RPS School Board Meeting - 3/22/22

001order at 5 32 p.m tuesday march 22 2022 in room 137 of the edison building interested members of the public are welcome and encouraged to view this meeting remotely at youtube.com isd 535 where the live stream video may be found this board acknowledges this site and all rps sites are situated on the ancestral land of the dakota people and we honor the dakota nations and the sacred land of all indigenous peoples present at this meeting our school board members superintendent kent pacquel a non-voting ex-official member and assistant board school board clerk ms michelle severson ms severson will you please call the role thank you director amundsen here clerk barlow director garcia here treasurer mclaughlin here cheer marvin here vice chair nathan here and director workmen here thank you thank you at this time we offer

002the opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Music] item 2.01 approval of the agenda are there any changes to the agenda move approval second it's been moved and seconded all those voting to approve say aye agenda is approved 3.0 comments to the board as you know although providing time for community members to directly address the board at meetings is not required this board believes it's important each speaker will have three minutes and we ask you to respect this limit so others may have their opportunity to speak when your name is called please have a seat at the table here in front of a microphone state your name and whether you are

003a resident of the school district we have two speakers sign up to speak tonight and the first one is ms lori bransford spransford 0.01 student musicians and students as you get in place over this way i would like to introduce students from mayo high school they are a ukulele choir band ensemble thank you under the able direction of miss katie quisley and i will leave it to you students hold me close and hold me fast this magic [Music] and though i close my eyes i [Music] a world where roses [Music] bloom and when you speak angels sing from above everyday words seem to turn into love songs give your heart and soul to me and life will always [Music] are we going to get an encore at some point no they're free to go thank

004you so much that was lovely or as we say in italian that was lovely i know ragu i guess that's and our focus area tonight is music so that was really appropriate thank you uh 4.02 continuing the celebration we have the minnesota elementary schools principals southeast division leadership award dr pikel uh dr marvin board members it's my pleasure to ask uh our executive director of elementary and secondary um education jackie peterson to come up and do the honors of introducing one of our very fine leaders who's recently been recognized as such by his peers evening school board it is really my pleasure to share tonight the wonderful news about mr grillier and his recognition as the southeast minnesota principal of the year did i get that right close close i didn't write that down i

005wrote all kinds of things down about you but jared jared's been with the district for how many years jared 21 21 and as a teacher an implementation associate as an assistant principal a principal a collaborator like no other with his colleagues and just an amazing instructional leader every time i go out to visit with jared i think our meetings go along because we have a lot to talk about and i end up more energized when i leave in talking with jared about his ideas and i know your colleagues really appreciate the leadership that you've demonstrated within your group jared has been the convener of the elementary principal group on a bi-weekly basis now but for a while weekly as a as we we're going through the pandemic and that collaboration is going stronger than ever

006jared never says no i don't want you guys to ask him to do any more than i've already asked him to do but if there's something that needs to be done jared is our guy and so this is such a well-deserved award i'm in addition to that i have to say he's the father to two wonderful children theo and eleanor and so all of that wrapped into one wonderful package so we congratulate you jared for this achievement and thank you for all you do in the district thank you jackie [Music] [Applause] and mr barlow would like to offer a few words uh yes and i have the opportunity to to meet jared's probably a good 10 years or so ago as a pastor at one of our local hospitals and was during the time of

007when a student was in declining health and i wasn't on the board then i didn't know jared from adam and yet i was told that's the principle and what i observed then was a caring serving what can i do to help the family he was there uh perhaps before it was known to the rest of the educational community the importance of principals being engaged in community jared was already doing it so i'm not surprised to hear that you received this recognition and i'm thankful to have seen you grow and and one day not within the next decade you may one day be here [Laughter] thank you congratulations don't go too far we need you for the next item actually oh yeah this is an exciting one wherever you want to go yeah i'm just going

008to pull this up for you though awesome all right our um next item is exciting well they're all exciting but this one 4.03 overland elementary school mascot reveals madam chair and directors of the board and community we have the exciting opportunity to be opening schools in rochester next fall that is not something a lot of school districts across the state have the opportunity to do and jarrod who we just heard recognized will be leading one of them and of course when you start a new school there are many many many things that have to be put in place um and one of the most fun for students is the mascot and so we now have got uh hopefully yes uh the reveal and we see our executive director of communications marketing technology uh heather nestle

009who's nestler who's been key to this effort as well um to share the exciting conclusion of some input we got from uh our students and so here it is perfect all right there is no issue with the powerpoint over here we're all good we got it right well thank you very much and i'm excited to be here you know as i'm transitioning from my role at principal of harry bishop elementary into the role of principal at overland elementary we've gone through our process and we've landed on our mascot so we will share that with you tonight a little bit just kind of about how we got here we reached out to our neighborhood to our students to our families as well as to the rochester community to accept suggestions for mascot names as we were

010looking at the mascot for overland elementary school and then we kind of went through a process of narrowing those down we landed on the top three names and we will share those tonight so with our submission process we had 40 names or over 40 names that were submitted as potential mascots for overland elementary school we used a team to help narrow those down we had 13 students that were currently at the building that are in fourth and fifth grade to help us narrow those down we had six members of the diversity equity and inclusion team and one member of the rochester public schools communication marketing and technology team alex um joined us for that i observed but i was not voting um at that time as well so we took those 40 names we narrowed

011it down to the top three and our top three names were the overland dragons the overland owls and the overland wolves we then put those back out to our neighborhood as well as to the community to vote and tonight we are here to officially reveal that our overland mascot will be the overland owls so [Music] so once we pick the name then then heather's team does kind of all the fun stuff as well so we also have logos and colors and all those things that i'll share with you tonight as well maybe so we have landed on our school colors will be navy blue century silver and you may know that overland has a copper feel on the outside as well so a copper orange to that as well and just a huge shout out

012again to the communications marketing technology department for all their work on the colors on the logos alex mundy is a member of that team and she was very instrumental in all of this work we have a mascot and our mascot's name is oakley and oakley is a primarily a gender-neutral name of english origin that means from the oak tree field if you've been around overland you may see owls flying around there as well you can see those school colors of silver navy and orange on there as well and then just a few other renderings this is kind of what it'll look like on top of some of our stationary and things that go out and this might be more of a logo on a t-shirt or something else as well so that is oakley we

013are the officially the overland elementary owls and that's what we'll look like next year so well thank you jared and i think i speak on behalf of the entire board to say it was really a wise choice i know it's just i somebody had to say it some people could say it's also a hoot you know you're stuck [Laughter] okay 4.04 board member committee updates board members are on a variety of different committees and they do work throughout the of the month we have a few minutes now for reports from any committees um first if our student school board representative is here elena lowe are you here maybe wait and and come back other reports yes the legislative committee has been busy um the last six months but more importantly now while the legislature is

014in session um i believe you all received an email from us encouraging you to make appointments with one or more legislators on thursday you still have time to do that um i have one that has already been set up for two o'clock in the afternoon so if you would like to join me on that call uh you're welcome to just let me know thank you other reports uh oh i'm sorry it's not a committee report committee report is it a report i believe so all right uh and i was gonna should we be making it isn't part of the agenda but our sro effort though maybe can be part of your committee work and then we're gonna be hearing from sure others as well so that's karen did you want to sure um i think

015we're calling ourselves a task force perhaps it's related to the school resource officers uh dr garcia mr barlow and i met last week and we have a we made good progress discussing the issue what we want to see in a revised contract and have made good progress in getting that started so i think our discussion was good um and stay tuned for more and we will be meeting with the district team that has been organized to assist us with this and we have some meetings scheduled for that as well so we are on track to uh get something back to the board soon else right well if if we see elena come in i'm going to take the prerogative to bring her up to do a brief report from student school board we will move

016on then to the consent agenda any item to be removed for separate consider consideration move approval right here it's been moved and seconded um all in favor say aye aye opposed agenda is approved and we have some retirements madam chair and directors of the board from our among our teaching ranks we have christine mary brown who's been a grade 4 teacher at gibbs elementary school we're retiring in on june 6th who's been with the district for 27 years dan devine who's been a science teacher at mayo high school retirement effective again at the end of this school year has been with us for 30 years tracy mcguire who's been a english learner teacher at bishop elementary who will be retiring actually march 25th of this year has been with us for 28 years donald cutone

017english teacher at rochester area learning center who's retiring at the end of this school year kimberly reed has been a fifth grade teacher at gibbs elementary school uh retiring at the end of june has been with us for 24 years among our paraprofessionals um we have alice sinis retiring he's been a bilingual bilingual spell specialist here at the edison building uh retirement effective at the end of may uh but we'll be continuing to work with us as a bilingual specialist uh somewhat reduced hours um and then participating in a phased retirement so we're happy to have alice with us for a while longer um and alvin weisbrod who is a transportation paraprofessional um at the edison building who will be retiring um in march i actually want to say i usually practice these names before

018these tonight i did not have the bandwidth to do that and so if i didn't quite get any of them right being pretty new here i haven't gotten a chance to meet everyone but hopefully i came close and we thank you for your incredible service to the students of rochester over in many cases decades absolutely thank you dr raquel we will move on to our focus topic then 6.01 arts overview dr pikel dr marvin and directors of the board as you know the beginning of this school year we began a journey through some of the academic content areas that we focus on in rochester public schools we began with language arts we moved into mathematics we looked at science we looked at social studies and we looked at foreign languages world languages and tonight we

019are concluding this round of digging deep into the content areas that we are helping kids uh master in our work with the arts and so we'll come back to other content areas in the future but for now this includes our tour through uh curriculum and instruction and i want to thank in particular as i ask our executive director of curriculum and instruct instruction brenda richmond to come up i want to thank brenda and heather willman and peter dodds the directors in that department for all the work that they and their teams have done in putting together this series of overviews for the school board the ukuleles that you heard earlier were an example of the really innovative and exciting kinds of arts education that we have underway in our schools we decided that the students

020did not need to wait for this presentation so you got an overview and a sample of the kind of work that we're doing there so brenda thank you again and um here is our finale in the series yeah it's the the grand finale if the arts team wants to come forward we'll pull those tables back too if you don't mind so um chair marvin members of the board superintendent paquel um i don't know that we're sad that this is the last one for a little while um but we really have enjoyed this opportunity to take this dive into not all of our curricular areas but many of them and we will be back gladly whenever you ask us and hopefully you know this is i don't know number seven you know you've heard a lot

021of the same themes alignment to standards prioritized learning equitable grading practice practices student ownership empowering teachers so you know it's the same kind of overarching views in all of our curricular areas so tonight we have another big crew for you with all sorts of exciting things to share all right well good evening everybody um i'm excited to be here for our finale uh uh um before we get started i do want to mention that uh i hear um superintendent pacquel use this phrase often about nerding out i'm very excited about this evening because i am a a fine arts nerd and i'm excited to be up here with this group of amazing people to share a little bit about their work as well so okay um so just quickly a little bit of background the

022academic standards in the arts so they were revised a couple of years ago now so fairly recently um and the goal is to implement the standards by the 23-24 school year and there's been a lot of work within the district already around these standards over the last couple years and then heather do you want to speak at all to the graduation piece sure so graduation requirements in the arts we have both credit requirements um but we also have standards requirements so our students have to have one arts credit and that usually equals 2.5 credits so a full year of an arts experience and so we've kind of assembled a team that's going to help us tell that story tonight hi i'm lorie raymond poinsei i teach orchestra and music explorations at frodell and so i'm

023going to talk about why the arts matter and i'm going to approach this from a music lens just because i could speak to my own experience of what i've seen so we noticed with the pandemic some changes in actually how students operate in the classroom when they came back to school and one thing that we noticed is that when the kids were doing school at home for the first time ever they were super cognizant of their own mistakes so as they were struggling through their learning as they were working they developed a lot of anxiety and really a fixed mindset just because they weren't used to hearing their own mistakes and especially in music that turned into a lot of anxiety and even some kids dropping out the other thing that we noticed is that

024kids became almost hyper independent so they got so used to doing their work on their own time at their own pace and even sometimes well outside of school hours and they came back in the classroom and just really didn't know how to start collectively and learn collectively and so what i've seen in music is as we go through this year i've really watched the kids change from the strange place that they started the year now they're starting to develop those skills and it's really in music at first it was like wow what are we gonna do with this this mess that kids can't play at the same time no matter what and now they're building that that skill back they're building that growth mindset even in the comments that they're making as they approach their

025learning the words out of their mouth have gone from fixed to growth mindset it's coming back and then in music and in other arts one thing that we get to do is that collective learning experience so the kids have to not only learn their own part but they have to overlearn their part enough that they can divert their attention from their own pitch up to what their friends are doing what their peers are doing and not only notice their peers but respond to their peers and so it's that collective mindset that's starting to come back so that's why i think i mean you can't get that in a lot of other classes music is really a place and the art classroom is a place where we can explore those types of learning um so the

