RPS School Board Special Session - 04/23/21

001all right i'm showing on the on the feed anyway that there's this special session of the independent school district 535 school board is called to order at 4 27 pm friday april 23rd 2021 virtually in room 137 of the edison building with colleagues participating electronically in accordance with minnesota statute 13d .021 until further notice and with my apologies for our late start we were having technical difficulties and i am so sorry that we are we're starting later than was posted members of the public are currently not permitted to attend these meetings physically due to covet 19 pandemic recommendations interested members of the public are welcome and encouraged to view this meeting remotely at youtube.com backslash isd 535 where the live stream video can be found we acknowledge that rps sites are situated on ancestral lands

002of the dakota people we acknowledge and honor the dakota nations and the sacred lands of all indigenous peoples present at this meeting our school board members ex officio member and the assistant board clerk ms michelle severson ms steverson will you please call the roll thank you clerk amundsen amundsen here director barlow director garcia muted thank you director mclaughlin here thank you chair marvin here vice chair nathan here uh treasurer workman here thank you 2.01 approval of the uh the agenda are there any changes to the agenda seeing no changes i will ask for a motion to approve workman second nathan it's been moved in second didn't miss severson would you call the role thank you director barlow aye director garcia i director mclaughlin hi director marvin hi director nathan aye director workman hi director amundsen

003hi thank you 8.01 this evening we welcome back ms barb dorn from the minnesota school board association who will lead us on a study session of the interim superintendent hiring process procedures and questions and at this point i will thank miss jorn again for her patience in waiting for us to get the meeting started and turn the meeting over to her ms doran thank you chair marvin i really appreciate it and absolutely no worries on the technical difficulties it happens it's not the first time that has happened to us considering the number of online meetings we've been a part of this past year so please apologies not necessary so i'm going to highlight for you first of all the things that we're going to accomplish during this session today and let you know in advance

004what we're going to walk away tonight with as far as the decisions that have been made and the things that the board needs to reach consensus on the first thing we're going to be discussing is the stakeholder report and you should have all received that copy i am going to review that and discuss some of the highlights in there and then i want to talk through with the board a real clear understanding of how you're going to use that information you had a phenomenal response 899 stakeholders responded to the survey over the course of 10 days so that's the first piece of business we are going to review the stakeholder summary report uh then we're going to go through some interview training and that is the document you received also last evening it's a document

005which reviews not just your brochure and your timeline but some of the necessary steps that you need to better understand before you go into your interviews on may 11th so i'll be certain to answer any and all questions that any directors have regarding the interview process but we really want to take a dive into interview processes and procedures tonight and make sure that you're all comfortable with how that process will unfold on may 11th the third thing we're going to talk about then is the stakeholder involvement and the board has given me the directive that you would like stakeholder representation to observe the board interviews with your finalists and to provide feedback which msba will summarize and provide to the board prior to your deliberations so i want to talk a bit about the stakeholders

006who they might be how they'll be invited to participate and i will need one board member to coordinate the stakeholder involvement that i will work with and guide through that process so one of the things we want to walk away with tonight is not specifically exactly who are going to be the stakeholders involved but rather what process will we use to invite those individuals to participate and which board member will be working with me over the next couple of days to really iron that out especially early next week we'd probably start working more diligently on it so i'll just need someone to coordinate with because we will not get all of those answered this evening it's too big of a topic but we'll at least agree on the process and then the fourth thing that

007we're going to do is review some questions i have taken the liberty of suggesting some interview questions for may 11th those are based on the hiring criteria the board selected so you will see in that packet there is gosh i remember how many it seems like a lot of questions perhaps 30 plus they do align with the hiring criteria however there are additional questions if you saw any in the training packet that you really really liked and want to ask we'll certainly weave those into the conversation keep in mind you want to whittle it down to about 15 questions you'll have one hour with each candidate they'll probably give you fairly in-depth answers to each of your questions and you want to make sure that at least enough time remains at the conclusion of their

008interview for them to ask you the board some questions as well more than 15 questions does tend to mean you run out of time and if you're unable to have that dialogue where the candidate is asking you questions that's really unfortunate because that's when you really get to know one another and you can better get a sense of the dynamics that might exist between that candidate as your interim superintendent and the school board so we will talk through the interview questions and then finally the last piece is the interview schedule i have drafted two options for your consideration when you identify the timeline originally seems like months ago you selected may 11th for the interviews and may 13th if needed so i put two different scenarios in your packet for you to consider and i'd

009like you to preliminarily choose one of those two options and i can certainly talk you through the pros and cons of the different scheduling options as well so those are the five things the five goals that i have on my list for this evening this meeting typically takes about two hours depends on how many questions you have but again those are the highlights does anyone have questions before we start with the stakeholder report review all right see no questions if you would please pull out the rochester public schools interim superintendent search stakeholder engagement interim superintendent search survey this is a document which we pulled together after having reviewed the entirety of the responses again from those 899 people i'm going to provide an overview of each of these areas for the benefit of the listening

010audience they do not have the report in front of them but the board i know has had the chance to look at this in much more detail but i would like to not only stress the patterns that we identified but give a couple of representative quotes to support the patterns that emerged from those 899 respondents i really am so proud to have it involved in a survey that was offered in eight languages we have never had a survey that is that comprehensive and was that inclusive of folks who are non-english speaking so i really want to congratulate and thank you for that as well this survey was open for 10 days it was available online in all of those eight languages it was also available in hard copy at the district office for anyone who

011didn't have access to or would preferred not to use the electronic version of the survey so as you can see when you look at the results the largest group of respondents were parents slash caregivers of the people who took this survey identified themselves in the parent slash caregiver category now one of the things we need to keep in mind that most people probably represent multiple stakeholder groups they could be a parent caregiver and a community member and a staff member but we asked them to choose one category that they were using that lens through which they answered all of these questions so 64 a strong majority were parents and caregivers uh just over 28 and a half percent were staff members that would include licensed and non-licensed staff members of rochester public schools so 28

012and a half percent five percent of the respondents were community members just over one percent were students and over one percent selected other i always think it's encouraging when there is student participation in the survey very often we see zero percent from the students and so i thought it was wonderful that at rps the students participated in this survey but again parent giver parent caregiver 64 a staff member 28.5 were the majority of the respondents to this survey as for areas of expertise this was a drop down menu where we asked people to select their top six and these are the five categories which really bubbled up to the top overall for all 899 responses number one was student learning number two was collaborative leadership three strategic planning and growth four community and parents slash

013caregiver engagement and five budget and finance those are the areas of expertise which your stakeholders felt were the most important for the interim superintendent and the challenge with this survey is always that everything they have to choose from is important and i know it's a challenge for people to have to only pick five or only pick six because all of the expertise when you come to a superintendent are very important but these are the five again that really rose to the top for the stakeholders in the rochester public schools when it comes to previous superintendent experience or cabinet level administrator experience in a district the size of rochester or larger we asked if that was important or not yes or no that level of experience as a superintendent or in a cabinet and in your

014school district 58 and a half percent said yes that they felt that was important to be familiar with the inner workings of a large school district at that level of administration and 41 and a half percent said no that's actually fairly close i wouldn't say it's statistically insignificant but it is fairly close to have one in the 50s and the other in the 40s it's it wasn't a 90 10 split or something where it was significant but generally speaking your stakeholders felt that that level of experience would be useful and helpful for the interim superintendent on the other hand whether or not a doctorate in education was something that stakeholders felt was extremely important we ended up with a much larger width where only 65.6 excuse me 35.6 percent said yes so the vast majority

015said no to the doctor in education being required and that was 64.3 so more than 64 of the responses did say that it was unnecessary or not important that the interim superintendent have a doctorate in education uh personal characteristics the same kind of drop down menu choose your top five or top six and the stakeholders felt that being honest and ethical was number one being an effective communicator was two being a problem solver was three fourth they're looking for someone who is approachable and personable and fifth someone who is transparent so those were the quantitative number crunching results of the survey of those 899 folks then we also had open-ended questions in this survey we had four open-ended questions as well as a general comment section and it was very encouraging again that so many

016people took the time to offer additional thoughts in terms of open-ended responses 494 people on average out of 899 answered these questions it wasn't required that you have to answer all four open-ended questions or none you could answer whichever one you chose to or all four of them so when we say an average of 494 people there were definite responses where more than 500 people chose to answer that question and there were some cases where fewer than 450 chose to answer those questions in regards to the questions this is going to take just a bit but i'd like to highlight for the audience what trends we notified noticed and the very first question was what is important for the interim superintendent to know about positive things taking place in rochester public schools and then that

017regards the the themes that emerged from all the comments that were provided appear to be in five primary areas uh one the vast majority of people recognize that rps has a great staff that is dedicated providing each student with a quality education the staff were mentioned over and over and over again as far as the strengths of the district a couple of the comments very quickly i'll say that people noted that they're highly qualified professional they're hard working they continually strive to do what's best for students they're knowledgeable they are smart capable thoughtful teachers who overwhelmingly care about their students and also it was noted many times that the district has prioritized social emotional learning and health through adding counselors and social workers so the staff obviously recognized as a great positive thing in rps

018the second thing that was noticed is that rps meets students needs through a variety of curricular co-curricular and extracurricular programs and the strong integration of technology many people noted that as well they were very proud of the fact that there are many different options for families and students there are great educational opportunities people are very happy with the one-to-one technology provided throughout the district i was noted the district has great programs and they're very proud of the community schools so the variety of programs and activities available to students received a lot of comments the third area in terms of things that are going well is that they noticed that rps is a leader in the area of diversity equity and inclusion with the school system that was mentioned over and over again someone pointed out

019that no two schools are alike within the district people felt there were some promising equitable changes on the horizon that there had been an increase in training for equity and inclusion education for staff that there are culturally responsive classrooms and finally there were a lot of quotes about the fact that the district celebrates diversity and inclusion very positive things people noticed about the district the fourth area of positivity is that the community is growing in population diversity and in opportunities and that rps is expanding and updating your facilities to accommodate this growth so there was a recognition in the answering of these open-ended questions that there is growth and increased diversity in the community that the district has a good growth plan and new school buildings that there has been expansion of the rps infrastructure

020and a recognition that there's lots of growth and change at rps in response to the community's growth we weren't hearing people's frustration with aging infrastructure or core facilities or things such as that this was really a positive for folks which is which is difficult in a growing community that's becoming more diverse so congratulations on that recognition there and finally the fifth area of positivity that came up from the stakeholders says that rps enjoys a high level of community support and family engagement many people pointed to the fact that there is a fabulous community of parents and caregivers that are hugely invested in the school district the public has a willingness to invest in education that families want to support the district and that community support and community engagement is quite high so all in all

021those five trends speak very highly of the positive things that are occurring in rochester public schools now the next question shows the flip side of perhaps those things that are so good and that question was what's important for the interim superintendent to know about challenges facing the rochester public district so a couple of things here let's see one two three four okay four primary areas of challenge arose when we looked for the patterns in their responses the first was that trust has been broken between the community and the school district due to a lack of transparency communication and collaboration that received the most comments from the stakeholders there was observations from some folks that there is a need to rebuild trust and confidence within the system that honesty and transparency is crucial and communication is

022lacking there was also an interesting comment a few times about the lack of the district to actually act on community input and i noticed that one because one of the things that i think it boils down to when you ask for community input and i know that the district surveys your stakeholders on a number of topics expectation management is so incredibly important and so the expectation management in regards to this survey for example what we shared with folks when they took the survey is that you would use the information gleaned from this survey to provide valuable input for the board to consider as they move forward in selecting the interim superintendent for rochester public schools so what you're looking for here is input to help you consider as you make the determination of who to

023hire and sometimes unfortunately when surveys are placed in the community and ask for stakeholder feedback sometimes it's interpreted as you're asking them to tell you what you should do and that's not the intent of this survey and we're going to talk about it again in terms of stakeholder involvement because the one thing you don't want to have is residual resentment building up within your stakeholders that you asked them for their opinion and then you didn't do what they said you should do and i saw that in this comment one of the comments about the lack of transparency and not acting on community input i want to remind the board that you are elected to make the decisions and the input you're gathering and through this survey for your interim superintendent will help guide you and

024yet the decision rests on your shoulders as a hiring authority and you will not be able to please everyone we know that right offhand because with this much interest in the search you are never going to please everybody and you're used to that but expectations are really really important so when i get to stakeholder involvement i want to revisit that because it did crop up as one of the challenges for you previously all right second point in terms of challenges the theme that emerged was that there is an interesting divide in rochester public schools stakeholders when it comes to diversity equity and inclusion most stakeholders believe that there needs to be an increase in dei education but some stakeholders believe the schools should focus more on academics and less on dei so we heard both

025of those trends but as far as people responding with their comments we heard from 133 people that you need to do more dei but we did hear from 24 people that you're doing too much of that and need to be doing more on academics so there are there are two sides to that that topic there there was a lot of praise even though it's been occurring but it said there is a challenge to create equal opportunities across the district because of the diversity within your families and your students um also someone said that we need to really work on putting our equity work and our equity beliefs into practice someone else noted that they're ready to move beyond self-reflection and start implementing more and more and more things in dni and then on the flip

026side of the coin we've had a few comments about being more concerned with equity than perhaps with education and that sometimes there seems to be a lot of effort energy and emphasis on inclusiveness and diversity instead of on academics so that's a prime example of a topic that's of great importance to the district and you're hearing from two very polar opposite thoughts on where it fits in terms of the district's overall vision so that was a challenge the dei thing then the third spot is that there was some point that the community is concerned about the community growth which could potentially lead to overcrowded classrooms and continual changes to school boundaries you as a board know the boundaries are always a challenging topic and so that's something that was on the minds of respondents when

