October, 2021 State Board of Education Meeting

001good morning everyone and welcome to those in the audience it's october 8 2021. the time is 907 am board members please engage your microphones before speaking and turn them off when you are not when you are done speaking please note that board members may be using their cell phones and laptop computers to access the agenda and information related to the meeting live web streaming is available through the state board of education website www.education.net state board agenda item 1 call to order patricia tim let me know that she would not be in attendance today also as a reminder i will be leaving early today due to a family event at noon and vice president code johns will be taking over at the helm so thank you in advance vice president the october 8th 2021 state board

002of meeting will now come to order agenda item 1.1 andrea please call the roll patsy co jones here lisa fricke here patty goobles here jacqueline morrison here patricia tim maureen nichols present robin stevens here deborah neary hair commissioner bloomstead present seven president one absent thank you andrea please rise everyone and join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you agenda item 1.3 information regarding the open meetings act is posted as you enter the room from the main entrance doors the open meetings act is also posted on the state board of education website www.education.ne.gov state board agenda item 1.4 profit 19 meeting protocol commissioner yeah

003i'll just uh we have uh published protocols within our agenda items but just generally getting we're doing pretty well today giving people the social distance they might need and and wear a mask so thanks just to be attentive to other people's needs thank you agenda item two-point agenda item two commissioners report agenda item 2.1 agenda overview and consent agenda process commissioner yeah i i know that president nichols are going to move around for our special guests a little bit for a timing on this but i do want to remind board members if you do have any items that you had chosen to call special attention to in the consent agenda brian do you happen to have any over there i can see the the bottom of the box so no items okay so we'll move

004forward with that um also so far i guess we don't have any items to remove from the consent agenda so i'll turn it back to you maureen as i know you want to move on to yes i'm just going to move to agenda item 4 right quick the president's report which is short i just want to thank those members of the board that attended any of the area nasb nebraska association of school boards meetings in the past month or two i found both of those that i attended very interesting and always good to see local board members and a special shout out to those members board members who have attended via zoom wednesday yesterday and some today on the national association of state school boards annual delegate conference very well attended great sessions and so

005i appreciate those of you that were able to make it work into your schedules to participate in those agenda item five we're going to move on to the consent agenda is there a motion to approve the consent agenda i move to approve the consent agenda motion made by patty i do have one item to remove so sorry about that you do yeah so there is one item to remove item 5.2 point a um on committee appointments and so we'll take that up after after this but otherwise the consent agenda should be or that motion should be amended to remove that item okay so 5.2 point a will be removed and where are you going to place it at under what item um we'll move it down to the other business i think we'll we'll figure

006that out after this is done so okay all right is there a second on the motion second okay motion was made by patty and seconded by lisa per board policy there is no discussion on the motion to approve the consent agenda andrea please call the roll fricky yes niry yes tim goobbles yes stevens yes morrison epstein nicholls yes co john's yes um six yes one no one abstain motion passes thank you andrea we're going to move to agenda item 3 and we have one item for special presentations and discussions would ryan 4 please come forward and introduce our next agenda item and guest good morning board members good morning about two months ago i got a phone call from a mother of a student here in lincoln diane mertens who's with us today and she

007expressed that her daughter whitney and whitney's friend rhys were very interested in american sign language and the requirements around american sign language and the offerings within schools in the state and that they would be interested in a presentation to the state board on what they have been learning and researching over the past several weeks and so we worked together to find a time when it would make sense to present in front of the state board and so here we are at the october board meeting and so today with us is whitney mertens and rhys pederson and their mothers diane mertens and nikki petterson and so i'll turn it over to whitney and reece to introduce themselves and give their presentation and then there will be time for comment welcome whitney and rhys it's always great

008to see students come and present to the board i bet you're just a little bit nervous right don't be we're pretty easy to get along with so welcome we're glad you're here thank you you'll want to speak right into the microphone if you can so we can hear you okay hello my name is whitney can you speak up closer hunt hi my name is whitney mertens i'm 11 and i attend st michaels hi my name is pedersen i go to moore middle school and i'm 12 years old we have become very passionate about sign language because it's such a beautiful way of communication and a lot of people depend on it we would like to thank you for this amazing opportunity to be here and advocate for american sign language in schools american sign language

009emerged as a language in 1817. nationally 90 to 95 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents children are born ready to learn but for a quarter of a million u.s children who are deaf they enter school not prepared to succeed parents are often the source of a child's early learning of a language the earlier a child is exposed to and begins to acquire language the better that child's language cognitive and social development will become we know that sign is easier to learn before speaking because fine motor coordination is easier to learn than vocal motor coordinations babies are a prime example of this as parents teach simple sign language to their children to make it easier to understand their needs in the early days of nebraska deaf students had their own school called the

010nebraska school of deaf this school was for children with hearing disabilities and was founded in 1869 unfortunately after operating for a few decades the school was closed due to the fact that a large number of the students had chosen to educate themselves among the mainstream a school for the deaf has not been reopened in nebraska so families that rely on direct communication access have to relocate to a state that has its school for the deaf other families either home school or send their children to public or private schools that have to seek out american sign language on their own they they then figure out how their child is going to communicate with teachers and other students yes an interpreter can be arranged for the child but imagine if you were deaf and learning an environment

011where you were one of the few or the only deaf child this might be hard to imagine you probably think that it means not hearing but it means so much more for a moment put yourself in that child's shoes imagine you are in a world where everyone around you speaks french and you speak english now imagine yourself in a world where everyone can hear each other speaking and talk to one another but you can't it's the same thing in both situations you are close to others but yet in a sense you are in another world a world of your own you feel distant from others navigating childhood is hard on its own when it comes to forming friendships and figuring out your interests but adding a communication barrier to the situation only complicates the problem

012even more if more students learn sign language it would reduce isolation for hearing impaired students although they may have an interpreter there is a barrier in any classroom with a deaf student it can be hard for the interpreter to keep up with everything the teacher and student says not to mention it is also very hard for the deaf student to participate in class and make new friends when the main source of communication is an interpreter according to the nebraska office of special education in this school year there are 943 students under the identification of deaf or hard of hearing in the lps system there are a total of 108 deaf and hearing impaired students with 50 of those in elementary school deaf students who sign communicate in a different mode it would be beneficial for

013these students to have more language partners [Music] our solution to this problem is to offer american sign language in schools we realize this solution is somewhat of an uphill battle especially since there is no endorsement for asl in the state of nebraska which makes it hard to supply asl teachers at schools however it was brought to our attention that accreditation rule 10 could allow teachers who are fluent in asl to teach outside of their education area asl could be taught as an elective or they could partner with an online program online online programs such as startasl.com provide a teacher's guide and curriculum this online program currently has hundreds of schools all over the united states that use their curriculum our research indicated that lincoln southeast is the only school in lps that offers an asl

014club and they only meet once a month we also got information from amy rohn director of special education in nebraska and she stated that millard has some online programs as part of their career academy we also looked on the nebraska department of education website and found asl listed as a course this school year there are two schools teaching asl1 further investigation led us to learn legislation just passed last year in nebraska accepting asl as a foreign language legislative bill 839 would allow the state board of education to provide for the teaching of american sign language in schools if a school offers a course in asl the bill would require that it be offered to all students regardless of whether the student is hearing hard of hearing or deaf this brings us to our next question

015are we really committed as a state to improve our learning environment for the deaf and hearing impaired solutions to this question could be as simple as offering an after-school club for elementary students learning a language when you are young is easier for middle and high school students american sign language could be added as an additional foreign language class option the university of nebraska and other area colleges accept asl as a foreign language credits so students would be able to use these credits upon entering college we realize having an american sign language teacher at every school will be a huge investment we suggest starting with one school and gain interest or possibly utilize the online program startasl.com and have an educational interpreter in the classroom to facilitate the online program schools across the state could pull

016the student body to gauge interest and demand it could also be possible to utilize smart boards and technology to reach schools throughout nebraska the goal is to normalize sign language and give access to all students to create a better learning environment for all as there are many additional benefits to learning american sign language american sign language creates better social outcomes and environment for deaf and hearing impaired by reducing isolation it improves language outcomes for deaf and hearing impaired children a second language has been proven to be beneficial a more inclusive learning environment for all it promotes being bilingual and opens up career opportunities in the future it leads to higher reading levels in kids and improves vocabulary and spelling skills asl signers have incredible spatial reasoning knowing asl gives you a way to build relationships

017with countless deaf people in a way to enjoy the richness of the deaf community nationwide and it can help teachers maintain a more respectful classroom by using signs for restroom and question which can reduce interruptions making it easier to teach and learn in a quieter environment to add to our argument we've experienced the awkward stares happening in real life while we were at the pool one day we were practicing sign language trying to see how long we could go without using words every time we looked up we noticed someone whispering and staring at us like we were crazy one girl in particular said are you one of those signed people imagine this negative attention every single day just for using a different method of communication we were hurt by this and we aren't even deaf

018imagine how hurt you'd be if you actually were deaf we want sign language to be something people are proud of not something you feel you have to hide normalizing sign language and giving all students access to this language would make it possible for the deaf students to feel more connected to their peers and for the hearing to have a deeper respect for their fellow classmates sign language and all of the hearing impaired community if asl is taught in schools imagine the ripple effect it could have in our state nebraska faces a teacher shortage especially in the area with students with the highest needs such as the deaf and hard of hearing we could address that shortage by providing more opportunities for nebraska students to take classes in asl and later go on to teach it

019there are so many ways that we can improve life for those in the hearing impaired community but this change alone would help all children hearing and hearing impaired to live a better happier life so please help us to make an impact on children statewide um we we have some handouts um with some additional information and again thank you for your time and consideration wow [Applause] i see the two of you in the state legislature one day making making a state statute for us pretty amazing board members ms niri i just want to thank you you both inspire me so much that it makes me very optimistic about our future that two young people could think so deeply about people that have different needs than you and what you're talking about is a huge equity issue

020and i truly believe that when we're able to support all of our students and make sure that they're all thriving that's when we are most successful and i wanted to say kudos to your mom because i am just amazed by these young people that they have that kind of awareness so thank you thank you so much patsy co john well i actually have two questions for you okay so i want to thank you as well i i think you're absolutely amazing i taught speech and i'd give you an a so oral communication should be no big deal for you when you get there right so um my um my first question is what sparked your interest in this what happened that sparked your interest both of you um well american sign language is just a

021really beautiful way of communication and we realize that not a lot of people speak it because you know it's not really used for those who aren't hearing impaired so we thought that it would be cool if we could learn more about it and it just seems so interesting and the need for it is yeah it's um and we just when we were working on it we just kind of noticed that they're really wasn't like when we were like practicing it we'd always get like stares and we just don't want that to like be something that people have to deal with because it's really it's not their fault and it shouldn't be something that they're ashamed of and so we just kind of want it to be more normal and like just everyone we want as

