School Board Meeting, June 7, 2022

001good to see you all right kathy do you got everybody in your view now no i can see from jess to half of melissa see on our screen we can see all of you moving that way just a bit let me see can i blow um but now i can't see jess so now she says she can't see jess at all uh i see i see her arm there she is now and yeah now i don't see her just shows it's all right i'll stream it on youtube and that way i'll be able to get everybody that you've got you received them so uh foreign this regular meeting of independent school district 535 school board is called to order at 5 30 pm tuesday june 2022 in room 137 of the edison building interested members

002of the public are welcomed and encouraged to view this meeting remotely at youtube isd 535 where the live stream video may be found this 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 present at this meeting our school board members including kathy nathan who will be attending remotely superintendent kent a non-voting ex official member and assistant school board clerk ms michelle severson the severson will you please call the role thank you director amundsen here clerk barlow here director garcia here treasurer mclaughlin here chair marvin here vice chair nathan here and director workman here thank you at this time we provide an opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to

003the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice 2.0 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 in favor say aye aye opposed agenda is approved uh 3.0 comments to the board as you know we do not broadcast comments to the board just as we do not publish emails to the board or text the text of phone calls that board members receive the minnesota school board's association is clear that time at board meetings is not intended to be used by stakeholders for speeches to the community or their affiliated organizations it's also important to note that especially during this election season any kind of

004endorsement or disparagement of a candidate is not allowed that said this time is appropriate for speakers to agree disagree or offer an alternative to actual district initiatives and if you have a question you want answered please let us know that and we will respond by a phone or email each speaker will have three minutes ms severson will be keeping time and she's good at that when your name is called please have a seat in front of the microphone at the table right here state your name and whether you are a resident of the school district and our first speaker this evening is westland mr lund welcome you can't i is think on the last day of school it would have been really good to give all the students a message about how to keep out

005of trouble take your hands off the buttons so the point being um when you have such a beautiful school system why not say to the kids on the last day of school stay away from the underground nightclubs stay away from the places respect your curfew what are the kids learning that makes them so angry that they attack the olmstead county fairgrounds and even the sheriff's department realizes that they can't control the groups send everybody home what are they learning or not learning about their social responsibility or respecting the community that they decided to come why not live something to save their lives a little bit i don't know what it's about but about a year ago in august everybody was asked to please tell us what you're teaching about critical race theory i'm just going

006to remind you of the 41 page document that was sent to all the school board members that was sent to mr peckle and it was asking about critical race theory black lives matter and what structures were used in the but i brought copies for all we all share thank you our next speaker is jim rice thank you um i'm basically going to read a letter that i just gave michelle that i've directed to the board honorable board members in my letters uh to you dated december 9th 2021 and january 14 2022 as well as my statement of the rochester school board during the january 20th 2022 listening session i established in specific detail with the board's equity core police statement dated 8 31 2020 in the board's equity policy statement adopted june 14 they are

007grounded knowingly or unknowingly in a marxist ideology and worldview that worldview translates into a moral code that defines right and wrong behavior for our children in our public schools it serves as a basis for defining what is true and real particularly in this case outreach our first group to be recognized on this evening 4.01 student athletic activities and academic recognitions dr piquel chair marvin and board members we have uh the privilege of recognizing a number of students and the educators and staff who work with them and we are going to flow through here in the order in which uh michelle received the information from staff if i butcher anybody's name my deep apologies and it happens to me every day all the time um but that doesn't make it right so we'll try and move

008that i'd invite you uh when we get to the recognition that you are here to present just come on up and walk around and come to the podium i wonder if one of my cabinet colleagues might we might be able to pull that forward a little bit since there's the the light there just so people aren't uh tripping over that and then uh i have your student or students plural if they are here with you come up with you as well and so uh we are very excited to have the opportunity and we have a really diverse set of uh folks who we are privileged to recognize we put out an all-call and we certainly always like to recognize our athletes but today you're going to see we get the chance to recognize artists and

009students who've succeeded academically and community service as well so let us start then with uh is jack failor here from kellogg middle school great come on up and uh uh you can tell us who you're here to honor and if they're with you they can join you or otherwise you can just describe them there we go great yeah it's right up um well you can use the actually it's your choice you can use the ball podium's probably the easiest let's do that here come here it's about you yeah exactly so thanks for having us first off um this is eric he's one of our sixth graders at kellogg i've been honored to be the kellogg math coach for three years and we participate in the national math counts competition this year our team finished third

010at the minnesota state and eric took second place overall as an individual as a result me and eric were invited to go out to dc me as national coach and eric as a student where he finished 64th out of 226 as a sixth grader so we're excited to see what the next two years will bring unfortunately our assistant coach going to make it golden pink he's a 10th grader over at century who gives back to kellogg he was part of the program and helps us out but we've had a fun year and we're just excited to see what's going to happen the next two years and see if air can keep on going and eric are your parents here would they wave [Music] eric is there anything that you'd like to like us to know

011about math or the competition were you nervous um or were you confident that it was going to work out i was kind of nervous i was not sure i would i didn't actually know that i would get nationals it was kind of a surprise but well it is fantastic and thank you and thank you for all that you've been doing and let's recognize it one more time [Applause] and uh next we have um claire sykes doing i hope i'm saying that right are you here claire i'm here okay great so you were come on up tell us who you're going to recognize all right i guess i should start with an introduction i'm tim morgenstern i am the assistant head coach at john marshall high school in the speech and debate program so we're here

012to recognize some of our national national qualifiers and state qualifiers for the first speech and debate which is growing here in rochester and i'm excited to see it it was my first year as a coach here i coached in the cities but i was happy to come down here and john marshall qualified two people to the national tournament i don't see either of them here but i do see one of my state qualifiers so if you want to come on up and [Applause] so along with mayo high school and uh century high school i think combined we we did over a dozen students went to the state meet this year um and john marshall had nine students um and odile here uh qualified in the category of poetry and she uh did fantastic and we

013will be had i will be headed to uh louisville on friday with two of my students um to compete at the national tournament and very excited for that so deal if you want to introduce yourself hi i'm odile and um yeah like he said i participated in the category poetry um where i took a bunch of poems from famous poets and put it all together in a script that i really liked um it's been a fantastic season and tim has really helped me and all of our and all of my teammates really go to where we want to go and reach our full potential so thank you for that we may be looking at our next youth poet laureate right here [Applause] [Music] and do you have parents or anyone with you this evening [Applause]

014thank you congratulations and um next on the list is um anne pagel ann here and we have another substitute mr queasy he doesn't look anything like anne good evening madam chair board members dr paquel i am stepping in for anne pagle this evening the great news about anne pagle is the end of the school year came and she retired so i called her today and asked her if she was going to come down here and she says no mark i'm going to hand this one over to you so as duties as a signed as we say i'm not sure we have any of our bpa qualifiers for century but if they are here can you please come forward okay so um we had several students who placed at the state level and were actually able

015to go on hans zoo advanced accounting first place financial math and analysis concepts fourth place parliamentary procedures and concepts third place ethan zhang fundamentals of accounting was third place logan duran primary parliamentary procedures fourth place daniel wang and dean wang fundamentals of desktop publishing first place user experience design and use of adobe first place and then brandon mccrady was a presentation management health leadership special topics was second place so we want to say congratulations to those students on behalf of century high school fantastic would you just want me to i'm going to continue on here since i helped michelle submit several of these here i'm going to have tom brown our adapted softball coach please come up and talk about our adapted softball team [Applause] um good afternoon like mr quizley said i'm i'm tom

016brown and i'm the head coach of rochester raiders adaptive softball team i'm here today with me is our senior graduated captain this is stuart batterson and my assistant coach caleb gannon [Applause] um we're an adaptive softball team with 14 players both boys and girls we have players from century john marshall and mayo high school we have a player from kellogg middle school and we have four players from byron and byron middle and high schools we play our games in a gym and we use wiffle balls and bats uh this last weekend we competed in the adaptive softball tournament in chanhassen minnesota we won our first game versus osseo 15 to two in five innings and we lost our state summit final game 10 211 to anoka hennepin and we lost our third place game 9

017to 13 versus robbinsdale we ate out we stayed in a hotel and we had two graduates introduced in their caps and gowns prior to our state semifinal game yes stewart and another player of ours player of ours noah tolman they're both century graduates they chose to come play softball with us instead of graduating that day so if their parents had a great idea and the minnesota state high school league allowed us to have those kiddos introduced with their caps and gowns on prior to the game so it was awesome uh and lastly i just would like to tell you that our goal was to give our players a fun and exciting state tournament experience and we achieved that goal we ended our season five and five and through all of our games we made a

018lot of lasting memories so i appreciate your time and thank you very much for letting us come here today [Music] [Applause] [Music] and stuart do you have anyone here with you this evening um my mom and dad yeah there they are [Applause] [Laughter] thank you all very much we appreciate it thank you i usually feel the same way about speaking your story thank you next up is evelyn kim evelyn is a orchestra student for us at century high school and she was selected to the allstate orchestra for century high school next maya ebling maya if you'd please come up please i told maya to limit her speech to under five minutes and i thought she was going to walk out on me here i'm extremely excited to introduce maya and not only is she a

019great student for us in rochester public schools she broke a barrier this year she was the first ever state qualifier for wrestling for rochester public schools and placed for us at the state tournament and as a as a wrestling advocate and a person who helped write the bylaw to give these young women the opportunity i'm i feel truly blessed to be standing here next to her and watch her participate in this program so um and this all happened on the 50th anniversary of title ix for the state high school league so a lot of celebration throughout the year we had a great celebration at the state tournament as to what it means to be a female and a female athlete now in minnesota and we are very proud of her and miss kaus who will

020come up in a minute actually had the opportunity as a board member to strike medals on those first ever female athletes so on behalf of century high school congratulations and your mom and dad are here this evening so if they would wave to ours please okay she has thought about this she does want to say a few things hi amaya ebeling i'm really excited to have a great season next year and i'm excited to grow the girls wrestling awesome [Applause] next i'm going to have miss kaus come up and her students and then we'll have one more student after that good evening everyone my name is century high school this past year we had four students that participated in the 2122 minnesota music educators association allstate band program with us tonight is sean erickson other

021participants were elena thompson grant delasi and ben malm the allstate program is a competitive audition process so shawn auditioned last march the march of 2021 and was selected participated in a week-long camp in august and then performed once again this february at orchestra hall um so if we congratulate sean and um we've got additional results back sean will be back with many more friends this year uh for the 22-23 but we'd like to recognize sean in the other three further involvement this past year and shawn do you have anyone here with you i do not tonight you're gonna need to play something so next time for sure i play clarinet oh very well anytime you show up anytime and you can play got it awesome congratulations thank you [Music] miss marvin cowbell cowbell here all

022right up next maria hansen and we saved the last one here for us if she would please come up the minnesota state high school league has what we call a triple a award and it's honoring students that excel in academics arts and athletics and i'll have miss kaus talk about this young lady's arts experiences first maria has been a four-year member of the band program at century i'm just a tremendously hard-working and dedicated member in the classroom and the many facets of the music world that extend beyond the classroom and i know her other teachers would say the same about her academics as well um hung in there through a couple years of non-traditional band experiences in the high school and then when we were able to return to many of our in-person performance opportunities

023this year was just a tremendous leader for us represented century in the big nine select band another thing we were able to bring back um to in-person full happening this year so excelling there in the arts and the academics portion [Applause] and as miss kaus said she accelerates very well in the fine arts but her gpa am i okay to share this okay i always ask the students ahead of time if i'm okay to share this but 4.61 gpa um eight eight ap courses she was allstate in la crosse she was all state and soccer she was a participant in soccer nordic ski and she's a rugged lacrosse player i've had an opportunity to watch her with a stick all spring um and so we're very proud of her being selected as the region one

024a representative and one of the finalists for the minnesota state high school league triple a they honored him at the state basketball tournament where she got a chance to be at a banquet and then got on the floor and got on the jumbotron and everything at the arena so again do you want to say anything and introduce your mom and dad for us i just want to say thank you for this recognition it's an honor and that concludes our list thank you very much again for the opportunities for these students student athletes and students and activities thank you let's um let's move on to um if it's acceptable uh john marshall i see mr irkey here i also have on the list uh michael hutchins uh one of our business education teachers um so anyone

025from jm who's who's here to recognize some excellence come on down hello i'm mike hutchins here from john marshall and uh we had this year on in our bpa program uh we had three national qualifiers all right here we had uh erotica odile once again and mimi um so all three of them uh competed at the regional competition here at rcdc and then qualified for state and then at the state conference in minneapolis all three of them qualified for the national conference in dallas this year uh in which odile and mimi actually went and competed and finished i believe his top ten or top twelve i can't remember where it was and went in in a website design and then erotica has actually uh two times for the past two years has qualified for nationals

026last year obviously online and then this year in person which which is not able to attend uh this year but uh amazing work this is the most we've ever had at john marshall was all three of them qualifying so amazing work please [Applause] do you have any parents you want to uh represent here [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] her dad [Applause] thank you guys awesome work congratulations wow there's a certain website i'd like you to help us redesign just a certain organization i don't know okay i love it um and uh hearing that's our folks from uh john marshall let's move on to mayo high school i see mr priggy here i don't know if i see mr whitney but um we'll have our lead principal well it is evening so good evening everybody so i

027am not mr whitney i'm here to pitch hit for him he he just sent me a picture of the region uh baseball tournament that he's running right now so yeah he's a little busy but it's my pleasure pleasure to be here tonight to uh introduce a couple of of groups and first off we flipped a coin and miss munson if you want to start making your way up here we have a fantastic teacher director in miss munson and our plays and our musicals are second to none and with tons of awards i'm not going to steal any of her thunder i'm just going to move out of the way now but without further ado miss munson [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you for the introduction mr priggy um and thank you superintendent picale and chair

028marvin the board and the cabinet for allowing time for public recognition of excellence uh i'm amy munson i'm one of seven stage door directors through the course of three different types of performances joining me tonight are jennifer humkey and troy kowalski also erin cole is our music director kim hill one act director christopher smith technical director and megan shelley is our choreographer also tonight we have some actors and technicians with us here sophia and julia sanchez our stage managers and then sydney grayler uh performer and costumer right yeah fantastic anybody else sneak in vern left okay and then vern um a costumer it has been a stellar year of successes for extracurricular theater at mayo which includes fall musical the adams family one act play flowers for algernon and spring play clue on stage and

