RPS School Board Study Session - 04/20/21

001this special study session of the independent school district 535 school board is called to order at 5 pm tuesday april 20th 2021 virtually in room 137 of the edison building with colleagues participating electronically in accordance with minnesota statute 13d .021 until further notice members of the 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 may be found we acknowledge that rps sites are situated on ancestral lands of the dakota people we acknowledge and honor the dakota nations and the sacred land of all indigenous peoples present at this meeting our school board members and superintendent michael munoz a non-voting ex officio member also present is

002the assistant board clerk ms michelle severson ms severson will you please call the roll thank you clerk amundsen here director barlow here director garcia here director mclaughlin here chair marvin here vice chair nathan here and treasurer workman treasure workmen we have seen treasure workmen i'm guessing she's having technical difficulties and she'll check in in a minute all right two point six percent thank you 2.01 approval of the agenda this is an action item are there any uh changes to the agenda there are no changes approval of approval second it's been moved and seconded ms severson will you do a roll call vote please thank you director barlow aye director garcia hi director mclaughlin aye director marvin hi director nathan hi director workman and director amundsen hi thank you sorry once again 3.01 strategic plan access

003and equity goal timeline this is an information item mr munoz yes uh thank you before i turn it over to um amy i executive director of community education i just want to in the for inform the board that we just uh probably about an hour ago sent out another uh letter to our staff and families and made them aware of additional resources we we did something very similar the week before but we provided some additional resources uh this afternoon and uh based on what just recently uh took place up up in the cities we thought it was important to provide some additional resources for our staff when talking and working with students and for parents as well so just wanted to give the board an update that that just went up this afternoon and now

004i'll turn it over to amy ike amy thank you mr munoz uh board members good evening i'm here to give you a quick update on the timeline related to the equity and access goal in the strategic plan and so with your permission i'm going to share three quick slides that will guide you through the timeline these are also in board decks if you'd like to refer to them later so the request was made to give you a little bit more information on the timeline on the equity and access universal goal in the strategic plan and as you know we had an opportunity part way through that um paused our progress on the main plan and has brought together some um different groups of people working on the equity and access goal and a different set

005of goals so i'll just walk you through a little bit of that recent history and then where we're headed as well so last spring we were given the opportunity from the midwestern plains equity assistance center or map center for short to send a team to what they call the equity oriented strategic planning academy this is a learning opportunity that occurs over three days spread out over time that teaches people a process to undertake strategic planning from an equity-oriented position or framework and so i'll tell you a little bit more about that planning academy in just a minute that academy wrapped up in september of and when that team got back we realized that they had actually identified several new equity related goals to consider that were separate from our main strategic plan that wasn't in

006development at that point so we brought together the remaining staff who went to the academy so of the four people that we sent two of them were still working in the district and in their roles we also invited some of the leaders from the employees of color resource group and brought them together with our original access and equity goal team to talk about how to merge in the goals from the academy with the existing goals and what made sense to keep and leave behind and how could we merge the two processes potentially together so after we had a number of conversations and began to work through some of that there was quite a bit of interest in that group to get more people trained up in the equity oriented strategic planning process and so we

007approached the map center about the idea of sending a second team through the academy this is somewhat unusual but they met with us a number of times talked through the needs and did earlier this month around the fifth approve are sending a second team through the academy the academy began then last week and so we had a team participate in the first two days of the academy and then the second or the third day i guess is in june so there's some work time in between so between now and june that academy team will work some among themselves on what they began last thursday and friday and they are focusing on the rigor and relevance goal from the original district-wide strategic plan we felt that that was an area that was not fully addressed through

008the previous academy and that's a goal area that we didn't want to lose in the process of merge so we decided that our team would focus on that goal during this academy they're also going to share with the full group they're learning from the academy so they're they're kind of if you think about the academy as a almost a train the trainer experience they are coming back and sharing that learning and training up some additional people within the district to understand that process we believe that will increase our capacity to continue using that framework in the future so as i said june is the final day of this round at the academy and then over the summer the intention would be that the full team continue to work with the academy team on completing the

009any remaining steps in the action plan that need to be built and then the equity oriented strategic planning model includes a communication planning step which i think is very important to talk about why we chose to take the approaches we did why we chose to use the vocabulary we chose to use and gives that plan some context both for our internal stakeholders and our community so having given that kind of broad timeline overview i just thought i would share with you who is on this spring equity oriented strategic plan team and i won't read all the names as you can see them there but we approached this from the idea that we wanted people in a variety of roles from a variety of backgrounds and then we wanted to tie through to the previous cohort

010and so you can see nicole andrews at the top of the list there participated in the previous cohort and she's participating this time so she is our link to make sure that we don't lose some of the pieces that were developed in the first cohort or first academy as we go through this one when we talk to the map academy or the map center excuse me they thought it was important for us to have at least two cabinet members present to give the the message or to communicate that this work has support all the way up through the cabinet and so carl and carla represented the cabinet in this experience i also wanted to share just a little bit about this equity oriented strategic planning process so in the experience it's divided into three sessions

011so session one and session two were last week with the team and then session three will be in june and you can see the broad titles there and then i'll just bring up these elements so at the beginning of the academy two foundational things are touched on both critical race theory and the the skills needed to do the the deep looking at the data and to have the difficult conversations necessary to really identify systemic change that needs to happen and then a focus on how to write goals that fit the acronym smart and i think we're all familiar with that but specific measurable goals that are really attainable and we can assess later and then the academy really gets into the work of a strategic oriented policy or process excuse me that um maybe other

012forms of strategic planning don't always do so it begins with a look at data and creating what are called statements of inequity sort of pointing out where we have inequities in the system and then the group begins to talk about what needs to change and those become broad goal statements then they get into what can help us that would be a lever and what is in the way of progress that would be a barrier and again the group is having deep conversations through each of these stages to come to agreement about what those barriers and lovers are then the group makes a hypothesis why do we think this is happening and that leads then to a theory of action if we do this then we expect this will happen and again lots of deep processing

013going on once you get to that point we begin to talk about how we will achieve the change we'd like to see so that's the strategy piece and then the last two pieces the map center is indicated very few groups get to action planning and communication planning during the academy they leave the academy with the instructions on how to do those steps but that is the work that will have to happen with the whole group in june after that last stage in the academy so action planning who's going to do what and when and sort of who's accountable for each of those steps and then again that communication plan before we roll it out so i hope that gives you enough background on that timeline and i'll just step back to that timeline oh i

014guess i can't show you the whole thing in black sorry about that but i would just open up for any questions at this point miss ike i think you've explained it so well there are no questions fair enough we're happy to answer them in follow-up as well great thank you so much appreciate that we'll move on then to 6.01 the school resource officer discussion let me just remind the board and anyone who may be watching that this is discussion only the board will not be voting at this time let me also acknowledge that today especially there has been tremendous emphasis and emotion about policing in this country with the verdict read for the derek shelvin case with the funeral of dante wright in brooklyn center a lot of people are thinking about the relationship between

015the police and the people of this nation this discussion is about the relationship that the school district has with our sros our school resource officers and so we want to make the discussion specific to that not overlooking for a second however how much impact national news has had real impact it's had on our families and our students we have a number of people here in addition to board members who interact with our school resource officers and i want to encourage all of you who are on the panel who are in this discussion today to please speak your truth speak your experience this is an important decision one does not that the school board needs to make but we really want to get input with that mr munoz you have some information about the sro contract

016yeah i just first want to give a little bit of background i think it was back in 2010 the district received a notification from the office of civil rights that um actually let me back up there was a a complaint made ocr i think in 2009 and then in 2010 uh is when the the superintendent before me received a letter from the office of civil rights and said uh you need to start each year collect this information and submit it to the office of civil rights so uh we did that for for several years and then in uh 2015 we did uh reached an agreement uh with the office of civil rights and uh we continued to provide some data but there were why i bring this up is the the use of our school

017resource officers was a big part of that agreement and they had to approve our agreement with the rochester police department for sros and they also had to approve the language that we put in our uh student discipline handbook that reference well the entire handbook but there is a section in there that references how we use uh school resources officers so um i want to give you that a little bit background so both the handbook and the agreement has been approved by the office of civil rights and i thought what i would do is i'm going to share just not the entire handbook but i just want to share the section i copied and pasted the section out of the student handbook that references how we use school resource officers and that's what i'm sharing with

018my screen at this time and really like i said it was some back and forth conversation with the office of civil rights for how we use resource officers and how we explain that in our student handbook so i just wanted to share that with the board and give them a little background on the work that we did with the office of civil rights with how we use school resource officers uh in our schools and uh really i guess i really wanted to you know summarize it up in in one sentence that they're there to they're involved when there's uh criminal possible criminal behavior and maybe refer to law enforcement and there are some examples of what what that may entail so i did want to share that with you and then i did also share

019earlier with you the actual contract that we have with the rochester police department and let me get that and really if you go i want to go to uh section 2d that really explains um kind of the duties that school resource officers we use in our buildings and tonight we are fortunate to have some of our middle school and high school principals that if the board has specific questions on what they do and what their roles are in the buildings they're available to respond and then we also have uh members of the rochester police department i saw that the chief was on with us as well so if there's any specific questions that you have for them uh they would be available to respond as well so just kind of wanted to give especially some

020of the new board members may not be aware of that our agreement with the police department and our student handbook was approved by the office of civil rights and how we use our school resource officers thank you and and again there will be uh oops sorry certainly time to to ask questions about that i think good reason to get into that a little bit later board members you all should have received a copy of the contract some time ago so you should have a copy that you can be accessing right now you've had some time to study one of the things that our community engagement committee wanted to do as we were looking at whether or not this district would renew its contract with the city was to make sure that we were getting a

021sense of how the community viewed this kind of relationship what the reality was here not minneapolis or anywhere else but in rochester and we did that three ways the first way was to send out a survey to the community kathy nathan from that committee was largely in charge of developing the survey and she also was a person who received the feedback back and put it into a spreadsheet and she is going to which you have at this point and she's going to share that information at this point miss nathan all right let's see if i can successfully share my screen great everybody can see that yes thank you okay so this will give you an overview of the results by question that can be tabulated as you know there were a number of questions that

022were written responses comments that respondents could write in but this pie charts just summarize the responses that can be tabulated so this is from the survey that was filled out by students parents guardians and community members so we got about 1543 responses although you'll see that number varies from question to question as people may not have filled in answers to all of the questions on the survey you'll see the vast majority of the respondents were from either a parent guardian of a current student or parent guardian of a former student our current and former students made up only a much smaller percentage of the respondents you can see the distribution by gender you can also see the distribution by race and ethnicity then we asked questions about people's interaction with school resource officers in a

