RPS School Board Meeting - 08/17/21

001foreign yes you ready justin welcome okay this regular meeting of the independent school district 535 school board is called order at 5 30 pm tuesday august 17 2021 in room 137 of the edison building the board acknowledges this site and all rps sites are situated on the ancestral land of the dakota people we honor the dakota nations and the sacred land of all indigenous peoples interested members of the public are welcome and encouraged to view this meeting remotely at dot com backslash isd 535 where the live stream video may be found present at this meeting our school board members superintendent kent pacquel a non-voting ex official member and assistant school board clerk ms michelle severson ms severson will you please call the roll thank you clark ahmanson here director barlow director garcia director mclaughlin chair

002marvin here vice chair nathan treasurer workman here thank you thank you at this time we offer the opportunity to say the pledge of allegiance [Music] i pledge allegiance to the plague of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all 2.0 approval of the agenda are there any changes to the agenda seeing none second it's been moved and approved moved and approved moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye opposed agenda is approved 3.01 comments to the board although most community members correspond with board members by email or phone call the school board has elected to provide 30 minutes at the beginning of regular meetings for individuals to address the board in person about issues that directly affect students

003i'll say that again issues that directly affect students this is not a time or place to make a speech to a particular audience or constituency and this part of the meeting is not live streamed procedures and prohibited conduct are posted so as you know issues involving personnel negotiations and protected student data are not allowed personal attacks abuse of language and disruptive behavior are always inappropriate at meetings where the primary goal is to discuss and make decisions about how to provide the best possible education for everyone's children the board will listen and generally not respond to speakers but we will be happy to connect with you later if you request further clarification or conversation each speaker will have three minutes and we ask you to respect this limit so others will have their opportunity to speak

004miss severson will keep track of the time and now it's on our screen thank you when your name is called please have a seat in front of the microphone either microphone at this table state your name and whether you are a resident of the school district and our first speaker we welcome you miss anna folp thank you teacher of the year congratulations to natalia benjamin dr pikel hey [Applause] [Music] good evening to the board board chair board members dr paquel miss severson tonight i stand before you at the start of a new school year long fellows already in we have confusion about schedules new staff members changes all over the place and we need a little bright spot so tonight we bring a little bit of optimism here a little bit of sunshine into our

005world natalia benjamin is tonight we're here to celebrate her she is an exemplary member of our union of our school district and i've known natalya well i worked with her as an fr as a faculty rep for us and as now recently on our board for our union she is not afraid to bring new ideas to us she's not afraid to challenge our thought processes she's not afraid to ask us the why when we do things it continues to refine us as educators it continues to help us become better advocates for our students and our families as a teacher up at century she's an el teacher there i know she's a very strong advocate for her students and i know she's a very strong advocate for her colleagues within the building we are so lucky

006that she's in our district and i think it bears out being elected voted as the teacher of the year it shows it shows so much so i am i know there's other people that want to speak tonight but on behalf of myself and the rochester education association we would like to say thank you and to offer her a little something you better [Applause] i would i would love it if natalya would talk to you kind about her journey of becoming that teacher of the year and maybe what's a little bit ahead of her in her schedule if she knows that yet i think it's a little wild card yet so thank you very much and natalia benjamin minnesota teacher of the year madam chair school board members superintendent pikel and members of the cabinet thank

007you for the opportunity to address you today i hope that the recognition of minnesota teacher of the year can bring light into the arduous work that rochester public school educators do for our scholars and students every day it is after a year of teaching through a pandemic that we find ourselves at the beginning of another school year this pandemic has shown light into the many inequities that our students face in their lives and this is reflected in several data points that we all have access to there's graduation rates for marginalized populations like behind their peers racial disparities in students reading at great level discipline disparities increase mental health needs where students have to wait to get services at school racial disparities in some special education settings and on the representation of our community in gifted

008and talented advanced placement and honors classes we must provide educators with the tools and resources to match their dedication and desire so that we can meet all of these students needs we need smaller classroom sizes increasing in diversity of the staff so that it can reflect our community incorporating schedules that make time for social emotional learning and relationship building we need more diverse curriculums and having materials and training for hands-on learning just to name a few things we need these structures in place to support students at all levels in school for their social emotional learning from the early childhood to the high school students i believe that we must build these bases so that we can affirm our students identities so that they can find success regardless of their socioeconomic status their gender identity or

009their racial backgrounds topics of racism xenophobia homophobia sexism ableism and all the other isms tend to make people uncomfortable many say that these topics are divisive when division stems precisely from unchallenged words and actions based on these helpful premises as we better understand our own biases and the multiple identities that exist in our classroom we can fight against all these isms within our schools so that educators at rochester public schools can prepare our students to be successful in a diverse multilingual and multicultural community we need to reflect on our practices it's critical that we ask ourselves whether they benefit on the represented populations and we must be courageous to change and know better so that we can do better we must act with urgency and an intentional plan that will allow success for all especially

010those most in need i urge you to continue the work of equity and to not get sidetracked by distractors who do not have all of our students interest in mind we will need all of rochester public schools educators in this endeavor we have a lot of work to do and i know that the educators at rochester public schools can rise up to this challenge so that we can prepare every student at rochester public schools for their future in a diverse society and i hope that as this year of service continues that i can share this message with other people as the union has asked me to to share what is best for our students in education thank you [Applause] madam chair board members i want to just add a couple of points about uh natalia

011i've only known her for about a month um and i already feel uh deeply privileged to have had the chance to interact with an educator of her commitment and her skill i also want to call up one of my colleagues after board members have had a chance to share any thoughts that you want to share i just want to say that this morning i conducted a workshop for about a hundred of our new teachers who were awesome over at mayo high school and it was of course on relationships and i try my best to have it build to this really positive ending and natalia doesn't even know this i ended and i was saying to these hundred new teachers i was like and you are in the district with the minnesota teacher of the year

012and they cheered and then i'm not kidding natalia walked by the glass volunteering with rochester education association to meet our new teachers on a day when she didn't have to be there and i was like that's her right there um i've had the chance uh to begin to get to know her to support the work of the employees of color resource group and the work that she's done as a multi-language learner instructor and i'm so excited on building that partner and the only thing i want to add is this is not going to be a one and done this is a recognition soon after you've received this amazing honor we want to have hopefully when we soon get beyond some of our covid restrictions a celebration and more than that we want to lift up

013this extraordinary honor over the course of this year that you're serving as minnesota teacher of the year to learn from the things that the state education association has recognized in your career here at home we also know we're going to lose you for a bit because part of the role is to go out into the state and to share uh your insights with educators across minnesota and we fully support that um because we think that what works for the state as a whole is in the end going to work for rochester public schools so congratulations thank you um and i i know board members join me in their excitement about this opportunity thank you and natalia not only do you have great timing in terms of showing up exactly when you need to for a

014room full of teachers um you i think it's been pointed out you were the first ever rochester teacher to be named minnesota teacher of the year and we couldn't have a better representative both for our state and this country so we are so proud you deserve it so well and uh we know you're going to continue to make a difference but you have to after this year promise that you're going to stay in the classroom here so there's i think there's is that in her contract it will be tomorrow it will be tomorrow so other other board members go ahead and felicitate i we're i'm so proud of you i like um superintendent paquel haven't known you incredibly long like some of the other people here in the room but i feel also very privileged

015and fortunate to to just be in the same space as you and i think that this is a well-deserved award and recognition for all of the wonderful work that you do in our district so yes natalia you are a superb teacher of students but you are also a superb teacher of adults um i've gotten to know you over the past few years in in the work where we've tried to put into words the equity work that we hope the district does going forward and you've taught me so much by just sharing your story by by bringing the stories of your students forward um by teaching them to be advocates and i'm i'm so proud that the rest of the state is going to ha is going to be able to see everything that you bring

016to this district and i look forward to all the work we're going to do together in the future congratulations [Music] and madam chair board members the the whole cabinet was sort of vying for a chance to say a few words and in the interest of time we want to ask someone who is very new to that role but a long time colleague of natalya's um will ruffin is our executive director of diversity equity and inclusion and uh i asked him just to share a few thoughts about this really extraordinary accomplishment of a longtime friend and friend and colleague of his so will yeah [Laughter] i randomly met natalya a few years ago at a union training we we knew each other or knew of each other that we had never met well we want to

017get all of this recorded can you speak into the mic thank you sorry we had never met and right away i think it was an emerging leaders training or something like that that i met you and when you just spend five minutes around the tie you just start to start you get sucked into her and it's hard not to be um a part of your story but we all know that you care about your students i think many teachers do but what i wanted to tell you that you also care about developing the leadership capacity and the competency of all the adults in our district so that we won't have just one teacher of the year but maybe we can have many more to come and i also wanted to let you know that that's

018something that you've done for me personally i'm a better person because i know you i'm a better leader because i've learned from you and i just wanted to make sure that i said that publicly in front of everyone so thank you for being you thank you for making our district better and our students and our families are lucky to have you in their lives so thank you thank you [Applause] thank you so much um our next agenda item 4.02 cradle to career this is an update uh information item julie brock is here from cradle to career the executive director [Music] good evening that's hard to follow but i'm super super excited because natalia is a boss and that's just what i just tweeted too so boss um thank you so much for having me today

019i'm so excited to share with you some of the findings that we have out of our high school network today so this june we um our high school network uh organizations wanted to learn from the youth that are in their programs so the high school network is comprised of both uh of rochester public schools um programs local young youth serving organizations and other high schools in our uh city in june partners in cradle's career co-hosted get togethers for youth to learn more about their experiences within these programs over the last year the program asked three big questions on a scale of one to five those questions were do adults respond to your bad day do you feel like you belong in the organization or the program and do you feel like your ideas count in

020the organization or program and out of those three most scored just over four however the one that was the farthest away from a a perfect five was do adults respond to your bad days that actually came in at a 4.39 as part of a facilitated conversation students provide more information about what they like don't like and would like to see in the future in these programs when asked what their hopes are for the program most asked for more students to be involved close relationships and friendships between students more resources for the programs that they were involved in and support and resources provided for their future all of those above hopes are also about relationships and about relationship building and about trust you feel like staff responded to bad days when staff are being proactive and

021engaged in the program that are connected to youth youth also feel like staff do not respond to bad days when staff maintain emotional distance and are there to get a paycheck so cradle to career we support face masking across pk to 12 so students can be together in spaces and can access the resources needed for their health and well-being students deserve equitable school experiences and in-person settings are vital for students to get the help that they need that's what we learned over the last year this is what our kids are asking for across our community our data aligns with what we are seeing across the state and nation that connection true connection to trusted peers and teachers and program staff is necessary for students to feel safe supported and successful and this is why the

022high school network is focusing on trying to make sure program staff are culturally competently trained and engaging students where they are help the students identify their goals and ambitions so that they are successful now and always as learners in charge of their destinies this is real-time data that was collected in june 2021 i wanted to make sure that you knew that going into the school year that our kids need desperately to be in touch with their peers and with their educators thank you ms brock any questions thank you 4.03 board member committee updates are there any committee reports ms workman yes i have one that's coming up um if you haven't already seen it either in your snail mail or in your mailbox here there is a letter from the minnesota school board association concerning

023the um legislative advocacy tour that's coming up on september 1st there is a link in that email that you can access this meeting from there are also five questions that they would like us to think about and what i think i will do is to send those to dr pickhouse so that he can better inform us as to how we can be better advocates for our district with this legislative group thank you uh then the consent agenda any items to be removed for separate consideration of approval second it's been moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda all in favor say i opposed the consent agenda is approved and we have four retirees who we always like to honor our retirees and i always like to put the superintendent on the spot so it's kind

024of a win-win who almost certainly doesn't know these people but would have admired and loved them had i known them absolutely i am honored to recommend uh with apologies for butchering any names bonita k sawyer who's been an adult literacy teacher at hawthorne education center she's retiring effective at the end of the day october 28 2021. she's been with our district for 24 years that's in community education we have some paraprofessionals who are retiring laurie ann dubois is a special education paraprofessional at the education service center and rail and is retiring effective august 2nd 2021 so that's complete she's been with the district 23 years denise ray thompkin is a special education paraprofessional at male high school retirement will be effect was effective july 31st she'd been with the district for three years and in

