RPS School Board Meeting - 1/18/22

001good evening this regular meeting of independent school district 535 school board is called order at 5 33 pm tuesday january 18th 2022 in room 137 of the edison building interested members of the public are welcome and encouraged to view this meeting remotely at youtube.com isd 535 where the live stream video may be found the board acknowledges this site and all rps sites are situated on the ancestral land of the dakota people and we honor the dakota nations and the sacred land of all indigenous peoples present at this meeting our school board members two of them virtually virtually but apparently they don't like me uh superintendent ken pickell a non-voting ex-officio member and assistant school board clerk ms michelle severson ms severson will you please call the role and board members workmen and amundsen we think

002you may not be able to we we may not be able to hear you so if you're here when your name is called will you raise your hand dr amundsen that hand raises a here clerk barlow here director garcia here treasurer mclaughlin cheer marvin here vice chair nathan here and director workmen with another show of hands thank you thank you at this time we provide an opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice edison building is an rps building and a 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

003mask and we so appreciate that all of you here are doing just that uh we also remind you that this is a business meeting and although you certainly may record the proceedings attendees cannot position themselves in such a way as to disrupt the business of this meeting we appreciate organizations including our media organizations who attend regularly and respect the importance of that protocol 2.0 approval of the agenda are there any changes to the agenda of approval it's been moved and seconded roll call vote except we've lost our two remote board members okay and the back okay miss severson roll call vote please thank you clerk barlow hi director garcia hi treasurer mclaughlin chair marvin hi vice chair nathan hi and director workman another show of hands thank you agenda is proved uh comments to the

004board hearing different perspectives is important and it's healthy what's not healthy nor productive nor legal is to use this time to launch personal attacks against individuals we remind you that there are a number of city state and federal regulations over which school boards have no control and this is not a venue to express your perspective about those we absolutely want to hear from you about existential issues that the school district can control we support your first amendment rights to agree disagree or offer an alternative to actual district initiatives and if you have a question you want answered please let us know and we will be happy to ensure that the appropriate person gets in touch with you each person will have three minutes to speak we ask you to respect this limit when your name

005is called please have a seat in front of the microphone at this table state your name and whether you are a resident of this school district as we have explained before if you prefer to remove your mask while you're sitting sitting at the table facing the board you may do so for three minutes today we have two speakers and the first one i'll apologize in advance if i pronounce your name wrong karen sharon public schools foundation grants dr pacquel dr marvin and director of the board this is a really fun time of year when we get to recognize those who have been recognized by our local schools foundation the rochester public schools foundation is one of many jewels that i've discovered in this community was proud to make a personal contribution to that work and

006i encourage anybody else who's so inclined to do that but that's not our focus today i want to recognize justin cook who's the grant committee co-chair for the foundation to come up and give us a chance to hear about the work they're doing i believe he's accompanied by rutherford who's our student representative we haven't had the privilege of meeting but um this is uh really an honor for us to have a chance to thank you for supporting our students justin and reese thank you so much oh look at that was there something i was supposed to do to make this visible or not oh okay they should do it in the back you're good they'll switch it over in the back okay perfect ah there we go okay so yes we are honored to be

007here thank you for that kind introduction dr paquel we're here to recognize the fall winter 2021-22 grant recipients at the public school foundation and just very briefly a reminder about the rochester public school foundation we're a non-profit community foundation that connects the community and our schools to advance and inspire educational opportunities for all students our main activity is awarding grants to support innovative enhancements to curriculum that might otherwise uh not occur due to limited resources oh since 1988 rpsf has awarded over 550 000 in grants to fund innovative educational experiential programming uh within our schools that are dreamed up by rps staff these funds come from personal and business donations including school district payroll deductions which we continue to be grateful for our annual fundraiser boo fest this past year replaced by a series of

008drive-in movie nights and other fundraisers and then importantly established memorial funds this year we are really excited for that for the first time in a while we are announcing a new established memorial fund uh the marylou sebesta warren fund this was established just this past year in 2021 by the family of mary lou sebesta warren to provide support for the areas of greatest need in any given year identified by the board of directors of the public school foundation the family was very interested in spending these funds quickly in a way that they could have maximal impact it was established with the largest initial gift of any established fund in the more than 30-year history of rpsf we're obviously very excited to have these additional resources to deploy within our schools for the benefit of our

009students mary lou sebesta warren was a long time beloved public education teacher in rochester spending many years at golden hill elementary i'll or actually reese will highlight some of the other established funds that the rochester public school foundation administers funding from in this past grant cycle we were able to award thirteen thousand two hundred ninety six dollars and twenty eight cents to fund eight innovative projects this is a an increase over past funding levels in large part due to the mary lou sebesta warren fund grants were part of the fall winter 2021 grant cycle which received 12 applications from district staff the eight projects were selected by our grant committee that sought input from a diverse group of volunteer grant scores among other criteria successful applications must demonstrate positive long-term impacts that align with the

010mission of rps including emphasizing projects that benefit historically underrepresented communities projects were also asked to follow up with a brief report to indicate how the project went with photos so that we could capture those learnings and this is an example of a project from the past at john adams um using the sphero robots these are these little blue um light up balls that you see kind of moving between the the paths that are drawn in masking tape there on the carpet um some reflections from uh the the project director for these eighth graders said that the students in eighth grade absolutely loved getting the opportunity to use them uh these this quarter i cannot wait to use them again next quarter it's a reusable uh piece of infrastructure the coding skills they have gained using

011the sphere robots greatly helped when we were using our software called robot c as a teacher i feel so much better knowing my students gain the coding skills before they leave me at the end of the quarter unlike last year without the sphero co the without the sphero robots we couldn't have done it without you now i am going to turn this over to reese who's going to take us through our grant recipients and for the grant recipients that are in attendance come right out up here and i'm going to take your picture and after reese introduces you make sure you take an opportunity to pose with your certificate so our first grant recipient is lisa becker and she's from john marshall high school and she organized a visit with dr green on a graphic

012and digital arts class and this grant was made possible by jaclyn b goodyear fun for the fine arts and you're free to share about your project so you know a few years ago we were rebranded for rochester public school and it's this graphic designer who i'm getting to come in um lee green of graph how graphics graph sorry lee green of greenhouse graphics is going to be coming in for my graphic art students and um he is he owns the first and only black owned um graphic design company in rochester and with this grant mr green will visit my upper level graphic art students and take them through the design process for several days the designs that we create with them will be printed on and cut with vinyl and printed on items for students

013to actually wear so we'll be able to use this for years to come thank you and our next grant goes to julie mclaren chris davidson heidi howe and amy hughes at gage elementary and their project title is gage discovery time her gauge discovery time is a daily opportunity for students to explore their interests at a deep level students get to choose from a variety of categories and with that student choice they get to dive in deep and um and expand their learning opportunities and we're hoping that when students are given the time and the resources to dig into these topics that you'll be able to see what they can achieve so we are very excited about our discovery time opportunity [Music] our next grant goes to jenna sur chris reed amy dyer jennifer reynolds laurie

014shep laura jacobs and paige butler at gibbs elementary and their title is perspective through pictures hi i'm jenna i'm one of the kindergarten teachers and our project funds are going to be used to purchase multicultural texts that will supplement our reading curriculum we wanted our students to be able to see themselves in the books that we're reading and studying so that they can really have a greater appreciation for their own cultural identity and respect and appreciate the identity of their peers so we're really excited to be bringing these texts into our classroom and we're really excited about the deep conversations we're going to be able to have with our students surrounding these texts so thank you very much our next grant goes to amanda lambert and lisa higgs at riverside elementary and the title of

015their grant is the stem mentor kurt something came up here that we don't want and i will share a little bit about it so the students will participate in a stem-based learning experience for three weeks alongside a scientific researcher and then participate in a riverside science fair during the school day this experience will prepare them for hopeful future continuous entry and participation into the gateway science fair and ultimately the rochester regional science fair the next grant goes to von clayton lita casper and sarah holder at riverside elementary the title of the grant is the riverside shelter hi thanks for having us uh riverside plans to build a small covered outdoor shelter as we continue to provide access opportunity and value of the natural world while students reap the many health benefits associated with the outdoors

016we have engaged several community partners in this project including the dnr and other committed volunteers while this covered structure will provide classes protection from the many minnesota elements we also see it as a highly engaging learning opportunity to expand on standards curriculum and real world application our students will work with volunteers remotely to design and build these little model structures to their of their own to inform our final product which will be built on riverside's own dnr designated school forest in the spring of 2022 and sarah hulker couldn't be here today but she'd like me to read a little note from herself dnr naturalist this project demonstrates the staff and families are committed to building a strong outdoor learning program the park the department of natural resources is excited to keep growing our partnership and

017help provide meaningful outdoor learning opportunities and experiences for students and families at riverside and thank you for your support and our next grant goes to natalia benjamin at century high school and the title of her grant is the value of telling our stories and a quick summary is stories are a powerful way to connect with each other as individuals they allow us to get to know each other and to develop empathy as we learn about each other's lived experiences through writing multilingual students in high school engage in developing language skills at the same time that they build personal identities and a better understanding of each other publishing their stories helps our students see their value and it allows their families to feel seen inspired and empowered and this grant award was made possible by the

018joel e lumen memorial fund the next grant goes to sweden patel and nicole websted from rochester alc and the title of the grant is bringing extracurricular activities into the school day the funding that we've been awarded will support our experiential learning happening on student-centered wednesdays at the rochester alc currently on wednesdays we offer an alternate credit-based elective schedule to our students in collaboration with many of our full-service community schools established partners and this is not an exhausted list but to give you an idea of who's been participating in our partnerships the boys and girls club channel one post bulletin sombra valley vita tax preparers diversity council and others have offered classes to our students such as adulting 101 growing up black tax preparation poetry slam writing for an audience student resiliency and mental health and

019other opportunities to students that would not otherwise receive them using this funding our staff are going to continue expanding innovative offerings for our students with the support of the funding that we received through the foundation for thank you we thank you very much for your support our next grant goes to cheryl cleore cindy tree ellen balderas brittany ignatius kurt caskey beth cosby derek buscovit and divya manikin at phoenix academy and the title of the grant is the phoenix academy smart program thank you thank you very much we're um very excited about this program so for those of you that don't know a lot about phoenix academy students a lot of our students struggle with emotional regulation that's why they go to phoenix academy and a number of them are also non-verbal or have limited verbal

020skills so we're putting together this sensory room that is actually a rather powerful room like i'm super excited about it so one of the things that students do is they get in the room and they try out all these it's almost like a physical therapy room where they have therapy balls and balance beams and they get to see how their body works and they can kind of figure out or will help them to notice in a fun playful way what gets them up regulated if they're tired what can help them get to a place where they're ready to learn or if they're over excited and about to explode i'm going to catch them before they get to that point but what helps down regulate them so again they're ready to learn so that's kind of

