September 11, 2023 - Regular School Board Meeting

001- All right, thank you. Good evening, everyone. I would like to call this Regular School Board Meeting for Independent School District 624 to order. (gavel taps) Could we start with a roll call, please? - Daniels? - Here. - Newmaster? - Here. - Streiff Oji? - Here. - Thompson, here. Arcand? - Here. - Beloyed? - Here. - Okay. At this time we'd like to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance. - [All] 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. - Thank you. Okay, currently in front of us we have an agenda waiting to be approved. And in that agenda we have some donations that we are thankful for, that we have received.

002People are always very generous and providing things for our school district. We have some business in there that occurs on a monthly basis, in that consent agenda, and then we have the regular agenda. So could we get a motion to approve the agenda? - So moved. - Second? - Second. - Okay. Any discussion? All in favor of approving the agenda say aye? - [Members] Aye. - All opposed same sign? (gavel taps) Motion carried. We have an agenda. The first thing we have on the agenda tonight would be the introduction of, are we gonna do the introduction of student representatives. Okay, do we want to do that? - Thank you, Dr. Arcand. So we are pleased to welcome our new student representatives for the 2023-24 school year, who are with us today, and it's Ari Vann-Cook,

003a 12th grade student at South Campus. She will serve as a student representative for the 23-24 school year. Ari is the leader and founder of the Women Empowerment Seminar. She's co-leader of the Black Student Union, a prized book recipient, lacrosse player, and WriteNow Writing Contest winner. Ari is also published through the White Bear Center For the Arts and testified at the capital (speaks distantly). Also, we have Lydia Kleinhans. She's an 11th grade student at South Campus. She will serve as the alternate student representative for the 23-24 school year. Lydia is involved in the student council. She's a trumpet section leader in the band, plays both club and high school soccer, and works as a lifeguard at the YMCA. She's also a part-time PSEO student at St. Kate's. During her time as student representative, Lydia would

004like to learn about the work of a liaison and how to make respectful and healthy relationships. Lydia is not here tonight because (speaks distantly). You might run into that if you're involved (indistinct). Hopefully we'll have at least one (indistinct). So anyway, welcome, and, well... (people applaud) (people speak distantly) - After would be great. We'll do it after. - Okay. Thank you. The next thing on the agenda that we actually have to have the roll call vote, would be the consent agenda, which is our minutes, (indistinct), donations. Thank you to everybody who (indistinct). Any field trips or personal items. So can we get an motion to approve the consent agenda? So moved. Is there a second? - Second. Any discussion? All right, this requires a roll call vote. Can you call the roll? - Newmaster? -

005Aye. - Streiff Oji? - Aye. - Thompson, aye. Arcand? - Aye. - Beloyed? - Aye. - We're good. - Motion carried. (gavel taps) Well the next we have on our agenda is public forum. In the public forum we allow speakers to speak to the minutes. And then we tap the gavel. Speakers are called up to the microphone and recognized, normally. Fortunately or unfortunately we don't have anybody who has signed up to speak, so we're gonna go ahead and move past that. We're gonna go to informational item number one, student recognition. - All right. Thank you, Chair Arcand. We'd like to celebrate White Bear Lake Area School students who received state level honors. This month's video honor our students who represented the district in state level Trap and Skeet team and the Fishing team. Well done,

006students, and thank you to the staff and family members who supported the students along the way. Go Bears! And roll the video. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - All right, well, thank you for all those participating. Congratulations. The next thing we have on the agenda for tonight is the Superintendent's Report, C2. - Thank you, Chair Arcand. So I'm gonna, before we begin, I'm gonna hand it out here in a second, but before we begin, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the significance of this day, September 11th. 22 years ago, we had an experience that those of us old enough to remember, no one forgets. Today we remember the tragedy of the attacks on the World Trade Center, and also the terrorism of the passengers on Flight 93, and our nation's first responders. I'm

007still sad about the loss our country sustained that day, but I am also encouraged by the way we came together to support each other following this tragedy. With that, I'll turn it over to Ari, for the Student Liaison Report. - Okay. Thank you. Throughout the 2023-24 school year, a number of programs are taking place. Sports like football, soccer, and cross country are all being held, with home game tickets now free for students (speaks distantly) Congratulations to our varsity volleyball team, for winning (indistinct). Other current extracurricular activities include music competitions, this day and tomorrow, as well as the opportunity for seniors to work as an Extended Day assistant. Speaking of seniors, this is our last year as a split campus (speaks distantly). Monday, October 2nd, marks the beginning of White Bear Lake Homecoming, with our football

008game taking place October 6th versus Stillwater. Go Bears! - All right, thank you, Ari. And we'll just jump right into mine. All right. So we enjoyed welcoming students back for the 23-24 academic year. Elementary and secondary students began last week, and our Early Childhood programs begin this week. Throughout the district there are many exciting smiles, as young ones entered our front doors after a summer vacation, or in some cases for the very first time. We wish all of our students a terrific year. In addition to our weekly e-newsletters and our usual information share-outs, we invite you to enjoy two 624 inspired initiatives on our district Facebook and Twitter pages. Every Friday the district will post a video update of the week in 62.4 seconds, and weekday mornings right at 6:24 AM we will share 624

009Facts on the district's Facebook and Twitter pages. Videos can also be found on the district's YouTube channel. District community members age 65 and over are invited to apply for our lifetime Senior activity pass, which allows free entry into a variety of activities for entertainment, home athletic contests, concerts, and theater productions, just to name a few. If you'd like to be added to the list of almost 1,000 senior community members who enjoy the benefit, call the Superintendent's Office at 651-407-7563 to request a free Lifetime Senior Activities Pass. The district continues to hire for a variety of positions, offering both school day and out school time hours. Full and part-time options are available. Check out the employment page of our district website to find ways you can join us as a Bear. And that's my report. -

010Okay. Thank you. I'm looking at the agenda. I don't see the (indistinct) on my agenda. - That was an opening school report. - Opening school report. - Okay. So you will have an opening school report? - Yes. Yes, we've done the opening school report. All right, thank you, Members of the Board, Chair Arcand. So our members of the leadership team will all be involved in an update. This is always a much anticipated report at the first board meeting after the school year gets underway. You get to see and hear about all the goings-on from the last few weeks. Who do we have kicking it off? - We're playing rocks, paper, scissors on which of us gets to kick it off. But I will. Thank you, Board Members, for letting us get together as a leadership

011team and give you an update of the things that we have done to prepare for the school year. So as you can see, we'll have a variety of updates coming to you from a variety of people in the crowd here. And we'll kick it off with Teaching and Learning. - Good evening. Jen Babiash, Director of Teaching and Learning. We welcomed over 30 educators to White Bear Lake Area Schools on August 23rd and 24th. The theme was Proud to be a Bear. Educators spent time with their mentors and instructional coaches in their respective schools and heard from district leadership around the importance of building relationships, partnering together, and embracing change. As we continue our elementary literacy work to ensure that each student is guaranteed learning experiences that develop lifelong literacy, a group of elementary educators continued

012to meet over the summer to write unit plans for our new ELA curriculum, called Core Knowledge Language Arts, CKLA. This year, teachers will continue to learn evidence-based reading practices in year two of LETRS training, while implementing the new curriculum. We will continue to partner with our Educational Equity and Achievement Department, and provide continued support and training for educators and principals in literacy and the new curriculum. And finally, we had our secondary staff kick off the week of learning together as they prepared to welcome new students to the buildings for the new school year. - Good evening. So this past year we've been working on expanding our mental health services. And one of the things that we have been doing is we have co-located mental health providers that are providing services in the schools. We've added

013six, what we call CTSS workers, and they go in and they partner with that co-located practitioner, and they actually work with the classroom teacher, on saying how can we generalize those skills that we're learning in our sessions into the classroom? So we're really excited to continue to add more CTSS workers into the schools. The other area that we worked on is expanding our services. So we have Ramsey County resource navigators, and those people are multilingual, and they're able to partner with families and helping them navigate either housing resources, mental health resources, whatever they would happen to need. And they're available 24/7. So that's one of the things. And then the other one is the Ramsey County Crisis. And what we're really excited about this service is that it's one point of access in Ramsey County.

014So if you contact this phone number, a 24/7, a person will be able to connect with you and get you connected to one of our mental health providers in the community. We have six different agencies that we're partnering with, and each of those agencies hold three slots open every single day so that if a student needs immediate access to mental health resources, they're able to go through that one point of access. Questions? Yes. - Just briefly, you can get to that through the website, correct? - Correct, mm hm. - There's student support services for mental health? - Yes. - And you can find all important resources. - Up through that, and also the Support Hub. - Yep. - Mm hm. - Thank you. - Yeah. - Any questions? - Do educators have access to these?