025student nutrition services catherine a lee has been an associate at mayo high school retirement will be effective at the end of this month august 31st and she's been with the district for six years and so we thank all four of these professionals and we wish them the best for what's next thank you 7.01 school resource officer this is sro memorandum of understanding this is a briefing item dr pikel thank you madam chair and board members um this is one of many issues that at rochester public schools i had the chance to get on the train that had already left the station and gone down the road quite far in the tracks as board members are aware we have continued to have school resource officers from the rochester police department in our schools i was very

026pleased to note that we have those officers in our schools when i got here that's not the case everywhere around the country but i was also pleased that we have had a rigorous discussion with the rochester pd about the role of those school resource officers i was fortunate to attend the last meeting of the working group that we convened with the rochester police and a diverse array of districts not just staff but also students to look at the role of school resource officers as board members are aware this mou and the idea of it came up as you were considering the renewal of our annual contract um with rpd for these services and there was clearly a sense that especially as the district is embarked on a different level of emphasis on equity and with

027some changes that are happening in society we need to have a conversation and reach some new agreements um i am very enthused about the result of this um effort the mou that is here really paints a vision of the role of school resource officers that reflects both best practice and i think aligns with where we as a community want and need to be and there's a lot of things that are in the agreement and board members i'm going to ask scott sheridan who as most of you know has been our executive director of operations to come up and also make some comments and chief jim franklin from the rochester police will ask him to come up in a moment as well and and start us out with some uh thoughts from his perspective i will

028just say a lot of districts have gotten this wrong um and i think we have a chance to really get it right but this is the beginning of a journey even though we may be a realizing this agreement not the end of a journey there are a lot of things that are challenging about the role of police officers in schools but something i was very enthused about for my first meeting with chief franklin was that he and then the rest of his team who i've met understand that school resource officers are not average cops they're a very special breed who is really willing to build relationships and to work with kids to know where the line of their responsibilities begins and ends it's not school discipline it's building the capacity of the school community and

029it is being involved when there are issues of criminality that arise i'll just tell you some of you know my wife was a middle school principal and she had a school release officer in the school who was everything we want in an sro and it was a critical positive relationship builder he was injured totally outside the context of work and had retire and in the separate city they put a new officer in the school and this was a guy just off the street is a by all accounts a good cop and he was not right for working as a school resource officer um that chief in that city made a shift and they put got it back into a new place and i know that rochester police department has appreciated that as well getting the

030right people into this role is critical but so is getting the right procedures and processes and i think this mou gives us a good chance but as i said it's the beginning of a process not a culmination so i recommend that we approve this and move forward with the understanding that many of you's board members have long-standing experience with these issues um and will have i'm sure some good feedback and thoughts for us so if chief franklin i could have you come up and then many of you know that scott um sheridan who we are fortunate to have wearing many hats in our school district one of which was by all accounts being one of those kinds of school resource officers earlier in his career that we want in our schools with our kids so

031uh thanks to you both and chief i know you have a million things on your schedule tonight so thanks for stopping by with us to to share some thoughts from your vantage point yeah absolutely uh superintendent uh madam chair school board thanks for having us here uh i think uh i'm gonna keep my statements brief here and then i'll give an opportunity to answer any questions that you might have but i think what you have in front of you is a reflection of where we've come from and that's our commitment to creating a school resource officer program uh that we can all be proud of that we can see is effective efficient and is something that we all uh desire to have and and that commitment came out came out of those discussions that we

032had earlier again coming together in the collaborative effort i think what you have in front of you is that culmination of that collaborative effort coming together uh to get the program where we want it to be and that's that's not a one and done uh commitment and it's not a one and done collective effort this is gonna be a continuous conversation throughout the school year with staff and with the superintendent etc in dealing with things that pop up if they pop up and continue to revamp and revise the program to create the best program that we possibly can to deliver the highest level of public safety to the schools within this community and quite frankly it's it's reflective of the same commitment that we have to policing within this community thank you chief uh good

033evening board members uh just to uh follow up on what chief franklin was saying uh just i provided you a pretty substantial background in the board doc as far as the makeup of the committee as the superintendent said it was a very diverse group of individuals i found them very engaging they were phenomenal to work with the work wasn't just at the meetings themselves there were three meetings with about an hour and a half each a lot of the work was back and forth behind the scenes between the district and the police department a lot of that was headed by captain stillwell who is overseas the program uh right below the the chief lieutenant thompson who oversees the sro program as well and then sergeant blanc who is the direct supervisor for the sro program

034in the school district like i said we had a very large group from all different areas we included special ed we included the director of special ed student services i mean the equity specialists the hr equity staff um myself of course and we also had uh the pleasure of having two students uh we had some difficulty getting the students to come we did actually have a lot of input from the students because the equity specialist prior to the end of the year after the directive in april to form this committee the equity specialist went out and had engagements at all the the high schools and collected data so we had a a pile full of data to go through and like i said a lot of that was done outside of those meetings but everybody

035then brought back their input to the meetings and some of the majority of the credit for the the format of the mou uh goes to captain stillwell we went back and forth redlining things and and changing things but it became very clear that initially the direction from the board was they asked us to review 2d of the current contract and that had to do with the duties the daily duties of the sros and it's it's really difficult to put down on paper every little type of duty that an sro might be involved with because it's it changes every single day just as it does for a patrol officer on the street and we we quickly realized that that document could go on and on and on for pages and pages and so our intent was

036let's create a document as a memo of understanding that outlines the philosophy of what the program is uh what the district's vision is and what the police department's vision is show how it's merged together that we're working collaboratively collaboratively together in this endeavor and like the chief said this isn't an end all right here i'm sure there'll be modifications in the future there'll be changes along the way to make this better and better but uh i firmly believe this phenomenal group that we had together to work with has put together a a very fine document for you you to review and to give us feedback on thank you and i'm guessing there can be some questions from board members let me say first though that i was especially impressed uh that part of the mou

037is the agreement that there would be monthly meetings with students and staff that's one of the things that our students were telling us is that they wanted that opportunity to talk with the police officers about what their concerns were and you know make sure that that the people in their buildings really understood the kids in that building so i think that's a major a major improvement and thank you for that questions or comments board members um mr garcia minister dr garcia um i i just want to thank everybody who worked on this and i guess i'll just go first because i'm typically the negative nancy on this issue um i can appreciate all of uh the things that would have to go into you know writing out every single task an sro does either in

038an mou or in the policy um and there are some decent uh changes particularly around the language but i feel like the document is so vague i don't know what to do to do with it um it's our intent and mission as leaders i think to engage in culturally responsive which as ms hicks mentioned would also include trauma-informed responses to our community and to reduce the interactions of oppressive systems on our students and those in the um the larger communities so i still don't see that reflected um in the mou in the way that we had asked for it initially and it does not make explicit the changes that that i'm already being told are made and i see you know via social media and through conversations with other officers um in rpd that there

039are these positive things that are happening and i i just felt like it didn't come across here and i want to make sure that that is present um i also think that um like where is our transparency and vulnerability both as the district and as the police department and in tandem doing this work that we're we're recognizing that we are a larger part of that of oppression and i think that this discipline data that we go through i have a lot of this to me feels very interconnected that's what our community needs to hear and so during our last meeting about this i made very clear that i wanted a radical reimagining of what we were going to do differently and i just i don't think that that comes across here and just a few

040questions i guess that i just kept coming back to when i read the mou is if if the intent is to be a law enforcement officer for what reason would you need to respond to any requests from the district on our property where a law is not being broken i also see a lot of comfort in continuing to be a tertiary or reactive response system rather than doing some of the identifying and figuring out how we can how we can do this preventatively and i also want to just say yes the comments may seem harsh and i do not want to disparage any of the work that you know many people have done on this but i feel like what i know is happening behind the scenes didn't come across at all in this and

041so i feel like that radical reimagining um but it didn't it didn't hit or exceed the mark for me so miss mclaughlin and then miss amundsen um i'd like to start by thanking dr paquel for his comments i think it was good to hear a different perspective um from from our superintendent about this issue because it's extremely important to our district um chairman i also appreciate your comments about the meetings with students but that's kind of where i want to start with my comments and my questions is that the mou i think it's an improvement but i agree with dr garcia that it's just not far enough that i had hoped we would be at this point of reviewing the mou to add to this current contract the example i would give i guess is

042that in item excuse me 3c it talks about as as chair marvin talked about addressing the concerns of students and meeting with the students i would like to see that more explicitly expressed in that paragraph to talk about things like addressing the concerns about equity addressing the concerns about social justice specifically addressing the concerns that students have expressed about incidents of police violence i think the students are mature enough at the high school level to have those conversations with their sros and i think this paragraph needs to make that explicit because it also later in the paragraph talks about things like equity training if we're not expressing explicitly what to have those conversations about that training on equity and inclusion just doesn't fit with the rest of that language so that would be my feedback

043on that paragraph and i guess i would present it with a question as well related to the very first paragraph about the beliefs and and i believe that that so let me take a step back after the we had this discussion earlier i actually spent several hours with several of the sros at their schools um they do wonderful work and they do very student-centered work but that doesn't come across in this document that's where i agree with dr garcia so the first paragraph talking about these this commitment and the shared belief in our students how do the officers and how does rochester police department plan to demonstrate these beliefs to the students the families and the staff that's the question i have for you chief franklin i think first and foremost the way you demonstrate

044that is your willingness to come to the table um and i and i hear your concern or i hear your reflection on paragraph c uh you know the key word to me is sros will meet with students and staff on a monthly basis to address concerns concern could be defined in a wide variety of of ways and so i think there is wiggle room within that paragraph to fit in equity discussions social justice discussions etc just by the broader definition definition of that word itself how do you how do you demonstrate uh your willingness again that's coming to the table and and then i want to address something dr garcia said you know in in reference to um i look at school resource officers certainly we can all agree that law enforcement has had a

045a rough uh several months here and we've got room for improvement to make but uh the sros are are really that proactive in my view is that proactive vehicle engagement for the youth of winning over the youth for tomorrow because let me tell you something if we don't do that we're going to lose the next generation so i look at this as an opportunity to really get school resource officers in front of kids in a time of non-crisis non-enforcement non in a safe environment to tear down some of those barriers to build those bridges with the students of the future that is of the utmost important for us in law enforcement today and i look at the school resource officers as the vehicle to help me do that in winning over some of the kids

046for tomorrow can i just have a follow-up that's what needs to be in this documentary that's what people can people can hear the public meeting but seeing it in a document that can be shared more broadly would be extremely helpful on that topic so i appreciate your comments i'm miss amundson um i have a bunch of random points that i'm trying to weave all together into something coherent and i'm afraid it's not going to happen so bear with me um i was pleased and honored to be welcomed on what you call a ride-along which was more a walk-along but i i was actually able to ride between buildings and a police officer's car so it was a ride-along as well i was i was able to witness an unplanned event that i could see firsthand

047the need to have officers in our schools i get it i do i was also able to see some of the daily tasks of our officer at phoenix academy and i heard a firsthand account of an example of why sros are the only people who can do some of the jobs that our sros do such as looking at the call logs from the previous day or the night before the previous weekend and seeing where some incidents might have happened to disrupt students lives and they bring that with them to school the next day and that type of information is extremely valuable in our partnership between the schools and the police officers because we are able to respond to those children's needs better if we know what's happening outside of the school building i i don't

048know of any other way to accomplish that perhaps there is perhaps we can look at it creatively so i want to be the first person to say that i was very impressed with the people that i met and impressed with the job that i watched them do that being said i think that we can all agree the police officers and the school district and the public that in a perfect world our tax dollars would not be going towards paying police officers to be in our schools whether that's the world we live in or not is arguable but ultimately what i would like to see is a list of tasks that our sros do and then an evaluation of whether or not that's the best use of our money and their time and whether or not