022many people as we can to know it both both good reasons now where where do you go from here you've presented the problem to us what what are you going to do about it now next step um i guess we're just gonna do some further research and just try and like let more people know about it so that we can really make this happen and get it into schools and we want it to be like in middle school and high school we want people to be able to like take sign language as their foreign language class and we just kind of want it to be like something that a lot of people do and are interested in because it really and when we were learning it it really is kind of it's really fun to

023learn and so it's not something like boring it is fun and so we just kind of want more people to like be interested in it and so yeah yeah just making people aware that there's more to sign language than just hand movements because it's just it's a really important it's some people's way of life in their way that they get to share their voice with the world so um yeah well i hope you make lots and lots of speaking engagements and make everyone you can aware of this just like you did for us today because i really learned a lot thank you so much thank you lisa wow you girls are amazing um have you considered talking to your state senator and doing a short presentation um no we have not oh that might be

024i think that would be very impressive and um my husband was a principal and decided to get out of that and so he went into special education transitions and one of his favorite classes was sign language and he came home one day turned on i don't know where he had a copy of it's a beautiful world or something like that and he signed it to me and it was really an eye awakening moment for me so i'm really proud of you girls and don't stop here thank you you're welcome jacqueline i am so impressed with your bravery because i don't know if she would have been as brave to do this today thank you so i i think that's awesome i also want to tell you that the work that you're doing is very important

025and i'll tell you how it translates into my career and what i have done i worked as a as an attorney in the courts and a lot of times when i'd have clients who were either deaf or hard of hearing we'd have to have an interpreter and so you have to have people who are hearing who are able to speak sign language who can do the interpretation for people and so i think the work that you are doing will open up careers for you but also help you to be help other places be accessible to people such as courtrooms hospitals things like that they're always looking for translators and sometimes if we didn't have a translator that person's court hearing got continued and continued until we could get someone in to interpret and the other

026thing i think that would be interesting if you guys want to continue to look at this sometimes we'd have people from other countries who couldn't hear and so they didn't speak american sign language they spoke a different form of sign language for their country and so we sometimes have to have two types of two layers of translations going on because we're trying to figure out the sign that they spoke in their country and then converting that to us and so there were a lot of different challenges but i want to thank you for bringing this to my attention i took sign language when i was in high school and i didn't know that we had such a shortage in nebraska so i think we definitely need to look at this and look at our local

027school boards and see which languages that they're teaching and if they are teaching sign language and so thank you for putting it on my radar and thank you for being here thank you thank you any other board members well whitney and reese thank you thank you you have bright futures ahead thank you continue the good work girls have a good day going back to school thanks to the moms who got them here thank you commissioner i think we'll be moving back to agenda item 2.2 report on the rules and if you want to finish your commissioner's report all right so as i get back if you ever get discombobulated i guess i have to get combobulated again is that how that works so so i'll get back said here but great presentation i'm i'm super

028excited for that uh so thanks again to our presenters so um the report on rules is actually in uh your agenda items and you will see if i can get it to open anyway we have awaiting approval from the attorney general's office on on rule 24 regarding certificate endorsements that the board passed i forget the exact time we did that but still in front of the a.g and then uh still waiting on rules one and rules two to be approved by the governor and that's all i have on on the rules report and then if you want me to move on yes i'll actually invite elaine carr up to talk about um the next item 2.3 excuse me two point whichever it is i'm not combobulated yet so it's okay welcome lane good morning all

029right so we are going to be speaking i wanted to provide a quick update to you all on the first year implementation of the purple star schools act and recognition program i just want to be real quick here i have a couple of slides and those should be posted here for you as well but really today i just want to provide a little bit of context around purple star the recognition program that was that will be implemented this fall share with you a little bit about the timeline and then just answer any questions that you all might have so just a little bit about the purple star schools act this is our logo that we are using and this was a build that was passed in 2021 but even if we take a step back

030let's talk about why this is such an important conversation and recognition program so each year in nebraska about 4 000 students are military connected a military connected student is a student who has a parent at least one parent that is in a current or former member of the armed forces the nebraska national guard army navy air force marine co marine corps coast guard and then space force which is our newest branch of the military they are also students that maybe lost a parent who was killed in the line of duty so those 4 000 students each have unique needs many of which are transitions coming in and out moving with their parents um from place to place and so schools therefore have the need to respond differently and and serve those unique needs in a

031little bit different way which is why we're excited uh to be implementing the purple star schools act which is meant to recognize those schools that are serving our military involved students and serving their families as well this was signed as i said in 2021 and it is a recognition program for public and non-public schools so we're sharing this information out with schools and then more importantly than just the recognition is the supports that we also want to be providing to our schools and districts on how to better serve these students and their families and you can see the qualifications here it's around having somebody who's really going to own the process of serving these students meeting them where they are creating you know unique plans for their transition into this school as well as a

032website or a page on their website that shares those resources of for students and families as they come into the community there should be also a transition program and again many districts already have these and we're going to be providing some resources and information on how they could stand those up as well as professional learning and then doing one of the following which i just think is a really cool part of this program recognizing april as the military child month or november is the military family month and then hosting events or creating a resolution at the local level that is supporting military-connected students and or partnering with a local installation and getting veterans getting military involved community members into the school as well so our timeline we are we wanted to provide this update to

033you all let you know that this is the plan for moving forward for this year and then we're going to close those applications in early november so that we can share out and recognize those schools in november as well we also want to think about ways that we can continue to support schools in this so you know this is a first year this is kind of a quick turnaround and we want all schools to be purple star schools so that we can make sure we're serving military involved and military connected students and then continuing to raise awareness right so there's so many different parts to this conversation different supports for our veterans different supports for their families and the unique needs of these students as well so i wanted to just share this as a

034quick update to you all and see if there were any questions about this i'm sure we'll come back in november and share some of our early results lisa first of all i want to thank uh senator carol blood for bringing this to nde and looking at what you just did what you just showed us and what nde and with you as lead doing coming from a military family that moved about every two and a half years there was only one transition where we didn't have support as a school student and a large school and you just feel all alone left out and so thank you for doing such a marvelous job lining up these events activities and resources for these students and families thank you i'll go ahead lane do we have a sense of

035how many schools in nebraska currently have students that are military involved i'm sure we have that data somewhere patty and we could get that for you as well great thank you lane i did not follow this legislation perhaps like i should have so i just have a couple of questions if someone becomes a purple heart school what benefit or incentive do they get for doing that so it's just a recognition i don't want to say just a recognition but it would be the designation basically so the schools will be listed on our website we'll also have that logo that we have and we're thinking about ways that we can celebrate them out with you know for example the blue blue ribbon schools that are from the u.s department of ed those schools get a prominent

036banner so we're thinking about ways that we could recognize schools better with something right so on the fiscal note for the legislation [Music] i do you know what we asked for as an agency or what if there was any financial component to the fiscal note on that legislation i don't believe that there was and you know i'm double checking with brian just you don't recall that there was a fiscal note that yeah yeah i'm not aware of any okay and then my last question then is so i probably get myself in trouble but one of have we as an agency as we're looking at our esser funds and different types of funding sources that we received this year and when we're looking at how we distribute those funds have we considered looking at schools that

037serve military families as an input or consideration when determining how much funds a school could get to be able to help them support the additional challenges that come with serving military families elaine's probably best to answer that one so go ahead mine yeah you bet so not directly but we have been spending quite a bit of funds and i know the commissioner is going to be updating you on some of those um investments that have been made over the past several months we've been doing a lot with transitions and thinking about uh the supports that are needed for mental health transitions family and community engagement so i would say not directly jacqueline but we have been in a roundabout way serving some of those mobile students students that are experiencing trauma etc and then so

038with i guess again kind of i'm always trying to see the big picture if we see that this is a priority the legislation passed are there other places where we have tried to take that priority and incorporate it into other things that we're doing i think yes i mean the dynamic of responsiveness to legislation that passes right when when we weren't necessarily part of the the conversations that took place as that was moving on we might have been asked kind of along the way but i think you raised a really good point of what are the state's priorities and how do we fit into those different things what are the other things that are happening that we can help leverage resources that we have to meet those overall objectives and i think that's a very

039good point thanks okay uh agenda item 2.5 yeah what i'm going to recommend is we go ahead and take a brief break and get you settled here so so i can be assistive on the meeting stuff and we'll just do i mean if it'd be all right five minutes i think it's plenty so all right we'll go ahead and start i this this item is uh to talk a little bit about the esser funds and kind of where we're at at this moment in time um i asked lane to kind of stay up here as lane's been kind of critical to the the efforts in applying for the different rounds of funding that were available thinking through the structures that we would have to have and so as as i speak there might be a

040couple questions that that ling is able to address more effectively i do have a document in fact this document that's attached in the information i'll kind of talk through it but board members are welcome to look at that um one of the things that just to think back 18 months and to think about uh you know what not just what the country but the world's kind of experience with with covid and you know the sadness of of the changes that happened i you know i kind of want to start by saying just how proud i am of the schools across the state of nebraska and the work that they've done to ensure that we can return to school i remember probably about april end of april of 2020 not not knowing for sure how all

041of that was going to play out and i i will just say uh across the state and i think universally so there was just very much a will to figure it out and how to get back in place and and start serving students most effectively i also know that the impacts on students are not always equal across across these times in these moments and obviously the anything that that created challenges for students and families that it existed before the pandemic were in many ways uh doubled tripled you know enhanced even even further and so it's really important that we're able to think through these uh these moments in time and try to think of the how the resources that now have become available are are also important um the cares act the first funds that

042were available uh to the partner to this well states and to education entities across the the country came um you know fairly quickly and and the amount of funds that were available to the state of nebraska at that point uh was 65 million dollars and we use those funds across you know there were there's approaches to that that they have to be used in schools in certain ways and but really the intention was that we'd find a way to address the current needs of that schools had schools got those funds basically on the title distribution level that's something that kind of stays throughout the the funding formula and their the expectations from congress at that point in time and so there was about 59 million dollars that went directly to schools and there was about

043six million dollars that was set aside at the statewide level to do those funds with we can get into the details of how that worked but a lot of the things that we were doing in the summer of 2020 thinking of resources thinking of different ways that we could ensure that students had access to to broadband thinking of different different things that could be done we really set a framework at that time underneath launch nebraska and so a lot of the information that i even talk about today you can see some of those results on our launchnet.com website because that's where we provided guidance to schools and interacted with schools over those times and it is really hard to imagine or even it's not hard to imagine i don't know how to best describe this

