RPS School Board Study Session - 4/12/22

001not well is really there are fewer people here tonight that are going to be at my house for dinner on sunday and my table is not this big and you're inviting us for dinner it's family i don't even want to invite thank you if you have any extra grandchildren just send them my way since i'll have zero and someone's kids need a grandparent let me know oh the study session of the independence school district 55 school board is called to order at 503 pm tuesday april 12 2022 in room 137 of the edison building this board acknowledges this site and all rps sites are situated on the ancestral lands of the dakota people we honor the dakota nations and the sacred land of all indigenous peoples interested members of the public are welcomed and encouraged

002to view this meeting remotely at youtube.com isd 535 where the live stream video may be found present at this meeting our school board members superintendent kent pacquel a non-voting ex officio member and assistant board clerk miss michelle severson ms 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 workmen here thank you at this time we offer the opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the life of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all 2.01 approval of the agenda are there any changes to the agenda move approval second it's been moved and seconded to

003approve the agenda all in favor say aye my agenda is approved 3.01 this is a focus topic issues for schools start times feedback process back to the cat uh chair marvin and directors of the board i apologize for being a little late i was across the hall meeting with the leadership team of one of our schools um and of course that was important and i didn't have a clock in front of me i would hope just because we have a few a couple folks who are not always here at study sessions if we could just loop around and each person could just share uh if they're on staff what your role is and of course you know we can just board members just sit here but you can also introduce yourself really briefly and then

004i will try and set the stage for our free free flowing discussion tonight i'm from kent paquel superintendent and let me just spread that out my name is john gates i'm the manager of first student bus company and i'm in my 29th year of doing such karen mclaughlin school board brenda wichmann curriculum and instruction carla bolson student services jackie peterson elementary and secondary uh kathy nathan schoolwork just garcia school board john carlson finance don barrel school board melissa anderson school board will rough in a second of diversity equity and inclusion michelle severson assistant to the superintendent and school board gene marvin school board thank you and of course everybody knows jordan we all wake up in the morning and find out what we said so um our fearless chair and vice chair asked me to

005take a brief step back and re-articulate how we got to where we are in this discussion tonight um so that everybody's on the same page about why we are where we are in terms of our process so while i know many of you have this in mind for the millions out there watching on youtube the school board made a change in start times predates my time in rochester but it was implemented at the beginning of the school year and as with many aspects of our work we did an evaluation and we wanted to scrutinize how it was going and we got a ton of feedback worked with two researchers one from the university of minnesota one kind of the dean of minnesota school district research evaluation directors and we looked at the pluses and the

006deltas of the change in our start time and as board members know we got a lot of feedback but if you have to boil it down into two key conclusions of that evaluation we found that the change has worked quite well for many of our secondary students there's been an improvement in being alert in class a benefit for some family aspects and a lot of what we saw in the research aren't start times for older kids has played out in the change in times here at rochester but as will often happen when you decide to do an authentic evaluation of something we got some feedback that at least i was not anticipating going into that evaluation which was that our start times that put elementary schools starting at 9 has have had in the views

007of many of our teachers and some of our parents a negative impact on the readiness to learn and the actual learning that many of our youngest learners are engaged in and so faced with those two candidly contradictory findings the board said we need to grapple with that but we didn't want to grapple with it if we couldn't afford it because as this board knows we have a structural deficit that we've developed a plan to resolve but that is much on everyone's minds as we're doing that and so a significant increase in expenses in any area of our work whether it's transportation or any other part of our operations would be really problematic right now and so what we said was we first needed to cost out the possibility of a change in our start times

008and in order to even cost it out we had to bound it we couldn't go back to a blank page looking at a million different start time possibilities and so what we decided was viable was to look at one alternative to our current start times and board members and staff have got both the current start times and the potential alternative scenario listed on the bottom of your form we said explicitly that looking at lots of other variations was beyond scope for this spring partly due to staff time but partly due to the extraordinary burden that our both transportation staff internally and at our bus contractor uh have been going through and continue to go through so we've had one alternative that we bounded it bounded ourselves to looking at and and before we could actually

009cost out that alternative we had to actually build our new route structure tied to the boundary changes and the openings of four schools and the closure of one school because we've redrawn the entire map of our transportation system based on those changes and so i don't know if it's a chicken head of the egg or a cart before the horse but we needed to first create our new transportation route structure that is tied to the new boundaries and tied to the new schools before we could come up with a cost estimate for even considering that alternative start time about which no decision has been made so what scott tells me is that we have just completed building out that new route structure tied to the new boundary changes and the new schools and we actually

010have an estimate of the number of new buses we would need to complete that and john has an estimate of what that cost would be so i'd actually like to either ask you know either scott or john uh or however hannah just give a brief update of what we've learned this is not the start time piece just yet so right now we have this week costed out the transportation structure for our new boundaries and our new schools i could do it off top of my head but i don't want to have to apologize for getting it wrong so john sure so the contracted rate next year to add uh five routes um would be i just rounding off roughly sixty thousand a route times five so about three hundred thousand dollars additional cost that's on

011top of the already scheduled increase in in fees that we had agreed to a couple years ago with uh first students so 300 000 for new boundaries and new schools which all in all maybe jeff first scott could comment that doesn't seem that bad to me considering we're opening up new buildings and at the end of the day hopefully only adding up to five more rounds i i was pleasantly surprised with that number i was expecting six to eight and just to clarify what they actually said they said at least three new routes and then they suggested there probably would be two overload routes and those are for new students are going to be signing up between now and next fall that we aren't aware of yet that might overload a certain route that we

012are now going to have to add that's another route too we have some routes with a significant overload so we are going to do a registered rider this year for 10th through 12th grade and all district-wide option kids so hopefully we can get a good handle on that but again in the pa we've done registered rider for years and a lot of parents just sign up just in case you know their student might write it once or twice a year so it's really hard to get a true judge until you actually see what ridership looks like when school starts can you explain where that is registered riders the kids that are eligible to but to ride a bus we ask we will ask them to sign up to actually you use the bus and route

013it if they don't respond then we don't route them so in sum the the start times that are listed at the bottom of your sheet as current start times uh high school beginning at 8 20 elementary school beginning at 9 35 have been costed out in our new boundaries and with new schools added at about a transportation increase of around 300 000 and we'll be building that into the budget proposal that the board will be asked to approve in june and as jeff says it comes in pretty reasonably there's reason to believe that changing the start time from the current start times that's listed to the potential new start times may be cost neutral but that is what we're working to confirm right now and we obviously would not want to advance a discussion of

014a change in start time if we do not know with a greater degree of certainty that that actually is cost neutral when the board previously considered this issue three years ago and we looked at the hugo's first flip of elementary versus middle it was relatively cost neutral at that time in our old transportation structure so right now what we're working on and we expect to have by the end of the week is a projected cost of shifting elementaries to the 8am time and what the board has directed us to do is if if it is relatively cost neutral we would seek further feedback from stakeholders and answers from uh experts two of whom are sitting next to me to questions that board members would want to have answered and feedback they'd want to receive to

015consider that potential change in start time potentially before the end of this school year or next fall so the task that i've worked out with the chair and vice chair tonight is really not one to debate or even get deep into the substance of is this a good or bad idea but what are the uh the opinions and what are the pieces of information that you as board members will need to consider that possibility if it does in fact prove to be cost neutral which we would know in the near term um the task before us tonight really is to talk through board members questions that you'd like us to solicit first of all from three key stakeholder groups um parents staff and students largely through a web-based survey which we've had stunningly good luck

016with getting rich feedback on since i've been here on multiple projects that we would that we would release next week and would give people 10 days to two weeks to complete what are the issues that we would want their opinions on in addition though what are the things that you as board members would need to understand about our transportation system about how the routes are developed about how buses how much time they need to turn around between those routes the nuts and bolts of the system if there are some of those questions we can answer for you tonight because they're not really related to start times directly then that's one reason why we're really glad and john can be here to answer some of those questions because the devil really is in the details about

017these issues um we will be taking very careful notes with what you say but i'm also going to ask board members and cabinet and others everyone here everyone's invited you all have some index cards at your place as you will probably know there are 10 index cards and then there are 10 categories on this sheet of paper that we all have for us we're going to have a pretty fluid conversation and i know that either i or chair marvin will keep us on track timewise about each of these 10 categories if we go too deep in any one category we're going to miss another one where these ten categories one of which is other came from is the study that we did earlier this year these were the nine factors that emerged to varying degrees