026process to date for the elementary work they've been looking at the standards for the last three years and our teachers have come together to do some revision of their curriculum and you'll hear a little bit about that this evening and then also our music team at the elementary adopted a new curriculum last year and you'll get to hear a little bit about that as well and then both the art and music teams we've continued to do ongoing curricular work as we uh look at refining the prioritized learnings and we have both groups working on that this this spring right um and then at the secondary level um the teachers have been working with the new standards over the past three years we were lucky enough to have jen olsen as one of the members of

027that arts team for the state and so she kind of helped us get ahead of the game on that our visual arts teachers have worked together during summer curriculum writing and then they've been revising their curriculum plans as well and then music teachers had some specific training around the create standard from wendy and i think her name is barton we got that wrong from minnesota department of education and then our ukulele course which you heard highlighted tonight was recommended and part of implementation after reviewing our our fine arts areas we wanted to really look at the demographics of our students that were in music courses and so ukulele came out of that so some promising practices that you'll hear about with our spotlights we had a hard time as you can tell deciding on which

028things to spotlight because there's so many great things going on so we'll have michelle talk a little bit about the new music curriculum then we have a student and teacher from the graphic and digital arts pathway which is a huge growing area for us the ukulele class you saw highlighted and then we have two teachers from the unified art course that are going to talk a little bit about that and then finally i think tiffany is going to speak a bit to art as a process not a product and how that works so that's kind of what's coming up i guess we'd ask as you start to share if you wouldn't mind just reintroducing yourself to the board as you start to share that be great okay so we're first going to talk about elementary

029art tiffany um i'm tiffany erie i lost my voice so i'm sorry that sounds bad i'm taking you the art teacher at franklin in montessori at franklin um thank you for having us celebrating you with art month this is the perfect time to be here because you've all heard from me um and it's music in the schools month as well so big deal um so our new standards they used to be very focused on the elements and principles in the in the elementary and now it's much more close focused on the process that the kids are going through instead of the product that they're creating um and then i just listed some of the verbs that you're seeing in the benchmarks because it is a lot higher level thinking it's a lot um a lot

030harder to teach because we're teaching some really big skills within those benchmarks but so the standards are create respond present and connect and then you can just see some of the things that are happening um coming directly from those benchmarks that we get to teach to our young artists and we're still building in the elements and principles but we're trying to kind of pull all of that together through letting them just explore and really understand the tools they're using and using their own ideas and then the present standard with the present standard we're trying as much as we can to showcase our artists throughout the city and our schools and here at edison so you've seen the displays here at edison and now we get to do with the superintendent's office thank you um some

031teachers are displaying at art in the sky in this uh skyways there by the doubletree there were three schools uh franklin kellogg and john adams that participated in the minnesota youth art month show and kellogg had two winning artists uh first place and second place we have a district art show coming up in april which will be at the rochester arts center we're partnering with them and super excited it'll be really incredible um franklin had a virtual art show which again i already bothered all of you with that um and before kovid vanvervalley was also doing a school-wide art show when it was in person and then lincoln's been doing a lot of things with student art they have a big school auction so there's a lot of collaboration with the work that they're doing

032and then community kind of projects with the kids for their school hello my name is maureen quinn and i teach art at mayo high school one of our three art teachers at mayo high school and as we talk about curriculum in the high school um the big benefits for us is one is some consistency within our high schools working together um the other is uh for our students providing a wider view of the arts and as tiffany mentioned those standards have really stretched beyond the tools and techniques that our students are doing and so it gives us a chance for them to we're asking those bigger questions working broader themes and community connections diverse artists and employment related in to the visual arts to help us implement it we've got strong plc's within our buildings

033but also then trying to expand that working across all of our um not only high schools but our elementary as well we're we're pretty fortunate that our our art team is a k-12 pretty strong team we know each other pretty well and it's a big benefit to us let's see um jen olsen has what is not here tonight but worked with the purpose center in helping write not specifically some of these curriculum pieces um with the standards but it gives us a hands-on person that was really in there through all of that process and the purpose center is kind of the i call them the kind of the custodian for the arts in uh the um in mde they they are really that governing part of fine arts and we have worked with the purpose

034center for a number of years and have the benefits of really having a close connection helps us really ask questions of how do we approach some of these pieces and they've come down and worked with us on several different occasions let's see um one thing also we're working with the high school is trying to work with a more common assessment that we can focus on across the district together and then working to reconnect um since covet you know we're rebuilding i have classes where i have students that have had i teach ceramics so i have students that had all virtual learning we bagged up clay and we sent it home i students that had clay or my class virtual and then in person and now all in person so we we've got some classes where

035we have a right very wide range of um abilities so we're working through that but we're getting there we're happy to have the kids in in our buildings and in our rooms and as tiffany mentioned we're just really trying to make those connections out in our community so one is by um displays and and finding places for our work to be visible and um just in other ways connecting to our community and helping our students do that hi my name is lisa becker and i teach graphic and digital arts at john marshall five years ago we weren't doing anything close to what we're doing now students grasped onto digital technology and um and they're doing so in an artistic way too um they'll you know they'll grasp on to these artistic ways of creating when

036they have the opportunity to do that and so through the work that we did with ms willman we were able to research and figure out what we needed and so we ended up getting adobe cc and tanya is here too one of our media arts teachers and that allowed us to do illustration and photography using photoshop and animation and film um which a lot of kids are really really into i was nervous starting off with all these things but as you can probably guess the kids have taught me a lot and we're also utilizing nikon cameras with video capability that are just working beautifully we have a student here from john marshall and i would like you to hear about her interest in the arts and two pieces that you see in front of you

037here hi my name is lily sunsbach and i'm a junior at john marshall and i'm hoping to make arts as like a career for myself in the future and these are both my pieces of artwork up here and i made them both over kobit when i was doing this and i learned to use a lot of the adobe products as well as like other alternative sources that we can use to adapt to things like that and i don't know i just love the i think the bright colors express me and so much and it helped i guess express myself in ways that i couldn't interacting with people during the pandemic and as i said we just students didn't have this opportunity five years ago i do want you to know there is a lot of

038room to grow in this area and as you know technology becomes outdated over time and so i do want you to keep us on your radar but as you know in one of our earlier slides lori said that um you know art helps students get through the pandemic and so with this last one touching on the visual arts i'd like lily to explain how she got through that um so basically i remember in during the i guess beginning of the pandemic sitting in my room and i would do my classes but it kind of felt like a routine or i guess more of a day-to-day process so then i started relying on things i had in my room as in like magazines or hobbies i like to do during the pandemic and i decided to

039paint them all and then with me on my computer doing my homework in my room and then i kind of started this during the week we were online this year the one week and then i decided that i remembered all these like things from the last years so i decided to combine them all into one painting thank you hi i'm tanya oye i am primarily the digital arts teacher at mayo high school but i also co-teach the unified art classes with hannah priest so the unified art was new to us first of all when we were in the pandemic so we had to teach this class virtually it was so much more fun to teach it in person the students had such amazing connections and if you're not familiar with the unified art class is

040all about we are basically a class that brings together the students with special needs and students from our general ed population we are an elective class currently uh and we just all come together as you can see in the pictures on the left we've got friendships that developed and students will see them in the hallways and they're asking for their friends that they saw during class it didn't work out but that first picture actually was a video of students having a dance party in our art class so they were having a wheel time and that was just our day to day it was just one of those classes just made you happy and made you smile and it was a perfect way to start your day on but some of the things that we cover

041and talk about we besides just building the relationships between the students so that they're connecting outside the classroom uh is we do inclusion we did uh chalk messages outside of door six at school uh just to bring awareness to everything that we were doing and these happy things and these students coming together and everybody had a part and everybody was involved uh we did leadership uh lessons where the students got to pick the lesson that and they got up front of the class and they taught it and they worked together they figured out what were everybody's strengths and once they figured out their strengths what was their job in presenting that lesson to the class and helping the class and we just kind of sat back as teachers and let the students take over as

042they did that and they had they just the pride how students i had previously you they were like wallflowers in the classroom and when we had them in this class their personalities just came out i mean one student she never said two words and i had her in this class and she wants to be in the theater and she is just this big personality and still sends me emails of her art that she's making so it's just it's so fun um but yes the teamwork and the pride that they took in the things that they created yeah so to touch base a little bit about how this is a little different for our students with disabilities i work with students with severe to profound disabilities so when we would join an art class like art

043one for example we have amazing students at mayo high school who wanted to build relationships and wanted to help but they also had to get their art projects done they also had to complete the curriculum and earn their grade um so what's great about unified art is that we have the ability to pace it to meet all the students needs to really emphasize the relationships and the inclusion piece so that they're all in this together kind of what tanya talked all about the students don't necessarily have to worry about getting their you know their project done because they're all working together it's so student driven um within our classroom we have many wonderful paraprofessionals but this allows not so much adult drive when it comes to a class but student and student work together no

044matter what your ability levels are um also we really try to educate our general education students as well at the same time so for example tony came up with an activity or a unit on designing your own bedroom and one of the areas transition areas in special education is home living so i co-taught a lesson about housing for students with disabilities once they're done with high school and educated all the students about you know group homes supported apartments things like that so not only did it help tie in with our ieps but also enhance the art piece um and then we also explored some of our therapists came in we had an occupational therapist come in a physical therapist just to teach the students you know all about the careers that you could take if

045you're interested in working with people with differing abilities so it was great on so many different levels it was a wonderful experience and we welcome anyone to come on in and see what we're doing uh superintendent pacquel actually came in and got to see what we were doing and i think he was a little bit impressed with what we had going on in our classroom but we will also be as tiffany had mentioned we'll be showcasing artwork from this class as well as all of the art classes at the art show at the rochester art center um our art show will be april 12 to may 15th and we'll have an open house on april 23rd so you're welcome to join us my name is michelle mogensen and i teach elementary music at sunset terrace

046elementary school and i just i'm here to talk a little bit about our elementary music curriculum implementation it's not really that we chose we have a new curriculum we still have the same curriculum we just have new curriculum materials it took us a couple of years we started with a music articulation team and then we split up into elementary and secondary and then one of the things that came up was that we really needed to replace um the things that we were using they were purchased in 1991 and so it was time for an update we had one member of our group it happened to be me we attended a one day i attended a one day weekend conference in the cities and it was a showcase of new elementary music curriculum materials options there

047were five options presented i ranked them i thought that there were three good ones and then we brought those back and i shared them with the whole group and we kind of picked out realized interactive music which is what we have now we chose it because it has a broad range of music from many cultures and languages the resources include interactive materials authentic recordings especially the pronunciation practice tracks and almost everything is downloadable and printable music textbooks were also included so kids can actually hold the music in their hands and see it up close um one of the what it looks like in practice i made a video but i guess we can't watch it um that we we i can share it with you upon requests yeah for sure send the other video in

048that one like make sure you send them later okay sure okay it's on zoom so i'm not zoom um i'll get it yeah i'm sorry we can't see it but we're not going to send it i can't remember but it's i did it right so um i can it has an example of a maori welcome song called karanga tiara it's from new zealand the kids really liked that and um i also included an animated listening map of our happens to be the sunset terrace composer of the month modest mazorski's valley of the unhatched chicks the kids really like to watch that um what we like about it it's easily accessible to teachers through classlink if you're a traveling teacher which i'm going to be again next year you have to trav you don't have to

049carry stuff from place to place you can just log in on classlink and everything is right there i'll probably still bring my book because i'm old school but it works well with google classroom for dl we were able to share things with the kids through that and then they could turn things into us too the kids really seem to enjoy the songs they always request karanga tear on you can't always do the same one we'll never learn anything new um and then the interactive activities are really engaging what we can enhance we need to keep using it and learning about it i feel like i discover something new all the time just today i did we were part of the purchase was one and a half days of training provided by the company we did

050our first two half days um over zoom with the company and hopefully we can get that third one scheduled next year in person and then we're as a besides our new curriculum materials separate from that we're also working on prioritized learning and curricular work around grading for learning and equity so we have a lot going on in elementary music alright so unfortunately i don't have a pretty slide i was out of the building on friday i did not get to make one in time um but i'm going to talk about secondary music so first of all abandon orchestra we are working hard to recover from distance learning and it was so hard because it's a physical skill and we couldn't be there to provide the usual feedback so really what we saw was our ability

051gap which we usually have a big ability gap between families that can afford private lessons or youth orchestra or things like that and families that can't with the pandemic that ability gap just became massive so actually we've we've partnered with the youth orchestra semio to create summer camps to support students and we keep the cost super super low so that any kid that wants to could participate um and then we we just we did an orchestra last year we'll do band this coming summer and we also worked with them to create two new programs that go year round so we have kids from the public schools that are going and participating in the samuel opportunities and filling that gap a little bit so that's been a great partnership that we've been able to um implement

