001um uh um versus questions is over here uh [Music] just curious what building does she work so the question was is why is the northwest building being used for a very small program when there's not a playground here at the middle school correct all right so there are a few different things with that the northwest building is a single grade building this is a four grade building for one so we couldn't just trade one grade out into that building because in here we house five six seventh and eighth we house over 800 students in this building that building is only designed for a capacity of around 200 to 50 for one the tlc building or the tlc program is housed in there as well as the ell program as well as the gifted program and
002i believe there's another program that is housed in that building if i'm not pulling it off the top of my head correctly so there that space is a little bit larger outside definitely on that end of town and it was designed as an elementary school when it first started so there is a lot more playground over in that area the equipment over there is not designed for children even of middle school age so that would have to be changed as far as the playground would go over there so the feasibility really didn't come into having a middle school program over there in that building if that makes sense okay so the other question was critical race theory which is a uh a theory and a design that some people do use and some districts have
003held on to or went to but it is not something that's recognized within the state and it's not a curriculum or a core requirement for any district to do we are looking at equity and other things within our district but not the not that theorem [Music] so well the question was what are we teaching during black history month correct so what they would be teaching is probably in various subject levels i we are not educators and we don't design curriculum i just want to make sure we get that out there you know before we even start what happens building level day-to-day that is not necessarily something that we dive down into um we have had history there's presentations that go on i've seen some subject matter that they've talked about in various places but i
004don't know exactly what the curriculum is or what exactly we're looking at specifically building by building a grade by grade those would all vary by teacher by building and by celebrations so the last part so i guess maybe we should do some introductions um i'm brian jakes i'm the current president of the school board this is matt smith he is the current vice president and then harry carroll who is a member as well of our school board and this is dr mayor our superintendent who's in the front row over here so she was clarifying the question that he asked earlier so she didn't ask a question he had asked about critical race theorem he that's right and that is huh that's not something that's recognized that districts have to adhere to as far as curriculum
005that's kind of just something that some districts adopt some districts do not it's not something that has to be part of your curriculum or are going forward so we are focusing more on equity in our district verdicts is critical race theorem that's kind of a little bit more radical for us excuse me so the question was would there be repercussions if people were teaching that within their within their classroom as long as people are educating people there are various topics that people are educating people on whether they're core curriculum ideas or if they're somewhat abstract sometimes in different classrooms or or other thoughts um just for instance uh i know mr gehringer touches on a lot of different topics within his classroom to kind of give exposure to different ideas and to bring things to
006people so we educate people across platforms but we don't necessarily drive them into a into a straight mold or into a line of thinking that's not what we're designed to do that's not what a system should once do a time once upon a time i was a history teacher and the choice of textbooks that you have for teaching history i think is critical and it's not part of the critical race theory as i understand it right now but it does the the books i used had people through history whether they were black or whether white where they were indian or native american the contributions they made to civilization and to the society was covered and the kids were tested on that and i and i think that's about all that is really necessary that everybody
007is a citizen they're free they have representation and if they made contributions back through history that should be included in the classes that they're taught and uh and they were with mine i thought in the high school and not in marshall but the textbooks included that so the choice of textbooks i think is the important thing and to come up with just something critical race theory for one race or contributions i'm not sure how that would be but as i understand the critical race theory it's not dealing with the contributions made in history it has a different focus [Music] yes [Music] and i'm glad of that but the only other thing i had to say is i wanted to compliment the board i'm not sure this is all it is okay i wanted to compliment
008the board for having an open forum and i hope we have more of these and that they are productive i know there's some reluctance to come out and and face the public and hear that where there's complaints or compliments that you know it takes a little bit of courage to do that and that was the second thing i wanted to comment on tonight i think you're in the right steps i think we're going to have more public comments and involvement and you need involvement in the school and i congratulate you we definitely do need the town to support the school so without the town there is no school in my mind as well so um [Music] so uh the question was is from uh mayor swetz who happens to be here with us this evening
009is what the district is looking at doing going forward um if there's any thoughts of moving forward with the hab center property where the spain hower school is and to looking if there's any kind of building or moving in that direction and then also that was also a question that was sent in one of the questions that we received via email was with cares money or the esser money um why don't you just build a school well a school uh a school building for um it's gonna be roughly about 40 million dollars just to throw that out there the only way that a school will be built is from the support of the voting body of the town there has to be a bond issue that's going to be passed to support the school the
