Blue Valley Board of Education Meeting - Dec 14, 2020

001it's probably a good idea first up caroline danda the following comments were submitted by dr caroline danda whose students attend blue valley north and leewood middle my name is dr caroline danda i am presenting again to the board as a concerned parent of middle and high school students and as a licensed child psychologist i appreciate and applaud the decision to keep elementary students in person i am disappointed and frustrated middle and high schools are back to distance learning distance learning is not working for so many and is not developmentally appropriate ers and pediatricians are seeing surges and mental health visits in teens and tweens in my office they express challenges with motivation focus and apathy others express high anxiety about managing workload especially given attention motivation and technology challenges some express urges to self-harm and

002suicidal ideation students are disengaged unmotivated and fatigued by the amount of screen time the workload and the absence of a learning environment at home students do not have the same environmental cues movement breaks socialization or connections to students or teachers that lead to engaging and learning or maintaining a sense of well-being we need students back in school the american academy of pediatrics and cdc director agree that reopening schools is a priority and schools are among the safest places kids can be respectively is their risk of transmission zero no that is impossible and unreasonable but it's low blue valley has approximately twenty four thousand four hundred students teachers and staff cumulatively since november the district has had 2.1 percent new positive cases reported across the entire district across 38 different buildings there are very few to

003no new cases at any given time at middle schools there is no need to close the entire school district for middle school and high schools when the rates of covid in individual schools remain low and mitigating strategies are in place furthermore data from the kdh shows the survival rate for kids aged 0 to 17 is 100 adults aged 18 to 64 survive at a rate of 99.8 percent and the rate for adults 65 to 84 is 95 when weighing the significant negative impact on the social emotional academic and physical well-being of students against the risk associated with copid the answer is clear all students need to be in school consider developing gating criteria at the individual school level to determine school closures be transparent let us know the data and plans for getting all students

004back in school and what we can do to help besides prevent community spread that's a given thank you thank you caroline up next amy thomas the following comments were submitted by amy thomas whose students attend blue valley southwest and aubry bend middle i would like to take this opportunity to express my extreme disappointment in the continued cancel culture of the blue valley school district and the members of the board of education i am extremely grateful that kasia made the right decision to allow two parents to attend winter activities but was extremely disappointed to see all of the blue valley representatives including two members of this board of education vote against this measure there is major liability in not allowing parents to attend activities as many schools discovered in the first week of activities secondly i

005would like to address the curriculum being delivered in the sophomore modern world history class a sophomore boy at blue valley high said the following to his mother mom is the district pretty liberal i ask because a video i just watched talking about different political parties did not seem neutral conservatives were portrayed in a negative manner while liberal progressives was all feel good type of stuff not just the video but the powerpoint slides are negative as well i don't feel conservatives are accurately represented this type of brainwashing is not okay and no teacher should instill their political views onto students this is highly concerning lastly i would like to address the fact that blue valley continues to not follow the science by choosing to keep middle and high schools 100 virtual dr fauci and the cdc

006have come out and said that schools are the safest place for children it is unacceptable that you continue to push a learning mode onto parents who chosen person learning and are not afraid of this virus my boys continue to be deprived of the material they need to be successful and my son's algebra ii teacher just skipped an entire unit this comes after his honors geometry teacher skipped a unit last spring stating that the students would need to know it for the a.c.t so they will need to take time on their own to teach themselves you are failing our children and this is subpar education i am paying a large amount of money for tutors due to the lack of interaction and access to teachers my son's grades are not the same as in-person learning and

007should his grades and act scores reflect this lack of education due to your inability to allow him in-person learning i want to make sure you have in writing that i blame you directly and to make you aware now that i am personally incurring damages i look forward to the opportunity to run for the board of education and to see each and every one of you unseated in your positions you have and continue to fail our children thank you amy terrence codd the following comments were submitted by terrence codd whose student attends sunrise point elementary dear members of the blue valley board of education my name is terence codd and i have a son at sunrise point elementary i am addressing the board this evening to note my disappointment with your persistent failures to address the

008concerns brought to you for months parents and students in this district have brought concerns in public comments by way of petition and through countless emails the board has refused to address or even discuss these issues presented one of these concerns has been with the arbitrary gating criteria you adopted as they offer no real chance of in-person learning for older students the board maintains a myopic focus on coronavirus infection rates while ignoring the devastating effects your policies are having on academic performance and mental health over the past several months many people some of whom are medical professionals have given well-reasoned arguments for why schools should be opened i agree and believe that the board should open all schools immediately barring that you should at least do us the courtesy of publicly voting for what seems to

009be your preferred policy of keeping students locked out in previous meetings some members of the board have stated that they want students to return to school to receive an in-person education i will remind the board that it is entirely in your power to make this happen and could be accomplished tonight with a simple vote in addition to your decision to keep students from school the board has also allowed several american classics to be forbidden from being taught in class here again the board has been petitioned multiple times to overturn this policy but has refused to publicly address the issue generations of students and teachers alike have treasured to kill a mockingbird of mice and men tom sawyer and huckleberry finn i believe our students would be also able to appreciate them despite their containing racial

010slurs if the board disagrees and wishes to have them banned then you should be willing to hold a vote for that thank you for having this open forum and for the opportunity to address the board thank you terence carrie paschke the following comments were submitted by carrie paschke whose students attend blue valley southwest aubry bend middle and timber creek elementary the blue valley school district insists on keeping our middle and high school students remote despite multiple suicides an overwhelming number of students failing classes and a high rate of absenteeism these problems aren't unique to our area but the difference between our district and others is how they are being handled i'll give you an example dallas grimes superintendent for roosevelt isd in lubbock said a large majority of our remote learners are not being successful

011over 70 percent of them are failing at least one class any school district that is okay with 70 of their students failing and doesn't do something drastic shame on them for doing that they have the same problems we have and do you know what their response was they ended remote learning in september this district isn't alone either i did a quick search in a small section of the same state and found over 52 others that all found themselves in the same predicament we are in and they all responded by ending remote learning they tried something it didn't work equipped with new information they changed course that's leadership let's contrast that with what we did here in blue valley we tried remote learning but it didn't work we then tried hybrid but that didn't work either

012the logical option after that would have been to try full-time and in-person learning like these other districts but do you know what our leaders did they sent our students right back to remote learning do you know what the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while hoping for different results i'll tell you what i like most about how these other districts handled the same situation we are in they said to their students look our job is to give you the best education we can and we are going to give everything but give up to make that happen unlike our district who just gave up want proof i got a notification from the school on friday that automated calls for attendance have been shut off i guess that's one way to handle

013the problem remote learning is not working our students are failing and not showing up for classes and their mental health is suffering our leadership knows this and is not doing anything drastic and like dallas grimes said shame on them thank you thank you carrie christine white the following comments were submitted by christine white whose students attend blue valley northwest my name is christine white i have two daughters at blue valley northwest since august i've spoken at every blue valley school board meeting advocating for kids to be in school if that is what their family has chosen i describe the faults of the health department's skating criteria as the main yardstick for returning to school i describe the negative physical health effects of online school i describe the learning deficits that are occurring i describe the

014increased incidence of anxiety depression and suicide occurring in our district and all over the country because of the isolation inflicted on our kids i explain the data showing that schools can safely remain open and the infection rate for kids and adults in school is lower than the community at large when fauci the cdc and even dr lemaster from the johnson county health department state the safest place for kids to be is in school i have to wonder what's going on so tonight i'm not presenting any data no statistics no pleading tonight is the story of one of our own blue valley juniors this happened four weeks ago i have the parents and patients permission to tell her story my phone nurse came to me at 11 30 a.m stating one of my teenage patients had

015cut herself multiple times around midnight and was still bleeding from one of the cuts her mom wondered if she needed stitches and if so could we do them i facetimed the patient the cut was three inches long gaping and oozing there were seven other parallel cuts on her thigh i told her to come to the office straight away as i cleaned and numbed the area i asked her simple questions after it was numb i asked more difficult questions how was school bad she missed seeing her friends and teachers miss the routine and learning her grades were slipping from all a's and b's to b's c's and d's how are her friends okay her boyfriend he'd broken up with her but was still calling her in being a jerk was she exercising no was she sleeping

016okay if you count 2 am to 8 am good sleep how was her appetite ok what was she doing for fun or that she enjoyed what had made her cut her thigh with a razor blade 8 times in the middle of the night all of the above she said did she ever feel like killing herself she'd had some vague thoughts about it but never any concrete plan was she still taking her medication for depression yes did she think maybe we should increase that a bit yes was she still seeing her therapist off and on so i sewed her up increased her depression medication went over suicide precautions with her mom and made sure the patient had suicide hotlines plugged into her phone to call or text if needed she promised me that she would go

017to her mom in the future if she ever felt as overwhelmed again as she had last night this is what we're doing to our kids but we don't have to thank you christine next up genesis ackerman the following comments were submitted by genesis ackerman whose student attends blue valley north thank you for your time and for hearing my thoughts i have a unique perspective i am both a blue valley teacher and my son is a full-time virtual ed student i see both the classroom and the bedroom the in person and the behind a zoom wall the struggling ap student and my struggling son my heart is breaking in both spheres i receive at least one email a week from a parent or student asking for leniency or help due to depression anxiety overwhelmingness sickness etc

018i was one of those parents last week sharing my family's struggles and my son's slide into a deeper depressive unmotivated fog it would be convenient to say that this is due to remote learning it would also be wrong our kids are more complex than that this is not a new problem we as a nation and as a community have been dealing with mental health and the decline in student engagement for years we had just begun making positive strides in our schools via programs and conversations our teachers have just begun the shift toward new and innovative instruction the pandemic hit in the infancy of our endeavors and our teacher administrators support staff and parents have been in triage mode ever since most of us have no triage training we are just trying to keep kids as

019close as we can waiting out the pandemic one day at a time we resort to what we know and it isn't working the answer is not found in the hallways of our schools in classroom desks or in basketball practice the answer is not in test scores or college admission the answer isn't in the supportive or unsupportive homes of our kids the answer isn't in technology or the absence thereof the answer isn't different for johnson county or dallas the answer is not anything we have done before so we have to stop trying to do what has worked in the past we cannot do school like we did in december 2019 it just isn't possible the answer is just patience and grace we wait it would be silly in a triage situation to attend to patients as

020normal as if some things don't take precedence over the status quo assigning an essay as a teacher or cleaning the bathroom as a mom would be status quo those no longer seem urgent the definition of triage is to assign degrees of urgency to wounded and hurt patients all of our kids and families and teachers and principals and support staff are wounded by this pandemic all of us are suffering in some form or another we have to stop and assess as teachers as parents as leaders what needs our attention now healing we just need to heal as a community let's learn how to let go of what is familiar and expected at least for a few months maybe that means no finals maybe that means no homework maybe that means being okay with just surviving right

021now our kids might suffer a little academically so what i want my son and my students to be alive i want my son and my students to learn how to persevere i want my son and my students to have a community that values their mental well-being over convenience and social pressure i want to guide my son and my students through this i know that this is the heart of every single teacher in the district we love to teach and our content is important but it is too far down the triage list let's change the conversation from our kids need to be in school to our kids need us the location does not matter we have how many thousands of students learning through our virtual ed program they will not be in a building this year

022right now most of the district will be virtual for the foreseeable future stop wasting time on the where the kids are and let's talk about where the kids really are let's talk about action to assess the wounded and action to keep them healthy they may just learn something in the process thank you genesis and our final speaker amy pelfrey the following comments were submitted by amy pelfrey whose student attends blue valley southwest why does the blue valley school district continue to hold graduation ceremonies across state line when we have adequate facilities to accommodate our graduates and families other school districts in our county use their own facilities and seem to accommodate just fine in my opinion to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a missouri venue to hold graduation ceremonies is not a prudent

023use of our tax dollars and not to mention a real inconvenience for those attending please consider this when thinking about renewing any contract with municipal for future graduations thank you amy this wraps up our open forum tonight on behalf of the board of education like to thank our participants we appreciate each of you took the time to share your thoughts with us next up we will call the meeting to order receive reports from board advisory committees dr merrigan we have several board advisory committees tonight we will start with curriculum and instruction and i believe dr collier is going to give that report the curriculum and instruction board advisory committee met via zoom on november 11th tara walrod district coordinating teacher for student support services and dr kelly wessel director of professional learning presented on social

024emotional learning in 2021 the presentation highlighted efforts being implemented to foster cultures of balanced health and well-being as defined as a goal within our current strategic plan the multiple responsibilities of our mental health team consisting of our counselors social workers and school psychologists were defined relative to social emotional learning additionally strategies being taught to staff and students to assist with well-being were reviewed these same strategies and staff were shared with you at the board of education in a previous board meeting kellyat and i presented on the choices families were being asked to make for the upcoming second semester regarding learning modes that include in person meaningful distance hybrid or full in person and virtual ed the process to be prepared for second semester was described along with program revisions made to virtual education for the