027they filled out the survey we had people pointing out that as the city grows it's a positive thing but it also brings challenges there's a some fear of losing the personal touch because of the size of the district growing larger there's a recognition that it will require creative solutions to challenges and there was some some concern several people noted that the district is losing students to neighboring districts through open enrollment and then the fourth area of challenge based on stakeholder feedback is a concern about the academic standards of the school district and some of the observations were that they feel there is decreasing education standards that more innovation in education is needed there was a sense from some folks that the performance has been going downward over the years and that there may be some

028loss of focus on core academics and again that can always come back to as new topics new curriculums are developed new instruction techniques are developed people fear losing some of the things that they feel are core to the students achievement so that was the the other thing that came about and then a few other things to keep in mind when we had the other comments area people did raise some concerns around school staff wanting to keep small class sizes wanting more support staff and not wanting the teachers as one of the strengths of the district to get burnt out or to leave the district to keep the school staff there also were notifications in general about the academic and mental ramifications of the pandemic and the effects of the pandemic on both students and on

029staff all right that was very clear someone said the mental health and wellness of both staff and students is suffering so you're coming out of an extremely challenging year it is not something you will be able to fix overnight and i do think it is something that the interim superintendent will want to be very aware of of course every district has faced that this year but particular to rochester and the issues that are happening there within the district and the community the mental and emotional wellness of staff and students and that led to also comments about an increased focus on mental health again they pointed to it for both students and for staff there is room to grow people are pleased with the social emotional learning programs that are in place but there's always room

030to improve that and get better to demonstrate social emotional learning am i going too fast for everyone or are we okay okay thank you all right the third question what is important for the interim superintendent to know about the students and staff of rochester public schools oh wow this is great to read so many wonderful things about your students and staff the first theme that emerged was that you have a great staff that's dedicated to providing each student with a quality education okay i think you recognize that as well as a school board comments again they are hard-working they care about education our staff are some of the most amazing people you'll find in our community and they are 100 dedicated to our students uh people also believe that staff and students do need more

031support and i think that is universal that it's been a very rough year staff and students both need support groups should both groups staff and students should be treated with respect and deserve a voice in the district's decision-making process that again will get back to expectations and what does it look like for staff and students to have a voice in the district very often there's some misunderstanding of the role of the school board as the governing authority for a district and then the role of administration and the role of staff students and parents as well so maybe some clarification on how a district operates and what roles when you have a voice at the table what that voice is for and how it will be included in the board's decisions someone pointed out that we've

032been through a lot and they said we need a strong leader and it was echoed many times i think that there this is a truly inclusive and celebratory approach i love those words inclusive and celebratory when it comes to the students and staff of rochester public schools and again someone pointed out the tremendous potential with the staff and students that you have in your district another point when it came to staff and students was point was specifically about students and i love this quote too rochester public schools has incredible students that are resilient creative and motivated to learn really some beautiful things mentioned about the students in your district my students here are incredible they amaze you with their creativity and their compassion rps has a great student body and a caring staff the pride

033within rps by both students and staff is amazing the opportunities are endless there's a lot of optimism here and i just love this one the students are the most precious resource in our society so people recognize obviously the importance of all of the kids that are connected to to rps and there's a deep love and respect for the students that attend your district another point that came through is both staff and students are highly diverse we heard that quite a bit not just in terms of race and culture but also the socio-economic range of students and families was brought up again and again someone pointed out that it is a shockingly diverse community which i thought was an interesting choice of words so therefore the students and staff particularly the students at the district are

034incredibly diverse and that every subgroup due to that diversity needs to be heard and advocated for and then that same question was asked beyond staff and students what is it important for the interim superintendent to know about the community in which rochester public school district is located first thing that was mentioned by the vast majority of respondents was the rochester community is highly diverse and i think that is something that everyone recognizes but when you ask what's important for your interim superintendent to know that is something they need to know and truly understand and appreciate the diversity of this community someone pointed out that this will require knowledge of many different communities different cultures and different needs there is a disparity between many of the communities in our district and someone used this term we

035have a very have and have not community so the disparity between the hands and have-nots seems to be growing at least according to the open-ended comments people made in response to these questions and then another point that was made relative to the community is that the community of rochester is very supportive of and has high expectations for the rochester public schools as a whole this community truly supports public education they are passionate they are concerned and they have appropriately high expectations for the school the board and its leadership so that came through loud and clear the bottom line was summed up by a quote where someone shared this is a very engaged community that supports our students so i think that encompassed all of that and then finally there was also the rochester community desires

036increased collaboration and transparent communication from the district there is a concern that the voice of certain stakeholders carries more weight than others again when you have a district as large as yours it isn't unusual for some voices to be louder or to have more access to the ways to have impact on school board's considerations and so some folks have noted for example that we can't let the loudest control all but listen to everyone in the community and also there will be a need for the interim superintendent to connect with all stakeholders on a consistent basis and i think the term all stakeholders and consistent basis points to the need for communication which will build transparency they're all interconnected in that regards and so there was a desire for that that there be increased transparency and

037communication finally in closing there was an opportunity to say what else what other comments do you have it was simply a place for people to add their final thoughts and this was something that came through in those comments when you look at the final comments that people offered i think this statement captured captures it all the rochester community desires that the interim superintendent have superior leadership skills that will help them collaborate and communicate with stakeholders be a visionary and be visible in the district so those four things collaborate communicate vision and visible when people were asked what else do you want to say those were the things that emerged from their comments they pointed to needing someone with an open mind someone who will start laying more foundations for equitable practices there was a recognition

038from someone in the final comments that the interim superintendent will need to include issues of diversity and systemic racism in any plan to move forward and that there must be an incredibly deep commitment to doing the hard work uh finally someone said we would like someone who really wants to be here to make a difference uh be real and be honest and so i think that there's a great deal of optimism about the opportunity which exists to bring in an interim superintendent that was a lot of information and this is distilled down from about 30 times more than this because the volume of responses it was very exciting to see how many people were engaged in this survey i'm hoping that overview um shares not only with the board but also the folks watching this

039meeting what's important to district stakeholders relative to the interim superintendent search and i again took a little longer than i thought but i wanted to do it verbally so the folks who are watching would know what the highlights were so at this time i'll entertain any questions from board members regarding the stakeholder summary is there anything anyone would like to ask i'm not seeing any hands and again the board has um board members have received these in advance have had time to look them over so thank you for that okay great thank you so as to what you will use this report to do i mentioned you will use it to help inform your decisions around the superintendent search and there's a couple of things i would recommend you do uh one i know you've

040read through it thoroughly and you've taken notes and jotted down things that you you really resonated with you when you read the report i would recommend that you re-read this report once you have the applications in front of you so as you know next week the applications will close at midnight on monday on tuesday we'll do a review of all of the applications to ensure that they're complete and on wednesday we will send them to the board members through a secure link so that you'll be able to access all of the applications resumes all of the information in the cloud so when you do that i would suggest you re-read the stakeholder report so that the voices of the stakeholders are in your head as you are weighing the applicant's qualifications for your position then

041i would recommend you go back to it again before the interviews on may 11th re-read it look at the highlights take some notes so that when you're listening to the candidates themselves you also have the voice of the stakeholder in the back of your brain your mind and then finally right before your deliberations uh whether you do that on the 11th or the 13th when you are making your final selection i would encourage you to revisit the report as well so those are the ways i would suggest you use this report to ensure that you don't just put it on a shelf and let it gather dust there's some really great stuff in here and i know that you will take it to heart as you move forward through the next couple of steps for

042the superintendent search all right so with that we're ready to move on to the school board interview training and preparation and i also want to thank any of the stakeholders who happen to be watching for taking the time to fill out that survey we really appreciate your input and your feedback this is what you're going to have next in front of you it's my old-fashioned screen sharing and so we will now cover sort of the steps that you need to be aware of opportunities and pitfalls of a school board when you go through the interview process for a superintendent the first document in this packet is your vacancy brochure not going to dwell on it but this is the brochure that is out there masa's website msba's website it's in all of the links in

043the emails that we send to the people in our crm database the video about why rochester public schools is embedded in here on the second page it's a really good brochure it also identifies your hiring criteria and that's what we're going to talk about here in a minute relative to the questions you'll be asking on may 11th to find out where do they fit within each of those hiring criteria the board has identified so i'm not just been any longer on the brochure unless someone has questions all right so the timeline is the next document and i'm briefly going to review that keep in mind again at midnight on monday well 11 59 p.m on monday the applications will close you do have applicants i know that's always a concern of the board do we

044have anyone and i want to tell you that yes you do this year i think i shared with you early in the process that there are fewer applicants across the board perhaps because of kovid however the folks that are looking for opportunities aren't tire kickers they're very serious about the opportunities that lie in front of them so there's a lot of quality in the pool but you do have applications and they have until 11 59 pm on monday to submit we will as i mentioned to get the applications and all that information to you on the 28th you'll have instructions of how to get into our database in the cloud to review all of that you will need to keep all of that information completely and utterly confidential and we'll talk about that in training

045just a bit our next meeting is may 7th on may 7th we will meet once again to finalize the interview questions and the interview procedures and i'll review some things from training about how to uh deliberate in public for example and then at the end of that meeting or the second half of the meeting you will discuss your applicants and select your finalists to be interviewed so that's the last thing we'll do on may 7th after that meeting or the conclusion of that meeting is when the names will be made public and until that time every single thing you say about applicants will be applicant a b c x y z um and that's part of the interview training we're about to get into so no changes to the uh timeline again you had identified

046the 11th and the 13th if needed and we'll talk about that more when we get to the schedule any issues with the timeline okay moving on i will first of all open this i'm going to leap ahead in this packet just a little bit i want to talk about the two foundational principles of superintendent search in the state of minnesota and that is the open meeting law in the balance that it needs to strike with the data practices act both of those are extremely important and required by statute so the school board needs to recognize that everything done regarding the superintendent search must be done in an open meeting and the public must have access to your activities about the search it aids in transparency that's one of the things people spoke about in their

047stakeholder survey so doing this the way that you're doing it is exactly the way it should be done and the open meeting law policy 205 is in here on page 18. you cannot close a meeting for any part of the superintendent search in fact the only time you can close a meeting relative to your superintendent is for the evaluation but during the hiring process it must be done in the open so the open meeting law i always have to simply stress on that and then i want to talk about the data practices act because if you look at page 12 at the top of page 12 it does say that the names of applicants are private data except when they become finalists for an employment position all right so the names of applicants are private

048data except when they become finalists for an employment position and then a few pages earlier on page 10 it defines what a finalist is this does not differentiate between semifinalist and finalist if you had multiple rounds of interviews for example but here it says a finalist means an individual who is selected to be interviewed by the school board for a position so after you have deliberated on may 7th about candidate abc once you have passed a motion someone will make a motion second it once you pass the motion to interview candidate a b f and m if that is seconded if it's passed at that time you can read the names of the candidates or the finalists everyone else who applied for that position whether they're internal external whether they're telling people they applied for

049the job or not u.s board members must keep that information private so you will never be able to tell anyone who applied for the position of interim superintendent unless they're named as a finalist to be interviewed by you and i'll admit it can be a delicate dance between the open meeting law and the date of practices act but you can do it those are two things that we think are really important and foundational to making sure you adhere to state law but also that the search has integrity and the process is what candidates should come to expect from a high quality school district like rochester all right so then i'll go back to the beginning of the packet page two i just want to get those two things out of the way on page two

050we talk about relevant law this is a position where you are not allowed to ask anything that you want to ask in this interview there are things on here such as don't ask questions there are protected categories these categories are protected by law so you cannot ask any of your finalists about their national origin their age their race their religion family status mural status pregnancy any of those things because they are irrelevant to their ability to to their job as your interim superintendent so you have to stay away from asking those questions that is just i think common sense very often and yet sometimes we have to spell it out very specifically now because you're working with msbn the search will ensure that all of your questions abide by the law all right we also

051will not have you asking any follow-up questions because if you ask a follow-up question you may accidentally tread on some un um unasked territory so we don't want you to be doing that there's all kinds of examples on the next few pages pages three four and five about the protected category what you cannot ask what you can ask that might be in that same area now i'll tell you that when it comes to stakeholders they very often want you to ask questions such as are you planning to move into our district well that's illegal you cannot ask that question or sometimes people want to know so do you have kids are you going to enroll in rochester public schools and it's friendly small talk sometimes and yet you can't ask about those things the board

052can't ask stakeholders can't ask and you can't consider it we've had candidates know that they can't you can't ask them these questions and so occasionally i've seen a candidate toward the end of the interview in their closing statement they might say well now i'm going to tell you everything i know you can't ask yes i'm married yes i'm going to move into the district and buy a house i have three kids and they're all going to be enrolled in your middle school you have to strike any of those comments from your mind and from your consideration because they're irrelevant it creates an uneven playing field when some candidates have provided personal information that might sway you in some way or another so you really have to strike it from the record if people volunteer that

053information it's also why we recommend that you don't engage in small talk prior to the interviews with your candidates if you are doing interviews in person if you meet them in the hallway before their interview at the water fountain or wherever we encourage you to talk about the weather uh the weather and maybe the weather um but if you engage in conversation that might slip into a you know a revelation that they have have to get back by nine o'clock for my daughter's dance recital well you don't need to know they have a daughter in dance so small talk we suggest you do not participate in that's also why we don't recommend social engagements with the candidates sometimes the board thinks that they want to take people out for dinner get to know them on

