001okay we're ready to go this meeting of the board of education is now called to order please stand and join us in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all like to welcome everyone to our meeting tonight and we'll get started by approving our agenda are there any changes to the agenda as presented nothing for me randy can we have a motion please thank you celeste all in favor please say aye aye opposed the motion passes and we'll move forward with our agenda and uh go right to the superintendent's report mark thank you we have uh three scheduled reports this evening the first is uh an audit presentation
002so i'm gonna turn over to paula and let you do the introductions kim lindsey from raymond robson with us this evening to go over the highlights from our 2021 audit thank you good evening board members of the public who are in attendance tonight i'm going to take a few minutes to run through the highlights of the audit for the fiscal year ended june 30th of 2021. i met with the finance committee earlier our audit committee earlier today to go over the report in detail and you all have the full reports with you but i'm going to just take a few minutes to run through a few slides to touch on the highlights so bo if you could advance the slide first of all the district received an unmodified or what we call a clean audit
003opinion which is the highest form of assurance we can give you on your financial reports i'm happy to report that there were no findings or reportable conditions either to be brought forward to you tonight in fact i don't think there were even any journal entries proposed by the audit firm which is highly unusual just a couple of items i also want to point out is that the district did receive a substantial amount of corona relief funds this last year crf funds and education stabilization funds or esser and those were the two programs that were required to be tested for the federal audit or your what we would call your single audit over federal funding also in those reports which are at the tail end of your big bound book i'm happy to also report that
004there were no findings or reportable conditions related to your administration of your federal funding also in the audit report itself you'll see a two foot note disclosures which talk about the district's compliance with all the applicable laws and regulations and in fact your ballot language related to the bond programs that the district has in place so when this last fiscal year the 2019 a bond program was being spent down then of course you had sinking fund a sinking fund millage as well the department of treasury puts out a list of items that specifically have to be tested related to those funds so that taxpayers can be rest assured that the funds are being spent appropriately according to state law and ballot language and i'm happy to report that that footnote shows that that was in
005fact the case on to slide three i just would like to also point out to the board the report itself is 124 pages long i believe if you look at the management discussion analysis which is on pages 13 to 25 of the audit report you'll get a big overview of the district's finances and what has occurred in the last fiscal year instead of having to look at all the individual pages but those of you who are like to see all the detail it's all there for you as well i would like to point out that the very first financial statement in the package is a statement of net position it is a full accrual basis statement for the district that's the only one you'll see in the report the rest of them are fund level
006reporting but that financial statement when you look at it has a very large negative number at the bottom of it the net position and it's caused by the fact that the district is required to report its proportionate share of the state retiree health state retiree system for teachers the ors system and also the retiree healthcare plan which is part of the ors system those liabilities accounted for 189.3 million dollars of liability for the pension plan a growth of about eight million dollars from the previous year and then the retiree healthcare plan liability was 29.6 million dollars at the end of the year a decrease from 39.5 million dollars last year the result of all that is that big negative number on the front page which is a deficit of 106 million dollars just like every
007other public school system in the state of michigan you sit in that deficit situation on these full accrual statements only the district itself is in is in good financial condition we don't have any deficits but in this reporting it does show that large number so i didn't want you to be shocked when you see that page next page please still talking about those district-wide or government-wide statements the change in that position or your net increase decrease from the previous year was a positive of a 711 thousand dollars revenues overall district-wide this last year were 124 and a half million dollars up from 100 just under 120 million dollars last year i'll point out to the board that included in that increase is 4.1 million dollars of pandemic federal relief funds that have been received by
008the district total expenses were about 124 million dollars down about a million dollars from the previous year next slide please looking at balance sheet information so assets and liabilities and equity of the various funds the slide i'm showing you here is laid out the same way the financial statements are you see across the top of the page the funds identification of the funds themselves those that have specific identifiers are considered to be major funds meaning they have magnitude whether it be assets liabilities revenues or expenditures and then the next to the last column is labeled non-major those are all the other smaller funds which include uh the larger of those two would be the food service fund and the newly created student activity fund this last year i just want to spend a couple seconds
009here on the general fund end of year uh 26.7 million dollars of total assets most of that being amounts owed to us by the state of michigan for your final two state aid payments uh for fiscal year 21 which happened in the months of july and august and then of course money in the bank and money invested liabilities of about 12.7 million dollars big biggest numbers in there are amounts due our teachers for summer payroll and the related benefits for those teachers who are on 26 pays having earned their wages through june but get the remainder of their payments on that contract during the months of july and august fund balance in the general fund uh 13.9 million dollars at end of year most of that is unassigned or meaning available for expenditure and then
010just two other numbers on this page i'd like to point out the 2019 a capital projects fund that was the last go round of voter approved bonds 2019 b is now fully expended and 2019 a is getting closer we have eight million dollars remaining there after a spend down this year of just over 16 million and the building in sight sinking fund is another millage out there which i believe is in place for at least the next two or three years funds funds available at the end of the year for the sinking fund 5.1 million dollars next slide please looking at those same funds revenue and expenditures as you can see the general fund topped over 101 million dollars of revenue in this last fiscal year once again boosted by those federal coveted relief funds
011and also an increase in your state aid foundation this last year and some categoricals expenditures and other financing uses this last year of about 98.2 million dollars adding 3.5 million dollars of equity to the general fund included in that would be federal grant funds uh not expended but received so but increase to the fund equity there in the middle column to the 2019 a capital project in the middle of the page there you see we spent 16.9 million dollars of equity there so that fund is is coming toward a close of course the voters have approved new bonds which we'll be seeing hitting the books in the in this next fiscal year next slide please two slides quickly on the general fund the first one showing the components of where our money comes from for
012on the general fund as you can see the big red piece of this pie our state provided funds seventy percent of every dollar received this last year the federal fund piece of the pie grew it's now five percent of the total and then local is 25 the majority of that being property taxes collected on non-homesteads remember property taxes collected from homeowners is included in that state number as it gets allocated back out on the per pupil foundation allowance next slide please looking at expenditures this is a pie chart that i like to show the board each year the key key thing to look at here is that blue piece of the pie how big is it so it's 61 of every dollar spent is considered to be instructional expenditures that those are dollars spent directly
013in the classroom so classroom teacher wages benefits supplies capital outlay that's used in the classroom those are all sitting in that area supportive services at about 36 percent that's kind of everything else transportation administration psychologists librarians all that kind of stuff is in support and just want to point out that that ratio at 61 percent to 36 percent is a very strong ratio you always want to see that instruction number as high as possible and at 61 percent that's a that's a very strong percentage especially compared statewide and two-year peers next slide please one slide on the general fund's budget results board you you know that you adopt a budget for your fiscal year before that fiscal year begins so back in june of 2020 you adopted the initial budget and at that time there