049those tasks could ultimately be done by other professionals who could serve the kids needs in a different way i'm not asking for sros not to be in our schools i'm asking for an examination of what what is done what is needed to be done who's doing it who's best to do it that was what i maybe didn't articulate well enough when we went into this process but that's what i would like to see going forward it it is really outside of this memorandum of understanding it's really a long-term process that i'm hoping our district can undertake i would like to see mr superintendent at least six months before we have to decide on signing the next contract i would like to see a discussion by the board and potentially a task force to be convened

050to examine where we want to go i would like to charge the task force with examining what other large urban districts have done in minnesota and possibly around the country in their redesign of how they use their sros or some of them have removed sros entirely i think we can learn from other districts and their experiences and not try to to reinvent the wheel ourselves that would be my request and obviously i you know would need to hear from other board members their feelings on that um regarding that the memorandum of understanding specifically i continue to be disappointed with the issue surrounding uniforms specifically and i know that we agreed in previous study sessions that the firearm issue is a non-negotiable coming from the side of the police department they will not discuss that i

051am opposed to having firearms in our buildings for whatever reason because i don't believe that the argument if um a police officer needed their firearm to respond to a school shooter and they'd have to go and get it from their car or from a safe in the office which was the um happy medium that i i asked about and recommended because we don't have officers in our building 24 7. they aren't always in our buildings so that isn't in my understanding what is in the contract or what is in the memorandum of understanding it's not to have a armed officer on hand in case of a school shooting so to me that isn't isn't a logical argument i i i i feel like the message that it sends to our students that we have uniformed

052and armed police officers in our schools because we expect there to be trouble because we expect officers to need to respond using force to student behavior i think it's not the kind of message we should be sending our students and our staff and our community that our schools are such a dangerous volatile place that we require people in uniform with with guns that's that's how i feel about it and i would like to see us all work together to move to a point where that's not not a perception of a need on anyone's side um that that is my main concern with this mou and [Music] i respect that the people who are in the best place to make those decisions are the people in the schools but some of the people in our schools

053are students and i've heard from students specifically how they feel when they see an armed and uniformed police officer and the mou says it will be a collaborative decision between the school administration and the rochester police department and i think that leaves out the people who are most affected on an emotional level when they see a uniformed and armed police officer every day walking past them in the halls or whatever that be we all know that our students can't learn unless they feel safe in their environment if they aren't feeling safe that's my concern so that is my my my number one problem with the mou i respect what others have said that it doesn't um it isn't specific enough and it doesn't go far enough i think we can continue to work on that

054and i'm fine with that but um i just want to register officially my disappointment that we weren't able to come up with some sort of a more concrete meeting halfway on that issue thank you and chief franklin do you want to speak to the issue of having being armed while you're in the building or esther was being armed whether in the building yeah and again um i don't want to be misconstrued i think what i said previously was the disarming of school resource officers is off the table but the discussion of you know what the uniform looks like or maybe wearing a suit coat or a untucked polo shirt or something like that to take away that visual piece if you will is on the table for discussion and i think that's uh that was

055captured in here in in one of the sections here via collaborative discussion but i think we there's what i like about this is there's wiggle room in there for uh threat assessment and if you've got an active threat against a school you may want a uniformed officer as part of your protective services and that's really quite frankly what makes the challenging of a task list for the officers is you know they're here for this to create this safe environment for the students to learn in in the meantime while you're doing that do it with a smile on your face and do it while you're engaging kids building relationships uh and i think uh to your point i think what perhaps is missing and maybe we can capture it with uh some wordage is a commitment

056to tearing down those barriers because quite frankly i don't think the answer is just saying uh this child is traumatized because of the uniform i don't think that's setting the child up for success moving on later in life and and what a better place i can't think of a better place than the safety and security of a school to help a child navigate some of those trauma issues or whatever triggering them so later in life when we see them on the street as adults and have interactions with them as adults that we have better policing outcomes and so that's our commitment is to uh address those if it's if it's a matter of coming together and saying in a facilitated manner of of explaining the uniform to a kid sitting down having lunch with them

057or whatnot and having a safe dialogue explaining why we have what we have on our duty belts uh we're willing to do that again i look at it as let's draw let's address the root cause of what's causing the triggers maybe not just kind of putting a band-aid on and saying we still want to see it paquela and then mr barolo um i i really appreciate the comment that's that several board members have made and you talk when you talk about a radical reimagining i i wasn't around for the origins of this and so the board may at the time have been very clear but i'll just say as somebody kind of coming in and encountering an mou process between two organizations an mou process between two organizations would have been the wrong way to

058do a radical to explore radical reimagining this is an mou is by definition how two organizations are going to work together better within their existing paradigm you don't do radical reimagining to an mou a task force as you mentioned that actually looked at best practices elsewhere and was frankly not facilitated by either organization which is not because we didn't do a great job facilitating but when you're running the process yourselves you don't have someone who's neutral who's actually guiding a really inclusive visioning process and so i think this is a good mou i don't think it meets the intent of what you're talking about now i can't as i said a minute ago speak to the board's initial intent but i don't think we structured it right if we wanted radical reimagining i think we

059have a significant enhancement of collaboration between two organizations as opposed to something that was larger because the structure wasn't actually and the deliverables weren't necessarily set out right and i'm not faulting anybody who actually managed it i think it was well managed process of two organizations saying we're working together we're going to do it better but it sounds like from the perspective of a number of board members it fell short of some of the issues that you wanted to have explored so looking forward one thing that some places have done is not just look at this in the lens of school police collaboration but look at look at that as a critical component of safe and welcoming schools or belonging schools so you have a larger strategy and then you ask to what extent is

060our collaboration with sros or the police enhancing or getting in the way of that larger strategy of all kids feel safe and welcome in our schools so i do feel a need to inject that question of a process because process is critical here and if we were thinking of that kind of of more radical reimagining we may not have set up the process in the way that might have led to some of those ideas i don't know if we would have reached consensus on something like that but for instance i don't think the charge was at least in anything i saw to go look at what other cities are doing i think it's actually a great idea but i at least so i think some lessons learned for us as we get into our strategic

061action plan process to really define our scope and intent really clearly so that you as decision makers at the end of the process really feel like what we did in implementing the collaboration reflects what you hoped you'd see at the end of the rainbow so some thoughts there for somebody who is coming into the process way down the road thank you mr uh thank you dr pickell and fellow board members um i'll speak briefly to the some of the elements of the mlu chief franklin i do recall when you were candidating to become chief of police you spoke of the bank of trust and and for me i see value in that and and this mou represents uh drawing potentially uh well a withdrawal entity positing simultaneously occurring i i think we can trust the

062process we have built in within the current mou the capacity to re-evaluate within years we have with each of our previous mou agreement and not that i think we should give the benefit of the dow but we can certainly trust what is being placed before us i appreciate the fact that human resource equity specialists was involved students were involved things which perhaps weren't necessarily the case in the past at least to my recall i might be mistaken though i see those things being very a positive and a step in the right direction and then finally i believe it's also important for um our students to well the acknowledgement if you will of the legacy policing i think briefly of the ocr report that did at that time our police were being used on occasion to

063uh in the role of discipline to whatever degree and however that may played itself out so to ignore that that that that has uh not occurred in this district would be perhaps a minimization of where that trauma may come from because these may be younger siblings of those older their older brothers and sisters who have that take and yet i'm willing to support the current mou and uh uh allow our feedback and internal mechanisms around their course and to uh not that i'm waiting to see it fail i'm waiting to see it succeed i believe each of us wants this to be a successful relationship and i don't want any of our students to ever feel intimidated or to like me not necessarily feel nervous when there's a cough in back of you so i

064want them to have that freedom to you know learn to just relax and to i know that there's nothing to be fearful of thank you and let's refocus maybe the resolution in front of us is whether or not we will approve the mou for everyone who's listening the board already approved the agreement between the school district and the police department to have sros in our building next year we asked that there would be an mou that would be presented to the board before school started this year there are what 10 people who've been involved in that meeting four times and this is what they came up with now i think some good points have been raised about going forward this year how do we assess whether this relationship is working or not whether this mou

065is adequate or not whether we want to continue the relationship in the future or not are there alternatives and i think that's a great idea but right now we're looking at whether we will approve the mou or not and honestly i if we don't approve it right what is the difference because we're doing it any i mean they're here anyway well they're here my sense if we don't approve it we're with the agreement only that we already approved in april and not the mou right just uh so it would be contract worse if we don't approve it because from my perspective at least and i get your point about this isn't everything but it's a heck of a lot more than we've had in writing before and it really again from my perspective expands the

066scope of the relationship building that we would expect our sros to do so to me that's a real that's a really positive thing certainly not the end but as dr pickel said the beginning of exploring a different kind of relationship dr garcia but if it's voted down then it gets updated we don't look at it again for the six months when we're asking for a task force like what happens to it that is such a good question and um well the thing is the agreement was that an mou would be presented to the board before the school year began so it's being presented and if we don't approve it maybe miss nathan knows well i i think director mclaughlin is correct if we vote it down tonight then the only thing guiding the work of

067the sros is the contract that we approved in april and they will begin their work in our buildings under that criteria which did not include for example the piece on the uniforms um and talking about alternatives and did not include the monthly meetings so we could continue to have a conversation about the language but the longer we have the conversation about the language the less time the sros are actually implementing the language during the school year so personally the way i look at it is that i recognize the two pieces of thought that my fellow board members have have talked about which is the short term and the long term and i was part of the conversation at the last meeting where we talked about the reimagining i think that's a good word for it

068um i i support what dr amonson said about the feeling last time is that we didn't have enough time to talk about the bigger longer term visioning issues of roles of sros in the approval of this contract for this year so i would support going forward looking at a timeline whether it's part of the strategic plan conversation or whether it's you know part of its own conversation setting that that conversation up for success so that we really feel like we've had that full conversation as far as that the the wording in this mro oh sorry and this mou um i i thought it covered most of the topics that had been brought up um by the board specifically for this upcoming year i will say that the monthly meetings with the students chair marvin and

069i sat in with a number of video calls with students when we were talking about the sro contract and it was really clear there are so many students who do not have any understanding of the role of the of the sros i'm not sure monthly meetings are going to be enough it's going to be voluntary possibly for students to come you may not have students in the room who want to be there because either of perceptions or misunderstandings or whatever so i really think that's going to need to be fleshed out so i would hope that monthly is a target but not a limit if we can see it more frequently i think that's going to be key to that personally as a board member i'm going to need to see at the end of

070the year a systemic effort to reach as many students as possible because that's i think that's the only way we're gonna we're gonna get to a better understanding of what the role of sro should be and having student feedback that really reflects an authentic experience so at this point if there are no more comments i have one more comment um i do support um director edmondson's idea about having a task force that that was something that i was thinking about as well i guess the one thing that i would leave with the challenge for the rochester police department is to include in this document and chief franklin you talked about the importance of the relationships but incorporating this document why that's important to you that articulate for the students and maybe it's an assembly at

071the school or some other recorded message or some other way to get the message to the students but i think that's a key element here of building that relationship because it reflects on our world today that that's what's important that needs to be conveyed in this document and in any other possible way that you can figure out to do that uh mr barrow um before this is moved to action um the mou that's before us is uh what we will in a moment uh vote to either approve or not and i think the work group chief franklin superintendent pakel have heard the concerns that they will have opportunity to work at addressing and we need not necessarily try to change the agreement at this time both of these are key leaders of their organizations and

072especially with uh superintendent piquel he has seven people that will kind of be uh making sure that action is is occurring on the the constant the concerns that have been voiced and so i'd like to move this to action thank you i'll second moving into action any discussion madam chair just so that this idea of a task force doesn't fall off we have a very i think important uh study session on the 24th that's all focused on board process uh strategic plan i would suggest we add this item to that uh meeting not to talk about so much the kind but to follow up on this idea because i heard what you were saying and i think this was a good process that wasn't entirely aligned with some things you were looking for and so