052over the last two years we're also working really hard on just building back that growth mindset and that stamina for pushing through mistakes which has been a long long push to get that back to where it used to be in music explorations this year we've added online music explorations with rps online so we've been working to expand our offerings within that course to also be able to offer that in the fully online format so a lot of updates just to the curriculum and the process of how we teach music explorations and then finally my third hat adaptive music this has been another great program that has been created within the last few years and that's for students who are in fully setting three um homerooms they spend their entire day in a special at homeroom

053they come as a class of music and so within that adaptive music class we work on just general general skills for operating in a general ed classroom because these students are spending their entire day in a special ed classroom they need an opportunity to develop those class out behaviors so working on just working collectively together doing the same thing at the same time learning how to manage their emotions and push through when they made a struggle so that's been also another class that i absolutely love that we have created and i hope we can continue to maintain that class right so a few broader implications we've tried to kind of pull these out as we've talked about each of the content areas so one thing that we've really tried to do with fine arts is

054really seek student voice and then think about our course offerings and what our students are telling us so you can kind of see that through the graphic design pathway and ukulele so we want to keep doing that with all of our curricular areas we want to embrace pathways that connect us with technological advances as lisa said we have to keep up with technology and that's not always easy but i think it's worth it we want to make sure we continue to review our demographic information and look at who's accessing these opportunities and how can we do better to make sure all of our students are able to participate and then we just want to make sure we keep supporting our teachers with high quality professional development sometimes if you teach a special area you get

055lumped into training for everyone else and so we're trying to do a better job of making sure we differentiate and then support the great leaders that we have in this area so some of the challenges that we want to make sure we speak to in all the content areas of them but in the arts specifically you've seen this one pop up before but collaboration time um amongst our teachers who are all over the district it's harder to collaborate when we're in different buildings and on different sites so ensuring that we think maybe more flexibly about how we can build in um collaboration time because that's critical for for this work the second point is just in terms of particularly at the elementary level but it happens at our other buildings as well as teachers having

056to serve multiple sites um and that's a real challenge right we have some teachers having to serve maybe four schools and typically these are our new teachers in these content areas which is equally as difficult so that's an important piece to keep in mind as we move forward in planning and then the other ones on there they've been spoken to already a little bit but again looking at our demographics and who's participating trying to mitigate those barriers as laurier was mentioning one which and then our unified art is a great example of that as well but um trying ways to make sure all of our students have access um is critical and then exp allowing students to explore more than one instrument and then uh that idea of unfinished learning that that will continue not

057only in the arts but in all of our areas how do we support students and and getting the practice that they need to wrap up that unfinished learning that we've had over the last year and a half all right so some future plans we'll continue to listen to our students and keep planning fine arts programming that reflects their interests we want to continue to offer unified opportunities in fine arts and in other areas as long as our staffing supports that we want to ensure that we have music and art for many cultures we're making some good strides with that with our new curriculum but we know we can continue to do better with that we want to continue to expand that graphic and digital arts pathway and we have great teachers that are going to

058continue to push i think in that direction we want to develop our music exploration class a little bit more at the middle school level just to make sure that we have relevant music relevant selections and purposeful music exploration activities those are students who don't select to be in choir or band or orchestra or one of those areas and so we just want to make sure we're developing that and then lessons that represent all of the standards with the new standards we want to make sure we're looking at the create respond connect and perform is that right did i get them okay good present and then continue to support common assessments so that we know that we have a good sense of where our students are are showing us a growth and where where their strengths

059are so we will open it up to you guys for questions board members they did not ask for volunteers to sing just questions ms nathan well i appreciate all of this um my two sons had an amazing elementary art visual arts experience and music band experience in high school and continued in college so i appreciate the foundation that our arts program gives our kids um talking about the barriers i'm really appreciative uh not surprisingly of your awareness but are are there any models that we're seeing maybe from other communities that have partnered with community partners especially on the financial barrier because that that transition to sixth grade and choosing whether to do an instrument or and starting to invest in that sometimes that's the cut off right if you don't if you don't do it

060at that point it's really hard to catch up later so other than allocating more funds i know we have instruments that we loan you know to students but is it a monetary issue is it an awareness issue is it you know what what what can we maybe draw from the community to maybe help some of those barriers i can i can kind of start and then lori might have some things to add as well um i know that we do get a lot of donations from community members so each of our our schools will take donations for any of the instruments because that helps i know we're just making some purchases now for dakota um to make sure that we have adequate instruments because we want the students to be able to have especially the

061larger instruments to have one at school and then the their at-home instrument but i think that's an area we need to continue to grow in because we have more need than what we can provide in terms of um of support i know last year and and the previous year we did do some through curriculum instruction we paid for some rental fees for families who are struggling with the rental fees and so we can do that at times but there's definitely more need and more interest than what we can support so i think that's an area for an opportunity yeah i would say that it's financial and it's cultural it's exposure and so a lot of times as you say if a student hasn't been exposed to instrumental music in elementary school if they haven't had

062the experience of going to concerts or if that hasn't been a part of their upbringing it's a bigger hurdle to get them interested and that's one reason that we actually go out and we visit elementary schools and let them put their hands on and try the instruments before they sign up kovid took that away the last two years and you can see in our enrollment it's a direct correlation to our enrollment in some of the maybe things like tuba things that they hadn't seen in the public the enrollment went away down so that's a direct cause and effect impact that we can see um another thing financially part of the barrier is getting the kids into the class a bigger barrier is helping them succeed and make it through their first year and that's that

063that struggle that comes with starting an instrument it's fun for a month it's fun for two months and then you realize it's so much work and supporting them through that work is the harder piece and that's where we really see the the family income is a bigger part of that because paying for the private lessons paying for the outside music groups is really where we see the the disconnect and so we have actually pretty healthy enrollment numbers for sixth grade we lose a lot of them in seventh and eighth grade and we'd really like to see that gap be bridged and so that's why we that's why in the orchestra community we worked with samuel to provide those those summer camps the saturday programming to help support the kids that maybe aren't taking private lessons

064but yeah i agree we could make use of a lot more community members there's a much bigger connection there's a desire to work with them but it falls on the teacher to make that happen and so that's where we could definitely as a district support that piece better go ahead mr problem yeah i appreciate you um as a group acknowledging the existence of the ability gap and speaking to it quite well there i was excited there was linkage i noticed both at the secondary and elementary level you refer to it as pacing it and uh lori i think you [Music] referenced collective mindset and how important that is to [Music] if you will acknowledge the need for students working together and and maybe arts being that mechanism that mechanism rather that can uh bring our

065students and for you as staff i would have really appreciated hearing maybe your testimony of how you know you're able to connect with students through and you've seen the growth and development of them even beyond if you will their musicality if you will but uh seeing them overcome barriers i think our student spoke to that quite well and so i did want to ask this one question though in terms of of the [Music] unified arts class how and i appreciate the fact that all students have opportunity and that we're especially uh creating opportunity for those who often times are overlooked or left out and and so how are you able to ensure that does that stop at elementary the the okay okay thank you and uh then finally um and i tried to i wrote

066a number of notes here and uh i guess my final one then just deals with involvement um you've suggested that um if students don't necessarily see themselves succeeding or seeing other students at me that they may know or who they may ride the bus with participating in certain things and they themselves may opt not to so how are we um what's the outreach aside from you know well you have to graduate with at least one credit or half a credit uh how are we really trying to make more of an appeal and i'm thinking specifically now culturally speaking the ukulele when i saw that i thought well what country does that originate from if you want to believe siri she said portugal uh and um but then i thought well we have students significant student

067populations that come from other uh countries and and there are instruments so i did look at you know some of the instruments somalia as an example what instruments are in use there that maybe if we could even engaging a community partnership with uh this srl smalley rebuild organization or others out there who can maybe uh partner with you and maybe spend a day or two you know offering that or putting it on our district website to attract attention and and we may have another group of students wanting to become involved because they didn't realize oh it's for us as well because many of our current offerings are i think um common to western cultures and not necessarily as common for non-western culture so just an observation comment i like what you're doing the direction you're

068headed and just as a side note i started uh playing the coronet in seventh grade uh transitioned to the bare tone in 11th grade and then realized that brass instruments weren't for me so went to choir in 12th grade [Music] but it was honors choir thank you mr burlo um ms workman and then dr garcia there's a whole lot i could say we could be here for an hour so we'll try and keep it fairly short first of all i was really glad to see that so many of you have had a very positive experience working with the folks from the purpage center for arts education this has been one of my interests i've been on the board of directors since 2016. so i will carry this message back if that's okay with you that

069you did have a positive experience um you know if it wasn't so great you can shoot me an email about that too um but i was just thinking in terms of how do we how can we integrate the arts cross curriculum um and i think a lot of it like patrick mansella said when he was up here last time it's so much as dependent on the individual teacher to be doing that and i mean we're fortunate to have a lot of very creative people who are sitting at the table here tonight as well um but i remember when i was teaching fourth grade orchestra at falwell a thousand years ago um and i worked with the fourth grade teacher so that when they were teaching fractions i could correlate that with what we were doing

070with um meter signatures time signatures you know three quarter time four four six eight and what does that mean so there's a big correlation between math and music i don't know if we could manage to eke out a a standard in math from music but it's you know it's certainly there um then i think the other thing that's important is how communities been involved more um i know laurie does a lot of work with samuel um and she's been very instrumental in getting some of those opportunities out there for students let's see oh and then purpose center for arts education also had the turnaround arts program at riverside for a few years and if you have not seen one of the other things that came out of that was a giant mural which was a

071community project i know some of the people at this table worked on that so i can see all kinds of opportunities to do that the question is when is the time you know when do we have time to do that what are the barriers um you talk about collaboration people often think about as music as being one huge thing but you know we don't have we only have one not more than a full-time orchestra person in every one of our secondary schools and they are often less than full-time so that collaboration time is very difficult to come by unless you do it on your own so um i'm just really pleased to have you guys up here talking about the importance of the arts mental health issues creativity expression and very importantly the development of

072relationships that you forge with those students is really really meaningful and i think it's one of the most important things we can do so um kudos to all of you for continuing in this work and um i'll stop there thank you yes yes so actually to kind of pick up where director workmen left off i had um i became a psychologist quite by accident and actually my original intent was either to become a conductor a music educator or go be on broadway and i've done none of those things um and the reason i did none of those things is because when i was in high school they were just cutting on mass like arts in schools and i was afraid that i would go to school for four years and come out and not have

073a job and so i decided i would just go to school forever for another 10 or 12 years and hopefully there would be a job for me after that and so i want to i guess kind of pick up on that theme like i was i'm a product of public schools and the arts made school my safe space and so i appreciate because we heard it from a couple of your or at least one of your colleagues um a couple meetings ago um that i really like i hope and sort of like the future version of this meeting that we talk about how that impacts students and like if we were to take those things away what impact that would have because i think that there's also that overlay with a lot of your other

074subjects right you could easily overlay history and music or history in theater or english and theater or math and music and i think a lot of people who don't get to see or experience that just they really just miss the boat on how important this work is and so i want to thank every single one of you um i do have one question but i also wanted to just note lily i really appreciate the art that you've shared and also the outfit that you're wearing was what i would wear in high school 20 years ago so when i saw you i was like wow i think i had that jacket but in purple and i had the 1990s version of those shoes so you're very cool you'll be cool again 20 years from now um

075and the question so praise to all of you thank you for the work that you do i still keep in touch with almost all of my music teachers literally from like kindergarten all the way through high school so i am curious about the assessment piece i guess i was not aware when i was in grade school about whether we were being assessed or not in any formal way other than to like do a test at the end of the year and so i'm wondering like what assessment or battery of assessments you're looking at and or what are you hoping to measure to show like what is that i mean we're working on it or maybe you're developing it yourself yeah i can speak to the elementary piece uh um um so we spent the last

076two months with a smaller music team that wanted to do some work around creating prioritized learnings and music but we started not with the standards we started with the question at your core what do you want your students to walk away with at the end of your time together and what came out of that was some really cool learning targets and that aligned well with the the state the state requirements but one of them was is connect music to the world around us which is an amazing uh prioritized learning target that we want all of our students to experience so the next steps and this would be ongoing work and music will be to do some learning and some collaborating around well what does that look like in kindergarten for our kindergarten students what would

077be feedback i would give them to a kindergartner about how they're connecting or how they could further connect so that's part of the work that's happening right now other oh you guys can can probably add to this but i think at the secondary level you really see a lot of portfolio work in the visual arts so rather than it being just a single day test i think in in both music and visual arts it's there's a lot of formative work and then it's really embedded in the practices that are happening in the classroom and it's a lot more performance assessment um than it would be like any kind of a paper pencil test so portfolio reflection on the portfolio thinking about goals and how are we doing in terms of our own goal setting those

