001this regular session of Independent School District 535 School Board is called to order at 5 30 pm on Tuesday March 21st 2023 in room 137 of the Edison building the board acknowledges this site and all RPS sites are situated on the ancestral land of the Dakota people and we honor the Dakota Nations and the sacred land of all indigenous peoples interested members of the public are welcome and encouraged to view this meeting remotely at youtube.com backslash ISD 535 with a live stream video may be found the agenda and documents for this meeting are available online at rochesterschools.org backslash board Docs present at this meeting are school board members superintendent Kent pickell and ex-officio non-voting member and assistant school board clerk Ms Laurie Sam and Sam would you call the role director Barlow here Dr Cook
002here Treasurer Garcia here clerk McLaughlin here director Marvin here sure Nathan here Vice chair Workman here at this time we offer the opportunity to say the Pledge of Allegiance thank you 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 foreign we have no one registered for comments to the board this evening so we'll move on to approval of the agenda are there any changes to the agenda move approval second it's been moved and seconded to approve the agenda all those in favor say aye aye aye any opposed the agenda has been approved a note to the board in the community if we're still meeting at seven o'clock pm we'll be taking a brief 10-minute
003recess at that time item 4.01 Student Activities recognition we have a lot to celebrate tonight superintendent McKell thank you chair Nathan and directors of the board welcome this is an amazing turnout this is somewhat Innovative for us we have always acknowledged the athletic the athletes who participate in competitions that are sanctioned by the Minnesota State High School league and we did that a couple weeks ago and we wanted to have an opportunity to acknowledge students who excel in some other athletic areas that may not be State High School league activities but also academic and Artistic Endeavors and this turnout is amazing we want to thank all of you are here I want to apologize to the students who are not going to get to hear our very popular comments to the board which usually happen
004when people come and tell us how much they love us and but if you come back you will get a chance to hear that um I do want to say a little bit about the logistics of how this is going to work because you are a big group and we even have an overflow crowd in the hall I'm going to turn it over to our chief of schools Jackie Peterson who's going to call up the advice advisor for each of the activity or each activity or the coach and then we'd like the students to come up at the same time we are unfortunately going to only be able to hear from the advisor as opposed to all the young people but we really hope you will come back at other times where we can hear
005from you directly and then I'd ask everyone to save your applause to the end of that recognition for each group then let's all definitely applaud and thank the young people for the work that they did and then just so that you know uh we will not take it personally if after your recognition you choose to go out and all of you students can start studying right away um we will accept that and think that that's just fine you're welcome to stay but you don't need to stay so I'm now going to turn it over to Jackie and she is going to begin this recognition and we really want to welcome all of our parents and caregivers it's great to have you here as well so Jackie thank you we're going to start with Gage Elementary
006and principal Chris Davidson who's going to talk about Lego robotics all right thank you so chair Nathan Dr Patel school board members thank you for this opportunity and some of you may know that I can get long-winded so I wrote a script and I will stay on script okay so thank you for providing Gage Elementary the opportunity to honor the accomplishments of our students and staff on December 14 2022 nine of our students competed as members of three teams at the Lego robotics competition at the rctc regional sports sports center there were 58 teams competing we are proud to share that one of our four teams earned a second place finish while another earned a third place finish while another team competing as well their accomplishments are the result of many days after school preparing
007that demonstrated graduate profiles such as being critical thinkers effective collaborators collaborators and resilient learners a special thank you to miss anascari and to Mr Thomas Brown he's our fourth grade teacher and as our media specialist Thomas couldn't make it tonight for their leadership and advisor of our students we also want to thank Mr Steve Jensen from IBM who supported our students and advisors through the IBM Lego outreach program without the supports of our parents parents will you stand up real quick please where's our gauge parents there we go come on stand up we got to recognize you too thank you I had to do that sorry Off Script without the support of our parents advisors and IBM this recognition will not be possible so please join me in recognizing the students and our advisor Ms
008anascar read their names would love to love the shining stars Lily Carey Abby Owusu and Evelyn Campos Perez our team assassinbots Jackson pipcorn ariadne Rivera Morales and Wyatt Lipinski Bolden and our team the golden falcons Hudson s wagon Walter Scharf and siren Tennyson [Applause] thank you and while they're going back to their seats I'll call Angie McAndrews principal at Kellogg Middle School proud principal that's her tagline and I know she's super proud tonight to share with you these students from Kellogg all right thank you for having us here tonight I'm gonna first call um actually why don't I have all of our Kellogg students come on the forward and I'll have you kind of raise your hand as we recognize each group because we have a bunch of you here tonight to be recognized come
009on forward don't be shy don't be shy this is important for school board members to recognize this is what it feels like every day to be surrounded by a bunch of awesome middle schoolers so you're missing out if you're not in our building seeing these kids in action all right um the first thing Jack feeler is our advisor for math counts he's not able to be here tonight but I wanted to share with you an accomplishment from our math counts kids How about if you're in math counseling raise your hand and you can face the board over this way if you want so two weeks ago Kellogg took six students to the math counts state competition prior to that they had competed in the regional tournament where I think we had I think we had
01010 or 11 of the top 16 kids in the math guns Regional competition coming from Kellogg which was quite an outstanding result at the state tournament uh Kellogg finished second as a team and they had individual accomplishments for Elizabeth will you raise your hand Elizabeth placed in the top 16 as did Arden and then Eric finished first as an individual and Eric will be advancing to Nationals again right we raise your hand a little bit so they can see it so quite awesome accomplishments and outside of um so math counts as a community ed activity that we host at Kellogg but beyond math counts we also have math Masters which is hosted by the Rochester math club and I think those Community Partnerships are really important to us so kids that participated in math counts
011and math Masters were Ange Lucas and Alma that are here as part of the math counts team can you guys raise your hands the ones that are here and actually the two math club teams the Rochester math club math Masters teams are coached by Arden who is a current Kellogg student and William who is a former Kellogg student and so they help with the Rochester math club coaching the math Masters teams which are pretty awesome accomplishments um and the students that participated in math math Masters through the Rochester math team anjan Lucas's team placed first and almost team placed third with anch going on to you had individual for uh first place for individual and first place for team so quite an accomplishment for the math Masters also and then Mandy can you step forward
012so this is a little uh this is kind of an extra honor that I wanted to bring up tonight so uh Mandy is a collag student who recently participated in the 2023 National table tennis team trials in North Carolina and earned a spot on both the u-17 and u-15 girls national teams so while not a school sanction sport we felt that while she was here uh celebrating her accolades for math we maybe could share this this accomplishment also quite literally if you Google the you the Team USA table tennis you will find this young lady featured which is a pretty awesome outstanding accomplishment so we wanted to make sure to recognize Mandy tonight and then last but not least is trash here okay so we have uh Zora McLaren here who is one of two
013students that placed first at the state level for fencing um we don't have organized sports that happened at the middle school so a lot of our community ed programming is really super critical to the success of our students so both Therese and Zora got started with their fencing opportunities through our community ed program and continued on at the fall tournament here in Rochester Missouri took second interest took first and they went on to the state tournament and it was Zora her sister who is a century student uh Therese and then one other community student and they placed first at the state level in the fencing tournament so quite an accomplishment there also and that's what we've got for you [Applause] thank you would it be also okay if we acknowledge any parents who are here
014and caregivers of any kind yes all right [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and Kellogg students next we have Century High School and Mark Weasley is here on behalf of all of the students from century thank you Jackie Dr Patel and members of the board first off we're going to hear from our new BPA director Shelly felsen and I know Shelly is here with a few of our BPA this is business Professionals of America thank you board for for having us tonight um bear with me this is my first time being their advisor for this year so you guys were really good helping me out with a lot of things here uh we had a number of students that actually qualified to go on to state tournament the the people that I have here we have four of
015them actually that one at State and I've got two of them here tonight I've got our meet up I'm ready to kazima said I say all right because I mean she take she took first place and fundamentals of web design first place keep in mind we were at state competition with over a thousand students competing there pretty great I also have Ethan Zhang and Ethan has taken first place in advanced accounting that's remarkable considering he did not take an accounting class I'm going to for my taxes all right they also took place in the Parliamentary procedure team as well which took from fifth place at the state and they're great students I'm looking forward to them coming back again next year with the be seniors for us the other two students I have another one
016um Dean Dean Wong and Danielle Wong and Dean took a position as vice president for the state of BPA which is a remarkable cons remarkable achievement on his own he's also the State president for our region too so and that's everything so nice job and thank you for having us tonight okay [Music] I'm wondering Mr quesley if we also I won't be like a broken record but being a parent and caregiver do we have any parents that are here from okay thank you well Ethan maybe armida will uh design your website for your first tax page for you there up next director of bands Amanda Kaus and her group of students for Allstate band and solo ensembles here myself cool well once again thank you for giving us this opportunity to recognize our students and
017their achievements we have two groups um from Century Panther bands that we're recognizing this evening the first are members of the 2223 mmea All-State band um we had eight members of the century Panther band um that were part of the Allstate ensembles this past year which is quite an achievement nine is the max number that any program can have in students audition in the previous year so these students auditioned last spring were selected for the ensembles and then participated this past August they were at a week-long camp gave a performance and then just this past February had the opportunity to reunite with their groups and perform an Orchestra Hall so of our eight allstaters we have um four of them with us tonight so if they would just indicate who they are Nathan Anderson played
018horn and symphonic band Idris Clements was oboe and concert band Briar dare bassoon and symphonic band Tasha Dali in trombone concert band Sean Erickson was clarinet and Orchestra Samuel freemanth was clarinet and symphonic band Luke Kim flute and concert band and Elena Thompson and some phonic band on base clarinet so the Juniors that are here with me today just recently auditioned for again membership next year so we hope to have some two-year allstaters here from them um we other event to acknowledge this evening are the students that took part in our region solo small Ensemble contest we had 49 students from Century bands that participated we'd like to thank our colleagues at Mayo for hosting this year at that students earn ratings and then there are named best in sites and we had several of