073i would suggest we add that to our study session to have that process discussion about it um separate from the decision you all will be making now on the mou remember i had one more thing can i respond to that it's already a big agenda can we maybe schedule [Music] yeah we look at the calendar okay and i just want to respond that i saw it both as a process and a reimagining both correct that i think we made more progress here in terms of process and perhaps not as much as the reimagining that we still have the intent to do so right now the discussion is moving to action it's been moved to action and seconded any other discussion about moving it to action yes okay all in favor of moving this to action

074say i i opposed it's not an action item be it resolve the school board of independence school district 535 approves memorandum of understanding as a supplement to the school resource officer services agreement for the term of july 1st 2021 to june 30th 2022 approval second and moved and seconded all in favor say aye the motion passes thank you and thank you so much scott and chief sheridan thank you 7.02 safe and open schools plan this is an information item dr pacquel directors of the board madam chair this is a part of our continuing conversation about how we help our youngest learners um and our oldest learners now remain safe during this pandemic as you know this has been an issue since i got here and the the intent of this discussion here tonight is twofold

075you have before your recommendation to change the policy that you voted for fairly recently regarding face coverings but you also have an initial overview of our larger plan for keeping our schools both safe and open that first item is at least in my recommendation one for action and for decision as we now are uh essentially open in the school year the second is for feedback and for input which we value greatly um the process which we are necessarily on a tight timeline because of course recommendations and new data has been coming out uh continually going forward from tonight will look something like this we are going to get some feedback from you shortly and we hope some action on that policy 808 face covering issue tonight we will based on your feedback revise the draft

076plan that i shared with you in writing for this meeting we will be sending that out um on wednesday through a survey to school community stakeholders to get their feedback not on the policy that you'd be making a decision on tonight running face coverings but on all the other aspects of the plan we will be holding meetings with key rps staff on this larger plan for the remainder of this week the survey would close on monday we'll integrate the feedback from that survey and i'm sure further refined some of the feedback we get from you and from key staff groups such as our covid coordinators in all of our schools and then we will release a final version of our safe and open schools plan um on thursday august 26th so we're on a tight

077timeline here but we know that the start of school is upon us to take a step back behind why i uh recommend it and as many of you know it was my strong hope to avoid needing to recommend that we have space coverings for students who are old enough to be vaccinated and staff who are old enough to be vaccinated and that recommendation has changed and it's changed through looking at the same evidence many of you have been looking at and talking to a lot of the experts and as you all know i like to cite research in these things and so i'm going to inflict just a little bit of it on some of you right now and the first is actually just to underscore why we must keep our schools open and we

078heard a little bit about that from one of our comments to the board visitors tonight megan cofield who's a researcher who does really important work on analyzing test score data has conducted analysis that suggests a catastrophic negative impact on student learning and reading and math as measured by tests rebecca lee and her colleagues in 2020 highlighted how emergency room visits for mental health related issues among 12 to 17 year olds increased by 31 percent during the worst of the pandemic compared to 2019 angela duckworth and some colleagues released new analysis in 2021 of high school students that showed that when you control for demographics and a wide range of other factors students reported lower social emotional academic outcomes when they were virtual than they were in school we must keep our schools open and that

079is the bottom line imperative um we thought we were going to be able to do that with vaccination alone and vaccination as you all know remains our single best tool in this effort and yet with the spread of the delta variant it appears necessary but insufficient we know uh from increasing evidence uh from the cdc and other sources that the delta variant of the cova-19 virus is twice as contagious as the original virus that sent us into lockdown for the previous year and very importantly for this board's consideration tonight we know that whilst children are less likely to get it than adults we now know they can get it in fact the cdc said in no uncertain terms quote children are at risk for severe covet 19. um in addition we are beginning to see

080the long-term impacts of what happens when kids do get covid19 we're seeing multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children that has continuing impacts and top academic journal nature reported that several studies have now shown that young children can experience what is called long covid with headache fatigue heart palpitations even though those kids experience that at much lower rates than the adults here in minnesota last week health commissioner jan malcolm said that 18 of our new covid cases are between zero and 19 years of age she also reported that cases among children nine and younger have almost doubled in the last two months to now just under 10 percent of infections olmstead county has now moved into the highest level of community transmission we're in the red zone and that has always been an area that we've been

081looking so there's got to be a sense of urgency about this decision we know that our youngest learners ages 2 to 12 still cannot be masked or not still cannot be vaccinated we know that breakthrough infections can happen even among the vaccinated and we know that the vaccinated unfortunately can spread the virus so why masks why do we come back to a recommendation around mask contrary to what we have sometimes heard and what frankly many of us feel i didn't love putting this on uh recently either um masks work um the the national academy of science proceedings of the national academy of science and these are scientific entities where your career is made if you get published in them and your career is destroyed if your data is proven to be false and so this

082is not just a few people sitting around with armchair analysis the presidio's the national academy of science synthesized research from leading researchers around the world on mass and they said quote the preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts public mask wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high and members of the board you also received as did i a really wonderful letter from 102 i counted them physicians here in rochester who had lots of other things to say but this sentence jumped out at me quote there is no science that supports claims of adverse outcomes for mask wearing by healthy children and finally some researchers at duke university conducted a very rigorous

083study of large data set in 14 states particularly north carolina and found that mask wearing reduced transmission even when kids were not practicing social distancing which we're not proposing um that they do so vaccines aren't the sole solution masks aren't the sole solution social distancing isn't the social illusion a sole solution it's a series of these steps very briefly because board members and the public have had a chance to read the larger um safe and open schools plan which is draft there are 13 key components to it and i'll just tick them off very briefly the first is what is before you as a policy proposal tonight regarding face coverings for students and staff the second is an effort to voluntarily verify the vaccine status of our staff and our students it's likely that we

084can access the student data through a county registry for staff we'll have to ask it will be voluntary what that could allow us to do is begin to have a much more differentiated strategy as we don't have to look just at the covid spread rates in the county as a whole but we can look at rochester public schools in particular and potentially even individual schools where we can see what vaccination rates look like in those schools the third component of the plan is we will continue to conduct vaccination clinics with olmstead county uh the fourth is that we will maintain social distancing at right at present our plan is three feet or more i've gotten a lot of letters i'm sure you have from some teachers saying can't we go less shouldn't we go more

085we'll continue to get feedback on that over the next week as we finalize the plan the next several steps are actually designed to lean into that vision of keeping our schools as open as they can be we are proposing that we will welcome visitors back into our schools who are not once in a while drop drop-ins but who are tutoring or providing services on a regular basis so we can actually we know who they are and and they are engaged in our schools in an ongoing basis we'll operate extracurricular activities operate field trips with the exception of no overnight field trips at this time um and we'll operate group gatherings one remaining question is should we limit the number of either students or staff who can be in a group gathering and that's something that

086we're looking at initially in the plan i proposed to leave that or suggested i would like to leave that to individual buildings and departments we've gotten some feedback over the last couple days that suggests we may need to be a bit more forward leaning in saying x number of kids x number of staff um the theory of of letting people decide for themselves is it all depends on how many people and what the size of the room is and what the ventilation is but we're getting the sense that that may be too much flexibility and people may want a clearer standard we previously constrained where substitute teachers could teach we'd be opening that up now to the full district they could work in multiple schools we'll maintain the work we did on sanitation and ventilation

087last year we have done a ton and yet it's really important to remain vigilant on that front um we just received yesterday new guidance from the minnesota department of education on testing procedures and we're just looking at that and so we'll continue to lean into an aggressive testing regime so that we can find out where there is covid if there is in our schools and programs and then we are very actively working on the quarantine process which is quite complex there's some guidance from the cdc that says if people are vaccinated there's not a need to quarantine so that's what's something we're looking at the critical issue is how are we going to provide instruction to students who are in quarantine when they need to be there so that's something that we have got folks

088working on both in terms of general education and special education so there will be quarantine guidance by the point where we would release this broader plan as well and then finally we'll continue to listen to the same set of experts every once in a while when i get emails about this people say well where are you getting this information and so we tried to name them it's the centers for disease control the minnesota department of health the olmstead county public health department and the minnesota department of education along with the mayo clinic through um the covet advisory group that we've had for um the last couple of years so that's the broader update we welcome your thoughts about the uh components of the broader plan as part of the larger input that we'll be getting

089over the next week and a half and i recommend that you take action on the face covering issue tonight as a matter of forward policy thank you a question dr piccal and i don't know if they're well let me ask this first board members have comments or questions i do have one question okay well so here's here's my question would you prefer that we wait and have the mass discussion when we're talking about the mask policy i would defer to the board however you you think it's best to do that i thought it was best to talk about them together because the whole point is it's a package absolutely okay but i'm just thinking we're going to be talking about that again anyway ms mclaughlin i just have one question about the vaccination clinics i

090was interested to hear when the cdc made their last recommendations on april 5th that they actually encouraged school districts to promote vaccinations and we're talking about in the in the draft here of vaccination clinics for students and staff i was thinking along the lines of could we include something like our neighborhood schools could be neighborhood vaccination centers in in reflection of the media reports that i've read there are some people that oppose the vaccine and philosophy but they're also people that don't have access to it so if we can give them access in their neighborhoods here locally i think that may and and i'm thinking particularly parents if we can get more parents vaccinated i think the better off our students will be so i would encourage us to include a broader definition of our

091vaccination clinics i love that and we'll we will pursue that that's a that's a nice enhancement and we'll pursue that with the colleagues at olmsted county just to be really clear they run the clinic we house the clinic we we partner but i think that's a great idea i think it may have happened somewhat without a lot of outreach in previously we think most of our focus will be on middle school initially but um that's a great idea to really try and make them centers for broader broader i just want people to have that access if they haven't had it already that this would you know if they're coming to school any way to pick up their kid they get their vaccination and be done yeah that's great thank you other questions or comments thank

092you dr pikel you left us almost speechless we'll move on to 8.01 8.01 and this is a real crowd pleaser a student nutrition services acceptance of bid for paper products this is a briefing item with dr pikel um madam chair this is an item that um is is on the agenda separately simply because we were given the advice to hold off on this set of purchases because we were going to get a better price and we did and we did and so we're bringing it to you now for approval awesome oh so no discussion needed i don't think so but unless board members have questions this is a fairly straightforward and it's one of those that i think in future we may want to include on a consent agenda but tonight for as a matter

093of process it's here for your decision all right um do we have someone who wants to move this to action i will thank you thank you and thank you um all in favor of moving this to action say aye aye opposed it's an action item be it resolved that the school board of independence school district 535 does hereby accept the bid from trio supply company of minneapolis minnesota in the estimated amount of 230 490 dollars and 30 cents that's an estimate for the purchase of paper products for the student nutrition services department for the 2021-2022 school year i have approval second it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye post motion passes 8.02 approval of the 2020 2021 budget adjustments as of june 30th 2021. this is a briefing item dr paquel

094board members i'd like to call john carlson our executive director of business and finance and all things financial to give give the board an update on this thank you chair marvin superintendent peckel and board members hopefully kurt will put this up on the screen here in just a second but really this is a straightforward budget adjustment process um we have not typically done this for the fourth quarter it is something that our auditors are asking us to do kurt could you move it to the next one because i forgot the clicker thank you um as as i said this is a best practice what's what's happening here is after we approve the march budget adjustments things keep happening in april may and june we keep receiving uh grants and donations and we keep adjusting the

095budget to reflect those but when our auditors get here in september then they they say well your budget in your books doesn't quite match what the last budget was that you gave to the school board so they said you could probably just bring this forward to your board sometime in the summer and just have them do a final approval on the final budget numbers um and then that's what they'll audit against so that's what we're here to do tonight bergen kdv is our auditor they are going to be looking at the books in september they'll be here for a couple weeks and then they'll bring you a final report on november 16th that matches the budget numbers that we approve here i'm curt if you could move to the next one um so what we're