078kinds of things that are more common i think in our fine arts areas and there are lots of things i think we can learn from that for our other content areas i would probably just add in a lot of it has become about the creative process and learning the process of it of how do i get that idea where do i start and then it starts with a little bit of research it starts with a few sketches before you finally get to that final product for example in digital arts when i do a logo design it takes way longer to come up with that final idea than it does to create that final idea and so just learning that process you know every comment i've had from a student i never thought so much work

079would go into a simple logo a simple little shape i had to work that hard for it but that was the biggest takeaway as well as what goes into something that could be very simple for elementary art we've been doing similar to what music and we're going to start again because we got our new standards and we set up proficiency scales with all of the benchmarks and seeing them once every six days which makes about 32 times we actually see them hoping for no snow days or dl or anything else um it was it's a daunting task to try and meet all of that assessing um so we're working with peter on trying to do better with that and um figure out what are our uh yeah prioritize learnings so then it's not such a

080huge task and what we really want them to walk away with but we still have in and we've been we continue to work in our plc's on our proficiency scale what does this look like at each level similar to what they were saying and then to add on to that um when we started working with the purpose center it was maybe 10 years ago and so for i think with the arts it's it was easier for us to step into the standards because it was what we were already doing it was just kind of plugging them into where we need yeah we needed them as far as assessment and and lesson planning so i think among a lot of groups that maybe are looking at those standards and going wow how are we going to

081do this we're like oh we have these we just need to plug it in where it fits for us thank you so much this has been a real treat for us and i hope you look forward to seeing us at the art center and keep sending invitations to the concerts that you're doing and that your students are performing at your schools in the art that you're displaying here and elsewhere thank you so much thank you [Music] next on our agenda is 7.01 school resource officer memorandum of understanding that's the s-r-o-m-o-u implementation group progress dr mikel thank you chair marvin and directors of the board i want to give a chance to have our colleague tawanda burks come on up while i uh say just a few words as the board knows we really have four

082inter-locked efforts underway to think through the future of broadly defined safety in our schools one is director mclaughlin shared with the board a moment ago and dr garcia and director barlow are involved in that is thinking through some changes we are likely to propose to the rochester police department in the contract that we have another is looking at the research on what we know about school resources and alternatives to them yet another is going to be doing a co-design process around safety and belonging broadly defined and in the meantime with all of that we have got an effort underway to really ensure that our current memorandum of understanding with the rochester police department is implemented effectively and as in many initiatives where you're crying not trying not just to cross cross organizations but actually in

083some ways across cultures organizationally between school and law enforcement and other things we decided it would be helpful to have some skilled facilitation and so board members had a chance to meet tawanda previously she has a very important day job in mayo clinic but in addition to pursuing doctoral studies she also does consulting on the side and so she's been facilitating a group that has had a couple of meetings and so this is one of a number of updates that we want to give the board and the community on this effort to ensure that we are implementing the memorandum of understanding that we reached last summer with rochester police department regarding school resource officers effectively and learning from the lessons that are going on so um thank you for all of your work i don't

084know if we're gonna try and bring up the powerpoint are you just gonna kind of uh you're great whatever whatever you prefer and tawanda i i apologize i missed a beat here is sorry is elena low here oh okay i promise to come back to this in case she showed up anyway tawan welcome and you're on thank you this is our standard suspense builder all right thank you so much yeah no problem so i'm swanda berks and my job was phase one uh which was successfully implementation of the sro so we did have a couple readings to date so far and actually our third meeting is scheduled for tomorrow so our very first meeting i would say it's just very high level introduction meaning to get a meet everyone see what their pulse is on

085everything and what they're understanding there's a lot of information dumped at that very first meeting as you can imagine um so i just took a ton of notes at that meeting our second meeting um just to summarize the first meeting i thought that it seemed to be some sort of conflict between the sro role as well as the equity specialist role so i opened up that meeting with just reading the school district's mission statement as well as the rpd mission statement to see where the gaps are and why while they're why there are a lot of challenges so the second meeting concluded with us talking about the administrator as well as the equity specialist deliverables for the mou and the outcomes for that included for the administrators um both equity specialists and sros believe that

086a lot of communication is is very important and really needed in this space they felt that both positions should be included in administrative meetings going forward so that communication can be shared across the board including with parents staff teachers officers and equity specialists in other positions that align within this this framework um concluded with the echoey specialist deliverable there pretty much a lot of discussion about roles and responsibility in that space it sounds like the equity specialist as well as the sro um needs more clarifications on boundaries in a lot of spaces so it was a lot of conversation there as well a lot of notes taken again of course we kind of just try to stay on topic with what the goals are but there's a ton of recommendations that each position position is

087looking at as we move forward there so again our third meeting tomorrow is schedule where we'll talk more about um student services and monthly student beings as well going forward i think overall like i said the the first two meetings i would summarize that as a lot of communication is needed and a communication plan as well as rules and responsibilities for both positions thank you any questions i had a question about the monthly student meetings are you doing that just part as this of this phase or are you trying to implement that moving forward with the sro administrators yeah so my goal is to come up with a plan so that they can implement that so my goal is to understand what the current current environment is like and if they're implementing that successfully if

088there's any challenges barriers or anything like that going forward how can we fix that thank you this was really informational appreciate that thank you uh next is 8.01 strategic action plan uh focus group and survey results this is an information item dr paquel chair marvin and directors of the board i see i see one of our research colleagues who's here and uh a couple may be in transit still from the city oh they're they're okay great there we go perfect timing welcome go right up here that is perfect timing i'll give colleagues a chance to um [Music] as board members are aware and as community members who've been following along are aware we are in the home stretch of the development of a strategic action plan which uh has uh engaged the work of six

089different uh working groups that are comprised of staff parents some students community members looking deeply at the future of our school district in addition to the work of those working groups we've had a number of other complementary efforts to conduct analysis to develop the content of that plan as board members are aware at earlier sessions the board dove into our student outcomes at our world's best workforce session and in a number of other sessions and so we've drawn insight from those conversations and conclusions and tonight we're going to give the board an opportunity to hear data that most of our working groups have also heard that summarizes very important what we might call perception data that comes really from three critical parts of our uh school four parts of our our our stakeholder universe um

090students and parents and staff members and community members and this is a mix of data from qualitative and quantitative purposes and we've had it uh pulled together by some really talented individuals that i'll introduce in just one second as i do that i just want to briefly set the stage by saying in conducting this analysis we chose to lean into the areas for improvement and we did not spend a lot of time digging into our areas of strength now there are areas of strength that emerge here but with limited time in our surveys or in our focus groups we decided to really focus on the areas that previous analysis and conversations and including conversations at this board table had suggested we need we need to dig into and so as we hear this data and

091as we uh continue to work with it while we finish the development of the action plan for board consideration um starting next month um well i'm getting ahead of myself starting in may um i want to highlight the fact that there are many incredible strengths in this district but we're trying right now to really focus on the areas for growth and improvement and so let's think about it in that way the second final point i'd make is whenever we're thinking about perception data whether it's from focus groups or surveys which we're going to be hearing about um we do need to keep two things in mind and i'm sure nicole and anna and peter will will make this point one how representative is it we got some great samples here but not necessarily fully representative

092of all the stakeholders that we seek doesn't mean it's not really really relevant but that we should keep that in mind and then the second is what's the context for it and are there some contextual factors that are influencing the way kids or staff or families may have responded and just to pick one example from the um data that our colleagues from wilder research are going to share with us in in one of the findings they concluded that there were 26 percent of families who said they might be thinking of changing schools and that's a pretty striking finding when you dig a bit more deeply into that you can find that four percent in the survey said it was likely seven percent said it was very likely but 15 said unsure which was included in

093that larger amount and in a school district where all of the boundary changes are changing next year and four new schools are opening and one school is closing to have some folks say unsure could be reflective of that changing system um and so there's a lot to dig into here and to take a look at final point for me whenever you hear data like this at least if you're like me there's a pretty uh immediate desire to say what are we going to do what are we going to do and the thing that i'm excited about in in talking with these three scholars about their findings all of these findings in various ways are addressed in the plan that we'll be bringing this board in may and june and there has been rich work facilitated

094by um anna nicole from wilder research in development of that plan and so this is not one of those instances in which we get the data and then we have to go figure out how we're going to address it you're hearing data that has informed in the development of the proposal that we're going to bring you soon so um dr nicole martin rogers um and anna grenius are from wilder research based in saint paul and peter ruck you know as our director of research assessment and evaluation here in the school district i'm going to turn over to our colleagues from wilder but first i want to thank them for the work that they've done it's great to actually see you in person we've been on virtual forever i also want to thank denise moody who

095has really ably coordinated that work who's here as well and turn it over to our colleagues from wilder first what peter did as part of this process as one of his actually first analytic efforts here in the district was dig into our panorama student survey data so we also have that student voice and so peter will go after that discussion and madam chair i would defer to you as to when whether you want to take questions as we go or save them to the end um but this concludes all you're going to hear from me until i join you in asking some questions well i would defer to you would you prefer questions as they come up or do you want to do your presentations and then take them at the end all right so

096i will leave it up to you too board members if you have a question just raise your hand they're the blast now turn that's great good evening i'm nicole martin rogers thank you for having us here tonight with my colleague ianna granius and we're going to present to you about the surveys and focus groups that we did over the last couple months so talk to you a little bit about the methods that we used and the data sources that were informing this presentation and then we'll present the survey and focus group results and have time at the end for questions since many of you have seen these results already we're kind of presenting it by theme tonight instead of just general results to make sure that the kind of key themes that rose to the

097top are going to hit home for the board and before we get into that i just wanted to point out that wilder research is a non-profit organization we're based in saint paul and we're not your ordinary strategic planner so we're not um strategic planning isn't something that we do as a regular matter of course without a data component and so the reason why i think we were brought in here is because this is a really community engaged data informed strategic planning and that's what we that's where our strength is is engaging community members and compiling data and using data to inform decisions and plans and so that's why we're really excited to have a chance to work on this because you all were also interested in using data to inform your plans and that's great

098to have an opportunity to work in that way um just also wanted to mention that we have worked a little bit in rochester with some of the other organizations in the community including the public library and rochester community foundation and um olmsted public health a couple of other organizations and we're happy to be back again working with you all um so as many of as all of you are aware i assume we facilitated a strategic planning approach that has really allowed for a wide variety of voices gathering input from various perspectives and we've really based the development of the plan off of the work of these committees who have met a total of five times and these were as you know very long um meetings where there was a lot of deep thinking engagement and

099discussion um and so we'll cover some of what was discussed in those meetings today and as we use data to inform many of the initiatives that have been drafted you may kind of see some of those come to light through our data when you look at the strategic plan you'll see these arise in the focused areas that you see identified in the planets so overall it's been an incredibly iterative approach building on the expertise shared by many of you and others within the district students parents other caregivers wide variety of perspectives so you can see this we conducted surveys with parents guardians staff and community members and these are actually really high numbers so we achieved an incredibly high response rate for parents and staff so if you look at parents and guardians it's actually

100a 24 response rate for parents and 59 for staff members so that's over half of all rps staff and the survey wasn't even out in the field that long so it's really an impressive number from our point of view um the highest proportion of parent guardian respondents came from the high school so mayo john marshall century and some of the middle schools kellogg john adams willow creek and gibbs and bamber elementary had the highest proportion of respondents of all elementary schools and all rps schools except for two alternative learning schools are represented by the parent guardian survey data we also conducted 15 focus groups so these are about an hour and a half two hour long conversations with key groups representing your community and in total we talked to 141 people and you can see

101the numbers by type of respondent and we have more information about the demographics of who participated in those groups in the summary report that we provided for you so here you'll see a breakdown by race ethnicity for the parent respondents and community respondents and we've also included the breakdown for the student body as well to precisely kind of examine the representativeness of the surveys that we received and we'll talk about staff next um but i do want to acknowledge that there there are always limitations to survey data and the data we see does represent whatever bias is there depending on who has decided to participate or not and this could be based on race ethnicity or a number of other things for example maybe people who have really strong feelings about some hot button issues

102like coveted protocols or critical race theory might be more likely to respond within the context people who are more invested in rps are also probably more likely to respond and then typically with surveys women are more likely to respond there are some of those kinds of things that we see that are just limitations that we have to acknowledge on the front end [Music] and challenges to get responses from certain populations just may be reflective of a larger systemic issue within the district that hopefully this strategic plan can really dig into and address to get some of that engagement going with families that being said we've got a very large number of respondents and a fairly diverse racial and ethnic representation here and then the next slide is staff respondents and similarly with staff we got

103a huge number of respondents really impressed by that and the data we have shows that eight percent of staff do identify as black indigenous or people of color so they're fairly well represented here among staff and then um the superintendent kind of presented this slide to you and he broke it down just right so i just thought this was a really interesting and meaningful data point to prompt us to ask you know why what what are some of the things that families are unsure about or are making them consider wanting to leave the district or the their school i should say that's what we asked them do they think they're going to change their child's school not leave the district um so again four percent said likely seven percent said very likely and another fifteen

