School Board Meeting - May 18, 2021

001meeting of independent school district 535 school board is called to order at 5 50 p.m friday at all right 5 30 p.m on friday may 18 2021 virtually in room 137 of the edison building with colleagues participating electronically in accordance with minnesota statute 13d .021 until further notice members of the book are currently not permitted to attend these meetings physically due to cova 19 pandemic recommendations interested members of the public are welcome and encouraged to view this meeting remotely at youtube.com isd535 where the live stream video may be found we acknowledge that rps sites are situated on ancestral lands of the dakota people we acknowledge and honor the dakota nations and the sacred land of all indigenous peoples present at this meeting our school board members mr munoz a non-voting ex official member and assistant

002board clerk ms michelle severson ms severson would you please call the roll chair marvin i think um as clerk i'm going to call the role for this meeting thank you clerk amundsen thank you uh clerk amundsen is here director barlow here director garcia director mclaughlin here chair marvin here vice chair nathan here treasurer rickman here one more time for director garcia and clerk edmondson i think she was going to have difficulty joining this evening so she may or may not be able to um to meet with us thank you for that though 2.01 approval of the agenda are there any changes to the agenda yes policy and procedure briefing items have been added to the agenda as items 8.03 to 8.12 and item 5.02 has been removed from the agenda thank you move approval second

003thank you the motion has been moved and seconded and clerk amundsen can you clarify will you be doing the clerking for the meeting yes because while miss stevenson is is trying to be here um internet is spotty so we could be best if for consistency if i just called all the worlds excellent and thank you for stepping up yep um so director amundsen says i director barlow aye director garcia director mclaughlin aye director marvin aye director nathan aye director rickman aye thank you 3.01 cradle to career update this is an information item mr munoz yes at this time i'm going to turn it over to julie brock executive director of creative career to give us an update julie thank you so much superintendent munoz and the board it's so good to see you this evening

004um cradle's career has been busy i'm going to share my screen very quickly for you and we're going to talk a little bit about once it comes up uh here we go now can everyone see that what do you see yes okay yeah perfect okay so um uh cradle to career again just to to very quickly give a oversight for um anyone joining the call who hasn't met us before we're a community-wide community-owned initiative working with uh organizations across the community to ensure that children uh receive the resources they need when they need them to be successful academically and beyond so one of our networks called kindergarten readiness is working on a strategy that they um co-created with their stakeholders parents and caregivers indicated that they did not feel like they had enough information to

005understand how to make sure that their child has what they need in order to be successful uh hitting kindergarten doors so they have created what we call the kindergarten readiness cards these cards are based on the standards standard teaching gold methodology which uh this methodology really looks at different domains of learning for a child so the cognitive development approaches to learning social emotional physical and motor development and language and literacy so we have developed the experts within standards learning gold have created cards a deck of cards that will actually be placed in the hands of parents and caregivers that provide activities that are either skills that will help with development um they indicate why the activity is important and then the materials they need to do that activity and um so here is an example

006of a card so crafting uh numbers so uh we're gonna be working on recognizing numbers we're going to be um manipulating things and you're gonna need some paper um and some crayons too to do this activity and so this is an example of a card we've been piloting the these and um with focus groups of parents and caregivers uh we're we piloted with english speakers we hope to pilot with um uh other home language speakers we have these translated in somali arabic spanish as well as english so once those pilots are done and those cards are printed we'll be excited to partner with the district as well as our other network partners to get these in the hands of parents and caregivers grandparents anyone who is interacting with kids so that they have what they

007need to know that confidently that the activities that they're doing with their kids may look like play but they're actually things that are really helping them be prepared for kindergarten and so i'm gonna unshare my screen and if there's any questions um please i will answer those right now questions board members uh yes i have one mr barlow good evening julie uh for the um parents grandparents care providers how do they get their hands on these wonderful teaching learning materials and we are going to we're going to have actually another campaign much similar to what we did with support your local learner so we're hoping that there's going to be a psa component to that we're still working on that um and then we're going to have access through our website where there'll be in

008pdf downloadables but also we'll have physical cards that are printed that we will distribute through our partners and so most likely we'll be working specifically with community engagement family engagement with the district to figure out a plan as to how we can get these into the hands of students hopefully there'll be a way that we can do like kick back to school since kids are coming back and we can like help equip um kids and family members to feel excited about learning and so that's a brief follow-up so those who may be listening tonight uh when's the earliest they could possibly put their hands on these materials say if they wanted to swing by united way would they be able to do so absolutely we will we are hoping to have uh our finalized cards

009available on july 1. so like i said we're doing some pilot groups right now some focus groups right now to make sure that they work well for parents and they are addressing um what they need and so we'll make those uh adjustments first because as we know in education sometimes we can get kind of jargony and we can put words in there that maybe needs to be um you know translated into regular english so we're working with parents and caregivers to make sure that those cards are usable and understandable okay thank you very much mr classic uh director barlow took my first question but i thought of another one um what age ranges would you recommend these for so these will be um they're really geared for probably two and a half three four and

010five so really those three prime ages um and you know a great place for uh parents to start thinking about this is we know that um it's really important for students to be screened for school and have their preschool screening by age three and what that does is that affords um two years of of intervention and intervention just that heavy word for like intentional play or intentional um interaction to address these domains and so i would say it'll be really um fantastic to partner also with our partners who offer these screenings to make sure that when you get your kids screened at three you get a deck of cards and miss amundsen miss brock are there things that we as school board members can do for you or perhaps volunteers out in the community who

011are listening to assist with this or any other initiative absolutely so i think um spread the word first and foremost if you can let people know that these cards are going to be available share those with your friends and your families and your neighbors you can pick up some cards for you know neighborhood night out for august and give them to your neighborhoods um a little tug and cheek but no really that's a good idea we should do that um and then uh the the second piece is um for volunteers we will actually be looking for volunteers especially folks who in their workplace are there folks in your workplace your colleagues that you work um with or next to you that you would be willing to pick up a deck of cards and and get

012them into their hands or let them know that these resources exist so we will be wanting to work through just a community-wide effort to make sure that anyone who interacts whether they're a grandparent an auntie a family friend we call that family in my house who's working with a kid between ages two and a half to five or just right there in that sweet spot right before they enter into kindergarten so up into six for some families we have access to these cards thank you any other questions board members miss brock you always bring us good news and your enthusiasm is contagious so thank you well thank you thank you uh the i just feel for all my education friends all of them so um thank you for for serving our kids and a really

013crazy year and thank you for your leadership because i just know that i've never watched so many educators and education leaders pivot so many times without a basketball in your hands so way to do that without traveling nicely done and thank you thank you for fighting for our kids i so appreciate you good metaphor there too thank you very much all right we will move on to 3.02 national merit scholarship award this is an information item mr munoz yes at this time i'm going to turn it over to jackie peterson executive director of elementary secondary education jackie good evening board member superintendent munoz i'm bringing you more good news as you know we have so many amazing kids in our school district and it's my pleasure tonight to share with you just some of them

014this time of year we typically will bring our national merit scholars those who can make it to the board meeting in person and since we could not do that this year due to covid we worked with all three high schools to to put together a powerpoint for you so you can see their faces and and see their plans for the coming school year so i am going to just share my screen and and share this powerpoint with you and i've got it set to auto play so are you seeing the powerpoint hopefully we'll see yeah okay okay i'll sit back and enjoy there we go those are the uh 19 finalists this year that's i think about six more than we had last year and um several commended students that you saw at the end

015of the powerpoint so we want to congratulate all those students and and also thank their counselors for their um dedication to catching up with all these kids to get those um pictures and their uh and their plans for the coming year thank you uh mr uh yes jackie for students and or parents who are very intrigued by how does one become a national merit scholar when should a student begin that process or that journey uh how can one prepare what resources are available or what supports can be provided can you maybe speak to that briefly if you're if you don't mind sure i had to do a little research myself because i was not a national merit scholar when i was in high school nor you but i did research a teeny bit and i

016would encourage people to look at the website for national merit scholar to get a whole lot of information but it starts with standardized tests and there the school counselors can provide a lot of information so if students or parents are wanting to learn more about how they can participate and and work through that process they should see their guidance counselor and and get all that great information thank you yes thank you miss peterson and to our um winners and you are amazing winners if you were in the board room right now you would be getting a standing ovation so congratulations well done you have amazing futures ahead of you and you're going to make this place a better place for everyone so congratulations thank you jackie thank you 4.0 consent agenda are there any items

017to be removed for separate consideration seeing none yes director barlow aye director garcia director mclaughlin i director marvin hi director nathan hi director rickman aye director amonson hi thank you thank you and uh superintendent munoz yes we have retirements tonight uh the first one is christine siegrist a receptionist secretary at bishop elementary he's been with the district 12 years richard dawson special education paraprofessional male high school has been with the district five years and julie walston secondary paraprofessional willow creek middle school has been with the district five years we thank these individuals for their service to our district thank you 5.01 executive director of diversity equity and inclusion this is an information item superintendent munoz yes uh will if you could turn your camera on this is um i'd like to introduce to you will

018ruffin is our new executive director of diversity equity and inclusion and i'm okay well if you're on turn your camera on there he is we would like to congratulate will whittle's been with the district since uh 2006 he's been a teacher at uh riverside elementary in lincoln k-8 uh recently was the community school facilitator at gage elementary so we're excited to uh work with uh will in the ca at the cabinet level and excited for the work that he's going to do and help the district move uh forward with our equity work so will if you want to say a few words yeah i would just like to say thank you for bringing my name forward for consideration i'm excited to be a part of this leadership team and i'm even more excited to continue

019working for the students staff and families of rochester public schools so thank you to everyone on behalf of the school board will congratulations you have since you've come to the school district you've been a huge asset for the staff for the students and we just couldn't be more thrilled that you're going to continue out working with with all of us and helping make this district better you uh you're a born leader and um thank you for saying yes all right and you're also getting a standing ovation i just you're not but you would be if you were here so there's that all right we will go to 5.03 uh middle school sixth grade orientation day this is a briefing item mr munoz yes i'm going to turn this over to jackie peterson executive director of

020elementary and secondary education jackie thank you board member superintendent munoz i don't have a big presentation for you i did put an outline of what the secondary or middle school administrators are requesting you consider and that is they're calling it uh meet me in the middle which i guess we're all a little bit um out of it these days because we did not realize that was the name of a song but maybe that's in our favor too um as you may recall in april when we rolled into in-person learning with our secondary students we did implement an orientation day at middle school similar to what high school has done for many many years which is to bring their ninth graders in just 9th graders for the first half of the day to give them a

021chance to get oriented to the building and do some activities with students from upper grade levels middle school did the same thing they brought their sixth graders in for the first first day solo they also included students who had never been in the building who may have been in seventh grade and never had a chance to be in the building in the past or students brand new to the school community so it was really designed for kids who were getting to know the building they did have some gatherings so that they could share information about the building and hints and tips for navigating the building they spent a lot of time doing some of the things that we know cause a lot of anxiety like opening lockers and traveling between classes without being late and

022they did some team building things with the kids with with students from 7th and 8th grade and we had really great positive feedback from that from staff from students from parents that it was a nice way for kids who are feeling anxious to get really into the swing of things as you know some of our kids participate in the middle school what we used to call middle school prep program but not all kids are able to or choose to do that so this is a way to really start kids out on the right foot and really get kids established in in the routines so they the middle school principals are asking for you to consider and approve doing that exact thing as we start the next school year in the fall that we would invite

023our sixth grade students and students new to the building to come for that first day and unlike the high school it it needs to be a full day just because our middle school kiddos are a little less mobile in terms of being able to come midday um like our our students our older students at high school so this is similar to i guess you would call it maybe a step into learning only for uh first sixth graders so that's what is um that we're presenting to you tonight to consider and i would open it up for any questions you might have at this point director workman yes so i'm assuming that seventh and eighth graders then would start their first day of school on the second day they absolutely would unless they are some of