015- For themselves? - Services, yes. - No, not right now. These are all the children's mental health collaborative work. - Okay. - Mm hm. Yeah. Okay? - Any other questions? - How are we communicating this with our families so they know where to find that phone number? 'Cause it saves, in the moment, if you have to go and search. - Right. - On a website, it can be overwhelming for some people. Are you communicating in other methods, and then is it being... You know, either they don't have access to the internet or maybe don't speak English or have English as a second language, is there other ways that we're making sure we're gonna, and this is a great resource to have. - Right. Yeah, thanks for that question, Angela. One of the things that we

016did is we brought together all our social workers, our psychologist, and our equity specialist last week. and we had Ramsey County come in and present, and we went through all these different areas. So hopefully they're offering these to the parents. But I agree, I think there's ways that we can increase our visibility on the Support Hub, as well as just getting out those frequent communications, maybe from the principals, about these different resources. - Is this included in the principals report, like the high school principals send out that- - Yep. - Okay. - We'll go ahead and be doing that. Okay. Thank you. - Yeah. Thank you. - Good afternoon or good evening. Brenton Shavers, Director of Educational Equity and Achievement. So I have a couple of people with me today, and I'll let them give

017a brief update on their pieces to this. So one of the unique things about educational equity is that we do get to partner with almost all departments, probably all departments within the district, which is really a unique piece to really make sure we are meeting our goals as well. So one of the things we've done or I've done this year as we've started the school year and meeting with new teachers and staff is really to define the difference between equity and educational equity, to make sure they understand what our roles truly mean as it reflects to our work in the schools, which equity is talking about the understanding that we're not all starting in the same place. And for that, when we talk about educational equity, we're really looking at how do we provide high

018quality pedagogy, social and emotional learning, cultural competence, and family partnerships, which is the core of what we are doing in our department. It all centers around family engagement. And this includes all students within our district, LGBTQ+, gender identity, special education, deaf, hard of hearing, sight and physical impairments, EL, et cetera. We really try to engage with all students, all parents. So when we did our new employee induction, we had a individual from Welcoming Schools, Erika Sass, who gave a brief introduction to our new employees, what Welcoming Schools is and really wanting to develop a foundation within White Bear, on how we are starting to kick off this within our school district. We also talked about courageous conversations and the racial harm and bias protocol, as well as our equity decision making process, and the importance

019of making sure that we as a department are focusing on that and understand that as we're working with our building principals, day in and day out, to help identify our deficit areas so that we can address those and move forward. So that's part of those. I will have Kim Rasch come up first, and actually I'll do Indian Ed, since Vincent wasn't able to come tonight. But Indian Ed, we are also looking at some of the new laws that have come out this past session. So I know in October Vincent is, or has been putting together presentations for K-5, 7-8, and then 9-12, in different, since he was a teacher, he is putting it all together in these PowerPoint presentations for teachers to show in their classrooms for Indigenous People's Day in October, which is awesome

020to see the work that he's doing and working with various departments on closed captioning and things like that for everyone. And then as another piece, he has also been really reaching out and trying to develop different activities for our American Indian students to really participate in, to increase the numbers that are reporting, when we're doing the forms for the federal government on the number of students who identify as Native students. So he's been really active in getting into the community and trying to engage our parents that way. And the first meeting for our AIPAC is this Wednesday. So if anyone wants to be a part of that and come, it'll be in this boardroom. So that will be Wednesday the 20th, I believe. So MTSS update is Kim Rasch. - Hi, Board Members. Thank you.

021My name is Kim Rasch, I'm the District MTSS Coordinator. MTSS stands for Multi-Tiered Systems of Support. And really it is a systematic and continuous improvement framework that ensures positive social emotional behavior and academic outcomes for each and every student. This is our graphic, our MTSS graphic, for White Bear Lake area schools, and it aligns with MDE's graphic as well. First, if we were to talk about equitable student and family engagement, that's on the handle, but it's actually the lens in which we're looking through all of the components, 'cause that's first and foremost. We really wanna amplify student engagement and family voice in decision making for their kids and for the students. And then when we talk about continuous improvement, it's really an infrastructure that provides a system for which people can work effectively and efficiently

022together to get those positive outcomes for kids. And then when we're talking about evidence of student learning, it's really about assessment tools that reliably and accurately collect information so we can use our database decision making, again to provide services for kids, so that we're meeting their needs. And then database decision making, that really we're considering practices that consider the unique experience of each student and unique populations of students too, and drive continual improvement. So we're looking at all sorts of data, quantitative and qualitative. And then of course this is where kind of that focus of MTSS, when we think of multi-tiered systems of support, we think of that Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3, and not think of MTSS as this broader, really systematic framework. But this response to students' needs is really that

023focus on those multi-layered practices and supports to match the intensity of student needs. And so this year we are working with MDE in a cohort with other districts, as a district leadership team, to do a needs assessment of these different components and then create an action plan of where do we see some strengths in our system, and then where are things that we want to strengthen, some weaknesses we have that we wanna continue to strengthen so that we are continuing to put student needs at the forefront of our thoughts. So that's just an update on MTSS. - Does anyone? Beloyed. - Can you give me some examples of the diagnostic assessments and the outcome assessments you guys are using? - So for example, one of our universal screeners, we use FastBridge, and that's also identified

024with MDE as an approved literacy screener. Within FastBridge, you can drill down further to better pinpoint like where are the students' needs? Is it phonological awareness phonics? So there's sub-tests within FastBridge that you can drill down as further diagnostics. That's one example. (board member speaks distantly) Right now we're utilizing FastBridge K-8. And so, yes, it is all levels, and all kids participate in those universal screeners, and then from there we'll drill down to further diagnostics. But FastBridge is one example, like word segmenting, for example. - What do you guys use at the 9-12 level? - As far as diagnostics? You continue to drill down, again, utilizing some of the different screeners. So a lot of the times, too, we will look at how are they performing within their courses, and then drilling down from there,

025what are their needs? So. - There isn't a specific diagnostic you're using? - There isn't a specific diagnostic, necessarily, that's used at 9-12, but, mm hm. It's determined based on what their needs are. And then from there, if you're seeing a further need, so we'll continue to drill down to see if, for example, with literacy, if comprehension, if we're seeing a comprehension need, then we'll drill down into fluency, and then into phonics and decoding in that area. - So it all will be academically based per subject? Or at the high school level, you have social studies and you've got a lot of disciplines within that. How do you drill down for the students that maybe have several areas of trouble? - So there are screeners that are used for literacy and math and also social

026emotional as well. So from those, how they're performing on those different screeners is then what you would do next with the students. So you'd have to see how the student is performing on those screeners and then go from there. - Are those students flagged by their current teachers? - How they would be flagged is within collaborative linked teams. So when teams of teachers are coming together, whether, like at the high school they're utilizing BARR as a method to come together as collaboratively linked teams. And during those meetings is when they start to talk about students and seeing where are their needs, how are they doing from a strengths-based approach, though, too, what are some strengths, what are some needs that these students have? And they talk about all students, during their small block is what

027they're called, or larger block, where teams are coming together to talk about students. Mm hm. - Other questions? Thank you. - Yep. - (speaks foreign language), I'm Briana Santoscoy. I am the Student and Family Community Engagement Coordinator for the district, and mine is going to be short and sweet, very sweet. Just like a little synopsis of what has happened since last year. Last year we had three DEAT meetings, the District Equity and Achievement Team meetings. And we really reshaped the purpose of DEAT last year, to make it like a collaborative sharing space, where people can bounce ideas off of each other. What are you doing at your site that's working, and it's related to equity? What's not working? They can really bring issues from their leadership and equity teams that are site-based to this leadership

028sort of level and talk about it with each other. So that has been really good. We did six IZIs last year at different sites. IZIs are intentional social interactions. So I don't know if anyone's heard of Marnita's Table, but she really is the founder sort of of the concept. And it's really when, well, Ms. Streiff Oji knows well, we did a massive one at Willow a few years ago. It's really like sharing food with families and community members and like sitting down and having conversations with them about what's important to them, what do they care about, what were their own experiences in school, and how has that shaped how they've interacted with school? Things like that. And I'm really working on making them as sort of sustainable and meaningful as possible. So like how are

029we, then, after we have this event, how are we gonna leverage those relationships that we just started to build so that we are building ongoing real relationships and sharing sort of that collaboration with families? The restorative practices, we, last year I trained all of the secondary sites. And then this year we'll do five elementary schools. So we have, I think, like a three year plan. I should know 'cause I wrote this plan, but I don't, I think it's three year. We'll be doing those five sites this year. For Latino Unidos, I just wanted to point this out for the student engagement piece, we did do one, big, in collaboration with Mr. Calvin Terrell, BIPOC student conference, leadership conference. It was amazing. We've never done that before, where we brought different affinity groups and different student

030communities together. That was really awesome. Latino Unidos, 27 Latino Unidos students, high school students, earned letters this year. And they do that by, you know, using their leadership skills. I make them organize and facilitate many things. And then we did seven college visits. And then the last thing I was gonna share was the NOLA conference, that Brenton and I went to in New Orleans, which was all about family engagement. We invited two elementary teachers, or teachers, admin, principals to come, because my strategy is really to like share this work with people that are already sort of seen as leaders in the district. And what I realized at the conference was we already have, like above and beyond, way more than any of the other people had there, as far as family engagement initiatives and work

031on paper. So like our work moving forward is always going to be, like getting people to utilize the tools that we're bringing to the district, right? And making sure that work is meaningful for families and building those collaborations. Oh last thing, the backpack events, which Ms. Thompson aided, she kind of got caught. I think she was gonna come and like be there for half an hour, but she got stuck behind the backpack table for like eight hours, I think. It was a long day. We gave over 600 backpacks away, with school supplies, which is like, broke our last year's record by a ton. It was just amazing. She can tell you more about it later. But we had clothing, The Closet is still closed, but we got so many, I asked, I asked too many

032people for clothing donations. We had like 30 tables full of clothes. We had a bajillion backpacks. We had families filling out all of the school information, like helping with annual family update and things like that. So thanks to all the people who donated, all the people who helped out with that. It was pretty amazing. So this was the third annual time that we've done it, and, yes, I'm excited for next year. That's it. Gracias. - Just a couple of comments. Thank you for your report. Thank you for posting or putting together (indistinct). Saturday, about (speaks distantly). The Closet is open, by the way. - Oh, good. - You know, I don't, (speaks distantly). - Oh good, okay. - So it is open. So just, it just opened. - Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. - This week.