029i'm thrilled that we were able to perform these three productions for approximately 4 000 community members in our community uh despite the challenges of the pandemic and i'm also grateful that many of you attended our shows as well i'm incredibly proud of each of our 118 students this year we're brand new to stage door they were eager to learn anything we could teach them and their investments showed you may have received lists of honors announcements from mayo high school administrators in december february april or a press release last month in may so i will only hit the pertinent highlights now one act play advanced to sections for the seventh year in a row and last year performing at state festival and kim hill could not attend tonight but on her behalf i want to extend

030gratitude for supporting student activities and opportunities in theater our mayo high school stage door theater program participates in the hennepin theater trust spotlight education program and spotlight provides opportunities for students to enhance their interests in theater to train with professionals to sharpen skills through extra classes to better understand theater beyond high school and to receive critical feedback on their current high school performances while i already think that these students are pretty awesome i ask hennepin theater trust professionals for unbiased evaluation so our students and our program can keep growing in pertinent ways adjudicators evaluated our program for the adams family and for clue receiving any honors can best be equated with the tony awards recognizing professional theater at the high school level the adams family received 15 awards and honors including outstanding overall production and

031outstanding orchestration and music clue received 25. honors and awards the most that stage door has ever received for being what hennepin theater trust says the best of minnesota high school theater students from the cast crew and pit orchestra will perform a medley from the addams family and it is at an event called spotlight showcase at the state theater in minneapolis on june 14th additionally four seniors and two juniors have been selected by the professionals at hennepin theater trust to highlight their talents the showcase event participants are aaron stoking as showcase stage manager lorelei lewis as featured performer william bradley and max spinner as showcase orchestra musicians and they only selected six and we got two week as showcase featured dancer and she was missing from the may press release because of timing and william lauden

032triple threat finalist he is one of eight boys selected in the state of minnesota at this distinction and if he wins because he's only got to beat seven he goes to new york city for two weeks to train with professionals and to compete in the national jimmy awards all of these six students couldn't be here tonight regretfully but they're rehearsing in the cities tonight for showcase so thank you for supporting directors who strive to foster students growth and learning thank you for recognizing student excellence and thank you for supporting the arts [Applause] [Music] and i think we do have some parents here tonight parents [Applause] [Music] [Applause] uh for all of us theater has been really important um but i know these two especially we all got very behind on sleep and homework but it's

033some of the highlights of our day uh i was actually lucky enough to actually get an award for my first time for the show i was um honorable mentioned for uh directing a technical leader thank you sorry this is why i'm not acting but it's just the highlight of our day and since we get to do a little bit in the summer it's just making everything much more enjoyable thank you all so much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] again if you have the opportunity to come out to any of the plays uh or musicals i highly recommend it i don't think i've missed one in the 10 years i've been there at mayo so next up as mrs priebe comes up talk a little bit about bpa and business um miss priebe like uh miss munson

034have really grown their programs and you know that's just a testament to you know their dedication to male high school and the things that they do so miss priebe all right thank you so much everyone for allowing us to be here tonight um bpa you know you've heard the other schools um get awarded or be reminded or told to you what they did bpa stands for business professionals of america it's an organization that allows students to be able to show their skills that they have in a variety of areas not just business but specifically business marketing anything with computer programming desktop publishing as you heard speech website design it's a wide range of of skill sets that these kids can really share with others and who i have here tonight is hannah lemaster she's been

035my student for three years she was a intro to business first year then she was in bpa the next two years with me she survived covid online everything and she also qualified for nationals via covet online this year she also competed and along with her and five of her teammates all went up to the state conference and they all were finalists hannah was fifth place in the state in banking and finance and she was also part of a small business management team as well as their other three students um or part of a small business management team and again all finalists hannah qualified for nationals went down to dallas with the john marshall students and competed very very well she was 17th out of 64 in the banking and finance and 18th out of 239

036in the open financial math and analysis i can't take credit for any of that financial math and analysis instruction we have to give our math department fair credit there but it has been such a joy to work with hannah these last three years the growth that she has shown has been amazing and lincoln has got a great student coming to their college and i look forward to following her and seeing what the future holds before i let hannah speak here because i know she has a speech prepared i'm just kidding again as others have mentioned in amy specifically to be able to support electives activities and things of of our nature is so important to the students because it gives them an opportunity to be able to um branch out in areas that they might

037not have done before i wasn't quite sure if hannah would want to do this as after a header is a sophomore and intro to business but she she took the chance and she did and to be supported by the school district in our areas is amazing like i see three people on the board that supported us one behind me here um with our finance camp and that was just just amazing so um thank you and hannah if you want to say anything yeah i don't have to wait first of all i do want to give a huge thank you to mrs prabee she's been a huge help these last three years it's been really exciting just bpa in general has been such a cool opportunity because as mrs priebe was saying there are so many

038different things you can do with it so really anybody who's even relatively interested in business should definitely try it and just see if it's for them yeah and thanking my parents too they've been a huge help they're online so they couldn't be here today but here's a thank you to them and yeah thank you all thank you [Applause] thank you so we have i don't think we have anybody else but i want to thank you for the opportunity we have amazing kids in the school district and amazing kids at mayo and i just want to congratulate all of them that are being recognized tonight a 4.61 gpa i probably would need to do some addition on mine to get to there but anyways thank you for the opportunity and go spartans [Applause] [Music] i believe

039that covers all of our recognitions but i just in case there was something that uh didn't get translated is anybody else here for the purpose of recognizing student accomplishment or excellence okay madam chair i think we are complete all right we will move to 4.02 the alarm pilot update dr pikel uh dr marvin and directors of the school board as board members know my previous job before coming to rochester involved doing research on relationships and at some point there was a foundation and a non-profit organization that came to us and said we want to build an app that is based on the findings of some of your research and that foundation was called the chan zuckerberg initiative it is the philanthropic arm of facebook founder and ceo mark zuckerberg and his wife dr priscilla chan

040who's a pediatrician and the non-profit is called gradient learning that they support and they built an app called along and when i got to rochester they said we've now got this app created to strengthen teacher student relationships would you be interested in helping us pilot it and so i asked our executive director of equity and engagement will referend the second if he would be interested in working with some staff across the district to pilot this app and so what we have been doing this year has been what i think is going to be a hallmark of our new strategic plan which is trying innovative new things seeing what works learning some lessons and continuing in and building if we find something that seems like a good fit and so we wanted to give the board

041a glimpse of this we were provided with some philanthropic support from the foundation that made this work possible but i really want to thank will for his leadership in bringing this to life so mr ruffin all right thank you chair marvin and school board members um like dr pickel said i'm here to give you an update on some software that many of our teachers have used throughout the school year so first i just want to start with what is the alarm along is some software that was created throughout the pandemic just thinking about how students have lost that sense of connectivity with each other that sense of connectivity with their classroom teachers and even other people that the pandemic has caused them to lose that connectivity to so if you think about it right here

042this is a screenshot from their web page and it says we want to help each student feel seen and understood so the software was built to try to reconnect students to their classroom teachers and for the purpose of the pilot we extended the invitation out to people beyond the classroom so you have social workers you have counselors you have different coordinators throughout our district who also piloted the software so what i want to do quickly is just show you what it looks like so you have a better understanding of when we get to the questions so this is what it looks like from the staff perspective so the staff can pick some pre-made questions these questions were research based or the staff member can create their own question for the students to answer in true

043teacher fashion the adult would model what this will look like in this case this person chose a video after that the teacher would send the question out to all of their students i should also let you know that some staff chose a small group some chose to pilot this with their entire classroom so there's a mixture the students can then respond to the teacher's prompts they can respond through audio they can respond through text or they can respond with their own video as well so then on the educator's end this is what it looks like for the teacher they get to see which platform the students chose to respond with and then the teacher also gets to respond back to the to the student so now what i want to do is just show you

044which schools participated we had seven schools bishop friedel gage mayo john marshall lincoln k and riverside from those schools we had 57 total staff members participate in this pilot 783 students total across those seven schools here's some of the things that we found at the end of the pilot so before using along how often does your teacher do the following and i won't read all of them but i will point out some my teachers show me that i mattered to them so if you can see a number four it says almost always we have 213 students who answer that 86 students said often it's quite a huge number my teacher challenged me to be my best my teacher helped me accomplish tasks or goals so you can just see some of the questions that or

045some of the feedback that we're trying to get from our students during or after the pilot how often does your teacher do the following we just ask the same questions the average scores pretty much stayed the same within the three-point range but we now have more students in the almost always category than we did before so our numbers within the ranges increased or decreased if they chose rarely or sometimes previously we also asked how much do you agree with the following statement again a long has helped my teacher get to know me average score of three out of four 120 students that strongly agree 170 students chose degree a long has helped me get to know my teacher i look forward to receiving a new reflection question from my teacher that one kind of surprised

046me many of the students actually look forward to receiving this this reflection as you can see when i get down to about the fifth one down my teacher uses what i shared through along in their teaching that has one of the lowest scores of 2.6 the teachers chose how they roll this out in the classroom and the point of the pilot was to get to know the student not necessarily to tie what they learned from the student back into the classroom that's why you see a dip in the score there it wasn't the point of the program just some quick demographic data of the different student groups who chose to participate so elementary students we had 175 students middle school 90 and high school 86 students you can also see the breakdown there just more

047demographic breakdown for you then when we're related to language what i would like to do now is just read one comment from one of the teachers i had several of these but this is the one that stood out to me the most i just wanted to say that i really enjoy this platform the comments from my frequent responders have been amazing and they have told me on numerous occasions how much they appreciated being able to interact students then responded to those reflections 125 times for a percentage of 86 percent looking at fradell 32 reflections were sent out students viewed them 220 times and responded 210 times for 90 98 response rate at gage john marshall 85 lincoln k8 88 response rate from 418 reflections male high school sent out 300 or excuse me uh 76

048reflections and students viewed them 390 times and responded 289 times for 75 those are the numbers for riverside 88 response rate and i'll stop there and ask you if you have any questions before you do i just want to say that the software was free it didn't cost the district any money and the teachers were compensated for their time for piloting the software any questions yeah miss work so this is all online so this is all online correct yes were you able to observe any over into the classroom as a result of this in terms of how students interacted with each other or with their um teachers i was not able to observe them no i'm not in the school building but i mean did you get any feedback on that or maybe it's something

049you haven't asked for i haven't asked for that yet good question though mr parallel uh more of a statement of appreciation just ask there are different learning styles i appreciate the fact that in terms of the response there were different options available which is acknowledging that students communicate differently and how each style or response style is valued and i just thought that was very important i should also say that this was a brand new software this was the first time that this has been used throughout the country there are only two districts who piloted and and our district was one of them so if teachers choose to use this going forward they can because the product is free and it will always be free so if this is a resource that we can put in

050the hands of our teachers it will not cost us anything going forward that was going to be my question is how is this going to be used in the future but it's no cost to the district mine reader we like that and in terms of we uh will and i and many others spent um half of the day today and we'll spend half the day tomorrow at our um belonging and behavior summit which is taking lessons learned from the past year and looking ahead to the following year it was interesting to me that several schools were talking about incorporating along into their efforts to strengthen student belonging next year so it was i think an example of one of those things that you start and um director workman there are classroom lessons that can complement

051the dialogue piece in the in the portfolio good to know so yeah it was i thought it was an encouraging sign that some of them were thinking of using this as a as a tool and i think it's the kind of innovation that you know in the home of the mayo clinic rochester public schools should be driving innovation nationally and so i think as will points out this was a appropriate example of us doing that and so i hope we can do more of it thank you mr kevin thank you uh 4.03 student learning project presentations i believe we have two students who'll be meeting with us dr pickell chair marvin and board members as you know all of us really value the opportunity to interact with students and i've had the chance in the

052year i've been here to interact with many you're going to meet two of the most impressive that i've met they both happen to be at century high school but that isn't they don't have any um uh sort of monopoly on the market of student leadership these are two students who both reached out to me with uh two totally separate ideas that they were thinking a lot about and we talked over the course of the year about those ideas and what i uh in talking with our chair and vice chair in our executive committee meeting think is a really good use of the board's time and the community's time is just to hear these thoughts from two of our student leaders we don't bring this to you for any board action i can tell you from

053the administration we'll be taking both of these ideas over the summer and next year and considering incorporating them into our future work but for now i want to just have the chance to give you a brief glimpse of the innovative kinds of thinking that some of our students are doing about the quality of teaching learning and really school culture in our district so thomas tyler is going to start us out he has done some interesting work in thinking about how might we help high school teachers continually improve uh the quality of instruction and relationship building happens in their classes and so he came to see me with an interesting and innovative idea and he has had conversations with many across the district and is going to give you um a quick overview of his proposal

054which as i mentioned we will be talking with teachers and our rochester education association colleagues and others with um in the months ahead thomas again it definitely wouldn't be this at this stage without them so so to start this is called feedback surveys for educators it would affect only high school students and it would provide educators with easily usable pre-made feedback surveys that they could provide to students over the course of the year and so that they are able to make changes to students academic environments and so students can improve their level of success in the classroom as the course is ongoing and so what else this a feedback survey is made up of two parts one the first section is completely anonymous and it's quantitative and these are the questions with the liquor scale

055the five options scale and then the second section is completely non-anonymous and these are the open-ended qualitative questions and so the proposal is that rochester public schools would highly encourage but not require educators to provide these feedback surveys as students and it would be recommended that students receive at least two feedback surveys for every semester of the school year so they're able to see changes to their educational environments as the course is ongoing so why does it matter um as the so this will achieve three goals the first it will facilitate the amplification of student voice and especially in the classroom there's not a lot of student voice and students largely aren't able to impact their educational environments second secondly it would empower students to reach their greatest academical potentials as they're directly able to

