001secretary is there a third nomination for secretary then again by acclimation dr shelton harris will be our new secretary okay we'll move right on to our reports and the first report is the superintendent's report please thank you randy i'm going to reverse these two first two reports and uh do board recognition first this is school board recognition month in uh in the state and across the country and it always gives me just a little bit of time to reflect on the the past year kind of briefly reflect on the work of the board as you know this past year has been kind of an unusual and we started out well first of all the board had 24 meetings during the course of the year last 12 months the first six of those were virtual and
002then the following meetings were we had 13 of them at nhs auditorium we had two at central heights auditorium and had two meetings here in the community room those we those included two retreats three special meetings and the rest are either work sessions or regular meetings of the board so if you remember last year we started out the year actually with a special meeting and that was uh because of the passing of joanne wilson and the board's first charge last year a year ago was to to replace her and the board did that and brought on keith grove to fill that that position so just you know i'm not going to go through every meeting but some of the things that um that we accomplished the through the board's work and uh and with us
003was uh the monthly extended learning plans that uh needed to be reconfirmed every year that that lasted through the course of the year you heard about social emotional learning efforts in the district we worked on ends policies are revising some of the policies reordering some of those getting eliminating some and adding a new one bond projects uh took up a lot of your time including you know learning about the kind of refreshing yourselves on the surveys that had previously been done if you recall it you know kind of put that in advance during the course of covid and and and re-picked up that work again in in winter of last year there was also some project enhancement a lot of technology purchases throughout the course of the year that you're responsible for we did another
004survey of the community that the board called the special meeting to uh to hear the results of that before putting a bond resolution together we hired a lot of teachers at the beginning of the year i also hired a new principal for central middle school again more technology purchases those seem to occur throughout the year curriculum purchases we began planning and learning more about the centennial that portage schools is celebrating this this during this year and then prepping for the election the uh the bond election that occurred in august so that took uh took place both in the spring as well as during the summer months and uh and then also the the budget uh we spent some time on the budget from the previous year as you recall we had to adopt a budget
005with a lot of uncertainties in there and and then when things changed we spent quite a bit of time discussing the changes to that budget for the for the 2021 school year and then adopting a budget for for this particular year in the fall we started the process of authorizing the the sale of bonds we hired uh architect and engineers and then later construction management services uh we did year-end financials and uh and then also some a couple of budget updates that that you heard then the delegate assembly this fall that randy attended on your behalf i got into the policy on naming of school facilities so that also involved work behind the scenes with with the policy committee of the board and and then bus purchases as well as some of the other enhancements
006that we were fortunate to be able to take care of this year so it's been a busy year it's been an unusual year we've had a lot of community participation this year a lot of perspectives shared a lot of uh i know you're processing a lot of emails and communications personally and uh the work goes goes on much beyond just meeting uh here in this facility or at northern and hopefully we'll we'll be able to settle sooner or later one place i think we're going to be able to meet here instead of bouncing around we as the auditoriums are used for school plays and other functions it becomes difficult to find a permanent place but i think the rest of our meetings may end up being in this location here so with that i just
007you have a little gift token of our appreciation for your work and then some certificates that you can do with as you wish so both thank you for your service thank you randy thank you thank you thank you sir celeste thank you this is so thanks again for your service and it's much appreciated and now i'll turn over to johnny edwards it's a little bond project update thank you uh superintendent b lang president van antwer members of the board and members of the community uh tonight's bond update will be brief since our last meeting obviously we're on a two-week break for the winter so we're going to just focus on the central athletic event facility with the softball dugouts and then i'll talk briefly about the 2021 bond as it relates to the softball dugout
008all of the masonry work has been completed the framing has been completed and the shingles are on the roofs of both dugouts our contractors have completed the lighting there's storage built behind the home dugout on the third base side so that particular dugout is larger than the visiting dugout so all of the lighting has been completed there we are waiting for the inspection and approval for that particular portion of the project we are expecting the benches to arrive within the next two weeks and those will be installed upon arrival as i mentioned at the last meeting once the winter breaks in march that's when we will restore the site to where where we had to adjust the fencing and kind of adjust the field during the construction so we'll restore that back to planned conditions
009uh once the weather breaks at least 50 degrees or higher and then from there the softball team would have for that full access to the field for practice and for competitions the central athletic department they are aware of the timeline as well uh and then just moving forward to our 2020 2021 bond um we had our first meeting with tower pinkster philippine international our architect firm as well as oak our construction management company we met with them on last friday it was about a two-hour meeting and during that meeting we discussed everything from our communication process both internally and externally we discuss the project overview and then the development of our master plan we will be following up with those firms again this friday with our core team and that meeting will be uh primarily