044but we went into a mode where we were communicating with schools on a you know pretty much a daily basis a weekly basis myself live on zoom calls having conversations what do we need to do a lot of unknowns obviously that were taking place and a lot of concerns one of the first concerns i remember surfaced in the in that summer was the desire to serve special ed students in person in the state and that was a really really tough time for for students that needed that certainly most benefited from that in-person opportunity to learn and and i just remember the tension with that and the the importance of getting there we had people doing amazing things across the state trying to balance those particular needs and i you know at that point in time

045there was no guarantees that there be other money even available to school so i remember saying hey look this is if we get back in we can start to assess what those challenges are by the fall there was a lot of conversation of additional resources that might come through federal appropriations and we didn't really know and if you remember is actually in december 2020 where you know these all have acronyms but i always could call it s or two the second round of funds came into place that was called the coronavirus response and relief supplemental appropriation act um you know so that got named carissa i guess is the way that we look at that one but but in that total allocation that really became available shortly after that in in december into the next

046year and there was 243 million again those funds were given out to schools underneath the title funding program and the allocation to districts in that case was 218 million um that went out through title and there was a 24 million dollar set aside for for for the state to be able to do statewide responsibilities on that front and we started that application process and i remember it pretty well because i think i was in front of the appropriations committee or one one of maybe a joint committee of the legislature working together to understand what the impacts were going to be and so at that point in time we had heard that maybe there'd be this other third round of funding that would become available but it wasn't quite known and we laid out a framework

047at that time with our partners partners with a lot of different entities that were involved schools included in that saying what are the most important things that that we should be considering at this moment in time and so for that that became our framework and then in march and that's i remember i think it actually happened while i was in the meeting that that that the american rescue plan was actually passed or signed and remember the exact moment in time but and we were learning of these other funds that were coming so they got stacked one on top of the other especially those last two funding rounds became really uh closely linked together in a lot of ways but that american rescue plan included then 546 million dollars to to the state with 492 million

048dollars going out through the title allocation funding approach and 54 million dollars of those funds became available for the state uh for for statewide use right so so all of those things it it happened pretty quickly the the the interesting part of the application process is there wasn't an application process to the federal government right at least on the first rounds actually that the funds really just ended up showing up to the state and then you had to build a plan and there's a lot of questions i i attended an appropriations hearing the state has other funds these are these are just education ones right there are other funds available to the state to do things and one of the well the person who runs legislative fiscal office uh he he spoke to this tom

049burke was his name spoke to it he said i'm the one to throw a wet blanket on these things you have to spend these funds within the categories of of what the federal government would say and i i can tell you i know with brian halsted over the years on federal funds you always have this you know important role to play at the department to make sure that schools are spending them in alignment with what the federal government says and at the same time creatively right along the lines of what would be most beneficial to our students and so that's the work that we've undertaken and continue to undertake as part of the responsibilities we have as a as an education agency as a state education agency to ensure that those funds are being distributed

050according to the law to ensure that they're being used in ways that are most helpful for for the state of nebraska and that we have you know a window of time in which these funds are available and so on the each each funding source kind of went to one year and then to the next into the next so the very first sr1 time period would have started in april of 2020 and should be expended or at least encumbered by september of 2022 the next round was january 21 and it would have to be encumbered by september of 23. in the final round sr3 or or arp would be march of 21 when it started and encumbered by september of 2024 so there's a three year window of time with each round of funds that comes

051with some overlap obviously in those time frames so it's important to know that because the other part of it is that the u.s department of ed then required certain provisions to be done by schools in certain ways certain provisions to be done by the state part of the responsibilities again for us from an agency standpoint is to make sure that those funds are being used appropriately so we we had an application process that schools also went through to try to align that application with with the expectations that we had overall but also part of the expectation i think for us and i i'm not going to go through every detail of how that has to be done within within our because i may put you to sleep pretty quickly on that but the the the

052the responsibility is real for us right that these are accounting dynamics that that we have a responsibility for as a state and i think as we as we kind of watch the rest of the leveraging points that we have against the state funds other funds that are coming into play from the federal level we want to be that type of partner and again earlier this week i was able to testify very briefly i think i had three minutes and no questions in front of the appropriations committee just to outline a few things and i want to i wanted to share a little bit about how we went about engaging with folks on identifying the themes this might be where i asked lane to share a few insights on on that as he he and the

053time frame that was required underneath um american rescue plan and our our engagement with different communities and and different approaches we did several different things but we ended up with a kind of a set of priority areas and then i'll have you kind of talk about how we arrived at those priority areas perhaps but the priority areas that we ended up with were really addressing kind of what are the comprehensive mental health services that was one of the biggest concerns that our schools raised for their families really right it's not just that these things are taking place in schools but how are we supporting families in the in this particular time family and community engagement we settled on that because we're looking for different ways like our before and after school programs for instance is

054a requirement underneath the arp funds and again how would we do that most effectively but again what we're hearing from from our communities about that particular work one thing we definitely heard was around professional learning and the teacher pipeline just worried about whether or not there were enough folks to do that that classroom work it's been a very stressful time on teachers they've done remarkable things in classrooms uh in the in the last 18 months it's been a i think a heroic lift of what's happened in our school settings so i see you have a question i just want to clarify what i'm hearing are you talking about the nde money or at this point the priorities or for the schools kind of both okay what i'd share with you is we tried to frame

055it so it's a partnership between the schools and the nde that we could leverage against one another for those those types of services so yes that's a great point and so um but we will talk about specifically the nda portion too but within these big big priority areas i think that was really important we we know and in fact i think over the next few weeks we'll be able to have what i'll call a covet impact study on assessment nebraska is one of the few states that was able to conduct statewide assessment i actually don't know of another so but i'm going to say one of a few just not to be to be too wrong there but we conducted statewide assessment so we have an idea of what the impacts were on learning across

056the state not a not a perfect picture never going to be a perfect picture but on our three through eight assessment um early on we could see that we were concerned about what the impacts were on early literacy early early readers right i mean that's not a maybe a huge surprise but we actually do have data i think that will begin to back that up math as well right i mean in the in those areas and i i guess we we've i've used the phrase before but if you're not busy learning math you're busy forgetting math and and so for our students even at the early years that's an important part of of that and so any disruptions that we've seen have to be somewhat addressed and again that's the purpose of these funds both

057for the state and for for schools overall to think about those those things and how can we accelerate that learning and how can we help ensure that we're addressing any of those any of those challenges and then last a big one for us and for the state has been around data infrastructure and systems and ensuring that number one we can meet the requirements that that we have to do from that state level but also thinking about how we can make those improvements to to ensure that information is being shared for school districts again like the like the data around assessment to have a good sense of how that's working and make sure that that those investments can be made there's also oddly enough in the midst of all this a lot of concern about technology

058and security right we've seen um you know in these times of disruption you actually see that other disruptions happen and you see ransomware and all sorts of things and so that's actually a substantial concern for school districts and data privacy and anything else that just being aware and trying to trying to be able to use these resources to help on any of those fronts that help provide stability in the education environment is is part of the overall work but i might ask lane just to speak a little bit about groups that were engaged how we went about that process and and give folks a little bit of that background too you bet so for our specific portion of this and this is around page three in the document that's on spark but our process for

059our application for arp actually mirrored districts as well so the u.s department of ed and actually the law was very clear about the stakeholders that needed to be engaged and stakeholders should always be engaged right it's not a it's not a always just a must have it's a should have and it should do and so we actually asked for an extension over the summer so that we could make sure that not only our application but also that that our districts were submitting and they actually just submitted in september and i can talk about that if you'd like but that our districts had enough time and we also wanted school to come back so that they could talk to their students right super important obviously um uh really necessary to get our students voices here so

060we surveyed uh uh our schools and our public in uh for the cares act and then as the commissioner said we really have been kind of considering chris uh or sr2 and arp sr3 sort of together because they kind of all came at the same time so we spent a lot of time in may and june hosting roundtable sessions with administrators with our teachers with principals and superintendents we spoke with civil rights organizations and really wanted to hear from them specific needs for the populations that they represent we spoke with parents we spoke with parents that are bilingual and perhaps that english is not their only is not their first language and so had a wide variety of voices come to the table in addition to a survey that we put out that had almost

061450 respondents and you can click on the hyperlink there and see kind of where those respondents were from who they represented and some of the high-level data but then really just took all of that information and some of the projects that we had already been investing in over the over the past several um months aligned that to our framework for renewal and acceleration and then ultimately came to these five uh high-level priorities so commission i don't know if you want me to talk any further about schools and their processes or anything else it actually might help because i know schools then we had a deadline for schools to actually submit their their applications i guess to us even though it's not exactly the right term for that but their plans essentially to us maybe talk

062briefly about that sure there's a question commission so i have some pretty specific questions and i could ask them now so as you're kind of going through this you could cover it or i can just sit and kind of listen and then we may have to revisit it so can you let me know what is best for you yeah i think it'd be great if you go ahead and ask the questions and then if we we can either address it right now or kind of where it fits in the rest of the information got it okay so when you kind of are talking about the process can you outline what schools were required to submit like what are their what was their initial request or what did they have to give to us in order

063to be able to spend the money that they received what are their ongoing reporting requirements to us to show us what they did do we have to approve what they're doing or do we have any remedy if they spend money other than how they said that they were going to and then how are we assessing i have a couple of questions about the uses of funds and our priorities so i'm assuming the priorities that we identified or historically marginalized students with disabilities english learners economically disadvantaged but then it goes on to say approve uses of funds and those two could be read in conjunction with one another or they could be read separate from one another and so i want to know how we are tying those categories because i feel like that's how we

064decided we voted on as a board to distribute those funds based on looking at those categories but if the uses of funds if the schools aren't necessarily tying them to the approved uses then there's a disconnect there so i would like to know kind of how all of that what is our mechanism for applying our mechanism for compliance and then also how are the two connect the uses of funds going to be connected to those groups so if as you're kind of going through your questions you can answer those i won't have to kind of i might have follow-up questions but it might help guide kind of what i'm thinking but thank you yeah and actually i i think it's actually a good point to talk about the application process so each each of the

065three rounds of funds had slightly different requirements from the federal side so i'll kind of couch it that way and maybe speak maybe to the third one in particular as that's the biggest amount of money and there will be similarities with how that that works generally for us um and i i think i've got another staff member too here that maybe can help if i go off the rails a little bit but but the uh first part is number one i just want you to also realize so even with federal funds there's always this responsibility in the agency so just our normal federal funds would have a similar process you know so i'll highlight that so our normal federal funds we'd have to follow i believe it's two cfr 200 is that the yeah you're