054a personal level have them bring their spouse or partner that creates all kinds of opportunities for you to ask or learn things that are irrelevant to their ability to be your superintendent so we want you to be very careful when it comes to the don't ask categories and the relevant law for superintendent search are there any questions on that i know i'm talking a lot and i i will stop and take a breath if someone has a question about any of these issues all right good all right so now we're going to go past the open meeting law and the data practices information we're going to leap ahead in your packet to there's a lot of policies in here if you want to read more policies page 27 common interview mistakes i will tell you

055right up front that you're not going to make any of these mistakes we write them down simply for you to read them and go oh well i won't do that i will do the opposite for example one of the mistakes boards make is to not know the kind of person you're looking for poor or incomplete hiring criteria you did a wonderful job as a board really diving into and identifying what characteristics for this person are important for the interim position those are in your hiring brochure that's what the candidates know you're looking for so that's that's really good you're ahead of the game in that you don't want to make a bad impression this is a two-way street trust me these candidates will be interviewing the board much as you are interviewing them the best

056opportunity you as a board have to make a really good impression on the candidates is when they start asking you questions which is why we recommend about 15 questions or fewer because you want time at the end for them to ask you a question and then you can engage as a board in replying what you'll want to do is ensure that if a candidate asks a question chair marvin will field the question as chair she may answer it and then she may say who else would like to add something to that i highly encourage you to leap in with your thoughts and comments candidates love to see boards building on one another to strengthen and support each other's ideas or to offer an alternative view so the way you interact during the q and a

057with the candidate when they're asking you questions will tell candidates a lot about you as a board the worst thing that could happen is a candidate ask a question and you don't want your chair to answer every single question first many times she may say that's a great question who on the board would like to answer that if it's crickets and complete silence that is the worst thing that could happen because they're going to think you have nothing to offer as a board so we'll get to a point in here where it says some of the things they may ask you about really think through as individuals what would you like to answer if there's a question about the strategic plan or if there's a question about diversity equity and inclusion what what might you

058want to participate in and you don't want to be too long-winded because there's usually 10 minutes or so maybe 15 at the conclusion the interview and you have a lot of board members so keep it succinct but do try to ensure that every board member has a chance to say something in response to a question and i really hope there's time for each of your your candidates to ask you things i'm not going to go through the rest of these you aren't going to ask me anything on the don't ask list keep in mind that this is a big picture process do not get immersed in the weeds whether it's the interview questions we're going to select tonight or the answers you are giving to these candidates try to stay at the 30 000 foot

059view with a vision and a governance mindset because that's what you are as the board you are not in management you are not in the weeds you have to stay above that and superintendents will appreciate seeing that because if you cross the you look over the fence too often and get mired in the details and micromanaging or your answers sound like you're micromanagers a red flag will go up for many of the candidates who are experienced superintendents and they understand that difference between governance and management all right so incomplete notes that's the last one i want to touch on here you will need to take notes because after a while having read applications whether you have three applications or 13 applications you're going to be tired there's a lot in there there's resumes there's letters

060of reference there's letters of application there's answers to your interview questions or application questions take some notes so that you're able to remember the important things about candidate a that stood out to you and what really stood out to you about candidate b your notes however whether it's the application process or the interviews your notes are subject to data requests so we recommend that every single thing that you jot down be professional and appropriate you don't want to be writing down things about candidates that violate the don't ask list okay when someone's in the interview don't remind yourself who they are by saying anything about their race or the jewelry they're wearing or anything that could be construed as a judgment in a protected category so if your notes are professional appropriate you're good to

061go at the conclusion of the search you'll turn in all of your board notes to your hr department and they will keep those notes in accordance with the district's data retention policy regarding employment records so incomplete notes is bad complete notes are good but the best are complete professional inappropriate board notes all right that's it for interview mistakes you can read all the rest in that booklet on your own i am not going to go through pages 28 to 34 because these are a lot of possible questions 178 possible interview questions and when i tell you that you really should have about 15 questions we will never make it through all these questions i do not intend to do that i tried to save you some time by providing you with questions that aligned with

062your hanging criteria so instead of picking from 170 some you can pick from 20 or 30 some but if when you read this something jumped out at you as a must-ask question we'll come back to it and include that in the list for consideration okay director and i saw your hand up this last question we talked about notes and i see in the packet it says incomplete notes but the other information you just gave us about turning it into hr and all that is that written down as a set of instructions somewhere that we'll be able to refer to later about the absolute relationship we take notes those treatments so that is not written down anywhere we simply ask folks that when you take notes take notes about their skills qualifications and backgrounds that jump

063out at you i would stay away from references to again gender race religion family anything such as that that's really the dividing line so when you take notes if you want to look back at the don't ask categories and don't write things down about those protected categories that's really clear just keep your notes on skills and qualifications instead are we allowed to keep a copy of our own notes for reference i'm sorry you were shorting out director anderson did someone else catch that microphone are we able to keep a copy of our own notes for reference yes you do not turn in your notes until after the search is completed are we elections are not long term give them a copy to keep our own certainly you certainly could okay certainly they do need to

064go into personnel files for your applicants though which is why you need to turn them into your hr department and from there they're kept in accordance with the the district's policies on hr and every district has a slightly different data retention policy so thank you for the question anyone else okay great um page 35 does touch on the candidates turn this is where there's a there's probably a list of 15 questions here that candidates will ask you and i have to say that over the last year or two we've seen the questions from candidates becoming more and more sophisticated these are typical ones they do want to know about the district's strengths maybe your evaluation process they ask a lot about strategic plan they may ask about student achievement so so give some thought to

065where your passions lie as a board member and what things you might want to be want to answer now i do want to point out that you shouldn't feel pressured to answer a question that is not in your wheelhouse so for example if a candidate asks a very specific question about achievement or teaching and learning as board members with the district decides that you have you have administration and experts who already understand that backwards and forwards you as a board understand it at a very high level so try to answer it at a very high level but don't be afraid to recognize in your answer that we have every confidence on our administrative staff to really truly dig into those issues don't try and fumble your way through something that's just not in your area

066as board members most candidates understand that your your responses would really be an area of governance and so that's why some of these questions are really you know big picture kind of thing if they ask about your finances you can give them a general overview but you are not expected to know absolutely everything about your district's finances it's why you have competent staff to take care of those things so don't be afraid to say that and again it will demonstrate for your candidates you understand the difference between governance and management anything on the candidate's turn again i really hope that there's time because this is when you have a dialogue back and forth it's when they get to see you shine and why they might decide that they do want to work for the rochester

067public school board all right reference checks i will tell you that reference checks are an important part of the process and it happens twice when msba meets our former superintendents service providers and staff get together and look through all of your applications while you're looking through them as board members we will look for we have a scale on our vetting of yes maybe yes maybe maybe no or no and we'll look for agreement amongst all of us as to which candidates rise to the top we'll select four to five that we feel best fit your hiring criteria that we would recommend you interview but then we will do additional vetting on those folks it includes checking references so we'll call the candidates that we feel are best for your district that we're going to recommend

068and so we'll call and do a pre-interview with them we will call and talk to their references we'll do a quick social media sweep so we'll check into folks and call references we also encourage the board however to make some reference check calls and the reason for that is sometimes references will tell you something as board members that they would not tell the consulting firm that you're working with they're just more comfortable potential especially if you're calling another board member you know appear to appear now i'm not saying i want all the board members to pick up the phone and make calls you can't go on your individual fact-finding missions however you should designate one person on the board to make reference check calls if when we get to the scheduling we go with option

069two with interviews on the 11th and deliberations on the 13th this person would have wednesday to make some reference check calls and prepare a very brief report for the board to consider during deliberations if we decide to do it all on the 11th then the reference check calls will need to be made probably on the 10th just to ensure that the board has done some checking with that so really think through who might be the person to call and check references on behalf of the board again you're speaking with a unified voice throughout this entire search so only one person will be making these calls now typically it's the board chair but it certainly does not have to be so is there a sense if i can ask you at least today as of april

07023rd is there a sense of who on the board might be willing to make two or three reference check calls on your final lists so many hands i'm always willing to help i don't think i should be the person to do it for any particular reason other than availability and willingness i'm willing to do it but i have a question first um can school board other school board members um send questions to the person who is checking the references because the person who's who's checking the references you know something might not occur to them that occurs to another board member absolutely you can certainly do that we also have a list of about 12 questions that i'll forward to whoever's making the calls and we recommend you only ask two or three questions because references

071generally speaking don't have very long to spend on the phone with you so we have a list of 12 pretty standard questions and you can select two or three that you really like and then you want to be sure to ask those same questions of all references for all candidates you don't want to be asking some questions for this candidate and other questions for that candidate you want to have the same questions across the board but we have a list we also can provide if that would be helpful elicit go ahead um so the references that we're talking about are we only contacting the people on the list of references that are provided as part of the application or is it also possible to call up it is possible to call other folks and in

072fact it's recommended but it's not required uh we usually as an agent to the board during our vetting we call the folks that are listed as references on their resume or on their application when it comes to the board members doing reference checks some folks don't have time to dig any deeper but other folks really enjoy going off the beaten path i've had board members that make it their goal for each of the finalists to talk to someone this person has worked for someone that works for them or has worked for them or someone they work with so they call three people of each finalist and they specifically don't call the people who are listed as references so they might call a former superintendent from a district they were in or they might call the

073administrative assistant in the district they're in so they they do go off the beaten path and that is okay because as part of the application applicants check a box that says i recognize you will be contacting people familiar with my background and experience and i give you permission to reach beyond my listed references so it's okay to do that is there anything off limits are there any clauses and rules or protocols or uh etiquette related to who it would be rude to ask that's a great question i i don't know that um from a statute perspective that it's illegal to call anyone but i think there are some protocols where it might be considered inappropriate to call certain people you know i i for example if it's i wouldn't call someone where their relationship with

074the candidate is of a personal nature you certainly could but it's it's irrelevant to their performance as a superintendent so i think you can call former colleagues current colleagues so on and so forth so it's it's common sense as to who would provide you with the best information are you saying like not their children not their ex-spouse i wouldn't call those folks nope i don't know if there's a law that says you can't i think it would make the board look bad though if you're going to do that i had a board interestingly enough um this year rather than make the call themselves rather than a board member making the calls they asked a member of their police department to make the reference check calls and i advised against that because that was um that

075would be unusual for candidates to receive a phone call from a police officer in that district asking them questions about their professional history but it's not illegal to do that that's something they chose to do but i would always recommend a board member make those calls so that's exactly the direction i was looking for thank you okay and miss workman yes so if if the person who's designated to make these calls decides to go off the beaten track and not call the references that are on their application because you guys have reviewed them and vetted them already does the board need to agree ahead of time as a whole as to well we want one person from this environment this environment in this environment and then who hunts those people down or who decides i

076mean you know calling another school board chair would be easy right or another school board member would be easy but who has the discretion to make the determination of where that beaten track might go whoever is assuming it has to be the same and then it has to be so so the beaten track off the beaten track references have to be the same categories for every candidate even though the personal rep or the references that candidates give aren't all the same but we have to make them all the same that is correct i would try to keep them similar so if you're calling a colleague you want to call one colleague for each of your finalists not four colleagues for one of them and no colleagues for the other so yes that is correct as

077far as who decides where it goes well and so so it can't be like okay um i'm going to call the the manager at the grocery store because i know they shop there and they know each other but that's not going to be true for every candidate so i wouldn't be able to make that call into that one correct correct correct and whoever the board designates to make these calls has the authority the board to choose what kind of folks they're calling and what questions they're asking so you don't need board action you don't need to come to agreement on what kinds of folks you're calling it that gets you into the wheeze and it bogs down the process so whoever is charged with making these reference calls and it should not take you very

078long this is not meant to be a huge research project it is meant to be the board's due diligence to simply make some calls on all your finalists to ensure that it's going to confirm what you already know it however should not become a burden or a massive job otherwise it's just too much it needs to be scaled down and again thirty thousand foot view in everything that you're doing so if so if can other school board members then suggest to the person who's tasked with making these calls what kind of category they're interested in does that violate the open meeting law if it's just one board member to a single board member if it is a one-way communication and you don't reply and you don't start interacting with one another it's okay if they

079simply send you in one direction some suggestions that's fine um you want to have a deadline on it though because again you'll be making these calls if you do this between the 11th and the 13th on the 12th so you need to hit the ground running and it shouldn't take much time and board members should not feel obligated to provide that information to the person making the calls i'm certain that you're all very capable of doing this it's just a matter of due diligence and so a couple of phone calls for each candidate and then i can help you prepare it's a verbal report of no more than maybe two minutes on each candidate that means you're not going to prepare a litany of information on every candidate you're going to provide a quick overview

080of here are the strengths that i heard on this candidate here's some opportunities for girl if they suggested and then you can move on to the next person so it doesn't take very long okay okay director garcia i'm i'm wondering if there are different rules perhaps if the person is coming from within the district or as a former something from the district because obviously if we're reaching out but if they've been with us the majority of their career who who else would we be reaching out to but like a principal or the superintendent or somebody on the cabinet and i just wonder how invasive that might feel for going you know kind of off the beaten path that's an excellent point so in the interest of time for tonight as well as to your point

081director garcia how about we table this conversation and on may 7th we revisit it after the or at the end of the meeting on may 7th you will have named the finalists that you'd like to interview so you'll know if they're internal or external because yes you would handle the call slightly differently if it's an internal candidate you'd ask the same questions you simply want to be more careful so that you're not infringing upon anyone's employment status by asking them so if it's all right with everybody just know that there'll be some reference check calls to be made potentially between the 11th and the 13th and we'll need one person to do that and i can work with them and it shouldn't take very long i don't want people to read too much into this