023rochester public school so the majority of respondents to the survey um had not had any interaction their you or your child had any interaction with the school resource officer we also asked a question about whether school resource officers have a positive or negative impact and we gave people a range of responses so you'll see the combination of strongly positive and positive was the majority of of the responses we also asked a question about how important you feel it is to have school resource officers in rochester public schools and you'll see that the majority of the responses felt that it was very important or important we sent a separate survey out to staff however there were some community members that answered the student parent community survey and identified themselves as teachers or staff so we combined

024their answers from that survey into the staff survey to get the total the total numbers that you'll see in the spreadsheet this just reflects the numbers that um were just submitted on the staff survey there were only 23 additional uh submissions so you'll see it will won't change the num won't change the results the race or ethnicity of the staff teachers and staff who answer the survey we also asked the questions about school resource officers having a positive negative impact and the majority of the answers indicated it was strongly positive or positive and we also asked how important staff feels it is to have school resource officers in rochester public schools and you'll see them that the majority of responses answered very important or important now while those responses show the overall results we thought

025it was also important to disaggregate the results to see what different groups of our students and parents felt about school student resource officer school resource officers i'm going to open my screen again this is also in i believe this has also been uploaded to board docs so you have the charts that are in this powerpoint in board docs as well not yet sharing my screen yes okay everybody can see that so the first were the responses to the student resource officer survey um no matter what their relationship to rochester public schools were the options identified on the survey and you can see that we had we also disaggregated the data based on whether they had an interaction with a school resource officer or not or whether they preferred not to answer so you can see

026the results from individuals who have not had a interaction with a school resource officer and across the board for those individuals who did not have an interaction with the school resource officers they ranked the impact of sros as strongly positive or positive for individuals who had an interaction with a school resource officer you'll see that the individuals ranked the impact on the school experience of students as a majority strongly positive or positive and for the group who preferred not to say whether they had had an experience with a school resource officer the result was more across the board so we also felt it was important to just aggregate it by who was answering the survey and some of the characteristics of the respondents so this section will talk about current and former students combined so

027for current and former students who had not had an interaction self-identified with a school resource officer the impact positive or negative on their experience you can see varied across the board between strongly positive and strongly negative for individuals who had an experience with the school resource officer their rating of the positive or negative impact the majority was strongly positive but pretty much evened out when you take the negatives the positives and the neither positive or negative so again pretty um consistent across the board and then there was a smaller amount of students prefer not to say or no response and this group had slightly more positive rating of the impact this section talks about the responses from parents and families both current and former students and remember that was the vast majority of the answers

028that were given to the survey so for parents or family members who identified that they themselves or their child had not had an interaction with the school resource officer the rating of strongly positive or positive was the highest in for this group for parents for families who self-identified that they or their child had an interaction with a school resource officer they also rated uh high the most responses rated the impact as strongly positive or positive and finally those who preferred not to say or did not provide a response the majority also ranked their experience that positive or negative impact of school resource officers as strongly positive or positive the last set of breakdowns is for staff and so we asked two of the similar questions to the same questions on the staff and the community

029survey uh the positive or negative impact on the school experience of students in rochester public schools was strongly positive or positive from staff and how important to have school resource officers in rochester public schools was very important or important what i did not go through in all of these slides but i hope that the board saw it in the patterns when you break down was that there was some difference of experience based on what the race or ethnic category of the respondent was for the most part strongly positive or positive was the highest rating in the category of white or caucasian but the experience of strongly positive or down to negative varied for um our students of color um across the board and it varied from question to questions so i didn't want to summarize

030that and draw conclusions for everyone but i hope that you all were able to see that when you looked at the breakdowns of the data and that's my summary thank you and do board members or others have any questions for miss nathan mr barrow go ahead uh yes thank you director nathan for your last comment for had you not mentioned it i made a notation to raise that point uh and i think in part uh well what point the point that there seems to be a difference there is a difference in terms of individuals views and interactions uh perhaps based on their race or ethnicity and for me that's very important to acknowledge uh can both be true best program ever and i don't think so well depending on one's experience yes and uh i

031was just curious um really i thank you for designing the survey i do know in most of the report outs that the district offers especially as it may relate to discipline data there seemingly always is linkage tied to free and reduced lunch uh to whatever reason that is always included but maybe that also speaks to the other associated constructs that may exist my point now is this in that we weren't able to identify or draw from and i'm going to use this term now that was uh presented by the naacp education committee i believe each of the members of the board had received a copy of that and there is a reference to data and i made a point to highlight the type of data that is important stratified let's see if i can rapidly

032recall that but at any rate when it re as it relates to statistics and intent was this meant to tell a story or just provide a raw data response you're not no conclusions are being offered to drawn it's just could you maybe speak to the intent yes um director barlow the intent was just to provide the raw data the tables you saw just represent uh tallying up of the raw data from the spreadsheets based on what category the answers fell into so no no conclusions john except the ones each board member draws individually by reviewing the data and the board was also provided with the entire spreadsheet of all the individual responses including all the written comments organized by um what group so parents were organized together students were organized together so that you could

033read the responses um by population category okay thank you other questions all right thank you miss nathan the community engagement committee also engaged with two other groups students from the three high schools and principals from our secondary schools mr barlow and ms nathan if you have information to share on either of these absolutely feel free to unmute and add those comments beginning with the student groups we met virtually and in person with century mail and john marshall schools at their sites all together we probably interacted with about 50 high school students now that's a small percentage but i i think from the comments that we received from them they were a pretty good representation of feelings that exist at those schools none of the students who we talked with had ever had a an interaction

034with an sro beyond just a conversation in in the hallway whatever some of them uh talked with the sros often some of them didn't know the sro's name hadn't seen them their perspectives about having a police officer in school were wildly different students some students said adamantly that sros are important because they keep schools safe and they protect students we talked with a or listened to a group of middle schoolers uh through student school board and a hundred percent of them said we really need these people in the buildings because they keep schools safe they want them there in case something bad happens and they show students that police officers who are good people now full disclosure about half the students we listened to had never been physically in their middle school or had been

035there for a week but their perception is that it's a good idea to have a police officer in the school among the high school students we heard that school resource officers are important because they keep schools safe that school resource officers should not be in schools because they trigger anxiety and students who are already affected by trauma some students said that they exacerbated the school to prison pipeline some students said that they formed positive relationships with students and they were there to answer questions and help students process things others said you know what we have plenty of adults in this building including our teachers and our counselors who are better qualified to form relationships with and to help us process issues that we may have a couple of students said that sros are in schools

036to keep kids under control to check hall passes and to tell kids to wear the masks now if you check in the the contract that is absolutely not while they are there it is very clear that sros do not get involved in school discipline they are there when there is an infraction of the law when there is some sort of violent interaction but their lane is quite narrow a number of students said they had no idea what sros did and we heard that a lot what do they do why are they there one message that we got consistently from students uh and again none of these students had ever had any kind of a meaningful interaction with an sro other than a conversation but what students were saying is the uniform uniform freaks them out

037and they don't like seeing a police officer in uniform with a gun greeting them as they come into the school building in the morning that was fairly consistent then we talked with the principals and well i learned a lot from the students when when students said i've never really had an interaction with police officer but they really they're just their presence traumatizes me i think it would be easy to think that doesn't make sense but if you know students if you know human nature you absolutely can understand that our kids especially our secondary kids have been following the news and the presence of a police officer can absolutely trigger trauma even for a student who has never experienced that firsthand but they see people who look like them or look like their families being mistreated

038by police officers in other places that has an emotional impact it has a neurological impact on our kids so when they say it feels traumatic i think we need to believe them then we talked with our principals and i think a few of them would be willing to share the experience that the sro has had with their students in their building and i'm hoping principle scripture that you will share what what you told us before some principle said that the sro may be the most impactful person in helping certain students be successful they said that the school resource officers more than most police officers do know how to de-escalate students and that they credit the sros because they're used to being around teenagers de-escalating a lot of situations that never got worse because the person

039assigned to their building knows how to interact with a student and will first focus on what the student needs rather than what on the event is they talked about sros having that just-in-time information about what's going on in the rest of the community and they can share that information with the principal or with the students teachers one one instance was a student had his parents were arrested during the day and that kid would have gone home to find his parents not there but because the school was alerted to that information you know they could make certain um arrangements for that student to be taken care of and then the principals talked about the relationships with the sros that again i didn't really get so much but what they were talking about that when you have

040the same officer interacting with students and the same students on a regular basis this officer gets to know that child and the child's family and that very often that is going to be the person that the family may reach out to when they're concerned about things that they're that their child is doing so it may be that relationship with a few students with a few families um that that could be the most significant one um the principal said that a lot of students probably aren't in schools aren't so aware of how sros spend their day because they simply don't see what's happening behind the scenes so uh questions comments um from any school board members and i'm certainly not going to be the one to answer most of them um with our principals and we

041have denise moody here we have uh i i think we have a representative from the police force here please feel free to raise issues to answer questions and miss nathan you have a question i just wanted to add to your summary of the of the listening session with the principles that one of the things that pretty much every principal said 201 was the difference between the skills of the school resource officer in and you mentioned the de-escalation of the situation but their presence in the building versus having to call dispatch or 9-1-1 to access a police officer in the case of an emergency that the familiarity of the sro with the circumstance in the building with the student already perhaps from past experiences or working with the family helps to address the situation in a

042more appropriate informed way than maybe a police officer coming in the street with no knowledge and no relationship and no background and pretty much every principal um said that independently which which i found interesting thank you other questions or comments well i sat in as well with the secondary principles a lot of information i take a lot of notes i learned a lot and on this uh point of of the sro having a fed up if you will on the street officer i view that as a training opportunity you know if if we as a district are saying you know it seems like the sros they kind of get it right and it seems like those who are those officers who aren't may not necessarily have the level of training or expertise so i view

043that as an opportunity for training you know communicating to the uh chief of police that we'd like to whatever we can do to assist your officers and becoming more knowledgeable further drawn from my experience uh as being the director of our emergency operations center there in anchorage uh i thought also it might be a value to um even provide training uh with our uh to our office personnel so you may make calls to police dispatch on a medical side they're called pre-arrival instructions where you kind of triage the incident and maybe similarly if there's response to a school a call from an office associate or principal saying this is going on then there could be set step of questions that are asked to inform and prepare but all in all one additional thing i greatly

044learned from i don't recall the principal's name from phoenix academy that was mr scripture yeah yeah okay uh uh he shared uh that um some issues do not have to be referred to the police uh he gave examples and i don't want to overstate but i say smoking okay uh more specifically marijuana now i only mentioned that in that the majority of our rps referrals to of the police department are drug vaping alcohol paraphernalia and from our last uh study session you know it's not that the police live for that they prefer to probably not be involved in that but i just see an opportunity you know to to perhaps uh learn as we continue to listen and that's what i'll continue to do as as we move forward in our study session tonight thank