033So I just wanna make sure that you know that, and you go through either your social worker or family liaisons or (speaks distantly). - Yep. - Yeah, and then... Oh, Martina's Table, so thank you for that update. That's helpful. That's a few years of them, people pulling together. - Mm hm. Yeah. - Beloyed. - So yes, thank you on six IZIs last year. That's quite a number of them, so thank you for that. Are there any planned (speaks faintly). - Well, so I will be at the principal's meeting at the end of the month, and it's gonna be like first come first serve, I have a little sign up and they can determine if they want to do like large scale, small scale, medium scale, and then their funding's sort of based on that. -

034Do you do high schools? - Yeah, for restorative practices. - For what? - Restorative practices. Which is aligned with our racial bias and harm protocol. - And are they, is it still student led? - They have been, except at some of the elementary sites, they've been sort of mixed. It depends on like the scale of them. I like to have student leaders as much as possible. That's always a push. Yeah. - And then lastly, Ricky reminded me of the (indistinct). - It was Ready, (speaks foreign language), Ready for School. Mm hm. Yes. - Exciting. - Yeah. Thank you all. - This is just a random follow-up. - A Brenton follow-up? - Yeah. I heard that American Indian Parents Advisory Committee, you said that was on the- - Yes. - Yeah. Here? And then you referenced

035the forms for parents to fill out, and those are forms to gather information about families that have some Indigenous, Native heritage? - Correct. - So it's really, I just want to say that that's how we get grants from the state, and that our government funds activities and curriculum for specifically to that group. So I just want to say how important that is, to have lots of people come attend that. It's a great event. - He has done a really great job of reaching out to families to do that. - He's done a great job of getting people involved, again, with the pandemic. (board member speaks distantly) - Thank you. Our whole goal as a department has really been about family engagement, and how can we increase that in every building, every site. So that'll be

036the work this year. So thank you all. - The date is September 21st, the AIPAC. - Right. - 21st of September. - I think it was mismarked on there. - I think- - Thursday? - It's Wednesday. I think it was marked wrong on the calendar. It was corrected though. - All right, Activities. - All right, good evening, Members of the Board. My name is Brian Peloquin, I'm the Activities Director. Apologize, I'm coming from soccer. I was slinging hotdog at the concession stand, and would love you to come over after this meeting to see our new stadium. Our soccer teams are playing Mounds View tonight. So thank you for having me to talk a little bit about activities. I'd like to begin by talking about our new facilities. We are currently transitioning from South Campus facilities

037to North Campus facilities. As it sits this fall, we currently have soccer and lower level football and lower level volleyball taking place at North Campus. As you know, with the city and the permitting, our goal and our plan is to have football and all of the other sports come over next school year. But for right now, we're in the middle of that transition and have gotten nothing but compliments about the new facilities and how great they are. So it's very exciting times. We're thankful for the leadership of our students and our coaches as we go through this transition. It was a bit of a daunting task, like everything last year, with trying to move everything from the old building to the new building. And it was fun to find old uniforms and boxes of things

038in nooks and crannies of North Campus that probably hadn't been seen in decades. So it was kind of a fun transition, but it's been awesome. For fall sports and activities right now, we currently offer nine Minnesota State High School League sports. We have 553 participants taking part in those sports. We have 45 clubs on campus. And so I like to say that we've got something for everyone. And the thing that I'm most excited about is we have increased participation in all nine sports from last year. So we are continuing to grow and we actually have more students participating now than we did pre-pandemic. So not only have we come back from that, I hate to even bring that up again, but not only from a participation standpoint have we gone back to what it was

039pre-pandemic, but we actually have more students involved than before the pandemic. So things are going great, and hopefully we can continue to grow all of our programs. I wanna talk about building our leaders within our building. We are completing professional development for our coaches. We have two official professional development sessions, one here in the fall that just took place last week, and another one in the winter. We have leadership academy. We are meeting with all of our captains, in-season, weekly. And then also we have last year, and plan to this year, I have a couple of sessions with our North Campus student athletes as they transition into high school, on what it means to be a Bear. So we've got lots of exciting things going on from a leadership, and building students, and our coaches,

040to be better leaders. And then lastly, some successes from last year. We had two of our Speech students, Mariam and Sanyu make it to nationals, again, which is outstanding and very exciting. They represented us well. Our boys' basketball team made it to state and placed, took the Consolation championship. Our softball team in the spring, made it to state for the second year in a row and took Consolation championships. And then we actually have an alum who graduated last year who actually signed a contract to play for Minnesota Unified United Professional Soccer team. So pretty exciting times, with a success standpoint for the Bears. And then lastly, we've refreshed and updated our website. We are full online for ticketing. This is now our third year doing it. It's been a great transition. We also have season

041passes. One thing that we have been able to work that I'm really excited about, and it's already shown, and for those of you that have children at the high school, we have gotten ourselves to a place where we are able to offer free passes to all of our home events for all of our students, nine through 12, at the high school, North, South Campus, and the ALC. So that's very exciting, trying to draw up some interest, and break down some of those barriers for kids to be able to get to our activities and events. And then lastly, as usual, we have the senior community member lifetime activity pass that people can get if they are senior citizens living in our district, at the District Center or out of our office. Any questions, thoughts? Yes. -

042Just to clarify what you just said. - Mm hm. - Did you say every student, 9-12, has free passes? - To get into our home regular season events, Yes. Pretty exciting. And it's been awesome. We've gotten good showings at our events because of it. So we're already seeing the difference. So it's very exciting. - Appreciate it. - Mm hm. - Thank you. - Absolutely. - Just going by tonight, you can tell- - It's busy. - Yes. - It's busy. - It's so busy. - There's people everywhere. - It's exciting to see the (speaks faintly). - Yeah, it's been fun. Sunup to sundown. - Yeah. - So it is, it's an exciting time. Thank you. - Just a comment on the nine through 12- - Yeah. - Our home events. So my daughter's a ninth grader,

043and they got to sit in the high school section. You know- - You finally made it to the student section. Yeah. - Well, a football game, she's finally a high-schooler. - Yeah. - And then when her sister found out that she didn't, doesn't have to pay, (speaks faintly). - It is, it's- - It's exciting. And we're very grateful. - It's awesome for our kids. Thank you. Yeah, it is an awesome thing for our kids. - Yeah, I just want to thank you, and all the coaches and all the leaders that, it's so much more than just about winning a game or playing an instrument or writing a speech. It's about building our students (indistinct). So much to learn outside the classroom. It is (indistinct) that's so important that we do that with students. They take

044that with them, and they can build lifelong friendships that you network through the rest of your life, that you'll get there and meet that, wherever you are, it's like you've never been apart. But it's just a huge part of (speaks faintly). - Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. - Thank you. - And again, come on out and have a hot dog and watch some soccer afterwards. Thank you. - Thank you, sir. - And speaking of facilities, we'll talk about facilities. I had the opportunity to give a tour to members of the Class of '73 for their class reunion on Saturday. And there were 80 members of the Class of '73. Really excited to see the facilities, and they saw the fields busy Saturday morning with youth soccer teams, and just really enjoyed the facilities. And one

045of them mentioned the intentionality that went into the design of everything. It was super impressive. So really fun to show off the facilities. And we've had a lot going on this summer. This is our fourth really busy summer of construction. In the construction industry, they call it the summer slam in schools, because they've got three months to get in and just slam the work out. And our custodians are part of that every summer. But this summer they had to work around construction site, or construction crews, who were really thankful for that team of custodians, the men and women who are really flexible with their time to get that school ready for students and staff when they return in August and September. It was really great. And our construction managers, Kevin Fernandez, our Project Manager, and

046Dan Roeser, our Director of Building Operations, working with those teams and those contractors to figure out how to work around everyone's schedules and needs to get everything done. And they just pulled it all off. It's very impressive. You can see that we had, summer of 2023, we completed projects at ALC, Oneka, Lincoln, Vadnais, and you've seen new monument signs popping up all over the school district, and those, until we have them all installed, you'll continue to see those pop up. The Central Middle School gym addition has started. If you drive up Bald Eagle, you can kinda look in to Central and see the work that's being done there. Otherwise it's kind of hard to see. But the new gym, storm shelter gym, is in process of being built there. Price Field is nearly complete. The

047field is done. We're just finishing up the track now. They have it taped off ready to paint the lines. And so we're excited for our middle school kids to get busy on that track and that field. And then the work at North Campus continues, with the fine arts and administration additions, and then all the renovations that are occurring in that building. Kevin Klecker, our Safety and Security Supervisor, worked really hard this summer to bring many of our security projects across the finish line. The visitor management system, if you've been in some buildings this fall already, you've maybe seen that, where they scan your driver's license and then you get a photo ID sticker. And that has important information about all our visitors, identifies the destination that they're going to in the building, and so we

048can keep a better handle on who's in our buildings and make sure they're more secure. So we're thankful to have that across the district now. Key card access, as we complete projects, the key card access to all the buildings is being upgraded. Security camera upgrades are remarkable compared to what we used to have to what we have now. Very state-of-the-art surveillance systems in all of our buildings. And then the intrusion and burglar alarm systems tied to the key cards, so we have tighter security around our facilities when they are locked up. Our Nutrition Services Department, as you know, had a, you know, a lot of, a lot of work put on their plate last spring, and they've prepared this summer for that. And they've been serving meals at a record rate over the last week.

