RPS School Board Meeting - 2/8/22

001all right well good evening before we gavel in this evening i think you know we have two meetings uh tonight the first which i'm assuming will be very short uh specifically about uh field trip fees and then we'll begin the second meeting immediately after that but we'll be starting both meetings the same way and here's the first one the special meeting of the independent school district 535 school board is called order at 5 30 pm tuesday february 8th 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 isd535 the live stream 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

002sacred land of all indigenous peoples this statement which we read at the beginning of each school board meeting is the first of our district's core equity beliefs the document is available on our website and posted in the boardroom it serves to affirm that we value the strengths within our staff students and families and we celebrate their differences and diversity that make us stronger present at this meeting our school board members superintendent kent pacquel a non-voting ex officio member and assistant board clerk ms michelle severson ms severson will you please call the roll thank you director amundsen clerk barlow here director garcia here treasurer mclaughlin here chair marvin here vice chair nathan here and director workmen here thank you at this time we provide an opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance of

003america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice uh you know that the edison building is a rochester public schools public facility so if you choose to attend a meeting here rather than view the live stream at home or elsewhere you need to wear an effective mask and we appreciate all of you who are doing so 2.0 approval of agenda are there any changes to the agenda of approval second it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye the agenda is approved 3.01 field trip fees dr piquel chair marvin and directors of the board i'd like to recognize our executive director of curriculum and instruction brenda richmond whose office manages this regular approval which if some of you may be wondering we are required

004to do in a separate special session like this one brenda so chair marvin i'm school board members you know according to policy 610 which outlines our our adherence to the pupil fee law that we have an approved list of field trips that we charge for and if those prices are going up at all we need to come to you for a special hearing for approval and it has been a while since we have approved any such field trips honestly we haven't been taking as many field trips in the past two years but we have two um that are on there for a fee and we'd like to up that fee a little bit so the university of minnesota um if students were to go there on a field trip we were approving up to thirty

005dollars per student and we want to up that to forty five dollars and then um you know that our high school marching bands go to uh the disney day parades and they march there and that has gone from thirteen hundred to a request of sixteen hundred dollars just as gas prices have increased and everything has increased so those are the two requests before you today thank you and is there any discussion ms workman yes um tell me if i'm correct that not all of these field trips will necessarily take place every year oh no i mean this is just the approved list so that if teachers want to take them you know they can yep so you know that'll go in into the procedure then that if bands want to go to disney they can

006charge up to sixteen hundred dollars from here on out and no the bands don't go every year good question all right then i have the resolution here be it resolve the school board of independent school district 535 approves the increase in collection of student fees for the following field trips in 2022-2023 mayo high school marching band to huntington bank stadium university of minnesota in minneapolis minnesota and mayo high school band choir orchestra at the disney world in orlando florida second it's been moved and seconded any discussion all in favor say aye i opposed motion passes thank you miss whichman this special session is adjourned at 5 36 pm [Music] good evening this regular meeting although we think every meeting is special this regular meeting of independent school district 535 school board is called order at

0075 36 p.m tuesday february 8th 2022 in room 137 of the edison building as you know you're invited to watch this live streamed or it's also recorded and we will take attendance once again present at this meeting our school board members superintendent kent pickell non-voting ex official member and assistant board clerk ms michelle severson ms severson you're really good at this so would you please call the roll again thank you director evanson here clark barlow director garcia here treasurer mclaughlin here chair marvin here vice chair nathan here and director workmen here thank you thank you and we've we practiced and and you have another opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance i pledge states of allegiance and to be the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for

008all approval of agenda are there any changes for this agenda move approval second it's been moved and seconded to approve the agenda all in favor say aye aye opposed agenda is approved 3.0 comments to the board we value input and ideas from community members who really care about our students and our schools during comments to the board we will listen respectfully to you if you want a response let us know and the appropriate person will contact you after the meeting if you've signed up to speak you have been provided with the policy and statutes that govern this time of the meeting when your name is called please have a seat in front of the microphone at this table state your name and whether you're a resident of the school district you will have three minutes

009to speak and again if you'd like someone to contact you after the meeting please let us know we have one speaker this evening it's miss elena nye nehoff ms nehoff contributions which we acknowledge should be recognized and celebrated every month but our schools and our district is spending some particular attention uh this month ensuring that our students are aware of the incredible contributions that people of color have have provided and continue to provide the leadership that they brought to this nation we also note that and you'll be hearing more about black history month throughout this month we also note that january 27th was holocaust remembrance day after world war ii this day was created by 46 countries in order to commemorate the liberation of the nazi death and concentration camp auschwitz and to support education

010programs that would ensure lessons from the holocaust would not be lost anti-semitism nationalism racial superiority and propaganda were all methodically perpetrated by hitler the nazis and their collaborators to persecute and murder jews six million men women children and millions of others the term genocide was coined in 1944 because no other word existed that could describe that kind or that level of atrocity and we must never forget 4.01 introduction of research assessment and evaluation director dr pikel thank you chair marvin and directors of the board i am not immediately seeing our new colleague peter ruck in the room and so we might end up moving beyond this item briefly um peter rock is our new uh research evaluation and uh assessment director and i know is planning to be here tonight so we may have a

011little bit of a scheduling snafu and so if it's okay chair marvin i would suggest we move on this was purely an opportunity for board members to meet dr ruck um and uh learn a little bit about the work he's going to be doing i will say that the first two years of the work he's going to do will be focused very intently on helping our students recover from some of the academic social emotional other challenges that they've experienced during the pandemic and as such the first two years of his position will be supported by federal funding that we have available from the federal government to support students recovery through covet now we fully intend to sustain that position beyond this period but i know in a time of budgetary constraints uh adding positions as

012much on people's minds and so were dr ruck here i would have introduced him uh in a more personal way but i want to take the opportunity to explain that that new position that we're adding which is very critically urgently needed we have not had a research and assessment director for quite a while is going to be supported by those resources and focused on helping our students thrive following the huge challenges that unfortunately we're not fully out of just yet but we'll find out exactly where maybe we had a little bit of scheduling snafu and if peter joins us here in this information and outreach section maybe we can flip the agenda for your approval but otherwise we'll find another time absolutely thank you then we'll move to 4.02 diversity equity and inclusion dei this

013is an update dr pikel thank you chair marvin and board members i am going to ask my colleague our executive director of diversity equity and inclusion will ruffin the second to come up will is going to introduce his team this is a opportunity for the board in the community to get a progress report on the really i think exciting and critical work that we have been doing uh around supporting all of our students and embracing the board's uh equity statement and principles just as i made this point with peter and i don't mean to bring it down i'm going to make the point here briefly too under will's leadership we have uh recently added uh eight new really dedicated members of our team uh equity specialists who are going to be working directly with our

014students in schools those positions as well are as intended being supported by that federal funding we intend to sustain it but once again i want people to know that we don't take lightly adding positions at a time of financial constraint and so those positions which i think are going to come up in the presentation tonight are appropriately being supported by those uh very valuable funds that we have available so take us back up the mountain will because i just brought us down there with that very wonky financial point and we're more interested in the in the work that you and the team are doing all right thank you superintendent pikel um school board members i just want to say thank you for this time and space for us to give you this update this evening

015i'm excited to have my full team here with us tonight and i will let them talk about their individual pieces but first i want to show you the structure of how the department has been set for a while it was just a position that was created it wasn't a department we have now morphed into this beautiful team that we have before us today so the first thing i want to show you is how the department is structured as you can see there we have four coordinators who have four separate lanes let's call it so in the yellow box you'll see mr tipton who's our coordinator of equity and his focus is on human resources and student services he is also the supervisor of our equity specialist next in the green you'll see julie rouzak who's

016our coordinator of family engagement and community partnerships and she is in charge of our american indian education our community schools our title one programming community partnerships and our gip program that's a lot hon julie in the orange you see mr louise henry who is our curriculum and instruction liaison she is also the liaison for the employees of color resource group and she actually is the qualifying assessor for the idi which is the intercultural development inventory which is a tool that we're using to build a cultural competency of our staff throughout the district and she also runs our equity teacher leaders i'll let her explain that that's why i'm not explaining it and then lastly in the purple we have brian bolton who is our coordinator of bilingual services and also our registrar he's our migrant

017coordinator he's a supervisor of our bilingual specialist and also our implementation associate whose focus is on our english learners i'll just let that sit there so you can see it okay first up we have sir louise and each of the team if you would just quickly just say your name how long you been in the district and what makes you passionate about this work or keeps you doing this work before you jump into your part of the presentation tonight my name is sarah louise henry and i am very thankful to be here today i grew up in this district and it went through rochester public schools as a child of color and so many of the equity concerns and the gaps that we are working so hard to address they're not hypothetical scenarios for me

018it's a very real life experiences and so i have been very blessed to be part of a team that has been looking at the progress that has taken place and also working very hard to keep this equity work moving and building it into the structure of everything that we do and so part of that is the equity teacher leaders as you can see the purpose of the equity teacher leaders is to build our internal capacity so making it so that our teachers can have that internal support through their other colleagues and so how that's structured is we have representation from all of our schools one to two equity teacher leaders and then we also include instructional coaches in that and what we do is we meet monthly and are able to learn about topics such

019as affinity spaces we've talked about implicit bias and microaggressions and how those things show up in our schools and not only what they are and how they show up but what we can do to create a more equitable environment for not just our students not just our teachers but everybody in this district and the community members and so some of what that looks like is people looking at the different books that we read and how students are experiencing those things looking at are we being accessible for students who have different abilities and not only are we being aware of culture and all of those differences and celebrating them but also what are we doing to see the strengths that come from every single student and family that is represented in the district and so another

020thing that we are able to do with that is we give them work time so each of the different sites have time to not just learn as a whole but then take that information and see how it's going to apply to their specific school and there's a particular school culture and in doing so we are able to have the equity teacher leaders collaborate with our equity specialists and building that that tighter knit of a school community okay do we have any questions for sarah louise before you move on to mr tipton i just have an observation uh i've known sarah louise as she said when she was a student and have watched her grow as an adult parent to where she has obtained her masters along the way and i think it's wonderful we sometimes

021speak of growing our own and let me be clear in terms of staff and i think this is a very good example of what can occur when a barriers are eliminated and access is allowed okay ignore the thoughts and we're going to move on to mr tipton all righty hello everyone i'm superintendent cabinet board first i want to thank you guys for actually giving us this opportunity i'm i've been with this district now for 11 years and and i've watched growth and the progress over the years and and that's the main reason why i'm here is because of the fact that not only did the community embrace me but the school district as well and when you have both of those linemen up it's a lot easier for you to be here and engage and

022want to make a difference within this community um i know it's a great place to live i've i've raised family here and and you know i've met a lot of great people and a lot of people have helped me along the way and i just wanted to get that out of the way first before i got started there but once again i'm willie tipton and i'm the equity coordinator for student services and human resources and yes we do we just hired eight new equity specialists which brings the total to 12 and these equity specialists are responsible for three primary sites secondary sites our rps online and mighty oaks is which all of them share um and having them in three buildings is a lot different than having them in eight when i first initially started