045you mr barlow i see that uh dr garcia and ms workman also have questions or comments i just wanted to quickly though um sort of piggyback on something you said we we had a couple of students who said they would really like the opportunity to share their feelings their experience with our police officers and they talked about what it would be like if there were regular meetings between students mental health staff at the school administrators and the sro in the building and there's even some talk that perhaps those people who have been in the buildings the resource officers could be liaisons to help other officers understand what it's like to be working effectively with teenagers so i mean they're all about education dr garcia i just wanted to double check because i have plenty of

046comments and plenty of questions but the other people that are here are going to be presenting information or their perspective to us tonight right or we're just they're just here to ask answer all of our questions they're here to share information and to answer questions right okay so i have i i think for me and and i was not at all quiet about this while campaigning um i work in a place you know i've worked in in state and federal prisons i've worked in forensic mental health hospitals i work in one now none of us are armed at the facility where i work and the people that i work with are identified as you know in the legal term mentally ill and dangerous so they have a history of being violent towards themselves or others

047and we the way that we respond to a crisis is sort of multi-level um and we do not have you know we have what we consider to be forensic support specialists which are there for i would say to to maintain sort of day-to-day activities and security issues as they arise if there are concerns with um you know illegal activity we deal with certain aspects of it in-house before it gets referred out for charges if necessary but most of the time because there's there's already some sort of legal involvement um we you know if we can manage it in-house we do that and i think a lot of it is to prevent this just sort of cyclical experience of them having to continue to go back to uh into the criminal legal system and so that

048was sort of my reimagining of what the sro role could be because i think one of the things that i have been taken away or i had taken away from your study sessions prior to me being on the board was that there was a lot of confusion about what they were actually doing in in the schools and not you know they were doing their job but as we kind of heard you know some of the middle school kids think that they're there for kind of the the law and order piece of the day-to-day like you have to put wear your masks and you know keep kids out of trouble in the hallways but it sounded to me like a lot of them were offering mentoring services mental health services which are not things that are

049in their um job description and if we are requiring that of them we need to be putting funds towards people who will actually provide those services you know if we're if we're consistently using someone else to provide a service where there are licensed individuals who can do that work that's where we need to be shifting that focus um and i you know i don't discount at all uh you know like phoenix academy i you know i did listen to that previous listening session and some of the other teachers that appreciate the opportunity to have the familiarity with an sro you know who knows the students who knows the schools that that part i absolutely understand i am also very sensitive to some of the data as director nathan reported to us that there's quite a

050bit of skew because racially and ethnically it was 75 percent or more white and caucasian and even if we add in that prefer not to say with any of the other minoritized racial groups it's still not a balanced representation of what we have here in the school district and so you know i mean we can continue to try to collect more data but i think that we're we're not going to get we have a good representative sample of the people who responded but not of the district in its entirety um and there's clearly some you know questions or concerns and kind of inconsistencies about what people appreciate um or don't about sros and i i suppose you know from the work that i do and maybe similar to what director barlow was talking about is

051there are also threat assessment programs you know multidisciplinary teams that should be at work in a district specifically our size which includes mental health professionals which would include a um you know public either public health officers and or you know police officers etc to start to identify a threat before it is imminent and to reduce violence before it happens and there are also things that we as a school can do and we have new schools coming online that will increase the security of a school building facility so you know i i guess there are a number of different perspectives on this that i have um and i know a number of people have reached out to me specifically to to let me know why the sros should absolutely stay because they believe that i'm 100

052fundamentally opposed to it and i suppose to that i just say i'm i'm willing to hear our community and if our community wants them to stay if our students want them to stay um you know that's that's their voice i also think that there's room for how it could be funded differently how it could be utilized differently like if a school like phoenix academy absolutely wants to keep their sros and the vast majority of people are in agreement and this is something that they want to contract does it need to be a district-wide every school has to have an sro or can it be sort of this person-centered or school-centered approach um you know and if one school wants um like safety coaches or just other type of support staff or more mental health staff

053and no sros are you know are we able to do those things are we able to be that flexible and i'm wondering if somebody can just speak to what we as a district can offer in terms of flexibility and adjusting funding as needed because clearly we need a lot more mental health services than we have available now and that seems to be a big priority thank you and uh miss mclaughlin before we get to your question i'm wondering if um denise moody i think you're here i don't mean to call you out but i did oh and ms workman too sorry i see you there but to speak to that you know that threat assessment the mental health issue and whether buildings should each building should maybe determine whether they want to have this contract

054i don't even know if that's possible but and denise would you who may not know what your position with the district is sure my name is denise moody i'm assistant director of student services and my role within the district is at central office to work with our counselors social workers mental health practitioners and other student services groups so i want to comment first on the threat assessment piece so i appreciate that you brought that up and i realized that that may not be something that we've talked to the board about um but that is something that we worked very um steadfastly in 2019 and that has been an area of partnership with the rochester police department about developing threat assessment teams at each of our secondary buildings so we trained a number of people about

055a threat assessment process and this was really important to me because i wanted to be able to identify follow up and provide support to students that might be showing some concerning behavior early on and this is something that we've learned from many of the school shootings is that there are often early warning signs there are often points of intervention and then often students don't have the follow-up they need in order to get their mental health um the level of service that they need and we end up with some really disastrous results so i really felt kind of an ethical and moral obligation to think about how do we identify who those students are that are showing some of those early warning signs how do we make sure that we are able to follow up with

056them because what happens a lot of times is that we have an incident and if you deal with it as a discipline issue we don't necessarily have to follow up from a mental health perspective to you know what's going on with this kid and the roster police department has been a fabulous partner in that they've attended several trainings with us they've been a great link to the community um aspect sometimes the threat happens in the community but there's a connection to school so being able to communicate about that um sometimes excuse me they are um yeah sometimes they're people adjacent to the school they may not necessarily be our student but have a connection to our school so that's also been a fabulous way that um the police department has helped us with that so

057they are we have a threat assessment team you know we've been really careful about confidentiality about some of those concerns with our students so um we have some guidelines of when our police department or school resource officers or others from the police department are involved in those teams but realize that they're a very important piece of making sure that that student's safe that student gets what they need community safe schools safe and that we have good mental health supports so that is a multi-disciplined team of counselors social workers administrators and then our police department i don't want to keep going on about this but it's good we also have a community team so in addition to the school-based team we have a community team that also involves our county attorneys some members from olson county

058behavioral health we also have um probation officers so we have kind of a multi-disciplinary team that also is sometimes maybe talking about specific situations but also just working together um to think about partnership and i i think that's one thing that we do well in olmsted county is really wanting to have strong partnerships to reduce the criminalization of some of the behaviors that we see in our youth and i think that is something that i don't want to lose i think it's something that we're all committed to as different agencies and think we have some strong partnerships in those areas i think the other comments that i just would want to make is around mental health support the board has been very supportive against mr videos about increasing the mental health support that we have

059for our students i think that we still have more work to go as the mental health needs of our kids continue i we've had conversations with this police department about what their role is and i they've been pretty clear that they're not mental health providers and so sometimes i think it gets a little bit gray and how we talk about it but i think our sros on the in the schools know when that needs to go to somebody for a suicide assessment i do think there's maybe some more clear boundaries among those providers about what's an appropriate action for the sro to take and what's an appropriate action for our mental health providers to take and believe that we have some good systems in our building about the separation of those roles anything else you

060want me to comment on before um no we'll get back to you though okay stay tuned thank you ms workman um yeah earlier chair marvin you mentioned that there were students or a student who said that the sros were enforcing mask wearing and you stated very unequivocally that that wasn't their job no and i'm sorry if i misstated a student said a student said he thought that was what they were there for to tell kids what their masks on and to check hall passes so we have that conversation about okay now well okay i apologize that was my misunderstanding um but thinking about that i'm looking at this agreement and i'm seeing on you know the page i think that was referenced earlier page two with the sro duties include and there's a whole laundry

061list but it doesn't i'm not seeing it in this agreement and i'm wondering where it is that they are not to be involved in student discipline that's not their role but i'm not seeing it in this agreement specifically or what those student discipline things might look like i mean i it was my understanding from quite a while ago that yeah our school resource officers definitely are not to be involved with discipline but and behave those kinds of you know normal types of behaviors that would be handled by the administrator or the teacher in the classroom or you know checking hall passes the student gave that example thank you and i'm wondering if there's somebody from law enforcement or somebody else who could answer how sros know what their job is not i i can speak

062to that well let me get my camera on here i apologize hi josh thompson with the police department good evening um and and what specifically as far as was the question as far as how do they know when it's just that they're yeah that they're not there to check hall passes or to uh tell a kid put his mask on or if it he walks by a classroom and a kid is you know throwing a book on the floor that that's not the officer's job to go in there and collar the kids intervene yeah correct yeah all the sros are aware of that i mean that's something that we have discussions with as well that they know their lane if they need to intervene or help out because it creates something creates a safety concern

063that could pose a risk to other students or to staff they might have to get involved only if the behavior after a you know staff member tries to enforce the school rule creates an environment where that becomes maybe more violent otherwise we're not there we're not they're not there to even or shouldn't even be there as a use of muscle so to speak um we know you know what our lane is and and i believe the administrators in the schools and the staff know what that what their lane is sometimes they intermix um if it gets to that point where there's a safety issue but once that's you know once that's calmed down or de-escalated and any discipline is taking place we're removed from that we're not in that we're not in the room with

064with staff we're not standing outside the room with our arms folded we're we're removed from it we're not involved in it anymore after that could i ask a follow-up or so you refer to elaine and that's great and you know teachers administrators know their lane and um sros know their lane but do they know each other's lanes in other words you know as a board member i don't know what their lane is i don't know if i need to know except in terms of making a decision at some point is whether or not we're going to continue with our school resource officers but i think it would be helpful to me and perhaps other board members if we knew you know the kinds of things kinds of discussions that you had with those officers in

065preparing them to work with our kids and what they can and can't do you know maybe perhaps there are school administrators who are involved in that that conversation who can give them some really specific examples of what that might mean because they may not know um you know i'm working kind of from a a point of some ignorance here in terms of what the parties do and don't do and how that's communicated to the respective individuals involved mr scripture i see you on screen i don't know if you want to weigh into that in terms of how building principals and officers communicate about what the job is and what it is not yeah i can tell you how it's done here is office reporter and then the other sros i've worked with they don't get

066involved in anything until i call them and say a possible crime is committed then it's really turned over to them and they deal with it um sometimes i will call them to be proactive i don't know if you want specific examples or not but like i had a student teenage teenager in my office grabbing cords and choking himself with it hitting me every once in a while i called officer ford m for backup and he just he stayed out of it never got involved in it just in case the kid turned on me and got the cord wrapped around around my neck or was hurting me so a little proactive um we had a fight the other day never got him involved we were able to deal with it there was no both kids wanted