021my selling point on this is we're going to really help students and they're going to help themselves work with them to figure out what helps them regulate i'm super excited because i'm hoping i can come back in a year or two and talk about some of the other things i expect this room will also help us learn attunement um help with attachment issues with students and really help develop interpersonal skills through the body so um yeah anyway super excited thank you so much for giving us so you can feel the passion from the rps staff that have come up with so many great proposals that we're so excited to be able to support this year um it's extremely exciting time in the foundation and we look forward to seeing more proposals in the future for

022those that are interested in supporting the rochester public school foundation we started a new way to both do that and honor rps staff members last year for the first time we the public school foundation made it possible to make a contribution in honor of a specific rps staff member and include a personal message to that staff member to let them know what they were doing that was great or what they were doing that made a difference in your students life um there was uh a strong response to this from paraprofessionals and administrators and teachers instructional coaches and more this is the the list that came about in the first um in the first offering of this in 2021 but for those that are looking for a great way to um recognize your teacher and honor

023them around the holiday times or at the end of the school year or any time that you might be doing that or you think oh i should be doing that this is a really great way to do that check out rpsf.org we'd love to add to this list next time we report it and then we're always looking ahead to the next phase the spring summer 2022 grant cycle preparations are well underway there will be an email to rps staff very shortly to announce the application dates and the availability availability of the application for rps staff and others we are always looking for help in evaluating grant submissions it's really important to our process that we continue to engage a diverse group of grant scorers and uh as always we're grateful to the district for its

024support um for inviting us here to announce this exciting news and uh um for more information on rpsf how to volunteer or donate support our mission in other ways please check out our website at rpsf.org if there's any questions from the board now is the time i have a comment from mrs mclaughlin who couldn't be here karen mclaughlin is the board member who serves on the rpsf committee and she wanted to be sure that we let you know how proud she is of all of you how grateful she is for the work that you're doing and congratulations to the recipients um mr cook thank you and reese you're a really good moderator i mean nice and very photogenic too so i mean it's kind of a win-win so thank you for for that any other

025questions i just have a comment i really appreciate this i see a couple of faces that i recognize and some that are new to me i think if you know if i worked as an educator with an rps or even as a psychologist i would certainly tend towards alc and phoenix i also really have a special place in my heart for the community school so the fact that we are able to get funding to those who have these like innovative wonderful projects i'm so glad that we're able to do that i'm so glad that you asked for the funding and i'm so glad that you were able to get it because i hear in my other work about how some of this trickles down into the students and and it's i i love it thank

026you for all the work you do and thank you also for what you do mr parlow and um i definitely plan on visiting some of the sites to follow up and celebrate in the work you're accomplishing then i wanted to commend the foundation for um uh your selection and inclusion of reese it's important that we ultimately see the reason why and the reason behind and and so as chair marvin has already acknowledged it's good to see a student involved and engaged and and thanks to the foundation for doing that rhys is a rare find and we hope she doesn't graduate you probably don't mean that like selfishly stick around keep keep doing the good work you're doing rhys thank you thank you so much one more one more round of applause for everyone thank you

027then we will move to 4.02 the referendum update dr pical dr marvin and board members as you know this uh school district is in the midst of a multi-year uh very ambitious effort to meet our future facilities needs and we have periodically had updates from executive director of operations scott sheridan on the progress of that effort and so it is time for another one of those updates i want to thank scott and his team for the work they've been doing anybody who's been uh into the buildings that that referendum is supporting are has been struck by how we are creating really amazing spaces for learning learning and community building so scott thanks for giving us a sense of how it's going i was looking to see if the presentation was up anyway thank you here

028we go here we go good evening board members and those that are here virtually as well i am this is the 23rd update referendum update um they all began way back in february of 2020. like i said this is the 23rd one we try to come every month sometimes we come twice a month to give you an update of how things are going keane mcwaters who's part of the construction management group from knutson that we hired to be our cma prepared another presentation for us to go over along with a budget update and a schedule update as well i can't see it there now this is just the face sheet of it but what he did is he he gave giving an update on the middle school the middle school is coming along very nicely

029um it's pretty much fully enclosed which is good for the workers that have to work especially tomorrow morning and thursday morning with the cold temps but uh the next picture you'll see here is a shot that looks to the uh northwest so we're on the southeast yeah the south east corner of the building kind of looking to the northwest the main uh large area there with the black roof that's one of the three gems and then the classrooms and corridors are to the right of that main entrance is to the left these pictures are fairly current the next one is just looking to the straight north this one's looking uh directly at the the main entrance which is the plywood that's covered up there right in the middle like i said on my past referendum

030updates uh the view is pretty incredible out that back to back uh north corridor and then this one is from the back side kind of into the sun but this is the back of uh middle school as you'll notice there's the two floors there and so it's kind of like a walk out to the back when you walk in the front of the building you're actually on the second floor and so go you would go down to get to that lower level that exits out the back there that should all be done and uh we'll be moving in at the end of july 22. longfellow uh a little further ahead than where we are at dakota we're doing uh it's fully enclosed except for a couple windows this is a corridor another corridor with some

031of the color schemes that were picked some of the painting that's going on accent walls and this shot is looking to the northeast from the southwest corner of the building you notice this has a more distinct look when you compare to dakota this one has aluminum facing on the front that highlights uh really gives an accent to the building and the precast is just a little bit different color than dakota this is a picture from the northeast looking to the southwest further out in those fields those are the soccer fields that we're going to re-groom and prepare for park and rack that we'll also have access to as well for our fyed classes and again this is looking to the northwest the front entrance is almost directly in the middle there and then this is

032looking to the south at longfellow so this is the backside of longfellow looking south toward 20th street you notice it is fully enclosed like i said all the windows are in and this will actually be done in hopefully late may because of the 45 15 schedule they start in late july and harriet bishop is the final school we're building this is an old shot looking to the northwest giving an idea this is country club manor another old shot this is just highlighting the precast that was put up in the number of cranes that we had to use to do it and this shot is looking straight to the north so at the bottom of that photograph is the gym the main entrance is around the corner to the gym to the left kind of where

033that orange lull is that's doing the lift up onto the roof this is looking to the northeast or southwest actually the shot is looking to the northeast and again right in the middle there is the main entrance and you notice this has a really distinct different color than longfellow they put some color into the precast uh i call it kind of a burnt orange but you'll notice that the roof is almost complete they're still doing some insulation up on the roof as you can see but it's almost it's going to be fully enclosed here fairly soon they'd still have some windows to do and the final large project that we're doing is the century high school pool edition it is coming along one of the you're really going to start seeing some changes starting next

034monday is when they're going to start doing the precast so they're bringing the cranes in and they'll start putting up the walls that'll really change the dynamics of the building if you look right to the this is looking northeast so right on the north side of the current building that you see there in the upper right that's the gym but right on the north side of there is where they're building the locker rooms so the locker rooms will be built off the north end and there'll be a corridor to come down to go into the pool which is just north of the north cafeteria at century this is a good shot of the locker room and this is looking straight south and this is looking southeast all the blue duck that you sit there here

035you see there will be installed this massive ventilation system that you need for a pool so the budget um after all is said and done we're kind of about where we were last referendum update we're at about 185.8 million dollars and with the interest earnings of three million dollars and you add it to the 180.5 we're pretty close to being right on budget there is a lot of contingency dollars still out there because they always carry contingency until the projects are complete and there's some other projects we want to complete still other alternates that we're going to want to take if we have the money once we get to that farm and i know it's really hard to see but and they love all these different colors but they all mean the same thing and

036this is just basically the schedule like i said bishop should be we should take owner occupancy moving on august 22nd for the pool that won't be done until mid to late september dakota should be like i said in july or late june and then longfellow hopefully in may or early june the update on the current projects there's any questions i'll be glad to answer them any questions thank you scott appreciate it [Applause] 4.03 board chair comments uh very quickly last at our last regular meeting we elected new board officers and i wanted to say at this time i wanted to say thank you to former board officers clerk melissa amundson and treasurer julie workman you're not here but we appreciate you for the work that you've done and i want to congratulate our newly elected

037clerk don barlow and treasurer karen mclaughlin thank you also to kathy nathan who accepted the board's unanimous vote to serve another year as vice chair kathy is one of the most dedicated capable humans i've ever known she continues to play a critically important role in doing the work of this board in keeping the chair sort of on the reels and i i couldn't be more appreciative so congratulations kathy and it's going to be an honor to con continue to serve this board and this school district we have a lot of good things going we have amazing families incredible kids and it really really is the honor of a lifetime so thank you we'll we'll do our best and we know that you'll continue to let us know how we're doing then we will move on

038to 4.04 safe and open school plan update this is an information item dr pikel dr marvin and board members we actually have got some very important um updates to provide you and our school communities with on the specifics of our safe and open schools plan and i'm going to ask heather nessler who's our executive director of communications marketing and technology and jen irkey who's our director of special education to come up and give you those updates but before they do i want to touch on or as they do that's a better way to put it as they do i want to touch on two big issues that have been much on all of our minds and that is the move to distance learning and the question of mandatory vaccination these are probably the two more

039heated issues that have been swirling not just in rochester but across the country around the covid pandemic the decisions that heather and jen are going to walk you through though while less controversial are not less important and they involve aligning our strategies with recent guidance from the centers for disease control around quarantine and some slight differences around isolation and some important updates but before we get to that very important but more nuanced discussion let me say that the decision that i made and that the board empowered me to make about going to distance learning um last week which began um this week was a very reluctant one and that we called our plan the safe and open schools plan because we wanted to keep our schools both safe and open and i think we can

040say that we can be very proud of the fact that we have very effectively mitigated the spread of covid within our schools it was not as board members are aware the actual rate of positive cases of covid that caused us to go to distance learning it was the staff shortages that were making it impossible to safely and effectively operate all of our schools when we took a look last week after we took a pause on what is called contact tracing in order to get really good hard numbers on our positive cases in our schools all of them were under ten percent the vast majority were under eight percent most were under five percent and many were at about two point five percent and so we can feel good about the mitigation efforts that we had

041in place but when we look we looked at the number of teachers paraprofessionals administrators bus drivers student nutrition service folks who are absent we simply reached a point of no return more than half of our schools crushed the 10 consistently abstinent staff threshold and heading upwards of that we had schools over 30 last week and so we came to the reluctant decision that there was a point at which we needed to make a shift as board members are aware we initially looked to make that shift at the building level and not to do it at the district-wide level but when you got to more than half of our schools that were at that point and the other half looking at their rising absence rates and saying we think there but for the grace of god