019them um Luke Kim here on flute was named best in sight along with Sean Erickson they shared that honor in one of the sites as well as Nathan Anderson on his horn solo and then we had a small Ensemble um that was named best in sight that consisted of Nathan Anderson again Reid bloxom Luke Kim Isaac katange aru lamba Theo Smith and Micah Williams and the piece they performed they received best in size but was also a piece that Isaac arranged um so he was also involved in that way so and I know we do have a few parents of these students tonight so if they want to be recognized yeah yes is [Applause] up next Mr Chuck Hanlon with our chess club good evening uh if the chess players would come up here first
020of all I want to thank you for recognizing the Arts and academics it's long overdue some of you that have been around at Rochester for a while remember when the post bulletin used to have an academic scoreboard page and give equal press and I would encourage them I planted the bug in their ear to because there are so many successes and these students put as much time and lifelong commitment to their craft whatever it is as the athletes do and I've been blessed to be centuries coach advisor since the 2000-2002 school year and in that time and if you go to the century go around the edge of the Forum and you're going to see a trophy case uh chair Kathy Nathan's kids played for me and she was a proud chess parent that organized
021things but we've have a local League the Rochester area Scholastic chess League we've been League champions nine times that we have a culminating City Cup Tournament we've been City Cup champions 12 times and we've placed uh third at State uh fourth four times I have all the stats in my head there but um these these young men have been working since last November uh they were the league champions at the in the Rochester area Scholastic chess league and then we went on to State and they placed fifth at the state tournament uh we have golden Pang and Jay and Jay chandran who plays second in the league overall Varsity points Ethan Zhang who's a co-captain and also placed um third in the state and then Nolan schneader who placed fourth in the state it's an
022interesting team no high powered players but the combined total gave us fourth place so I'm really proud of the work that they've done and thank you for taking and if the parents could stand up as well we have a few parents yeah [Applause] you may also notice that many of these these students do double duty they're involved in BPA Math League and so they're all all around Scholars and athletes next up the century Math League Kyle Brandt all right thank you board for having this opportunity to present these um find students and their acknowledgments for Math League uh the century Math League team competed last Monday March 13th at the state tournament um they finished as a team third place in the state and it was kind of a exciting come from behind um events
023so it was really fun and exciting to to see them some individual accomplishments golden Peng finished first in the big nine and also qualified for the math bowl which meant that he finished in the top ten in the Invitational event and the math bowl is a very nerve-wracking um event where they're they take the 10 students up to the front and have a little white board and they get about a minute to answer a pretty complicated math problem on the spot so it really puts a lot of pressure on them and and it was fun to see not only golden make it there but also Eric ding also qualified for the for the math bowl and we had a good representation from Century another creates individual acknowledgment Catherine Zoo finished second in the big nine
024individually and also uh qualified for the usamo event which is a math competition that we administer and there's about 250 students in the nation that that qualify for that annually and so it's very very prestigious and very honorable uh award um and then also uh Eric ding finished third in the big nine and armida Kazemi also finished fourth in the big nine and qualified for the Invitational and uh just like to use the opportunity here to thank parents will preemptively add that comment parents uh stand and then um one other thing I'd like to mention special recognition for uh yego and the Rochester math club their work and um and all the things that they do really really set up these students for for success and you see that in the math math league and
025and math counts in the younger grades so thank you so much [Music] [Applause] golden I think you've been coming to Century since fifth grade or was it sixth grade you started walking the Halls fourth grade holy moly I can remember watching him come into the building the very first time and you could barely get the front door open and his backpack was bigger than he was as he went down the hall for math class first hour and he's been around a long time almost as long as I have she's um last but not least we're going to jump down to robotics since I oversee that program as well and we're going to have Tim and Steve come up with their group of the Rochester robotics good evening uh so we are the uh inconceivable the
026Rochester High School robotics team we actually represent all three schools we we work a lot with Mark um these are a lot of our students and the the cool thing with us is is that we represent not just the three schools but we actually have eighth graders as well so so we actually Encompass some students here from Kellogg and and also nobody here tonight but also from John Adams um contrary to how the meeting started we are actually a high school sport we're a Varsity Sport and recognized by the Minnesota high school league there's a 147 teams this year competing as uh uh Varsity High School Robotics and we're one of about 3 000 teams that's competing worldwide in the FRC competition so great thank you Tim uh good evening everybody one of the things
027we're doing in robotic before we talk about our accomplishments is we are delving into deeper learning not just in a traditional stem fields of that science technology engineering math but we're bringing in business Revenue Finance I'll call it Revenue Dr Patel we're trying to still find that uh that correct acronym and also arts and Aesthetics into what we do because as a business growing we have a lot of fundraising we develop a product that's a robot in only six weeks to develop 150 pound competition robot but we also have branding you'll see our t-shirts you see our colors and such just like a business does so we are expanding into what we go beyond stem but going into stream so that's our new acronym we're trying to push that and recruit students who might be
028interested in the business finance and arts and Aesthetics too so we'd like to create that and expand that out so as far as our accomplishments this season um Ethan Murphy is our program manager senior at Century High School he's been on the team for five years and I'd like him to take you through some of our accomplishments this season and a precursor to what's coming up this weekend Ethan so as was mentioned we've been trying to diversify the types of things that students on our team can pursue with the goal of getting a more diverse group of people and we were awarded earlier this year I think the diversity equity and inclusion award by Medtronic and were awarded 1 500 for this to help fund our team and that was one of our accomplishments with
029that more recently we recently participated in the week zero competition in Eagan where our team's robot performed really really well and allowed us to not only participate in the eight matches that we were scheduled for but also to go beyond that and fill in empty spots participating in 17 matches more than doubling our original count and then just a few weeks ago we participated in a regional up at Duluth where we were ranked 19th and were the First Choice by an alliance captain in the playoffs and we were ranked in the top 10 for almost every notable statistic with regards to scoring and defense and defense so a robot did quite well looking forward to this weekend we are going to be participating in another Regional at La Crosse where we hope to do even
030better and improve on some of the things that we did poorly on last time and do we have any parents there we go thank you so so our parents are a lot of them not not only parents that that help out but we also have a lot of others um that don't necessarily have students on the team a more of the service mentors as well I'm not sure if any of them are here or not um but we do draw a lot from the community so there's a lot of adults engaged that are you know outside of the team that just kind of help because we have a lot of fun so I just wanted to call them out as well thank you so much Mark Weasley and all the century students and advisors for
031um all you've done I'm going to call uh Brian urkey from John Marshall up next to recognize the John Marshall students I thank you so much for having us tonight um first group I want to introduce is our BPA business Professionals of America but I don't know if Mr Holland is here or any of the students I guess not um I'll just their names real quick uh Joma Elena odile heart steep April Mimi and how uh the competed of the state tournament did a really good job for us and we're really proud of the the work that they did uh the next group uh Science Olympiad or any of those students here uh Mr come on up now since there's only two of you would you like you guys like to speak all right so
032I'll I'll put you on the spot a little bit why don't you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about Science Olympiad and a couple of words we want up there hi I'm Anna I'm a senior um this year was my first year on the team and I had a lot of fun um I think it was really nice getting to know different people at my school and working with them and so I think this whole club was a really fun experience and I hope other people at our school also get to experience that um hi my name's shreoli I'm a sophomore this year and just like Anna this was also my first year on the Science Olympiad team and just like she said it was really fun and very welcoming environment and along
033with that I think we did pretty well this year our team got the spirit award at the state tournament for the best Spirit um and Anna and I along with odile placed second at state for experimental design yeah thank you thank you thank you I think I think when we see these young students uh working on Robotics and the science fields and other things like that knowing that our hand our future is in their hands it makes you feel pretty good so um next we're gonna I'll have uh talk about Allstate band is Alexander here I've not seen him Alexander young was all stayed banned for us at John Marshall and we had two members of the All-State choir if I can get to the right screen here um Andrew cook and Catherine Strom are
034you here they were All State Choir for us [Music] um another student we'd like to introduce is Mateo Wilkins and I know Mateo is here and his coach kamau his father's here so why don't you guys come up and talk about fencing kamau was our state champion this year in fencing Mateo [Laughter] our little thing fell off here thank you so it's uh I don't know if you can hear me on here but uh it's nice to be here at the school board meeting and not complaining about something sorry I have a history here um so I I actually uh didn't know that we were speaking on behalf of our students um I I would say that I'm I'm super proud of Mateo uh um as my as my son but also as a student
035um not only is it his second state championship um in a row so he's a two-peat state champion um he was also a member of the men's team uh foil that also won State uh State and one of those students is a century student in weiju Chen goes by Jonathan Chen and another student is out of uh cassin Ethan Brunner um uh Teo is also a uh um academic All-American he's looking at also being an academic All-American this year and one of the goals is to not just be an All-American runner-up but a All-American this year so um you know yel has a lot of fencers I was super proud of you know the ryf team and and the yel team coming out of a state as foilous uh to take it back to Rochester
036that was that was a huge success to see both Rochester teams come together and and and take that Championship home um for our teams we have a lot of up and coming fencers um in the yel program we also do chess and so seeing um you know other other people doing chess in the community I'm super proud to be a part of uh you know those types of programs um what else was I going to say I was supposed to give you the mic you were supposed to give like a three-minute dissertation um I I would say that uh Teo has also officially announced um with Hefty uh academic in and um uh fencing scholarship he has announced that he has committed to Lawrence University he's officially a viking um but yeah again my son