024those kids where you rely on to do activities correct yes okay this looks like just a really wonderful list of activities and i'm sure the sixth grade students and any others new to the building are really going to appreciate having some hand-holding and some tender loving care and all of those other things that are so important for students so thank you for for doing this absolutely are there any other questions the only one i have is you said meet me in the middle as a song is there any chance you could sing it possibly i you know there's one cabinet member who has a beautiful singing voice and it's not me and i don't know if that person will come forward but but she does like to have a song for every kind of situation

025maybe maybe someday she'll sing for you that would be great but if there are no other questions this is a briefing item and i'm guessing that you would just to soon have us move it to action we would just like to move this to action well there you go second it's been moved and seconded to move this to action ms amundsen director garcia director mclaughlin hi director marvin aye directed i director workman i director amundsen i director barlow hi thank you thank you i just wanted to say we we appreciate that just so we can inform parents as soon as possible uh as we know they may need to make some plans if they have seventh and eighth graders in their family so thank you so much thank you and we'll actually vote on it

026now too so then it's official no but you know how this is going to go here's the resolution be it result the school board of independence school district 535 approves the request to implement an orientation day at all rps middle schools on the first day of school fall 2021 move approval second nathan it's been moved and seconded director amundsen director mclaughlin aye director marvin aye director nathan i director workman i director anderson i director barlow hi director garcia thank you thanks so much thank you jackie uh under efficient and effective operations 7.01 approval of the interim superintendent this is a briefing item we're pleased to announce the school board has contracted with dr kent pacquel to be rochester public schools interim superintendent beginning july 1st negotiations with dr paquel who was offered the position last

027thursday night went smoothly and quickly we look forward to welcoming welcoming him to our school district uh the public may note that the last time i checked the contract and some other information is not yet on board docs this was a very quick turnaround uh have the contract agreed upon and signed and uh they accomplished that today so we will have that information available to the public but if at this point if a board member would like to move this to action and then after that if there's any discussion i you'd like to have we can entertain that i'd like to move this to action workmen second to amazon thank you and director amundsen would you call the role director marvin i director nathan hi director berkman i director amundsen i director barlow i director

028garcia director mclaughlin hi thank you and here here's the resolution i'll read the resolution and then we'll have time for discussion be it resolve the school board of independent school district 535 approves the contract of employment including a gross annual salary of two hundred and twenty three thousand dollars for dr kent pacquel to serve as the interim superintendent of schools for the rochester public schools effective july 1st 2021 through june 30th 2022. move approval workmen second nathan it's been moved and seconded any discussion uh yes madam chair mr brown so for for the viewing public they may hear that number 223 thousand dollars can you share briefly uh how that figure may have been arrived at and is this consistent with um the par for the course so to speak it is uh again our

029school board had a conversation with the board attorney mr wallsburger who typically does the superintendent contracts um this is less than the current superintendent is earning but it's well within the parameters of what a superintendent for a district this size and with the expertise that mr dr cacao has would expect to earn thank you any other questions for all right then i think we are ready to vote director amundsen director nathan i director rickman i director amundsen i director barlow i director garcia director mclaughlin aye and director marvin hi thank you and dr paquel if you're listening uh congratulations we really look forward to working with you all right uh 7.02 a referendum update this is an information item superintendent munoz yes at this time i'll turn it over to scott sheridan expecting director of

030operations and he can introduce the guest that he has with them scott thank you superintendent good evening board members tonight is the 18th update referendum update and tonight we're focusing on the century pool design and budget with me tonight is dana liptech from wsn he's one of the lead design architects for all the pool projects also with us tonight from knutson construction is uh delbert feenstra who is the estimator keane mcwaters who you know from prior contact tyler lunzner as well i assume you remember he's managing the pool and knutson construction is the construction manager agent for many of the projects that we're doing during the referendum also with us is rich schaefer from us aquatics who's part of the design team as well so i'll turn it over to dana first who's going to

031provide you with an update on the design for century pool thank you scott um before i get started i just want to just kind of give a little bit of an update on where we have been since our last uh presentation to the school board uh since since our last meeting our team our design team has made a trip up to sibley high school where we toured their new pool uh we got a lot of good information from that from that meeting we brought that back and since then we have had four coaches meetings uh and one with the adaptive programs uh those coaches meetings were were used to gain input insight from our coaches as we move through the design process brittles are very valuable meetings we made several design changes based off of

032their needs for offices locker rooms training deck space and so forth so i'm going to share my screen and i'm going to go ahead and just show you a couple of the design changes that we've had recently okay there we go so um you can see this is the uh this is the the new and revised site plan that you're looking at right now the yellow or the green box in the center is this the scope of the addition or the expansion with the eight lane stretch and then the modifications or the changes to the road you can see that uh wrapping around the north side when we looked at the design of the building on the exterior we looked at some of the existing materials the masonry the precast and how that how the

033addition would impact uh the existing building you can see here i'm just drawing my hand here around the the footprint or around the shell of the of the proposed pool you notice we put a sloped roof on that uh that sloped roof was is it is is there by design as we're trying to be efficient with every dollar that we spend on this project every decision that we make is based on how does that impact our our overall project cost and our project scope and so sloping the roof even though it looks pretty uh pretty minimal we reduce the overall height of the walls of precast walls on the west side and then by doing that we said i believe approximately a hundred thousand dollars i'll let dilbert talk about that in a minute um

034the overall floor plan as you can see um let me zoom in just so there we go now it's clear uh the yellow being the common corridors the blue obviously is the swimming pool so when i talk about decisions that were made the width of the decks on the east west and north side is 10 feet and 16 feet on the south side those are the minimum deck widths that we determined would be the most efficient based on the number of swimmers that we have using using the pool at one time as well as locker rooms locker rooms the pre-race gathering area again that would be part of our storm shelter component which is required by the state the locker rooms the men's and women's restrooms family restrooms pool storage coaches offices as well as

035pool mechanical and our mechanical rooms specifically for this addition the second floor i shouldn't say second floor the seating level for the pool we are seating approximately 400 in the in the elevated pool seating which you can see on the right hand side is the yellow um when we talk about decisions that are being made uh the one decision that we have here is to provide alternate seating an alternate which would be located on the south side and on the north side so we would at this time we're bidding those seating components as an alternate so if if we don't have or if our budget doesn't isn't as friendly as we'd like it to be then we can remove these seating components or we can add those in later but that will be identified as

036one of our alternates for the project so our core seating then would be then from where my hand is here on the north side uh to the south side with the entry to the natatorium being on the very far south as we come from the existing corridor right there there we go so come in from the corridor from the south come into a small uh gathering space within the natatorium and from there we can go up uh with it with an accessible lift or stairs which brings us up to the seating along the east side when we look at the design of the building on one second here we go and look at the top section first now this is cutting a section east west so when we talk about sloping that ceiling this is

037what the impact is on the inside of the pool and so what you see here is that red line and that hatch and this is the minimum clearance required for one meter diving boards on the south end of the pool so when we look at their our roof slope we we slope that in a way where we could lower the west wall to help with our budget as well as still provide for diving clearances for one meter diving boards and then of course you can see the elevated seating area on the on the would be the east side of the natatorium here and then another cross section looking looking to the east obviously the pool section and then you can see the seating in the background and how that's elevated above the seat above the

038pool deck go back to the exterior there and then let me just zoom in here let me show you this this is a nice view of the natatorium and the impact of the seating uh again the alternate seating on the north alternate seating on the wet on the south and then the base seating in the center of the of the natatorium with the pool in the center obviously and if there's no questions i can turn this over to tyler and the knutson team to discuss schedule and budgets delbert do you want to take it if there's no questions here i think you're on mute albert about now there you go all right very good sorry about that okay so we'll try that again so here's the the budget um for the project as dana has

039it drawn um you know everyone wants to jump right down to the bottom line or uh just over 15 million four hundred thousand um i took the the drawings that dana has uh generated along with uh cut sheets and narratives regarding the mechanical electrical systems uh did a full quantity takeoff on all of the building systems and reached out to subcontractors and vendors locally to validate all of our pricing and developed the price that way the um you can see uh but in the middle of the page there i'm projecting our construction costs to be 11 million 137 000 and i'm still carrying a four percent estimating contingency and you might ask yourself well if you've quantified all the building components and reached out to vendors and subs to verify the pricing why why are

040we still carrying over 400 000 in contingency and the reason for that is market volatility on raw materials um just in just since the first of the year a 16 foot long 2x4 has gone from 17 to 27 and a sheet of three-quarter inch plywood that we would use for say building form work for the concrete footings or tempering closing the building as we progress has gone from 37 back in january to now 90 to 100 depending on where we find it and they're rationing it when we do go buy it because there's a lack of supply and i'm getting daily emails regarding these price increases and material shortages some of it has to do with covid some of it has to do with other other areas of the nation are really ramping up building

041wood structures and and although concrete has stayed fairly flat as people run short of of two by fours and plywood to build their stuff they're gonna start there's going to be a shortage of concrete and concrete block as well some anticipate those costs are anticipated to rise over the next several months now this is still a work in progress we still have and tyler can talk a little bit more about the schedule six or eight weeks of design before we put this out to bid and all of the vendors and subcontractors that i talked to and confirmed that the pricing with this week are telling me that that the numbers are only good for a week or two but they themselves as i mentioned are are getting notices daily about shortages and price increases below

042the 11 million you can see all the soft costs that go into the project there's a construction contingency of three percent we'll maintain that through the project is like we have in all the other projects for rochester public schools and then you can see there the general condition is the design fees and all the remaining city fees that bring us to the fifteen million four hundred thousand that's a quick overview of the project i don't know if anyone has any specific questions board members any questions so far directory i'll let director edmonson go first i'm just trying to raise my hand you can go ahead okay um so dana i just had one and one question well my first question on the design was um the alternate seating that you said could um uh could

043be done depending on the uh cost how many more seats would that add um that's a really good question and i apologize i don't have those numbers right in front of me at this time our total seating for the natatorium was 400 seats including the alternates there's about 65 seats we figured would be the alternate the base the base is going to be the 335. thank you dilbert also admitting his alternates you know we figure the value of those seats is probably around 20 000 twenty to twenty five thousand dollars there also will be an alternate for uh deck showers just figure that's probably fifty to eighty thousand dollars um and then there was a third what was the third oh no we took it never mind so those would be alternate um alternate bids

044that you'd include in the bid package yes they'd be alternate ads so that if if everything comes in well you know when we're under um the budget and we don't use any of that four hundred thousand dollars we'll use some of that four hundred thousand dollars to pay for those ads okay and then one more question for dana you mentioned um that you had made some design decisions to minimize the cost like sloping the roof um were there any other major components that you could highlight for us that where you made choices that were particularly related to minimizing cost um you know the the sloping the roof was probably the largest um option or the largest uh decision that was made in in multiple levels because it affects mechanical systems because by reducing the volume

045you reduce the amount of error which reduces the number of mechanical units so it's kind of a snowball effect on how that slope roof is impacted by more than just the structure height but more of the mechanical system as well when we uh we also reduced the amounts of amount of seeding um we eliminated moa seeding yep for for a couple of reasons one that helped us get the roof height down two that helped us reduce the size you know the storm shelter which made the footprint smaller and got us closer to my understanding was the actual ceiling seating that's at the sibley pool that we're using as the mop correct and then by also reducing the number of seats it reduced the number of occupants in the building and that again in turn reduced