023as an equity specialist not initially started the district but when i was there we were responsible for a builders by them being responsible for three buildings they're gonna give an opportunity to do a lot of great work within the district within those buildings and be able to support them to to their full capability without being stretched out to the point that you know it can be really challenging when you have so many sites to support and another thing we wanted to talk about we come teaching minnesota grant which we received and to come teach in minnesota grant will give us the capacity to provide hiring bonuses for licensed tier 3 and tier 4 teachers for american india or people of color who moved to minnesota to teach i know mr barlow did you discuss that

024growing our own but you know sometimes you know reaching out to other communities and bringing in the best best teachers that we can possibly have i think that if the opportunity presents itself i think that we should take full advantage of that as a district but we're also we also apply for grow your own grant for adults and students pathways grant and the grow your own is a teacher preparation strategy focused on developing retaining teachers from the local community grow your own is often used to address teacher shortages and increase the diversity of the teacher workforce here in rochester and the community and hopefully we'll i'm thinking within the next week or so this week we'll be hearing back from that and and if we're able to get that that's going to give us an

025opportunity once again to present partial scholarships to multiple teachers who are who are interested in going and teaching at rochester public schools but also we'll have other initiatives that we can help them with as far as with housing and other areas to support them as well as students because there's a student um piece to that where we can actually have students who are possibly going into their senior year that they can actually start to receive college credits while they're still in high school in hopes that they will go after high school and go into teaching as they pursue a degree in college and we'll also be able to provide partial scholarships for them as well so i'm really excited about that and the recruitment and retention we both know we all know that and recruiting

026is a it's been a challenge over the last couple of years and i've been in this role for a little over a year due to the pandemic and a lot of colleges kind of being shut down and now really allowing for a lot of visitations and things of that nature but i've been really working hard at building relationships with a lot of our we our focus has been in the midwest because i think over the over the years it's been proven that we've reached out throughout going all over you know from throughout the states and we've had had very little success in teaching so we thought they will really focus in on the midwest you know preferably you know maybe um from illinois to wisconsin of course in minnesota and iowa is another location as

027you can see on there we've we've had college visits to winona um chicago state university and we're building really great relationships with both of those universities as well as we've been to job fairs at um at um winona state northern iowa um mankato state university and the university of minnesota as well we've been really building before with a lot of their staff there and a lot of the students and just really to get to know them because it's not enough to when it comes to recruiting to just visit them one time or say this would be a great place you have to really build relationship with these students and let them know how great of a place it is to teach here but yet makes most importantly we have to be able to support them

028once they're here and i think that as as um department grows we'll be able to handle that and really be able to build those relationships and support those teachers as they decide to come here and teach and we've done job fairs walk-in interviews i think we've done a total of eight maybe i think it's nine actually we just done another one then and on average we averaged probably close to 20 to 25 people but we've had times when we had over 50 people there and a lot of we've been able to hire people during those times and we're going to continue to push that because it not only gives us an opportunity to get more employees but it gives us an opportunity to build relationships with the community and with that i think that's pretty

029much it for me once again i want to thank you guys for all that you do all of the support that you've shown us and i hope that as the years go on as we continue to build that we will continue to build together before you jump into questions i just want to acknowledge director barlow you hit on the head of the reason for the grow your own grant because we're hitting barriers i think we have two examples right here of what it could be you have sarah louise who's a product of rochester public schools you have myself who's a transplant from los angeles who was tapped on the shoulder while working at best buy with this grant this will allow us two different pathways so who are the students that we can start grooming

030right now that will be excellent educators or maybe excellent principals and we can start building those relationships with them right now we can partner them with educators who are doing the work right now so we're basically grooming them so that's like the real grow your own and then in the adult pathway we can look in the community and see just like someone did for me who are other people in the community that are good with kids but maybe they don't have the degree well with this grant and hopefully we get it we can take those barriers away we can send you to school you have a gift that cannot be taught which is working with kids let us help you with some of the other stuff so we can get you in our buildings so

031that's the per the purpose of the grants so thank you for bringing that up willie and with that i'll open it up for questions a question about might these grants offer the opportunity for grow your own outside of just educators so might we also look at school psychologists of color or nutritionists of color um or those who might speak other languages special education para as i'm wondering i think the grant is just for teachers okay yeah we've looked into it but it's it's basically it's just for teachers to teach you yes i would wish it could be for all maybe as time goes on that they will present an opportunity for that right now this specifically is for to grow the um teacher capacity of teachers of color um throughout the state yes sir and

032if i may uh i believe i know why this is so important in terms of uh having staff that is a representative of the student population but perhaps maybe not all may be aware of the value the benefit uh even i would dare say the necessity can you perhaps speak to that briefly oh absolutely i think that you know the bottom line is some people say it's good to see somebody who look like you but then within the classroom that you can build a relationship someone you can reflect on and see the value in education but it's not just that it's just students in general they can build relationships with teachers who don't look like them and they can build a relationship and they can get a clear understanding of other people from different backgrounds

033than them and that's and that's really important for all of us i think we all can learn a little bit from that in order for us to continue to grow i know personally for myself if i would have continued to think in a way that i was thinking early on in life then it would have been hard for me to be a relationship with people outside of people who look like me but i think it's not just about that it's not just about the way you look it's just about the character of the individual and the caring and the support that they can put behind these kids and i think that the more diverse of the population of teachers that we have here i think in the more of a reflection that it can be

034on the population of the rochester community i think that that's in itself will tell you that we need to make sure that everyone has that opportunity to have people not just to look like them the people who are going to value them but yet at the same time giving them an opportunity to learn something different from different people from different perspectives and values and ethnicities and values and understanding of life yes sir you know i can't resist doing this of course recent research from johns hopkins researchers found that black students who'd had a black teacher in kindergarten were as much as 18 percent more likely than their peers to enroll in college separate studies found that having at least one black teacher in elementary school reduced the probability for black students of dropping out dropping

035out by 29 percent for all low-income african-american students and 39 for very low income black boys one teacher that's rigorous careful research a lot of us have felt that for a while but we know it empirically now so this is central to the work absolutely thank you for sharing sarah louise go ahead thank you can i also add to that comment about other staff of color in being representative in our district i think too that's another point is we need people who are representative of our community also in places where decisions are made i went into a site last year and i saw the way that it was set up for students with wheelchairs it was the um the locker that is not something that i ever would have thought of because that hasn't been

036my experience and so we that is an example of we need people who are thinking of those different aspects that we don't all think of because they may not be our experience and we need those diverse perspectives to be in places where decisions are made and in different um areas of our district too that's nathan hello um i'm very glad to see all of you here tonight um so the equity specialists i know we're proving a number of them in human resources actions tonight and some of the new ones really haven't had a chance to get up to speed and we may not have time to dive deep into it tonight but it would be great to get a description of their responsibilities and and what their goals and focus would and we of course

037would love to see them here at a perhaps a future board meeting once they've all had a chance to to hit the ground running and and and we can hear some stories about the great work they're doing in the schools but i'm very glad to see that that ratio of equity specialists to schools is being improved because eight is more than enough well thank you and they're doing a lot of great work the first thing was for them to build relationships with their principals and getting to know their staff along with support staff rather be your counselors your social workers you know being a part of teams um you know pbis of course making sure they're being a part of those teams and most importantly getting to know the kids you know reaching out to

038the kids and getting to know the families because um it's a lot of responsibility for them but yet we have a really great team of members who are who are willing learners who are willing to do the work but i think the most important piece is they want to build these relationships and they want to grow the district i think that's the key you know you want to have people who who believe in rochester public schools to be in these positions because that's the way you move the needle is when everyone's buying in and we're all aligned together in the mission of what we're trying to accomplish which is to make sure that all students are afforded the opportunity to have success and reach their fullest potential i think we should also note that there

039was a survey that went out to principals before the equity specialists were hired about what they would want as far as some of our cova dollars to be spent on and it was loud and clear that they wanted equity specialists so i think we should note that that's where the hiring of the equity specialists came from and i think the principles noted the difference because we have a 97 percent all-white teaching staff that's not the same of the students that are in front of them so when they're planning lessons when they're even planning seating arrangements like sir louise was saying we're only thinking from our one lens there's nothing wrong with that that's the lens that they have but now we have a person that we can partner with and say hey will you look

040at this with me you look at this lesson with me will you plan it with me we look at the seating arrangement now i think we're getting better so we're going from good to better just by increasing uh our population our staff population in the more diverse way so we also have to say thank you to the principals for acknowledging the need in their buildings and then thank you for the people who are hired for applying and accepting the position like willie said it's a super responsible position but i think the key word is together if we can finally get people working together for the good of the students and the good of the families and the good of the staff who are here we're moving in the right direction all right i think we're

041going to move on to julie rosette how do you follow that i think i have some positive things to say that's cool stuff um good evening superintendent and board my name is julie rouzak first of all i had a hair appointment that i had to cancel last week and now will ruffin wants me to tell you how many years i've been working in the district so it's 15 and i've got some gray hairs but i earned them all and i'm proud of them and i'm proud to have worked here this long so 15 years in rochester public schools i've held a variety of different titles this one currently is coordinator of family and community partnerships as you could see i support a lot of different partnerships within our district as well as working with community

042partners on a variety of collaborative efforts as well tonight i'm here to speak to you specifically about our community schools and update you a little bit about what's happening in the world of our community schools initiatives so first of all i wanted to bring up the community school's guiding principles this comes from the national coalition for community schools there are seven guiding principles and number one is pretty important and the reason why i do what i do which is the other question you asked us to answer i love school and i love people and i believe that every student that comes to our district is entitled to the very very best education and i believe that community schools implementing the community schools model is one way that we can give them that education so i

043won't go through these principles for you tonight but i just wanted you to take a look at the guiding principles of this work and it's a little bit of the why to why we do what we do within the community schools initiative the next slide kind of gives you an update about where we're at with our community schools in rochester currently we have five community schools where we have been implementing the the community schools model our first school was uh gage elementary school and we did we looked up the date the other day the first year i think we implemented was either 2015 or 2016. so it's been a number of years now that we've been doing this work we added riverside central and rochester alternative learning center the following year two year two a

044little over two years ago we added john marshall high school and this year phoenix academy joined us as well so we've been working within five of our school sites this year and i have to mention our backbone partner the united way of olmsted county we really could not do this work without their partnership in both financial and brainstorming power they provide some data support to us we have a community data manager her name is nikita noral she's amazing if you're watching najita you are amazing um and i don't know what we could would do without her she is really helping us with the implementation of our city span software which we are renaming our story here in our own community and we met with peter dr peter ruck today uh just to talk about aligning

045that software um with the work that he's going to be doing as well so that's very exciting the united way also provides community connections to us and i put this here on purpose a limited amount of programming dollars it's not a lot but but we're grateful for the amount of money that they are giving us to support programs and partnerships outside of rochester public schools and as we add more sites that number hasn't been growing much so it's like cutting the pie into even smaller slices the good news however is that we recently received a competitive grant through the minnesota department of education to support two brand new sites and then phoenix as they've just joined us this year so three new sites uh an award totaling one million sixty thousand dollars out of the