010to discuss what our what i would call our master schedule or our timeline of the events or sequence of events uh from there uh tower pinkster fielding international next week will lead a professional development workshop with our elementary principals as well as our district instructional staff to kind of talk about the instructional strategies and getting involved with a new building and next month in one of the february board meetings i'll be able to share a more detailed plan about the 2021 bond timelines and the projects as we look to sequence them so that's my uh update for tonight's presentation any questions johnny a quick question um because i've lost track of the overall scheme of the kind of the 10-year but will there be a groundbreaking this year so our plan is to do a
011groundbreaking ceremony uh late fall before the winter of 2022. that's our that's our tentative plan yep thank you and there's a lot of other things that go before that but yes that's the short answer to your question yes other questions thank you very much ready to move into a board education piece let's do it okay um huber is here to present the remainder of or kind of a summary of monitoring report 1-1 that you have been uh getting over the past three months yes so i'll turn that over to you mike thank you board thank you trustees for uh being here this evening and allowing me some time to share kind of our overview let me make sure i turn the clicker on before i transfer boxes it is not but you do have all
012the slides in front of you that are in the deck that i've got right now so yeah um this is kind of the culmination of that whole report and we're really just going to look at a 30 000 foot view of some of those key measures that we've talked about already with you and then i have a wrap-up of some of our reflections and response to the work over the last year year and a half with this and really if we take a look at the first chart that i have for you we like to see improving over ourselves in based on prior years so one of those goals and our interpretation there is that we're improving in our academics over our previous years and we've talked about having a three-year running average to help
013mitigate extremes and situations and our analysis is that we have experienced one of those moments where our three-year average is kind of going to come into play and for the next three years we'll have a little bubble in our data regardless of of how it looks and so what you're seeing on this is just that relative ranking the colors on here are based on the interpretation that you have in the report of anything above or below two percent creates either the green or the red and anything plus or minus two percent from from where we were prior creates that yellow zone and so our goal here is to always be improving over our prior years and all of this data you've seen in other charts and tables here it's aligned this way and applied with
014the three-year average we are including our eighth grade m-step and psat keep in mind that this we apply it here so you can see some of that difference in one of our other comparator charts we don't have that eighth grade data because the test changed back in 2019 so that three year average tends to be a little bit kind of off because we don't know how we tested and the shift in test creates our own internal change but all of that data was presented in in prior years looking at the second chart this is our approaching comparator schools and you might have a question certainly um do you usually do the data that way where you know the 11 you have the change of 11 percent and in business we would say you know you're
01511 of 67 so if you have 20 some percent change really um i don't know how you do it education so yeah the math wouldn't work that way okay i understand what you're saying and we we look at it as just as points against the change of the percentage so it's pretty much you're correct it's not an 11 change it's 11 percentage point difference between obviously you're underestimating both the up and the down that's that would be what it would and it does represent for us a change in that percentage but not a percentage change of that right so it's from the way i look at the numbers are misleading okay i mean just from yeah because we wouldn't do it that way in business so we appreciate that and we can take a look
016at what i don't believe some of our computer schools do it any differently than what we're presenting right now but if that's the case we could talk about a percentage change as a percent of that looking at the comparator schools this is where we're approaching so our goal is to always be improving and we have two components there that are the interpretations on that end statement one is approaching and one's succeeding so in this chart you're seeing the approaching comparator schools and you'll see our ranking as a whole you'll notice now that we're using the comparator schools that 8th grade slice we don't have on here because of that overall component and i think again mr droppers that you'd see that difference in the percentage numbers looking different because it's not a percentage representation of
017the difference right and this this information was contained in all the charts i think on the 11th grade elements that was back in october and on the fifth grade elements that would have been in december looking at the last chart exceeding our comparator schools this is where we just look at the year and we bring that together in one chart we did have a typo on the initial report where some fields were green even though the number inside the zone was correct so i've corrected that on this slide and what you're looking at right now the numbers were in the economically disadvantaged category and so for a handful of these we do line up in number one and other ones we don't this does not have the yellow category because either we're exceeding or we're