082is it's a matter of some quick due diligence calls and a brief report to the board do i see a question from someone or not no i have one more question um on the internal uh candidate possibility that director garcia raised so internal candidates are not public until they become finalists but if we have an internal candidate if we were to call anyone in the district that's employed by the district then they would know that that person has applied and if that person then become doesn't become a finalist then it seems to me that there's some violation of privacy going on so for me i like i don't know how we could possibly call you know you're not making the calls until after the interviews you're not making the phone calls until after the 11th

083okay these names are public on may 7th the evening of may 7th so you're not making any calls until the 11th or 12th unless you'd have to make them before the 11th but still no you're absolutely right we would never put you in a position of ever checking on folks that um potentially does uh divulge who they are and that's an interesting point i mean that would that would apply but that would apply to follow-up reference calls correct so if we were off the but but if we're off the beaten track then we would have to say that we cannot call anyone who's employed by the district because they would then know that somebody from their district had applied for this job but you're not making any calls until after the finalists have been named

084you don't understand let me see if i can be clear more clear going back to reference checks you said we could determine who we might call that's not listed on their reference so if we say okay i'm going to call the high school a high school principal in this district and ask them questions then that high school principal would know that their superintendent or whoever was applying for this position wouldn't they that name is already public right they would know because it's been in the press release that went out that said these are the four people we're interviewing and then a few days later you would make calls and if you made it to a high school principal they won't be surprised if they saw the press release or the article about that person's candidacy

085so we're not making so we're not doing any reference checks until after they've been declared finalists is that correct correct correct right correct between the 11th timeline that we were talking about so i apologize for my confusion msba will make reference check calls as part of our vetting before you name your finalists but we always talk to the candidate first one to see if they are still interested and two to ask their permission to call the references they've listed on their application and if the re if the candidate or applicant says yes that's fine we'll make those calls and contact people and yet we ask those references to keep in mind this is private data and that this person gave us permission to talk to you regarding their application for rochester public schools so we

086deal with that on our end before we bring you our recommendations you will not have to deal with it because those names are public by then we wouldn't put you in that position but it's a great point um internal external candidates need to be treated exactly the same if you have an internal candidate that's shouting it from the rooftops that they've applied for the job you as board members cannot confirm or deny that they have applied all right so you can't say anything because it's that person's choice to share with folks that yeah i've applied all well and good if they want to tell people that but you as board members have got to stay out of that conversation because that is private data so you have to handle it very very carefully okay all

087right let's come back then on may 7th to the idea of reference checks again it's not a huge endeavor and i don't want to become a big burden for anyone so i will help guide you through that i'll send you the list of questions we recommend you can pick two or three you don't have to go off the beaten path it depends on your personal preferences and the time you have to do so plenty of board members call people listed as references or people who've written letters of recommendations plenty of boards do it that way so don't feel obligated to go outside of the beaten path okay all right the next page on page let's see is it 37 or so deliberating in public and i changed that word because this says debating in public

088this summer when i redo our materials i have to change that word because a debate implies that there are two sides and when you are talking about your candidates in a public forum there are no sides there is one side it's the side of the district and the side of the students that will be attending a school under the leadership of your interim superintendent so deliberating in public is something i want to close out with here today because you are discussing your candidates in a public forum the way you speak about them is extraordinarily important obviously on may 7th you'll be speaking about them only in terms of candidates a b and c that evening when you are discussing those applicants you cannot use for example gender pronouns that's the toughest one for people to

089um get the hang of we really encourage you to say they you might say well candidate b i really liked their background in special education or i felt candidates see their experience in a large school district is very beneficial you will need to be vague on may 7th you cannot discuss this in a way that gives away any identifying information you can't say i like candidate c because they've worked in minneapolis public schools and i think that that's a large district that's comparable to us that's identifying at some point someone could figure out well who's played it or who worked at minneapolis that might be wanting to work in rochester so can't use district names can't use their name clearly that's the most important one try not to slip up and refer to anyone by

090name try not to use gender pronouns keep it as high level and as vague as possible but also keep in mind this conversation might not take very long boards are often surprised you had about a week to look through all of these applications and get to know these applicants you're going to have some that you know you want to interview right off the bat you'll have some you have questions on and there will be some that you're like no i don't feel that candidate has the background we're looking for so i'm putting them in the no pile right off the bat you'll come into may 7th already having done that work we will then join you from msba and we will say here are our recommendations we recommend you interview candidate b d f and

091g and we'll tell you very briefly we'll read a few comments in a couple of reference check thoughts on that candidate each of those we'll turn it back over to the board it might be that all of you feel the same exact candidates are the ones you want to interview so in that case the discussion might last two or three minutes someone might say those are the same four that i had and another board member might say yeah i had those same ones but i also am curious about candidate h why not h and we will do our best to answer that question as to why we're not recommending candidate h but we have to be like likewise very careful of data privacy so candidate h we might say well one of your hiring criteria

092was this and in our process of looking into this candidate we felt that they did not meet that criteria as strongly as the other four did we're going to be vague in our responses um now you as a board might have a lot of questions maybe you have a whole different four than the four that we're going to recommend and that's okay you are not obligated to take our recommendations automatically you are required as a board to discuss and decide as a collective group who do you want to interview but i think people are often surprised that the same ones we're recommending have risen to the top for board members as well so it could be a pretty short discussion on may 11th it could take us a half an hour because you don't like

093any of the four that msba is recommending as a group none of you see the value of a b h and f or whomever and you want to dig deep and ask well what about this candidate that candidate and we will tell you within boundaries why we're not recommending that person but you will make your own decision and choose who you want to interview we're looking at four candidates right now um and so that is something that uh i guess you'll facilitate chair marvin on the seventh the board deliberations and someone will make a motion usually is to interview the full slate of candidates imovie interview candidates a b c and d for the position of interim superintendent someone seconds it and then the board passes it if you are stuck however you could say

094at this point i recommend that we move to interview candidate a you could take a vote on candidate a and then you could say i also if someone makes a motion for candidate c you take a vote on candidate c you could do it candidate by candidate by candidate most often it's a slate of folks because there's been consensus built but again it depends on how your conversation shakes out that night so first of all i'm deliberating in public any questions on may 7th and the need to protect the identities of these folks okay then i want to move on to deliberating and public following the interviews you don't get to close the door and have a frank conversation about each of the four people you've interviewed their strengths and weaknesses you you can't do

095that you're going to do it in public so it's very very important that everything you say about these candidates reflect their strengths if you keep it focused on strengths you will come across very positively to any candidates who are watching you imagine putting yourself out there in front of the board and whoever else watches this interview only to then observe the board talking about your performance and having you nitpick all the things they did wrong you do not need to do that so instead if you focus on the strengths it will make for a much more positive experience not just for your board but for your stakeholders and for your candidates as well if someone for example is very nervous in their interview you don't need to point that out during your deliberations everybody saw

096it okay no need to bring it up uh some people have a verbal tick where maybe they say um a lot you don't need to point that out those are the things that by not saying anything about them really truly elevates the board to a very professional and considerate and compassionate level if however then you're focusing only on strengths everyone's got strengths no matter what their interviewing skills are these people are going to be very qualified and so focus on their skills experience background answers to a question you thought were fabulous you might say wow i thought sally jones's answers to the question on equity was phenomenal that really impressed me so focus on the positives and it'll be very successful we'll go through the actual interview process and how you then deliberate you know

097with strengths and maybe the report on the reference check calls i'll have a report to summarize for you on stakeholder feedback we'll go through all of that on the 7th but for now my biggest point is to please be positive and don't nitpick what didn't go so well potentially in their interview there have been times where the number one choice by a board you know say they have two or three extraordinarily strong candidates the number one choice for whatever reason does not come to terms in the contract with the board if they then make an offer to perhaps the second choice candidate there's many candidates who have accepted the job happily because of how they felt treated by the board treated with respect treated positively we even had a board go to their third choice

098one time when negotiations fell through with the first and second choices and the third choice candidate has turned out to be a phenomenal superintendent and because their part their experience was so positive they were happy to accept the position so really important to do that one other point i want to make on deliberating in public it's important i think i think this board is very aware of this that you check your bias at the door i'll give you one example just to let you know um what we see sometimes during deliberations and people don't even know unconscious bias is a real thing and i know you know that but we had a board last year that was deliberating on their final two candidates and um really strong candidates and there was a board member that

099in discussing the first candidate said you know what he has a really strong personality i could see him walking main street making connections i think people get along really well with him he's just very direct i think that would be really good for a district and everyone's nodding and then they go around and people keep saying other strengths that this candidate had they started talking about second candidate and the exact same board member said you know she had a really strong personality i don't know that that's going to fly in our community i don't know if i could see her fit name with people around here because she's so direct i just didn't see that that being a fit mic drop i mean exact same comments and to this board member unconsciously a direct personality

100was a positive for the male candidate and a direct personality for the female candidate was a negative so gender bias is something msba is trying to bring to the forefront with our school boards to be very aware not to do that if you catch yourself being tempted to do that and then the flip side very often is well she was very comforting very warm i could see the staff really feeling comfortable with her there was a nurturing side to her i really liked well he seemed kind of you know weak and i don't know that people would you know enjoy talking to him about personal things and so it's the flip side where there are traits some people associate as positive for females and negative for males so it's an fyi it's a please don't

101do that and we're seeing less and less of it but i think it's an important point to raise with school boards just to ensure that it's on your radar okay that's all i've got for deliberating in public there's a list of do's and don'ts um there's general guidelines but i am certain that you're going to do a fabulous job and we will have a script for you to use during deliberations to keep you on track with what you're doing this this and this before you actually start deciding who to make the offer to the rest of this packet is the sample superintendent contract now i will tell you that we also have a sample model contract for an interim superintendent it is only a page and a half long but we're currently updating it so

102when the interim superintendent model contract is done i will share that with the board if you'd like to use the interim contract as a model for what you're going to be using for your superintendent interim superintendent so that's in process of being updated you'll find it on our website right now uh but we did want to do some fine-tuning of it relative to a couple of things so i'll make that available to you when the time comes therein finishes my school board interview training and preparation session are there any questions on everything i just said i know i said a lot okay moving on thank you very much we're now going to talk about stakeholders for a moment and i know that this was something we've discussed previously and when you look at the the

103packet of information that was sent to you in attachment to the first page is stakeholder consideration it says audience input forms stakeholder groups to consider for interview observations now what you've decided to do in this case is the board will interview up to four people on may 11th or may 11th and 13th you will have stakeholder representatives observing those interviews and providing feedback through an electronic form that msba provides we have an audience input form that asks people to identify up to three strengths of each of the finalists and up to three opportunities for growth for each of the finalists as well they're asked to provide that feedback within 15 minutes of the interview after each of the interviews and then we take it and summarize it and distill it down into the the themes

104and patterns again that the stakeholders have observed this is simply an outline that we use with every school district uh it can vary depending upon the size of the district it can vary upon the just the stakeholder groups that should be represented and so on so forth the only caveat i would make is i would change this at the bottom where it suggests that school board number of people providing feedback should not exceed 15. i would change that to 30 for rochester public schools obviously you're you are a bigger district so you have more stakeholder groups than a district for instance of you know five or ten thousand students also though msba has an additional day potentially to create the summary for you if you go with schedule one where it's four interviews a half

105hour break and then deliberations then i'm going to hold you to no more than 15 people because we need that half hour to prepare that report for you and it's a lot of information to distill down in half an hour so then we can't have more than 15. but if we have the next day to actually collect and collaborate or see me collect and collapse the information into themes then we can have up to 30. much larger than that and it starts to be too big of a representative sample of your your stakeholder groups so i'm going to stop talking for a moment and let you discuss this and ask questions but that would be my recommendation that you have representatives from different groups who are selected by their membership you as a board should

106in no way be involved in picking people to watch the interview you can pick the groups you know bargaining units or administrators administrative group or community groups but they should send you the person who will be representing their voice during the stakeholder input for the interviews okay all right i'm gonna sign off here but i will answer any and all questions uh director garcia who had um i think i'm missing and maybe we're assuming that they would potentially be part of a different one of these groups but parent involvement in this i didn't see where we would maybe have a caregiver input well i hope i can do a better job of answering that than i can that's one of my biggest questions is who who do we decide not to involve i mean some

107of these groups are relatively finite parents is huge so i apologize uh pto is supposed to be on there um so if there's a parent organization or if there are representative parent groups yes they should be on there um i should oh student representative is on there as well but yes without question especially considering 60 plus percent of your respondents were parents caregivers so that was an oversight on our list thank you for catching that director garcia and i'm sorry about that so yes but whatever avenues you have to reach into those communities if there is one parent group if there are multiple parent groups you would want to invite each of them to send a representative and again i'm looking for one board member once we've talked about this for maybe the next 10

108minutes or so looking for one person on the board that i can work with starting monday to invite those folks you can also do it over the weekend if you're interested but i'm happy to help guide how these groups get invited how you process the invitations and collect the email addresses for the people who are going to be showing up that day to observe but absolutely parents and i'm sorry for the oversight i'm miss nathan so we may have some um parent leaders from some of our ethnic communities um that might need translation services so um i i know we have to have a conversation about how this is going to be done virtual versus versus in person but um is that do you have any experience with that or how the district has helped

109to facilitate that process or are they on their own to get a translator or can you help us with that that's a great question we had one district that attempted to have non-english speaking people participate in stakeholder feedback it did not go well because there were so many roadblocks but again we were trying to summarize this feedback during a half hour break i think in the case of rochester if your deliberations didn't occur until thursday if the district were able to provide bilingual support to folks who are observing i'm not sure how that would work because these are potentially four one-hour interviews and how a translator would do they translate it live in a new language while they're listening are they able to do that or they wait till it's um recorded and then translate