010school was able or the board was able to work on saving their money and adding on to the spain howard building for a wing but that is not a feasible the the school board can't save that kind of money to build an entire school or finance that our lease purchase or go back out because that has to be a bond issue there has to be some town support with that so i'm going to let matt add on to that because we've talked a little bit about that that we're we're working on that with the strategic plan so we'll have kind of a phase that we're going to go through and a direction to go through i i drew up just it was just a sketch on google earth on the the middle of the campus
011out there and it was similar to like a cloverleaf type building so it would have been second third fourth and fifth grade because we got to get the fifth graders out of these trailers yeah they're almost all gone and i don't i don't know um when the state left a lot of water back into the tunnels there's a lot of issues other things um uh and i think they called that's the inner circle right is what they refer to it which is where we kind of plotted out a bill which was plenty of room there as long as google earth wasn't off by about that much there's plenty of room there but uh kind of the point of starting these was because we know we need to move forward this this town needs some it
012needs a building in it for schools and but we can't do it without the community so we've got to get in front of you and we've got to find out why we can't get that and and change what we need to change to get it done so um [Music] so you know uh um delivery systems uh um you know is oh um for those at home they couldn't hear so so so the mayor has uh also pledged to be in support of the school district as we start looking forward and going uh going on to things as well so um but partnerships is what makes progress and we've got ahead of a partnership you know um you know every everyone won't come here you can't bring a company into town if you don't have schools
013that are advantageous if you don't have a commerce district if you don't have a certain level of places for people to go and spend money recreational you know restaurants those kind of things it doesn't matter what it is you've got to have things to draw people to come into town and one of those biggest draws for people is to look at the school district because everyone brings kids in and so you know improving a school district grades buildings capacity whatever it would be all those are pluses to people looking to try to come and move into our area with industry and so you know the town and the school district are very linked with you know support of the future i've heard of businesses saying that they they would not move to marshall their business
014to marshall because we hadn't passed the levy since the 70s so you know it scares them to invest in in a community that they feel like is scared to invest back in school districts them the state that does not have an operating room yes we don't have an operator that's very just very important there's only two schools in the state i think that doesn't happen we don't have it because the voters yeah it has to be a tax levy you have to raise the taxes yeah it would have to be a tax levy but what you're saying is basically true yes we have to get on the ballot with something that passes to be able to go there's a difference in whether you put things on the ballot for april elections or whether you put
015them on november elections as well as far as the percentages of people that have to pass those kind of things as well so we were talking about gearing up more we're talking about gearing up more of a a speaking campaign and finding out what people actually really would support so that we can put something together that will be successful to put on a ballot um right now we are trying to garner more support we're trying to be more visible hopefully with the audit situation now far behind us now looking at other things to the future of course there's always a a hiccup in your plans you know no one planned to have a fire that disrupted the school year for kids yet for a third consecutive year in a row and it also disrupted the
016lives of families as well in our community that's you know you you know your neighbors you know what each person in the community has to go through finding things out one of the other questions uh that came in through email was about why we have early out wednesdays why don't we just have school all the time well there has to be adult learners as well within the district there has to be professional development there has to be so many hours that are devoted to enhancement of your staff through professional development by standards that are given to us as well cta is currently looking at some things right now we've discussed some things on well they stay wednesdays do they need to be maybe an all day session where instead of having a half day that
017way people can kind of plan a little bit differently having four half days a month are two full days a month look a lot different when you're looking at child care and what you can do with children after school so those are some things that are going to be we're going to be looking at so maybe when you see the calendar come out and you say why on earth are they going to have two mondays out in october next year well maybe that's because we're not having four wednesdays out so don't assume that everything's going on as a change some in the community will say you're trying to give people extra days off hopefully people inside the district will be able to publicize that and by being in situations like this we can talk about
018the fact that this is what works more effectively you know we're hearing from a lot of our teachers that half day wednesdays i don't get started on much so it's kind of a dead day for us well if it's going to be a dead day then we just need to have it be a dead day all around and just put it in a different place we have to have so many hours and we have to have so many professional hours hours of in-seed instruction for the students and hours of professional development so when we talk about our school history and people being willing to move to town and so on we always look at the buildings now we've had a number of superintendents since the year 2000 and some of those had ballots run every