042go we and we may be there next week we made the difficult decision to make that shift and so i want to thank our school staffs and especially our parents and students who made this shift very quickly we considered having a no contact day for students for staff planning purposes but that was one more day that our families would not have had their students in school and for those parents who need it and there are many child care and so we had two days last week and we jumped in this week i want to say today things have gone well but we know the impact that this is having i want to say particularly huge thanks to amy ike and her team and many others across the district who dramatically increased the number of child

043care slots that we're able to provide for students from kindergarten through fifth grade we were initially and in most other instances where we've provided child care at about 200 slots and literally in a matter of days we were able to go to 500 and that is also due to paraprofessionals teachers administrators and others who are not directly providing distance learning who have volunteered and in some cases been reassigned though there have been no protests to go and help and we had 500 kids at john adams today who are very engaged and occupied and whose parents we know appreciated that additional support final point on distance learning when we say two weeks we mean two weeks we can never say never we've learned that the hard way with this pandemic but i know there's been some

044skepticism is two weeks the beginning of distance learning for the duration of the school year we know the educational academic social emotional mental health challenges that distance learning poses for our students and we know the child care challenges it poses for our families we designed this two-week period to coincide with what mayo clinic is predicting will be the rise and fall of the omicron variant and so we are absolutely committed to bring students back january 31st that said we can never say never but the intent is very very clear to make that move so that's a quick overview of the distance learning decision it's a work in progress i spent a good part of the weekend responding to emails from staff and parents and some students about that many positive many concerned and i just

045want people to know we didn't take it lightly and we're going to continue to be responsive to the concerns final point on the question of mandatory vaccinations as most as i know all board members know and most community members know the supreme court uh decided that the biden administration's uh rule that would have been interpreted at the state level here in minnesota mandating vaccinations for organizations that employ more than a hundred employees was uh shot down to use the legal term and um i want us we uh and the policy committee of the school board did very careful work in drafting i think what would have been a model draft policy which we have now removed from the agenda because it was entirely rooted in the requirement of the federal mandate so we're not bringing

046that before you right now to my knowledge and by my recommendation we have no plans to move in that direction but we will continue to monitor the um the federal and state level policy environment and certainly the policy committee will revisit that discussion what i want to reiterate somewhat similar to the no more than two weeks point on distance learning is we are not moving forward with the vaccine mandate we have every reason to believe very high percentages of rps staff are already mandated by choice and we thank them for that and we encourage them to get their boosters and the federal mandate never included students though there were a lot of people who were emailed and called uh concerned that it did so with that as kind of some of the big macro picture

047for what we're thinking about i want to thank um heather and jen for their work with the rest of our small core team which is also informed by partners from olmsted county and mayo clinic more broadly and turn it over to you for an update of the rest of what we're doing to mitigate covet in our schools thanks dr raquel good evening board members we are going to talk about the following things that you see up there tonight contact tracing quarantine isolation you can take a peek at it we'll go through it i just wanted to give you a summary here and also let you know that we plan to include a revised version of our safe and open learning plan on our website tomorrow so the information we cover here is high level but

048it will be deeper in that so as as dr paquel had already mentioned about the contact tracing we had to temporarily suspend that but our plan is to resume that contact tracing when we return to in-person learning on january 31st contact racing as you know is the process that we use to identify those individuals who are in close contact meaning three feet or less with a positive case or 15 minutes or longer within that 24 hour period one thing that we will be making a change come january 31st when our students and staff girl back is our quarantine guidance so quarantine is used for a person who has been identified as a close contact as jen just said and has tested that person has tested positive cova 19. so we would put someone who's a

049close contact in quarantine starting january 31st we're going to adopt the cdc and mdh guidance on quarantine which means instead of 10 days which is what we have been um using as our standard and then allowing some of our individuals to come back on day eight after testing all that's going away and we're gonna follow the cdc guidance which is five days and so on day six after being placed into quarantine individuals may return as long as they are masked and can provide proof of a negative test on day five so just to just to back up one step quarantine is also only used for individuals who are unvaccinated so our vaccinated individuals are not placed in quarantine unvaccinated individuals are placed in quarantine if they are a close contact i might have said that

050too fast because i live it every day um but i hope that i i hope i corrected myself there um and so they will test and return and they have the option to return on day six isolation is different than quarantine isolation is used when someone has tested positive for covid19 and so um we are not changing our guidance for isolation we are telling our staff and our students if you are positive with covid19 you need to isolate for 10 days the updated guidance and we have this written on our on our slides but i actually want to read it to you verbatim because i think it's important the updated guidance from cdc allows for the return after five days of isolation but advises that strict wearing of high quality masks such as this one

051um is required to successfully implement that approach and while we're really proud of our students and our staff because they are adhering to our masking requirements at high levels it's not completely universal across the boards we've made um not all of our students are using their masks with fidelity depending on age level and maybe personality or whatever and we've not made investments in these types of masks in the fit so we are going to continue to adhere to the stricter standard for the return of confirmed covid cases all right this next one is test to stay and so previously we did a pilot called alternate to quarantine and this is really our way of pushing this out to the rest of the district so test to stay is rps's long-term strategy for enabling unvaccinated students

052to remain in school if they have been identified as a closed contact but have not tested positive for copid and are not showing any symptoms we are looking at a staggered rollout of test to stay across the school district that will begin a couple weeks after we return about february 14th is the plan so as we take a look at different options that are available to uh students and staff for testing or screening for covid we have several different options the first one is the zoom needle enabled vault health saliva test kits that we have they can take home they're for students or staff and they actually log in and somebody talks them walks them through the testing process another one we have is buy next now is over the counter that one is primarily

053for students but we have been using them for staff and now we have a new test in called the bd veriter if that's another over-the-counter test and that we will be using primarily for staff either symptomatic or asymptomatic to be able to test for coping we also continue to work with outside partners on vaccination clinics and our youngest students ages 5 to 11 are the most recent people that can receive the vaccination so as you can imagine our take rate on vaccination for our young students is lower than that of our secondary students we are working with olmsted county public health services to offer two clinics coming up in february we were actually hoping to offer them this week but with the high case rate in this county um we defer to our partner and

054we rescheduled it to february so we are targeting um sunset terrace elementary school along with elton hills engage elementary students to come into a vaccination clinic on february 8th we'll do this right after school at 4 30 from 4 30 to 6 and so we are going to work with the county to do pre-registration and again we're targeting those three schools for that particular clinic and then later in the week on thursday we're going to have a clinic offering at franklin elementary with the target audience of franklin elementary and pinewood students now we can open that up wider for students ages 5 to 11 we started there knowing the need was the greatest there and the county will work with us if we need to expand as well so we're really fortunate about that and

055we do have a second dose scheduled so when they schedule their first appointment they will schedule their second appointment as well um also we're working with some outside partners aqla which is the alliance of chicanos hispanics and latin americans and hasters are haser which is our hispanic advocacy and community empowerment through research group and community health services so those three organizations are working on a vaccination clinic for families coming up february 19th at riverside elementary so we are working really closely with our community schools partner there to make sure that we are messaging the appropriate information to the right families so we hope that we can vaccinate some individuals through those opportunities and get us um at a higher percentage boosters um so i provided the definition of up-to-date it means a person that has

056received all recommended covet 19 vaccinations including booster doses and then the definition of fully vaccinated individual is a person who has received their primary series of covenant vaccines so that would be the two doses for pfizer and moderna or the one dose for johnson and johnson we strongly recommend that our staff that are eligible for a booster shot get their booster dose and we did promote a free booster clinic i believe it was not this past saturday the saturday before through olmstead county public health to our staff so that they were aware of that as well as other resources that we intend to share with our staff where they can receive their booster doses another area that always comes up is wondering about athletics so rps will continue to follow the minnesota state high school

057league guidelines which state that athletes are are to wear masks when not participating in competition and are encouraged to but not required to wear them during competition when on the field court or rink spectators are required to wear masks in all rps buildings and we are asking our visitor teams and their spectators to follow the rps guidelines that'll be an important thing is asking our communities that come in to rochester facilities to help support our mass mandate so that's one thing we included in here for your information osha on the vaccination and or required testing mandate superintendent paquel already touched on this but we just wanted to make sure that we highlighted in here that we will not have to follow that mandate at this time the it required organizations with 100 or more employees

058to require vaccination or require testing weekly for employees and so um we do have some next steps here we are you know our policy committee of so of the school board we'll continue to monitor this issue and then we're still going to collect and record staff vaccination status on a voluntary level and so far staff have been really willing to provide that information to us and it is on a hipaa compliant form so we're going to continue to collect that in the event that we're going we may need that someday um but for now that really concludes the major updates for the changes that we are going to be including in the overall safe and open school plans so now we can take questions if you have any mr barlow uh yes i have two

059questions one deals with the vaccination clinics um location and time 4 30 to 6. [Music] have the planners or designers of the clinics taken into consideration that there is probably a significant portion of the community students parents who may be at work or not able to participate in these clinics at at this time frame and additionally do these schools uh uh serve of the underrepresented populations that could potentially benefit uh from these clinics great points we are working with our bilingual team we did translate flyers into um the three or we have flyers in three languages for both of those clinics and they are english spanish and somali and then we are working with community partners to do specific outreach to our families as well this all changed early early last week because of the

060case rate in the community so we've got a little more time but as olmstead county public health services shared with me you can promote something a couple weeks in advance and you'll start getting people to really respond within that week window and so they also shared with us though that that time frame was ideal in terms of clinics the one at riverside is a saturday clinic so we are going to have to work hard um to notify families and to make sure that they're aware of the time frame we chose 430 because it is right after um pickup so as soon as those buses leave there's a lot of parents that come and pick up their students and they'll have to accompany their child that was the best time frame during a week to do

061that and we wanted to try to offer it during the week day because we have had some saturday clinics and we just really want to see let's be successful and we'll see how riverside turns out the last time we did one at riverside on a saturday we had 200 slots and we filled all 200 slots for families so that's some of the consideration there okay and then also um athletics and uh i was somewhat intrigued by the fact that we as a district uh require a mask and yet for spectators who may be supporting out of town teams they're simply being asked if they wouldn't mind what they wear a mask well my words not the language of your presentation i just find it somewhat odd uh either the way i consider this either we

062have a policy that we expect everyone to comply with who enter our buildings or we don't and if we don't then uh should anyone actually then need to wear a mask if we're opening the door to our athletic programs to where it's optional i'm just curious as to the thought process that uh went in regarding this it's not optional it's just that we do have some and i'm sure dr patel if you want to hop in here but we have noticed some non-compliance in the stands and so um we can't always address that during the middle of a competition and so um now we want to we're actually saying hey teams coming in here we have this policy you have to adhere to it so that's what we mean that's why we brought that forward