037and and student here gives me something to be proud of literally every day this is just one of those many accomplishments and and as he moves into the NCAA competition I'm sure he's going to make Rochester proud in other ways as well so foreign [Applause] she is our speech in uh debate coach and uh Claire all right thank you so much my name is Claire sag stewin and as Brian said I am the coach for both the JM speech and debate uh teams and I am just so excited to gush about my fabulous students for just a couple minutes um first of all a huge thank you to our superintendent who showed up to our John Marshall speech tournament he set through a discussion round he sat through a poetry round and just having him
038there the number of coaches from across southern Minnesota that came up to me and said they have never seen a superintendent so engaged in the community that is exactly what we like why we are so grateful that you are here so thank you for showing up just so much oh so much things to give all right so speech and debate oh so we are researching hot button issues from multiple perspectives but we also give opportunities for laughter and some drama so I'll start with our team's overall Awards so first of all our program is a top 100 program in the nation not once but twice so two years in a row we are a top 100 program at John Marshall with our speech program Aaron ress was a semi-finalist at our national qualifier tournament Zan
039free along with her Duo partner Annika share we're also semi-finalists in Duo interpretation Sherry Lou was a semi-finalist in program oral interpretation and Monica was a semi-finalist in program oral interpretation and then Zan ended up being an alternate to the National Tournament in humorous interpretation and then a couple other fun facts about our speech program manasa is currently placed number one in the state of Minnesota for poetry interpretation as well as top 15 in the nation for program oral interpretation additionally each of these fabulous students have special distinctions when it comes to the National Tournament Zion has received 505 points throughout her four years of this program receiving special distinction Hershey cower who is supposed to be here but track happened I get it so she has 968 points receiving Superior distinction Aaron Russ as
040a junior has received 1 216 points reaching the top of distinctions which is outstanding distinction and Monica uraboyna receiving 1432 points also qualifying as an academic All-American at our tournament this year in Arizona so now our debate team all right so Aaron res over here along with Hershey cower are two-time State debate qualifiers in Congressional debate Hershey is also a first alternate to the National Tournament and Congressional debate monissa is our first ever National qualifier in debate for Congressional debate but not only that she is the first Rochester student to qualify twice as well as not only in speech but now in debate as well the first ever student to do so in Rochester Public Schools but this cannot be done without the support of our parents and our caregivers it is a long season
041so these students have been working from August all the way into June for the national tournament it is early mornings I feel bad that most of these parents don't get to see their their students on Saturdays but also during the week with our practices so if there are parents and caregivers in the audience please stand up and get applauded [Music] so just again thank you so much for the support of our JM speech and debate program thank you Brian urkey and all of the JM advisors and students for being here tonight and congratulations on all your accomplishments last but not least while we have Mayo high school and then we have one other district-wide activity and um Jeff Whitney was not able to be here tonight but as a fellow graduate of mayo high school
042I'll take over for him go Spartans um the first activity is business Professionals of America BPA and Pam prigi Priebe sorry [Applause] all right thank you very much for having us here tonight I too wrote a script because as my students could probably attest to if you let me go without a script I'll be talking and rambling for too long so thanks for having us here tonight as this is such a great opportunity to recognize these students for their hard work for business Professionals of America this is an amazing organization which allows students to really expand their knowledge in many areas of Interest after qualifying for a regional BPA competition in January 12 students from male participated in our state conference as Shelly said with over 1 000 students from across the state of the
04312 students five were able to attend this evening so we will congratulate them on a job well done Carter Jones right there if you want to raise your hand um qualified for Nationals and payroll accounting by placing fourth state he'll be heading to Anaheim at the end of April to compete at the next level Carter's such a great kid who worked very hard to get to this point first year BPA student as well Zach Thomas qualified for three um I thought you were going to flash on the three Simon no events at the state level and competed in two because that's all you can compete in at State and did very well himself as a side note he also has a business Church who that he tries to balance during school I'm Ruby Everett competed
044in the presentation individual event and did extremely well in her first contest she wasn't too sure about this whole competition thing but I'm so proud of her effort she did so well um Rhys Ackerman also competed in two events at state which allowed him to work not only with the team but to present on an individual event I believe is a health leadership special topic event so we had some quality work by Reese and then Alex Germany was one of a number of students who I have had as a student for almost all four years of their schools at school years at mail kind of bummed that I couldn't get them into BPA a little bit sooner but at least he made the choice this senior year either way him and his team excelled at
045regions and did run into some tough competition at state which would include recent Zach's team there are a few students who couldn't make it here tonight because of other commitments or there's three of them I think on a spring break trip in Florida but I would like to quickly recognize them they include Ethan Kramer Sammy Xiao Elena memes Greg poppy Hayden einke Blake Olson and Logan Berger and you might be familiar with Logan Berger he's been a couple here a couple times for the state wrestling and for the State football team he participated in stayed in two events and he was a finalist in those two events those would be payroll accounting and Banking and finance and now he also qualifies to attend the national conference with Carter out in Anaheim in April as these
046previous advisors have said the students should not only be recognized for what they have accomplished in BPA but for all of the other activities that they're involved in all the jobs that they hold down and the sports that they are involved in a vast majority of these young men and women are involved in student government debate drama and Athletics and in fact a number of them have been here before like I mentioned in regard to Logan and in fact Ethan and Brig and I'm sure Zach and plenty of other ones it's just a huge time commitment for the many things that they're involved in and I am so very proud to be a part of their life these students did step out of their comfort zone and join BPA which they might not have normally
047done so and I personally believe that every single one of them are going to excel so well once they graduate from Mayo High School a special thank you also I know there are some parents here somewhere and I would really like to give them a shout out I think I see one in the hallway there [Music] thank them for for their support I know Alex's parents have very been very supportive in fact the first day that Alex and his parents walked into open house Alex's dad Mike said anytime you want me to come in and speak in your class just let me know so let's just say he's on four years right now coming in and and um informing my students about his career so it's a wonderful thing to keep our parents involved as
048well as their other community members so thank you for letting us be here tonight and kudos to my kids [Applause] Thank you Pam next I would like to call up Corey Olson the coach of the Mayo speech team who himself is a winner of the nsda donus D Roberts coaching Excellence award so uh Corey you want to come up and talk about your students laughs hello so I'm Corey you'd think as a speech coach this would be my jam but it's kind of like terrifying um so I knew this year when our speech team almost tripled that we were in for quite the season and I think we can all agree what a season it's been um some of our highlights um include the big nine conference Championship uh winner for speech this year I
049was told it's the first year for Mayo since nineteen 78 wow so that's very cool for us and they worked very hard to earn that one of our other highlights is nsda which is the national speech and debate Association we had our first year of going to the national qualifying tournament and we have two national qualifiers who will be going to Phoenix in June will Loudoun and Rock River Guri um they're also um going to be at the Nighthawk which is another uh like National Tournament um representing Mayo uh there as well so they've worked very hard um everybody has um we had a couple other finalists um and semi-finalists at the national speech and debate qualifier as well so quite quite the little overnight for us um because of that it was very cool
050um we've consistently placed in the top three schools all season um uh which it kind of tests their hard work and we will be hosting our first in a long time if not ever I don't really know the history of the Mayo speech team but our first in a long time home meet on Saturday this Saturday at Mayo so other than that um let's see that kind of covers everything um we're preparing for sections and state in April um and will here is the current state storytelling Champion for one double a the year before was the fourth place although third place in our heart like in in a little inside joke um so uh yeah um what else you guys oh yeah he also we we also learned that he is also the top Storyteller
051in the nation so yeah you can do two categories there so um Cooper is the other senior um he's had a great year um and then we have um a few others here Michael Claire um Claire um Katie and Eva all here too so this is just a fraction of our team um what else you guys anybody want to talk about anything yeah sure take it over thanks uh good to see everyone um yeah our speech team has has really grown this year I mean last year we had 12 kids and now we have somewhere like a little bit over 30. um so it's been really great uh to really see it um and I can really not stress how important speech is um I think to find a community for for kids that really
052don't fit into other traditional athletic senses um and it may seem kind of weird that we go to other schools on Saturdays and talk for fun and compete but uh um it's a really engaging uh life skill that I think all of us will will take everywhere and so I think no matter how great our successes may be um I think it's we'll always carry the life skills with us so yeah proud proud of Captain this team proud to be a male Spartan um yeah part of all these kids up here for our [Applause] first one last year so we're gonna be having another one this year come in visit any parents are there any parents of a speech team any parents of the speech team or fancy stand if you yay also I think
053we should give props to Mr Olsen for his awesome Mayo Spartan gear including the sparkly shoes I don't know if you notice but those are outstanding really awesome okay uh Science Olympiad is Aaron Larson here here he is [Music] [Applause] coming up right down here with us yeah all right oh thanks for having this tonight this is really great that we could be recognized so my name is Aaron Larson I'm the Mayo High School Science Olympiad coach and I'm here to recognize and congratulate this super talented bunch of scientists they came in first in sectionals or we call them regionals in our area and then third and state which is outstanding it's really hard to get by Wayzata Eden Prairie those guys and we did we just lost the what was it why is that
054it and mounds you Killers all right so we're gonna get there sooner or later with this group especially they're really really talented so um Oz is going to go on script here our team is super intelligent hard-working dedicated and we had especially long leader uh strong leadership from our captains Marcus Ivy yeah Jeffrey Wang's not here and rohill Patel and these guys would probably tell you they kind of really run the run the show I just I stay in the back and they really do the work so uh just a quick note about what scientists Science Olympia does is because we were going to bring our plane which was down by NOAA first and state which stayed up for two minutes but he had to run from track here right so anyway but it's basically