019year and one of the attempts was out here at the garinger property and during that time the group that came in to help facilitate the the bond issue did a study and they they didn't study the elementary that was going to be elementary out there but they did the middle school and the high school and they were rated by three different organizations one was great schools one's the state department of education the other is school diggers and they all they all have a different way of studying to rate the schools but they come up with similar ideas and taking the school diggers and they do it across the united states it's not just in missouri and there's been times that well back at that time the high school was rated at the 70 82nd percentile
020and the middle school was at the 87th percentile which means that this we were only 13 schools were worse off than than marshals than middle school and there was only 18 schools that were worse off than marshall for the high school and my feeling has been that we need to have if we have community understanding where we are at and if we are if our ratings go up i think you'll have the people that you need to pass a bond issue high determining factor sorry i'm asked from dr bellickle's question and one of the reasons that study was was because of her inability to fund schools build schools move schools and that was one of the higher indicators you know how those things are put together you get more points for something and more points
021for this and that one was weighed heavily on the fact that we could not now i i worked on three three bond issues and lost all of them while i was in the school district i know you've probably worked on some too and it's terribly disappointing to put all those information out there and tell everybody you know what all the good things that can happen and then i think one we went down by less than 100 votes one of the first ones i worked on i think is just before you came here we went down by less than 100 votes and it was performance of their devastating and i think that the vote will be there in the community to build buildings and schools are not just buildings because i attended a country school when
022i was a kid i attended con avalon up here and these are all small districts now i don't know if pineapple has ever had a bond issue in the least recent past but some of the schools that are that size in the northwest corner of the state south west corner the small schools outrage what marshall's doing and they haven't had bond issues it's the quality of the program that they put out and if we have the backing of the community that we have a good program our students are performing well and i think you'll have the backing you need to pass a bond issue because i vote for bond issue i haven't voted for a bond this year and the reason being is our ratings are so low sure and the lower the lowest it
023got it continued to go down until just a recent pass this year i got an email i never have gotten one before from school diggers but they didn't email me and let us let me know where they rated marshall and we've gone up quite a little bit from the past year well from two years yeah but when we were at the 93 percentile seven percent of the school districts in the state were worse than marshall and the rest that were better and look into their research that's all i'm going to say i just encourage you to look into it and i would i would argue on that roger that it went up and what have we done we've put a elementary building up there at spainhauer and we've made progress out there so i think
024that's one of the determining factors [Music] another thing that's changed dramatically in the district is curriculum and people actually being all aligned underneath the same curriculum uh curriculum was developed in this district and signed off on dr mayor was that roughly about four years ago year before last it was finalized it was started since then so so having everyone on the same lines as far as what our end goals are as far as curriculum another thing when you were talking about you know small the some of the smaller country schools some of the things that actually have they voted for taxes within their area the tax levy here is uh 3.17 2.87 2.83 yes because we had to drop it so there wasn't a significant gain yes and some of the ones in the area
025are two and three times as high as ours are so miami for one to be able to keep excuse me malta bend for one to be able to keep their school that small school open in that area the town rallies behind it financially you know so that's something that you know hopefully we can get some rally behind our town as well so well i mean that's kind of the plan is before we put anything before we put anything on a on a ballot personally whether i'm involved directly on the board or not i want i really want eyes dotted and t's crossed and you're always going to have people that are not going to vote for a tax no matter what but if you can just make the argument solid then you'll sway a lot
026more people and i i don't i don't want to just go hey harry let's throw one on there in april yeah and then do this and never talk about it again that's been done before and it didn't work at i'm not even close so i i don't want to do that i want you know i want the town to grow and i want the school district to prosper with it but we have to we have to do it right we have to make sure that you know for something that is the second time yeah i mean that that's kind of why we we want to have these it's we want to we want to know what is keeping people from voting so so the question was what can we do to get more buy-in to
027come within the school district to come in with more support to the town there's gonna have to be a lot of things it sounds like for this gentleman is we're gonna have to raise some scores in order for him to see you know something going on he sees that trend starting to go up so maybe his support will start going up one of the things that's also in our strategic plan is that we want to involve as many people across the the community as we can within groups committees and organizations that's one of our bullet points that we currently have now and so bringing in other people within the community will draw natural investment you talk to your friends about those so starting those small conversations leads to the larger conversations you know i can't