063and highlighted that piece especially now that the city has a mass mandate through february 7th i believe um it's important to know it's just bringing attention to it which is why we included it i don't know if you want to add anything additional yeah it is a requirement for us it's just as you can imagine you get to a game and it's tough to enforce so i'm meeting tomorrow with the superintendent's high school principals and athletic directors from the big nine um and i'm going to say look we know you have different policies and we would really really appreciate that you would message to your families when you're in one of our facilities please respect our requirements um it's tough when you're there to do the enforcement piece with people who aren't rochester families but

064our policies clear and our signage is clear and we're going to ask them to lean in and i think actually the city mandate may help somewhat in enforce getting enforcement with that our families have to say generally by and large have they know what our requirements are and that they they've been abiding by it and it i have to say that the problems i thought we might have around this by and large have not been as bad as they might have been we've had a couple of bumps in terms of confrontations but it remains a continuing concern and as we know we go further into the winter sports seasons where we're all inside it's just something for us to fly and so the other part of my concern is if you will the selective identification

065of people who are maybe not masked and and i just want to be sure that there aren't individuals or particular people groups or and we're using the term enforcement whereas they're really we're not really enforcing we have the ability to trespass a person but staff can you explain how that enforcement if we are what that looks like i observe what we do here at our board meetings is it different than what we do at our board meetings in a sporting event as it relates to compliance slash enforcement i can take that um i don't think it's much different we have not had to trespass anybody who has been non-compliant um it's from what i have heard and um director barlow i'm not 100 i'm not at all the athletic events but um when we have

066our activities directors or the event manager that's there they approach our individuals kind of tricky i know there are times when we have students that make comments to say hey put your mask on and so um as far as i know and dr paquel just alluded to this or stated it actually um we haven't had that many problems with it whereas it could cause i mean it can be a polarizing topic and but we have a policy we have that we adhere to so um as far as i know there hasn't been anything of significance that has occurred other than the conversation to put the mask on or please leave our facility and i don't think there's been issues other questions it was nathan so thank you for the update um i'm wondering when the

067test to stay starts rolling out who parents can expect to hear communication from and maybe what the first steps a parent might have to take yeah that's a great question we'll craft that here at the district level but we'll be working very closely with our schools and parents will likely hear from their school that's how we rolled out our alt queue process and so parents will receive information about what this is and our website is our website needs to be updated with the language of test to stay but we do have a website that exists now called alternative to quarantine and the information is very much the same we have instructional videos on what to expect and how it works that the district created along with how the test works so there's a huge faq

068section so our sites our schools will communicate with parents with that information in addition we will also send out a um uh compliance i don't know what word i'm looking for like a permission slip i don't know why i'm lost for what but a consent form there you go consent it's been a long tuesday and so um we'll send that out to parents and so parents will opt in and you do not have to participate in this program but it is a way to keep students that are unvaccinated in our schools so we'll send that consent form we also ask if they have technology at home because these tests require that you upload a photograph so we know if your test is negative or positive and we have a coordinator that will take a look

069at that in the morning before admitting to school all that's explained um and we've had really good luck with it in our other building so we'll do the same thing director nathan will work with our schools to message that send videos as well as links and then if your uh home is without technology we work to send a device home with a student along with the test kit when they are called for as a close contact thanks i just i have a question and and i've this has been an issue i think for other facilities as well about the the language around um on your booster slide where it says the cdc says up to date means a person who has received all recommended cova 19 vaccines including any boast booster doses when available so

070or when eligible so if the individual for whatever reason has decided to get vaccinated and they received their two primary doses and are at close contact they're not yet eligible for their booster dosage yet are they considered up to date i mean they're not not complying if you get if you understand what i'm saying like would you still consider them up to date they wouldn't necessarily have to quarantine if they were a close contact or would they because they have yet to have their booster that's our current our current plan says that and that guidance has changed slightly so we are discussing how to make that work because you don't want we don't want to have issues where we have staff that are quarantined but they've been vaccinated already but they don't have their booster

071dose which is why we're really strongly suggesting i get that booster dose and i believe that is for anyone um and up that has received their vaccine right now so the guidance still says fully vaccinated right and so i guess to me it's like fully vaccinated to what you are eligible for now or fully vaccinated you have for some people who need two primary doses or three primary doses plus a booster yeah is it all of those doses and the booster and then you're fully vaccinated because might there be people just in like in this space right that are that have maybe two primary doses not a boost or three primary doses and not necessarily their booster would they be considered up to date because they're not yet eligible for that additional shot or are

072they considered fully vaccinated because they can't yet get their booster i i just want to say dr garcia thank you for that that is very helpful it's one layer deeper we've had some conversations but as heather was saying i think i'd like to have us take that question and make sure we look very carefully at the current guidance um if either my colleagues have a more specific response but i think you every time we think we've unpeeled one layer of the onion another one comes and so um i would like to take that and loop back to you and the community unless there's a more immediate straightforward response based on guidance but i think you've identified a degree area that we will that we'll take this question and clarify i think what she's asking is

073that that time between the second dose and third dose you are considered up to date because you are not yet eligible for that booster okay that is essentially my question up to date but do you qualify you're up to date but you're not vaccinated so you no okay but if i if you did not get the booster when eligible like after that six month period then you would and it's one that we talked about at our covet advisory team um i think two mondays ago with um some of our external partners and the language can be confusing and so it's something that it's another layer that we're peeling back and still working through because i can just imagine for a parent that has kids in two separate age categories right like if they have somebody

074who's 12 and they also have a five-year-old if one of them got a primary dose and then they're at their second primary dose and now the other one is now eligible so they're kind of you know they're not necessarily in sync with each other are we considering those kids fully vaccinated slash up to date and it's very tricky olmstead county public health will tell you when we talked with them that um you know once upon a time the recommendation was six months so after six months of your two dose shot you were eligible now it's five months and so the moving timelines are also making things tricky so there are so many different flowcharts and grids and things that mde has sent out and so we don't have that immediate answer right now and as

075dr paquel said we'll circle back but it does require a little bit more conversation but for the sake of tonight after if you were to get your booster shot today you would not you would be considered fully up-to-date with the booster shot today because it doesn't have that two-week period waiting period that that and i just want to clear up a concern that i'm quite sure is misinformed from some folks when you have the vaccination clinics at schools that does not mean that you will be vaccinating children whose parents do not want them you're already saying no so correct you're not going to be grabbing kids and say get in here get vaccinated and don't tell your mom no it's an it's an opportunity for families it's after school parents have to consent and parents

076must be present in order to have their five to eleven-year-old child i heard you say parents have to be present and consent correct thank you other questions thank you for saying that you also had it translated in other languages because you know that was going to be a question yes thank you so much we appreciate the work you're continuing to do thank you 4.05 msba minnesota school boards association conference session report and discussion some board members were able to attend the minnesota school board's annual conference in minneapolis it was fully masked absolutely distanced there's some wonderfully informative sessions up there one that i attended i thought was particularly interesting and has to do i i think it's interesting for the public to know this because it has to do with the perception that some folks

077have that school boards have become political the minnesota school board has exited the national association of school boards association they feel that that that organization has become too political has become too involved in bureaucracy so minnesota school boards association is joining with a number of other states in creating a new totally apolitical school board association that will be laser focused on working with schools and students at the national level we are determined that and our our school board especially that we will continue to be focused on what is good for kids and families and communities and that politics will not be involved our school board has not operated that way and so we have left the national association anybody else want to give a report about happenings there um so i um have been serving

078on a advisory committee for the minnesota principles survey which is the first uh survey of principles statewide that has been done and it's being done by the university of minnesota and so we did a presentation to msba about the findings specifically findings related to the work of school boards and i have a one-page fact sheet that i can give to you all that summarizes the initial takeaways uh the full responses will be available in february and they will be disaggregated by the local service co-op area so we'll have all of our data for our area our region and we'll be able to request that data so that we can see specifically what principles in our region are saying compared to principles statewide so it's a really exciting piece of information that really show us specifically

079what principals are saying about what they need for their professional development that that's an area that they felt that needed development and recognizing both the mental health needs of students and staff and principals themselves being an area that needs to be developed and finally what school boards can do for our building leaders to help clarify or inform the public about what decisions made in the district are those that are the responsibility of the school board or the superintendent versus things that building leadership have authority over um hopefully to help with their communications with their parents and families and and reduce some of the misunderstandings there thank you i went to the presentation i thought it was excellent i would also say that you know as a mental health professional when they showed the data about

080principles being concerned not just for student mental health but also educator mental health and that they didn't feel like other professionals like in the mental health field were providing them any assistance i felt like i haven't told that to the presenters like it was kind of a gut punch because i am now have moved away from what i'm doing um you know i was working out at st peter and now i work here in the community as a mental health professional and i'm like but i am doing that work so what is it that we aren't doing as mental health professionals to like let people know that they are um you know that they're receiving that service and i think perhaps the difference is but i will also like to bring this to our tri-government

081committee is if if if a teacher or a parent of a student in the district are coming to someone for mental health services my assumption now is like that is them seeing that they are taking care of their their own mental health versus the school is trying to do something or the district is trying to do something to promote or stabilize their mental health and so how can we as mental health professionals and there are many of us in the community better support than i guess what we're doing right now which is just receiving like an onslaught of people how can we better do that pairing or that work here in our district so that principals aren't stressing about not only their staff in the building but also their students and how can the families

082feel like the principals and the rest of the district are also kind of holding all of that for everybody so thank you for your thank you for the presentation it was like not necessarily anything i didn't already know but just that there's that miscommunication of like but the mental health professionals in this community are so overworked like we have literally no space because everybody is in our office and how is it that we as a district are not making that like making our you know staff and our families feel held in that way so thank you all right we will move on to 4.06 board member committee updates any board members have board committee work that they'd like to report on i can speak very briefly for my colleagues who are not in the room

083so our legislative committee we are going to be meeting later this month next week the 27th with some of our legislators to have sort of preliminary conversations about how we can work to kind of lift some of our legislative priorities off the ground and then also additionally planning in the future as very many of you well know that we're going to be having some [Music] i'm sorry i'm also i caught what heather has a very long tuesday that we'll also be doing um candidate forums later when we've already start you know kind of figuring out um maybe who giving them a platform to sort of talk about their priorities for schools and our area so you'll hear more on that i don't know if julie if you want to add anything in i don't know

084if she's furiously typing or nope she's good thank you okay i think that both miss workman and miss amanson two also wanted to mention that the school board will be offering a school board academy uh probably in february march march and that will be free and open to the public for anyone who is considering running for school board and wants some information about how that works how school board works and for that matter for anybody who wants to to get a background about what school boards do we continue to understand that it is confusing because city council works one way county commissioners work in other ways state legislatures work another way board school boards work an entirely different way and i think people have expectations about what school boards can do should do that they