110it i'm not sure how it works but that that would need to fall on the district's shoulders to try and help us help us do that we obviously don't have the resources i hate to put it back on the stakeholder themselves to find their own translator i know an awful lot of parents for example rely on their kids to translate information for them from the school district if they have a system that really works well just remember that these are live interviews and a lot is said in the course of one hour so trying to make sure they understand all the answers not just the questions but the answers and then providing the feedback to us in written format on the audience input form it's it's laborious and then one time we tried it unfortunately

111it just didn't work but we are more than happy to work with the district that thinks they can do it direct garcia do you have another yeah sorry i there were a couple of things that i just wanted to follow up with but and to to director nathan's point i mean for interpreter services you could certainly do both it would just be on us as the district to figure out which would be more um useful to the person requiring the service i was just going to ask so when when when are we as a board getting all together to decide how we flush out the between 15 and 30 people and or is it not just that one person you're asking for to start one day that won't help in the interest of time i

112would hope that tonight the board can provide big big picture direction for these are the groups we want you to reach out to and you can certainly identify the groups tonight and then i would hope that you could entrust the one person that i'll work with to send the invitations and coordinate who's going to be participating because i'll need those it's going to be the 11th i'll need those back names and email addresses probably by may 5th or 6th because then i need to reach out to that group of i'll say 30 people i need to reach out to those people with specific instructions and a practice link so they can go in and see the form and get used to filling it out and get them the links to the interviews although potentially maybe

113michelle can help with that so there's coordination on the back end we can't be identifying these people on the 10th for example that's far too short of notice people also need to be able to clear their calendars set aside the times on the 11th or the 13th to be available to watch all of these and every single person i should mention as well if they're going to provide input they have to watch all of the finalists interviews they cannot watch one or two they have to watch all of them so that we're getting feedback on all four for example from one person so did i answer your question director yes garcia did and i guess to the board i suppose in terms of like the educators that we would be choosing from like early childhood

114elementary middle and high school i feel like because we're such a diverse in terms of type of school district like we have some that have more than just you know it's not just like a first second grade third fourth grade and we have community schools i wonder if we want you know if we can pick people from those pockets of differently structured schools or like the um the adult learning center like that kind of thing or make sure that when we're that we diversify if we only want four educators that maybe we're seeking out students or other community members from those different areas within our district i agree with you jess it's in order to get a good representation we're going to need about 200 people and and so it's sort of an issue of

115who how how can we focus this and i think we're going to have to look at doing pretty well because i think it for me this is really important and really frustrating uh mr barlow okay along the same lines then um if i understood you correctly barb then tonight in fact even now would be the time for we the board to say 15 or 30. uh if that is then indeed the case um chair marvin would it be appropriate to then start offering those names and or organizations would you be expecting that to occur at this time then go ahead down sorry i'm sorry so i guess i was awaiting your leadership regarding this yeah good luck with that um i wonder if the first thing we have to decide is whether we want to

116do the whole process on one night or on two because that's going to determine sort of the limit of the number of people we can get and barbara is that the first decision mission sure we could leap ahead to the schedule take a look at the very last piece of information in the packet and maybe choose between option one and option two you could certainly do that okay i had a question about the first part of the discussion but my opinion for the second part is that i personally appreciate time to deliberate i really would be in favor of having all of the interviews and then there's that effect where you can remember the first person better and remember the last person better and then forget kind of what the middle people said so that

117would also give a little bit more time to kind of clear my head and then reload all of that information fresh when i'm when i'm doing comparisons so i vote for the all the interviews one night deliberations another night all right thank you ms workman um director amundsen just took all the words out of my mouth so i i would agree with her on that all right is there anyone who would prefer having trying to complete the process in one night if you would prefer doing the process on two nights can you do a thumbs up okay we're not voting making it very clear we're not voting but the consensus seems to be to use both nights the first one to interview folks the second one to have the discussion right that being said then

118if we can have up to 30 people who will be observing i think at this point it's probably all right to suggest from which which groups we approach to ask if they would be willing to send a representative ms mclaughlin i just wanted to clarify i think the topic came up earlier but i'm not sure we came to a consensus i'm gathering that the stakeholder stakeholders will be by teams are we going to be by teams as well with the candidates as well are we all going to be by teams or are we going to be a hybrid of that mix okay maybe i don't understand your question um the stakeholders will be observing the board interviews so they will watch your interviews live um and we do need to talk about it if it's

119electronically or in person teams in terms of microsoft teams not teams ah got it thank you director mclaughlin i appreciate it that's a decision the board has yet to make i believe as to whether you are interviewing in person on the 11th uh because then that means the stakeholders would need to either be in that same place to watch um live or if you are live streaming it they could certainly watch it live streaming because the form they fill out is electronic they'll have the link they could do that from anywhere actually okay and just if we can maybe put that one to rest i think and somebody correct me if i'm wrong uh that because we would have a group of 40 people it would be very difficult for us for those who are

120observing to meet along with us and the question just went out to our tech guy are you able to do teams and youtube at the same time so let's put that aside until we get an answer back from kurt ms amundsen laurie i'm still confused about the question director mclaughlin asked though because our materials say interviews done by a team so where are the board members going to be and that's the conversation we're having right now is it going to be live with the board members here i don't think we can have the observers here they have to be remote or is the entire thing going to be done remotely like we're doing part of my question too is where are the candidates going to be are they going to be electronic or are they

121going to be in person another good question so if i could weigh in on this we haven't had experience yet with being back in the boardroom and if we have some people like the the candidates on a screen or something and us in the boardroom in person i'm just really worried about technical glitches and us being able to hear them well and those types of things okay hang on for a minute kurt is here and i think he can give us some perspective on this kurt do you want to speak to the board here or um okay hang on for one minute just listen to the expert on this it is possible after april 27th when we do our first meeting back in person that they'll discover that this can happen to do live and

122remote um kurt has said that he is more comfortable at this point of having the entire interview process be done remotely having the observers remote and having us remote the candidates sorry yeah that's okay i would agree with that because we just did a national match for our um pre-doctoral interns and with all of us in a room and we had to masks and like some people virtual i mean it was such a disconnected and sort of impersonal process that if we could at least all see each other's faces and i think it increases accessibility the one thing i would suggest though is if we are going to have individuals present that maybe would require um some sort of assistance or device on our behalf like if we are going to be providing um somebody

123to to to do interpretive services that if they need to be physically on-site somewhere that we have something set up for them as well um like if they were planning on we need to have this person come and interpret like they were planning to come to the boardroom and we need several people that maybe they are able to do that in a room socially distanced or whatever so that we're using one interpreter instead of maybe like five or six in like all of these different places and having to send them to people's private homes sure and we could absolutely have people coming into the edison building not being in the boardroom but again if everybody were doing this through uh microsoft teams at this point kurt said he's much more confident in that ms nathan

124so i just want to make sure that i'm clear about the scenario because personally i my preference is to have the candidate and the board members of the boardroom and i guess i'm unclear as to why the people who are watching and providing feedback of the interviews can't watch on youtube because they won't be interacting with us nor will they be interacting with the candidate during the interview so that's what we're doing during a normal meeting is people watch our meeting on youtube and observe it so i i guess i somebody clarify why that option isn't available to us hang on again just so i'm understanding you're saying the candidates would have to come here for interviews which i would assume in a normal non-pandemic year that would probably be the case barb uh you're

125correct in a normal non-pandemic year that is the case this year if you are in the boardroom and the candidates in the room with you keep in mind though that you need to be pretty spread out and so you won't have up close personal views of their faces because you are fairly spread out you may have to even have your masks on depending upon what the cdc guidelines are saying at that time we've run in the same thing some of the same issues director garcia mentioned in terms of it feeling far more distant in person because right now i can see your face is framed beautifully in your cameras and if you meet in person do you each have your own individual devices so people can still see you directly it's not one big room

126where you're very tiny okay so there's that consideration and the other thing to think about though is and we have had some districts this year just in the last few weeks conduct interviews in person where the board and the candidate were in person and yes sometimes the stakeholders are watching remotely sometimes they're in the auditorium with them one thing to keep in mind is should there be someone whether it's a stakeholder a candidate or a board member who is exposed to coveted needs to quarantine then they will have to participate remotely and sometimes it's on the very last minute the day before the interview they realize they have to quarantine for 10 days so you might need to make those arrangements anyway even if you plan on in person depending upon individuals exposures the latest

127from kurt is that kathy what you had suggested is is possible but i i think a recommendation is let's wait and see how the meeting goes on april 27th i mean right now we've decided to to do this over two days so let's just see how the tech works and then i think we can make that decision later and it seems to me what we're looking at right now is which groups do we want to reach out to and ask if they would provide a representative to be involved in this process miss amundsen well i i hear that you're trying to move the conversation on but i think yeah if this is the time for us to talk about our preferences between those two options when else are we going to get so i would

128say my plan a option would be for everybody to be in person in the boardroom and if on that night we find that on the 27th we find out that there's gonna potentially be technical difficulties then plan b would be everybody go to teams okay so all or nothing would be mine with the preference of being in person okay so here yeah loud and clear so let's again wait until the 27th and then i don't think this is going to be a lengthy discussion and i'm hoping we can get through the agenda for this evening to the agenda for the 27th pardon we're adding it to the agenda for the 27th well at the end of the meeting you know we'll see what happens and i think we could even talk about it at the

129meeting on may 4th is that does that work for everybody okay thank you okay i see uh mr barlow and director garcia well i see all of you but you have your hands up yes so i would like to offer for consideration of the naacp education committee as as well as um representative from rci rochester community initiative and then finally a representative from the rochester public school employees of color group thank you dr garcia my list was essentially identical the rci slash youth commission because there's a lot of crossover they've been very explicit about wanting to participate in this um so if we have one student or two students or whatever that are part of both that might be useful um naacp rochester their education committee and any sort of like interfaith potentially um you

130know as like a grassroots group i think would also be maybe helpful as at least for general consideration and the rochester employees of color okay all right we have in the past and i think this is really important included rochester principals association um their two representatives well they can decide who the representatives are going to be but i'm i think it wouldn't be a mistake to ask for ask them to provide a couple you know one from the high school and one from the early education or preschool in elementary as well as representatives from the rochester education association and from the cabinet also you know i absolutely think we need student voice rci youth commission but i'm wondering if it might be an idea to ask for one student from each high school i mean

131we'd end up with four students and i i don't know if the time would work for them but just something to consider would it be five students because um alc has its own building well you'll see jm century and john marshall oh and then i was heading here but i was also counting the student you had already discussed from rca oh okay so we've got naacp education committee students one way or the other employees of color group possibly an interfaith representative rea cabinet i i wonder if our equity coordinator you know one of those two folks would be appropriate um miss nathan so um i'd like to recommend someone from the cradle to career rochester partnership and as far as the the parent organization so you know i'm affiliated with pta we don't really have

132a um we don't have other people who are umbrella with pta in town we could go to any of the local pta units and ask for them to nominate someone but there are there are other community groups that um julie rousek and melissa brandt have worked with in those community town halls and those um well represented i think it was 10 different ethnic groups in rochester so maybe we want to ask julie or melissa to identify perhaps some parents from those groups who participated in the town halls and have interacted with district issues that that might be a good source of appearance okay and we'll have some crossover from some of these organizations they may be from that organization but they may also be a district parent i think i think that i'm feeling a

133little bit better about is that right now we are naming organizations or already kind of created groups which makes sense and we we can't have every representative we want but if we go with groups that have already been created at least there's some equity there in terms of how we are determining who we reach out to and i think that asking melissa or julie for instance to reach out to the leaders of the groups that they meet with i think that makes sense okay uh and how many how many i mean is it a single one that's what we're asking yeah let's try let's try to get the groups first and then maybe look at the number it's because it's a good question kathy uh melissa do you have another idea a list of suggestions

134that mentions chamber of commerce so i think that would be important and um it lists leadership of any major foundation so we could ask our psf i think i could ask sir say it again rpsi fresh chipotle school foundation um all right uh dr garcia yes i just want to kind of i guess follow up on maybe a comment so not so much a very specific person but when i'm looking in that middle section where it says a member of district administration member of buildings and grounds food service transportation paraprofessional secretarial staff um ell director or cultural liaison my my recommendation would be to choose people not from the same cluster like we don't want everyone from northwest or you know we have 27 going on 29 schools in our district and i feel like

135we talk about the same five over and over like we need to diversify and so if we can pick people from those categories from different schools i think that would be helpful okay and again i think one of the i hear what you're saying i think one of the challenges is going to be you know if we decide the category we don't really get to decide that person um but yes you'd mention maintenance paraprofessionals that type of thing i wonder um someone from the paraprofessionals union someone from the maintenance food service seiu yeah well i guess that's maybe more too than for the person who's going to be working with barb to send out invites as if like our rci people and all of our education staff and everybody's coming from like mayo and john

136marshall you know that's two two schools we need to like move them over or at least request to send out invitations maybe and make specific like can we get from maybe one of our lower ses schools or where there's like high free and reduced lunch percentage that kind of thing because those are the people that we're routinely missing out on and those are the people that i feel like we need to truly be making you know an effort to include in this process yeah good point uh miss nathan kathy oh yeah okay i i don't have the list in front of me but i want to make sure that if we're going to include bargaining units we make sure that we include all of them and i and i think we have nine bargaining units

137if that's correct but i want to make sure we have the the correct nine so i've already heard the principals association the rea food service correct paraprofessionals clerical um did you say principles already i need seven eight and nine who can remember what seven eight and nine are well we can look that up too if there are nine of them i mean we can sure look that up and just you know if that's what we decide we can reach out to all all the groups okay found it hold on found it i did it's just opening okay uh maintenance oh um non well we have non schedule um we have cabinet but i think you already wrote you already said that right yeah um all right community education so i think that's nine it's community