066better than me but so but some of the cares act did not require that level of detail and so they waived some of those requirements some of them for the state came back with arpa funds we'll have to utilize those but i don't know how they as they relate to us or so if you could educate me yeah it would i'll try to describe the infrastructure that we have to do some of those things and then how kind of we interpret you know those responsibilities too so that the first thing is that the federal law reigns kind of supreme for us right so if they say a school can do something with the funds then they can do something with the funds even if we say well i don't think that's the highest and best

067use of it right i mean we don't necessarily have that ability to to redirect them if the at the federal law basically says they can use it for this purpose we have tried to provide guidance to them along the very set of priorities that we have and and and try to go uh down that particular path i guess i don't know a good way to say it but we can't be more restrictive than the law is on on those requirements so that's one thing the other part is that just as we do tracking with with with federal funds schools expend funds and then seek reimbursement for those for those federal funds generally so there's a chance number one we look at it on the front end of what they say they're going to spend it

068for and then when they seek reimbursement there's a chance did they spend it where where they said they were going to spend those particular funds and so that's one of the kind of the checks on on that overall um do you have a question on that from sorry oh sorry i just say the again because each one has slightly different requirements you know we have teams kind of tracking and by the way when i say teams it's largely the same people within the agency trying to track each one of those uses of those funds and ensuring that they're being appropriately applied according to the plans that schools set forth but it might help to kind of talk through what we did with arpa a little bit different we asked schools to put in a pre-plan

069in jul in june i think and say say we intend to apply for these funds and then they had a period of time to engage with local communities with their stakeholders at their local level and set out some of their particular priorities and i think that might kind of help and then i'll i can come back to the the other portion of that sure so for you all and also for our public the uh best resource for all of this information we've consolidated all of our web pages on essers one two and three and it's just education.any.gov backslash esser e-s-s-e-r so specifically for sr-3 it was very different it actually required the nde to put forth a plan it also came with some very specific stipulations and ways that districts must use their funds so

070for example districts are required to expend 20 percent of their funds on learning loss what the what the legislation calls learning loss so it's co which comes with connotations for evidence-based interventions that they must provide etc so our nda team spent a ton of time from around april may june into july our entire uh we had an entire strand of support for districts during administrator days and then we also created a several resources that walk districts through this process we called it a budget roadmap so as the commissioner said there were two parts to um to the application the first was a safe return to school plan which our districts submitted to us and said this is how we and many by the way like commissioner said most all had them already so it was

071dusting them off bringing them up today working really closely with their local health departments to get those ready and then the second part was the use of funds and that's what really our districts spent a lot of time into the fall and those were due on september 15th and we had our district submit those and now our team is as is checking them going through them sending them back and working with districts on pieces that might need to be tweaked so as commissioner said you know there's kind of a two-part uh check on our districts the first is does what you say fit the appropriate uses of funds and then the second check is in the back end when we reimburse our districts or don't so again lots of time new this year was a

072requirement or with this round of funds was a requirement for stakeholder engagement and very specific stakeholders that needed to be engaged we asked districts to think through a theory of action so if we do this investment we believe it will have this outcome for our students and then we put a premium on high quality instructional materials lots of information out there around evidence-based practices because we wanted to make it easier for our districts to select and vet some of those interventions especially with that 20 percent um piece as well the last thing that i will say that i think is a really useful part of the arp is a six-month requirement for revisiting and digging back into the plans so districts on a six-month kind of process will be engaging with us and then re-engaging

073back with their stakeholders to say are we on the right track not only with our health and safety plan but with the plan that we have for these for this use of funds and you know districts would have probably done that anyway and that's just best practice of looking at data new data as it arises re-engaging stakeholders but for us it's a it's an opportunity to um you know redirect and and change course if we need to or tweak things as we may as well so go ahead so i see a question and if there's a better time to answer these i can wait till the end but two questions uh one on during nde days part of the administrators conference i did listen to your finance team go through this process of reimbursement and

074i was very impressed uh you know that there is accountability and scrutiny of how the funds are used in that way i wondered i mean have has there been a case where something's been bounced back or do we have a process for that i guess that's my first question and then i have a second one um you let me just go on okay and then the second one is about learning loss since these funds are intended for that purpose and of course we've all seen on social media you know where the money's been used for football fields and i don't know if that's even true but i hope not um but uh i guess am i correct in thinking that there will be a measurement of that learning loss is a result of our accountability

075systems and our assessments i hate this word subgroup but it's the term that the federal government uses that we you know are measuring uh how our subgroups are doing uh and so there will be an accountability in in in measuring their learning loss is that right yeah and and kind of as i was mentioning before i'll hit the learning loss uh concept too so there's a 20 of the funds that schools have to be able to demonstrate are approaching learning loss and so um and again the federal definition of that is you know a little less clear obviously every state in the nation lost the 2020 spring assessments right there was not a single state that conducted their their statewide assessment at that point in time what we did in nebraska was actually go how

076do we now shift um on a plan that we already had in place around what we're doing for three year assessment on our three through eight assessment system and how can we uh make the most of the resources that we would be using to ensure that schools are able to test right away in the fall part of that's gone to the the um literacy side of our of our goals as a state prior or even previous to the pandemic but the intention of being able to measure where students are at at the beginning of the year so we really used resources aligned the work that we were doing on assessment and shifted to ensure that there could be assessment being done through the midst of the pandemic and see if we can measure and again

077i wasn't so worried about the accountability at that point but the real use of the data at a school level to know where students were at and gave us some understanding very early on about uh you know what student performance was looking like in in the midst of in the midst of the pandemic uh the nice part i think for us anyway as we were able to continue that work and then actually complete our 2021 assessment cycle and so again we had almost 95 percent of our students do that assessment which is unheard of across the country right i mean that's just that just wasn't happening in other places and so what we'll be looking at is using that largely as a baseline right i mean that's our first uh solid measure of how students

078did on on the three three and again that's from a statewide look schools have other looks at data that that give them a chance to kind of engage in that but it gave us that chance to to to continue to build out that as a baseline of that information and then as we release and look at that we'll be able to look at how schools are really doing are we actually addressing some of those things and learning loss now that's it's not always easy to compare all those different things and put them together but it gives us a pretty good leg up on on trying to move that forward so on that particular point that's that's the approach and we can tie that back to hey look is that really working for us as a

079state are there other things that we need to be looking at even though six month reviews that are kind of built into the cycle is this really a good you know theory of action is it functioning for for us and for schools overall so i spurred more questions every time i answer one so this is a lisa glad to get the mask off um i had a question i'm glad we're addressing you know the 20 with learning loss are we doing trainings um for accelerated learning we you talked about best practice evidence-based and i believe lane has explained to us how accelerated learning is a better path are we training teachers about a better way to use that strategy i'm going to say yes but it's not just us right and so even with schools

080as they're doing that particular work with the a lot of different ways that's taking place but it's not just around accelerating learning but learning different learning modes in the midst of what we're facing thinking through different strategies with the impacts that our students have really faced so i don't know that i could frame it just as accelerating learning but but improved practices and improved supports for teachers that are dealing with with the challenges that they're facing in their classroom so a lot of different aspects to that yeah i just wanted to make sure teachers were getting the support they needed the training they needed thank you i think jacqueline so i am a visual learner i have to read things and i have to see it like listening is very difficult for not difficult for

081me to listen but to try to put things in a framework and i was really hoping when you said lane was going to be presenting or we were actually going to be kind of seeing some numbers and charts and things about kind of the processes so it might be helpful for me if we can put together some type of report or at least that outline of what we're doing with each program and kind of that process and rob and i did send an email ahead of time saying here are my questions back on september 25th so i kind of there there was a heads up just so that you know but i guess my concern and at least the part i'm not understanding and we can talk about this at a later date maybe this

082requires a separate meeting if the funds come to the department of education and we decide which school districts are going to get what funds i feel like we do have a layer of control or say so as the grantee or sub award of what and how those funds are distributed and what they are used for and i heard the commissioner say today well we can't be more restrictive than the federal and that seems a little counterintuitive to me when we decide where the money goes so it seems like we can set those parameters so i would kind of like to see that layer of where we're saying we we can't be more restrictive than the federal when it does the money flows through us the the other thing is and i i won't just beat

083around the bush here i saw where the ops outline of what they plan to do with these funds and there were infrastructure costs there was technology there was the purchasing of curriculum and i know the purchasing of curriculum plans had been in their plans before the federal funds even came and so if we are looking at truly learning loss and how it's going to serve particular groups that are disadvantaged or who have been performing differently and we see districts that are just making across the board investments that aren't specific to those groups that we have outlined when do we approve and say it's okay for you to put a new roof a roof on a building because you say that affects air quality for the children in the room but we've also specifically said we

084want to see how learning loss is being captured among those particular groups so i'm missing our control component here or where we're reviewing this and then i'd also like to know kind of to deborah's position or at least her question if has the money already been distributed to school districts and if it's not if it's on a reimbursement basis at what point are we going to say we want to see what you've done with the 25 percent that you had before we issue the next round of 25 or the next 50 percent to you because while your plan initially might have been to do this if you're putting windows but the kids are still falling behind because you said you improved air quality maybe we need to reassess that plan and so i'm not hearing

085i'm kind of hearing what you guys are saying but i'm not seeing specifically what our process is what our controls are and how we're going to look at this going forward and this isn't a matter of me getting into the day-to-day operations of nde but at the same time these are once in a lifetime opportunities of funds to truly address big picture gaps and i want to make sure that we are being good stewards of the resources that we're given and if that's another conversation for a different day or a different report or a different outline i'd really like to see it i don't think we need to keep going back and forth here but i'm not kind of hearing those specific questions or answers yeah and i think in part what i hear you

086say we can walk through in great detail how each one of those kind of processes work so i i think on a high level the this is a good place for us to start your questions actually and then a little deeper into the questions is helpful to see what what else you're interested in but what i what i would say i mean and i'll use an example what i mean that we can't be more restrictive right so if the fed if the congress says you may use it for like hvac systems is one of those right that we are not in a position to say a school couldn't use it for an hvac system that actually underneath federal code and we've had this conversation back and forth with the us department of ed and others

087that look at how we do it so those those are things that are real the national scene i think it's actually worth kind of noting that as well the fact that we work on a reimbursement model is actually one of the big checks that i would recommend every state would have in some fashion right and many of them don't i think iowa as a neighbor for instance in the midst of this their schools got all the money spent the funds and then came back and said oh you didn't spend them the right way so we have better checks in place than than many other states but i'd have to walk you through that and have the kind of the right team of folks to put that report together to kind of share that with you