014was great speculation across the force the force of the universe we were talking about possibly huge cuts to state aid all kinds of drastic things and as you know when the when the revenue estimating conference happened later after after your year end ended the calamity did not occur so we actually had a small increase in state aid this last year and then you amend your budget a couple times during the year like right now you're going to be you're nearing a budget amendment as the student count has been finalized um and you'll be having that budget brought before you probably at your next meeting and then a final budget amendment is done generally in the month of june so what i'm showing you here is that final budget amendment and comparing it to the actual
015results for the year so on the first bullet there we had estimated budgets budgeted revenues to come in at about 102.5 million dollars they came in at 101.7 million uh 825 000 variants or the quick math there would be about eight tenths of a percent budget expenditures we had estimated about 101.9 million the actual was 98.2 million a variance of about 3.7 million dollars once again about a 3.3 percentage point variance and most of that has to do with the fact that our costs came in less during cobit there were some things that didn't occur we weren't transporting kids five days a week we had some open positions things like that so um overall you had estimated to add to your fund equity of about 637 thousand dollars the actual increase about 3.6 million so
016a positive variance of 2.8 million dollars which is if you're gonna have a variance that's the one to have next slide please final two slides um just some information about the bonded debt of the district at the end of the year we had some bonds we also had some school bus notes out there total debt was 166.7 million dollars you paid off nine million dollars of principal in fiscal year 21 you'll be adding to this number with the voter approved bonds you just made your your first sale of the first series of those so this number will go up 47 or 48 million dollars next year minus the principal will get paid in 22. capital assets of the district net of related depreciation about 238.4 million dollars there were about 79 million dollars of capital
017asset additions in fiscal year 21. a lot of that is sitting in construction in progress as those projects hadn't been completed as of end of year and will come online here in fiscal year 22 and then you'll be adding to that again possibly depending on how quickly construction ramps up on the new bond project like next slide please lastly just some other things um unusual to the year as i said before uh 4.1 million dollars of pandemic federal relief payments were received and expended in fiscal year 21. um you also were allocated sr2 funds of which you just began to spend before your end and then sr-3 funds are now allocated and available to the district you'll have the next two fiscal years almost three fiscal years to spend those all the way out through
0189 30 of 24. a total of over 3 million dollars plus will be coming in in those funds and as i told the audit committee earlier today as we're doing budgeting and thinking about finances of the district i think you have to look at it with two lenses what is our normal and what is the extra so that when you're doing your budgeting and thinking about projects some things that are coming along that you keep them in two different pots knowing that this one time money is going to expire over the next couple of years also great news to the district and most districts around the state the foundation allowance was increased 529 up to 8 700 per student for this current fiscal year and um also in august as you know and i'm so
019happy for the district that your voters approved another 175.7 million dollar bond request to rebuild all those new elementary buildings and that will be taking place in series over the next seven to ten years so we'll be talking about bond expenditures for quite some time i would also just like to congratulate the finance department this was a very very smooth audit as i told you no journal entries were proposed by the audit firm which is highly unusual and you have a really good team here they're doing good work being great stewards of the district's money and it was a pleasure to do this audit i would take any questions you may have i would say uh not a question but a thank you a lot of complex information delivered succinctly and clearly so thank you
020thanks bo yeah paula mark and your whole team thank you for your financial stewardship yeah thank you to paul and her team um for doing it and thank you for our auditors and making this all seamless for us any questions no i think i think after our audit meeting uh earlier we i think you asked all of our questions and we got them answered sufficiently so we're good thanks celeste i got to attend my first audit meeting today and uh enjoyed it kim always enjoy your presentations and it's all succinct and very easy for us to understand thank you for your firm's work on this for your work on this and certainly echo bull's comments to thank the administration for astute management of our funds here we're very lucky thank you okay we'll do a
021little seat shuffling here our next update is a bond project update and mr edwards is coming up to the podium to to give that thank you superintendent b lang and president van outer members of the board members of the community tonight is just a brief update but informative in terms of our bond projects first at central middle school the commissioning is complete and we are waiting for the final report at central athletic event facility the softball dugout progress project is still in progress uh the electrician is installing underground penetrations and electrical work there is a delay in the delivery of the wall blocks this delay will extend the project into early december instead of the end of november over at the northern campus five benches have been installed around the around the perimeter of the
022detention basin so if you have an opportunity you'll see those benches are now there and then moving forward to our 2021 bond the rfp for the construction manager was made available november 3rd earlier today we held a mandatory pre-proposal meeting with the invited firms and then later in tonight's agenda i'll discuss the architect and engineer recommendation so brief tonight but those are my updates related to bond projects any questions for john thank you sir thank you thanks johnny in our third report uh it's it's been a while since we've given you an update on our efforts around uh diversity equity and inclusion and uh dr janine matson-gearhart is here to give you a little bit of an update about what we've been doing what primarily she's been doing with through her department are you uh
023coming up alone or something oh michael mike's coming up as well okay so i'll turn that over to you um [Music] so thinking about diversity equity inclusion um use the word cei you may have noticed that it has become a phrase that a lot of people like to utilize in our world thinking about how this work connects to our students and our staff we go back to our mission and vision obviously we review those mission statements and revision statements we are trying to help our students reach their full potential by holding high expectations and creating a learning environment that's committed to it all so and creating a culture and climate where everybody is valued and included in the educational environment especially in the classroom we are intentional about listening to our students experiences at school
024we know that our family and culture can be improved and we've got students who have met with us to tell us about their experiences at the building level as well as um at the um level and we believe that building our own capacity as administrators and leaders in the classroom that we can make that change to the climate uh ethically in our aware with our students so this is a just a graphic it's not meant to be a mathematical equation and certainly the timelines are um um which was a midwest partnership throughout multiple states a couple of um um that was available to our administrators if we um we also are connected with eastern michigan university where we have an opportunity for our leaders to receive a certificate in social justice and equity and we
025also multiple initiatives and conversations and building leadership talking about inclusion within the building prior to 2017 fully understand what our systems needed to change last year um is and that is led by somebody who is very passionate about api at the building level it might be a principal it may be a spelling specialist counselor or and i think we were able to listen to about five or six of those students last week or two weeks ago um meeting when they spoke and nobody else really engaged with them so we have time to debrief with those students so it was very powerful to hear them they were very proud relationships with a variety of families and people who have come forward we are intending to have our community but kind of a community collaborative a place
026where the community can get together to talk about issues and so right now we're kind of doing it informally but we really want to create a formal process to bring our community members together along with our students and with our parents and our staff in each department we know that um learning opportunities so we i mentioned the coordinator and obviously so i um to give you just an update on what he did um that's called the listening tour so the result came to the exact team in april the high school club were very vocal about how they wanted to have a person that was close to the students focus thinking about the um um training we have some implicit training that is available that people have taken advantage of so on the curriculum side um