085have no authority to do but it's going to be a great education and especially for those of you who are considering running for school board it's a it's a great way to get started and again no cost and miss amundsen is saying they think their mics are working oh she's saying she thinks her microphone's working okay that's not about the school board academy however i i don't oh can you hear us now yes absolutely and now we can't hear you do you assistant that will be in my tour april march or april okay good enough and that information will uh be available um shortly all right we'll yes miss nathan um i wanted to give the update on the virtual learning or listening session that was happening this thursday okay um from 7 p.m and

086i'm wondering if any of our district staff can tell us is registration still available for that there are still openings available and that link is available on the district website under our news section because it's it's virtual ms nathan as you said it's important that you are registered ahead of time it's again no no cost but this is going to be an opportunity for community members to talk and for board members to listen it'll happen in small groups virtually and uh we'll take notes and provide answers either during or afterwards so um still time to register for that all right then we will move to 4.07 covered funding update this is an information item dr pacquel uh madam chair and members i want to begin by saying i think it's appropriate on this first day

087of distance learning that the school board meeting is having some technical challenges every teacher and student in this district is having him today and so we're sort of feeling your uh stress here with trying to make this work but we're getting through it um executive director of finance john carlson would normally provide this update but he is away and so you got me but it's going to be fairly brief because uh we have decided with the boards the board has decided and i agree with the decision that we are going to allocate the remaining funds that we have from the federal government for mitigation of the covid virus concurrent with uh planning for our budget for the 22-23 school year and subsequent years and so when we scheduled this item for the agenda we had

088some sense that we might be ready to talk about exactly how we're going to allocate the remaining funds that we have we are going to be taking that up at the study session on the 25th of january and the board will be looking at it on the 8th of february but we kept this item on the agenda tonight because we think it's always important to report to the community and all of our stakeholders how we're using these dollars and so i'm going to move at some breakneck speed here all of these numbers are contained in a memo that is available through board docs and i want to move at breakneck speed because i know we're all excited that we're going to talk about math tonight and i want to get to math right now so

089i'm going to give you some math to get us to the math our total funding to rochester public schools from all federal sources was 38 38.39.3 million dollars as of january 14th we had spent 13 million of that six million of it went for staffing people to do the kind of work that jen and that leah and heather just talked about the jen and just talked about contact tracing instructional technology technology support summer school and especially rps online 3.4 million was for technology lap books for teachers chromebooks for kids 0.8 million was for air purifying devices 0.5 million for cleaning equipment 0.3 million for vehicles to transport students specifically vans and 3.3 million on contracted transportation that means there's some money left over we have 2.9 million which is encumbered means there are plans to

090spend it but those plans have not yet been implemented because we haven't done the work yet and that includes staffing for our rps online school which is board members know is uh very full with 500 students all of whom are being well served in the midst of this pandemic staff who support instruction through technology obviously a huge need for us especially these next two weeks technology support the staff who do our contact tracing managing our test to stay program chromebooks for adult basic education and then the recent air purifying devices devices and equity specialist positions that we've hired to lean in to both continually enhancing the quality of air and ventilation on our buildings and staff available to help students readjust in-person learning after a year and a half of this pandemic or more than

091that time so that leaves 23 million left as of january 14th there are some pots in that 23 million that are by uh statute designated to certain purposes um things like out-of-school time or summer school and so those are the resources that will be working with the board and proposing to the board strategies for spending we continue to believe the four priorities that we articulated last time we did one of these updates will be the priorities we'll be bringing uh plans to you around over the next month and a half the first is continuing to mitigate the spread of the virus staffing and supplies focused on covered mitigation the second will be mitigating the social emotional and academic especially consequences of the pandemic so additional supports such as potentially small group tutoring other interventions to

092help students recover academically from what is often called learning loss investments in staff because we know that retaining our staff during this very challenging time is critical to the well-being of our students and then a limited stream of funding that will but very importantly lay the groundwork for long-term improvement in rochester public schools such as things tied to our new strategic action plan that the board will be reviewing and i hope approving in june so we've passed a couple of milestones in december we gave you the updated five-year general fund projection when we talked about um the deficit that we are making plans to uh address in the over the next three years on january 11th the board gave us guidance on some broad options for reconciling that deficit and building the budget um and

093we will be moving toward uh sharpening those plans at the study session at the end of this month and then february 8th and we are hopefully and i believe we will make this goal on track by may 17th to have formal consideration of the district's budget that will include all of those remaining federal funds so in short we've laid a lot of groundwork most mostly to date with mitigating covet in our schools and we have a remainder of the dollars that we'll be allocating as you make decisions on the budget in the weeks ahead one final point none of those federal dollars carried with them requirements for any coveted mitigation strategies that we had to adopt we did not have to adopt masking we didn't have to adopt social distancing we did not have to

094adopt quarantining we did not have to adopt an approach to vaccination all of those were local decisions in this school district as in every school district the funds were allocated based upon the size of enrollment and the other demographic markers that are used to allocate federal funds and state funds in fact but there were no strings attached that we needed to um respond to in order to get those federal funds so with that i know you'll all be happy that john will be back to do this the next time um but hopefully that's kind of a whirlwind tour through these dollars final point i even one more final point all of these um funds are fully audited as part of our annual audit and as board members are aware once again we are fortunate to

095have an entirely clean audit with no findings for our school district which is very rare for a district of our size and these funds will be fully accounted for in the auditing of our district's current year budget as they were last year madam chair well you're no john carlson but you did a darn fine job there so thank you thank you any questions from the board members okay and again i'd like to reinforce one more time dr pikel these funds that the district get guests are scrupulously accounted for and they have to be used that they can only be used for a relatively limited number of uses uh for the most part we spend money from our funds and then get reimbursed for those funds that are appropriate so i think that's important too thank

096you marvin i would point out that in board docs there is a excruciating detailed spreadsheet of all of the expenditures to funds to date by federal source and tracking code and how much we received and how much has been spent so for those people looking for even more detail um who also like math that is available and by excruciating you meant really interesting really interesting we have math people coming in kathy so you have to be careful okay thank you so much uh 5.0 consent agenda any items to be removed for separate consideration move approval second it's been moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda uh we'll have a role call vote miss severson thank you chair marvin aye vice chair nathan hi director workmen hi director ahmanson i clerk barlow and director garcia

097i thank you motion passes unanimously excellent 6.01 math human race madam chair per tradition i might recognize our retirees absolutely thank you for those in the audience for the first few meetings i was the one who kept forgetting this item and now i've kind of gotten to the point where i look forward to recognizing we just have four to recognize tonight who are retiring from our school district i'm starting with monica j bowler who has been a principal on special assignment at the edison building ms bowler has been with the district for 32 years um moving on to kurt d verdoorn who is a senior uh high senior high assistant principal at century high school and mr verdoorn has been with the district for 22 years deborah a new who's a special education education paraprofessional

098at hoover early learning school and ms new has been with the district for five years and james lynch a grounds equipment operator at the facility service center mr lynch has been with the district for 23 years and so we thank all of them for their work and wish them the best in their next adventures absolutely thank you then we'll move on to math 6.01 math overview dr pikkel and director of the board i want to recognize brenda whitman who is our executive director of curriculum and instruction to come up and uh bring the colleagues up to give you a sense of the work of rochester public schools in mathematics as board members know we are taking a tour in the first board meetings of this school year through our major content areas and so at

099our last board meeting we did a pretty deep dive into english language arts and tonight we have the opportunity to do the same with mathematics and so brenda thank you for pulling this together and your team for pulling the group together and there is a briefing paper that is posted with our board materials for those of you who want some more information and some links that are available as well thank you yes um chair marvin school board members and dr raquel we are excited to talk about math tonight and while my colleagues come forward peter if you want to grab one more chair we're going to need one more we really enjoy doing these subject area updates and there will be a math test tonight so be prepared for that no calculators and we have

100a an all-star guest list again today like we normally do peter dodge you're familiar with him by now from elementary curriculum heather willman um jen conan who is our stem implementation associate jake johnson a math teacher from john marshall and amy hughes gage elementary assistant principal do you have the clicker great i'll get it i can go ahead all right i think i get to start us out so first we're going to talk a little bit about the articulation cycle just so you kind of have an idea of what we've done previous to coming here and you have a bit of background so mathematics was reviewed last in 2017 and we purchased new materials and they were implemented in 2018. that was for most major core content areas the math electives sometimes we don't get

101to those as as quickly or as frequently with new materials but that's when we reviewed them our goal is to review mathematics during the 23-24 school year and this will be a two-year process so during the 21-22 school year mde started the process of reviewing and revising the math standards and they will be submitted to rulemaking at that time so we're in a little bit different process with mathematics just in terms of when the new standards are coming on board we do have prioritized learnings that were developed in k-12 and they were reviewed and revised at the high school level so as we worked with high school we felt like the prioritized learnings were more kind of a laundry list of our table of contents and we wanted them to be more broad and deeper

102so you can see on the next slide if you guys can see it we've really moved away from kind of just content knowledge to computation and operations visual representations verbal and written communication skills and then that problem solving and application we want to be sure that the students can actually take the mathematical concepts and apply them in a new setting and so our high school math teachers really were the first ones to say okay let's take a look at this and some of our middle school math folks were involved as well because they teach accelerated math okay so um why does it matter again we want to keep the context in mind and this was a quote from the nctm president from a number of years ago but we highlighted in blue what we felt

103like is the most relevant from that quote and words that should stand out and hopefully come through i think in uh when we have highlight some of our practitioners here is the idea of flexibility the idea of perseverance um and then motivating and developing a positive mathematical identity i did not consider myself a math person and that's not what we want our students to be doing right we want all of our students to have a positive mathematical identity and that's something that we're going to be working on um additionally this ties very closely to again our graduate profile particularly the critical thinker but also skilled communicator as we're wanting our students to develop the language needed to be able to talk about math and talk about their reasoning and you'll see an example of that

104a little bit shortly here as well so some promising practices that we're going to be highlighting tonight so you kind of get a sense of what they look like and feel like first is number talks so we have amy hughes with us who's going to be actually i think walking you through a number talk and a little bit of the thinking around that practice we want to see rich open-ended tasks and activities matt we are working really hard on mathematics specific training for our new teachers so this year we have a larger than usual number of new math teachers at the secondary level and so we've been able to provide math specific training each of our new teacher sessions in fact jake johnson who's here and we'll talk a little bit about intermediate algebra and