088in a in a in a in a better way for you i think so but am i correct and the federal government could say an hvac system is okay but the department of education in this board when we approved that formula of who which school districts were going to get what funds based on how many kids they had receiving free and reduced lunch etc we could go back i'm not going to say we're going to retroactively go back but we do have the ability to say we've seen your plan you want to do an hvac system we saw this school district's plan they want to do accelerated learning for kids we would prefer that we distribute the money this way than for that hvac than for an hvac plan like we do have a control

089in how we decided where the money goes i'm going to say to a certain extent but i don't i actually don't believe that we there's certain things that when we work with the us department of ed that's not the case like we can't be i mean they will tell us over and over again we can't be more restrictive than something that was expressed there we are asking and i'm just going to put this out there too and working with our team in my kind of national role these are the same types of questions we get from multiple states and so we'll be pro posing some questions i guess the us department had about what that guidance is on the back end of this i can remember telling superintendents the first two rounds of especially the

090first round of funding was go out and spend it towards these things to get open right it was a little clearer a little smaller kind of purpose the second round of funding broadened that you know pretty dramatically and i remember saying because there was a lot of go spend it quickly right and my line became with my national colleagues as well was you can spend it quickly or you could spend it wisely but i'm not sure you can do both and i think there's kind of this balancing act that's going to take place again not just on education funds but on funds that are available generally underneath the american rescue plan that that's the balancing act that i think we'll have to kind of keep playing i i do think we have some room for

091guidance and interpretation and and we do some of that i know you asked that question what do we do you know if something's not there we have a process for that without getting into some examples it's hard for me to to probably describe that well but that might be a what we could bring back in in kind of a an update on this is dive a little bit deeper into what that looks like dedicate a bit more time for for you to be able to engage with how that works in our team and i think that would be probably most helpful for you so and then this the last thing as it relates to the funds that nde withheld which i believe is ten percent that's a discretionary amount we don't have to withhold ten

092percent we could withhold one percent two percent um that's a choice that we made to keep that for administration and i understand sometimes that requires additional staff members at the department to monitor these funds different capacities and it has to sometimes last over the course of five years to be able to monitor something like that and so i had hoped that we would be able to one see the results of the survey today that we did of the state to ask what they wanted to see done with these funds and so i don't know if we have that in a report format that we'd be able to review and what what's what our stakeholders asked us to do with the federal funds and then also an outline of what we would do with the 84

093million dollars that we withheld and didn't send out to schools and we do actually that's what the link that lane had mentioned so there's a report of the of the survey and that and that's actually what frame those priority areas that's so that those two things kind of go together so we'll kind of organize that in a little bit different fashion but the the other part is when we made the decisions to uh retain those funds that was um it's not just around administration it's around providing services to schools directly so some of what we did in the very first round we made that decision with the first round kept that for the second round maintained that for the third round with the intention of building up that set of resources that are available to

094schools not based just on the on the formula then but based on things that we can provide scale for a good example is schools were really interested in like math curriculum and so we actually at one point and this board approved the purchase of zern math as part of that that strategy so each one of those things comes to pass but i think what i what i get is you need to see the big picture and then get down into the weeds on some of those things elling weeds in a negative way but to be able to see the that each one of those those contracts in whole because you're seeing them in parts right now and i think that's what what i'm hearing you say my last if i can ask two questions could

095you tell me the link that lane stated again because i tried to put it into the computer and it didn't work or at least i put it in wrong so i will own that if you could just tell me that again and then the other thing when the decision is made to keep the 10 percent well 10 percent i mean for administration that's actually a federal term i'm not that's not jacqueline's term it's kind of like that's the amount you can keep of federal funds but we who makes that decision is that a board decision or is that a decision that the department makes because i don't remember if we voted on that yeah it was a decision largely when we started down this path of accepting federal funds that that we discussed at that

096time and we retained that through so i guess the department made it in that case yeah the link jacqueline is the document that i've been referring to that the commissioner shared with the appropriations committee is linked in spark and then the um the link that will take you to the uh respondents from the survey is on page three and it says nearly 450 respondents and then that's the the documents also on the esser webpage which is just education.ne.gov backslash esser e-s-s-e-r yep e-r yep deborah thanks patsy um in speaking with some of my friends that are ceos of non-profits i'm hearing lately that they are losing a lot of their social workers and mental health therapists because there's such a need out there and a lot of corporate enter entities can hire them at a

097higher rate and and so there's just a huge shortage of social workers out there now in the nonprofit world and i'm wondering uh does do these funds allow for some kind of a judge adjustment of salary level in order to meet the demand since you know i yeah the scales are changing so much right now i don't think i can answer for sure for certain i think that's but i i i think this really was surfaced also in the appropriations hearing the other day just across the sectors right that there's a workforce shortage in a lot of different areas we're worried obviously and those things that impact directly on schools but we're also worried about our partners being able to have positions that fill those particular needs so i don't have an immediate answer for

098you know how could they be used for for those particular things but i i don't think we're the only ones trying to consider that right now so robin thank you madam chair i listening to this conversation uh really reminds me of of uh the importance of having many different thoughts many different experiences as i look at this board you know of course there's a lot of educators but we also have a lawyer we also have person of higher education and we also have a person who's involved in non-profits in in her experience and it just reminds me of the importance of a board and and how we all bring our own experiences to this because as i listen to the questions uh which by the way are great questions and and those are questions i

099hadn't even given them one bit of thought to and uh so i uh i just really uh i guess appreciate the board and all of our experiences there uh and also as i listened to this discussion it in my experience of course is that of a uh of a old retired superintendent uh and as i look out there and i see dr edwards from kearney and and that sort of thing so so what i'm going to say is based on my experiences and i need to keep that in mind when i think about the rest of us and and how all of our experiences are different i really am not as concerned about what the local districts are doing with that money because i am truly into local control i'm truly into the uh the

100goodness of those board members and the goodness of of those administrators who are now challenged to take on this as another uh project another job in their already full plate and and so i'm just i'm really into i'm i want to know how did kent edwards at carney get his money and how did dr rhodes at gothenburg get his money i think i heard quote title uh the title formula so that is my concern is how did kent get so much more than gothenburg uh nebraska i'm saying that facetiously please so so how is how is that decided and so that we can give empower uh these superintendents empower these local boards to make the decision at the local level again if the question on how the title formula works i can go we could

101go into that but it's really based on title poverty and poverty counts of students and so obviously when you have the scale of students number one the the percentage of poverty is you know a big part of that and so going out underneath that formula that's not determined by us that's really determined by the federal law so then once they get that amount of money how they spend those particular funds within the frame that's permitted within federal law and then to the point about how they apply for it and say what we're going to use it for it's not so much that when they just use it for the things that are allowed it's when there's that question mark of is that one really apply or that one really apply and that's that's something i

102i think it'd be most telling to actually maybe to bring in a school and kind of have that conversation about how that interaction actually takes place i get lots of emails from folks going i can't believe you're blocking this for us right i mean so i know we have stop points where we're going we're asking questions along the way and at the same point at the end of it if schools kind of follow our processes and understand those things that we don't have to do quite the same amount of audit work or find audit findings right so it's that we have built some of those things into the process and we can it's probably best i just try to describe how we do that well but we do want schools to have some of that

103local control to meet their local needs obviously that's part of the part of the desire for us as well thank you oh patty thank you um i i'm not sure if we're ready for kind of a summary statement but i guess that's where my thinking is at this point and when you consider the huge influx of money that has come into nebraska for all of our schools we're all taxed with a great deal of responsibility personal and professional responsibility in how that money is spent but i also believe that like no other time in our history in american education because we have money and money doesn't solve all the problems but this this provides us with opportunities to not just correct the wrongs i guess i will say that way but more importantly to reimagine

104and to sculpt our education system into even a better system than it currently is and i'm really impressed with the local school districts that i hear taking that step their their first priority is acceleration of learning but they also recognize there are so many things that they can do differently and better than they've ever done before so that's the part i guess i focus on is what are we doing with this money to really make a great system even that much better i liked your summary so much so but i i think that's our driving point so i just thank you for the discussion it helps me kind of frame it what's the next thing i can help you with in a report that would be get to some of those other kind of details

105of how that functions and works plus we're going to be in this for a while i think as jaclyn said i mean we actually have a responsibility for years on these funds and actually years beyond the the expenditure side of this that we will be watching and trying to build on as we as we look at how that impacts our students learning as that impacts we'll be watching other data sets that aren't part of the account i don't mean it as accountability but do we have the teachers in the classrooms that we need do we have the support systems that we need those types of things that i think we can be watching as a as a statewide kind of with a statewide kind of vision for those things and how they would come together

106is really important i wanted to thank each one of you as well because that discussion and those questions really made us analyze this topic from every angle lisa as a teacher accelerated learning i mean every single person approached it from a different way and i thought it was so informative and all the synapses were clicking and so thank you very much great discussion i'll i'll go i'll move on i think to item 2.6 and what i wanted to highlight here so as part of the and regular i'll say well it's regular annual process to ask for a deficit request to the legislature meaning that something happened within the biennium that we have to go back and ask for authority for or resources for uh in the in the midst of a biennium that wasn't part

107of the particular budget i i'm going to tell you our big our big item is our move right as we moved and and i don't have to rehash all of those details but a pretty uh sudden and determined move with a lot of other state agencies that we're also having to move at the same time we've made that move we are working really hard to try to get set up uh in the in the new office space and i think robin by chance had a had a chance to go uh see see that we're we're in the process of being able to i guess finish up the design work for what i'll call what was the sixth floor of the state office building where we were at before we're kind of cycled into the as

108building division works on other agency moves our turn is coming for for that kind of next phase of our work and so we're excited for that it actually puts us in a position to go hey what what are our actual costs that we're going to expand or what do we project so we can get that in front of the legislature and so a big portion of our budget deficit request is just making sure that we've checked those boxes and been been able to ask for the resources as part of the cost of that particular move um there's you know kind of a few other items that that are kind of typical like um that we might run into if you have retirements there's like a typical thing to go ask for retirements and other things

109that have a cost at the end of uh end of someone's career on those fronts those are just kind of the typical ass but the less than typical one is about our move and so i just wanted to highlight that for you as well so which page was that on of the agenda that's on the deep the detail at 2.6 oh the d is the detail let's see i don't know where that's located on the i don't have jen in the room do i maybe i do to the what i can't so okay so it's actually under item 57b is it included as an attachment in our agenda attachments yeah okay i'll look for it yeah yeah and actually now that i was able to pull it up myself too so it has all of