025second semester finally katie bonama and kelly op provided an update to high school course recommendations which the board of education has reviewed the curriculum instruction board advisory committee will meet again via zoom on december 16th this week the diversity equity and inclusion committee has actually met twice since our last board of education meeting the first meeting was held on november 12th at that meeting we began with dr kelly wessel who gave a history of professional learning that has happened within our district she went back several years and shared with the com the committee that information then the committee went through a protocol to identify actionable areas for the group to consider as we work on a dei plan that we would be able to present to this board later this year those categories are curriculum

026and resources dei training and accountability for staff a development of a response system for students and staff to report incidences and development of a restorative justice process a dei subcommittee planning and work in each school and development of student advisory boards then the committee actually between the november and the december reading sent information in about which group they would like to small committee to work on and then when we met on december 12th that's what they did is that each group of those five groups spent some time working individually and collectively to come up with some actionable steps and we plan to meet again on january 14th where we will continue that process um the next committee would be finance and operations and i think kyle hayden is going to do that one the finance

027and operations board advisory committee met on thursday december 10th at 7 30 a.m via zoom 18 members were president along with two guests i shared a general update on the status of the modes of learning at each level and mention the new covid19 testing opportunities available to the district jenny daniel director of finance shared the budget projections and outlook that the full board will hear later tonight jake slavod nick director of facilities and operations presented a design and gmp update on the flexible learning environments at cedar hills sunset ridge mission trail and overland trail elementary schools the gmp total for these two work packages is 8.97 million which is 431 000 under the estimated budget director business operations jason gillum and director of facilities and operations jake slobodnick presented seven design and construction contracts including

028the logistics center design services contract with alison miller they've presented three bids seven state and local contracts including the purchase of apple macbook air devices for the incoming 21 22 9th graders and johnson county community college funding the students we have enrolled for spring vocational education classes the next finance and operations advisory committee meeting is scheduled for thursday january 7th at 7 30 am once again via zoom and the final committee report would be the student activities committee and i believe dr collier is going to do that one as well the student activities committee met on thursday november 19th the primary purpose for the november student activities committee meeting was to discuss student mental health and the development of a mental health action plan caitlin truehee and doug weissner both with the university of kansas

029health systems presented information on mental health caitlin has researched and developed a mental health action plan that she shared with the committee additionally tara wallrud along with dr mark schmidt assistant superintendent of special services shared additional information about some incredible mental health well-being initiatives that are being led by blue valley the discussion closed with david stubblefield requesting a list from schools of current student character development training and student leadership development programs utilized by our coaches and sponsors additionally topics were narrowed down and finalized for subsequent meetings this school year administrators provided athletic and activity updates for each high school and middle school as well as an update from bv recreation the next meeting of the student activities board advisory committee is scheduled for thursday january 14th that concludes our committee reports awesome thanks team thank

030you dr merrigan up next receive reports from board members and the superintendent on items not included in tonight's agenda jody dietz i'll start with you i have nothing to add nothing thank you patrick hurley nothing thank you michelle benjamin nothing thank you mike sites uh one item for those of you that weren't able to attend the kansas association of school boards had its annual convention the 3rd and 4th of december one of the most one of the things that happens at that at that board at that meeting is the election of the i'm going to get this wrong president-elect designee so it's not the next president it's the president after that um and the president-elect designee is jason winbolt of spring hill district one of our neighbors to the south and i was fortunate enough

031to deliver his nominating speech um remotely of course jason is a i think what you'll find with jason is he is a caring empathetic school board member who has the best interests of students at heart and i was proud to nominate him for that position um the rest of the the rest of the uh convention if you will was predominantly um a series of seminars as they have been in the past um and quite honestly it wasn't as voluminous as it has been in the past those of you that were able to attend i know patrick attended i think michelle attended i think jody spent some time there and i know dr merrigan was involved i apologize to you guys because i just didn't see you on on board i think there was a bit

032of disappointment that we all couldn't get together um uh physically and and i know there's a there's a a a lot of um opportunity to network with our with our fellow board members um with any luck that will occur in uh december of 2021 one of the things they did differently is the um adoption of the legislative agenda was pushed to feb february patrick your delegate is pushed to february correct it was held in conjunction with this uh in the past it was held in conjunction with the election they pushed that to february along with if i'm not mistaken the um modification to the um bylaws of of kisb quite honestly the and michelle was our legislative rep the legislative items that kasp is looking at um pretty much mirror what we're doing i don't

033think there's anything that that i saw anyway michelle you you could speak to that more appropriately but it was an interesting and interesting session and uh i hope we never have to do it again mike was the adjustment you talked about a one-time deal or going forward no i i suspect it will be going forward and the reason i say that is there's an advocacy um week if you will in end of january or february that historically board members have traveled to topeka met with our local delegation discussed educational issues and i think the thought is as long as they have those folks together they will continue to have that the approval of the legislative agenda at that point i suspect i'm not sure it makes a lot of sense but what can i say

034right okay thank you mike nothing else for me nothing madam vice president stacy yes um as i mentioned last month i continue to represent the 10 districts around us on the acacia board of directors it has been a busy year this year and also recently a week or so ago two weeks ago they started the conversation but they have voted to allow up to two spectators to winter sports as allowed by local county health departments and the local boards of education when possible they have set dates for practices and games and moratoriums for over winter break they have put out guidelines on mask usage for everyone involved in the activities and it continues to be a very vibrant group with a lot of great discussion enjoy sitting on that also had the chance to sit

035in on a zoom navigating change they had four of the doctors that were responsible for helping set some of the criteria and guideline for the um getting criteria that we use i know i saw michelle and jody on there as well and i know dr merrigan was as well i apologize if any others where i didn't see you it was a large group um but they covered a lot of great information and i didn't get a chance to write everything down because i don't want to monopolize all of the time but a couple of things i would point out they acknowledged or stated that the state board of education had recently said to try to keep elementary in person for as long as possible there was a change to the grading criteria to make that

036a little bit easier to do which i found very helpful they also talked about the covered numbers and how they're starting to see an impact within the state and in our hospitals and what that means for the state they um did note that covet cases unfortunately are rising in children they had been around seven percent and now they're up to about 12 percent i believe they did allude to the mental health crisis that we talk about so much and um wanted to stress that we have been in this crisis mode for several years this is not something new um and that we're this is something that we have been working on and putting a lot of effort into and the doctors felt like this was something that is going to happen and it didn't really

037matter what the learning mode was that it was going to be stressful for kids and focused on that they did mention that the mental health percentage of both adults and children seeking help has risen and they alluded to the fact that those are sometimes intertwined that parents mental health has an impact on students mental health and vice versa and there's a way to hopefully hit it from a family perspective and not just focus on one or the other they also finally alluded to some new math guidelines that had come out and their recommendation was that all sports except for wrestling and swimming for obvious reasons should be masking up and obviously don't use them when they're wet they're not as effective but make sure you're changing them out so again it was another great opportunity

038to learn and hear from some of the folks that are making decisions that we are using and that's all i have thank you mr president thank you stacey i have nothing so approve the agenda for the december 14 2020 regular board of education meeting as published i'm looking for a motion i move that the board of education approved the agenda for the december 14th regular board of education meeting as published motion by amy tyson second by patrick hurley all those in favor please raise your right hand that motion passes 7-0 next up consent agenda approve the consent agenda for the december 14 2020 regular board of education meeting as published looking for a motion i move that the board of education approve the consent agenda for the december 14th regular board of education meeting as

039published second motion by michelle benjamin a second by stacey o'bringer barhal any further discussion or anything we'd like to pull off the consent agenda for further discussion oh good okay all those in favor raise your right hand that motion passes 7-0 next up new business receive report on the blue valley survey dr merrigan thank you tom uh the as the presentation is being pulled up thank you um blue valley gave a check-in survey um that we gave right before the last board meeting actually i think it closed the day after the last board meeting so we wanted to present some results to you this is long so i'm going to try and go through this all the results will be in board docs for those of you viewing and you want to go back and

040look at it so please please know that they will be there um so first of all though before we get into that want to talk about our cover dashboard we've tried to share this each time and you will see that we peaked there at about 95 96 cases and then the last couple weeks we've been at 73 and 77 a couple of caveats this last week of course we had middle and high school students not in our buildings other than for athletics or a few students for special education so i would want to make sure we note that we still would like to know if middle and high school students test positive because that is something we're continuing to monitor but we don't always know that if students are at home and then the number

041of students on quarantine this is staff and students on quarantine and just as a reminder if you go to our district website this is broken out by building if you want to know that it's it's all tied together staff and students but it is broken apart by building so again you can see we peaked at about 679 and this last week we had just 376. one other thing i would say here is that there was a change since the last board meeting and how our county is recommending quarantining of students and staff as you likely heard the cdc changed their guidelines and our county is adhering to those guidelines so rather than a 14-day quarantine uh if you have been exposed now you can come back after seven days with a negative test on day

042five um or six or seven um or after ten days if you don't have a test and you have no symptoms of course so uh that has changed and allowed students and staff to come back um quicker so that was a change so now let's go to the survey um this is how many folks responded uh we had um over 8 300 families about 2050 students and the students were just high school students that's all that we sent this to 1050 certified staff and about 436 classified staff that is about 35 to 40 of each of those groups uh give or take a little bit but that that gives you an idea of the number of participants that we've had and then on the thought exchange you can see how many participants we had and

043how many thoughts were shared and how many ratings we had and then of course the survey was open from november 2nd through the 10th so that's an important date to remember uh so let's first start what which best describes your child's grade level and that shows you um the different breakdowns that we had um what's your students current uh mode of learning and remember this was back november um in early november and so you have in-person daily um you have in-person hybrid which is our middle and high school at the time in person plus virtual ed so some of our high school students do kind of half and half and then we have full virtual education it gives you an idea of again our families so we divided these rather than go question one question

044two into the different areas and so the the first area is well-being and relationships and we've heard an awful lot about that even tonight as you heard committee reports there was a lot of conversation there and we've reported on that and so here are some of the questions that pertain to that how concerned are you about your child's social emotional well-being right now this was family question 16 that's the nomenclature at the top and you can absolutely see concern there um that there is concern from families about their child's social emotional well-being um from staff how concerned are you about your students social emotional well-being right now again you will see concern absolutely concerned from our staff about their own students as well what kind of this is a staff question again what kind of

045effect is the current learning model having on your social emotional well-being and you can see um if you look at you know the negative part uh 30 45-ish 46 percent are having it's a negative effect on them some are neutral but again some concern from staff from a family question how concerned are you about your child's relationships right now it's another way of looking at that again you'll see concern absolutely concerned about the relationships that that they have from a student question how connected do you feel to other students at your school right now and again you'll see uh not so connected in those bottom two cases there from the student what we don't have is a comparison of what we did where this would have been a year ago um post covered or pre-covered

046sorry um a family question how concerned are you about your child's relationships with adults at school right now and so you'll again you'll see some concern there um how concern a staff question how concerned are you about students relationships with adults at school right now and you'll see again you'll see concern here uh from a student how connected do you feel to the adults at your school right now you'll see again not so connected um from somewhat connected all the way down there it's it's it's not overly positive uh a staff question compared to past years how much harder or easier is it to form relationships with your students right now and you will see some difficulty from from staff expressed there um another staff question how concerned are you about your own well-being and

047you'll see again concern about their well-being a student if you were struggling with your mental health how aware are you of resources available to you as a student and again you'll see that there are several students who aren't aware at all and so as much as we think we put that information out there we need to really continue to work on that and so this is a lot of questions uh that we've had about this and and we absolutely noticed concern on there uh we've talked to this board about this in the past um but we wanted to bring in somebody from our community who is an expert in that and so um tim did we actually talk to mark schmitz board advisory committee so i'm going to let mark over here introduce mr dewis

048good evening i would like to introduce tim dewees tim is uh the director of the johnson county mental health center and and i just want to say that tim has been a tremendous partner to the blue valley school district uh for as long as i've been in the district um the mental health center provides a tremendous amount of support a lot of collaboration whether it is with drug and alcohol prevention mental health supports therapeutic services for students uh suicide prevention staff development uh the list goes on and on and uh i did appreciate tim's availability to work with the health and well-being committee and also i'm excited that you're available to share with us tonight with the larger board of education welcome tim and i appreciate you coming here tonight it's my pleasure to be

049here thank you um tim just to kind of get us started i thought we just have a dialogue and i know the board of education has uh questions they would like to ask as well certainly but i know that you listened to part of the survey results um one of the things the parents and staff expressed concerned about the emotional well-being of students from your experience and your perspective how how are we how are the kids dealing with uh kova 19. so um you know when i get asked that question uh i think that we have to understand that that each individual each child is going to experience it in a different way what i can say is that we're all um experiencing this and it's all having an impact on us but from our

