001all right good evening everybody we're going to go ahead and get started um we're excited to welcome case and gents up front and he's going to help us do the pledge of allegiance tonight i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and a republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all great job well you always have to take pictures but could you tell everybody where you go to school what grade you're in and then who came with you today i am going into fourth grade i go to liberty view elementary and my mom molly gents is here my dad chriskins molly [Applause] chris and we also have a certificate for you the most important picture thank you thank you oh and we have
002a such a kid congratulations thank you i think you're welcome thanks for coming thank you for inviting me you can't start a board meeting off any better than that oh i love that all right next up we're going to do some even better or not even better but it continues to get good awards and recognition that's right we have a distinguished service and excellence in the um recognition that we're going to do and these are four staff members that they'll be honored with either the distinguished service or the excellence in ed award and these special people go above and beyond each day in our schools across the district so would joanne blakely please come forward with charles rathbun nice flower she got for her nice job charles we are excited to recognize joanne food service
003supervisor with a distinguished service award joanne has been with the district for a total of six years of service so charles would you start us off with a few comments about why joanne is so deserving sure julian's been with us for a few years and has gone from a manager to a couple different locations and now as a supervisor she's just an unbelievable supportive staff member that has stepped up over and over again goes above and beyond every day she leads by example she doesn't ask staff to do anything she wouldn't do herself last march when we started to do remote pickup meals joanne stepped up did unbelievable work continued that on during the school year along with everything else that we were doing with different meals we were preparing and now doing it in
004the summer she's highly respected with all of our staff and i couldn't ask for a better supervisor she's awesome and we wouldn't have be where we're at today without her so thank you i know your husband tony is also here tonight and or troy i'm sorry troy so i want to always recognize the people that support our award winner so thank you for all the support you provide her that allows her to do what she does so thank you so much troy congratulations joanne and now it's time to recognize our excellence and education award winner john rogers please come forward with your principal chad ralston [Applause] so uh so there was another mr rogers that said something i thought that was pretty poignant he said that when things get really really difficult look for the
005people that help and the one thing that i came away from this year more than anything else your students came away from is that you were able to provide for them an opportunity to learn even when things were difficult and when i say opportunity to learn oftentimes this year students might have felt alone they may have felt isolated as they're behind their computer screens this gentleman right here never let not one of his students be alone as a matter of fact he made them connect with each other every day in a meaningful way and he taught them ways to connect that were not immediately apparent to all of us at the beginning of this pandemic so he taught them to be critical of each other but also to be kind to each other and for
006that i will be eternally grateful for the work that you did this year cole did i miss anything all right all right so we did get you a gift uh can you hold that for me and if you you'll know a little bit about mr rogers and where he's from by this so sorry not sorry about the whole 2019 thing but but he's a big san francisco fan and he also leaves his coffee cup just about every day down in the break room so now we'll know it's yours [Laughter] all right thank you sure thank you um thanks a lot and i and i think that that's always been my i brought a couple of people here my mother joanne rogers just julia rogers and my niece alex sharp for the very first class that
007i ever taught at broadmoor technical center for shawnee mission class of 2009 and a current student that i have cole miller who ended with me and graduated this year my philosophy has always been if you want them to work you got to get to know them and it's a lot easier for them to to get passionate about what you're doing if you get to know them they'll take instruction a lot easier and that's just been kind of the way i've rolled since since i started teaching so thank you guys for being here too thank you to both of our staff members who are recognized this evening we have a couple more recognitions and then there will be an opportunity for those that were here for recognitions to leave naturally and sneak out of course we
008always welcome those individuals to stay for the regular board meeting if you'd like to do so as well so tonight we are honored to recognize several people in our audience who acted heroically to save a life this spring at this time i'd like to ask the following people to please come forward blue valley north nurse amanda colegio blue valley north world language teacher jody johnson blue valley north officer tina morse blue valley north assistant principal and athletic director kelly curley and blue valley north principal tyson sorry i get distracted you're just tyson to us oh um what would you do this is it's an absolute great story you know i think if you ask your question what would you do if you came upon a person who wasn't breathing and had absolutely no pulse how
009would you react on march 22 2021 a parrot educator at blue valley north suddenly collapsed and went into cardiac arrest these employees were in the right place at the right time and did the right thing without a second thought or hesitation they quickly jumped to action performing cpr administering an aed and ultimately saving a life their actions show that in a time of crisis the most important thing we can do is to take that brave first step to help those in need your quick response provided the early intervention needed to make a difference that day it is our absolute honor to recognize those who were there to help a fellow colleague when he needed it most thank you for going above and beyond the call of duty and for making a life-changing impact please join
010me in honoring this incredible group for their heroic efforts i i want to add a couple of things one is i was on the phone with tyson when this happened and he was cool calm and collected and said i think i better go and said i'll call you back and honestly that's what he was supposed to do the other thing i would say is that we've trained on the use of the aed um i don't know how many times you've been trained i've been trained a couple times and i've always thought would i be able to do that if i had to and i think the answer is yes that we were able to do it so i i could not be prouder that you actually saved a life and you saved a life that
011person would not be here today without the five of you so thank you um from all of us congratulations we're gonna get a picture real quick here thank you tyson and your incredible team so just when you think that that was an amazing life saving effort we have another one that is pretty special we're also honored to recognize one of our students at oxford middle school um maxwell barron i think they call him max and our audience max will you please come forward so last month max was on his way home from a friend's house on his bike near the school it was a normal stroll on his bike one that he made quite often however this time that simple bike ride turned into a life-altering moment for him at an intersection maxwell encountered a
012young person who had expressed issues with anxiety depression and self-harm instead of continuing to write on maxwell understood what the young stranger was going through and i mean this was a young stranger and not only listened but took action by accompanying the person to a safe place where they were able to help they rode their bikes together if it were not for maxwell's caringness and understanding of mental health the young individual could have been in serious peril maxwell exemplifies how helping one person might not change the whole world but it could change the world for one person at this time we'd like to welcome tim dewees director of johnson county mental health to the front to say a few words thanks again my name is tim dewees i'm the director of johnson county mental health
013and when i heard about this i couldn't think of any better way to to recognize him as well from the mental health standpoint at the mental health center we work really hard in our communities to educate people about what they need to do and quite frankly it's not rocket science you have to have it from here you have to care enough to engage and max did that and then you have to care enough to listen max did that and then you have to care enough to get the person to a safe place max did that that exemplifies everything that i would want someone to do within our community within the mental health center and you are just an inspiration to many people and i thank you one of the things when i became the director
014i minted a coin that i give in special situations and i've given a couple out and i want to share this with you it says johnson county mental health on here and and on the top it says providing hope your actions not only provided hope for that young person but it provides hope to all of us and me so thank you very much i'll shake your hand too good job and i think max's mom and dad are right here too so we want to shout out to them congratulations and that wraps up our recognitions for this evening those that would like to stay for the um board meeting you're welcome to otherwise if you had other plans for tonight which i believe maxwell has a baseball game to get to we perfectly understand that so
015thank you to everyone who is recognized this evening well deserved uh all right next we're going to move on to public comments so welcome to those who are in attendance to address the board or listen during open forum open forum provides a time for individuals to address the board in an effort to ensure an orderly efficient 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 that time period the board will enforce a three-minute limit per speaker after 60 minutes the board will close the open forum and will proceed with their agenda items for the evening whether you plan to speak or just listen we're glad you're here because we care about the opinions and concerns
016of 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 limit the discussion to the relevant business of the board tonight discussion of matters related to a specific student or employee is not allowed instead please send your comments directly in writing to the superintendent please remember to limit your comments to three minutes and avoid repeating the concerns of a previous speaker and lastly if you have questions that require a response someone will follow up with you at a later time on behalf of the board i
017welcome you and appreciate your interest in blue valley as we strive to provide the best education possible for our students when your name is called please introduce yourself before beginning your remarks and just a reminder that we're going to limit remarks to three minutes tonight first up is dallas bower okay next is christine white my name is christine white i'm a pediatrician and have two daughters that attend blue valley northwest i am very pleased the board has adopted a mask optional policy for the coming school year i'd like to address one mitigation technique i fear will be imposed on our kids quarantines on may 13 2021 i saw a job posting from blue valley for contact tracer covet 19. the job title was changed a week later to health liaison how many cova trackers do
018we plan to hire to track a disease with a greater than 99.997 percent survival rate for people under 18 years old when 80 percent of those over 80 years old and 73 percent of those over 65 are fully vaccinated in our county when per the cdc 80 of school staff and teachers in the u.s are vaccinated data from the cdc and the journals the lancet and pediatrics show mortality rates for influenza and covet are actually identical in children for young children covet causes 0.3 deaths per 100 000 and flew 0.4 deaths per 100 000. for older children and teens covet causes 0.1 deaths per 100 000 and flew 0.1 deaths per 100 000. we don't hire flu tracers and we should not hire cova tracers this will lead to unnecessary quarantines with further loss of
019learning more fear isolation and greater mental health issues for our kids we must recognize covet is just part of our winter pathogens now along with influenza and rsv and treat it as such i am also concerned a child's vaccination status will affect whether or not they are subjected to a quarantine it is discriminatory to provide an alternate set of restrictions for those who have opted to delay vaccinating their healthy children additionally a proviso in the state budget from from may 2021 prohibits the expenditure of state funds related to vaccine passports defined as written or electronic documentation of an individual's coven 19 vaccination status a state agency including a school cannot spend state money in any way that would deny an individual access to education based on that individual's coven-19 vaccination status so potentially it may