018from the work that kyla wallstrom and dave heisted did that the board heard about previously that families teachers to a lesser extent students we do get high school students responses these were issues that they raised in various ways so we're just going to talk through each of those categories what i would be grateful for you to do again certainly board members and also others who are here take one of these cards and use one for each category and if you think of a question or a point of information that you would like to have answered please write it on your card which we'll collect at the end of this today such that if you don't get a chance to ask your question or you choose not to ask it or to make your statement we

019can still capture the information that you are interested in and the reason to just have one card per subject is it's just going to make us easier to very quickly aggregate this into the survey that we have to build very soon so for instance our first category is impact on student learning in a minute i'm going to stop talking we're going to open the floor and say what are the things you want to know about in terms of considering a possible change in start times in the area of student learning you would take one of these cards and write student learning on the top and then if there are issues or questions in the area of student learning you want to be sure we consider including just jot it down you also can and should

020raise it in conversation but this makes sure that we capture it and if you don't want to raise it for conversation we can still uh capture it then let me pause there and ask for any questions of either clarifications or redirection that the chair might want to give us otherwise we will we will jump in um to these categories that that grew out of our previous work hearing none let's just oh yeah please clarify so if we have a question that has multiple categories within the question do you want any other both categories only one category whatever works for you we'll we'll we'll we'll catch it yeah i like other oh there's a great example others are good it's a good catch i wasn't sure what would be other but i wanted another category so

021yeah if there are some overlapping ones you put it in and we'll make sure that we go through and we look at all those and try and make sure we can get feedback on the issues that are important to you excellent thank you and i wonder if we can get one thing clarified from our transportation experts who are here before we begin with this at this point the new schedule would have about an hour between the start time of elementary and secondary is that right in the morning the morning it's it's basically the same difference as we have right now okay and and so the question is going to come up why can't that be 30 minutes difference in start time real simple you can't get to a junior middle school senior high school and

022then back out in time to pick up kids to get them to school you can't get to the from the elementary and get back out to pick up the middle school high school kids and get them to school on that there's just a lot of time but what the problem is the district-wide options because for example a student that might go to montessori at franklin that lives in oronoco we we bring them like the gibbs and then do a transfer so we take like the lincoln and montessori franklin kids from gibbs down and i when this came about i hopped in the van out here and drove from gibbs to franklin and it took me 22 minutes so you gotta you gotta factor that drive time in as well to make that work i don't

023know if you mentioned it earlier you told us yourself how many square miles this district is it's not a small district that's what 220 which is 218. and two different towns olmsted and two counties thank you so thank you for that again it's a narrow and tall district it goes if you've been ever been to lake city it goes to south troy which is halfway to zumbro falls so it's it's a long ways and thank you and madam sheriff it's okay briefly uh so orinoco other points beyond um why is it where pic the viewing public may not know well why are we picking kids up from way out there so give someone state to that briefly for those who may not know what that are they they're they're inside the isd 535 boundaries and

024we do not determine those boundaries i mean i know that that was that was a product of when the little country schools consolidated way back in the 40s and 50s that's why we have some really interesting boundaries if you look like like mr sheridan's house was kind of surrounded by rochester but because the landowner at the time chose byron that little chunk that's totally almost surrounded by rochester's byron school district so we don't it's just not a square nice pretty rectangle it it jogs in and out and makes some really interesting shapes yes i just want to make sure that we're crystal clear on this especially for the viewing public that right now the time between what we call tears because we're going to use that word tonight is 7 is 75 minutes in the

025morning is that correct and then in the afternoon it's it has to be a minimum of 30 minutes between each elementary middle and high school the way the system works without adding cost yeah without so without adding any more routes that's the time frame between the tiers and we we do even with these tighter times in the pm we run a few more routes in the afternoon than we do and we also run them longer we don't have that time constraint like for elementary um we we have buses out there now till what 5 30. with the four o'clock dismissal right now so and that spacing is the same in the proposed time on the new times between the elementary and the new times between the elementary and middle and high school it's actually an

026hour more because right now middle schools get out at three and elementaries get out at two at three three three three thirty it's three three thirty and four no i mean under the new times yeah under the new times yeah because right now the first school that gets out let's say is the middle school at three o'clock under the proposed times the new school or the elementaries will get out at two o'clock 220. and that's that leaves a huge gap in between for transportation which i can address later as far as a time clause in our contract but but you can see it the the time between middle and high school is crunched down so that potentially could cost extra routes too and part of that was to get the minutes of the day that

027we that we've worked under to get to keep the school day as it was and he's got scott's done a lot of math on that he's more he's more into that than i am but as you all know if he her state statute requires a certain number of instructional hours every year and at the uh high school in middle school you need 1020 hours a year in elementary i believe it's one and if you do all the calculations and divide it through 356 minutes per day at the middle school high school and per day 327 the elementary level so you need 5 hours 56 minutes at high school middle and 5 hours that's the minimum requirement obviously you can go mr kepper said because i didn't quite understand this that if because of those close

028timelines between the middle and high school you said that we might need to add routes can you help us understand the logistics of why that is is it because you have to have two buses for those number of kids you can't cover you can't cover the ground in that amount of time to get empty because that like the middle school bus right now on a three o'clock middle school time we'll run kids home quick and come back and use that bus at a high school and then we'll go back again possibly and use it on an elementary route we're three tiering a lot of our routes in the afternoon so what you're saying then is the pm is different because kids are going home they don't have to be there at a certain time because

029school isn't starting they've met the time requirement and what time they get home is can be more variable than a school start time in the morning right um for example at the four o'clock we we don't have that time constraint they gotta be at school ten minutes before the bell or something so we run the routes longer at the end of the end of day than we would in the morning just it's it's time and miles it's it's covering the it's covering the 218 square miles in the time we're given you know some of our boats are really packed and some of our routes that start out by maple valley golf course for example might not be as full you just can't cover that many miles and you know the kids are sparse are more

030sparse out there you just you can't make as efficient use of your equipment and i want to follow up on something that director nathan said as well because i was i reviewed some of the material that was sent to us and it talked about the time between tears being 75 minutes in the am and it said 30 minutes in the pm but what are you saying is that it's 30 minutes multiple times so it's not just 30 minutes right yeah it's 30 minutes between each each okay so total in the afternoon it can be 60. is that what you're saying or i i get i'm sorry i'm not following it um that i'm trying to understand why it's 75 in the morning and 30 in the afternoon again we've used more routes in the afternoon

031to to accomplish that tighter time is that because you want to get the kids home as quickly as possible within especially when you start out you only got when you let out middle school at three o'clock you gotta you gotta be back and and actually you've got 27 minutes because or 23 minutes really because we leave seven minutes after the bell rings is when the buses depart so you really got to empty out quickly and some routes for example right now and we're going to lose some efficiency on this too like kellogg kids that live way north we we may take take them up to century and transfer them and take and several buses that leave century they're just gone for the afternoon they're out of play for even elementary because they're out until [Music]

032four o'clock or after would an example help of how we use the bus in the afternoon yes okay all right let's let's do a bus that i drove last week i took a group of kids i left willow creek at 307 i went down marion road dropped at some high populated areas and got and it was empty approximately 325 327 after that i went back up marion road and i got to male high school by 305 or 3 35 loaded my kids at at that time and we left it at 3 37 at that time i went over in south wheat south west area in hart farms i had approximately 40 students i went down 18th avenue along hart farm dropped those kids on my way to bamber valley i got to bamber valley approximately

033four o'clock waited in line patiently until about 4 10. when all the little kiddos got on the bus best part of my day is when i when i get the elementary kids on the bus and then we took them home back out in the heart farm area so i basically in an hour and a half of time i took home 150 students in one on one route and that's how we try to route kick route the buses most efficiently it works easy when you can do high populated areas it doesn't work so so well when there's like less sparsely populated areas like jeff talked about the golf course out there we we do make efficiencies in certain areas by using transfers and next year with the boundary changes i had to add a couple more

034transfers to be creative so this under the current routing system as happens this year the middle schools and the high schools are all paired together you know they're all basically the same attendance boundary well next year it's not even close so like what i'm going to be doing is up in oronoco i got four buses that are going to the community center up in oranoco i'm going to leave two buses out there provide i mean if we do the same type of schedule i've been routing this the last couple weeks i have one bus going to century now and since there's no kellogg students out out there one bus will go to dakota so we got four buses using the covering a large area out there maybe bringing half a load of kids each into