055a track meet of science so there's 24 events you run around and you usually do five six seven of them and throughout the day you just get scored and the best team wins and we're the third best so there you go so I'd like to just talk quickly about the members that are here what they receive for their scores and then and then we'll be done so uh first let's see uh roll's not here so Mark Mark senior Captain uh second detector building fourth experimental design second remote sensing third in Wi-Fi second and Scrambler and those are all state that's amazing uh let's see Cooper gamble also senior third in chem lab 8th environmental chemistry 14th trajectory 13th firming questions and second remote sensing awesome uh Ezra let's see you're right here Ezra Weldon Gabriel
056uh third chemistry lab second detector building uh eighth environmental chemistry second rocks and minerals wow outstanding Noah spinner here he is uh he at first in flight second in Bridge Building second and Scrambler fourth and Forestry outstanding and then our youngest member that is here tonight which is uh sundari Mehta uh fifth in forensics and she did write it do it as well so yeah she just didn't want me to say so I won't say but it was great it was great for a scene a freshman so that was outstanding so anyway thanks for supporting Science Olympiad we really have a lot of fun every year where our motto is come for the friends and food and stay for the science so awesome good stuff thank you [Applause] [Music] thank you are there any parents
057of the Science Olympiad here yay we're getting close to the end uh All-State band and All-State Orchestra I know I see uh our band director for Mayo Aaron Cole who had his band so ready to go at the back to school you probably remember a rousing time and yeah I'm not sure if Kathleen is here I'll represent all of us yeah yeah so hi I'm representing the Mayo music department this evening and uh we have a number of All-State band and All-State Orchestra students that participated this year earlier you heard from Miss Kaus who explained a little bit about the Allstate program uh one more little tidbit that these guys got to do that you might not realize is they all got to perform at Orchestra Hall which is the uh the big Orchestra Center
058up in Minneapolis where the Minnesota Orchard plays and I think they would all agree it was a really really amazing time we don't have all of them here tonight but I want to recognize them and uh maybe for those of you that are here tonight when you hear your name can you give a wave so you have Monica Robertson and we have Noah Davis uh asmira hojish and Tor Lindell we have Thomas stokig and Elise Nino and cam verberg all from the uh Allstate band and Orchestra and then from the Orchestra Orchestra side of things we have James Biser and Eric Kugel and Soren Locke and Oliver and uh yeah these uh these 11 students they all did Allstate band and Orchestra this year and can we give them a quick round yeah and all
059the parents do uh one other thing uh from the State High School league perspective we did have some winners in uh best in sight this year at the State High School league uh solo Ensemble competition uh some of them are here tonight but not all we had some individuals who won uh Brian winter uh and Sawyer Thompson and Ethan stropp and then we also had an orchestra Ensemble a number of different people in there with Eric Kugel and Leo Ting and James Biser Sophie Spindler Craig and Oliver Boris and they also won a best inside award at the State High School league solo Ensemble this year yeah thanks so much board for supporting the Arts and education and having this recognition tonight and thanks again to all these Allstate students and their parents for all
060their support thanks so much [Applause] winter coat-a-thon Eric Dirks is Eric here yeah and it's John bartruth yeah John kimano uh good evening uh we just wanted to give take a chance to kind of announce or I guess acknowledge our second annual winter coat-a-thon um we did talk about this last year but if you don't remember uh the fun part about this is for the whole month of December for the first 25 uh days of December um a new puzzle drops at midnight eastern time which is 11 o'clock here so some of these guys say up to 11 o'clock and their parents let them so thank you to the parents and uh the puzzles drop and they coded as fast as they can and we keep track of who between the three high schools uh
061and then even some middle schools this year to see who wins and and this year uh just for a few stats we had 62 participants through the Rochester Public Schools we have they completed 723 points which is two points per day so that's a lot of puzzles we even got some kids from Prior Lake and Owatonna involves we're trying to Branch us out Statewide and we had some individual winners and then um School winner too so uh are you Finn you are a fan okay uh so we've got Eric kugel over here from mail uh who got third overall um and then oh yeah okay um were you on the team here are you you're for Kellogg right okay I'm meeting some of these people so this is Arden and uh he's from Kellogg so
062he did the best for the Middle School um and then this is Finn in eastern century and he won overall so um congratulations to you guys and then I'll turn it over to Mr bartus sure hi I'm from the University of Minnesota now um formerly of RPS I would just like to point out that this is actually a worldwide competition so professional programmers do this and they have a really like Elite group called the top 100 every day the fastest 100 and I think Finn got in the top 100 worldwide on one of the problems this year so right and then no you don't get that yet I don't know uh we also so the primary uh despite these wonderful programs programmers here um the primary goal of this is obviously to increase participation so
063what I wanted to do was get a giant Trophy and present it to the school with the highest participation so you don't have to have a lot of super programmers if you get a lot of friends just to do one problem you can win the overall so of course with Mr Dirks he has not only you know these super programmers he also has the highest participation so for the second year in a row Mayo high school has won the Rochester programming competition thank you [Applause] [Music] and one last thing a little uh promotion here uh for those of you that don't know I wish we had the whole crowd of all the Robotics and everybody but there uh there is legislation right now in Minnesota to add computer science licensure and funding to train awesome
064teachers like Mr Dirks so if you would like to see computer science in every school in Minnesota uh check it out call your legislators and tell them you want computer science because it's there it's it's going we have bipartisan support so thank you very much [Applause] [Music] that does oh we might have parents here of do you have parents of these young men [Applause] that concludes our recognition I do want to acknowledge it took an hour for us to get through all the amazing accomplishments I think that we should be proud of the number of students who've achieved this year in their activities and I too want to thank the board for taking the time to recognize activities as a mom of a kid that would have been up here for activities and not Athletics
065I'm glad we celebrate both um they all deserve the honor and also thank you to the large number of adults who take time to advise and coach and support the kids it means a lot to our students and we appreciate your energy and your commitment so thanks to all of the advisors and teachers one more round of applause for everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] can we just go home now because I'm feeling pretty good about that all right item 4.02 board member committee updates um I've had a request from director Marvin to go first thank you we have four students who've been waiting here and I know all the students who have left or are leaving will go home and watch these four um on YouTube uh let's see Jack Marjorie Sim and wamba Wanda
066would you come up here please and sit at the table right here these are talk about All-Stars there's no trophy for student school board but these are four of our incredible leaders and they're going to give you the report for this month's students school board can we ask the middle school students Jack and Marjorie to present your report first thank you so my name is Marjorie tweeny and my name is sorry and my name is Jack Wagner we are here today to talk about what the student school board has been working on for the past month for some background information the student School Board is a district-wide opportunity for students to meet and share ideas as well as find solutions to problems we meet once a month and at the Edison building as well as
067individual meetings at our school one part of these meetings is the question and answer opportunities that the superintendent provides at every district meeting these opportunities are a direct way for students on the student School Board to get their questions answered but we also feel that these question and answer opportunities would be helpful for all students in the district therefore it might be good to explore student school board members should if student school board members uh should gather questions from their peers which they can then ask the superintendent on their behalf to better represent the students at the school a major district-wide problem that we've been discussing is the issue of student stress and the correlation between the stress of the students and the actions of the teachers we've discussed what students can do to help
068teachers alleviate students stress and this feedback has been addressed in the form of letters to the teachers and students of each School additionally at Dakota Middle School some students have put together a presentation about respecting teachers that will be presented by students to each grade level and advisory this is just one school's plan and every school has developed their own plan for discussing this topic because we've been focusing on the effects that teachers have on students and vice versa for a while last student school board meeting we focused on the effects students have on other students the negative behavior of students in class can be extremely disruptive for everyone this Behavior can consist of shouting out answers cursing shouting at teachers and stealing others belongings we understand that many disruptive students will care more about
069their peers and Friends reactions to their behavior rather than to their teachers at this month's meeting we brainstormed ideas to help change the school culture surrounding disruptive behavior by either not providing any attention to these behaviors or by providing feedback such as you're bothering everyone here can you please stop we believe that students discouraging other students from doing these things may just lead to a change in Behavior the teachers cannot make on their own overall this will lead to a Better Learning environment for all thank you for listening thank you so much and then our high school students would you provide your first and last name please my name is Wanda El zubair my name is simran Sandhu um and like the middle schoolers so eloquently put the student School Board is a group of
070students with um from all three high schools and we also meet with middle schoolers sometimes and we have meaningful conversations with dedicated students across all the schools in the district including RPS online and ALC about concerns that eat into each individual School in the larger district and we discuss plans to rectify them we recently served as a model to pem District as they move towards forming their own student School Board throughout our discussion with the other schools some topics of greatest concern have come up and those are school safety mental health and then communication within the district both student and staff relationships and then also building sites to District level relationships um and then another thing we recently discussed was belonging a group of community members voiced that they didn't believe that belonging was an
071important conversation to have with students that schools should be an academic Place only but through discussion with other schools student school board members we found that belonging actually has a really high correlation to academic performance and when people feel like they belong in a space they're going to be more willing to go there and put in the work that they need to put in yeah it may be mushy and it's but it is absolutely necessary and it must be addressed now to improve the state of Youth mental health you will see an improvement in discipline and academic achievement as a whole we like to talk about our plans for the future but we'll fail to address how the present will be improved we must realize that today's present is tomorrow's future and so we must
072take action now to ensure that tomorrow is a better day at next month's meeting we'll be talking with representatives from Cradle to Career to discuss effects on the sense of belonging in school our district is in good hands thanks to all four of you so much any other board members have any committee announcements and by the way that's going to be a tough act to follow you know for the rest of the agenda items indeed um the community engagement committee wants to announce uh that we have our next School Board Community listening session scheduled this Thursday March 23rd from 5 30 to 6 30 p.m right here in the Edison boardroom board members will be present and available to meet individually with members of the community so we hope we'll see you attend our next