046five million dollars that was available statewide so this will be a two and a half year grant where we will fund site facilitators at each of these sites as well as contracts for service that will allow us to do some more programming and working with other partners in our community to support our students that grant started just this past january and will go through the end of june 2023. so it's really exciting we have a wonderful team that works at our sites i think the best part about working with community schools is the dedicated staff on the ground our administrators in these buildings our staff in these buildings our site facilitators our partners are second to none and really are willing to do whatever it takes to meet students needs to elevate students voice and

047family's voices and do the very best we can for our students and families any questions for julie mr parlow oh yes julie thank you both you and willie reference grant and it seems to me that possibly without the existence of grant some of our programming would not be as rigorous as it currently is [Music] how can the community or well how can the community become more supportive of these programs so that you're not necessarily dependent on the life of the grant these two additional schools it seems like there's a two-year lifeline can you briefly speak to well how the other ones were probably were they all funded initially through grants and then picked up through perhaps you could explain great questions the majority of these sites did start as grant funded positions outside of john

048marshall high school that's the only site there was a current position there that was was re-reorganized and revamped to then um implement the community schools model at john marshall other than that the rest of the grants are the rest of the sites started as grant funded initiatives and i think it's important to note that after the grant dollars ran out the sites saw the importance most of the grant dollars fund the site facilitator position and so the sites used their site dollars to continue funding that position and have done so to date hopefully that same will be true of these other sites that we're adding however it it it goes beyond the site facilitator and needing to have existing dollars where we can be using contracts for service working with community partners um doing doing

049more activities that are collaborative is where we've really leaned on the united way and there are also other organizations where that we've partnered with for basic need items the salvation army has been a great partner for us this year in addressing winter outerwear and how we can make sure that all of our students get to school safely through these winter months with boots and snow pants and coats and hats so so we're always looking for for partners that want to align their work with us um maybe they're they just want to co-locate in the same space and there really is not a need for exchange of dollars we're looking for that and making sure that those goals of their their program aligned with the goals that we're looking for through each site but again i

050think more than anything mr barlow looking for a sustainability plan that goes beyond just funding the site facilitator is is key to the sustainability of this work how can we both fund these positions but then also fund the programming dollars that we know it takes to to move this initiative forward at all those sites is nathan could you speak a little bit to the our story um and what it means for the data collection and outcomes measurement and how we can use it to attract more partners yes uh so as i mentioned we are working with a company called cityspan out of california that really is helping us create a database where we have real-time data from a variety of data points both internally and externally where we can have our partners also inputting their

051own data to get a very well-rounded picture of of students individual students and cohorts of students so that we can measure both successful programs and then programs and partnerships that might need to be tailored a little bit so prior to the the inception and adoption of city span we were doing a lot of excel spreadsheets which were not real time data analysis and by the time we would get to a point where we could look say at attendance of our students versus attendance of our staff in certain grade levels that information was a month old and so city span allows us it uh does it nightly i can't this is terrible of me i don't know if it's an upload or a download i don't speak that language but a nightly data dump of of

052real-time data into the system where we can then get an accurate pic accurate picture and print reports that are telling us if we're successful both with our with our partnerships and then comparing those about against impact for example i'll use attendance again if we're implementing a walking school bus at gage elementary per se is that impacting attend daily attendance of students that are coming to school by participating on the walking school bus so city span is giving us that opportunity to look at data more regularly and continuously than the antiquated excel spreadsheet manual data collection miss mclaughlin um this is probably more of a comment and it jumps a little bit into our next agenda item of the committee updates but i just want to remind the board that one of the legislative committee priorities

053is to support in it and advocate for more funding of the community schools um so hopefully we will see potentially some legislation that we can lobby our legislators about and i think that goes directly to the point of not just the coordinators but the programming as well thank you all right we'll move into brian bolton thank you yes my name is brian both and i'm the bilingual coordinator for the school district i've been with the district for 25 years i was a peace corps volunteer in west africa before that right at the beginning of the civil war in sierra leone i spent three days myself standing in line amongst liberian refugees to get to one of the six public telephone uh in uh freetown in sierra leone to call my parents to tell them that

054i was coming home um and that experience really kind of inspired me to want to keep working with refugees it happens at my second year here with the district half of all of the new students who came into the rochester school district were refugees from east africa so you know i mean it was a great opportunity for me to keep doing what i love doing and back here where i'm from so um i i also i know that i've expressed this to some of you individually but i really want to make a point of thanking you expressing my gratitude for the fact that this department of uh diversity equity and inclusion even exists and that i'm a part of it i am so optimistic hopeful about the future of our community because we have made

055this commitment and i want you all to know sitting here amongst this in uh truly incredibly uh impressive group of professionals maybe my proudest moment in my 25 years here with the district so thank you um so i am specifically here though to represent the uh department of um bilingual specialists they are all amazing and i think that i have said to many people honestly each of them have lived lives that are probably worthy of a hollywood script right um three of them i do want to highlight right now though uconn and the lease combined have 115 years of service to the cambodian and lao communities in rochester and the rochester school district so i think that's truly impressive the rest of the department omat suhair nawal palestine alex marta susana antoine again i am

056so honored to be here representing them tonight i know that i didn't go in the order that they're on the picture there i apologize for that but i did them alphabetically anyway i'm sure that there are probably people who don't really know what bilingual uh specialists do we are basically oral interpreters our goal is to make sure that everybody in the room is a part of the same conversation so one of the things i say is if you're not sure whether you're doing what you should be doing just look around the room if there isn't an english speaker and a member of your community in the room then you really shouldn't be there either because your whole purpose is to make sure that they are all the part a part of the same conversation um

057one of the things that's happened of course over the last couple of years is that our opportunities to actually sit in the room with people have been significantly diminished and we've had to adapt to more social media outlets and text message outlets that's it's been an incredible increase in the amount of written translation that we're being asked to do it is quite honestly overwhelming for us uh so one of the other things that i want to thank you for tonight is uh um is our commitment to adopting the talking points platform which is a classroom communication tool that we can use for individual classroom teachers to communicate with their parents and students what's wonderful about it is that they can type in english and every family can decide what language they want to read it

058in and then they can respond in that same language and the teacher can read it again in english so it's a wonderful communication tool for all languages including english but i think i really do hope that it'll increase the opportunities for our second language parents to connect with their teachers um yeah i'm sure that you probably have all seen you know there are many online translation tools that you can use and actually i'm quite thankful that the district if you scroll all the way down to the bottom left-hand corner of the district website there's a little toggle there that you can use to translate the district website into other languages that's really helpful it's really useful the problem is if you use one of those translators and translate something into spanish but you don't speak

059spanish yourself you can really never know for sure if what you said is what you wanted to say right so one of the good things about the talking points platform is that the opportunity for human interaction is there um you you'll send something to a parent and they'll reply if they look at it and think i don't really know what this teacher is asking they can flag it and someone from talking points will step in and say oh this is what this is what she meant to say or if their response doesn't seem like it is replying to the question she meant to ask they can flag it somebody can stop in and say or step in and say this this is what we're trying to say so that it is also optimized for education

060so you know a lot of the jargon there are people here who spent 10 and 12 years just learning all of those terms right well our interpreters have also spent many years learning the meaning of all of those terms but many of our parents haven't and just being able to describe those terms in ways that are meaningful for people who have not spent the last decade understanding our terminology that's a skill all by itself and so the fact that talking points is a staff full of people who are also good at making that translation that that's meaningful for us um so that really is what we're working on right now i do want to also just last finally say you know i was i was born just a stone's throw from where we're all sitting

061here right now tonight um and i never imagined when i left here that i would come back to find a community that was every bit as rich and diverse and as interesting as the one that i traveled the five continents to on my way back and i really do want to thank you for the commitment that you've made to seeing that that entire community is a part of the same conversation so thank you very much thank you brian boyan that's you're a tough act to follow too just um i think what how i spent my life and it's kind of well i go to the grocery store um the talking points in uh translator thing can you remind us about how many languages that enables for translation isn't it about a hundred yeah and you

062know obviously we we don't necessarily need all of them i know that there are times in the district that i think that we normally have somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 languages that are spoken in the district not all of them are languages that people can read and write i i think that we really need about a dozen languages that that's the languages that people will want to communicate in um and and that's that's difficult a couple of our languages like onward amharic even somali um they're the translation tools that exist for those languages aren't great you know somali was only a written language for about a decade before their civil war started so many of the people who learned to read and write somali actually learned english first and then learned to read and

063write somali because in somalia they had learned to read and write it with osmania arabic looking characters instead of our english looking characters so you know the fact that it has the languages that we need that are useful to our community is is it's lucky for us thank you anything miss nathan i'm going to add this to my list of requests just as it would be great to hear from the equity specialist it would be great to have the bilingual specialists come and tell us a little bit about the kinds of encounters they have with our students and our families and our staff i've had the pleasure of meeting a few of them and some of the family engagement work i've done and we if we let them tell their stories it would be worth

064devoting an entire school board meeting too of of how they came to be here and what they bring to to their experiences with the students so i'll add that to my list too thank you mr barrow uh a statement and then a question um only recently did i become more aware of the kinetic uh language and their use of symbols uh and how symbols are used to convey concepts and as you just referenced uh the somali language uh not all cultures have written communication that being said bilingual services do they have anything to do with the welcome center um they do it it happens that right now the majority of people that are in our are our welcome newcomer classrooms are they're kind of from three different groups um what actually one of the biggest

065groups is temporary residents who are somehow attached to the mayo clinic so we get the children of the visiting clinicians and research fellows who are working at the mayo clinic we also get the the children or the patients that are at the at the clinic um and then we also still have a migrant and refugee population we are just now beginning to get the first of our dari and pashtun speaking refugees from afghanistan uh just a few families and i think that we're anticipating more we don't have that capacity in the district yet there is nobody in the district that works for us that speaks dhari or pashtun so we we would love to be able to have people there working with those students we do have chinese um actually one of our arabic interpreters

066is also a japanese speaker so when we get visiting clinicians who speak japanese it's our arabic interpreter who helps them um and um you know that the onawak and um uh pashtun and dari speakers that are coming into the district uh there aren't enough of us to be able to communicate with those families yet dr garcia i just want to say thank you for the work that you do it's i mean it's i can tell how meaningful it is to you which means to me that your heart is singing because you're helping someone in the school system um and that ripples out into the rest of our community and it does my heart good to see how much you love the work that you're doing and to know how much we are positively affecting the

067the rest of our our students and families so thank you well on on behalf of these people because they are the ones who do that actual work i i really don't i can be polite in a couple of languages but i am not an interpreter myself you are welcome yes thank you all of you well i decided to end on this picture for a reason so if you think about the picture and think about the people who are in front of you we're the most diverse team in the entire school district so when we're trying to mirror the students who look like us this is what it looks like this also has to expand it has to expand so when you think about a department you can really think about it in three separate categories

