001you didn't know anything at all had no idea he [Music] yeah yeah sure was but I'm [Music] R can do I might the United States of America and to the repu for it stands one nation God indivisible andice all right moving on to the approval of the agenda I have no additions or Corrections can I have a motion to approve we have so we now have the consent agenda uh we have close session minut review prior to the motion close session out to you guys I need to get them back and do we have a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented with the consent agenda we have the board minutes close session minutes and P and Che Reg all those in favor say I anybody motion all right highlights moving on to District
002highlights uh Mr milander will be highlighting for Eagle Lake Elementary if there's a tech problem you can blame one of the jar I'll let you decide right now it's this one well hey good evening Dr members of the board I really appreciate the opportunity to highlight Eagle Lake and celebrate the wonderful things going on over there I know um I'm just really proud of our staff and our students incredible work that they do daily and so one of the things I'm going to be highlighting tonight is and talking about is something that we call our word collectors and it's a new initiative that we have started um where word collectors came from just a quick background of the journey that got us to this idea of being word collectors is during one of our early
0032hour late start PD sessions we did some mstep analysis um as a staff and we did some digging into those areas that while there was more positive areas that were strengths we did find a few of targeted weaknesses that we wanted to focus on and one of those was vocabulary and so what we did then is went back and met with our School Improvement team and a separate vocabulary team to say what can we do within that area to make sure that we are targeting it to make it go from a weakness to a string so we said we wanted to create some excitement around vocabulary we knew that we had to create something that kids got excited about to buy into and so then in our next late start we went back and said
004we are going to create something with vocabulary as a schoolwide initiative and what can we do for that and so we collaborated into different teams and we went through what are the important pieces of vocabulary what are we looking at here U more so than just saying words and so we talked about ready to roll ideas things that we could do immediately coming back from winter break because this was our uh December meeting and then also some put a pin in ideas that we said these are great thoughts but we need a little more time to develop so with that said we came up with the idea of word collectors and the purpose for the word collect word collection Journey um really comes back to these five pillars of literacy and so we know to
005create strong readers to the science of reading it takes all five of these components from phic awareness to phonics fluency vocabulary and comprehension and we are grateful that our primary does such a great job in really honing in on those early skills with phic phic awareness and Phonics that allows us at Eagle Lake to really start focusing on those fluency and vocabulary pieces and so that's where we know through in Scarboro Ro it's reading comprehension is developed through word recognition and language comprehension so we really wanted to create a language Rich environment that has students invested and excited about acquiring words and improving their own vocabulary so what we did initially is I visited each classroom I read the book called the word collector by Peter Reynolds and in the book um it's a story
006about a young man Nam Jerome who he creates a collection of words himself and so one of the things that he collect is he says is the more words he knew the more clearly he could share with the world what he was thinking dreaming dreaming and feeling so this became the purpose behind what we were doing is we wanted to empower our students to have that ability to be able to share more clearly what they're thinking dreaming and feeling and obviously then it very much impacts their ability to become fluent and skilled readers fluent and skilled writers to be able to use those pieces so what does word collection look like what is it our plan of action was to create two words of the week schoolwide um those two words one of them is
007an academic word um for example we've had the word fraction we the word numerator and those are all words chosen by our staff and our vocabulary committee um to be very intentional about words that we know that students will be exposed to through the curriculum may see it on mstep that we want them to have more exposure to and the one that I get really excited about is what we call our wondrous word of the week and this is a a word that is chosen by our students it is a student Choice word the class it leads into the student Le announcements where our students get to choose that word that they want to add to the word collection for eagle as a and they get to then leave the school all week through announcements
008of breaking down that word sharing what that word means and all those and I have some awesome Eddies here tonight who are going to model that for us in just a second that was me prepping you so you can build up um so they're going to model for us here in just a little bit what that looks like it then those words then go into our word collection jars um which look like this we have all these giant poster siiz um one word collection jars all throughout very highfly areas in the school and those areas would be by all three of our bathrooms because we know that those are places that students will go to frequently want them to continually be reminded of these words um and I mentioned earlier how we put a pin