028sit up here and change your mind it sounds like a politician if i'm up here trying to give you a speech and a spiel but when you start having parents and friends start telling success stories when you start talking about going to meetings and about momentum when you start having those things build in those small groups then that becomes infectious and when that becomes more infectious then you'll have more support and hopefully those are the ways that we're looking at doing those kind of things whether it's you know opening ourselves up a little bit more as mr blakely said you know that i don't know what any of you all are thinking there could be somebody in here that's got five different kinds of ugly they want to talk about tonight you know but we're
029going to talk about it and see what happens you know we changed our our open discussion policy you know there's going to be people that are going to come in there with great things there's going to be people that come in there and we're going to say man we should have just left the policy alone probably but you know you have to become you know we want to be as transparent as we can as a board and in order to do that sometimes you have to be vulnerable and so this is kind of a vulnerability that we're exposing and and trying to have here with these conversations it's starting i can tell you the board meeting and any of us up here can tell you there's probably five people in the audience at a board
030meeting two of those people have no vested interest within the district the rest of them are employees are people that are actually paid people of the district that are there for reports or because they come to the meetings tonight i see 20 people out here in the audience and none of you all are paid by the district except the superintendent who's sitting here so there's been a change just in us offering a different type of meeting to where there's a different kind of support you know and there's a different type of conversation that's going to start happening whether facebook thinks i did it all wrong or we did it all wrong tomorrow you'll read about that and there'll be notes about that tonight or tomorrow or discrepancies that they have you know but there's also
031going to be hopefully some dialogue that goes back and forth between citizens you know and that's where we're trying to get is the dialogue back and forth [Music] every day okay um uh um so for those of you at home hopefully you can hear me i'm going to try to paraphrase some of this that went on in the last few minutes so amanda is a former student of the marshall school district and she was talking about roughly some auxiliary programs to say baton twirling and other things that she's involved in at ucm as well currently now that she would like to see bought back into the fold within the district the original thought was that asking what we can do to get the community be a little bit more connected amanda's idea was that we
032also have a little bit more extracurricular activity involvement as well so i'm going to encourage you to get a hold of the principals at the middle school and high school to talk about programs that they may be interested in or maybe volunteering that could happen within those programs are the band okay so get in touch with the summers family and that would be within the music program so so i would suggest that you get a hold of the activities director um that is kelly callahan and also with the summers and then you can move from there to look at them bringing a proposal back to us as a board or just looking at um adding that in as a volunteer or something else that can be done there on site within those programs yeah it's
033not anything that we have to sign off on as far as other programs to come into the district you know the superintendent writes budget line item things so if it's something about uniforms or batons or whatever that would be those things are are things that would fall into a budgetary area that would probably go underneath the band the marching auxiliaries those types of things as well so the boosters might be also another place for you to uh talk to the the mob as they call it the band boosters so as well so the original thought also came over here was getting the town and the school a little bit more connected we're not as connected as we used to be sadly coveted has disconnected quite a bit of things that we have um we don't
034have performances the same as we did three years ago you know that changes the way people come out to events for those of you who are maybe we'll say 40 or so um you know the only thing that happened in friday night in marshall 25 30 years ago were football games it didn't matter what else was going on in town the entire town stopped to go to football games there's a different level of interest with people now and so everyone's not interested in coming out to football games or everybody's not interested in coming to the philharmonic or to the band or to those other things but we still do use those opportunities to go various places and to be out in the community um if there's some place that you think that you know a
035group would be very beneficial then you know i asked you to talk to maybe brian wilcox and at the career center they've got the skills program there um culinary arts they do cater and do things as well so maybe as you're having a city event or maybe even a personal event that some place you can reach out and give a little business back to the town i mean to the district and then also they're doing it at very low cost because they're doing it for education and then also those conversations happen this came from the culinary arts program you know so those things are are kind of natural small things that happen that can bleed out into larger scale items plug our vocational school kids they had some great awards i mean we talked about
036this media coverage would be something that would help us if we had more more media i know the kids were at the kmmo well ours our vocational kids did a pretty darn good job and i'm a strong supporter of vocational won a lot of awards in the last contest i don't know how we get that information out there pass it on and and tell people i know it's going to be on our web the school webpage and things like that i know you shared it with us but uh i mean auto mechanics for example uh i was went and talked to those kids a few weeks ago and then when they go win some awards and our kids do well when i first got on i'm getting i told my wife i wouldn't do this
037when i first got on the school board dr mayor would be bringing those kids to that board meeting and they would be showing us all the great things going on from the elementary and i'm thinking we got to get that to the public we got to get that to the public and then we started streaming and i thought and then covet hit and i thought you know i mean when those kids came before us at the board meetings that was impressive what was happening in some of these buildings and some of these rooms and we didn't get to share it people didn't get to see it and then we had to shut it down i think that would be something that if we ever get over this covey thing we'll go with it our kids