096asking for is to accept 2.1 million dollars more in revenue and 2.4 million dollars in expenditures so you're probably wondering why are you doing slightly more on the expenditures so if kurt you could move one more i will tell you why we have coded funding in there that was the biggest thing from federal grants that we received other grants and donations from other sources as well as two other large items one was the spring semester pseo courses so we brought that through for your approval but we were out of budget in that code we went to pay the actual bill so we just want to kind of increase the budget to account for that and then the last one is we were finally able to negotiate a settlement there with the insurance company on the

097bamber valley tornado claim from 2018. so that roof needed to be replaced this summer and part of it is being paid for by insurance so that's in there is both a revenue and an expense to approve um everything is detailed out in a separate attachment i'm not going to go through them all here on the screen but if you have any further questions i could answer those any questions for mr carlson should we move to action yes move to action good it's been moved and seconded to move this to action all in favor say aye aye opposed it's now an action item be it result school board of independent school district 535 approved the 2020-2021 budget adjustments through june 30th 2021 as presented move approval second it's been moved and seconded all in favor say

098aye aye opposed motion passes thank you mr carlson thank you 8.03 referendum projects update this is an information item dr pikel uh partners i'd like to ask scott sheridan to come our executive director of operations i will just say as you see that slide john and scott in our meeting earlier today were um john was feeling a little outdone by scott's powerpoint slides because john's were just bullet points about money and we're now going to see a few pictures of the very good work that's happening around referendum construction and as i often say i've been really stunned and pleased by the efficiency with which this complex complex project process has been managed so um looking forward to giving you an update with a particular emphasis on pools thank you superintendent uh credit for the photo

099goes to dana this is dana leapchak from wsn he's the lead architect on the pool project and i think you recognize the person on my left your good friend keane mcwaters from knutson construction this is the 21st update referendum update and we we're at a point right now with the century pool which is our last remaining project where we're expecting bids to come back and so we felt it was important that we provide you an update of where we're at with it and dana can do a great job of that and then we also just so you're aware we started construction on that pool yesterday uh breaking ground with it at century so i'll turn it over to you did you want to go first yeah yeah that's fine okay thanks scott scott mentioned my

100name is dana libachuk i'm an architect with with south architects and engineers it's nice to finally meet you in person versus doing versus virtually um i'm just going to run through this real quick and give you an update on where we're at and where we've been and where we're going to go there's our team i think you've seen that before oh yeah there's where we are century high school as scott just mentioned we're starting excavation the project is actually was released in two different bid packages i'll get to that in one second the last time i was in front of you was tuesday march 16th and this was a presentation of the eight lane stretch pool if you remember we started with an eight lane standard eight lane uh competitive pool and then we evolved

101that to an eight lane stretch on march 16th construction documents started with that that phase of the project on march 18th starting at that time or continuing at that time we had weekly meetings with our ps staff scott sheridan and his team were included in that starting in april on april 8th we then included the the coaches in the community within the swim community also within our rps team we included mark weasley who is the athletic director of 4th century high school so he was engaged in this process from the very beginning so um weekly meetings with our coaches began on april 8th and that continued until july 29th so we engaged the swim community the male coaches century coaches the adaptive league coaches those who are engaged on a weekly basis throughout the design

102process and construction document process we crossed a major hurdle in the last two months on july 2nd we released our bid package number one bid package number one included the civil design the demolition architectural demolition of the building components of the building sorry as well as the structural precast we had to release this package early so we could time the delivery of the structural peak precast to the erection of the precast over winter break right ken um close to it yeah right um the delivery times for uh different materials is becoming a challenge on any construction project today um that package is now under construction we're just in the process of working through the city through the through the sdp approval uh but we have started demolition and we're starting to move dirt on site

103which is very exciting uh the second oh and then that that package actually been on july 28th and we're moving ahead with those selected contractors subcontractors um the second bid package uh was released for bidding uh we completed the drawings on august 10th and those those bids will be due on august 31st and that will include the remainder of the project which is a structural concrete interiors interior finishes mechanical electrical and plumbing systems as well as the pool design itself and we just had our actual we had our pre-bid meeting today at century high school and had a couple good subcontractors show up so we're excited for that phase so this we crossed a big hurdle here last week when we finished that on august 10th when we finished that second bid package and we're

104now into the bidding process and so our next big hurdle then would be the the completion of the bids on on august 31st um this is this is where we're at and nothing has changed since the last time i presented this to you i believe this is exactly what we showed you in the past something that some small changes uh with some with some glass and some glazing and some colors and things like that but really the scope and the uh the size of the building the materials have remained consistent um this floor plan is very similar to what i've shown you back in march there's very small changes since that time we had to move some mechanical rooms around but you can see on the upper right hand corner of that red box that's

105our storm shelter which we've discussed in the past the natatorium is on the left side with the diving well and the eight lane stretch in the center and please stop if you have any questions stop me this is the spectator seating and what we're showing there's 336 seats now that's in the base bed i think it's important to point out that in the alternate bid we would be adding seating on the north and the south ends of the natatorium which would bring us up to 411 total seats but the base bit is the 336. and this is i just want to include the sign here so that you can get kind of a scale of what we're what we're doing on the left side you'll see is the the natatorium with the pitch ceiling pool

106obviously the natatorium seating and then the the locker rooms and the storm shelters on the right-hand side and that that box on top of the locker room that is the actual size of the mechanical equipment needed to feed that natatorium so you can see the scale of that one piece of equipment for a couple pieces of equipment i'm sorry did you have any questions regarding the design or meeting process where we're at today ms nathan so i know we had a long conversation about um all the features um that we were that we were able to have in the pool and the last uh time we talked about the budget i'm looking at the numbers from the last um it looks like we're at an estimate of i don't know which number to use the

10715 million 414 232 or the 15 million 469 1609 okay so we were clearly able to include more features than we did at the very beginning of this process because the the budget has increased to 15 million um and we've had conversations you've had conversations uh board members have had conversations with the community um are you all confident that we have the pool that are swim teams um and our facilities our adapted facilities need based on all the conversations and work you've done yeah i i believe so i mean there are the the wish list for every project is always greater than uh any budget can afford um so there are items that we've had to compromise and uh and value engineer from the project and and i think you're where one of them was

108a precast bleachers i think is that what you're maybe referring to might be yeah it might be one of them right um yeah and that that was a a product or a part of this project that of course we wanted to include um and just to give you a little bit of background on that um some of the pools that we looked at one of them being civilian i think we showed these pictures to you in the past that had a precast concrete stadia assembly and um it's it's a great product and uh it it's it's long lasting and but when we looked at that against our budget putting 400 seats in precast stadium we put us over about three hundred thousand dollars well that was the cost the estimated cost of the precast assembly

109was 300 000 um so we had to take a serious look at that and say you know what what's more important at this time you know what what can we take out or add uh to get that in and when we hit our 411 seats we found that as a real that was one of our goals was to get 400 seats in there so we were proud of that we added a another um i guess you'd call like a crow's nest for our coaches or our timing our meat coordinators for them to overlook the pool we added that into the project so that was an ad we added deck showers to the project which weren't in the original design we added those to accommodate our diving coaches um well i can't think we added oh

110i'm sorry we expanded the the pool storage as well uh because we knew there was a demand for um all kinds everything from floaties to uh pool noodles and hose reels and everything you can imagine for multiple teams and ages we added some storage underneath the stadium seating underneath the bleacher seating um to accommodate some of those those needs and wants for the project but but when we tried to say okay let's have precast well now we're adding 300 000 to the project and we're we're maxed out where we're at right now so much as we'd love to redesign and put that in that that we determined that back in may june uh i can't remember it was early in the design process we really took a close look at this and said okay now

111we need to stop and decide we're going to go ahead with precast or we're going to go ahead with aluminum bleachers and that was a that was a time where we really had to say you know we don't have the money for that we really had to say we don't have the money for precast and so we went ahead with the aluminum bleacher system our team has taken it upon ourselves to make sure that aluminum bleacher system is is a good system i mean it's i was just visiting with the representative today and and he identified that as a 30 or 40 year product 30 to 40 years for that aluminum system um all this there we need steel underneath that bleacher system to support the bleachers well that's all that steel and everything is

112that's there is what's called hot dip galvanized so it's it's it's a process of coating all the steel and the bolts and all the connections there's no welded connections underneath there it's all bolted and it's all galvanized hot tip galvanized and we do that because we're in a corrosive environment the bleachers are completely i don't want to say they're sealed that you can't seal aluminum bleachers but they're vertical risers and then of course the treads uh with very small butt joints there's a gutter system within that bleacher system which captures any moisture any water because they have to wash down the bleachers about once a year just get to get the chlorine off of it really and so during that washdown process there's gutters within the aluminum bleacher system to capture that water and put

113it into a drain so we've gone gone through that process and we looked at how do we put these aluminum bleachers into a corrosive pool environment and make sure it lasts and so we've we've taken those steps to do that but that was a hard that was a hard decision and it came up in in i don't say april or may and then it came up again in july because we really had to research this and make sure we were making the right decision for the swim community and and for your pool i mean this is your product we're putting it in for you so tell me how the alternative bib then works for those 411 seats is that included in the budget or how does that work um well i'm going to use a

114laser here okay i guess i can't do that um i and the area is i guess it's hard to to show on what we have here for graphic um but on the north and the south ends of that stadium seating there are sections one section has 39 seats the section on the south has 36 seats and hopefully i have my mouth right on that and and so those sections actually what we're doing is we're building a concrete platform so the stadium seating that we're providing the bleach the aluminum bleacher system is is like i said it's suspended on these steel um components uh underneath the bleacher system when we get on the alternate ends on the ends we put a concrete platform on both ends so that concrete platform is just going to be a

115concrete platform if we don't accept the alternate um and so you could come in you can put a concessions up there i don't speaking beyond what we talked about i guess so i can't promise anything but maybe you could put a small band up there i don't you could do anything you want um it's it's available space that we can use you can put storage up there and then later on you can come in you could come in later and we could add the bleachers on the ends to accommodate additional seating if we decide that we that we need those 411 seats you can add those seats immediately if you wanted to so we've accommodated to easily add those in the future but right now it was that was one of the easy low hanging

116fruit anyway where we could identify an alternate to reduce some costs of the project if we had to we're seeing everything is coming in over budget and this is no surprise to anybody in this room every everything we're going to put in this building is a little higher than it was a year ago we're trying to combat that cost of those additional seats though are not in this budget okay other questions board members can i ask one more question sorry yeah so i didn't are you done presentation i didn't mean to cut you off there no that's all i i think you want to talk about budget numbers yeah well that was going to be my next question to talk about budget so real quick the four schools those are unchanged from our previous update

117that scott had done the century pool number has been updated based on bid package one like it previously mentioned so we're targeting 15 million 469 000 and that does still include about 330 000 of estimating contingency that we would then reduce to zero once those bids come back the other number that has been updated is the um auditorium referendum projects we were previously holding 2.06 million for a rough numbers sake and it needed to be increased to 2.2 million based on the actual and the cost of that project so putting us at an overall referendum amount of about negative 1.6 million for the total um secure entries are complete the emergency notification projects uh half of them are wrapping up now and then half of them will still be completed next year so we are

118still holding contingencies in that project as well as pretty much all of the ongoing new school projects questions on budget so i guess it would be remiss of me not to ask since our referendum dollars were 180.9 and we have that 1.6 million variants where do those dollars come from i'm not looking at keem [Laughter] here comes the savior they've been sitting in savings accounts and different bond investments so they are going to earn some interest and we're projecting that it's going to be a little bit more than what the variance is there so i feel overall comfortable right now if there's no major problems with construction contingencies that we should be able to cover that i would like to point out that for the middle school decommissioning we're holding about a million dollars budget

119for that but all that would do is decommission those three pools at the middle school and it doesn't include any fit up which means we take the water out we decommission the pool we fill it with sand and concrete or whatever and that's what you get it doesn't include walls it doesn't include anything else that depending on how what the use of that space is determined to be there isn't a budget for that right now thank you for the presentation and let me just say thank you so much for the work that you're doing i know that things keep changing as with any project this huge and you've been dealing with all kinds of unexpecteds and contingencies and you've been flexible and the expertise you bring to this project is really appreciated so thank thank