009in a few ideas one of the things we'll eventually do is add some activities by those um word collection jars so you know like charades um can you guess that word some of those activities that while teachers are waiting to go to the bath with their students they can be reviewing these words continually um a few other things is continuing the excitement with activities with those selected words and then doing a deeper dive in the classroom so the real highlight of tonight is to model as you can see here these are some students who did the announcements but I'm going to invite our two of our eddes up to model what the announcements would look like come on up bro our our our board meeting vocabulary word of the day is Excellence the definition of
010Excellence is the quality of being out outstanding or extremely good the example sentence for the word excellence is IED demr excellence and everything will do now we will play a game I will give you an example of our vocabulary word if it is the correct meaning of the word give a thumbs up if it's not give a thumbs down a student who studies hard for all their tests interb an athlete who gives up easily and does not practice their skills thumbs down a per a person who consistently works hard at their job thumbs up and so what they just LED you through is each one of those pieces on Monday we give the academic words Tuesday with the definition Tuesday another student gets to share it in the sentence and then on Wednesday we introduce
011that wondrous that student Choice word they use it in the sentence and then Friday they play the non-example example game and so then you know that's all to create excitement right schoolwise with the announcements with the collection jars but then of course there's some even better work going on in the classrooms where they do a deeper dive into those words um again our fantastic committees created Daily Review slides for all the words where they provide those definitions pictures of the words um getting into even more in depth with the word with synonyms antonyms looking at you know um again I won't get into all degree but more detailed of those words and than for you I think that was somebody told I need to hurry up um and then you know in addition the C
012the kids are also creating their own what we call like their Frayer word model journals where they're going through and um recording the words of the week themselves they're writing those definitions the sentences all those using them in their own writing looking for them in the books that they're reading and I think my favorite part is you know sometimes things don't always stay up we had a few occasions where the word collection jars fell down and you have kids coming up saying where's the word collection jar when are we going to get it back up and that's really what we're trying to create is just that excitement and love of words so that way it can transfer into their love of reading and being able to be skilled readers and the incredible students they are
013so that is [Applause] it uh now moving on to items of business uh we have to select uh somebody for our district for um the um masb board uh did you guys all get a chance to review that uh so we have one we required to vote for one seat for region six uh I'd like to recommend that we uh does anybody have a recommendation I would like toana Harrison few [Music] okay anybody else have any comments or thoughts on okay well I think I'm just fine with doing that so um would everybody support that we do a for that so in order to vote for Tiana Harris Nick yes johon Kevin yes yes and myself yes okay moving on to person um we have first M Jordan M Jordan thank you good evening I
014have the pleasure of recommending the hiring of Miss Jennifer Taber for our position of Elementary music teacher uh Jennifer has a Michigan certification in K12 music education she received her Bachelor of Arts and Music education from depal University she's also currently working on her master of educational leadership degree and she most recently um graduated from the leadership program through golden Sachs 10ks SB she might be able to say what I don't know what they stand for but 10ks SB um uh she also uh has created a music school locally here um that is developed for after school music education opportunities and she has three daughters two of them will be going off to college um in the fall and she also has a fourth grader um when she does have free time she enjoys gardening
015and home renovations um and now Mr good evening everybody uh Middle School would like to highly recommend Mrs Elizabeth cin um for a sixth grade position specifically English and social studies I'd say we'd like to welcome her but she spent a lot of time at our Middle School uh in recent years and many of you are aware of the time she spent in other buildings in recent years taking on long-term substitute roles she always does an outstanding job um Liz holds a bachelor's in elementary education from St Michael's College and a certification Elementary education in Michigan um her family or she has her husband here Ryan and Hendrick her ninth grade son then a couple of uh adult eddes out there doing the world right now Mia and Andrew so they're Edy through and through
016um what I've learned about Liz and in my time with her recently is just the passion that she has to to get back into the classroom fulltime she just brings great energy every day and works great with kids so um it's our recommendation to to hire at our Middle School JH uh can I have a motion to hire J tber and Liz as recomended all right any questions or discussion on that I just want to say it was two great edes here because uh the other day at the primary when we had is love to read come and when you put that many K1 kiddos into a gym it's a little crazy and right away uh Jennifer Taber got up and said okay let's sing a song and all of the kids knew the words
017and all sang it together and then with with Liz I mean she's just been in so many of our schools for so many years it's great to have her now officially in the classroom every day so two two great new edes excellent well all in favor of hiring these say I hi anybody opposed all right welcome to Edwardsburg would you like to make any comments or here you don't have to you don't have to you're welcome here you um yeah I've had a great time teaching all the kids the administration's been amazing and teachers been welcome tool we're excited to have you oh this is not my first rodeo um and so just happy to be in um a full-time role and I feel like we've been Eddy's forever so it's exciting so thanks for