038are still doing well we can say what you want about the school district i've been in the buildings our kids are still doing well uh he just asked about mass and uh the vaccine the shots so which are everything is optional did you mr carroll you're absolutely right about the kids i belong to kiwanis and the some of the teachers will bring people there to put on a program and they're just outstanding as far as that goes i want to make one other comment to go back to the bond issues uh mayor if you remember you gathered some information for me and i'm going off top of my head now that somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the population of marshall is over 65 years old and those are the ones that vote and
039they don't want to increase their taxes now how you going to solve that problem i don't know but young people don't vote even though it benefits the most and i think to myself once in a while somebody voted for a bond issue when i was in high school and gave us a new building and so they supported the kids back then why we're not doing it more of it now i don't know but that's one battle and how you solve it i have no idea but the older people don't want any increase in their taxes and they don't care their kids are out of school and they they don't you know they want marshall to be good but they're not willing to pay for [Music] it on i believe it was on i believe it
040was the second bond issue that i worked on you might be you might have been on that one roger we made a specific focus group and targeted the elderly as much as we possibly could and i honestly believe they they weren't the ones that defeated that election because we have no way of breaking that numbers down but we targeted them and i really i now that one really bothered me because we got the support in those in that age group or we were pretty sure we had that support in that age group and it was the other people that took us down maybe we should have had more targeting we don't have enough people to target everything but i know we were i was working with the group that was targeting that age group that
041we we dropped it down to about 55 and we targeted them specifically and we really thought we had them uh honest and i thought that one was going to pass and then because we can't break the demographics down but we can go and look at it we did look at it afterwards and we really truly thought that uh that group didn't let us down it was the other ones that did [Music] i think another thing is and it's uh we're the only district we see as far as teacher retention and keeping teachers here it's an it's a nationwide thing it's been well publicized but people they focus it it's tunnel vision when you're talking about your hometown so you know if we can if we can prove to the community that what we're doing is
042is bringing in good educators and and locking them down maybe that helps you know keeping them here and and you know i don't know the the full day of pd if that makes a difference um i don't know that's what we're we're going to have to sit down and have some hard conversations with people and figure out what what they want us to do you know in order to get that support and we still may not get it when the day comes you know it has a lot to do with what time of the year you do it too april april elections november elections what's on it already you know and you don't know until you file so it sometimes it's a win-win sometimes it's a lose-lose but we have to try to tackle it
043[Music] anybody else have anything [Music] so there were a couple of um other questions that got sent in by email that um i was going to answer as well or we were going to look back through so one of the questions was how are students placed in marshall paid for why should we pay for other district students i believe this is probably a reference to children that are probably attending our school district probably through great circle are people who are not actually true citizens of the county regardless of where someone comes from students who are placed in marshall by the state are funded by the public placement fund and not local money so that money is paid for those students not out of your tax dollars or anything else they're supported with public funds that
044come from somewhere else and also from sending districts if we have a student that chooses to do an online situation then we pay that daily rate to that person who is uh uh doing that for us whether that's maybe mo cap or or whoever the other vendor would be because they're truly not students of our district are in seat so we have to pay for that program so money kind of follows the person if you think of it that way versus it's not a daily rate that we necessarily get because kids are coming because we have other people that are here maybe that have residency in columbia or other places we still get paid for those students here with our district and it doesn't change our tax ratings our tax members [Music] well i'll follow
045up on the the next question which is i think they all it all came from the same information but it was a question about services for homeless students and families um we get a grant for 185 000 that pays for our homeless services and by the state of missouri's requirements i guess or or thresholds we we currently have 144 students in our district that are considered homeless by the state of missouri so i don't know for sure i think that's if you don't live with your parent or guardian basically so we've got you know they call them when i was in high school it was a couch surfer you jumped from couch to couch or uh but right now there's 144 kids that uh that need those services that qualify for that and it all
046comes from a grant um i don't know 185 000 a year we we have to reapply for that every year okay i was just going to say i heard a couple gasps when people said 144 students in a town this small and this size when you're talking about a district of um somewhere around you know 12 1300 students and you're talking about 144 of them you're talking about a very large population when you look at our free and reduced lunch numbers our poverty levels within you know the school system you're talking about 40 to 50 percent of our students again you know on those levels as well so you know you have to understand the demographic of the students that you're supporting when we were talking about test scores earlier if i don't if i'm