104percent said they're unsure just just to clarify um you're talking about one quarter of the families who responded correct okay i don't want anybody leaving here saying a quarter of the district our parents in the district are planning on leaving but it was just with this small group that you surveyed yep okay and a further point of clarification if i may not leaving the district but changing their child's school yes yes i almost misspoke so the data from the focus groups and surveys point to what we felt were these six key themes that in our opinions should be addressed with the rochester public school strategic plan or in some way by the district and we'll talk about each one of these themes in turn and as a superintendent mentioned it's important to note here that

105we really were focusing in the questions that we asked these different groups about the issues that should be addressed in the strategic plan so therefore that does tend to focus more on gaps and deficits and a little bit less on strengths but it's mostly just because the nature of the questions that we're asking that that's where we're focusing today we did learn a lot about the district's strengths through this process as well and that will also be um you know built on and highlighted in your strategic plan so the first theme is that students academic performance is below expectations and also concerns about academic disparities by race and ethnicity so parents and guardians and community members prioritize students academic performance being below expectations above any other issue that should be addressed by the rochester public

106schools strategic plan you can see here that the green cells i guess they're showing up as kind of like teal on this slide um are where 30 or more respondents said that this was a key issue and there are many more issues than this that we asked about in the survey and you can see the full list of the issues and how they were rated in the report but these are just the ones that were most commonly selected by the different respondent groups so that you can see in addition to student academic performance being below expectations the other issues prioritized by parents and guardians were that the students social emotional learning and skills students mental health and safety and on the other hand staff respondents prioritize staff well-being and staff capacity as the biggest issues

107that needed to be addressed surprisingly to us aside from this one data point there were other issues besides academic performance including school climate and safety a sense of belonging that were most commonly prioritized across the range of survey questions and focus groups that we talked about and so we'll get into those issues and their importance next so the second theme is that staff and students need to feel belonging and connection the proportion of parents and guardians who agree strongly that their child's school is a welcoming place does vary quite a bit by race um here we have combined the agree a lot or a little but it was actually like uh three quarters of asian american parents who um strongly agree compared with 52 percent of black parents that strongly agree that their child school

108is a welcoming place so there are some differences by race ethnicity although overall most parents do agree that their child's school is welcoming when we ask staff how much they feel that they belong in the district 23 percent of black staff and 22 percent of asian staff responded with unfavorable responses which compares to just 11 of white staff so again we're seeing some racial and ethnic disparities for both staff and students in terms of feeling that they belong in the district we're going to show you some quotes from the focus groups that we did and this is one of them from a caregiver in general caregivers expressed concern about movement toward larger schools and how that might affect academic and disciplinary outcomes as well as school climate and some parents and guardians express concern about

109the lack of diversity among staff and the desire for students from non-dominant culture to feel like they belong and for students having a connection to staff was the most important thing with regard to their sense of belonging and connection to the school extracurricular activities were also another thing that the students talk about in terms of playing their uh playing a role in their sense of connectedness back to anna to talk about the next things um so you may recall that we showed you a moment ago the issues prioritized by the survey respondent groups in terms of what rps should focus on and staff as you saw ranked our well-being as their number one priority of issues to be addressed through the strategic plan um from the student perspective mental health resources were talked about as

110being really critical um an alc alc students specifically we spoke with a focus group talked about the wealth of resources in this area at their school and really the value of knowing who to go to for what and students at other schools expressed feeling that students really aren't aware of the resources that are available to them and sometimes simple barriers to access can really cause problems like not being able to get an appointment with a counselor soon enough simple things like that so not that the resources aren't available but that they're not um aware students aren't aware um students also really want privacy in this area and noted a continued kind of pervasive stigma related to mental illness and help seeking and they noted wanting not wanting other students or family to know if and

111when they're accessing mental health resources through their school staff expressed concerns about staff capacity and open positions that are not filled as well as collective efficacy peer support and leadership really wanting more of those things to support their work and many staff expressed feeling disconnected and overburdened and you see this quote kind of notes the burnout that that a lot of staff are feeling lately um so this is our fourth theme concerns about safety discipline and overall school climate and it's the fourth one we're talking about tonight but it just might be the number one priority in terms of issues that rps needs to address with your plan because it came up in so many different ways just like all of the other themes this is interrelated with everything else that's happening and these themes

112or the strategic initiatives that are developed to respond to these issues really can't be viewed in a silo or vacuum so for example it appears that school climate and these related issues are important factors that contribute largely to enrollment decisions among families these are really critical things that families are paying attention to and looking at school climate and discipline issues are also significantly affecting staff well-being and job satisfaction as you saw in some of the survey data in the report discipline disparities and differences in perceptions about how welcoming and safe rps spaces are by by race ethnicity also cannot be ignored and finally many committee members rightfully pointed out our strategic planning committees pointed out that students who are not feeling safe or welcome really won't be able to effectively participate in that academic learning

113either so i'll just show you a bit of data on these topics i just covered here um so note again here that school climate and staff responsiveness are are quite a bit more frequently identified by parents and guardians as a top reason to keep their child in their current school academics you can see is is also up there it's important four out of ten parents said this is a key piece that keeps their child in their school but it's not ranked quite as highly as some of these other things like staff responsiveness and positive school climate and we showed you the data earlier about one out of four parents considering changing their child's school within the calendar year the most common reasons for considering changing schools are bullying safety concerns negative school climate and just

114other students being disruptive in their child's class um also related to school climate and culture caregivers parents and guardians and rps staff expressed concern about incidents of violence and behavior issues and these issues are really perceived to be worse due to something some of the staff shortages staff feel they need more support to be able to effectively address some of these challenges that they're experiencing an rps student's perception of safety was fairly mixed so from the alc students we heard that they felt really safe at their school and they're comfortable there but they did not so much at their previous school within the district and other students at other schools within the district feel relatively safe as long as they're able to stay away from fights which they did talk about occurring in the halls

115but being able to avoid those situations and recent graduates who we spoke to in a focus group kind of interpreted the question a little bit differently and expressed concern about the preparedness of their school to handle emergency incidents like a shooter or intruder parents and guardians were asked if they feel students of all races and backgrounds are treated fairly when being disciplined at rps schools and if you look at favorable and unfavorable responses here you can see that 44 of black respondents disagree that discipline is fair well about 14 to 24 percent of respondents of other races disagree with this statement so you can see a disparity here in perception staff were also asked about how supported they feel in dealing with behavior and discipline issues asian american staff were most likely to report feeling

116very supported similarly across all racial and ethnic groups about 20 to 25 percent of staff feel they are supported either not very much or not at all so that's about one in five one in four staff um and staff and caregivers um parents and guardians expressed concern about the discipline disparities especially for students of color and students receiving special ed services um and they both noted uh training to improve fair handling of discipline issues as a potential suggestion for dealing with this issue but regardless staff want more clarity around improved discipline policies better data practices and more training on school discipline approaches such as restorative practices also students students don't perceive discipline as hand handled fairly at their school with the exception of alc students they seem to feel like it's it's handled really well

117at their school equitably students feel that there are not enough staff overall though um to handle these issues that are coming up more and more like fights and just general class disruption all right theme five a need for better communication more information for families and responsiveness so parents parents and caregivers really seemed hungry for more communication about their child's progress both academic and behavior they'd like more information about bullying more communication about discipline and emergency incidents that happen at their child's school and just in general more transparency not necessarily specifically about their child but school policies discipline policies academic curriculum rating school outcomes data and technology changes or advances advancements um rps staff also would like better communication from the district level building to building between buildings and from leadership and more support for communicating

118with families particularly with families who don't speak english as a first language and our final theme for the evening is a desire for more accountability and transparency so in general families and community members really want more information about how their child's school and how the district as a whole is is doing overall compared to other districts and between schools so as mentioned earlier parents also want just more information in general about grading curriculum discipline policies and how those decisions are being made and why and this final quote just highlights the desire for just more measurement and information about the district that really could be communicated to the community more broadly about how the district and schools and students are doing so i might have missed a few hands for questions and i apologize but um

119that's that is the end of our presentation and we would love to hear from you and follow up questions you have i know there's a lot of information i think we're good i just at one point can we get this slide presentation i think we have all the reports on the data but it'd be nice to have this just as a guide to where to look for other things if we want to go back and look at something that'll be helpful you have it already oh do we okay thank you somebody does oh you may you may not but the district doesn't it's a communication thing right could you describe just for um for folks that aren't as aware of how when you're talking about qualitative data like from a focus group how you decide

120something is a finding and not just something that one person said really persuasively and you have a great quote in there when we see the survey data we can see the percentages and we know that somebody said it the most often or there was a disparity but i think as board and community consider and i as i said at the outset i'm so glad we have qualitative data here um how do you for instance when you have those six themes that was part survey part qualitative you just say a little bit about your your methodology of how we landed on those those big conclusions can i sorry can i ask like an absolute mine was a similar question but it was like a to to what degree like obvious i can look and see 53

121is greater than 50 but at what point for you is it statistically significant in you know across or between groups so it's kind of like a question so with regard to the qualitative data we um highlighted some quotes uh but these quotes are sort of a luster tub of themes that came out so we didn't just pick quotes that we liked you know we did try to pick quotes that were a good example of a theme that we saw that came out multiple times in different discussions we also try to triangulate data so you know when we're hearing something from the committees and we're here and we see something in the survey and we see something coming up in multiple focus groups that's what wrote the level of something being a theme for us so

122it sort of came up in multiple different places we did use um coding you know so we went through the focus group transcripts and sort of identified different places where the themes were coming up so we can um make sure that we're not just picking out random stuff um and then they answer your question about the um what's significant so we called out differences in most cases where there was a 10 percentage point difference between groups we did not do tests of statistical significance because the sample sizes are pretty small for especially for like the staff um non-white groups you know that the ends are so small that it may not reach a point of statistical significance but still be practically significant because there's a pretty major gap so we could do statistical significance testing

123but that's not what we did we just looked at like about a 10 percentage point difference if that makes sense coincidentally i used roughly the same benchmark for my stuff okay that's nathan um i i don't having worked with both of you um as part of the member of the coherence committee one of the working groups and um having reviewed the data beforehand and also having seen how the conversation um took account uh so the groups have seen this data before um and have taken it into account in the drafts of of putting together the strategic plan i don't think we can leave this item without talking about how sobering the data is but i think we've all known a lot of these factors before it is very helpful to have it in such a

124data-rich way to look at it because i think it will help going forward as we evaluate the success and the outcomes from our strategic plan to see if we're making a difference i think the important thing that i don't want us to leave this table without talking about is that having read all of these survey results and the focus group results and seeing the draft of the plan it's going to be in the plan addressing these sobering results and it is the first time since i have been a parent advocate and been on the board that not only do we know the challenges we face but we have on our on the verge of a plan going forward to address them so these results weigh heavily on me but i am somewhat heartened that our

125next conversation that we have is going to be about our plan going forward well and as i was looking over especially the anecdotal information provided it was interesting for me to see what some people are perceiving you know there were some comments for instance about the the district just isn't transparent and i'm thinking my gosh everything that our kids do lesson plans everything it's right there online parents have never had access to as much information about our schools as buildings to individual classrooms as they have right now but they may not know how to access it and in at that point their perception becomes their reality so that was really an important message for us is that if we're thinking we're an open book and if we have it you know about it um but

126if that's not the perception then we have to do better so then also epson may relate to perception the area of if there's a incident of disruption or response of police to a school and the parents are simply made aware that there was a response but no students or staff were in danger or harmed to me that would suggest that may also be that desire to request for more information and but maybe for us it's communicating the why behind the limitation of information that we provide to suggest that there's a lack of transparency would in my mind convey that there's a belief that we're withholding information and the examples which were provided i think could be addressed if we simply openly communicated our policies our limitations what the statutes allow us to share or not

127and then maybe that perception of withholding information would no longer be be there thank you i would actually add to another perhaps addition to that as an assurance that as soon as we can share more we will we invite our colleagues in wilder to stay and dr ruck to go an overview of his and then you certainly can jump in as as peter is having a chance to give us a sense of some data from our students some quantitative data from our students all right so i have a little bit of a different task uh versus my colleagues at weiler this evening and that's to give you an overview of the quantitative student data that we collect through the ongoing panorama surveys so this evening i will be going a little bit over an overview

128of what panorama is what it collects what the topics are and then some general results from sort of a higher level uh the detailed responses the detailed uh data are in your written report that's a part of your uh so there's additional details there in addition all of the visuals that i have on the slides this evening are in that written report so you don't have to worry about trying to copy them down or anything all right so panorama is we often call it the panorama survey but it's actually multiple surveys it's a series of surveys on a variety of topics and it also does go to our instructional staff all of our other employees as well there's a there's an employee component i will only briefly touch on those tonight but there's a lot