138education a separate bargaining group yes i think i don't i don't i don't have an assignment for them but i have an agreement for them so is that the adult basic educate the adult uh literacy group okay so you're talking specifically about adult literacy and in those programs rather than community jet ed in general okay not like or we want somebody representing community ed right so so you want okay so you want all all all of these groups not just the ones that we have negotiated contracts with correct these are the ones we have negotiated contracts with okay i mean as opposed to they're not really a union or anything and we just tell them what they're going to get i mean we might have a conversation with them but it's there's no bargaining from

139their end okay melissa could we ask somebody from our community school staff from that department oh [Applause] are you talking about one of the community schools uh coordinators for instance billy rules jack or just somebody who's working with that sure sure okay barb i don't oh kathy you want something else you have something else nope okay so barb we it looks like we have about 20 different groups here um is that and i don't know how what's the next step now do we need to try i would suggest that's great first of all well done um with 20 groups you may want to take a look at which are potentially the 10 largest groups where you might be able to invite two people from those groups so which groups should potentially have two folks representing

140that group just because of the size of who's in it that would be the next step and then it's identifying who i'm going who am i going to work with to get these invitations and making sure people are available because you do want to keep in mind that you're looking at a commitment from folks on tuesday may 11th from four o'clock until 8 45 right so four o'clock till basically nine o'clock four to nine if there are employees of the district you want to be careful about contract hours you'll make sure you pay people if you're infringing on their work for the district of their district employees all of those considerations as well so making sure that expectations in the email are super clear and i would just need to know who am i going

141to work with on that that would be the the only step remaining and then the expectation is that they're not then involved in the conversation on the 13th correct that is purely the board conversation anyone can watch of course and listen to your deliberations their input would be provided within 15 minutes of each of those four interviews and then their obligation is done but they can certainly sit in and watch everything you're talking about on thursday okay thank you miss amundsen they thought of a another subgroup um it might be nice to include the people who will be working most closely with the superintendent in the edison superintendent's office like miss christian or mrs miss severson okay the problem is we can't afford to let them go for that much time now good point good

142point who's gonna who's gonna run things around here um my next steps then would it be appropriate for me to send out this list to the board and then have them respond either to me or to you in terms of are we missing something or which of these groups or maybe to send out a suggestion these groups and maybe a couple or three from certain groups or what's our next step we could spend another hour you certainly could you'd need to do it over the weekend though so that i'm ready to hit the ground running on monday with the board designee or you could look at that list tonight do you already know which are the ten largest groups and you could simply say two folks from each of these ten and the rest will

143be one person or do you need to have continued polling and feedback from board members in order to do so karen wait go ahead and win on that one i just want to make sure we don't lose sight of the recommendation here in terms of the level of representation from the different teacher areas the early childhood the elementary middle and high school so that if we're talking about rea is that separate from representation from all levels of education well if i understand the process correctly we're identifying the organization and they're going to re recommend individuals but we could say please recommend an early childhood in elementary a middle and a high school preferably not from the same feeder pattern right so that we've got some spread i'd like to try and do a similar thing

144with the principle so that we don't have just one principle or if they select two it's two you know two elementary principles i mean maybe one elementary and one secondary or one elementary one middle school and one secondary principle because principles do work closely with the superintendent i mean sometimes i think when you're looking at representatives with i mean director amundsen brought up an excellent point like who's working most closely with the superintendent you know so obviously somebody maybe in that office or um you know um cabinet members um administrators are certainly going to be the ones who are going to have you know perhaps even day-to-day right working relationship and we yeah we could sure ask them that um technically they have two leaders of rpa in elementary and a secondary principle and generally

145those are the two but of course it would be up after that okay and um miss amundsen we already get diversity council no good that'd be good though okay and um miss mclaughlin in thinking about the principles i'm thinking that if we have the ability to expand up to 30 that we should include all three of the levels the the elementary the middle school and the high school level okay and um ms nathan so i've been trying to keep a tally of how many actual people we're talking about so if we um have multiple individuals from the rochester principals association and i would actually recommend that that be four because it doesn't include pre-k so pre-k elementary middle and high school before four from rea um we're talking about four students one from each high

146school and then every other group that we spoke of would be one we're at 31 people so the idea of finding the bigger groups and asking for two we're already at 31. all right does this work then if if i come up with this with the numbers that kathy just did send it out and then board members you let me have it if i got it wrong this will not be a back and forth you just send things to me i will send out then a revised list with numbers i could do that by sunday hopefully if we can get moving on this barbed is that reasonable or do you think that's just an accident waiting to happen okay does that work for everybody julie did you have something else okay all right and and

147seriously if i've got it wrong if i've missed something um just let me know i'll send out a revision if that one doesn't work i'll send out another revision and so it'll just be and then by monday we should have it down so we can contact those organizations and ask them if they would invite folks to be included mr barlow uh so barb you were hoping uh tonight to have uh one of us identified as that board representative i just want to clarify on the role that individual will play and that may guide whether i'll volunteer to be that person great thank you for asking director farlow so i have some general guidelines about reaching out to stakeholder groups that i can share with someone districts do it different ways because every district is different

148generally speaking smaller districts may pick up the phone call the leadership of each of those groups you've identified explain what's happening and just do it that way larger districts do tend to do it with an email and you could either do a mass email to all 20 groups or however many you finished or if you have the time you simply send the same exact email to leadership of those different groups so it's a copy and paste kind of function depends on the time that you have available you would ask them first of all you explain what the purpose is it's very brief you'd explain the commitment the day and the time and then they could expect to hear from msba with further instructions and a practice link to provide their feedback and then you'd get

149them a deadline i need to get the name and email address for the person representing your group by and will agree on a deadline together and then you would send that email out as those responses come back in if questions come back in that you cannot answer please have them call me i'll make sure you have my cell phone number and i'm happy to talk to them about what the process will look like for those stakeholders and then once you have the email addresses and names of the people participating you'd forward them all to me and i would then reach out to each of them in a large group and say thank you so much for participating so appreciated here's what's expected and i would specifically lay out the times of the interviews here's a

150practice link for the feedback form please let me know if you have questions so that's it's a coordinator role more than anything and it is um it's meant to be very simple we don't want you again getting into the weeds with people and we certainly don't want you recommending or picking anyone to participate did that answer your question yes and i like samples so chair um marvin uh if you don't have it if you don't have a particular board member in mind that you like to sign this i'll be more than happy to take it on mr barlow i'm not seeing many other volunteers or any oh you just got a thumbs up a couple of thumbs up and i can think of nobody better to do this job than you so thank you i'm

151grateful a grateful nation acknowledges your service thank you sure and also thank you director barbara i look forward to working with you on it uh we will be in touch then monday with one another uh once we've gotten the final information from chairmarvin so thank you for volunteering and i look forward to working with you on this all right can i also suggest that when you send the email out to the board to confirm the list that if anybody on the board has contact information for the leadership of any of these groups that they provided in the response to you because that might help director barlow's work miss nathan i think that is a genius suggestion thank you well geniuses may be too strong a term but it's a really good suggestion thank you all

152right thank you you did a wonderful job on that um you stayed out of the weeds and you did a great job of identifying the stakeholders that need to be invited to observe your interviews so i'm looking forward to that now the only thing we have left are the interview questions does anyone want a five-minute break typically these questions take 15 20 minutes to identify but if you'd like to take a break we certainly can i've seen some thumbs up okay five minutes it's 6 35 so by 6 40 is everyone able to be back and pick up on the question says our conclusion to the meeting is that okay with your marvin yeah okay just fyi i don't think we ever went to break on youtube so hello world do so barb are you

153going to begin by giving us the questions that you recommend yes okay you can let me know when we're ready to go i'm happy to facilitate the questions but i don't want to start until everyone's ready okay i've seen melissa julie are you back dr garcia i'm here um jess is here okay we're ready to go great all right thank you so the first thing i want to let you know is this is your opportunity to practice being vague so on may 7th when you're discussing your applicants you'll again again need to be very vague because of data privacy issues tonight when we're discussing the questions i'm also going to ask you to practice being vague because you really don't want to be revealing these questions in advance of the interview if you for example

154specifically read a question out loud and the board says yeah i really like that let's use it you are sort of showing your hand with some of the questions and i i think it it might be advisable for the board to speak about these questions only in terms of the numbers so for example someone might say i really like questions three and five and we'll see how many people agree if you for instance don't like some of the questions in that category and you want to refer back to that training packet pages 28 to 34 you could say i might suggest instead question so that's how we're going to try to speak about the questions just so that you aren't publicly sharing all of your interview questions before may 11th does that make sense absolutely

155okay so uh what i've done in the interest of time is i took your hiring criteria on the list of questions i've sent you as suggestions i think there's 31 questions the first thing i'll say generally speaking question one and the very last question are sort of standard all right those do tend to count toward your potential 15 questions so you could change question one if you'd like i did have a board say one time why is that necessary we've seen all of their application materials well the reason it really is necessary is for the people who are listening particularly your stakeholders uh haven't seen all of the application materials haven't read the cover letters and so question one or some version of it will give your candidates an application to explain that about themselves

156question one and then the last question again is one that you really do want to ask so i think those two questions should be a given but if anyone has issues with them these are your questions we can certainly pull them then there are a total of eight other categories there are seven hiring criteria those are in bold you'll recognize the hiring criteria are exactly the same as in your leadership profile in your vacancy brochure so i have suggested anywhere from two to six questions in each of your hiring criteria areas as well as some general questions at the end so of those eight categories if you pick one question from each you'll be at 10 questions some of these categories might carry more weight for the board in terms of your hiring criteria so

157you might want to select two or even three now when these questions are asked of your candidates they won't be in this order okay for example you're hiring criteria on equity that is the first and foremost hiring criteria you would not ask three equity questions in a row instead i will place them throughout the interview so that you keep circling back to some of these issues so i would not say that you sort of you don't want people to become comfortable asking questions in one particular area so we're going to mix it up i also will pull the hiring criteria questions out excuse me the hiring criteria out for your finalistic questions now us board members do have um a rubric you're going to use to evaluate your candidate's answer so i'm going to tell

158you in advance that once you settle on we'll say 15 questions you will also have an electronic form to fill out after each interview and i will send these questions to you in advance so you can practice with that link it will contain your 15 questions and after each question you select exceeds meets doesn't meet or timed out it's the e m d form so if someone's answer to a question exceeds your expectations you select exceeds they get an e if you feel they really didn't answer the question very well and you're just not pleased with the answer they gave you can put a does not meet and if you thought it was an average answer you give you know meets meets my expectations so you'll practice that in advance and then we will put

159together a report for the board that shows you the total of e m and d for every candidate you interview it's anonymous it doesn't say which board member ranked which candidate how it simply gives you an insight into how your fellow board members felt about candidates the more ease they have obviously they exceeded expectations so the stronger candidates will have a lot of ease if there's a candidate with a lot of ds does not meet that's your indication that the board at least as a whole didn't think the questions were answered very very well so it's a tool it's not the tool it's not a mathematical way to select your interim superintendent but it is a tool so you'll be using these questions and evaluating each question when they give you an answer the timed

160out option is only going to be used if they run out of time if they're so long-winded and we'll let them know when there's 30 minutes left and five minutes left will be timekeepers for you during your interviews if they run out of time then you select the timed out for the questions that they didn't get to which would be a shame again because that last question is pretty important so that's how you're going to use a metric matrix matrix to evaluate your folks uh your candidates um but at least you would have 10 cat if there's 10 categories here the opening in the closing and then eight more one from each is ten questions i'm not saying that you have to i also took the stakeholder report and cross-referenced it with this list of

161questions i think there might be uh one area or two areas that will want to find one more question based on the stakeholder feedback to add into this so what i'd recommend right now at least initially is it goes most quickly if i say i need to see everybody so you put thumbs up how many really liked question one yeah how many would want to keep question two three four so we could do a very quick poll of the board and then go back and revisit the highest scoring questions as to which ones you really want to keep will that process work okay for everyone okay barb can we vote for more than one on each category i mean could we give thumbs up for all of them if you like them you sure could

162so far we're going through all i was thinking that you had a list that you thought would be the best for oh you're not that is this list of 31. oh good okay i think these 31 questions are best for rochester based on your hiring criteria that's why they're under those bolded categories okay um because they're relevant to that category so yes we're going to go through all 170 whatever okay however if as i said you had a chance to read the 178 questions you may have fallen in love with a question or two or more in that long list when we're done please let me know because we can add questions from that booklet of course if the rest of the board fears are relevant we're just going to try not to use the

163language to give away your questions okay okay thank you kathy you have a question but keeping in mind as we tell you what our preferences are we do have to narrow down the number of questions in each category so we we we should be saying well two is nice but five is better so i'm going to tell you i like which one i like better is that what you're looking for us to do yes and that's another way to do it director nathan thank you rather than saying how many want to keep question two how many one creep three how many people want to keep four we could actually say under that category of equity for example and we don't need to be coy about your hiring criteria because those been published so if i

164say proven experience and equity diversion and inclusion and you simply could say i really like question three five six and seven and maybe a consensus build so we don't have to go through each of them individually that's a a preference of the board what style you might have when you deliberate these things how would you like to proceed share marvin do you want to facilitate oh no no no i really don't melissa you have a question oh at this point i'm a little confused because this process means that if we had uh questions that weren't originally on the list or wording changes to the questions you've suggested we're unable to discuss them and so we're unable to use them so you're picking the questions and we're prioritizing them and we can't customize them you certainly