049And so Bridget Lehn shared that with you at the last work session, everything related to the free school meals for breakfast and lunch. She also has a grant from the Department of Agriculture, Farm to School Grant, and working to get some locally grown, locally produced, minimally processed foods on plates. And so some neat projects with Hamel Maple Syrup and Taylor Ventures, is a minority and woman owned business, and she's growing vegetables in the Marine on St. Croix area that we'll be serving on students' plates. They also have three new combi-ovens that are installed, at Oneka, Matoska and Lakeaires. And that's a combination of steam air and direct heat. Probably don't know how it works too much. Transportation. The most difficult start any school year is always transportation. Trying to get kids to the bus stops,

050to the right bus stops, and the bus is there on time, especially during a time when our, when it's very difficult to hire bus drivers. And so, Mike Turitto and his team in the Transportation Department, we did receive a grant, and so they were able to install, stop, or what are they called? Stop arm cameras on all of our school buses. They have new GPS tracking software so they get a really better sense of where buses are at every moment and how they can most efficiently manage their fleet. I mentioned the school bus driver shortage. It is significant across the nation, as well as Minnesota and White Bear Lake. We're down currently three drivers in White Bear Lake. Our contractor, First Student, is down three drivers. So, you know, running with six drivers short across

051the system has been a challenge. So we're continuing to monitor that, and try to figure out how to best get our fleets moving every day. And I'll turn it over to Steve Asper. - Oh wait, do you have questions for him? - Oh, questions, sure. - Go ahead. - Which route are the six less drivers? - Well, right now they're, I don't know for sure, but they have substitute drivers that are filling in, so they've been having regular drivers on those routes. The problem will happen when you start getting sick drivers, when viruses start moving around. And so there may come a time, when we were preparing last year, that we may need to have route cancellations. We were seeing that in districts around us last year. We've been very fortunate, last year in Whit

052Bear Lake, we didn't cancel a single route, but our neighbors did, and we were able to pull it off. but we're feeling even more strained, with First Student and our crew, it would be harder this year. - So what kind of license, like what kind of licenses are needed to drive? Do you have to go through special training, scoring? - Yeah, for the, yes, and for the school buses, it's a commercial driver's license, and so that's a more challenging license to get. It takes some training and passing the tests. Van licenses are easier. And so we find it a little easier to get people to drive vans than big school buses, but we need both. - Do they have to pay to get this training? - The school district covers the cost of the training.

053And so it's about 40 hours of training and they get paid their driver rate for training and the school district covers that. (board member speaks distantly) We've been recruiting hard for years. And every now and then we're able to hire a bus driver. So knock on wood. - Just a quick comment. I find it amazing that we get all of our students to all of the schools we have with how big our district is, with 36 buses. 36 buses take all of our kids everywhere they need to go. - Yeah, well it's a few more than that when you add in vans. We have a lot of vans running. So yeah, about 36 buses doing three tiers, about does it. They're driving them, you know, about 8,500 miles a day and making about 3,500 stops

054a day. So they're busy, busy buses. - It's amazing, and I'm very thankful for (speaks faintly). All the things you see, people drive, when there's a bus in area. That's really a great thing now (speaks faintly). - Some changes we have made over the years have allowed us to bring that down to 36. It used to be 48, 49. So, route times, boundary changes, all those things, it's just part of the equation and it was a decision making process. But anything we can do to make it efficient. - Had we not made some of those decisions, we'd be down 15 drivers. - Just a comment, the summer slam that we were talking about, going by the field, on the hottest weekend of September, ever, working, on the weekend. And they were working hard on that

055field. Appreciate it. (speaks distantly) And then I had to keep looking ahead and put my eyes on the road. (people chuckle) - Thank you. All right, well, thank you. - Thank you. - Good evening. I'm Steve Asper, Director of Technology and Innovation. Thanks for having me this evening. I feel sorry for my colleagues out here who have to talk about things like family engagement and our classes and all these activities and events happening for students because, you know, it really doesn't compare when you get to talk about things like I do, like network infrastructure, right? Yeah. Last year we had some issues that lasted much longer than where acceptable with our internet, where it kept glitching out. And we worked with our partners to figure out all of that and what was going on. But

056we wanted to make sure, for our students and for our staff and our teachers and our families, that that wasn't gonna continue at all. So we focused a lot on our network infrastructure, both what we can control inside our boundaries and what we have outside of our boundaries. So with that, we purchased and installed about 80% of them, but over 1,000, we call these APs. You might think of it as a Wi-Fi antenna. There's one sitting right there. You see them in the ceilings in all the classrooms. So all of those have been replaced, or are being replaced as we speak. And the Wi-Fi antennas, once your device connects wirelessly to that, everything else on the internet that you do is hardwired. It's all going through cables and boxes. And so after they connect through

057the Wi-Fi device, or the AP, they go to these, these are called network switches, and they are Vikings purple and that's why we buy them. And the network switches funnel all of that data all together into one main switch at each building and then the main switch funnels all together at our District Office into our core switch. So all of these switches are also in the process of being upgraded and replaced so that we have that network infrastructure that we know we can count on. Related to that, we also have new internet service providers and we've increased our capacity by over 250%. So we have the bandwidth that we'll need, not just this year, but moving forward. And we've also hired a new firewall provider that's a leader in the industry to help us. A

058firewall you can think of as kind of a gatekeeper. The people that stand at the doorway of our network here on campus to say, "Yes, this is safe traffic, come on in." "No, we're worried about you. You need to stay out." That's what that does for us. And so all of this together helps us, helps protect our network and helps us make sure that we have a stable network that's reliable. Other hardware that we've been working on over the summer includes devices for staff and for students. So over 300 desktops, a handful of laptops. And we always are doing lots of new Chromebooks in our cycle every year. So over 1,600 Chromebooks. And then we're taking about 1,200 Chromebooks that have finished their first lifecycle and refurbishing them, getting them out back into service for

059their second lifecycle in our district. And we also are in the process of replacing a good number of monitors, because we don't always regularly replace them. They have a lot longer lifespan than other devices. And then, so you might be wondering, who is doing all of this work? A lot of it is done by our students, our Summer Tech Depot students. We had 26 fantastic students working with us this summer, and two lead students. So our leads are students who have worked with us for two to three summers and help coordinate all the other students, help do some training with the students, and have an experience of student leadership. So those 28 Summer Tech Depot staff worked a collective 890 hours. And just to give you an idea, that is the equivalent of one person

060working five months, one FTE, five months. So they do a tremendous job for us. Working with them, we have two of our Tier 1 technicians, and they support the Summer Tech Depot students with all of that work. And they work collaboratively with our three, year-round, Tier 2 technicians, doing a lot of this install work. And then I'd be remiss if I didn't point out Pat Suko, who is our former network communication specialist, and he's now our new Network Engineer and Support Manager. He's taken over duties for the retired Chris Hautman. And he was really the brains behind the planning of a lot of this network infrastructure change out. So we're really thankful to Pat and all his work there. In addition to all of the hardware work, we're obviously we're working on our systems, making

061sure they're updated. All the data is migrated or archived for last year. And not least of which is Synergy, our student information system. So we're rolling into our second year using Synergy. There was a big update that happened this summer. So we've been working on making sure that is configured correctly for all of our staff and students, as well as setting up the system so that teachers can do standard based grading at the middle school. That was a big lift to get that system changed over to be able to do that for them. But it's ready to go and we're doing final tweaks with teachers now. And in addition to that we've done a lot of trainings and refreshers for staff this summer. Counselors, elementary and secondary admin assistants, registrars, schedulers, attendance folks, and also

062teacher training. During the back to school teacher week, we had three representatives from Synergy here, at North Campus, doing training with all K-12 teachers. And then we also had teachers doing some additional training with teachers. For some of them who have really dug into parts of Synergy that they found really useful, they had an opportunity to share that with their colleagues. And so we're building that capacity in the building, having those experts there, so colleagues can help each other really move forward with the platform. And then, in addition to that, we're always thinking in this environment today about cybersecurity. In the background we're always improving our cybersecurity profile. But we also know that a big piece of that is awareness by our staff, by our users, on what their role is and how important their

063role is in keeping our data safe. So this year's cybersecurity awareness campaign will come in monthly installments to staff, and we'll have kind of three flavors of that. One will be some slide decks that are customized to our district that will come out with information. This month's theme is password security. And so staff will be getting something about how to keep safe passwords and smart passwords, that kind of thing. We also are using a new platform that does short video trainings for staff and they can answer some questions. That will come out in the future. And then we'll also have a new phishing simulation platform. A phishing simulation platform sends out an email that looks like it might be a legit email from somebody. And you know that phishing is when a bad actor is

064trying to access data from a user, unbeknownst to them. So this is a way to practice that. This is in no way meant to be a gotcha for staff. They'll be aware that these are coming out and they'll be informed on what to do when they get that and then we can practice that thing so that we can avoid this. This is becoming industry standard in for-profit, but even in education. And we think we're just one half step ahead of our cybersecurity insurance company in this requirement. And then the other thing that we worked on this summer was really revising our technical support model, and how do we do that with fewer resources? And we worked with Dr. Dillon, who's been working with the district on spaces and furniture and all kinds of other things,

065and he was a great facilitator for our department in looking at how can we support the whole district very efficiently? And so what we came up with was, this year we'll have two teams, one team supporting mostly the northern half of the district and the other the southern half. In the past we've had one technician kind of assigned to one or two or three buildings and they would kind of cover like that. And now we'll have teams of people. And we think this is also gonna increase efficiency when it comes to having staff out, for being sick or need to be gone, that someone else can come in and replace them rather seamlessly. So we think it'll provide a great model. So that said, any questions for the exciting world of technology? - So you