035that transfer point that leaves two buses not doing anything well those have to those buses would not have time to come into town with anybody and go back out to oronoco so we're sending them back out right away to start picking up kids almost immediately to get them back into town that's just some of the things we face and how we're being creative in order to make best use of our buses and and with our staffing situation we we have to do that because you know it's not like the airplane movie where that pilot just popped up out of the plane it doesn't happen i mean we have some significant staffing issues and we just aren't finding people i'm not sure what the answer is on that we've been running 12 to 15 but bus

036drivers short all year and you wonder how we do that that does not count our sub drivers it doesn't call the office staff or the technicians that drive so we all rally together we work with jeff we get it done our goal is to not have you hear about us we want to be taken for granted [Music] we don't take it for granted but just play on director mclaughlin's question at least what i think it was understanding that was super helpful for you to walk us through an afternoon how is the morning fundamentally different than that what's the you're educating the idiot's guide to trump myself the idiot's guide to transportation what you just described sounds amazingly complex but uh pretty comprehensible so what's different about the morning well the morning is a lot in

037that in the higher populated areas like let's let's take uh let's take heart farms out in heart farms there's enough there's enough population of students out there to take a bus directly to middle high school okay if i tried to put middle school kids on that bus at the same time because they're roughly the same start times in the morning i i'd fill up a bus on a block so i i go around the neighborhood and fill those high school kids up and i go another bus i fill up the same area and go to little creek this time here and a lot of times with that i got very few now that do it anymore but some that in that instance i have a couple buses that go into male high school that have

038just enough time to go up to park lane for instance and pick up you you make two stops and you have overweight will crease foods and then i turn right around and go right back to willow creek so i can get 50 more kids on a bus and then and some of the buses that i get done at the high school most of them i send out to pick up the district-wide program and in the past the catholic schools were part of that this year they decided not to do that but we go out in those areas and they start earlier and we bring them into transfer points for the district-wide program so let's say i bring in the transfer point from the transfer point this year from like the heart farms general southwest area

039is bamboo valley they're scheduled to get there at 8 50 in the morning we use that same parking lot then then we have one bus lined up basically go to lincoln one bus line to go to ben franklin one bus lined up to go to washington gauge and one to go to cage and uh it's so and that that's where we need that time that drive time because imagine getting from bamber valley to gage that's what kills us is i mean i'm not going to say it'd be easy but district-wide programs are are a challenge to them they really are but when you're covering that many square miles and and we talked a little bit you know st paul they have a lot more kids but it's a lot more compact area you have more

040extensive you you just don't have that drive time okay you can do more with you can cover the ground what you're describing sounds more like an express bus out in the suburbs coming into minneapolis yeah yeah yeah and we if we when i first grabbed it i mean i used to work for the district five years in the transportation office before i was out there 29 years but i did try to have maybe a pickup or two on the way to it just didn't work because if if i went into a neighborhood and wanted to pick up a couple gauge kids on the way i would get within a block and someone else's gauge student and they'd want you to make another detour and it just got to be so we just cut the cord

041and made it real simple just go to use your analogy so i know that you don't stop at every house to pick up kids so you have hubs for lack of a better word where kids would gather at the corner of whenever although they might have to walk through your four blocks to get there is that correct is that pretty accurate and the young the younger the kids the more the elementary we don't they don't walk as much up to the high school we try to do it more of a it's more of a time crunch it's more like a city bus like jeff said except the rural kids of course that you know and when we're picking up on highway 63 you got to stop at the driveway i think i think this is

042really good information for us here and for people who are listening because we have a lot of people who say why don't you just start everybody at you know pick a time and it is incredibly complex the transportation it's been the issue for ever really so thank you that's excellent explanation well i think i think the thing that i've been trying to get through to people is it would be twice the cost twice the number of buses which was not likely and twice the number of drivers so that means instead of missing 15 bus drivers every day would be missing 30 if you could even get them all to begin with so i think that that human capital is a pretty important piece of it and we're all facing that you know i used to

043tell scott show me the money we can make it happen that isn't true anymore no it's not true honestly what we've faced this year so i think we're just going to work through the list then we can but i mean part of the really extraordinary opportunity of having our two experts if there are other questions of how does it work either you can you can bring them in as we move along um but yes i can kind of give you a sense of how at least i'm envisioning this um would happen so our first category is impact on student learning here's what here's an example where i want to view as board members that i might want to know we heard that teachers thought 9 35 start was not effective learning time for younger kids

044i would like to know what time teachers elementary teachers would say is optimal learning time and would the 8 am start address their concerns that's the kind of question we we heard what isn't working i would want us to go out and survey them and say well do you think the 8 a.m would be more effective so that's the kind of uh question that we're here to be sure we understand so in conjunction with that because i've been thinking about it and over the last couple of years i randomly do research when it passes my into my brain and this quickly leads is we have a lot of information about why it's important for for high school students to start earlier there's a lot of research how much research do we have for elementary study

045and end times i mean if if the research shows that these are the parameters then that could be different from what teachers might think are the best parameters i'm not saying we should discount either one but that's a perfect example of what we're looking for what does the research say on elementary start times in student right because we know what it says on secondary students i got that and that's something that that's not a survey question that's something that we do to look at the research literature but that's fine we need to we need to get what your concerns are so we can bring that to you if we move this forward in may and i would be more specific about that even because in the the information that director nathan sent out the august

0464th of 2020 did have attached to it a sleep study but it was the older elementary so third fourth and fifth graders and i view that population as potentially different than the k one and two as to what their capacity is and at what time great um so i'd be one of my i'd be more interested in the very young learners dr garcia you had a question yes i was just i'm thinking so like there are some of us who do know that information and so i'm wondering who we are like i can see value in surveying people and there's there are places where that information is rarely available to us and so i'm wondering like even if it sounds like that information was to some degree presented already and so i think for me

047the question is yes we have the research can you bring that forward can the staff also let us know when the parents let us know sort of what works for them so that could we do sort of an overlay if those two things are the same numbers but also like how do we prepare to fit the science of sleep and learning needs for developing brains versus relying solely on a budget issue or the budget of the issue so it sounds like when i heard because this just the original decision also predates me i heard a lot of that conversation and people recognizing the different needs of sleep for kids and how that impacts their brain development and readiness for learning and it didn't weigh enough to change how we were going to do things because

048of logistics with transportation and budget so those two things like we could know both information it doesn't mean those two things are going to fit together for us so then i have an additional question like at what point do we choose the science of sleep and learning and their brains over the budget issue like how do we prepare ourselves to move forward past the next vote that we have affecting kids 10 20 years from now not just 20 23. so and i think that's an a really important point and maybe that would go sorry to make this all about numbers maybe that will go under number nine in terms of you know how much is this worth to the district when we when we know for sure what works best for kids how much is

049it worth to the district right um because i in terms of like answering so i did you know some of those numbers it's hours of sleep and that it also is determined by like when the child goes to sleep so if you need 10 to 11 hours based on your developmental age if a child goes to sleep at 7 30 versus 9 pm versus 11 pm obviously the start time will be different it's the amount of sleep that their brain needs in total over a full day and for the younger kids that would include nap times but if you're an exhausted learner even as adults if we get less than seven hours of sleep we are not as functional as if we got eight nine or ten hours so just uh i'm thinking that you're

050talking about how much sleep do kids need at different ages and when is the prime time for them to get that sleep and how and how does uh when they're in class affect their learning what's the prime time for learning sleep when they sleep and prime time for learning right well right so like it's an eight eight to 15 hours depending on the age of the child and then all of those things will look different but generally if we're looking at kids you know this and we had left out early education like our our little but if we are looking at generally like middle school elementary high school the 10 hour range fits either the low end or the high end of what those kids would need and so if we're to me this is

051also like an activities issue because if we're looking at those activities and they're all ending at you know 9 p.m 10 p.m in the evening if you're traveling from somewhere else how that's going to affect the next morning for the child but doesn't some of it especially with the older students involved when their biological clocks are set for falling asleep i mean you can say okay your high school kids say needs nine hours of sleep high school kids aren't gonna go to sleep at six and six pm correct you know so it's not just how much sleep but and when but when can they actually fall asleep so the sleep it's a 24-hour sleep cycle so people in places like alaska have a very different right have a very different day daytime experience than somebody

052who's living you know on the other end of our equator or on the other side right so that i mean that can also take effect too and we have a pretty short winter time so it's i mean there's a lot that goes into it but in general if we kind of try to hit that 10 hour mark that would help our families understand when they might need to shift those things but if we have things that we are demanding of our kids in school like sport sports start time isn't until 7 00 p.m and if it's an away game they're not getting home until 10 11 midnight depending on what the sport is and then they you know hopefully that's varsity right on a friday and so it's not going to affect their saturday morning