020be illegal to use these copa tracers if any part of what they are basing decisions on relates to vaccination status there are many schools in other cities states and counties that have let go of all mitigation techniques their kids are thriving their case numbers aren't climbing you are deciding the guidelines for blue valley based on recommendations from the johnson county health department have you really looked hard at the data they are using to provide this guidance have you looked hard at data in other areas of the country or internationally where they are doing things differently and it's working there's no harm in checking out other sources or thinking outside of our current box thank you dr white next up is shelly roldy did i get that right it was a typo letter oh that's right
021yeah yeah and thank you for bearing with me again my name is shelly robletter i didn't write down any comments so forgive me if i ramble i have watched a lot of the board meetings online and just wanted to maybe take a different tone than some of the regular speakers that you have at open forum i wanted to come and express my appreciation to the board to dr merrigan and district office staff staff um for all the hard work you guys have put in this year i mean at the beginning of the school year nobody you know last year or even this year nobody really knew how things were going to play out and i would say probably for you guys on a good day you have a thankless job and over the course of
022the last year it's probably been a very terrible job so i just wanted to say thank you for your hard work as a parent i have three kids in the district i feel like you guys have done a good job at kind of balancing you know the needs of education for our students along with health safety for our staff and students as well so i know a lot of people don't come and when they're happy with the way things have been going this year so i just kind of wanted to take the time tonight to come and say that we had a great year and i appreciate all the teachers at sunrise point elementary and i appreciate you guys for all of the work that you guys have done um i know dr merrigan i
023think this is your first year as superintendent it probably feels like 10 years after the year that you have had but thank you for your leadership it's very much appreciated i also wanted to miss hillman i believe is her name i have watched um several of the sb40 hearings and you're amazing if if i ever need a lawyer i want to hire you so thank you for your work representing the district and you're very calm and professional and it's just very impressive to watch so thank you another person i wanted to point out and i'm not sure if he's here is dr schmidt who handles special education and i know their this year was especially challenging for special education but he does a great job i've only met him once but you can tell he's
024a very genuine and caring person and so i just wanted to thank him for his work so thank you i hope you guys have you know a wonderful summer and get some much needed rest and relaxation in thank you shelly we appreciate the kind words uh next up is katie bowers hey good evening my name is katie bowers i have six kids who are either have either graduated or are attending blue valley schools right now so i'm here to advocate for our parents and to support parent choice so i'm sure there's a multitude of reasons that culminate why we send our kids to school every day during the year but it really all boils down to one thing we send them here for education so i know that blue valley has a multitude of wonderful
025educators administrators and involved parents our children have chances and opportunities that are truly incredible that's why i send my kids to blue valley i cannot teach them calculus chemistry or second language i even accidentally taught my son how to tie shoes backwards because i was really young when i had him and i didn't understand the angle you were supposed to use teaching kids to tie shoes and even though i have many kids six that's still not an entire softball team and so yes we go here for extracurricular activities in sports so on a more serious note i don't send them here to be bullied for the color of their skin or which political party they follow i do not send them here so that they hear they should get vaccinated that they shouldn't practice our
026faith or to form opinions on our local law enforcement at home it's my job to teach my children the difference between right and wrong how to be kind to tie their shoes kind of to say please and thank you and to treat others is the way they want to be treated um it's also my choice to instill family values our faith and decide if i would like to put a mask on them or vaccinate them that's my right as a parent these rights are slowly and stealthily being taken away from parents and therein lies the crucial issue we're at a crossroads right here and now the overreach being allowed in some classrooms needs to stop instead of obtaining a non-partisan education my children are being taught an agenda that has no place in my home
027my children are expected to conform to unproven ideologies that do not belong in a classroom so it is right and fair to express and explain current events and the reasons and meanings behind opposing viewpoints but it is wrong and manipulative to take advantage of young minds and bend them to your way of thinking as a person of authority i think the video circulating blue valley southwest on facebook was pretty pretty clear in what's being allowed to be put around our children so i did want to bring up per our policy manual the civility of employees of 6340. and the first paragraph is we will behave civilly and the second one says uncivil behavior shall be defined as those that are physically or verbally threatening either overtly or implicitly as well as behaviors that are coercive
028intimidating violent or harassing in all forms of communication examples of uncivil behavior shall include but are not limited to bullying cyber bullying hazing the use of profanity personally insulting remarks and attacks on a person's race gender nationality or religion thank you katie and next is owen frederick hello my name is owen frederick um i think my address is on file i've got two boys that recently started at blue valley um so i've been trying to get more involved find out as much as i can about the school system um i was on the web page and i saw that goal one was improving you know academic at least if i put it down here improve academic performance for each student by 25 so i wasn't really sure if that was a goal like 25 was
029the goal or if it was like that's the progress you guys have made towards it so i was trying to it wasn't really clear on the website but someone looking for information um and i led me to the kansas state department of education and i looked at some of the assessment data over the last couple of years it's not good so math you guys went from from 2017 down from 60 percent to 55 percent at grade level science 59 down to 53 percent english 65 percent down to 61 percent and while that was better than the state why data that's horrible that's not good and you guys are getting worse and i i'm not here because i don't like them i'm here because i love that guy okay and you know he came out of
030school this year and he can't he can barely read he can't sound words he doesn't even know what that is he doesn't know what phonics are i mean that's that's bad i mean and then i learned thanks to dr white that's not even being taught in our school so then i went and looked you know that's not a teacher problem that's not a standards problem that's a curriculum problem and that's that's you guys and now i i'm under no delusion that i come up here and talk and you guys are gonna listen to what i say and then make you know changes i mean i think we've learned from the masks sports school closures that we can come up here every week or every month and tell you guys about what's wrong and you guys
031are gonna not listen to us or if you do you're gonna take what we hear it's gonna go one ear out the other and it's not gonna change anything that you do now i'm i'm glad that three of you have decided not to run for reelection but honestly that's not enough i i really feel like and i don't mean this in malice at all but but i really hope that the rest of you strongly strongly consider resigning so we can get some parents in here that will listen to parents and they will care about their kids and that we'll look hard and critically at what we're teaching how we're teaching it and get back to blue valley excellence thanks [Applause] next up is carrie mcrae all right jessica eberle okay hi um my name's jessica
032eberline and i actually went to blue valley schools all the way through as well as my sister and my parents um decided not to vaccinate us ever and so that was actually um i mean that was their decision they thought that was the best thing for us i don't think they made their decision out of anything other than that was what they knew and with their research when i was a grown up i got vaccinated on my own fully vaccinated and we have chosen to vaccinate our kids but with this new vaccine being brand new and especially with the messenger rna being a brand new kind of technology and tried out we don't feel comfortable putting that into our kids bodies when they're still developing and um without knowing what happens more long term and
033like how the spike proteins and all of these new things that i mean no doctor on the planet knows what happens long term we just can't know until you know we all find out together so i guess um coming up to this fall year uh when we're trying to figure out like because i will say that decision is because again we love our kids and we just want the best possible outcomes but the parents that choose to vaccinate they're making that same decision like just from a different viewpoint but they're making their decision to help their kid and do the best for their kid and their family and their community but i just i have i have a few things that i guess that when i think of making that decision and whether or not
034to vaccinate my kid um i have a few things i guess i'll say from a doctor because it's not me um this is from dr paul kempen on behalf of the association of american physicians and surgeons he says young and healthy adults are at extraordinary low risk for coba 19 morbidity and mortality the covet injections are not approved by the fda to treat cure or prevent any disease at this time clinical trials will continue for at least two years before the fda can consider a full approval of these injections the cova injections being rolled out have considerable adverse effects including deaths girls may be at a unique risk for these adverse effects citing cases of blood clots interruption and menstrual cycles and miscarriages recent research is showing that spike proteins induced by the covet injections
035are the primary cause of disease infirmity hospitalization and death mandatory vaccination policies discriminate against individuals who aren't candidates for the injections or otherwise exercising their free will to choose whether to participate or not in the optional vaccine experiment and schools should consider whether they might be liable for damages poor health outcomes and loss of life due to mandatory vaccination policies and i'm actually glad that we have the vaccination i think it's actually saved i'm sure many many lives but when we're making policies for next year i just ask that kids not be um left out of social activities because they want to make health choices or us as parents want to make health choices that long term but i just feel like there's a mental health component being left out of things because you choose
036not to vaccinate thank you jessica next up is amy thomas hi my name is amy thomas first i'd like to thank the board for eliminating the mitigation criteria that you did put in place in last year um it was the first time an entire year i felt you made the decision it was best interest of the children and not the teachers unions moving in the next year i would ask that you eliminate all mitigation requirements why because we're no longer in an emergency according to the kansas and johnson county department of health websites johnson county has a 1.3 positivity rate over the last 14 days there has been zero deaths in the last four weeks our numbers continue to decline all while johnson county mass mandate was lifted at the end of april these are
037the lowest numbers since march of 2020. these are not pandemic numbers teachers who chose to be vaccinated are vaccinated and students who are choosing to do so will also be vaccinated the emergency is over i specifically asked to remove quarantine of exposed students there's no benefit to quarantining healthy students with no symptoms according to the cdc and dr fauci a symptomatic spread is very rare additionally according to the nurse at blue valley southwest not a single student who is quarantined last year due to an exposure at the lunch table not wearing a mask actually got covered not a single one in the entire year all they did was stay at home and get no instruction i'm also asking for the continued choice and masks and privacy in the every family's decision to vaccinate or not