073item is our consent agenda would any board member like any item removed for separate consideration is there a motion to approve approval second it has been moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda any discussion all those in favor say aye aye any opposed the consent agenda has been approved item 6.01 our skip update from Lincoln K8 this is an information item which is the next in our series of school comprehensive Improvement plan presentations superintendent pick up thank you chair Nathan I would like to invite Jim Sanyo and the Lincoln team to come on up and take your place if we need to pull a chair up uh our jack of all trades chief of schools Jackie Peterson is helping with that thank you Jackie um there you go I'm not as fast as you
074that's good um thank you all for taking the time to join us we know that Lincoln is a school that has not only served generations of students very well it was recently recognized nationally as a blue ribbon National School of Excellence and so it's exciting to have the chance to hear about the Improvement processes that you have underway uh at your school so I will turn it over to Jim and we can get a chance to meet the team and thank you for making time to join us well hello we are asked the staff that is represented representing Lincoln Ka tonight chair Nathan Dr bakal board members cabinet thank you so much for giving us this opportunity tonight to talk about why we feel Lincoln is such a special and wonderful place to be and
075we are excited to share with you a couple of our skip goals tonight um the our first slide um I want to just our Lincoln Community wanted to take a moment to thank all of you this fall when you came and celebrated um our school becoming a blue ribbon school we know that a lot of you came and supported us and we just want you to know that we are so appreciative that you came and I know the students and our families are so appreciative too so thank you so much for your support um so Lincoln is again we think it's the greatest School in the universe but that is our opinion Lincoln is a choice school we offer instruction for nine grades kindergarten through eighth grade um we have 473 students in our building
076to break that up a little bit we have 325 Elementary students and 148 middle school students and you might hear us call them uppers tonight that's kind of what we refer to them as software classes um if you need to have a little bit more of a breakdown there's the demographics are on that first slide um so tonight are two goals that we're going to be sharing with you tonight um we at our leadership training this summer and through lots of discussions and um things um discussions that we had with our families with our staff and with our students we came up with two skippables that we are going to share with you tonight the first one is to increase our family and student engagement and really work on that sense of belonging for our
077Lincoln Community and then our academic goals we're going to focus on the all Lincoln students we'll meet their their reading growth Target and we'll be using the fast Bridge assessment and we'll do that in the fall winter and spring uh and also uh the uh the reading goal was based around that fast bridge but um Peter Rock Dr Peter Rock would say that that was uh an improbable if not impossible goal to we wanted all students to show growth um but I think it was more of a mindset goal that we all sat at the table I think about 10 of us and we said not one we don't want one student to not have that growth throughout that Year and have that success so so that's where uh we have changed a couple things
078we actually had three goals to begin with and we combined a student and a student and a parent uh engagement poll so you'll see that in our basically we really came around the word of intentional being intentional with families being intentional with students in our in our engagement and also looking at who is engaged and who isn't and why not and what do we do about it so one of our main goals in Reading was all Lincoln students will meet individual reading growth targets as measured by fast Bridge fall winter and spring and some of the lovers that we use to help support this goal uh in the area in the curriculum area include implementing structured literacy practices using the really great reading in K2 and in K1 hegarty and using the literacy lab leaders
079and then aspire in the targeted interventions area classroom teachers provide a small group with tier two interventions the reading core provides tier two interventions with targeted students and the reading specialist provides tier three instruction interventions and then the teachers of students who receive special ed services they provide intervention using spire in the professional development area again teachers use in special ed were trained inspire grade level literacy leaders K2 literacy lab K5 teachers use structured literacy training with Dr caster and uh this dyslexia screening process was um our current reality right now is spring and then we just recently took the winter fast bridge and we have 77.9 percent of our students when we are looking at fast bridge data we really looked at a lot of the different data that we had and we sort
080of zeroed in on two different uh things to present to you tonight because we think we thought they gave us data on our growth targets or the growth that our students are making and some actionable items that we could take the first one is we've got K and one here because they do the early reading test and then on the next is our second through eighth grade that does um a reading if you want to go on to the next one yep um this is growth with Norms um one a couple of the things that we can look at here is our targeted interventions if we have students in the red how do we look at what interventions do we need to make or even in the yellow are there instructional decisions that we can
081make in the classroom for the students and then thinking about are there students that could have some extensions in their reading English language arts time we also it helps us to think about the risk that our that we might want to look at with our students the next one is um by Benchmark data and what we are kind of looking at here is the growth on the left hand side we've got flat growth and then modest growth is sort of the two purples and pink or the burgundy and pink and then typical growth and aggressive growth and how are we able to look at all of our students in kindergarten and first grade and then also second through eighth grade and say can we move the growth into typical or aggressive for all of our
082students no matter where they're scoring okay that's all right so some fun facts oh I didn't go uh there's a lot of data uh that we look at but also some fun data uh that we also want to add is uh we looked at with reading uh with covid we had to change our practices the way we're using the media center we weren't able to uh students were able to check out as much because we're looking at proximity and classes and so we really tried to ramp that up and so we as of yesterday uh we have 25 331 books have been circulated which was a far increase from the prior years and so we look at those what are we doing to get those books in students hands and we've got a Lincoln links
083program that really focuses on early early reading and has been a fantastic program for quite a while also we look at our Literacy for stem we have 16 students from Lincoln that qualified for the uh State science fair and 15 will be representing uh Rochester Public Schools on Friday we're very proud of them for that um yeah we'll talk a little bit about our um when now that the coveted restrictions and regulations are starting to are discontinuing um thinking these are kindergarten and second first and second grade families they haven't really even been in the building they haven't been here because they couldn't and so we really wanted to make some um intentional ways to re-engage and to invite our newer families into the building we wanted our we want to have that sense of
084belonging for our students as well as our families and our staff where they can feel they're being heard or they feel they're being seen and where they just feel welcome to be in our building with our community um so some of our things that we're doing are lovers for that for our relationships we're working on making sure that students and families parents grandparents even staff are feeling comfortable to lead events and help plan those events um we also all staff has made a commitment to be out in the hallways for those first 10 minutes of the day reading kids greeting families that are coming in and just being a very welcoming presence um we also have a K8 big and little buddies program that we have had for years um but during covid we couldn't
085because we couldn't combine the classes for that so we're re-engaging that and all K-8 students are involved in that um we took pictures of all the kids at the beginning of the year at our step into learning and they are in our hallways all the pictures are up there and I I teach kindergarten and they still go through all those pictures and are pointing out where their picture is and the people that they're meeting throughout the year they know where those pictures are so it's really important to the students um we also um there's lots of celebrations there's lots of displays in the hallway that celebrate the Heritage and the history and the awareness months that we have throughout the school year and then the family lepers is you know our people who does a
086lot of planning they do a lot of different activities to make sure that everyone feels fit to the to the building um yeah we wanted to highlight two important platforms that Lincoln uses this year so one of those platforms that we use to communicate with parents is talking points and as of last week we've had about 40 000 different exchanges between families and we're also really diverse in many different languages at Lincoln we have 11 different languages that are being utilized with talking points and then one of the other platforms that we thought was important was getting that sense of belonging back at Lincoln so we started to use a program called along and this is a website where teachers create a short little video where students are given a a prompt to respond to
087and then um it gets sent to them they make a quick response either using a video of themselves uh responding to it or they can type in the response to and then as teachers we see those responses and then we can make comments and things that they that they have commented on so it's it's really beneficial and it gets some of those students who um find it hard sometimes to talk to other students or talk to grown-ups this is a good outlet for those students that can really um kind of show showcase some of their the things that they're they're really good at and and you get to know them too so I think using this it's kind of the the heart of the heart of Lincoln um because we really want to get to
088know these students and reading all their responses and going through all those things I know my students way more than if if I if I hadn't been using this so I think it's super important that more schools maybe try to use this this type of platform but uh grades three through eight have been using this there's about been 270 students responding to about 150 different teacher reflection prompts and we we've had a really good success rate 92 percent student responses come back so it's really good I also looked at tracking the amount of families and uh families and students coming to events at school during school after school at different events we wanted to see you know because account coming out of covid we really didn't have that they weren't they weren't able to come
089at the tail end last year we did have a few events where we were allowed to and it was um not as robust as we had uh had prior so we thought we really need to make sure that we're having grade level events and and school-wide events and you can see some of the data we did have a just this last weekend we had a school carnival and auction and uh it was more like a thousand to twelve hundred it was just people everywhere just packed and it really felt great the energy around just the love for the school and and the support was fantastic things we don't even have on here or was a Veterans Day celebration about 125 Community veterans and different family members working in offers concert upper's concert about 250 fantastic
090lots of representation of all the uppers and we just I last night we didn't have time to put this in um put it in last week but uh we the Lincoln students won the district Equity knowledgeable and they were brought home the Cup last night and they were very proud it was at Dakota middle school and so that was fantastic lots of different engagement with different families and different students and that's we really feel like that we're back thank you so the Lincoln broadcast is one tool that we use to help create that sense of belonging and community in our building this is a 10 to 15 minute production that the students put on every week and we use this as a powerful tool to communicate important things such as birthday celebrations and PBIS good
