uh several years ago and so it's not a um it's not it was expected and what we as a district did was to take down that money when rather than just take
089it all down and sit in the bank and pay interest on it let's take it down when we need it exactly yeah yeah there's um a rule and if you want to get into the guts of it i'll let kevin wimpy at gilmore bell talk about it but essentially at the time you sell your bonds you have to reasonably expect to spend the money within three years so if you do a big election in most cases that expenditure of that fund is going to take more than three years so we split the sale up into you know they split the issue or the approval up into multiple sales any other questions anything from i hate to hear you not be able to any question any thoughts from you or i mean that in a good
090way and i hate to see you not able to chime in are you at the musical footloose by any chance right okay i i wish i had the rave review to share with you uh on footloose i'm sure it was wonderful kevin wimpy with gilmore bell the district's bond council i can be very brief just following dave i appreciate the opportunity to say hello and say hi to some of you again after the committee meeting but yeah if you recall this this body approved the resolution to go to market several months ago and dave has given you the update now that we've come back with with bids and a low bidder so by adoption of the resolution tonight you'll prove acceptance of that low bid lock in that interest rate and allow us to proceed
091towards closing in two weeks and receive your funds at that time so i'm happy to answer any questions you might have any questions i i just think we had kudos these guys and our entire team in the district and superintendent and our new director of finance and everybody just these are the way we fiscally run this school district is is it's run very very well which allows us to save an incredible amount of taxpayer money and the ability to get these type of integration bond sales so i just i want to note that that's just really really important we pass these votes and again we'll be going for bond in a few years and talking to our voters that we're fiscally fiscally responsible with their money and doing the right things which they allow us
092to borrow money at a cheap rate so thank you this these are also just for people's awareness these are fixed-rate bonds for for a period or do they ever flood are there a fixed rate for the duration right these are fixed rate bonds yeah and you do have the option to call them i believe it's a 10-year 9 or 10-year call option but otherwise fixed-rate bonds so just just to tie this up and i know this really isn't like your area you did the hard work with the the sale today um but probably kyle so the rest the remainder of this money that we we have now from from the approval bond approval of a couple years ago is finishing out projects can you just just mention kind of what this is tying up yeah
093absolutely so um we've expended about 106 million of the 125 from the first sale we're two years past that first sale so you know speaking to that three-year window we're well within that and we'll have those funds expended probably by the time we hit summer quite honestly so the remaining sale this uh 61 million eight thirty five will primarily go towards the remaining fle projects at our elementary schools which we have seven lined up for this summer that's really kind of the big stuff we still have a lot of asset preservation funds that we use so pavement replacement roof replacement just things like hvac replacement so those are still going to be ongoing that's another pretty good significant chunk yeah the blue valley academy there's three million dollars to go towards renovations to that facility
094also we have a pot of money for career and technical education projects that we're still working on a plan of how we would spend those funds but right now we're talking about going into middle schools and and updating some facts rooms and trying to modernize those spaces so yeah oh and timeline wise by the summer end of summer of 23 we should be 95 plus percent done with all of our projects any other questions comments do you have a motion i knew that the um i believe that the board of education approves the sale of series 2022-a bonds as presented do i have a second motion by tom second by jim any discussion seeing no discussion all in favor raise your right hand all opposed same sign motion passes 7-0 the next item is curriculum
095and instruction update mathematics so so a couple of months ago um patrick you talked about uh kind of coming out of coba and and refocusing the work that we're doing and this is one of the areas we talked about uh mathematics and kelly and holly are going to share with you the work we've been doing because we haven't just been sitting idle around any of this work um and they're going to um share the amazing work that these two have led throughout our district so i'm going to turn it over to kelly good evening i am here with holly mccarty our district math coordinator to talk about a lot of work that's happened over many years in the area of math so um i want to point to this kind of driving quote behind all
096of our work and it spoke to us because it says students deserve rich mathematical opportunities to be learners doers and since makers of math and almost everything we've done to this point really has has been in in service to this goal that every student gets a great math opportunity so i wanted to show you a timeline just go through rather quickly some of the activities we've done since 2017 and 18. so uh the timeline has stretched out a little bit covet gave us that that little curveball but um we have made a lot a lot of progress so beginning in 2017-18 and through last year we did a ton of research and planning and training so in 2017 and 18 we began began by reading books and we went to some workshops in stanford the
097nctm which is the national counselors of teachers council of teachers of math math the most the largest and probably the top math organization in the country their conference is amazing we attended that and some ksd workshops the next year we began to do the optional math mindset workshops we had tens of teachers dozens of teachers come and begin to learn about how to change our math instruction so it is more engaging and goes deeper and has a more conceptual approach our teachers did this as option they came they learned and over the course of the next few years we trained a hundred and hundreds of teachers after school in some mathematical mindset approaches i've been to stanford workshop one of our one of the people we've read with and learn from the most works out
098of stanford names joe bowler lots of great things from her dope a relationship with her and her group and they've continued to give us guidance on how on good math curriculum and math resources so the other big thing that happened that year is nctm published the catalyzing change book series there's one for elementary middle and high we've read all of them and they are kind of the call the call to to change mathematics for the better for students future all of the work that we're doing in curriculum and our resources based on these recommendations from this this series of research the next year continued to do math mindset workshops again couple hundred teachers came and did that voluntarily and began to see after these workshops some organic use of these new instructional shifts in math
099so that's when that started to kind of happen again it's pretty much centered around teachers that came into the workshops but begun we began to see some really great shifts 21 we were surviving and planning um we had more planned for that year but who didn't and so we but we continued to work we continued to graph curriculum and write new curriculum with teachers as best we could in in that year so that came to this year and this year has been a an explosion of activity around math we implemented a new eighth grade math curriculum um using some of our esser funds we were able to create a math cadre of over 100 k-8 teachers who volunteered when i volunteer we paid them but they came after school four to six some of the
100best time i spent this year is with those groups learning about math there were three people from every school and they went back and we're the de facto leader in in their schools around math we did math minutes adam wessel you can see that i got was adam wade that picture he he is a former math teacher uh this summer he and i made 38 videos on all the little bitty parts of of this and these were sent out about i don't know once three or four a month to teachers just a three minute snippet learning so we try to keep the learning going we finalize curriculum and we went through a huge adoption process that holly and her team led um we had some de facto pilot classes which i'll talk about in just
101a moment um and then the thing that's happening most recently in april all k-8 buildings will have a math fun family fun night and those have begun i think harmony elementary's us tonight and we've had a good good response in those and we have a quick video do i click okay there we go about the math what does it mean to teach and learn math in blue valley if i walk into a classroom in any one of our schools in any one of our grade levels we want to see active learners of mathematics we want kids to be the learners the doers and the sense makers of math and in order to do that kids have to work together they have to have rich problems that allow them to think deeply about mathematics and if
102it's a really good task or problem i should need to work collaboratively but when you go into that classroom you're going to hear noise you're going to hear excitement you're going to hear kids working together they may be all around the room moving in different directions it's not what you're probably going to see or what you might remember about sitting in a desk and just taking notes or doing a worksheet of 20 problems so tonight we are having families come to school and we have a bunch of different math activities i think it's really exciting as an educator to have this opportunity because we get to see parents and students engage with math in a fun and exciting way previously you know parents were taught that you know you memorize these things and memorizing multiplication
103facts and so this shift is to help i think ultimately prepare students for the real world to be able to apply concepts more i mean the greatest thing about math is that it is so hands-on and there's so many opportunities to have manipulatives in their hands and to be able to create and discover and just embed it in so much of what we do in kindergarten and how we play and so just to see them being able to take something that's learned in a math lesson and just apply it throughout everyday life and them just cheering and being so happy about it being math time really shows just how engaging math can be for the kids [Music] a great snippet that jake in the communication department put together for us we'll pop it up on
104our learning connection website but it gives you a good a good you know math is a is something you do and in that video i think it was very evident it's something that kids engage in it's it's a it's a collaborative thing where people can learn from one another in the process of all this multiple years workshops a couple hundred teachers trained idc's super jazz develop math they we we came to have some we called them pilot classrooms but they weren't official pilots they were de facto pilots because we had groups of teachers who attend these workshops and then go hey we're going to try some of the that stuff and they'd get their principal involved in supporting and their idc and eventually we had these kind of little pockets where this this type of