056influence their environments and then lastly would inspire educators to move forward as they take student feedback into consideration and make changes to students educational environments so this is what a these are some examples of questions on the feedback survey so on the section one this is the quantitative anonymous section one example is my teacher provides me with the guidance necessary to complete my assignments effectively and we also have questions like i i believe that this my classroom is a positive community and then section two this is the non-anonymous section that's open-ended and one example is what specific things can your teacher do to help you improve your level of success in this class and we also have a self-reflection question and we're looking to do more of that so are there any questions miss workman

057i have a question but i think i'm going to direct it to the superintendent because this would probably put you on the spot so i'll direct it to dr pikel so in the student concerns process proposal that was included as a an attachment here it was stated policy 413 while comprehensively described in the school board policies lacks a specific system in which students are able to follow and relies on students to do their own outside research it states that an investigation will take place but how and what are the steps a student should take so people don't always understand that the policies are the what and the procedures are the how so the procedure that's attached with this that i'm wondering if this would address it at least in part says students are strongly encouraged

058to notify the title ix coordinator of sexual harassment allegations but may report allegations to any school district employee a school district employee who receives a report from a student is responsible for immediately notifying the title ix coordinator and then procedure for 13 8.1 is the actual form so i'm wondering if this procedure addresses any of what the students were getting at and if it doesn't if there's something that the policy committee might want to consider to review that procedure in consultation with you and any appropriate cabinet members um yeah thank you director workman that that that actually uh is the item for the next student update that salma is going to do in a moment so we will come to that one in in a minute and yes i think that consideration at the policy

059committee might be a great place to take the overview that's almost going to give us um in a second um i just have to say when you said uh um that the question would be for the superintendent instead of thomas in my mind it's only a matter of time before thomas is the superintendent [Laughter] you're ahead of me yep karen i just have a curiosity does this topic come to you as a question from you as a student or you potentially as a future educator future superintendent well i think yeah i think i think so and this i think this could affect a lot of students in a very positive way and yeah i guess what i meant is that do you plan to go into education is that one of the groups not exactly

060okay so thomas that's the wrong answer you should say of course you want to become an educator and then a superintendent although teaching is more fun you can do that first i i do have a brief question thomas if i could what what would be uh one concern if we move forward with this voluntary feedback surveys what would be one concern that we would need to be very careful about something that you'd urge us to you've talked about the potential benefits of giving teachers i think a lot of teachers choose to do this i did when i was teaching high school i did something like this but we don't have something that's used across the board and teachers have to take their time to invent their own and you've created one so if we went

061down this road of encouraging but not requiring teachers to use this what's something that we would need to be attentive to as we did that well i think just phrasing the questions to be the most effective as possible and providing accurate feedback to teachers and um yeah yeah we learned it's not as easy to write a good question as one might yeah and i i sent thomas to go talk to dr peter rock our research director and he came back and said well that wasn't as simple as i thought it was that was great though yeah yes dr garcia i just want to make a comment i guess maybe in the spirit of director workman's response is that i feel like something like this would give power certainly give power to the student voice because

062something like going to a title ix coordinator it's quite a formal process and the concern may not rise to the level of like i feel that this particular civil right of mine has been offended against it's just i want to be able to have a direct conversation and so you can elect as a student to give non-anonymous feedback more immediately and there doesn't have to be this kind of long drawn out process so i you know as an educator i would appreciate something like this too yeah and i'm i'm thinking again we've got two different student projects and i think that they're going to really enhance each other but thomas yours specifically is about how the teacher teaches and students being able to communicate with their teachers in terms of this is what's really working

063for me and this is something i wish you would consider way back in the day we used to do this routinely ask have a forum and have our students fill it out and one thing that i discovered was that i talked way too fast no student had ever told me that before but i got a number of students who online let me let me know so it was for me as an educator it was really useful so and mr barlow sure thomas my question is um so what prompted you to go down this pathway was it something you experienced or feedback from fellow students without putting you on the spot but i think this is something of great value and so i'm curious as to what lit the flame well it was really just observing

064the classroom environment and the concerns of students that they're expressing to their friends and i like we not every teacher provides students with the opportunity to provide their feedback on their concerns and so i just thought this could be useful and going in that direction awesome thank you thank you it's really great i want to thank you uh for raising this it's pretty impressive when someone at your point in life sticks to something like this and um i think the one point that i don't know was in your presentation but you and i talked about it a lot at least in your current recommendation these surveys would not go to the principal or anyone else in the building it's just for the teacher just the teacher so that that teacher has that feedback yes thank

065you so much thomas thank you thank you and our next student leader to give uh the board and community a sense of uh some of her thinking is selma abdi who's also a century high school student and i've been proud that she has been my mentee through our community mentoring program this year and so as solomon i talked about what project she might be interested in undertaking the one that she's going to tell you about and that we've already had a little bit of discussion about came up and so it's been exciting i also am excited to say that selma is now one of our proud graduates um and will be headed to the university of minnesota and salma you're sort of ubiquitous we see you everywhere and you're another one who give it a

066few years you could take his job i mean not that not that we want to get rid of you but i mean amazing amazing talented young woman thank you thank you chairman or event for nintendo paquel and board members um my name is palma and i just wanted to talk to you guys through the policy proposal for student concerns process which i've been working on the past year in the mentorship in the community program so a little bit of background on it so rochester public schools doesn't have a system that students can use to advocate for themselves when they believe a school staff member has harassed them or acted with bias based on race or other factors so my project a lot of it focused on racial harassment specifically but in reality you know a

067lot of this process and this proposal really goes to all protected classes and gives all students the agency to advocate for themselves so the rps student handbook doesn't clearly provide a pathway for addressing student concerns about harassment or bias it also assures staff's due process i'll get more into some of the specific policies because i did read the entire student handbook and board policies if you haven't so when issues of harassment or bias are addressed through rps's current process you know there's a lot of miscommunication you know a lot of there isn't a lot of understanding on the student side because students do have to do research students to have to take make the effort to look for exactly what they should do who should they report it to you know there isn't any specific

068sort of pathway that is available to all students so a new approach to investigating and acting on students reports of bias and harassment is urgently needed in rochester public schools if 10 years from now 20 years from now we don't want the same issues to constantly continue within rps we want there to be a huge cultural shift within rps and making sure that once the student reports something and many students report similar themes of bias or similar themes of issues we want to make sure that it stops then in there and we want to make sure that students are able to be heard and feel heard and um you know make sure that their perception of rps's system is good so the new approach should protect the rights of both staff and students you know

069especially in regards to things like employment law in rps while also working to eliminate harassment and bias from rps so um as i did say that i looked at some of the things exist the existing rps policies the first one i want to point out is section 400 code for 13 substitution 2d of the board policies which does stay as director work than as you stated the school district will act to investigate all complaints either formal or informal verbal or written of harassment or violence and then states some of the protective classes that exist um and to discipline or take appropriate action against any student teacher administrator or other school district personnel to have violated this policy um and then this is i'm just gonna go through the existing ones and then go into some

070of my analysis the student handbook references policy 413 and district stance by categorizing harassment as a level two offense um the next thing is the rps equity statement that came out a couple years ago stating that we believe that all students and we all believe we believe all staff and students deserve a space to be their authentic selves we have a collective responsibility to ensure our schools provide a caring supportive and anti-oppressive environment school communities should support the health positive development of students and help them grow their unique gifts and talents and then the last thing is a new one that you know is really a big part of the solution i've been thinking of so the rps strategic action plan for 2022-2025 so objective a specifically focusing on that which build a positive school

071climate and safety for all students and staff and i think that's truly the end goal of my project making sure that every single person is able to thrive within our school community and then especially focusing on 8.2 the student and staff voice giving students the agency to advocate for themselves so yeah policy 413 comprehensively describes you know in the school part well it's described you know it's we're going to investigate but how are you going to investigate what should a student do who should they go to there's not enough language around it and you're expecting like middle school and high school and even elementary school students to take action to advocate um for themselves which is always a difficult thing um and so what steps should a student take and then policy 413 additionally fails

072to provide students with the necessary protection when described in student handbook um i didn't actually know about the board policies until i started my project i really only knew about the student handbook and when i looked at the student handbook you know a lot of it focused on punitive things um if a student does this they're gonna get in trouble you know it's policy 413 is actually only talked about in the student handbook as a level two offense really not describing what a student can do who should you do and what they should do and then level two offense is really discussing like student-to-student issues if a student is facing harassment from another student the rps equity statement generally encompasses what the school district believes but how do we ensure that our schools foster an

073equitable environment how do we make sure that's happening and then objective a which also describes a desire to build a positive in school climate which is why creating a system of reporting allows for one record-keeping and ability to understand rising concerns within each school site once issues and concerns are catalog principles administrators and district officials are able to create a cultural shift within the school community which is important because we don't want the same issues constantly continuing generation after generation student after student so the proposal would be that rps should develop and implement a clear process for responding to student reports of harassment and bias from rps staff members that addresses student concerns and that protects the rights of staff members due to due process so making sure that there is a sort of like

074a universal process that exists within rps that each school site sort of this exists you know there are like pieces that can be tailored to each specific school site but making sure that this exists all across the school district which is important if the student changes different schools if students are talking to their friends at other schools and sort of you know there are differences within who's in charge of what who's doing what what's going on and really how issues are being addressed at each school site so as part of that new process rps should designate a staff member in each school program or department whose students should notify if they believe they've been subjected to harassment or bias so someone every student knows someone who is accessible to students and someone who knows how

075to guide a student through the process within rps whether this is a issue specifically at the school level so talking to that person the designated staff member would help the student talk to the principal or the administrator who can help them with the school district and if it's a really big issue and you may be going to district and talking to district officials who are able to properly address that issue and that concern and rps should also designate a leader at the school district level in the office of equity engagement to support and coordinate the work of staff at each school who are responsible for reporting so someone that all the staff members that each school site can report to someone who is able to address maybe like the there's an issue that's happening in

076multiple school sites what is the school district able to do to make sure to ensure that it doesn't happen again and the new process envisioned by this proposal should also require rps staff at each school who investigate reports of bias and harassment to explain that the school district will likely not be able to tell the student what action any action was taken to address their concern so this one really um this project came from my personal experience and needed to talk about me being everywhere which is true and as someone who's a part of the minnesota youth council which works with the minnesota department of education in my scenario when i faced racial harassment when i would face microaggressions i didn't know what to do i did my outside research i reached out to people

077i knew at the minnesota department of education and i still struggled to know what to do whether a reaction i had was an overreaction or an under reaction so making sure and even when i did report a one thing that really sort of that i didn't know is that due to employee employee confidentiality the school district cannot tell me exactly what you guys did and i really struggled with that because it didn't give me any closure and there wasn't enough discussions around that and i wish i knew that from the get-go so and to report an adult in the school community it takes courage um you're asking students to look outside of every single sort of like authority issue we talked about sort of every single power structure that has always existed in our lives

078and asking us to talk over that person to make sure that we are heard and we want to we want school districts we want rps i would like to see rps give students the protection and the agency to advocate for themselves because in the perfect world a student wouldn't have to advocate for themselves but they do and we want to make sure that students know exactly what they can do know that there is someone in their corner helping them through this process because a lot of the times the kids who aren't coming up with these concerns the students who aren't really reporting it are the students who don't have parents who are going to help go to these meetings with them they don't have the community the platform the resources to advocate for themselves so

079this will allow every single student at rps the ability to advocate for themselves and the ability to navigate this process thank you any questions thank you questions [Applause] ms workman i just have one comment i think you're gonna give thomas a run for his money in order to become a school superintendent that was really really well done and i appreciate your thoughts and um this is something i think that you know students when they do take it over they do have that agency and certainly well i can't speak for the whole board but um i'll let dr pickel speak to that if he wants to for a minute in terms of student agency yeah the thank you director workmen i mean in the strategic plan i know i'm like a broken record on the strategic

080plan a new youth leadership initiative is prominently called for and i think we have two examples tonight here of what that kind of uh support can can lead to one question i would have salma is it sounds like from your review of our policies it's not so much the policies that need to change it's a process of implementing those policies would you did i did i yeah summarize your conclusion yes so it's not necessarily that's why i titled like a policy proposal for a student's concerns process there's no process that exists all the language states that this is an issue that the school district needs to address it but how the how is the bigger question and i think that's why it's necessary that we have a specific process in place that students can that's

081easily accessible to students and that students know ms mclaughlin and i'd like you to think about taking that a step further that i think everything you're saying is great and great presentation but also include in your thoughts in passing this forward how to communicate that to the students so it's great to have a policy but then also we need to make sure that students know about it and that process so that they can take advantage of that if they're in the situation yeah i've definitely thought of that and it's one of the discussions i've had with some of the district officials that i talked to specifically will ruffin um and one of the things is that in order like have making sure that all the information that the school district has that like student handbook

082is easily accessible and making sure this process is easily accessible like maybe having things like a form that students can fill out um anonymously or non-anonymously similar to sort of what thomas is discussing you know like this reporting process and allowing students the agency to really discuss it and make sure that's you know there's like a qr code every school there's a pr i would call a poster at every school and that students know about it um i think that's what's important like because it does exist and sort of the outside research that i was um that i really discussed is that students regardless of who they are always have to do this more research they have to take on this task of looking for it um but that's not how it should be you

083know it should be something that's discussed at like freshman orientation that's discussed on the first day of school that teachers know um and any class of presentations that students have they're talked about it's talked about and it's given to them i would also encourage thinking about putting it on our website yes well we don't want you to think it's your responsibility to do all this we've heard you i've hurt you thank you and it seems to me like you're not one of those students who have had your feet propped up on the desk or anything like that but that you have been very attentive focused engaged and that is of a great importance and value uh thank you for sharing your experience and so do you think your experience was unique or that it is

084the reality of many other students as well i'm glad that you asked that so actually so part of this like year-long process i wasn't just sitting here writing this two-page policy proposal i was doing a lot of interviews of students at different schools and it's there are a lot of instances of this that students either don't report students don't know how to report um and you know students never feel heard and if they do they really struggle to understand um what they can do about it so a lot of i did a lot of interviews and i'm going to keep people's information confidential but it is not a unique experience and it happens to a lot of people it's been happening for years and it's going to continue happening if you don't have a specific