067to engage nobody got hurt we we never called officer reporter i don't even you'd have to ask him if he even knows that it occurred um it's only when i call enough he walks around the hallway and also there's a fight and he happens to be there is he going to deal with it yeah he's not going to wait for me to call him but it's literally in what i call him for at phoenix is just emergency stuff and a little proactive i got a kid puts a um two-foot hole in the wall with his knees and he's swearing and banging and ripping the aed thing i called him there but they he won't engage until i say hey it's this is this is a crime i think it's your your choice we had a

068student yesterday um standing in front of the buses teenage boy wouldn't move from the buses making the buses wait my myself and another stan staff member that are cpi trained transported that student about four feet away so the buses could go we had a different sro that was here because ours is gone right now um didn't engage the student was kicking me in the shins the entire time as soon as the buses went we let the student go um student ran in front of another van at that time i said to the student if this continues there's a chance that we might have to have this officer involved and done over was never really involved in the situation but was there so long story short i i myself in the one that determines if he's

069involved at phoenix that's how we do it and it's emergency situations it's not dropping a book it's not chewing tobacco it's not um cigarettes we've had a couple situations where our kids will loiter at properties around here and smoke out front and the business owners will call and then we'll bring them in with officer ford i mean just says guys this is what could happen i don't want to do that but that's that's i don't know if that answers your question or not but it's really kind of dictated through me and the reason i do it here because then i don't have all these other perceptions of what's in emergency it's kind of my perception of what's an emergency and it really comes down to the safety of the students and the staff thank you

070thank you miss mclaughlin thank you i just want to just advise people who perhaps don't know this about my background but i used to be a prosecutor here locally so i know the officer is very familiar with the the school liaison officers at that time based on the work that i did in juvenile court um so i have some background and some understanding of their role and particularly their role in the school district and it seems to me that it has ebbed and flowed um since the time that i left that office in 2016 i think that there's things that have changed that are perhaps positive and some that perhaps are not as positive but kind of what i want to ask about here is that i looked at the sro duties on page two

071of the contract and i'm wondering if this is an opportunity to at some point take a look at this and and update it to see if there's some changes that need to be made in this um the things that kind of jumped out when i read this today are um one of the one of the towards the bottom it talks about apprehending and prosecuting criminals i think there's perhaps a different way we could say that these days and i i would really hope that we have updated language for that type of situation um so just an example of things that perhaps we can take a look at the language and and seek some modification and some agreement about ways to update that but one of the things that i was thinking about i wanted to

072use um dr garcia's words on this in the sense that um i also um i want to speak to the topic that i do also personally take ownership from my role in the school to prison pipeline and that i did have a role in that in my personal uh previous employment but dr garcia's word of reimagining what the officers do i'm hoping that the officers could speak to that in the sense that you know the world has changed in the last year um you know what ways can we reimagine how the the um sros are operating in the schools as well and i can i guess my focus would be on the question as to um in one of our recent board updates of the um the strategic plan there was some reference to restorative

073justice and employing or perhaps contracting with some restorative justice work with the district and i'm wondering if the officers could speak to their potential role in that you know that the plan for that strategy and in how they could be involved in that and both in the reimagining and specifically for the restorative justice yeah captain jeff still well i'll i'll take that one uh i i have been involved in a lot of conversations uh and and i probably don't have to uh tell you board memorial golovkin that some of the biggest pushback uh is coming from the system not the police part of the system to to to really keep these things out of the system and we're committed to that we're doing that every day in the schools uh the the you know i

074i i'd like to just sort of say that you know what we know what we all know is uh kids getting thrown out of school and not being in school is is a prime predictor of things of them not achieving their full potential and we're committed to being part of the solution not part of the problem uh we dealt with an issue this week uh it happened on a school bus and the patrol officers again i'm not trying to they used the tools they had uh which was a system solution uh which we were immediately able to uh wrestle from the system i'll just say uh uh and and turn that over to the school to deal with again a perfect example of how the school bus never made it to school which uh didn't

075engage the school resource officer at the at that point and engaged the the the sector car and again i i think this is you know i i appreciate the fact and that that uh the police aren't the only um the only part of the system that's that that needs some help here needs some reform here and and we're committed to that and i think a couple of the other comments again i think it it starts with and this might go to uh the statements by mr barlow you know we start by selecting seasoned police officers with a diverse history and field experience that are youth-centered that have shown their dedication and their tech temperament to demonstrating work with communities youth do we still have a ways to go there absolutely do we have to make

076sure that uh just like everybody else in the system that they're called that were you know raising their cultural intellect that their culture culturally competent to understand these things for sure and and we're doing that every day um my uh my personal feeling is is in lieutenant thompson knows this that i i want to see every ticket that's written by an sro and i want to know why there wasn't another solution where that's a fundamental shift from the easiest way to deal with the problem is write a ticket it always has but it's the fastest way and and again i don't i don't say the officers that aren't working in the schools don't understand that but they believe the system will work it out i believe that the system may or may not work it

077out in it and it will take too long and tensions can rise between a fight on a school bus and two or three or four months when one of these gets in front of a diversion panel uh and so we are committed to um being part of the solution uh and and uh again i think um restorative justice we're also highly committed to restoring the trust and police department and police in general and and i spend every day that i show up for work doing that in this community and i'm proud of the work we're doing uh i think there's got to be a better way we can't go on like we are right now but uh again i think the con i i really like and i'm i'm more from the perspective of dr

078garcia that site they you know what i found out when i really started digging into what we're really doing right today you know right now in our program is is every site's a little different and and i think that's okay i think we're hearing from a lot of students that want some involvement uh obviously which i think is great but but again there's different challenges at different sites and so nothing in that contract is not rewritable or changeable we're committed to providing the best program possible for everybody involved in it our partners in the school are our students our parents and everybody so again i don't want to take up too much time but we are doing this work and i appreciate the staff that have weighed in to help us get better i appreciate

079those board members that have been willing to listen to to let us at least tell the story and how how we're doing things here in rochester and i think again the survey is a snapshot in time that probably doesn't uh capture all the data that that we need to make a a super informed decision but it is it is a map a road map for us to to to how do we move those strongly strongly dislike or whatever the last category is up and those are the challenges us for going forward if we remain in the schools thank you miss nathan so at our um study session back in september we delayed looking at the information about law enforcement referrals because the superintendent wanted a chance to update the data and that information was sent

080to the board earlier this week superintendent do you have someone who could speak to those um law enforcement referral numbers and um what the nature of those referrals that actually end up as cases in the justice system yes i can have scott in that scott i don't know if chris uh on with us as well yes i'm here also okay yeah those those two can do that i'll turn it over to you you guys okay and mr sheridan and mr lane could you for people who may not know who are listening could you tell folks kind of what your position is in the district and scott especially what you did before you were the facilities guy sure my name is scott sheridan i'm the executive director of operations for the school district and i've been

081with the district since december of 2014. prior to that i was a police officer with the city of rochester for 33 years and i was one of the original sros back in well dating myself here 1993 to 1995 and i was the first middle school sro at that time and the only reason i got pulled out of there is because i got promoted to sergeant but otherwise and this was at kellogg middle school is where i was assigned but then when i retired from the department i was a captain of the patrol division and when i was hired here at the district i was hired to do district security and then from there it transitioned to a few other areas that were assigned to me which is great but um and i work real close

082with chris lingan chris has more of a direct contact with each of the sites when you're talking about referrals when we're talking about referrals there's really two types of referrals one is a referral that the administration of a building deems necessary to give it to uh the sro and they consider that a referral and when that is done chris can address how that happens but there's other types of referrals that are familiar to the role of the sros of what a referral is and that's basically a referral that may go to the city or county attorney for review prior to uh charges being filed and and so the referral where word in our sense is different for each entity but chris do you want to handle the the school part of referrals and do a

083better explanation than i did on that no you're you're right i'm scott um my role i'm the director of valentine's secondary um my i used to be the principal at jefferson and before that i worked very closely with the sros before scott was hired um went under the days of dr dahlman and the start of mr munoz's time i worked very closely with the sros and the program so as far as this part as far as if if a student is going to be referred to law enforcement let's say there is an issue that happens within the school and we're going to have a discipline issue and ends up being referred to law enforcement so we go through our own discipline issue we then let the our own discipline so we're going to suspend or

084where whatever we end up doing and then we let the sro know here's kind of the situation so let's say two kids have a fight and we'd like it to go forward we like let our sro know we then have the sro no we check a box to refer to the police that's all we do the sro may bring charges may not bring charges so that's why some of our data doesn't look right because it looks like we've got 12 things going to the sro and they've got only six things listed well not every time does when we send something to sro does it go up for check charges we just let them know here's what took place they can make their own determination we don't tell them hey i think this should be an

085assault charger i think this should be this not our role and then when you have the referrals to the sros they have the discretion to investigate it and they have the discretion to decide what type of charges if any or what type of disposition they want to apply to it and it goes from there so our data from the district will never match what the data is from the police department police department has different coding systems have different uh titles for different types of offenses ours in the district don't match what the police department has so when you you're trying to compare referral numbers from the school district of the police department the numbers are never going to match the other thing that isn't taken into account is potentially you could have an sro and

086i'm just drawing a scenario here an sro sitting in their office and a student who was had an issue at home that required or wanted to report to an officer say some type of assault that happened at their home and the sro is a resource there this student might bring it to that sro and the sro might investigate it create a case write a report and that data there gets applied to that sro so when we run the city data that's assigned to that sro and it's an increase of something that the school may never have known anything about and so when i go back to saying that the data may never match that's there's all types of instances such as that that apply here lieutenant thompson i don't know if you have any other

087information you want to apply on the slro piece as far as where it goes from there it's up to you yeah and you make you make a very valuable point um i've been reviewing a lot of data from referrals over the last couple weeks and that's that is one thing that has come up quite often are times where there are students that feel comfortable coming to the sro to report a problem that's been coming going on at home whether it's child abuse neglect domestic abuse and things like that where we're able to provide intervention where there wasn't a call to police from the home or from the community but we can still provide and that might include or involve an arrest but also might involve us being able to contact child protective services or social

088services and get services provided to the home that may not have ever been um able to be provided because they weren't the call wasn't made somebody didn't feel comfortable um we didn't feel they're in a position to call police from home but they are able to reach out to a resource that they they felt they could trust within the school um i do also know there's a and there's other simple referrals that you know somebody got a student got a new truck and they want a police officer they sro to go look and see if the window tint is too dark or if the muffler is too loud um things like that that end up uh maybe being listed as a referral because it's something that you know they wanted to talk to the police

089officer the sro might have a better understanding or answer as to uh you know um to those questions so there are a lot of times where we're referred to more from that type of a standpoint thank you uh director garcia so i have a just a few more questions and i don't know if it'll be easier for me to ask it one at a time and then have people respond um or chair marvin if you'd just like me to answer ask them all at once why don't you get it all out there okay so one of my questions um is how many if somebody could just speak to for the public's sake how many sros do we employ and can you be clear about how that's funded that would be great also from the data