050experience here at the mental health center my experience actually uh kids um historically um and by the fact that their kids are much more adaptable to change than adults and so what we've seen is that in many cases um that are the adults that that we're serving the adults that are reaching out to us uh the parents are having a much more difficult time managing um and and adapting to this this new environment and that is impacting the kids themselves so while i certainly believe that there are kids that may be struggling with um online learning there may be there may be kids that are are struggling with numerous things there are kids that are actually doing better and that are that are thriving in in this situation so the fact is is that i

051think that one kid's experience is one kid's experience what we're seeing is that that is greatly impacted by how the parents are reacting i i i'll say one of the things before you before you asked another question i'll also say that that you know there's been a lot of discussions about or concern about increased drug use um you know just at-risk behaviors uh in including um increased uh suicide behavior things like that the fact is is that these behaviors were a problem well before the pandemic they may be exacerbated in some at some level by the pandemic but actually they were much worse over the prior two years and if if people go back and look at kind of some of the things that i was saying in public and making public statements and presentations

052is i was sharing what my top ten concerns for johnson county were and uh number one was an epidemic of loneliness that um our kids were reporting being more lonely than they ever had been uh and and i can just go on and on the fact is is that the things that we are experiencing right now uh unfortunately we're experiencing our community um well before the pandemic hit us the pandemic has just shown a light um to what has existed in our community for a while now and i think parents are just now becoming more um aware of kind of what's going on so you're saying that a lot of the behaviors and a lot of the struggles that students were having before are still happening now have you noticed any any significant differences in

053what's being presented to your therapist and uh other providers well i think that that there's uh there's a little bit we have to as mental health professionals we really have to to nuance the the and make a distinction the distinction between what is impacting kids um emotionally or what's causing them distress versus what's causing some clinical disorders and so we see we see a large amount of individuals who are and again when i say large amount we're seeing a significant amount of adults that are coming in that are experiencing distress because of the current situation we're seeing kids not at nearly the rate that we're seeing adults come in for services um but they are they're they're distressed about what's going on um and and they're having um behavioral health issues with that i don't

054know that i would say that we are seeing uh more true clinical disorders as a result of the pandemic i think that um in fact i i would argue that some of the work that we've done with the school districts in particular with blue valley school district i think that some of the work that we've done over the course of the last two years in the areas of suicide prevention in the areas of social emotional learning in the areas of building resilience i believe that um we actually have created a foundation of resilience and that our kids are actually responding pretty well overall to this pandemic and and we see that in the number of people that are are contacting our emergency uh crisis line you know we wanted to make sure that people knew

055how to access services we wanted to make sure that people felt comfortable accessing services and so they're doing that so the fact that we're seeing more people is not necessarily a bad thing and quite honestly i believe that it's a good thing because that means that we've got the message out there that people are not going and trying to do this on their own or trying to handle the stress and anxiety in negative ways thank tim again thank you we appreciate you being here what advice would you have for parents if they have a student who is is experiencing some distress or changes behavior right now and is is struggling well i think the first thing that i would say is that um that's normal and and that we are going to see kids struggle

056and we're going to see kids have some behaviors that they may not have before the fact is is we're all experiencing a global pandemic that none of us have ever experienced and that's going to impact us what we have to be aware of is when we begin to see those behaviors um routinely impact their lives um on a regular basis so that that if it is more days than not impacting their health then they need to reach out for uh professional intervention and i think that's the key is that um it's providing an opportunity quite frankly for families to come together and and visit and spend time together and check in with one another i think when i talked earlier about this epidemic of loneliness that occurred that really or that was occurring prior to

057the pandemic that really was a result of technology and screen time in the amount that we were not having um human interaction uh what i would call authentic human interaction and so the fact is is that um now we are not able to have some of those social interactions so we're we're finding ways to make human connections uh and i think that's what we need to do you know i put out a statement that i that i think is really helpful for everyone to think about and there were there were basically five actionable steps the first was that we need to acknowledge that we're in the middle of a global pandemic i've never met a single person that's ever recovered or managed the stress of some situation if they've never even acknowledged that it's going

058on so the first is to acknowledge that we are amidst a global pandemic that's having devastating health effects economic effects and personal effects on all of us the second is to be mindful and regulate our emotions um what this allows us to do is become reflective instead of reactive the fearing anxiety that that the virus that the virus creates about what could happen it can be overwhelming and it can develop strong or cause strong emotions and in a world where we face so many things that we cannot control there is one thing that we can control and that is how we react and what meaning we give to this current situation so coping with stress in healthy ways will make you the people you care about and our community stronger so i think it's really

059important that we find what we can control and then control it the third area was really for us to focus on um on sharing the narrative of hope um meaning that this narrative of hope is really this notion that this is temporary and while our world has changed significantly um it will not be forever uh it will not be for heritage forever and i think that creates an opportunity for parents and for us as adults to provide one of two narratives to kids the first narrative is that of a victim that they've lost something that they're entitled to that they should be outraged that they should be scarred um by all of these losses or second narrative that you could provide is that of impair empowerment that's a narrative of delayed gratification of adaptation resilience

060and about grieving and moving on to develop new meaning and new scope and coping skills and then the fourth is gradual um gratitude and helping others there's research that's real clear out there that helping other people have positive health benefits it lifts your mood it refrains negative thoughts and it lets us experience the healing power of human connections it gets back to what i was talking about earlier about authentic human relationships and so when we can find those ways to connect with people and that's why i've been really careful about saying we need to remain physically distant but socially connected that we need to find ways to have that authentic human connection and the fifth i already mentioned that is when we experiencing when we experience or we see these behaviors that are existing within

061our kids um or our loved ones around us we need to get them help we need to outreach for professional just one more question for me and i'm guessing there may be some others um as you look forward what kind of what do you see on the horizon as far as mental health supports and partnerships with school districts like our own uh lessons that we've learned through the pandemic that are going to have staying power and that might help us um address some of these long long held problems with mental health student wellness suicide prevention [Music] is there any silver lining to this anything that we can learn that we can move forward with yeah i think that one of the things that is interesting is that you know mental health has never really been

062treated like public health it's really been faced it's really been focused on and mental health has been treated as a personal matter or something that should be faced alone or faced with a therapist rather than in public or as a matter of public health and that really had needed to change and i think the pandemic has actually created an opportunity for us to begin to have that conversation where we can begin to say that mental illness is not just a challenge for individuals but it's a challenge for populations it's a challenge for society that it impacts all of us and that you can't have good physical health care without um good mental health care and the interesting thing is is that um two years ago when we started zero reasons why that were that was

063some of the first things that we heard from the students themselves uh that really mental health need to be discussed and talked about no different than physical health and that you know as we begin to have physical health classes you probably need to be talking about how we should cope and how we can build resilience and how we can create mental wellness as well as physical wellness and so i think that all of the initiatives that we're currently working with the school district on whether that's um you know signs of suicide or or sources of strength zero reasons why uh there are a plethora of interactions that are happening between the mental health center and in each of the school districts across johnson county and i think that has what really has has been a

064product of kind of the behaviors that we were seeing pre-pandemic and it's really even brought us tighter together to view this as more of a public health issue and really for us to begin to say okay well if we if we want to look at this as a public health issue how do we prevent some of these things from happening and that's really something that i think is really has a lot of of energy and is exciting and is hopeful is that we know by the research that major mental illnesses can be prevented if you take prophylactic measures and what i mean by that is if you are able to identify youngsters at an early age that maybe are not coping as well that maybe have some behaviors that are um not necessarily what we

065would see as positive behaviors if we can not just focus on them because i think that's where we made the mistake to say that the kid is the issue if we can focus on um not only the child but their environment both within the school system but also at home and be able to surround that that child with the the supports that they need which is exactly what the school has has really focused on doing moving forward then i think what we're going to see is a a child coming out of out of the high school not only academically prepared for the next step but they're going to be more resilient they're going to have better coping strategies and they're going to be prepared for whatever barriers they're faced in in the future and that's

066where i think that that the pandemic if we have to look at a positive of of this situation it is allowing us to help kids um become excellent um problem solvers and and um resilient um young people thank you any other questions questions from the board and tim thank you so much for coming we appreciate your leadership in our community and and the discussion tonight so on behalf of the board of education in blue valley we really do appreciate you coming a couple questions for you patrick hurley thank you tim for coming tonight i have a quick question so so if i'm a parent and i and i might have some concerns about my child's mental health what's the how where do i start to try and find the either the professionals or the resources

067to help me uh start having my child looked at or evaluated or even treated absolutely so and and and that's a difficult question because our system is so fragmented and because insurance is so different and the frankly mental health issues are not treated like health care issues and that's an issue of parity so the easiest way to help identify that is to contact our emergency crisis 24-hour crisis line that's 913-268-0156 and that line those folks at that at that crisis line they may they may take your information and have somebody from our open access call you the next day but they'll walk you through where you can access the best services that matches with with your insurance or whoever so many times you know the mental health center really works with with a wide range

068of folks but there are also a lot of people that that have private providers and and the fact is is we can help walk through all of that all of that all of those hoops so to speak and be able to get people connected with the right level of care with the right provider the provider that they want and so what i've said is that people should view johnson county mental health centers not just the safety net for mental health but the gateway to behavioral health within our community we can help you get connected to that so if someone is experiencing significant or even if they're just worried about their youngster or or their teenager they should just call and talk with a professional um at the center and we'll walk through them through the

069next steps i would also i would also encourage any any member of the the board or or any member of our community to participate in things like mental health first day or um or something you know or suicide prevention training that provides you also the the information that you noted and it also helps people ask the right questions but you can't go wrong with just saying hey let me connect you with the mental health center so we can find out how we can get you some support thank you tim one more question on that mental health first aid are those classes that you can enroll in on the website where do we find those yeah absolutely you can go to johnson county mental health center look under resources and and that information is right there

070um i i hope that you all also just recently received the last week or so a mental health matters event that we're putting on tomorrow in fact for just an hour but we'll be running through a lot of the information for all the elected officials here in johnson county about how they can participate um in and be aware of of how we can make our community uh more mentally well thanks tim jody question um yeah so um i was at a meeting what week or so ago and i found out that there is a game plan to have a three-digit phone number um assigned like you know a 9-1-1 or a 4-1-1 can you tell us a little bit about that and how i know i know it's not been completely assigned yet or it's

071not a done deal but where would that get me once it is assigned so it's the 99-988 project and there's still a lot of unknowns there there are a lot of people that are really excited about it i'm excited about it but i also have a lot of trepidation when when the when the nation first created the federal government put a large amount of money into a framework a structure that would support people calling this three-digit number and getting help unfortunately right now the national hotline that exists for suicide the national prevention or the national suicide hotline is primarily funded and the support is provided by volunteers and so to think that we're going to go from uh this you know very um kind of thrown together piecemeal system to a nationwide um three digit

072by just giving us a three-digit number is is really um short-sighted there needs to be some uh there needs to be some some investment in an infrastructure that would support um just like 9-1-1 call centers the the ability for communities to have those now fortunately here in johnson county we have this 24-hour crisis line we are in the process of becoming part of the nationwide suicide prevention hotline and we are all county employees so for johnson county we'll have a a good set of infrastructure but i don't know that other other communities are going to be in the same position that we are and i don't know what that means for the demand because what happens is if there's not somebody available to pick up the call in missouri then it just moves to the

073next closest state so we could be inundated here in johnson county with calls from across the nation so why i think it's an absolutely cool idea something that we need to be excited about and work towards we also have to do it with some thought and planning good jody other questions mike sites hi tim it's mike seitz um mike first thing i want to do is thank you and your staff uh for the ch the way you've been able to change your process um i i think sometimes we forget that um covet affected all of us in this room all of our students but also all of you you and your staff um you know you're not immune because you're caregivers um and the way i've watched you and your staff i hate the word

074pivot anymore but um address some of the the realities has been nothing short of of superb so um thank you for doing that um there's no doubt that that our kids are suffering there's no doubt that we as adults are suffering many of us in this room are are suffering in various stages um but i think one of the things that you said rang true to me and that's it's not forever it's going to be over and um i can't remember who said it but but there are lots of things happening that would suggest the immediacy of that forever is is being reduced um could you talk to us a little bit about the longer lasting effect on and obviously especially on kids and how we as a district can look forward um and plan

075for some of them now as opposed to waiting uh uh until until we need to right well i think that that um there there are always um you know the long-term impacts of trauma and and the fact is is that we are all experiencing traumatic this this event and it's a traumatic event and it's impacting every single one of us and so that's why i think it's important that we validate each and everyone's experience uh and so that will that i think is one of the most important things that we need to do um with young people is is to validate their experience um and and then let them be able to um develop ways to manage that um i think that the other thing that i think that's real important um with with in

076particular young people is to let them grieve i mean the fact is is is they're losing um things um and that's real i mean when i say that that earlier about the narrative i'm not saying that they're not losing something so last year um the kids that graduated in in 2019 in essence really lost their graduation and and so some kids this year are losing their senior year uh or their sixth grade year or whatever and so i think we have to be able to um find ways to to make sure to validate that experience and help people help them find new ways to celebrate that success so while this has been a unique um senior year for the seniors of of our high schools it may be won in the last in in the