038you've never asked about the flu shot so why should this be different i also ask that our biblized schools not discriminate against students who choose not to be vaccinated by forcing them to wear a mask segregating them or in any way treating them different the legal definition of discrimination is the act of making unjustified distinctions between human beings based on groups classes other categories to which they are perceived to belong discrimination especially occurs where individuals or groups are unfairly treated in a way which is worse than other people are treated on the basis of actual or perceived membership in certain groups or categories aka unvaccinated students being forced to wear masks i leave you with this quote from my up my rising junior at blue valley southwest mom do you realize i'm halfway through high
039school i'm not had a single normal year our children deserve better than this they deserve better than what occurred last year please keep in mind that schools all across the country achieved this last year without the vaccination they held homecoming they had sweetheart dances they had prom and graduation many of them lifted the masking mandates in the second semester let's put this behind us and work together as a community for the mental and social well-being well-being of our children and help our children get caught back up from the academic loss they had in the last year and a half thank you [Applause] and then uh jim mcmullen good evening my name is jim mcmullen i've got my wife and i have five children three have graduated two went to um southwest one went to west
040and uh sorry southwest and then blue valley academy i've got a rising senior at blue valley west and then we have a little one a fourth grader i'm here today to address serious concerns about blue valley's curriculum and its fundamental mission in particular the increased focus in the schools on number one so-called equity policies and number two on social emotional learning i don't believe that either of these approaches to education have any place in our schools they just don't distract they damage on the first point i pull out an example in september of 2020 a committee of the district office presuming it's the same committee that is addressing the board or update later today the diversity equity and inclusion on the basis of quote improving racial equity inclusion banned four books from the school curriculum
041of mice and men tom sawyer huckleberry finn and tequila mockingbird the district contends that these were retired but they were banned this was a this was a nationwide movement targeted these four texts and they were pulled out of schools and school districts across the country and apparently uh blue valley released a board uh sorry a committee inside the district bow to its own intellectual anti-intellectual you know anti-enlightenment tendencies and and went along with that and then didn't i haven't heard the board address it i've heard a ninth grader come and address it about four times at district meetings but i haven't heard the board address it i know for certain that for decades blue valley's english departments have been have been teaching diverse uh literature from different perspectives uh from different points of view we've
042had a diverse curriculum and if we haven't that's the failure of the current administration for not having done that i read richard wright uh all the harlem renaissance uh uh poets in the 1980s so what are we doing in blue valley we're not uh we're not teaching diverse we haven't been teaching diverse texts you know what kind of uh parochial pro point of view is that the world view that believes that it's appropriate to target and bring ban great works of literature imperfect works of literature but great works of literature that have had uh great influence and uh from uh in across our society both historically and uh society in and in local communities is simply uh uh you know in fealty to some distorted notion of promoting racial justice is simply incompatible with the
043fundamental tenets of western civilization and open and free thought thank you thank you jim [Applause] that wraps up open forum for tonight on behalf of the board of education thank you to our participants we appreciate that each of you took time to share your thoughts and please know that we all took notes during the forum and will follow up as needed all right next we're going to i'm going to call the meeting to order and we are going to receive reports from board advisory committees the first one tonight is curriculum and instruction good evening the curriculum instruction board advisory committee met on may 12th uh first up was brad mosher our director of blended learning and he presented on some of the blended learning technology highlights that we've had that we had from this past
044year he was able to highlight the importance of learning with technology and he left the committee with four takeaways one instructional technology is a tool to keep students teachers community connected instructional technology as an avenue for access to resources instructional technology as a way to be efficient and work in our work and our feedback to be to and from students and also instructional technology is a tool to allow students to continue to learn and have experiences beyond the walls of their classroom or this year their assigned learning mode additionally adam wade our director of academic achievement and accountability he presented a presentation regarding data and our assessments that's a similar presentation that he conducted for the board earlier this spring we plan to provide an updated presentation to the board coming this fall on updated
045information related to data and assessment as related to our spring assessments that our students just completed future cni dates are being finalized at this time for the 21-22 school year thank you thank you dr collier next up is the diversity equity inclusion update the diversity equity and inclusion committee met on thursday may 13th for the final meeting of this school year kelly wessel began by leading the group through a review of the recommendations that this group had come up with over the several months prior and you're going to hear those later so i'm not going to repeat all of them right now the second half of the meeting provided the committee an opportunity to give feedback on how blue valley could be more inclusive and belonging for students staff and families some ideas that were
046generated included things like the use of multiple language feature in blackboard as well as an intentional welcoming tone for new families reaching out and personally talking with families about involvement in schools connecting families with a mentor and making it a priority to communicate about who the school is and what they're doing just so that they can get involved in each school the meeting ended with a thank you to the committee for the inaugural year of and their commitment to to the district and the work we're doing uh the next meeting tentatively uh is september 2nd from 4 to 5 30 and it is our hope that we are doing that in person rather than via zoom thank you dr merrigan and the last report for tonight is kyle hayden with finance and operations the finance
047and operations board advisory committee met on june 10th via zoom the meeting began with several updates including the transition to summer activities around the department uh planning for the 21-22 school year and then board of education tours at blue valley high school and elementary 24 for the current construction projects jenny daniel director of finance presented the 2122 budget calendar revenue and expense projection factors and then provided a report on an update on sr3 funding jake slobodnick director of facilities and operations talked about the start of the busy summer with construction projects and then just the outlook of what those schedules look like jake also presented multiple new design and construction contracts that are on the agenda for board approval director of business operations jason gillum highlighted several bids and contracts including natural gas with constellation
048energy annual food nutrition services bids for things like milk and dairy and other items an agreement with johnson county community college regarding career and technical education programs for nearly 100 students this next fall and then multiple agreements with thomas mcgee for property casualty and workers comp insurance next committee meeting is scheduled for july 15th thank you kyle uh next up we're going to receive reports from board members and the superintendent for items not included on the agenda patrick stacy um i just have one quick one i just would like to thank jake slobotnick for taking us around and showing us the new elementary school being built south of southwest and um also blue valley high it was kind of exciting to see all the changes underway there and i know it's been a long time
049coming to remove a lot of those mobiles out there and i know that they're pretty excited to have those new classroom spaces available for next year so it was great to see i mean you follow it for you know two three four years you go through the design plans everything the budget everything it's kind of cool to actually get to go out and see the progress being made and all of the projects that they're working on this summer not just those two all of them will be fantastic for the kids this upcoming school year so appreciate that opportunity i'll be back to you all right tom mitchell yeah i thought i'd take a few moments to we had a tremendous spring for all our scholar athletes um this spring probably unprecedented amount of state titles
050so i'm not sure if anybody read the article yesterday including our scholar athlete um of the year from valley southwest uh you've seen al denmerdash if you haven't had a chance to read this and i'm old school because i always buy the paper and the star is really thinned out but they do keep these awards so we have all our blue valley folks in there but uh he um he has six swimming school records at blue valley southwest and he's also a paralympian so think about that and it's a tremendous tremendous article um state champs and boys golf actually one two three in blue valley state champs and girls swim and dive state champs and girls soccer with blue valley west bloody west was a girl swim a dive winner 5a state baseball champions 6a
051state baseball champions so that's five team state titles for blue valley this spring which i thought was tremendous and tons of school records broke in and and a lot of great things going on for some full normalcy which was uh great to see i'm not sure if we've won five state titles team wise in a spring before so congrats to all the student athletes and the coaches and all the parents in that group as well i know we had some bait debate things going on with some national championships that dr mary and i'll let you um allude to i also want to congrats all the seniors that graduated that were on board advisory committees didn't get a chance to do it last aboard vegan i was out of town so congratulations to them and all
052their work and then also i just want to thank the staff and the schools and everyone for a great graduation weekend a couple weeks ago ended up making it through the weather another great normal day huge crowd and it was it was a lot of fun so plus seeing my daughter graduate and i know the folks had graduation kids in here as well as is always a positive in the in the mitchell household so great last 10 weeks of school so thank you and we only got rained on for a couple minutes and all things considered was great so exactly jody you have anything um just a couple things so um blue valley ed foundation um they're trying to kick off their women's giving circle i just want to kind of draw that to attention
053i believe olathe had started this women's giving circle program a number of years ago and we're kind of piggybacking on that and creating opportunities to network uh and work with women in our community so that's kind of exciting um blue bellied foundation is also working with a social media specialist and trying to get more information out and and do a better job at marketing um they're they're um program and and what they do um for us so that's really exciting to kind of see the direction and all the energy um with that so um let's see what was it i was gonna say something about graduation oh um wonderful um you know graduation weekend um weather held out pretty much uh a couple of little mishaps wasn't too bad um but really appreciated those students
054um i believe dr mergan may have to correct me i know four at one graduation who actually received their certificates from johnson county community college and they received a degree degree associate's degree associate's degree but a certificate recognizing that right correct yeah you're both right that's fine yeah so um that was just really exciting because that we're just on the cusp of of the potential of in that area and in creating additional opportunities for our students so i'm really excited to kind of see that and see us moving so well in that direction thanks jody those are great highlights mike yeah i spent the better part of last weekend in gypsum kansas um at a kansas association of school boards um monthly board meeting as you know we have board meetings about monthly and they're