027we've worked a little over a year with monica liggins abrams and her consulting organization specifically we opened up on our eighth grade social studies unit so we identified some content areas that attention was needed and we addressed those adjusting some lessons and one of the key components of the three was eliminating using role playing or simulation when we're teaching sensitive topics that's definitely one of the key lessons there we also adjusted some vocabulary we looked at how those lessons were being utilized and our eighth grade social studies team that seemed to work really well and we rolled all that out last spring and had positive results from it and we continued the work into summer with her in um in working with what it looks like to lead into those classes so lessons in sixth
028grade and seventh grade and what that leads up to um alas though monica uh took a position with another organization and so we're wrapping up our work with her consulting group and we'll finish up here by thanksgiving she's helping us kind of put together the final steps of her processes relative to curriculum review ultimately the goal of this is to build capacity in our own organization so that we can execute a review and an audit of our own curriculum without needing to always bring in an outside consultant so that's what we're monica's helping us get some of those initial stages put in there she's also helping us to identify more resources in support of our global middle school social studies program so she's bringing a few more resources for that team to review and then
029last she helped us initialize our work for our 612 ela program and so those will be the things that i'm working with monica to wrap up and then we'll take recommendations from her and uh to see where we want to go next with our curriculum equity work morning [Applause] um uh i have a question regarding the um curriculum equity capacity uh well any of that information that you've been able to gather and secure will that go before the c cic yes and it and it has uh thus far we brought some of the information that's there that they did we didn't bring all of the lessons forward to them per se but we have brought up that and then um at the next meeting i'll announce the process like i'm announcing it to you right
030now that that were that monica is employed um with another organization and is wrapping up our work with us and lastly um i would like to thank you for your selection i think we're going we're off to a good start and congratulations to erica driver dr erica well i just want to say thank you for for the update obviously a lot of work has gone into this and continues to go into it and it was just wonderful to have that and just congratulations on hiring dr driver and looking forward to having you back in part of the district another question will be getting more frequent updates i think i think you know like keith said it was good to get this update because it's been a long time since we've heard anything so i'm just
031curious if we're going to have more frequent updates as we move along because we've done a lot of work and it's good to know that that has taken place yes congratulations thanks for the update congratulations on the new hire um so can i ask a question that could be directed to either of you or mark but as we proceed in the work here do you ever encounter people who are threatened by it and if if you encounter that kind of what do you say in response i'm basically handling those conversations so i know janae if you wanted to share a little bit about that um yeah thank you because i think it uh it forces people into sometimes uncomfortable conversations and i i mean and and i struggle with how to exactly describe this to
032people um so my and i may be a little off on this but i say uh have you ever been invited to a party where you don't know everybody anybody there but everybody else knows everybody else at the party and how do you feel um when you're in that kind of situation and uh but i'm i'm still looking for for better ways to describe it so you know there's a lot of work to be done here so thank you janine you mentioned that you want to bring the community members along with our students and staff and you you indicated a community member relationship what does that look like i mean are we still developing it i don't foresee it as a like a town hall meeting or anything like that but where where can those
033difficult but necessary conversations take place and one of our challenges too because it's not easy to create the right kind of mechanism to have those conversations so we're learning as we move along we're learning from what other districts are doing uh we're you know learning through the conversations we're having already you know internally and with some of our some of the groups we've met with some of the folks we've met with so um it's it's it's gonna it's a continually it's a growth opportunity for us as well in trying to figure that out and get it right and we'll stumble we'll have uh you know we'll have hiccups in the in the process it's there's nothing perfect to this work that you just have to start entering it and having the hard discussions as you
034move along yeah jeannie and mark and everybody i just think this is you know really great stuff for this community i think everybody expects change overnight and this is like a great big slow-moving ship um i think society has come a long ways in 20 years and we have a long ways to go um but you know this is good stuff and it just helps i appreciate everybody's helping and you know and thank you for the great hire it sounds like a doctor driver being from this community you know already understands the culture and you know that's one one big you know thing to totally understand so welcome and we look forward to the great things that are going to happen now from my perspective this is all about making sure that we allocate resources
035and instruction and opportunities according to need ensure that all students have access to equitable educational practices and services because the fact is we have economically disadvantaged students we we have disabled students we have minorities and in many cases those students don't do as well as other students and we want all students to succeed and i i get like beau is saying it's hard to explain because dei is not a racial construct it is a it is an intense look at how we're serving different groups of students and making sure they are allocated what they need to for them to succeed and be independent someday so yeah we're very supportive work and we certainly welcome dr driver to help us and any other questions for our presenters tonight okay very good thank you very much janine
036you might mention i know you're you're officially the director of special education but you were toying with uh changing the name of your department to be a little more descriptive of the work you do um certainly a more descriptive title for what you do that also means there's a lot on your plate thank you very much to the two of you for uh updating us and dr driver we welcome you to uh welcome you back to pps and i look forward to working with you and and seeing the good work that's about to uh continue so thank you for being with us that's all i have for uh my part of the report very good we'll move to uh board education which is a monitoring report on a middle school achievement and this is how
037the board does its work to monitor progress in the district well thank you trustees it's good to be here to share the middle school data with you and i appreciate dr pascoe taking the high school data when we were out of town at the last board meeting so taking a look at what we have available for you tonight in the report i do want to cover some of the implications of the impact of covet on the middle school data i'll give you an overview of how we're looking at the assessments for middle school that we utilized in the monitoring report we'll hit all the data highlights i think we'll talk about each graph that was in there there aren't as many when we just look at psat for middle school and then of course we'll
038talk about some of the next steps we're taking relative to relative to our work and our continuous improvement so on the middle school data while it still has those same impacts one we know student learning was impacted by the changes that we made in there and of course spring 2020 testing was fully suspended throughout the state with no accountability or expected results in 2021 we did conduct the testing last spring it wasn't mandatory and there wasn't the usual 95 percent accountability for us so with that limited testing and optional component that did impact our data and it's difficult to identify that relative to our comparable districts so we want to be careful with the data because it's a double-edged sword if we look at great data and don't turn inside and take a look at
039what our practices are it can make us look really good when quite possibly we're not seeing the full picture of data the other edge of that sword is we can have data that might look poorly and when we look a little bit deeper we may be in a spot that's looking good so we don't want to over celebrate and we don't want to under recognize and so both of those are a part of us taking careful application of this and so the first table i want to show you is an excerpt from your report and this particular table was around the percentage of accountable students that were tested so for our middle school on the psat 8 we're not looking at the students who qualify for taking the my access test but we are looking