018not and so there is no zone in between that's a highlight from the comparator schools if i take a minute and in the report that i sent along to you that kelly jensenius and dr pascoe and i worked on along with a host of people over the last few years it contains really four key elements that we think have been responses to our work and the first one is around our continuous improvement process we've adjusted that over the last two years that work started prior to covid but we had started adjusting our continuous improvement processes and that's one of the key responses that we continue to do and we were able to lean on a lot of that work during the last school year we have a lot of elementary and secondary math and literacy
019work especially around what's been happening this fall the state of michigan has funded a program around literacy instruction and we had already started using it and had a cohort going through the training then the state of michigan said we'd also like to use some of our funds to support that literacy work and so they've offered more cohorts so we're up to about 90 teachers who are being trained in that elementary literacy it's not a curriculum but it is a philosophy and a foundation element that allows for quality instruction to happen there in the mathematics side we both have some new established standards and some better ways of measuring student performance there and at the middle school we're doing a pilot with our nwea mappers which is also nwa accelerator to try and take a look
020at how we can close some of those gaps in skills and standards at the middle level with our mathematics looking at our social emotional instruction we did have a lot of work over the last year year and a half related to this the impacts of cobid are most felt in how our students socialize and the connections they have and that has set up some different conditions for us so we've established and followed through on beginning to integrate michigan's social emotional learning standards into our classroom instruction we've also been able to adjust as you saw in the report additional counseling supports and we're continuing to find new ways to add those supports as well as ensure that the climate and culture which is one of our school goals this year is something that our teams are
021focusing on and all of that impacts how our students are able to access instruction then lastly i would say there were components that we responded to that are solely related to covid for instance we had a lot of potential loss of high school credit and so we had our summer learning opportunities program last year where we were able to [Music] allow students an opportunity during summer to gain back credits that they potentially were losing by fulfilling the learning standards that they were missing and so some of those things in our responses have been able to help us ensure that our students are moving forward and meeting expectations for us as they head towards graduation those are just a few of the things i know i went into a lot more detail in the report and
022i'd also just like to say that with these impacts there's been a lot of work that our teams have done and this goes all the way from bus drivers hall supervisors playground and cafeteria supervisors our custodial maintenance i mean our admin assistants working in our buildings following up on covet phone calls and making sure that contact creation is happening our technology folks our teachers and our administrators all working towards supporting students with that we don't i'd also like to call and say our parents and our community have played a key role in how we get our outcomes because it's not done in isolation by just us or just one monitoring report so i know that our key monitoring report in one one is is crucial for us and i know that it connects to so
023many other things so i appreciate being able to bring this and i know that dr pascoe and mrs jensenius we've appreciated spending this fall digging into a lot of our data and i'm happy to answer any questions you have about this particular final report um mike i'm just curious about the literacy piece was additional support added to read by grade three yes and so some of that support looked like well one that letters training that i mentioned that is focused on early literacy so that really is while it works as a k-12 kind of foundation the focus is on the k5 area we also were able to add courtney huff this last year as our district-wide reading literacy coach and so she's been crucial in helping keeping that alive and she's a partnership between us
024and k risa to be able to allow her to coach our reading specialists to help our buildings and so she's been instrumental in that component which is exclusively around young fives through third grade literacy randy if i could just you know picking up on on kirk's comment on how you do these calculations maybe it would be beneficial to have the policy committee meet with us at some point so that we can land in a place that worked we don't we certainly don't want to present information that's confusing or or creates any other additional problems we want to make sure we're consistent from year to year and so that might be just something in the way of follow-up yeah i get there's different ways of sure providing percentages we just want to make sure from year
025to year we do it the same way so that all of a sudden one year the numbers look like completely different we have hey mike so um some of those results are suspiciously high and some are suspiciously low so um tonight you didn't go into any of the issues that made us this last year or maybe two-year of the standardized testing those results are just weird yes and i'm trying to recall what they were i mean one was the tests were not mandatory so we had a subsection of students who took them including with the comparative schools yeah we also had um questionable i mean and that was k 8 that well actually it's k11 if we want to go there for last spring for how those assessments were done so in many cases especially
026with our comparator schools we're not sure whether or not they use the same expectations we did yeah and or some of the schools used paper pencil and some did not so that also is a difference that could have impacted what happened on those results yeah well and then i'm recalling um what a lot of these tests were taken virtually which typically does not happen so that's is that's another issue here some of our screener data especially anything back on the elementary report around our acadians we had a lot of virtualized acadians uh delivery and assessment last year yeah i mean so i mean my my question i'm just kind of thinking out loud here is you know as you use this data given this past year and the weirdness of the test it's just you