165can customize them usually what happens is board members will send me their wordsmithing preferences and i'll incorporate your comments into the questions when i redo these this weekend but no no no questions that aren't all already on your list for things that are unique to rochester could now be chosen because we can't talk about them so if they're not on 178 or not on the 31 and you want to add something correct could you perhaps put it in the chat box this evening do folks on youtube see the chat box you could enter a question in there if it's a from scratch customized question absolutely if you could throw it in the chat and no one really can see it that would be a great way to go about doing that that would be open

166meetings no no because the the folks watching the media not seeing these questions anyway so it'd be just a very similar way of sharing questions amongst board members as you make a decision on them all right and mr barlow and barb if you wouldn't mind just for clarification for the viewing public and myself once again the questions that are before us uh were based on and there are 10 broad categories but can you maybe walk through that briefly again so that again the public may know we might be reassured as well as to how we asked why msba ufc consultant have provided the questions that are before us right now certainly so in other words read the leadership profile out loud the hiring criteria you selected well i'm not trying to drag prolong this but

167it might be useful for the public to be aware of that so that they will know oh this relates to something that is already in place okay great thank you for the suggestion uh yes for the categories for questions which the board will be asking on may 11th we've suggested questions within uh categories specific to the hiring criteria and in rochester's case those criteria are someone who has proven experience in equity diversion diversity and inclusion someone who is able to create an environment for staff students and community that supports and unifies the school district third category of questions prioritizes listening as one of the most important communication and leadership skills the fourth criteria possesses a demonstrated ability to build and sustain a diverse leadership team based on trust and collaboration a fifth hiring criteria holds

168experience in communicating school district needs and successes of students and staff in a manner that is understandable and appreciated by all stakeholders another area of questions are around someone who provides leadership for the school district through clear direction and delegation supports the delegated work of the team and holds team members accountable for their actions and the final leadership profile criteria is someone who has proven experience in managing transition and i would encourage anyone who is watching this evening to go to the school district website because the vacancy brochure is on the website and it would look something like this and included on the second page of this brochure are those hiring criteria which the board identified as priorities for the interim superintendent so around those areas i just read we have questions suggested that fit

169that question area but again to someone's question earlier if the language isn't exactly what you want we can certainly somehow vaguely discuss it i do have one suggestion already tonight that i'm going to share or you could put it in the chat or you could email it to me because this is not going to be your final final list you'll actually look at these again on may 7th and on may 7th you will decide for certain that these are the questions you'd like to ask so you will have another opportunity to edit or provide feedback on them okay this is a draft that big word in watermark across the middle any other questions before we start is it all right if we ask you to just raise your hand and say i really like that

170question and we'll see if there's any trends emerging okay please be a little discerning don't say you like all 31 questions my feelings will not be heard if you don't like any of these questions these are simply from our experience ones that have gotten to the heart of these issues when folks are looking for appropriate interview questions for their candidates all right so in the first category of equity diversity and inclusion raise your hand if you like question two see none question three i see three question four raise your hand if you like question four director nathan will you put your manual hand up or the icon up if you're raising your hand because i can't see you on your camera i don't want you not to be counted you'll do it that way okay

171so is that a yes for question four did i see three people then for question four okay thank you question five ic3 raise your hand if you would like to keep question six i see two and i don't want to rush anybody i want to give you time to read the question but i saw two on question six and question seven can we pause for a minute because i just lost all of the tabs that i had open with questions on them yes we'll pause so now the pressure's on i have a question about that one question seven yeah to me it feels like a little bit leading towards a don't ask question i mean i i think it's a great question i would love to ask it but it just it feels like i

172feel like if i were asked that question i would be giving up something that is not automatically announced by the way that i look that makes sense you can certainly suggest a different wording to get at the same thing depending on how many folks like question seven i i can tell you that all the questions we've suggested both in the booklet and on this sheet have been looked at by our legal counsel and said that they are okay inappropriate okay and appropriate but you can certainly suggest other wordings um maybe in the chat room or an email to me as well i'm good to go now okay director wickham thank you all right so i have um zero for question two three on question three three on question four three on question five two on

173question six and how many like question seven i see two okay we'll come back to this so we're seeing some trends here then the hiring criteria around creating an environment for staff students in community that supports and unifies the district how many would like to keep question eight i just jump in and um tell director nathan that her hand is never going down and so i don't know if she knows that she's getting counted [Music] and maybe you might want to go back to seven because it had been up that whole time great perfect thank you director anderson uh let's go back to question seven for a moment due to that catch um how many would support keeping question seven okay we're at two as well all right supporting and unifying the school district how

174many would like to keep question eight i see three nine four on question nine how many uh question ten you see three okay thank you you add me to eight i had gotten lost on the document for a second and didn't raise my hand fast enough okay so h you wanna be added so i'd have four people on eight okay thank you i ask a question sure so one of my issues with the um questions in this section and i don't think it's giving anything away to say that the hiring criteria groups staff students and community together but in our stakeholder feedback we had a number of comments that were specific to the relationship between staff and the superintendent and i'm wondering about having a separate question that just focuses on creating an environment related

175to staff that's an interesting point um one of the edits i was going to suggest is on question 15 and maybe that's not the place that you would want it but if you look just ahead briefly since you asked the question on 15 there's one question which then it says provide an example i wonder if we wanted to add with staff right before the question mark on 15 because of some of the comments that came through on the stakeholder report so that's one place that we could be specific to staff or we could change the questions um eight nine or ten to be specific to staff as well so when we come back to that but i i wondered that same thing director nathan myself after seeing the stakeholder report director mclaughlin just think taking

176that one step further for question 15 i'm wondering if we could make it a two-parter one with staff and one more general sure so that we can get we can gather input on both yeah okay all right i'll read that one when we get there see how it sounds all right thank you the next hiring criteria is that some should be someone who prioritizes listening as one of the most important communication and leadership skills there are four questions that you may consider how many would like question 11. i see three question 12. i see two okay uh question 13. two fourteen oh director nathan were you a yes on thirteen okay okay three on thirteen thank you fourteen all right what you're hiring criteria about someone's ability to build and sustain a diverse leadership team

177based on trust and collaboration we could say with staff and then we could have a two-parter which could say as well as all other stakeholders or make it specific to the leadership team i'm going to look at the chat here in just a minute so 15 how many would like to keep 15 in some way shape or form seven got it all right we'll have to work on that one and whoever provided that feedback okay is that an additional question director amundsen or is it to replace 15. that was in the last category it addressed the same subject but i thought it might be a way to be more specific okay so the communication and leadership skills question okay for sake of my notes i'm going to call that one 12 a if everyone could

178take a moment to read director anderson's question in the chat while i write it down okay if you would like to keep 12a the question in the chat please raise your hand on 12a as well i'll count that i see five okay great thank you i'm sorry i think it's six six dark nathan during there okay got it six on twelve a the verbiage in the chat okay thank you uh question 16. uh one let's see one question 17. three three all right your hiring criteria that it should be someone who holds experience in communicating school district needs and successes of students and staff in a manner that is understandable and appreciated by all stakeholders how many would like to include 18. i see five question 19. i see five six uh question 20. three

179see if director nathan saying okay three all right thank you uh the hiring criteria that someone should provide leadership for the school district through clear direction and delegation support the delegated work of the team and hold team members accountable for their actions how many would like to include question twenty one four five five and a half six seven i mean i see seven there all right i'm 21 two three four question 22 i see four hands up okay all right and the final hiring criteria is proven experience in managing transition how many want to include 23 uh four i wanna try and give you enough time to put your hands up i got four on twenty three twenty four five six twenty five three three okay so then we're on to general questions and these

180are simply questions that tend to touch on the breadth of a superintendent's responsibilities just suggestions you certainly don't have to include any of them if you'd not not want to 26. five six six on twenty six twenty seven four on 27 how about including 28 see one and thirty question thirty four okay is your consensus that you will include question 31 it won't be question 31 it'll probably be question 15. okay barb can i get a hand for number 28 i was slow yep absolutely thanks barb can i ask one question um hey i only saw one question um that specifically focused on the school board and i was wondering if question 29 could perhaps be customized to specifically focus on others replaced with unless you think there's a better question that gets to that

181relationship yep there very well may be i'm going to come back in a moment to the stakeholder survey to address the comments folks made to make sure we got questions that address those things but what i'd like to do next is open up the floor did anyone see questions in the packet page 28-34 that you absolutely loved and if we if you tell us the number we'll ask for a show of hands if you want that included in your interview questions anything from the packet and there are some specific to that director nathan in here i'll try and find them i think it's 158. i already found it huh so if everyone would look at question there you go there's also an entire section questions 17 through 39 about that topic 17-39 i don't know

182if you see anything in there beyond 158 that appeals to you it's taking me a minute to switch to these so i'm completely missing your questions we'll wait barb also um full confession the battery on my second computer died when we were doing the first questions could you so i didn't vote for any of the first ones could you add a vote two three and five yes thank you two three and five yes thank you i got my packet switched now can you um tell me what numbers you were just asking about in lieu of it's the same question but the others is more specific about something else or that topic is covered on questions 17 through 39 much more broad questions that touch on that relationship director mclaughlin i like most of this standard

183question 21 i'm not sure if the word definition is the best word there description maybe to replace definition please describe and would that be okay please subscribe what are the most important parts of any of those are fine with me i'm trying to get closer to what director mclaughlin going for or maybe how would you how would you describe number 23 might be an alternative to consider for that same topic maybe without the word perfect because nothing's perfect in the world i'm going to pull that out this summer it's interesting you caught that because these will be revised this summer and i thought same thing about perfect ideal maybe is anybody else interested in just going through questions 17 through 36 because i think this is an important category i'm sorry 17 through 39 or

184do you want us to just pull questions out of that section perhaps i'd like to proceed sorry i would agree with you director rickman except i think this might be a more important set of questions for the next oh that we do that's right this is in a round of hiring yeah here in your suggestion that we include 21 from the long list that could cover a lot of ground yeah so everyone's had a chance to read 21 raise your hand if you'd like to include 21 with a little bit of massaging on the front end of it yeah okay yeah i'll change that from that to something else okay does anyone have questions on the first or excuse me does anyone have questions that they've seen on that first page that they really want

185to include in your interviews director nathan um i'm going to go back to question seven in your list that you recommended because it referred to a specific period of time that is relevant to our discussion and it's the only question i saw in your recommended questions that had to do with that issue and i'm wondering if there is a a global question related to the impact of that that isn't specifically related to equity well done you're going to do so well on may 7th i already know you're going to be vague good job um perceptions of public education pull out the prepositional phrase or just perceptions of issues in pull out one word and i was going to point that out that that is something that did come through in the stakeholder report is concerned

186about the effects of the pandemic on education so i think it's good to have a question in there because you're still going to be coming out of the pandemic during the 2021-22 school year under your interim so if we pull out that word equity i had two folks that liked question seven but if we pull out that word how many now would support question seven with that word pulled out so it's broader okay three okay went up up from two okay thank you um so again did anyone fall in love with questions on page 28 that you want us to consider and i know that there is question director anderson has another question in the chat that i want to revisit okay any questions on page 29 that you're in love with and want to

187include so the one i'm looking at doesn't have page numbers could you just tell us the range of questions sure questions 1-26 okay questions 27-54 and i'm hoping that i'm not forcing you to speed read this for the first time i was hoping you might have had a chance to pick your favorites if you skimmed it once but 27-54 okay are you in love with questions between 55 and 85 and again to the point someone made earlier some of these would be much better questions for your long-term superintendent interviews okay 55-85 not hearing anyone director mclaughlin very early in your presentation did i understand that one of the community interests was the finance and budget yep do we want to include a question yep budget finance was one of the top six i think that

188the stakeholders had identified as an area of skills expertise that we needed so in that case that would be questions 66-82 great catch thank you is there a question 66 to 82 that you you like can we rely on your expertise of any of these that would be good for interim versus long-term you certainly could 78 is very broad and 80 is oftentimes used for districts that are facing some financial challenges in the upcoming year i would say 78 and 80 would be the potentially best fits one's very broad and one is specific to challenges you might face i was i was gonna suggest maybe 78 because it's it's general enough and then if should that person be or one of those people be in the second round when we're looking for a longer term

189superintendent that i think 80 would be a good follow-up question to that i absolutely agree yeah so if you'd like question 78 please raise your hand included in the list great that one's going to be in all right finance okay thank you for raising the finance point director mclaughlin any questions you want to include between question 86 and 112. i like a lot of the questions like 103 down so if any of my colleagues have strong preferences for any of them i feel like that would be a great 103 in particular i think is vague enough but offers the opportunity for them to be very specific 103 106 any others that you like is 106 the same as number five on your list that you recommended it's super good well we'll come back to that

190because that is a a priority for the board your hiring criteria so i'm going to add question 103 to the considerations on the first list i typed up question two through seven is in this topic and so i've added 103 and if you decide you want two or three questions about this topic i added 103 for your consideration to vote on that one as well so we may have to do a re-vote on this hiring criteria because there are so many are there others between 103 and 118 that you want to potentially include all right uh the next page how about questions 119 to 137 any of those preferred all right uh the next page is questions 138 through 163 oh director nathan um i'm sorry 128. uh the next page starts at 138 oh

191but you like question 128 i'm sorry is that what you're saying 128 does everyone have that in front of them okay if you have read question 128 please raise your hand if you'd like it included in the list for may 11th thanks tom okay i see two i only have six board members here did we lose a board member i see six of the cameras oh there's julia okay so okay so i had two though on question 128 okay next page do you see any you want to include from 138 to 163 did was somebody talking about 158 yes that that would replace question 28 was it 158 yes to replace question 29 okay that's good we'll re-vote on that because that um that one word might make it a difference i had one vote