053but if it's something else during the day or i'm sorry during the regular school week that's going to impact those kids in the morning and potentially loss of instructional time the day of the event if they need to get bused to a different location just a process question are we starting at one going down or are we picking questions and then telling you what number they fall under they're really good that's a good idea the plan had been to start at one study sessions i think are intentionally fluid and so um the plan had been to work through these nine areas and have you raised the questions but i think in dr garcia's point there's there's there's both issues of number one which is impact on student learning number two and health and well-being um

054i don't believe i heard the point about safety and what dr garcia just said i'm sure she's thinking about it but then very heavy in number four which is extracurricular so they these things are wickedly complex and overlapping we maybe each prioritize our issues because i mean i'm not gonna have time to cover 10 or 12 things should we pick the ones that are the most beneficial i think that's my best that might be a good pivot insofar as the idea which uh the jeremiah's chair and i talked through of going through it by the issues that came out of the study we previously did might be less productive than you all just liking that um the one thing i do think i think that what justice said is it actually frames it fairly clearly

055at least for me while we can't really determine when families have their kids go to sleep or wake up the research is quite clear the best learning time for little kids earlier the best learning time for older kids is later full stop it would be better to have our younger learners at eight academically it's better for high school kids later it rubs against extracurriculars jobs and family life at the end of the day and there is the primary tension so were we to make this purely on academic engagement in the classroom we would put elementaries first we put secondaries later and that would be the end of the discussion but we have a holistic approach to education and we also recognize the complexity of many of our families lives which involve things beyond the classroom

056certainly extracurriculars but also jobs caring for other family members a lot of the stuff we heard about so i really appreciate that tension being articulated that really is there and i think to director robinson's point if the chair is amenable to it i might actually say let's just hear from board members what is most on your minds that you want us to be attentive to whether it is looking at the research or putting it in a survey for stakeholders you have here the nine factors that we've heard people say they're worried about so you can glance at those as you formulate what you want to flag for us as most important and maybe we just go through and do it that way in fact i'm thinking even and include cabinet members if you want to

057include cabinet movers i'm sure my colleagues have things that they want to say as well so maybe i'll just refer to eugene and you can kind of okay one question i have is how will a later end time for high school kids affect day care concerns for families how many families are concerned that older siblings or neighbors will not be there to watch little ones who get out of school earlier and how it uh staffing at our school-aged child care programs one of the things so and if that's okay let's just go up around i'm taking notes so you can skip me that's good yes sir i just wanted to address some i've ridden a lot of special ed routes in my 25 years of doing this and it's amazing how many high school kids

058get their little little special ed kids off the bus so that those are the ones i see but i don't know how many elementary kiddos we drop off you know because we drop them at a corner but they might be relying on an older sibling to watch them so that's a pretty significant number in my mind and i'm guessing the only source of that information is going to be the family survey as we don't have that or students we could possibly ask the students that too yeah the high school kids scott or julie you know julie sorry so one of the things that was raised during distance learning was everybody had to change everything and so some of the idea was what did teachers learn during distance learning that they could then bring back to

059the classroom so i'm thinking of for example in the high school they were on a block schedule and wednesdays were reserved for well some students called it homework wednesdays um or for students who needed help or everything else so i would like people to think outside the box of an eight period day schedule i would also like to emphasize at this point that if we go to a seven period day the electives will take a huge beating and we can't do that i mean for me so you're saying that if we rethink the day we might be able [Music] while we are actually looking at things it might change it could change the start and end time for high school you know um does what's the optimal amount of time for instruction and i realize

060it's an impossible question to answer because it's going to vary depending on the context being taught in terms of our kids now burned out by 7th or 8th hour in high school and after the first 10 minutes they're gone you know so and i think actually dr marvin raised this point on february 10 2020 when she asked or when she said her opinion was that it wasn't necessarily the amount of time but the quality of time being spent or something like that i might have even written that down that was deep yeah it was oh yeah time in class isn't as important as the length of the class time in class isn't as important as the length of kids get tired lose focus and we should consider others so just maybe underscoring the urgency of

061timing on this decision i know that's not necessarily a question but how quickly we're able to get answers back and process that is weighing on me as our sac offices have opened up registration for summer and next fall and they are getting pummeled bombarded maybe with questions from parents not knowing whether they will need child care how much they will need whether they'll need it in the morning or the afternoon and then the question that came up earlier about will it impact staffing for sac the the earlier day is actually better for us on the elementary side for staffing because the morning is harder to staff and we can actually with a shorter morning use more of the school day staff who's willing to work additional hours but yes going to four o'clock at the

062high school will reduce the number of high school students that would be available right when sac begins um my turn i think this fits in the first category um and in my preparation for this meeting i went through the materials that director nathan sent and it was a november 12th of 19 that the presentation that night talked about these things but i would want to know the specific impacts it talked about the impact on special ed like you talked about i would want to know more detail about what that impact would be not just that it's going to impact that but you know that the nuts and bolts of what that would be the same thing with the early childhood and also the pseo the c-tec and the p-tech that you know i wanted populations

063of kids that would be impacted you know how many kids and what that impact would be and the significance of that impact for their student learning i just one thing that i keep thinking about and it's probably nothing that we can solve but when we talk about staff job satisfaction i think you know i usually think about what is that for teachers in paris but i really wonder is there anything that we can do with the schedule to attract more of our transportation staff because we are really we're in a crisis now in terms of having enough people and i don't know if it fits into the schedule or the time but it's just something i'm curious about well it would actually add probably about 15 minutes 40 minutes to the day of a bus

064driver so that could help it just depends on a lot a lot of drivers work at nail not a lot a few drivers working mail either amber pm and they may drive in the morning and go to work get it done at the lab and then come to work in the afternoon and it might be more attractive if instead of giving them two and a half hours then give it up for three hours i think we anticipated that this was going to be the shift in focus when we started talking about flipping the times because obviously the last time we had this conversation most of the focus was on the impact on secondary students and their sleep and we didn't have to deal with the extracurricular activities and the impact on employment or the later

065out time so when we had this conversation last time the athletic directors presented some somewhat detailed numbers about how many students would be impacted by a later start time relevant to athletics so they told us how many students were engaged in high school sports by by school and as a percent of total students um and they made guesstimates of how many [Music] how away games were impacting student attendance at the end of the day so i think it was uh if if they have to be um how many how many times during a season they would miss one class versus missing two classes i know that we've gotten some compassion letters and emails from parents who are guesstimating for themselves how much class their students would have to miss but i i guess i would

066really need to see if there's a way for us to really get a sense of how how much of a burden are we putting on our student athletes by moving um the times back because i also understand it most of the things with athletics are out of our control we're not going to change the start time of games because that's set by the big nine we can't control the travel distance to away games because of where we are in the conference so we have a pretty far-flung conference so the only thing that really is in our control is when our school time ends at the end of the day and then when the students have to leave to go to these to these mostly away games so if there's any way that they can i

067mean so that we have a real impact as opposed to what people perceive might possibly happen kathy you're talking about kids who have to leave a class skip a class because they got to get on the bus to get to the game and you want to know how many students that involves and how often right okay and i would maybe add to that too that i know that some students have their last hour free so that they can do that then they wouldn't be missing an academic class they're missing a study hall you know how many are in that category so that's maybe another question is how big an issue is that for schools to schedule student athletes so they don't have a class last hour and is it that even possible and if i

068wasn't recalling correctly it was it involved more than one class it wasn't as easy as just eight hours i think it included seven hours sometimes half of sixth hour if i'm remembering so that's the question is how how many classes how many hours how many classes how many kids how often does that happen okay a whole math equation and it's not just the athletes so like if we're talking about football we're talking about cheerleaders marching band you know whoever student volunteers so don't just ask about this individuals playing the actual sport but like anybody that would be bussed to that other location and if there's any other reason to piggyback on that we've been talking mostly about away games but if there's any other reason athletes uh leave school early i don't know if there's

069a because of uh for example availability of rent time we've heard that hockey players have to leave early because that's the only time the practice ice is available so if there's any other regular reasons that the end of the day one of the other things that was said at that meeting too was if a sport has 18 games half of them are home games so it's not every game that's affected it's as you said just the away games and then you deduct from that that they don't lose class time if they're playing one of the other high schools in town so that would be a consideration but i mean i i would like to have some a little bit more detailed information for how many baseball games are there how many students does that impact