040at all the rest that would be taking the psat eight and we tested 58 percent of our middle of our eighth graders so bear that in mind as we look at some of this data i've given a breakdown of the percentages that we've tested this is a part of the data that we would be looking at internally when we're trying to evaluate the impact of the information that we have so we i broke it down there not only by building but by particular categories that we report on in our in our monitoring report to take a look at the assessments we utilized there are two that we've always kind of talked about as future assessment areas because they are accountable for us and they are available with state comparable information that would be the the
041test that i've labeled in yellow here are m-step science and social studies and so we have those available at 5 8 and 11 although we tend to focus just on math and ela in these reports or evidence-based reading and writing as we kind of refer to the ela the ones in green are the ones that we did conduct for this year we did do the 6-8 m-step math in ela but this report focuses on the psat-8 outcome results so those are available for us and our eighth grade data we are able to get the comparable information from our districts that we've identified and so here comes the first table of information for you so on our evidence-based reading and writing this is the score for all of our students combined in eighth grade which is
042the 58 of eighth graders who test it so keep that in mind and just to explain the chart um again the horizontal axis so the organization of our comparable districts from left to right is in order of increasing students on free and reduced lunch so that's our measure of socioeconomic status so for us 83 percent of our students that tested were showing a proficient level on the psat-8 which is a great result of course we want to keep in mind the number of students that were tested and the impact that was there we know very little about who was tested in our comparable districts which also further kind of confounds the data or our ability to look at that comparison component but we do take it as a point of celebration to say for our
043students that did test we did we thought we did quite well on those results we start breaking those down into subgroups so this our economically disadvantaged group of students we take a look at them referential to the other ones and granville and midland were up there at the top with us and we had 66 of our students here so here's where we're kind of starting to see the impacts of covid there's a lot of research that's come out i don't cite any of it in the report but that kovid has greater impacts on families and students who are economically disadvantaged and so that may be impacting these numbers they still felt good for us but they definitely are an area that we will continue to reflect on the impact of what we've done and who
044was tested in order to kind of continue to improve their educational outcomes going forward if we look at some more of the groups that we usually reference here we staying on our evidence-based reading and writing those demographics with our comparable communities keep in mind for our comparable community we always move very close to that 30 number and it takes 30 students on a state report for the data to be available for us as a entity our data is always available but with our student counts i believe we had 16 of students who tested in eighth grade black african american and i think the other than white category was around 55 students or 60. so when we vacillate around that 30 number what happens is our data points kind of tend to appear or disappear doesn't
045mean we're not comparing to the correct communities it just means that's the data that's available and we believe our students did quite well in those categories and that was a point of celebration for our students that tested taking a look at math results our eighth grade math again we have some good results landing at the top compared with our communities we also notice that as i'll show you here in a bit that we can take a look historically at some of our uh percentages and take a look at growth relative to to past years so again we're performing well on our eighth grade math when we start looking at our economically disadvantaged students who took the assessment we still are doing quite well relative to our comparable communities and this is not an uncommon place
046for our overall rankings to land when we look at our comparable communities and lastly taking a look at the race and ethnicity breakdown of the information you can see that our students scored well compared with our comparable communities on math i do want to spend a few minutes on this table it's got a lot of numbers on it so i want to point out a few highlights after i explain what this is so we're looking historically at both m step and psat and what we're looking for here is what we call a growth percentile we're looking for students who actually showed the appropriate amount of growth or what m step in psa to consider an appropriate amount of growth between those years so the percentages that are listed here are not percent proficient on the
047assessment but they're students who showed an appropriate amount of growth the definition for that is usually 40th percentile or higher is an appropriate amount of growth when comparing to previous years they use 40th percentile because growth percentiles contain a fairly significant amount of possibility for error and so they usually use anything above a 40th percentile as being adequate growth due to the nature of a snapshot test so the percentages you're seeing here are the percent of students that showed that growth so in some of these data sets i requested we did internally request that we mask the data because the sample set was less than five students so it tends once we're down at that level it tends to really vacillate wildly and it doesn't really it isn't very helpful for a trend so you
048can start to see some evidence of the impact of covid when you take a look at the 2021 growth numbers they're they they vary greatly from the 2018 and 2019 numbers and so that coveted impact quite possibly is creating some wild trends here we do have though let me go back and maybe i might need your help on this up bow if you could please if you could go back and click that i have some areas that i wanted to highlight uh the first oh you know what it was an animation from the other from the other slide deck so i can just talk you guys through it so if we look at our eighth grade group of black african american students in 2019 they had a 63 percent we're showing growth and in 2021
049we had 88 of the students showing growth we felt that that and this would be the last row of the table here on the on the evidence-based reading and writing as well as on mathematics so we saw some areas where some students we saw some good growth here we also had some areas of concern on this table and that would be in the mathematics categories for our 6th and 7th graders when we're looking at either all students and economically disadvantaged we have some areas that our teams would want to focus on with some drops in the percent of students who were showing adequate growth now there's a lot in this and so we don't want to over celebrate or under under review that information in order to give those math teams the opportunity to have
050the impact that they need to have being back in the classrooms but but it is some areas where we've we've wanted to reflect on and make ensure our students are making growth relative to our previous years as we look at some of our next steps related to all of this data we evaluate the data with our middle school continuous improvement teams we dig in quite a bit with this information not only that but we also have their opening screener data with them that we've that we have just wrapped up our screener window at the end of october and so our teams will be able to review that data to continue to do good work we have done some meaningful preparation in this for the start of this school year all of our middle schools have
051been focused on three particular instructional strategies that impact all content areas including explicit vocab instruction active engagement strategies and what they call text writing frames which is a way to engage students in both the text and how they write about that content in those classes our central middle school continues a math intervention there and they're modeling some of that support we'll see the outcomes from that they have not had a full school year using this intervention system that they have and we're hoping this year will continue to show some good math results we we feel it's too soon to tie the math results that we're seeing in this report directly to some of that math intervention and we want to scaffold that math intervention quite possibly to other middle schools so other than that we'll
052present a little deeper analysis in january for you on the data we also are engaged in our 612 ela curriculum review process i met with those folks last week and we're continuing to right now do our first phase of that which is conducting focus groups with students parents administrators teachers in order to gain some insight into areas that we need to change and impact our ela curriculum relative to our outcomes and goals so that work is all going on i definitely want to say thank you to dr pascoe and melissa o'keefe for her data support in putting together the reports and of course it would go without saying but i definitely want to mention it here our middle school building teaching staff and administrators are out there working to teach and grow and support the