129of data in the employee surveys what i will say is the employee data largely complement everything that our folks from wilder have said this evening you'll you'll find pretty similar themes in the quantity of the four basic analysis categories are elementary school students grades three to five secondary school students and then our employees they can be disaggregated by a variety of characteristics demographic factors and so on which you'll see in some of the results coming up we administered roughly 10 000 student surveys the last time this was conducted and roughly 1500 employees completed the surveys they are optional but they're strongly encouraged administration practices do vary a little bit from site to site so there is some site variation and response rates but overall it's very representative when you consider that well over half of

130our employees and our students respond to the surveys those are astronomical response rates it's completed semi-annually and for the most part we do have historical data going back to 2019 not for all the surveys but we do have some trend the data on our panorama survey cover here's my slide a lot of topics um and it's some of it's even pretty disjointed but it covers a lot of the same items that you heard about this evening already including school climate staff and student perceptions of sufficient support some social emotional learning outcomes school safety student perceptions of expectations and finally to large equity and inclusion so results this evening for the panorama student survey are broken into four groups the first one is one that i've called rules and behavior the broad organizing question is something

131along the lines of how do students view the behavior of others impacting their learning how do they view the implementation of rules of their school and do they view these items differently so what you'll see here is the percent of students reporting that rules are fair at their school by race or ethnicity as my colleagues from wilder spoke about earlier this evening there's a perception among parents the rules are not necessarily fairly implemented in schools that's disproportionate by race and ethnicity those same things are borne out in our student results as well and you can see that that disproportionate impact is consistent across age groups as well primary and secondary students the other thing that i thought was particularly interesting about this perception of fairness is it starts early and it endures so the percent

132of students who believe rules are fairly implemented it's only three quarters in third grade and it's still right around 70 by the time you get to 12th grade so the takeaway here is these items this uh these lessons about perceptions of fairness and equity are being learned early and they're being carried through the time that students are with us so earlier this evening one of the uh items that that our wilder folks hit on was school climate and perceptions of school climate part of what's interesting about our student data is our students don't necessarily agree that things got a whole lot worse in the school climate over the last two years despite what the public discourse is they have a little bit of a disconnect between student perceptions of changes in school climate and what

133other stakeholder groups are also reporting as you can see over time it's roughly on par with where it was prior to the pandemic now this particular measure is an average across a variety of survey items that measure school climate so items on this survey include things like asking students whether the energy at school is positive or negative asking about physical space fairness of rules how much the behavior of other students helps or hurts their learning and whether teachers seem excited to teach their classes so moving on to our second big group expectations and help uh how rigorous do students believe their teachers expectations are of them and how much encouragement and support do they receive so on this figure you'll see that it's a percent of students who are confident that if they ask for

134help help will be sought only 57 of students said they were comfortable asking for help from other from adults at their school in the first place and about two-thirds believed that they would receive the help they needed if they asked it is concerning but it's also very actionable because there's a lot of research out there about creating an environment in which students feel more comfortable to engage with some of these things whether it's developmental relationships early on or you know there's all sorts of different research out there about it so it's actually a pretty actionable piece of information that this tells us there's also a noticeable drop and if you look at the panorama data in their in their dashboard system between primary and secondary school so something happens and obviously there are significant structural

135differences between primary and secondary school like there's a lot of different factors that could explain it but there is certainly a decrease in students comfort and belief that they'll receive help when they make the transition to secondary school so there's probably a need for some qualitative data follow-up in that area to get some of what's really the causal mechanism did students believe that their teachers expectations of them changed over the last three years once again you can see there may actually have been a bit of an increase during the pandemic but no real change among what our students are telling us they're telling us teachers have roughly the same expectations that they had before that's their perception um all right so school safety i apologize for the small uh the small prints on that so

136how physically and psychologically safe do students report feeling in their schools so once again this is another one where it's an average it's all the students who responded positively across these survey questions and then they averaged it out so this is items such as frequency of people being disrespectful in school frequency of physical fights the likeliness of the student being bullied um worrying about witnessing violence at school which hits on part of what anna was speaking about a little bit earlier and then difficulty in bullying victims obtaining help and the fairness and treatment from adults now you'll notice if we're using that 10-point threshold and i should explain um absent statistical testing and education research the 10-point threshold is pretty common for evaluating di it's one of many methods um because there's always some variation

137it's a question of whether the variation is systematic and too much right so um that's it's one rule of thumb there's a variety of rule of thumb using the ten point spread you can see that there are absolutely some pretty significant disproportionate impact groups here most especially our english learners which also came out in some of the data collection that wilder did our english learner students they reported the lowest levels of feeling safe at school and they also reported that they were least confident that they would get help for being bullied if they asked for it among all student groups um again it's consistent across survey items and between the two different types of data collection uh so you there's definitely something systematic happening there on the plus side on the positive note there wasn't

138any disproportionate impact in students reporting that they actually had been bullied there was very little difference among different school groups in that area this is the same measure except secondary uh first thing i should say the american indian or alaska native label is a mistake on my slide that should say english learners i apologize it's entirely my fault what you will notice is that the spread however is much smaller than at the elementary level even though most of the ordering of the groups in terms of sorry i didn't advance the slide you guys are looking at me like i'm crazy uh you'll notice that most of the this the spread is smaller certainly but which groups uh appear where on that bar chart are roughly comparable and again this is american indian alaska data i

139apologize that should say english and is there no american indian or alaska native cell there because there were too few kids for that there were zero students who took the secondary survey that identified as american indian okay thank you doesn't mean one of the students they just take the search so just so i understand we're clarifying then the on the bar chart where it says american indian that should be english language learner correct okay i had it backwards yeah i you know i was sitting in my office uh running through this right before i came down and saw that in fun and before you move on is it uh statistically significant that there weren't any american indian or alaska native students at the secondary level choosing to participate i'm not sure i understand the question

140well the fact that xero participated is that significant potentially yes without knowing more about how many students who identify as american indian alaska native solely in our secondary schools i couldn't really tell you if that's a systematic thing or if it's literally like a function of attendance the students who might have taken the survey didn't happen to be in that class um there's any number of possible explanations for that but we could look into it if you'd like it certainly doesn't allow us to draw conclusions about how we're serving our native students on this measure which is concerning because we know they are in our secondary schools and as we're going to talk about in a moment with the american indian parent advisory committee resolution uh serving those kids is an urgent priority um unfortunately

141as is far too common in research in education other fields our native populations there's a challenge of getting that in size and we we need to lean into that going forward and there are ways that we can even just mathematically do that when we do surveys in the future we can over sample american indian alaska native students we can wait survey samples to make sure we get enough responses by each category so it's something that i'm aware of and we can we can work with for sure secondary student perceptions of adults treating them fairly at school again almost the exact same spread as two slides ago so on the left and this is i'm not expecting that anyone can read what's on the left side of the screen this is just to give you a

142graphical representation of what the panorama report that we get from panorama looks like so this final section that i will go through is our academic inclusion data what this panel is showing you on the left is that in panorama's data our diversity and inclusion average fell in the 80th percentile nationally however as with so many things with research there are certain items within each of these surveys that are vastly different in terms of how students are responding so how do students perceive and experience race racism equity and fairness in their schools what goes into that average so there's a lot of different items there but mostly the idea is students actually meaningfully and positively interacting with students who are different from themselves if you really have to narrow it down spending time with the diverse

143groups of students having classes with students who look different than you diverse groups of students who hang out close friendships and then our students and adults treating students differently based on race or ethnicity so we'll get into all of that um only secondary students get these survey items primary students are not asked these questions while it's probably too early for me to comment on any causal relationship there are two general items that i think affect some of our data in this area that are more national trends the first one is the districts with rapidly changing demographics often experience many of the same types of issues that we've explored today and that's been happening in rochester as well it's also worth keeping in mind as we're talking about students from different backgrounds interacting with each other

144and you're thinking about what where we fall nationally that schools today are more segregated than they were before brown versus board of education segregate desegregation peaked in the 80s and they've moved back the other way so that's why these items are asked on a nationwide survey across the country because even in a school that's quote unquote diverse if everybody's operating in their own pockets in their own silo it's not all that mean so that's why these questions are so important all right the perceptions matter students reporting that an adult has treated them differently at their school because of their race and this is specifically race this did uh this question did not allow for anything else it was just race um as you can see the proportion again and it mirrors all the other items

145we've talked about this evening black students and english learners definitely the most likely to to have that belief or to have had that experience and sort of down from there gifted and white students being at the other end of the spectrum students reporting another student has treated them differently because of their race i think what um was concerning between the i mean there's a lot here but one of the things that jumped out at me as being concerning is the difference in these two slides for students in the middle of the pack so to speak when it gets to has another student treated them differently because of their race basically students who are non-white are all in the same boat in terms of proportions where that's occurred to them uh whereas the adult data is

146a little bit different i um in these slides about race special education is included how does that so it's a really good question panorama disaggregates these questions by special education status also and so what they're asking is basically what it's saying is if you're a special education student and you're a student of color has does that make sense okay yeah thank you that's a good question the labeling could probably be clear this last one student empowerment to speak up when they witness racism or discrimination in school this is one of the few places where i'm going to reference our staff findings so these actually interestingly mirror the teachers results right so teachers told us on the panorama survey and they told wilder that they wanted more in their toolbox to address these issues and to

147have these conversations when they come up and to have that be something that they can do comfortably and sort of smoothly in the classroom same thing for students students want the same things they want to be able to speak about these issues when they come up and have constructive conversations and so on so it's another actionable possibility there in that we can have parallel strategies for both students and staff as we think about how to improve the climate where we'd be able to discuss these issues and with that i think my only summary i have three summary points quickly so action the the persistently row results among our english language learners were one of the english learners one of the most surprising standout points for me as i went through this is how consistently that

148group showed up in the results as being most severely disproportionately impacted i also think that there's a lot of opportunities for parallel strategies whether it comes from behavior uh right we're talking about behavior uh items for students but also how can we better equip our teachers to address those behaviors right if students are telling us that the climate isn't their biggest concern then how can we help both stakeholder groups work together to improve that climate so that everybody is on the right path another possibility to keep in mind as we're moving forward with strategic plan that's all i have questions mr barlow well just one regarding uh actionable possibilities uh so um not so much result of a panorama but as we move forward do you envision um do you envision being empowered to recommend

149identify suggest actionable possibilities that we can hopefully approve secondly directly related will you be providing input regarding the strategic plan and uh incorporating those actionable possibilities into that uh so the answer to the second one is yes that's already occurred um i've been on one of the subcommittees denise moody invited me to be on the outcomes and measures committee so i've been able to to have some contributions there um remind me the first question again i apologize uh moving forward yes yes um to say that i feel empowered is an understatement i have this i have fantastically supportive colleagues and a really good group of folks that i work with who are very open to ideas it's an idea incubator up on the third floor sometimes that's a good thing so yes i absolutely feel

150empowered okay so we can expect some great stuff thank you thank you and i just want to comment thank you um the data's been extremely important and i want to i got the word from dr pacquel earlier the analysis is so much more thorough than we've had before you know not only your comments about it but the action planning and the ideas that you have i think that's been missing and i'm so glad that you're here so thank you thank you i would second that too i think it's it was one thing to hear it from people especially you know the three of us were campaigning not too long ago but to be able to see numbers and i still recognize that even though we got great results our end and a number of those

151categories was fantastic it's still not representative of everyone and so those people i think for me actionable item is for the people who are consistently not represented in the survey data how are we going to make sure that their voices are heard i completely agree the the you know quantitative data tend to be really good for theory testing and qualitative data tend to be really good for theory formulation and so if we're going to go out especially in education research so if we're going to go out and figure out why that's occurring it's a qualitative project to come up with a theory that we can then have a theory of action to address so yeah absolutely it's it's coming i think that's how that will be helpful because i know that there are a few

152of us on the board sometimes who hear from a group of people who don't want to formalize their responses in something like this and so then of course we're just carrying around all of this anecdotal data and you know how many other people and that's those same categories are feeling the same way and i recognize that we may not be able to sort of get into the nitty-gritty of some of these numbers because to be in multiple categories like gifted and a black student right like we'll probably be able to figure out who those kids are and if they're pulling in either direction numbers in another category i think that that's also interesting to note so and and what is their experience because i think that that's very important to know as well but i

153again echoing director mclaughlin thank you both both groups for being here because i think both sets of data we've been hearing for a long time and now we can say these are at least numbers at a launching pad that we can start doing some of this actionable work so thank you thanks nathan and to build on those thoughts i think the more our community can see this kind of data presented and discussed publicly perhaps when the opportunity comes to complete a survey or or to participate in the panorama data collection at a school when they start seeing that we are using the data to help our decision making and to monitor our progress hopefully it will encourage more people to participate and add their voice thank you so much to all three of you this