105mathematics instruction and learning were happening so um here's just an example of what the shift looks like and feels like so this is an activity from a fifth grade classroom around um around solids and volume so you can see it has the target and the kids are very clear about their targets um and it it clearly states what they're trying to learn mathematically the great thing about this approach to mathematics is it lets you integrate skills and like holly mentioned on the video it's not a set of worksheets it has different skills that you work in so the listening speaking component of ela this teacher chose to talk about the skills they're developing in students with respect to a collaborative discussion this is a life skill that we want all our students to leave with
106and this is worked into a math lesson additionally you can see there's more things around a relationship sales social awareness these are life skills communicate clearly value and respect people by showing them they unders understand their perspective effectively manage my time and then manage myself and emotions these are all fantastic skills that this teacher not only are they teaching the math concept they're teaching these life skills in the context of this math activity so that that that's how it can be how different skills can be integrated in the explore part they're able to get hands-on um they build they actually build this cube it asks open-ended questions so so students can hear what one person says build on their idea question each other challenge each other and that's that's why those communication skills are so
107important again discuss these again are open-ended questions how did you use images to help you that's modeling and when have you ever had a math math problem in your head you have to draw it out teaching that's that's not a skill every kid has we have to teach that it works in different parts of their life too and then inside the solid things they can't see so they're making conjectures and they use that big fancy word it's really cute to hear a first grader say a conjecture and they test their conjecture and they open it up and they they look and see and then they finally um they extend it beyond just what is a solid and what does what is the volume and they ask questions like what makes a good puzzle it's an
108open-ended question it's something that has lots of ways to find an answer to so not only are they learning math but they're learning some life skills along the way we absolutely in this approach get to the point where we teach um that volume has a formula but we don't start with the formula it's kind of it's a discovery piece i would say we don't ever have to teach it because they figure it out they figure it out and they can visually see when they go to find the volume of something else how that base makes the difference no matter what it is so we don't have to teach it they get to figure it out as the teacher facilitates or works with those kids that might struggle with peace right so that's just an example
109of how one teacher took um took this type of approach to math um i'm going to show you some data i absolutely will give that it is cherry picked because we have it in that's small but there are um the classrooms that we know about that were kind of taking math in this approach we went and pulled their data and compared it to other classrooms in that same grade level so again the numbers the numbers the n is smaller but here's what i have for you so just to so you know what you're looking at fall 2020 to spring 21 so this is last year beginning year to end of year third and fourth grade nationally um percent meaning growth goal so the national norm is set at 50 so they they pick the average
110so anything over 50 is good which is kind of counterintuitive but anything over 50 is good if you're in a blue valley classroom our average is 67 that's that's good nwea would say that is a good that's a good score so if you're in blue valley you kind of get a you on average hit about 17 higher than a kid nationally if you are in one of these de facto classrooms you can see the number is goes to 80 in third grade and 67 in fourth grade effectively you look at the the boost that you get it's it's significant so we have a little bit of data here's another bit of data that we're collecting with these pilot classrooms um here's another way to look at this so this is fall 2022 winter 2022 so
111this is the mid-year dip this year what you're seeing is a quadrant chart this is nwea math across the top is achievement in percentile and vertically is growth so what the green represents is students who are achieving higher than norm and growing more right so if you're on the right you're you're achieving higher than average and if you're above the midline you are growing higher than average so the best case scenario is that kids are in the green kids that are over the vertical line are growing at a good rate so we want to see kids over that vertical line and the horizontal line we want to see kids to the right of that and if you look this is a solid this is a solid fifth grade class again fifty percent on that top
112number is considered uh the average score nationally and then you want your kids all of your kids one hundred percent of your kids to to meet your growth target and that's the aggregate for this class so in this class aggregate 102 of the growth goals if you added them all up were achieved this is a good solid classroom you take this chart and you go to our de facto classrooms the chart i just showed you is d you have a b and c are our de facto pilot classrooms and you can see many more kiddos up in that top right corner what that tells us is that in these classrooms that this approach to mathematics is not only good for kids who achieve on an average a typically achieving kiddo but it's good for kids
113who are high achievers and that is something we were looking for in in the approach to mathematics and the resource because we have a ton of kids who do well in math and we didn't want them to grow less because they're so high achieving so we have like i said we have some initial data that we feel is um is is encouraging again numbers it low and i'm cherry picking just because i'm picking the classrooms that i know are taking this approach but it's looking positive so we're encouraged by those results and we'll be monitoring the heck out of it in the next few years so so that comes to this year um or this next year we just thursday announced that we are going to adopt the i ready math program it's k-8 math
114program very excited about it has a full suite of assessments diagnostics unit tests the whole kit and caboodle a core good core program that aligns with the approach where we've been teaching for a while and then an intervention piece so and again we're going to use all those manipulatives we have a great team working on that so we'll have a new k-5 curriculum and k-8 resource and then our our efforts a lot of our first worship shift to um implementation which honestly is probably the harder part of all this so we still have a ton ton ton of work to do so that is kind of where we have been where we are and where we're going um this is just a quick blip of what's coming up here soon in april we're ordering the
115resource we're doing the family nights we do pl on the 19th around math in june we're going to do a two day unconference we're really excited about that giving teachers time to come in and work with one another august again we'll hit some pl on the resources curriculum and then that pl will just that support will continue through 22-23 this has been a huge undertaking by literally a couple hundred people so i'm standing up here speaking about it but you have to understand that holly has been amazing she's had this math steering team all the elementary principals and middle school principals have been through training throughout the year we have over 100 people in the math cadre those folks are working hard in their building to to push math forward our instructional design team has
116been absolutely key special education leaders they're helping us better understand when students struggle with mathematics and and how we can help so they've been along on the ride and every single teacher has given feedback engaged in pl and has been part of the adoption process so again huge undertaking lots of thank yous to go around a big big big team effort do you have anything else you want i just think that a lot of the teachers that we've been lucky to work with over these math mindset workshops over the years the cadre and the learning the excitement around teaching math from our teachers and especially elementary teachers because sometimes that can be an anxious part of their day and the excitement that they are feeling and when they are seeing kids do it the emails
117i get and the things are like they did do it they did it you were right they could do it and i've been lucky to go into elementary classrooms and teach big groups of kids and the excitement and the joy of this low floor high ceiling where all kids can get in and get involved is really exciting so we will take any questions kelly just to reiterate all teachers elementary and middle had a voice in the adoption of a new resource yes actually we they did multiple feedback loops they had presentations and in the end when it came down to the final two the math cadre narrowed it to final two it was the teacher's vote and their and their voice those that data is what put it over the edge for the one we
118picked so they played a key role in fact so thank you amy i was just gonna say holly you sort of touched on my question just a second ago but one of our speakers tonight i think had read the presentation and just what you flipped through just now had some concerns about i i would say can kids do it and it sounds like you know the answer is yes but anything else that you would add to that i think a lot of times we make the assumption a kid can't do something right so we think we have to teach them every piece and every step before we do that and our kids um can do a lot they come to us as kindergarteners they are curious about the world and they are curious about the
119world with numbers and sometimes we start to take that away in second grade and third grade and go to algorithms so it amazes me what the kids do i've done number talks with kids um all the time and what they come up with and their teachers in the room are like they said that they said like they can't even believe um you know what the kids come up with so it's it's definitely doable for all of our kids and not only is it doable it takes them to the next level it makes them deeper mathematical thinkers and it makes them stronger to go forward in more stem fields and one other question so outside of the regular standardized testing how do quizzes and tests look different for students than maybe in the past so it's
120a lot of a lot of stuff that we are working on with teachers um and even our high schools have started to do different things you know kids can can talk about math kids can talk to us it doesn't always have to be paper and pencil they can do presentations they collaborate with each other if you're working on something in mathematics and your overall goal is what you want them to have at the end you can have them present at the end and give them a whole you know a different problem that they're not mimicking your steps to just get done but they're having to use what they learned in order to solve a new problem so it is part of our assessment and with our new um resource ireti they have some great things
121all of their questions that they have are done by standards which is very nice so that we can pull those and work with our curriculum but again it's continued process as we continue to understand there are other ways to assess and the combination of both is what's key what a performance a lot of performative type things so giving problems and having kids solve them is it difficult for staff sometimes to make the transition you know it definitely is a change they move really from a into a facilitator where asking questions and getting highly skilled at asking questions and anticipating misconceptions becomes kind of their role the good news is the resource i ready very much supports that and gives them what they need to be able to do this type of approach i think without