091behavior recognitions and communicating important messages throughout the building such as lunch menus weather and it's broken down into segments and we currently have about 64 students active in this production ranging across all of the different grade levels it's been a wonderful tool for us to have the kids highlight their gifts and their talents and to take leadership roles in making this happen another thing that we we've currently have 000 volunteers that has helped in our school that's the most recent number parent volunteers and families coming into our classrooms and this has really helped us to once again build more community and family connections and a sense of belonging in our building I can personally testify as an art teacher it's been amazing having parents coming in it's allowed me to spend more time with my
092students and to accomplish things that I would have difficult doing on my own um it's been also with the National Blue Ribbon that we had at the beginning of the school year that was a great opportunity for us to kind of launch having the the families in the community back into our building and got families re-established with um with just the Lincoln Community in general it hasn't necessarily come easy getting these families to come in we've had to do a lot of asking and a lot of intentional planning to get these families to come back in but we've seen a great um we've seen we've seen many blessings through through them being back in our buildings oh looking ahead but we're looking forward to our four goals and a lot of discussion already uh really
093around some of those things we've already established with our literacy and professional development and then also looking at using Panorama which we've used quite a bit looking at this year setting goals around that in our SEO practices so as you can see we're not refined we don't know exactly where we're going but we've had a lot of conversations we're looking forward to our June conversation when we get our skip team back together that's it thank you board members any questions director cook excuse me um I I wanted to start by just applauding the the skip team for uh and because I understand it's a collaborative process to identify these Targets in these goals and you really picked an ambitious but achievable academic goal by identifying that growth Target for every single student which is kind
094of inherently an equitable goal because it's going to be specific to each student to identify the growth Target the fast Bridge indicates is um an aggressive or a typical growth Target for that student so very well done I just my hat's off to the entire team for that ambition and I I wanted to ask a couple of follow-up questions about some of the levers that you identified to accomplish that and I'm not sure who the best person to expound on it might be but the letters training for administrators I I I haven't heard about uh anyone in RPS doing it that doesn't mean it's not happening lots of places but I'd just be interested in what what all went into that and what some of the takeaways would be what some of the value added
095through that training yeah so all all administrators across the district went through letters training I believe and that was this uh August and how do we support our St our teachers are they using those those uh you know all the reading skills and all the reading um materials that they're they're going through and how do we support as administrators what do they need what background do we need so when we're walking into classrooms and doing observations and having follow-ups with with teachers how do we support them best and what are we looking for what do they look fors and what are we making sure that our literacy is moving forward okay oh that's great um and for the um the structured literacy intervention or uh professional development with Dr Kastner is that something that was
096just at Lincoln district oh okay great and that was for K-5 right that's great because so much of the the shift into structured literacy I think has rightly been focused in the early early Elementary grades in the phonemic awareness but for as this is kind of a um uh we don't want to miss the students that are already past those those grades so that's great that that's happening in the later grades as well and then the last thing I I wanted to learn a little bit more about the professional development that went along with the implementation of the Spire curriculum for the special education um setting yeah so we uh we don't have our instructional coach our sped instructional coach so we we've I don't know who can answer that best probably uh that's district-wide
097and we'd be glad to provide an update for the board on that at some point it's a good point that we haven't actually uh shared that at any point because I believe spider was new this Academic Year right yeah we've been piloting it previously with some smaller pilots and so we are semi-district wide at this point and so yeah we that's we can talk on the executive committee about when we might provide an update to the board and yeah Lincoln certainly has been one of our uh schools that has been enthusiastically on that Journey yeah well it's it's just wonderful it's great to see I'm uh um excited and as encouraging as I can possibly be but uh um yeah way to go on an ambitious Target thanks Dr Barlow a couple comments then a
098question uh I'm excited about your intentionality of Engagement those 10 minutes before I think are so important and you're probably seeing the benefits and results of that as we heard from our students School Board they spoke about the importance of belonging and uh even though they are representatives of middle and high school it sounds like you're emphasizing belonging even at that K-8 level so keep them to get work also your usage of the talking points I found interesting um I have a basic knowledge of that in terms of uh it being what text to language translation and uh so our parents is that more so outgoing from the school to the home or from the home to the school could you maybe speak to that briefly and then the final question would be in regards
099to the targeted interventions are they occurring in class or out of if you could just speak to that briefly thank you but I really um uh um class announcement but I can also just do direct messages they can contact me I get it and it's just when they give me a comment back or they have a question it just comes to me it doesn't go through everybody else um so it's been really a great way for me to communicate back with families and and if I could if you don't mind Madam chair uh that is so important um just another example of how RPS and this talking points is available throughout the district uh that effort of wanting to ensure that all households have their voice represented literally if we can't do it linguistically we're
100able to do it through a platform such as this so it's always good to hear the reporting out and that it's being used and that it's also effective and and then only in terms of the targeted intervention I don't speak to that I can speak to it a little bit the fast bridge data that we shared with you is really a high level look at sort of our system and then our teachers and their plcs will dig more into the fast bridge data as well as the assessments that they're doing with their students in class so that they can make the best instructional decisions for where their students are at and knowing where they want them to go and that's in class and primarily if tier two intervention happens in the classroom and then some
101students are pulled out for an additional tier three yeah thank you Dr Garcia I just had so thank you for asking about the talking points I and this is more of a overall comment and maybe it's more of a superintendent pickle comment um but I think the the talking points is so important because there are a couple of languages on there that even though I know we have over 80 that are spoken in the district there were some that I thought oh interesting that we are seeing that in this particular school and how might we as the school be able to use that general information to kind of reach your first goal about the increasing family and student engagement past the school but in the community like we can share that information with other business
102I mean not specific about the family but other business owners other public health professionals about like these are the languages we see in our schools wouldn't this be great if you had Services additionally too in these particular languages so that this is not the only place that they're feeling part of the community um I think that would be excellent so that's more of a high level I was wondering if you could speak also to um the Lincoln links I don't remember who mentioned it but that sounded interesting to me in reference to the library of the media center it's part of our media and I'll K through one right now they go down to the library every morning right before they come into the classroom and they get um two leveled books that are kind
103of like they're reading level and then they get to bring home a read along that might be like a lab reading with their mom and dad something more that's a little bit more um has more literature a little bit more of what we have very um and books that maybe they need a little bit more help to read um but they do that every day all three those three books on there they love being able to go to the media center and they get to choose solid choice that they want to bring home okay excellent and just one more it's a generic response I guess to director cook so I don't know much about the professional development piece about Spire but I when I was um shadowing a student last week two weeks ago um
104I got to see some of it in action and I thought it was pretty cool I don't I don't necessarily know what the metrics show afterward but I thought it was a really it was just being able to see it I thought like I never really thought about how I acquired language or have learned to read based on some of the breakdown of the the specific interventions and like the unit that they were working on and I just it was kind of a neat thing to experience good well good it's my turn um I can only imagine what it was like not having parents in the building because as Mr son you always said when my kids were there he wanted to be tripping over parents in the hallways every day so it's good to
105hear that they're back but um you mentioned Amy about the the planning and and the invitations and the intentional actions we've been hearing varying reports from varying schools about their success especially getting parents to come back and volunteer in the classroom can you talk about anything specifically that you've done you know I can imagine if you build it they came but what specific things might you have done that that might help some other buildings get those parents back in the classrooms the parents come in to see their students learning to see their students experiences and I can just speak from kindergarten we in December we learn about a variety of holidays that have a symbol of light and we are they all learned a song with each holiday and we invited all the families right
106before winter break to come in and listen to their their songs and so trying to have an experience that the students are having and to invite the families and to see that acceptance or to share their learning with with their families that way we found that the personal invitation goes a lot farther now um you know especially with that barrier of coven do I feel safe do I come back in this building I'm used to not coming back so we really had to reach out individually to some families and let them know it was okay and we're doing well and um once they come back in they all right I've got this so I was really reaching out and we're doing a better job of being intentional like what do we need what are our
107needs for our building as far as maybe it's the art studio that they're working on framing things or doing things in the the auction Carnival really brought folks back with a purpose if you can tell someone that we really need you to do this X Y or Z then they're like yeah I can do that okay anything else superintendent thank you for the work there's we could we could pull you apart I think one real this is a cosmic question so I'll just invite top of the top of your head brief uh gut reactions what are the benefits of a K-8 structure like what does K8 let you do that some of you may have worked in elementary schools or middle schools but um it's a structure that truth and advertising I'm very positive about
108um I was glad to find we had one um any thoughts on that I have a first thought this is my first year being at Lincoln um and I've spent most of my time in elementary schools and I've seen it before the Cross grade level so kindergarten to fifth but there's something when you see the eighth graders with the little ones and what they're doing it just isn't it's just a little bit different when they're the middle school kids being able to spend time with the littles and when the little ones look up to them is really extra special I feel like yeah thank you um I I also I have a couple hats I was a parent of two of my children who went to Lincoln they're now in high school and doing wonderful