154is really valuable and the good news is as you continue to say we're using this uh to make really important changes and we're doing it right now so thank you it's been really valuable thank you we will move on then to again a fan favorite policy recommendations 8.02 policy committee and when we're done with this chunk can i suggest a break okay oh yes and we are going to actually skip to 9.01 and after that we will take do we need to make a motion to break the agenda i make a motion to change the agenda as the chair suggests there's been a motion to modify the agenda to move 9.01 up to right now in a second all in favor say aye aye aye agenda has been amended 9.01 approval of application for flexible

155learning year fly program for longfellow elementary school with thanks and apologies to this young man who i know will get introduced for waiting so long dr marvin and directors of the board i uh as as you know we have a wonderful school that operates on a balanced calendar a different calendar that where students go to school for 45 days and they have 15 days off the leader of that school is amy adams um and uh she is joined by uh jackie peterson who's our executive director of elementary and secondary education but most importantly i think in some ways a young man i met the other day when he was george washington carver over at longfellow braden anyama is here you've waited a long time to share some thoughts with us the state of minnesota has

156to approve different calendars for schools that operate differently and so we are about to submit and need your approval board members the application for longfellow to continue this calendar and when i was out with principal adams and then i met braden we got to talking about this calendar and so i want to thank amy for her leadership not just of the school but of the task of preparing this application to the state which is herculean and then as she and i were talking and i heard about the school newspaper that's recently been created and i met uh braden i said is there any way he could come and join us and share his thoughts so i'm gonna turn it over to principal adams to give us a quick sense of what we're asking the board

157to approve uh and then we're really excited to have others join so much well cher marvin and superintendent pacquel and board members thank you so much for having us it's it's a pleasure to be here and this is brayden and you'll get to hear some more from braden a little bit here but again i'm the proud principal of longfellow 4515 district wide elementary and we're here to present our mde application for a flexible learning year to continue on the balanced calendar long fall has offered this calendar for 26 years and we're really hopeful that we'll get to continue with this innovative and supportive schedule of students and families and staff members in our community our application process included the following a literature review data analysis of our students academic progress and social and emotional growth

158collecting stakeholder input from public forums along with google surveys and also a description of our intersession experiences and our community partners that we work with to support our students and families we have several celebrations to share with our data analysis according to our fast bridge data our long fellow students in grades two through five are more likely to grow as students and reach benchmarks and reading and math in comparison to their peers in rochester according to our mca data long fellow students in grades three through five scored above our district and state averages in both reading and math and according to the panorama survey that you heard so much about this evening which is just such a wonderful piece of information that we can work with to support our students our longfellow students reported a

159positive perception of our learning climate they feel safe at our school and they have a positive sense of belonging at school as well so we're really grateful that that is the case i'm proud of that as well we continue to offer intersession programming for students during our three-week breaks and we partner with sac and are building a partnership with our boys and girls club along with other community organizations to provide rich learning experiences for our students our parents and staff and students have shared feedback and reflections regarding our calendar and as dr pical mentioned we've released our first edition of the long fellow leopard student news and braden is a proud reporter from this uh this venture and it's again our first edition of the newspaper braden chose to uh report on the benefits of

160our balanced calendar and he'd like to share his article with you now as you know i attend the school longfellow elementary which has a school that has 45 days in and 15 days out in my opinion this is the best schedule for kids to be on here are the advantages of the 4 5 15 schedule we get more learning by having best days off and don't forget what we learn so don't feel left behind or to come back we also we also have more breaks during the year even though they're shorter and they seem to come when we're at our breaking point the advantage of being in school during summer is that it's we get to play in the field in the sun [Music] it's good we got to um play in the school play

161the field and stand with our friends instead of being we we get to come back at that instead of coming back at the end of summer when it's already getting cold we already have a three-week break so we our mind gets reset and we have to cut and we get to have a break from those crowds of school and the noisy loud classrooms you get to relax and play you know not forgetting what we learn at school so you don't get lost next year i'll be going to middle school it'll be a big transfer and i'll lose my 45 15 schedule hopefully if you see this rating you'll be able to bring it back for other schools too here we go all right well thank you so much for um for your support and your

162time and your consideration we appreciate it thank you and and uh braden this is a briefing item which means that if there's a board member who wants to vote on this right now after what you said that board member can move it to action i will do so i will retraction and it's been moved and seconded and i think mostly because of what you just said and when you get home i want you to be sure and watch yourself on tv did you know you're on tv right now can you see that can you see the tv screen in back of you oh or right in front of it right in front of you yeah that's actual tv so people around the world are watching and you can actually watch yourself over and over and

163over again okay i'm going to read the resolution that you're having us do we get resolved did we do eyes oh sorry actually everyone who wants to move this to action say i i no now it's an action item be it result the school board of independent school district 535 approves the flexible learning year application for longfellow elementary for the 2022 2023 2023 2024 and 2024 2025 school years brayden how many years is that three good answer good answer resolution's been read okay all in favor say aye aye opposed and it's unanimous braden everybody wants your school to stay on the same calendar that it's on thank you so much good job have you considered a career in public speaking okay here's a better question have you considered a career in teaching say yes nate

164think about it i bet you'd be a great teacher we can't wait to see where his next adventure oh there you go excellent we'd like to also thank your dad brayden for bringing you and parents for supporting yeah [Music] thank you thank you at this point it is 8.02 and we will take an eight minute recess thank you this meeting is reconvened at 8 10 p.m and the next item on our agenda excuse me it's 8.02 policy recommendations policy committee we have um two policy recommendations tonight that we've reviewed the first one is policy 6 12.01 which is the development of parent and family engagement plans for title 1. the purpose of this policy is to encourage and facilitate involvement by parents of students participating in title 1 educational programs and experiences of students this

165was updated to match the msba model policy the second one is policy 707 transportation of public students the purpose of this policy is to provide for the transportation of students consistent with the requirements of law there were updates to specify the responsibilities of the district transportation safety director and punctuation corrections we're good with the punctuation stuff that's it first briefing for policy pardon i'm doing the procedure but you don't want to combine them no we're doing that next um and next we have 8.03 the procedure recommendations first briefing so the procedure is tied to the first policy that julie just referenced about development of parental involvement plans for title one programs and all that is is updates to the current names of the positions that are used in rochester public schools that's it that's it

166okay so again we don't vote on these yet but they will come back to the board for review for the next two meetings then we have 9.02 the american indian education parent advisory committee resolution responding to a letter of non-concurrence and we're very happy to have us with with us this evening laurie sam who is uh here as the co-chair of that committee and lori if you'd like to come up you absolutely can't i think you should actually because you've done a huge amount of work on this every year the our native american parents uh have the option of we'll write a letter to the board communicating with us the work that needs to be done and the letters are always meaningful and thoughtful and actionable our response then which is required not only because

167we so respect uh the work that you're doing and the important ideas that you share with us but also it's required by law so we have responded in a five page letter and i will not read the entire five pages but i'm going to highlight the three recommendations that the apac american indian parents advisory committee have suggested to the district and then summarize some of our responses first one they said native american students need to see themselves in the classroom and in their schools absolutely so the district has committed to having this is part of the strategic action plan we regularly will post vacancies on a minnesota listserv intended for american indian candidates we will intentionally invite native students to take the intro to teaching courses as well hoping that some of them may go

168into that field of work their second recommendation was their students need to see themselves accurately portrayed in curriculum and among the district responses include that the native american liaison will be included in all curriculum review teams that we will include that liaison and other people in reviewing the standards in the curriculum we will work with the native american liaison tribal leaders and elders to embed more native american books and resources into our classroom and libraries and the suggestion suggestion to develop a high school course dealing with relationships between the united states government and native american nations we are absolutely committed to ensuring that there will continue to be many places in the current draft of the forthcoming new state standards for social studies standards which focus on the relationship between the government u.s government and

169native american nations we also plan to do um work on a sequence of courses to accompany ethnic studies question oh sorry i'm sorry if needed and we welcome support and guidance from aipac in in this regard another suggestion was whether we could create at dakota middle school a conversational dakota class offered as a language a choice in our responses we would really like to explore this idea how perfect would that be for students at dakota to be able to learn the language and the final recommendation was to ensure the cultural safety for our native american students the response is that among other things we will provide access for students access for native american liaisons to access students in the school and vice versa so that there would be an easy communication between the liaison and

170the students to create a grievance procedure where a student or a family can report procedure violation to the office of diversity equity inclusion and also having the office of elementary and secondary work with the native american liaisons continue that kind of work a another suggestion in the in the letter was to create an elder in residence program and this is something that the district fully supports and would like to work with aipac to see if we can make that a reality our response is much more it's much longer and more specific than that and you have a copy of it we have other paper copies and the entire response is also on our district website but mainly we would like to say that the school district really continues to value the relationship with aipac we

171look forward to strengthening that relationship and just to tell you and i hope you will communicate this to the other members that since its inception in rochester apac has challenged all of us to grow and has supported and guided that growth we look forward to continuing to build open trusting relationships that affect meaningful change and as part of that one other request that we absolutely will support is to have regular meetings school board members with aipac membership so we thank you lori and we hope you'll extend that uh thanks to all members of your group absolutely thank you um melissa so the um the item that was uh brought forward in an email that we received about the slight change in wording is and that you have in your possession yeah so it's but i

172wanted to to check to make sure that addressed everything that you yeah it has brought you our attention to your satisfaction yes that's what i was asking hearing i just have one question about um recommendation 3d the quarterly meetings i think we had touched on at one of the earlier meetings when apec presented to us can this be a board member who is assigned as a school board committee to meet with aipac so that they can report back to us as our committee reports absolutely and that's one of the things we'll talk about as a board and with with lori and others how how that would look used to be you know a few years ago that um school board members the community engagement committee would meet with aipac for part of every meeting that

173they have we'd be invited and stay for part of that meeting so we could have that conversation and that may be a model that you want to do going forward or we we could absolutely try something different but we absolutely agree that regular meetings make perfect sense thank you so much yes we have a resolution [Music] which right um we've been briefed we have a resolution and if you would like to move that to action second the briefing item has been ruled to action on favor of moving this to action say i post it's now an action item be it resolve the school board of independent i'm reading the wrong one be it resolved it starts with the same words right so i got [Laughter] talk about being organized it's a long agenda and you

174have a lot of papers printed school board hereby approves the attached letter responding to apex recommendations the school board chair is directed and authorized to sign the attached letter on behalf of the school board the chair may sign ella to sign electronically in light of the cobia 19 pandemic the district superintendent or a designee is directed to provide a copy of this resolution and the attached letter to apac to implement this resolution and the attach letter and to take any other appropriate action to ensure the district is in compliance with the procedural requirements of minnesota statutes section 124 d 0.78 the school board values its relationship with aipac and thanks the members of aipac for their collaborative input and their work on behalf of the district's american indian students move approval moved and seconded all

175in favor say aye aye opposed motion is approved thank you now we will move on to this is going to be a contentious one 9.03 approval of school board member melissa amundsen's right to employment this is a briefing item uh melissa do you want to brief this one or do you want yeah i mean it's it's fairly straightforward um uh i'd like to be a substitute for the school district and by state statute i have to ask all of your permission but um the background to that is that you know in speaking with staff throughout the district about the tough couple of years they've had i i clearly heard the message collectively that if um if you all want to help us get in here in the buildings and and you know give us a

176hand because ours our teachers are having to give up some of their prep time to cover for each other's classes and i didn't think that i was qualified to be a substitute teacher so this is just to let everybody out there know that it's maybe not as difficult as you think to get your substitute teaching license and even though i don't have the the same background and training that teachers get in a licensed teacher preparation program in a four-year college program i can still go in and free up those staff members during their prep time so that they can effectively teach their classes while i try to deliver a substitute teacher plan which is a lot more now than just putting on a movie and pressing the play button letting the kids watch but um

177i'm hoping to be able to assist now the 8 000 limit is set by state statute and it's per fiscal year and i certainly won't get to that because i only have a couple of days available per month that i don't already have other commitments on my calendar but um i'll keep track of the 8 000 make sure i don't pass it and then i have to come to you again in the next fiscal year to get your permission again so so the good thing about this is that there are bills in the legislature to propose moving that eight thousand dollar limit to twenty thousand dollars so um anybody who really wants to um make twenty thousand dollars should probably start in september right away so that they can be there enough days to reach

178that total but um this is a this is a bill that would not cost the state anything and it's been at the 8 000 limit for many many many many years thank you so this is a briefing item uh move it to action second it's been moved and seconded to move this to action all in favor say aye hi host it's now an action item be resolved that the school board of independence school district 535 does hereby approve the employment of ms melissa amundson with compensation not to exceed eight thousand dollars for the 2021-2022 fiscal year move approval second second it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye opposed motion [Music] is passed and congratulations miss anderson you are now okay to be a substitute teacher and the phone is ringing okay