090it seems like so few students have interactions with sros and if you could maybe speak a little bit to what you do the rest of the day when you're not interacting with students i think that would be helpful um and also if we were not to renew the contract or we were to adjust or reimagine the role in some way can you speak to your perspective or opinions of security officers safety coaches or public safety support specialists and how they might either replace or supplement the work that you do thank you so the first question is how many sros do we employ and how do we pay for it or what pays for it uh officer franklin thank you yeah i can i can take that one thanks for having me actually i think i

091can answer maybe one more question that i believe dr garcia had is how do we know what we don't get involved in and i'm looking at the uh our agreement here in in section 10 i believe it is under prohibited actions it says in addition a peace officer may not participate in recommending or determining student discipline or investigating incidents of student discipline which does not involve potential criminal activity so i think some of that well what we don't do is pre is highlighted in that section already within our agreement um in reference to the funding i'll tackle the first one maybe in the in the in the last one the funding issue is we have five school resource officers right now that you are uh funding or paying a part a portion of their salary

092i can tell you that um that you pay approximately i think it's about 65 percent of their salary obviously because you don't have them full-time year-round and it's about 65 percent of their salary as far as the exact dollar value that is also in the contract i believe it's in the range of about 320 000 annually i'm not 100 sure what that breaks down uh monthly i apologize uh but it's in that it's in that ballpark um let me just maybe jump since i've got the floor here let me just say a couple of things um we're we're committed the rochester police department is 100 percent committed to building out a school resource officer uh program that we can all be happy with uh whether that means making changes to the uniform whether we have

093squad cars parked in front or unmarked cars parked out in front you know we're willing to come to the table and make this work i believe in the school resource officer program i believe it's a it's it's effective i believe that it's part of the safety of schools but i also believe right now more important than absolutely ever in the history of law enforcement is it imperative that we have an opportunity to interact with kids on a positive uh in a positive uh environment in the schools there's no better place to do that than in the schools right now and so we would be at a significant disadvantage uh from a community relations building up that um those relationships with the kids if we were taken out of schools um and so from my own

094personal perspective and professional perspective quite frankly if you do take them out of the schools you are creating in my opinion um significant problems and challenges uh for not only us and law enforcement but for also the students outside of that night i completely respect where uh board member don bartle is coming from of yes can we always train our officers to do better yes but part of my job as the chief is to put the varsity team on the on the field here and having school resource officers people with passion people with a heart most of them are parents and as everybody that that is a parent today can understand you have a better understanding of how to deal with kids once you become a parent yourself quite frankly we've hired a lot of

095new officers uh in the last three years we've hired about 30 new officers which means one third of my patrol division has less than three years of experience so again absent the school resource officers that that have the heart the passion the understanding of juvenile uh development and behavior and quite frankly it brought a large part of this boils down to having the time to handle these things if you if i send you the sector car uh they got about four or five other calls stacked up for service that they're trying to get to and they're gonna they're not gonna take the time because they don't have the time they're obligated they gotta they gotta kind of churn and go through these and so to me the school resource officer program is in fact a

096source of strength when i look at the policing service model and how to deliver the highest level of public safety to this community and so i very very much support it uh i'm i'm pleased to hear that for the most part uh the surveys at least what i heard to just you went through the data really quick if i could get a copy of that that'd be great but you went through it quick it sounds like most of it's positive and we are committed to addressing and dealing with the negative out there and we've got to tackle that head-on that's the challenge that we have in front of us uh with this profession and we're committed to doing that um and so i think i answered the first the last one i'll take and stand

097for any other questions i quite frankly forgot what was in the middle the question in the middle had to do with what the officers do throughout the day and i would if you're interested i would encourage you to talk to an sro and do a ride along with them follow them around see exactly what they do it would be an eye-opening experience for you i mean i can go back to the time that i've spent for instance out at mayo and uh like when pat kelly was there and we'd go walk down the hall because we had to go talk to somebody he could hardly get down the hall because he's high fiving and hugging and people are calling him you know his relationship with the kids is just incredible and you need to see

098it for yourself you're more and i would imagine that the sros would be more than welcome willing to have you come with them and follow them around um and then i think i'd like to expand what chief franklin said about the replacing of the s0s and i think dr garcia asked about what other resources would be able to be used if we didn't have the srl's but when i was brought into this hired by the school district in 14 as the security person i use that lightly but security person i was also given the oversight of the sro program as well and the security pairs and the srls are the most valuable piece of what's done to keep everybody safe absolutely without a doubt they are the most valuable resource because they have the resources

099around them they have the training and the skills that we need if if you hire a citizen to try to do that piece could they be effective yeah potentially but just the vetting process to become what an sro is like they described as far as the selection of them we sit on the selection panels chris lingan and i sit on the selection panels to select the sros we have a say in who they hire i have i'm familiar with most of them anyway prior to them coming on so i have a pretty good understanding but to be completely frank with you without them in our building i don't know how i could do my job effectively and it would just change the dynamics of my responsibilities with the district and i don't know where that

100would wind up but uh i didn't even steal your sunder thunder chief could you give an example you said you don't know how you could do your job without the sros like can you give an example of how they make that more doable well what i'm talking about is this the safety piece if something would happen in a school and we didn't have them there and it's my responsibility to try to ensure it because you know i have a role in the crisis plans i have a role in the training and if something happens on my watch i take that as a self my own responsibility and not having that resource of having an sro who's familiar with the building who knows the kids who knows the staff who knows the layout of the building

101and you're you're calling regular patrol officers in who aren't familiar with the building aren't familiar with the kids or the administration it just inhibits the ability to achieve the end result of keeping everybody safe and insecure and that's one of the beauties of having the sro in the building is just their knowledge of how the school district works uh the kids the staff and layouts of buildings and uh it's just invaluable and the resources that they bring thank you i'm miss mclaughlin my question is a little bit more to a follow-up to the discussion uh between mr sheridan and mr lindgren about what the uh you know how how referrals are made and that type of thing uh and discussion of the officer's discretion about that my question for you though is it it's maybe

102for officers but also for um administrators or principals is is there anything that's considered like a zero tolerance behavior that it would require a certain response and not that discretion you know that it if there are limitations on your role either as the administrator or as the officer that you have either by school policy or law you have to take certain action and that discretion is is kind of out of your hands who would like to answer that one yeah go ahead go ahead i i i i i think there's a lot of discretion when we're talking about mr meaner type of activity uh and i think this is where my struggle or not my struggle but with the restorative justice i i mentioned an incident on a school bus we had a parent that

103was demanding a citation be written and that's where i think we can really be good partners in that we can bring parents that that might believe the only way to get justices through a citation or a system intervention and convince them there's a lot better ways to get justice and prevent the behavior from occurring and that's what we did in this case uh the tickets went away and and and and again so i i do think that obviously uh our officers are are are you know have to sell some of this stuff to parents who believe a system parents that believe the only form of justice is a ticket somebody going to court and a judge pronouncing sentence on anybody and and we all know that's not really uh that doesn't that's not really what

104most of these kids need so again felony type assault behavior i think we have you know i i'm reluctant to take on anything like that in in sort of a non-traditional way because there are part system partners that sort of have that but but i think almost everything else we can mitigate and get get a level of justice without engaging the criminal justice system and if i if i could just really comment quick because kind of response mr barlow um you're right there are a number of citations for things like tobacco and paraphernalia and things like that and that's one thing that we've been looking at is is is a ticket the best response for some of those especially petty misdemeanor things and is there a reason why there needs to be school discipline and

105then law enforcement action both to me some of those things could really go down the lane of the school and i think we have to have some more dialogue and collaborate collaboration together to kind of determine how we want to best respond to some of those certain types of incidents um but a lot of those things don't require our involvement even though technically yes it's a criminal thing or it's against the law but is that our involvement gonna real really give us the best resolution or the best result for those kids i think it was mr scripture i think in some in one of the meetings uh in the past that you know we're there for fun and emergencies and most of time we want to be there for fun you asked about like our

106daily you know what what's our daily a day look like and grant you can't predict a day today you know there was an incident um you know based on an outside threat that kind of changed things all at once for half the day but on on a given day if our officers can be in the in the schools and building relationships and getting high fives and getting comfortable enough where kids want to come up and give us hugs and and high fives and talk to us now does that mean obviously we're not reaching everybody and we need to be more intentional um i think of making sure we are and we've had we've been having conversations even prior to covid changed a lot of the things that we wanted to do um ninth grade groups

107coming into the secondary schools sixth grade groups coming into the middle schools so they know what our role is and what are what we want why we're there there shouldn't be a misunderstanding where a kid thinks the student thinks that we're there to check hall passes and and whether we're there for the mass to be the mask police our community is par our school is part of our community our kids are part of our community and right now as chief franklin mentioned it's more important than ever that that we're part of our community and we're joining together with our community to show and prove that we're part we're all in this together and i think it's important that kids see police officers we talked about not wearing uniforms or maybe modifying our uniforms and we

108can go back and forth i mean i could go either way with that but i think if the students understand why we're in the schools and we can get to that comfort level they can see us in in that community in a police uniform and then when they associate us outside the schools out on the street they recognize that uniform as a trusted resource and a trusted um partner in in our community and not just there for enforcement or or because somebody's in trouble um so that on a given day that's what we want to do we want to be there to for fun um and are the reasons or the sros we have in there now they really really i think believe that and that's what they want to do their coaches their parents

109um they are involved with with kids in a lot of different areas inside and outside of school the coach football baseball basketball they're involved now that doesn't mean we can't do better and we want to do better and this you know a survey like this for example really shows us where we can do that and we need that we need to have you know student groups and kids have that input and be involved in in making decisions on why we're there and what we're doing and if we're missing a certain population we need to make we need to do better and make sure that we're that we're able to reach that part of the population because yeah it's great that we have kids coming giving us hugs and high fives but where are the ones

110that aren't or the ones that don't that don't know us those are the ones we need to reach as well thank you mr barlow and then miss amundsen and miss nathan and i'm sorry uh chair marvin could i just follow up just with one something quick yeah okay thank you um officers i guess what i was looking for the topic that kind of put this in mind for me about the zero tolerance and maybe the district has something to say about this too is the concept of various weapons you might see is there any discretion in that or how do you specifically deal with that in the school environment chris did you want to handle that piece you're the one that deals with that far more than i do did we lose chris oh there

111you are sir chris is being the strong silent titans yes microphone issues there up almost at it there you go yeah i hate it when that happens is it on now again no you're good now okay keep keep clicking off on me it's off on there again now you're good okay i'm sorry repeat the question because i've been back and forth trying to get the microphone going i'm sorry okay if a kid brings a weapon to school what's the consequence i mean is there some automatic i think what karen's asking for is there anything for which there's just really no discretion karen is that sort of what you're asking so yeah so get back sorry just going back to that piece within that when it was asked what's not a discretion or what is always