077next hundred years so it's actually a very special um senior year so how can they focus on making that senior year special or making this upcoming graduation special the interesting thing is is that as i talked with a number of uh students that have graduated that that went on and and went off to college is that that um when i talk with them i see students and young people that that are very um resilient that have adapted very well and i think sometimes um again our kids are built to be adaptable um their their brains are are still developing and so um it's it's usually us adults that have the difficulty um in that and so i i would i would suggest that we look to the kids to kind of show us the way

078in that and maybe it's maybe it's about having some early discussions with with people or the students today about what types of supports they're going to need moving on after we become you know we get through the vaccination process and and we we have um the vaccines been shared we move forward and we again begin to get back to a semblance of enormous normalcy i will think i will say i personally believe that some things have changed and they probably won't go back to the way they were um you know pre-december of of 2019 but the fact is is i think that we will get back to um you know the things we want to do and and and that will be important for us to talk about with people i don't know if that

079fully answered your question but i think it's really it's really about understanding the impacts of trauma and the long-term impact packs of trauma that have that people experience and in my experience the best way to deal with that is for you to listen to the to the ones that have experienced it and process through that with them not force it um but to allow them to walk through it themselves thanks tim yeah other questions from the board for tim mark schmidt any other items uh just one more i know that tim talked about how to integrate with the johnson county mental health department i would also encourage parents that if you have any concerns about your kids mental health or how they're engaging in school please contact the school we we do have school counselors

080school social workers and also school psychs and if you just ask for a member of the mental health team they will be able to direct you to the correct location thank you tim deweese once again we appreciate it you're no problem your comments and yeah your comments and passion for the topic and everything you're doing in our county and once again like i said before your leadership so thanks for taking those 20 minutes to spend with the board tonight and and people in the blue valley community i i appreciate it anytime um i'll be more than happy to do that thank you thank you thank you mark so here's a couple of the numbers i think he even gave that johnson county crisis line there 913-268-0156 and then the national suicide prevention line and i

081just want to reiterate what dr schmidt said if you at any point are concerned about your child you just pick up the phone and call your main main line you don't have to know who who to ask for just ask for the mental health team so that was the first part of our survey or one part of the survey was on the mental well-being social emotional well-being of kids there were a number of questions in this survey on academics and learning so again i'm gonna there's a lot of questions so i'm gonna go through these and certainly can address questions but the first one how difficult or easy is it for you or your child to use the distance learning tools and so you'll see the family question and student question there this happened to

082be the same one um really not as difficult although families felt it was a little more difficult than students i think but there was for the most part they were okay there a family question how satisfied are you with the way learning is structured at your school right now and you'll see the various degrees now if you were to look at that and you know we want to be totally transparent here that doesn't look bad if you look at this just right there if you desegregate it between elementary middle and high you probably can guess what happens um elementary are much more on the satisfied end than middle and high school so i just want to be very clear on that with this question for staff how satisfied are you with the current learning mode

083at your school again you'll see some satisfaction there again if you disaggregate it you will see a higher degree of satisfaction from elementary than from middle and high school at that point uh from students and again these are just high school students now remember how satisfied are you with the current learning mode or current mode of learning at your school you'll see some definitely dissatisfaction there um from students if covid were no longer a consideration which learning mode would you choose overwhelmingly in person um a few undecided looks like about 10 percent and um some would choose still choose virtual ed that is working for some students families again overwhelmingly would choose in person a smaller number actually said that they would choose virtual or undecided from families and from students if your child is

084currently attending hybrid because remember at the time middle and high school were in hybrid uh how comfortable would you be if you were to attend person every day with the full student population and you will see um that for the most part they're comfortable there was a group that i didn't answer likely because either they were elementary or they were virtual students from staff if you're currently have students in the in person hybrid aabb schedule how comfortable would you be if they were to attend every day and you'll see our staff wasn't quite so comfortable family how concerned are you about your child's academic growth again definite concern so if you could go back one time if you combine all the concerns somewhat very and extremely concerned you're about 78 correct you're concerned about and

085these are this is the family question okay yes yep that's just the family questions yep okay okay um staff how concerned are you about your students academic growth right now and again you will see that there is some concern there as well uh students how confident are you that you can do well in school right now and so you will see that there are some students that that aren't confident that they can do well a staff question how confident are you that you can provide effective instruction in the current learning mode and so our staff were confident that they could do that in the learning mode that they were in from staff how confident are you that you can help your students who need the most academic support and so you will see that there's

086confidence but there's also about 31 32 percent who were not quite as confident that they could do that uh students are you getting all the help that you need with your school work right now and so you'll see yes mostly but about are saying that they're not getting the help that they need a family question how concerned are you about managing your daily schedule with your child's current schedule and there was a concern there a family question how much effort is your child putting into classes right now and so you will see that from a family perspective they're they're seeing effort that their children are putting in some effort uh students how much effort are you putting in again that mirrors pretty much what the family said that they are indicating that they are putting

087in some effort a staff question how confident are you that you can motivate your students to learn in the current mode again our staff were fairly confident that they could do that families how difficult or easy is it for your child to stay focused on school work right now and you will see again about 37 percent a little over that who were finding some difficulty in staying focused from students how difficult or easy is it for you to stay focused on schoolwork right now and you will see that our these are high school students again are saying that it was difficult um family question how confident are you in your ability to support your child's education during distance learning and again not not a lot of confidence there so we'll talk about some of the

088things we're going to do with that information but let's go into coveted safety measures so this question was a family question do you support the kansas state board of education adopted gating criteria that blue valley uses to determine their decisions um you will see 38 30 almost 39 percent said yes um 30 almost 33 said no uh 21 were undecided and then there are even some who aren't familiar with it those of us in this room talk about it a lot so that surprised me a little bit but you will see there's no definitive answer there from our families staff do you support the kansas state board of education adopted gating criteria 31 said yes over 36 said no you'll see again 29 undecided and there are some staff who were not familiar with that

089as well and we didn't ask a follow-up question so on both of these on both the family and the staff if they said no there are a couple of reasons why it could be no it could be no because we just don't want a gating criteria it could be no because we wanted you to use the county gating criteria we didn't want you to switch to this one so there were if i had to do over again i'd probably ask a follow-up question to that if you said no could you give us the reason how would you describe the level of covet related safety measures and protocols in your school and so you'll see from a family perspective i think they believe we're doing great they have above average and average a few thought we

090were below average but for the most part doing well uh students how would you describe the level of covid related safety measures um they had about the right amount was the predominant winner there and there were about 22 who thought we didn't have quite enough then you look at the staff and you will see a few more staff about 33 didn't think we had enough very few people thought we had too many about the right amount was the winner there um how difficult or easy has it been for you or your child to follow the covet related safety measures and for the most part you will see um that they thought it was easy a few people thought it was and then you ask the staff how difficult or easy has it been for you

091to implement and you will see that a few more folks thought it was is difficult or very difficult it is work i will say that's one of the things i learned over the course of the last month as i've been out and subbed in a couple of buildings our staff are have had to learn a lot of new things this year that really didn't have anything to do with the content that they were teaching it's just the different protocols that we're asking them to do to keep kids safe and then final area was around communication how satisfied are you with the amount of time you spend speaking with your teacher this is from a student and you will see various answers there from a student how often does your teacher reach out to you and

092you can see the the different answers there from families how satisfied are you with the frequency of communication from your child's teacher for the most part satisfied when you need to from a family how difficult or easy is it for you to get in contact with your child's teacher so their age easy or they were able to do that um how helpful has the communication from your child's school been this year you'll see the various answers there and then finally the final part of this was that we had the thought exchange and so there were again 3846 people who participated in this uh you see the number of thoughts and then the number of stars um there were top thoughts so there was 1999 thoughts um that each thought gets people can go through and

093market between one and five stars with five being the highest these are the top four rankings you can see do the right thing and stay home be a kind human wear a mask and stay home if you're sick and be supportive of teachers we're our top four comments and then the other thing that thought exchange does is it looks at two sides of an issue and so in this case um the different sides of this issue the blue side and the green side blue had 824 people in it and the green side had 539 and this is generated by thought exchange but the differences they saw were around time so that there's one group that that really wants students back in full time and you can see that's the the green side side b and

094then the other side um talked about uh being in in person as well but they had some other thoughts on that you can read those but you'll see that the common theme there for both both groups was around teachers teacher workload is not sustainable being be kind to our teachers who are exhausted doing in-person and virtual lessons multiple times a week so i thought it was really important to note that although we have both two sides to an issue i think we can all agree that our teachers are really working extremely hard this year and that we do need to to heed some of this advice and then this one again differences around um masks and are we preparing students and and again you will see side a and side b but you you'll see

095what they had in common is that teachers are working harder than ever and 99 of teachers are are outstanding please hear their voices and treat them with kindness so again i want to highlight that even though we have two sides and we have very differing opinions which is great and we can hopefully work together on that and we we do have some common ground there so with that's a lot of data i know we went through that quickly but we want to talk a little bit about some of the work we're doing around this and we certainly do not have the answers all the answers and can make this all perfect i want to be really clear on that that we are aware of this and and i wanted to have some of our staff

096here uh dr schmidt's going to talk um around the well-being and relationships we heard from mr dewees just a little bit ago um but mark is doing a lot of work around that too so dr schmidt um yeah the as you're well aware mental health student well-being has been a major focus of blue valley schools through the last three strategic plans and and so i've been in the district this is my 11th year and i believe it it goes back to about 15 years when we first started to emphasize that based on feedback from the community and and through this time we've been able to enhance year by year and we've made number of changes a few years ago really started to work more closely with johnson county mental health and some other partners in

097the community there's a list of uh items up on the screen right now and i won't go through them again you recently received a report from tara walrod in october about that and there is a link if you'd like to refresh your memory but our main focus this year has been how do we engage kids in the activities that we currently have in place and so a lot of the work has been around if students are in distance learning if students are in virtual ed it is still important to engage the students and still make sure that they are participating in suicide prevention students that are our newest program sources of strength where students are peer mentoring each other with support of a staff getting that back up and running even though other clubs were

098shut down um and those sorts of things so uh although you know i i also want to use the word pivot but we've we've figured out or we are continuing to figure out how do we make this work in this current situation to be resilient if you will as a system so that we can provide students the support they need thanks dr schmidt um dr collier is going to talk to us a little bit about academics so last spring it was clear and feedback that we received from our teachers and administrators that formative assessment really gauging the knowledge and skills of students before a unit is taught was going to be very important this year and our teachers continue to be engaged in exercising utilizing formative assessments those informal checks with students this year and

099they participated in professional learning earlier this year around formative assessments as well we have expanded acadiance that's that screener that we've talked to previously this year about that really is a check for uh to help us identify our early readers k5 that may be struggling or indicating that they may be at-risk readers and so that is assisting us in providing early interventions this year i would like to point out particularly at middle school and high school relative to some of the data you heard from dr merrigan earlier this evening that our teachers and our principals have really been relentless in trying to reach out and partner with our parents of our students who are demonstrating that they are struggling this year whether they lack engagement are showing at risk behaviors etc and so that is

100looking like one-on-one student or family support or small group support or really close study of current courses that they are in so again our staff is very mindful that seeking to help our students to be as successful as possible this year we are following the state recommendations from the navigating change guidance that we received in terms of teaching the priority standards and those are the most essential standards that we can be teaching this year to assist in our students preparation for next school year because that's the concern we hear from our parents is that will students be prepared so there may well be instances particularly if you've had multiple children in a family go through particularly a specific course or grade level that there may be some changes experienced this year with curriculum and that

101again is because we're focusing on the priority standards we know that we'll have to continue to monitor and make adjustments to curriculum so until we complete this year we won't know long term those final curriculum adjustments or revisions but we do know both in our district and others that that will likely be a reality after this school year one thing that we know is that we're learning this year that our students do appreciate having the opportunity for voice and choice and their experiences at school so we continue to this year study opportunities in our the area of college and career readiness and want to take those experiences that we've learned from virtual ed to assist in expanding pathway opportunities for students so again our students are giving us very good feedback and then really on

102this slide you note the comment about continued support of parents and guardians really the the partnership with our families has been absolutely imperative this year and we recognize all that parents have learned that is new for them this year in supporting their students so we certainly just are continue to be absolutely appreciative of that support in the area of safety we're going to continue to exercise the mitigation strategies that are in the buildings in preparation for second semester we will be providing opportunities for transition for students that may be new to the district second semester or going to the in-person model uh second semester we will be assisting transition help students be familiar with those mitigating strategies and then we continue to ask staff as we have the opportunity what else would assist them in