066said we have somebody new for the firewall person or firewall provider? - Yep. - Is that a cybersecurity company? Or do we contract that out? - We contract that out, yep. They have some hardware that they put on our network that's in-house, and we co-manage it with them. We help to put some rules in place that give that green light, red light, to the traffic coming in. Yeah. - Yeah. - I think about Minneapolis a lot. - Everybody. - Mm hm. - You spoke about the student group. - The Summer Tech Depot? - Summer Tech Depot. So what kinds of things do they do, you said, who's doing this work? - Yeah. - They're helping (speaking faintly). - A little bit on that, but it's more after we've made an order for Chromebooks. Our Chromebooks

067come in a pallet individually boxed. And so we have to unbox 1,650 Chromebooks. And it takes quite a while. And then we have a mountain of cardboard to manage. So they help with cardboard management. But then they also help with all of the getting them ready. So they'll do the initial setup on them to make sure that it's ready for a particular school. They also help us do the similar things with the desktops. And then they even put a lot of the desktops in place. So they went into the schools, into a classroom, replaced that desktop, rehooked up all the wires so that it's ready to go for staff as they come back in the fall. Yeah. - That's great. - Yeah. - Anyone else? Thank you. I don't know how you sleep at night

068with all (indistinct). - Right, thanks. - Human resources. - Hello. The HR Department update will be rather succinct compared to a few of my colleagues. But we'll get into it here. Ah. So a huge thank you to my staff, and also to all of our hiring supervisors, because I can tell you, that as I've been talking to colleagues in other districts around the Metro, although we certainly have some hotspots, we're in a really good place, due to the perseverance that people have shown through the summer hiring season here. So when we're looking at our teacher staffing, when we're looking at our support staffing, we're in a really excellent place, relative to a lot of other similarly situated employers. So I feel really good about that. We went through the work, hiring 151 new employees, 51

069of whom are teachers, for this upcoming school year. And we talk about kind of that summer slam for construction. The HR department gets to experience a similar slam there. In that, these numbers actually don't include all of the hiring and work that goes into staffing our summer programs, and then turn that around quickly to get ready for the fall. So a huge thank you to my staff, and again, to all of our hiring supervisors on that front. We also transitioned to Teachers on Call. That was led by Cindy Gustafson and also Angela Lundblad, who did lots of training and work with our super users, with our sub system. And what I can tell you, I'm going to do a little knocking on wood, and I'm also realizing that we're, you know, a week and one

070day into the school year here, but it has gone quite well. And one of the nice things that we knew going into this system was that it operates on the same fundamental software that we were using previously. The presets, the preferences that people have grown used to, they're still able to utilize. And so we feel really good about that. So that transition, while nothing is ever perfect, has been pretty seamless. And I will also say that we were able to retain a significant number of the subs that were on our system. We did not have more substitutes leaving their relationship with us than we would experience over a normal summer. So that's another piece of that. We do have access to a larger subpool at this time, but it's gonna take a little while to

071figure out the impact that this has on our fill rate. We really haven't gotten into the school year to a point where we're able to understand that at this time. And the last piece here is, as some other folks have talked about, we are certainly still hiring. So in a number of our departments, you know, we were fully staffed three weeks ago. But the world changes and so, you know, we're always looking in a number of areas. Some of those spots that are hottest right now, though, would be our bus drivers, and then especially Extended Day too. So those are two areas that we're working really hard on. You know, our partners in Community Ed have explored some new marketing efforts there that have been successful. So we're just going to keep working at it

072until we can pull in the folks that we need. And that's the update that I have for you. Any questions? - Teachers on Call, wasn't that something that we looked into three, four years ago. Decided at that point (speaks faintly). But one high school did kind of transition (speaks faintly). - Sure. So as we transitioned to that, there were a number of factors. For one thing, we had made some pretty aggressive moves in terms of our position for how we were paying our substitutes relative to other districts. So we made sure that we were in a good place there, and we were still seeing significant shortages. One thing is, too, that we only have one neighboring district that's not utilizing Teachers on Call, which puts us at a pretty significant competitive disadvantage relative to those

073other districts, because when you are a Teacher on Call substitute, you have access to all of the districts that have signed on there. And so that did create a disadvantage for us. We had also gone through steps of doing additional marketing and we were also doing additional training, and we were seeing that those steps were really not leading us to a place where we were increasing and improving our fill rate. And when we looked at similarly situated school districts around us that were, frankly, paying less, had less of that training and marketing going on, they were seeing higher fill rates. And so we decided that we had really checked all of the boxes that we believed that we'd be able to check without taking that step. And we do believe that that will be helpful.

074- Also in relation to Teachers on Call. So are they, how do they prioritize it? Is it up to the substitute just like we would be here? - Yep. - They got a call from us here, and they could say no. And you say we have access to more substitutes. - Mm hm. - So we have the potential to build capacity from around here? - Yes. Yep, exactly. But, as a substitute, you're not going to get a call if you, you know, prefer to sub in South Washington County, for instance, you know, public schools. You are going to get a call if you've said, you know, "I'm in the northeast here, "I'm interested in White Bear Lake, Mahtomedi, and Stillwater, for instance." And we certainly have substitutes that we know will continue to work with

075us and probably aren't interested in working with another district with Teachers on Call. - We still, because I know we increased what we were paying substitute teachers. - Mm hm. - With Teachers on Call, do you have to all pay the same? - No. That's completely in our control. We were also able to take incentive programs that we've worked on to draw in some additional retired teachers, et cetera. We were able to keep all of those systems in place, and we'll be able to continue to do that. So if there's something that we believe will be effective, we'll be able to transition to that. Yep. - I'm just curious like how those 51 teachers, how many Tier 1 teachers are you talking about? - We did not hire any Tier 1 teachers this time around.

076Quite a few out of field permissions and Tier 2 teachers. In this round, we did not have any Tier 1 teachers, which is kind of by happenstance, because often we can find some really excellent candidates there. But yeah, in this round we weren't hiring in areas that would generally lead to a Tier 1 hire. All right. - Food Service and Recreation. - Good evening, Vice Chair Arcand, Members of the Board. In the first day of the second week of school, we welcomed our first day for our Early Childhood students. So we had 797 Early Childhood students between our ECFE, preschool, and ECSE programs starting in our buildings today. So I started my morning greeting some of those at Willow and at Normandy Park and watching the little ones whose backpacks are sometimes the same size

077as they are. But the smiles and the excitement and all these little nervous but excited learners coming in was a great way to start the day and to start the week. We have, and to meet the needs of that, we do have available seats that are still open. They are filling up. So we do ask people if they're interested to take a look on our website. We do have a wide variety of different programs to meet families' needs. Two day, three day a week, full day, half day. Whatever a family's needs are, I would bet that we have an Early Childhood program that would meet that need. And some are in our School Readiness Plus programs at Willow. We do have some slots open there. So if families meet certain benchmarks for that, that's a

078entirely free preschool program for their child. So we still have some seats available there as well. But applications continue to come in, and we do expect our number to rise here in the next upcoming weeks. And also, in the tune of the School Readiness Plus program out there too, it's also good to note that we do have a variety of different scholarship programs to offer financial assistance for families. And currently right now, around a fourth of our families access those scholarship options. Our Early Childhood team continues to strive toward alignment with their elementary. And this year they're bringing in their Second Step Social and Emotional curriculum. And whether it's through home visiting, community outreach, or family classes activities, you know, we continue to seek to build home and school partnerships that support families into the

079future. You know, we work hard to help families connect with one another and with our schools, and, you know, consider them Bears from day one and we hope they stay with us through their entirety of their education program. So, yep. Out of school time programs. Extended day with Youth Enrichment and Development, just some data we have up here from over the summer, and then leading into fall. We had an increase of 126 contracts over the summer and they were able to meet all those contracts. We did not have any wait lists over the summer months. Leading into the fall, much like Matt mentioned earlier on, we are still hiring for our Extended Day programs. Our numbers are higher than we started in the school year last year. We're serving about 21 more contracts currently right

080now than we started the school year with last year. And expect to accept an additional 30 contracts within the next seven to 10 days based on, or depending on when we can get some new staff hired on. And part of that too is we partnered with a local company, Radar Solutions, which Matt mentioned briefly in his time earlier, to help just increase the volume of recruiting efforts that we have. And it has been very successful with the ability. So our recruitment efforts include syndicating on over 200 job boards so we can build a strong pipeline of candidates and quickly connecting with interested candidates and executing those pre-screening processes and streamline the interviews with our Extended Day team to meet those strongest candidates early, to get them on board. The numbers have changed since they're up

081there now. So right now we have 768 current contracts, Active and Extended Day. And as I mentioned, another 30 expected to be accepted here in the next seven to 10 days. The partnership on average right now is yielding with Radar Solutions about 10 to 15 new staff hires a month. So we hope to be able to continue that trend to meet the needs to continue to unload families off our wait list. We know it's a big, strong desire for families, and the need is there, you know, many people are being asked to come back to work in the office a few days a week, so the numbers just continue to go. But yeah, our staff, our teams, are doing their hardest and working as fast as they can to get people hired. And until people