112going to go to the sro a weapon is always going to go to the sro so we're always going to have that piece with it within the sro go that that direction um and then if there is when we do this stuff the the principal or the assistant principal is not in with the sro when we're going through the interviews their interview stuff is different with the weapon than what our interviews are so we're not together within that we're not sharing the information or anything like that like we have a weapon on campus you know and move forward that way if it's one where we need to uh um where we don't don't know where it is let's say we hear a rumor let's say that there's a weapon on campus let's just pretend not

113saying this has happened okay i'm just pretending um and we have a rumor of of a what weapon on campus um we may work together to to find that weapon but once it's found or what once we come up with the idea that there's not a weapon on it we do our interviews differently or separately does that make sense to take that a little further what chris says he says they refer to law enforcement but law enforcement will investigate it and then if they determine there wasn't any intent or didn't reach any level of criminality then they based on their discretion they're not going to do anything with it so there's really no hard fast rule that every single weapon results in a charge because that legally and statutorily that just isn't going doesn't qualify

114um but they do do their due diligence we ask the sros to do their due diligence to investigate it because obviously weapons are it's not something that we want on our district property for obvious reasons and so we refer to law enforcement to make that determination we still do our own as chris said and handle our own discipline based on it but it's it's very difficult to say everything has a hard fast rule because every case is handled individually on a and the discretion is applied appropriately to each individual case thank you miss amundsen and then mr barlow ms nathan and ms workman thank you um back to something that chief franklin said a little earlier about reimagining revisiting modifying the program in whatever way it will work best for both entities i'm i'm hopeful

115about that i'm supportive of that and i would i would encourage more conversation like we're like what we're having here but with our um with our administration more so than the school board the people who really know what we need and and um much more because they see it every day uh so i would support that and but i just wanted to follow up on a question that i had asked at our study session back in september about um the weapon the gun part of the uniform i would be in support of revisiting and being responsive to the concerns that were raised especially from some of the students themselves about the intimidation or anxiety or whatever negative characterizations might come along with a uniform and um and the gun is part of the uniform and

116i would even say that is the more intimidating or more anxiety producing part of a uniform so when i asked that question back in september i was told that it was absolutely non-negotiable end of discussion nothing can be done about it is that still the case or have we perhaps been able to to think about options or alternatives to that part of the challenge i'll take that one um in uh and if i was if i was blunt back then i'm really sorry about that i didn't mean to come off like that uh but uh no my position is still the same today that that is probably the one thing that's not um that's not negotiable as far as uh softening the uniform it's part of who we are as police officers in this profession

117um and i just cannot in good um conscience put the police officers in the schools without uh their sidearms which they are trained to to use we've got holsters uh that you know different level holsters that help secure the weapon and i and i completely understand the concerns um that you have in that and and i think we i'm more than willing to come alongside and let's come up with some creative ways that we can kind of soften that of that that fear or trepidation if it's there and uh let's come together and knew that a little bit but as far as taking that off their uniform um i apologize i cannot go there at this particular time but again if you want polo shirts if you want suit and tie if you want all

118that stuff i think could uh you know suit and tie with uh um a suit coat you're not gonna see the weapon and so there are ways that you could conceal that um to take away that visual stimulus uh if that's if that's a obstacle that's g franklin that's what one student had mentioned is could they just wear a jacket over it so that i didn't have to look at the gun so thanks for that uh mr barlow uh yes this is for um scott um the district has invested quite a bit of money with the approval of our voters uh to enhance our uh building entrances and uh among the student and community responses was safety you know wanting to feel safe can you perhaps speak to briefly what the secure entrances will do

119and how uh it uh establishes more of a control point as to who is coming in as well as the additional enhancements for uh outlying securing of doors if you don't mind sure thank you director barlow yeah part of the referenda budget that was approved by the voters included the safety piece as far as secure entries and what a secure entry entails is once one entrance point for all visitors to come into the buildings doesn't mean the kids per se so if the kids are out on the playground they may come in a different entrance but it has to do with uh one available entrance for anybody that's coming into the building whether it's a visitor a parent a volunteer or or some such and what that does is it it's a controlled access point

120that they have to be buzzed in so when they come up to the door they're actually standing either under a canopy or by a camera in the person that's the security personnel or the office manager who's ever controlling the door will have a visual of who that person is whether on camera also through a window can engage with that person while that person's outside determine uh the need to allow the person in and then they're allowed into a vestibule and once they're in the vestibule then they have to be buzzed in again and they funnel through the office so they have to sign in going through the office before they're allowed access into the main part of the building so everything is really controlled um the other piece of it is all the doors otherwise

121are locked around the outside of the school they're they all have a system alarm system on them which allows them to uh if they're breached or open uh somebody's going to be able to know and the other piece of this is uh as we're building these new buildings what we're putting in is the it's a das it's a distributed antenna system which allows uh the 800 megahertz radios which uh emergency personnel use to be functionable throughout the building right now we're having an issue at a couple of our buildings where those 800 megahertz don't work and obviously that's a safety factor for all involved it also enhances the cell phone usage and also the in-house radios that the district uses as well so that they function throughout the entire building because buildings are made of

122precast concrete and steel and that inhibits sometimes the signal so we have to find ways to go around that and that's a priority to us with our new buildings that we're working on and you're going to be seeing some budget numbers coming through in the coming months to to remedy that so all these things came into play and i appreciate the question director barlow on it and hopefully i explained it well enough for you yeah i'll i'll jump in there too thanks scott and um you know i i'm really happy that we're able to uh due to the referendum get all of our schools will have a secured entrance but it makes our schools safer but it's not the you know we're all familiar with the sandy hook school shooting they had similar secured entrance

123like what we have so they're not 100 foolproof but they are a lot safer than not having a secured entrance absolutely thank you miss nathan um so i i heard scott say um and i um i heard there was discussion about the selection of the sros for these positions um i'm wondering um we've invested a lot in equity specific training for our staff and training about cultural responsiveness for our teachers and our staff and i'm wondering right now the degree to which the sros are participating in our equity focused professional development and if it might be i know in the contract says attending trainings provided by the district but i'm wondering if we could specify more in the contract and maybe it's not in a contract it's in a separate document however it handles legally

124the specific kinds of equity and and culturally responsive trainings that the sros would participate with to specifically target the needs of our school populations and our students and and their diversity so that the sros can be more responsive yes that could certainly be added i know that the police department has been doing their own in-house culturally diverse training i don't know if lieutenant you want to talk a little bit about what all patrol offers it all patrol officers actually had uh the training that they go through in those areas yeah all officers are we received you know yearly cultural diversity training implicit bias training de-escalation training um all of our sros are cit trained or critical incident trained with de-escalation in things that involve mental health and recognizing and and de-escalating situations involving that um

125and and and looking ahead maybe there are things especially jointly as a team um whether it's with the administrative team or other district um opportunities that we have to um to attend additional trainings there there's national school resource officer um trainings that go on in conferences that our officers attend um in fact and i've only been in the position kind of overseeing part of the sro program here for about the last year but one thing i found out when i first started was that um a lot of our sros are actually recognized at a state level um with the with the work that they've been doing where they've been asked to come and actually teach and speak at some of these state sro conferences so um that the work and the training and the things

126that they're doing both culturally and you know with all that kind of you know are things that we are really very intentional on making sure that we're up to speed on yeah scott if i could just add we we were working and this was pre-covered but but we really need to get back to it on again making them experts on the impacts of childhood trauma i know your your team is like miles ahead of cops in general uh and and and probably sros so i i think there's a real opportunity there for us to look for those opportunities uh maybe we haven't in the past to really focus on on these officers that are spending a lot of time around kids that have experienced a lot of trauma and how even simple things like touch

127and that can totally impact the outcome of uh of what might just be a chance encounter so we are committed uh to doing that uh going forward and we were it was from some some service providers that were dealing with traumatized youth that brought this to our attention over a year ago and we're still trying to pull it off and and we will pull it off but but i know you guys are way ahead of us on that and we're committed for those officers to understand not only the dynamics of race in society but childhood trauma on the way uh chill our children react to certain things you know and miss nathan and then miss mclaughlin will get to you but as we're talking about this part of the contract reads meet and collaborate with

128school administrators and district administrators to develop and work toward mutually agreed upon goals our students were saying you know in addition to could they be plain clothes they were saying they would really like the opportunity to process with their sro and mental health provide provider and administrator what's going on in this building and what does our police department in this city need to know about us especially some of the kids of color we're saying not sure that they understand exactly what's happening around here and you know from experience and i can tell you too these kids are smart and they are educators and i think something like that you know changing the contract a little bit and say yeah meet with the administrators but also meet with student groups um because they'll listen but they're

129also going to talk and and they have a lot to say again i've learned a tremendous amount from them uh miss mclaughlin i just wanted to add one brief part to that discussion is that i would want to include the special ed students as a different population that i think that they're you know perhaps thinking about a very different response when working with that population is something again um captain stilwell you talked about the district is probably leaps and bounds ahead on that i think that's probably a similar category and i think that you could learn a lot from the teachers with that population about how to interact and and perhaps a different again reimagining a different interaction there versus the regular school population yeah and i i just to the chair's point uh we

130had committed the rochester community initiative which is mostly male kids to really start having some of these dialogues again school we haven't been in in person learning at the high school level but that the chief made that commitment to them when him and i and the mayor met with that group uh and and have our school resource officers not only dialogue but bring in other leaders from the community whether it's the mayor or or whoever uh in to talk to kids because i i thoroughly agree these kids uh are are gonna have to pick up the mantle from maybe my generation that that hasn't moved the ball far enough and that and and and they provide wonderful insight every time we meet with them and we we are committed to that at all levels of

131this police department thank you and miss nathan so at the community level with the police department i know there was a lot of um accolades about the um social worker that was assigned to work with the police officer and and respond to certain incidents i think i heard um mr mr lingan say that in a circumstance when the sro is doing an investigation the administration separates themselves from the police officers so that that investigation has happened have we seen any models or is there any consideration of that i don't know which i i've heard it referred to as a co-response for our students in our schools that if there is a law enforcement situation that it isn't just the sro and the student but there is a mental health or a resiliency specialist or an

132equity specialist or someone who's a trusted adult from the school side partnering with the sro in in addressing this the student's reaction to or uh mental social emotional needs in in being in this law enforcement situation so i i think a couple things one again i i i think we don't expect our officers to do mental health i mean we expect them to recognize when somebody's uh in crisis and try to de-escalate and then get them to the resource uh so so again i think you know there's nothing preventing us obviously we're working through this co-responder model in the community what we need to do together what we need to do separate early results are positive and and i don't know if you're asking would that be a resource the school resource officer uh could