122a quality resource it'd be it would be challenging i think the resource will absolutely make a huge difference and i'm pretty sure that's why the teachers picked it the professional learning that we've also done because it's not like it's even though we're going to implement the curriculum this year the vast learning has been going on for years um and a lot of the teachers will have me come out to do a lesson because they just want to see it and afterwards they're like i can do that and once they feel it with their kids that's pretty much all it takes i would say one thing that has made all the difference in the world is coaching so we've trained the instructional design coaches ahead of the teachers and they are in the trenches side by
123side working with them so a huge shout out to the instructional design coaches who who have made the difference for our teachers on this yep what else so um i just have a few make sure i understand kind of what the trajectory is here so i had down when i saw this presentation i just did a little background reading on catalyzing change and what drove nctm to to um you know write those those work those books and um i'm interested to know whether this is the direction we're going because what my understanding is is that one of the objectives has been of nctm was to to end the tracking early on tracking of poor math performers and higher math performers as early as elementary school so that even like say sixth grade you got kids
124that are you know already into algebra two in some schools around here my daughter was um and she was like alone in a class and then i've but i've had you know poor math uh students in my and so that when i understand it is there's really there's moving away particularly when you get into high school no honors classes any longer at least that's the way this is one of the the objectives there might be an honors designation but you group everybody together it's also so there's not a tracking of students but there's also not tracking of teachers where you get the worst math teachers teaching the most struggling students i'm just wondering if that is because that's an interesting theory you know i mean i i'm interested to know if that's where where you
125you see it going you know um i think we're gonna have to wait and see i think it's really important to meet the needs of our kids in our community so we have two different tracks for math with with advanced and on and on level we are hoping that this new approach to math serves students better at all ends of the spectrum and when that happens we're hoping to have the conversation about does it make sense for a sixth grader to pick their math track for the next six years of their career when they're 11. or is it something we wait and then it becomes more more you pick your path more in high school so i don't know that we have it predetermined but we are hoping that this approach to math serves our
126higher achieving students better there's lots of cases i'll talk to parents where they're higher achieving students and we'll we'll talk about differentiation and they continue to say you know my kids still not being served well in the on level math class i want to talk about you know going to that next level when holly said low floor high ceiling that's exactly what this this conversation is about is helping teachers realize that all kids can work on the same task but you can take it to a depth and so i think it's yet to be seen but you're right the nctm advocates for no no like middle school two levels of middle school i think we're just gonna have to wait and see if that's something our community and our teachers want to consider or not
127so just a few other questions on this so a lot of our students in the district do a lot of math after school like instead of going to baseball practice they go to kumon or math monkey and it's pretty that's a most of those programs are pretty traditional you know very much do a gazillion problems each day and drill into your head and then go on saturday morning um you know my guess is those are the best performers later on in our schools um just looking from my my own personal experience but i'm just wondering how how you i mean how does this like stack up to that and how is it different so i would say what this does is it goes for depth and we have a lot of students particularly in upper
128elementary that are good math performers i think what hollywood say where they know they know the algorithm they know how to add fractions but they may or may not understand the underlying conceptual pieces of what it means to have a fourth of a half and that that's an eighth and so while a lot of kids are very successful in that we also see a large number of students who do accelerate and get to high school and are lacking a conceptual understanding because maybe they accelerated too quickly so our goal is to have a very strong conceptual understanding as a basis of the math program memorization can only get you so far yeah um and as a former calculus teacher you can you see that so it doesn't it doesn't mean that math monkey or other
129places are bad it just means are they just learning a procedure to move on but never really understand why they're doing something and if they want to take an engineering path if they want to take a real strong mathematical path it will catch up with them not having an understanding i've seen it but more importantly it's math is so much more than a rote problem we look at our data science in the world today and these two new fields that are coming out that kids have to be able to analyze and problem solve and work and there's no one little formula that just is going to work so there's depth the depth is very important right well i mean i'm a big believer that the your best writers are people that are good math because
130they just learn how to think and they do it you know the younger you you get it the better so you know i i believe in that the other thing that i understood at least from some of what the nctm was was trying to get at was um us extincts in terms of its overall comparative math performance to other countries um and there's a lot of reasons for that we're a big diverse country but um i'm wondering if if this approach is taken another in you know like japan or china or wherever the best performance so um in for instance japan is one country where if they go into a high school math classroom you will see usually one problem on the board one problem and that is what the kids will work on the
131entire class period the teacher is facilitating the teacher is not up at the board having kids take notes they are diving into a deep problem that they're doing so when we talk about kids being the learners and doers of math they're the ones doing it on the flip side of that you have to remember sometimes you're comparing apples to oranges because in japan for instance they track very young and so once they get to a certain point there's a test that they take and if they don't pass they go this way or this way so you're looking at numbers that are a little different because we don't do that so you have to take the whole picture there and look at it but yes other countries do it differently a lot of other countries do
132it our way also but we are the ones that are towards the bottom yep i would say the the countries that we we actually looked at some the ones that are the higher are going towards a conceptual understanding of math and not a memorization basis yep so lots of math anybody else um is this the program we purchased last year this big one in our minimum nope no okay i was just curious we did not purchase it last year no it was in your consent agenda tonight for purchase so if you saw it in the package for next year the i-ready curriculum associates i think this is the name of the vendor and it is used by locally spring hill anybody else locally not like gary county spring hill manhattan so it's actually super it's
133coming on strong okay none strong so anyway anybody else thank you both yeah thank you both we need to let our closed captioner take a break so we're going to take a five minute break honestly um track okay right here oh yeah thank you you're right yes a week ago i are we ready to resume okay so let's get started and resume with the next agenda item that's going to be report and recommendations for the transportation services for the 2022-23 school year kyle okay it's hard it's always hard to follow those reports because i get you're up here smiling and nodding and like i just don't feel like this report's gonna give that type of response but we're yeah um so over the last couple months i've shared information with you around school start times
134uh the committee that worked on that throughout the course of the school year and then also how it related to transportation services so i'm going to talk about that tonight and then also talk about some recommendations that the committee has and that administration is bringing before you so when we look at just the work this is some of the stuff you've seen before we look at the work of the committee i was really guided by the strategic plan and the goal to review school start dismissal times and develop a plan to utilize and resources and maximize operational efficiency and i think that's a really important uh thing to keep in mind as we go through this because it's it's really key to to the work and and also to the recommendations so the committee actually
135began its work in september and it was made up of 19 different members seven district administrators six building administrators and also six staff members from all different uh ranges so some were early childhood teachers all the way up to teachers in high school who were teaching juniors and seniors so a good representation and they were very committed and interested in the work so early on we divided into three subcommittees you can see those committees there um and um the committees then worked independently and we came back together um in december so um what guided the work was these different bullets and and trying to just identify what the goal was the key considerations the questions that we needed to address obviously was going to entail a lot of research and looking at what other districts
136did not only our neighbors but also districts across the country we wanted to look at districts that looked like us too so we have districts that we've used before when they did the middle school study and those same districts that we pulled information from from there we wanted to develop solutions obviously and come up with making sure we identified what the strengths were what the weaknesses were what opportunities were there and then what the threats were and then consider each one of those things and how they impacted the staff and and students and families the common learnings um quite honestly became troublesome for the committee because most of the solutions really negative impacted the system and it impacted students and impacted families negatively and impacted staff and a lot of the options just failed to
137present any type of efficiencies which obviously went in direct opposition to the goal and so when all three was interesting one the three subcommittees kind of came back together and we looked at that matrix that we had talked about on how we were going to determine solutions and recommendations we all had a very very similar approach even though we had worked independently and kind of a conclusion was the existing problem around busing in our transportation services was really hindering any type of progress we could make when it came to changing start times when it came to being more agile with our system and so but we needed to really address that that bussing situation and i want to say there and kind of pause for a second because um the more i reflect on on