018having me we're very excited to have both here thanks for coming AB board all right now on School of Choice uh we have to um our district required to opt in or out of school of choice annually I believe it's the best interest of the district for our students to continue School of Choice can I have a motion for this all in favor say I I anybody oppos that motion carries see then we have to do a minimum wage adjustment um so the Senate approv changes the minimum wage requiring the district adjust to the following substitute rates you guys have that in your uh do I have a motion to change the wage to meet the standard for the law I'm just going to say and really we have no one who's currently on this
019wage because when a lot of our subs are previous employees who get to come back at the wage that they left so this is just to comply with the law we don't have anyone actually at this level just so for your information support great all say I hi anybody opposed passes want you to explain if you want yeah like so the relinquishment of the title three part A immigrant funds um this was a different situation than where we were last year I know last year we came um and uh relinquished our funds and we said at that point that we wanted to create a plan that we would use the funds because we didn't think it was right to give any money back that we could use for kids so we were able to do
020that with Section 41 and we submitted the plan and it was approved however for the title 3 part A immigrant fund you were under $10,000 and we were at a couple hundred you had to be a part of a Consortium to accept the funds and um Mrs Maguire tried really hard to get a Consortium to take us and we could not get a response from anybody in our area um I think with the couple hundred dollars that we had on the amount of work that goes into it so unfortunately we are forced to relinquish the funds because we cannot accept them unless we were a member of a Consortium so that is why we're here asking for a board approval to really p a couple hundred um any questions on it's a couple hundred total
021yes the section 41 that we were able to create a plan for that was a little over I believe $4,000 so we were able to keep that um but this was I believe 238 and we couldn't you had to be a part of the Consortium and we couldn't find one near close enough to us to have motion tit we have to do aoll this Chelsea Kevin yes yes yes Nick yes pass right moving on to the superint board okay well I'm excited excited to start my report with breaking news that we just won our game our basketball game double overtime so sorry to check my phone but I was waiting to get a report on that so we can start with that um actually lots of good news our support staff member from January with
022how our board um meetings felled we're going back to January for this one and uh this is again the support staff member of the month that we do in collaboration with cber um of Mishawaka Granger in elart and so we were excited to be able to acknowledge Mr Brant over at the primary who if you are ever in the building he is just you know as much of a celebrity there as Mrs faling is um and he goes above and beyond what a cust I mean all of our custodians do but he's working with kids on um all sorts of different social skills he takes them under his wing uh he just is a true part of the whole primary community and so some of his nominators said that he is a wonderful custodian who
023works hard to keep our building ship shape but his most important job is of course bringing a smile to student faces no matter what kind of day they're having Mr Brandt is always there with a funny joke or a way to make them smile he goes above and beyond what his job description is he does great of job but also works so well with all the students he has a positive impact on the students he is around he embodies the heart of our school Community serving as our dedic at custodian a steadfast Mentor an enthusiastic cheerleader and a true friend to us all Beyond maintaining the cleanliness and safety of our building he takes time to notice when students need a little extra support offering a kind word encouragement a listening year or a positive
024incentive for them so we were really excited to be able to acknowledge Him over at the primary and we'll have next month we'll have our our next support staff member um then just two quick updates too uh there were some questions about where we were at with snow days that I've had from parents I've responded to most I still have a couple to get to um but we have gone through our six forgiven days and two additional but the state of Michigan allows you to apply for a waiver for up to three additional days and that's what we will be doing I don't foresee an issue with us getting that approved uh because unlike a lot of schools we don't use any of our professional development time as student instruction time so we already provide
025more instruction to our students than a number of other districts do and we also have the bond work that's going to be starting so we really have to be out of our buildings on that last day uh especially out at Eagle Lake to get everything moved and ready for all of the great Renovations we're going to have this summer thanks to the community so at this point we are good I don't foresee any issue will we need to be going longer um there's also been some questions just so that you are aware of a board on why we don't use e-learning which makes sense because a lot of Indiana schools you'll see on the news use e-learning in Michigan you have to have board approval for up to 15 days of e-learning so it's not