046the size of the the storm shelter requirements it reduced the number of toilet pictures that are required and so all that sort of again it sort of snowballs when you make one decision to remove 100 seats how that impacts the the entire structure and everything that it's associated with including the number of toilets that are required so we reduce those down to the minimum number as well as required by code dana can you also share any changes that were made prior to the decision to add the stretch pool so you know was there change in the deck size and any other that had to be reduced when we switched to the stretch pool okay right so when we had just the eight lane stretch we did have larger decks larger pool decks all the way

047around the pool to accommodate more teams so when we went to the eight lane stretch and and we're looking at you know how we're going to minimize this the the impact of of the cost of of the eight lane stretch um that's yeah absolutely uh reducing the deck size down to 10 foot on three sides and 16 foot behind the boards that was a key factor in in trying to minimize the square footage i mean to reduce costs the best way to do that is to reduce square footage so we have streamlined and i mean streamlined in every sense of the imagination as far as corridor widths number of toilet fixtures like again the deck size you reduce that square footage and we're even squeezing our pool equipment room and mechanical rooms to minimum sizes

048and we're using 3d software we're using revit software to design the mechanical system so we can be so we can best streamline the design of the piping and the ducting within those rooms even to make those as most efficient as possible but yeah when we had we had just the eight lane pool we did have a larger deck size around the outside to accommodate more teams at that point and then we also had 500 seats at that point as well so reduce we reduced that by 100 seats a couple other items we also looked at were the uh below deck lane rails dana if you want to hit on that one oh yeah right so um the there there's a the below deck lane reels what that is it's it's a basically it's a plastic

049or resin product that's that's that's buried and it's it's it's installed underneath the the deck of the pool so when you pull the lanes the lane lines off uh they would roll down into a cavity basically underneath the pool deck so by eliminating those we're eliminating additional plumbing we're eliminating obviously the units that those would roll into instead they would be put onto basically like large rolls or rollers or storage units and that would be then rolled into the pool storage rooms that we have available and then one other big item we looked at was the acoustical ceilings oh right yes thank you so um we removed all the acoustical ceilings actually out of the out of the space um out of the corridors out of the locker rooms and uh the only actual acoustical

050treatments that we're using are just in the natatorium and that would be obviously for um you know for acoustics uh when you have large crowds in there and and and uh and and swimmers that you're in athletes you're gonna want some some noise control or some some acoustical control but we did remove the ceilings and so we're just going to go with an exposed structure in the corridors and in the locker rooms as well which also matches uh sibley correct that's correct yep miss amundsen you have a question thank you um so it's clear that we have a very solid design and that everyone has been extremely creative and and resourceful and coming up with with this um i know that pool community um maybe has a a grander vision and and uh it sounds

051like a good in the middle to call back to the song that we were just talking about meet me in the middle it sounds like we've met them in the middle as much as possible due to the budget but that being said could you comment on some of the things that we were not able to do that the pool community might have been asking for and is there any way that you can think of i'm thinking about specifically the acoustical tiles which could be an enhancement in future years perhaps or is this the type of thing that once it's it's done and designed it's going to have to stay that way and are there other things like maybe the storage area that we'd be able to add on in a future time should our projects

052allow a budget for that type of thing in the future okay so that's some good questions um yeah so in working with the coaches uh there has been there has been push and pull there has to be uh there's a checks and balances between the contractors the architects um the the rps facilities folks as well as with the coaches and we're always checking each other and pushing back and one of that's a really good question one of them was on the west side of the natatorium we want to incorporate some low maybe a two level uh bleacher system where you see that 10 foot two deck uh the pool deck right right in this area here we want to include a small bleacher area there for for the athletes as their you know between meets

053and between between events but in order to incorporate that we would increase our total deck occupancy because by putting bleachers and you're now adding additional occupants so what we've done is we've accommodated for that within the storm shelter so instead of taking additional square footage out of the storm shelter right now we're going to plan on future seating or future bleachers on this on the west side of the pool deck and we're going to accommodate that by keeping the additional 500 square feet within the storm shelter so if those bleachers are added later we don't have a problem with our storm shelter down the road and we're not going to get ourselves into a situation where we're going to wish we had that additional 500 square feet so that's one thing where you know we

054we can't provide the bleachers today but we're providing the storm shelter to accommodate it in the future i don't know if that answered your question or not i think you had a couple couple pieces there it does that's exactly the type of thing i'm thinking of are there other things like that that we could plan for and a lot for um storage areas the acoustical tiles anything else that that we've covered or anything else that we haven't for that matter we've sold pricing acoustical treatments in the pool area itself so it will have what's needed to keep the noise and the echoing down the acoustical tiles he was talking about was in the corridor between the pool and the gym um the the corridor now between the cafeteria and the cafeteria in the gym has

055some bulkheads drywall bulkheads and ceilings and that could be added later if needed or if a budget allows and that's i think that also goes to the finishes on the corridor in the corridor flooring as well delbert where um the existing school uh has a pattern you know i don't show it on here but within that existing corridor there's a terrazzo pattern and we're going to stop that pattern at the corridors and go with a a a a different finish within the corridor system uh from the existing pool you you could mention storage that's a great point we're trying to get as much storage in there as we can and one area that we haven't that we're being very careful with anyway is underneath the seating you can see this large gray area right here

056which is basically unaccounted for we still need to provide ducting and air ventilation which is going to have to happen somewhere let me just go right to that spot there here we are so here's our corridor and adjacent to that we have this these available sort of uh voids is what you see here but we're going to accommodate for our mechanical system now our goal is to take basically this front component here underneath the bleachers and provide access from the pool deck for future storage whether that be for life jackets or for pool noodles or whatever it might be just to give access there but first thing we need to do is progress our design even further with the mechanical system which is being developed right now and move this mechanical system into these ancillary

057spaces and and get access out to our our rooftop units and as well as ventilation supply and return so we're trying to accommodate additional storage underneath there we really are but we need to get our mechanical system um first that's number one priority for that space uh but if we can allocate that for storage we're absolutely gonna do that right now we have a full storage room uh right here and this is a this is bigger than not double but it's bigger than what we have seen in sibley and other uh similar sized pools it seems like the pool storage is is uh always takes the biggest hit when it comes to finalizing a plan so we've tried to accommodate that with as large as space as we can and then we're going to try

058to accommodate it again underneath the seating if we can we can do that director nathan um one of the other questions that we have seen from the pool community is the difference between using you have to tell me the correct name plaster versus tile for the pool um is that the interior of the pool and the deck of the pool can you can you tell us which one you chose and what the difference in cost was gilbert we'd have to defer to rick on that i'm pretty sure we've always prized the tile pool um all along knowing that plaster is not the way to go and not preferred by the district or the community rick rick and his team helped me develop that pool portion of the budget if you could confirm that if you

059i thought i saw him on the phone earlier yep i'm here uh we we commonly do plaster tile can be an upgrade it has future uh maintenance implications with grout we just want to make sure everybody's aware of that we're going to have tile and race lanes no matter what because you can't do plaster race lanes the cost is is generally very similar so which one did we pick then plaster i i believe that that rochester had chosen tile okay and delbert i really appreciate the um the itemization of the costs you're always so specific even though i don't know what half of the line items actually mean um but my my eyes of course go to the larger the largest budget items just to kind of see i know we've been trying to cut

060costs but tell me about line 23 mechanical systems and um that i know you always say that that cost so much but tell me a little bit about why that comes in so high so that's your heating ventilation air conditioning systems plus all of your plumbing for all the toilet showers and the locker room that cost actually came in a bit higher than i was actually hoping to be able to come to this meeting with a number closer to 15 million and we had been making cuts and we're tracking that way until i got my con confirming budgets from the from uh winona heat and vent and hunt electric who have been helping me um the material costs on those units have gone up steel is up 30 to 40 percent uh depending on the

061place um we are going with the uh the underground blue duct for exhausting the the chlorine court and chloramine i think i've got the word wrong the gases right that make a pool smell um because that's what's in the best interest of the of the district there would be because steel has come up so far the savings to keep the exhaust duct above the deck is down i think before we said it was going to add about a hundred thousand dollars now they're saying it's only going to add 50 or 60 or sorry save 50 or 60 thousand dollars versus the underground blue duck um so for the for the value for the money it's the right in our opinion the right thing to do to keep it under the deck um the the unit

062itself that provides the heating cooling and dehumidification for the the natatorium the pool area um the because you know people throw out there well you only added 30 feet to the pool or 40 feet to the pool why is everything going up so much well um in regards to the mechanical system it's not a one-to-one linear relationship yes we only we actually added 44 feet to the pool but because of that water surface area and the amount of humidity it generates and the gases are required the mechanical unit doubled in size or not quite doubled in size and um also doubled in cost we went from a 300 000 unit roughly to a 000 unit plus the the duct work you know that's just the the box itself right um so those are the things

063that go into that mechanical number um and then electrically uh hunt electric just did the the ymca pool in austin i know that was um and did all the lighting and things there so they've got a good handle and had good contacts for uh current pricing on lighting systems in a pool so they were able to help me with a budget there and again the the lighting controllers and the copper costs and all those things just keep going up on us thank you director edmonton another question yes please um this is this is a small point um but could become a huge headache uh it was mentioned to me that there's some concern about where the scoreboard will go with the sloped roof do we have the solution for the scoreboard issue are we confident

064that that we haven't um created a larger problem that's no that's actually a very good question and i cast my mechanical engineers with um coming up with a solution and let me show you exactly how that's impacted so what as i'm showing this right now this is a supply dot here this round duct and then i have another one on this side and actually it under the original design it wrapped around the entire pool and so as you can see um the distance between the pool deck and the bottom of the dock which is a huge duct it doesn't leave enough room for a 10 foot screen and then kids standing underneath it so what i've tasked my my uh my team was doing is what we're going to do is start with this duct

065here above the seating uh we're going to go up into the space of the structure uh come across a structure and and and stop there so instead of wrapping around the entire uh natatorium we're going to go up into the ceiling space come across and then drop down so instead of having the 60 inch duct at the west side we're going to put that duct up into this roof space and then have multiple legs going through the roof structure now that that will eliminate the 60-inch duct here on the end and will give us approximately i believe it's 20 feet from the bottom of structure to the top of the pool deck which would leave us enough room for a 10-foot screen on the end so that's a very good question and it's it's it's

066been a challenge to to me and my design team on how we're going to save a hundred thousand dollars by reducing the west wall uh but by by not um interfering with the screen so so we're we're working on that we're working through that that's a design challenge and it's a challenge that my team is working through for your creativity on that thank you any other questions miss nathan you have another one i do and i don't know um superintendent if if this is the time to to bring up some of the the global numbers but i remember the last time we talked about this we were talking about the comparisons of what our original pool cost that wasn't to stretch 25 was to some of the other pools like sibley and i'm looking at

067my notes and seeing that um the numbers delbert gave us is that the sibley pool was about eleven nine for the cost of the pool the cost of our pool is about eleven one um sorry eleven five but our all-in costs are 15 15 million 400 which is more than what i think at the time we talked about potentially having to finance the pool so is this the right time to talk about the difference between what our estimates are and how much money we have for the pool yeah i mean we're not i guess we're not looking for the board to vote or take action tonight but um we're hoping to get consensus at least from the board that they're comfortable with that number uh the 15-4-15-5 that is over i think after the resolution

068was approved uh a few months ago on not doing the mail pull all that money went to the century pool that gave us a budget of 14 million dollars this is you know over about a million and a half but we we are confident that we uh we have that in our referendum money to cover that um not over that amount but we feel that we can um we can make that 15 4 15 5 work um what we kind of need to know if the board is comfortable with that then they can continue finalizing the design process but if the board would say no you need to get it closer that 14 million then they'll have to go back to the drawing board and make some more reductions somewhere else but in working with