110the what i'll credit jen with her ability to put some of that all those moving parts into a nice graphic form so you can see it there by the way just us requesting it doesn't guarantee we get it right it's just our ability to ask for it um and and uh then work on the appropriations process as part of that so is it the proposed agenda item rationale october day october 8th 2021 it says estimated cost the department is requesting an adjustment is that the letter we're talking about um on 57b there's an attachment that is the 2022 biennium budget adjustments at a glance is it okay let me look for it at least that's the one i was looking at then for some of those additional details so we don't have to wait for

111me i'll keep looking all right well and and you can certainly if there's more that we need talk about that we can get make sure you have that information the the main point is that i just want to make you aware hey look that we're going through that process to make sure that we're putting our putting that request in as as required by required by kind of how the appropriations process works so that was before i said that was concluded my presentation i made a major picture so that is what i have for the report and i do very much appreciate the conversations we've had today thanks agenda item 6 standing committee reports agenda item 6.1 policy committee the policy committee did not meet therefore there is no report from the policy committee legislative or

112item 6.1 legislative committee they also did not meet therefore there is no report from the legislative committee item 6.3 commissioner's appraisal report the commissioner's appraisal committee did not meet therefore there is no report from the commissioners appraisal committee uh agenda item 6.4 aquest teaching learning and serving domain committee committee lisa please provide a report from the aquest teaching and learning committee domain committee meeting okay aqueous teaching learning and serving committee met and the committee had received updates and information from nde staff on two items the first item was an update on the math standards presented by a staff member and the process is in the beginning phases and the committee will be bringing discussion on this topic to the board at a future time the second item was an update on the praxis from brad

113dirksen which requires the teacher practice for teacher certification the committee reviewed the history of the use of the tests in nebraska and recent efforts to change policy related to the use of the test the committee briefly discussed other methods to determine basic skill competency for teachers and expects to bring discussion on the topic to the full board in the near future brad dirksen did a fantastic job presenting the update on praxis and and certification work has been going on behind the scenes i believe since 2018. it's a 12-page update with lots of answers to questions that we've asked in the past so if you haven't taken time to read that it's under our committee brad did an outstanding job so that concludes my report madam chair thank you lisa deborah thank you lisa um i

114know some of you know i've been asking for many months about getting an update on the praxis um and hoping that we would uh get working on it so i'm so glad that your committee is um i had asked for an update on where we are now uh and i just can you give us some highlights of brad dirksen's report so i understand not only where we are now but how quickly we can move forward because i know he's been working with other partner agencies and so how soon uh and and what's the vision i guess is what i'm looking for well i i can tell you that it's been a while but i contacted the colleges and university systems a while ago and i i believe the list that i have reflects those of

115what brad said without looking at 12 pages and finding certain things so um these were pretty much addressed in brad's report as possibilities and also from unk uno and wayne state college so um the reason and most of it they they didn't want the practice so these are reasons why teacher candidates already demonstrate basic skill proficiency well beyond and inclusive of those in the praxis one through the completion of the required general ed courses required advanced writing courses and required educator preparation courses and some colleges require a 2.5 to get into the teacher prep one of the suggestions was to raise that to 2.75 endorsement classes demonstrate teachers candace candidacy competency competencies through a variety of practicum experience pk 12 schools teacher candidates are observed frequently by faculty instructional coaches praxis core tests are expensive

116150 dollars for each test financial aid does not cover the cost of the practice an example that was given from i believe it was uno hawaii has used institutional accreditation to demonstrate teacher candidate proficiency and basic skills california has eight different ways that they can demonstrate and choose and candidates have voiced great concerns about the praxis core being a barrier to becoming a teacher both the nacte and ncte have had discussions about the elimination of the praxis core so that generally gives you an idea of representative college university and some of the things that brad had mentioned thank you lisa i think that was a really good summary for everyone to understand the history i guess i'll just say uh in terms of for us i mean it's it's been a priority for us for

117several years now we understand we need to get rid of it i guess we're there i know he's involved in discussions some have suggested to me that we have the authority to just get rid of it uh dr blumstead shaking his head no uh but i guess what are we seeing as you know what are the immediate steps uh that are being discussed so that you know because we've we are we've been talking about this for so long well i think if you go back and read the detailed information in brad's update um it gives you some direction and all 12 pages i think would answer your concerns but i'm going to turn it over to the commissioner and explain a little bit more we've had so many other things going on and this has

118been in the background going on since 2018. well probably even longer than that actually so the the dynamics of uh basic skills uh uh you know some type of test that does that is actually a requirement within law so i i want to highlight that now we have some ability to think about how he would change the rule which we've done over time and not been successful on that and so i think what we're trying to lay out and we can bring this back there is a legislative portion of this that i think needs to be addressed and so there was a hearing that senator pansy brooks or at least on her particular lr was part of that conversation so really good ideas that came out with a lot of our partners that are interested

119in working on that and then also there is work that we need to do on that if there is going to be an assessment we do i feel like the over time we've painted ourselves in a corner by putting a specific test into a rule and reg that test over time evolves and change which actually changes the bar somewhat over time it you know puts us in this position and really i think we need an option for some you know whether you want to call it portfolio approach course work other ways i don't really believe that tests should make decisions for folks they should inform decisions right and i think that's part of the that dynamic and so we'll keep working on i actually think we'll be able to lay out some of the the

120set of strategies there's a couple different meetings i know that that brad is having with these partners and i think in november maybe we can bring something for the full board discussion on that front so hopefully that helps madam chair may i continue with yeah my report is finished but there's a lot like the commissioner said changing the law isn't always an easy task but i think by having lr 157 come forward and invited guests from around the state who had the same concern and want to go the same direction as the commissioner reiterated had great ideas so having the legislature resolution in line with what we want to do with nde and by collaborating and partnering whatever we choose will be the best for what teachers need before they teach children thank you lisa

121deborah thank you lisa and thank you dr blumstead that was very helpful uh and i just want to say i mean as we all know i mean my interest is just the crisis mode of you know our schools needing more teachers and i'm not telling anybody anything new and i uh we have every month we look at some exceptions that we need to accommodate a school in order to keep a teacher at a teacher and while they can continue their work while they're in their teaching position and and pretty frequently now the praxis is something that is the barrier to somebody being able to teach and require special approval and so uh we've been discussing that in our student success committee for many months now and so i am very excited that there's going to

122be a lot of movement so thank you yeah we've been talking about it for years so also um just to make you aware there is a conference coming up that you might wish to attend on student student teacher retention diversity and the praxis in kearney and i believe it's october 27th and dr sarah skretta is leading that and i know several of us have registered for it and i think that is also going to raise awareness about just how urgent debra changing the practice is and i'm happy for that i'm glad that she's doing that in higher education jacqueline so my questions are more kind of procedural or policy driven i've heard our position on the praxis and i i want to be clear about who decides who the hour is like whose position is

123it the department's position is it the board's position is the board and the department aligned on what we want to see going forward with the praxis and so i don't know i'd like to know who drives those decisions of whether or not to request a legislative change whether or not to promulgate a change to the rule and regulation that we currently have and to initiate that process does that start with the committee does that start with a vote of the board or does that or is that moved on the department's motion i mean does the department move to do these things and if we want something to happen do we need to come together as a board and officially vote on the position that we're going to take or to decide what our position is

124going to be because i don't know that we have that and if we do maybe someone can point me to it but we can talk about it but unless we've decided what our pathway forward is going to be and the exact steps that we're going to take i think we're still just having the conversation we were having three years ago and so can someone kind of give me the road map and how we get to that decision because i know there are teachers who like the praxis and there might be teaching groups who think this is we don't want to lower the standard i know someone wanted to not have bar exams for lawyers i disagreed with that we have to have a standard for our profession and so i want to just kind of

125be clear who we're speaking for and that we've listened to everyone before we make a decision or move forward and i i i haven't heard that and so if someone could clear that up for me it would be helpful lisa um you're right we do need a legislative change um there is a process and it came to our committee and nde has been working on it but as far as the process i'd like the commissioner to lay that out before us if you will please yeah i mean i i'm going to get to what i think the practical question is right how do we actually make a decision what the board's decision is on this what i would what i would say is we're working on a proposal to bring forward to the board that

126would be kind of our here's a here's a plan for the board's consideration is this the direction you want to go which would include actually we've had our legislative kind of rules and regs and legislative positions on these things but i think in this case i think you mentioned road map that's what i would intend bringing forward and saying hey board is is this what you want to go do and then you could take a proactive yes or no on on that particular approach lisa [Music] i don't want the public to think that we want to lessen the quality of determining who our teachers are in the classroom that is never we don't want to lower the quality we want alternatives whether it's one alternative and the practice could still be for those that love

127the praxis that could still be a benchmark it could be you know two or three things that don't lessen the quality of the teachers but demonstrate that they're ready to be in the classroom deborah i just want to say thank you lisa for emphasizing that point because nobody wants to yeah uh lower the standards but this is a test that's proven to be an obstacle with a lot of bias and that there's many other ways to ensure quality in our teachers and so yeah i'm so glad you emphasized that thank you thank you madam chair uh i think it's important too that we understand that there is a little history here with praxis uh that twice it has uh went through the process the state board and then what is it the attorney general and

128then the governor is that is that correct i want to make sure that i'm saying that correctly yeah and it went through that that process and then we didn't we didn't end up changing and that was really just kind of a uh changing the cut scores within that right so that was an approach that was not not as broad as what i think now we've evolved to say hey look there ought to be at least considerations of these other other approaches but there has been some movement over the years with this and then if i may just kind of change the topic for just a quick moment if that's okay yeah before we do that i'll come back to you robin to recognize jacqueline she's on the same topic sure so i just wanted to

129be clear i too believe we have a praxis problem and i don't think that it's lowering the standard of teaching but what i want to be clear on is that we're all talking as a unit because right now if we don't officially have a roadmap if we don't have a policy if we don't have a statement it doesn't appear that it's coming from the board or from the department it's very fragmented and so i want to make sure if we're going to move forward with something that we have a plan in place to say this is what we are collectively deciding to do the other component you refer to lr157 and i just looked at it it talks about recruiting teachers of color and the disproportionate amount of students of color versus the amount of

130teachers and that's kind of how we got to the praxis conversation and the thing that worries me or concerns me is we're talking about kind of the symptom but not what is the core problem and why aren't teachers of color able to pass this test in the state of nebraska and so i would like for to see us as a department kind of consider what we're doing to make sure we close some of those equity gaps between the teachers of color who are applying those are our students who are eventually graduating and wanting to become teachers and so i think we i know that nsea has done a lot i i've seen their presentation on what they're doing kind of looking at moving the practice up so that students are taking it sooner in college