085process in place for students dr garcia yeah thank you i appreciate that you did this and i i certainly love things like this because i think in certainly my generation and and older um especially when they're adults in the room kids were seen and not hurt or that was the preference and that's not how you guys play right and i appreciate that so i think you have taken on the responsibility of kind of where we weren't doing the work that we needed to do right and we talked we're talking about systems of power and play here it benefits certain groups that other groups don't know how to make those complaints and i would say that that's true too even in minnesota so if myself if i'm feeling microaggressed against on a constant basis in the

086workplace where am i going to go who am i going to go to what does that process look like and oftentimes it's having to go through something pretty egregious before you you feel empowered enough to make a change and then you hit all these roadblocks so i can appreciate that you and also thomas that you're both bringing how do we resolve like student voices need to be heard and other people actually need to listen and i think that if we implement a civil rights complaint process within the school district that gives you additional agency it kind of levels out the playing field a little bit and i think it also would provide some some of this you know the equity and inclusivity that we're talking about if we have this present that we are shifting

087ourselves in that direction and kind of away from that 2015 right like office of civil rights complaint issue so i feel like i wish that this had been before us years ago and i'm glad that it's here now and i really appreciate that you brought it to our attention and i'm i love to support things like this yeah i'm one thing i do really want to bring up is one um one of the interviews i did someone said this they're like a lot of the times i don't want to say this because i don't want to ruin the vibe and i think that's such an interesting comment because the vibe allows um those in power and those privilege the opportunity to exist and continue to say harmful things just and this isn't a general thing

088whereas the student who is a part of a protected class who's already marginalized is the one who's constantly feeling uncomfortable but they're the ones who have to take on this task of not ruining the vibe salma thank you so much we really appreciate your work thank you [Music] before we move on i i'm curious i'd like to not necessarily challenge but more inquire we want to be a district that is innovative and i think this without necessarily by plan we've experienced student innovation here tonight and i know our strategic action plan will have some elements of opportunity but i would really like to see efforts like this highlighted during the course of the school year and however we can do that and i'm sure you're fully supportive of that but our students are so they're

089great okay they probably don't hear that often enough and uh we may not communicate that as frequently as we should but i would like our board to really take a more proactive role in encouraging inviting you know because uh we can learn a lot well said thank you chair marvin hi oh i was hearing voices yes miss nathan i think to build on um director barlow's statement superintendent pacquel it might also be interesting for our community to find out how students who might be interested in pursuing an opportunity like this that salma and thomas had with you this year how how that might happen in future years you might get an outpouring of requests so there might need to be some sort of application or selection process but to the best of my knowledge we've

090never really formalized that kind of superintendent mentorship so that might be another way to highlight not just the initiatives by our students but those kinds of formal opportunities thank you great idea then we will move on to 4.04 dakota middle school mascot reveal dr pickell dr marvin and directors of the board uh it is really exciting for me i'm going to ask amelia cordell who's our native american liaison american indian current advisory uh council uh coordinator and co-chair julie rouzek um and levi lundeck our principal dakota middle school and any other colleagues that are here with them i think i have all of the group we know we have an exciting school opening on the horizon and through community input a name was selected for the school and now we're taking tonight the next step

091as we think about a mascot not yet visual representation but we're on the way so amelia i'm gonna start if you don't mind or children simply because uh um this is amelia's first time in front of the board and normally when we have new staff we get on the school board calendar to introduce uh our new staff to all of you and come back later on to talk about all the amazing work they've been doing nothing about amelia's entrance into rochester public schools has been typical or normal day one was at the minnesota american indian ed conference with a group of us she also successfully and beautifully navigated and facilitated an amazing powwow for our seniors and here we are uh talking about the mascot for dakota so i would be remiss to not introduce

092first of all amelia cordell our native american liaison to all of you and just gush chair barlow you talked about recognizing greatness in our students and how we don't do that enough i completely agree with you we also don't do that enough for our staff so thank you for taking the job thank you for jumping in with both feet and now we get the privilege to hear a little bit about dakota middle school take it away well nice to meet you guys in person i know you got to see my little face my little one pager i wanted to take this time to say thank you to those that were able to come out to the pow wow um it was humble but it was beautiful to see the community come and thank you so

093much and those that weren't able to come i appreciate all your support and i can't wait to keep working with you guys and giving you updates and this next year's process and years to come so thank you so much so with dakota middle school michelle it was just on google but apac came together and they voted on a couple of options for the mascot they narred it down to the top two choices which were the bison or the stars just based on their cultural significance so that was before i came in and my position so then after that we met discussed creating a survey to send out to just the native american families and students in the school district we were battling about the thoughts about sending it out district wide or sending it out

094to the parents or the students going into the school or the staff but we just wanted to keep it with the native american students just to keep the cultural significance that's a huge importance so that went out and in apac the stars won by one vote but when we sent it out district-wide there are 175 native american families we got a little bit over 100 votes so our voting pool was a lot bigger but it was still a very close race it was 51 percent to 49 oh so it's gonna be the dakota [Applause] so what's next um we are working on finding a native american artist we were hoping hoping to find one a local native american artist to do the logo um that was one of apex desires unfortunately that wasn't possible but

095i was able to reach out to a gentleman named sam zimmerman he is up in the duluth area he's actually a principal and an educator up there so he knows like the whole budget thing he's ready to help us as best as possible he's gonna have a mock for me apac and levi to check out by june 15 of our logo and then hopefully have something solid by the fourth of july excellent amelia i don't know much about bison i've seen them before did any of them ever come with like a star on their forehead they're not like horses it's usually um just brown but we did just unfortunately we did discuss though adding the star since it was so close one of his ideas was to have like a silhouette of a bison bison

096being the main focus but in the background having some some stars since it was so close and they're both so very important to us questions or comments i love it yeah no it's awesome and thank you for the work that you put into this and getting input that you did and that's going to be an amazing logo for an amazing school and beyond the logo it's really now working with the staff the students the families about the cultural significance of the bison working on not inappropriately using the mascot you know sometimes especially with native american cultures there has been significant misuse of mascots so really making sure that we are working proactively with the site with levi with the families with the students just to recognize the cultural significance and utilize the mascot appropriately and

097do some real education is the next step anything you want to add nothing really it's been a wonderfully informative process from an outsider's perspective even when we did send out that survey we made sure we highlighted the names and their significance and basically was little reading so people understood the stars as part of the creation story and why the bison are so significant and so i've been talking with millian julian how we're going to use that with our staff uh and our students moving forward so they understand the the walls and the halls they're walking through and the land of course that we acknowledge that we're on to really help further that message and and respect what's there i i just want to briefly add about um levi your leadership in the midst of leading

098one school and getting ready to open another school i was continually impressed at how you paid attention as a leader to this issue because this is how culture is built and i really do believe of our school leaders you are one of our master culture builders because you take culture very seriously and we know culture influences student achievement and it doesn't just happen and things like mascots and things help to define culture and so and those of us who were over at the farewell friedel i know there were many parents and others but you as the leaders we saw there again how your leadership has enabled the culture there a culture of uh optimism and inclusion and belonging and so i think this is uh something i was glad to see in the email i

099was like how is levi paying attention to this mascot thing he's got all these other things going on but you took it very seriously because i think it's going to be part of this new culture you're going to build at dakota so i thank you for that and we want to help some of our other leaders become i think as as comfortable as you are with paying attention to the soft stuff of culture because it's really critical for student success thank you just it's a great opportunity to partner with aipac and amelia now on board uh had a number of conversations and just look forward to developing that partnership and inviting things like inviting apac to our planning meetings around culture are part of the next steps and i know you're going to reach out

100see if someone wants to join us we're glad to have them that's great thank you so much [Music] do any school board members have updates or reports from the committee work they've been doing ms workman just a brief summary that the 92nd legislative session concluded on may 23rd 2022 and provided no improvement no new improvement to e-12 funding part of that plan um would have provided six million dollars in new special education funding each year for rochester i believe is that correct um beginning in fiscal year you're 2023 so i think it's still not too late to contact our legislators to encourage them to come back into special session i'm not sure exactly where that is right now maybe they are already back in special session since i prepared this very brief update thank you

101anybody else chair marvin oh miss nathan this scares me okay go ahead sorry um over the past few weeks um i along with many of our uh fellow school board members were able to attend a number of end-of-the-year events various programs various buildings aside from the traditional graduations there was graduations at the launching emerging adults program and at alc and the end of the year events at incubator edu and um ctec and p-tech and all i want to say is keep the invitations coming when the school year starts up we don't just want to come to things at the end of the year we would love to come see the things that happened during the year one of the examples of an event that happened at the end of the year but i know had

102been happening earlier is the riverside grades bikes and books event which was a wonderful family engagement event um so i just want to thank everybody who did invite us and for everybody who did put on those um events it was great to see the culmination of this school year but we're looking forward to seeing it incrementally as the school year happens next fall absolutely and that's one of the um the gifts of being a school board member is that you do get invited to come to to schools and to events and to celebrate with our students who have accomplished so much and in so many diverse ways the programs that we have at this district that are designed specifically for students who are differently gifted never ceases to to amaze me um one other thing

103i'll mention too that our community engagement community and family engagement committee which does a huge amount of work all the time but they have been very concerned about parents getting the resources they need to be able to figure out how to talk with their children when children are feeling stressed or depressed or especially recently afraid and it's not i think natural for parents to know exactly how much to say what questions to ask how to approach a child who may be processing really difficult events and and they have a list of really good resources for parents and guardians so um and superintendent as well has sent out information for parents it's a tough time for kids and we as parents i i think need all the help we can get too so i appreciate that

104to our consent agenda any item to be removed for separate consideration second it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye opposed aye thank you miss nathan uh the consent agenda is approved 7.01 school board resource officer this is sro implementation group update that's the cal directors i am pleased to ask our friend tawanda burks to come up and join us as the board is well aware we have a very important collaborative relationship with rochester police department which is embodied in the presence of school resource officers in our schools and the board has directed and we have launched a multi-pronged effort to make sure that those officers are part of the efforts actually much of which we've been talking about tonight to enhance both safety and student belonging and so we previously have

105had a memorandum of understanding with rochester police department at the june 21st board meeting the board will consider a revision of the contract and in the meantime we have wanted to reach across the very different cultures and processes of education and policing and also community members to really be sure that we're effectively making the most of this collaborative relationship and frankly addressing some sometimes challenging issues and so tawanda has been serving as our facilitator for bringing us together for monthly meetings to check progress um and we know that the board requested periodic updates on that work and so this is an opportunity for us to hear how it's going and thank you for your leadership and your work that you're providing for us in this effort yes thank you i feel like pretty much summed

106everything up with communication i heard that key word several times today so that's pretty much what i'm going to conclude with today do i okay there we go as was mentioned here i am leading the charge here to kind of bring that group together to kind of talk about what does it look like going forward to implement this mou the last time i did come to this group i provided high-level updates about where we were at that point and at that point was very new in the process i think we had a couple meetings at that time just pretty much introducing each other what the current state was what do we want the legacy program to look like essentially at that time we also talked about what what does the work look like for administrators

107and equity specialists and at that time again i can summarize that with a lot of communication is needed and clarity around rules and responsibilities so since we've met last we pretty much got through the entire mlu as the the various different phases that needed to be implemented with student services staff that includes you know the various uh positions that are in place and how do the sros work with that group as well as the equity specialist it concluded again i would not stress communication enough it concluded with having monthly meetings to create better lines of communication across the board clear understanding of those roles and responsibilities as well especially around the equity specialists and the sros the monthly student meetings as well we actually that's the only topic that we have left left to discuss

108at our next meeting which is scheduled for the 16th and the reason why we have to come back to that one is because that's it's kind of a a gray line in that space with having sros as well as staff have an open forum with the students and things that can be discussed so we'll follow up on that one the monthly staff meetings um again clear understanding of the staff to include a monthly meeting that needs to be defined as far as what staff needs to be included in those monthly meetings the sros are to coordinate monthly meetings with the equity specialist as well going forward for communication purposes now we moved on to the last uh three which are videos forms for family as well as the equity training for the videos um it

109was already uh discussed that it was very limited content currently available on your website that included basic information and drug use etc the sr sros did say that they can do more in this space including relevant current current trends that are taking place tick-tock challenges vaping you know safety with driving and things like that form for families include the equity specialists currently engaging with families and providing support which was mentioned when when students have these topics or families where can they go to get more information so hopefully these forums can provide resources to the parents as well the equity specialist and sros to work together and do more outreach within the community as well um one way to to uh for the forums to exist one of the ideas was to create a survey for

110the parents as well to understand what topics they should bring forward and have discussions on and the way to do this the group thought that it should be a tiered approach as well lastly was the equity training it sounds like the sros are going through equity training throughout the summer time so this is where they are continued their education with microaggression terminology special education youth and wanted to be very youth specific as well and have training around lived experiences so great conversations that are taking place and again we kind of conclude it aside from coming back for the student monthly meetings to have that conversation what does it look like for communication plan across the board between the staff sros and equity specialists which is essential to moving a lot of this work forward as

111well as understanding the roles and responsibilities of each role that exists any questions for me i had one about the videos maybe i missed the transition can you just that top bullet point sure kind of where were you anchoring yourself yeah yep so for the videos the purpose of that one is to have content available for students and families that's educational for cheat for staff to use as well and currently the only thing that's available is very limited information that's on the website i believe so the goal here is to create more content to be available to students and parents thank you i'm sorry mr parlow tuan would it be possible earlier a member of the community expressed concerns about what the district perhaps could do in terms of informing equipping parents in terms of

112helping their children navigate summers and summer and things like that is it possible to at the next meeting float that idea of um potentially developing a video that addresses um how to stay safe if you will how to avoid certain potential activity or you know yeah that's a good idea to bring back and we actually had uh some conversation around that you know some of the things to stay safe as far as you know drinking and driving seatbelt you know things like that but i can certainly bring that topic back as well thank you ms mclaughlin can you talk a little bit more about the um the topic of the clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities what the plan is moving forward for them yes so it sounds like there's no clarity around the