069john carlson our cfo and looking at our overall referendum funding we feel that we can cover this additional million and a half for the pool project so superintendent do you want some feedback from the board now about that cost yeah because what we don't want them to do to when they come back with the final design to go out to bid to say oh no you need to be closer to 14 million so just uh consensus by the board that they're comfortable with where we are right now as far as the overall budget for the pool we still have a few little things that we need to work out um but we just want to make sure that the board's okay with staying right around that 15 4 15 5 so we don't have to

070come back and then go back to the drawing board again all right and um i see a couple of hands up but from my perspective we don't want to go back to the drawing board you know with with the inflation of costs for materials the longer we wait the more expensive it's going to get i think those working on the project have been really careful to be good stewards of the funding that we have i i know you've said with that we have some referendum money that we can use for this even though it's more than we originally thought but it's it looks to me like it's a quality product it's going to be exactly what our schools need so i for one would say that it's a good use of our funding and we

071should move forward with this uh director workman um yes i would agree um so long as mr carlson has not gone into panic mode and is continuing to push his stamp of approval on it from a budget perspective i'm more than confident we can we can handle it thank you director amundsen i i know this has been covered before but just to be really clear for um those listening the source of the extra dollars that we're talking about above the 14 would be what source it's still the rep it's referendum it's from the referendum it's not we're not going to use general fund or any other funding it's just uh part of that overall um approval referendum verbal so it's not being diverted from something else other than the fact that we've changed our priorities

072on the mayo pool project correct thank you i'm good i'd like to work on something else no i'm sorry i forgot to put my hand down alright oh sorry director nathan uh yes i just wanted to say that i'm i'm good with moving forward and i would shudder to think what it would mean to have to cut another 1.5 million from the design given how much um has already put into you know trying to give us all the features um for the for the budget that we have so and and superintendent i think it's fair to say that the money is also coming from the savings well the the i guess i'll call it savings from the other projects um in our referendum funding um you know estimate versus actual cost we've been able to

073be good stewards of that money so we have some additional funds available in in the referendum budget yeah that's correct and then i i also hats off to kanan from knutson he's he's been really he's making sure that our other designers on the other projects are being really efficient with our funding and and he's really allowed us to save some additional funding from the other projects that we can contribute to the century pool project i'm not hearing any negative feedback from board members superintendent munoz so i think that it's sort of a thumbs up okay thank you thank you and thank you those who are presenting here is there are there any other messages you want the board to hear in the community to hear or are you ready to wrap it up i think

074we're ready to wrap it up but the next step will be we come back with final design and then we'll put it out for bed uh key and do you know what the timeline is for that now better defer that one to tyler okay thank you let me get back on here um roughly about we're looking at about eight weeks uh still got some things we got to work through but about roughly eight more weeks give or take a couple for design before we get it out yeah initially we had thought about breaking ground in august but now it kind of looks more like september more than likely right around there yep okay thank all of you very much that great presentation and and incredible work that you're doing thank you thank you thank you

075we will move on to 7.03 approval of 2021 2025 coach bussing contract with rochester city lines this is a briefing item mr melinda yes at this time i'm going to turn it over to mark weasley activities director from century high school mark good evening everyone madam marvin and mr munoz and board members uh before you is our briefing item of a new four-year contract with rochester city lines for our bus service we do this in conjunction with first students but we're what we're finding in the activities and athletic world is is that we do not have enough school buses available so we are seeing more and more coach buses leave our facilities after school um just a side note our primary focus is to transport varsity teams on coach buses of 60 more than 60

076miles but i would say probably in the last four years maybe two years before coved um we were having a hard time getting school bus drivers after school because there weren't enough uh drivers available to do the routes plus our uh athletics and activities so our costs have been going up in this category for us but we're trying to make sure that well coach buses help us because we can get more kids on them they can study while they're on the buses a little bit easier than they can on a school bus and there are some benefits to this this service for our kids as well um i do anticipate in the future with our new late ending time for our school that we will rely um even more on rochester city lines because of

077our school buses would be out doing routes as well so um they've been a great partner for the numerous years for us and they have some costs that we have to incur in this new budget but this is our recommendation from mr carlson and i for the next four years thank you board members do you have any questions from mr beasley or mr carlson mr barlow uh good evening mark uh quick question regarding what i will term transportation equity okay what do i mean by that um are the coach buses have they in the past been if you will uh shared and or used equally among our high schools i guess i'm trying to in my own mind trying to ensure that uh jm i'll just be clear that jm isn't uh always getting the

078school buses you know to on their 60 miles are out and century always getting the coach buses so can you maybe help me understand the decisions which are made uh from an activities directors where you said in terms of of those decisions and how there will be transportation equity achieved throughout the district for our students needing transportation great question mr barlow um yes when we put out our bus requests we put them out season by season sport by sport and so if it is a varsity program no matter what the varsity program is and or what school it is if it's over 60 miles it automatically goes to rochester city lines there have been a few occasions where um if we have a school bus route that um is under 60 miles and the school

079bus company can't um take our team to like austin because that's under 60 miles we do have a system where we are rotating that between the three uh high schools where what next varsity team will get that bus since there's that shortage and the secretaries uh our assistants are really good at tracking that so is rochester city lines and so we talk on a weekly basis about making sure we're staying equitable uh the other thing that this contract has done the last couple of times that we've renewed it is our activities whether it's ban orchestra anybody who wants to take a field trip uh out of rochester has the option of the guaranteed price that the athletic department has and so it has helped fund some of those trips um more efficiently as well so

080that they're not playing a higher cost by going to a second or third party uh vendor for for those trips so the price guarantees help their activities programs as well i think i answered that for you and you did thank you yeah director nate mr queasly you said that the last full year we spent about 414 on these coach buses are you thinking it's going to be about the same utilization right it's hard to say as we're coming out of cobed uh madam nathan because we just don't know what we don't know yet uh with the shortage of bus drivers and the shortage of coach bus drivers um just this last week we didn't have enough coach buses even to send our some of our varsity teams out so um we ended up sharing a

081bus between three high schools and in covid that's not good for us to be doing um but we needed to be able to have the kids the opportunity to participate so um we're hoping that their their inflationary rate is three percent per year of the contract and they've been pretty true to that for the last several years that we've been using this service anything else board members mr quisley this is a briefing item is this something that you would like to get approved sooner rather than later um it would be great if you would decide to move it forward the urgency isn't until the 16th of august when we start fall sports but if you choose to move it forward that would be fine with us madam chair i like to move to action thank

082you mr barlow was there a second i'll second thank you it's been moved and seconded to move this to action uh clerk amundsen would you call the role please director rickman hi director amundson i director barlow aye director garcia director mclaughlin hi director marvin hi and director nathan hi thank you it's an action item be it resolve the school board of independent school district 535 does hereby approve the 2021 2025 coach bussing contract with rochester city lines of approval workmen second nathan thank you it's been moved and seconded and clerk anderson would you call the vote again director amundsen i director barlow aye director garcia director mclaughlin hi director marvin aye director nathan we couldn't hear you there you go and director workmen hi thank you motion passes thank you 7.04 approval of boundary adjustments

083for the 2022-2023 school year is recommended by the boundary advisory committee this is a briefing item but just mentioning at the beginning it is unlikely and probably untoward that we would move this to action tonight but we do we do have a report from the boundary adjustments committee mr munoz yes i'll turn this over to john carlson executive director of business services john well good evening board chair and superintendent munoz thank you for allowing us to bring this report to you this is technically the superintendent's recommendation tonight to uh change the boundaries as is presented i will say the superintendent has not made any modifications whatsoever to what the boundary advisory committee recommended to him so this is uh straight up from the volunteer committee uh that has worked on that we agreed to work

084with cooperative strategies so that's the gentleman you see on the screen scott leopold matt sachs rob olson back in i think november of last year and they basically ran this process and uh from my vantage point as the staff liaison with the boundary advisory committee they did an outstanding job they just ran this very professionally and very smoothly and we got a lot of good feedback from the volunteers that helped on this process so i'm going to turn it over to them they're going to walk you through the recommendation at this time okay matt's going to share his screen and i'll kind of start the presentation here thank you everybody i know this has been a it's been an emotional process uh boundaries are are near and dear to a lot of people a lot

085of people a lot of families um i think one thing that that really came out that the committee acknowledged was that everybody really loves their schools and that's a great problem to have um so it's been i i feel a transparent process that we've gone through this is just our agenda for the presentation we'll just review the process briefly we'll talk about our community feedback then we'll get into the recommendation and we'll talk about our next steps this is our overall process that we've been following since last fall we began with that listening tour uh where we you know listened to board members their opinions about the subject we then got into the details of the analysis you could in the students looking at the existing boundary we talked about some guiding principles we had

086the survey that we that we sent out to the community at that point to get some feedback uh around some of those concepts and ideas we then formed our boundary advisory committee we used that community to develop some options we ran those options uh you know through a community outreach process where we had an interactive online survey we also had the opportunity for folks to participate in focus groups to kind of have that more uh intimate interaction with with the consultants and other you know and each other as community members and here we are with the recommendations uh here's our overall timeline again we started back in october we kind of hit it hard with the committee january february march and through april we had six total meetings uh we had our our community feedback

087and our focus groups on the options in april and here we are at the end of the process we did have the ability to kind of stretch out into next year if we needed to but we wanted to try to get this done so that we could have closure for people so they knew what the boundaries it would be like before going into school for next year uh programmatic considerations this is something that we kind of talked about at the onset of the process uh there were some things uh kind of in play that we wanted to just see what the implications would be as far as the boundaries went uh the board didn't give us any definitive direction but they said that we kind of had the freedom to look at these as we

088were developing boundaries the first piece that we were looking at was making churchill a k5 walk-only boundary and moving hoover or moving the montessori program to hoover and having it be a dedicated facility for that district-wide option if you recall the options that we presented we modeled this in option two ultimately this didn't make it into the recommendation because of some of the implications that that occurred with uh ben franklin the utilization was really low once we took that program out of it and we also had the expansion of the long fellow there and it just left it a civil utilization that franklin was it was just a little low i believe was 54 percent uh longfellow uh this would be a combination of a walking boundary and a district-wide option we do have a

089a walking boundary four-long fellow in the recommendation oh and then uh spanish immersion we talked about perhaps moving that from gage to bishop and the recommendation it remains a gauge and the newcomer academy we talked about moving it from riverside to bamber valley and it remains at riverside in the recommendation uh just a little refresher on the boundary advisory committee they were a great group uh very engaged as we went through the process it was not a decision-making group but is representative of the community they were intended to provide feedback throughout the process and help us interpret feedback from the broader community roles and objectives we tasked them with keeping an objective view considering the needs of all students providing feedback during the options development process and making recommendations to the district leadership uh we

090had a total of six two-hour meetings um with some homework in between and that's the schedule that we kind of followed pretty much every every month and we did sneak in some additional meetings as needed as we went through that process i just want to review this was the feedback from the initial guideline survey that we had i believe it was before the holidays we asked the community to select their top four guiding principles that were most important to them um we didn't ask them to be objective we just wanted to kind of see how the community would react to this this kind of gave the committee a barometer to how the community may react to certain types of options the community really valued attempting to create boundaries that assign students to their closest school

091wanted to maximize walkability minimize busing aligning feeder patterns is important attempting you know creating boundaries that prepare the district to grow with minimal future changes was also important next so as we go into the feedback on the options that we presented so this is the original options one two and three we had over 2000 responses to the survey i think that initially when we did that that first survey we had around 500 and there was some concern and i said don't worry we'll get plenty of response when we have options that are actually moving the lines around so we had over 2 000 responses to the survey which i felt was a a good number we had six different focus group sessions that we held between april 13th and april 15th in which over 40