026something you can just do and as part of that you have to ensure that every student not only has a device but has access to Reliable internet at home and can be provided with any accommodations they might have if they have a 504 IEP so to do all of that as a lot on a snow day to make sure that everyone would have that internet access so we haven't gone that route um and we also haven't needed to so at this point we're we're still good this year pending you know hopefully this next 50 Dee weather sticks around and and we're all set um with the bond just a quick update we are doing a traffic study this week which is looking to see what um is going to provide the information to MDOT on
027where we can have access for doing that new pickup and drop off Loop for the intermed intermediate and primary so that will be going on all week um and then we had our pre bid meeting out at Eagle Lake last week on Monday was well attended bidding will be next week for that and then next week we will also have our pre bid meeting uh for the primary and intermediate and then that will go to bed after that so lots of exciting things going on and really excited about that basketball win so wish them luck on Wednesday that's right thank you Courtney anybody have any questions um next we'll move on to the comments from the audience um do we have any audio audience members that would like to I think that you know the
028the drill pretty well three minutes please state your name and address my name is Lyn Sean and you have my address on file um there's something that I like to talk about is this this one day a month of your late start um my I have two granddaughters one's in ninth grade one's in 10th Grade my grandson is a senior this year he goes to Career Center so he doesn't really he does that doesn't affect him but my two granddaughters do not like the late start at all they want to get to school that's number one number two um they were happy when the computer system was down because all three of my grandkids were tickled to death that they could use pencil and paper you guys need to seriously think about that about getting
029them off of some of these computers sometimes during the you know some of their class time and get them to pencil and paper because they were so excited I mean they I mean the girls they were just excited n n guess what we got to use paper and pencil today and when you have a ninth and a 10th grader that's a static about that and then you have a 12th grader he was a static too he said never you can't we got to use paper and pencil today I guess that happened for a couple days so you guys might want to think about getting them away from these computers for a while because you know when they go home not only are they probably on their computers they're on their phone they're getting all of
030this time when they really need to have time with their family so I just want to make that aware you guys thank you any other comments or questions my name is Sean Jesse I am here on behalf of the EA um I have been in leadership for the EA for the last 10 years as either vice president or president and we have found over the years that we do a decent job of expressing our concerns to our principles and to our superintendent but we don't do a great job of talking to the board so in it hopes that we can kind of be a little bit more transparent and also we just don't break to each other all the time and we got to actually try to make changes and frankly we kind of also
031believe that you don't know what you don't know so Our intention is from now on at every board meeting to try to express any concerns we have make any suggestions try to be helpful that's our goal and though obviously there's always lots of things to work on we're not going to inundate you we're only going to do a couple okay um so the first thing um was kind of just a little bit of a disappointment we negotiated to have um our Merit pay split up between all teachers and for those dollars we would have the option to put them into our HSA that unfortunately kind of just it got forgotten this year and though we understand that happens there is a lot of concern with t because we could have put $300 into our HSA
032and instead we were only given $200 because $100 gets paid to taxes our HSA gets its tax exempt so that's something that is it's still nice to get $200 we're never going to complain about that but it would have been nice to be able to put those dollars into our HSA the second is a concern for us and I think this is something that we very much support that we want to have this moving forward we just don't have great understanding what to do yet this is regards to alist stream as a entire District K12 our teachers just aren't really sure exactly what we're supposed to do we're not totally on the same page yet and I know and talks with Dr Su and in talks with our administrators we know this is a work
033in progress we know we're getting there it's not a complaint as to that but there is a lot of misunderstanding and this is something we meet as a board every once a once a month month it's actually the same day you guys all meet it's come up every single time and today we talked about it for 35 minutes so it's a major issue that we want to be on board with that we want a good understanding with and then finally just a suggestion these blate starts are something that we did talk about negotiated and we value them very much it is a time for us to work with our departments it's a time for us to actually collaborate that we don't get normally it's something that I think we've we've grown into we've gotten better
034at them but it's something we truly value but we also understand that parents kind of struggle with the the mornings find say morning taking care of children we totally understand that so we have a suggestion we'd like to see instead of doing Wednesday late starts once a month have a Friday afternoon whether that's a half day or just an early release we feel like that time could be much I don't say more beneficial because I think it's the same two hours but we would definitely utilize the time we continue to be able to collaborate but we also think that would be something that would be a little easier for our community members and our parents to try to take care of Child Care thank you for your time thank you any other comments or questions
035seeing none I have a all in favor say hi hi anybody oppos motion passes we are