070um what times do they have to leave and do that for all of our sports to figure out an exact number because if you get a number that's well between 300 and 600 kids are in fact you know you know that that's not precise enough then two more for athletics um i think we could ask the students um how the later start time would affect um their perception of their participation and extracurricular activities and um and also ask how many of them have uh jobs because i think they're the only source where we'd be able to get that information even when they're when their you know job hours are because they're going to be the only source for that information and then the next piece which isn't a survey question but i guess it's an

071internal outside the box question is for other and i don't know if it's looking in other districts or if it's a philosophy within our district but if we are moving start times later for high school is it an appropriate practice to have club meetings and practices shift to the mornings because that time is open now i know the argument is that it sort of violates that well you want him to get more sleep but it's when do they lose to sleep beginning of the day or the end of the day so i don't i know there are other districts who start late and we have high school students so is that is that something we can get information on i think the other piece of that too was that oh my gosh then kids who

072do this are going to still be missing sleep but it's just those students who have chosen those activities versus everybody and i think we need to keep that um in mind as well and once again it is ultimately a choice of the student and their parents yes so i think you're all sort of like touching on one of the questions that i had um which kind of encompasses all those things like how do we support or how could we support um activity staff and families in communicating what consequence the consequences or the outcomes of those choices would be so if a student wants to play this sport and also be in theater for example what schedule sacrifices do they need to make like what are we as the district expecting them to make what academic

073sacrifices would they be making if they're continuing if we are continuing to accommodate a student and making similar decisions and when do we shift to standard practice so like if one kid wants to be in both of these activities i have a little bit of an overlap and we're going to make concessions for that child and then there are a couple others that are also wanting to do that when do we just say okay no more accommodation we're just now going to shift either this class or this activity to accommodate sort of sort of the larger hole um because i think it's important for people to know similar to like i did zero hour like our school started at 7 20 in high school and i did zero hours so i was like six a.m

074like on the marching band field so that was not fun but again that was my choice and i knew that ahead of time so we need to give them a sense of agency but also be very clear about what we're expecting another question that i have is both sort of budgetary and safety um can we increase or how do we increase our walking zones during all or part of the school year and would that make a difference and would it be safe to do so and sort of like an added question to that is might there be opportunities to either reimburse or incentivize families for like carpooling and transport so something that would be lower than the cost of what we would be paying for but something that would obviously incentivize them and i was

075a friend of mine had a child in a district who did sort of like the biggest loser but instead of like weight loss it was about commuting time for school so like families got to sign up to carpool and however many kids they carpooled they were able to calculate like how much you know carbon was not put in the error blah blah blah so however much they were able to do this environmental thing they got some sort of award or reward and it also um it incentivized some of the older high school students to do this so they were more willing to carpool versus you know 10 or 15 different kids all driving to the same place from like the same neighborhood they all got together and participated in this and split the prize um

076and another safety question is um can we clarify or speak to parent concerns about entering and exiting buses in the dark whether no matter what end of the pickup or drop off or school day that's on but i hear a lot about that as concerns about kids sitting in the dark and like what are we doing what safety measures are we providing to them like how are we going to address that on either end and i can write all my other ones down in the card could it maybe ask just because i think dr christie asked one of those fact questions that would be helpful just to ground ourselves in can you just describe what our current walking distance is and what changing the walking distance which i'm not necessarily advocating but what that what

077that does to these transportation issues that we're trying to think about just before we go on because it hasn't been left yet well the state statute for for our bus in minnesota is two miles so we are at two miles for the high school kids we're at a mile and a half for middle school and a mile and a quarter for k-5 yes so if there's so if you go to i guess like district-wide option you can be anywhere i suppose so do we establish a the same thing for them so far we have walk zones for our district-wide schools but the kids are so dispersed cert i think the last time i looked at lincoln there were five kids in the in the mile mcquarter walk zone right right because i feel so like

078where i live i would be i i'm like as the crow flies closer to mayo but my zone is century so like i could probably walk to me or bike to me if i wanted to and i guess i'm wondering for like some of the youngers because i had written that down too if even if we increased it by like i don't know an eighth of a mile or something like that are we allowed to do that up to two miles or what that would that look like i mean that was a board decision to set those distances back that happened back in 2000 i believe that we it used to be a mile across the board and in 99 2000 we had some pretty significant budget reductions and they before it moved it to

079those boundaries it was painful i mean i think every board member probably had 500 calls so it's it it creates it creates interest from the public well another thing i think you mentioned that was important was you picked up five lincoln kids but the bus costs the same regardless of the number of kids who are on it so if you have to do a route for one kid i don't know maybe you'd be something other than a school bus but you know if there are 30 kids on the bus it doesn't cost any more than if there are 10 kids right you're buying that bus for that so changing the walk boundaries might have an impact so but it doesn't really help if you go from 30 kids on the bus down the line i

080think if i recall right when we we did that we cut nine or ten buses when we expanded those boundaries out we cut nine to ten positions nine it's nine or ten so to make the walking zones smaller would increase our costs i was talking about extending not that i'm necessarily advocating for that but i think if we did that with the problems our tears were in fact we were at two miles for middle school for example when we got it routed we realized we had capacity on the middle school buses because we're paying farm anyway so it paid the board brought that back down to a mile and a half versus the two miles so the way the tiers are balanced right now it's pretty optimal with the what boundaries we have the only

081thing you know if we got creative with district-wide options or did something different we could possibly have different time zones for different parts of the district that we could we could maybe get some more efficiencies there as well then we could look at walk zones and you know have a northwest i don't know if they still have the cluster concept that you know like century and kellogg and two or three elementaries were like a cluster if you could put those together and bust that area in a certain time a tier and yeah there's creative ways to do things but but right now covering 218 square miles for the district-wide kids it's it's with with one site it's really hard to do anything different than what we're doing now am i right yeah and one thing

082that no word the two miles for the high school is as far as we can go out across the statue yeah so in order to make any impact you have to do you have to adjust both the elementary and the middle school time or walk the walking boundary yeah so we'd have to do like half mile for elementary and then the two miles like extend back up to okay and i guess the other part of that i didn't know whether that would be safe enough to do so would would that make sense would there be a financial impact would it be safe enough to do or what are our other options to combine part of the if you look at the elementary boundaries right now if you pushed it out you'd be overlapping boundaries especially

083in the heart the heart of town like we're elton hills and hoover i mean the mile and the quarter boundaries bump into each other so you lose you won't gain a whole lot of efficiency there i have one quick question about um the safety piece i think if a student if a high school student lives less than two miles from the school but they have to in order to walk to school they would have some pretty unsafe territory to navigate then you make exceptions for those very rarely we really don't because back in the day back when john was in my in my office we could levy for hazardous walkers there was levy dollars to do things above and beyond that's how the crossing guard program came to be when and transportation used to be

084its own fund it was fund 3. it was kind of like nutrition services it was his own little silo the the the legislature and their wisdom decided to they were going to fix that formula they've rolled it into the general fund we get a percentage of the of the foundation aid and the the levy authority we had went away at that time so you know if we push the lock zones out for elementary would have to be the conversation are we going to supply crossing guards at some of those locations and and i'll be honest that's another staffing issue we struggle to cover crossing guards on a daily basis so we would just be exacerbating that problem as well mr parallel uh yes um i apologize i'm suffering from that lag again but i'm very

085enthusiastic in terms of our discussion the information categories i think on in many ways speak for themselves and and much of what i had previously considered and had asked questions have already been presented to some degree i am excited though to hear what the research and ultimately of the analysis of that research will will how that will inform us uh because i kind of have been a part of this process for uh well since we three years or so ago went about undertook this effort and i i thought i knew then uh quite a bit but only to discover that i didn't and i wasn't alone i don't think i didn't know as much as i thought i did so for me research should drive the process the concept of surveys and the constructs of

086those surveys will be important we need to hear you know how students will be impacted are impacted same is true with parents i observe my grandchildren my oldest grandchild here will go out and and see or bring his younger sister and she's in preschool and so siblings do play an important role i think it's important for us to understand that some don't have an option they have no control they're placed in that position same is true in terms of working the extracurriculars are optional you know nothing requires our our students to have to participate uh yeah i did when i was in school loved it it wasn't that great but i still loved it and uh but i don't think we should hold or have our extracurricular uh pressures concerns needs on the same level