103increasing their level of sense of state of safety in the work environment and we'll continue to ask those questions and continue to be committed to providing them ppe or other measures that they might request or we know that have been successful so we continue and maintain the high level of mitigation implementation that we've already experienced this year in the area of communication dr merrigan is referenced tonight we've spoken quite a bit about the experience of anxiety and depression so as we have moved into a new learning mode here at the latter part of first semester we continue to work with families to ensure that they have access to resources and our staff when we talk about priority standards our staff our teachers are doing a really amazing job i had the opportunity to observe a

104teacher and the really that conclude the beginning and end of that lesson was really about how you put a smile on your face and remembering to carry that smile throughout the day again trying to touch the the heart and the mind of our students in the next area we are working with again trying to inform parents where we see students that are experiencing you know struggles in their learning and will continue to monitor and assess what gaps in learning are occurring or curriculum we engaged last spring our teachers to share with us and to document where they were at in their courses their curriculum so we gathered that information last spring we will very likely do the same this year and we continue to be mindful when it comes to our communication whether either with

105you as our board members of education or with our parents with our staff to ensure that we articulate the why related to decisions impacting the school year so this is a link to all of the results this will be in board docs and so if folks wanted to see all of the results they are more than welcome to go in there and look at that there's a lot of information um if you know if you asked me to sum it up i would say that there is absolute concern from all parties about our students um all parties are working diligently to trying to meet the needs of the student during this this trying time and i would be lying if i sat here and told you uh we have all the answers and and it's

106it's all going to be the same as it was a year from or a year ago uh it's not the same anymore and we just heard mr dewey say that we're in we're in the middle of of this that we haven't experienced before and so we will continue uh to investigate ways to meet the social emotional well-being of kids as well as their academic needs we will work to continue to communicate and to make sure that everyone feels safe but i i want to just go on record as saying all of these groups our families our students not just our high school students those are the ones we surveyed but our elementary our middle or high school students and our staff have had to adjust have had to do things differently and they all are

107to be applauded and they all are to be celebrated and i want to echo what dr collier just said is that we are in this together and so when families work with us with our schools with their teachers and their administrators and the students um we know that we can have success and um so that's that's our um look at our survey and happy to answer questions if you have them so and and because i know a lot of folks will want to see the answer to every question follow the link up here correct and they can see the answer to every single question on the survey because i know you gave us kind of go to board docs and they'll be able to do that okay and you hinted at it just just right

108now on the biggest takeaways obviously you know how concerned are you about your child's academic growth right now concerned enough is 78 how concerned are you about your child's emotional well being right now 75 percent you know concerned enough is that i mean i'm just pulling a couple you know slides question 15 and 16 from the families but is that and following up on things that several folks have said is that is that your biggest driver concerns right now i know there's many of them but those are kind of the ones that really stand out to me absolutely and staff are concerned as well yeah you know if you look at this the staff concerned about their students that they're that's there as well okay other comments questions patrick mike dr american dr collier obviously

109um the president has indicated that uh you know and and you have through the survey that one of the concerns is learning the level of learning and how that's going throughout the year obviously we're concerned about it is that something we're starting to formulate plans for the following year to kind of make up ground trying to put together plans to support the students in the fall i mean while you know a virus is at hand you know i think we have the first vaccination given today i know there's going to be take some time before we achieve the levels that are needed in the population and that may not be till certainly mid mid summer or even early fall but that would be one of our priorities right now is to start looking at ways

110that we can make up some ground uh for uh what we we we're seeing is some loss in academics um due to the cove situation that we're dealing with so i would say that i'll start and i'll let dr collier jump in um so you heard dr collier just a minute ago talk about those priority standards that's what you need to move forward and so that's one of the things that we're really looking at um but we will be we are doing the same thing we started last year is what adjustments do we need to make in the curriculum um what talking to teachers what were you not able to cover how do we weave that into the next year or how do we not weave it into the next year and how do we

111determine that it's maybe not essential i mean those are all discussions that yes and we will we will be ready to to do that when students are ready to come back full time thank you i would just say to patrick in this process we will also learn that there are things that we've done that quite frankly this year and last spring have taught us that we actually can abandon and that abandon abandonment of certain things within our curriculum or practices opens up opportunities and time in our classroom as well so i would say that's another process that we're actually going to be walking through with our leaders and others this spring about what is it that we have learned to your point there will be a curriculum question about that so that we can take

112those lessons and apply them because there's the opportunity to come out of this and even be better than we were before thank you dr collier jody dietz um i i know we've talked a little bit about this so you know things may look a little differently um going forward how um have we reached out to maybe the local universities um and entities to to say okay are you still looking for the same standards for for you know enrollment um where are we at with with that um you know to help maybe alleviate some of you know i've got a junior to help alleviate some of our concerns about them not being able to get into a college because their educational knowledge may be a little lacking so that's a great question so several of the

113kansas regent schools have abandoned the a.c.t requirement for this year um there are several colleges across the country who have done that as well i'm actually on a board with one of our regent schools here and they talked about the need to do exactly what dr collier talked about last year that they did with their staff so our with our staff here where what standards didn't you cover how do we how do we make up for that in in classes coming forward they're anticipating that as well at the college level both at the community college level as well as the four-year college level um so i would say that yes those conversations have begun and that universities are also having to make adjustments and make changes and then would that be related to you know

114sports and recruiting i mean where where are we at with that what do we know um so with sports and recruiting uh as anybody knows who who has athletes looking to get into colleges what we're hearing is that many students um got that extra year uh because they weren't they didn't play this year or last spring they didn't play and so um some of our students are struggling a little bit um to find spots so that's just kind of anecdotal information that we've heard um ncaa again they can work through the ncaa process that hasn't changed so they still have to meet certain requirements there but the clearinghouse is set up to to help them navigate that yeah let me call mike um i'm going to give you a softball um first of all um

115thanks for we need a softball every now and again thanks for showing us the data there was a lot of it and frankly i'm not good enough to to absorb it all you will continue to work to mitigate the negative effects of kovid and the things that it has done to education the ask i have is that every at every board meeting we review your progress we review where our kids are we review um what changes you've made to address some of these issues the the other comment i'd make is that without a baseline it's really difficult for me to understand whether kids for instance on the um are you putting how much effort are you putting in i only know what i may have answered or my kids may have answered in a non-coveted

116environment so i'm a little cautious about the about the effort piece i think it's more important that we understand um the survey is good but the proof is in the data and the the survey was not a random sample i assume it was if i volunteer to answer the question i'm going to answer it and i don't know if it's statistically valid that's all statistics stuff at some point we're going to want to look i think as a district maybe not now but at student achievement and i don't know how we do that but i would ask you to put that on your radar and make sure that throughout the rest of this year we look at that and then planning forward um what are we doing next year for the kids that uh may

117have been impacted pretty significantly so i guess my my ask is let's keep this on the front burner not the back keep it front of mind for this board and i'm not dismissing the survey data at all please don't misunderstand that but student achievement data is far more important when i say student achievement i'm not just talking about academic achievement i'm talking about if there's a way to measure and i didn't ask tim this i probably should have mental health achievement and and social and emotional achievement i'm looking at mark schmidt i don't know how to do that but if there's any way to get those um metrics that would be really good for this board to see got it thank you amy i would just add to what mike said too and just as

118we talk about how kids are doing but also how teachers are doing i think that it's important for the board to hear all sides and all participants in this process so certainly the survey talked about our teachers but as we look to get down the road you know with vaccines and mitigation efforts and other things like where where are they at and how are they progressing and and what do we do i know you guys have done an excellent job of putting those mitigation factors in in place that others have talked about but just to help us keep their thoughts top of mind too i think is important absolutely patrick had another question yeah thank you back to jody's question on on the act or the sct you'd indicated that colleges were waiving for this

119year does that mean they're waving it for the senior class or the junior class they're waiting for the senior class and that may continue for another year as well from what i understand and i guess along mike's question we would want to make sure that you know i think most kids are taking the ict of sct their junior year at some point in time or at least in the in the fall of their senior year and so there is going to be some continuous or ongoing impact because you know we do have freshmen sophomores juniors and seniors right now that are all being impacted at some level and so we would we wouldn't want to stop i mean we'd want to look at certainly our data that mike says on our achievement how we're doing

120but we would want to make sure we've looked at virtually i guess every year oh absolutely and yes we have uh some different assessments that we could look at for example we have map data k through eight we have a practice psat i think that we're giving in eighth grade practice act in ninth grade the actual a.c.t is coming up for our juniors in february if they choose to do that that's the state paid one so we have some different things that we could absolutely look at state assessments i think are still up in the air but that would be another one to look at other questions comments i was i'm just gonna say this is just a comment but i know there were a number of schools even prior to covid that were looking

121to get rid of the act anyway and a lot of them were not using it as part of their evaluation for prospective students so this situation may actually have a lot of schools join and just kicking that to the curb as a way to measure right so that's just a comment i don't have any it's not all schools it's not all schools also be really clear there are some that still require it but yeah but if there's there's a number of pretty difficult to get into schools that are saying you know what this isn't the best measure um i think it's useful for us personally to see where we are academically but um so anyway yeah like with everything i think things will change but i agree with tanya's not every single school you know

122taking data and test scores out everything i i printed out this entire survey there's a lot of a lot of good information in there and where our parents and our students and our families are feeling right now and the challenges that are going on there's some intriguing information in here and so there's a lot of validity and and what we did here 80 about 8 000 plus is that right right which is about 35 to 40 percent okay i figured much higher taking the survey but okay other comments and questions okay thank you thank you very much yeah thank you for the entire staff that administered all that i know it was a lot of work uh receive a report on the blue valve that we just did that uh received the annual enrollment and

123facility planning board advisory committee report eric okay thank you very much i was glad to hear that you appreciate it when people bring you data and in the spirit of that i have the highlights of the 2020 enrollment report for those who are not familiar the enrollment report is a document we create every year that keeps the chronicle of our enrollment history looks at current conditions in our enrollment and then also contains a five-year outlook for projected enrollment in blue valley there we go so just looking at the district as a whole you can see this is broken down by elementary middle and high school we've been quite accustomed to growing in blue valley we've grown at a slower pace in the last few years and then obviously this year we had a decline in

124enrollment uh of almost 650 kids and i'll talk a little bit about where those declines in enrollment occurred and possibly why this graph shows some of our neighboring school districts in kansas this has recently released preliminary headcount enrollment data from ksde and what you see here is it goes all the way back to 1999 but you see in the years where we were really growing at a fast pace you can see that blue valley is the the fatter blue line but you see blue valley and olathe and how they were growing during those kind of boom times versus other districts that weren't experiencing that same amount of of new housing and then when the recession came around all of those school districts kind of grouped together into just a very slow enrollment growth kind of

125a pattern now obviously this was kind of getting to be something that was a little boring to look at because everybody was just growing a little bit but this year it becomes quite interesting and you can see that almost universally these school districts are experiencing some enrollment decline with one very notable exception and that's spring hill that grew by about 30 percent and talking to them that's really all wrapped up in their statewide virtual school but everyone else was experiencing between a three and five percent decline in enrollment depending on the school district and blue valleys was just over three percent uh i'll go back real quick i wanted to add just in this past week mark tallman with the kansas association of school board put out some information where he took some of that

126same data that i was looking at and he also applied a statewide look and added in the effects on accredited private schools and what he found was that it was a common experience not just among public schools but also in accredited private schools that those schools in kansas declined more than three percent from last fall and he noted that the largest drop was in preschool and the lower grades that was our experience as well and a big part of it is kindergarten you can see we had rapidly rising growth in our kindergarten classes culminating in 0607 with our largest class of all time at 1548 students through the recession that settled down some but it had been in the past few years growing back pretty quickly to where in 2019-20 we had our second highest

127class of all time in the year before that was our third highest this year we came in at 1363. and as we talk about a lot a big part of blue valley's growth involves filling a gap where we have our last year's outgoing seniors which may be 1900 students and then you have a smaller incoming kindergarten class that will grow through their senior year but we always have a gap between that previous senior and incoming kindergarten class that we have to fill this year that gap was 554 students obviously we did not fill it we had 1917 seniors uh graduate last year and we brought in 1363 kindergartners on the front end this year but as i noted it's the younger grades where we've experienced kind of that cohort decline so from first to kindergarten

128to first grade last year's kindergarten to this year's first grade we were down 36 and then last year's first to this year's second we were down 65 those were our biggest impacted age groups and then on the right you see looking at elementary schools that shows kind of the cohort change by grade level not to get into any real scrutiny other than just to say it's clear that it's kind of scattered throughout the district and while it's grouped at the younger grades it's it's felt throughout the district as a whole one thing that does not explain a drop in enrollment is a change in housing development we have uh experienced relatively stable housing development hasn't yet been effective if it's if affected if it's going to be um by the current economic conditions and the

129pandemic single family permit totals were right on target between last count day and this count day with what we were expecting and if you look at long range regional forecasting from mid-america regional council they show blue valley in their outlook to 2050 as still being a major player in new residential growth for the kansas city metro area at the top there you can see single-family permits just in overland park january 1st through november 30th of each of those years and you can see actually this year we had in at least in overland park um more single-family homes than were approved last year there has been a declining pattern of multi-family units so we're going to get into the projections first i want to talk a little bit about projection accuracy and what um we've observed