068and the first would be advocacy so you can think about calling out and calling in so purposefully naming those areas that we need to improve upon purposefully naming those areas where we've hurt people in the past and then calling in people to make those things better make it better for staff families and also for our students the second thing we can think about is one of building uh competency so when we start calling out and calling in how are we going to go about doing the work i think we have a lot of people here in our district who are ready but they may not know how so we have to figure out a plan or processes in our different areas so that doing the work is actually easier for people it's easier for people

069to step into if even if they're curious about it how can we bring you into the fold also and then brian you touched on the last one it's it's one of hope it's one of hope this is the most hopeful i've ever been in this school district that thinking that something for once will actually finally get better i went to school in los angeles california and i had my own situations over there and i moved here and there were some of the same issues and i can't help but think about my four sons who are in this district if they're going to go through the same things that i went through as a kid i can't be so we think about all of the students all 17 000 some odd students they all have a

070story and how are we contributing to their story see they want to be in a positive way or a negative way we want to be on the positive side and do some things right for our students and families and staff so with that i'll end and say thank you for listening to us tonight thank you mr reference and ms work manhattan yeah i'd like to make a comment you mentioned hope and i look at the five of you here and you are oozing hope and i feel it's it's contagious and it makes me feel so much more hopeful about the work that we are doing together so thank you from the bottom of my heart thank you so much thanks good night good night you don't have to leave it's just they know there's a

071third meeting after this i haven't mentioned that okay um again tough act pile board member committee updates all school board members are a number of committees and you have any updates from any of your committee work board members ms mclaughlin um i can start off the legislative committee i mentioned earlier the the work that we're doing with the legislative priorities we had our meeting with our local legislators on the 29th of our 27th of january um all of them were in the or i would say most of them are in the tent it's about 80 percent and we had about an hour discussion with the north side of town and the south side of town they had a lot of great questions a lot of great input for us things that they wanted to share

072with us about their work and things that we shared about the priorities answered some questions got some more information about how we can help them with the things that they're working on dr garcia i don't know if you have anything to add no we do have for those of you who are maybe interested we do have recordings i'm just having some technical issues because they're kind of big files so for those of you especially um director workmen to be able to view and kind of just listen in and it'll also influence and sort of help us determine what we might do sort of moving forward with more of like like the candidate forums when that time comes anyone else missed nathan policy committee had a meeting last week and we'll be bringing items to brief

073at the next regular meeting on the 22nd thank you and student school board meets once a month we did have a student lined up to present some information to you and had to had a conflict at the last minute but at the last meeting students provided feedback to on dr wallstrom who's done the bell time survey for the district they also listened to a student who has developed a survey that he uh suggesting students could use to evaluate their teachers and that was um that was interesting too i we amazing kids in this district and they don't wait they have ideas in there they're going with them uh also i'm able to attend every month family and community engagement committee that melissa brandt and i think she's here runs i continue to be stunned by

074the amount of information that is provided the number of opportunities for families and students and community members that is available in this district and that melissa knows about today for instance the focus was on injury prevention and a member of a mayo clinic talked about places where kids and families can get bike helmets car seats where they can get a simulator for distracted driving their couple board members who could benefit from that um i'm not i'm not naming names but that's just one of the things and uh they are developing a district-wide calendar so that people regardless of what school your child attends or if you don't have children you'll know what kind of community opportunities are available and they're getting that done but i just i'm so grateful i learned something new and exciting

075every time attend those meetings so thank you for that anybody else all right we will move on then to the consent agenda any items to be removed for separate consideration hearing none move approval second it's been moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda all in favor say aye aye opposed consent agenda is approved then we will go to preparation for action 8.01 approval of overall budget strategies including budget reductions dr pikkel oh [Music] and i missed the focus topic oh my gosh brenda i am really sorry that oh man that was that was bad okay we got you back what everyone's gonna pile on here ms whichman sorry do you want to introduce her i already did i just want to say as a former social studies teacher next to an english teacher this

076is what always happens to us okay fine brenda you take it away yeah seriously we we are very very excited about this it's a pleasure to introduce executive director of curriculum instructment instruction brandon whichman who's gonna uh introduce the team social studies is much on the news these days as our state is considering some new standards in that subject those standards are not approved and there's a lot to happen yet to see in the meantime we have really exciting work happening here in rochester as board members are aware this is part of our series of doing a deep dive into the major content areas uh that we are working with students on we've looked at math we've looked at english language arts and so it's really exciting now to introduce brenda and the team to

077take us into our work in social studies um thank you for that less than um warm welcome but we are here as our team makes their way forward um we have lots of chairs um on cabinet it's kind of uh oh brenda how many people do you have tonight i said well there's a lot but speaking of hope we have not only teachers but we have students here as well who really are our true hope and we are so excited that they are here and and you you kind of know the drill the team members will introduce themselves and team members please make sure when you're speaking you're speaking into a microphone you might have to pass them around a little bit thank you and i've just been asked to remind folks of the word

078continue to wear masks and students it's so good to see you and i know you're used to wearing masks because you do it in school but welcome and there won't be any tests after you get done with your presentation so we're good if i might just want a second what brenda said please grab the mic don't feel you need to bend over we want to hear you and i know it's a little awkward but it really matters also for people watching so just move those things around they're mobile for a reason all right well as you know we always have a cast of thousands um to tell the story and so we're going to start with a little bit of background as you know and have probably heard there will be new standards coming out

079in social studies they are not quite ratified yet so we are working under the 2011 um standards every 10 years they're reviewed and right now they're there's a draft and there's an opportunity for for comment so if adopted these would be implemented in the 26-27 school year so this is just kind of the nuts and bolts of what we kind of currently have in place in terms of materials i do want to point out that and this might be a theme in this conversation today is uh that our materials are dated in in some instances and we have work to do to make sure that um we are getting materials in front of our students that are relevant to where we are today so but those are just our elementary and middle school pieces and

080then if you go to the next slide you can see kind of the scope and sequence for high school and then we did want to show you um some work that we've previously done is our teachers have identified prioritized learnings in each of their courses so we wanted you to see an example of what a sixth grade social studies prioritized learning might look like usually there are about five to seven or five to eight prioritized learnings so this one is just a compare and contrast different points of view and then you can see we just shared the proficient there's proficient partially proficient and then it does not meet that's been identified by by teacher groups and then in u.s government this is what a prioritized learning might look like so this one is how the

081u.s constitution establishes a system of government that has powers responsibilities and limits and as we talk a little bit about the changes with the new standards you'll see that these skills are really the the important piece we're really looking at those skills that students have an opportunity to continue to demonstrate so why does this matter well and this time i think it's critical that we uh um develop and grow our students to be um critical thinkers and to be able to engage in civil discourse and and be um citizens in the pluralistic society that we live in um so when you look at the grad profile certainly all of those areas are speaking to that and i i certainly now more than ever i feel like this is what we want for our students so

082it's really really important work particularly in the social studies area i'm going to introduce um sierra linforce here she's one of our implementation associates at the elementary level actually syria typically is our science and math implementation associate but this year she's been doing pretty much everything which is very impressive uh but sierra came tonight to kind of walk us through um some progress to date at the elementary level thanks for that yeah yes i'll see you in a few weeks for science too um i do want to preface that um i am sharing the work that has been led and done um by others and and while i've done my homework and participated in some of these committees and things if there's questions that i am able to ask or answer i will but i

083also know that today specifically i'm i'm speaking about the work that we've collaborated with our native american liaison with and i know you'll be meeting with aipac i believe next week the american indian parent advisory group so if there's anything that i'm not able to speak to hopefully there's some people there that can um so just to highlight some of the work we've done with elementary and then we've got two wonderful teachers a kindergarten and first grade teacher who are teachers who helped create some of this work too and are implementing it so they'll be able to speak to some of these um but with collaboration with our native american liaison we did some revisions of our then and now first grade curriculum um traditionally that was a very focused on the the american settlers

084and not the contributions of the dakota lakota and anishinabe who were here first and so we really worked to incorporate what was their life like and how could we provide some photographs and some experiences for students to better be able to understand the past but then to be able to bring that to the present as well so we do feature the pow wow in that work as well the 13 moons in our kindergarten and first grade curriculum and that's what our teachers here are going to speak about a couple years ago we did the new look at thanksgiving so really looking at presenting what what happened with the new with thanksgiving in a developmentally appropriate way focusing on thanksgiving caller giving thanks of um the cultural contributions of the dakota lakota but as well as

085others that were here on this land before us um comparing and contrasting so that work took place a couple years ago and is being implemented in our classrooms as here's how we should be talking about thanksgiving in our classrooms we did some work with the seven grandfather teachings k5 our media specialists have really been working on curating culturally authentic texts for our students particularly in k5 although i know our lincoln k-8 has done some stuff as their stuff there as well our grade six started implementing the dakota homelands curriculum and then there was the implementation of the secondary ethnic studies course which you'll hear about more as well some continued opportunities so this is really continued opportunities and partnerships with our native american liaison and as you start looking really at the standards that are

086coming incorporating the experiences of our dakota lakota and anishinabe is deeply embedded within the standards within maths within science within social studies as well so intentional collaboration with our local tribes to continue that alignment work and refinements across all grade levels reviewing and revising our k-5 constitution day curriculum i learned when i was meeting um with our native american liaison that um part of our constitution was actually built on principles of the iroquois and um the the iroquois tribes who were working together to not be fighting with each other and that was one of the foundations of our own constitution and so really looking at some of that work and how we can adapt some of that k5 because that is talked about in every grade level and then continuing to work intentionally to collaborate

087with our american indian advisory group across all grade levels that is our our work that we've been partnering with our native american liaisons with all right so we're going to highlight a bit of some of the promising practices in the field of social studies so in a moment stephanie whitney is going to talk a little bit about our standards exploration committee because as you know we need to start looking at those standards start thinking about what the implications are we're really working on integrating multiple perspectives as you heard from sierra and then our ethnic studies has been off an elective offering and so we have students and the teacher from john marshall who are going to talk a little bit about that and then the final promising practice that we're seeing in classrooms is just

088more thematic teaching and less chronological so we're trying to really pull in what are those current events that are happening and then how can we bring that into a more thematic teaching do you want to click the hi everyone i'm back again i have one slide tonight so if the side of me made you nervous based on the last time we met um this one's quick and i know we're working to get to our student perspectives and i'm very excited for that so last year i had some social studies teachers who reached out to me and asked if we could explore the new standards talk a little bit about what those new standards might mean how that preparation might look and thank you and so this year we started an exploratory committee and so our

089teachers grades 6 through 12. i reached out to the 6th through 12th grade social studies teachers and asked who might be interested in just exploring we know that these standards won't be in place in our classrooms until 26 27 and so um just getting an idea of how these particular standards might change our practices and what it is that we want to work on in those in these years in between so the purpose of our group is right there in front of you basically we wanted an informal conversation with social studies teachers about what their thoughts are around these standards what they think these might mean for them and then also to think about the outcomes being what should we prepare how can we support them how can we support this work going forward um