133call on which they certainly could but i'm wondering if there's not some redundancy there that the resources aren't already in the school when we get to that point um again i don't think we're dealing with go ahead calling on the mental health or the social workers that already exist in the schools to to maybe play that role for our students yeah i i'm not someone else would have to answer that i do think the comments about the way we're doing threat assessments and those in a combined model are sort of the model for that i i think our cops and schools know where the resources are uh how often they're calling on each other or if it's a i'm not going to respond to you respond model which i think we could all live with

134uh if there's not a safety concern uh i'm not exactly sure how those relationships are currently working mr lingard it looks like you want to say something yeah maybe this is how you're asking it maybe i'm misinterpreting it too but um so if we have a situation in our schools where a student might be suicidal they're in with the building administrator would we bring a police officer in possibly would we bring you know as far as having to transport them would we bring in a social worker certainly we'd bring in all those people to help with that situation you know do we need to transport this dude do we need to do this is that kind of what what you're asking so yes um i don't know what billions if a billion principal wants to

135hop into and kind of go through that part of it but yes we do use triage all those things that we may need to have from a social worker to the sro to all those people of you know how can we help the student because right now this is the most important thing this student right now that's in crisis okay and denise moody i know wants to get in on this yeah i i i think the question kind of goes both ways if it's a mental health issue i i think our staff are absolutely involved and um kevin stillwell has been very direct about like that they should be taking the lead in those situations so um like mr lingam was saying that there are times when sometimes we need the support of our officers

136and they are great partners and it may be in some helpful transportation it may be um with locating a family member it may be so they are a great resource that if we need that to kind of do some of the safety planning sometimes on honestly i think it's a little bit rare but only if we if we need them in order to be able to do that safety planning piece i think the other thing that kind of comes up is if it's more of a criminal kind of aspect how do we also engage some of the mental health support and again i think it's kind of about creating a wraparound support for that child the officers need to do their work in order to do the investigation but it's not done in isolation and

137we're also looking at how do we support that child as a student how do we get them back at school like it so while there's a separation and we don't want to interfere with the role of the police and that it's not that we are um isolating that child from the other supports that they would otherwise be able to access at school thank you and miss workman okay yes um at what point might a parent be brought into the conversation between a student and the srl i'm thinking of if a student needs to be questioned and that student is a minor does that student have the right to have his or her parent present and might there be some kind of infractions where you're questioning a student where you think a parent shouldn't be involved

138or it is not necessarily necessary like it's not a super serious offense so how do you handle that so so that they'd always have the right to have a parent involved uh and i was mulling over this when we were talking about the weapons issue because josh has been into the data and reviewed a lot of case reports over the last five years and i'm trying to remember one with a weapon but again what we also find is a lot of times kids particularly kids that are going to come and take responsibility for their actions might not want their parent in there so yes they always have the right we are we have minimized we don't interview kids about criminal activity that occurs outside school at the school that that's a change from years past

139we don't let investigators unless there's immediate safety need come in and get kids out of class and those types of things but clearly students have a right to have a parent present and it's up to the officer to to let them know that again we often find uh kids might say yeah i don't want my mom and dad to know at which time we have to tell them they're going to find out uh and and or they might not want them present we find when we're trying to mediate these things it's much more important to have the parents involved because again kids go home and tell their parents you know i got in a fight and the police didn't do anything let's just say and then we're getting called so these solutions are uh work

140better when everybody's at the table and and most of the time we are leaving those conversations the bus conversation from the other day is a perfect example we weren't in when the school met with the parents and the students and and and decided what the school was going to be we don't want to be in there we wanted to know that everybody was was happy with the outcome and we could do away with a police report and two tickets that made little sense when we look at them through the lens of uh justice or restorative justice for sure and just to touch on on that as well a lot of times it has to do with age so you know a secondary student for example we're always going to tell them they have the opportunity

141to have a parent present maybe a middle school age children a child we're probably not even asked on that because we're not going to question them until we've talked to a parent and either have a parent's permission or have them there so we're taking every step we can to make sure that their rights are protected because ultimately yes there's they don't want to get they don't want if they if they could go through the entire school year without ticketing as any kids that would be that would be an ultimate goal that they'd want to reach um and and part of our you know with talking about restorative justice practices [Music] maybe not familiar and it wouldn't be a bad idea that we have maybe some some staff or some from the school involved but um

142you know the juvenile justice committee that i've just recently been a part of and the sergeant that was more recently in supervising the sros was part of um and along with that there's a subcommittee that involves other other collaborative members of the community and and government that are looking at and part of a restorative justice piece of it and we're trying to talk talk about certain things um you know and how we want to address what the best way to address some of those things are that we can maybe take care of some of those things directly at each school um that maybe we don't need to even get to a point where a police report is written and a ticket's issued we can you know there might still need to be some consequences but

143those are things that we can maybe you know get parents involved right away and get that ball rolling and deal with it more immediately at school um with the with the appropriate resources um so it doesn't need to get to a point where you know we talked earlier about diversion where we don't need to get to a police report and a ticket for something um some of our other conversations too with community members is and you look at it it makes sense and it goes back to like a simple theft when back when i was in school and however long ago the statute for a theft and what cause changes it from a misdemeanor during gross miscommunity is the same dollar amount as it was 20 years ago today a cell phone is kind of

144a simple theft but right away it could be worth a thousand dollars so it turns into a felony um so some of those things that i've seen that the sros deal with they recognize some of those things and they can cut off their they are cutting off some of those things immediately where they're able to say you know maybe talk to a parent that wants to wants another student charge for something we can say you know we can we can really reason with them um an example that we had an assault technically was an alleged assault here um last week where a parent called they wanted uh the other child charged the sro was able to get both talk to both parents get both sides and both kids to come in and kind of help

145mediate the situation between these students that result resulted in no police report written and no no ticket written when initially you know it started out with with an assault allegation and a parent that wanted a what another student charged so things that we can do i mean really head off some of those things because we recognize you know what it really is versus what maybe technically it it might come across as and we can see the bigger picture and what we really need to do great thank you that was very helpful all right uh miss nathan has a question and then i would invite any of the other participants in this group you want to share ask a question or share your experience we have some building principles and other administrators here you know let

146us know what you're thinking we're about 2 hours and 15 minutes in i think we've had a huge amount of information but we want to make sure we hear from people who have something important to say miss nathan so um we've covered having conversations with the students to talk about you know what they really need in the buildings and the kinds of things they'd like to see in a relationship with sros and the buildings but what was really clear from the survey results comments especially is lack of information or misunderstanding on the part of so many parents about what sros do should do so i know that in the past um i remember the vaping presentation that the sros did that i thought was just it was really a great public presentation and similar to

147talking about specific training either in the contract or some sort of agreement would it be possible to think about what kind of public adult parent focused informational sessions or i mean every parent can't do a ride along with an sro in the building but would there be a way to do a video of that or you know some sort of series of uh connections with the parent communities from the perspective of the sro role in the school and not generally as a police officer have you thought of any of that or any ideas on that yeah a hundred percent we we have to do a better job of communicating what we're doing and not not only in the schools but throughout the community uh and uh we're 100 committed to that to educate i mean

148that is the purpose of having sros and the community services division we don't have to respond to calls we don't not the sros may but you know it is to build those relationships and we are doing that on a regular basis with one-on-one conversations kovit has put a little damper but we will be doing uh a a bunch of restorative circles with kids and parents and and i and we know the value of our mock crash and some of the other safety type educational programs we're doing um i've agreed to meet with the parents that were involved in an incident earlier this week just just to hear how you know basically how how we could have done better on the front end of this i'm i'm pretty good i'm sure everybody's happy with the outcome

149but yeah i think uh a set of videos or something that a parent that doesn't want to come to a meeting is well within our ability to produce and and and put out there either on your website our website wherever the appropriate place is yeah one other thing we've been we've had conversations about and and just thinking out loud one of the times i think it would be beneficial might be right before school get started end of summer um we're talking about different things our the sros can get involved in with the with the um with the community and specifically with kids and the boys and girls club and and different things uh especially during the summer um but we've talked about maybe a community forums or like a town hall type of a setup

150where we can have those types of conversations it can be a meet and greet with parents an opportunity for us to answer questions get out get information out to them too that you know what what our sros are are doing in the schools what their what their responsibilities are and aren't and kind of squash any mis misperceptions of what we really are trying to do there thank you anyone else care to share experience perceptions suggestions yeah dino yeah i i this principles this is a great opportunity for you to talk about your experiences and what value you see in having an sro in your building so i would hate to have you miss this opportunity to do that it's just scripture go ahead yeah i can i can talk a little bit um for me

151it really comes down to a safety perspective i mean i shared with some of the board members in our meeting before i've been here seven years and before i got right before i got here they got a full-time sro and they brought me in and they showed me video of what was happening we literally had teachers running down the build down the hallway to get away from kids that were going to assault them um and hit them and not not a real conducive environment for education and really with the sro coming i i think we've it's almost been three years maybe three and a half years that we've had what we would consider a teacher being hit and i don't know any teacher that comes to work to get hit and be in that environment

152so to me it's just a the first thing is a safety issue the second thing is is roughly about 40 percent of our phoenix kids um are having the families are calling the law enforcement on a regular basis and my definition of regular basis is one to three times a month and some of them are more than that so law enforcement is at their house on a regular basis for a variety of issues and i think it's really important for our kids to have a relationship with law enforcement and see that them in a non-threatening manner that they are there to help because 99 percent of the time our police liaison is here it's proactive there's no tickets involved it's a relationship it ends positively and i think especially where we're at as a country

153right now that's extremely valuable um the the the thing i'll bring up is the the system has changed very much in the seven years i've been here um a kid used to get a ticket they would go to court i would be at court there would be a chance of uh if they had more than two or three tickets they might go to von wald for 30 days they might go to the jdc for a while the kid was on probation and got a ticket at school or they went to to jdc for consequence that does not happen anymore um i the one we don't have a jdc anymore so that completely closed we've had um situations where students even the mom was going this this kid needs to go to the juvenile detention center

154and dakota county won't take the student so there's it's really involved in the probation i had this conversation i wish we probably hindsight 2020 should invited one of them in here they've they've almost evolved more of a social worker role at the youth level where they're trying to find resources for these students mental health therapy different programming to help keep the the students out of that out of that situation um really i shared with the board before are the some of the people that and it's seven years i've been here the kids that went through and we've had three kids unfortunately that spent some some time in prison and not one of those three kids got a charge in the in the school setting we've had more kids get a criminal charge in the school

155setting that got on probation got off a probation are in and now in their home school and no longer at phoenix because of the work with the system and kind of working through that um so i i think it's valuable i i don't know how to do the job here and keep everybody safe without one here i wish that wasn't true that would be um great but i've worked here seven years i'm here every day i know the value um it's a big safety issue for me so i appreciate you guys just taking the time to to listen and kind of go through it and i do get both sides to understand the trauma piece of it for some of our kids and i have a lot of respect for that i hope we can