120all of you thank you thank you [Music] 8.04 stipends for short positions shortage positions to strengthen recruitment this is a briefing item dr kell marvin uh board members i would like to bring carl bakken uh up to uh give you an overview of something we've talked a bit about previously in this labor market a lot of talented people have a lot of options and so we while being prudent with district finances are going to need to and are eager to start to get somewhat more creative in trying to recruit and retain uh employees over time a lot more creative with doing that so this is an interim step um i've really appreciated the work that carl has done um on this effort and i'll just say this like many things um in our work um

121i think somewhat like the discussion we had about sros how are we going to evaluate it somewhat like the discussion we're about to have about discipline how we're going to evaluate it this is yet another area but it's not about students it's about our staff how are we going to evaluate it how are we going to actually see if what carl's going to tell you about is effective and as you know i think that we can bring that kind of an emphasis on measuring how we're doing and continually trying to improve to all of our work and this is an area that i think should where we should do the same so carl evening board members i'll try to talk through the massacre the best i can so as a resolution in front of you

122states we're facing hiring challenges i'd say unprecedented hiring challenges this year has been more challenging than any other year for many other districts and other businesses across the country we have people who've left jobs at the highest rate we have a very low unemployment rate because of that we're bringing an idea forward to pay a hiring incentive and this would be a one year only it would actually be between now and mid december and it would be for our paraprofessional unit we've been talking with the paraprofessional union lead about this for about two months we sent a general draft and said please take a look at this give us some feedback the original that we sent forward was only for new employees and what was brought back is please think about our returning employees who

123are coming back after a very difficult year and coming back to another challenging year and we brought it back to cabinet had discussions and decided to provide something to our returning employees as well to show how we value them and recognize the work they do so in in front of you were were proposing that we would hire um upon hire new employees would receive a 500 stipend after 90 working days they would receive an additional one thousand dollars and then our staff who returned who were with us last year and returned to work this fall would receive five hundred dollars split into two payments questions or comments of course i i appreciate the opportunity to compensate those who do the work for sure but i guess i'm also thinking in longer term than this so

124instead of just a one year are there discussions about how this would translate into more appropriate compensation for them long term that's a great question when we come back we would be we are working on our 21 23 um contracts right now which are teachers that we're actively negotiating with and we still need to negotiate with our principals the 2224 contract would be a paraprofessional contract and that would be a discussion that we one of the things we would do is come to you and get parameters for that next two year agreement okay and i guess my other question is um i imagine this is what you agreed upon but what was their original ask when you went to them does this fall short of the thing that they're asking for um we originally proposed

125the 1000 i mean 500 initial higher 1090 days but only new employees and they one of the discussions was we'd like the same for our current employees and we looked at the price tag of that and decided we would do a 500 and that's where we landed and they accepted and have signed the memorandum of agreement at this time uh dr garcia it's a great question i would say i would not see this effort in any way uh prejudging what we would seek to do on an ongoing basis through contract negotiations is trying to respond to the moment and um without naming them because the conversations are ongoing we have uh proposed this to a number of other representatives of other employee groups that we have serious shortages of as well so we have one

126group that's agreed to it and we've proposed it and those are ongoing conversations and but we we i don't see this at all as a long-term strategy it's trying to actually deal with the challenges of the moment uh we will not get to those negotiations well if i'm here in 2022 and say well gee we gave you that bump a year ago like this is a this is a challenge of the moment and those will be separate contract negotiations that we'll be having uh with the union down the road [Music] other questions or comments right this is a briefing item move to action thank you second it's been moved and seconded to bring this to action all in favor say aye aye aye opposed it's now an action item be it resolve the school board

127of independence school district 535 does hereby approve the memorandum of agreement to provide fifteen hundred dollar incentive pay for newly hired paraprofessionals and five hundred to paraprofessionals who maintain their employment from the 2020 2021 school year into the 2021-2020 school year who made conditions in the memorandum of agreement second and moved and seconded on favor say aye aye opposed motion passes thank you mr bakken 9.01 discussion continuation of minnesota department of human rights and discipline data this is an information item dr pikel thank you sure marvin board members as you remember we had a i think very good discussion that for which we ran out of time as we were trying to get to a community event around the discipline disparities that exist in our district along lines of race to a lesser but still

128significant extent um socio-economic status so i would like to ask jackie peterson our executive director of uh elementary and secondary education to rejoin us chris lingan who is our director of secondary education and will roughen our executive director of diversity equity and inclusion as you'll remember jackie chris and will were there and gave both presentations and discussions at our last uh conversation and we decided to table some of the time that we wanted i know board members wanted to devote to further conversation and questions and so we're returning to that we don't have an updated presentation for you we want to revisit your questions i'll just say briefly at the outset it's a point i made last time that i think it's important when you begin these discussions of discipline disparities i'm not speaking about

129rochester public schools but i would be surprised if our district were the exception to most all the other places where this has been studied we do know that at significant rates students of color are disciplined more harshly for the same infractions that white kids uh are disciplined for and so it's not a disparity just in the numbers it's a disparity in the consequences that is not true of every instance of discipline of every school but it's important to state that at the outset that we know there was one recent study last research study i'll mention tonight i promise where they asked teachers to say how they would uh administrators and teachers how they would discipline uh some fictitious students that were uh described in scenarios and when the names were identified identifiably more traditionally african-american

130then more traditionally white the kids were given significantly sterner consequences in the hypothetical scenarios that people were responding to and so those are the kind of things that are a reality that we're committed to uh work around and want to thank the three colleagues who are here for the work and we return to your questions or um observations um which will inform our work going forward great comments or questions ms amundsen i've got a bunch just start with one start with one that'll be good um so i'm trying to reset my brain to the last meeting and miss peterson you were clearly in better shape now so um i wanted to first compliment the whole team on um on your continuing work and say how impressed i was with the behavior for learning team and

131the process that everybody is going through you referenced talking to people about what worked for them and including all buildings in that conversation so that each one could learn from what the others were doing and and i think that's a that's a great way to um to do the process and and the efforts um i think it needs to be said and one of our speakers tonight referenced it just because the agreement is over the um the attention and the efforts will continue and i just think that's important to say it i think we all know that but i think it's important to state for the public that just because we've checked the boxes and completed the agreements does not mean that it's no longer important to us so that's more of a statement than

132a question but but the question would be for dr pacquel and for um staff what are our plans how often will we will we examine the data and from the board how often do we want to receive those reports is a discussion that i think needs to explicitly happen and it doesn't have to happen right now but i i just don't want the the calendar to get away from us i think we need to move forward with our own agreement now we don't have an external agreement we need to have our own agreement i think i can i can speak to that we prior to the pandemic when everything seemed to change chris lingan was going out to meet with every building monthly for a while it was monthly i think we may be doing

133quarterly and the importance of that is taking a look at the building data and examining the trends in the building with the principal with the leadership team at the building and looking at data that might be of concern to dissect that what is the reason for that we could have a teacher who seems to be referring an awful lot and then you find out it's one student who's going through a difficult time and then we we talk about is it appropriate to refer or should we be doing some other sorts of supports but what we found and i think we've shared this with borton you maybe weren't all on the board at the time but we brought principles before you to talk about the process because i think when we have our principals talk about

134their practice it personalizes it and it's not numbers it's it's kids we're talking about and they could tell you and i think you got a sense for they know their data they know the kids and they know the whys and i think when we meet with them and if we don't if we can't get to that then we've got a problem so we want to be there to help examine the data to make sure it happens and to and to be keenly aware of what the issues might be the question of how often do we look at the data prior to this year it was monthly i was sent to superintendent jack and jack peterson just here's a quick snapshot of where we are um compared to last month compared to this month what not

135but here's here's where we are um i really didn't compare city reports more to the month the month stuff of things and the question always came up are we suspending um for the right reasons and those things and that's where the questions then i'd come out for why was there an increase at this site um so those are the questions that that i went to the buildings with and had i don't want to come monthly to present data nope i i would suggest that that beyond the terms of the agreement the board should look at this data at least annually and ideally buy annually we have a very important exciting upcoming committee meeting around a board strategic calendar to help chart a strategic uh map for the issues you will consider and so this needs

136to fit in there in a meaningful way i think it's at least an annual discussion and the biannual nature of it might give us an opportunity to have a discussion that is both uh prospective and retrospective what what's coming ahead and how did we do so i think this for sure needs to remain a board level discussion and we need to scope it along with the other things that we're going to be we're going to be looking at that's nathan and i guess i'd like to provide reassurance uh to everybody here and the board members that in the equity policy we approved we do have this spelled out so we direct the superintendent to develop a process to ensure relevant summary and disaggregated data is continuously and comprehensively collected reviewed and analyzed to identify areas

137of disproportionality and academic achievement disciplinary action special education and other areas report equity data and analyses and the district's progress on the requirements in this policy to the school board on an annual basis and otherwise as requested by the school board and our responsibility as the board is to review the reports and data on equity and direct the superintendent to implement policy level action strategies or reallocate resources to address areas of concern so if we want to specify it as more frequently than annually we have the vehicle to do that in the in the equity policy so then when would we have that discussion now later study session i'm ready now i think i think it would be yeah i mean i think you should we should dig into the issues that you see now

138and then we should come up with i mean this needs to fit with i would say data on kids social emotional experience their belonging experience and their achievement outcomes and so we want to in terms of the calendar going forward we want to think about how the board gets the whole picture of our student outcomes in a meaningful way but i think we're ready now to give you a sense the challenge for me like the same discussion earlier tonight about the sros is i'm personally encountering a lot of this data and what we've been doing along with in a fairly new way um and so i certainly want to join in the discussion i i think even six months from now i will be able to participate in this conversation along with these folks in

139a at a deeper level but i think we you know we have time i do know we also have other other issues on the agenda tonight but we're ready to dig in with you well my input would be biannually because a year is a long time for kids so i would want to hear my fellow board members opinion on that is absolutely we can have the conversation now or is this would it make more sense if we're talking about timing to have that discussion when we talk about the uh calendar we can we can yeah i mean i think clearly we all have a lot of comments to make so i i feel like maybe that those comments will drive timing but then obviously when we have the calendar this 100 has to be a

140priority ms workman yeah i think at this point just the idea that we're studying we want to do this twice a year okay so i i don't need any more than that right now is that a consensus but as long as my fellow board members are good with that so maybe calendar people you can sort of figure that i'm i'm seeing heads madding that that's a consensus from the board twice a year sure okay good other comments questions um mr barrow uh i tend to think that our study session next tuesday uh it's the proper place for us to as they look at the initial potential planning process that dr pikel offered to us during our study session back in july goals and measures group has a potential grouping that would be a an appropriate

141time next tuesday to really delve into [Music] what it is we are looking for to what degree we uh want reporting and or the disaggregation of information you know versus simply i see what we're doing now based on the models that have previously existed we're just reacting to data and the purpose and goal of strategic action planning is to actually develop a plan where we're uh planning for the usage of data which is a completely different conversation i i would much rather have that conversation which will result in i think in substantial change than to simply try to look at what we have done without necessarily having to tie to a strategic goal then final point it's exciting to me to see and know and and director nathan had alluded to the equity the existence

142of equity policy i also see it as being with the intentionality of developing a strategic plan bringing all these loose ends together where it's all tied to the same thing and and so if we can um we're all eager but if we can allow the process to uh work its way through and hopefully i'm not setting dr pical up for or pining for lengthy to say study session but i think if we can you know if you could say yeah don that's exactly what i had envisioned and what i currently have uh my colleagues working to to provide i'm on board you know we don't have to necessarily spend a great deal of time tonight going over well what about this and what about that yeah i have questions who doesn't you know in terms