055usually in topeka but the president the current the existing president always has one meeting at their home um district um and i just want to warn the next um board board member of kasb that the next president is from goodland which is about as far west as you can get i think half of goodland is in colorado a couple of observations um southeast of celine has um it's the southeast of saline school district has 679 kids in the district um under one roof so they've kind of split the district into a couple of uh or the building into a couple of pieces but it's interesting to see uh a set of buildings that were built separately and then joined and then added to and and subtracted from the the thing that i came away with
056most was how much i appreciate being here um southeast of saline is about i don't know 10 miles southeast of salina right on the in the in the southeast corner of saline county and it's predominantly a farming community the the demographics look um arguably somewhat similar to ours the kids are excited but i watched a group of of teachers uh who were working with materials and and um facilities um that were significantly lacking and i think um it it taught me how fortunately fortunate we are here to have facilities like this and um i mean we knew that but get outside and and you'll see when you go to goodland you'll see that as well we did all the normal kasp business we met beginning at noon on friday and i was home about seven
057o'clock saturday um and as you're aware um those of you that have served on the nominating committee or the legislative committee that's work that happens on saturdays um to that end uh just a a couple of brief items the first is the kasp convention this year will be the first weekend in november it's usually the first weekend is in december they had to move it because it's being held here in kansas city at the overland park sheraton and the convention center and frankly they were tied up uh with other conventions earlier patrick i think you're nominating and i think michelle is legislative back everything you did up from last year by about a month and again there will be two two sessions effectively the first weekend in november will be the normal um learning that
058we do the normal seminars we go to the normal continuous learning we do and the delegate assembly will be held in two pieces again at the delegate assembly in november if i'm not mistaken they will nominate a president-elect designee and uh at the either late december early january delegate assembly they will approve the legislative uh agenda so um i just want to make sure you guys are aware of that and again it was um it was a long weekend it was about a three hour drive there about a three hour drive back um but some great great uh learning i will say um the experiences that we had here with all the things that have happened over the last year were not unique in the state of kansas so as many times as we went
059home and and you know wondered what we were going to do next everybody kind of went through the same thing i won't get into any of the budgetary issues um i'll let uh you all have read mark tallman's stuff um but it was it was a it was well worth the two days that i spent in gypsum kansas that's all i have thanks thanks mike michelle well everyone stole what i was going to say so but thank you mike for taking the weekend to do the ksb stuff and share with us it is very uh eye opening to see how big of a state kansas is and how our demographics vary so drastically from one end to the other and you have a school district with 600 or school district with 22 000 and in
060the end we all have the same goals and that's to of course i'm sorry uh i forgot 697 they are a class 3a school so they're about average in terms of enrollment which i found i knew that but i also found out we have 10 districts i think 10 with um under 100 students so you can quiz your family and friends when you go home tonight it's a big state with many needs that have to be all met somehow so kudos to everyone who works hard to do what's best for kids no matter where you are i was going to talk about the tour with jake slobodnick and thank him and kyle hayden for all the work that they've been doing and it was very exciting to see the progress you know we pass a
061bond we you know like stacy said we do all this planning and to see it come to fruition is just fabulous and exciting to know that our kids are going to walk in in august and have some neat exciting things to be a part of and i was also going to talk about how great graduation was but you guys covered that and it was great i will echo everything and i will be done thanks michelle dr american thank you as tom mentioned we had many state athletic championships but we also had debaters from our schools who participated in a national debate tournament and debate was done all via zoom online this year and our students did very well for that and so i just wanted to give a shout out to our debate coaches and
062our debate students in our high schools blue valley west had a presidential scholar which is every state has two or three sometimes if you have a cte scholar but blue valley west had one of the two for the state of kansas and that is based on your act score mainly but there's a few other little factors in there too but that is an impressive feat to have so congratulations to that student uh i would say graduations went uh beyond better than i had ever imagined to have them for the first time in my 23 years we planned to have them in our stadiums last summer we did it out of necessity and i would say that it's a tradition that we will now continue weather will always be our nemesis but we will continue to
063look at doing those locally schools liked it i've heard nothing but positive things from our community as well we did have four students who this is the first year this could have happened because last year is when we started or two years ago when we started the partnership with johnson county community college where students can duly enroll in our high school as well as johnson county community college and so those four young ladies from blue valley west graduated with both an associate's degree and their high school diploma additionally there was a student from blue valley west who was awarded on class day his automotive certificate so this is a it was an associate's degree but it was an uh certificate and it's on his way to an automotive associates degree and that's pretty exciting that
064program will only continue to grow and um i just am so proud of those students and the enrollment that we have in those a couple other little things that have already started happening summer school started last week with our special education extended school year as well as the high school program that we have actually at blue valley northwest where students are coming in to do some credit recovery as opposed to having them do anything online we do have some virtual classes that we do every summer as well today our elementary students started with step up to learn i think is what we call it but that started today it's gone very smoothly so we are we will continue that over the course of the next month uh construction and cleaning is in full force in
065all of our buildings whether it's a new roof or intense cleaning within the building or major renovations so that hap that actually started happening at noon on the friday we got out of school literally kids walked out the door and our crews were walking in behind him to start that work um and then finally i just wanted to shout out to our all of our teachers who are already engaged in professional learning so our elementary teachers k through 5 have had intensive work on phonics with the new phonics resource as well as some professional learning that went with that i just talked to one of our french teachers who was here being recognized and she has been involved in curriculum work uh revision of the french i think it was three or four curriculum this
066year and so they are continuing to do that work our all of our building principles were involved last week in two days of summer leadership where we started some again planning and learning for the fall so lots that happens in the summer in a school district thank you to dr merrigan and fellow board members for some really great updates appreciate it next up do i have a motion to approve the agenda for the june 14th board meeting i move that the board of education approved the agenda for the june 14 2021 regular board of education meeting as published second thank you stacy for the motion tom for the second all those in favor please raise your right hand motion passes seven zero next up do i have a motion to approve the consent agenda as
067well i move that the board of education approved the consent agenda for the june 2021 board of education meeting as published second thank you stacy for the motion michelle for the second all those in favor please raise your right hand motion passes 7-0 all right moving on in our agenda to new business our first presentation tonight is an update from the diversity equity and inclusion board advisory committee so as dr collier and dr wessel uh come forward to do this presentation i'll set it up so and oh i forgot mr wade's going to be here as well this year was the inaugural year for a board advisory committee around diversity equity and inclusion it doesn't mean this is the first time we've ever had the conversations around diversity in the work that we've done we've
068had some committees a diversity committee for several years within the district but this was the first time it became a formal board advisory committee and this committee met once a month throughout the year uh kelly was an ins dr russell was an integral part of that um team uh along with i think jody michelle and amy were on that committee i was there most of the time and they came up with a set of recommendations that they would like to we would like to present to you on their behalf so with that i'm going to turn it over to dr collier so the work of the diversity equity inclusion board advisory committee is directly linked to the district's mission and that is to ensure life readiness but also personal excellence for all students and to
069build a culture within our schools that particularly for the purpose of this presentation tonight fosters a safe and inclusive environment for each one of our students as they walk through our doors each day as they are students and so that's truly the the goal of the recommendations that you're going to hear this evening to ensure really increased sense of belongingness of our students and all of our families additionally i would say that the recommendations that you'll hear tonight and this work is actually even connected to our goals around associated with navigating next so dr merrigan just a few moments ago referenced that our building leaders were in conference last week planning for next school year and some of those goals that they're planning around are to increase school connectedness coming off of our school experience
070this year and so the work of this committee absolutely connects to those goals as well so relative to this sense of inclusion that we've just talked about we ask ourselves these questions and kelly and adam are going to be to expand upon these and data here in just a few moments but the work really for us to achieve that mission that we just referenced that was revised with the writing of the district's strategic plan is asking ourselves these questions do all of our students feel safe at school physically emotionally psychologically do they have a strong sense of belonging we know that that sense of belonging absolute absolutely impacts students connection to their learning and achievement also do families feel safe in our schools physically emotionally and psychologically do families feel a strong sense of belongingness
071here in blue valley our staff who our staff feel safe physically emotionally psychologically and you are staff also have a strong sense of belongingness as part of the blue valley school district those are questions that we seek to answer in this work i'm going to turn it over to dr whissel thank you well to begin we would like to look at our changing student demographics over the last couple of years so what you'll see before you is a pie chart that if you look really closely you might see some slight discrepancies from the 1819 to the 2021 school year this might make it a little easier when we actually look at the numbers when it comes to our student demographics if you look you will see a slight decrease in the number of students who
072identify as white or caucasian and a slight increase in the number of students who identify as asian keeping in mind that these numbers come from count day which is done in september of every year as part of a requirement from the kansas state department of education they therefore set the categories for which students can select or families can select when it comes to enrollment when you think about that category particularly of asia and from asian that is really limiting to our families because that covers a vast reign of the globe here is the makeup of all of our 35 schools as you can see no one school is the same as another we have a beautiful tapestry of diversity among our students and families in our schools but each one presents its own unique needs