087of of those which are actual in in my opinion it's important to certainly be aware and and do what we can to accommodate where possible but the extracurricular should not necessarily drive the process it's information i think we should be aware in shaping uh the process where we can as well as i would say uh dwos uh yeah uh that uh it's great to have uh our district-wide options and i've heard parents say in the past over the years well you know don't take our program i'm willing to bring my kids well maybe it's time for us to take them at their word okay uh again not as a punitive measure but as an opportunity uh to more effectively serve the entirety of the community versus simply some within the community and and so i'll

088i'll stop it at this point i appreciate the input that my colleagues are providing because again you have spoken to and addressed many of the concerns i have and so i look forward to the process i'm sure we'll hear later uh in terms of time frames what we should expect when and additional opportunities will be provided to provide input regarding so thank you thank you melissa yeah um i have uh questions that i would like to ask staff and parents on loss of instructional time in their perceptions of that because if i did my math correctly between the current start times and the proposals it's reducing instructional time more and we already did that when at least at some levels i'm sure someone here could throw those times out at me but um whether or

089not we're we're perceiving um that that's going to be detrimental because you know even three minutes a day adds up over the year so both both parents and staff their perceptions are lost instructional time i would like to ask staff for other creative solutions that may address the issues and i'm thinking specifically now that we're post-covered and post extensive distance learning whether or not we couldn't look into making more of our end of the day classes um technology based solutions for the students who are missing um for athletic events more often but i'd like to know if staff have other ideas too that might um completely alleviate the issue of athletes it doesn't help the kids who have afternoon jobs but i want to know specifically how much time some of our students are getting

090dropped off at their buildings before the bell rings and spending periods of time then killing time waiting for class to start because i know that's something that we had talked about several years ago and if we're doing that um for a large number of students then we're not um those students aren't seeing the benefit of later alarm clock times because they're having to wake up earlier to catch transportation and then school doesn't start very quickly for them so i'd like to know how long our kids are waiting at school and how many kids that affects um if we can get a little bit more information about which of our schools have really bad traffic problems right around them like falwell with the saint mary's shifts arriving and how the new times will affect those particularly

091busy or even dangerous areas around specific schools that would be information i'd like to have i i was interested to hear the uh registered rider idea but i'm wondering if there isn't a way for us to tighten that up even farther because i know as a parent when i got that for form i'd like well i don't know you know we might need it later in the year and even though you know we had other transportation most of the days if there isn't a way for us to focus on the efficiency of that um it looks on paper like we have this many students but in actuality we're only transporting this number of students and whether that wouldn't average out for those occasional writers um i remember uh in in our past discussions we looked

092at shortening lunch times is that something that we looked at in this new schedule i think that remains very much on the table for reasons of improving our high school students experience during the school day and culture and things as it plays out it doesn't appear to be a major factor in the start times solution somewhat to my surprise because i thought oh this is going to help if we shorten lunch but it doesn't really do that much for us in terms of start times okay because i had some comments about cafeteria space factors if we did that but i'll skip over that and we can talk about it another time if it comes up some people have mentioned the whole sac thing and getting the high school students who help us staff after school

093i would like to get information from other agencies in rochester that work primarily with child care to find out exactly how bad our child care shortage is right now i know when we were looking at this before a few years ago you know there was sort of just a buzz you know we have a shortage here in rochester but i don't know that we ever quantified that you know to what extent is this really a bad thing and has that changed or is it worse or is it that you know i i i really think that we need to to think about the agencies around us and whether or not they are um able to cope with if our sac spots reduced would we be making an already bad situation worse so i don't think

094that's something we can answer internally i think we need to reach out to other agencies and um i think that's that's the big ones can i add something to wonder things melissa i think you asked to survey the parents and the staff the parents and the staff about their perceptions of loss of instructional time could we actually get the numbers that compare the instructional time under the current times versus what it would be under the proposal well i know that when we used to start at 7 40 this year they went from um seven hours and 27 minutes for their day to seven hours and ten minutes and the new schedule for high school would put them at six hours and 57 minutes for their entire school day so how that's divided up in the

095day divide by eight to figure it out but could we just yeah yeah you know um one of the advantages or maybe disadvantages of going towards the end is all of the good questions are asked by the time it gets to us right so i would like to just take my time to emphasize the importance of the daycare piece i'm glad we're going to research that um especially for our families who have multiple children who attend different levels of school and how that could affect them differently so if there's a high school student that might have to take care of the younger one still understanding that the high school student would be home even later so now the families may have to shift responsibilities to a middle school student or even ask the elementary student

096to step up if they are in an upper elementary fourth or fifth grade something like that so i'm just glad that we're going to take time and dig into that piece because i think that will have a huge impact on a lot of our families um and i would also like to know for every response we receive from a family there's probably two others that we don't receive so just i know that data is important but we also have to keep in mind the people who didn't get the survey were the people who chose not to use their voice too so just to be really careful with how we choose to make our decisions based on a single survey that we've given to families i have you have anything i just had a question jeff

097first of all i want to thank you for reminding me about that boundary adjustment but is my question is is there still a mandate on um how long early or young children can be on a bus there really isn't a time frame that i'm aware of i mean we've tried to set it at an hour but again dwos that live in oronoco they're going to be over that you just can't physically do it and and be as efficient as we try to be i mean you'd have to have maybe five kids on a bus and have a true express route that would go from oronoco right to montessori so our neighborhood kids are probably pretty well within that but our district wise again when the bus a bus leaves century and goes to either up

09863 toward hammond and hits us the subdivision some of those kids are probably on a good solid hour as well again it's it's it's this a small number of students but it impacts those kids as well and that was one of the questions i was going to ask too you've pretty much answered it in terms of what is the earliest that a child would any kid will get picked up especially in elementary school and when's the latest they'll be dropped off we've had parents who elementary school parents who don't like the current time because they're saying their child is walking home in the dark and then when we propose maybe eight o'clock we've heard from people saying my kid will be standing outside in the dark in the morning so and walking to school in

099the dark and watching them um i would say you know given we still have that 20 25 minutes of drive time from the transfer sites to make this happen we'd probably be picking up in the 648 range 640ish would be the earliest pickups for elementary okay and then obviously that light dark thing changes depending when it is a year and whether or not it's daylight savings time which may not be a thing that's well i i think i think it was passed to be permanently like that you know the potential is that it would be a permanent daylight savings type clock so it would get lighter darker during the year okay and then two other questions about that obviously that involve transportation we talked about secondary kids if they start considerably later could they have

100extracurricular activities in the morning and and then it's sort of the same thing about well let's start with this one so if they don't have a ride they don't get to do extracurricular then so it's it's an equity issue it's only those kids who have their own transportation can get to school before the buses would have gotten them there sort of the same thing about district-wide option if we ask families then i think we should just to find out if your child is in a district-wide option school do you have the capability of transporting that child yourself there again if you can't provide transportation are we saying well then your child can't go to a district-wide option school and then the last thing and this has been raised before to survey students about will a

101later end time in your high school affect your ability to work after school we have a lot of kids who have after school jobs some of them just for some extra spending money some of them because they're helping support their families and their family desperately needs that income so i'd like a question for students about that too amy just following up on the equity comment too i'm wondering about after school activity buses that we run after after school and whether pushing later with high school would affect the availability of those after-school buses that make those after school activities at middle school it would be really late i would i would what do you think i'd say 5 30 quarter to six would be the earlier yeah it'd be easy to do because there's no conflict

102after elementary as we presently have so we could have as many as you wanted and there'd probably be a few if we if you adopt these new times they're probably a few buses empty by five o'clock so they could reset those six buses that serve the middle schools right now could well probably be eight next year with the forest middle school and so it's feasible that we could still have a two-hour program after school and then at middle school in i mean the other question i had was on the impact on our early childhood busing of do you um anticipate we have to have that conversation yet with the early childhood told us to see how that's going to fall into play here because that's a big challenge right now today um with with early

103childhood times following what they do we end up banning all the kids either if they're in the morning session we've added them to school or a.m or p.m at the end of the day we van them home that eats up a lot of equipment and and we're really struggling with the staffing that right now and is that because buses aren't available is that why you're using the bandsaw because that time would overlap when we're taking other kids home as well and we have a couple different programs where transportation is required if if designated so one is early childhood special ed and one is school readiness plus the other programs we're not required to provide transportation for early childhood so many times families could participate if they had it but if we don't have the equipment