130each year compared to what we were projecting would happen and what this graph shows is for each of those academic years what we were projecting five years before that year occurred so the purple bar is is five years out the red bar is the year before that year's enrollment count and you can see as we get closer to any academic year we are projecting a smaller and smaller range of possibility the top bar is the absolute economic boom scenario and then the low part of that bar is an economic bust or some kind of of a major event that would have a negative impact on enrollment and here's what we actually have observed in enrollment obviously the idea is that that black line passes through the middle of those bars and uh this year i

131think we would say we qualify for what would be a major negative impact on enrollment um the kind of thing we've never really had to consider in forecasting before but i can say that our enrollment came in just at that low expectation that that low end enrollment within about 15 students from what we were saying the year before so getting to the actual projections you can see from last year to this year that initial drop and then it projects for the next five years some gradual growth kind of climbing back out it doesn't project any major increases in student enrollment and if you actually look in 2022 it suggests that the mid-range projection that there's a possibility that we might have one year where we drop in in students a little bit and that's because

132our current junior class is going to be bigger than last year's senior class and it will be graduating out the year before so that's just a big hole that we're filling if you want to know about you know potential for bounce back in enrollment uh next year as hopefully things return to normal i would say that that that high end projection uh would be a good place to look um one thing that we did not do in these projections is we did not take the effect on our current neighborhoods of people seeking other options this year virtual schools and things like that and add it to our neighborhood turnover we we kind of left their their trends held them steady from what they were in previous year's increments and carried that forward otherwise that would

133take this year's impacts and carry them forward through the the next five years and we don't want to do that because we don't believe that will be our reality don't feel like you need to focus on the numbers here that's not the intent really it's just to kind of get an idea of the colors the yellow are schools years where they are within our desired utilization of the building green is 110 percent of utilization are higher and gray is 75 percent or less for elementary schools what we observe in the projections is that most schools have a fairly level enrollment over the five-year period cedar hills and wolf springs are the two elementary schools that are expected to exceed that desired capacity at some point in the five-year projections and the facility planning committee which

134kyle's going to talk about in a little bit um has them in in their discussions and obviously we're building a new elementary school as we speak to help help alleviate some of that from middle schools no school at its mid-range projection uh exceeds the desired capacity in the five-year period uh aubry bend we've are always watching that is expected to grow but not past that 110 percent uh and then prairie star if you look at they've got a lot of gray they remain underutilized but they should begin to grow again by year five and they have some new development in their in their attendance area and then for high schools we've been talking about blue valley high a lot in recent years in their capacity the projections have none of them none of their years

135in the green in part because the new addition of the new instructional spaces that will be coming online next year play into these colors and also because development's been a little bit slower on their side of the district compared to the west side so it's really stabilized their their population there and put them in a good place blue valley southwest remains underutilized and they have most of the growth in the district so we've got a lot of good capacity as as the school district grows so those are the highlights that i wanted to bring to you from the enrollment report tonight and i think kyle has the facility planning committee okay thank you eric next slide um so the facility planning committee if you're not familiar with that for those out there listening it's made

136up of 11 patrons that's two from each of our five high school attendance areas plus one at large person there's six administrators that serve on that committee along with three board members including mike and michelle and patrick that committee met twice in october and that's usually an annual typical thing that happens sometimes they meet more often just based off of scenarios this year was just twice in a large part it was only twice because when you looked at the numbers that eric just presented um this year was was kind of an exception to the rule of what we had typically seen and because that data was was a little bit skewed it was difficult to to really bring recommendations that um would impact boundaries for our different communities and so a decision was made to

137kind of to punt on that and meet again in the spring and look at really what the bounce back was for our enrollment because that's kind of a critical component i think the of the decision making process is you know we're hopeful that the bounce back is strong and that it's quick and but that remains to be seen i think there's a lot of questions to be answered and not only in in our parents minds but just community as a whole and amongst the state the region and the nation so there's a lot of factors i think they're going to weigh into that but at the current time there's no recommendations that we're bringing to the board um and we'll see what the spring brings and maybe even wait till next fall questions questions from

138the board and i assume in kindergarten numbers various reasons kids going to different schools parents holding them back with everything going on various reasons correct on that number that's what we believe you know where we could i think you heard eric say have a all-time record next year of kindergarten sections and that would be awesome we would welcome those students right and that would be that bounce back you're alluding to on a couple different levels other questions i know we've seen a lot of this data before you love it don't you eric i do i know i'm here i know we appreciate that that's you're usually spot on nothing else mike um i just want to say thanks to kyle and the the information that you provided is no doubt um accurate the concern that

139we all have is the bounce back and um on i think the um facility plan i'll speak for the other board members the facility planning committee um i think did the right thing by deferring any decision on anything until we get more data next year so i know we were all disappointed that we couldn't meet another six times this year but it certainly was the appropriate um the appropriate thing to do um the the the numbers speak for themselves i think we knew it was coming we weren't surprised i don't think any of us were surprised by the decline i think jenny's going to talk about the financial implications of doing that and we weren't unique among any of our peer districts um eric did a great job again as you always do um providing

140information not just data and i think that's the most important thing so thanks you're welcome and i do know who you are yeah i know you do anything else i appreciate it man you bet thank you kyle okay next up receive a report on the blue valley budget outlook from i believe kyle and jenny so i'll go ahead and get us started here um so we're here tonight to talk about our budget and the budget outlook highlighting where we stand in our current year and then also looking forward to the next fiscal year the budget challenges we're going to highlight here are not new to blue valley but we do feel that given the work that needs to be done to balance next year's budget it is something that we need to share with you

141and with the community out there who are listening tonight last year a great deal of time was put into updating the district's five-year strategic plan and dr merrigan led that effort the district's mission and the strategies that we use to fulfill the mission help provide us with a framework a road map of sorts to help us make important decisions that impact our students our staff and the community at large it helps us stay focused on what's important and what our priorities are and what matters most and obviously first and foremost that's our students as we address the blue valley budget we want to utilize the mission we want to utilize the strategies to kind of help guide us through that decision-making process at this time i'm going to hand it off to jenny daniels she's

142our director of finance and she's going to once again show numbers so this is a numbers night for you a lot of data to take in but i want to make sure and especially for those tuning in because we know we have a broader audience that may be interested in this but you know there's some key points that jenny is going to go through and some foundational pieces to school finance that and how it relates to blue valley that is unfamiliar to the general public and and quite honestly can be quite complex but um so comprehending that is important and and we want to make sure that we kind of touch on those things and give a little budget 101 perspective we would take another two hours if we really wanted to dig in and

143go in quite detail but we do want to touch upon a few things at the start of this so jenny so um just to touch on the district manages 39 separate funds and they all have very specific spending related to it and so tonight i'm going to talk to you about some categories of funds the first set of categories of funds is we're going to talk about operating funds and so these are the funds primarily funded by our state aid this pays for our yearly operational expenditures so our staff salaries health benefits supplies utilities these are all the basic costs to run the district and they fall all fall within operating funds another category that we talk about a lot are capital funds and we have two of those and one of those being the

144capital outlay fund which is a levied tax on our patrons and this supports construction and technology and a few years back during block grant times the legislature in order to help out districts kind of expanded what could be spent in the capital outlay fund and they expanded it to include things like uniforms um software building facilities and most of that is the staff who supports those facilities so we were able to put things like custodians maintenance grounds those people who work and support the assets of the district another set that falls in those capital funds is the bond funds and so many of you know that we recently uh passed a bond referendum and so the things in the in those funds funds are going to be your long-term assets so you're going to build

145your buildings in there you're going to have our one to learner initiative where we're buying equipment and those are going to fall within bond funds the most important thing to remember is that by law we cannot co-mingle these funds so often people say what a beautiful building why can't we pay for such and such out of that but by law we cannot commingle those funds together so we're going to walk through enrollment so eric just talked about head count of students but we are actually funded on full-time equivalency or fte and so that's actually fte equates to a student's daily minute so they're enrolled in school divided by 360. so not all of our students are full-time so 1.0 student would be funded full but we'd also have some students that are 0.5 and so

146they would not be funded at that 1.0 that enrollment is counted annually on september 20th it's submitted on a superintendent's report that's sent to the state and then our the ksd auditors come out and they're actually will be here in a few weeks and they'll audit those numbers from each of our schools and then that is our audited fte enrollment that we're funded on so also a few years back the legislature decided for their own budget that it was better to use a prior year count for that so they had a better idea of what to expect in their own budgets that they're having to do and so we're actually funded in this 2021 school year on last year's 1920 audited account and so that enrollment from prior year will be funded this current year

147at 45.69 for fte and then 47.06 and 2122. the state does provide for if there is a decline so eric spoke on that that we will be seeing a decline and so we would use last year's audit enrollment and then next year when we would be seeing a decline from this year we actually can use the two years prior whichever is higher and so we will likely be using 1920 again we also the state recognizes that there are um some students that might require extra expense in order to educate and so we have what's called weightings unlike fte enrollment these weightings are actually audited in current year and so if you see um a decline in a current year those weightings we'd also expect to see a decline so in this year we'll probably look

148to see if our weightings will be going down they audit those in january and so some of the enrollment weightings areas that we have are transportation bilingual at risk career and tech ed and extraordinary growth so kyle touched on some of the challenge that we had over the years and that we have worked through um painstakingly and we've we consider these kind of levers that we've used in order to kind of right-size our budget and help us fix some areas and so when the legislature changed the uses of capital outlay we were able to kind of use a lever to move some staff that we had sitting in our operating funds we were able to use move custodial staff into capital outlay this freed up the dollar in our operating funds and where it was

149able for us to pull lever there we do have a cash reserve balances and so there have been in some years that we've used our cash reserves in order to store up some of our budget a few years back dr white worked with all of our budget administrators to do something called zero-based budgeting and so every single district administrator with a budget had to come in for a meeting we had probably 40 to 45 meetings every administrator came and walked through every line item of their budget and explained what that line item was for and we were able to find some savings in that process then recently we walked through some expense reduction efforts and some additional revenue options as a district we do not have a lot of revenue options per se um we

150do have some fees that we have and been about 10 years since we had raised fees and so we were able to at this time raise some fees this year and then we also went through painstaking expense reduction efforts last year with a budget task force we reviewed some staffing adjustments that was about 2.4 million dollars we were able to find some more contracts that were sitting in our operating funds that we could shift to capital outlay and we also found some areas where we could lower operating costs so that gave us some savings of about 3.9 million dollars and then we walked into covid and so though that work was painstaking and we it was a lot of good work it was not for naught it did allow us to kind of find a

151hole in our operating budget but unfortunately we had to put covet expenses remote learning expenses in that kind of hole that we created and so now we're kind of walking into more expense reductions because we have about a 4.4 million dollar gap for in our budget so just kind of touching on covid um some of the things that we're looking at in this budget year is we do have lots of revenue so in our um in our funds we do gather some interest mostly from our funds from bond funds we do know that the market has dropped and so we are going to see some loss in revenue there um the fees that we've collected facility rental fees because we're not renting out our facilities food service income all these areas we're going to see

152are going to be a drop for us we've had a lot of additional expenses we've had supplies related to covid we've had ppe masks cleaning supplies all these extra costs and then all the staffing and the stipends paid to teachers for all the extra hard work and creating curriculum for our district to date the district has received about 1.8 million dollars in federal revenue one from the cares act about six hundred thousand dollars three hundred thousand dollars of that is for special education covet expenses three hundred thousand dollars is for um general education coveted expenses and then the county actually has allocated us about 1.2 million dollars of their federal revenue to help with covet expenses um to date we've seen about two million dollars in covet expenses across all funds not just operating funds

153and we expect to have about another 2.5 million dollars in expenses due to covet towards the end of the year so this net result of how much we have received in covid funding to what we expect our expenses to be is a net deficit of about 2.7 million dollars so now we're going to walk into the revenues and expenses of our budget and before we start on revenue i'm going to have to touch on a little bit something called ancillary facility tail off so when we talk about funding one of the things on the revenue side is we have when we open a new facility the state allows for something called extraordinary growth and so if you meet those criteria that the state has put forward you can go to the board of tax appeals

154and since you don't have any funding coming in for that new building quite yet until the students get in your building they allow you to if the board of tax spills approves when you open that building that you can levy a tax or that money comes into you it goes back through this to the state and then it's fed back through the state aid formula and so this graph is just showing you um we get two years of that funding and then it starts to what we call tail off so you get 90 in the third year and then 15 tails off every year and so this graph is just showing you when you're looking at 1819 i think that was about 11.7 million dollars in one year and 7 million in the next year