131they're also looking at doing cohorts so that teachers are able to do trainings and kind of learning more about how to take the test so i know that the teachers union is actively working on this but i think a question we should ask is how can the department of education equally have programs that are working on this i had one of my superintendents um addressed that issue with me and they reminded me to be very careful in how we message the diversity not being able to pass the praxis it's not only this the students of color there are many uh that aren't that don't pass so one year um in yeah we yes we want diversity in the teacher workforce for sure but it's not just the people of color that aren't passing in one

132year i can't remember the number of uh students that took the praxis one we list out we missed out on an opportunity because 20 of people of color didn't pass but look at the percentage of non-people of color that also did not pass so it's an issue for all students who want to be teachers and i think we have to be and i wasn't aware of this i think i appreciated what the superintendent said to me we have to be careful in how we message that because it isn't just people of color that don't don't pass that and i hadn't thought about that before in the messaging robert i'm finally back to you thank you again uh once again mine is moving away from praxis so if there are those who want to talk about

133praxis certainly uh they could is there anything else that the board would like to discuss about praxis okay okay the other part uh that teaching learning and serving committee talked about are some areas of of ultimate importance and that is math and well it isn't mentioned but english language arts and i'm excited about the updates in those required standards and uh i guess i guess i wanted to give a shout out uh to corey and his crew corey eppler and his crew for their work on that and then this is a rhetorical question but i want to make sure someone says it is there an opportunity for people throughout the state to to talk about and give their input on english language arts i think maybe that is past but uh inc was there with

134english english language arts and is there an opportunity for people to respond to those updates because i think that's really really really an important thing that everyone needs to be aware of so if if you want to answer that for me lisa that would be great my answer is yes but the details i'll leave to the commissioner i heard rhetorical questions so you usually don't provide an answer for that but i guess i do so yeah well i mean like always and actually i think we have a little later discussion on just standards process and so maybe i'll just kind of leave it to that but our intent always is to ensure that there's opportunities for input on that process patty yes and i would just add robin to your comments about additional things in

135the committee that we did have a discussion about the work that's being done relative to the standards development process how that process can be improved there the process with many content areas has worked but there's always opportunity for improvement and corey and his team is working on making suggested changes for the the process so that is that is happening debra i know we're going to talk about process in a few minutes but it fits here too i guess i i want to make sure that when we talk about process that we understand that i believe we're talking about two different processes that updating standards in my opinion is not the same as presenting standards for the first time because when an update of standards is done you know that we've done in recent years we

136had a sort of process that wasn't written down but it was followed although definitely with change each time depending on who led those processes from the staff but presenting standards for the first time is when i believe the uh scientific rigor uh is is really uh needing attention and so i i'm hoping that when we talk about processes we're talking about two different processes does that make sense yeah okay thank you agenda item 6.5 student success access and support domain and i will report on that the committee on the aquest student success and access and support domain met on october 5th and had one action item to approve the renewal of rule 11 waiver requests for moral public schools the committee recommended the approval of this item the committee had one discussion item on leading

137for equity and excellence leap state policy network uh nsctnscta conference this year provided a workshop on how to develop diversity equity and inclusion statements a template formula was shared at the conference to be utilized to create your own statement the committee had two update items number one melody hobson provided a brief overview of the legal scope of the nde and the nebraska department of health and human services two zainabrida provided a brief report on how nde is addressing school mental health a three-day institute three-day institutes were conducted on september 28 through september 30th 14 esus and five leas attended and participated in these institutes the goal of these institutes is to help each of the esus to become a trainer of the comprehensive school-based mental health program modules allowing them to host their own institute

138with schools within their service area who wish to develop a comprehensive comprehensive school based mental health program i uh we did not receive the formula but um if anyone would like the formula um for the for the statement the diversity equity statement formula i'd be glad to send it to you and the person who did that workshop suggested that that wasn't a process that you just that just state boards went through or schools went through or it was a process that an individual could go through to assess their their place as far as diversity and um yeah as far as diversity okay so um the other thing let's see there's one other thing that i was going to amend here that i thought we probably should include oh i wanted to say also that moral

139is a perfect example deborah of what we keep coming back to and you brought it up and here it is again and it is not their problem it right now is our problem and we need to really analyze it and take a look at it and so you cannot say no to a school who has done everything in good faith to to find a teacher to do that and melody hobson reported on that and they had more students that they could handle in one class so they had to make two class two classes and they had to have another teacher so that was really important to have that this concludes the aquest student success and access support committee report patsy cojones chair just just a quick comment i'm glad deborah and then you reiterated what

140you said about um you know waivers and i'm hoping that the revision of rule 10 the aaa will have portions parts of that that allow different paths to allow teachers to work and yet get their degree we have one action item that came out of that committee so i moved to approve the rule 11 teacher waiver request for moral public schools do i have a second second lisa second um will you take a password oh discussion yes robin just to make sure how do you spell moral is it m-o-r-a-l or m-o-r-r-i-l-l the second okay all right thank you okay further discussion okay all right you need to take a vote nichols neri yes stevens yes morrison yes co johns yes freaky yeah google's yes six yes one absent one vacant the motion passed agenda item

1416.5 b whoops 6.68 yeah we already did that agenda item 6.6 budget and final finance marine was to report okay patty all right please provide a report from the budget and finance committee meeting thank you the budget and finance committee meeting met on october 6th we began our discussion by talking about some of the consent agenda items specifically we were interested in discussing the amount of funds in the agenda item specifically related to the need to administer all of the additional federal funds that are flowing through nde the staff provided an explanation about how they determined the number of staff needed in order to do that work and what costs were associated with the staff the additional employees will be fixed term employees that will cover the three years of the esser grant duration nde

142staff had compared and considered outsourcing this work versus having the work done internally and through that comparison it became evident that there really was only one option and that option is for nde to have staff to complete the work related to the esser funds specifically some of the the rationale is that the technologies that schools use would not be consistent with an outsourced agency's technology so you would have all kinds of glitches for the the reporting to occur and also that when you outsource work you lose some of the control and the ability to monitor the flow of funds out and reimbursements and things like that a lot of content-wise what we were talking about earlier so we did spend time talking about that staffing the committee had also requested an explanation of how schools

143receiving project aware grants are selected and that process includes that the superintendent of schools supply submit an application then a needs assessment is used to determine which sites would be priority all three of the schools receiving the project aware grant are tsi schools in addition to discussing consent agenda items we looked at the monthly travel expense report the in-state travel authorization reports we had no discussion related to those and finally the commissioner briefed the committee that the full board would be discussing the deficit budget request during our meeting today that concludes the budget and finance committee report with marine nichols acting as chair is there any discussion jacqueline just one quick question if the department submits a request for additional additional funding to the legislature and it's denied how does the department plan to finance

144the move and the other cost without an increase in the budget what's the alternative that's a great question so part of this in the midst of all these moving parts with the agency i mean we would have to look at you know how you could use other funds to do this we're looking in part there are federal funds that apply for this that we have resources for but we also need the authority from from the legislature to be able to do some of that work in in that process so yes we we would um have that conversation with them we've been having conversations so this is generally kind of the routine business of how they would handle an office move it wasn't you know just us it's a whole bunch of other agencies that are

145involved in it and so that's that's how that would work if we got to that point where it's like they aren't going to be able to to do those things yeah it's it's a bit of a conundrum i guess in that sense but i i do think i'm not as worried about that as i am just worried that ensuring that all those process pieces are in place to be able to ask for the funds so we don't want to miss our chance to ask and that's that's why this is important so lisa i i don't know if uh commissioner how much is the rent approximately for the building per month is it like i don't have to get i'll miss states so probably i mean it's over a hundred thousand oh yeah yeah like well

146over a hundred thousand and if they don't approve their your budget so yeah that you're requesting have them lower the rent we do rent from the other agency by the way so that's actually part of that process too okay any more discussion okay the strategic planning performance and improvement committee did not meet therefore there is no report from the strategic planning and performance and improvement committee meeting pursuant to board policy b9 i moved to limit public comment at the november 5th 2021 meeting to a maximum of one hour is there a second i'll second the motion it has been moved and seconded it has been moved by patsy co john's and seconded by deborah neary okay is there any it was second by it was me oh it was oh i'm sorry i'm sorry patty

147um seconded by patti google's um is there any discussion on the motion lisa um i have a concern with that in the past few months we've had so many people come to our meetings and i'm just guessing that maybe you could get through 25 people in an hour maybe depending upon two minutes or five minutes and so i would recommend that we do at least two hours rather than the one if people are going to take the time to get off of work maybe have daycare maybe drive three to five hours for a particular topic i would like to see it be at least two hours we've sat through four but that's just my thought jaclyn i would like some context of where this motion came from because i had not been told that this

148was going to be a request prior to today and maybe there was an email that i missed but we started out moving the limit public comment on the day of the meeting once we knew how many people were going to show up and then we moved to doing it ahead of time like a day before and now we're at a month before and i have no reason to unders i don't even understand why we're doing this or what the could somebody please just give me a history of why we're making this motion what the rationale is board meetings were moved this week to accommodate hearings that we had to have our other requests for our normal meeting times for committee meetings were moved to times during the week that i couldn't even attend because i

149had work and so we do have the ability to move meetings and hearings when it's convenient for us so i i just need to know why why where this came from the only part that i first of all just trying to identify what we are going to accomplish with the next being it's up to you right so this motion comes as there are other agencies or other entities that restrict to one hour so we can actually be able to communicate that to the whatever you decide to do for the next meeting so we can prepare appropriately for that i think what we did in the last couple times we actually tried to as best possible understand what the what the environment was going to be like and make sure that we had an appropriate environment

150for the for the meeting so we're really looking for a way to make sure that you identify what you want to accomplish in that in that in that process rather than do it the day of a meeting so jacqueline do we know what the agenda is going to be for the november third fifth meeting for me to tell you what i'd like to accomplish if i don't even know what the agenda is i yeah i'm going to treat that as a rhetorical too i don't know obviously that's the point but but i'm what i'm getting at on on this point is however you decide to do it so we can make a planning decision about how we organize so well i don't want to get in a back and forth with you commissioner but you

151and maureen the president of the board set the agenda with and so my question is as of today on october 8th have you and the president together set the agenda for the november 5th meeting no okay i can't support this so i i don't think it's fair to us to say what needs to be accomplished if we don't even know what is going to be on the agenda the last time that our meeting format was changed it was to move all of our business to thursday to allow for public comment on friday so that we could accomplish everything we needed to do on thursday to make it accessible to the public this week when we had hearings we again move those committee meetings to earlier in the week to accomplish what we need to do