105the block concept was able to work with those math teachers so we can get them on boarded right away and get them the um the math teaching and experience that they need um we also are really focused on equity in our curriculum so our materials everyday math in particular really focuses on equitable environments for learning you'll see that in the spiraling you also see that in a lot of the explanation that students need to to have about the mathematical practices and then jen's going to talk a little bit about the equitable and inclusive math practices and coaching cohort and then finally jake will highlight that unique flexible teaching model that he uses in intermediate algebra okay i have my slides so i think one of the biggest things we probably talked about in math is

106from the way we were taught you know back when we were in school things have changed a lot and we hear that from parents all the time why do we have new math why is everything changed why aren't we doing things the same way that we did it when i was in school and i think our biggest learning that we've had over time is that we need to encourage students and we ourselves even use multiple strategies when we are doing math we don't often think that we are but we often are using lots of different strategies we want to encourage our students to do the same um and the importance of explaining our thinking has become more prevalent in as you've adopted these new standards as well it's not just about that you can solve

107the problem and get the right answer but how are you thinking about the problem and how are you strategizing to solve that problem has become more prevalent as we've learned and worked through these new standards over the last few years um and that that idea of conceptual versus procedural lots of procedures and algorithms have been taught before these new standards but it's more about kids understanding why are we doing things the way we're doing them and how can we do them in multiple different ways to get to the same answer and so that's been more um on the forefront as well as trying to teach kids that the conceptual understanding is as is as important as getting the answer and the procedural pieces that that entails um algorithms probably looked a lot different than the

108way we were taught because of that conceptual piece being brought into that instruction that teaching and so it's not just about teaching kids the steps in the process but teaching them how to understand what they're doing and why they're doing it and why we do things in certain ways in mathematics as well and we explore those concepts in earlier grades because we need to build that foundation and and that whole scope and sequence that moves through we start learning about them in elementary school so that later on we get to those algebraic under um problems in those classes we understand what that means earlier than we did previously before the new standards and math hasn't changed our instruction has changed for the better and so it's not about that there's new math and that we

109have all these new newly developed things it's just that we're teaching them differently so kids have a better understanding of those concepts um and the reasons why we needed to change a big reason is is we have devices at our fingertips now that we never had available before we have phones and we have computers and we have laptops available to us we can google the right answer if we needed to right so kids don't need to know how to get the answer they need to understand why we're doing things the way that we're doing them and we want students to think and not just do and not just tell kids like put this place the zero here to hold the place but tell them why we're doing that and why it's important to understand how

110to do math in the way that they're doing it now and we want them to understand the concepts and not just memorize those steps in the process um the standard algorithm is not always the most efficient it used to be the only way we were taught to multiply or divide or add was just this one algorithm but it's not the only way to get the answer we want students and teachers to understand that there's multiple ways to get there and that all those ways are helping you understand how to do the problem um and if students it's not that we're telling students to solve this problem in multiple ways we're teaching them those different strategies so that when they come up on a problem they can pick the strategy that helps them solve that problem

111the best it's not that we're saying solve four plus three in 12 different ways it's how do you understand what four plus three really means and understand that at a conceptual level not just a procedural level so we're gonna try a math problem so if i gave you the problem we're not using paper pencil or calculators if i gave you the problem 18 times five solve that right now 90 okay the answer is right and we know it's 90. we didn't have to write it down we didn't have to do those things we could solve it right i'm guessing that there's multiple ways to do that some people in their mind might have pictured the traditional 18 times five and and you know multiplied five times four and or eight times five and made it

11240 and carried the four you might have done that in your head probably not though because that's a lot of steps to try to memorize and picture in your mind did anybody round did anybody say oh 18 could be 20 times 5 i know that's 100 i'm going to take away two groups of five then to get back to the 18 which is going to give me 90. did you do it a different way i did it the rounding way okay i intended it was a hundred and then it subtracted right so how did you get to a hundred well five times um 20. right so you did five times 20 and then you had to subtract the two groups because we weren't multiplying 20 times five we're multiplying 18 times right right so we

113took away that ten to get back to nine did anybody break it down and say like ten times five plus eight times five and they broke down the eighteen into ten and eight right so you said something so you could say oh 10 times 10 times 5 is 50 that's the 10 from the 18 and i did 8 times 5 and got 4 i got 40 more which made 90. or did anybody do halving and doubling oh that's a great one right you often do that but kids are being taught how to do this especially with their basic multiplication facts if you know fours then you know eights because you can double it if you know threes you know six is because you can double it or half six to three so you could do

114the same thing with this problem you could say 18 right half of 18 is nine i multiply that two times and then i get 90. so we didn't have we actually are doing lots of strategies in our head that we don't often think about and that's what we want kids to be able to do as well you always have paper and pencil you don't always have a calculator so you need to know those strategies to do them quickly and efficiently in your head so what what is the most important things that we need to remember students no one can be efficient with multiple strategies we want them just like we were we solved that problem in lots of different ways we did and we could but you understood all the strategies because you've learned those

115strategies over time and you used a different strategy for this problem that you thought would be the most efficient and students need to explain their thinking because that is often what they're required to do in lots of jobs you don't have to say i got the answer is 90 and not ever have to tell people why and that's not just a mathematical thing that's just a workplace kind of strat um skill and students need to be comfortable with all those strategies to understand why certain strategies would be used and that they're not only building the algorithm algorithmic knowledge but that conceptual understanding so future math makes sense to them you learn that elementary so that makes sense to them in middle school and high school as they learn higher math we build that foundation early

116on in elementary school right then i will be talking about how ann miller who is the k-8 math specialist along with me are supporting the teachers doing the things that amy has talked about and peter referenced how math identity is a huge thing and getting students to believe that they are knowers and doers and understanders and make sense of math outside of our classrooms it's not just when they're in our four walls that they have a deep belief that they can be successful at math and also that they are impacted by how we as teachers position them within our math classroom and what are we doing to change that so every student does feel successful one of the things that anne and i have been diving into is catalyzing change which is an nctm publication

117they have an early childhood elementary a middle school and a high school version of the book that looks at these deep conversations that we need to start having of how to change what we're doing in the classroom and how it's going to help our students in the math classroom currently right now we have instructional coaches at the elementary level that are doing a book study with the elementary one the intervention teachers at the elementary level are going to be looking at this in february and with our equitable and inclusive math teaching practices group we are also starting to bring in those conversations that we are using to develop what we're trying to do in the classroom one of the neat things with the catalyzing change as we've looked at the three different levels are is

118they have had these critical challenges and they are some of those obstacles that are currently in place in our system that are holding some of our students back from being successful in mathematics and so this highlights what those are at the elementary level and then there's a nuance of how it changes a little bit at the middle school and how it changes at the high school but these are woven throughout all of these books the other thing that anne and i along with sarah louise henry have been working on for the past year almost is the equitable and inclusive math teaching practices cohort we started looking at things the three of us last spring and then pulled together a group of teachers to make a steering committee and then we pulled that steering committee together

119in the summer to start laying the groundwork of what we wanted to do with all of our teachers and so we started that this past fall and we are meeting throughout this year five times one of the goals of getting this group up and running is making sure that we had representation from all the different levels so in this group we do have elementary middle and high school teachers along with cni people and the diversity and equity and inclusion groups we're always looking for more people so if people are interested just let us know and the goal of having this group is so we start having those conversations we can have little conversations like in our classroom with our plc but it needs to be broader it needs to be starting as amy said at

120the elementary so we carry and build on that foundation middle school and then the high school builds on that and these are the those things that are helping us build those conversations using using catalyzing change and the pathway to equitable math instruction one of the things that our steering committee did during the summer was look at the equity statements that rps has and then looked at it with the lens of being math educators and what does that look like so on this slide what you see highlighted is looking at it with that math eye and what it can look like and this is just an example the last thing that anne and i are really working with teachers at all levels is moving away from that i do we do you do focusing on there's

121just one way to get there and instead moving like amy said multiple ways multiple understandings that help build that identity for our students if we only teach one way we're stifling that creativity and not letting our students show that they know how to be successful in math outside in their everyday life and as amy said there's multiple ways to do it algorithms are one way and it's not saying it's the way but showing students that this is a toolkit i might understand this way you might understand that way but we can still talk about math and all be successful so i teach i want to talk a little bit about what i what i see as making making for a successful student in a math classroom so i teach two very interesting groups of students

122at john marshall high school i teach the ap calculus one and two courses so you know just think the kid who loves math the kid who can't get enough and is in math league and is in doing every every math problem they can do um and then i also teach a an intermediate algebra block class for ninth graders um who whose mca scores are very low who do not experience success in in traditional math classes and i just wanted to to mention that that the biggest difference that i see between those two groups of students is how they view themselves as math learners how what the system has told them over the course of their academic careers about who they are in a math class and there are some things that we can say that

123we're going to do to help those kids but then there are actual things that we can do um so you know we want we want them to see them ourselves as creators that that sounds good and that is good but what do we actually do systemically to make that happen is is critically important and that's one of the reasons i love my ninth grade class so much um i teach these kids for for two hours instead of one so it's back to back they don't leave my room every day so it's a block setup within a traditional day so it's a lot of staffing like i recognize you know forty percent of my day is spent with these students teaching wise and also uh systemically the class sizes are kept small um and i i

124thank my administrators and i thank the district for providing the support that these kids need because our classes you know where many classes at a high school level are typically 30 32 or upwards from there my block class is capped at 20 students so 20 students uh for for two hours and what does that mean actually for those kids not only do they get more support which they inevitably do right they get they get more of me um they also are sent the message that and and i think one of the most damaging messages that is sent in math is that it's a race um that if that if it takes you longer that you're somehow a failure and that is why even probably in this room there are people with math anxiety um when

125we say we're going to put a problem up on the board there's something in people's souls that just goes all right this is uncomfortable to me why uh because math for the longest time has been taught as a winner loser sort of subject right and and that's why people have such you know oh they either love it or they hate it it's because they've either been a winner or a loser and one thing that we work so hard in my class to to show both in the class but also just through having two hours and spending the time that we need to is math is not a race the best mathematicians in the world spend hours and hours and days and days and weeks doing problems so you know that's one of the things that

126we can do structurally to actually show kids what it means to be a math learner is deep problem solving from multiple different angles but i'll be honest it's very hard to do that with kids you know if you took my 20 intermediate algebra blockades and just put them in an intermediate class and just said well you know good luck a lot of those kids would would not be successful but in my class and through our program those kids are being successful and they're graduating high school and when i survey them throughout the year i ask them questions like you know do you like this class you know first of all do you feel nervous in this class and the response is throughout the year uh improve as we go as they start to break away

127some of those structures that say this is what it means to be a math learner you have to do it this way you have to be fast um and and and i think when we start to approach math in that way we can start to break through some of the built-in walls that we've we've sort of wrapped ourselves in here so um you know i could talk more about the intermediate class in a little bit but um that's just just a little bit to think about a few broader implications for us so there we go one is that um we just want to make sure we're moving away from those tracked pathways traditionally we've had just one opportunity for students to move into accelerated math and so we broadened that a bit at sixth grade