138this bussing situation is the more i think about that although the situation you know is more dire now for blue valley and i think for school districts across the country it was also an issue pre-pandemic um it just wasn't as significant and it wasn't impacting and stressing the system so much and quite honestly in 22 years as a school administrator i don't know if i've had as big a challenge and something that you're faced with like persistently and pervasively on a daily basis um and you and it's and to the point where it's difficult to try to pivot and make some quick adjustments and figure it out and so that those are just a couple of things and and then the other one is um we think about you know we get kind of talk
139about the complaints coming to district office and those types of things but there's a daily stress that's been on our staff that i think has to be recognized here that that you know and i guess i'm i personally do my best to try to protect them from those types of things because especially on the finance and operations end of the system we want to do our best to make things run smoothly for them so that they can put their focus on their kids and student learning and what's become very apparent is that because of the situation you know kids are are late to school and they're missing learning opportunities and and then they're late to get home and that disrupts the family on the back end when they're trying to get to other activities and
140have family time together we want to talk a little bit about the state of transportation and then also talk about what types of things durham has done to try to address the issue and then what types of things we're trying to work with durham in the future to to address the issue also so i'm going to turn that over to jason gillam to talk about some of those things that's here for you thank you kyle good evening uh the slide that you have before you kind of gives you the average of what we've been facing daily uh this school year um obviously you can see from this slide we are short a number of routes but i want to take it to today i want to take it to what did what did today look
141like we had 11 vacant rounds this morning meaning routes that don't have a driver that durham doesn't have employed we had seven call in with the stomach flu and we had three that were planned to be off that means we started this morning at five o'clock with my phone blowing up with text of all the changes and and improvising that durham was trying to do to get our kids to school that meant we had 21 routes at both the middle school high school level and the elementary level that we were having to either double up or circle back and pick up and get to school late we had a number of kids late to school today it's not unique we've been battling that the entire school year and something needs to change we we need
142to do something significant and several things significant to help bring the improvement necessary to get these kids to school and get them home on a consistent basis so that's that's really what i wanted to share with you today about the state of the state of transportation although our average has been about 15 today was 21 and we really felt that um so talk a little bit about what what durham's doing so you can go ahead and go to the next slide like jason what time do those kids get home so 21 routes what time was i now we all you always have like the last we get a notice once everybody's off the bus what happens we tracked that in terms of the last kid got delivered home today at 503. okay so so back
143back in the day was it i don't know 4 15 4 30. um on a good day we are probably about 4 40 right now if if if we had better staffing we'd be about 4 40 but right now right now we've been the goal is an hour okay yep thank you so talking about some of the things that durham is doing so durham um is aggressively trying to recruit drivers this is they've been doing this all year the corporate team has come and said what what can we do ask the local managers what can we do to help support you and they they said we could use some money for bonuses um they've been paying a thousand dollar referral bonus paid to both um individuals and entities so they've they've gone out to civic
144groups churches and said hey would you help us would you partner this is a this is a way to help your community we'll pay you entity the the thousand dollar referral bonus if you help us find people they've offered sign-on bonuses for non-cdl drivers so 1500 and then three thousand dollars for cd current cdl holders that come over and transfer over and stay with the district uh corporate recruiting staff have been here um several weeks this year helping our local recruiting team with best practices that they've seen across the country and how to canvas and help find uh people and then they've also been providing ongoing weekly professional support for the local team so kind of helping them get through the applicants but we're finding if you get an applicant you have to get through
145it very very quickly to get to them and before somebody else does so that's uh that's that's a focus lots of advertisements jobs fairs events neighborhood marketing we've actually found that this has been one of the most productive approaches to finding drivers and we say neighborhood marketing we have bus drivers going home with yard signs they're putting in their yards saying you want to drive a bus call this number we have drivers going door to door in their neighborhoods trying to get neighbors interested in and driving a bus for blue valley and you have to remember plus of our drivers don't live within blue valley so these are all the surrounding communities whether we go across the line in missouri we go north of the river we go all the way down to oscillotomy bringing
146folks in to be bus drivers here for blue valley businesses and organizations they've done a really nice job in reaching out to some of our local businesses and saying how can we cross market uh whether it be a restaurant that's struggling with trying to find serving staff and saying okay why don't you be a bus driver and get a base pay and benefits and then you could be a serving a server at lunch because we don't need you at lunchtime and partnerships that way they've they've had advertisements on pizza boxes that are being delivered home from pizza shuttle if you've ordered pizza shuttle you may have seen a durham bus driver ad right on top of the box so creative different different ways but we also found too especially with the gas price prices spiking
147a lot of the folks that drive buses living in those communities that are a distance away are finding that the cost of gas is a barrier to come to work here so durham is running vans to kansas city kansas or different parts south to help bring in folks they have a park and ride program to get them to come here to work and we've been we've done that for a number of years but it's been especially when gas prices spike we see a lot more people willing and wanting that uh that service uh and appreciation events uh lots we we talk a lot about culture and creating a work culture here in blue valley um i the principals all hear from me and uh regularly this that i tell them i remind them if you
148want to retain your bus drivers they have to feel the love from the buildings as well as district office so please uh thank them please get to know them if they have a challenge on the bus be there to support them because that will cause them to want to stay so we all have a part to play in in keeping them but appreciation events uh durham has done many things uh most recently they've had a funnel cake truck come out after after a round at the end of the week just to say thank you to all the drivers they have done a lot of different games and promotions and giveaways and giving away a tv here pretty soon for attendance so just just fun stuff to help try to keep the work environment a place
149that they want to be and they tell their friends it might be doing like jobs elsewhere um so so what are we what else are we doing with with durham uh we we did hire a um independent uh consultant that has worked with the district a number of years uh they're nationally known um called transpar they focus just on student transportation and we brought them in we had them review durham's contract we've had several sit-down conversations with their executive team and we discussed potential solutions that they could bring to the table to help with this this challenge that we have of being short on drivers it was very constructive we had several months of conversation and we came away with some key key things that we believe we can do to contractually improve give them
150a better chance to succeed and those are listed here so we have increased wages is something that obviously we think will help we don't think it's the only way to solve the problem but we think that there's some opportunity there extra customer service staff you know our patrons have been frustrated at times when they try to reach the bus company and they can't the reason why they can't is that everybody that has a cdl that works in the office that could possibly drive a bus guess where they're at they're driving a bus so they've been understaffed in the office so we've talked about that and when we talked about the importance of creating a couple customer service positions within the office that can't drive just to help make sure we have a base there that's
151able to keep up with the call volume the use of more type d buses if you're not familiar with that term you'll see on the large buses there's buses that have hoods and noses to them and there are some that kind of have that flat flat face that flat face bus holds about 10 more students on board than the type c bus with the hood we're we have a commitment to get us up to about 10 of those type d buses in our fleet which is important for the elementary school that maybe has a full bus and maybe a couple kids on a waiting list that we don't have another bus driver to add another route we can swap out equipment now and and put a bigger bus in that situation and serve them all
152technology improvements we have we have a lot of drivers that have gone over and above and we are so appreciative of i want to mention that because these drivers they take a lot of pride in the route that they choose they get to bid on and choose and learn that route and then we tell them hey sorry we also have this other route can you go run this after you finish your route well the technologies that durham has today our way to communicate with that driver is two options over the radio somebody's telling them turn by turn where to go to go drive that route that we just asked them to go pick up or they are faxing over to the school to print out maps to run out to the bus driver to say
153here's your instructions we need to we need to advance that technology we pushed hard and they've come up with a tablet solution that the assignment can be sent straight to the bus with instructions and directions we believe that will help with retention and burnout and then wi-fi connected cameras so we have a camera system on the bus today but we parked buses in five different locations in blue valley so if a question comes up and we need to go get the information somebody from durham's office has to go out to one of the five locations where buses are parked pull a hard drive and bring it back to the office to search their video too much effort is being made to kind of help solve those questions when they come up and they come up
154on a daily basis so those are some of the uh additional efforts that we're working on through a contract modification and we've with transparence help we when analyzing the contract we have a max age of a bus of 12 years in our contract and an average age of about 6.1 or 2. and looking at the next couple years there's no buses that have to be replaced so we want to take advantage of a couple years of not having to replace buses to be able to afford some of these key improvements that are necessary so that's the contract modification that we've been talking about and transparent recommending that we react upon so we'll be back next month with that okay so as jason noted even with all these different efforts we still believe there's going to