092people participated and those are held over zoom as you can see on this chart here the overall survey responses to those initial three options so option one um almost 60 percent of the participants opposed it a little you know around 75 or around 25 supported it we've got you know some that were in the middle that were neutral option two a little bit more support a little little more than 50 percent and option three really had the most support overall uh some just some consistent overall comments again people love their schools they don't want to change uh proximity to school was the most important there was a perceived impact on home values uh there was concerns about around disrupting current middle school to high school theater traditions specifically athletics uh because there are also concerns

093about siblings in different schools uh hundreds of comments about implementation and granting exceptions to the to the to the power changes those are those are just kind of some consistent comments that we kind of saw throughout all three options uh next so this is option one i'm not going to go through this in detail uh but the map on the left shows you what the boundaries looked like for option one the background shaded areas are the elementary zones the purple lines are the high school zones and the orange lines on top of the middle school zone so you can really see all three levels at the same time that kind of heat map that you see on there we were actually able to geocode the comments that people submitted on the survey and identify some

094some hot spots or a heat map to really see spatially what people's thoughts look like this is a tool that we gave to the committee so they could drill down into it they could click on a spot and they could scroll through all the comments associated with that we were able to do that based on the street name that people provided on the survey and uh if they didn't provide a street name and they provided a school we put the comment on the school and then you see that little uh that little blip there kind of on in the northeast outside of the district boundary for those comments that did not provide a school or a street address we just placed them on that point outside the district so that the committee could again see

095that overall response to option one negative comments around the falwell area feeding into uh john adams middle school and john marshall high school uh there were transportation concerns with the vertical nature of the middle school boundaries so in this scenario we had all of bishop going to the new middle school and then back to mayo for high school and so it just seemed like back and forth and again you can see that overall response was about 60 negative so here's option two uh just as a refresher option two this was the option that did move the montessori program to hoover and made that walk zone for churchill um overall on negative comments here that wasn't well received in the churchill hoover area i think some of it may have been some of the other changes

096that were made to align to feeder patterns we had some areas that were moved from the current churchill hoover boundary into elton hills uh john adams and john marshall and that wasn't well received uh there were a lot of positive comments around the the social economic balance uh but the areas that were impacted to achieve this were not supportive of that um overall you can see you know a little over 50 support about 43 44 opposition to that moving on to option three um i think this is interesting to kind of look at the heat map of the comments um if you look kind of on the north the north west of the district we have that that kind of cut out that we have there for uh it's a part that is currently east

097of 52 that is currently going to century and this option we had it at john marshall a lot of comments there and that's something that we're actually able to remedy in the recommendation um there were i i would say that there was more support due to less impact at the high school level on option three and so we had a you know near 60 support for option three overall but you can kind of see some of those hot spots are kind of in the same area so moving on um as we went to develop the recommendations we actually sent all the community feedback to the committee prior to any discussion so we didn't just present this information to them and expect them to have a fruitful discussion that same day we sent it to them

098i think four or five days ahead of time we had two full meetings to you know we had one meeting where we really reviewed the feedback and then we had another meeting where we really kind of got into the nuts and bolts of the recommendations um pretty early on we removed option one from consideration just due to the feedback that was received and the demographic imbalance that we had at the middle schools option two had the had the best demographic balance at elementary middle schools but that low utilization that i talked about a little earlier at franklin was a challenge option three had the best overall utilization and the best demographic balance of high schools next so as we started to develop our our draft the committee kind of agreed to use option three as

099a starting point uh we made some slight modifications to the high school boundaries that were made again based on that community feedback uh the overall changes to the high school boundaries are minimal we had some areas from mayo from mayo and john marshall you know to century uh additional adjustments were made at the elementary boundaries to incorporate some pieces of option two that helped out with demographics uh one of them notably was the boundary that we had for gage uh what you'll see in the recommendation i i believe if it's not identical it's very similar to what the gauge boundary was in option two uh and we wanted to make sure that we were not creating a racially identifiable school as we were going through that and that's how we kind of took that change

100that that piece of option two and incorporate it into the recommendation um we also made some adjustments to the pinewood longfellow to decrease utilization to decrease utilization of pine wood and put some more students into the walk zone the students zoned to longfellow will have the option to opt out if they do not want to participate in the 45-15 calendar and so now i'll turn it over to matt to kind of go through the the details of the recommendation oh matt you're right yeah sorry i'm just getting unmuted there switching screens um thanks scott um we included the um current boundary maps and all of the live-in enrollment district-wide programs total enrollment facility utilization based on the current boundaries the current green reduced lunch percentage just for comparison to the recommendations um and we can

101see here um we used uh just uh to clarify we use live-in enrollment so it's the students residing in the boundary of that school with the exception being any students that attend a district-wide option program so that would be for example sunset terrace currently has 678 students in its boundary but we know that number is likely higher because some students might attend washington or longfellow or be in the gauge spanish immersion programs we also included some feeder charts uh so you can see currently what elementary schools feed into which middle schools at what percentage um so like to give an example we have a situation at gage currently where four percent of its boundary is split into kellogg while the remainder goes to john adams and of course currently with the middle and high schools

102uh you have 100 feeders from middle to high school uh but obviously it was adding a fourth middle school was not able to achieve keeping that hundred percent so currently um all middle and high schools are currently over ninety percent utilization eight of 15 are currently over 90 utilization obviously showing the need for some of the new construction at the elementary and middle schools and we have six elementary schools that split uh when they feed into middle school and in the recommendation i believe we cut that number to three so uh looking first at the elementary schools you can see the shaded colors represent the uh recommended elementary boundaries from the advisory committee and the green outlines show what the current boundaries are so i may not go through every single change but it allows

103you to generally see where the changes exist looking at the new overland elementary school we take this portion of sunset here that is currently east of 52 a large portion of the northeast area of the current gibbs boundary and a large chunk of the current gauge boundary and this kind of illustrates that um gauge boundary scott was referring to that is pretty pretty similar to what was shown in the original option two where that kind of core area around the current school and the current boundary remains there but it extends uh into um churchill hoover and uh the current jefferson boundary so um we have a small piece of riverside moving into franklin uh some of the southern portions of pinewood moving to bamber valley the new expanded bishop uh moves further into elton hills

104and to kind of offset that at elton hills and move some areas of of churchill hoover as scott mentioned none of those programs change change any buildings in this recommendation as far as the district-wide options that we had considered in some of the initial scenarios and 75 percent of elementary students reside in the boundary of their closest school that just kind of highlights where those change areas are kind of calls them out a little more detail the other thing i i forgot to mention was we currently have um you can kind of see them in this current boundary uh at bamber valley we have two sort of what we were calling island zones one in the current franklin zone and one in the current riverside zone and in the recommendation we move those to what

105we would consider more of their neighborhood elementary school moving this area here to riverside and uh the one that is in the current franklin zone is really right next to where the longfellow school is being built so it made sense to move it to that school so we have a uh kind of a smallish neighborhood boundary for a long fellow a little bit under 300 students but with the current enrollment at the 4515 program it gets that that school up to 580 students and about utilized you can see that boundary here uh taking portions of the current ben franklin building that bamber valley island area uh that little portion of pinewood that scott was referencing and a small piece of riverside as well moving on to the middle schools probably use the next map to

106explain these more but you can kind of see here with the now the green outlines represent what those recommended elementary boundaries are and then the different shaded colors uh show what the new recommended middle school boundaries are so you can kind of see how how each school feeds into elementary school feeds into a middle school so this red area here is the proposed john adams boundary and you can see it takes a portion of bamber valley so bamber valley splits about 40 percent to john adams uh the entirety of the fall well boundary the entirety of the bishop boundary uh a portion of sunset terrace it splits about 50 50 between john adams and the new middle school which is this green color up here a portion of age about 25 percent with the remaining

107going to the new middle school and all of the new elton hills boundaries just to go through each of these kind of quickly uh then kellogg is made up of all of the proposed churchill hoover boundary all of jefferson and all of riverside central willow creek is then made up of that remaining piece of bamber valley so about 60 percent of its boundary all of longfellow all of pinewood uh and all of franklin and then the new middle school uh is made up of all of the new recommended gibbs boundary the new overland elementary boundary that remaining portion of sunset terrace and that remaining 75 of gauge so those were the three schools that split in this recommendation 74 percent of middle school students reside in the boundary of their closest school we have all

108middle schools uh under 90 percent utilization at least the four boundary middle schools with the range being from 76 percent to 86 percent and the range of free and reduced lunch percentage from a low of 34 and john adams to a high of 42 percent at willow creek and again this just kind of highlights the areas that are changing um this big portion here moving from willow creek to john adams also a portion of willow creek moving to kellogg and this is the area of riverside that currently splits to willow creek and mayo so we now have all of riverside feeding 100 to kellogg and mayo and then obviously this new northwest middle school taking a large portion of the current kellogg boundary and the northern portion of john adams sorry matt uh riverside feeds

109to kellogg and century oh sorry because kell in the mail sorry thank you for clarifying uh and then here uh finally is the recommendation on the high schools so uh kind of similar to with the middle schools these orange outlines now show those middle school boundaries we saw here so like john adams this red color is now shown in kind of this orange outline so again you can kind of see how the middle schools feed into the high schools so those are the middle schools again and we have um all of kellogg's and the um sorry all of kellogg and 40 of the new middle school feeding into century which is that purple color so all of kellogg and this kind of northeast portion of the new middle school boundary so the new middle school

110splits 40 percent century 60 percent to john marshall and then john marshall is also made up with 65 percent of the john adams boundary and then mayo again is fed 100 from willow creek and then the remaining 35 percent of john adams so we have two middle school splits and 77 percent of high school students reside in the boundary of their closest school range of utilization is a low of 95 percent at john marshall and a high of 106 percent at mayo and basically pretty similar enrollments at century and mayo whereas previously i believe we had around 90 at century and over 120 percent in the mayo boundary and the range of free and reduced lunch from 31 at mayo to 40 at john marshall then again here's just kind of highlighting those changes i

111think overall as scott mentioned there wasn't a large change at the high school levels it was a more kind of feeder pattern driven base and we only moved i believe about 250 high school students if everyone were you know based on where they live today and if everyone were to pick up and move to a new high school and this map just kind of shows district-wide all three boundaries so kind of what scott was talking about in those previous maps where we have the elementary boundaries and the different shaded colors the middle schools in the orange colors and the high schools and in the purple so you can kind of kind of see here maybe not so well right now but where the middle and high schools overlap so this would be the mayo high

112school line and you can kind of see here that this is all of the willow creek boundary um and then this is the portion of the john adams boundary that feeds mail so in total 75 of all k-12 students reside in the boundary of their closest school um overall balance of socio-economics is improved compared to current boundaries we now only have one elementary school above ninety percent utilization where as we as previously mentioned we currently have eight and uh no middle school is above ninety percent utilization we didn't add any capacity to the high schools so obviously we would kind of expect that all three high schools remained above 90 utilization um i won't go back through this now but we just wanted to include a slide that kind of had all the numbers at

113all grade levels on one chart so that kind of covered the mechanics of the recommendation and i'll hand it back over to scott now okay um thank you matt uh just as far as community support um at our last meeting um you know we kind of took a straw poll at the end of the meeting to just see how everybody was on the committee and at that point everybody who was on that on that meeting did agree either strongly or just just agree but what we wanted to do is just make sure that we had a mechanism to capture everybody's feedback there are some people that just may not be as comfortable as others speaking up during these these these meetings so we sent out a survey at the end where they could uh share