082get on, we do have an array of different options at various schools for Youth Enrichment options, where it may not be the same as, you know, a school aged care program option, like Extended Day, but it could offer families a couple days, two to four days a week, through different Youth Enrichment options that their child could enroll in after school and be a part of, in a different club or activity or Youth Enrichment option. And part of that onboarding process, it's important to note too that, you know, sometimes the onboarding does take a little longer than it normally would because we work, we are DHS Certified sites. Again, the importance for that is to recognize that being a DHS Certified sites allows our families to access county assistance for those that may need childcare, but

083may need little extra financial help to have their child stay. But when we do that, we have our own internal hiring practices, but the additional onboarding requirements with DHS have additional background checks, fingerprinting, and pre-employment training. But again, we do this so our families can access those additional dollars for those that may need it. And again, we're very appreciative, you know, when we talk about partnerships and that we're all in this together, the collaboration with our building principals to a way to partner different positions that they have available as well to create a more robust position for somebody that might be interested in coming in to work with us that could be benefit eligible. So instead of just working in the afternoon, we can partner that with a para position or a recess aide or

084a lunchroom aide to create not only just a two hour position, but maybe a six to eight hour position throughout the day. It's been very beneficial for everybody involved in our buildings and we really appreciate the work of our principals to see the benefit of that and continue to work with us to partner in those positions when we're able. And just a recap from some things over the summer. Just quickly with Targeted Services. We had, between elementary and middle school, had 592 students participate in our summer targeted services program, Camp Summer and Summer U. Camp Summer topics included, you know, options for teachers to build their curriculum and kind of create their own class around a specific topic that they might be interested in and have those, you know, math, write, reading skills embedded in

085those. So they had the Create Your Own Business, Nature, Pokemon, STEAM, Game Design, Mindfulness, Cooking, you know, a bunch of different options. And students were able to practice those skills through whichever topic or interest interested them. And we had a very successful summer. The grant we received from MDE, we're very lucky they allowed us to have, helped keep our class sizes to no more than 15, and then hire additional school psychs at our sites, too, to serve our students in the summer. And to follow from Mr. Peloquin from earlier, our fall seasons in Rec Sports and middle school sports have started as well. We're off and running as we speak. There's probably around 200 some kids playing at the South Campus field for some flag football under the lights. And as well as our volleyball

086and soccer programs are off and running this fall as well, serving roughly a little over 800 kids right now between the three of them, three of those sports. And a huge thank you, again, we can't do that without the volunteers, our parents and adults in our community that volunteer their time to help lead and coach these young student athletes and, you know, help to create that love for activities in sports and to be a leader and to have that adult volunteer their time, 'cause we couldn't do it without 'em. Another thing to mention too, our rec basketball program registration is open. Basketball season's coming up. So if we have any families interested in that, we advise them to go sign up soon. And then in our middle school, our cross country and girls' tennis and

087volleyball, that we compete in conference play, is off and running as well. If you find yourself with nothing to do on the afternoon of October 12th, if it's a nice glorious fall day, we'd have you go out down to Lakewood Hills and see our cross country finals meet. A lot of fun, a lot of parents, a lot of families, grandparents, parents come out to watch their kids participate. And it's a great time. And then, in addition to that, looking to build off just to provide additional offerings for our middle school students to participate, like you said, Dr. Arcand earlier, just a way to be a part of something, to be a Bear, intramural sport options too. So we have ultimate frisbee and flag football offered this fall and looking to continue to offer additional options

088throughout the school year. And then moving on, our adult programs and facility use. Adult programs started out really strong. Our catalog came out a week earlier than expected this fall, working with the new vendor. So that was a huge benefit to us. We saw a huge uptick in registrations for our programs. Had over 1100 participate in adult programs over the summer. Current membership of the Senior Center is around 225, and this reflects our daily participation. Those participation numbers reflect daily participation in special events and then enrichment classes we offer as well. John and Michelle and our adult and senior staff do a great job of partnering with area community partners. One that's always a great one is the partnership with our Food Shelf to provide free produce markets at the Senior Center, and they do

089other things around. If you stopped by in the summertime, we had one at Willow when we were there this summer, and the line for people to get food was going around the parking lot. So very successful. And then a couple of you, I think, participated and saw us at our summer senior picnic, where we served over 180 meals to our community, in partnership with the White Bear Lions Club on July 20th. We had a great turnout, it was fantastic weather. It was great to see everybody there. And Meals On Wheels continues, an average of 45 meals a day, out to our clients throughout the district. Again, a big thank you to all of our volunteers that come and volunteer their time to drive and deliver meals. Just had a meeting today just around the importance

090of, you know, that program creates not only a fresh meal for somebody who may be in need or home alone, but also that visit and that connection. And I think we're in a very lucky position to be able, as a school district, to be able to have volunteers and through us provide that connection, it could be just a interaction, that could be the only person they see for the day, serves as a wellness check too. It's just a great service we're able to provide. And then we'll have additional offerings for our ABE classes. Our family literacy classes are up four days a week, over at Normandy Park, with the addition of some ESL classes offered as well. And then working with our ALC to kind of boost up our GED offerings to provide additional options

091for kids who might need a different path to finish their high school. And then I just noticed a thing, it's not a Community Bridget Consortium, it's the Community Bridge Consortium, but offers enrichment classes for our adults with disabilities in our community as well. So those are listed here as part of our catalog. And just finishing up with some publications and upcoming events. Hopefully you've all received our fall catalog in mid-August here to kind of show and highlight everything we have coming up here for the fall. The senior voice comes out, or is out, and comes out quarterly as well. On September 30th we have our Bear Bike Ride, to ride for youth sports. This was originally started by Trevor Putnam, one of our district staff members here, in a way for coming out of the

092pandemic, looking for ways to support families. And so the money raised from this event goes toward specifically youth scholarships for sports and we've also expanded some youth enrichment options as well. So if you'd like to participate, there's a 10, 25 and 50 mile bike ride. Or if you'd like to not participate, and donate any kind of money towards those scholarship, those options are both available for you. Or if you'd like to just cheer on the people that are participating, we'll be out here in the front yard of District Center around 8:45 to wish them well on their bike ride that Saturday morning. Annual flea market at the Senior Center on that same day, from 11:00 to 2:00. And then our Health Expo coming on Wednesday, September 13th. And additional events coming up, you guys can

093see in our catalog. - Have you got the scooter version? - I was just wondering if we were gonna see if we could have a scooter race between you guys, but we'll talk about that later. It's a good parking lot conversation. Yeah. - Do we have any questions you'd like to ask? - No? You're good. - Go ahead, Ms. Beloyed. - What's the current (speaks faintly). - We have 300. Yep. So that combined with the current contracts we currently have, we're seeing the highest need that we've ever had for childcare. So yeah. So hopefully by the end of this week, or in the next seven to 10 days, I can tell you it's down to 270 , and we'll continue to go down that direction. But yeah, right now we're just about 300. - Do

094we expect that to be an ongoing number? Do we have to prepare for it for the next year as well? - Yeah, I don't expect the need to go away anytime soon. The hope is that we can get, you know, quality staff in the program to offer them positions that they'll want to be able to stay with us for a long time. So hopefully we can continue to build up our staffing pool and have that number not be as great. So we're in a better position than we were last fall. I think our partnership with Radar has been very lucrative, in terms of being able to get more people in faster and to broaden our reach and the ability to get people to come in. But yeah, that'll, I don't expect that demand to go

095anytime soon. But I do hope that with the process we have in place, and again bringing people on, we do hope that number will be going down. - Is the contracts number, is that per family or per student? - Yep, contract per student. Yep. So each student counts as like an afternoon contract. And yeah, a lot of our demand is in the afternoon. Our morning numbers we've been able to staff no problem. That hasn't been the issue this time around. But, yeah, our afternoons are obviously the toughest. But again, we offer a nice variety for families too. A contract that ends at 4:30 or 6:00 to kind of meet those families' needs as well. But again, we have a lot of things going in our direction, but the demand is just very, very strong. Yeah,

096you're welcome. - Dr. Newmaster. - Well, I think you answered some of it, but, so the biggest demand is that long afterschool time for elementary kids? - Yep. - And is it a specific school that's totally uncovered? Or, you know, do you have any big gaps in specific areas where there is no after school program at the school? - I think what you're asking is like, what are the wait lists comparative from building to building? - Well, I'm wondering if there's, do you kind of gather them at one if you're short other places, given that, or is each list specific to a specific school? - Yeah. So we have wait lists at all of our buildings, except for Willow. I believe we have all of our needs met there. And some wait lists at different

097buildings are higher than others. Our three sites right now that have the highest wait list are Otter, Oneka, and Matoska. Yeah. So right now we're not in a position where we would combine sites and staff. That wouldn't, 'cause it's all based off of our ratios. So combining the staff to a different building would just increase that ratio, which we wouldn't be able to keep. So we have to keep a 1:15 ratio on average for DHS Certification standards. And those ratios do vary a little bit, depending on whether they're Early Childhood kids or elementary kids, or it happens to be a students with special needs. When we have a student with needs, those ratios are usually a little bit smaller. - Well, it makes sense, I was just wondering, if there was a room at one

098school that the kids have a bus to that school. - Oh sure. Yeah. (Marge speaks distantly) Yep, yep. Yeah. Yep. I think that's most beneficial for families too, so parents can pick up, yep. - Thank you. - Yeah, you're welcome. - Any other questions? Go ahead. - Fall registration, families that register, they don't automatically, they have to reregister every year? - Correct. Yep. - And it's first come, first serve. - Yep. - So once registration opens, our families should be aware of that. - Yep. Yeah. Yep, and we know that, you know, communication can always be improved and we could look to see where we could get that word out. But we've put information out in our catalogs. Like in our kindergarten welcome packets, it's in their information as well. Our site leads do a