113sro roles and responsibility so for example um you know some staff do consider that to be even though they are law enforcement you know in some cases they're being used as if they're you know there to be the police in some cases they're not so i don't think there's clear clear understanding of what the sro role is to the staff that's involved and how do you intend to work with this group too yeah so there's a lot of relationship building a lot of relationship buildings that needs to exist and through the various uh monthly meetings that they have to do is where they're continuing to build those relationships so it sounds like there's a lot of meetings that's currently not in place that they have to put in place going forward to build those relationships

114i also feel like some of that to be honest was just our fault because we weren't clear about what we wanted them to do and so if it's not clear in the contract they don't know what they're doing other people think that they're doing stuff i i to me this is absolutely a um a need for this it's like what what are the expectations and how can we appropriately interact with sros when they're around to make sure that sort of their roles and responsibilities are protected and respected and also when there needs to be a redirection of like no i don't do that as an sro where does that staff need to go and what education do we provide them so that they understand who they need to go to yeah i would say that

115both the the school as well as the sro side of things both agree that there's a lot of more work that each side should do and could do which is good and again we continue to have those conversations to to put things in place going forward thank you i have kind of a follow-up on that do you have thoughts on how to make sure that that's consistent across the district yeah so we actually talked about that too because it sounds like there's no standardization across the schools right each school does something different so we have talked about uh how do we ensure that some of this uh the work that's being done how can it be standardized so we hadn't gotten that part yet do you feel like that that is within the scope of

116your work though i don't feel like it is within the scope of the work but it's certainly worth having a conversation around to bring recommendations back for the the previous phase the the phases to come excellent thank you i think we're good thank you so much for the work you're doing for this really good presentation thank you so much thank you okay i told tawanda when she gets this one completely fixed we have a few other areas where we could we could use better definitions of roles and responsibilities that have nothing to do with sro so thank you so much thank you uh 7.02 annual debt management update this is an information item dr pikel uh directors i am pleased to ask john carlson our executive director of finance and technology um and everything else

117to give us an update on our debt management perfect well thank you chair marvin superintendent piquel board members this is my first annual update on debt management uh director or vice chair nathan was happy to point out to me that we owe an annual report on this so i am learning on how to do a debt management report so if there's anything you'd like to see improved for next year i'd be happy to do that so i thought a little bit of background would be helpful why do we use debt first we use it to finance our building projects so any project that we think is in the last 20 years or longer we may consider using that doesn't mean we're going to always use debt but we may consider it generally we're planning for

118our buildings to be in use for 50 or more years like for example this building is i think 105 or 110 years old at this point to finance technology projects that are going to be used for more than three years and generally we're using our technology for six to eight years so it fits right within that google so how do we pay for our debts for all of our current debts there is a property tax levy dedicated to the repayment of the debt so that's authorized on the annual levy when we get there uh you approve that uh each fall when the debt goes away so does the authorized property tax levy so in other words if there's not debt to replace that then property taxes generally go down voters can vote to approve issuance

119of debt and the school board also has authority in law to issue certain debts and so two of our 14 current debts are voter approved and those are the ones that built gibbs elementary school and then the more recent one that's building dakota long fellow bishop century pool and then a handful of other projects so right now we have approximately 347 million 630 000 in debt it's broken between general obligation bonds and certificates of participation our historical debt balance has been increasing over the last few years although as i pointed out in board docs this has been strategic this is not because we didn't know what we were doing we did ask the voters to approve issuing debt to build the new schools that i just mentioned as well as we've been asking the board

120to approve a couple debt issuances to do some major remodeling uh john marshall being one of the most recent examples as far as our credit rating uh standard and poor's uh recently did a credit rating review on us on april 15th they rated us double a that is the um third highest rating you can get uh there are two notches higher a a plus and triple a but there are 19 notches lower that we could go and so i'm glad that we're near the top and not near the bottom of that list and i thought i would just end with what does s p think about the level of debt so this is in their words i've quoted from their report a couple of the sentences i thought were applicable here but overall they believe

121we have low to moderate debt burden as noted 60 of the debt that we have on the books will be paid off within 10 years and that they also consider it moderate on a per capita basis so based on the number of people that live within our district it's moderate and then low based on the percent of market value so when you look at the tax base as a whole it's a low value in their estimation in board docs i give you a listing of all those 14 debts the amounts and then the dates are expected to be paid off and so with that i would conclude my annual debt management update questions compliments compliments thank you guys you're welcome thank you mr carlson 8.01 strategic action plan review this is a briefing item dr

122barman and directors we need to bring up a powerpoint here that is really the whole purpose of the presentation so let's see if we can do that right here i'll just stand here we don't have it there we go let's is that okay if i stand here um everybody can see it so as uh directors of the board are very well aware we have been over the course of uh the past uh really eight months engaged in the development of a strategic action plan to guide the work of rochester public schools for the next three years board members had an opportunity to hear from some of the folks that helped develop that plan on working groups that i'll briefly describe in a moment at a recent study session at the board's next study session you'll

123have a further opportunity in particular to dialogue with each other about the plan and then we are hoping that this board will take a vote on uh june 21st at your meeting to approve a final version of this plan to guide our work and so the goal of this presentation which is um intended to be relatively brief because it's a complex plan that we have to get continually better and better at describing to people is to unveil this plan for both the board and the community and other folks who are watching um the plan itself which is on our website on board docs um is is quite long and quite complex but the format that the plan is in as it came out of the working groups is not necessarily the format that it will

124be in as we move toward implementation some of the initiatives will be appropriately combined into similar strategies others of them may be phased they don't begin until year three whereas others will begin immediately in year one and so as i get ready to give a very brief overview of this plan and where we stand i do want to assure both the board and the community that while it is ambitious i believe it's achievable and i will tell you that i and our director of strategic planning and continuous improvement denise moody and our colleagues from wilder research who helped develop this and many of the participants of the working group looked for stuff to cut in the end we we concluded that everything that's here is absolutely critical and i do believe that with implementation that

125is as careful as the development of the plan has been it's achievable as well so with that these are the folks who've been on the working groups they uh you had representatives from many of those working groups at uh our recent study session and we owe an incredible debt of gratitude to these folks we know that in addition to these working groups we also extensively surveyed our community we looked at published research on effective school districts around the country and even in fact around the world but the heart of the process were these working groups one of which focused on developing overall coherence of the strategy as a whole second of which focused on the economic engine how do we resource our work so that we can provide all students with an extraordinary education the

126third focused on family and community engagements engagement the fourth on improvement systems how we get better at getting better the fifth and organizational culture what does it feel like to be a student a staff member a family member in rochester public schools and then the sixth and final focused on our outcomes and our measures what are what are we seeking to achieve and how are we actually going to get there on the slide and then also actually on the wall we have a document that was created at a final meeting of the working groups that i was actually not able to attend but that i have really enjoyed looking at and this was something that a one of these graphic artists who listens while conversations are happening and activities are being implemented and captures the

127language and the energy of the um conversation put together and you can see here it really is envisioning this is a journey a journey that is a process it's not linear it's fluid but it's headed somewhere and at the cornerstone of it there you see planning for purpose and if i have to boil what i think this plan is all about down into a word it is purpose first of all helping every one of our students recognize and realize their purpose their purpose as learners their purpose as people but also being purposeful as educators being proactive rather than reactive with the complexity of everything that we're dealing with these days it sometimes seems all we can do to be reactive but that's not how we actually get ahead of the issues that we are all

128facing and help realize the aspirations the high aspirations that our students have for their lives so that's an interesting graphic and a lot of great phrases that jump out from that final meeting of our working groups so what's in the plan i think one way to conceptualize this plan quite different from the matrices that are in the report that uh the board has received and that uh the community has access to is to think of it as a series of concentric circles beginning with the student at the center now that may make your eyes glaze over there very briefly but let me actually break it down into those concentric circles and just give you a general sense of the critical initiatives that have come out of our strategic planning process again some of these actually

129may be combined as we move into implementation but for now it's important to have them all represented here so that the stakeholders who helped develop this plan are confident that the work that they helped us put together is uh being presented to the board at your next meeting for a vote so the first ring around our students is the family and that family engagement and the priorities that came in that sector out of the planning process are first of all a new strategy to empower our families especially those families who may not have had successful experiences of their own previously in schools and so a parent empowerment program and initiative was something that strongly came out of that process the second was really reinventing the process through which we communicate with families to become more

130of an ongoing two-way dialogue really the antithesis of sort of the the old put a note in the backpack and hope that somebody reads it and then finally helping families effectively navigate many of the complex issues like selecting schools like getting services for their kids that are often very difficult for they're very difficult for anybody in any organization but really making sure that we're providing those navigation supports especially across transitions like from elementary to middle school and middle school to high school so that's our first ring and it really is about effectively engaging our families to support their learners the next ring is in that classroom level and there our priorities first of all focus on deeper learning which was a phrase that uh we found pretty late in the planning process there's actually a

131growing body of research on deeper learning in a nutshell the core idea is it's less is more and you go deep with understanding of the core concepts um core knowledge and skills and critically the ability to apply those concepts and skills to real world situations it's the antithesis of regurgitating something for the test it's truly understanding the concept and being able to apply it to solve problems to innovate just like what we saw in thomas and selma's presentations earlier today the next big focus of the classroom is being systematic with our approach to social emotional learning what we used to call those soft skills things like motivation empathy relationship building but what came out of our planning process is really to integrate that into academic instruction such that it's not just now we're going to

132stop and work on those social emotional skills but that while we're learning math or while we're playing in the orchestra or while we're doing extracurriculars we're building those uh those critical skills which we know are very essential to student success in the workplace and in higher education the next priority at the classroom level was elevating as as we were talking about earlier the role of both student and staff voice and being sure that students in particular at the classroom level have an opportunity to share their ideas and share their experiences with their teachers with our administrators and others and then finally really strengthening relationships in particular developmental relationships relationships with kids that are not just caring but also challenging and propulsive in nature so those are the priorities that came out at our classroom level

133at the school level and in many respects the school is the core unit of improvement behind this plan even though the classroom the district the family have critical roles to play a huge idea that came out of our planning process is that we really need to lean in what lean into what is often called multi-tiered systems of support to really have an understanding of what is at that tier one both of our academic instruction of of also our social emotional learning behavioral work that all students are receiving and then when stu for students who need additional support and additional resources maybe additional acceleration there's a tier two and a tier three where we're really differentiating the the core thing to get away from in this space is saying to a single classroom teacher you have

134to meet all of these diverse needs within your classroom with no interventions and no other additional opportunities for serving those kids we're going to be conducting an audit and a partnership with the university of minnesota starting in august of our multi-tiered systems of supports in our schools and this is going to be work that is going to be both structural creating new interventions for kids who need support or acceleration but also instructional helping teachers and others to differentiate within those structures but again it's it's moving away from saying to a single classroom teacher all of these needs are here and you need to meet them all within your classroom on your own uh next critical priority at the school level will be mental health that the mental health of in particular our students we know

135has been gravely affected by of course the pandemic but also other factors in recent years and in this case we know that enhancing the services we provide within the district to mental health as part of the equation but it also will involve working even more closely with community providers so that we can actually significantly scale up the number of students that we're reaching with mental health supports and the intensity of the supports that we're providing and beginning to move into some type of universal screening system where we actually can be proactively monitoring kids and giving them an opportunity to flag their need for additional resources and support the next category that came out of our planning process was also having continuous improvement and in particular reinventing our school improvement plans so that they are not

136kind of annual compliance box checking exercises but that they really meaningfully focus our schools on goals and and experimentation and innovation to achieve those goals with aligned district supports the school's the unit of improvement but the resources whether it's professional development or curriculum or expertise in other areas are coming from the system level to benefit that that school strategy for improvement another initiative at the school level that came strongly out of our working groups was staff well-being the idea that if our staff are not themselves uh feeling like they belong feeling supported feeling um their full selves in our schools we can't be all that we want to be for our students in the belonging and behavior summit that many of us had today with all teams from all our secondary schools this came up

137again and again and it was very difficult to be attentive to staff well-being in the midst of all the other things that have been happening this year i think we can be proud of the ways that we did that including our planning and well-being days we want to be much more systematic about that in in taking care of our our staff who make the critical difference for our students and then the final strategy at that school level is moving from kind of identifying the problem to making progress on the problem as it regards to discipline disparities between student groups in our system that ties of course to all of the work we want to do around belonging and culture but it also ties to our disciplinary processes themselves and really making sure especially that we're

138reflective of best practice that's happening in schools around the country that are meaningfully making progress on that because we haven't made progress in recent years despite a lot of uh of efforts to do so and then our final ring in the strategic plan is the district level not our final ring we have actual two more so at the district level these are the things that we want to be systemic across schools not necessarily implemented in exactly the same way in each school but that we do have as coherent initiatives across our district the first one is a major new emphasis on post-secondary and career planning we have unbelievable targeted programs in rochester like p-tech and c-tec but we need to lean in to helping all of our students especially starting in middle school begin planning

139for life after high school and that's that's going to have benefits of course over time for them as they move out into that world beyond high school but we also know from a lot of research that it has benefits for how motivated they are to work hard in their classes every day unless a student sees a purpose for learning in their life their investment in what their teacher is asking them to do is going to be very transactional and for some kids pretty light but if they see in their course content in their classes a path to their own goals for the future we know that can have tremendous benefits for those students motivation and the self-regulation and initiative that they take second strategy at the district level is increasing the number and the diversity

140of our students earn some type of post-secondary credit like in a college in the schools class a pseo class an advanced placement class something that actually will have both educational benefits for them because we know that that experience can help raise aspirations and increase motivation but also economic benefits for them as many of our students can come out of high school with an associate's degree at the same time as their high school diploma 20 years ago that seemed like a crazy impossible idea and increasingly it's becoming a reality for many students and of course our ptech students are well on their way to that path but the goal in the plan is to have a much more systematic approach also at the district level really launching a systemic effort to uh recruit retain and support

141staff of color and who are indigenous is another critical priority in the plan that's going to require rethinking some long-standing practices that we've used around recruitment and retention but that we're not necessarily focused on particular staff members staff members from groups that are underrepresented in our district when compared to the student demographics that we have another priority at the district level was a need to continue the work that we've begun to do this year to be very creative in filling our shortage positions why do we have certain positions that we are continually struggling to fill and how do we actually get ahead of that so that we can have those services provided to kids in the way that they're built into the budget that that we ask you to approve every year we have as