104available or drivers then same issue that you were talking about earlier that's a bigger issue than just this question i think this looks back to what dr garcia said um earlier is i think she laid out the balance that we're going to eventually have to have in our conversation but um and it may be premature but we've already established that without a large infusion of additional funds into transportation we cannot have our schools start at the same time but were we to consider that sometime in the future and i would think the only way we'd be able to get that additional funding would be as part of a referendum how would we if we make a decision about next year or the year after what kind of information can we give to the community about

105what it would take to go through a decision process and cost out what it would what we what kind of resources we would have to put our start times exactly where we want them and not be constrained by the the finances or the bus drivers that we don't have well we need to have the money to pay the bus driver and i know that's farther down the road but i i think in the feedback that we've gotten throughout this whole process the frustration of the community is well why can't we and we keep saying because we don't have the funds i think at some point we're going to have to tell the community this is what it would take to actually get to that point that was one of my questions because i feel like

106we can ask all of these questions like you know sleep sleep and learning development brain development all those things and even if we have the answers that we want it may not fit our budget and so one of the questions i have um is if money and staffing wasn't an issue how would you design our routes and how many would we need like what staffing would we need if we did like perfect case scenario versus where we actually are are capable of being like how do we enter ourselves future thinking into that space and is that like do you have that number in mind already like we need 12 routes and like 50 bus drivers or whatever and where are we in comparison to that how do we get there you know what i mean

107[Music] or if we did hybrid like we talked with rpt before you know because when we when we did a single tier study two three years ago it was it was five and a half million just just for the the public transit side and you know things have gotten more expensive since then so that's probably creeping up on six million or more what if it was just yellow the question i had on that is that how much does our middle high school what what does that cost us now versus what the city might have been able to provide what's the difference and you have to keep in mind that was just to cover what's in they can only cover certain services city limits so we would still need yellow to do elementary and anything outside

108the city limits so i don't think it was a big reduction in the number of routes because we still need all the buses we have right now to service the elementary kids the question was trying to fit the middle middle and high school kids on that didn't that wouldn't have the city bus and part of the challenge is you know you look where the schools are dotted a single start time you're still going to have to have a little bit of stagger to make that work 10 15 minutes here and there or you drop early and go to the next school or whatever so it it the logistics come into play too and that's a big piece and that that would take a a lot of time and some dedicated study i think to make

109that work and i think that's where the clarity for our community where he's got money up to this point in the process as we started talking about the city and i'm gonna ask the superintendent to give out any update he might have about the status of that um and then when when that was cost prohibitive then we started talking about other options but i think for that future thinking we need to separate what we need to put up whatever the options are on the table and be very clear about where the cost of each of the actions are whether we go at all alone using just the yellow buses or whether we have a partnership with city and and make it clear what time frame we could potentially be talking about it with the community

110because i see it in all the communications that we're getting from our parents is we they don't understand why we can't take a vote and make it so in the famous words of catholic and let's just make it simple we used all yellow and i'm not saying what happened let's just say it's double okay if we did that i would still have to paid bus drivers to up to our minimum and almost every route would be a two-hour minimum and a lot of them would be losing probably two three hours a day am i creating more of a problem that and more of a part-time job that people don't want to come in and do are they gonna look elsewhere because they're everywhere right now are we creating more of a problem then i may

111need instead of let's say i have 120 gallon pm routes that go to 240. would i keep the 120 or would i go backwards some because other people need those hours to survive i'm just yeah i feel like i mean just so we need to know the complexity because we also have a number of students in the district who are incredibly incredible climate activists so of course they wouldn't want all yellow non-clean buses right they would want some variation of things and so if the students and other other like transportation experts which i am not can tell us this is the most clean and efficient way of running routes for schools if we utilize that model and you had everything that you needed how would you design it based on what we're asking for and

112what would that picture perfect version be like so that we can parallel to the process right now because i think we're recognizing like we're going to get all this information that we want and it will confirm the things that we think and we're still not going to be able to vote for that option but then how can we tell our community like and we are moving in this direction though so it may not be available to us until 2050 or whatever but we are choosing to look that far ahead because we believe in this district we want your grandkids or like whoever to be benefiting from this so it may not help us right now but it will help us in the future and if it's cost effective then hopefully if john hasn't retired by

113then we will you know we've killed multiple birds with one stone i do think it's important to know this exciting conversation but um minnesota's transportation funding formula unlike special ed and ell is not generally underfunded it actually is relatively adequate to run a solid transportation program and if anyone in the legislature is listening don't let me think that means we wouldn't appreciate more but it would be highly unusual to use referendum dollars or general fund dollars to fund extensive transportation programming so while i love the discussion of what is the system rochester needs i think it's more likely that we get there from redrawing the map which i say reluctantly given that we've just finished these boundary changes to balance the portfolio of schools across the city and dealing with our district-wide options schools which

114are the log-jam in the system and i don't want anyone out there in one of our wonderful district-wide options schools to think that means that there's a target aimed at them but there are creative options that we can look at that are more regional than attendance area or city-wide right now we really have two you're very constrained in your neighborhood or you're everywhere and all the money is putting that bus on the street 65 000 bucks it's not that much money to keep them going in multiple tiers but you can't do it if they have to drive this wonderful gigantic city because we have this very large catchment area and so the idea of regions in rochester is i think the more practical way to getting what i think directors nathan and garcia are appropriately

115calling on us to think about which is the optimal system for kids so never say never about a risk referendum for transportation but if anyone's out there watching i want to be clear that that would be unlikely and i'd rather see that going for education enrichment and things because our transportation formula isn't inadequate to run a good transportation system it's not adequate to run a cadillac transportation system where everybody gets what they need in the strategic plan there's a provision that u.s board members will have the opportunity to review and vote on starting in may and june that actually doesn't say transportation but it talks about getting the portfolio of schools right in rochester and really think about our family needs and geography and that certainly requires thinking about how you get kids to that

116portfolio of schools and so i think it is taking us in this direction of what is the system that's really going to meet kids needs as you all know when the board gave us our charge to cost out what new start times might be you i think appropriately constrained what we're looking at right now to one possible alternative because of the amount of time the bandwidth and all the deep work that would have to happen to get to this very exciting vision and i definitely committed uh just not to have john need to retire before we can get there because i'm i'm with you that's where we need to head and it'll all be about hard decisions um but good decisions you know to think about what that what that chess board i don't play

117chess but that's the right mental model for me of schools in the city could look like in the meantime we're trying to respond in a very rapid time frame to this feedback we've gotten from from a subset of our families that we all cared deeply about our youngest learners while balancing these amazing opportunities we want our older kids to have so this is the near term and i think you've just articulated a lot of where we want to go in the longer term but i did want to inject a note of realism about a further expansion of transportation costs as opposed to the many other things we'd like to use referendum dollars for or other are general fund and i appreciate i could say great minds think alike but uh but no i was wondering

118where the strategic plan would uh come into play in terms of our discussion um because some of our elements have been and i'm going to use the term reimagining education our system and so i again will will say the intent for me in terms of the study session was adequate to allow us to hone in in into these nine areas and if you consider the other and weigh that against the information research that has already occurred uh and uh incorporate into that uh the implicating from the public and uh so in terms of the next steps can we if it's not uh being presumptuous on my part to inquire as to what the next steps are if it relates to this could we maybe hear uh you'd suggest that uh the surveys roll out next

119week if uh dr barlow if we find out we think by friday um the total cost of what an 8 a.m start time for elementaries would incur and i think the direction i got from you months ago was if it is prohibitive if it is a seven figure increase that is not something we would consider for next year now that doesn't mean we can't look at a tweak i've been we've been talking hard about a ten minute shift or something but that i think the direction i got from the board was that if considering the deficit and other things if that shift would be a very significant increase in cost we would not be considering it if it's relatively cost neutral then as you suggest director barlow next week we would do two things one

120we would work to get you some answers from our activities directors from early childhood providers from the things that you've named here some of those are not survey questions they're questions from the experts and then we would go out with a survey for parents students and staff that would ask them for their feedback on the subset of these questions you raised that are questions where their opinions are the ones that really matter and others we need to get the experts to weigh in on and then we'll schedule a discussion in may and june where we would reconvene to share the feedback that we would get from for you are there any barriers to doing something with the district wide options like if you live in our core city area we'll transport you but if you

121live outside that we can't all of those are absolute possibilities so there's no legal like when we have to but the bus outside of the two miles would we be violating that rule if we said something like that if we chose to bust longer than two miles no we we wouldn't be bus we would not offer busing outside of uh like if we do a reason area you could you could you could offer we had schools in st paul where we provide we have one we had no business she said it's only walking i mean you couldn't theoretically do that if but you can't for some kids give them a bus and then for others not but you could constrain where where you wanted to be i guess would i worry violating the statute that