027know the challenges of people not looking at the data that went down and taking it seriously but not getting too down about it because it may just be the way the data came out and on the flip side not getting not celebrating too much the data that was high because that might have been due to data irregularities too so it's a i mean it's a tricky it's a tricky line to walk this year it is tricky and i think the advantage comes in we know all of the data points so it's it's great to say 18 of this or 56 of that but we actually know that all the way down to the granular level of this is student mike huber and so we're able to respond to that and we're always interacting and responding
028at that level and so we do have a little bit more knowledge of our individualized students and what they may need and that's where our response comes from so when we bring up the data and aggregate it yes there's a lot more areas that we're concerned about and what's missing in that like let's take those high scores for instance where we're like wow these are some good middle school scores here we also know that who those students are and yes they're doing well so we're offering opportunities to accelerate and right next to them maybe a student who did not take that assessment we know that we're missing their data point and we also know from our internal screeners what they may need so whether it's looking like the data's too high or too low that
029we actually know the students in that low side they're actually doing quite well and even though the aggregate looks that way we're able to provide for them just like on the other side the data looks high for that middle school but we know there's a group of students there who have who have needs for us this is why we triangulate our data to use those state local and classroom assessments all together thank you well it's helpful to know that you are putting names and faces students with the statistics um another question just with the third grade opinions and so they're just tested on oral reading currency that's what we report on there's a number of factors that go into that but that one is probably the most prevalent for being a measure that we can
030present a single number on and it gives a good lens on where we might need to focus some attention so so because this is the most important work the district does we devote four meetings minimum four meetings a year to this we started in october with high school november middle school and then last month elementary and tonight kind of a summary of everything we learned and i just want to compliment you and mike and kelly on the reports you've provided to us because they've been very thorough they've been very open and honest and i don't think it's really easy to get up in a group of people and show numbers that you're not necessarily proud of and that and that are questionable so we appreciate that and you know we appreciate the responses that you
031have to what we see here and i think it really drives home that doing everything we can do to keep kids in school and a learning environment and give them stability is going to allow them to thrive academically and socially and emotionally and you know that strategy also mirrors what parents have told us and the post surveys that parents are very concerned about their kids falling behind and kids are very concerned about not being with their friends so i just appreciate everything that's going on to keep kids in school and not only for your group but all the educators and all the people in the buildings that are doing this because it's a tough year and uh again a year like no other so appreciate the data and your response to it so thank you
032very much certainly and thanks to those classroom teachers doing that work in their classrooms as well yeah that's for sure that's for sure please bring house in board education okay we'll move on to comments and communications i believe we have some citizens who'd like to speak tonight and i'll ask the last to review our guidelines for public comment please i'd the board welcomes community input at our public meetings when addressing the board please conform to these guidelines as follows sign the speaker registration form at the beginning of the meeting state your name and address limit your comments to two to three minutes provide a written copy of your comments and supporting documentation to the board secretary if available present your comments in a respectful and professional manner refrain from mentioning any student by name and
033contact the superintendent directly regarding personnel matters board of education members are not obligated to respond to issues raised during publicly public comment normally such issues are referred to the superintendent for follow-up thanks celeste uh we have five folks who'd like to speak this evening and our first speaker is roxanne helen thank you um so i was gonna stand here for a minute um i'm gonna stand here for those that couldn't make it tonight i'm gonna stand here for the kids that have been muted by the mask mandate i'm going to stand here for the teachers that have sacrificed their career in lieu of succumbing to these implemented standards since covid i'm going to stand here for the healthy kids that have been sent home to quarantined by your standards i'm going to stand here for
034the students at this very high school that were asked in the middle of class to show a raise of hands as to who is vaccinated or not i'm going to stand here for my children other people's children and their rights i'm going to stand here just to let you know that my rights shouldn't be infringed upon because of your fears your beliefs or your funding and donate the rest of my time to the next speaker thank you roxanne our next speaker is linda stewart good evening and thank you for hearing me out my name is linda stewart i'm a school bus driver i'm also a recess supervisor and i currently work for edu staff which is a company that portage public schools employs to employ other employees right now we are making eleven dollars an