109but what I think is really important is that the the relationships that they have with each other with students but also with the teachers I I know those eighth graders that are graduating this year I can go walk down the hall and they they know who I am um if I need to say something to them about anything whether it be a behavior or whether it be a compliment they they have that relationship with me um and I think when kids go to middle school I think it's just the difference between like Willow and um John Adams they're going into a whole new situation where they don't know any of the teachers they don't know a lot of the kids in the building where our kids know what's going to happen they know the teachers
110that they're going to have when they become another student they know the kids who are going to be in their classes so if that that trust level and that community that Community is already where I think it's a little bit starting over if we go to the middle and then I think it also really gets them ready for high school they're ready to go I'm an eighth graders and they're ready we can call this meeting down until midnight if you want to we have we really have so much to share with that but as I say K-8 is great and uh our parents love it the families yeah it's a special area teacher who gets to work with the entire building um it's been a fabulous experience being able to work with both the kindergarteners
111all the way up through the 8th graders and I feel like my relationships are deeper with the students as a result of having them in the building um when my fifth graders transfer over into sixth grade I already have that relationship established with them and I feel like I can jump in and pick up where I left off because I know where they are at and I know how to meet their needs better and how to build that relationship deeper right away yeah um I guess for me probably about 10 years ago when I came to Lincoln Jim said to me the toughest day is the eighth grade graduation didn't get it until the first third graders I had graduated and I'm like oh my gosh I get it now because you put so much
112effort into that grade and then you see you see them get older and older and you still have those connections and that's what the that's what the kid experiences seeing them um become who they are and then you see them like a drop you see them go to the next stage in their life so it's that's that's what it is I I really appreciate that what's happening come back yeah K8 makes that structurally possible but I'm not announcing Jordan I'm going to recommend moving to K-8 across the district but I was at I was at I was at Dakota um this morning with the whole staff at Willow Creek yesterday and those schools are doing amazing work um and especially Dakota where it's an entirely new school but they do have a particular challenge with
113receiving students that are really um literally new um I think we have some things we can learn from what you've done at K-8 about the transitions across that divide we need to be very intentional about the jump from elementary to middle and middle of a high school and we've done a little bit of piloting of kind of a summer before ninth grade transition strategy at John Marshall in partnership with our Cradle to Career partnership and I think we need to do a lot more about that because we we don't have the resources for Cade everywhere and there are benefits to elementary schools and middle schools that are separate but we really have to have a much more intentional strategy across those divides one of my favorite projects that I ever did was across the elementary
114to Middle School divide where we had kids in fifth grade do videos on what we called their spark what I love and then we gave it to their sixth grade teacher before school started so the minute those kids walked in their teachers like oh Kathy your spark is horses I saw that and the kids were known for what they loved right across that little divide and it was a short video of course they're cute as heck because they're fifth graders talking about what they love but anyway I think the continuity piece that you're highlighting there is really powerful and you have done a great job because there's nothing magic about any model you've done a great job at Lincoln of Leaning into the benefits of that Kate model and accepting some of the trade-offs that
115are there because you do have some trade-offs in the programming that you can give some of your middle school students so thank you thanks for letting me no problem what was that one there's a reason you're a National Blue Ribbon School and we really appreciate you coming and presenting tonight and I'm glad I got through this without doing a few tears about my days my kids days at Lincoln because they were lessons that they do carry with them for the rest of their lives and the caring that that the staff has um really shows and what you guys do every day so thank you very much thank you agreed 10 minute recess it is 7 14 p.m back at 7 24. oh yeah okay so it's the same thing yeah yeah all right director Workman
116are we ready we are back in session at 7 24 pm and our next item is item 7.01 budget update with greater detail this is a preparation for action item superintendent pick out thank you director Nathan and board members as you know this board has identified um and I think taken bold action to address a structural budget deficit and you earlier this year approved the parameters that you've asked us to work from in addressing that deficit and we are on track to bring you a recommendation to vote on uh in June with a deeper discussion in May and we followed broadly stated the same process last year I think to good effect but one thing we learned is that when we asked you to approve the parameters we gave you as much information as we
117could without being overly specific for two reasons one we're talking about people's positions and two we had not yet had the Staffing meetings that are where the very specific details of the budget reduction get worked out and so this year we have added this update for you after you've approved the parameters and after we've had the Staffing meeting discussions with school leaders and leaders of departments but in advance of bringing you a final recommendation so as chair Nathan just noted we don't bring this for action but we bring it because we know these are difficult reductions they're not reductions that we anybody wants to make but they're ones we are making with uh care to advance the Strategic plan and do it in as Humane a way as possible and so John is going to
118give you an overview of what we now know about the specific reductions that you directed us to work on within the parameters approved earlier in the year very good thank you chair Nathan superintendent pacquel and board members I'm here to give a brief update on where we stand with Staffing so we held our staffing meetings with principals and Central administrative leaders February 16th to March 1st and then very shortly thereafter as soon as I think it was March 3rd we did let people know about displacement actions and basically that means they're being notified that you still may have a job with us but you don't have the same job that you have right now so then it sets off a whole process of being able to select a different position within the organization most of
119our staff have rights to transfer to other open positions there are a few that do not have those rights and then there are going to likely be a couple positions where they will be placed on an unrequested leave of absence and be called back at a future time when a position opens up so where we stand right now is 2677 full-time equivalent positions and we are planning to reduce to 2 573 full-time positions next school year this is a budget reduction of about 104.3 FTE now this is our best guess as of right now um we have finalized most everything but there are still just a handful of details up in the air so I might expect that that number could be dropping a couple more or it could be increasing a few more it's
120but it's going to be in that ballpark at this point because we've had the vast majority of the meetings a lot of our positions have tried to emphasize this have been vacant over the last uh actually really three years we as of today this morning when I looked we're at 112 full-time equivalent positions were vacant meaning nobody was being paid in a contract on those positions we believe when everything settles out here there are going to be eight employees that are laid off but we are still going to be hiring in several broad areas such as custodians nurses special education teachers I think there's probably 35 to 50 new hydros that are going to need to happen in that area student nutrition services are our food workers Transportation esps which is important to me now
121that I have supervision over that area we'd really like some more bus riding esps in our morning and afternoon routes and then there's a handful of other positions where we will still be hiring the eight positions that are going to likely end an unrequested leave of absence or a layoff in other words five operations professionals employees and then three teachers this is a chart that just shows where all of the positions that total up to 104 by job group where they land so in our administrator group there's a reduction of one a clerical group six ESP is about 27 to 28 positions although again we're I think everybody that works in the ESP role today has a job for next year and we will still be hiring more maintenance same thing we will still be
122hiring I think six people even though we're reducing nine positions because we're about 15 short today mental and physical health professionals about three operations professionals ten principal one and teachers 46.8 positions again we think there will be three teachers that are up to three that will be unrequested leave of absence and will bring those specific details to you through board action at a later time we've been using this chart for the last couple of years and uh now I've added one more column to the right showing the uh school year 23-24 and so if we go with the Staffing numbers that we have presented so far in this presentation the blue line which is the one we're tracking the most closely is the Staffing growth over the last uh 12 or so years and that
123would be bending the curve further downward in the direction that we kind of need it to go to continue to be able to have a sustainable and structurally balanced budget going forward I think that was the end nope I have one more so where we go from here is our finance team now takes all of these positions that have been decided upon and we assign budget codes to them in actual dollars to them and we get our first draft of the budget by around April 7th we will be working then from April 7th to May 22nd as we uh put together the final materials for our school board we'll have that ready for you eight days before the study session we'll post it publicly on May 26th somewhere in there I forgot to put this
124on here we are planning some sort of public comment or public engagement or we may even have our new community budget advisory committee assembled by that point those invitations are going out this week so we're looking forward to having some sort of opportunity to get some more feedback on the budget before we bring it to you for final approval on June 20th there will be the study session as we normally have we're kind of sitting around the table and we open up the budget book and we kind of go through a lot of the details there and have a great discussion back and forth so I think at this point I'm ready to take any questions if you have any board members any questions foreign ER I don't have a question just to comment John
125I just I I appreciate so much the work that you and so many other people on the staff have put into this for weeks and for months it's a it's a painstaking with a lot of pain process and um the information that you continue to provide doesn't make it less painful but it is so transparent and I just want to say thank you and I and I think to build on that this is this intermediate step is something that I know the board members have been asking for for a number of years is you know we hear about the bad news and then we get the budget and Nary anything in between so um I think the transparency for the community for the people who may or may not be involved for the people wondering
126what that over 100 ftes looks like in terms of impacts we may not um make people feel more comfortable because budget cuts are never comfortable but to understand the thoughtfulness that's gone in and and the conversations that have that have gone in I think um I remember from one of the questions that one of my other board members talked about was um that that process you mentioned about talking to the principals and and having them engaged can you just talk about that a little bit more so that everybody has an understanding of of how we got to this point yeah thank you for that question so we had three principals who worked directly with a smaller group of central administrative staff on the budget reduction committee we started the week of Labor Day and we