053students as we return back to uh normal day-to-day instruction here and that has been in all cases and in all schools a lot of work and i appreciate their work in helping not only to make a data report that i bring to you easy to do but also for the work that we still know we need to do so it's very encouraging to work with them on that and i'm also happy to answer any questions you have on the data hey mike um in 19 and 19 what percentage of the students did we give the psat to the data i mean obviously we only have 58 here but what would be a normal year above 95 is what we're required to do we're pretty close to 99 of our students would take either the my
054access test or the psat so the data is really skewed right i mean as far as being reliable with only 58 of the yes it is it's reliable in as much as it represents that 58 it's not reliable when we start looking at our scores historically if we want to compare multiple years and since we don't know what percentage tested in each of our comparable communities it could be great could be bad we're not sure how the comparison would look mike will that 95 requirement be in place for the 22 testing yes and they will be doing the same tests for as in the past correct so we'll again have a skewed comparison from that this school year this year last year correct we will be able to go back and look if we take
055both of those years where it was in the pandemic we will be able to kind of bridge of gap there to look at that information okay good thank you michael for your presentation of middle school yeah oh you got something yeah okay i was a little slow on the draw randy sorry um like so uh once again this report and the two other 1.1 reports probably the most important reports we get all year um appreciate the caveats on the smaller sample sizes and so we can't totally trust this as we could in other years but i still see a lot of number ones and number twos on here which we don't always see we haven't always seen those in the past and i mean from our perspective we wanted to see portage moving uh when
056you know these districts these other districts that looked like us we wanted to see us being either the top or up toward the top of all those and so you know as a trustee i see those number ones and that's exciting you know caveats for this year's data notwithstanding and then you know the other thing that jumps out is that um the the economic disadvantage students and african-american black students do not do as well as students you know as a whole and so so this draws a line right back to the dei work and um you know hopefully that dei work can start raising all these students up to higher levels so good report look forward to the next one on elementary kids certainly thank you mike appreciate it i will now move on to
057our comments and communication section is there anyone who wishes to address the board this evening our secretary dr shelton harris will read our guidelines for public participation please thank you 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 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 can contact the superintendent directly regarding personnel matters board of education members are not obligated to respond to issues raised during public meeting public comment normally such issues are referred to the superintendent for
058follow-up thank you we have two speakers tonight our first speaker is dr ryan freeland welcome good evening mr dr van lang trustee sport thank you for the opportunity to speak again i'm dr ryan freeland i spoke just a few weeks ago as many of you recall um thank you for including um our issue here in a full and important agenda so thank you very much first of all mr van antwerp i very much appreciate your emails even this week in clear communication for uh the proposal so um what i am here to do is first of all thank the board for continued consideration of potential commemoration and renaming of school facilities to be discussed later but essentially i'm here to gather your expertise your your intelligence and your recommendations for the way ahead for us
059i know this is a discussion piece for later but just to mention that i am here going to talk even after the meeting if if applicable but essentially i'm here for three reasons number one to continue to learn and collect board commentary and policy number 7250 commemoration and naming of school facilities two collect board recommendations for committee member inclusions as well as communicate to the board our working list of potential committee members we do have a working list of names that we're prepared to share with the board tonight should the board request it importantly we are open to additional names that the board would like to see included in the proposal committee three and finally we're here to listen to the board recommendations regarding proposal requirements format and timeline thank you guys and look forward
060to the discussion later tonight thank you sir our next speaker is james asher welcome first i want to thank the board for their time tonight to first just come here again and last time i came here it was very got my pen it was very heated and there were some things that i said that i felt the way that i did but they came across in a very rude way and i want to apologize to the board and instantly on the drive home i reflected and realized that that's not who i am i'm a calm and collective person and i try to share different viewpoints even if they're difficult conversations of course i would love the board to change their stance on masking but that's not really why i'm here i'm here to discuss because
061there are some questions that the community members do have about the masking i'm not here to change an opinion we just have some questions um when i've talked to people they have brought up concerns about the large gatherings at like sporting events and things such as that nature where people are hundreds of people are together without mass clumped together and then how people students have to wear masks in the classroom spread apart facing forward but then they can have their masks off which most students do take their masks off in the hallways not spread apart it's really like a mosh pit i mean the hallways are busy places people are hanging out unfortunately some people make out it's just it's a nasty place so there's some there's some questions as far as that um but
062those are just the things that i think i've when i've talked to people um people from all backgrounds all parties all whether they're for the masking or not it um those are just some of the things that people have brought up and just some communication to parents that may be on my side or not just clarification on those things would be very helpful another thing i wanted to bring up is that um i'm just super excited to work with the board within the next two years i'm on uh superintendent's advisory board and i'm super excited with the work that we're doing there and the great things that we're doing as far as equity i think that we're going in the right direction especially with adding dr driver to portage's team i think that's super exciting
063and having a fellow husky in that position is extremely exciting and i know that the students will be super excited to hear that that's all i had to say i look forward to working with the board in the future and thank you for your time thank you thank you james i appreciate your comments and thank you for your service on the superintendent advisory board thank you very much okay are there any comments from trustees this evening um we had a good audit meeting before this meeting and um i guess we'll have a motion later to accept that report a reminder that portage northern is opening with little shop of horrors this friday night um i believe it will be going on for the next two weekends and central has had a play going on too
064i believe what's called the sparrow and i'm not sure has that concluded yes all right i hope they had a good turnout and a success with that anyone else well i'd just like to say i had the opportunity to attend bob knight's memorial service on saturday at uh saint michaels and i can tell you that every seat in the house was was taken um there were several speakers and uh among them uh there are people who definitely have connections to portage public schools eric boersema spoke you know a former former football player frank galkowski was there former assistant coach at central and uh principal at central high school and uh and dan knight as well um bob's son and they all uh had interesting stories and interesting memories to share and uh there were there's
065a lot of laughs and uh a lot of respect for the man that's for sure um dan knight uh finished his comments by saying that the coach really liked teams because teams brought people together to do great things and i just thought that was a great takeaway from the event so anyway it was a great send off for coach bob knight and the programs are on your desk if you'd like to look at them anything else okay we'll move to board committee reports kurt already reported so i'll just uh report on the policy committee we met last wednesday for a couple hours it was intense we had to uh do some work on our public participation policy at board meetings because neola has some suggestions on how to improve that and then we also worked