035hour i stand outside anywhere from two and a half to three hours at chilling temperatures anywhere from zero to 100 degrees at any one time if you look at the statistics school babysitters are paid 1306 to 20 20 an hour per child i am a paid eleven dollars an hour for 85 students that would equal out to 3 30 and 30 cents i know that's unrealistic but i believe that our staff edu staff employees deserve more money for what we do we are taking care of these children to the best of our ability we're withstanding the weather elements to the best of our ability and unfortunately you're going to lose a lot of staff because of not compensating us for our work thank you for your comments linda and i thank you for the work
036you're doing thank you very much our next speaker is jessica van dyke good evening so first i would just like to take a moment to remind us all what the duty of the board here is to hold the superintendent accountable for what's going on in the school district which means if something's going on in the school district that is inappropriate questionable et cetera then the school board will step in on behalf of the community to bring those concerns to the superintendent to resolve them and i feel that if ever there were a time to the school board needs to hold the superintendent accountable it's right now with these mass protocols the administration's decision to mask our children and teachers indefinitely is arbitrary and capricious with no metric or benchmark for what will cause them to
037change the policy the charts and studies that were cited in the last board meeting there are interesting data points but they don't tell us what will be the right time to shift to an optional math protocol a u of m study indicating that schools with mass mandates have less covet okay that's great um but that doesn't say so when do you stop a mass protocol same thing for a chart showing the case rates in columns of county districts those charts and studies are still going to be the case in july october next year five years from now so are we still going to have maths on our kids in five years because after all the chart shows that fewer schools mathematics have less covet i don't think that's the case at least i hope not
038but since we have no benchmarks one can only conclude that it's going to be when the administration feels that lifting it is the path of least resistance a political decision rather than a decision based on actual any really anything else really the only other possibility i could come up with was that it'll be when the health department changed the recommendations but we were last summer when we had the optional policy for like eight weeks at that time the health department was recommending school mass mandates so it's not like we're beholden to the health department this is really a decision by the district additionally i'm sure that schoolcraft in vicksburg and the other districts in kelowna county with optional mass protocols have access to all that same data but since they're not changing their policies clearly
039they think that it's not worth it for whatever less covert they may or may not get because masks do place a limit on the educational experience and they just don't think it's worth it um the administration choosing to exempt their workplace the administration building from the policies they're imposing on the school buildings is i would say a generally questionable decision the administrators many of whom are of an age where kobut presents a higher risk they can choose whether or not to wear a mask in their own building but my six-year-old who is at essentially no risk for any sort of serious cova case she is not allowed in the building without wearing a mask in addition to making zero sense this is really very unacceptable leadership to impose a plan for everyone else that they
040don't have to follow and finally the superintendent spent the months of july and august preaching a message of parental choice repeating over and over to reporters channel three week after week that without a county or state mandate masks would be optional and portage literally the only changes that we've had in that time in as far as covet goes as far as schools go have been positive ones vaccines are available to all school-aged children test estate policies allow principals to feel more comfortable not closing school buildings and the current variance symptoms are usually identical to a mild cold especially for children the superintendent owes it to the parents to explain why he spent all summer preaching parental choice and now suddenly parental choice means nothing and the administration to him in the administration when the health
041risks for school-aged children are essentially non-existent at this point you all know that i want a mass optional policies effective immediately but that's not what i'm asking i'm asking to hold the superintendent accountable for the decisions of the administration that are questionable and appropriate and inappropriate for proven protocols that are based on real risk not rates of mild illness or positive tests for covet protocols that are consistent across buildings and not optional in the building where the diminished decision makers work but mandatory for everyone else and i'm asking for the superintendent to stand by his word or at the very least give a real explanation for why he's going back on his word thank you thank you jessica thank you for sharing your viewpoint this evening our next speaker is monica johnson do i have
042that right yes thank you hello my name is monica johnson you guys don't know me um i have very small children so i'm on a path to find the right place for my children and their education i've been to a few private school board meetings and i wanted to come speak at the portage public school just to let you know who i am that i'm a resident i'm a mother i'm a small business owner i i live in portage i bought a home in portage for the school system now what the school is doing with the mask mandates i can't even let my kids walk in the door it's just not to happen i grew up in a small town west of here and i grew up on a family farm we worked really hard
043we did everything for each other we worked in the community my family's been in the community for over 150 years working for the community my grandmother was an advocate for agriculture and farm workers rights so i have a background i have a knowledge and a passion to help those that cannot help themselves and those right now are children and when i was dreaming about raising my kids one day it was not the world that is today i thought i would be a wife and a mother and a business donor but it's all happened it's just not how i thought it would be god gave me a completely different path he said nope this is it the world's gonna shut down to slow the curve and i was faced with a job loss a career loss