090so there they feel more at ease trying some things out and and spending some time studying and researching on their own as well and so these were the outcomes that our group worked on together we've had one meeting so far right after winter break and it was it was fabulous we had a great chance to talk with about eight social studies teachers about what their what their thoughts are what their concerns are and and essentially what they're anticipating might be some um important conversations that we have in the coming years so our next meetings at the end of this month and i'll keep you updated but that's kind of where we are so now we're going to have um danielle canole and randy wood where kindergarten and first grade teacher share some of that work

091that i was speaking about that we worked with our native american liaison and our american indian indian advisory committee um to work and implement and so they are using it in their classrooms and you'll even get to see some amazing kindergarten and first grade student work as well hello my name is randy wood i'm a first grade teacher at washington elementary and my name is danielle canole i'm a kindergarten teacher at sunset terrace so i was fortunate enough to be part of a group that got together to do some curriculum writing this summer revolving around the 13 moons curriculum myself another teacher some instructional coaches some cni representatives we all got together and decided that we needed to have some equity diversity in our social studies curriculum revolving around native american culture and history not

092only because it's important that we learn about it being as we've adopted the land acknowledgement and all of that information it goes along with our standards but also to make those people of those cultures feel represented in our classrooms so um in our classrooms in september we kind of did an introductory lesson with the students to kind of give them a little bit of background and explain to them sort of the moon cycle and what that means um in uh and so then we have the turtle shells there um so we talked about how they use the turtle shells to kind of talk about the moon so the inside of the shell represents the 13 different moons throughout the year and then the outside of the shell um has 28 days counting between the moons

093and so we use that every day in our classroom to count down between the moons um and then the circle in the middle tells us what moon we're on um and so we did that at the beginning of the year and talked about how at each month we would have a new moon and we go through that so then at the beginning of each month on the calendar we put a little tag just like all of our other celebrations or things we have um with the moon and the kids are so excited every time there's a new month they come in and they can't wait to find out what the moon's going gonna be what it means um and they're they're talking about it a lot i have a lot of parents who tell me

094that every time they get in the car they look in the sky and they're like oh there's the harvest moon there's the raccoon moon and they're just having those conversations which is super exciting to see um so then with that we practice counting um in the dakota language so we talk with the kids about we focus primarily on the dakota moons um since that is sort of our land acknowledgement and those pieces um but we do talk about how depending on where you are um the names might have different meanings or different um names um so we do talk about that a little bit um and the little book you see there is actually a book called 13 moons and it's um a story about a little boy who's being told about the moons um

095and so we referenced that book but it covers a variety of the moons so it's not just the dakota ones but we do tie in those pieces too but then we specifically have clips um for each of the moons um focusing on the dakota side um where it talks to the kids about why it's it's named that moon so the current moon um is called the raccoon moon so there's a clip that talks about how this is the time of the year when raccoons are coming out of hibernation and you'll start to see them and it's a sign that spring is coming and so we have conversations around that we watch the clip um and talk about those things and then we usually do um some um i'm drinking on my word right now extension

096thank you extension activities with it too um so the next slide shows um some of the things that have um we've done um to bring that even more into the classroom so the pictures that you see there um were actually painted with corn so one of the moons is the corn harvest moon so we got out corn and we got to play with the corn talk about how corn grows and then we painted with it um to give them that full experience and there was it's not there i see there was another um clip there we did the tree popping moon and so we made and then we used bubble wrap to represent the popping of the trees so they could hear what that sounds like and we did some science experiments with that to

097talk about well why does it pop what's making that happen um and have some of those conversations so it's really fun to see it come in all facets not just the social studies piece but really we connect it to everything we're doing and we're really lucky because we've been able to tie in some of the videos that corey hill has made and put out for us and get to tie some of that those experiences in with it too um and really it's just been so awesome to see the kids talking about nature and those experiences and getting and investing in in these and looking forward to just sort of those conversations and what we're going to be learning next hi so we're representing john marshall high school my name is michaela sperle and i am

098the ethnic science teacher at john marshall and then we have three students with me who will introduce themselves um and so in ethnic studies we cover four major topics which include personal identity hidden history community action and then social movements and so over the last two years as this course has been offered so we are now this is the fourth section that i've taught being that is it's a semester-long class um and i'm going to let most of what we do and share in class be communicated by the students that i have here but a big piece of this is just making sure that we have as many voices as we can included in the story of the united states when it comes to past present and future events and so that is the majority

099of what our topics include it's a class that is i think a tight community is created through this class and especially when it comes to that first unit of personal identity we're able to get to know ourselves get to know each other which then creates an environment where students are i think feel comfortable speaking and sharing their own personal experiences as well as hearing and listening other students speak up about theirs so i'm going to let them share a little bit about their experiences now i guess i'll go first so uh my name is tahara lopez and i'm a senior so basically like miss sprawl touched on uh the two subjects or two units that i think stuck out the most to me was definitely personal identity it gave us the opportunity to really indulge

100in kind of an own reflection of yourself but also how that reflection of yourself and that identity connects with other people and then we also did hidden histories and then within that big unit we had you know multiple different sections where we talked about native history we talked about black american history lightning next community the asian american community and i think it's a funny thing that it says like it's a hidden history because it really is the idea that uh u.s american history is george washington and abraham lincoln it's a thing that's like a constant reminder in your head so when you're giving the opportunity that no it's so much more than that it's all of these different groups and all of these different people that contribute to american history and that contribute to our

101lives deserve to be recognized and ethnic studies gives us the opportunity to recognize that so i think without it we're just kind of in this state where we're like we're trying to ignore it or we don't want to acknowledge it and that's not okay you know we deserve to learn it because it's just as important as anything else um my my name is megan holland and i am also a senior at john marshall i decided to take the ethnic studies course because i understand how learning about people who have different experiences than i do is important in becoming a more well-rounded person and i felt like it was something that was missing from my high school career and um one of my favorite things about this course is that in the past when i would

102ask a classmate about their opinion on a certain topic that related to ethnic studies without thinking about it i would kind of be asking them to you know with their opinion represent much larger group of people and in miss roll's class she would teach us about a certain topic but then my classmates who had personal experiences with the topic would be able to share their experiences as they felt comfortable but the responsibility of teaching their classmates wasn't put on them as it maybe had in the past and i'm very proud of the diversity at john marshall as as i know a lot of my classmates and teachers are and i'm just very happy to have had the opportunity to take this course and i hope it stays around because i know that a lot of

103other people would benefit from it as well hi my name is amina sharif and i'm also a senior at john marshall high school being in ethnic studies i think it was probably one of my favorite classes of the day it was also the first class and so right away we're asking serious questions that you truly you have to think critically but once we get past those questions kind of like how my classmates have talked about we're able to connect with others and i think the one thing that i learned the most in ethnic studies class was how to relate to others and because we got through those tough questions those maybe dark sides of history that do need to be spoken about and talked about there was this kind of unspoken respect and just this

104large bubbly community that all the classmates all of us we're just so happy to be a part of i think that um taking this class also helps students like me and also my friends here it helps empower us because we see our stories and our voices being heard and represented we see ourselves as members of the community and as young people who can actually make a change and difference in this world and i think that it's just starting off with a simple class just every single morning if you can dedicate just five minutes to learning about our history learning about the history of your neighbor i think we can achieve great things so i'm very happy for the opportunity it was the first time i had ever seen ethnic studies listed as a social studies

105class and i knew i wanted to jump on that and take that right away so i hope that this stays around for a long time so a quick story um as we developed ethnic studies there were some doubters who said well i don't think you're going to get enough students to run that class and we've been able to run the class at at all three high schools um for the last uh two years so i think students are actually asking for where's ethnic studies too or how do we build that in um so i think that's where the hope is i think that's kind of our theme tonight um so some broader implications and the students hit on many of these um more eloquently than i can but we're really moving away from discrete knowledge

106into critical thinking practices so they talked about connection i think that's a huge piece of social studies credibility of sources how do we know if something is credible or not how do we make sure that we have multiple perspectives and then moving away from analyzing events through just one perspective to multiple perspectives and then moving away from that idea of studying the past and not bringing it into what's happening today and what the implications are so those are the changes that we see happening that are broader implications even beyond social studies as it relates to the challenges as i mentioned earlier you know making sure we have the right materials in front of our students i think is critical um and we have some work to do with that um and then also just finding

107various ways for students to showcase their understanding and their knowledge and and uh through different assessments and then just ensuring that we're continually looking to add in those multiple perspectives um i think again you heard it from our students and did a wonderful job explaining that but it's critical that our students not in just one course but starting in kindergarten you know that they get an opportunity to see themselves that's really really important and then just in terms of a future planning we have much more work to do with our native american liaison i know they'll be filling that position soon here but then looking for cross-curricular opportunities specifically at the elementary level social studies is an opportunity to develop that language comprehension that's so critical when we looked at that reading work and scarborough's

108rope that we talked about a couple of months ago getting students to really learn how to read like a historian and identifying um credibility uh uh is a huge component that we want to work on as well listening to our students and hopefully you heard them tonight on how can how can we better meet our students needs with other offerings and then um just learning about the new social studies standards as they go through that process um and then time to implement those is part of the work i think that's uh what we have for you um we'd be happy to take questions i know we have a lot of great experts up here to share any questions you have mr farlow uh first two our students um i believe this board has always believed

109in your ability and the capacity and you have uh proven us right so you've done this on your own just in what you've shared and uh but it speaks to our hearts which i think is important as well [Music] and so i wanted to commend you and what you've shared and the difference that you're saying it has made and probably will continue to make after you continue your journey you all each of you are seniors and you probably have some plans if not i want to encourage you to develop some uh you're going to be you are the future now and what you're sharing helps build the future well i didn't realize danielle your kindergarten teacher correct and seniors and then kindergartens kindergartens have the capacity to process to hear to appreciate uh to value

110to benefit and and thank you for bringing that to light uh additionally i think uh chair marvin we may have to have a study session to on the 13 haven't moons about the popping moon but uh i consider myself quite well versed in telling my grandkids oh that's a full moon but i realized there's more than just a full moon bro let me interrupt for a minute um clearly these educators are sophisticated and experienced enough that they might even be able to get this board to be able to understand so that would be fantastic go ahead and then the fact that you were audacious enough to acknowledge that the iroquois [Music] our constitution wasn't just a result of our founding and and scratching is a significant beginning uh and uh um is there more that

111you think this district could do and what could we uh as a board in an ideal situation how could we be more supportive of ethnic study programming yeah so i ended up becoming the ethnic studies teacher because i went to the principal and said we don't have any african-american or women's or any specified histories like that many public schools across the state across the country have what can we incorporate and this class was being developed at the alc and so then i was brought on board from that lens but i think there are so many histories that you can go so much deeper with like even just like the four broad categories that we can get to in the semester-long class you could teach a class on each one of those if you had the