155be a gap for us to fill in trying to you know overcome the deficits we're in now but step one that the committee really identified as a positive measure that was really kind of a minor tweak to some schedules high school start time would remain the same but the school day would end 10 minutes earlier and they've just identified some places where they could do that it wasn't actually what a year or two ago before they just extended it 10 minutes so i think there's retreating from that but middle school would be 10 minutes later they're currently at 7 41 start and elementary would be a five minute switch from 8 35 to 8 40. the idea behind that is by staggering high school and middle school by that 10 minute or 11 minute time
156it would allow for some more combination routes we already do those combination routes but it maximizes our opportunity to do that to do that um and then the other thing is is one of the factors we have to keep in place is maintaining this 45 minute window between i call this tier one which would be dropping our middle school kids off and then going up back out the same bus drivers going back out get the elementary kiddos and get them to school on time and then the same result with when it comes to getting them home this results in an estimated reduction of five to six routes the next thing i want to talk about is is what state statute is versus board policy and then blue valley's practice so um the state statute says
157that you're required to transport students who live 2.5 miles or above from their school and it's the most direct route is how that's identified and we receive funding for that the blue valley practice is not only adhering to the statute of course but it's also providing a pay rider service to families who want to take advantage of that if they are don't qualify under the statute so the next step we believe that we need to do to position ourselves for success beyond just that schedule change beyond the recommendations from transpar is reducing this pay rider option so the recommendation that really the committee wrestled with on this was you know we know that the change in start times is not enough we know that these contract improvements should help but probably won't dig us out
158of the hole how far can we go with a recommendation or need to go to make sure that we're going to set ourselves up for success and make sure that kids don't continue to lose instructional time and this was the recommendation that appeared which was removing the pay rider service for high school middle school students who are less than 1.5 miles unless they're qualifying for special education transportation services right now it's estimated that that's about 515 students who would lose transportation should note there that there's approximately uh 1 250 students who have their transportation services probably interrupted on a daily basis so there there's that many students who are being negatively impacted typically and we also have a total of six thousand riders so beyond just our pay writer system uh the total number of
159writers is that so it gives you a little bit of an idea of of what we're talking about here as far as total numbers of students impacted but this gets a reduction of of 9 to 10 routes which when you start to think about what we were talking about earlier when we have an average of 15 but could see spikes of 2021 this puts us in a closer position at least to be successful day-to-day the other thing that typically this you'd see this on on the consent agenda would be the adjustments to pay rider fees we didn't put that on there intentionally we wanted to embed it in this presentation because it just made sense to talk about this holistically and have this as another uh recommendation in motion so it's a it's a minor
160change as you can see here um but it primarily has to do with um changing it according to when pay riders sign up early right so as it states there super majority of pay writers try to register by the early pay deadline so this would you know impact them just slightly yeah so um you know bus stop distances are typically don't go over 0.25 miles one of the things that would help once again speed up routes is a reduction in the number of stops which would then by increasing um that's from 2.5 or 0.25 to 0.5 where it's safe to do so then that helps with obviously the efficiency of running those bus routes so even if the bus went by your house i know that that's always you know the question the bus goes
161by and your kiddo gets to jog down the street no hopefully your kid was already ready and waiting for the bus um but uh there's no because i think i think in the past what i've heard we've been a little flexible on that um so that would be pretty solid even though your bus is going by your house you got to be at the stop yeah that would be correct yeah and that would be my son that would be one of those that would be running half a mile to do that yeah uh so that the pay rider fees um last slide is just uh discussion questions that you may have that i know we had discussion this morning aboard workshop but an extension of that any questions well i know we had we had
162talked about this quite a bit this morning just for for those in the audience um and and one of my concerns um was that there were no parents you know on your committees and um so i just i'm sorry you know i i gave you the question this morning and um um just just a seat at the table even though you know i think the more parents that know what we're confronted with um could help in in in knowing what options are available yeah i thought more about that a little bit um there were a number of parents because they were either they were staff members in some cases so some of the teachers had students some of our principals have students and that will be impacted by this quite honestly um and same with
163district office staff so there are some folks i also failed to mention you heard it in my finance and operations advisory committee report that it was discussed with that group too there was a good conversation around that and decent feedback but um by and large it was the response was this is not fun this is not you know something we believe that you know nobody wants to do but there was an understanding that they understood the recommendation and why it was there but point taken yeah kyle what's our what's our turnover and do we do we track that kind of a turnover rate the attrition rate for bus drivers in a typical year is about 25 percent so that means we we have to be churning a lot of new bus drivers through the system
164on a regular basis and it takes quite a bit of time to get them all the way through from the applicant stage through all the background checks physicals classroom training behind the wheel training testing before they can become a bus driver so we're constantly there hasn't been a meeting yet this year that we haven't talked about we refer to it as the pipeline how many people do we have in the pipeline and what stage they're at because of the attrition okay and then maybe a following question what's the what's the current rate that uh we're paying or through through durham uh the the current starting rate is right about uh 18 an hour just under that's the starting pay and that's not for utilization that's not for using their buses we provide our buses and
165we just pay an hourly rate uh no it's their buses their buses yes we contract them so so we rent their buses basically or i know we've got a lot of buses parked yeah they they own the buses uh there's there's a lease component to it but okay yes so the contract includes the leasing of the buses and the services overall contract pays for it all that just from clear that that rate 18 an hour is what the bus driver receives we pay probably some markup on that or uh we don't pay uh based on uh employee hours we pay based on routes performed but average i'm just trying to understand kind of what does it mean to the driver 18 bucks an hour growth it's kind of well at the starting rate correct starting
166rate average driver probably in the low to mid-20s and durham has other schools in the kansas city metro area so my guess is that they pay they have a pay structure for all schools that they service correct it is it is a negotiated agreement with the teamsters union so which had been for ever since uh several decades ago so so overall contract pays for everything right it's a lump contract pays for it all whatever the salary is it falls into their agreed upon contract and correctly that could change through future negotiations we may have and other things okay and i know that i know it's been a tough time and so again this does not affect elementary schools right correct or not effect but your plan it is not it will positively impact elementary schools
167because the elementary schools right now are being negatively impacted by not having enough drivers to cover all the routes but if we reduce the rest uh they will be made holding whole again and and uh be getting the school okay so elementary's taken care of remind me the neighboring district does everybody provide buses to element for elementary schools just that it's it's been a it's been a change we're not the first to make a change like this so we've we've looked around at some of our neighbors i know in olathe today if you reside less than a mile from home to elementary school there's no transportation services provided if you are in olathe and you're a middle school or high school student and you're less than one and a half miles there's no transportation option
168provided shawnee mission does it a little bit different they look at it by boundary area and make decisions in some of their schools they say there's no buses at all for the school just because of everybody's within two and a half miles that that goes to that school lawrence is probably another another good example to give where they say okay the state rule is two and a half miles we're not providing any transportation under two and a half miles so so have we ever told anyone no we don't in what way do you ever put a threshold you get your buses all set you get your routes all set and then you know yeah so we have uh late ads um so we have deadlines to sign up to register for the bus so uh
169we we may tell them that if you signed up three days before school starts and the routes have already been established and to add you would change the times for every other family on that route we're not gonna be able to do that for the first day of school but we will be able to buy labor day but if they're two and a half miles or more we don't have a choice jody yeah we have that we have to add them right so we have to have time to to work them in but we do have to add them with 300 but we treat the two and a half mile families as well as within that circle the same and and oh and work it in right right now i mean some of the most
170difficult conversations i have with parents is when they they call and they they're the ones that are being late picked up in the morning or late drop dropped off at home and they're beyond two and a half miles and they're asking why aren't we prioritized over pay riders that you're not required to drive to take to school and i don't have a great answer for that right now so that that question comes up that's come up by several parents do you have something else tommy no i'll chime in later on just overall jason appreciate you working on this did didn't we didn't have a lot of parent involvement but we had some did we were able to identify reasonable options for those 515 kids or is it just kind of one of the situations where