143of uh the disparity and and how it continues to roll itself out but if through a strategic plan we can say yeah we have these ongoing issues but here's the plan okay i did look at our plan what's called the plan what's it called the rochester public schools plan to address disparities okay i looked at that and saw the five areas restorative practices positive school climate professional development instructional practices behavior interventions program monitoring student family staff community engagement wonderful stuff okay and uh so i guess i'm just wanting to see it tied to a strategic plan director garcia yeah so um just to kind of go back to to the presentation um i appreciated you know obviously the presentation of the data i think one of the things that i would hope for us as

144a district is that while we i can appreciate and acknowledge or appreciate the acknowledgement of the limitations or confounding variables like we still need to to use language in which we are accountable to ourselves rather than trying to um kind of suggest that well the data may be conflated we need to we need to be responsive to the fact that it is the numbers are what they are or we need to learn how to ask the numbers to show us the data that we're actually asking for and i think one of the things that didn't really come across in the district data which actually should be highlighted because this is the thing we're in trouble for which is not so much the difference between like a racial or ethnic group from last year to this

145year academically but how the students in in an entirety of a group there is a disparity there so in the 2019-2020 data i just wanted to be explicit that even though at that time our student population was 57.8 percent white they were 32.9 of the referrals for discipline whereas grouping all of the non-white students together there are only 42.2 percent of our population but they were over 67 percent of our disciplinary referrals and for last year it changed a little bit in which our our white students made up just over 60 56 of our total population and we're 40 just over 40 percent of the referrals whereas the whole the entirety of the non-white student population was 43.5 but they made up almost 60 percent of our disciplinary data and so i want us to

146be able to have those conversations uh and just acknowledge that and you know we were dinged by ocr for a reason um and just kind of lasting comments like i've noticed that we like to emphasize what a small percentage of the student population is represented when we review the data we you know we've had ourselves in the back a lot for it's less than two percent of our students and this is where for me data data from different areas that we're looking at come together because if that's the case that i don't understand how that justifies that to the majority of people in this room that we're in need of sros to manage problematic behavior um and that we're spending that money to control something that we keep telling ourselves is only present very infrequently

147um and that we like to tout uh you know this as a response when really we're just treating the symptoms rather than the problem itself and we aren't actively jumping at opportunities to spend money to support the of our student population which is obviously more than two percent um for our students of color to do things like run an equity audit in our district or to develop other culturally responsive practices because let me tell you something that when we take care of our minority students which are students of any color racial or ethnic background that come from poor working-class families that are lgbtq that have physical or neurological differences or require special education they're dual or multi-language learners if we can focus on helping them and truly incorporate this and look at data from different

148points also not just our discipline data it's going to help all of our students so while i appreciate the information before us i really do think it's a drop in the bucket of what we should be analyzing in order to fix this issue and i also think we need to change some of the language um and how we talk about and acknowledge this as an issue um and be very explicit that there are disparities and that there's something that we have done for you know many years that is lending to this problem and that we also as the board and the cabinet need to be fixing the problem within our own structure here because it's going to trickle down into the rest of the district um so we have people asking as we mentioned to

149have the data available so while we may take action on it or review it twice a year i think that that that disaggregated data does need to be available to the public because i think at some point we want to we don't want to be shying away from our the data or whitewashing or you know trying to reinterpret or water it down because we want to get to a point where we were proud to show our data because we did the right thing and we are we fixed a decades-long issue so that's my little soapbox well let me just thank you for that um director garcia i think it's critically important what you just said here's one question i have is there data that about discipline about achievement that the administration gets that and board

150gets or maybe only administration gets that's not released to the public i mean i understand we don't name names but how much of the data that we get about achievement opportunities the gaps is not public i would just say that the names is the only thing that we go through and meet with billy administrators we go through and go right down the names so everybody gets the same numbers that the board gets yeah yeah but when i give them the data i mean i give them the document and they can click in and they can go in the names right but they can see that jackie peterson or will reference had this many referrals so by person who provided the referral is that what you mean like i'm thinking that the numbers that we often

151talk about are the students but they're also probably educators in school yeah certainly yep well you know so if we're identifying like this staff member is often referring a student for this particular problem obviously a skills assessment needs to be done yep so that yeah we have those conversations also and some of the times we've realized well that's the person that's entering the data and they're just putting their name in there right so we had to have some different ways of going about that we had something about 80 of them while we found out that person just the person that entering right and they put their name as the referred by but yes we tracked that also okay and we talked about that building but we don't come to that's probably one item we don't

152come to this to identify that way but within the building we have yes and chairman i can have a follow-up on that because i think it's maybe a difference of we might have the data available to us and sharing what we do but it's how it's discussed and conveyed so for example one of the questions that i have is that in your presentation you talked about the most common offenses for the referrals and i would like to see that broken down by elementary middle and high school because i want to take a closer look at you know what those referrals what's the issue at the elementary school that's causing this data what's the issue at the middle school what's the issue high school there might be different issues and i think that's something important for

153us to see and the public to see they might be completely different behavioral issues at those different buildings and if we need to target ways to help students i think it would be helpful at least to me to know what those issues are you know if they're specific to those different age populations yeah we i mean i have the data right here in front of me with that broken down but i think we have to also take in consideration a few of these have two yeah value two in there right now you know you know elementary middle high school you know we don't need to get as detailed about each individual school or classroom or whatnot other questions comments saminson um so dr pikel maybe isn't aware of of the long history of community involvement

154and input into disciplined data and there's been different iterations of community groups who have been involved in different ways over the years and another question that i wanted to pose to the board and the staff maybe not tonight would be how what what did we learn from what we have done in the past with community input and many of the people on the board now were much more involved with that committee than i ever was i only went to a couple of meetings but um before i was on the board but but what did we learn and what is our vision for involving the community going forward i think that's just because things don't always work out the way that everybody intended to the first try or the second try or the third try doesn't

155mean that we stop trying it means we learn from what did work and didn't work and restructure it so that it does work and i think speaking for myself community involvement is very important in this area and so i think it might be time for us to examine a reboot of that concept a director garcia and just to kind of piggyback off of director amundsen i think that that's incredibly important because i often get communication from community members that no longer respond to the district when we send out surveys or you know we're asking for input because they don't feel hurt or have historically not feel heard so they'll register sort of a private opinion to me but don't necessarily that's not reflected in any of the data we specifically are looking at but i

156know that it's a data piece in my own head um because i've obviously had that communication or conversation with that person and i think if we are more intentional about not us trying to go out and kind of force ourselves upon the public but to really truly have that engagement and be responsive i think that that's going to be absolutely key but i also want to just point out that so many of them like if they if the community reflects a percentage-wise ethnicity and race um of what we have in our schools and it's about 40 of all of rochester like if all persons of color felt exactly one way about a particular thing regarding discipline they're still going to get out voted by the rest of rochester because they're only 40 so percent so

157we also need to figure out how to better ask questions and how to look at data not just this percentage versus this percentage but looking at where there are actually statist statistically significant differences between groups within groups you know whatever it is that we're looking for and i think that we don't really do that great of a job as a district with asking that asking of the numbers what we truly want to know of it ms mclaughlin um i have a question that kind of takes this discussion into a different direction um so apologize if it's if it seems out of place um the mdh report references that crisis prevention and intervention strategies i'm curious to know if you can estimate for us how many um teachers or staff are in the district who are

158trained in that process and then if you could give us your input into do you see that as useful training do you see it being used by teachers and staff when you visit the schools i can see my colleague carla boleson who would have the cpi training data coming up but i can let her share and then i can speak to as a former principal how useful it was so from 2017 to 21 we have just under 1500 staff that have been trained and that includes paraprofessionals generally teachers special ed teachers counselors and social workers and administration as a as a former principal i can say that the the part of the training that is most useful is the part about how we interact with kids de-escalating situations how our actions um can escalate a

159situation um and that's that's the part of the training that is very much emphasized with staff um i think sometimes people think of cpi as the holds that we do but if you do if you do the de-escalation strategies well you don't get to the holds so yes i think it's very very valuable and i do anticipate that we'll continue with that training it's been very well received in 2016 we did the two-hour de-escalation component that jackie is referring to for all staff it may be time for us to do that again but we did that in 2016. thank you other questions ms amundson um i i very much respected what you had to say mr ruffin you spoke from the heart and from your experience and i didn't want it to be lost that

160you put forward a number of recommendations um at the last meeting when you spoke about recruitment of educators of color about anti-bias training about increasing our employee resource groups about restorative practices about peer conversations and i think those recommendations and more probably need to be formalized in some way i'm going to leave it to the superintendent to decide how to pursue those those very valuable points but one thing that you mentioned and um it maybe wasn't a formal recommendation but i was impressed when you were talking about your experience as a teacher and how you would take your lunch hours to sit with children and get to know them and it occurs to me that you know that's not something we can require of our teachers because of their their contract and obviously we need

161to keep our human needs at the forefront and get our rest and nutrition but what that led me to want to ask to you and and to other educators is what else can we do as a board and administration to facilitate those opportunities to think creatively of ways to make space for those interactions for our staff who are very you know busy working hard don't have a lot of time for anything and that's another thing that i would like to i guess just redirect the spotlight to and move forward with you know what can we do to change what we have been doing to to create space for that so just another point i wanted to make that really resonated with me from your your words at the last minute thank you miss nathan so

162one of the can i just yeah sure well you're gonna yeah i can jump in a little bit um first thank you for for grabbing on to that when i first started in the school district it was because i was a volunteer and dr robert simmons asked me to come in during lunch time to spend time with kids so i've always held that as one of the things that i need to do when i'm in the classroom is spend time with kids over lunch but i learned so much about the kids um over those conversations so i think that is something that we can do better at but one of the strategies that i've seen in the district is when there is a situation happening in the classroom we do have some things in place

163where an administrator can come and take over the classroom where the teacher can then process with the student or at least spend a few minutes with the student so some of those things are in place right now obviously we can do better but i like the formal recommendation of spending the teacher spending time with the student first before any referral or any other thing happens after that we have to process with the adult and the student sorry ms workman oh yeah okay i was going to just comment on what he said i think um one of the things that i've observed over the years is that it's very easy to add lots of stuff to teachers plates and these are wonderful ideas but then i think we also need to figure out what can we

164take off their plates what can we mitigate because adding one more thing is going to it could guarantee that it won't be successful you know and so i i'm sure that teachers would love to buy into this concept but you know there's so many hours in the day and how do i fit it in and what is it i can stop doing without doing damage to my students so that i can make room for um some of these other other things so really it's a question of how we prioritize what's important and then how do we make it happen for the people who have to implement those priorities this workman miss nathan um so one of the things that i know has been asked um by some of our comment commenters to the board and

165members of the community i've talked about is that concern that now that the minnesota department of human rights reporting is final and the ocr has been over for a few years um what happens with all of those pieces that are in um the action steps that that we've been reporting on for the past three years and when the various teams of people who were working on the equity policy over the past few years or writing it we were looking at the ocr report and the minnesota department of human rights action steps to make sure that we were codifying those in the equity policy so just to double check i went back and did a crosswalk and every one of those action steps that we talk about is codified somewhere in our equity policy or in

166our student handbook or in other practices that have been integrated into what we're doing now the actual implementation whether it's the program or how it's described in the minnesota department of human rights report isn't in the equity policy but the requirement that we do something in that area recruiting staff of color doing the restorative practices reporting the data to the board and i think the piece with the equity policy that the board hasn't had the conversation about is we are required to hold the superintendent and the district to completing the requirements of the equity policy how are we going to do that as a board because a lot of what we've talked about here tonight is the kind of information we want to come back to the board the kind of reporting the board wants

167on how we're making a difference in these discipline numbers and how we're making a difference in the gap so that might be a conversation to wrap our heads around the equity policy and that feedback loop that happens i know that that staff and administration is working on how they think the equity policy gets activated in their buildings but the board has to talk about then what what that whole loop looks like when it comes back to us and and we're responsible for the accountability and the oversight of that policy but for so for those people who are wondering what happens to that report that report lives on in the equity policy and it's our responsibility to to continue to hold it accountable going forward well and we'll become part of the strategic plan too i