112time and resources to do so and so i think a lot of would have to do with probably surveying students seeing where the major interests are and how we can incorporate that but also i think with the new social studies standards how is it that we can incorporate some more of this into the u.s history classes or the world history classes at a broader scale and so that kids don't just have to choose based on an elective and that information and there are so many teachers that are already doing that work but i think being able to support that work is going to be really crucial as we're developing the new standards okay and then finally um one of you had mentioned that eight teachers had gotten together and decided and that intrigued me first

113of all i'm thankful that this district allows collaboration such as that and opportunity to dream and and believe and to develop [Music] so outside of the articulation cycle um are you able then or how long did that take you to get to that point and are there other opportunities because um critical thinking is important and uh without necessarily saying well we're developing a curriculum called abcd but how can we continue to develop and and promote critical thinking on the level that you guys are providing um i think the slide that sierra walked through about what has been progress to date um yes we haven't had a formal social studies curricular overhaul in well eight years or whatever the case may be um but in the interim we've identified a need in our gap in our

114current curriculum that we need to fill and we set aside summer curriculum writing time for projects just like this because there's some things we can't wait 10 years for now so we want to continue to support that and that's certainly the main work we would be doing with our native american liaison specific to a native american integration of perspectives and i think you know we we know with social studies our curriculum is dated um and and i can only speak to the elementary side um and so we have you know we broke it down into three steps we've got a beautiful color-coded chart of what we might do here when um but i also think that over the past two years we've also provided some supports and con and provided space for conversation about how

115to respond to current events as well in our elementary and middle school and on up as well and so we're trying to be aware of what's happening in the world current and connecting it to those events in the past and then continuing to move forward with teachers that are interested and passionate about that work sometimes things come from family families of students that say hey this has happened and can can we change it and when we know about it we try to try to move on it and so you know from the elementary perspective i think that we have done a nice job we would love to do more with greater capacity but we're chipping away at what we can when we can and we always have teachers on board and then reach out to

116those representative communities as well just wanted to add one piece your question about ethnic studies and possibly expanding mr ruffin and i were able to visit ethnic studies and we didn't want to leave but one of the next steps that we talked about was possibly taking a field trip to some districts that do have more offerings including some students in that conversation and some teachers and then just kind of thinking about what that could look like as we think in to the future patrick garcia yeah so i just wanted to thank of course the educators for making these things happen and i also want to acknowledge too to the students i know that this year and the last two years you've also been instrumental in sort of pushing that needle recognizing that there are things

117that you want in your classroom that you don't see and asking for that i'm into it i appreciate when you do those things so keep up the good work and i'm glad that you had educators who are willing to sort of hear you in that process and provide you the thing that you're asking for i also just had a question maybe for this part of the room what training do teachers receive on ethnic study pedagogy and content like so outside of those of you who are teaching ethnic studies what do the rest of you get in that respect i can speak to at the elementary level all of our new teachers when they come into the district they get focused work through regan would come and do a session on our native students about the

118students we have in rochester public schools and then also the culturally relevant teaching practices is integral in the new teacher orientation that we do that's a whole year long so that's the primary place that we tackle it for new people as they come in when we rolled out the new look at thanksgiving that was a significant shift because as an elementary teacher i taught second grade there's a lot of pomp and circumstance that can come with holidays and so really changing that we needed we knew we needed to provide um support for how to have those conversations and that historical background and understanding um regan and our native american liaisons were instrumental in creating that pd but we also made sure that when we presented that information to staff that we had a parent from

119the american indian advisory committee there at those sessions as well to be able to help answer questions that we were not able to um and so really partnering together doing a lot of the deep research um and then reaching out to our teachers and asking what do you need and how can we help support you in that as well we do have our equity teacher leaders as well so every building has at least two equity teacher leaders and so they do they plan and organize professional development at the sites but i do think this is an area where we could do better and i don't know i want to maybe let michaela speak to that too from the teacher lens but i think a lot of our offerings are strong for new teachers um and

120i think we could we could deepen that um support that we could provide for teachers and i'm just going to piggyback off that a little bit too so we have our equity lead teachers and then i'm pretty sure most buildings have like an equity team i know at sunset we do and that's actually the conversations we've been having is how can we deepen that and what what what do we have available to us to continue those that work so i think i would agree and piggyback off of i think it is something that we're looking for um and and continuing to try to work on as a equity lead teacher in my building um and part of the equity team and we're meeting tomorrow morning um is that that is a big piece of this

121is bringing that pd to staff members i would say one of the bigger hurdles that we have come across being that the equity work has been done about the same timeline that covet has existed and so when you get to those pd days it has been a huge struggle with working with teachers and staff in general to push on this topic because they're they're just as we know burnt out or whatever you might say um and so it's how is it that in the next coming years we can make this into um some professional development that people are ready for excited for and ready to move on in their journey of learning in this area so that that has i'd say probably been the biggest struggle for for the work at this point thank you

122thank you and miss nathan then dr paquel well you can't be thanked enough tonight for coming and for everything you've been doing and you know when when the district first rolled out the graduate profile and we heard from the community the skills that we wanted our students to have when they left you know the biggest struggle has been how do we measure it how do we show it and you have all shown it tonight you're doing it in kindergarten with with the the teachings and the skills you're building and you students have demonstrated that you have mastered a graduate profile i think um in in the work that you're doing in this class and i think um just hearing your i wanna i wanna go to that ethnic studies class to just immerse myself in

123something that's really rare in this world or people who come from different places who have different experiences who may have different ideas sharing them learning from each other and growing from it and i'm i'm just so i'm proud of all of you um and and thankful how much you're helping us show um what we really can accomplish for all students in this district so thank you dr pacquiao well i have a question for amina and tahara and megan i want you to be as honest as you're inclined to be and if you don't want to say anything you don't have to one of the biggest criticisms of some of the kinds of things you've covered in your ethnic studies class is the teaching about the injustices and the struggles in our country's history will lead

124students to either hate america or lose hope for america and i'm wondering what how you would respond to that having gone through because it's a very serious frequent criticism of this kind of content that you've you've told us was very meaningful for you so for you as the people who are the uh instructor barlow said the focus of all of this work how would you respond to that uh criticism of this kind of learning and don't overthink your response just where's your head well in my personal experience because i took a ap u.s history course the amsteads course and honestly learning about american history from one perspective i think is what makes students like me frustrated that their voices aren't being heard but again with a course like ethnic studies we learn things like empathy

125we learn things like respect so having those principles with learning anything i think is what's going to guide us and that's that's the most i can speak on for it but honestly yes sometimes like those negative feelings may arise but it's also knowing that with education and with having instructure instructors who know what they're teaching and with having students who are also motivated to learn what it is that we're learning when we come together for the greater good which is learning about these things and learning how to interact with others that this pushed aside i think about that all the time when people argue on that behalf that it's just going to cause more turmoil it's just going to arise more problems and i think that that response is just people being afraid of change

126people being afraid of what can happen what this means for other people what it means for them and it's it's harmful and it's hurtful to think that you are so satisfied with how things are now that you're not willing to see something else that you're so okay with the position that you are right now that you don't think about the other people who are suffering the people who have lived through like so much that their life hasn't been easy because of the institutions that we have now because of the way we are now so yeah i think it's just a response of fear a response that they don't want to see change and i think it's our responsibility to shut that down to say no we're not going to listen to that anymore we need

127to create change if we want to do better because if we just stand by or we shut it down or anything we're no better than what we've done in the past my classmates already did a very good job explaining their opinions but i took ethnic studies last semester and i i was very upset that the class is ending the um friendships and all of the amazing conversations that we had in that class was something that i didn't want to leave behind so although weeks we explained the shortcomings even when it wasn't in the lesson plan when we were just talking as a group because we became such good friends and we like to do that even though we talked about the shortcomings as we've said the empathy and understanding i think was far greater thank

128you all very much thank you so much we really appreciate the presentation i had one more comment sorry um i like that um dr pickel's comment about wrapping that wrapping the student's voice into this i just want to thank you for being here these focus topics are the highlight of every meeting for me you clearly know how impressed your students are thank you thank you thanks guys [Music] thank you um on as i tried to do before by mistake because that was an amazing presentation and i think there should be some way that the three students there's got to be some sort of contract that they need to come back here we need them yeah this community needs them um 8.01 now we're going to be doing the approval of the overall budget strategies including

129budget reductions dr pikel dr marvin and directors of the board i'd like to ask our executive director of finance john carlson to come up as board members know this board has chosen to grapple with a significant structural budget deficit that we have in our district that potentially equates to 23 million dollars uh next year but we are doing so with the input of our community not as much input or as lengthy the input as we might like and aspire to in the future but a lot of input nonetheless in fact 153 pages of input that you all received on some proposals that we shared with you last week very importantly before i briefly touch on that input and then turn it over to john to share with you the resolution that i'm recommending you approve

130tonight it is incredibly important to suggest that we are not bringing to you any specific reductions or approvals of investments in the budget to approve tonight we are recommending that you approve a strategy that we will then use over the coming months starting this week to develop the proposed the budget that you would review in june and so the specific difficult reductions that we got a lot of feedback on last week are not before you in their particulars they are illustrative of the kinds of challenging reductions that i believe we will need to make to get to structural balance over a three-year plan but again they are not before you tonight for action rather the broad strategy that we would use to develop the budget you would see in june is so with that as

131kind of a framing for the purpose i'm going to go very quickly because i'm sure everyone in the audience and all board members have read all 153 pages of feedback very briefly um we heard from people who filled out both our online feedback form and participated in the uh input sessions that john and i facilitated one people liked that the strategy is a mix of approaches including using budget reserves using federal funding and some reductions people like that people liked that the proposal under consideration for this upcoming school year 2223 does not include reductions in class size they generally appreciated the emphasis on trying to avoid reductions to people who buy direct service to our students of course teachers paraprofessionals though that is not the case across the entire plan but there was appreciation for

132the general intent along that line there was strong strong encouragement for the district not to only think about reducing but to also think about raising revenue and being creative through new ways such as medicaid billing increasing enrollment drawing more students to rps online so a strategy only of doing more with less uh was not what our stakeholders were urging us to think of and exclusively uh people did express however that the well-intended desire not to reduce positions that directly serve students could uh problematically emphasize cutting people who indirectly serve students who provide critical support to those teachers who work directly with students and that that can have a very negative consequence on their ability to support students and so some caution uh some caution for us in simplistically assuming that the uh best cuts quote

133unquote are those uh that are a step or two from directly working with kids a frequent concern about reducing supports for mental health that we know that this has been a growing need during the pandemic and so we aren't doing as much as we probably want to be or could be already and so to be very concerned about reductions there frequent concerns about reduction in special education services first because of impact on the students but second also because of some concern about legal requirements and making sure that we're meeting all the requirements that are in students ieps um a significant theme of safety be cautious about especially in our middle and high schools anything that might uh impact that um some uh encouragement among some people especially in our uh our public input forums to