066on policy 7250 commemoration and naming of facilities and that's later on our agenda uh i will get you the um uh changes we talked about for our public participation policy but we only had one copy and it's all marked up and i gotta clean it up before any of you will understand it so we'll get those things out uh shortly okay we'll move forward with our consent agenda on page six we have two items tonight the first is the october 25th 2021 regular business meeting minutes and number two that the board of education approved the addition of our virtual elementary program and select courses for our middle school virtual program to our elementary and middle school programs of study are there any exceptions to the consent agenda as presented hearing none the consent agenda is
067approved and we'll now go to our section on assurance of district performance and we land on monitoring report 2.2 treatment of staff on page 34. is there a motion please yes mr president i'd like to make the motion the board of education except has presented the modern report on 2.2 treatment of staff as a reasonable interpretation and evidence of compliance with policy thank you is there a second second very good thank you for taking a look at that monitoring report just a few things i wanted to uh um bring out your attention on that one um and it's similar to the comments i made on at the last meeting is because of uh of uh of our covet situation we've decided to modify the the way we're seeking input from from our staff this year
068rather than doing our traditional employee engagement survey we're doing pulse check surveys that we did both last year and we're we're doing again this year i shared some of uh some information with you at last meeting but uh there's a summary uh here in the notes section i did keep the other report still there just so that we don't lose sight of what's normally presented but just made some comments here that that based on what we're hearing from staff they told us that they know what's expected of them they feel a sense of belonging in their respective work environments and that they would recommend uh pps uh that's that students attend pps they would make that recommendation for family and if you remember that's a that's a category that is is important to us as
069we look at our other reports as well so it's consistent with what we've been hearing and it's good to hear from our staff in that regard we they also told us that and again this parallels what we've heard before is they want to be staff members want to be included in the decision making process before that the decisions are made and providing their input into decisions so we know we have continued work to do in that area it's it is a challenge especially when decisions have to be made rather quickly on how we get especially around what we do in terms of responding to our ever changing coven situation it's not always possible to get the kind of feedback that you'd like but it is an area that that we're aware of and again these
070are district level results building results are going back out to the buildings and are being shared with staff and action plans are being developed i did include some charts in the report on the numbers of staff members who participated and whether they were teaching in person or virtually uh or a combination of both and uh you can see the results there that uh again they're on a five point scale that we use the the high areas were all above a four point the low areas were about a point below that so those are the reasons why those are highlighted everything else in the report is pretty much the way the information has been presented in the past and there are no no changes really to that i wanted to highlight or bring to your attention
071be glad to answer any questions if you have them any questions for mark that was a great report mark appreciate it and uh i think we ought to prove it all those in favor of approving approving monitoring report 2.2 treatment of staff please say aye opposed the motion carries and the monitoring report is approved our next spontaneous report this evening is on compensation and benefits is there a motion please on page 47 president ben entered by move that the board of education accept as presented the monitoring report on 2.3 compensation and benefits as a reasonable interpretation and evidence of compliance with policy thank you terry there's a second seconded thank you uh again this is becoming uh you know the information presented is uh pretty routine kind of explained what actions the board has taken
072as uh as it relates to compensation and benefits for for my contract and and other other areas the the only thing i mention is that we still have seven people that are vested uh in the uh in that plan that pay for pay for performance plan that uh that is being phased out so there are still seven remaining in that otherwise the report is pretty much the same as as it has been any questions for mark on this one all in favor of approving the monitoring port for compensation benefits please say aye aye opposed uh the motion passes and the marching report for compensation and benefits is approved um our next action item is to approve the audit and the motion is on page 54 please yes mr president i'd like to make the following
073motion that the board of education accept the 2021 financial report single audit act compliance report and the management letter as presented thank you is there a second second any discussion we had the presentation here and the audit committee met before the meeting i think everybody's questions were answered okay all those in favor of approving the audit report please say aye aye opposed the audit report is approved thank you and our next item is a required action item and that is to amend l4029 paul is here if there are any are you going to present paula or just answer questions i'm not sure how we want to proceed on this well why not you present and we'll ask for a motion please on page 58 as part of our requirement each year when we adopt our
074budget in june we set our tax rates and because we issued bonds in this fiscal year we now have to amend our l4029 to collect the required debt levy associated with making the new bond payment that will happen in this fiscal year so it's a formality site of the board and a revised l4029 will be sent to the city of portage they will collect that tax levy on the winter collection for the new debt levy and then the other municipalities will just receive an l4029 that shows the full amount this is because it went down and went back to the same level it was right i mean we didn't raise anybody's taxes we just we did not raise energy it went down and went back to where it was and so we just have to
075reinstitute that correct because we can only levy on the l4029 the required amount to make our obligated tax payments and at the time that we adopted the budget we did not have this new issue the 2021 bond issue yet so now we're going back and amending the l4029 bringing the levy back up to the 6.85 debt mills we're doing what we said we were going to do any other questions comments uh is there a motion please on page 58 yes mr president i'd like to make the following motion the board of education men the l4029 as presented reflect the debt millage change associated with issuance of the school district 2021 school building and site bonds thank you kurt is there a second second thank you all those in favor of amending l4029 please say aye
076aye opposed now the motion passes and now we'll move to our action items the first one is to approve a special educa education parent advisory committee member is there a motion please on page sixty one president financial if i move that the board of education approve ann kossik as a member of the kalamazoo risa special education parent advisory board is there a second please seconded thank you and uh the board thanks ann kosic for her willingness to serve on on the special education parent advisory board we preach that appreciate that very much all in favor of approving this motion please say aye aye opposed the motion passes and ann kosic is the newest member of the k resist special education parent advisory board our next action item is to approve architectural and engineering services for
077the new elementary buildings there's a motion on page 63 please president van antwerp i make a motion that the board of education award the architectural engineering services to tower pinkster including the services of fielding international and authorize the administration to negotiate contract terms and conditions under the guidance of the district's legal counsel thank you is there a second second thank you johnny edwards is back up with doug phillips to uh kind of review how we got here gentlemen thank you um doug phillips vice president of plant moran chris uh i believe you met earlier uh in the fall um doug has been assisting us in the rfp process for both our architectural engineering uh contract or services as well as our construction manager services just to give the board an update of how we landed
078with uh our particular uh recommendation um once the bond uh the citizens uh voted for the bond proposal in august we sent out a request september 28th for the architectural services uh we invited firms that were present in the southwest or west michigan area those firms were c2ae stantec as a partnership dlr whiteman gmb king scott tmp then tower pinkster with felding we held a mandatory pre-meeting october 4th with all firms and that followed up with a walk-through of central middle school as well as morris bridge elementary school the architects kind of want to see what the standard was here within the district there were follow-up questions two addendums were issued for clarification uh we asked for the firms to give us uh their pricing in terms of the percentage of construction costs as well