073and therefore it's important that we look at each school individually and the school connectedness for our students and our families a little over a year ago on june 3rd 2020 blue valley schools made a statement in response to black lives matter fueled by the killings of george floyd and brianna taylor to name a couple in the statement we stated that racism or discrimination of any kind has no place in blue valley and will not be tolerated in response to this statement particularly the statement that was released on the social media platform instagram our students current and former made some comments over a thousand comments reflecting on their lived experiences in our schools and the discrimination that they had either themselves faced or witnessed here are some examples to learn more about those experiences and the
074experiences of our families and staff of color we facilitated focus groups in which we interviewed those willing to share here are some examples of what our students told us and their lived experiences inside our schools one student in particular showed up to the focus group but wasn't able to find his voice so his mom encouraged him to send us an email instead this student has faced and witnessed discrimination and harassment in our schools so much so that he literally felt as if his voice had been taken away from him and was terrified to go to school and while these comments and examples come from june of last year we have countless others that could have been from any other day over the course of the last school year to provide some additional information about our
075students and their lived experiences i would like to invite my colleague adam wade up to share some academic data with you right thank you dr wessel the first piece of data that we want to look at here is from panorama which is our social emotional learning measurement tool that we use in grades three through five um a lot of different things are measured within panorama but but one of the more interesting constructs that they measure is self-efficacy which we've defined there so self-efficacy an individual set of beliefs beliefs about their ability to execute and achieve behaviors to acquire in this case certain achievement measures so you know you think about this we're talking about students in third through fifth grade you know if they don't feel confident in their abilities to learn that's obviously going
076to impact how well they learn among other items so we see some comparative data and again this is all from this particular year i mean the positive is that from fall 2020 to spring 2021 students responded a little more favorably in the spring than they did in the fall but certain disparities here are pretty stark so students identifying as asian 72 percent reported positive metrics on the self-efficacy piece down to uh for african american or black students 52 percent so a 20 percentage point difference students identifying as hispanic 54 you can kind of see the the trends there um graduation rates are published by ksde each fall um november december around there so this was the last three complete classes of graduation data classes of 18 19 and 20. um so you can see the
077overall numbers and you can see them again disaggregated and by the way you know you you do see some a couple of ethnicities like hawaiian pacific islander and american indian alaska native not mentioned here that's because we don't have enough students for ksd to publish the subgroup results because showing that data would identify or could identify particular students but that said when you look at this particular data you know relatively stable over the last three years 20 was better than 18 which was better than 19. but then when you break it down by subgroups you see a little bit more difference i think the positive here is probably the graduation rate from african american students and the improvement from 2018 to 2019 to 2020 but on the flip side students identifying as hispanic there was
078a subgroup or a dip in the middle there that's the one data point below 90 percent so again i'm just trying to get the lay of the land the first data point was from elementary this data point is from the end of the system so now let's look at all the levels kind of put together so this is data from the ela state assessment in 17 18 and 19 percent of students scoring a two or higher so as a reminder a two on a state assessment demonstrates that a student shows basic ability with regard to skills and knowledge needed for college and career readiness okay so this is the disaggregated data percent of students showing basic ability with regard to those skills all right so when you look at the data from 17 to 18
079to 19 again we do see a downward trend from students scoring a two or higher within pretty much every subgroup but again it's really the disparities that that stick out the most so we see in 2019 um asian students we're at 94.7 percent scoring a two or higher african-american or black students about 69 so 25 percentage points lower um pretty clear separation when the data is disaggregated this way in terms of you know what we see we can do a similar analysis with both math and science um and and really the point is just to show that it doesn't really matter which subject you look at the data is is just different by a percentage point or so so again here about a 25 percentage point difference between asian students and african american students um
080in science again we're going to see something pretty similar the gap's a little bigger here it's a 30 percentage point gap between asian students and black or african american students so that that kind of gives you a little bit of the uh the lay of the land uh and part of the why and some of our work here thank you adam as dr merrigan mentioned last year you took thoughtful action to form the diversity equity and inclusion advisory committee this committee met monthly with the set agenda and spent a majority of the time learning more about our policies and practices particularly when it comes to school safety hearing from dan carney our director of school safety recruitment and retention hearing from dr amy dillon our director of human resources and hearing analyzing the data that
081adam has shared with you tonight upon conclusion of our inaugural year they have a series of recommendations that they would like you to consider as we work to fulfill our mission of school cultures characterized by safe and inclusive learning environments for every blue valley student staff and family the first recommendation is that we would form a diversity equity and inclusion subcommittee in every school this committee would be comprised of representation from different groups cultures and roles within the schools and it is suggested that they too would meet monthly with a set agenda the purpose is to collectively work on ways to identify specific school needs as noted earlier each school is unique to improve inclusivity at the school as well as the family school connectedness the second recommendation is that we would establish a district-wide
082tiered response system for reporting incidents we would train all staff and students on how to use the system and we would be sure to increase its awareness and accessibility by broadcasting it in several ways it was recommended that questions would be included to determine if it is a repeated incident and to get contact information for follow-up anonymous responses would be allowed a district-wide survey should be sent periodically to determine its effectiveness the next recommendation is the creation of an inclusive lens we would develop an inclusive lens to help provide meaningful learning experiences for all students this lens can be used to support and evaluate current and future curriculum and resources and to help provide multiple perspectives and learning experiences ultimately providing opportunities for students to see reflections of themselves and their learning and to learn
083from the lived experiences of others professional learning and accountability it was recommended that we develop and deliver professional learning to help our leadership team and staff to appreciate diversity equity and inclusion which would include but not be limited to avoid dismissing discrimination to act in professional way to ensure the safety and belonging of each student and to further realize application of board policies surrounding discrimination we should monitor measure and share results and take steps to quantify our success for example getting feedback evaluating scenarios doing and conducting student and staff climate surveys and looking at our family participation there should be transparency included with the sharing of those results in our professional learning communities as well as looking at it from district-wide and building-wide perspective and last they recommend that we add a diversity equity and
084inclusion leader to our staff this person would be charged with collaborating with the board of education and district administrators to better serve the widespread community of our school to fulfill our mission of decree of a school culture characterized by safe and inclusive learning environments it would support the district's buildings and individual staff members professional goals in the area of diversity equity and inclusion and provide leadership and issues of diversity equity inclusion to suffer to serve the students staff and families in blue valley schools and with that i thank you so much for your time and i open it up to any questions um just i guess my first question would be on that last slide and i don't know dr merrigan if you have any thoughts about this yet but if you're thinking about adding
085a leader for this um undertaking how would you go about doing that what would that look like um well the committee felt strongly about this i'm looking at kelly for affirmation uh we we talked about and those of you who were on the committee and heard that as well it is june what's the date today 14th it would be hard for us to add a position right now and find a quality candidate so we need to take this recommendation we also had a budget situation that we've talked to you about this year so we need to take this recommendation we need to um over the course of the the next couple of months come up with a plan around it and this is probably the one recommendation that we we administratively need a little bit
086more time to come back to you with a plan on how we would do that jay um quickly so just to clarify um you know this this dei committee um talked about diversity all types of diversity we're talking about male female we're talking about different body sizes we're talking about religions we're talking about um different faiths or i guess i just said that so um these are these are some topics that that we're just talking about everybody's differences and and working on inclusivity with everyone all of our students and me with with my background in corrections um you know safety is a is a big deal whether it be from you know school shootings um or or um from people being bullied um that's that's kind of my thing right and so that's something i'm
087watching and very concerned about when i do set in these meetings you know like i said could be male female could be race um body sizes all of that so that's a big big topic and it's a big big issue to talk about everyone should feel safe in in school that should be the safe place right if nothing else is at least by gum our school should be so um the the um other thing i just want to mention really quick in setting in this dei media committee is listening to the students talk and and just realizing or reminding me that just because i don't feel it or i haven't experienced it doesn't mean it's not real because there's there were some students that we had on the committee that were relating experiences they had
088firsthand and it is heartbreaking that you know especially with you know my concern about school safety that just really gets to me so i just i wanted to mention that because that was important to me michelle can i i just wanted to add to what jody said in that not just for our students and feeling safe and inclusive but our staff as well so i mean that became very clear as we were in our meetings as well so mike did first of all thank you um to both all three of you um i have just a question i guess for adam and that is we talked tonight about um academic attainment and i know the answer to this but i'm going to ask in public okay you will be coming back at some point to
089talk about academic attainment and i assume katie you will also be giving us uh some information about what the plan is going forward to ensure that that academic attainment um is going in the right direction i think that's in a month or two if i'm not mistaken um to jody's point um there are other i assume there are other metrics that you have other than than racial there's socioeconomic issues or designations you have male female differences and so on um would you come back with that as well sure yeah you know i i will say one of the biggest reasons for kind of highlighting the ethnicity piece here was just that that's that's where the disparities are um you know at least in my eyes probably the most striking um but you're right that certainly
090uh we're tracking a whole lot more than just the ethnicity thank you yeah and i can tell you just from doing the student demographics the last few years i don't have an exact number for you but we're about 50 50 when it comes to students who identify as male and students who identify as female each school is unique and then when it comes to our numbers when we're looking at free and reduced meals or financially insecure or food insecurity we're looking roughly around seven percent of our student population that are willing to identify themselves as needing support i think that's always something that we want to make sure we clarify is that not everybody will fill out the paperwork necessary just due to the stereotypes and discrimination that can happen when you ask for that