114their level of support and then provide us any comments uh about the recommendation uh whether they agree or disagree um and then how the process went overall um almost 90 percent of the committee respondents agree or strongly agree with the recommendation so next uh just some other thoughts um there were some that were neutral or disagreed um this is something that came up early on in the process i didn't want to dwell on it but i wanted to make sure that everybody was aware of it there were concerns around only two of the four middle schools splitting at the high schools um this is kind of just based on the geography of where the facilities are you know in all of the options that we developed willow creek always fed 100 percent to mayo kellogg

115always fed 100 to century and then john adams and the new middle school ended up getting split we had some discussions and some comments within the committee around the idea of a district-wide option middle school creating continuity from the elementary school programs we spent some time you know internally analyzing this uh and i just identified some challenges with challenges with it if we're going to replicate visitors wide option elementary programs for the middle school grade six through eight it's going to be cost prohibitive we're going to have to have you know special programming um additional staff those types of things i think the idea with this is that is that we could have um john adams be that district-wide option middle school and have all these students feeding into it but in actuality we can't

116force students to attend a district-wide option elementary school that we can't force students that attended that elementary program to continue at middle school if they want to go back to the neighborhood school they can and there's no mechanism to force them to do so and it would likely hinder the ability to balance demographics at the remaining middle schools because we have kind of lower than the district average free introduced lunch percentages at those district wide option programs and that would just propagate itself up into the middle schools the concerns about the feeder splits will very likely be addressed if and when a fourth high school is built so we didn't end up going anywhere else with this within the committee but i just wanted to bring it up so that you guys are aware that

117this is a conversation that did occur uh just our overall thoughts on the thoughts on the process this is feedback from the committee they felt it was a great process to be part of committee suggestions were listened to the recommendation took many comments of the public into account the boundary development was thoughtful the process was fun i'd love to be part of it again when when you know if and when a new high school is built extremely positive process but i think overall the committee was great to work with they were engaged they felt valued they listened to each other they worked well together one last thing here um and john if you want to chime in on this uh we talked a little bit about exceptions uh the district currently has policy around exceptions

118to attendance this is the link for it uh and if an exception is given transportation is not provided by the district so this is something that kind of came up throughout the process john did you want to add anything on that i think i would just say the superintendent will probably talk to the school board in a few minutes if they have questions about grandfathering because that's probably at the top of people's minds so he can address that perfect uh so next steps uh again changes take effect in the fall of 2223 um this presentation has been recorded uh you know we have this pre-recorded and there's a link to it on the project website we have a new school locator myschoollocation.com rps bounds the the original one is still there with the original options

119this is a dedicated locator just for the recommendation and you know our plan is to be available in the first if you have any additional questions as this becomes an action item so at this point that that's our presentation we're happy to answer any questions you may have thank you that was it was very thorough and uh we appreciate so appreciate the work you've done the work that the committee has done board members have not been involved in the process at all other than we have had a representative who has attended and just audited uh meetings without any kind of input but just to see what's going on and all of us who were able to attend were so impressed with the kind of objectivity of those involved their commitment to uh making sure that

120the decisions they made were informed and equitable uh it is it can be a very emotional experience but we were really impressed with the process so thank you for that um and i do have one question for you this is going to come back to the board for a vote on june 1st between now and then there will be folks who want to provide input how likely is this plan to change because of that input i mean at this point this is this is the recommendation i know john mike i don't know if you want to add anything else yeah i would say uh we've had multiple opportunities for people to provide feedback and i know sometimes people don't pay attention when things are going on until all of a sudden they realize that they're

121going to be impacted by these changes and uh if they want to submit their feedback uh they can definitely send it to the superintendent uh i would say it's very unlikely that we'll make uh any definitely no major adjustments to the boundaries uh i think we've had you know like it's already been said we've had a group of people that really were engaged and really did a nice job of thinking of everything and looking at all the feedback and trying to make adjustments based on the feedback as as mentioned earlier there were focus groups where we received feedback and we also had a community meeting where people were able to provide feedback so at this point in time uh not very likely that we would make any changes to the actual boundaries i know there's

122some questions about grandfathering in that's something that the district management team will will spend the next month or so uh working through that i can tell you our past practice has been uh when we've made boundary adjustments that we do allow students to for finish their last year at that school if their space and you know with bringing on new schools i don't think that should be an issue for having space but we do want to spend some time as a district administration team to iron out those uh processes for grandfathering students and at a later date we can bring those back not not for vote but to just to inform the board on how we will implement the boundaries that the board approves thank you and i think that does clarify hopefully for the

123community what this process is going to look like so i appreciate that uh yes thank you uh very good presentation i however found it interesting as i listened and reviewed the slide deck that when it came to the consistent uh comments and in the area of community feedback and i of course realized he couldn't include everything but i just found it interesting that there's no mention of quality of education you did open with what you discovered was and it's probably true in every community that parents and students love the schools that they're able to be a part of true statement and and yet the community feedback concerns ranged from uh impact and home values uh the effect might have on siblings uh and i just found that again interesting there didn't seem to be as

124i looked and reviewed the information uh concerns about uh the quality of education you know whether my son daughter uh a child attends this school i just want to make sure that they receive a high quality education versus you know i want to make sure they attend the school or that school just an observation i want to comment and then secondly um while it's true you know the public definitely has had its opportunity for input uh this is really the board's first opportunity to actually see a finished product and to spend time and i don't believe we'll be spending the rest of this evening talking about the recommendation but we will have a opportunity i'm sure uh to to really discuss and uh ensure that we fully support this recommendation and i look forward to

125that uh opportunity to do so miss mclaughlin i just have a question related to one of the last items on the slide mainly because it is a question that came up at the student school board meeting this week i want to make sure that it's very clear on the district website that the link to see the locations for the recommendation is very clearly identified compared to what the options were so that if people have looked at this previously and saw one thing that they're it's very clear that what they're about to look at at the website is going to be the current recommendation i just want to make sure that that's absolutely clear to people so they're not looking at all the information thank you any other questions or comments uh director amundsen um so

126early on in the discussion about boundaries and our priorities and and values um i had stated that one thing that was important to me was to reduce wide discrepancies in free and reduced price lunch schools so having one with a very low number and a very high number um through the process i've been able to learn a little bit about that and that there are some definite advantages in keeping um in keeping some schools high free and reduced price lunch like a density like a concentration of students at schools like that and i'm i'm sure i would not be very good at explaining that in such a way that would uh make a lot of sense to the public so i was hoping for the sake of other people like myself who might can see

127that who might be able to uh to see that as a concern that maybe somebody else would be able to address that in such a way that it would be easily understandable and allay other people's concerns is there someone who could do that for us i could i can tackle that for you if you wouldn't mind so what you're talking about are two uh two buckets of funding uh one is state funding it's called compensatory revenue and it's calculated district-wide based on our free and reduced population um and then it is allocated to schools based on the free and reduced percentages at those schools and so you know as a district we might get 10 million dollars but 1 million of that might go to gauge and 80 000 might go to washington and it's

128all based on the concentration level at that school what we've done is is we've allowed our principals basically to buy more staffing with that money and so if you walk into a school with a higher free and reduced price lunch percentage they're going to have smaller class sizes more staff available for students in those buildings because of that funding that they're getting and so there was some concern in the committees if we got these all perfectly even we would probably experience staffing cuts at some of the schools that have a higher free and reduced price lunch percentage right now the same goes with the other bucket which is federal title one we're going to get an allocation from the federal government that's based on the whole district and then we allocate the money to the

129elementary schools that have a higher than the district average free and reduced price lunch so again our gage our franklin longfellow so on and so forth are going to get that extra federal funding to again buy more teachers buy more staff have smaller class sizes so uh if again if we got too close to even all the way around we would have some pretty significant adjustments in our staffing in our schools and can i take that another step down the road in translating all of that financial stuff to what actually creates equity and you can tell me if i'm wrong um if we're assuming that uh students with free and reduced price lunch status may have additional needs then concentrating them at one building will or i mean more than one building but concentrating them

130in each building allows us to take and leverage those extra dollars and reach the greatest number of students with those extra needs at a greater efficiency for the district i i wouldn't even have anything further to say on that i think that was said i think it's an important point for people to understand and a concept that doesn't normally um become evident without maybe being pointed out specifically and i think it's important for our community to understand that we are not deliberately creating um inequities among the schools out of a negligence or an uncaring about those inequities we're deliberately creating those those disparities between free and reduced price lunch numbers because it's an efficiency and because it allows us to serve those students better and if anyone wants to jump in and correct me in

131any of those points i would appreciate it well i i i agree with what you said melissa but i also want to make it pretty clear to the public that boundaries aren't designed for that purpose uh we have some of our schools just they're just there's a lot of poverty in the neighborhood around that particular school so obviously they're going to go to that school because that's when they could walk to so that causes maybe a higher pre-reduced percentage than another school that doesn't have that type of neighborhood but for the advantages that you say that that is true but i just want to be clear that people don't misunderstand that that we designed boundaries to for that for that purpose and then the other thing i will mention um karen asked about the website

132actually heather uh has it ready to go once uh this meeting's over they can go to rochesterschools.org backslash boundaries and the updated recommendation that we presented to the board tonight will be there with that link where they can see uh put their name their address in to see where they would land so it's updated ready to go and actually it's live now as we speak so it's it's updated on the website thank you director nathan and director barlow thank you director marvin so building on the conversation that um and and the excellent summary that dr edmundson just gave i also look at the community feedback and it was a priority about having students go to their closest school and if i read the numbers right we were able to accomplish that for 75 percent of

133the students is that did i say the right number correct yes so if we were to um balance the free and reduced lunch we would have to probably not have 75 percent of the students go to their closest school because we would have to be moving students around to populate different schools from different neighborhoods yes we have a situation a couple situations of that which was corrected in this proposal we called the the bamber valley islands and they were neighborhoods over by riverside and longfellow that were made into bamber valley and those kids were put on buses and driven over into bamber valley um and we've corrected that that was a big priority of all three options every group that sub group that worked on it thought that's not fair to those kids who have

134to drive by like three four schools on their way to bamberg valley all right another demo go ahead and talk to marvin i have one more question but go ahead go ahead now i'm just going to finish so another another demographic uh that we've that we've heard about but has not been reflected in the presentations although i know that you talked about it a little bit when you talked about not wanting to identify a racially isolated school is the is the racial and um and ethnic demographics of these schools can you talk a little bit about how that data did or did not play into setting the boundaries and why it did not play into setting the boundaries we did not use race as a factor at all after we kind of had the three

135options we started developing the recommendations matt and i internally went through to just see if we had created any schools that were racially identifiable and to see whether or not we needed to correct that and that is the extent to which we used it the the committee did not use it at all in their decision making director amundsen i just have a comment on the grandfathering issue and um i don't believe this has been a discussion um with the board on whether or not that's something that we want to be able to work into or not but i do believe that we gave our feedback on that early in the process so while i won't object to the administration dealing with the the grandfathering an exception to attendance issues i would just want to state

136that if we do hear an awful lot from the community from our stakeholders about that issue in the meantime um i may end up bringing it up again despite what we're agreeing to tonight because that's what i feel that my job is is being a conduit of the community's concerns so i wouldn't feel like i was doing my duty if um we started hearing a lot of concerns and i didn't bring them up so just sort of a forewarning that even though we're agreeing to um allow the administration to address it that doesn't mean that i will be silent if if i see a concern note taking miss amundsen and and as i think we discussed before that's pretty much a management issue and i know the consultants talked about that too that how much

137grandfathering un does the work of the committee but i i think mr munoz said that we all heard that that that's going to be addressed after the decisions on the boundaries are made so um that's still coming and i'm guessing that won't be completed probably until june sometime is that correct mr munoz yes yes mr barlow i just had one additional comment regarding um compensatory dollars and title one dollars as it does relate to free and reduced lunches uh and i certainly don't want the public to think that uh or anyone to be given the impression that um you know if a student and i'm trying to construct and convey this in a positive way if title one dollars and compensatory dollars were all that was needed to if you will close the gaps and