079as any other uh fees associated with uh their services the deadline for the proposal was october 13th of 2021. on the committee along with uh superintendent b lang and myself we had dr michael pascoe assistant superintendent of instruction kelly jencinius director of elementary education dan vomastic director of technology paula johnson director of finance jeremy zones haverhill elementary principal and steve phelps maintenance and facilities manager now i'm gonna turn it over to doug to talk a little bit about the criteria based selection uh process of both what we use for quantitative and qualitative work thank you johnny uh it's a pleasure to be here again this evening with you to update and report on this effort uh um uh spent a lot of time reading those proposals and evaluating from their perspectives individually what were the
080most important criteria and how those firms met those criteria and then as a group shortlisted firms for interviews and brought them in i believe the date of that interview process was october 20th we spent an hour nearly an hour and a half with each team those were very productive sessions and the committee again convened and and the three firms that we brought back for the short list was dlr whiteman tower pinkster as well as c2ae stantec uh the fees are also associated here in terms of how uh todd pinkster proposed their fee structure again this is before negotiations and then we wanted to highlight several of the factors that led to the recommendation with tower pinkster having a local presence and doing more than half of their work in education they've done several uh designs
081and engineering projects for us uh over the past decade or more and then filled in international they bring a national leader perspective in k-12 education in terms of their research and design the tower pinkster felding international team has a history of successfully working together and also they were well prepared and had a strong understanding of our goals for the project the tower pinkster team members understand educational philosophy and its application to learning environment so i'll be happy to answer any questions for the board um not a question but just an observation um you know when when processes like this happen i kind of think well is is this process just going to spit out the name of the company that just wrapped up the prior projects with us and in this case it did not
082um but but i know that the past projects have gone well and those were respected people we worked with and i i think it's kind of refreshing that we're willing to say we're willing to keep an open mind and say that a different group is better for the elementary based project so i just uh that was was noted and appreciated thank you thank you just thank you for that comment and reminder bo this this uh selection certainly is not any kind of an indictment or reflection on any other firms that we've worked with you know we try to to match the firms with the projects at hand and c280 stantec did a wonderful job for us with our middle school projects and our athletic facilities and uh we worked very well with them together and
083expect that the same will happen with tower pinkster on this next series of projects well i'm glad we went through a big process because it's a 10-year project and it'll be going on probably none of us will be on the board when that's coming to the end and i'm 10 years from now and so it's great that we did the backup work to have the next group of people feel confident in what we've done here and i don't know if it's clear but doug was our advisor in this whole process he was not a voting member any voting that or selection did happen by pps staff doug helped facilitate the process and brought us the information we were looking for so that is where a kind of a team collaborative effort to come to this
084decision just like to say i appreciate the process i know doug has worked with the district so he understands the expectations but i think this is like our our fourth time we've done a you know architecture uh search and uh you know um this was my favorite process i think this did a good job i mean one time the whole board did it um and it just got really mucky and i mean so i really appreciate the thoughtful process i think it was done right so thanks to everybody and like the no the no questions thing is is a testament to what a good job everybody feels i think so thank you thank you thanks to everyone who worked on this and made the recommendation tonight we appreciate all that work and i think the
085board looks forward to meeting the reps from tower pinkster and fielding it'd be nice to get a look at how they plan to move forward on this thank you thank you very much thank you i think we're ready to vote on this recommendation all those in favor of approving the architectural engineering services firm please say hi hi opposed the motion passes and the architectural engineering services firm is approved our next discussion item is the summer tax resolution paul is going to handle this one again it's a pretty much an annual uh resolution that the board takes if we want to collect taxes so you can add to that paul if you would mark pretty much summed it up for you this is an annual process that we go through to allow requests that the city
086of portage collect operating taxes for us so we receive those funds over the summer because there is a month that we do not receive state aid so this does allow us to have our cash flow come in at a normal basis operate um any questions for phone thank you paula our next discussion item is to approve the purchase of three vans johnny just disappeared he was checking on the dugouts at the softball fields johnny gets a multi-million dollar contract approval and he's walking out and leaves a hundred thousand dollar van approval in terms of our uh van recommendation uh we would like to award uh this particular bid to sealy fort which is a local ford dealer here in town the three vans uh would add to our fleet we currently have eight vans in
087rotation uh four vans were recently retired which brought us down to the eight and those four vans were retired because they no longer were in repair and they did not meet the safety standards by the state of michigan on a daily basis we have three vans assigned as shuttles between our high schools particularly so that that way those programs do not require a bus and that saves the district money in lieu of using school buses however they sometimes create conflicts with other programs such as having vans available for athletics in addition these vans would be used uh in the summer for curious kids and for food services meet up eat up and read up the vehicles were competitively bid with sealy four being the lowest bid uh for this particular configuration we looked at a
088number of configurations between eight and ten uh passengers low roof uh medium roof or high roof as well and um and also as you all probably know with the uh chip shortage uh these products would not arrive anytime soon so sealy ford had the best turnaround time which is not ideal but it's practical given the environment we're in which is around may of 2022 uh for this particular uh van and i ideally we wish we can get it quicker but you can drive past most dealerships and see if those lots are empty uh but this would bring our fleet up to 11 and again it would give us the ability to have a little more flexibility with some of our programs and services that we offer and i i failed to mention at the beginning
089in the 2021 uh budget this item was included as part of being used with esser funds so this is not a new expenditure that just appeared this was budgeted in this year's budget johnny would help you at all if we were to approve this tonight it it it would help it'll start us a little earlier but silly fort does not guarantee an arrival prior to may so it it could help us in some matter if the if the board so choose is the board hoping to do that this season yeah sure uh okay is there a motion please and oh could you provide the motion it's on page 71. well um randy would you like me to start with a motion to forward to an action item oh i'm sorry yes sir yes sir i'd
090be delighted to do that okay i move that the van purchase be moved uh ahead as an action item tonight yes second all in favor of moving the van purchased to an action item please say aye aye opposed the new van purchase is now an action item and is there a motion please sure glad to help there uh mr uh chair i recommend that i move that the board of education approved the purchase of three 20 22 22 ford transit all-wheel drive 10 passenger vans from sealy ford in the amount of a hundred and three thousand five hundred fifty seven thousand dollars funds will come from the 2021-2022 general fund via esser uh purchase included in the adopted 2021-22 budget thank you is there a second thank you all in favor of approving the van
091purchase please say aye aye opposed the van purchase is approved thank you i thought that'd be good to get that done because uh we're not going to be holding our second meeting in november our agenda is pretty late so we will not be meeting thanksgiving week so it's good to get that taken care of so our last discussion item this evening is commemoration and naming of school facilities and as i mentioned policy committee spent some time on this this past wednesday and a copy of the policy is in front of you and as you know it says the board has complete authority and responsibility for the naming of facilities and our customary practice in the district is to name a facility after a section of the city or the street where it's built but we