192previously but we'll take a quick vote on that when you read question 158 how many would like to include that in your interview questions 158 four okay so that increased it from one to four votes that question by putting 158 in there instead of 29. i'm not opposed to 58 but i'm wondering about 154. if there would be a way to merge those thoughts somehow is that somebody reflected in 26 on your recommendations i'm glad you have these cross-referenced director nathan because i don't i think it's easier if we have hard copies in front of us because we're not switching screens so i find it easier on hard copy myself so whoever's doing this electronically i admire you for switching back and forth uh question yeah question 26 is extremely similar to the one that

193you just highlighted so all right and finally anyone in love with questions 164 to 178. actually like question 165 um it uh it's consistent with some of the training and one of the books we studied uh two years ago that you know everything really the district should be about should be based on the input the community provides and well that's just my basic take on that but um 165 correct i'm not married to it it's just really an observation that i have um to build on that um director barlow i was thinking about 166 but customizing it for the interim to talk about the strategic plan steps that our staff is currently working on because we're you know we're not in a develop a strategic plan phase during this next year we're going to be

194in a make it happen phase so i don't know how to ask that question for a year right so director mclaughlin director barlow i agree with you on 165 but i'm wondering as director nathan talked about it's maybe better for the future the longer term but i'm wondering if how we want to ask it for this round for the interim is somehow related to you know how would you do this jumping into the middle of a process that's already started okay i can do something around that so something around implementation of the strategic plan during your interim term okay how many would support a question around implementation of the strategic plan during your interim year or something like that i'll change it okay i see six got it all right so that's enough of those

195questions i can tell you how many questions you're currently sitting at then but i do want to revisit briefly uh when we went through the stakeholder report i had made notes on the themes that arose from the stakeholder comments particularly open-ended in terms of the rating expertise and background i had said the budget and finance one so i'm glad you're including the question on budget there were notes from your stakeholders about equity diversity inclusion you're going to have questions on that topic uh there was questions in the stakeholder report about trust and staff relationships and so i think you have a question in here that you have highly recommended from the board on that there was concern about effects of the pandemic from your stakeholders and you do have a question on that mental health

196is in here but i don't know how many votes it received when it's on the bubble um communication check collaboration check vision was something mentioned by stakeholders and yet this is a one-year appointment so i'm not sure to your points about an interim position if vision is something that you want to drill down very deep on in this interview around but also visibility and we don't have a question in here yet about visibility within the district and the community all right let's go back one more time then questions two through seven and please consider because that is a question on that same topic that you seem to really like so how many would at this point make you vote again sorry how many of you would like to include question two hang on back up

197yep we'll wait and so are we voting between a couple of questions or are you now suggesting additional ones are we having them narrow what are we doing great question for questions two through seven and 103 i think i'd like you to pick no more than um your top three we may be able to include three questions on this and still hit 15 but i i'd like it at this point when i went down number seven we're looking for a long list on the first list we're looking at the first list of my suggested questions but i've added question 103 to this category so um okay okay so if you only get to pick three so maybe it would be more clear if you said two through seven on the original list plus 103 on

198the longer list there you go exactly how many would like question i still have to look at them all again as i was figuring out which that's the question i mean back and forth switching back and forth between two screens is really hard and i've got the short ones in front of me but i cannot tell you off the top of my head what 103 was okay how about if i type it in the chat great idea thank you thanks kathy welcome and i'm still a little confused we're doing the same exercise we did the first time around i thought we narrowed it down some there were a lot of ties questions two through seven you had two threes and two fours so i'm hoping by forcing you to pick that we'll be able to

199see which ones really rise to the top so none of them got uh narrowed out at all none of them got a six or a seven okay all right can you see what 103 is in the chat then thank you director nathan very much i'm not seeing anything in the chat is there anyone else that can't see that the last thing i see in the chat is a message from kurt oh you might need a refresh no how do i do that have you refreshed the chat without leaving the meeting oh right maybe scroll down i i'm scrolled all the way down and that's all i can see i can only see kurt's question i mean that's the last question there's like one if you're in the team's app and you go to the upper

200right hand part of where the chat is there's an x if you click out of the chat it'll widen and all you'll see are our faces and then just go back to the top the little talk bubble is and open the chat again i'm not getting anything different i see your messages if six other people can see it i don't need to see it okay so does everyone have the shorter list in front of them all right how many would really like to include question two [Music] so if you only get to pick three of these because we are going down these seven questions okay question two i've got two votes question three got one vote question three uh question four okay five uh question five i see six people for question five question six

201scene one question seven and is that with the change i see three yes with that one word pulled up so i see three okay and question 103 which is in the chat six okay so in this category you could have um two or three questions so we'll start with two the top vote letters are question 103 and question five i would also suggest that question seven is not now specific to that category so question seven could be a standalone question to ensure that you do ask about that since it came through on the stakeholder survey so it's not necessarily it isn't about equity anymore okay so perhaps question seven states if we then look at the rest of the surveys just real quickly i can tell you that there's a tie for question eight or

202nine let's try and get um at least at this point because it's a shorter categories let's try to get one clear winner in some of these other categories choose between eight and nine you only get one vote how many like to keep question eight four and how many would like to keep question nine three okay that's a close one eight um very similar though i'm sorry you asked if they are similar or not yeah could they be combined to i mean eight on the short list and 103 from the long list have a lot of overlap that's what i'm saying yeah and i think one or the other is fine 103 or eight no i mean either eight or nine i don't think it if i could speak to nine what my concern is about

203nine i like eight because it asks about the candidate nine just asks about cr you know critical elements that they may or may not possess um that's my concern about nine is it's more it's generic to the sense of it's not even speaking about what they may i think about you implement the how is really important to me the halloween question eight okay well we'll see where we're at with the number of questions here then in just a moment under the uh category of listening 11 through 14 it looks like 12a which was the question that director anderson put in the chat was far and away the selected choice on that 12-8 uh question 15 16 and 17 question 15. far and away had the most votes wordsmithing that one a little bit 15. in

204the next section question 19 received the most and the next section by far had the most the next section 24 had the most votes and if you want to get into general questions uh 26 had the most votes general question chat oops all right can everyone see director amundson's suggested question that she wrote at 7 09 pm all right if you could read that question from 709 pm if everyone has done that if you would like that included please raise your hand 709 pm see one two three okay all right then there are other questions added that people really liked they liked question uh 21. i think we're looking at the longer list and i don't expect you to toggle back to it but 21 with a slight change in the language of 21 got

205a lot of votes 78 got a lot of votes on the long list and a strategic plan question got a lot of votes i'll have to make that one up from scratch can i ask a question about the first section on equity on equity diversity inclusion um question number five how many votes did that get six so are we picking three from that section or just two so far there were three no there were two i'm sorry question five and then 103 from the long list question seven got pulled out of that category with that one word being pulled out and it's in there because it addresses one of the stakeholder it did get three votes alone because it was part of the equity puzzle but if you'd like we could take another vote on

206that whether or not to include question seven as a separate question from equity and question four was out of the running because it got less votes right okay barb could we add seven to the general list just so i can categorize them in my brain sure great thank you all right question seven could move back to the general list and if you reread question 7 pull out the word equity raise your hand if you would like that categorized as a general question to ask about okay six okay so question seven is in i will count real quickly where you're sitting and again this is not your final draft i'm going to re-type these up for you so uh one two three four five six you're at 11 questions so you have room to add a

207few if you'd like and the closest ones if you want to do it by a vote seven seams seven eight nine ten eleven oh now i have twelve i'm sorry i have twelve other high vote getters were question four that got five votes so question four is close question 18 had five votes in this close those are the only two with five votes a piece so would you like me to add question four and eighteen again they'll be separated in the list so it doesn't sound like they're all about the same kinds of questions but five of you did vote for those can i ask a question sorry i did count 103 in there yes oh sorry karen go ahead no go ahead yo don't finish you're finished your thought is 18 like 103. it

208is similar yes give a preference if we only used one i think 102 got six right it did so not include 18 because it overlaps too much is your suggestion with 103. i guess my comment is they like the word trust in there can we wrap trust into yep great idea and then i had a separate question um is 27 off the list then add that word to 103 quick okay uh 27 seem like we wanted to touch on that topic yep 27 did have four votes so we could add 27 and was it four that had five votes yes 27 and four could be added in i see yes's okay four and twenty seven [Music] okay i was at 16. so if you're okay with that i can pull these together into a solid

209list and send it to you again then before our meeting on the seventh and at that point you can look at it you might see duplications that night that we're not seeing tonight because they're in two different places when you have them all on one list i think it's 16 but my chicken scratches are pretty all over the place it might be 15 or 17 i don't know um so let me put it together into a final list for you to look at on the seventh and then you can make your final edits that night and uh any other questions that you might want to include did i get everything out of the chat did we at least take a a chance to vote on each question that was in the chat tonight i think

210we did uh the 709 question we did vote on that okay great and 703 okay that one was included all right that's a lot of work i know it's very laborious and the way we do it there's no magic way to make it easy i do think it's harder when you do it electronically because you do have your information in two places and i apologize so much easier when we're in a big room and you're looking at it right in front of you on hard copy uh dr mclaughlin director mclaughlin i thought of a question over the break and didn't have a chance to ask it that occurred to me on the seventh when we're talking about your recommendations and who we want to interview is it common for all the candidates to watch that

211live just so that we're prepared that everyone is all the applicants are watching while we're doing this and talking about that it's more common now that things are online than it was when you just held it in the boardroom and they would come sit in the back room it's very rare that anyone who was a candidate would come sit in the back room and watch your deliberations or watch your discussion um now that it's online it's more common but i would still say it's less than half of the the candidates usually will watch they're generally speaking very very busy people and don't have the time potentially to keep tabs on the folks who are talking about their application but more so than it used to be i'll tell you that much so that would be

212a disadvantage to the first person in order who interviews it can be is it appropriate request that they don't uh you are going to live stream these because that's one thing i don't have yet i was going to reach out to tracy for the right language at the bottom of the schedule right now that language says all interviews will be held via microsoft teams and will be live streamed please check the website for the meeting like that language needs to be clarified by uh tracy maybe heather or whomever for me you don't have to live stream them some districts have chosen to make it a meeting link and if someone wants to watch it they have to request the meeting link from the district and then tracy would send them the meeting link so you

213would know who's requesting the link it's more work it does make it a little less accessible because it's one extra step for your public to say yeah i want to watch the interviews and so they send their name and email address to the district office who then sends them the link so everyone still has access to it but it's a hoop you have to jump through in order to watch the interviews so candidates i feel they could give a fake name if they really truly wanted to watch these but that's an option for you as it doesn't have to be live streamed it could be made available through a meeting like the people request give me feelings on that one way or the other it seems like to be more fair but i think being

214accessible to our public is probably more important than being fair to the candidates i think i would yeah the idea of transparency you know that if we're being accused of not being very transparent it's more transparent but i i again my question is would it be appropriate to ask that out of fairness to all candidates that a candidate not watch the previous previous when we schedule these we can certainly say that to each and every finalist and i i think the kind of folks that you'll be interviewing their ethical and moral standards are high enough where they would agree and say absolutely i won't i won't observe so we can ask that okay and i'll get the language in that so live streaming you are correct you're going to live stream these interviews i'm going

215to leave that in there then okay um one final question for you once these questions are complete let's say you have 16 questions typically when we connect the electronic interviews five minutes before someone's interview i would send them the questions in to their email address so they would have them available um during the interview if you were in person i would hand them a list of the questions i don't have to do that if you'd prefer not to the only thing we've learned is not everyone's an auditory learner so as you read the questions it they might not fully grasp it but if they can read it on their computer screen along with you for some folks it makes it easier to respond because they better understand your question do you want me to send

216these questions five minutes before each interview or would you prefer that i do not do that i i would also we have enough audio problems to do online meetings but if they miss just a word or something it might be really helpful for them to be able to just read it great point would it be possible to screen share the question in writing um i don't know if i would screen share during the interview i think that could be distracting for your stakeholders to be looking ahead to the questions versus focusing on one question at a time i mean one question at a time as we ask the question throw it up in text on the screen if you if you screen share then you can't see the face of the person talking and i

217think we're already so impersonal if we're doing it online i'd like to be able to see the person's face you know what that's a good point educators it's really important that we cater to auditory as well as visual learners i think it's absolutely appropriate for them to have the questions ahead of time and they can print them out if they want to but i think that's absolutely i think it's really important i agree and i like the time frame you know it's not you know a day before the five minutes before seems appropriate okay i will do that that's our normal procedure it's the best practice but there are some boards that just don't want them shared so i want to check that so five minutes before is okay all right you have already selected

218option two for your schedule so it'll be thursday the 11th as well as your deliberations then on thursday the 13th tuesday the 11th thursday the 13th with that that's everything i needed from you tonight unless you have additional questions there's a lot to get through you did a great job tonight thank you so much you're all troopers just to get through this amount of data and you'll have another packet of information to review prior to may 7th i always try and get it to you at least 24 hours in advance i'll do my best to do that if not a little bit sooner for the may 7th meeting as well next wednesday then you'll receive all of your applications please follow the instructions carefully you have access to our database but you cannot nor should

219you print anything download anything screenshot anything when you are looking at the applications electronically please don't be looking at them in a coffee shop for example someone might walk behind you and see a resume and you then have violated data practices by allowing someone's name to be made public so do it in a private place and again don't print anything or thinking like that just to make sure that you are adhering to the practices act so any questions it's been a long night but again thank you very much for your time and attention do you need anything else from me before you adjourn i think we're good to go barb thank you so much for your time and expertise and kurt if you're listening in the tech room thank you so much for spending your

220friday night at a board meeting i know your wife was planning on going out to dinner so thank you to you especially it is now 7 52 and we are adjourned