142board members are well aware added a research director over the course of the past year and the plan calls for really building out the capacity of our schools to use data and research to make decisions about their um their strategies for improvement in the consent agenda tonight you approved a new software platform that i am very excited is going to allow individual educators school communities and the district to both drill down and aggregate data in a much more actionable way than we currently can which in many schools if you ever want your head to explode ask to see the spreadsheet that the orca team at john marshall high school uses it is everything on an incredible spreadsheet and it's amazing what they've built and they know how to read it but it is not user

143friendly for people trying to provide needs services to kids in a in a rapid way we also came out of the planning process with a strong emphasis on uh induction for our new employees in particular what we've historically called paraprofessionals and what uh i think we're going to be increasingly in rochester uh calling education service professionals um that we bring those very critical members of our team on and in many cases we heard don't do much to both help them understand how the districts work how their role how their role works it's not just limited to paraprofessionals but we got that message very loud and clear that that's an urgent need but new employees in general is really really critical i will just say one thing that also came out of our process as you

144launch those efforts to you know uh in induct someone who's new to our district we need to be careful uh we need to guard against recruiting for diversity but then onboarding for similarity that we recruit people who are going to bring uh life experiences and uh knowledge and other things to our district that we need and then their induction process is now here's the way we do everything in rochester we need to be very mindful of the fact that the inclusion starts with induction it doesn't end with recruitment um and then leadership development we know that starting with our principles critically but also our assistant principals teacher leaders who actually want to be and are in many cases leading in our schools but who have no desire to leave the classroom but whose ability to

145lead improvement efforts and other things in our schools can and should be continually enhanced also leaders at the central office level so we're adding a director of leadership development position this is work that we know in the corporate world in the military in many other sectors they consider essential developing their leaders continually it's not optional it's required they spend money on it that's very new in education and so uh to have leadership development in a systematic way is key and then finally at the district level thinking uh very hard and creatively about how we allocate dollars from the district to the school level and making sure that the way we are allocating those those resources is most effectively meeting the needs of kids in each schools our schools are very different from each other and

146when we staff them using a common ratio across the district that has benefits in terms of transparency and fairness we need to ask if it actually is most effectively meeting the needs of kids in each school we also need to take a look as part of that effort at some really important categorical funds and the way we're allocating them in our district in particular compensatory education aid from the state of minnesota and title 1 funding from the federal government to be sure that the ways that we are using those really important resources are integrated with the school improvement efforts that are happening in schools as a whole we know from pretty strong body research on school finance that treating funding streams as separate isolated sources of funding for particular programs is very unlikely to result

147in improvements in student outcomes across the whole school because it's a very piecemeal approach and so thinking about how title one funding balances general education funding balances integrates with special education funding integrates with english language learner funding um and the compensatory education aid is really what's at the heart of that district level agenda and then our final ring of the process is at the community level interestingly again some of these ideas came totally organically out of our planning process they were definitely not on my radar screen when we began this process reducing the primary barrier to participation in many of our really wonderful early childhood programs which is transportation came out of that so that priority is actually interestingly not about strengthening the quality of those programs or or making major shifts in their content

148it is it's not even necessarily in depending on the program about the funding stream because we have funding streams to provide the services in rochester for young families with very young children one of our biggest barriers is transportation so that those those parents and caregivers can get the kids to our program so that's priority one on that community piece um we have a an initiative that also came out of our process that certainly would be something the board would very much own because the board owns policy and that is reviewing all of our policies for their um alignment with equity meaning that all of our students our staff our families are have what they need to thrive and so that would be presumably something that the policy committee of the school board would uh take

149ownership of and integrate in i think uh having been with that committee for its monthly meetings for most of the last year it's something that has always been implicit and the strategic plan calls for making it quite explicit and potentially even having a rubric through which policy would be analyzed uh for its alignment uh with equity each policy that is to say we had um out of the outcomes and measures working group a very strong desire to have a regular reporting to the community especially around our academic and other outcomes that is totally transparent very accessible easily understood if you want to right now get data on how one of our schools or our district as a whole is doing we don't make it easy for our stakeholders to do that you kind of have

150to know about the minnesota state report card and then that's really only one slice of what it takes for students to succeed and so having a strong and well-resourced strategy of sharing our outcomes and also data on things like what we're talking about tonight's school culture and belonging with our community and having an advisory committee that has community stakeholders on it that is advising on those data that we make available and so really holding ourselves accountable to be transparent with our outcomes uh next priority at the district level is really leaning into systematic new levels of community partnership to be sure that those engagements with community organizations whether it's non-profits businesses um many others uh social service agencies governments are truly reciprocal they're two-way and they're efficient and that they're moving the needle for our

151students and then finally and critically as the board has not yet made a formal decision but our planning process certainly calls on uh our district to develop a compelling plan for uh an additional operating referendum that the citizens of rochester could consider and support which really could light a fire under this plan the earliest that would happen of course would be the fall of uh 23 but i think in some ways one could think of that initiative as the opportunity that really would propel this plan forward in a really extraordinary way but even in advance of that we do have the resources to uh to get moving on this strategy so that is what it all looks like when we put that graphic together i'm confident that we will continue to get better and better

152at making this clearer and clearer i think for me it's it's getting there we're iterating in that direction but we don't want to uh let anybody think that in trying to make the components of this plan clearer as i said earlier that we're dropping any of the things that came out of this process though when you vote on this plan in a couple of weeks you will have the opportunity to add or subtract or make other adjustments and then it's my hope that over the summer we will move very intensively into planning for collaborative implementation structures just as the development of this plan was highly collaborative the implementation of it will continue to be we'll have cross-cutting teams that will be involved in setting measurable outcomes timelines milestones responsible back to the point towanda was

153making earlier real clear clarity on roles and responsibilities the final point i would make is that over the summer and especially in the fall we also will launch a very extensive process of reaching out to both internal and external stakeholders to describe the content of this plan which i think by then as i've said a number of times i'm confident will be even clearer and simpler and easier to understand as we keep getting getting sharper about what's at the core so implementation and community and stakeholder outreach will be critical next step priorities after you consider the plan on the 21st and with that i will rejoin you up there and thank uh denise moody in particular for all of the leadership she's provided in our work on the strategic planning process including helping me along

154with folks in our amazing communications team at that first cut at a better visual way to represent this plan i think that i kept referring it to it as the donut rings i think it's a step forward but if any of you are more talented graphically than i am and you have a brainstorm of other ways we can distill the complexity of this plan into images or metaphors that are more easily understandable that's really an urgent priority for us right now because the success we have in implementing this plan will be directly related to the degree to which people can understand it so with that i'll open it up to discussion and questions comments you know we've all had a copy of the entire plan in book form and it had quite a bit of

155time to study it so i think this is a great overview i do have one question karen um thank you for clarifying enter the district the career pathways relates to student career pathways because i was thinking that was relating to staff but it led me to think is that also then part of the leadership development on the other side of the server absolutely yeah the pathway it's a good way to put it the pathways for um staff who do choose and want to be aiming at next steps is another is a really critical component of that leadership piece for sure i think it also runs through our the induction work that's that's in here as well but yeah that that that point in the circle was referring to um post-secondary and career pathways for students

156and i'll just give my feedback i love the circles the donuts um the plan itself is very dense it's nice to have it on one page okay and i think it gives us all good ways to talk about it i agree it's like a very systems theory-esque and so i i think it's easy or will be easy for people to see how might they fit into many of those categories for a student or solidly in one thank you i know we're going to be voting on this in a couple weeks and and we'll be working with this for years to come so thank you dr marvin oh yes i know denise kathy yes um we have been talking about this for a while and we've had a few board presentations but for anybody watching this

157on youtube or in person this is the time for the community to provide feedback on um what might help the board understand what the community sees and and what we've presented so that before we take a final vote we're doing it with a mindset of you know knowing that our community has a good understanding of what we're voting on and the direction that we're going for the district so um as as term arvind said the whole document is available online the one page roadmaps available online this is available online and this is the time to give us your feedback good point thank you kathy and again thank you dr paquel we will move to 8.02 central office reorganization dr pikel dr marvin and director of the boarding i'll just be very brief here there is

158a long memo and a resolution here that provides the board with an opportunity to um take some formal action on something that i have talked with board members about in uh in other settings and that was a structuring of our school district central administration meaning people who don't work directly in a school or program to align with the plan that we actually just talked about and so there's a quite long memo with a lot of detail um i want to say at the outset that uh changes in organizational structure are never easy and we have tried to do this with as much precision and and care as is possible um but these changes are often hard and i regret the challenge that it brings to us but i also think it lays the groundwork for

159achieving many of those goals that are at the core of the plan and that we all hold a whole hold dear for our students so very briefly at the core of this reorganization our four big ideas one is having a unified office of academics that really brings together our different different strands of our support for teaching and learning notably including our general education supports our special education services for students with disabilities our multi-language learner services acceleration supports and others along with our analytic capability and specifically our office uh which is currently one person of research that office will be led by a chief academic officer and that recruitment for that position closed on friday and we'll begin interviews and processes soon so big idea number one is alignment of our support for the teaching and

160learning process in schools the second big idea is also alignment of the support we provide for schools in particular as it applies to support for leadership school improvement planning processes and crisis response and that's the creation of an office of school support that will bring together all of our schools and programs under the leadership of a chief of schools that is our currently occupied as a new name for the position jackie peterson holds the third big idea is taking our very new and very exciting office of diversity equity and inclusion and adding to it the critical idea of engagement students engagement and learning and family engagement in particular of students and families from historically marginalized communities so no backtracking on the commitment to diversity equity and inclusion that certainly is at the heart of our

161equity policy and predates my coming to rochester but adding to that a strong emphasis on how we help students engage in learning and how we engage families so two issues in the strategic plan for instance that clearly will be housed within that effort are those efforts to ha to engage students to support them on pathways to success and post-secondary education and a career and then also efforts to empower parents um especially parents who need additional supports in both understanding and navigating our school system and then the final big idea is broadening the work that um amy ike and her amazing team have always done in community education to include community education partnerships and also communications um and so this really will be a hub of connecting our district uh to the community of rochester and

162really beyond such that we become i hope a really really responsive organization where as we were saying earlier the arrows of dialogue uh and the exchange of ideas are headed in two directions um there are of course reductions in a uh in a process of organizational improvement that often get made cumulatively since i came the the the changes in the central administration will have reduced the cost of our district central administration by about 350 thousand dollars in the elimination of some positions uh it's critical in order to make some new uh positions possible and so the new positions that are created through this uh position or or somewhat reorganized would be a director of communications um excited that previously a cabinet position that we've eliminated as a cabinet position director of school support director of

163leadership development director of post-secondary readiness two important important coordinator position focused on community partnerships an important coordinator position focused on family engagement we've had folks focused on both of those and they do blur but there's a body of research on effective school community collaboration that is actually quite distinct from research on school family coordination so we want to have real clear centers of gravity adding what was previously a rotating teacher and special assignment position to have a real educational leader as our coordinator of multi-language learning which is like all these positions uh something that is open and posted right now and a chief academic officer that will be responsible for that unified academic support um the final thing that's in the middle and i won't go into in detail now but in doing a series

164of interviews that i did with all members of the cabinet leadership teams from all of our schools representatives of every one of our employee unions or bargaining groups or just leaders from the groups that aren't represented by a union uh in march and april a series of 15 different themes emerged that really are not about org structure it is about culture and process and the way we work together and those 15 items are there and on wednesday uh tomorrow we're actually gonna be working with all hundred plus people in our district-wide leadership to look at those 15 and really agree on which ones are critical so that we're trying to be attentive not just to these structural issues but to the processes and and the ways we work together the i think the final thing

165that i would add about this reorganization is that um [Music] to some extent this is never done in an effective organization you're always you know shifting and thinking but i do want to say this has been a a ton of work and a challenging effort and that i'm confident that this structure is going to help us move in the direction we need to go and it's one that at least as i have the as long as i have the privilege in the next several years of for sure being here that we will continually evaluate and improve and so if some things that are in this structure and this has already happened uh in the couple weeks since i announced this if we discover that there are some problematic assumptions or some things that were not

166anticipated in this shift we will be eager for feedback on that and uh i hope very responsive to uh correcting things that aren't working and that's a commitment that i want to want to make to folks that are involved so with that um i uh i'm glad to take any other questions or comments but the resolution before you would provide you with an opportunity should you so choose to uh weigh in on this um uh i'll stop there okay questions comments mr barlow uh not so much question i think it's important for the public to know that uh superintendent pical met with each of us individually to go over this and so it's not like we're being hit with this for the first time and we're being asked to co-sign if you will i do

167appreciate the early opportunity to understand the rationale and to give an opportunity to share our concerns and so i fully support the effort that's before us right now this is a briefing item at this time is there any appetite to move it to action just a quick question sure so i noticed that um on one of these attachments it's said to be voted on on the june 21st meeting is that something you wanted us to hold off on for two weeks or era okay i could do it now okay i'd like to move this to action it's been moved and seconded to move this to action any discussion mr brown know the exec committee goes through great pains to prepare the agenda and purposely i think identified this as preparation for action and if there

168were a urgency for action tonight i would believe that you guys probably would have presented it in that fashion so um but i'm just offering an observation director nathan or chair marvin if you could maybe share insight i know procedurally we advance things initially in this manner uh and uh um so i just wanted to make that as a point of observation is working yeah i think i think you make a really excellent point and um i will apologize for not paying attention to where it was on this this agenda thing so um i'm happy to withdraw my move to action at this time but if somebody else wants to book it well i i can yeah whatever yeah can you do that withdraw withdraw and outside with drama a second well director dr jeff

169has a book that robert's rules of order right here let's ask her if it would be last is there any other discussion about moving this to action all right then let's vote about moving it to action on favor of moving this to action say i all opposed okay let's not move to action thank you good resolution though good recommendation good plan uh we will move on to eight point and we'll vote on this at a subsequent meeting 8.03 approval of the 2022 2023 school district budget this is a briefing item and we will not move this one to action because we've told the community putting it out there um that they will have an opportunity to provide input mr dr pickell uh chairman and directors like the discussion of the strategic plan my sense is