171i think the most important thing that uh we could do is to let them know within with as much advanced warning as possible that a change is coming so that way they can begin making making other plans and arrangements it could be it could be something as they have a they have a lease coming to the summer that they may want to think about maybe we don't want to stay in the same same house that we're renting and we want to move some somewhere else they would have the opportunity to to make that family decision or to find a carpool with their neighbors or other ways to solve it part of the communication plan this month i plan to communicate with the pta pto president's group really walk through this present presentation with them and
172and help them understand because i think our our parent groups within our schools could offer some support or maybe um create you know some type of different systems that would would help i have two questions um if i can remember both the one is did you run it um just with without high school students because you know at some point they drive right right potentially yeah so we haven't been able to to complete that jody but i would say that if the initial uh look at it is that it would not give us the same number of route savings is what we have recommended half this i don't i wouldn't hold you to anything i'm just yeah i'd probably say at least a third or 40 less so three or four less than what we're
173what we're looking at at least so it was nine or ten i believe it stated right so this would save you five right maybe just throw that out there when you when you look at the number of kids who are riding the younger kids ride more than the middle school age kids than the high school age kids so the less the least participation we have is going to be at the high school level yeah right and especially after school at least from what i found because that's when a lot of activities take place and mornings you know not so much so jason i want to appreciate the committee's work and and all the iterations that you work through i know it's complicated and i don't think this is an easy issue to work through but
174appreciate all that hard work thank you thank you i know what i was going to ask secondly um so is this i mean we know that that all across the country staffing shortages you know is is an issue or are an issue um but is this about i mean we're constantly talking about funding right is this fallout in some way from the funding issue um i'll say this at the state level they've had conversations around funding transportation differently and saying you know is two and a half miles too far should it be one and a half and um and even a conversation today with katie we've talked about missouri is a one and a half mile rule so so they received funding for that and and transportation is required for students 1.5 miles and over
175so um we believe like with this adjustment that we would stay within you know those type of guidelines of parameters and and um at least across the state line and and in the same as conversations at the state level but i do not see them changing that 2.5 mile rule though is your point that or is it let's just say we've got special education funded and we had a certain amount of money to make up for some of those we'd have more money in our overall budget thus could essentially pay our bus service more money in the contract and pay the drivers more is that what you're getting yeah okay is is the pay writers um aspect of the program pay for itself it does not so it is actually subsidized so secondary benefits reducing
176the routes is a slight budgetary savings that we could then turn around as we're doing the contract modifications look at putting towards um paying bus drivers more and and so is it does it not pay for itself because to do so would just make it um a price point that doesn't make sense it'd be a price point that would stick out when compared to our peers in the in the area and we just have never stepped out in that way and as a reminder this would not affect elementary this would not affect anybody 2.5 miles or more and it would not affect students whose iep their special education students and their iep calls for transportation so we're legally obligated to provide 2.5 and more and we're legally obligated to provide anything that's in an iep
177and we would that would not we would not touch those correct they'd be positively impacted you know the bus topic's been a topic since i came on this board ten years i don't know if you remember jason remember we switched users with that awful first couple months when they came on board i had to say the word awful but it was just new and getting things fixed and i i think it's always been kind of a struggle right with with staffing get enough folks the routes and those type of things now it's only just enhanced correct through everything going on and it's unfortunate for a lot of our families that are counting on this and it's a conversation on every superintendent call i do whether it's in the state or across the country yeah and
178there's conferences with the topic and everything like that i you know my overall thoughts on this i'd like to i've written down some notes here and just recap so you've got an average of 15 vacant routes a day 15. you had 21 today you have kids that are consistently late to school or late getting home or to you know other things after school we have no sign of getting it better or it's getting better right are we seeing any positives at all get the price of gas we're throwing in here as well with getting these drivers here um hearing this plan and seeing it and obviously we saw it this morning as well and lasted a few questions i i just i'm just wondering if this makes us better overall especially with planning and overall
179efficiency if you will and i know it's going to be painful for for some families but i'm just wondering if the end game here with just the ability to know folks to plan you guys to be able to do some things that you haven't been able to do for a while that just makes us overall efficient and things actually get better so we know routes are going to be filled and kids are no longer late to school and kids are no longer like getting home and you're no longer getting 20 texts at 5 30 p.m and no longer is dr american worried that kids aren't home yet because i know she worries about it she i think you always ask for a note when's the last kid get off the bus which is awesome so
180to me it seems reasonable that we we have to make some tough choices and have to make some changes and hopefully maybe it's it's a six month change or maybe it's a year or two and we can revisit this but i think the plan you put forward just knowing um is is is could be a good one at the at the end of the day those are my overall thoughts any other comments or questions so so you're asking us to approve the pay writer fees i thought there were a couple pieces here yeah so there's there's two uh recommendations in most motions one is to approve the pay rider fees that we presented and also to approve the recommendation that we presented to eliminate the payrider ship for middle school and high school students except
181for those under 1.5 miles except for those who qualify for sped transportation services um and that would be it is there just one motion here that combines all that now there should be two different motions that are listed just one comment which i i i said some things this morning which i i hold to but um i don't want to reiterate them all um i don't think there's no i don't think there's any easy choices here um but i i feel like we are in the service business at some point in time some prior board decided the you know the the um this one and a half mile rule for pay riders and there's a lot of people that have settled expectations on it and i hate making decisions when the the market's not like
182it's it's at its worst and so i i just sense that we're at the you know like could things get worse yes it could get you know gas could go up higher the unemployment rate could go lower wages could go higher and i don't know there's a tax on rubber or something that makes you know you know things could get worse but um that's my sense is that that i i hate to see a service business cut a something that you know not an insubstantial number of people um rely on at a point where you know we're at our most stressed but i i don't think it's a great answer to tell you well you know let's you know throw more money at it or whatever but that's kind of where i am yeah i
183think this is a difficult issue under the circumstances and it's one of many that we continue to be faced with um i also wonder if um you know things will get better or there's uh other ways to to make this work but uh so patrick just a thought here one i think and i could be wrong but that at a minimum we could approve the pay writer fees for tonight i don't know that anyone's that i think we we understand and generally believe that it's time to pass some of that on so maybe we do that first and just for a couple folks that have mentioned um not getting parental feedback i'm just trying to process what and and i and i follow what kyle said as well which is there were parents on that
184committee so it wasn't like it was just no parents but is it giving them more notice or is it hearing of some idea that they might have that hasn't been thought of i'm just trying to get my head around because i think from what both jason and kyle have talked about from a parental planning perspective sooner than later to be able to tell folks that this is in effect is important um but hypothetically what would one month buy us um and i'm just thinking out loud a little bit just to make sure that i'm thinking about what you guys are thinking about and like kyle said he's going to pta pto here pretty quick so what what do you guys think you're wondering whether that buys us a little more thought into this or if
185perhaps it doesn't do anything or number two is is it better off to give folks a little more heads up yeah i'm just trying to balance that in my head plus our administrative team to plan this out with our bus service and other things is right and i would say i don't think going past the may board meeting no is an option for sure and these two would probably say going past this board meaning is probably not a great option but yeah i think we're all in 100 agreement these are tough decisions here right i don't disagree with it i agree with jim's just thoughts here 100 on doing stuff like this and not knowing exactly what's going to happen i'm just trying to give it a little more realistic approach that we know this
186is a problem we're gonna have to pivot a little bit somewhere somehow maybe this isn't the perfect answer but i just i think we got to figure out something so to me the biggest thing that i took away from tonight versus earlier today is that it's 1250 kids impacted daily um by their routes and making them late to school or late home and this is going to impact 500 which is obviously we don't impact any but with no change in the foreseeable future on number kids impacted daily this seems like a great option in contrast i think too when we're speaking from a point of trying to get back to normal everybody's trying back to normal and if you're looking at 1200 kids every day i can see the look on their faces when they're
187presenting this they don't like it nobody does but i do agree with jim it's not just giving my two cents but when we're looking at every kid having to deal with that every day um that's a lot that's a lot of worried parents i would be very distraught if my littles were on the bus till almost 5 pm i can tell you that right now i do not like the fact that we're going to impact 500 but i can't even imagine what like kyle you said you're trying to protect all the admin from the angry texts and phone calls and stuff i mean we've had trouble with buses before and there are times where they're hesitant to tell you where they're at we're not sure so that is scary as well so is that uh