044i went to michigan state i have a degree from michigan state university and now i'm at home as a small business owner and a mother taking care of my children working full-time taking care of my kids full-time i had this dream of what i was going to do with my kids that they would be educated in this beautiful public school system of portage and now i feel like that dream is just shattered because of what has happened and the things that have come to light because of the shutdowns because virtual school because we have seen what the curriculum has turned into because of mass mandates because of vaccine requirements because of coveted testing and quarantining of healthy children because of critical race theory there's so many things that i just i can't send my kids
045supporters public schools not right now not unless things change so i just wanted to know how is this mask policy determined to be in the best interest of our students thank you for your time thank you monica our last speaker tonight is kelly sackett okay thank you i thank all our speakers tonight for coming to this meeting and for your comments we appreciate them all and we'll move on to our consent agenda and we have three general items organizational items approval of minutes and approval of a revised policy our organizational items are the first is to designate depositories for school funds we're using the same nine depositories banks as in prior as last year approve our board of education meeting schedule we have 23 meetings scheduled 12 regular meetings seven work studies and four retreats
046we need to designate a person authorized to use the safety deposit box and as the superintendent assistant superintendent director of finance and the board secretary we need to designate the electronic transfer officer and that's paula johnson our director of finance we need to appoint the board recording secretary and that's bart atkinson administrative assistant to the superintendent and finally to approve the board and district legal legal counsel troom law pc is our retained legal counsel but we also on occasion use miller canfield and farnam for bond issuance matters and special ed services are provided for kalamazoo county by clark hill plc so the organizational items are our first consent items the second is approval of our minutes from the december 13 2021 regular business meeting and finally number three is to approve a revised policy zero
047one six seven three regarding public participation at board meetings and if you recall these changes were recommended by neola to prevent viewpoint discrimination by the presiding officer all the the new policy was vetted by the policy committee and presented to the board at our december 13th meeting and we have not heard any suggestions for improvement so with that are there any exceptions to the consent agenda okay very good and then the consent agenda is approved as presented our next item is assurance of district performance on page 28 and that's the approval of monitoring report 1.1 is there a motion please mr chairman uh i move that the board of education except has presented the monitoring report on 1.1 global ends as a reasonable interpretation and evidence of compliance with policy thank you what was there
048a second my segment any discussion all those in favor of approving the monitoring report please say aye aye opposed hearing none the motion passes 1.1 is approved our next action item is the approval of new teachers there's a motion on page 62 please mr president i would move that the board of education approved the following new teacher appointments as presented and apologies if i don't get the names exactly right but jeff y krent industrial tech teacher at northern high school alyssa pinon kindergarten teacher of portage virtual elementary thanks paul is there a second second fred good evening and uh krusty snyder you got both those names exactly right thank you um yes just here for uh two teacher appointments so both of these teachers are replacing teachers that we have lost part way through the
049year mr matt kiam at northern high has retired and our kindergarten virtual teacher returned to her previous district and we're fortunate to bring ms pinon back to us after leaving us a couple of years ago so we're thrilled to have both of these teachers coming to us to take these vital roles thank you any questions for bread all those in favor of approving the new teacher appointments please say i i i opposed the motion passes and we welcome jeff and alyssa to fortis public schools uh we'll move to our discussion items and the first one is northern and central replacement furniture purchase welcome back john thank you for uh round two uh this particular uh purchase recommendation aligns with the items one of the items on our unallocated contingency was round was centered around furniture
050at both northern and central high school so i'm recommending to the board that we purchase student and teacher chairs from uh for central and northern uh the cost of the total purchase is 74 000. 227 and that would come from our 2019 bond fund proposal one of unallocated contingency in the report you'll see that combined between both schools we would like to order 425 student shares for a total of 55 and then 48 staff slash teacher chairs for a sum total of over eighteen thousand dollars uh the last major purchase for the high schools was around the 2012 bond and overall we've been satisfied with the student and the teacher chairs but now with wear and tear it's outside of the manufacturer warranty and we are unable to repair the student chairs and the staff
051chairs so we are making this recommendation we want to be consistent with our existing furniture so it will align with that steel case shares for our staff and teachers is consistent with what we purchase in our middle school bond projects they are robust and have an extended warranty for uh repairs all items were bid and we have those attached as well so we would like to work with great lakes furniture which was the lower lowest bid that met our specific specifications for student chairs and then custer while it was not the lowest bid for the teacher chairs it was closest to what we requested and again those teacher chairs align with what we've purchased with our middle school project we've worked with both principals and they've given input on their desires as well and again