091kind of support in an affluent school district such as ours and that's seven percent as a district but there are some schools who are in the 20 percent absolutely yeah i think our highest this last year was around 21 22 percent my point i guess was it would be i think valuable for the board to understand um a disaggregation within multiple elements agreed that's all i got one thing i would just highlight as well as a participant on the committee is um just i know you all talked about the student participation in their perspective but i would also say the parent slash patron participation just in that we have an excellent group of parents on that committee patrons that represent different industries different they have kids of all ages they too had experiences to share
092and i would just reiterate that they are supportive of these recommendations um in terms of what you guys presented tonight and it's really been a great learning opportunity for me to see all the different perspectives that we got to see as part of the committee i'm just going to pay you back on what you said too and the word that strikes me is very moving is the word belonging when you have people saying that they don't feel like they belong that's not okay um so it's like mike pointed and jody pointed out it's diversity of so many different aspects of our society and we just want everyone to feel safe and belong um adam could you could you go back to the ela k.a.p slide yes um so again just for anyone watching or clarification
093can you explain again what the two is and what that represents and because we hear a lot of percentages being thrown around even some this evening then i'm not sure where those numbers come from yeah um especially when we're looking at this number here and right so state assessments have four classification levels students score one two three or four a one is when a student shows the phrase they use is limited ability with regard to skills needed for college and career readiness so the way the state categorizes is they change that word in front of ability so a one is limited a two is basic a three is effective and a four is excellent all right so um we opted here to go with the two plus to talk about basic we would see a
094similar disparity amongst groups or maybe even possibly a heightened disparity i don't have it right in front of me if we were to look at the effective separation or the excellent separation um as well so and so the two was considered basic basic but on grade level so that's that's something that that i actually reached out to ksd and asked clarification for recently because you know we hear that thrown around a lot and then you look at state assessment scores from kids they don't use those words anywhere they they are not in the business anymore and they may have been at one time of using the phrase grade level or grade level plus on track to be college and career but now they're using the phrases limited basic effective and excellent so and it's for
095college readiness for sk right with regard to the skills and knowledge needed for college and career readiness so if you're talking a third grader you're talking you know do they have the skills that would eventually translate same as the 10th grader yeah so they might not use those words but that essentially is what it is if you're on track the way to reach college readiness or or college and career readiness right for graduation yeah so the question would be you know is the goal basic or is the goal effective i mean i would say the goal is probably effective which is why people are gonna be looking at a three more often than a two right i'm just i'm hearing so many different numbers and i'm trying to square them yes i you know i
096had to do that too and that's why i reached out to kste last week even thank you for clarifying that sorry about that thank you guys we appreciate your presentation yes thank you next up is uh another one related to safety but a school safety update so dan carney i think is here oh here we go our director of safety and security uh we have you have not had an update from him about the physical safety of our students in our buildings and so we asked dan to give you uh an update so take it away dan thank you um yeah let's go ahead and i have it there you have it i've got it okay um i thought it'd be nice to start off with a nice picture there of officer reindel he's our
097liaison on the left to the elementary schools um and does a fabulous job and everybody loves him and officer gibson's an overland park officer over there that just recently retired so she was an sro for quite some time in our school district but anyway yeah i wanted to talk tonight just for a little bit about school safety i haven't talked to you in a long time about this and i you'll see that the thing immediately sort of starts getting funneled toward true safety okay or you know school violence and those sorts of things but um over the last year goes without saying that there's been kind of a necessary laser focus on kovid that's what we've been talking about that's where everybody's attention has been and over the year i started to think about that
098we probably especially when the kids came back to school full-time that we might need a reminder that that's not the only threat that we need to be concerned with so i was fortunate enough to find this fellow and i had attended the training he's in marshall county kentucky he's the superintendent of schools there it's kind of a small place but the high school has 1600 kids and they had a school shooting there in 2018 and he was a very in intimate part of what happened there and i think we had a hundred of our administrators uh on a zoom meeting with him and he gave us about an hour presentation where he just walked us through it it wasn't a gory thing it wasn't a you know wasn't a horrible descriptions and those sorts of
099things he just walked us through it what he experienced and i thought it was a better way to kind of plant that seed than for me to put out a bunch of bullet points about safety that may or may not stick and i think it was pretty it was pretty valuable um it was pretty valuable for our time yes yeah really just he was all kentucky and i just love that guy okay so obviously anytime we talk about school safety it's like i i've been beaten this drum for 10 years that the key to it in my opinion is trusted adult relationships with kids and we could talk about this for quite some time but um i think that um there's there's a there's so many things to be said about it but first and
100foremost it's just the right thing to do to have every student in a building have some adult relationship a trust adult relationship with somebody in that building you know i think everybody's probably heard a news report after a an act of school violence where they say you know nobody really knew that boy he just kind of walked around he's a loner nobody really knew him and um i'm just determined that we're not going to have that in blue valley we're not going to have some young man walking around that nobody knows or nobody really wants to talk to him so it's just the right thing to do for students to have somebody they can go to by having these relationships you know firmly embedded it opens up lines of communications with students and students ends
101up ends up end up telling us things that they may not otherwise have an opportunity to back when the secret service did a study of school shootings they said that these students who committed these acts almost always told other students before they happened but those students did not go to an adult so it just kind of goes without saying that we want to have those connections several years ago well gosh probably more like eight or nine years ago i i stopped by a high school where a student was in the office and she was crying she was in the principal's office and she had reported that a male student was interested and had texted her in harming himself with a knife that he said he had brought to school and as these text messages went
102back and forth he started talking about hurting other students with the knife before he hurt himself and so she reported this and i asked her who did you tell about this and just like that she said mrs so and so you know just automatic she had that trusted adult relationship with a teacher and why was she so upset she was so upset not so much because of the concern about everybody's safety as she was concerned about that she had irreparably damaged her relationship with the boy who was a good friend of hers because you know that that um business of of uh harming your relationship with your peers is a big deal um and uh that was what was that was what was really upsetting her but she overcame that and told somebody and she
103told somebody that she trusted a teacher so by having that community open lines of communication we can get that also it establishes a baseline of behavior so if we know a student if we don't bother get to know them we really don't know what normal looks like for them if we bother to get to know them we know what normal is and so when they go off normal one way or another hopefully we identify that and we can talk to administration about that and then it also gives us an opportunity to intervene none of these acts of school violence are spur of the moment things that happen they happen or they develop over time there's a path to violence and we need to intervene before they get there so i always like to throw this
104quotation up i put in quotation marks but i don't know who said it but i know someone said it it wasn't me so i figure i have to give whoever that is out there credit for saying this i like it so i put it up here and we've already talked about how it uh communication intervention and ultimately prevention okay um as part of this update i just wanted to um also talk a little bit about our blue valley police officers our campus police officers we have sarah here tonight she's in the picture officer ben eric who came to us from leewood we were lucky enough to get her after eight years in leewood and and um she's just fantastic way behind beyond her years and wisdom and and maturity and everything else i threw in
105officer kelsey houchin who you saw when you came if you came through the front door on the far right you see that's not part of the picture she she uh but i didn't want to leave her out right she replaced officer reed using the upper left hand corner so there you go that's that's the crew right there and this is represents over 150 years of law enforcement experience so we don't hire people who don't have experience already the mandated training for law enforcement officers is 40 hours a year we average about 70. some of the basic things that they all have to have is the police academy the national sro basic training cit training which you probably heard a lot about the critical incident team training that teaches officers about interacting with people with mental
106health and it brings about a level of patience i think that maybe officers from the past maybe didn't have as much of fair policing this is mandated and we we spend time on this and i i call it fair policing because i didn't have enough room to put bias-based policing and those sorts of things but it's all it all fits into this category um i'm talking as fast as i can because i know i don't want to keep you here late but i did want to point out that we had a really great session with officer john lacy and officer ken braden if those names mean anything to you officer lacy's the pio for overland park pd officer ken braden was 19 years or something at blue valley high he's over at the police academy
107now and we brought them in and had our police officers all right way around round table with them and just got to have an open conversation about what it is like being an african-american police officer being an african-american citizen in you know in this area a little bit about their backgrounds um one grew up in memphis one grew up in st louis and we just had uh you you were there we had a wonderful um one hour conversation with them and it was very enlightening and i really like doing that kind of stuff i think it's helpful to us to get it get it just see a different perspective plus they're just both great um other mandated training um you know and i can talk talk talk talk about all this stuff but we'll go
108on some physical security stuff that we're making great headway on if you remember teachers one of their biggest complaints this goes way back was that when they when we would have a lockdown at their school they'd have to step out of their classroom and put a key in a lock lock the door and then pull the door shut and so what you see there on the left is um the new locks that are being installed this this was a huge undertaking as you can imagine i don't know exactly how many doors but i know there's over 3000 doors that these things are going on and it's a huge undertaking they're in all the high schools um and they're working on middle and elementary now that intruder-resistant glass i think i've talked to you about that