122says you have to buy you have to opt for bussing outside of the two mile radius if i get that right that if we told some if you want to go the district wide you wouldn't have a bus to ride i thought that was a thing what you're saying i thought that was that's what i'm asking yeah does it change for choice options as opposed to a neighborhood that's what we don't know right no that's a district provision we we would determine that we're determining the city-wide nature of a district-wide option we absolutely could regionalize a district-wide option to say you have half the city um because we're defining that as their attendance here the critical legal test is that we're not differentiating among kids with different options right but we could draw that we

123do have to adhere to the two miles for you know uh state statute with the amount of walking distance but we could draw lines in the map of the city where it makes sense as long as we transport kids equitably within those lines and i guess for our next study whatever we're gonna i would like to know how many kids at the district-wide options live outside of a certain boundary you know we like we talk about are we going up there just for five kids and it cost us 60 grand just to do that i would like to know that information um and i just want to touch on oh the other question is that closing freidel does that alleviate some of that concern uh because that is a district-wide and we won't be getting

124kids they're going back to their neighborhood schools so we won't be getting kids to drive them all over the city great example it's going to help a lot can you quantify how much together i can use the buses better elsewhere rather than running all the way across town from jam to friday all i can use a much better rather than three buses going from all the high schools to that i only have to have one right now going to willow and then alc that brought the number of buses needed based on the redistricting that helped keep that number at five it could have been much higher we were doing back at the envelope math this morning we said like 125 000 maybe savings from not having anybody else just in transportation i i think there

125were how many direct droughts did we have we got rid of quite a few in the last couple years just to save drivers there was i think three or four yeah but i think we run nine buses out of there at the end of the day so more you know nine nine what nine or ten i think i can't remember and i just have a couple other random things to touch on just to make sure that they're captured in the discussion that um one of the feedback from a family was that there was no space at their sac program i'm hoping we can take a look at that and i hadn't encountered that that was a thing that's a staffing issue um so if there's things we can do to look at that you know

126moving stuff around or if we can survey to see how many people are going to need sac at a particular school i would want to know if we have significant if there's certain schools that have significant issues with that um to see if we can work through that the other thing i just want to mention is that particularly with our younger students we think about extracurricular activities mainly for high school students but the younger kids are involved in you know dance and youth sports programs that may or may not be fitting with our schedule that i worry about that impact on families as well that they're not school-based but there's a lot of little kids that are participating in those things and have that in their lives and it's enriching like it is for older

127kids but the schedules might not fit because we don't have control over when those organizations are doing their things i think some of those organizations may simply have to adjust their times and expectations if they want to keep the same number of kids in their program and what i worry about is the families are feeling that pressure because that hasn't happened and that if we can communicate this to the community to those organizations this is how the schedule's going to be this is giving you notice that you may want to adjust right i would i'd say the communication would be key because what will probably happen is that if we don't make clear to other i guess places that service kids and whatever they're doing that they won't necessarily know to to change until pressure

128happens where like i work here like outpatient therapy and i knew to say oh we shifted our start times for kids how about we have like our school-based people knew that but like our regular outpatient providers maybe didn't understand so i said we could we could potentially shift up or back to accommodate those students recognizing like the littles are going to have a huge gap between the time they wake up and the time they have to get on the bus for school like might we then offer telehealth services for the people who are doing that but if but that's because i knew this was happening if a dance studio or you know music instructor private music instructor don't know those things unless we offer that information they're not going to be able to shift and

129adjust and alleviate that tension for our family so i feel like that absolutely would be a must so not just direct students but like other other organizations that are helping our kids and working with our kids in other ways so um mr upfront mentioned that we may not hear from everybody that we want to are we having any targeted outreach to our families we might have language issues not with the time frame we have left i can't i would i would understand that might be reason for the board to defer a decision but given the amount of time we have between the end of the school year right now there's not a plan to do that and get it done in a timely fashion for the board to consider it yet before the end of

130the school year and i regret that will the web form have though that our standard language where we list in multiple languages if you need help completing this form you can contact defense of my language i had a related question on timing and i think i kind of inhaled quickly when someone said june as a possible decision point if we i've just been scheduling on my paper here if we have tended ten days to two weeks of response time that would close april 29th or so the only business meeting in may is may 3rd we could potentially close it a couple days before then analyze and have it to you by the third but we wouldn't you wouldn't have a week to look at it because the survey would still be open otherwise we're probably

131talking june 7th unless you would create a an opportunity before then like at your 17th study session this is it's concerning with all the other dominoes that are going to fall to wait till june to make the decision maybe that's a really important point and you know we we really couldn't have this meeting until we found out what the cost was going to be for next year i absolutely agree with you that everybody involved in education and every family who has children in education they need to know and they need to know sooner rather than later i'm thinking june is my opinion is too late i think maybe may may be too late families are planning now for next fall so um i guess you know we'll we'll get the feedback on the work that's

132being done right now i think we've raised important questions here but our next question our next decision i think has to be whether we can go ahead with a change for next year that's what it seems to be the people the community and others want or if this is a decision that is dr paquel said maybe we can tweak a little bit for next year 10-15 minutes and then wait until the following school year to do any kind of major changes so the next time this would come up at the board meeting would be may 3rd with the cost of data and the results hopefully the robust results of the survey depending upon response rates and i mean again this is not how i would normally choose to run a process like that so i'm

133going to be qualified in that but yes we would i would imagine as happened with our budget survey we would get a lot of responses quickly but we'd want to make sure that we got a sufficiently robust sample of the district second seconding will's concern about representing representatives i bet we'd get a lot of responses quickly and so yes may 3rd that would be the best case scenario and just to remind everybody and also clarify for the public the reason our main schedule is a little different we have a meeting scheduled on the third a study session on the 17th then ordinarily we would have a meeting on may 24th but we cannot have a meeting that night because it's a primary election night so the only thing for us to consider would be whether

134we should add a meeting on may 10 where we currently don't have a meeting schedule which is something we can't decide tonight obviously that's something we can certainly put in the discussion around it's really tight may 3rd so i think what we need to do is cathy and i and others obviously will be in contact with dr pikel with amy and with others in terms of the timing and determine if it makes sense to add a board meeting to get a sense about what kind of response the survey is getting how quickly it can get out and the kind of response it's getting and again i'm trying to reiterate why are we in this situation we're still waiting for the cost projection of this change so none of us are reluctant to do the analysis

135engage the community we are have just this week finished drawing the routes thank you for all that work that it took to redraw the routes in the entire city and now we are looking at what the cost of the 8 a.m start time would be and so as we have that we would have the ability to make a decision about the appropriateness going forward absent that just for anybody who's wondering it would be like coming out to the community talking about all the complex things we're talking about tonight and saying we don't know how much it would cost in which case they would reasonably say well why are you asking me if you can't tell me what this would cost and so that is the the thing that is delaying this process i think to

136all of our frustration but unavoidably so in fact the work that has happened to even get to this point this quickly in the year has frankly been heroic and we've used extra funding to get this analysis done as quickly as we've gotten it done because otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion at this point if the start times issue was not on the table for for the board right now we would definitely be figuring this out this summer and i might add the routes for next year aren't 100 yeah i mean me and my assistant manager we basically do all the routes in the district we know the district very well but we have to we've got to go through every single route again to make sure that they can do the tears that we're

137asking them to do so it's and if we flip and we go to the june time frame you're talking about you're talking about a heroic effort you might just push me into retirement if we get it in june it's going to be a challenge to get it done because you like to mail out everyone by the first or second week in august i know we're in a study session and i know dr marvin you're trying to move us forward it does remain and it's something that i talked with board members about it does remain an option to direct us to look for the meaningful but still relatively modest adjustment of probably 10 minutes uh probably mostly moving elementaries up 10 minutes which doesn't fix the early morning issue but does help with some of the

138issues we've heard about with families of our youngest learners and staff getting to their second jobs of which many of them have one for the fall of 23 at fallout 22 and deferring the larger redesign to the fall of 23. that does remain very much an option it doesn't address the concerns that i know all of us heard very loudly and clearly from some of our uh elementary teachers in particular parents as well but i hope the fact that we're here that we're putting in all this effort shows that we take them very very seriously and not acting on them for next fall doesn't mean it's a dead issue forever i don't want to sound that i think that's a board decision about moving that forward i think there's merit in considering that option but

139there's pros and cons it and if there is nothing else it is 701 and we are adjourned is