052this purchase aligns with our unallocated contingency that the board has seen several times i'd be happy to answer any questions i think we're good john thank you thank you our next discussion item is to approve the 2022-23 program studies welcome back mike i guess if you're going to give mr edwards twice i can go here twice as well so um appreciate that i kind of just pulled out some of the highlights for you on this slide which you also have in a separate sheet of just you can see that but bringing our yearly program of studies we've made some minor changes of course i'll highlight all the course changes in there we did change our learner behavior language to align with what i said before around the social emotional learning so it aligns with the
053state and with i believe it's n one three or n one three that now has the social emotional language in it as well so those are kind of coming together in one spot we did clarify some upper level math and science and we did add our fifth grade human growth and development content is in the program of studies now was mentioned as a blur but now it has a full entry at the middle school there is a new digital media course and then we've clarified some language and clarified uh some things around tuck dad just to kind of um that normally can happen by a team leader kind of making a recommendation in there then at the high school we've added a computer science course this will be new for us we added a um
054the oops i'm going to mess that up we changed the name of an art course to jewelry and metalsmithing to kind of broaden the application in that class and most of the changes were around that science course so this is the last of our science recommendations that's now going all the way back to the michigan science standards being changed so the current class of 24 which is our will be our juniors next year we'll have this new year-long earth science class for them so really that's ultimately the changes there the biggest other piece that we have is we just update roles and names and general corrections there are a few typos but other than that the biggest thing is just i want to say thanks to janet johnstone for once again combining 40 plus separate
055word document with changes in it into one document that gets approved by dr pascoe mr settings and myself throughout that time so really that's uh our program of studies changes for this upcoming year any questions that you have on that yes the sixth grade music course schedule it was unclear that they go every other day at sixth grade in music so it's very clear to me that they go every other day yes it is to me as well with my sixth grader last year but it wasn't clear in there that that would be the application so we wanted to add that and the tech head language was just more descriptive to how we do more manufacturing innovation processes and what they're doing with them with the new cnc and 3d printers and testing of their
056own structures okay so no changes just no no changes thank you mike uh our next discussion items three and four are all about the phone system dan all right our existing phone system is cisco based it dates back in 2009 and is showing its age in fact we had to reboot our phone system during the middle of the day again today to clear up a couple of server lockups on it as we approach this process to pick a new phone system we really kind of looked at the two biggest challenges we have with our existing system one the cisco system is closed if you're in a cisco space you have to buy cisco hardware and this board knows i don't like being closing ecosystems i like to have flexibility with technology purchases the other big
057challenge we've had with the cisco system is just it's very difficult to manage there's no easy way to get in and make phone changes with this the solution is being provided by a telnet worldwide solves both those issues it's an open source system so we can use whatever hardware we want the management interface is much easier to use as a part of their package they'll actually do a lot of management for us so we'll be contacting them with support tickets versus trying to solve things in-house which puts the district in a much better position as well the other big difference with this phone system versus the one we currently have this is cloud hosted the only hardware we'll have on site will be the actual telephones telnet will maintain all the servers in our data
058center and we'll be using our internet connections to send and receive outside calls versus using standard copper telephone lines to do that i have listened to some other key features that this software brings the one that i am also very excited about is a mobile app that's available for both android and apple phones which will allow all portage staff members to access their office extension from their mobile device whether they're at home or on the road or wherever that is a feature that our teachers have wanted for a long time even before code because they don't like to necessarily reveal their their personal phone numbers out into the wild which i appreciate the annual services are going to be a little bit higher with this than we currently pay but the trade-off for that is
059we're not going to have the hardware costs you know and if for the second memo which is actually the phones and this is split into two because the service has to come from the general fund but the phones are going to come from bond dollars but these phones are less than half the cost of what we currently pay for cisco phones and this recommendation for the actual phones is honestly worst case scenario i've quoted a more expensive phone i'm in a lot of areas we're going to be able to select a device that costs between 40 and 70 dollars per unit than often the 250 to 400 hours of paying per unit for the cisco devices so i'm very excited about the proposal this is a good move for the district our goal is to
060have this up and running by the end of june so we can get training done and get everyone ready for the start of the school year the good news is it's a relatively easy symptom a system to use and we're going to have a lot of support from the company to get it installed and up and running and we'll actually have a period of time where we can test and learn the new devices before we actually make the final cut over from our existing system to the new system so with that i'd be happy to answer any questions the board might have so i assume you've evaluated the risk of having all the phones go through the internet versus landlines and you've concluded that we're going to be okay so we looked at this kind