138to allow each of our students to experience a high quality education then our data would be showing this because boundary changes are not necessary a tool to reveal that uh absent uh any change at all we would still have of the free and reduced lunch uh uh concerns and for me i guess i just want to restate our shared commitment to ensure that irrespective of one social economic background and what school they may or may not go to or however this boundary may affect them every parent every child should expect and to believe that they will receive a high quality education and that uh no trauma and or uh life situation will be used as an excuse or a barrier to prevent any child from having full access to every educational resource rochester public schools

139makes available thank you mr barlow are there any other comments or questions before we move on miss workman um yes i see there being um some potential inequities between students who would like to stay at their current school but don't have the transportation um as superintendent munoz referred to under exception to attendance so i'd like to have not now but sometime soon what the difference would be between exception to attendance versus grandfathering my greatest concern is are the 54 third graders who are currently not in a district-wide auction school who would end up at longfellow and longfellow is a choice program so it seems to me that if there are students who do not want to be in the 4515 program that and can't afford the transportation or there's a barrier there that maybe there

140needs to be some consideration by administration i'm not looking for an answer i'm just throwing that out there as one of my concerns yeah there there are two different things exception attendance has nothing to do with these boundary changes accessory attendance is um i'm supposed to i live in the gage neighborhood but my child care lives in the church hill so i apply for an exception to attendance to attend churchill because that's where my child care i mean that's one of the four reasons grandfathering is connected to the boundaries and that's like i said in the past whenever we've made boundary changes we've tried to allow a student to if they only have one year left in that school allow them to finish at that school instead of having to do one year at a

141new school so they are the second attendance even though it was thrown after tonight it has nothing to do with um the boundaries even though more people may apply based you know if their child cares now in this neighborhood but they need to go to this school but it's they're not they're not the same thing and there's four reasons that parents can use to apply for an exception to attendance and that's approved out of jackie's office and the grandfathering is just the procedures that we will establish for implementing the boundaries that the board approves okay i apologize for misunderstanding but you did mention exception to attendance and that you know people are required to have trans their own transportation so that's why i i think it would help the board if we had some some

142real clear um guidelines as to what your process is going to be to go through this because um i think it's it's certainly helpful to us to be able to understand the thought and rationale behind the decisions that you're making so thank you when we bring that as an information item we can share that with you great thank you thank you i think we've had some good discussion on this and i don't see any other hand so i think we're ready to move on to the next agenda item which would be 7.05 closed session uh this meeting will be closed at 7 44 pm as permitted by minnesota statute section 13d .05 subdivision 3a and is required to be closed in minnesota statute 13d .03 to discuss labor negotiations and i'm before we move ahead

143with that mr leopold i'm sorry have i just stepped into the next item too quickly oh did you have any any other comments no thank you very much okay good thank you very much we appreciate it appreciate it so it is um 7 45 p.m and we are in closed session effective january 20 22 my thinking on that is that we elect a new chair in january and i would like this to begin for that stipend to begin when the new chair uh takes that position beginning next year not before i i i don't second that i i respect your um um i respect your sentiments towards that chair marvin but having seen uh the sheer volume of work that that that you do and that this year especially has required um i i cannot

144support your emotion well that's hurtful but but in a nice way in the nicest way can i ask a process can i ask a process question so if director marvin makes the motion and it's seconded it's because it's not necessarily your motion right melissa it's it's not my words emotional okay so i'm going to second the motion to allow discussion right now that does not mean melissa has to restate what she previously said we remember that right okay thank you i will however speak in favor of the amendment because as chair marvin is the current chair and she's proposing something and actually works in her against her self-interest um i yeah i'll just speak to that part i i i agree there's something about starting fresh with the beginning of a of a term i

145also would uh support the motion dr marvin continues to demonstrate true leadership and she's doing so even in terms of this motion and i appreciate that and and thank you well it's been moved and seconded oh miss mclaughlin sorry it took me a second to get my hand up i would speak against the motion primarily because i agree with ms amundsen that the amount of work that's been involved in this academic year even as a newborn board member i can see from following the earlier meetings that it's been such a significant increase in workload because of the issues that we've addressed this year particularly the pandemic and the interim superintendent search that i think that it's it's very much warranted and it shows the value of the work of the chair well thank you and

146thank you for for those of you for the kind words and i know this isn't exactly objective but i would appreciate if you would accept this i just i think it's i feel awkward it's been my honor to do the work and i just would feel better not accepting this at this time i i do think that the chair should should be provided as stipend and i would just feel better about the entire thing if we could just wait until next january so whoever it is then could step into it payroll would begin again and just do it that way but at this point i think maybe we should just have the vote after ms workman has something to say i do i i'm going to say i don't know if this is going to

147pass or if it will fail if the motion to amend the resolution will fail just a reminder we have an even number of people here tonight so if it should be a 3-3 vote then the amendment fails and another suggestion to chair marvin is if it does should not go the way that she would like it too she always has the option of declining that increase in making arrangements with payroll to not get it thank you and that was my plan b so ms amundsen if you would call the vote on the amendment to the resolution i will director mclaughlin hi director marvin hi director nathan i director rickman i director amundsen nay out of love director barlow all right thank you and the motion dr garcia who isn't thank you uh the motion to

148amend passes uh so at this point if there is any more discussion or if there is not any more discussion on the resolution and ms nathan has some discussion do on the on the on the first part of the resolution and it sort of ties into the conversation we just had because one of the things that i was weighing in my mind at was whether july 1st was the right start date or whether actually beginning it at the beginning of the next term of the next school board members elected was the right start date as i weighed that in my mind i realized we would never there's never a good time to get all of the board members on the same schedule of the increase so if we waited until after the 2022 elections and

149began and began it then the board members who were elected in 2020 would benefit from the increase while they were still in their term so um i'm in i i'm in support of beginning it at the beginning of a fiscal year which is what july 1st is and not waiting till january because there is no good time to find a different time that we're all going to be on the same schedule except just picking a date thank you miss uh director amundsen you muted melissa thanks your proposal is to start it when did you say i i i i thought about proposing a different time and one of the things i thought about was at the beginning of the term of uh school board members who would be elected in the 2022 elections and then

150waiting waiting to do the increase for everyone until that point but there still would be members who weren't recently elected who would benefit from it and and i just wanted to point out um well i'm open to those types of discussions i wanted to point out that the dollar amount um we'd be losing yet another year in cost of living adjustment and so then the dollar amount again we'd be losing ground on i don't know what i'm trying to say um the inflation the um the value we'd be losing value yet again so if there's a delay i would also recommend examining the dollar amount of 16 000 to see what uh inflationary pressures on that number would be oh sorry so just i'm sorry my brain isn't um communicating quickly tonight it's just a

151cautionary thing not an oppositionary thing if that makes sense thank you director workman yes i would concur with um director nathan for exactly the um reasons that she mentioned i know that some governmental bodies the entire body is elected once or at once every two years which makes it relatively simple however our three local governmental entities us the city council and olmsted county commissioners have staggered re-election time so um i would say i support the resolution as it is written any other discussion miss mclaughlin and you're muted too i have one other proposed amendment for the second part of the resolution is it appropriate to address that now or should we wrap up the discussion okay i would propose them given that we're looking at a different effective date i made this a statement at

152the last time we addressed this i would propose that we increased the 1600 to a 20 percent rather than a 10 increase of stipend for the chair again recognizing the amount of extra work that's been involved this year i can't imagine that that's going to change in the future the diligence and time commitment and the value of that position i would propose whatever the the 20 of the 1600 16 000 is and just to be clear i'd make that motion to to modify sixteen hundred stipend for the chair i'm assuming it's 3200 i'm not doing the math in my head so miss mclaughlin has made a motion to amend second part of the resolution that the additional stipend of thirty two hundred dollars annually would be paid to the school board members serving as chair

153is there a second to that motion well it seems made that then the motion fails for lack of a second if if i could just comment i think that um this the sentiment is valid and could be looked at again in the future the only reason that i wasn't able to support it is because of the research that we did into the practices of other districts and i feel that they're much closer to the 10 percent are we ready to right right to vote on the amended resolution i think so and clerk edmondson have you captured the language that changed language of the first right of the of the first one i could probably do it again if you can do this second well and the second one um just changing the date to january

1542022 now therefore be it resolved that the school board of independent school district number 535 does hereby approve increasing the stipend to 16 000 annually for each school board member effective july 1st 2021 thank you and then the second part as was read before be it further resolve the school board of independence school district 535 does hereby approve an additional stipend of sixteen hundred dollars annually to be paid to the school board members serving as chair effective july effective january uh first 20 22. all right let's write to me okay it's been moved not as yeah that was the amended resolution that has been approved so miss amundsen will you call kathy nathan you have a question and then miss amundsen will call the role all right so we have amended the resolution and we're

155having final discussion on the resolution before we vote right it's already been amended it's been moved and amended correct right right okay so i i guess before i vote i just i i i'm not gonna speak for other school board members but i can say i'm uncomfortable with voting for an increase in my own stipend um i haven't decided what to do with that increase um and whether i would accept it or not however for future board members i think it's important that now we make it clear to our community the value of the work that we do deserves to be compensated and that for individuals who are thinking about running for school board that it is something where your your time is valued with some compensation although it probably doesn't compensate for the amount

156of hours we all put in to the work but in order to align ourselves with and i think the research that director workmen and director anderson have done about what other districts do for school board members i think it's been well researched and well documented and i hope it encourages more and more diverse candidates to um be candidates for school board in the future so that's why i would support it and miss amundsen and i echo much of what what director nathan said and i would add um it was based on data on logic and we are still quite the bargain compared to city council and county commissioners but again i think the forward-looking nature of this increase to make sure that we attract school board candidates from diverse backgrounds that's that's my motivation i'd

157also point out that there's lots of great education charities that we could direct contributions to foundations and so on so absolutely all right i i think we're ready to vote ms anderson will you call the role i will director marvin aye director nathan aye director workman aye director amundsen director barlow aye mr garcia director mclaughlin hi thank you the motion passes next we will go to 8.02 policy committee recommendations and my understanding is the policy committee is going to cover a number of policies and procedures during this time so i will turn it over to the policy committee yes so we've been we've been busy um and the agenda has each of the policies in separate um agenda items but i'm going to walk through a summary of all of them together and then maybe

158ask if you have any questions to hold them till the end and then we can go back to individual ones if there are questions so policy 413 harassment and violence the purpose of this policy is to maintain a learning and working environment that is free from harassment and violence on the basis of race color creed religion national origin sex age marital status familial status status with regard to public assistance sexual orientation gender identity or expression or disability significant portions of the policy were updated by our legal counsel in response to changes in federal regulations and we added procedure language to reference a new procedure for 13a there is an additional edit to the version that you see in your board docs and this is to remove the word including before the phrase gender identity and

159expression in multiple places in the document that was something that was approved by our legal counsel 413 a is a procedure it is the harassment and violence report form and this procedure was created and a form is now used to report incidents of harassment and violence and that form is now in this procedure 413a policy 414 is the mandated reporting of child neglect or physical or sexual abuse the purpose of this policy is to make clear the statutory requirements of school personnel to report suspected child neglect or physical or sexual abuse the changes include a summary of the policy in the employee handbook and provides for annual staff review identifies a point of contact for questions on mandated reporting procedures and procedure language is added to reference procedure 414 a there's also some additional edits