155so that kind of difference is the 3.6 million dollars so that just shows you the revenue that we're losing each year as this kind of tails off from that funding source so when we're looking at 2021 to 2122 our projected revenue in 2122 is about million dollars compared to in 2021 of so we're looking at an increase in revenue of about 2.9 million dollars and the change in this is made up of your base weightings and your state aid of the finance formula of about 5.6 million dollars but then you see this tail off of 1.4 and then also we receive covet dollars in 2021 we will not receive that federal funding and 2122 we do not project so that's another loss of 1.5 million dollars in federal funding i do see some uptick back

156of our other miscellaneous revenues and so that change in revenue is that's where we get the 2.9 million dollars on the expense side when you're looking at the expense budget and totality you will see that our budget is made up mostly of people with with 71 of salaries for across all employee groups 17 is health and benefits and only 12 of these other operating costs which is mostly your utilities um supply costs and the transportation contract for transport transporting our students so when we're looking at our projected expenditures we're looking about 212 million dollars for 2122. um in 2021 it's 208 so you're looking at a difference of about 3.9 million dollars and that's made up of net personnel changes of 2.2 million dollars and then the change in other operating expenses 1.7 as you

157can see when we talk about projections we will look to use about 689 000 to balance in 2122. so in 2021 which is this budget year we have an enrollment increase of about 18 students because we're using last year's audit enrollment so that's the difference between 1819 to 1920. our base state aid per people is 45.69 so we're looking at revenue in our operating funds of about 204 million dollars in the expenditure side we're looking at about 208 million dollars that's a net difference of four and four million dollars and so in order to make up that shortfall we're looking to use our cash balances of about four million dollars in 2122 you can see our net enrollment increase is zero because we will look to be using our 1920 audited account again we will

158see an increase in bay state aid of to 47.06 so our revenues will be about 207 million dollars and expenditures 212 which is about a net difference of 5.1 million dollars and this is where we'll use the cash balance of 689 000 that will get us to a kind of a peg in our cash balance reserves of about 14 million dollars and that puts us in a position of about 4.4 million dollars and this is where we're going to have to work towards okay so what's next for us in january we are planning to engage our staff and members of our board advisory committees and other several other committees standing committees that we involve with parents and community leaders and a conversation around this information in the blue valley budget and a little bit a

159more brief message but we're currently process of scheduling about 50 meetings that will occur throughout january in the early part of february during those meetings we plan on walking them through a thought exchange exercise is being coordinated by christie mcnerlin the communications team ultimately the expectation is that we develop a plan to close this 4.4 million dollar gap and bring a recommendation to the board in march and march is important because that's when we look at starting to staff for the next school year so here's our timeline tonight obviously is our the first presentation to you guys um in january we'll continue to provide updates the staff and community engagement piece happens february the same thing and then march the recommendation along with um making that happen so our hr staff can work with our

160principals questions so so 4.4 million for the next school year and that's with all funding staying intact nothing deviating from some of those things okay um you took you talked about staffing community engagement starting next month what does that look like as far as our community and get engaged is that survey is this virtual stuff is this what are you thinking about kyle yeah so you know all of our board advisory committees are via zoom um and so we continue in that practice you know those dates are already established throughout the school year so they're set uh for january on the regular schedule um so the plan would be that uh right now is is a video that uh walks through this some of the high points of what we just showed obviously in a

161more abbreviated fashion and then simultaneously would go through a thought exchange process where we ask a few guiding questions and much like what dr merrigan showed earlier about the survey is you know some of that thought exchange information as answers come in to some of these questions while you have the opportunity then to star them like them and you can start to see what rises to the top and so you if we go through that exercise with these different board advisory committees hopefully you know gain a lot of different perspectives and use that input and feedback to help with decision making we'll do the same exercise with all of our different schools so some 38 different meetings that we'd have engage our staff and you know our hope is that with each one of these

162that we can accomplish this task in about 30 minutes so it's not necessarily all time consuming but um and and the end result is that uh we can use that to help guide our conversations administrative conversations with an internal budget task force a team that would continue to look at the opportunities we have to close the budget gap so you when you say community engagement you're talking about through our board advisory committees then okay and committees like pta pto and all the presidents the best committee and the best all those groups yeah awesome thank you stacy yeah can i ask you to um maybe talk a little bit about the cash reserves i know there's always a lot of confusion about how much is in there what what that's sitting for because it is unusual

163to just use 689 to get us down to that 14 million can you talk about the significance of that 14 million and what that means for us sure um so when you talk about cash reserves i know actually the state just currently went through a cash audit of all the districts and actually determined that they had nothing to say about it mostly because everyone's different gfoa which is the government finance officers association has put out that it's usually good to keep a cash balance enough to cover two months of operating costs we are looking at about 15.6 um in one month for payroll and then in our operating funds and then about 1.7 to cover the rest of the cost out of our operating so you're looking at about 17 to 18 million a month

164and so we don't quite even have that with 14. so it's just good that you have enough to for kind of a rainy day fund so if a state payment has to be held back i know that we had one just recently that they had to put it in july instead of june it wasn't a you know a big deal for us but you just never know what happens and so um we do need to keep some reserves just like any business would okay but that dollar amount really doesn't even cover for one month that's correct and so you may recall i think early on in our tenure maybe before that i think the state was delaying payments a lot correct in regards which pays salaries and yeah so it's obviously a significant deal questions

165patrick um junior kyle so i know you're going to reach out to the board committees and kind of generate that conversation and kind of go through an evaluation process but what are the traditional tools or areas that you we would start having a discussion about to close that 4.4 million gap well i think it you know jenny pointed to the different tools and levers that the district has used in uh over time and and and quite honestly we've we've been able to do that without um a significant impact to our programs and and things in our people and um you know everything every decision we make is is an impact to our to our people and to our staff but in large part we were able to kind of make some minor adjustments use capital

166outlay resources you know gain some additional revenue in some areas um but unfortunately you know and one of the reasons we're really being a much more public with this conversation and trying to to bring this forward is is that um we're kind of been backed into a corner a little bit and we we have to really do some evaluation of programs and and kind of get some get some input on what do people value in blue valley what's what's important to them at the elementary level at the middle level at the high school level and with an understanding that there may be some things that we will have to adjust there may be things that we need to suspend there may be things that we just kind of came up earlier that we abandon you

167know some things in curriculum that we may have to abandon but there's also some things and programs that you know through a program evaluation and getting feedback that we might look at and go is this essential for us to have so those are type of things that i think that we'll be looking at so go ahead well i was just you're using very kind language back in the corner a little bit we're gonna i mean from what we're looking at we're gonna have to make some really hard decisions um we did some right sizing stuff last year um that we had to make some tougher tougher decisions from that from my what i recall but going forward we're gonna have to make some hard decisions is that is that a correct statement no i think

168that's safe to say you know like i said um every decision we make is an impact to people and it's gonna and some people are gonna be passionate about one thing more passion about one thing than another um but you know undoubtedly you know if you make a decision to cut something whatever that is um then some people are going to be impassioned about that and and and that's realistic and that's i think we know that going in so um but you know we're we are in a position where those decisions have to be made and um you know what though and dr merrigan has said this a number of times internally within our administration team and as we have discussions with our principals this is doable you know we can accomplish this but it's

169not without some pain mike um really three questions two easy one maybe not so easy um the first is do you feel there's any additional federal or local um covid related reimbursement that will be coming our way i haven't heard of anything but you guys probably know more than i do i i don't think there's any more johnson county dollars i think there's still a possibility of the federal government that they might and then if they do do another covert relief that there will be school district money that would go through the state and then maybe be allocated to us okay um the second and i think i know the answer to this have we exhausted all of the um um i'll call it operations based um capital outlay that we can i think it

170was in the eight and a half million dollar range at some point we're we've used everything we can that lever correct we don't have anything waiting that's correct we've moved just in staffing it's about 1200 12 million dollars okay 12 million okay i was wrong on the number the third is the elephant in the room and um i looked forward well i already knew the answer but i looked at our legislative positions and i want to talk about special education funding for a minute um statutorily um we are due 92 percent of the excess costs associated with educating our special education students we have probably the best special education program in kansas we have parents and and children who move here specifically because of our special education and i don't in any way suggest that

171we want to change that um we're currently funded i think at 62 so we're getting about two-thirds of the dollars that it takes to to fund a special education student can you tell me what the delta is between the 62 and the 92 in terms of dollars well i pulled that up because i expected that question you knew i was going to ask the question and i can't get my computer to pull up but i have about i ha i think it's let me see if i can pull it back up both brackets the nearest million would be great because i know it's it's it's it's huge it's safe to say mike as she's working on this that if they were to fund us at the 92 this 4.4 million would go away and we'd

172have some left over to put towards staff wages um that are much deserved especially after uh this year so it's about 12 million dollars about 12 million deficit state aid to the 92 percent okay and i guess i'm making a bit of a pitch for our legislative positions because that's number one on the list um what i don't want to do is if we get to 92 i don't want you to stop your efforts at continuing to look at expenses with a fine you know fine-tooth comb if you will and i know you will because the the the continuance obviously can't continue if spending more than more more on the expense side than on the revenue side um but i think it's important for those um watching the stream to understand that statutorily we're due

17392 of those excess costs and we haven't been funded at 92 percent at least since i've been on the board in fact in the last two years i believe it's gone down from a 68 69 percent down to 62. so we're actually losing ground mark schmidt left i don't want to take anything away from those special education students however it was 65 last year 65 last year okay sorry that was a bit of a uh editorial but 12 million bucks is 12 million bucks it's an appropriate editorial yeah that was good patrick thank you i got one difficult question obviously that 12 million dollars is important you know since uh 2008 the real question is um you know we went through that difficult financial recession we increased class sizes and so i know you said

174this is doable but how likely are we going to like see some sort of potential increase in class sizes going through this budget exercise obviously it's it's doable and it's it's um potential that we get the 12 million dollars but the the dollars available continue to be eroded over time and and this question is really there's this year and there's next year and the year after that go ahead i will take that one i don't think we can sit here today and say to you we're going to raise class sizes we're not going to raise class sizes because we truly want to listen to our our community the very first question we ask is what do you value and then we ask some questions around budget so i don't think we're here to say that

175uh we did they did raise class sizes in 2008 i was in a building at that point and i remember that so that that is one level but that's only one lever of ways that you can look at different ways to reduce your budget so we are going to have some tough decisions to make and what you suggest is one but i don't think we're in any position to say um that that is what we're going to use or that's not what we're going to use until we hear from our community and you're right it is moving forward so you heard kyle say what are we're going to ask folks what are some things we should suspend just for a little while and maybe we pick them back up again if we can what are

176some things that we just should abandon because they're really not working um and then what are some things that we just have to um cut for now and it's just gonna be painful i mean those are some real tough decisions we're gonna have to make okay so remind me again how coveted monies were dispersed to the districts so um when you talk about the esser monies that was in that first co swing of quiver relief it actually the federal government gave it to the state the state then allocated it on title one allocations out to all the districts um so not on the staff size or student population it was on title 1 population and then the other dollars the federal government gave money to all the counties and so johnson county actually i had

177to submit with my team all the expenses that we had and then they allocated it to us in three um buckets of money and then that came to about 1.2 so the bulk of it came from the johnson county allocation so um when we talk about title one just so that everyone understands our district may not have quite as many title one students as let's say someone to our north or or even south that's correct so there were some districts with very low enrollment and maybe not very many staff who got much larger allocations of money than we did thank you other questions from the board yes michelle um kyle you had mentioned that when we assess our community and what prior what priorities they are they feel um we were going to do it

178through advisory committees are we also going to put out something to the general public or um i just i think that the advisory committees is a very limited amount of people from the community while we do a really good job i think trying to pull from all different areas i just somehow if we even just did another survey like we did for um how are you feeling about all of this i just think it's important to kind of throw it out there and let everybody give their input um and then then make our decisions so yeah i think you know we're early in the process and so um you know once we get into january and we see you know what the type of feedback we're getting maybe see what type of consistencies or inconsistencies

179there are and if we need to cast a wider net then um then that'll be up for discussion okay question anybody else thank you jenny and kyle appreciate the way you manage our money in this district tremendously and we've always done a great great job at including this so look forward to working with you guys for this next couple months and and seeing where we end up here thank you thank you next up consider amendment to the 2020 2021 calendar this evening we are going to ask the board to vote on a revised calendar for the remainder of this school year we bring these revisions recommendations to you the state has given us some flexibility as we've communicated around snow days and our ability to engage in remote learning with snow days the state board

180has also recently acted related to professional development and how we can look at those days and so i'm going to walk through for you the revisions that are suggested this evening so first of all january 11th 12th 13th and 14th typically you'll see three days for high school finals you'll note that we're suggesting creating some breathing room if you will for scheduling and for students at the conclusion of this semester with four days for finals at the high school level then january 15th at the end of that week the recommendation there is that that actually becomes a professional learning day paired with grade preparation that actually is a typical standard process for us in the district originally that was noted on our calendar as a half day for early childhood through 12th grade and the