099wonderful job of communicating that with parents, you know, weeks before registration opens, advising them to register, you know, soon, and as soon as they can, to get in. Yeah, so it's just, we have a lot of requests coming in. - A question about ADP. - Yeah. - Are we still collaborating with Trinity and Nursing College? - Yep. We're still in the, yep yep. We're still in the Metro East Consortium. - Okay. - Yep. - Other? - I did. Do we, in recruiting for Extended Day, is there a way that colleges who maybe have students. - Yep. - Using that as a (indistinct). - Yep. Century, Bethel. Yep. All the local ones nearby. Yep, we collaborate, we work with, we also work with our Career Pathways Coordinator to see if there's students in the education pathway

100that can be qualified for work release to get out early, if we have students that are eligible for that. And we also have the additional option this year, I worked with Principal Young right before the school year started, seniors that are on track to graduate that are eligible for an elective hour also have that ability too. So we sent out information, "Hey, like afternoon work, no nights, no weekends, you know, with a nice hourly rate." If students were interested to take that, if they're able to not have that last hour of the school day to get to a site. Timing's a little tight for that stuff too. But we're hopeful that that can work. 'Cause even if we got, you know, six to, you know, five to six high school kids to come work on

101our events, that's almost another 100 contracts we can, you know, welcome. Yep. A lot of different options out there. We're exploring everything we can. Yeah. - Other questions? - Did you say seniors only? - Yep. Yep. - Well thank you very much. - All right, you're welcome. - Okay. - Hello again. I realized that I didn't introduce myself the first time I was up here. I apologize. Marisa Vette, the Communications Director. And my presentation, or part of the presentation, will be a little bit more of a show and tell. One of the really fun things about being in school communications is that you get to help support all of the great things that are happening, help to be a cheerleader and make those connections for different departments and colleagues with the families that we're all

102serving. So we'll start our trend here of just showing off a little bit. So this isn't everything that we've done, but some of the main things that we did to get ready for the school year. So our activities calendars are printed every year and mailed to each of our families. They include some important information in English, Spanish, and Hmong. And then in addition to, obviously, other information that is sent out to families as well. But we have that and we have the event information in there as well. District-wide, different days off of school. So the academic calendar, recognition calendar, and then the by-school main events that the principals have turned over to us during the summer that are printed for families. And we have been told that that is something that people love. We believe

103that that continues, and we'll keep printing it until it changes. But it is also a really fun way to showcase our students. They grace each of the pages of the calendar. And then the website, in addition to obviously the overall website. This summer, once again, we did a back to school page of the website. So a one landing spot for families to go to. It was pretty popular for the school supply list. And then we ended up adding the school events, back to school events information on there as well as, you know, the first day of school, knowing that they were staggered, the parent view information, helping families really understand what they need to do to start the school year off right. So we sent beginning of the year letters to families and to staff

104members. The family letter, of course, included information, just general beginning of the year information. Had the directory data opt out, Military release information that we need to provide by law as well. So families did receive that. And then we had a lot of fun also, working with our Nutrition Services Department. Of course, as we know, the meals are free at this point, but it is also still important that our families do the application for educational benefit. So really trying to help people understand that. Something we added into the mix last year, and we continued it again this year was a postcard. Just giving them the information about how to put money in their account for a la carte menus or secondary entrees, where to find the lunch menus themselves, practice your pin. And I don't

105know if anybody had heard the stories, but I know I brought home a proof of it, and my kids started, you know, typing out numbers and that was exactly what we wanted. So kids could practice at home before they showed up and had a number pad and said, "Now what do I do?" So we've been pretty proud, and the Nutrition Services Department has really led the way on some good things for families in that regard. School videos, a couple that are featured here are sort of special videos that we do every year when we have new principals. And so you see our new Birch Lake Elementary and Otter Lake Elementary principals. We were able to do highlights of them that they then shared with their families to help their families get to know them before

106the school year started. And then those specific videos will be shared out later this fall as well, as community e-newsletter video editions. So if you haven't seen it on the YouTube channel yet, you will get it sent to you via email eventually here. Another fun thing that we get to plan during the summer to happen is, staff members are coming back, would be the convocation event. Of course Dr. K was the keynote speaker this year, but we had our cheerleading team there, ending the event with a, in Go Bear style of course, we had our drum line come and really kick off the events. We had students performing the national anthem with an orchestra and a choir working together. And then our teacher of the year spoke at that as well. So it was a

107really fun time. It always is a fun time for our staff members to come together to begin the school year. And we were back in the community auditorium again after a couple of years at the stadium. So our students and families also got into the mix with Back to School Bears that we had done. We offered or asked people to send in their pictures of their first day. And we ended up actually with many more photos than the ones that are here. I did sort of a screen grab at a time, but if you looked at the e-newsletter video, or the e-newsletter we sent last night, the number of pictures we received were quite a few more than this. And if you see, there are families in here that we had individual photos and the

108families together. To fit them all in, we did the families together. So we had a lot of fun with that. And then of course we did our regular communication, and continue to do so. Our e-newsletter, our social media facts that we share out every morning at 6:24 AM, and then our Friday weekly videos, are starting up again for this year, and our first one was last Friday. And then something else, so those are all sort of tangible, something else that we are starting this year, we're pretty excited about is third Thursday communications trainings that we're doing with our district leaders. And so we had one already in August. I think, poor planning, it didn't happen on a Thursday I don't think, but from here on out we'll have one in, what is it? A week

109and a half. And really just a time for our district leaders to get together, sort of learn something new or really refine something that they already know and just sort of remember it again, and then another hour to just sort of troubleshoot through anything else that's on the docket and that people are looking for help with. And so, we're excited to start that this year and see where it goes. And we're thinking and knowing that it can only help our families. - Beautiful. - All right, thank you. - Thank you very much. Enrollment. - All right, this is it. And it's only two slides, so a little more quickly. On the first Friday of opening week every year we run the opening week enrollment report, and that we present to the board every year at

110this time. As we budgeted our enrollment for this year, we were conservative and we expected a bit of a dip in enrollment. And we're seeing a little bit of that, but generally our enrollment's pretty stable from last year to this year. If you note, our elementary schools, you can see the boundary changes had some impact on the numbers up and down. So you see Willow Lane had a loss because Willow Lane, we cut some attendance boundary out of Willow Lane. We didn't add attendance boundary back to Willow Lane. So Matoska sees a significant increase from the Willow Lane boundary, and Lakeaires had some of that increase as well. If you look at Otter Lake and Vadnais Heights, you see they pretty well offset each other. And we took a portion of Otter Lake, those kids

111who lived a lot closer to Vadnais Elementary, and moved them to Vadnais. And so you can see that shift reflected in here. So our elementary enrollment at this point down 29 students. About what we expected. Birth rates suggested that we would see a smaller kindergarten, and we're seeing a bit smaller kindergarten. At the secondary level. We had a large 8th grade class move on to North Campus. And so North Campus continues to have two really significant classes there. And so their numbers are 1,361, just a hair lower than last year, but still, at 1,361, that's a lot in that building. South Campus saw an increase. And ALC is starting the year strong at 161, significantly more than they saw last year. TEC is up a little bit too. So we take our 9-12 total and

112our 6-8 total, kind of offset each other. We see an increase of 10 students at the secondary level, just starting out here, K-5 down 29. And so we see we're generally pretty flat this year, across the board. So our enrollment doesn't stay that way throughout the school year. Kids move in, kids move out. And we have the kind of 2.5% that changes throughout the year. And so that's just a guess on how that's gonna play and when that's gonna play. And then at the end of the year we can get a better sense of, you know, what our numbers were throughout the year. Yeah. So that's where we're starting. - Streiff Oji. - I have a question on these changes. When will you know demographically how the schools have been impacted? - Yeah, we we

113can dig into those numbers now. Yeah. - Interesting to see if schools have been impacted. - The models that we ran needed, that there's no (speaks distantly). But now we just have (speaks distantly). (people speak distantly) - Well, correct. - No, you're right, yeah. - Newmaster. - I'm looking at Matoska, and that's my neighborhood school that I will always think of as Parkview. And it's up, and I wonder if that's reflecting of our neighborhood. There are more places left for neighborhood kids who are walkers. - Right. Yeah. Matoska has a fairly small attendance boundary assigned to it. But many of those students can walk, they live very close. Quite a few of the older Lakeaires students chose to stay there. And so I think it'll be interesting how that evolves as younger students in the

114Matoska boundaries stay at Matoska as opposed to go, as the 4th and 5th graders leave, who really wanted to stay at Lakeaires. Yeah. So we'll see. That'll continue to shift over time. - About how many kids actually are, I guess overall district enrollees in their IB program? That's kind of what I was wondering, if that was impacted, or if it's more they like the school, the location? - Yeah, I'd only be guessing at that right now. I don't know the answer to that. - I have one more question. On schools that have gained a lot of students. Do they have space? Are they strapped? I just know, have you been support if space was tighter than it had been? - Yeah, I'd say Matoska is a little snug. But they're fitting in fine. - Okay,

115well thank you very much. - All right. Thank you. (people speak distantly) - Thank you, everyone. I see there's a lot of work going on in schools, so (indistinct) and obviously, make sure that the kids get welcomed and settled and the learning process begins. So thank you very much. So the next thing on the agenda then would be discussion item D1. And I'll start, say that the school board met with Superintendent Kazmierczak on August 28th, and he reviewed his annual evaluation. Dr. Kazmierczak continues to meet expectations of the school board in areas of leadership for continuous improvement of student achievement, communications, stakeholder involvement, fiscal responsibility, school facilities, and policy implementation and development. Superintendent Kazmierczak and the school board have established the following priorities for the 23-24 school year. Teaching plan implementation, educational equity and achievement,