047hungry sitting in seat i'm not going to learn as well you know sometimes we have to meet basic needs where they are and then we can work on equity and getting people up to the level that we know we need to be and so we're recognizing a lot of those basic needs our social work team i think does a phenomenal job with addressing those needs looking out to those whether it's you know backpack drives or driving kids home or making calls at 7 30 on a friday night they're doing those things you know and those things also take community support backpack drives happen because a bank in the community also donates some money donate some supplies as well as when we fill a bus that comes from you all in the community you know coming
048and putting items on a bus for us to be able to redistribute back out you know a call for coats i saw one that came out for valley students as well you know when it got really cold here we've got some students that aren't used to cold weather they came here to valley and they didn't know what they were necessarily getting into with missouri december you know and so they were here in missouri and shorts and t-shirts when they needed parkas you know or are bigger coats you know our students need those kind of things also within district because they don't have those provided form so we meet people at a lot of different levels and you know we need to understand that you know what we see as a traditional student they're not traditional
049anymore you know everyone is a lot different animal you know our teachers deal with people who are totally across the board from people who come from you know middle-class families all the way down to families or not having families at all so you know there's a level of compassion that we deal with while we do instruction and everything else and i'm saying we because i'm talking on behalf the district but i know i don't teach there you know so our border is wide open and a million people come up here doesn't affect marshall that much do you have a lot of students from i don't think we have a large transit population we do have a we do have a lot of subsets of population um so but i don't believe our our diversity of
050the school is any different than our diversity of the town yeah we do have some programs that are um english language whether it's esl or ell or second language those kind of things but we also garner diversity from those people too you know and we have to treasure those people that are also within the district as well you know everybody at one time was a foreigner you know and we're all here because we're here you know and hopefully you know this community is going to be this community as we just said amanda tells you know i'm back in town trying to do a little bit of something and maybe work with the community that's something else i'm not one of the sorry one of the things that i do is i sit on our our
051region executive committee for region five right now i'm reviewing belcher scholarships as well from across the state um we're reviewing i think the district i have for some reason we only had five scholarships our region scholarships were region five there are nine or ten scholarships within our region but they're smaller ones in in other areas you know so um you know just looking at at those but as i'm reading through those the topic this year is teachers and how you bring teachers back into the classroom how you can maybe do some of the grow your own programs which is something that we're kind of on the floor with and and started here a couple of years ago with looking at blocks and trying to you know increase teachers as they're coming out of districts you
052know one of the things that may be on the table in the future is looking at teachers kind of like people look at nurses you know nurses get sign on bonuses they get recruitment bonuses to come back or or maybe to work for a certain amount of years somewhere and some of the things that i've read and other districts have talked about are talking about doing is you know giving scholarships to students with the intent that they will return back to their districts you know to teach you know so you know there's the way of recruiting teachers to form our future generations is what we need to look at um mr len said something before that you know it's kind of a big idea for me that you know somebody voted for a tax levy
053for me you know and we've got to look at that you know yeah nobody wants to pay taxes but these taxes are an investment in our future you know passing a levy for buildings is to get your children at a better quality is it going to affect us maybe it's going to affect people in 20 years that are living here hopefully i'm still around in 20 years you know i know some people are saying in 20 years i won't be around and it doesn't matter but those kids that are growing up are going to be now 25 year olds they're going to be the people going into the workforce they're going to be the people at the bank managing your money so you may not want to give them any now but if they don't
054know how to count it if they don't know how to invest it they're going to be in charge of it later on they're going to be people at the hospital they're going to be the people that are going out and are going to be diagnosing you with things you have to think about it in terms of this is an investment in our future when you're looking at bond issues not what's coming out of my pocket exactly right now and counting in dollars and cents that's exactly what i was going to say brian word for words questions well i think our i think we have to get our strategic plan in place um before we can do anything because we can't i can't bring it to you and say vote for this and you say what
055is it i go i don't know i'll get back to you we i don't want to do that we'll have everything set so we know what direction we want to move as a board and as a district before we go now one of the reasons to have these meetings the week before the board meeting was so if things come up that maybe needs to be brought forward on the agenda we have time to do that and still get it on there in the legal time we have so you know next month you know we're going to talk about this get together tuesday night and hopefully everybody's still on board with wanting to continue to do it and then next month we're going to do it again and we'll have some information you know there may