128level where um you can opt into that pathway but we need to think about more pathways at more more times so that we don't just have one time when students can accelerate we also need to think about how do we move away from teaching arithmetic that idea of the teacher is going to show you the way to do it you're going to practice that same way and then you're going to practice you know 10 or 20 of those problems the same exact way how do we move away from that structure to multiple ways of knowing and solving and then moving away from mass practice to spaced practice and you might have watched the video ahead of time about that but the idea behind mass practice moving to space practice is that we want to make

129sure that they're that students are practicing and then they actually get to apply it and they apply it to a new situation so we're not going to do all of our practice and then move on and say okay you can forget it now because we've moved on to the next chapter but we're going to continue to go back to those concepts okay so we want to be honest about the challenges right these are supposed to be uh candid conversations i would say um again one of the challenges is just time for professional development and continued time for our teachers who have been spending a lot of time particularly over the last two days making a shift into this distance learning model and working hard to do that but how do we provide supportive structures for

130our teachers to be able to really dig in and and do some thinking around this and then also just to heather's point talking about the accessibility making sure that those pathways are open for all of our students and then one area another area of growth is number three they're making sure that our teachers are representing the students that they have in front of them and i know our human resource department has done a lot of work around this and is making progress around this but that continues to be a challenge and particularly in math how important it is to have people in front of the classroom that look like our students and then finally just the challenge of the new math standards we don't quite know what they look like yet and they'll be coming

131and we have to go through that process over the next two or three years so we can't leave it at challenges so um some of the plans that we have in place right now are one to re-examine the prioritized learnings in elementary middle school and then the high school math electives so we want to be sure that we do have the deep enduring knowledge and that those are the pieces that we we've selected for our prioritized learnings we also want to support discourse and mathematics so we want to see that mathematics classroom kind of bubbling over with students talking to one another and explaining how things work we know that that's not a strength area for our students but often they want to be able to just show you the the answer and not necessarily

132show you all the steps so we really need to work on how do we build that in to the structures of our classroom and how do we make it safe for risk taking we need to strengthen our core instruction and provide more opportunities for students to access the rigorous mathematics all of our students and then we really need a strong system of support for our students who aren't um they're not acquiring mathematics at the same rate maybe they need more of the time so same standards but more time you probably heard that theme from english it's the same thing with mathematics we need to have that good strong structure to be able to support our students when they need more time and then i think a piece of that is thinking about quality formative assessments

133so how do we know who's getting it and who's not um and i think that's one of the things that i definitely see in jake's classroom is every day when you leave you can see he knows exactly who got that concept and who didn't and who he needs to revisit with the next day so i think that's a piece where we need to provide more time for our teachers to collaborate around and then finally that that continued goal of retaining a diverse teaching staff so when we do hire teachers that are diverse we need to make sure we support them so that they stay we had a great presentation i think the last time we were here about that but we want to make sure we have both recruitment and retention because we know that

134that is is part of where our future in mathematics is going to be so we want to open it up to your questions for us we've got our um practitioners down here and throw any our way that you're wondering about i triple cal um this is fantastic and um i want to ask the question for any of you you mentioned in your list of challenges sort of a multi-tiered system of supports which we talked about with english language arts the opportunity for kids who either missed fundamental concepts or who actually learned the wrong fundamental concept so i just missed it or i actually saw number sense or something like that in our current structures you know and like jake i'm excited to come out and see you teach sometime you know i want to do

135it but across the curriculum when you have a student in our like class-based current structures where we don't have a lot of small group tutoring and things like that yet how do you handle that when a student is missing a foundational um body of knowledge or skill that they might have been you know planned to master either in an earlier grade or just they weren't ready to get it at that point how do you think about that how do you know when that's the case and how in a class and jake you mentioned smaller class sizes but how in a class with lots of different needs do you address that those conceptual misunderstandings or the missing skill pieces and then how could we support you in doing that better so how are you doing it

136today and how could we do it better uh yeah i mean i i think it's it's a definite challenge uh but i think it sort of depends on the skill to me as i think about it at the high school level if it's a fundamental skill for what we're working on in that unit or in that chapter or however you measure learning then it needs to be addressed immediately because the student won't experience success on that unit chapter whatever uh if that if that uh structure is unsound so so it needs to be addressed uh different teachers have different strategies for doing that but it to me needs to be done within the context of the class period and that's critically important so some teachers use it as bell ringers some teachers do um sort

137of uh you know number talks to build back on some of the things um or algebra strings or whatever it might be there are a variety of strategies that teachers employ um recognizing i think within the context of the class is your best um your best bet it can't be a thing where we we send it home right the whole send it home and you know i'm sure it'll get done there um i i'll speak for myself i've got 49 minutes daily to work with my students i want to make the most of every minute that i have with those students so for me it's bell ringers that's that's the strategy that i use um and and it's a way for me at the beginning of class to both start class effectively and quickly but

138also to address some of those foundational skills that it's good for all of my students to have but especially when i identify those but but again this is looping back from the previous day a lot of times those things should be identified by teachers with things like exit tickets and formative assessments to say okay what don't my kids know now what am i going to do about it that's how i do it but i know different teachers do different things and and personally i think there are two things that just spring to my mind immediately about what more could be done i think just the the effective sharing of ideas from teacher to teacher about good strategies that are working in their classes and having a forum for that district-wide would be really helpful and

139awesome um and then the other thing is just when we know there are pockets of kids like the kids that i have or other kids to um to be able to provide them sort of systemic uh time or additional uh para support um within the class period is what jumps to my mind but that's great nine of others talk can you just briefly describe what you mean by a bell ringer oh sorry yeah uh it's when the bell rings every day we uh i have a series of problems on the board um that are what i would consider foundational instruction uh you know structural supports for the things that we're learning within that unit um and and the kids it's it's a routine to get us started right away so that we don't lose precious

140time at the beginning um but it also uh morphs quickly into kids sharing ideas and kids having conversations to start the class period so um and then you know i do i do it where those are those are actually assessed and we see like did we make progress on these specific skills and if we didn't well then we need to try something else the goal obviously is that we do and that that we can sort of put that into the yep we got it for now category thank you mr barlow so my question is very similar to dr pickell's um as i looked at the minnesota standard for mathematics uh i'm going to read just a small sentence from the standard so the standards are placed at the great level where mastery is expected with

141the recognition that intentional experiences at earlier grades are required to facilitate learning and mastery for other great levels that isn't always the case where that mastery is occurring in part jake you have answered that to some degree but but uh i guess i'm concerned i i have engaged in conversations with parents who are frustrated they know their children are doing well in mathematics and yet they're promoted to the next grade and they continue to struggle and struggle and struggle they eventually graduate yes but not necessarily proficient at and i'm not suggesting you may have the solution for that though if we were to reduce it to some type of mathematical formulation we might come up with the solution though jake and i i i have visited jm last year he and i spoke with uh

142principal johnson i sense then and continue to hear your passion and i think that is so important i believe each of you possess a passion and uh so my question now begins how can we ensure that uh not only is it related to content area but that uh staff who are passionate uh are provided the opportunities to a two block period provided the opportunities to really invest and to cultivate and and develop what they know is there not only in the 20 or so students that you may have opportunity to see but and most learners i'm curious to to hear what maybe we can do to be more supportive of that i do know that we can't necessarily uh continue to do things the way we always have that 18 times five i'm a traditionalist

143so i multiplied eighteen times five ninety and i was kind of surprised that these other rounded broke it down but you don't know what you don't know and and yet what i saw there was an opportunity to challenge teachers and students to not necessarily do it the way you've been taught or the way that is convenient or that the scope and sequence may call for but to maybe view there's an alternate way and approach and and so can you i know i kind of went across but is there something you can maybe share that i can that will allow me to rest comfortably i i can share one thing that i think has made a huge difference for our new math teachers and i think it's that idea of being able to see one another

144teach so we've been able this year we haven't had the demonstration classroom up and running because of covid and and the subs shortage but before that we were able to have teachers take teachers to a classroom like jake's or a classroom at gage where they're implementing number talks and let the teacher watch what that looks like and what that process feels like for students and then they're able to debrief with the teacher afterwards and talk about how did you build that bell ringer what information did you get from the students what are you going to do next what will you what's your plan for the week after that and i think being able to unpack some of that thinking so that teachers can see that and then okay i'm going to go try it and

145now i want to come back to you and talk through how it worked or didn't work i think that has been really impactful as we think about growing our teachers ability to do that i don't know if you want to add anything to that but maybe maybe on the student level just to speak to you know we have kids who are behind you know they show up in ninth grade and and these are students who we're working on at the beginning of the year students with gaps in their third and fourth grade math levels we take them as they are right we take every student and they're in intermediate algebra this is why the time aspect is so important for those kids because they do have more standards that we need to see them them

146build and that's why i am i'm so happy to have that intervention proactively at john marshall for kids uh because right without that it's like we're just sweeping it under the rug and pretending like everything's fine when in reality it's not fine that they're mathematically damaged at that point and and we need to we need to assist them in both how they see themselves but also the skills that they can present um in sort of that fluid way so i think the more proactive interventions that we can provide for kids at a building level that get out in front of it and say it's not that it's not that you're you can't learn math it's not that you're bad at math which by the way is something that is perpetuated in society often is well

147you're either a math person or you're not right we believe that everyone is a math person and can be it's just we need to get ahead of it before it becomes a failure mindset that oh i'm just not good at this so i think one thing that could be done and should be brainstormed is more widespread use of proactive interventions for kids in math that are focused on both mindset and skill i think would be good well it's good to hear that it appears you have the autonomy at your school and i'm guessing at most schools to try stuff you know maybe getting kids together smaller class sizes two hours great teacher let's try that and see how it works and i think that's the schools are different and i love it that you're trying

148stuff so again i appreciate these detailed presentations um you talked a little bit about how the instruction has changed and we also talked about how the adults in the room might have had a different experience with math in the past how have what parents see coming home in terms of homework changed and what can parents expect to see as your instruction is changing in the class and or maybe just give a shout out to what the best way parents can support their kids at home to be strong i have a strong math identity as well as learning the skills of math i mean i think it's about education of the parents just as much as it is about the teachers and the students and so i think along the way you have to share with

149teach or with parents that it may be different than the way that you were taught the way that you were taught isn't wrong or or incorrect it was it's just that there's other ways to do it and so not to stifle students into thinking that there's this is the one way in the right way in the only way but to let them explore how would you how how did you solve that problem because kids often have that thinking but then we often squelch it by saying i'm gonna show you the way to do it on the board and then that's an implied that that's the only way or the right way and so i think letting kids explore with manipulatives with lots of things early on helps them build their confidence like jake said which