116academic achievement, change leadership and management, fiscal management, and facilities plan improvement. On behalf of the board, I want thank Dr. Kazmierczak and his fellow cabinet members for everything, and all the ways that you do, during this exciting time in our school district. Thank you for everything. And I'm gonna open it up for others, if anyone wanted to make a comment. - I'll comment. Yes, I just wanted to thank Dr. K for his commitment to the students and the family, staff, and this community, and following a vision that I think is an addition to our strategic plan management that we see too (speaks faintly). - Ms. Streiff Oji. - I also want to thank you. I mean, watching these presentations is amazing. It's incredible and focused. I feel like it's a laser line focus that hasn't

117been deterred through a lot of tumultuous times (speaks faintly). So thank you. You guys are doing incredible work. - Ms. Thompson. - I would just add onto both of theirs, same kinds of things. And when we look at our cabinet and they're here and they're smiling and they're excited to share with us all the things that are happening in this district, that is a testament to the leadership, which falls mostly upon their shoulders. The team obviously as well. But I think it's just a great testament to the work of the district overall, everybody's working together. It's been fun to watch and then has progressively, getting better and better every year. And hopefully, beautiful now, and be more (speaks distantly). - Dr. Newmaster. - I can hardly answer that, except to say I agree. But I

118do think that it's a reflection of what you see on all the presentations, that there is a vision, there is a strategy, Dr. K has led, and everybody else is focused, the district is focused, and the focus is on our kids and how can they best follow their path and succeed, all of them. So I think it is a good district, and I appreciate our leadership at all levels. And this was a wonderful display of the vision. - Ms. Beloyed. - Well, I'm not gonna add anything, but (laughs), I just wanted to say thank you to Dr. K, and all you have done over the past year, all the years, through some really interesting times. So we appreciate you. - I think the biggest thing that I see is, you're never done learning, always listening,

119you're always reading, you're always thinking, and innovative, and you're open. And that's the key for us here, is you're always able to talk people, and listen to people in our community, and then take what they say and you digest it, and it's about how will we move forward. I think that also works with our staff and our teachers. You're always willing to listen to what others have to say, even sometimes when that may not be very complimentary, you listen. And that's the part, we have a leader who listens to what we have to say, and who's willing to do that, and willing to then make changes. So we need to (speaks distantly). (people speak distantly) All right, anything else? Okay. The next thing we have- - Wait, we gotta move (speaks distantly) - Oh. Okay,

120what we've gotta do, we need a motion. - We gotta have a motion to approve the action on these items. - Is that on this B1? That's this- - Oh, I'm sorry, I was ahead of the game. That's the next thing we- - Gotta take care of. Yeah. - Yeah. I was trying to keep- - Keep moving. You gotta keep me in line, I know. The next thing is we have E1. We're gonna take action on the committee and school liaison assignments. And so you each should see your assignments. And it's an opportunity to get back into the community and get into the community to work. So can we get a motion to accept the school liaison assignments. - So moved. - Okay. So we'll have it here with, and then Streiff Oji to second.

121Any discussion? Okay, this will be a voice vote. So all in favor say aye? - [Members] Aye. - All opposed same sign? Okay, motion carries. (gavel taps) Next we have E2, is action on the school board policies. These 28, 28 policies, were updated in the latest Minnesota Legislative Session. I'm gonna say it again, 28. And so this was a heavy lift for our policy committee. This came to a first reading in August, and now we're bringing it forward. If you'd like to ask a question or make a comment, what you will need to do is tell us the policy and the page number. Okay, did I get a motion to accept the policies? - So moved. - Okay, Streiff Oji. A second? - Second. - Second by Beloyed. This would be a voice vote. So

122all in favor say aye? - [Members] Aye. - Opposed same sign? Motion carries. (gavel taps) Then, this is exciting. E3 is action on a Tentative Agreement for the 23-25 Fiscal Year with White Bear Lake Area Educators. - It is indeed exciting. And I am pleased to be asking for board approval tonight. Before doing so, I want to thank both parties to the bargaining process, the district's team, Tim Wald, Andi Johnson, and Cindy Gustafson. And then the WBLA's AE's team as well. Our educators bargaining team committed, along with the district's bargaining team, to spending a considerable amount of time working and collaborating and pushing each other to find a resolution and to reach a tentative agreement here. And so we always start that process by trying to set goals and determine where we'd like to be.

123You know, we've had a consistent goal over the last couple of rounds of bargaining that we'd like to get done so that teachers have a tentative agreement to vote on when they come back for workshop week. And we've been able to hit that for our third consecutive round of bargaining here, which we're proud of the work that goes into that. In order to achieve that, everyone committed to meeting, with a couple of breaks, but meeting two times a week for up to 12 hours, throughout the summer, which is a significant commitment. And so a huge thank you for what is, you know, a process that I really value. I think it's a great opportunity for us to continue to build relationships, even as we continue to push each other, and it's greatly appreciated. So with

124that, I will seek approval. - Do we have a motion to accept the Tentative Agreement? - So moved. - Second. - We have a second by Ms. Daniels. Any discussion? Ms. Thompson, are you okay? - Well, I have a comment. I just have a comment, that I'm very thankful to our team who helped, you know, accomplish, and for educators. I know that the last couple years have not been the easiest time to be in education, and to be in public schools has been something that I'm just thankful for all of our educators who have stuck with us and are still with us and have, you know, have helped make this process a smooth process and are sticking with us. And the district's vision that we have here is greatly, and also new to our educators,

125who are big partners in everything that happens in our buildings. So I'm just very thankful for this wonderful team, to be getting this done in such a good (indistinct). It could have been different and it hasn't been, and we're thankful for that. - And I just want to say that we have some of the best teachers in the world. And as a White Bear graduate, they were here when I came through and they're still here. And they've said, (indistinct) those teachers, is when you ask them what they teach, they might say a subject, it might be math or maybe science, but what they teach is students, and they care about the students and they nurture and they give people like me an opportunity to grow and go on to post secondary and then have success

126in the world. And without them, many people like me, wouldn't be where they are. So I truly thank all the educators for everything you do and proud to vote for this today. So any other comments? - Hear hear. - Okay. - They have seen so much. - This will be a roll call vote. - Daniels? (people speak distantly) - I just wanna, I'm gonna read the resolution you're approving tonight. - Okay. - So whereas the White Bear Lake Area Educators have voted in support of the Tentative Agreement, then be it hereby resolved that the School Board of Independent School District 624 approves the 23-25 Contract, authorizing the chair and clerk to execute the agreement on behalf of the School Board. - Thank you. All right, now, roll call vote. - Daniels? - Aye. - Newmaster?

127- Aye. - Streiff Oji? - Aye. - Thompson, aye. Arcand? - Aye. - Beloyed? - Aye. - Motion carried. (gavel taps) All right. Now we are at the part of the night for our board forum. Talk about what's happening and what we're doing in the community. (people speak distantly) - Well, I'm gonna jump in and just say that, I'll let you go next, is that today is a significant day for me. 'Cause I was in a classroom on that day when the terrorists attacked the country. And I remember turning on the TV and being confused by what was going on. And so it can't be said enough that we need to remember our citizens who perished on that day. We're grateful for the firemen, the EMTs, the first responders, the police officers who rushed to

128the scenes of all those, and gave their lives. And we also, we want to remember those on that plane that did not allow it to get to the Pentagon. It is clearly, at this day, we to remember our freedom is fragile, and we need to continue fight for our freedom. And I'm thankful for those young men and women who are serving right now to protect the freedom so I can sleep at night. So thank them, everybody. Ms. Daniels. I mean Ms. Thompson. Sorry. (people chatter) - Thank you, Dr. Arcand. And it is definitely a day that I will remember always. I can tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing, but we won't (speaks faintly). I did just want to mention a clarification. I believe that first weekend meeting will be on Wednesday

129the 20th, but Mr. Patton sent out a thing that it is on the 21st, so I will check with that and clarify and you know, let the people know out there. - It's correct on the website. - Huh? - It's correct on the website. - Oh, okay. Yeah. All right, so then it's here in this room, where it will be provided, you can join in person or online, and it's from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM, then, on September 20th, which is a Wednesday. And then I just wanted to mention the back to school extravaganza ready for school that I was so thankful that I last minute decided to see if they could help and went to. I just can't even say how grateful I am to our community for all those backpacks that we were

130able to give to the students, and the amount of clothes and shoes and coats and winter gear, and the Food Shelf was there getting food out to people, and there were volunteers there who, I mean, there was one gentleman who was helping a family for at least two hours filling out every form that needed to be filled out so that their students could start school on time with everything that they needed. It was just amazing to see. And Briana, I'm not gonna butcher her last name, 'cause I know I won't get it right, is truly another asset to our district. And just watching her work that day, and all the families, and everybody, it really was quite a thing. It was wonderful to be a part of that weekend. A lot of happy kids with

131full backpacks of supplies, and I mean, they got to pick which ones they wanted, by elementary, middle school, to high school, all they needed, really needed. It was... - Okay. Anything else? Without being anything else, I'll do, I move for adjournment. Do we have a second? - Second. - Okay. (speaks distantly) All in favor say aye? - [Members] Aye. - Opposed same sign? (gavel taps) Everybody have a great night. Thank you. - Thank you.