168mean so much of that that's going to be foundation for a strategic plan dr pikel did you have just very briefly what i've i've been trying to do is pull up um from all the places i usually can find it and i think it's just yet another casualty of covid long-term trend data because what we don't have in the two-year trend data that we see and covet has been such a dramatic shift what has been our long-term trend i mean these disparities are a gigantic problem that we must address and the question is looking over a period of five to seven years are we making progress in reducing those disparities i couldn't find that right now i mean you know chris or jackie may know that somewhat off the top of your heads but i

169also we're we're only looking at two years of data here so i think we do need to bring you long-term trend data uh for sure as part of this this new approach to measuring our objectives um that's one point the second and i appreciated um dr robinson that you mentioned will's ideas that he shared last time those absolutely will be integrated into the work we're doing both as we create the dei function in the district and think about a i'm using the term strategic action plan to try and differentiate from the strategic plan but we'll talk about that next week the one thing i would say very briefly is i think to oversimplify things there's two pieces of this puzzle one is creating safe and equitable schools in which all kids can be their full

170selves the second is getting tighter and tighter about what is a disciplinary infraction and what is the consequence for it and we need both um if we only did the piece of like what constitutes a suspension and what's the alternative to suspension or then we would be missing the stuff we'll talked about if we only did what will talked about and he didn't talk so much about this other stuff because i wanted him to talk about the holistic school vision we also need to do the what is suspendable what is an alternative to suspension how are we doing across schools i mean the very interesting data point to me that jumped out last time was what's been having at atoms where it seems that they had a fairly um conscious attempt not to suspend and

171how did that go did administrators and teachers feel that they lost a tool in the tool kit or did it work i mean i'm you know i'm sure it's not that simple so it's a way of just saying you know this is absolutely you know critical i share your commitment to it i think it fits within that larger set of you know creating schools uh which are places where all kids can you know be their best selves um and discipline is a piece of that along with these other strategies so really appreciate the conversation and really appreciate the groundwork that's been laid and we will for whatever reason the state data sets are not really loading the discipline data but there are some useful tools that we will flag for board members in the future

172that you can use to actually look at some of that long-term trend data and it may just be that the state hasn't been loading it the last couple of years because of coda but all of our data is supposed to be there and so it should be transparent and a lot of people never know where to find it um but we'll take a look at it thank you ms mclaughlin i just wanted to comment on director nathan's comments that i i totally agree with you what you're saying and learned a lot from what you talked about it may be helpful to include that in onboarding of newer board members as i'm a newer board member to get us up to speed faster on those issues or even for potential candidates to make sure that people

173are um joining an organization that has different values of equity and that that's the historical background of where that's coming from i did also have one more question for the panel that in your presentation you talked about the continuing efforts of the district and you reference um something with the initial clr could you talk about what that is and about how that fits into improving discipline efforts yeah i think if we can get teachers to be more can you tell us what clr is first so we have uh culturally and linguistically responsive teaching so that's what we kind of go by in the school district but i think the premise behind it is if we can get our adults not only teachers to be more aware of our students different rings of culture and they

174can be better or more understanding of them when they're in the classroom when we see different behaviors in the classroom we don't necessarily see them as a negative and see them as something that needs to be disciplined we see them as just a different behavior that's different than ours right so for example if i have a young man this actually happened to me so i'll use a personal example i had a young man that every time during reading time he would get up and walk around the classroom all the time during reading now i used to do this i used to tell this young man i need you to sit down i need you to sit down and read this is what i need you to do because this is what you're supposed to do

175right not taken into account that this young man needed to move during this time he probably had been sitting for a long time but because his behaviors were different than what i was used to in the classroom setting that became almost a tension for me right but what i had to do was reflect and go who is this like causing harm to no one who is annoyed by this only me not the students him walking around in the classroom didn't bother anyone but myself so if i'm the problem then i need to go back and check myself before i send the student to the office because he will not listen to my instructions right so if we can get people to understand that like there are cultural differences and not even always cultural they're just

176personal differences and personal behaviors that people do and use in the classroom just because they're different than ours or what we grew up with doesn't mean that they're bad so this is something that we're also trying to get people to understand there's far many more examples that was just a simple one that i always think about because i used to do the same thing and i no longer do that so i know that people can change also and have different outlooks on their students in their classroom thank you we um obviously this is a conversation that needs to continue uh throughout the school year and throughout the school years so if we wrap this up no no you have a sense that we sort of need to move on to the next thing this does

177not mean that we have all the information we have asked all the questions we need to ask but we so appreciate your input your work and um your willingness to continue the conversation with the board and with the community so thank you and i i think we'll move to the next thing at this point thank you thank you thank you thanks very much so we will move on now to policy 8018. this is a briefing item and i'm not sure if this is coming from dr pacquel or from the policy committee probably from both that would be good um dr paquel made the recommendation um regarding the masking policy change because it currently because who is required to wear masks currently lives in policy 808 for the board to change who is required to wear

178masks we have to modify policy 808 so the only if you're looking at it on board docs and you're looking at the change the major change is to replace any section of the general policy where we specified an age range or specific individuals required to wear a face covering with a statement that all persons are required to wear a face covering and then it goes on to say when they are in any building that is owned leased or operated by or on behalf of the district unless an exemption or exception stated in this policy applies and then we changed it to persons are not required to wear face coverings when they're outside of school district facilities but on the grounds of those facilities because we extended it to all persons we also had to add

179a few sections back in that was in our policy last year it's an exception for staff working alone when they can remove their face covering we added back specific provisions for visitors in the buildings and we added back face coverings at school board meetings so those are the major changes that were accompanying the recommendations that all persons wear face covering questions or comments go ahead i just have one nitpicky comment so the page six um d part one um you say the exception of medical condition or disability um if a person asserts that he or she has a medical condition i ask that it just should be changed today because where are you at page six sorry it's here so the school board meeting okay good catch here she or she um okay that's an

180easy fix otherwise yep thank you and i guess i should also add as has been the case with this policy um we are including in the resolution that we approve it under the emergency provisions of school board policy 208 because activities and buildings related to the school year are already underway and the school year begins august 30th and this policy must be immediately implemented in all district buildings to ensure safety of student staff and visitors i might just ad parenthetically that the board has been i don't know if inundated is too strong a term but we have received many many emails from families about masking and i've been surprised and shocked the number of parents who said you have to have universal masking it needs to be every person in the school kids and adults

181and you have to do it right now we've gotten some some other emails and i had a conversation today with a woman very intelligent conversation with a woman who absolutely did not think masking was appropriate for kids but it's been stunning and i don't know do you suppose it's been 15 to 1 saying maybe more than that keep our kids safe and they're not going to be safe unless everybody's wearing a mask so this is not a vote that the public is going to take but i'm betting that if it were it would be a landslide you know as dr pikel said none of us were thinking we'd have to go back to wearing masks this fall but this is where we are right now and the fastest way the safest way to get through

182this is if we keep kids safe and so they're not going to be spreading the virus to to people at home even vaccinated people we know can get covered this new variant but i just think it's important for us to let the public know we hear you and again it's not a vote that the community is going to take but it's been an amazingly strong community response i think it's also important to remind the public that this is not a permanent decision right um we're we're both talking about the parameters under which the superintendent might make a recommendation to to change the mask requirement but we're also going um to be talking at the policy committee as to how uh policy 808 might be changed going forward to remove the who wears the mask from

183the policy and put it in another decision vehicle whether it's under the superintendent's direction or whether it's by board resolution but that has not yet been determined but will be part of future conversations that's a really important point and i have a question for one of you the resolution that i'm seeing here now is approve the modified policy 808 coveted face covering guidance but there's no date on it refresh your screen press okay so i was looking for it okay refresh i haven't refreshed this so anyway this is a briefing item is anybody want to move it to action and moved in any discussion about moving into action uh just one quick question in terms of enforcement yeah especially in light of the fact that it will include school board meetings as well yes um

184that's a discussion we had at the hall in the hall before the meeting started so we'll all have to get back to you to each other on that one excellent question okay it's an action item and because i don't have a refresh screen here with somebody else who has the correct resolution read it please i can read the resolution wait did we vote to move it to action no we didn't we didn't vote we did we motioned we seconded okay all in favor of moving it to action say i i post it's now an action item and the resolution is be it resolved that the school board of independent school district 535 approved the modified policy 808 covid face covering guidance this policy becomes effective at 11 59 pm on tuesday 8 17 21. move

185approval second it's been moved and seconded all in favor say aye aye opposed passes unanimously thank you 9.03 policy committee recommendations this first reading of a number of policy that the policy committee has been working on ms workman ms amundson and ms nathan are our policy committee and they do it enormous amount of work i will turn it over to whomever and i have to give credit to ms severson as well because she is our keeper of the record absolutely missy person um the good news is that you only get to hear uh only have to hear the briefing the first time we do um the first reading of the policies so my apologies that you're hearing me again tonight uh policies reviewed with no changes recommended is policy 425 staff development the purpose of

186this policy is to establish a staff development program and structure to carry out planning and reporting on staff development that supports improved student learning policy 501 weapons prohibition the purpose of this policy is to assure a safe school environment for student staff and the public policy 503 student attendance the purpose of this policy is to encourage regular school attendance it is intended to be positive and not punitive policies reviewed and changes were recommended and approved by the policy committee policy 503.01 age of entrance to school the purpose of this policy is to define the age eligibility requirements of kindergarten students updated policy language on the list of documents allowed for proof of a student's age policy 50303 exception to attendance transfer and placement the purpose of this policy is to establish guidelines under which a

187student may attend a school outside of their legal and physical resident attendance area the policy language is updated on the documentation exceptions the impact of rps online school enrollment and when a child care exception to attendance ends policy 601 school district curriculum and instruction goals the purpose of this policy is to establish broad curriculum parameters for the school district that encompasses the minnesota academic standards and federal law and are aligned with creating the world's best workforce the policy language was updated on assessing students for gifted and talented programs examining the equitable distribution of teachers for low income and minority children requirements for school district and school site golds use of scientifically based reading instruction screening for dyslexia reading assessments instruction and interventions for students with reading difficulties and reporting to parents and the minnesota department

188of education policy 615 testing accommodations modifications and exemptions for ieps section 504 plans and lep students the purpose of this policy is to provide adequate opportunity for students identified as having an individualized education plan rehabilitation act of 1973 section 504 accommodation plan or english learner needs to participate in statewide assessment systems designed to hold schools accountable for the academic performance of all students the policy language is updated on the names of the assessments used and eligibility requirements for taking which assessments policy 620 credit for learning the purpose of this policy is to recognize student achievement which occurs in post-secondary enrollment options other advanced enrichment programs other schools alternative learning sites and out-of-school experiences such as community organizations work-based learning and other educational activities and opportunities updated policy language on weighted grades and calculating a weighted

189grade point average this language reflects the current practice in rochester public schools there was no change to current practice just a match of policy language to the practice we are recommending two policies for retirement policy 521.01 interdistrict agreements and policy 950 cooperative arrangements with community-based organizations neither of these agreements are used by the district so the re the recommendation was these policies could be retired procedures reviewed with no changes recommended procedures 628.1 credit for learning this outlines the process for the transfer of academic requirements from other school districts post-secondary institutions online learning outside the school district setting and credit by assessment procedures reviewed with changes recommended 503.01 a age of entrance to school we updated the procedure on the protocol for early entrance to kindergarten and last but not least we are retiring recommending retiring

190procedure 615 a basic skills testing accommodations and modifications all the steps in this procedure are currently included in policy 615 so this procedure is no longer needed thank you and as miss nathan said those will show up two more times on our agenda and then they will be included in the consent agenda for approval so at this point any additional information board members want to share any recommendations for future meetings items for future agendas [Music] hearing none i would just announce that august 24th at five o'clock we'll have a study session where we'll talk about the strategic plan and interim superintendent goals and then we will have two regular board meetings in september september 7th and september 21st both at 5 30 pm and at this point it is 8 34 p.m and we are

191adjourned [Applause] you