127ended the week before the holiday break and during that opportunity it was or during that process they had the opportunity to present ideas that were for their level so our high school principal recommended things for the high schools but in between meetings we also talked about what can you share with other principles in between what feedback can you get and so we had a pretty good process where they were able to take information go back survey ask their colleagues what they're thinking and come back and give us even more refined information meeting to meeting as we progress through so while we may have not asked every one of our 2500 73 positions what their thoughts were we had a broad perspective in our leadership participating in this process director Workman I'd like to just take
128a minute and really thank the cabinet for all the effort they put into the 21 questions that the board asked before this meeting um the information was was helpful I know that some of it probably took um some time to prepare so I just wanted to recognize and acknowledge that director McLaughlin Mr Carlson I think I might ask you this every time I see it the operational professionals is a new category can you remind us what's in there just because that's new so that was a we used to call that group off schedule which superintendent correctly pointed out it was kind of mean or nothing it's a much better title but it's it hasn't sunken so the operations professionals so I supervise Director of Finance we have transportation manager facilities managers facility supervisors accountants HR
129Specialists let's kind of catch-all group of employees that don't fit within a union group and I just to feel up and I didn't want to follow up on a few of the other comments here that um just so that we're talking about transparency there was actually these attachments in the in the board docs were actually updated this week I want to make sure that people know if they looked at these documents really early on there have been some updates so you want to make sure you look at the current ones and then secondly that one of our new processes again I think which is good for transparency is that at the end of our board docs agenda There's an opportunity for the board members to ask questions and that's what director Workman was talking about
130that the questions that we ask and the answers from the cabinet are all in the board docs agenda at one once the meeting is complete so that they can see the questions that we're asking in the in the quest in the comments that uh the answers that we're getting and the one question that I asked is um I asked several but this is what I want to focus on the issue of the world languages can you speak a little bit about that about um was there data to support that in terms of enrollment in in one of the plans moving forward I know that that um not recently but previously we were getting some questions from parents about that can I asked the superintendent maybe to jump in on World Language I know that we
131have a reduction planned at the middle school level but then maybe speak to the rest of thank you chair Nathan um we we are proposing no reductions at the high school level at this time we are developing A New World Language strategy because we know that in order to maintain enrollments in three of our four languages at the high school level we've had to go to online instruction which is not an optimal instructional mode but we are not recommending further reductions we are carefully candidly watching enrollments though because of course we cannot afford to offer classes that are way too undersubscribed we are recommending the elimination of Spanish at the middle school level and that is a very reluctant recommendation and it is one that uh I am making after a lot of reflection about
132the fact that it is what we call an exploratory class it's not part of a sequence that kids take for multiple years it's um a initial introduction to that language that the vast majority of students do not continue to study in high school I would propose director McLaughlin that as we develop a new world language strategy broadly which Dr abbamu and her team are working on one of the things we should think very hard about is a world language program at the middle school level that would be different from an exploratory class that everybody takes to have a bit of an introduction and instead offering it as essentially an elective option along with other elective options at the middle school level that's significant change in our Middle School programming but I think we've talked about
133at this board table before the need to have Middle School programming that is more likely to engage some of our students in subjects and studies that really appeal to them and electives are one powerful way to do that so I'm getting a little ahead of our process but we will be bringing to you a strategy for World Language broadly in the meantime if we didn't have a budget deficit I would never be recommending this reduction I am pleased to say that the really valuable Spanish teachers at the middle school level of whom I have with whom I've met recently and who I know you many of you have heard from um will be among those who have the opportunity to accept other positions in our district and so it's not that we are actually taking
134a step back from people who have Spanish language proficiency and are passionate working with kids in World Language but that still is a reluctant reduction um but one that came after a lot of discussion including as John alluded to with leaders at the building level but when I get asked about that cut in our schools um the simple answer is I wouldn't be recommending it if we didn't have to get to that uh curve bending that we saw on the graph that I think is actually painful but very encouraging because we're getting ourselves to the point where we do have that structural balance in our budget and just to follow the the time frame for the modification of the world languages is that rolling out not next year but the year after yep thank you
135yeah but I would be uh eager and I know Dr Obama has been thinking we would be eager to provide the board with an update on that well in advance of bringing you a recommendation we did just complete a very interesting survey of student interest in World languages at the high school level and so um we're working on it and look forward to briefing you on that soon thank you any other questions or comments board members so the next time we'll be talking about budgets will be May 30th unless we think of something else to tell you in the meantime I think that's the the most likely next opportunity great thank you thank you item 8.01 nope nope nope sorry 7.02 and 7 0.03 with the board's permission I'll do these two items together it's
136a preparation for action item which is the second briefing for the policies and procedures that were reviewed by the policy committee at the February 24th and March 2nd meetings any additional questions or discussions of the policies being briefed hearing none these will be included in the consent agenda at the April 11th meeting Now we move on to 8.01 approval of budget adjustments as of January 31st 2023 this is an action item I'll read the resolution ask for a motion and a second and then we can open the floor for information and discussion be it resolved that the school board of Independent School District 535 does hereby approve 2022-2023 budget adjustments for November 1st 2022 through January 31st 2023 in the following amounts 2 million three hundred and eight thousand seven hundred and seventy six dollars
137of additional revenues for a grand total revenue budget of 355 million 514 461 and 3 million four hundred and eighty two thousand two hundred and twenty two of additional expenditures for a grand total expenditure budget of 428 million 837 779 dollars and be it further resolved that the school board of Independent School District 535 does hereby approve the 0.9 full-time equivalent FTE of additional positions as summarized by the following amounts 0.8 FTE less education support professional positions 0.7 fde additional student nutrition services positions and 1.0 FTE additional teacher positions of approval second there's been a motion and a second any questions or discussion superintendent great happy to give you a quick brief summary of this budget adjustment this one is not very complicated in the fact that there's not a lot going on even though
138you just read a resolution that said 2.3 million more in revenues so just to briefly explain what happens is throughout the year we learn new data every day we learn about new grants that become available we bring them here for approval we work those into our budget we get donations we work those into our budget and so we're constantly making those adjustments so that as the grants and things come in we have approval to or our leaders have approval to spend that money but we do need to bring them formally here to have your approval on that and so this budget adjustment covers what's happened from November 1st through January 31st as stated we have about 2.3 million dollars more of Revenue with the biggest amount being there in the local category the local category
139is the category of Grants and donations that are from private sources whereas the federal line is grandson or federal grants that we have received the last time on the expenditure side there's some pluses and minuses some of this is budget transfers where we're allowing our staff our leaders to make decisions to say I don't need as much in contracted services but I need more in supplies for example so they are allowed to actually move their budgets around so that's part of what's happening within the adjustments but we're also rolling out that expenditure budgets to match the additional Revenue within that number two I should explain there was a carryover found that we needed to include for our p-tech program and so that's worked in there and that's kind of what the difference is so it's
140money that um doesn't necessarily have new Revenue associated with it because we already have the revenue but we need to put in the expenditure adjustment as well um as stated the new Revenue budget if this is approved would be 355 million in total spread across all of our funds with 428 million dollars of expenditures you might wonder why is it so discrepant a lot of that is because of the construction projects that are still being completed at the new schools and then our ending fund balance across all funds would be 127 million uh representing about 29.8 percent of what we spend this year where we really get laser focuses in the general fund and we're watching that unassigned fund balance that number per year school board policy needs to be eight percent or greater it's
141projected if we fully expended the budget would be 10.7 so we'd be in really good shape there as stated there's just some very minor position changes that were requested over the last three months and so we were able to approve those through discussion uh with other colleagues of mine Kim Gallery said that and I said that as well so I think we're ready to uh to have any questions any questions or discussion great if no further discussion um all in favor of the resolution say aye aye opposed the resolution has been approved and next item is 8.02 referendum proposal development this is also an action item I'll read the resolution ask for a motion in second and if received we will have information and discussion be it resolved that the school board of Independent School
142District 535 does hereby direct the superintendent to prepare a referendum proposal for the school board's consideration for calendar year 2023. of approval second there's been a motion and a second we'll have uh questions discussion do you have anything superintendent Patel I I think I can be very brief uh as this board has had a number of discussions this is my formal request for marching orders to develop a proposal for you to consider regarding a referendum that we might might put before the voters next fall as this resolution of the requests and of course I will bring your recommendation on both the substance of the potential uh referendum and the timing um we have an operating referendum that provides 17 million dollars a year in support for our students that expires in 2025 and so we
143have a couple years three specifically within which to renew that so that is a urgent priority one of the options that we will be considering and would bring to you if you pass this resolution is some possibilities for additional support for our students and this board as we know has been very committed to being both transparent and very deliberate about the possibility of putting a referendum before the voters and so I'm requesting uh that you provide your approval for us to do our homework uh both in terms of the finances the educational Investments and the community priorities and bring you some options to consider on a time frame that I'll work on with the executive committee questions or comments board members well hearing none all those in favor of the resolution say aye aye all
144those opposed the resolution has been approved thank you item 9.01 the updated ABCD um that is our annual Board calendar draft are there any items that a board member would like to add to a future agenda item hearing none I'll reiterate uh what Dr McLaughlin said about the board questions and responses those will be available in item 10.01 on board Docs in our upcoming board meeting dates on April 11th at 5 30 we have a regular meeting April 18th at five o'clock we have a study session May 2nd at 5 30 we have a regular meeting and May 16th at 5 30 a regular meeting and hearing no other business this meeting is adjourned at 7 48 pm foreign