181recommendation is half day professional learning and grade preparation that professional learning is important for that last bit of teacher to teacher teacher to counselor transition and collaboration getting ready for the start of second semester there on that tuesday february 25th february 25th that falls during the week of parent-teacher conferences on that thursday we have learned and understand that we need additional time for scheduling parent-teacher conferences particularly at the high school level so to ensure that we're having opportunity to schedule with parents those conferences that we need to have particularly if and where our students are struggling or at risk this year we want to make sure we have that time for our teachers um set aside strictly for those parent-teacher conferences and then the next revision is the week of spring break previously that was

182noted this year as march 18th and 19th the recommendation is a full week of spring break the 15th through the 19th would be the revision and that recommendation is brought forward to honor the needs of our students for a break prior to the remainder of the school year there and you can see that stretch for our students there through april and may in april we're recommending we're recommending a movement of professional learning that was scheduled on the 19th on a monday in april we're recommending moving that to the 23rd giving some forethought to needs associated with substitute teachers and so we thought it would be advantageous friday is typically high substitute day advantageous to move that professional learning day to friday in lieu of a monday so those are the recommendations for the remainder of

183this school year's calendar you'll know to just as a point of comment that in june you'll see that we still have three days noted for high school finals three versus the four we do have that time if you will in our back pocket depending upon the learning mode if it's necessary to have four days there at the end of the year certainly we would do that but just wanted you to know the difference in those two months june versus january so those are our recommendations for uh revision for this calendar year okay thank you so the major changes are spring break's been added essentially back in that full week correct and then a couple days in february right uh yes the favorite professional learning correct okay and then some days have moved in regards to

184professional learning correct thank you patrick no go ahead stacy sorry i know you haven't asked yet oh that's okay um so um unlike previous years it looks to me like june 4th is going to be a hard stop right we don't have to worry about snow days anymore there's no fluctuating waiting to see what happens with the weather that is the last day of school so parents can plan around that true or false so june 3rd will be that last day the fourth will be a professional learning day and yes that is our plan we'll be able to k-12 engage in snow days at home learning at home and we do have some time if we were to for some reason have a traditional snow day if that's something we had to do we would

185be able to do that but we believe we're going to be able to address it through remote learning okay and then i um as tom just mentioned the spring break that is fantastic i know you alluded that it will be a wonderful break for our students i also think it will be a wonderful break for our staff and in talking to some staff and getting some emails there was a question raised about if there was anything that we could do over the upcoming winter break as far as adding days there was some concern that you know they really don't have time to quarantine you know for the recommended amount of days and then travel and visit family and come back i understand that this is last minute and that's probably not realistic or doable but

186i'm wondering if there's anything else that we can provide as an option for staff to allow for a peace of mind that they might be able to travel and see family and and experience at least a little bit of a winter break so i can jump in there we've been working diligently with a lab in johnson county to do testing for staff and we've actually tested it on indian valley so thank you to our indian valley friends last friday who who volunteered to do that and it worked well so staff are going to get some information from our hr department here in the next day or so about an opportunity that they could if they choose nobody has to do this um get a a coveted test uh over the course of the next uh

187few days before we even leave next tuesday that is fantastic thank you so at least they could have some peace of mind knowing that they do or do not have it thank you very much i really appreciate your efforts and i know this is hard and difficult to change and you know maybe some folks won't appreciate the changes but i do feel like they're being made in the best interest of the students and uh the staff so i really appreciate your efforts thank you patrick thank you so so we're adding three days to spring break right and we're ready three days to february so we have a full week off in february no february that is those are parent teacher conferences and thursday we have made that a non-student attendance day so that high schools

188have that full day for parent teacher conferences versus students in on that day allowing more time for conferences with parents elementary middle we're already out all we're doing on that thursday in february is saying high school is also going to be out because they need the time to do conferences okay so so february 22nd 23rd 24th 25th those are they're only out thursday and friday students wouldn't be in school those lines are there because that's telling you that there are conferences happening all that week the kids are still in school monday tuesday and wednesday yes okay so so we're just adding three days to spring break right and then at high school one day one day so we're having four days off for high school yes and three days to middle school and elementary for

189spring break how are we making up the four days we have plenty of minutes we have to meet 1116 minutes in a year and blue valley has exceeded those minutes the state also gave us a small waiver for some professional learning time if you watch the state school board meeting last week um for january actually december but we don't have any january february march april and may for some professional learning time you have in there but but we have the minutes within our calendar to make this work and so school times aren't going to change start and and end of the day okay jody okay two questions my understanding is we've heard from those maybe experts in the mental health arena that having the the spring break a real spring break would be incredibly beneficial

190so i just wanted to put that out there that it was motivated by recommendations from the mental health community and the other thing is and i would be remiss and my i would have to go home to a 13 year old who would be very upset but she wanted me to put in a pitch for the snow days right because they need that occasionally so i just i'm just throwing that out there and if we are over on time you know um if it wouldn't be beyond the thought of of implementing some normalcy it does it's the same day and the whole world so i want to put that out there if that's ever on the table that you know there would be a heck of a lot of kids and probably some teachers and

191parents who wouldn't mind maybe a snow day occasionally i bet they wouldn't want to go on june 7th though as it yeah probably not i'm just putting it up there yeah point taken though any other comments okay looking for a motion i move that the board of education approved the amendment to the 2020-2021 school calendar as presented motion by michelle benjamin second by patrick hurley all those in favor please raise your right hand that motion passes 7-0 more calendar stuff introduce the proposed 22-23 calendar katie yes so as a annual function again of the calendar committee um that has representatives again from our teachers and administrators we've met to design a 22-23 calendar fairly standard in nature a couple points i would point out to you in september it continues to be a value of

192staff to ensure that we have conferences earlier in the semester rather than later to assist in communication with parents to better understand their students earlier in the year and give parents feedback about how the year has started for their students the question has come up was are we going to continue virtual parent-teacher conferences and i will say just as a side note to this conversation there's been a lot of positive feedback a final decision hasn't been made but certainly it's it's highly likely we would continue that format in some way shape or form additionally you will see that i'm going to jump to march march has a full week of spring break again i would like to note that the state board has given school districts recommendation about the placement of spring break within their

193calendars for consistency across school districts and post-secondary education and so placement of this spring break does fall in line with that state recommendation in april you'll notice two professional learning days it's been desired a desire to add additional professional learning there so that one that's late in the semester that allows principals time to go potentially deeper with topics with their staff and also allows for professional learning at the time where you're not only ending but also forecasting goals for school buildings for the next school year as well it continues to be of a value in blue valley to end the school year prior to memorial day and you'll note that on this calendar as well our typical standard is our calendar committee presents this to you for review and we post this on the district

194web annually we'll gather feedback based on that feedback the committee will come back together review any feedback and then if there are any revisions once we've reviewed that we will bring those to you for a vote at your next board meeting okay again this is just an introduction to this tonight no board action taking place but any questions patrick when's graduation um graduation would fall potentially the weekend of may 20th and 21st again um you know we continue may have additional conversations around that but following historical patterns that would be the graduation weekend and can i also ask when's graduation this year the weekend uh 22nd and 23rd same weekend yes any other questions comments thank you katie for all your work on the calendar i know it's like i always say it's not an

195easy job okay next up approve legislative positions for the 2021 legislative session again this was presented to us last month we had a discussion on this so um last month we looked at our we had a number of priority positions and standing positions and we narrowed it down to three priority positions the first one mike alluded to earlier kind of stole my thunder there mike fund special education at the statutory amounts and expand our definition of at risk that's our number one priority our second one is to enhance student mental health and that includes funding for our community-based partnerships like with johnson county mental health and then finally eliminate tax credits and vouchers for private schools those are our three priority positions we have a number of standing positions that that are listed there as

196well but that is where we're at with our legislative positions thank you we are looking for a motion i've moved that the board of education approved the 2021 legislative positions motion by stacey obringer barhal is second by patrick hurley all those in favor please raise your right hand that motion passes 7-0 approved formation and organization of the caps network 501 c 3. dr merrick so as you know we have had caps for gosh going on a decade now i think and maybe over a decade and so one of the things that's happened with caps over the the last several years is we've formed a caps network so there are caps of affiliate type programs all across this country and actually there's even an international program and so we are looking to form a 501 3c

197for the caps network this will allow them to go out and seek some some funding for that network blue valley will still retain um the major shareholders in this network and um we are looking for permission to actually file the paperwork that's all we're doing at this point is just filing paperwork and identifying who our initial board of directors would be from blue valley okay we have a resolution that needs to be read in motion mr president i move that the board of education approved the following resolutions whereas the blue valley school district bvsd has developed an education network designed to create rich and meaningful experiences for students and partners by sharing access to curriculums and best practices and connections with education professionals post-secondary institutions and students the cahps network whereas the board of education

198the board deems it advisable to transfer the assets and operations of the caps network to a non-profit corporation controlled by the bvsd whereas the cahps network inc a kansas non-profit corporation the corporation was formed on december 5 2019 for the purpose of taking over the assets and operations of the caps network whereas it is proposed that the corporation's initial director corey moan complete the organization of the corporation by adopting the organizational minutes attached hereto as exhibit a the organizational minutes which organizational minutes appoint the initial officers of the corporation and adopt the initial bylaws the bylaws and conflicts of interest policy conflicts policy of the corporation whereas it is further proposed that immediately following the adoption of the organization minutes cory moan resign as a director of the corporation and the board appoint three new

199directors and serve as the initial bvsd directors of the corporation within the meaning of the bylaws and whereas it has further proposed that immediately following the initial bvsd director's appointment of the initial at-large directors of the corporation within the meaning of the bylaws the corporation adopt the amended and restated articles of incorporation attached here too as exhibit b the amended articles and together with the organizational minutes bylaws and conflicts policy the formation documents now therefore be it resolved that the bvsd's transfer of the assets and operations of the cahps network to the corporation is hereby authorized and approved further resolved that each of the formation documents is hereby authorized and approved further resolve that amy tiesling is hereby authorized and directed acting for and on behalf of the bvsd to execute and deliver the formation

200documents with such changes therein as are approved by amy to incorporate the names of the individuals appointed as the initial bvsd directors and the initial at large directors such approval to be evidenced conclusively by amy's execution and delivery of the formation documents further resolve that each of the following individuals is hereby appointed by the bvsd to serve as a bvsd director of the corporation within the meaning of the bylaws until such individual's successor has been duly elected and qualified or until such individuals earlier death resignation or removal tom mitchell jody dietz dr katie collier further resolved that amy teisling is hereby authorized and directed in the name and on behalf of the bvsd to execute and deliver all such other documents and to do or omit to do all such things as amy deems necessary

201and appropriate to affect the purposes and intent of the foregoing resolutions and to consummate the transactions described above and further resolved that all actions previously taken by any officer or agent of the bvsd for and on behalf of the bvsd that carry out the terms and intentions of the foregoing resolutions are hereby in all respects ratified approved and confirmed second woo thank you for reading that little did you know i was an attorney in a former life somebody give mike a gatorade motion by mike a second bye stacy o'bringer bar hall any further discussion all those in favor please raise your right hand that motion passes 7-0 introduce and approve policy revision for policy 1684 councillor can you hear me now all right this is a policy update um policy 1684 which is our open

202forum policy i just needed a couple of updates uh especially as we have uh over the past six or seven months found a need to transition from in-person and virtual meetings um under the new proposed revised policy we would provide open forum at all regularly scheduled board meetings unless in the rare circumstances it would be impracticable to do so perhaps because of the length of the agenda or something um there's also change in here for uh open forum maybe held live virtually or through written statements again this is a modification that we've had to make over recent months when we transition in and out of virtual and in-person meetings and it continues with the three-minute limit per speaker and provides a 60 minute in the aggregate limit or is otherwise determined by the board president

203it also notes in this revise in this revision our new sign up process that we've implemented over the past couple of months signing up on the district website if you want to participate in open forum and discusses how to do that the decorum guidelines have not changed much in the revision um we have re proposed redacting or taking out the section where voter voter registration visitor registration uh when we used to have the cards out front now we're signing up on the website um the old policy had the board president recognizing people by name and people stating their address the revision here would provide that a person speaking would address the board offer the person's name their children's school and is speaking for a group named the group that they're speaking on behalf of we

204have removed the requirement that a speaker provide their address [Music] last change provides for a transition to virtual meetings as we've had to do from time to time and it provides for an open forum format should we wish to do so during virtual meetings any questions on those revisions yet questions i know we covered this over the last few weeks with some meetings but any any thoughts or questions in regards to these changes which again just are making it a little relevant towards things that are going on these days yeah we we often have uh opportunity to update our policies if not looking for a motion i move that the board of education approved policy one six eight four as presented second motion by stacey obringer barhal second by amy teiseling any further discussion all

205those in favor please raise your right hand that motion passes 7-0 looking for a motion to adjourn motion by mike seitz a second by patrick hurley all those in favor please raise your right hand motion passes 7-0 [Music] thank you everybody you