156come up with a way to make it as non-threatening as possible um but i but it is a key to keeping everyone safe here so thank you for the opportunity thank you and mr priggy who is the principal at mayo high school hi good evening um so i i guess i i'm first going to start out i um our kids at mail are fantastic they they tell us when they need something they are open and honest and you know we listen to them we we want we we hear them we want to we want to do what's what's right um and there are a few students that that um you know have spoken out against um sros and and and having those conversations uh with those students you know within the last month or so

157um either virtually or in person and you know we were able to talk through a few of their concerns and you know the uniform is is one of them and um they did understand that the you know the the weapon or the sidearm is a non-negotiable and you know covering that up was something that you know the ones that were opposed the students that were post could live with but um i2m um you know the value in having an sro in the building to de-escalate to build relationships uh it's it's invaluable to me as an administrator you know at mail and ensure that the safety piece of this is is as the utmost of importance for the students and staff um at male high school and and um i've been doing this job for about

15825 years now and i've worked with nine different sros and had great experiences with all of them and and you know very few times there were issues um and if there were we worked it out together and and worked with the with the police department to to figure out a solution they're not there to jam up students they're not there to rate tickets they're not they're not there to do any of those things um but they are there for that adds support and one of the one of the i could tell you a story a minute for all night i don't think everybody would want me to do that but um we are miss marvin's shaking her head but i i just think that that the opportunities are there now more than ever for our

159sros to do things like a seat belt challenge that officer kelly had put into place you know some things like that and doing the round tables and talking to our kids i think we have that opportunity right now and and um you know losing the sros would be a big loss uh for our schools community thank you mr perky and i should know too that mr perky just turned 50 so he is prone to tell stories um endlessly um thanks for that and for keeping it short um mr is capital right yes you got it good okay make sure i pronounced it right thank you good evening everyone i'll provide a maybe a little bit more middle school lens and i know a lot of what we've that has been discussed tonight really resonates about

160what our our sro does and we share an sro with john adams middle school so we're a split situation where our sro is here part-time um and i really can't emphasize enough that relationship aspect with with our sros and what that does in the middle school setting and in a high school setting too but i'll let the high school principals speak about that piece we've heard comments around our officer in our building and students who have had maybe a rough run-in with officers in the past whether that's been a home visit or out in the community where there's been something coming up that they want to talk to the officer about but they said well that's not like talking to an officer out on the street that's just officer al who's in our building it's

161just another person because that relationship's been developed and so when something comes up that they need a resource they're not afraid to approach and to have that conversation and at the middle school level we've been parents so parents are aware those conversations are happening it's not a student just approaching an officer and having a conversation about something high level uh so that's a big piece and i think the other piece is when something does come up that we have to uh involve our officer and that is more on the side of needing them to talk to a student about a legal issue or something that's that's more wrong he can do it in a manner that provides dignity for a student instead of an outside officer coming in with lights on and all students seeing

162it we can keep it in a setting that the student has that opportunity to be in an office be called down and not have the show for everybody to see and so our building stays level and doesn't go high level for the rest of the day where our students are talking about it and and really i understand when something goes big in a building kids are going to talk so it saves some dignity for our students as well i think that's a really important piece of our sro program is because they have that relationship because they have that home base in our buildings they can provide our students a way to engage with them in a very positive manner so i could go on and on and talk about relationships and talk about kind of

163what that looks like in our building officer al does a great job getting out and talking to students in the hallways that's probably where some of it you're hearing from our middle school students of we have an officer enforcing masks and walking in the hallways but that's because they're new to our building and they've really been gone for a year like you said a chair marvin there's uh many sixth graders who haven't had the experience in our building and so i think that's a a big piece of hearing some of those things the other thing i've heard from some of our students is that they were a little nervous when they saw a police officer in our building the first time as a sixth grader or a seventh grader this year coming back and they

164said that's because we don't have them at the elementaries and we don't see officers on a regular basis in our schools so it's foreign to us and so we talk through a little bit how we can address some of that in our building and working to build some of that comfortability for our students as well and really just that line of communication to to further develop that relationship but overall i think those are some of the things from the middle school lens that i'd like to share but also to remember and refresh that what we've talked about tonight has really been a an overarching view of what our officers do and it's a great thing so thank you thank you mr johnson from john marshall good evening members of the board um you know when

165i think about our mission at john marshall you know first and foremost we're working to provide an opportunity for all of us to be successful academically and as in individuals and citizens and to help them meet the tenants of the graduate profile and we're all about doing everything we can to help them get there and i really feel like our sro is a key component of that because we work so hard to keep the mission on first of all our building is safe and our students can keep their focus on learning i think it was mentioned that earlier today there was a situation there was an incident with an outside threat well that that was at john marshall and and working through what that looked like it was because our sros were there and present

166and rolling that we were able to i watched our you know our officers work um you know the sro in the building working with outside officers coordinating with other officials they're able to figure out where that threat was within half an hour figure out that it was not credible and we were able to keep the building rolling and the students were learning and we never lost one minute of instruction and we were able to keep that focus and and to me that's huge our officers who are in the buildings are are keeping that mission they're part of our collective effort to make that happen um i could give you you know tons and tons of examples through the years of that but you know i want to think too you know we've heard a little

167bit about relationships tonight and i was thinking about our early work with dr holly and you know the idea of validating affirming building and bridging that vibing well some of our sros are just absolute pros at vibing with students and they do it inherently they know how to talk to kids they know how to validate students they know how to affirm students and they build those bridges and building those bridges is really you know the underlying principle why we have school resource officers in the building to build those bridges and i feel like we're in a good place right now where we can really start to expand on that piece we've heard from our students that a lot of them don't necessarily know what the role of an officer is now is that time we

168start building those bridges showing them what the role is and and that might be as simple as vamping and it might be as important as keeping the building safe so you know i sure hope we can continue with this program i would love to be part of the conversation about how we move it forward in a productive fashion and i really thank you guys for the time and attention for this tonight thank you and miss denzer from century high school good evening everyone um thank you for this opportunity i you know i can speak from you know both a middle and a high school perspective and having with um sros for 20 years that i was working in rochester and you know everyone speaks about the relationships that you know i you know i totally

169support having sros and i'm a very big proponent of having them in the middle schools because i think where a lot of our students gain not only their confidence but their you know just their view on life having an sro in the building to give them an experience that's positive and also well-rounded makes you know makes their experience you know really good and you know like other administrators i can tell you lots of stories but you know some of the stories are of students asking for sorrow they know how they knew pat kelly by name they would see him out on the street and they would give him you know they give him a lot of credit i think because he spent a lot of time getting to know the students so you know in

170the lunchroom in the hallways just talking to them during passing time and i don't think we can get that in under normal conditions and i know other people have also talked about the difference between having an sro and having to call you know or dispatch and there's a remarkable difference between you know how that interaction happens and you know i think we all completely understand what happens when you know we have an officer come in from off the street and you know their interaction is really to just get the get the work done that they need to do and get back on the street their training and experience is a little bit different and i think sros come with a very special unique understanding of what is what is developing what student development is and

171how they can interact with them in a positive way i you know i've worked with many different sros and to an sro they are part of the fabric of the school and i even though the students might not know the term sro they know the people that are there and i don't know that they associate necessarily sro with that person but they know that that person is in the building to help keep it safe and there's just so many different ways that it's a positive experience and outweighs anything that might be seen as either negative or interfering or increasing trauma in in the building so you know i really appreciate people reaching out and asking questions and listening to you know all of us you know talk about this so thank you and good luck

172with your decision making thank you we are okay uh miss nathan you have one more comment and i think we're about at the plate and then miss mclaughlin about at the place where we're going to wrap it up again we're not voting on this tonight so if people have additional questions that they think of between now and the next board meeting they absolutely can send them to the superintendent who will right route them to the correct person so let's have two more uh comments or questions miss nathan okay so second to last is before we leave the meeting i'm hoping that the superintendent and he can do it now but i want to ask my second question about what the next steps are with the contract what what exactly is the board action that we're

173being asked to do in the future what is the time frame what are the the parameters for any changes etc but before he answers that that i want to i want to make sure i get this question in um we've heard a lot from the principles and we heard a lot in the discussion tonight about what sros can mean for those students who unfortunately interact with the law enforcement just the justice system whether personally because of a crime or because of their family we also know there's a lot of students who out there who don't want to interact with the justice system or with police officers and it gets to what chair marvin said at the beginning of the meeting about generalized perceptions about police and the trauma that many of our students are feeling

174now what kind of everything that we're talking about and the possible changes and the evolution is really great but that will take time so what's available for those students now who don't feel comfortable with school resource officers are affected by their being in buildings what alternative places to go where they can share their concerns in the building who do they go to that's not a school resource officer if they're if they're currently feeling discomfort or trauma about them being in the building what support can we give them now that um perhaps in the future a relationship with an sro could be built but if that's not what they're looking for how else can we support them with their with their issues with sros and i'm not sure if that's a question for the superintendent or

175for denise moody or both yeah i can i can take this one i i would say just like any other situation a student may have you know they have a counselor they have a social worker or they may have a trusted adult in that building that they might want to connect with and then that person would know who to connect with based on what the student told them so i think there's resources available at our secondary sites um you know i don't want to say what you only go to your counselor you can only go to your social worker i think they should go to that one trusted adult that they have in their building that would be the first step and then that individual would know if it wasn't a social worker or counselor

176they would know that that information would have to be passed on so i don't know denise if you want to add any more to that i agree that i think we want to have open communication and we want to build relationships with kids we want them to feel safe to be able to express what they need what their worries are what their concerns are you know and i think as we work on building some more of these restorative practices as we um and continue to invite students into spaces where we want to hear from them and we want them to be able to express how they're feeling i think that is another place where we can explore some of these there are a lot of feelings right now around police and um i think that's

177part of the development of our students is creating places and building their skills in order to have honest conversations and to you know i there's some sel work there too of recognizing what how do i understand the feelings i have and how do you um move forward that idea of agency around creating a plan and addressing that um in a proactive way and how what does that advocacy look like for you and so i i think it's part of what we're trying to build in our students and they are honestly probably teaching the adults a lot about that as well so i i agree that we want to think about who are those adults that um they feel comfortable having those conversations with you muted director marvin yes i am thank you the other question

178was next steps about the contract you know what needs to happen when in making this decision yes i would say the the board does have to make uh in may uh we will be bringing a recommendation to um approve renewing the contract so i would say i guess the board will have to decide between that first may meeting and now how information changes in the agreement that you would like to see and i think hopefully it won't be a consensus of the board that they want these particular changes not i want this change this first one has changed this person wants this change i think i don't know if it's something we'll have to build in uh the an upcoming meeting to have some time where the board can cam can come consensus on what

179changes they recommend and then we would have to have time you