1881200 kids is that majority of them elementary kids that are showing up at five or is it middle school or is it high school 1200 1250 kids a day is all grade levels right but it's so so is it 1250 that are showing up late yes it could be an assortment of things correct correct anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes late getting to school or late getting home from when they are expected to we bus about six thousand right yeah yeah so so um i'm probably in the minority but i am of the view that money is mostly the thing that makes you know in a market economy it's what generally drives decisions um and i was just trying to do some math and to make sure i'm not my math isn't way off that
189if you just across the board did like a five dollar starting pay was not 18 but 23 and moved everybody up to 28 and just bought exercise not proposing it i'm just and pretend that there was like no other monetary issues that we were faced in the district um in any i you know any or whatever seven dollars an hour and with but i kind of calculated that to be kind of a five to six hundred thousand dollars cost to go five bucks an hour is that close i think you're a little bit low okay like require 500 000 or like 200 000 the numbers that we were looking at to make a significant move like that would be in the seven figures okay i just think one more quick question i'm not sure what
190how beneficial this is but do we have performance majors in the contract we do actually have an sla in the contract so obviously durham is not fully staffed to perform all the routes that we're requiring and that is a measurement in the contract so they are providing a liquidated damage to the district on a monthly basis based on that and it is i will tell you it's substantial and it's one that they feel they feel a lot of pain from it from a bottom line of when they look at this business operating providing service to blue valley they are upside down can you also just talk for a minute about other options in town i mean i know tom touched on early in his tenure on the board i think you said it sounded like
191we switched companies yeah we switched companies and i think these guys have done a great job since then it just you know new buses coming in big drivers filling out the routes their administrators figuring out i wish it was a tough two years the transition probably the first several weeks was a tough one okay whatever i'm just kind of curious and i know you guys have thought through everything under the sun but yeah i don't get the impression that other bus companies in town are not feeling the same pressure uh none of them have any surplus buses or drivers to offer us to help our shortage because there are many of them either just barely making it or short themselves i thought we i've talked to a number of bus operators in in the metro
192area and that's been the consistent story but changing providers doesn't necessarily solve this problem either no but we experienced so we those of you that remember we had first student as a vendor for a number of years and we went through an extensive rfp process took a year and a half two years going through the process and managing the change we hired a company called peterman and what we quickly found out is that what we really bought was a different philosophy and a different leadership but when it came to the staff we're still pulling from the same community so the staff mostly just changed over with with the company there wasn't a huge influx of new new drivers quick question so um this has obviously been an issue for many many years we've talked about
193that right so by by accepting these recommendations cutting the routes down 15. um what what makes us think that it's going to be better because there's we've always worked at a deficit am i am i wrong on that i mean it feels like with the with the bell time changes with the pay ride change that's recommended with the contract modifications that were that we're working towards all of those things collectively along with the efforts that durham is continuing to to make on the recruitment standpoint it gives us a chance to succeed because right now we're losing every day and it is it is a defeating feeling for our leadership team at durham i worry about their burnout on a regular basis because i see the number of hours that they're putting in to try to
194keep the ship afloat on a daily basis that can't be sustained we have to do something to to help otherwise it's going to fall apart do you say how many pay riders are there total including elementary uh currently about three thousand or maybe just under and i'm i'm sorry what was the increase we're gonna approve or did you recommend uh twenty dollars so what if we increased it 120 dollars how much money would that bring in uh 20 is generating roughly 30 000 okay so we're not we're not talking huge dollars what if we were increased to 200 dollars yeah would people pay it i i think we'd hear from a lot of families that would struggle with that yeah there's some that could and would elementary again my assumption is we'll stay on top
195of this right let's say we would be these motions we've proved this i'm assuming kyle jason that this is a priority we can revisit this things get better we could pivot adapt and go back to the providing the service that a lot of people have had in the past and and we've provided a lot for people right absolutely absolutely i i think that durham is very motivated jason kind of spoke to this i i've been in i don't know how many meetings last three years with durham management like senior management making trips to to the blue valley their account is important to us are important to them and that relationship is actually um pretty strong especially since over the course of this school year when we really started to dig in and work on okay
196what can we do contractually to flip this thing around and um so there's a lot of positive momentum with durham right now i think and with the recommendations we brought and with um the contract the renewed contract that were amended contract that we would bring to next month that's quite honest it's built around this recommendation and we would be coming to you with a recommendation to go a different direction if we were hearing from our colleagues that it was so much better transportation-wise we're not hearing that so ever literally i don't know anybody who um works in a school setting like us at an administrative level who would tell you oh my gosh buzzing i haven't heard a word yeah overall business might have to be reinvented a little bit yeah it's a structure it
197is it's critical we get an email and and jason has taken the brunt of this um but we we got one today uh with a strong concern um rightfully so because the bus was once again late 30 minutes and um she was very frustrated it was a mother again it rightfully so um she sat at home and waited for 30 minutes with her elementary aged kids mr president are you ready for a motion yeah let's let's have anybody gonna ready to make a motion there's two motions i have two motions i'll do the um the writer fees first i move the board of education approves transportation pay writer fees for the 2022-2023 school year as presented is there a second uh motion by tom second by gina any additional discussion scene none all in favor
198raise your right hand all opposed same sign motion passes 7-0 i move that the board of education approves the recommendation to no longer provide pay rider transportation services to high school and middle school students who reside less than 1.5 miles from school with the exception of students qualifying for special education transportation services tom's made a motion is there a second i'll second motion by tom second by amy any discussion on this motion seeing none all in favor raise your right hand all opposed same sign any abstentions so motion passes four two one okay the next item is uh agenda or legislative update okay um this is a legislative update we said we would do this each month that the they are in session in topeka and this is the legislative calendar i highlighted in red
199right now our legislators are on a break so april 2nd through the 24th they are back in their districts and on a break and the veto session will begin on april 25th so again just as a quick reminder these are our board adopted priorities fund special education at the statutory amount of 92 percent apply at-risk funding to define student measures enhance student mental health and eliminate tax credits and vouchers for private schools so first of all i want to extend our thanks or my thanks to those in topeka because i know they have hard decisions to make just like like you all do they're elected officials and so they have done a number of different things and i'm just going to highlight a couple of areas um and to kind of tell you where they're
200at right now in topeka and i tried to look to to see if the governor had signed any anything into law and i don't think she did today that affected us per se so first of all the budget bill so the budget bill uh currently is ccr committee combined committee report for house bill 2567 this did not sell this did not pass so they had a house bill and they had a senate bill and they weren't the same so you have a conference committee come together and work and they did not solve that during the veto session so they'll need the conference committee to iron out a common bill and they'll take it up in the veto session but in this bill special education is not slated to be at the statutory amount of 92
201percent and i just want to talk a little bit about how that affects blue valley so if you look at the last two years in 1920 and in 2020 21 you will see that we were covered at 62.2 percent two years ago and last year it was at 65.3 what that means is that blue valley's general fund um had to absorb the rest of the cost and so you can see the amount that that costs our our district i just want to be really clear that that doesn't mean that we are not serving special education students because special education students have what's called an individual education plan an iep every single student who has an iep has a team that comes together on a yearly basis and writes that iep and that team is consists
202of parents it consists of an administrator consists of a general education teacher it consists of a special education teacher minimally it could have other people on there as needed they identify what that student needs never one i've sat on a lot of iep teams never once did we have a discussion to say i wonder if we can afford that this student needs a full-time para oh i wonder if we can afford that we didn't even say i wonder if we can hire one because we are just concentrating on what that student needs that student needs bus service we can't we can't call jason and say hey do you think we're going to be able to get a bus if that student needs it we are obligated to provide it so we are that's what we're
203covering uh when i say the blue valley cost of two years ago 11.6 million uh last year about 9.7 million so um you may have noticed uh that or you may have heard that the johnson county superintendents wrote a letter to governor kelly and asked her to amend her budget and to include that we cover statutorily special education the reason why we did that is that the state has a surplus this year and it is the the time we believe that they they actually could fund us at the statutory amount so any questions on that before i move on that 9.7 million i'm trying to do that is the delta between 65.3 and 92 correct and just to be clear that that money is spent and it comes from the general fund correct and then
204the other eight percent comes from the general fund correct always and so if we got the additional special ed funding that would therefore be additional money in the general fund correct and so so this is not for so this is for 2223 no this is for 1920 and 2021. it's for the last two years because 20 we're not done with this year yet you're saying the governor's budget right oh the governor's budget is um going forward yes that is correct 20 22 23 right and so for for that budget year we would need how much i don't know around between 9 and 11 million and so that would be based on what we would expect in terms of enrollment that would it would based on again those iep needs what we identify if we have