170this presentation that john is going to give us in some ways may seem underwhelming because it's so familiar and i think that's a good thing it means that we are engaging this board in critical processes early enough and often enough that when we are close to the moment of decision you are familiar with these plans and so with that i want to ask john to give you a a an updated uh summary of where we are in the presentation of a budget proposal for you to consider which looks a lot like our previous updates for you thank you very much superintendent chair marvin um i would also reiterate that we have been working on this so long now that we kind of did it out of order and we got this done early and then

171we had to circle back to budget revisions and five-year forecasts and so i've made some notations where numbers have been updated but we'll just quickly go through this that you do need to approve a budget by july 1st and so we're counting on that two weeks from tonight within our revenue assumptions for next school year i've listed those there we are basing our budget on 17 642 students on our expenditure assumptions we know that we do have a subtle teachers contract and a principles contract that's a that's a big win for us to have those in place so that we know how to budget for those uh we are in process of working now through all of our other contracts and work agreements we've had to make assumptions for those we did do some budget

172reductions as far as contracted services supplies capital expenses site supply budgets district-wide or central office budgets were all reduced i'm just going to flip to the bottom here on ftes and so i'm going to be giving you another presentation probably in 5 to 10 minutes but and it's going to have slightly different numbers this is trying to just compare original budget to original budget to original budget the next update i give you is just going to show you how we've progressed through this year but bottom line we are budgeting 2653.9 fte that's good news because as we were talking back in april and we were up excuse me back in january and we're forecasting ahead to what the budget might look like with opening dakota and overland and other new buildings we're anticipating up to

1732760 fte so through all of our work through the budget study sessions through the superintendent's listening sessions and our recommended uh budget reductions we've gotten that down to 2653.9 as stated the superintendent's shifts in central administration which you're going to sounds like approved next week or two weeks from now those were done after we had already budgeted as well and are announced and so those are not included in the original budget so we don't have a savings reflected per se we're going to get that caught up in the october budget revisions this is where i've done some crossing off and and and updating but basically if this budget is uh passed and approved in two weeks um because we have better numbers now on where we are going to end this current school year at

174about a 12.6 unassigned fund balance uh approval of this budget would bring us to 11.6 unassigned fund balance next year and so in our documents we went over a few weeks ago it was at 9.4 uh this is an improvement because within the current year we're expecting an improvement from where we were and i think that is what i have again very short and sweet but we've talked about this for multiple months at this point questions is working just not really a question but just a comment um director barlow made me think about this a little bit more and that is we are not looking at this for the first time we've had a study session we've had the materials to review um so just so the public understands that we just don't come in

175and vote on something willy-nilly i would say just a conjecture a lot of my colleagues around the state are presenting their school district budgets for the very first time like this week and next week and we've had ours out for almost a month at this point for you to look at so again we're kind of ahead of the curve this year all right then we'll move to 8.04 the five-year general fund forecast this is an information item dr pickell and uh as thank you dr marvin as john switches powerpoints uh this is really an extension of the conversation we just had about the budget but looking out with an updated version of our projections for the next five years all right i'm gonna roll right into this um i think this is standard i this

176language has been in there but we review the forecast a couple different times a year we use it as a road map for planning again revenue assumptions i kind of just went over that but basically i i highlight there in the middle with the arrow that while we have assumed what we have assumed there is still a possibility as superintendent mentioned to increase our operating referendum by about eleven hundred dollars per pupil should we choose to do that at some point for salaries and benefits we've assumed three and a half percent increases per year over the next few years same with our other contracted services and supplies natural gas is running a little bit expensive right now and keeps going up and up and so we put a six percent inflator on that uh this

177is just historical this is the same numbers i would have had in our december presentation but just reiterating that for the last few years we've actually been running surpluses so we've been building fund balance for such a time as this when maybe we need to withdraw a little bit from the fund balance um this is just commentary on trying to explain that because of the ordering of how we did this some of the numbers got a little bit goofed up but um i want to point out the bottom line with updated numbers now within the forecast based on the budget revisions that we can be providing to you in five to ten minutes from now we're expecting that the long range forecast for the unassigned fund balance expressed as a percentage would be 12.6 at

178this year 11.6 next year um 6.9 if we made no changes for the 23-24 meaning if we just let everything run that's in the budget right now and make no planned reductions uh or any adjustments we would drop the fund balance by about five percent and then after that we'd be running into the venue i wanted to highlight too that the 23 million dollar projected deficit that we had uh as we had prepared the last forecast and discussed that in in december and january that's been reduced as planned to 4.3 million dollars for the coming school year um so there is no longer a 23 million dollar projected deficit it's 4.3 million as we just went through the proposed budget that we've been studying we've followed the superintendent's roadmap uh with using federal coverage funding

179reducing our expenditures and using some of our surplus the 4.3 million dollars so um i think it just be noted that we can talk about a 4 million deficit now at this point it's not 23 million would it be accurate just to you know not to split hairs or anything would it be accurate to termina terminologize that as a 4.3 million intentional spend down that would be an even better way of saying that we know what we are doing we planned to take 4.3 million dollars as part of a larger discussion we had back in january and february so as a perfect way of saying it that we're doing a planned withdrawal from our fund balance we're using accumulated surpluses from past years to help us uh through next year so the the terminology of

180deficit is a matter of perspective right our auditors would say it's absolutely correct if we if we spent 4.3 million dollars more than the revenue it would be technically a deficit but we know where the money's coming from and it was intentional it was intentional this is exactly the road map that we've been talking about thank you so where do we go from here well we are still waiting uh to hear from as director workman said from the governor and legislature hopeful that maybe they would call a special session and pass a bill that was proposed to increase special education funding by 6 million per year in absence of that if we don't have any new funding for the 23-24 school year we're looking at about a seven million dollar budget rejection so about the

181same as what we did this year and then as superintendent noted we have we are assuming that there will probably be a referendum put before the public in november of 2023 by putting very very small texts there that only the school board has the actual authority to call that so as we as a staff member and superintendent talking about that you need to engage in that discussion uh sometime in 2023 or at a future point to actually call an election there's a lot more details within board dogs obviously miss anderson so the um the assumption of the 3.5 increases in contracted services and supplies um it doesn't i am not an expert but that doesn't seem necessarily realistic compared to what we're hearing about for an annual inflation rate for you know cpi and that

182type of thing so the question is number one is there a reason you chose 3.5 and number two what's the contingency for if it turns out to be a lot needing to be higher than that yeah i think it could be very much yeah so if it needed to go higher than that that means that the amount of budget reductions would probably have to be more than the seven million dollars that work tentatively or actually planning for next school year and and how often are you examining i mean we do the budget to actual but in terms of a projection yeah so we took that three and a half percent that would be another way of saying that would be around seven percent on a two-year contract that we're settling and we took that kind

183of from the teachers contract that we recently settled and said that might be the setting of the tone for other groups and so at least for the purposes of putting something on paper and trying to make a forecast i thought that that was a reasonable that doesn't mean that that's what the board's going to settle all the other contracts that but it's an assumption that as management we're making i was looking specifically at contracted services and supplies sure yep i know you said six percent for natural gas which even seems a little optimistic but yeah so again if those go up faster and if we're finding that we can't buy the things that we need to buy for our students or provide the services that we need to for our services at the assumed amounts

184then we're going to have to increase the budgets and which also means then we probably have to make a reduction somewhere else in the system but that would be mid-year that could be mid-year and we haven't had to do that in recent memory correct correct even this year as numbers have been inflating a little bit we haven't had to come to you and ask for more money yet we've had enough cushion within our budget as it was and that's why we also felt comfortable actually reducing our budgets by about five percent because there was a little bit extra in there that we were noticing year over year that we weren't fully expending well what we had but when you watch the news and they say this is an unprecedented level of um of inflation in

185in recent years we don't have mechanisms in place in our budgeting process to do a major correction well at least on the expenditure side we could certainly come to you we bring budget adjustments to you which is what i'm going to be bringing in a few minutes um and so we could ask for more it but it has a trickle-down effect it means that something else might need to be reduced or further cuts in the future to something so i just wanted to know that it was on our radar as a potential new mechanism for sure miss nathan um mr carlson i know we've talked a little bit about a referendum tonight but just to make clear were we to go out for a referendum in 2023 none of that revenue could be used to

186offset the seven million dollars in budget reductions we're anticipating for the 2023-24 school year correct that's right that revenue would be first available for our use in the 24-25 school year so it would not help mitigate reductions coming for this next school year okay thank you okay anything else thank you mr carlson we'll move on then to 8.05 and 8.06 policy recommendations and procedure recommendations in our policy committee i'm not sure how you want to handle this we figured it out you figured out we figured it out so um just a reminder to anybody who's still here or listening at home the policy committee consists of the vice chair and two additional board members the appropriate cabinet members necessary to review the policies in the superintendent so the cabinet members and the board members on

187the policy committee we study the policies and the procedures ahead of the monthly meetings that we have and recommend any changes sometimes there is a legal change or an msba revision some of the changes are updates to grammar and punctuation as you will see tonight some policies have no changes and some may be recommended for retirement some policies are required to be reviewed annually but the majority are on a three-year cycle of review so with that i will start with the policies that we reviewed in the policy committee the first one is policy 404 background checks and the purpose of this policy is to maintain a safe and healthful environment in the school district in order to promote the physical social and psychological well-being of its students the school district will seek a criminal history

188background check for applicants and on all individuals who are offered the opportunity to provide athletic coaching services or other extracurricular academic coaching services to the school district so the only change in this policy were updates to grammar and punctuation the policy 516 which is student medication sets forth the provisions that must be followed when administering non-emergency prescription medication to students at school and school activities the updates are from msba's model policy as well as recommendations from legal counsel 16.02 which is related student medication administration administration on school sponsored field trips also updates to grammar and punctuation policy 522 title ix sex non-discrimination the school district prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in all forms including sexual harassment and the only updates were to grammar and punctuation so policy 714 on the recommendation of our

189executive director of finance was to update the language on the minimum fund balance to no less than six percent to no less than eight percent that will allow us to um have a new classification to allow for useful fund balance reporting and for compliance with the reporting guidelines specified in statement number 54 of the governmental accounting standards boards and moving on to procedures also related to student medication non-emergency prescription medications so procedure 5 16 a the procedures outline the steps that must be taken and the forms that must be filled out before district staff may administer non-emergency prescription medication and it had been a while uh since it had been updated updates to form names and language that coordinates with the changes in policy so procedure 516 8.2 we did an update to correct the

190procedure number which i will explain in just a minute to clarify language grammar and punctuation so the purpose of this procedure is to set forth the provisions that must be followed when administering medication to students when participating in school-sponsored overnight field trips so procedures reviewed that we recommend retirement the first one is policy 404 a background checks and this was a series of forms that we have used in the past our legal advice was that we don't need to have these forms in the procedure so that's the reas reason for retiring procedure 404 a we are also retiring 516 a form 1 and 516 a form 2 and we are retiring those procedures because they are now actually included in procedure 516a or maybe this policy 516a anyway they've moved somewhere else and that does

191it for our current policy review thank you questions comments i i have one comment we received an email from a an individual who is concerned about our background check policy and i will forward those concerns to the chair of the policy committee and it may be something that you want to consider then we'll go on to 8.07 this is the second briefing of policies and procedures that have been briefed before i'm assuming if you had questions on that you would have boarded those to the committee all right and then 8.08 procedure recommendation unlike policies procedures can be moved to action and can be voted on at any time and i just want to clarify for board members that when this was brief the first time it included both policy 606 and procedure 606 c we

192have since received information from msba that we can anticipate an update to the model policy language for those items so we remove those from our consideration until we get those msba updates and we're just focusing on the procedure recommendations specifically related to the reconsideration procedure right so we could we could move this uh to action this evening if anyone is inclined and i will move to act uh we'll move to action second it's been moved and seconded to move this to action any discussion all in favor say aye aye opposed this is now an action item be it resolve the school board of independent school district 535 accepted recommendations the policy committee for these am i reading the right one for these six procedures 606a yes okay for these policies and procedures this is just

193a procedure blue approval second it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye opposed thank you and the motion passes then to our action items 9.01 approval of the agreement for construction manager as advisor services for rps dr pikel uh dr boyd i'm pleased to ask scott sheridan our executive director of operations to come up and provide the board with some background good evening board members good evening i'm here to brief you on the uh request to approve an agreement for the construction manager agent or as advisor services for rochester public schools as you know we've been doing 180 million dollars plus in referendum projects we are planning to do about 11 million dollars in long-term facility maintenance revenue projects this year in addition we started the john marshall indoor air quality project

194which is uh costing us about 45 million dollars that's over the next three summers and we have planned to do indoor air quality projects at a variety of other buildings in the very near future within the next three years we have a construction division of one coordinator and two construction assistants who will oversee all this work and it is impossible for them to have the their fingers on the pulse of all the daily requirements in order to to monitor all these projects and so when we did the hoover edition for the early childhood center back in 2017 at that time we realized that we wanted to utilize or try out the services of a construction manager agent or advisor on that project because it was about an eight million dollar addition that we put on

195to hoover that was very successful it was we hired knutson construction and you approved the hiring of knutson construction to be the cma on that project and we learned a lot from that particular project that the value of their services of a cma whether it's knutson or another company is invaluable there's a lot of benefits to using them in addition to the the help that they provide us with our small construction services unit and so we utilized we asked the board to approve having a cma for the referendum projects the vast majority of them at least the large dollar ones and you approve knutson construction there since that time our relationship has continued and grown and we have a fantastic working relationship with knutson construction you've seen their members that have come and presented to

196you on the referendum updates and we did the board approved a a cma them to be our cma through june 30th of this year what we're asking in this new resolution is that we just continue that indefinitely our opportunity to utilize them we make the decisions which project we want them to be a cma on they aren't the cma on all our projects but we make the decision to ask them to be a cma for the larger projects and we're asking you to continue that contract indefinitely that contract can be terminated just if we choose to do it or if knutson chooses to do it as well and they have set their fees that are in the board docs that will remain in effect during the term of this contract however long that may be