134be really careful about cutting things that are popular with families and therefore attract enrollment because then saving the money on that whatever program or intervention could reduce the larger financial benefit of the enrollment that those students bring if those families make different choices other than rochester public schools there was general agreement that programs that serve a very small number of students when you're facing a deficit of this level do deserve scrutiny significant theme about not backing off of diversity equity and inclusion investments though there were some counter voices that suggested that those were not as valuable at this time the predominant theme was that this is not the time to step back from those efforts which board members heard about tonight lots of discussion about the position of instructional coaches and some real concern that

135reductions in that position could impact our ability to support the teaching that helps to achieve positive student outcomes some significant concern about the theory which was a major theme of this proposal about eliminating unfilled positions and that while there seems to be a logic in doing so because it's not somebody's job is the position open but very much needed and so that reducing it leaves someone who's already filling in for part of that position continuing to need to do that and so that wanting to be encourage us to to not necessarily assume that reducing that unfilled job is always the the best or easiest way to make the cut strong endorsement of the work that our social workers and counselors do for reasons that i know this board is is very aware of frequent theme

136wanting us to be very deliberative and people asking how did this happen how did the deficit come about and urging us to really be as clear as we can about the causes of this i want to interject as i've said again and again it did not happen because of any failures in our finance office or analytic systems the deficit was accurately predicted several years ago and that's very important we can trust our numbers uh we have to make uh decisions with the numbers some strong advice to look for more community partnerships and to try and actually share services with organizations outside our direct uh district and we heard a little bit about that earlier tonight with community schools some strong endorsement of the idea of going to the citizens of rochester for a referendum potentially

137in 2023 but some real uh encouragement to say we're going to need to have our financial house very clearly in order to make the case for that support some frequent themes especially in the online feedback forums to also think about the higher levels of the school district whether that's with the superintendent's office the cabinet the school board itself in addition to people who are working potentially more directly with kids in schools encouragement to continually emphasize communication on these issues that we can never communicate enough strong suggestion that we create an ongoing citizens budget advisory group where people could get deep enough in the challenges of finance to provide kind of deep insight that is hard for people who don't deal with the intricacies of of school finance to do and then two final points on

138our strategic plan one don't abandon the idea of a strategic plan because you're in a budget crisis it's arguably more important than ever but some real concern about how are we going to do move forward a plan when we have a deficit and then the suggestion among some that in future years as we look to get to a structural balance in the school district that the goals of the strategic plan be a guiding theme of making those financial investments and decisions which of course is not impossible this year because we have not approved that plan so with that very fast a summary admittedly rushing past some nuance on both sides of many different issues what i'd like to ask john to do and then we can simply throw it open for board member questions and

139especially comments is give you a sense of the strategy resolution we are recommending you approve tonight to give us direction on the development of the budget over the next several months so john great thank you very much superintendent pacal chair marvin and board members the resolution that we've provided for you to consider is basically a six-legged stool so to speak and it really is guiding from that option c that we talked about a few weeks ago but in high level terms it's take covered federal money about 9.3 million dollars use 4.3 million dollars out of our savings account delay some transfers into our opeb and our gas b16 those are technical terms for health insurance money we're setting aside for our retirees and unused sick time severance program we're not going to short any of

140our current retirees or upcoming retirees we're just going to slow the rate we put into savings cancel some leases now that we'll have more of our own space and then find ways based on the options we've given to reduce seven million dollars in in expenditures or other assumptions we can make in our expenditures also could include finding additional revenue sources so we've written it in kind of a way to be as flexible as we can to kind of go back now over the next couple months before mark uh may 17 for our study session and to really narrow down on the exact and specific ways we're going to reduce spending um in our proposed budget that we give to you i think that's a pretty high level summary and we can take questions on thank

141you mr carlson so i will read the resolution and after it is seconded then there will be time for discussion uh for for those of you who are listening the board has had this information for for some time and have had a number of questions um answered so there's been a lot of study that's gone into it a huge amount of work and thank you to to both of you and and john to your entire department for preparing it in a way that is so easy to understand and as dr pickell had said and he's he talks pretty good for a social studies teacher um this is a strategy you're not recommending yet for the most part specific cuts to specific positions it's a strategy that we're going to be voting on so here's the

142resolution and as you said it's a six-legged stool john that doesn't exist it doesn't even exist like a chair i don't know two three-legged stools because i can do math somebody we already had the math focus but anyway be it results school board of independent school district 535 does hereby approve the use of 9.3 million in federal covid19 funding to maintain critical services to students during and following the pandemic be it further resolved school board of independent school district 535 does hereby approve the use of up to 4.3 million of the district's unassigned signed fund balance and be it further resolved the school board of independence school district 535 does hereby approve the delay of transfer of 0.8 million into the opeb health insurance savings account and be a further result the school board of

143independent school district 535 does hereby approve the delay of transfer of 1.4 million into the gas b16 used sick time severance savings account and be it further resolved that the school board of independent school district 535 does hereby cancel the following three facilities leases to save 0.2 million gauge east facility for girls gymnastics the boys and girls club site for middle school right fit and the building at 415 south broadway for the incubet incubator edu program and be it further resolved school board of independent school district 535 does hereby approve reductions in spending reductions of assumptions in spending or use of other funding that becomes available in the aggregate amount of seven million dollars in the preparation of the 2022-2023 budget second it's been moved and seconded now is there any discussion yeah okay yes

144yes yes speak now hold your peace dr garcia did you have i have all the things to say um i i think just in in general like growing up with not a lot of money um to have to like cut 23 million dollars from anything that just like you know just wrapping your head around that um it just doesn't seem possible i think i have a couple of questions um that i suppose i just need clarification on or like how do we want to go through this do we need to like go through the reduction list because i imagine my other colleagues maybe didn't even have a chance to read the responses to their questions or how do we wanna well i think if you have a specific question you want me to have a

145specific issue you want to address i mean i have several either comments or questions on several of the different things i just can't i don't have the access to the little the little pencil thing that we're supposed to be using to offer comments so i have several and different items do you want me to just push all the way through with a couple and then and and then we'll maybe switch speakers and come back to you okay so i want to just clarify when we're talking about some of the reduction um proposed reduction language when you're saying that we're going to adjust budgeting methodology to reflect certain things and we're assuming that there will be something we are not we're not cutting we are just hoping that those things will not be filled is that

146right you're talking about staffing positions correct so when it says like under financial impact statement like number three for example it says assume that there will be 20 of the average of 168.8 unfilled positions fiscal year 22 and 23. we're talking about not filling positions not necessarily that we're cutting any correct yes we we are trying to communicate as we look back over the last 12 years at any given time we have unfilled positions in the district but yet we've never accounted for that in the budgets we've never made a deduction to say we're going to have unfilled positions so we're not going to say don't fill the jobs we're just going to try to make a an assumption that says we'll save a million and a half at least just because there's two weeks

147here the job's vacant then two weeks here in two weeks here all that kind of normal transition that happens every year that we kind of over budget for um assuming that the jobs are filled full time all the time year-round so if we were to get a few people to fill the positions that are currently open and we are just assuming that they won't be filled where will those cuts then come from then we'll have to come back to you and ask for a budget uh revision at that point if that would happen my my intuition is telling me that even prior to the last four years where we've had over a hundred open jobs at a time we still averaged 40 to 60 unfilled jobs at any given time so this would be kind

148of just acknowledging what if the world were normal again and we just had a normal small amount of turnover it's still in an organization this large up to 40 50 60 jobs at a time are vacant okay so we're we don't have like a plan b like bucket list of if some of the assumptions that we're making don't actually come to fruition or i guess maybe the opposite if we do if somebody does step into that position and we needed them is there like another list of like cuts part two that we're looking at or will you just is it contextual and you would just look at it and come back to us with something specific i'd say be more contextual as well as we're not planning to run our savings account down to board

149policy so we're leaving intentionally like a three percent margin there in case something like this what if we were fortunate enough to fill every position that we put in the budget next year this never happened in my 11 years here but if it did happen we have one we have a safety valve in our savings account still can i on it's a critical question and again to stress i'm going to be like a broken record tonight we're not asking you to approve this tonight just a target we will be asking you in june and this is essentially saying where we would like to include for your consideration in june a somewhat less conservative financial planning strategy for rochester public schools than we have historically done we've been very conservative i think this is still very

150prudent but it is recognizing the reality that in almost no scenario are all these positions filled at every given time but that's a significant change in budgeting process so i think it is approval to ask for board action on that as part of the full budget in june to your question though dr garcia should those assumptions not prove true actually that'd be good news for a separate reason we'd be we'd be filling our positions more we would bring you a revised budget that would uh find those savings elsewhere to reflect that we didn't get it right but i think john is even in this change being conservative that this is a very prudent change in our methodology that i think it's very hard to see us not uh in the near term anyway uh realizing

151ms workman yeah just to to piggyback a little bit on what dr pikel said so some of these positions that are currently unfilled might be filled if we had additional students coming into the district and those students would bring revenue now it's not terribly likely that that revenue would cover all of the cost of those positions but it could go a long way so um is that somewhat accurate that's a good way of saying it yes thank you if it happens that way i'm talking about if there are like no extra students that come into the district and we just all of a sudden like three people pop forward and say like i've been wanting to apply for this position that's been open and then like oh what are we doing so i think unfortunately

152yeah has been carl would probably back me up and say this that when we fill a position then we get an email that somebody else has accepted a position somewhere else and there's just kind of been a constant churn right now in trying to keep a full staff okay miss mclaughlin and then um i just want to tie into this because i think it's something that i brought up at the last meeting but it's relevant to this discussion too and just for the you know listeners who perhaps didn't watch the last meeting but are paying attention to this one i kind of made the same comment about specifics to special education that if new special education students came in that funding would flow with that so we don't need to be concerned that our special

153education staff is going to you know that 10 more kids get added to their caseload and they don't have any additional staff to assist that's that was my worry can you explain that a little bit from that special education perspective so special education should be a fully funded program that's the ideal of our federal and state governments the reality is we can count on about 60 to 70 percent of the costs actually being covered so yes we would have the majority of it funded but we're still going to have to find the other 30 percent of the extra cost okay thank you for clarifying listen the comment that you made about the board policy for the reserve the percentage and that that we're still going to be um prudent and give ourselves a little bit

154more padding made me wonder do you feel that the board policy is at the right amount right now or do you think a change in policy would be represented that's a tough question because from a finance director's point of view it's say it's too low and i'd say raise it up to provide more margin more cushion for bad things that might happen unexpectedly but that's that would mean cutting the budget even further so in an ideal world it'd be 16 to 25 percent not six percent so i wouldn't go lower or that wouldn't be my professional recommendation but um we're trying to leave a little bit of margin there so that we don't run it right to six in case something happens thank you ms nathan so going back to the special education question we

155had a lot of comments um in the community engagement and i think it was as they were looking at the whole package but can we clearly say that there will be no current positions teaching or otherwise that serves special education students that would be cut in the seven million or not i would not want to be on record making a promise that we can't keep but the majority of the discussions i remember were targeting positions that were unfilled and that we were trying as much as we could to not impact a current staff member in that area in special education that's correct okay this is actually a important thing can dr martin this important point of clarification that i meant to mention in my opening uh comments and it's in the memo to the board