109before but the idea was that and i say this sometimes when i'm given a talk that to staff that if you can get behind a locked interior door in a school during a school shooting your chances of survival are almost 100 percent statistically historically okay really close to almost a hundred percent um and so we consider the classrooms again if you can get into them that your traditional classrooms um to be the safest place to be but we said we want to make them just that much safer and so we have installed this intruder-resistant glass i don't like to talk about it too much publicly but um everywhere where an intruder could potentially gain access into a classroom from inside the school okay enough said about that all right um the flexible learning environments that
110that are going in the elementary schools that when i first saw those they had me a little perplexed because of all the glass and the sliding doors and the openness of them and so on about how are we going to maintain this standard of being able to lock down students make them put them in a location where they are safe and they are hidden from anyone that would want to see them from inside the building and it was a little tricky but um what we've kind of settled on we started off with one iteration and what we've kind of settled on now and i think it's working pretty good requires a little bit more strategy from the building teachers and administrator and the teacher and the principal but the idea is and the reason i
111put this little shot of liberty view up there is just you kind of imagine the front door is sort of the first location i'm called the three layer lockdown plan the first place that you stop someone from coming in the building is the front door right it's always locked should be except except when kids are arriving and dismissing but the rest of the school day the next stop point is the pod so the pods now when they're built in the flexible learning environments have doors with crash bars on them which they have to to go out of the pod but they have thumb turn locks on them which is kind of unusual if you've i've never i've never seen right right there you don't see a crash bar with a thumb turn lock on it's
112kind of unusual but that's what they have so that the pod can be locked down and then the students retreat into safe rooms within that pod and lock down so so i look at it as a three layer lockdown plan it just whereas in a traditional classroom setting you tell the students everybody get to the nearest classroom and lock the door right and it's kind of depending on what time of day it is it can be a little bit of a free-for-all but it's it's a real simple plan this is requires a little bit more strategy out of the teachers that work in those pods and so on to make sure they you know kind of layer it back that way but i think i think it'll work i think we just need to make
113sure we train and that we clearly identify those rooms that are the safe rooms i've got some ideas about that that i'm working on right now okay all right let's see and then on the horizon the fbi the secret service the department of education have for several years now recommended that school districts have threat assessment teams in their buildings and these are teams that would address scenarios where a threat has come to light that a student generally that a student has made toward the student body or towards other students okay or even towards staff i suppose and so i recently went through the training that you see the picture of the book there the comprehensive school threat assessment guidelines by dr dewey cornell he was the one who originated the virginia model that sort of
114gained a lot of notoriety because he bothered to he bothered to make sure it was a evidence-based program by doing a tremendous amount of research and making sure that the things he was putting into place made sense and worked i just put up a few little bullet points about the idea behind threat assessment what it what it hopes to accomplish what here's what i love about it the secret service um did a big training here recently up at the sheraton and they had this was i say recently it's been a couple years ago where they talked about threat assessment and the importance of it and i talked to the speaker after it was all done and i said you know the only i love what you're saying but the only thing that concerns me is
115that you're talking about a team that might live at the district office and a threat is made out at blue valley high and this team jumps in the van and drives out there and tackles the problem and i said what we have been doing kind of intuitively over the years is we put the team together at the school because those people know the kids now i'm usually there but but you want you want those people that really know the kids to be involved and so the very first thing i heard about this was that it's school-based teams and i thought okay now we're getting somewhere because that's where it should start is with the school that know those those kids so that's what this is and what we're um hoping to do in a timeline
116would be in within the somewhere within before the before the end of this before the end of the year the end of the first semester um train teams from each school in this approach the one quick little thing i tell you y'all you all are very familiar i'm sure with the suicide tool the protocol tool that we use when we have a student having suicidal ideations and making comments and so on there's some similarities there with this that will help help administrators to sort of go through a checklist and sort of to better understand what is it we're dealing with here you know what is this a is this a just a transient threat that really doesn't uh pose it pose a risk to anyone or is it something more serious um and i i
117found it to be um really good really good stuff i think that must be it did i go too long is that okay all right okay so just some highlights yes no that's it that's good i'm i'm i'm done um two comments um you talked about a trusted adult relationship with kids um and i'm making an assumption well let me go back we heard uh about max baron this evening a young man who um had a trusted relationship with his buddy and obviously max had that relationship but somebody had a trusted relationship with him as well and i i don't want to stress that enough and i think you recognize it but we all should recognize it um that it's not just a child that might be struggling uh i think a couple of years
118ago dr um todd white suggested that let's spend the first couple of days of school getting to know our kids and you know when i heard it it's like we're going to take two days out of school to get to know our kids and it's taking me a while to understand that that and this my point will be made in a moment um we also talked about safety tonight and and it seems to me that we've talked about two pieces of safety what i'll call emotional safety and physical safety one without the other kind of defeats the purpose i don't understand why we would why we would talk only about physical safety if we're not talking about emotional safety as well in my opinion and and this is just my opinion learning doesn't take place
119unless i feel safe and i can feel safe physically but if emotionally i don't feel safe then that doesn't work if i can feel safe emotionally but i'm worried about something physically happening to me i'm not going to learn either i'll go back to my my southeast of celine experience we happened to be have most of our meeting in the elementary school so i was fortunate we had the little teeny chairs and the little tables um some of my taller counterparts didn't enjoy that but i certainly did um but we also used the restroom in the in the elementary school and there was a sign on the back of the restroom door that said in the event of a lockdown do the following stand up on the toilet turn your phone off and be silent
120and that's i don't mind telling you that shook me a little bit um because kids shouldn't have to shouldn't have to read that every time they go into the restroom obviously you've taken steps and we've talked about them at least for the 11 years that i've been on the board you've taken steps to help us understand what needed to be done and i think we funded that appropriately um and we heard from dr collier tonight in her counterparts um some of the things we're doing from an emotional perspective so i want to thank both of you for keeping our kids safe and doing the best that we possibly can to make this a safe environment so that they can learn thank you and one other thing i almost forgot does anybody remember mash yeah okay
121remember colonel flagg he was the guy the the security guy that you never saw enter or leave a room when you came around that corner i swear you were colonel flag and i certainly expect not to to see not to be able to see you leave when you leave tonight dan i was trying to put a little drama into the entrance thank you mike i'm just gonna um say it's not just your opinion it's actually like educational theory it's cause called maslow's hierarchy of needs kids do not learn well or effectively if they don't feel safe that's one of the bottom layers so very good that's why i'm not an educator i know i know you're not which is why i'm saying that that was very intuitive very good you were right on point so
122we got a couple quick questions um about how many hours of cit training do the officers receive it's one week okay and as it relates to the cit training you know we've got counselors we've got teachers and numerous people that have training on the mental health side how do those layers interact as it specifically relates to the officers are they seeing more incidents that is involving their cit training or is it being caught sooner do you have any idea of what the data might be saying in terms of how that training interacts ultimately with the different layers that we have in place well as far as any statistics or statistical data no but i talk to our officers pretty routinely and kind of know what what sorts of things they've got their hands in um
123you know everything i hear is that they it all sort of is seamless they all sort of work together they share information and the officer typically becomes more involved when the seriousness of the situation ramps up you know the you can you can reach a point with a student that is suicidal that they just have to be taken into protective custody it doesn't happen very often thankfully but or the same thing could be said i suppose suppose of threats the the crossover with mental health mental illness and um aggressive behavior criminal behavior certainly is is there i saw it for 26 years when i worked in overland park um so we um we certainly see that but the other piece of that is that a lot of times students have sort of befriended the officers
124and they come to the officers to talk to them and i think it's important and it's important in those scenarios and it's important when they have a student in crisis that they have that foundational training and helps them to remember that i need to be patient that was that was probably the biggest thing i learned from it was just be patient there's no hurry let's just you know we have a student here who clearly has issues you know and they're and they're battling those and and uh so you i don't know if you can tell from the picture but i don't hire any robocops you know what i mean sure yeah they i i want to hire officers who really believe in that whole idea that they can form some of the most important relationships
125with students that perhaps of anyone in the building depending on the student you know so there is no friction that i ever see between social worker school site counselor police officer there's just this pretty friendly and amiable working relationship that goes on and i hope and my officers hopefully are very helpful when it comes to sort of helping with the legal end of whatever it is they're dealing with you know that help i don't know if i answered your question no dan i appreciate it i mean i think the officers do a lot of really good work and they deal with a lot of situations that ultimately into the end in positive resolutions yeah but i don't know dr merrigan how those layers interact i would say that they interact at the building level so
126every building has a leadership team a building crisis team and those teams um interact with the officers in the building and for those who don't know who are listening all of our high schools have a sro in them from overland park as well as a campus police officer our middle schools all have one officer at all times and they're either an sro or a campus police officer correct pretty much true there's a little there's a few exceptions where they are just sros and so those at the middle in high school those people are included on those teams at the elementary and dan referred to we have uh dave reindel who coordinates with our elementaries and then dan and khloe of course are on on standby for our elementaries as well but the officers are an
127integral part of the team i can think all the way back to my days at blue valley high school where i was a counselor and i worked with the officer that you mentioned just a little bit ago and we tag teamed sometimes he said i don't need to get involved in this it will make it a bigger deal if the police are involved and sometimes i needed him to be involved so i would say that that that is very fluid and very much they are very much a part of the team at each of the schools and the other thing i wanted to add to what mike said earlier about the physical safety and the emotional safety i couldn't agree with you more which is why dan came in and talked to the dei committee