092have the opera have the option to commemorate a facility by naming it after a person who's made exceptional contributions to the district so the policy doesn't restrict the number of suggestions that may come in for naming different things after a person and so we feel we have the need to broaden just what that would be so we looked at a variety of ways to do that in both the introductory paragraph and in the commemoration section and you see in blue there it says add language to incorporate the concept of monuments or other physical representation of a person in this section and under the subheading commemoration below so the goal of the policy committee is to be able to present some language to the board in december to look at and right now at least a
093draft of the language we have is something something to the effect placement of a permanent monument or other physical representation to preserve the memory of a person requires the approval of the board and so i would i would certainly appreciate if all of you could think about that and get back to us the policy committee with any suggestions you may have because we would like to finalize this next month at our board meeting any comments suggestions seems like a good idea yeah we really struggle with how to do it so also i i don't know if you're going to continue but also as part of out of the policy committee there's you know through our discussion there i had mentioned that eric albertus the principal here at central high school had has had some conversations
094with other individuals about what is an appropriate way to recognize bob knight and those those discussions started taking place outside of this whole process here and it was suggested that that eric form a committee to at least revisit those discus those ideas that came up as he was having discussions with individuals to see if there was something other than just automatically landing on the naming of a facility so eric is putting together a committee there were some names that have been bantered around i don't know how far along he is in that process but it would it would be a process that would be kind of run parallel to what the board is doing here so if they did come up with an idea that involved the placing of a monument uh after a person
095or some other recognition that um that it could be brought to the board as a recommendation that they do that and then you would have this monument language in place in your policies if that's the direction they go if the direction instead is is the actual naming of a facility then i think the board then the the process that the board has would kick in at that point if if that's the direction that's headed so hopefully that made a little sense i mean we're trying not to confuse things but to simplify things to to have conversations at the at the school level to see what ideas are there and just have further conversation around that before it really comes to the floor so is the group that eric is working with are they acting in
096the form of an advisory or just making recommendations i mean what what's the because you see they're working parallel to the board but i'm just kind of wondering when does it other than a recommendation well the uh okay so it could come as a recommendation that that there's some some other visible way to recognize bob knight that um that receives support from the people that he's working with and if that's the case um the board would then have a language in its policy that deals with monuments if they went with a in a direction other than naming of the field so with that group stature than an individual coming forward with a recommendation different stature you know i see that group as really having some thoughtful discussion around you know what what's being said what's
097being heard in the community um you know certainly i mentioned to him that dr freeland had been here and and we had some informal conversations you know after the board meeting he's had conversations with different members of uh of the athletic community and i think it's only right that they have that discussion first before the board puts together a committee for something that there may be a better idea that surfaces before we get to this point okay so i'm what i'm hearing you to ask i think is is this committee that mr albertus is putting together separate and apart from any committee that would be formed by the superintendent to address this issue and i i believe that the comment that i made at the meeting last time was we need to be thoughtful about
098how we do this because it affects the entire community and so that's what i believe that the two of you are asking is is eric's committee that committee or is it a separate committee and they won't morph into whatever committee you put together there may not be a need for what you're talking about but you're saying it is a separate it is a separate committee it is it's separate from what is outlined in board policy okay great and because this your commemoration policy says the board may it doesn't require that this committee be formed if the board you know accepts a recommendation or the direction that that this committee would uh would want to go in and this is very it's a very prescriptive committee the selection committee and board policy so this would give
099a little more latitude and include individuals beyond what would be who would be serving on this committee at some point during the process whenever the appropriate time would be i think last time when it when the possibility of any sort of a renaming or fitting other names in there was not a clear understanding perhaps of the history that went behind the naming of the current football facility and i just think uh for historical purposes and for any other considerations that would be a good piece of research to be included and i think we also talked about the longevity of whatever we do for coaching mind because another group may come along and then some then it's a yeah i just want it to be permanent yes i think we don't want to be put in
100the position of revisionist history um to me it's kind of like saying george washington really isn't real relevant to our life today so let's rename this monument something else right it's it's not uh replacing washington with lincoln it's they're both great anybody else yeah well and um i mean mark so i really support this because um the neatest thing here is it it starts some dialogue so that moss does not grow on this while it takes us you know another month to tweak our policy um and it has the right people i think talking and i think i think eric with the historical work that and knowledge that he has is a really good person to help these informal discussions and you know i so i don't know how long it's going to take but
101i certainly don't see a list of options coming to this board i mean at some point no matter what the process is i really want a kind of a thoughtful um really a thoughtful process that's inclusive and you know has has lots of input and i don't know exactly how this is going to turn out but i i i think it's going to be really neat so um yeah i have a lot of confidence in eric's ability to facilitate that he certainly is you know knows the historical perspective of this district and in particular this campus and i you know my my work with eric i mean he's very open-minded about things like this and certainly is willing and able to to uh to get out some really good ideas that that might might serve
102us not only for this project but for others around the district so mark you don't see a second committee after air gets done right you see a recommendation from eric's committee no that will influence the language of the policy that's up to the border policy it's up to us if we want to have a committee vet all the suggestions that we have we're just working on we're just fixing our policy while eric is having some discussions internally which i believe he was having anyway before all this started so so the answer would be yes you see another committee after if the board so chooses we have that option but we could very well they could very well somebody could bring us a proposal that that we think we're going to accept and we've accepted two
103of them a couple this year already i think the library at moore's bridge and the hill at west middle schools people brought those recommendations um and and we we had a brief discussion and they could this committee could very well bring us a recommendation or we could say we would like to talk about it further and and moore's bridge that was that was easy and that it wasn't being renamed so it was yeah this is a much bigger deal you know and i just um regarding the policies i don't know do you guys is there anything about any discussion about finances so when you change a name or do anything or a monument um you know how much of the of the financial burden does the district bear i don't know if you if the
104policy committee wants to consider putting something that in there but you know um we could very well accept something and then expect to to to pay for it all as well so i just maybe the the policy committee wants to consider the the financial impact of some of that stuff what the impact would be and if there are alternate funds that are going to be proposed for it private funds always joke i wish i was in the the sign business that got to change the name of banks because i'd be i'd be filthy rich yeah any other comments well we should just reaffirm the fact that the the board definitely believes that uh honoring coach knight somehow is appropriate and we'll get our policy tuned up while this internal group is having discussions and we'll
105be ready to uh act either by forming a committee or act on the recommendation as the policy specifies so okay if there are no other comments we are adjourned you