1799.04 approval of the budget for library media center books for new school buildings this is listed as an action item so i will read the resolution and then if it's seconded we can have discussion be it resolve the school board of independent school district 535 does hereby approve the purchase of library media center books from the mac and educational resources in the amount of 285 thousand six hundred dollars by utilizing pricing from the cooperative purchasing contract number a e p a o two o dash c move approval second we need to move this from briefing i inadvertently moved it from the consent agenda down into this so it's it's delicious yes so we just need to move the motion first and move the action i've already read the resolution we have to vote on the

180second should we remove it and re-second it i thought we just voted no we just moved it to action so now is our opportunity to discuss it should we choose to do something yeah so and i don't know if miss richmond do you have anything you want to say and to be clear this is to provide the budget for the books not to approve the books this is a they work with a company that provides books for libraries and that's what this is it's been moved and seconded no discussion all in favor say aye aye opposed motion is approved 9.05 long-term facilities maintenance review that's an ltfmr 10-year plan update this is a briefing item dr pikel dr marvin directors of the board i'd like to ask scott sheridan to give us a sense of

181the update that the board has before it as part of our normal course of action are they trying to trip you over there maintenance revenue plan update as you know annually we bring you a 10-year plan that highlights the projected projects for the coming years you last approved a 10-year plan in july on july 13 2021 prior to that in september of 2020 you approved series 2020 b bonds and in the amount of over 46 million dollars and some of those bonds were to be applied to the john marshall indoor air quality project that deep approved actually approved that in october the 2020 b bonds we've updated the project since or the long-term facility maintenance revenue plan since last july we're a little behind where we normally bring it to you but there's been a

182lot of changes recently and we wanted to make sure that we had everything right when we brought it to you i realize it's march and then we're going to bring another one to you in july an updated plan but this current plan that we brought to you now includes some new 2022 a bonds that my counterpart and cadmie john carlson will be bringing to you in the next board board items so if you look at the 10-year plan the items that aren't color-coded are from the pay-as-you-go levy the items that are color-coded are from the bond series based on the year of the bound series that were approved we try to keep it pretty simple basically for ourselves those of us in construction services are responsible for the management of all these projects so i'm

183open for any questions that you might have and you said we'll get a comprehensive uh report in july yeah we'll provide the new 10-year plan that's going to encompass 2023 through 2032. long past time here and this update um just this just includes updates on projects that we already knew about we don't have any new or emergent emergency items that you added no there were some added one of them that comes to mind is the century light poles when we were doing the pool project we had to take down some light poles and we recognized the fact that they were rusted at the bottom and to put new light poles up required some extension of the electrical wiring because the poles are different heights so we had to replace them and we figured well at

184this time it's a better benefit to order all new light poles because as we reviewed the light pulse throughout the century many of them were rusted out so we decided to incorporate that project we pushed a couple iaq projects out a year or two for instance the century we pushed a century concession stand out a little bit a year um the freidel we moved to 2023-24 until we figure out exactly what we want to do with the fidel building we just figured we'd better defer that temporarily at fsc we we determined that our trench trains that run down through the middle of our warehouse have corroded significantly due to salt and that kind of thing and so we added that as a new project as well that wasn't on there in 20 in july and

185some fall protection from jefferson for one of their playgrounds i believe is a new project and a gym replacement at sunset where we there was some water damage to the gym floor they have a wooden gym floor there and we need to we added that as a replacement project too that wasn't down there in 2013 or in july of last year it's a brief summary there might be some more little projects but miss workman i i must say i'm always incredibly amazed and impressed with how your department is on top of all of these projects all the time and that our finance director makes sure that we have all of the funding laid out so that it can be covered because there are so many districts in the state in the nation where they don't

186they they don't have that capacity to do that and then all of a sudden their buildings are falling down and now what so i know it's a lot of work but um i really appreciate it thank you well thank you we have an outstanding division of three manages about 100 million dollars in projects plus the 180 million dollar referendum let's get a look at a lot of support from john and his business services this is a briefing item would it be useful to pass this tonight it would because i think john needs a pass speak for the next one that he's bringing as well move to action second it's been moved and seconded to move this to action all in favor say aye hi host it's now an action item be it resolved school board

187of independent school district 535 does here i approve the updated 10-year long-term facility maintenance plan group approval second and moved in second all in favor say aye aye opposed that motion passes thank you and then uh agenda item 906 the authorization of issuance and sale of 51 million seventy thousand dollars general obligation facilities maintenance bonds series 20 22 2022 a back the cal chair marvin director of the board john carlson executive director of finance all right thank you um joining me tonight is greg i think you remember him from january he was here giving you some updates at that time um we are here to get permission to proceed with a bond sale to finance the next round of projects in the 10-year plan so greg i'll let you talk a little bit about the

188set sail resolution and what needs to be done here all right thank you good evening board members superintendent picales nice to see you all again um i knew we had a long night already so i'm going to move through this fairly quickly and actually as i go through the pre-sale report for the 2022 a bond issue i'll point out a couple of differences for the 2022 b cop issues so we can kind of clear them off both at the same time the two resolutions are similar as well they both authorize us to prepare and preliminary official statement take bids on the bonds and bring those to your next uh to your board meeting in about a month and they also provide for participation in the state credit enhancement program which gives you that good state

189um aaa bond rating in addition to your great double a bond rating when you put a solid box so let's take a quick look at the uh pre-sale report um the purpose is to finance the health and safety projects that are included in your tenure facility plan that was just adopted so that was one of the other revisions we made since last summer was to incorporate the updated debt service schedules into the 10-year revenue plan that you just approved the 22b is for technology purposes so that's something that you do every three years and so you'll note undetermined call feature this the facilities maintenance bond is just under 17 years and it is callable in 2030 meaning that in 2030 the 2031 and later maturities can be called for refinancing should interest rates prove favorable

190at the time and just to contrast that with the 22b that's a three-year certificate of participation and it is not callable because it is so short so you won't have an opportunity to refinance those certificates i do want to mention on the the rating that you've got the aaa rating and the double a underlying rating so we'll do another conference call to speak with the rating agency about your current financial conditions and the economic conditions of the school district and um really that's the main there's a there's a lot of boilerplate the other thing i'll point out on top of page three is that we are always reviewing your existing debt and um you have three bond issues that will potentially provide some taxpayer savings that are callable on february 1st of so that would

191require us to come to you this fall with potential opportunity depending on where interest rates go to refinance those bonds and potentially save your taxpayers funds so this is to give them new money they district new money for projects that would be to give taxpayers savings page five has a calendar both issues will follow the same calendar uh next board action will be on april 19th we'll bring the bids for the bonds and the certificates at the same time for you to award to the lowest interest cost bidder page six is sources and uses we do anticipate a premium at this time of almost two million dollars and so the bond size that we're projecting is 49 million and the resolution authorizes a an amount slightly above 51 million if we don't get a premium

192bid which we're still seeing premium bids but if we don't the bond size might be higher and probably guarantee it'll change because the premium won't be exactly what we estimate but we'll make sure we hit about 49.6 million project costs to line up with the 10-year plan that you just approved the cop is the 22b that produces about 6.3 million dollars for project expenses and is an annual levy about of about 2.2 million let's just jump to the back page there's some detail eye chart uh schedules that you need your cheaters on to read the small numbers but the chart is pretty uh straightforward and this is something you've seen before from us the goal here is to incorporate these new projects so 50 million on the on the facilities maintenance bond 6 million on

193the technology levy in a way that keeps your capital levies and that's what we're looking at here um level with their where they're at now which is also the level that we talked about with the voters during the election or actually declining in the future and so you see there are some step downs in the debt service levees over time and that will allow you to continue to manage maintain and invest in your facilities and have some opportunity to do that without raising taxes and so we want to kind of keep that plan in place going forward as i said the resolution is in front of you is fairly straightforward i'm so happy to answer questions about the report or the first resolution that you'll take up like i guess if there are no questions

194any questions and this also is a briefing item move to action second it's been moved and seconded to move this to action all in favor say aye aye opposed it's now an action item it resolved the school board of independent school district 535 does hereby approve the resolution relating to 51 million seventy thousand dollars general obligation facilities maintenance bonds series 2022 a move approval it's been moved and seconded all in favor say hi post motion passes thank you so much for for being here i know it's a late night for you and for sharing your expertise this really helps thank you chair marvin do we still have to vote on 9.07 yes he's still he's going to sit there and tell him we just voted for 9.06 almost identical right okay but 9.07 it's listed

195as an action item but it's not it's briefing so they were both that same way i i know there was just they were mislabeled on that board box so 9.07 authorization of issuance and sale of six million four hundred and forty thousand dollars full term certificates of participation series 2022 b to action second and working seconded to move this to action on favor say aye aye opposed it's now an action item be it resolved school board of independent school district 535 does hereby approve the resolution relating to six million four hundred and forty thousand dollars full term certificates of participation series 2022 b is this appropriate time to ask a question after it's seconded seconded did you second it yes i just did okay yes good time for discussion uh mr carlson can you clarify

196for anybody who might be watching the difference between what we purchased with the bonds we approved previously and this one yep so the facility maintenance bonds are going to be fix it projects they're going to repair and improve buildings that we already own spaces we already have the certificates of participation for technology are going to be for purchasing devices like laptops chromebooks ipads it's also going to deal with infrastructure purchases like network switches and wireless access points and things like that to maintain upgraded technology for those student use purposes and are these replacement items or does this reflect the fact that we're opening new schools it's a little bit of both it's primarily replacing but there is going to be some new components other discussion all those in favor of the resolution say aye opposed

197motion passes thank you again thank you thanks for saying thank you thanks for sticking around we will then move on to 9.08 and this is a briefing item approval of superintendent contract brief background as you know after uh superintendent munoz's resignation last year school board voted to immediately conduct a search for a one-year interim superintendent for the 2021-2022 school year and then conduct a search for a long-term superintendent in 2022 last spring of or this fall last spring we worked with the minnesota state school boards association and we're fortunate enough to have dr pacquel become the district's interim superintendent the process for a long-term superintendent began on january 11 2022 when the school board approved a contract with hazard young atea search firm that firm conducted extensive community outreach including a survey to find out

198from this community what folks here expected from a long-term superintendent and what kind of person we should try to recruit on february 22nd the board met with the representatives of the search firm to receive a leadership profile report which described those perspectives on the qualities that the community expected included in that report was information that 185 of the people who completed an online questionnaire specifically said that the board should recruit kent pacquel to take the job that coupled with all of the other information from the community made it abundantly clear to the school board at that time that we should cease to search and offer dr pical the contract a three-year contract and he said yes all right so the board attorney mick waldsberger has met with dr pickel to negotiate the superintendent contract and

199the terms were agreed to on march 20th 2022 and board members you all have copy of that contract which is now also available on or docs or will be is yes okay but we we received it a few days ago so we were able to um to view it it's there now for the the media and others who are interested it is available on board docs this is a briefing item let's move this one to action okay it's been moved and seconded to move this to action all in favor say aye hi good opposed sorry said good too soon here's the resolution be it resolved the school board of independent school district 535 approved the contract of employment for dr ken paquel to serve as the superintendent of schools for the rochester public schools effective

200july 1st 2022 through june 30th 2025. move approval second it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye opposed motion passes and as a caveat this new position begins july 1st 2022 conditioned upon the fact that you can't quit before then so no chance okay good congratulations and thank you thank you uh annual board calendar update 10.01 any questions or comments about recent updates i'm going to assume that the board has had the chance to read the changes the changes will be reflected in our draft annual calendar that's available on board docs and in the affiliated board docs agenda items when those meetings become when those agendas become available to the public thank you 11.01 closed session attorney-client privilege this is an action item i moved the school board of independent school district

201535 does hereby close this open meeting to enter into a closed meeting to discuss the potential resolution of a dispute with vendor as permitted by the attorney-client privilege exception in minnesota state statute 13 d05 subdivision 3b the closed meeting will be held in room 126 of the edison administration building it's been moved in second at any discussion on favor say aye aye opposed motion passes and we are in recess at 8 47 pm b briefing to action at the closed session president where school board members edmondson barlow mclaughlin workman nathan marvin garcia also an attendance for executive director from finance carlson superintendent picale and from communications director nessler and attending virtually attorney john edison thank you and we have a resolution ms nathan would you read the resolution please be it resolve that the school

202board of independent school district 535 does hereby approve the payment plan agreement with cornerstone technologies in the amount of 252 000 subject to the condition that cornerstone technologies make the march 21st 2022 payment specified in the agreement by march 25th 2022 move approval second it's been moved and seconded any discussion no all in favor say aye aye opposed motion passes thank you uh item 11.03 upcoming board meetings we will be having a board we'll be having a study session with a representative of the minnesota association of school boards next tuesday march 29th beginning at five o'clock our next regular board meetings will be on tuesday april 5th and tuesday april 19th both at 5 30 and we've scheduled a study session on tuesday april 12 at 5 pm any other business hearing none we are

203adjourned at 9 28 pm