160to 414 that are in the last section regarding dissemination of policy and training and it just more explicitly lays out where the policy can be found in the employee handbook and who the contact person is for the policy 414 a is a procedure and it has the new forms from rochester public schools and the minnesota department of education to report student maltreatment so the new forms replace the old forms policy 415 is mandated reporting of maltreatment of vulnerable adults the purpose of this policy is to make clear the statutory requirements of school personnel to report suspected maltreatment of vulnerable adults the reporting process for the mandated reporter was updated and the minnesota adult abuse reporting center contacts were specified we also included the same changes to the dissemination of policy and training section about where

161the policy was located in the employee handbook and who the point of contact was for mandated reporting procedures 50302 attendance areas we wanted to review this policy to ensure that it was in line with our process of setting the boundary adjustments and the only change was to change the word choice to district-wide option to more accurately reflect the language we're using in the district 806 crisis management the purpose of this policy is to act as a guide for school district and building administrators school employees students school board members and community members as to how to address a wide range of potential crisis situations in the school district the changes in this policy included the timeline for updating the crisis plans incorporating language that referred to our new emergency notification systems that we're installing in our

162buildings employee training on safe schools training modules specification that we're using the avoid barricade and counter method to respond to an active threat update to lockdown procedures and drills and the number of drills to be conducted annually and how to resume normal school routines after the crisis by the crisis intervention team policy 904 is a distribution of materials on school district property by non-school persons the purpose of this policy is to provide for distribution of materials appropriate to the school setting by non-staff and non-students on school district property and through online platforms in a reasonable time place and manner which does not disrupt the educational program nor interfere with the educational objectives of the school district most of the changes and these changes came from our legal counsel address adding electronic and online platforms for

163the distribution of these materials when the policy was originally written it was thought of as printing a flyer and putting it up on a wall or passing it out and of course we now know we have electronic means to do that so the changes in the policy reflect that and then items were added to the list of materials that are always prohibited so um there are nine additional categories of materials that would would not be allowed to be distributed either physically or electronically through district means and finally 904 a distribution of material on school district property by non-school persons is the procedure that implements the policy and it added it corrected the title and added designee as a source for approval of materials it had a process and a timeline for review approval reconsideration and

164communication of approval of materials and added language on costs associated with the distribution of any materials those are the policies we're briefing this evening in 8.03 through 8 11. any questions on those good so now i'll move on to item h12 which is the director oh sorry dr amitson have a question i i had a comment and i can i just recognize director nathan's leadership in a lot of detail-oriented work with with adding procedures and and getting things um consistent i i it's been mostly director nathan and the staff members related to each of these policies who have put in a lot of work thank you and uh director i appreciate my members of the policy committee thank you dr i just have something really minor related to agenda item 8.10 that i just want

165to make sure that i'm wondering if the agenda is just missing a word that this is a proposed revised policy 806 and not a new policy uh you are correct it is a it is a revised policy okay i just want to make that clarification yep good catch okay right so these will come back at our next meeting agenda item 8.12 is a proposed new policy direct mclaughlin and it is the equity policy that we've been talking about for a little a little bit um we've been working on this for a long time and it it started when um director selinger was on the board and then director workman joined the effort and then director marvin joined the effort and now director anderson has joined the effort through people's rotations on the policy committee we

166would not be here without the work of some of our staff of color from the district our previous equity coordinator shavana talbert our current equity coordinators our employee of color resource group leaders have been essential to um helping us take um ideas and concepts that are uh maybe new to what we've documented in policy um and helped us understand them and understand the need for them and help us put it in language that really reflects accurately the areas of work we've also had great feedback from our students in developing the policy and in providing us feedback for the policy so we really appreciate that um i want i wanted to start by just talking about policy because we've gotten the question why do we need an equity policy so i want to remind everybody that

167in our school board policy 208 how formal guidelines are necessary to ensure the school community that the school system responds to its mission and operates in an effective efficient and consistent manner a set of written policy statements shall be maintained and modified as needed policy should define the desire and intent of the school board and should be in a form which is sufficiently explicit to guide administrative action so that's really our north star in writing the equity policy and i'm not going to go through each section of the policy but i'll point out that section one has a purpose that dovetails with the purpose of of policy but specific to our equity work um and you know one of the things i wanted to highlight um as we look through this policy draft language and

168and i would welcome any feedback on the language but realizing that the question we get is what happens to the policy so you you approve a document and then what does the district do well the superintendent has said this many times and i think the board has confirmed it the district has not been waiting to do equity work until the board was able to uh formulate and get feedback on the policy um the board has passed three um statements you are welcome here the equity beliefs and then the recent um government speech resolution to support the purpose and the intent that is reflected in this policy the superintendent and staff has been working with our midwest midwest and plains equity center to merge our strategic plans in the area of equity and access we've had

169two reports from that group to the board and we're going to have another one in july once they're finished with that process and they have action plan and metrics and a communication plan um we had a conversation last year uh at our budget uh meeting where the board expressed uh an intent to want to devote more resources to our equity work and the superintendent came back with a three-year plan that involved hiring a number of employees and that came to fruition tonight when we announced the hiring our our executive director of diversity equity and inclusion and over the past year we've seen the hiring of our equity coordinators and more equity specialists and looking at the role of the bilinguals and how they can be supported so um i just want to point out to

170the community that this isn't the starting point of our equity work it's a it's a codification of the pillars of our equity work that will allow the board to go back and review the work that we're doing against a set of standards and the standards are what are established in the equity policy and the equity policy provides for at least annual review of the policy as well as periodic review of metrics and data and and outcome information that we can use to measure whether the work we're doing in equity is the work that we need to do to achieve our positive outcomes for our students so given that i will take any questions miss amundsen director nathan i i was only part of this at the very tail end um but my understanding is that

171there was a lot of thought and input given to the wording the word choices of of the majority of the content of this policy so while a board member or community member may say wouldn't it be better to say it this way in essence it's been reviewed multiple times by multiple groups and consensus has been reached as to uh word choice and and that type of content is that correct yes and it's also been reviewed by legal counsel as well so so that all that is to say you know i i may look at it and say well that's not the way i would have put it but i'm choosing to defer to the multiple groups that have refer uh reviewed this and their consensus in the word this was i think and i don't

172think i'm overstating it here the absolutely most inclusive process we have ever followed to construct a policy and it may change i mean policies change but it involved an enormous number of people many different iterations of feedback push and pull up but it has been incredibly inclusive and i know there's two other people who want to speak too but i'd say also it's i think it's quite educational it has an amazing glossary of terms so that people who are interested in the terminology often used in equity documents it's right there um go ahead ms workman and then mr barlow and then miss mclaughlin yeah i think chair marvin you really touched on what i was going to say that this document is not solely the work of the policy committee i looked at myself i

173can't speak for the others who've been involved in this work in this this work who've been on and off the policy committee during this time but um i looked at my own role as a facilitator for people to be able to share their words their experiences their views and that basically what we did um okay now i'm speaking for everybody was to synthesize it put it back together send it back out and then back and forth and back and forth to a number of groups um throughout the community and that did include a student group so um their perspectives were certainly extremely valuable i learned a lot in the process and i really think that that's the purpose of many of our policies in this one particular is to really inform people as clearly as

174we possibly can what the intention of the district is as we continue to move forward with the work that we have already begun and have and has been underway for uh quite some time so director nathan i i'm very happy that you spoke to that as well because it's an important facet of of the work thank you mr barlow and ms mclaughlin thank you um equity be it in the form of policy or practice oftentimes has fallen to those individuals who have the lived experience or have had the impact of injustice if you will or inequity face to face and and the thing for me regarding this particular policy but more than just the policy those who have worked hard to bring this policy forward is that it's a result of a journey okay where

175there was a willingness to learn a willingness to acknowledge and and be uncomfortable okay to maybe think differently and say well maybe there's a point well not maybe going beyond maybe there's a point and realizing there is a point there and and with responsibility also known as privilege uh there is opportunity and and so i appreciate this opportunity this step forward uh that it sends a strong signal to our students our staff our community often i'm asked well what's the big deal regarding equity how come it's necessary and i shouldn't say it that way because i don't want to minimize where people may be or or their degree of being and i don't want to use the word woke so i just did it it comes down to i think policies such as this that

176are clearly stated passionately crafted and then presented with the possibility of what can be and and so i'm i'm thankful to be a part of a board that's that is coming to realize this i know this is presented as a briefing item uh and as much as i would like to move it to action i think we want to also give the community an opportunity we want to hear from them okay uh we want to be respectful of those who may not at this point get it who may sincerely want clarification what do you mean by this and why is this necessary and and and we're willing to stand by uh this policy and if need be you know uh develop it even further along with you not without you but along with you and

177so again to those who've worked and will continue to work and to those who are now part of the uh responsibility roughen director but dei there's work to be done and we're gonna do this together and so again thank you uh kathy policy committee the work you're doing and this is this is worth the wait so thank you thank you miss mclaughlin i just want to echo and applaud the work that's been done here that i know it's been a long time coming and i think it's really a reflection of the work that the district has been doing all along that formalizing it this way and what chair marvin said about such an inclusive process i think it's a great example of what i understand the district wants to do moving forward and particularly you

178know recently coming out of the interview process for the interim superintendent the board was very focused in our questions and our deliberations about equity issues and it's at the forefront of our mind it's the forefront of education i think it's something that perhaps the um a community member who doesn't follow the district very closely might not understand how important that is to the district and i think this policy defines that and formalizes it and also gives us a way to respond to questions from individuals who perhaps either don't follow our work as closely or don't understand this important mission of the district that it gives us something to refer them to as was said earlier as an educational tool so that everyone can be on the same page of what this school district and what's

179important to us thank you director amundsen and i i am i know that director nathan already referred to all of the people who have gone before but i want to call out specifically our former school board member deborah selinger for her her passionate support of equity and moving this policy forward and i will defer to the other board members who worked on this longer to recognize anybody else that that really needs to be recognized who may not um be with us any longer that was a good recognition and ms nathan i think you have the last word well i thank you for teeing that up for me uh dr edmondson because the other group that i didn't think was our cabinet they also took a look at the policy because policies are designed to be

180implemented and the weight of implementing it is on the shoulders of our cabinet our superintendent and our building leadership our teachers and the cabinet really took a very close eye to taking um some concepts that needed to be addressed and helping us put it in language that would be used right i mean we don't want just language that make a statement we want language that's going to guide action and their feedback um was really instrumental at a pivotal time that i really think this makes a policy that will guide action so i appreciate their work thank you um and again this will come back we can't approve policies when they're presented so this will come back for approval in the consent agenda at the next meeting we'll move on then to other business board members

181do you have any items that you want to be considered for a future agenda mr parlow uh yes i was contacted earlier this afternoon and uh was asked regarding well when are we going to meet in person and i said i didn't know and i just wanted to maybe have that as a item of future discussion all right thank you thank you and i can tell you that uh the last time that vice chair nathan and the superintendent and i met uh the consensus we sort of came to was the second meeting in june our our schools are going to be the staff and students will be masked through the end of the school year and which would include the first meeting in june part of the problem going back face to face now is

182that if the board goes back face to face uh then we need to be able to include the community you know large numbers and um anyway at this point we're looking at the second week in june when the situation situation and guidance may have changed may not have changed but we'll see how things go anyway we'll keep you updated but good question and i didn't give you a good answer at all thanks doc director workman yeah i think um director edmondson and i have had some fairly extensive conversation about the process that we went through um in the super interim superintendent selection and it's it's not anything that is super major but things that would help to streamline the timeline to give us more opportunity for example to check references and so on and so

183sometime in the next month or six weeks um i think it would be helpful for us to have this discussion because we will be starting a superintendent search in the not too distant future and i'd like us to all to be on the same page so be thinking about what you thought went well and what you where you think improvements could be made and then hopefully we'll be able to have a really fruitful discussion about that excellent anything else all right hearing no other suggestions it is 8 50 p.m and we are adjourned you