152every single meeting we have moved our meetings for the past few months to accommodate what needed to happen and still accommodate the public comment and so for us to do something differently this time i think is preemptive it's presumptuous and i don't i don't think it's genuine so i i don't support this [Applause] lisa whatever is decided when i think of the comment period the public needs to know well in advance so that they can make preparations one hour i don't believe is enough time considering the constituency that has come the past few months to share their concerns so i i can't vote for one hour [Applause] was there any discussion about length of presentations or do you know the commissioner i see is waving or shaking his head no okay thank you deborah yeah

153i over the last six months i've uh mentioned to a number of you quite a few times about uh making our meetings more accessible around the state i we were finally able to accommodate a meeting in omaha and i appreciate that but it wasn't just omaha i was worried about i mean i really hope that we are more accessible all over the state with our meetings because i think it is a concern that someone would have to drive four hours in order to be heard at a public board meeting and so because that has been my stance for the last you know many many months it's certainly uh not something that i could support a limit of if we didn't have a reason or know the agenda [Applause] any further discussion would you please call

154the rule morrison no freaky no nickels google's no co johns no niri no stevens no six no one absent one vacant so i'm thinking that perhaps we need to discuss what it's going to be or not nope okay thank you 7.2 discuss the development process policy for standards in the future jacqueline morrison so i requested that this be put on the agenda and i asked for it to be put on the agenda so that i could speak to the full board and not just to come through the policy committee and other people not here there are people who say that this process we had was working i can't in good conscience say that that process worked we got calls for our record resignation we have the governor upset with us the legislature upset with us

155superintendents upset with us and eventually because the process was so tumultuous we stopped the process so to say the process that we had it's working or it worked or it works i think is disingenuous and so one of the things i would like to see is for us to dedicate some time and energy toward developing a process that's written that's transparent and that works and so whether that should come through a referral to the policy committee or through the creation of a new committee i think we need to consider that as a board how we're going to handle a new process or actually i think we need a new process a transparent process and a development of a process throughout the process of the health standards i heard the commissioner state and i will misquote

156him but in general we we do need to work on improving this we need to work on we need to work on this and i asked kind of for an overview of what the process is and i got an email from some time ago that kind of outlined what had happened with the health standards but i don't think it was a formal well i know it's not a formal document and i i'm concerned that wait us as a board waiting for the department to initiate this is the wrong approach because i think that the a lot of the health standards was department initiated and we are the ones who kind of caught the brunt of all of the frustrations and so i would hope that we as board members could decide that we were going

157to make this a priority and either say policy committee we want a policy by a certain date or we need this to be worked on or that you guys would join me my preference would be for us to create a special committee devoted to this issue so that it gets the attention that it needs either way i don't think that the process worked and i think that we need to fix it and so i'm hoping that we can kind of brainstorm among ourselves how that process can be fixed i guess i just feel compelled to perhaps explain my comment about the process working i am not necessarily talking about the health education standards process and or anything else associated with it because we know there were lots of different kinds of issues from covert limiting

158people being able to be in person that was a very unique situation my reference is to i don't think we want to just throw out everything about the process that has been in place because clearly up to the point of the health ed standards that process had worked that i that's my clarification jaclyn i was not necessarily referring to the process as it played out with the health ed standards robin uh i appreciate the comments from both of you people uh both of my colleagues thank you very much i think they're very relevant if i was to uh suggest uh i would like to see an ad hoc committee developed not only of of board members but also members of of nde um and if you thought that the the the that it should be

159a broader group of people i would go along with that as well but those two areas come to my mind um uh so i i would support that that ad hoc uh discussion deborah yeah and i i want to just repeat what i said because i'm hoping that i'm heard the process that we had was one for updating standards and even in that process i called people who were involved in working on past standards that were updated and to ask them things like how's the advisory committee utilized and i learned through that that each time we did standards how the staff used the advisory committee was very different and i had the concern because i knew that for the sex ed standards or health education standards the advisory committee wasn't being used uh very much

160and when i come back to the fact that the process we have was for updating standards and we just went through our health education standards were being presented for the first time and for many months i had been asking for us to look at the process we never made a vote of the board to decide we were even going to release them i know the fact that they were even going to be worked on was a decision that was made before many of us were even on the board because it's part of a timeline for that the staff puts in place and so as we talk about process and say what works i just want to make sure that we end i know we all know this last process didn't work but i believe it's

161in part because it was new standards and did require more thought about the process when we're working on something new so thank you lisa i too appreciate the comments and the question what i would like to see is what we did for revision of um rule 10 ideas we had a retreat and it was led by reg lichty and we had two tables of four and what i see it looking like i think we need to hear what the concerns of every single board member would be in this process and if you just send it to one committee first that's not going to happen right away so just troubleshooting in a retreat to talk about what went wrong what you would like to see and then with that list of ideas from every board member

162then go to a committee whether it's a the policy committee or the ad hoc committee but again i emphasize with this process having some flaws that we've recognized i think we need to hear what each board member perceives as problems before we send it to a committee and the committee has a list of things to look at and figure out that's just my thank you lisa the fur i have i have two things i guess the first one is you know i'm i'm new on the board but my understanding is that we have developed standards in the fairly recent past for some of the other content areas that are not required by state statute is that a correct assumption so we have had new standards development within the last i don't know how many years

163but just so that i'm sure i understand that um the second thing is as i'm listening to this conversation we're talking somewhat about policy and somewhat about what i would call process implementation i think those two are very separate things um what i'm hearing i think is that we are more more focused on how does this work what are the steps that are involved to me that that seems to be much more in the realm of an ad hoc committee that that would be my recommendation as opposed to a policy any more discussion yes i i do like the idea of ad hoc committee i i do think it's policy and procedural i see policy being on the side of kind of who makes the decisions whether it's something that's initiated by the department or

164is it something that would be board initiated kind of within that decision-making process or what role does the board want versus what role does the department have in the process so i think we're a lot of us are on the same page i don't know procedurally if we can make a motion at this time i guess ryan would have to state whether or not because the the issue is on the agenda but i don't know you can't take an item up for action that's not on the agenda yet okay so what i will do is make a request to put that on the agenda for next month but but thanks for the discussion yeah one thing i just add two that i i believe underneath our policies the president can create an add-on committee so

165that would be another thing that you'd be requesting that the president would do that and and that wouldn't take any action item i don't believe you could still have an agenda item as you saw fit so i guess might we could take it to the president and see if she would do it if she does not on her own motion then i would make the motion at the next meeting and then we could take a vote on it okay okay well we'll report this to madam president so i'm sure she'll want to accommodate comments or discussion on this okay we'll move to three discuss process for adding items to the agenda debra neary oh actually i don't have anything for that i had my questions answered ahead of time so i anyway thank you though

166thank you deborah agenda item 7.4 push it appreciate it don't hold it i keep holding it okay um 7.4 discuss contracts related to brain injury capacity building project deborah neary uh actually for that i'd rather postpone that discussion the next month so i don't have anything this month so thank you thank you deborah 7.5 um should i say this first though yeah yeah okay 7.5 the ciac committee um i can't read the writing this is the item that was moved off of consent so it's actually item 5.2 point a which we'll take up at this point so okay and it's an action item okay i moved to a point the recommended individuals uh to fill the vacancies on the cx special education advisory council do i have a second second thank you patty that was

167deborah deborah oh was it you too okay okay it was both of you we could cut it now can we have it oh seconders okay uh discussion on this item deborah so i requested that it be pulled from the agenda uh just because i wanted to give some background uh on why these things are so important to me for the last couple years that i've been on the board i guess i've just worked in a non-profit world for so long and have had a couple jobs where my job was to travel around the state i did this in the museum sector and in the mentoring sector both my job was to make sure that organizations around the state were utilizing all the new research-based best practices and it required a lot of nudging because what

168i learned is that a lot of organizations no matter how big or how small or how great the staff is or how great the leadership is it's very easy for organizations to get stuck in default mode where it's very easy to just keep doing the processes you've always done with the same people that you've always done those processes and i worked hard to get on the state board of education in order to work on the achievement gaps in the state because i do believe that we need to address the gaps that exist and the reason that they exist and we really need to change the way we hold our processes the way we think about our processes and and change the people that are doing the work by adding more inclusivity of backgrounds different lines

169of thought make sure that we're representative of all the populations that make up our state that were representative of all the regions of our state and that we have many different voices as part of our processes so the staff will tell you that for the last two years anytime a committee has come to our board or to one of our subcommittees to be approved i have always spent time googling every single person that we're approving for any committee to make sure that we have different representation than what the default mode was and that we had a lot of different inclusive exclusivity of backgrounds of thought and of specialty areas and that was something that was important to me for everything that we've done a year ago i asked in our student success committee i asked

170that we put together i didn't want a policy because at the time we were in the middle of a pandemic i knew that a policy was going to take a lot of thought i was asking for a process or a rubric or something that would be used as an internal document to help change the culture and help change the thinking about how we looked at our committees and and how we could start trying to get new people new voices to our processes and i just want to say that i am pleased uh with the appointments uh our recommendations uh that were approving today uh i googled everybody that we're approving and uh love the background and expertise and just want to say kudos to the staff and the team that brought forward these names and

171also thank carlos cervand and lupe stevens and i apologize if i've mispronounced your name but i just want to thank you for your your service uh to the committee that we're approving thank you deborah um do we any further discussion any further discussion robin whether we have agreed or disagreed uh on on this i i do want to say that my colleague deborah has been consistent with this from the time which when we came on this board together and and so i just i just want to emphasize that as this is something that hasn't just all of a sudden showed up on deborah's radar and i appreciate her passion any more discussion called the role googles yes mary yes co johns yeah nichols fricke yes stevens yes morrison yes six yes one absent one vacant

172thank you andrea let's see the motion passed okay agenda item number eight uh information items then reports 8.1 through 8.4 the next items are information items and written reports for the board and for our information only agenda item number nine for the good of the order this section of the agenda is intended for board members to offer informal observations of the work of the state board board members may make brief announcements about attendance at future events for the purpose of informing other board members no business or emotions or suggested suggested actions of the board may be offered at this point in the agenda nor should board members engage in substantive discussion about other agenda items or introduce new eye new agenda items deborah i don't usually talk this much at a meeting so sorry but

173uh i just want to repeat what um board member stevens said earlier i really appreciate all of my peers on the board i appreciate the diversity of thought backgrounds we all i know that my peers care passionately about doing what's best for the youth and families of nebraska and and they bring completely different backgrounds to our discussions and i just appreciate everybody's work and i i don't say that enough and so i just want to make sure that you all know that thank you any more okay i agenda item number 10. thank you for those who attended in person and who tuned into the broadcast as needed a work session will be held on thursday november 4th at a time and location to be determined a business meeting will be held on friday november 5th

174at 9 00 a.m at a location to be determined the october 8th 2021 state board meeting is adjourned