156in the previous draft that many of you saw we um referenced the position that type of position that director nathan is referring to which are unfilled positions and we described that as special education positions because those are many of the open positions in fact in retrospect as we looked at that public feedback we recognized a much more accurate way to describe it is open positions is where we would seek to make the savings and it will depend upon where we find those open positions as we bring you the budget and so in the revised proposal tonight it does not identify them as positions in special education it identifies them as essentially those open positions which those are challenging positions for any school district to fill and so i can't say as john just referenced that

157there would not be positions that are open that that provide services to our students with disabilities that might not be in the set of reductions we bring you in june but it would not start out of the gate with special education as the focus it would be looking for those open positions and as i shared we also heard feedback it's important to let people know we heard them open positions are not necessarily easy positions they're not necessarily freebies and i think that was very important feedback for us to get that said i think this year with the timelines and processes we have generally speaking that's a good place to prioritize reductions rather than existing staff in current positions so thank you for the chance to add that clarification dr garcia you had other questions yes

158and it kind of just falls right in line with us so if you're looking at the the document that memo that number 12 i just wanted clarification under the proposed reduction languages says reduce unfilled paraprofessional positions after examining the position and understanding why it has been vacant can you give an example of what reason of what reason would not result in cutting a position well i think or even its opposite what would result in like this is a good enough reason to cut this position what would those reasons be that language dr garcia would refer in particular to position that if we were looking at a point in time and a position was open for a relatively brief period but it had been filled previously and there was a very good prospect of refilling it

159and we were hearing from carla bulleson and her team that this was a really critical position that would not be one we'd be recommending um if we had a position that frankly we had lived without for a long time and we have a good number of those which again is not an easy reality but that's our reality those would be the positions we'd be looking at including in the recommendation to you in june but again it's not an individual who is currently holding that job right that is being cut it is it is an opening in a position because someone left or it had existed before and we're looking to fill it with a new person but we may choose not to fill it because it may be not the priority or it had been

160unfilled for a long time but so there's no human being associated with that who is losing a position yes okay like a perfect example that pops into my mind without trying to with trying to not to identify a specific student or a position but there was a position that supported a student one-to-one that student is not in the building right now i don't know the status if that student is coming back after the pandemic or not so that position is open it would be one that would be obvious to take out of the budget if the student never comes back but if the student does come back we're going to put the position back as a posting and get a person to assist that student so that students not going to be cut off from

161the services that they are entitled to but if they're not here in the building holding a position open in our budget we're cutting something else a service to someone who is here doesn't feel right either so that's an example of something we want to take out of the budget cut it but we will absolutely put it back if that person comes back and needs that support we'll find a way to make it work mr carlson just being captain obvious here so what we're talking about is that statewide city-wide we have way more jobs than we have people who are willing to fill them and we don't expect that's going to change anytime soon so that's basically eat what you're talking about even though if all these people all these positions as you said should be

162filled we may need these folks the reality is which is what we're dealing with right now we will not be able to get 100 of those positions filled that's right no organization can i know that an individual education plan might declare that this is required and that is required but the reality is you still have to find people that are willing to do that and in absence of that then we have to become creative too in figuring out how we're going to provide services and we might have it might have to look different to us okay thank you ms workman um this sort of ties in with the legislative committee but i'd like to let board members know that the education house finance committee is meeting this week and one of the some of the

163testimony is to ask the legislature to completely cover the english learners cross subsidy and for rochester that's a little over 3.5 million dollars now if they would also do the special education cross subsidy that would be another 15 million so um if at some point in the past i think the state did cover a whole lot more of that i don't remember what all the ins and outs for you know why we are here um contact your legislators uh you know those of you in the audience contact your legislators and and really push for this and there is more information on the um the legislature website that's that's a great point and that's kind of why the resolution the very last thing says if other funding becomes available so we would definitely prioritize taking things

164off this list if we were to fortunately find out in april or may that we're getting some new funding that can help erase the deficit we'll we'll be taking things off the list so want a little bit of flexibility there thank you other questions i just have a more technical piece um that this would be helpful for me if i'm going to look at this again that between the first draft of these proposed reductions in the current draft those first numbers changed from the number and alphabet but the comments refer to the old version so it would be helpful i don't think you need to redo it but if you could put them you know like number one and then one a so that we can reference them from either document that would be helpful

165and then the comments make a lot more sense uh i appreciate that that's probably my fault at like 2 a.m or something but i will say and at 2 am in my house it was harder to read that way the logic of that was as you know the board considered two levels of reduction and so those numbers equated to those two levels and then you direct us to a different level and there was some overhang there someone asked john's help in correcting exactly what you're pointing out because uh he was the keeper of the numbers before i i got got into it but we'll just be too hard we can do it through life on that i see what you're saying garcia yes mostly i think it's really just like two other major things so

166one of the questions i had was more just like clarification so on item 14 under the finance impact statement it says reduce from 34 to 26 spots for special education preschoolers used to integrate them with their general education peers i i guess i'm wondering are there are there already like do we have eight kids right now that will be affected by that or is that another like we're assuming less i would need to phone a friend and get some help on that clarification if those spots are indeed filled and students would be displaced or if that was a trend that they weren't all being used and we could give up a few thank you for being my friend yes those positions are not filled with students right now and we didn't need them all year

167so that does change year to year in terms of the number of students that need that experience but we did feel pretty confident that we won't need those next year so they do not have students in them and we have other opportunities for inclusion as well okay and you might also be a person to answer the next question that i have which is about some of the language um and one of the um feedback items that dr pickell had identified so let me see where i wrote this um and item four it makes a comment this the you know in summary saying the school district um the community is asking the school district to urgent or the urgent need to find ways to increase enrollment and find additional sources of revenue such as increasing billing

168of authorized mental health services to medicaid and increase enrollment for students from outside rochester and rps online so in terms of like the billing the medicaid part what does that what does that look like right now and are we talking about shifting away from like school-based mental health with services outside or what what would that actually look like so currently our mental health practitioners they can bill for their service for third party party billing so we try to maximize that as much as possible it would not affect our school-based community services that we have right now in fact we'd like to increase those that we need to explore every option we can to add that mental health and social emotional learning support in our buildings we always are looking for new ways of revenue so

169one of the things that we are currently doing with third-party billing is adding our students in transition our services for our students that are homeless we can now bill for those so it's it's a constant look at how can we maximize those services to the fullest extent thank you i think the rest of my things are just sort of general comments i have one other question or actually it's probably more of a com that i need to thank whoever wrote the resolution that we have on board docs because i am much more confident supporting the language of the last paragraph than i was of number six on page three of the memo that i think just it's been become my brain works but just a little bit of shift in language and then dr pikel's

170explanation earlier um helps solidify for me exactly what we're being asked to do here and um what we'll be asked to do in the future so i think that clarifies it a lot anything else miss nathan i i don't have a question but i i want to bring forward some of the comments that were um some of the positive comments that were in the um from the community because um we've heard a lot about communication and transparency and i just want to read one because i think it summarizes um what the when the board was first taught me go back when the board was first talking about these budget cuts and we were talking about the process um we had some really strong voices at the board table saying we don't feel comfortable making these

171decisions without hearing from the community and even though we were in a very tight time frame um the superintendent um and mr carlson put in the effort to really get i mean how many pages 153 pages of comments and i'm just going to read one comment clearly a lot of thought research and effort has gone into these budget proposals i appreciate that the options have been laid out so thoroughly in a way i found accessible i also appreciate the fact that student and staff impact was taken into consideration opening up this discussion to the public is also a strength and shows an increased effort and transparency and attempts at eliciting more participation through dialogue with families as well as building staff i'm really glad to see that and that wasn't the only comment that members

172of the community saw it um i i think that's a theme that we should a goal that we should continue to work for and everything that we do because i think this process worked and i i think we just need to keep repeating it with all these big decisions that we have because i think it will make our decisions better thank you anything else i just got close i just want to acknowledge that um you know while this isn't the final budget it it does feel like we are approving cuts even if we're not actually approving the budget right now and i just want to take a moment to acknowledge the staff in rochester public schools who will be affected regretfully because it's going to mean some potential loss of of employment and it is

173going to mean other people working harder and i just think it's important to acknowledge them thank you and are we ready for the vote all in favor of the resolution say aye hi resolution passes thank you thank you carla thank you john and thank you dr raquel uh for those of you who are still here first of all thank you secondly um it is national school counselors week so if you see a school counselor give them a hug i mean ask permission first but give them a hug we are going to go into closed session so if you don't want to sit here quietly waiting for us to come back and adjourn um you certainly have permission to um to exit um and it this what michelle made me remind you that we have to

174vote yes and that's i even have it written down here social studies teachers at this time i move the school board will meet in closed session as provided by minnesota statute 13d .03 to consider strategy for labor negotiations is there a second second huh yeah okay all in favor say aye aye opposed um this open meeting is recessed i'm sorry i just needed to note that you will be adjourning to the superintendent's conference room for the closed session now i need to capture that in the minutes for this meeting thank you i thought we only had to say that when we came back you know where we're going now well okay thank you so we are going to the superintendent's conference room and we are in recess at 8 04 pm is yes i lost

175your friends and i think they're really important um so okay hey uh foreign so jordan appreciated um know who knows when i was a board member okay um oh my first year foreign um oh he did history uh now uh um foreign cambodians is um hmm i felt so bad for you all right um my husband [Music] oh [Music] [Laughter] this open session of rps school board is reconvened at 8 32 pm the closed session in the edison building conference room commenced at 808 p.m and was adjourned at 8 30 p.m at eight twenty what time did it work thank you at 8 30 pm thank you um and clerk barlow would you read the names of those who were present present at this closed session meeting were school board members jane marvin jeff garcia

176julie workman carl bakken h.r karen mclaughlin school board melissa edmondson school board don barlow school board kathy nathan school board john carlson finance and kent pickels interim superintendent thank you item 10.0 annual board calendar update any updates for the annual calendar or no there's nothing no there's nothing to vote uh yes updates to the calendar uh these updates were made after the executive committee meeting on monday the school board self-evaluation that was scheduled for february 15th we are looking to move to a later study session in order to open up the schedule that night for the other two topics um we changed we changed the order of the study session items we'll be talking about the school resource officer contract first or a school school resource office or contract and school safety strategy and then

177the american indian parent advisory committee resolution we are we add we added an item on the march first meeting of the american indian parent advisory committee resolution responding to letter the board needs to approve our response we added a student school board update to the march first meeting and we added a discussion of our nsba membership to the september 20th 2022 meeting the district has a membership with nsba and it is renewed in october so we thought we would have a discussion about whether we wanted to maintain that membership or not closer to when the dues were due thank you are there any uh agenda items that people would like to have considered for future meetings hearing none as ms nathan said we have a study session on february 15th a regular board meeting on

178february 22nd it is now 8 34 and we are adjourned you