150is so important that they feel confident as a math student and not to stifle or to like funnel them to think that there's one way of thinking i think that parents need that education just as much as the teachers and the students do and i think just as many opportunities as you can give to tell parents there's lots of ways to do it let your kids explore it let your kids show you how to do it and be open to that and not thinking there's like this one rigid way so i think that's important for parents to know just as much as the students and the teachers are there particular ways that you already practice that because i'm imagining like just the students sitting in the room feeling like they are not a math person

151rather than developing that identity i imagine one or both parents probably feel that way too and so if you have two people with not a strong math identity in the room and it's sort of like they're just kind of bumping into each other where like i just learned now today in school this one particular way and you learn this other way and how an invalidating to the parent to now not be able to help their kid like how do we help them help them without them obviously sitting in the classroom with you to learn this new way of learning so i've got a couple things on that number one to me that's that's the beauty of the exit ticket and when i say exit ticket that's uh the thing that i need you to know

152before you leave and i take it very seriously as a professional and i think we all do and should that my job is to make sure that you know this before you leave today because that just in itself tells the student that their presence in the classroom matters and that them knowing this before they leave matters and how we get there based on conversations in the class can vary right so that's that we don't need one rigid way there might be three ways four ways to get there but we're gonna get there and i think if we send that message to students that it's just we can't accept anything less than you understanding this you can i can't we're on the same team against ignorance here when we think of it in that way then

153the kids can't possibly accept any other option then i got it right i knew what i had to do before i left the class and i think that as a parent then you have a kid who's coming home who knows what they need to do they've got that confidence i think it would be relieving as a parent to not feel like they have to fill that void especially if they have math anxiety already so i think our the biggest thing that we can do as educators in math is use the class time that we have with the kids as effectively and wisely as possible every single minute has to count because whether we like it or not a lot of times we can't count on parents from day one to say oh yeah well i

154can help you with that so i think that's how we can empower parents along with the conversational pieces but but certainly using that class timing and having the feel the kid feel like and know that they are an expert on what we worked on that day is probably the most empowering thing we can do for kids right because like i i'm just anticipating the idea that once the kid outpaces the parent in terms of confidence in math and as a parent like not being able to provide assistance like hey i need help with this problem and they're like i don't i don't know and even if i let you sit there and explain it to me i don't understand the new way that you learn to do this then there creates an additional tension of

155them being you know holding that confidence and being able to move forward so it's not really just the logistics of understanding how many ways you can solve a math problem there's also like the psychological barrier that we're dealing with both like for two people in a room and then it it turns into like okay now you older sibling can you help younger sibling because i don't understand as a parent how to do this and then there's there's a widening gap there and dr picala has a question too but i just want to build on this quickly absolutely attitude confidence whatever but how about if you're somebody like me and you're trying to help your kid or your grandkid and it's it's not about confidence i just don't know how do i do this grandma i

156don't have a clue so my question is are there so he and i said where's your book he said well the there's no book but there are all these videos online and that's what he had access to so we watched it together and um and then i was much smarter than i had been five minutes before so you know to me that's huge is having resources for people like me who just don't want to know but just don't and online or books or whatever dr piquel sorry jumped in ahead of you no i'll be brief and these are more it's less of a question than just building what dr garcia said i have a friend who founded a non-profit and you can google them called power my learning and this is not a commercial for

157their non-profit but it's this insight and the it's technology embedded uh work and it starts with math between the teacher the student and the parent or guardian and the basic idea is when the student is taught the skill the teacher also using a tablet introduces to the kid at an explanation and application of that skill that the student then goes and uses the tablet to teach their parent or guardian and the parent or guardian has a separate module they look at to sort of so they don't feel stupid because these are there's no sound like right no and but it's just so powerful when it works and it opens up like everything how the teacher uses it but you're teaching that skill and then you say okay when you're going to go home you're going

158to be teaching your person you know and these families can be very diverse you're going to be teaching them about this but it's really carefully crafted so that it's a guided presentation for the parent of what i learned and the parent has their own kind of module so they don't have to know the math and it's really magical when it works and i was doing research on relationships at the site and i said at the time and when i was talking with liz i said have you ever studied what happens to the relationship between teachers and parents and kids and parents when you have this connection around the content she says no but we know it gets a lot better but you know they've never really looked at this idea that i come home and

159i teach you something i learned we all know that what's saying you really want to learn something you have to teach it so it's a really kind of genius insight that they they had so you can google them but i don't think we need to do do anything with their platform to take this insight that i really appreciate director nathan for raising like how are we helping parents because we got a lot of math math fragile parents out there how are we helping them kind of support their students in this journey so at the elementary level in particular heavily at the primary level um our current curriculum everyday math which is very focused on um equitable practices within their curriculum but one of the key pieces that i have seen a lot of as a

160parent with my own children going through school is a home link that comes home and it leans heavily on game based learning as opposed to so you can play with that when the directions are included in those materials so that's another resource that we do have access to that's a great opportunity to connect with parents thank you so much we could do this for another hour but you have other things to do um thank you this was really really interesting appreciate it and now we're going to go on to a resolution that involves math john marshall bid package number two that's the number that comes after one back to cal alright directors of the board you will not be surprised i want to ask executive director scott sheridan uh director of opera operations to come

161and uh present the board with uh this resolution online i have another math problem for you to spend about 20 something let's go through that as you know the john marshall indoor air quality project was on the long-term facility maintenance revenue plan the 10-year plan that was board approved last in july the project is about 39.7 million dollars estimated to be uh and for john marshall high school it's about a 340 000 square foot building and includes a replacement of all the boilers which are the original boilers in the building from when it was built in 1957 i believe and we're going to redo the dehumidification equipment a lot of the electrical we're going to place the curtain wall on the front of the building that is leaking considerably and that's on the east side

162of the building and it's all going to be funded through some general obligation bonds knutson construction is the cma for it and as you know you approved bid package one on i don't remember when it was oh i'm sorry october 5th of 2021 we put together bid package 2 and that went out on november 22nd and this includes the glass and glazing and that's all the curtain wall that has all the aluminum front along with all the windows also we put out a package for the plumbing and heating ventilation and air conditioning hvac then we also put out a package for the electrical package all of these were best value proposals on december 28th we received the proposals we got one for glass and glazing two for uh plumbing and hvac and one for the

163electrical package these were all blind rated by members of construction services and facility division for risk assessment team expertise and value-adds and then on the fourth we conducted interviews with the one vendor for the glass and glazing the two vent two vendors for the plumbing and hvac and one vendor for the electrical and they were individually rated and scored as well the purchasing manner manager keeps track of all the scoring in the end hench's glass was identified as the best value contractor for glass and glazing one million seven hundred and forty seven thousand nine hundred ninety one dollars was their package emc plumbing and heating was the best value contractor identified for the plumbing and hvac and the amount was 13 million 746 thousand dollars eagan companies identified as a best value electrical package in

164the amount of four million five hundred and fifty seven thousand seven hundred dollars there were three ultimate alternates that we're holding off on alternate one includes uh hvac and ceiling replacement from area four b and five area five if you remember was the news the newer scion swing that was built in so we're reviewing if that area really needs the upgrades or if we can just correlate it in with the current but with a new system that that we're putting in we're going to decide on that one at a later time and then the hvac and ceiling replacement in the kitchen that was a fairly recent remodel as well when they redid the cafeteria so we're going to wait on that to decide if we need to do that alternate as well and then alternate

165three is to replace the emergency power generator and again we'll write weight on that one so the total estimated cost of the bid package number two is two twenty million fifty one thousand six hundred ninety one dollars any questions from board members mr sheridan is this something you'd like to get resolved quickly or not i would appreciate it yes okay this is a briefing item move to action and moved and seconded to move this to action miss um zeverson i forgot your name ms severson would you please call the role thank you director amundsen aye director barlow aye director garcia aye director marvin aye director nathan hi and director workman right it's now an action item be it resolved the school board of independent school district 535 does hereby accept the best value glass and

166glazing package proposal 8b from hench's glass in the amount of 1 million 747 991 dollars plumbing and hvac package proposal 22a from dmc plumbing and heating in the amount of thirteen million seven hundred forty seven thousand dollars an electrical package proposal twenty six a from eagan companies in the amount of four million five hundred and fifty seven thousand seven hundred dollars for a total of twenty million fifty one thousand six hundred ninety one dollars for john marshall high school iaq improvements bid package number two move approval second it's been moved and seconded ms severson rule call vote please thank you director amundsen hi director barlow aye director garcia aye director marvin aye director nathan hi director workman thank you the resolution passes thank you thank you mr scott 8.02 superintendent search firm planning this is

167simply a announcement that at four o'clock uh next tuesday we will begin our study session with a an hour-long planning meeting with hya superinten attendant search firm this is just an introduction to how the process is going to be and hopefully we'll come up with the timeline 8.03 board meeting dates and times through the end of march 2022 these are included in board docs note that we have a study session beginning at four o'clock next tuesday and then we will have a um three meetings scheduled so far in february that all the dates are there joe marvin yes ma'am um just to remind the community that after that um initial hour from four to five on the 25th at five o'clock we'll be talking about the budget reduction information and we'll also be having a

168presentation on possible referendum scenarios from ellers yes thank you the the five o'clock um study session was already on the books and so we're just bumping it starting at four o'clock with another issue but thank you thank you miss nathan all right uh 10.01 recent changes and updates to the annual board meeting calendar ms nathan um so since the last update you received on the annual calendar we just announced adding that four o'clock start time for the study session with our superintendent search firm we'll be having a public hearing for field trips on february 8th and then on february 22nd we'll have an agenda item to approve the field trips on april 5th we will have the approval of pseo payments for spring semester and on february 8th we'll also be having our diversity equity

169and inclusion update and on february 8th we will have the introduction of our new research assessment and evaluation what is the title director director um also recognition on february 22nd of the computing the computing competition awards and on the march 1st agenda we'll have an agenda item on antenna service systems at four schools so what we plan to do at these updates board members is to give you all the individual updates of things that have changed and then um ms siverson is responsible for maintaining the master document which is always available on board docs and also linked through our website thank you so this is completely accessible to the public then okay thank you so much um other business are there any other items that you would like to see considered for a future agenda

170mr barlow well just clarification in terms of this coming thursday can you speak briefly too yup and and i'll cover that briefly the listening session right yeah yeah so the community knows at seven o'clock they can still register for a listening session with board members and the entire agenda for that is for people to let us know what they're thinking uh provide that information to the board member and then to hopefully to allow some discussion within each small group for the people who are there thank you any any other items you want considered for a future agenda all right hearing none it is 806 and we are adjourned thank you you