056be there may be a month where we don't do it um but it won't be because we don't want to it may just not you know logistically work out for for everybody we're going to try to keep it at three members um you know so we don't have to make it a meeting i said it i mean that was the farthest thing from my mind doing it um tell them why sunshine laws we've got if there are four of us in the room then we have to write it all out and do all these kinds of things if we say anything so we have to so we have to be careful no we're gonna we're gonna rotate rotate people around so different board members will get different input and you know so yep we have
057the strategic plan from the administrators yeah i had to get straightened out on this at the last board meeting so i know a little bit about that and now the strategic plan will come from the board of education and i'm a matter of fact i got two questions for dr mayor and one of them is going to be on that and i'm going to talk to her right after the meeting about uh getting to work on the strategic plan from our from our end yeah i i've got the copy of the administrative version then i didn't know we had to do one i kept saying we're done we're done but no we're not so and then that one will probably be if i maybe even mistaken where we would put things like the elementary school
058complex what we want to do with the high school what we want to do with the middle schools and things of this nature so at least that's my thought of it i'm jumping the gun on that because i don't have it yet but that's where i want to go with it and and this will be my first one on the board but the way i understand it we've got it basically we've got the foundation of the foundation of it in place we just have to put it we have to make it our own now so everything is there we just have to fill in the blanks with what we decide we need to do so the strategic plan in its current draft form is available on the website and so you can go on and
059see that where the administrative team is left off i'm just kind of phases the strategic plan out it has came about is the first thing that we did is we developed board vision or board goals we have four more uh four goals that we came up with as a board after that then we went back and pre-coveted we had community groups we had asked people from various kind of walks of life to kind of come around and work on the groups the groups all averaged about 10 people a piece and they were in each one of the topics so we had people who were both administrators in the school teachers within the school as well as people that were from the community in various walks of life at that time that went over and kind
060of came out with hey you know we want to look at teacher retention or we want to look at how we bring more people into the district or or whatever those goals or whatever those steps were and now it's kind of gone back to the administrator said okay well we think we can do this this and this to go forward then the board has to put its final touch on and blessing basically to it so the plan is roughly i would say 75 percent 80 complete so a question for clarity sometimes i find when i'm talking to people and people ask me questions that everyone's got a different type of lingo we'll say whatever your job is you use different acronyms everyone speaks in the same terminology you all understand everything like it's it's a
061foreign language maybe to some people when they're listening to you talk about it but it all makes sense to you all while you're standing there so one of the things within the district is when the questions came up was the compliance officer is the superintendent well the compliance officer in the district doesn't do anything about is the district complying to certain things what the compliance officer looks at is claims of discrimination and harassment so what we do to look at our books and other things are auditing firms and so that's where you get financial compliance maybe with things also when you're looking at evaluations you're looking at those on building level from the superintendent looking at our principles and principles looking at their teams and looking at those things so those are ways that we
062internally look at things but you know the term of compliance officer is not what someone thought it meant as that they are actually as the district complying with things this is just making sure that if someone says there is some discrimination or harassment within something that that person looks in and investigates those situations not a true dollar and sense compliance so i don't know if there were any other questions or things on here that we maybe didn't touch yet well there was there was a question submitted and it was pretty early uh actually it was the second one submitted i said i would like to know why we do not have school spirit at sporting events so there's a couple high schoolers sitting here maybe they could come up and tell us why i i
063don't know the i don't know the answer that i mean yeah i mean i do know from how i'm sorry i do know from having two children in the high school right now that there's a lot of of outside dampening that goes on for our our kids and sometimes they do get i don't know maybe out of hand or louder or uh uh i don't know what it may be inappropriate um my kids don't other people's kids may but no never uh you know there's i mean there's a lot of other adults uh at these games and and sometimes they're not uh real keen on hearing the yelling and the and the cheering and the chant and so you know maybe it's a talk to grandma and grandpa about coming and wearing a foam finger
064and yelling in a cowbell and a bull horn whatever we need to do i was going to say i've been a lot of different sporting events school spirit is still alive and well in marshall you know we may not do things the same as other towns do and that's because we don't have some of those same traditions when matt said cowbells i went to excelsior springs to a football game and they ring cowbells they ring cowbells and carry in cowbells like nobody's business in the middle of the city pretty much but that's not something that we do here but we do have a student section that is at our football games the bird cage section and they self-lead they do cheers with the cheerleaders they are very responsive to each other and to at pep