061of a system honestly four years ago but that was back when we only had one internet connection and that made me very very nervous now the district has two we use cts and charter spectrum and they both exit the building on separate physical paths we've got a lot more failover on the internet side the single biggest weakness for our phone system is not our internet connection it's actually the fiber connections out to all of our individual buildings even though we have multiple strands of fiber that go to the different buildings they all live in one cable and so if a backhoe finds it or a mutant squirrel finds it then we're going to have an outage and that problem existed with our existing phone system because the servers reside here so we're going to have
062to think about some backup options for the buildings it's getting harder and harder to get copper based phone lines all the telcos want to be out of copper they want to all be on fiber so we've got some logistical challenges to work through there but it's not any more worse than we currently have with our current system thank you i've been on the board too long because this is the second supposed yeah it's uh box and i i hope this is my last one and i thought i don't love working here but now there are three things i don't like to do on one of them is change phone systems so thank you any questions for dan thanks dan i appreciate it our last discussion item tonight is a freedom of information act fee appeal
063and just to make everybody aware mr darren malik submitted a freedom of information act request for information that involves the search and retrieval of emails and documents district provided mr malik with an estimated fee to produce the requested information mr malik has made a deposit and work is underway to retrieve this information for him but mr malik while this work is going on is appealing the fee he believes the district's fee estimate is excessive and the work to produce the requested information could be completed uh at a lesser cost so he's appealing the fee we have quoted him the district is quoted on and uh mark i don't know if you have any thing to add to that this is a similar appeal that the board received earlier this school year and my response is
064essentially the same as it was then we identified the lowest we based our fees on the lowest paid employee that's capable of doing the work and that remains a person our technology department and our communications manager for uh for the prices that we've outlined you know two two things that that contribute to that well actually one that the biggest unknown is the the amount of time so it's very possible that the time required by uh in the estimate that we provided could be less so that could reduce the fee but the the basis for the fee is based on what we we believe for safety and security reasons would be performed by those those people that that that are able to access that equipment or that information sorry so we're talking about multiple people to
065do that or one person two people one would be for the retrieval of the information and the other for review and redaction of information that we cannot be sharing with others so so mark if it takes less time it could end up costing a lot that's correct but if it takes more time this is an estimate i mean it's so it takes more than you anticipate it could the feet could go up yes so it goes both ways we've we've never the two foia requests that uh that have been questioned we've never received anything with this large of a scope since i've been here and uh that's why it was it's really unknown to us how much time it's going to take to get through the documents and what was the fee this particular one
066the fee was a total fee of 1463. mr malik has deposited half of that fee and as randy indicated we're in the process of processing the request and then he pays a remainder or if it's if it's less than that it's a refund so so the board has four options we can waive the fee we can reduce the fee we can uphold the fee or we could issue a notice to extend the time the board has to consider the appeal and i don't know what the board's pleasure is but i think it would be good to let mr malek know tonight if we could what we plan to do so is there any discussion on that please well i'm not real big on exceptions i just don't want to open pandora's box and in the
067future you have to do that again for somebody else unless you want to change your full policy uh you know how you handle boys but that's most organizations public organizations handling i mean it's a quick when you do it but if it's not the thanks rusty anyone else yeah just just just to echo that and for consistency the ones i've done in my life are more at the lansing level but everything has to be very consistent that's pretty much a requirement so as long as we believe this is consistent with thanks keith hey um randy is this written in policy somewhere the district has a foia policy yes okay but it's below the board yes yeah i mean as a future discussion as a policy committee we might talk about this at some point i
068mean the the area where where i would consider an exception would be say a reporter who's doing kind of a public welfare kind of research thing that would be kind of something i'd i tend to maybe consider uh more about a private request i would i would stick with with the policy that we use any other comments uh so uh the poor's pleasure seems to be to uphold the fee for this evening then i'll be comfortable with that okay then uh we need a motion to take that to action please uh mr chair i i would move that we take the voyfbe appeal to an action thank you poser second second thank you any discussion all those in favor please say i i opposed uh the motion passes this is now an action item and
069we need a motion please to uphold the fee president i think the motion that the uh employee has presented me of help thank you second thank you any discussion all those in favor please say i opposed uh hearing none the motion passes we've reached the end of our meeting um be sure and turn in your court self-assessments and i'm not doing court evaluations and uh thank you for your time this week we are adjourned thanks randy [Music]