128this year because they were talking very much about safety and we knew that dan's voice needed to be a part of that conversation and one more question so so would the the dei professional that were slating to hire in the future that how would they fit into that equation and that's a great question patrick that's part of the work that we administratively need to do is to decide where if if we hired a dei leader whatever we're going to title that person where do they sit because if it's a part of safety dan has dan and his team have to be involved in that conversation as well thank you you know i got you know what got me thinking about that meeting we had with john lacy and ken braden it's fine you just you
129just reminded me of it it was that meeting that i attended with your with the inclusivity uh committee and somebody said had you had you ever thought that maybe some students feel triggered or when they see a police officer in uniform they don't feel safe and that's what prompted me to call john and say hey what would you guys think about this i thought that would be a good way to start the conversation anyway it just i'm sorry just you know that's that's exactly what i was going to say because i was sitting in the dei meeting with you and a few of the students who are there and i i they they're right on by by expressing you know their their experience and and saying that i don't feel comfortable with with an sro
130or an officer in in my school i'm not comfortable and this is so interesting i know we talked a little bit as we were walking in but you know i was running a little late uh because i was standing out you know basically on the corner of my house some kids were selling lemonade and uh one of our police officer overland park officer had pulled over and was partaking of lemonade from the kiddos on the corner and uh so i had to go out and buy lemonade also um but i was talking to him and he's he's actually one of your sros over at the academy right and we really had like probably a 30-45 minute chat about some opportunities in this area because because of you know my passion for for corrections and and
131my knowledge base you know i want that relationship i want our kids to feel safe i want them to to know that that you know the mr rogers reference earlier you know go to the helpers and and our officers should have that relationship and are the helpers right so i i think there's some opportunities because of the conversation in dei that that maybe we can we can take a look at and you know so much potential um in that area i know that you know your officer from from the academy said you know he loves his job because it's a little bit smaller you know he can get he's part of the team over there at the academy he's he's in he knows all these kids names some of our bigger high schools or bigger
132middle schools and elementary schools it's a little bit harder so what what can we do you know about that um the other thing i was going to mention yeah totally um all the you know i've read what makes you know blue valley work and shawnee mission work and what makes maybe some of the inner city school districts not work well one of the big parts of that is the safety feeling and if you don't feel safe as a student you cannot get your brain in the right learning mode so that's huge huge so i just wanted to mention a few of those things oh and i don't know if you mentioned earlier about your safety and security part um the pinpoint entries i can't remember if you said that i may have blocked it but
133that is one of the things that you implemented a number of years ago at all of our schools for safety additional safety yeah implemented that first and then came back around with the intercoms to just keep the doors locked and yeah yeah we actually moved bond money way up for safety to take care of that which was a good thing right you know piggybacking on all this just real briefly i think it's those magical moments by the way you should always stop for all kids lemonade stands that's a general rule and i over tip yeah always but um you know that magical moment whether we're touring elementary schools or with our kids or we're at a football game and the officers know the kids by his name or vice versa so they can't wait to
134see him i think back to your relationship piece and what everybody's talking about is to me just that magical fairy dust if you will that just makes the thing oh yeah better so the way your officers work that obviously is crucial to the success here and just on you are you 10 years here yeah this month yes okay so we appreciate you and congratulations on that i knew it was about this time thank you we were neighbors that good good looking sport coat i wanted to say um kudos to our wonderful officer in the back i sat at a at lakewood middle school when mike and i went to um we were asked to serve as judges for a um shark tank type situation and weren't you there at as one of the judges for
135all that you do to build relationships with our kids which was my point was just it's that connectedness and i'm so impressed every time i've interacted with one of our sros we have some phenomenal staff and um really appreciate everybody that's in our building so thank you and thank you to you too and next time you should try and go because it was really neat so one little tiny little point the person that's in charge you mentioned khloe earlier her name's khloe anne rizzo is her name i don't know if you've ever met her but she is the captain over the officers um and she was a kansas missouri officer for about eight years worked undercover worked in vice and narcotics and all that stuff then she took time off to be a mom and
136then she spent three years at wyandotte high school and so she just brings an interesting perspective um if you if you meet her she's a ball of fire but she's she's great and she's great on this topic we've been covering here tonight too so i just shout out to her she's a great lady dan i got one more follow-up and maybe it's dr merrigan but we were talking about kids feeling safe what are the protocols that we have in place for kids that don't feel safe in terms of those layers that we were talking about earlier wait you know fine we have like a hotline i mean i know we got a relationship with them do we have do do we talk about communicating and yeah there i think there are multiple layers so uh
137the first thing would be we're proactive and we've somebody's developed a positive relationship um that that would be the first thing and they feel able to talk to a trusted adult there are safe schools lines that people could call um there is and one of the recommendations from the dei committee was to have that anonymous reporting tool which we actually have but the kids on the committee all stopped and said what you do what uh we don't know how to do that so we need to beef that up that needs to be really easy and that's something that's on our charge this summer uh to relaunch in the fall uh so that kids know how to um report that anonymously so those would be the the main things i would say and then the other
138thing i would also say is again our schools are working really hard to make sure that every student feels connected to somebody to a teacher to a counselor to an officer to a principal to the nurse to the custodian to to somebody within our buildings back um it was what a couple well three years ago maybe we formed that nice uh relationship with crime stoppers over in kansas missouri and we and and i brought that tips app for teens in for high schools that's just high schools though but it gives kids a chance to text issues into that and then they come back to us and we do get things about bullying on there periodically along with a whole variety of other things as well but that's been a nice tool just to add to
139the you know the group a good question is that program given to uh do the kids learn about that when freshman orientation and then yeah and and i always i i always harp on the high school officers let's keep promoting keep promoting keep marketing the tips out for teens and um you know they have the big banner that crime stoppers made for each school with each school's logo on it that they keep up they they do a variety of different things they go to lunch hand out lollipops if you download the app stuff like that so i still think we could do better with it be honest with you i think we could do a better job with it and i want to want to keep working on that one so it's just not about
140the criminal safety feelings right they can come from a variety of different places a variety of different environments and so i think you know i'm not asking them to be social workers but i do think their role um has multiple layers multiple levels that i think help make kids be safe yes i i completely agree with you completely yes thank you again and thank you for 10 years we really appreciate it thank you yeah okay thanks our last agenda item for tonight is to approve the restated and amended superintendent contract melissa is going to kick us off with a couple comments and then i'll have a few as well yeah good evening um first i'm going to take this opportunity to very briefly compliment dan i don't get to speak very often at these things
141especially in say complimentary things his department is so well run i had the privilege of being part of the overland park mental health task force over the past year and through that process i learned a lot about training officers and supports that we need to put in place for officers and after about every meeting we had i would call dan and pester him and say are we doing this are we doing that for our campus officers i mean these officers are as well trained as any law enforcement in this country he's done a spectacular job with that so they get all of the crisis intervention training and he does a a phenomenal job so just want to take that opportunity real briefly um so i'm actually here to present to you uh your last agenda
142item for the night which is um the first amended and restated superintendent contract i will tell you that this is a fairly routine thing we do about this time each year but i when i say that i don't want to undermine the value that dr merrigan brings to the blue valley superintendency the primary purpose of amending her contract is to extend it for another year blue valley typically works under a three-year superintendent contract her previous contract or current contract is set to expire uh june 30 2023 with the amended contract it would expire june 30 2024 hopefully she stays longer but this is just a mutual expression of a desire to extend her contract there are no major substantive changes other than that there's no express compensation package change stated in the contract if you
143have no other questions about that i'll leave it to you yeah i'll make a few comments and then we'll let the board ask any questions maybe um that they might have if that's okay with you so just um on behalf of the board um i'd like to just reiterate what melissa said in our support of you dr merrigan as the superintendent of blue valley as one of our patrons said tonight a heck of a first year and we want to thank you for your support of staff and students during this time and we knew you were the right one for the job before last year and we know even more now so um thank you for that and just to piggyback on one thing that melissa said as well this three-year approach is one that
144is used often with superintendents and specifically with those in our county and this is a very normal typical thing to do it is as a matter of fact it's a statutory limit a kansas statute provides that the limit the max for a superintendent contract a k-12 is three years and our other neighboring schools utilize that three years as well so i believe that's true yeah okay so i just wanted to share those remarks on behalf of the board um and just open it up for any other questions um ultimately a motion will be asked of you guys to approve um but just wanted to address any questions or thoughts you had before we go nope all right do i have a motion i can just real quick no just pick it back like you said
145i'm just positive and obviously it's been a trying year and a half and just appreciate your leadership dr murray we've all this obviously all of us have spent a lot of time together you and i spent tons of time together last year and we just i know it's been tough and it's been a grind and things are getting much better obviously which we're all excited about to get for normalcy we alluded to earlier and through the last several weeks so thank you so proud to be proud to be doing this all right if i could please have a motion uh to approve the restated and amended contract i moved the board of education approved the restated and amended superintendent contract thank you motion by tom second by stacy all those in favor please raise your
146right hand motion passes 7-0 um before we close tonight i did want to share with our patrons that our next board meeting is july 19th which is a published date and we will be resuming our daytime in-person workshops as well which are also publicly meetings and that just gives us a chance to have a little bit of additional conversation so please note that if for those of you that have followed in the past that's something that we did do previously and we feel like now is the right time to bring it back so with that do i have a motion to close the meeting not everyone at once i move that we adjourn then june 14th 2021 florida thank you stacey second thank you michelle all in favor please raise your right hand thank you
147much 7-0 have a great evening everybody happy birthday amy yeah and dr collier tom mitchell very good no that's awesome 10 years ago you