065assemblies and other things as well you know you're not going to probably hear a chanting going on at a baseball game but you definitely can see other students coming there and supporting as well as other parents and individuals so you know i encourage you if you think there's no school spirit then go out to some of these things and be part of the audiences you know the change has to be the person that's sitting there doing the complaining you have to turn around and be the people that start cheerleading a different way i mean we have an amazing band too is so what she said was uh basically reiterating the fact that the birdcage is alive and well in the high school and they're very supportive uh one of the young ladies said buy a
066t-shirt i bought one 15 bucks first day got it i wore it to a football game and i thought do i have to go sit with the students now but you know support support things that are going on in your community you know everybody gets tired of buying candy bars doing this and that whatever those fundraisers are but remember those kids are selling those things so that they can go and do something else whether it's funding their ffa competitions whether it's making money for the bird cage for them to have some operating funds or whether it's for the baseball team to be able to travel and go out of state to a tournament that they're you know very proud of going to every year you know and since we've been doing some of that stuff
067and they've been traveling and going to that they've been performing a lot better as well you know you can definitely see where they're placing and things like that are going on you know so you know there's a lot of things that are going on i talked with miss peel a couple of weeks ago they're going to have a more of a local robotics tournament that's going to be taking place at state fair community college that she's been working with them to get set up so there's something more local i believe that they had to go to southern missouri i believe to compete for their robotics competition it was some weather that wasn't great and it was you know if they don't get to go down there this is their only shot you know they don't
068reschedule that they're not going to let us come back at a later date or at a later time so you know we've got to also focus on bringing some of those things back here you know we renovated our track like it or not i know there's pluses and minuses but it's something that need to be done for safety as well but also that's something that maybe is going to bring in a district track meet to our location district track meets mean that people are going to go to mcdonald's and buy food means that people are going to stop at your square and spend money so those kind of things that the school can attract and draw in feed back into your town feed back into our town so make sure you're thinking about those things
069instead of just saying oh man they're going to have districts here this weekend i won't be able to leave my house no but it's going to help the economy of your town you know for that weekend of support the gates the admissions that we make at those times you know little bits of money all over the place make a difference and the more that we can get in the more it's going to help us all out in the long run so well every improvement we make is something to be proud of maybe not for you but it may be for you so you guys get together and you talk and and and maybe we figure out something you're proud of maybe you're not you know everything we do i mean one coat of paint is
070something to be proud of in our district for what we have the buildings we i mean this this is a beautiful auditorium and two-thirds of the people in town may not know that so next month they can come and they can see it themselves and talk so i don't know it's there's a lot more to school spirit too than stomping on the bleachers and and yelling you know just being proud of being from marshall going to school at marshall i graduated here in 95. um i chose to stay i i didn't have to i could have went somewhere else but i chose to stay and i don't ever plan on leaving i mean i love this town i want to see it do nothing but good so whatever we can do to to be proud
071of our district and proud of our town i mean i i think we should take the steps to do it so i sound like i'm running i'm not i think i am but that's okay i think my final comments are going to be if we do anything it's going to have to come from the people i mean that's all there is to it if they if they get behind us we'll try to lead and if they get behind us maybe we can get something done but it's got to come grassroots does everything we're done one more thing so i was just gonna piggyback off one more thing that matt said about having pride in your town i spend four out of my five work days in other towns i wear my marshall shirts and sedalia
072the looks that i get who cares because i want them to know where i'm from you know and and what's going on here you know i and and everyone needs to have that kind of pride about things when they're when they're stepping out moving forward so uh thank you all for coming out tonight you know there's a handful of questions this generates some conversation uh people watching at home you're going to have some conversation you're probably going to have comments floating up faster than we can even get out of this auditorium but remember you have to look at things we're looking at things from a very macro level here at the board level we have to look at things from the view from up high looking down if you're having one of the questions that
073came in was you know one building looks cleaner than another building when i'm in it well if you're seeing those kind of things and you need to bring that to the building the building leaders level you know saying that all maintenance people aren't doing a good job isn't true you know our old custodians aren't doing the job isn't true or all educators aren't doing their job that's not a true statement if you're having issues with a particular person or a particular situation then you need to take that into the building to try to get it solved and worked on nothing's going to get fixed on facebook nothing's going to get fixed at the grocery store gossiping and being mad things are going to get fixed when you come to people and you talked about and
074talk to people that can help with those situations so we all got on the board for various reasons but one of the main reasons we all got on the board is like matt said and harry says because we want our students and our community to be better and that's why we're all here that's my closing thought if anybody else wants to say anything else fine otherwise we will bid you a good evening thank you everybody for coming it was very very good turnout for the first one so you