205additional students move in if we identify that different students need different services um we have to hire more speech-language pathologists more ots just a big unknown in terms of correct correct and it fluctuates from year to year to correct in which kids move in and out yep and there is fluctuation right so i know you're going to talk about the open borders probably next um but one of the big implications of open borders i believe is that you know we serve everyone so we wouldn't know when we accept a student if they have special needs right so they're going to increase special needs costs as a result of the open borders legislation right well my understanding is um that that is that they have said that's not something we could ask like we could put
206some criteria absolutely in place but that we couldn't ask do you have an iep um we would have to base every student on the availability of space and whatever our policy was around that is the way i currently understand that and and there's a bill before the legislature about transfer right yeah we're going to get to that okay just hold on good good question oh look at that open enrollment mandated open enrollment uh is now included in that budget bill that we just talked about that is not fully done yet but it was senate bill 455 and house bill 2016 no conference committee bill they just put it into the budget bill so again our concerns around this are blue valley resources being used by non-blue valley tax paying residents the administrative time and money
207to staff the program and the logistics of saving enough space for blue valley residents who move in throughout the year so you know if a student moves in today i bet in one of our schools somebody showed up today because they had just moved here and we we if they're within our boundaries we have to take those students and so we'd want to make sure we left room in our schools for those students the other thing is is we would not be able and we wouldn't want to discriminate against any students so we'd have to be careful what we ask if they're outside of our borders before we allow them to enroll so again this is not a separate bill this is currently embedded into the budget bill that will have to be settled in
208the veto session the parent bill of rights conference committee report for senate bill 58 so this bill was passed and it clarifies that all parents have the right to direct the upbringing education care and mental health of their child it would require local school boards to develop and adopt policies to guarantee that those rights are reserved by the state for parents with regard to their child so that that's what it says again we support and encourage parent involvement absolutely parents have a right to see anything used in the classroom i we would absolutely agree with that you know i thought back as i was thinking about this 23 years ago when i started as a counselor at blue valley high school one of the first parent meetings i had was with a parent who had
209some concerns about her health curriculum and so i got to know the health teacher really eat really quickly and we sat down with that parent and walked through the health curriculum and through the materials that were used and that parent chose to opt their child out of a certain section of it and that was allowed and that still would be allowed today we we want to protect our teachers in this we don't want to hinder a teacher's ability to adapt mid-year to a student's needs we also want to ensure that this doesn't add additional work to our teaching staff so for me that what i have been saying is the devils and the details on this i if we can do this from a district level i i don't want to add extra work to
210anybody here either but i certainly wouldn't want to add work to the teachers within our buildings and that one did pass and i believe it's um on the governor's desk at this point yeah i don't know that's why i was i was looking to see if anything had gotten signed today i don't think it did but she has 10 days right yeah 10 days to either sign it veto it or if she doesn't sign it it becomes law so so the open enrollment bill is still being jacket or that's it's final finalized no it's it's still being there is no final uh it is in the that uh budget this one it's included in that budget bill there's a a whole bunch of stuff that's included in that bill now that has to be settled
211in the veto session so i was mentioned earlier that there was in that on that open enrollment bill that mark was like did this listening session i thought it was really well done in this special ed advisory council there were a couple of points again this was like a total across the board spectrum of different perspectives um mark made an interesting point but i'm wondering i don't you know we can't do anything about it but it's it's at least interesting to understand that a lot of districts like the vast majority of kansas districts already have open enrollment there are several districts that do already allow it and they probably use it as a as a mechanism to attract students yep so it becomes a revenue source for them right the concern in blue valley is
212it's unknown as to whether or not um you know we we probably would get and you know ask you know people who want to come to the district and that could be financially beneficial or it could be financially detrimental particularly if it impacts special education services correct so there's some unknowns there so those were points that some people made there was a little bit of discussion around how the how this would be would become a burden on blue valley taxpayers if the students coming are bringing basically the financing follows those students but i the way i answered the mark asked me to answer that i said beyond the special ed versus general ed issue that it it could be based on the way the capital budgets are financed so maybe you could address that just
213right so um residents are the ones who finance our bonds uh residents are the ones who correct give us the capital outlay resources to maintain our buildings um so that those would the base state aid would come from if if they're here by september 20th i might add that day right if they're here by september 20th the bay state aid would come from the state that is correct how much is the bay state aid uh 47 ish 4700 yeah 4700 4800 um is the base state aid so that's all that would come for up for one student and then if there were any weightings so if they were in special education we might get some weightings there but we know it's not at 100 percent we know that um we have to pay the excess
214if their career technical education weightings if they're in special education um i believe we would have to require we would have to pay for transportation if the iep team deemed that they needed transportation okay so those were all the points that uh at least i wanted to highlight yep that um came out of it so you know um but but by and large the sentiment was only almost across from conservative liberal non-political etc that weren't really in favor of this and that the other thing is is that like we're aware of it but you know maybe most of the patrons in the district aren't they're not and can you i i'm afraid if this went through the aftermath or folks kind of clueing into what was going on would be tremendous especially especially everything you're
215talking about and then sometime in athletics and activities and recruiting and here you know here comes your child they're going to be a senior somewhere and great expectations here comes 10 kids to to jump in that are not part of the district and etcetera and things like that so the aftermath of this could be huge if this thing gets through for everything you said and what i just said several other angles it's going to be messy from a recruiting and other standpoint as well yeah i think go ahead sir so also would we be then required to accept students up to x level of capacity or percent of capacity my understanding is is the well again it's not finalized yet but what i have seen is that the district would set so you all uh
216we would sit and we would um talk about a policy and you would set that policy so again i don't know they haven't finalized it but that's my understanding the other thing hopefully if this does pass they've given us some time to put those policies in place so in in conjunction with all the other comments one of the other pieces i don't i don't think we've hidden if we did then i apologize but if the um number of kids where does that money come from to support those kids as it relates to the amount of money the district receives and can can spend on education for that year so first of all to be clear my guess is part of our policy would be you have to be here by this date okay and i
217i don't want to speak for the board but that would certainly be our recommendation is that there's a date but say that they were there by that date and then they didn't follow through with the attendance uh the way they were supposed to um and so they weren't here on september 20th and they didn't do the before i mean there's some other things you can look into we it would just come from we would have to we would have to pay for it out of the general fund and and which kids are most impacted by the general fund spending well every kid is i mean which group of kids it's obviously not necessarily special education right but i would say it's every other kid right that's every other kid right yep class sizes class sizes
218class offerings paras middle school sports when i when i try to do easy math just to understand the base bay state aid coming with a student and then i look at the numbers we went over this morning i mean unless the weightings are really heavy a lot of that comes from our local option budget and yeah we did the math right here on that yeah so it just feels like even even if you didn't have any special that people need specialized services it would still be a deficit yeah i agree it sounds like it's a suburban versus other parts of the state issue i think that's why it's shaping up would that create some potential unsettling during the school year from a budget standpoint would we have to do cuts for an example um no
219again i think we would we would set our limit okay so we we would have to make sure that didn't happen okay so we would have to wrestle if this passes with what are the limits that we're going to allow what are the dates and you know jody i think is the one who asked earlier did we say do we say no we're not good at saying no we would have to say no we would have to say nope this is it this is the the date um you're a day late sorry i mean this is the date probably but it would have to be that but again this board would have to wrestle with those policies of what that would look like thank you any other uh questions the thing i just want to
220remind everybody is that we do have a legislative page on our district website with this information so one more one question so what can we do or what can parents do now between now and i guess when the veto session starts to try to affect change in this way i think that they can one thing i would say is they have opinions um they are always welcome to contact their legislator and and share their opinion with them do you know does our delegation largely support these in the same way we do do you know um they can write their governor as well is this is this was this like party line type votes on on this issue uh probably i didn't i haven't looked at the actual votes but i would say probably yes close
221anything else no any other questions thank you thank you thank you dr american okay uh we are now to the end of our meeting do i have a motion i move that the april 11th regular board of education meeting be adjourned second discussion see no discussion all in favor is right hand all opposed same sign motion passes seven zero you