197mr sheridan i see that a term is beginning july 1st 2022. is it in the district's best interest to move on this sooner rather than later yes move to action it's been moved and seconded to move this to action all in favor say aye aye opposed it's now an action item be it resolved school board of independent school district 535 does hereby approve knutson construction as the construction manager advisor for the rochester public schools for the term beginning july 1st 2022 with an automatic annual renewal unless either party provides written notice to terminate the agreement that's the resolution second it's the resolution has been moved and seconded okay all in favor say aye aye aye opposed motion passes thank you thank you 9.02 approval of budget adjustments as of march 31st 2022 dr pickell dr

198marvin board members pleased to welcome john carlson back okay thank you uh chair marvin superintendent pikel this is where we should have been probably maybe a month ago to get this to you but we got hung up on processing next year's budget ahead of that so apologize for that uh peyton can you put it on the screen for me though peyton can you put hey thank you this is not the right one sorry about that all right march 31st budget revision so the gist of what's going on here is we are lowering the amount of budget expenditures in the general fund due to the persistent high numbers of a vacant positions and spending being below target or below budget um so that means we're estimating growth in the unassigned fund balance which means there will

199be a potential surplus as 21 22 comes to a close and so if you remember a few minutes ago i said we've had four years in a row where we're adding to our fund balance this possibly is going to be the fifth year that we do that and again it's from not filling these positions that the superintendent was talking about when he was talking about the strategic plan and not being able to fill some of our critical positions this is slide is more for in case somebody picks up this in the future and just wants to understand what's going on i comment about numbers that are gray and crossed off are all in context of moving and doing this after we already did the the other items so let's just get to the march 31st

200budget revisions that we're proposing again for anybody who's interested there's way more supporting detail in board docs than what i share on the screen in about three minutes time so the general fund we're asking that we update the revenue budget higher than what it was from 256.5 million to 257.4 million and we ask that we reduce the expenditure budget from 265 million to 261 million this means that the unassigned fund balance then would be about point 32.8 million dollars or twelve point six percent and i used that number uh earlier in a different presentation our other funds there's very minimal changes again there's more detail in board docs but uh food service we're increasing the revenue budget slightly the community ed budget increasing a little bit building construction a little bit uh debt service uh

201we're making a very small uh change and then same thing on the expenditures very minimal changes that are being proposed in our internal service funds some of the numbers there like workers comp and printing are not changing at all and then we're making very small adjustments to the revenues and the expenditures of the other funds and then these are some of the funds that we put money into for our like our flexible spending accounts our health reimbursement arrangements a custodial account where we run some scholarships and donations through and then the oped fund which we're not recommending any changes so all total the budget was 347.3 million dollars in revenues this is again all funds not just the general fund uh updating it to 349.1 and then we're dropping expenditure budgets from 516.8 million down

202to 513.8 million and so all funds including construction everything we'd have about 90 million dollars in fund balance at the end of the year i had mentioned before on fte adjustments this just tracks from where we were at the beginning of the year to the last budget revision to the current budget revision and i'm just going to drop down to the bottom line there when the budget was approved last year at this time it was 2612.5 fte it grew to 2672 fte a lot of that change was due to the online school and making that a more significant school than what had been initially planned and now it's grown to 2702 fte with some more strategic use of some of our federal dollars uh just breaking down the 90 positions that uh have increased over

203the year 50 of them were teacher positions 17 off schedule 14 pairs and then a smattering of other positions where they've been as i mentioned the rps online school added 46 fte from where we started at our pre-kindergarten our elementary school buildings we added 25 positions throughout the year high school buildings 10 and middle school building six but on the flip side even though we've added 90 positions into the budget we're running at 144 vacant positions right now and so that's really the gist of what's going on here is that with all of those positions that we haven't been able to fill that's why we are projecting that we're going to spend several million dollars probably less than plan questions i always i always like to point out at these presentations by mr carlson um

204that um this is a normal part of our operations and that first part is is approving a budget which is um i i like i like the terminology he uses and expended your authorizing or appropriations document and that um mr carlson comes to us four times a year to present these adjustments that reflect the reality of both our revenues and expenditures and any interim decisions that we make to our programming or our services etc so this is not something that catches anybody by surprise especially mr carlson and i just really appreciate the transparency and the to the penny um documentation of our revenues and expenditures um on an ongoing basis thank you miss ms nathan any other comments or questions this is not i mean this adjustment is not going to change until it gets

205adjusted next time yes and which somebody won't be that far down the road somebody want to move this to action second it's been moved and seconded to move this to action all in favor say aye aye you need to stop talking so fast you know you're not the first person to tell me thanks a lot okay motion passes and thank you mr carlson 9.03 referral to legislative committee a potential resolution regarding school safety i don't know that there is a household in the nation who hasn't been touched by that recent horrific shooting in texas nine and ten-year-olds and the shootings continue we have heard from this community and they have said we have to do something this community has to do something the shootings aren't stopping and whether they're in schools or synagogues or sports

206arenas or shopping malls grocery stores our community is saying do something promise us that you will keep our children safe this district has taken greater strides in the last few years than in the entire time since i've been here to do just that to make our schools as safe as we can [Music] and still we have reason to be concerned and dr paquel i don't know if you want we're going to be having a study session in august devoted strictly to school safety what we're doing what changes have been made what we need to think about but dr piquella i don't know if you want to speak to the issue at this point i'll just take a very brief opportunity to say and i've had many parents email me in recent days about this we

207can we continually align our work with best practice in the field we think about this all the time and we don't talk about our plans with specificity because we don't want to share those plans and those parents that have emailed me have often responded with oh i never thought about that that you intentionally don't describe your proactive threat assessment processes your crisis response processes but people need to know they are out there and we know we want to do that at a sufficiently high level to as dr marvin said reassure the community without giving away our playbook we also think right now would be an inappropriate time to do that we are still learning what happened in uvalde we are mourning with those families and any discussion of the work we do today in rochester

208would be unavoidably comparative though unintentionally so we've intentionally scheduled this overview for august it's a time when also intentionally we will not have any students either in summer of discovery or in school and so we'll look forward to providing the community with a high level overview of the work that we do in this area i can tell you there have been many things i've been impressed about in rochester public schools as a newcomer and this is at the very top tier we have a very collaborative relationship in this space with rochester police department with law enforcement generally and we also are increasingly connected to mental health providers and other social supports for kids that can be invaluable earning early warning systems and a lot of this also comes back to culture since i have been

209in rochester we have had students do the right thing and point out peers that they said needed support and when we intervened they did need support um and that is everything that is invaluable if our students will come to us so we look forward to providing more information in august even as the board considers whether or not it wants to take some other action beyond our district we want people to know we are highly engaged with these issues in the district and that leads leads us to the next point a number of organizations including the national pta have called upon groups everywhere to ask our leaders our state and our federal leaders to pass some kind of legislation that will make it more difficult for these kinds of tragedies to continue and miss nathan actually

210miss nathan wrote up a resolution and i wonder if you want to take the group through exactly what this resolution involves sure um one of the roles of a school board is to advocate on the local state and national level to other lawmakers and policy makers it's part of the standards of school board leadership and it's also one of our one of our responsibilities and our external facing role we have heard um many voices not just the pta but other um voices representing parents and students and staff that action um is desired from these other policy makers and we have a a vehicle by which we could express uh that belief and that is a resolution that the board could pass we have a legislative committee for whom that responsibility lies to develop these kinds

211of resolutions and bring them to the board for consideration so in order to make this process clear for all board members and allow all board members to have the opportunity to weigh in as to whether they would like to see this kind of resolution and then to give that job to the legislative committee we just we just developed this formal resolution for the board to consider for approval that would direct the legislative committee to identify whether a resolution is appropriate and what the content of that resolution would be so at this point the issue in front of us is not to to draft what the message would be but simply to ask our resolve to ask our legislative committee to determine what the scope would be what the message would be whether this board should

212go ahead with a resolution and if so what the resolution would include ms amundson i have a question for the legislative committee regarding anticipated timeline and i don't know how often you meet and how much sometimes something like this but how how long until we would see something return i guess my response that would be that if we're tasked with something like this we would make the time to accomplish it i would propose in a time frame to meet that august study session um time frame would be my input i don't know if others have other ideas i was thinking the same about eight weeks i mean yeah if you give us one week we'll get it done if you give us until august we're gonna get it done i'm gonna give you more than

213one i just would like to be able to answer people's questions as to when we expect to um to have well the first thing we have to do is pass the resolution asking the legislative committee to actually do this and then we can put the pressure on him to get it done fast once we vote then we move on to the next agenda item so that's exciting for the question would have been yeah now i guess my concern is you want us to decide if it's appropriate to draft a resolution and if within our committee we decide it is then you also want us to research and draft the content for that resolution as well am i understanding that correctly yep and that could certainly be with input from you know other board members yeah

214i think it'll be easier than it sounds because it's all right there right now right there miss mclaughlin and i did have a question when i read the draft resolution here and i directed it to dr paquel thinking he wrote this and now realizing that it's director nathan who i should have directed it to um director nathan when you drafted this and you used the term local do you define local as city and county in rochester and oma state county or do you include school board in that as well that would include uh city and county it's an external facing action okay so what about the concept of other school board resolutions did you contemplate that when you were um i'll go about other school board action if you wanted to include um a resolution

215regarding our own actions right i would think that that would be in the scope of the content and i think as far as the appropriateness question i think that does fall into the timing um issue that dr amonson brought up um i mean we don't know how quickly at the federal level for example some of the conversations that are happening may move so um by the time we meet again which our next regular meeting is june 21st action may have already been taken so that might um guide i guess what the content of our resolution might be depending on what other policymakers are already doing ms mclaughlin um and director nathan i have some feedback on that that one of my concerns on a practical level is talking about um recommending actions to the state

216and federal legislators and policymakers is that the practical aspect is that we don't have a current congress person in office so us advocating to someone who doesn't exist i don't know how effective that will be unless we're going to broaden that to other people in congress and senators from our state and the related concern is that our state representatives now won't unless they do a special session which we don't know yet won't be back in session until january or february so i just i worry a little bit about the effectiveness of that advocacy by the legislative committee and by the school board well and i i think that's you know it's a valid point um the thing is our alternative is we can do nothing and and whether we send this to every person elected

217official in every level which is something we could do whether there are people or somebody else's i think it's just it's the opportunity to say do we want to finally speak up and just say enough too much well we do we do have an election for cd1 on august 9th so hopefully we will know within at least a week later who that person is yeah and i mean they're estab i mean obviously there's not a person but their staff is still maintaining the office so we don't have someone who can vote on our behalf at this time that's correct mr barlow well it seems to me like the intent is not who is or may or might but it is for us as a board to lend our concerns seizing the exigency of the moment

218to communicate a resolution and i would believe our policy uh committee is well able to do that uh everything else beyond that is while it's nice to talk about think about it we're not asking the policy commit uh committee to take that on we're simply asking them if i understand correctly draft the resolution uh for potential uh distribution uh to but we want to see the resolution first yeah okay we would vote on it yeah right this is already an action item but because it's the first time we have addressed it it i think it needs to be moved to action move to action um chairman i actually had a little bit more okay comment that i just wanted to share with my board colleagues here is that um reflecting a little bit on the

219language that we're presented with here i think is helpful um the proposed resolution talks about we must all work together to end gun violence i fully support that that that's what the national pta is is communicating to us here um it also was within our authority to exercise our ability to pass resolutions that was the basis for my question to chair nathan is that or to vice chair nathan is that if we can draft a separate resolution that just on the local level that we can take action i think that that's what the pta is potentially looking at is things we can do on the local level here at the school board at this table to work together to end gun violence and i take that direction from the pta to heart um i think

220in the whereas statement there's also the concept here of that there's a need for school districts to express their positions on school safety matters that affect students and staff again i fully agree with that and and support that concept but i think we can even take it further with resolutions about things that our district can adopt as resolutions and actions we can take not just advocating that others take action but we ourselves can take action on behalf of our district and our our students and our families that's a really good point karen and i think i think that's part of what we're going to be discussing at our august study session too and i guess the reason i speak to it now is i think it's an important issue and you know the sooner the

221better um some of the things that i've come across in my research are that one of the things we could take action on is advocating for safe gun storage there's studies that say that it it increase it makes a change of 85 percent reduction in risk of unintentional firearm injuries in children and teens that 80 percent of school shooters under the age of 18 get their guns from their own homes i think back to i think it was the december meeting where director barlow mentioned the oxford high school in michigan that you know if action had been taken with that young man perhaps that would not have happened in thinking a little bit more about this issue i heard a speech by connecticut senator chris murphy talking about what are we doing i think what

222we can do is speak out and take action even on the local level there's been an increase in the number of guns in the united states and specifically in rochester in the purchases during the pandemic i think at the local level we can look at um what we can and cannot do ourselves there's things at the state and um national level that can be done but again we can't necessarily control those things i'm looking at what we can do and i'm sensing a change that there are even now the most recent articles that i'm reading talk about even gun owners supporting some of these changes but i want to focus on what the school board is doing that students and if we can do something here locally perhaps you know by our august meeting or

223at our august meeting to present a resolution so that students and families can have education about safe gun storage we are in the business of education and i feel like this is a gap in perhaps what we're providing to the students at this point and i look at it in the terms of student safety because it's not just about student shootings but also suicides that 90 percent of suicides by gun are successful if we can reduce the children's and students and teenagers access to those guns that we can have an impact on that here locally so again i'm looking at what are we doing and can we start right here at the school board table but again do support the legislative committee as well good and i'm glad that this is a both and because

224absolutely we can do things right here um and also urge our elected officials to do something too so is there an appetite thank you it's been moved in seconded to move this to action any discussion on favor of moving into action say aye aye aye all opposed it's an action item be it resolved that the school board of independent school district 535 does hereby direct the legislative committee to consider the appropriateness of and research and draft the content for a resolution that would recommend actions to enhance school safety to local state and federal legislators and policy makers it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye aye all opposed motion passes thank you legislative committee you have your work cut out for you and i know you'll be getting plenty of input from

225others you see the changes to the annual calendar on the on board docs we will have a study session at five o'clock on june 14th a regular board meeting on june 21st another study session on july 19th and a regular school board meeting on july 26th it is nine o'clock exactly and we are adjourned