Board of Education - May 05, 2026

001[Captioner Present] [Music Playing] [Waiting for Host to Start Meeting] [Music Playing] [Background Conversation] Oh look I fell over the room. I guess it's time to start. I'm sorry we're running a little late. I appreciate your patience. Thank you all for being here. I officially call this meeting to order. At 412. Thanks again for being here look at all the people. It makes me happy. All right. Secretary Nolan would you please take roll. Next we're going to have the Pledge of Allegiance. And Coraline who's a fifth grader from Hillrise elementary, are you Hillrise? Highland. I'm so sorry. Highland. Carlyn from Highland Elementary is going to lead us in a pledge prayer Caroline I'm so excited. Whenever you're ready. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which

002it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. [spa Nish] I salute the flag of the state of New Mexico as a symbol of perfect friendship among united cultures. New That was beautiful. [Applause] Caroline would you mind coming up here? I just have a little something from you. Congratulations to you. You did such a wonderful job. Thank you. Let's give her a round of applause one more time. [Applause] Entertain a motion I would like to entertain a motion May 5th 2020 work session agenda. Seconded. All right, I'll say that it was moved by Vice President Wolford. Seconded by Secretary Nolan. All in favor please indicate by saying I. All opposed. All right, the ayes have it. I would like to entertain a motion to approve the April 21st 2026 regular session

003minutes. So moved. Second. Moved by Vice President Wolford seconded by Mr.. Can I protest that? I do think I would simultaneous. No, it's seriously going to happen. All in favor please indicate by saying I. All opposed? Thank you. Thank you Mr. Frank. I would like to entertain a motion to approve consent agenda items six A one. MOU between region nine Education Cooperative Rec nine and Las Cruces Public Schools 682 Las Cruces Medical Center LLC DBA Mountain View Regional Medical Center Athletic Trainer Service Letter Agreement and six a three outdoor recreation trails. So moved. All right. Second. Okay thank you. Moved by Secretary Nolan. I got you and seconded by Vice President Crawford. All in favor please indicate by saying I. All opposed? Here's a report on the closed executive session for April 22nd, 2020, and

004May 5th, 2026. The board met in closed executive session on Wednesday April 22nd 2026 from 10:11 a.m. To 2:15 p.m. To discuss limited personnel matters permitted under section ten dash 15-1 New Mexico meetings act specifically so that when the board can continue to discuss and prepare the superintendents end of year evaluation period the board also met in closed executive session on Tuesday May 5th 2026 from 2:13 p.m. To 4:08 p.m. To discuss limited personnel matters as permitted under the section ten Open Meetings Act specifically so the board could continue to discuss and prepare the superintendents end of year evaluation and I affirm that the item discussed in closed session were limited to those stated above. Miss Robyn do we have any -- all right we have no public comment today. So we will just skip

005right over that section. Beautiful. Now we're going to move to the superintendent's report. Thank you. Members of the board it's great to be here see all these awesome folks here. I was telling some of them it's nice to see this large crowd and that are here to celebrate the great things that are happening across our district. I'll go ahead and make this as quick as possible. Some updates. Some of the events that have happened in the past couple of weeks. Had the opportunity to attend a number of meaningful events across our district. On April 23rd I participated in the in the know luncheon which wrapped up 2026 legislative session and provided opportunity to reflect on the work accomplished on behalf of our students and schools by our state elected officials. On April 23rd I also

006had the pleasure of attending Sonoma Elementary School's 20th anniversary celebration. A wonderful event that brought together alumni staff and the community to celebrate the school's history and impact. On April 24th we gathered for a celebration of Excellence. One of my favorite events of the year. Where we recognized the incredible people who make Las Cruces Public schools thrive each and every day. I also want to take a moment to recognize 2026 District Award winners. Jacqueline Scarborough eighth grade teacher at Camarillo Middle School. Our teacher of the year Peggy Harold. Lead custodian at Vista Middle School, (indiscernible) our service and Leadership professional of the year, and Doris Solis, principal of Sunrise Community Elementary School principal of the year. [Applause] Each of these individuals represents the very best of our district period the commitment to students copied their

007leadership, and the care they bring to the work each and every day truly embodies what it means to thrive in Las Cruces. Congratulations again to all of our honorees and thank you to our sponsors for helping make that so special. Also on April 24th, following the celebration of excellence, I also attended the Best Buddies Prom in Las Cruces High School and inclusive and joyful Evening where students from across our schools came together. Thank you to President Cord for also joining that celebration. Showing a few of her moves. Students were double s. Students were dancing. They were eating cake and just an awesome event. And also adults supporting. I appreciate their support in that great event. Also on April 25th new Mexico State University. Great to see a strong representation and to watch our students actively

008engage in civic conversation. I want to remind the board to check your event calendars. Many more events coming up exciting time of year. As we continue to recognize and celebrate our students and staff across Las Cruces Public Schools. On May 1st our entire leadership cabinet and representatives from all of our divisions, along with our strategic thought partners came together for a day focused on the strategic plan for LCC. We reviewed our progress and continued to refine our work. Moving into next year. This was just a nice opportunity to spend time together as a group. Spend time discussing the meaningful progress and opportunities for LCC and thank you to our LCC partners for sponsoring that day's event. Without further ado I would also like to invite doctor Miller Tomlinson and Miss Melanie Stewart, student activities specialist,

009to recognize your 2025, 2020 six, Student Advisors. Good afternoon Madam Court and Superintendent Ruiz. Members of the board. This amazing Las Cruces community. Thank you all for being here. My name is Melanie Stewart and I have the privilege to be the Student Advisory Council advisor. Thank you for allowing me to be here this afternoon to recognize this outstanding group of students today. As we wrap up this year, the student advisory, I want to take a moment to recognize each of you for the role that you played as leaders and as the voices of your campuses. You didn't just show up coming you showed up with purpose, you led meaningful discussions, shared honest perspectives, and helped us think differently about how we can continue to grow and improve as a district. That kind of leadership takes

010courage, commitment, and heart. And you demonstrated all three. On top of everything you did at your own schools you gave time and energy to support so many important events this year helping with the move into Columbia Elementary to being a part of the ribbon cutting to bringing energy into the teamwork to thrilling grill barbecue. At the Elementary Leadership Conference. Tell the story and many meetings in between. You made the difference. What stands out the most is what you did but how you did it, you represented your schools and LCC with professionalism, positivity and pride. That doesn't go unnoticed. Please know how truly grateful we are for each of you. For your leadership your ideas, your willingness to serve, and the examples you have set for others. As you move forward, I hope you carry this

011with you and use your voice to advocate and inspire. Thank you for an incredible year. We are proud of you and we are grateful for the way that you represent like us every single day. Board members could please come to the front of the stage to present certificates to our students and Stoles to our senior members, we will appreciate it. We will begin with the seniors and when your name is called please come forward. I'll right, from Arrowhead Park early college high school. Senior Sam. [reading names] [Applause] [reading names] And our underclassmen that will still be with us coming from Arrowhead Park Early College High School, Secretary Soraya Karmali. [Applause] From Centennial High Schoo l -- [reading names] [Applause] At this time the president, Corp members, I would like to introduce two of our high

012school outdoor clubs, who represent a unique and meaningful way for students to thrive at school. And experience the beauty of our region. Please welcome Mr. Torres from Centennial High School and Miss Gustin from Las Cruces High School along with some of their students to tell us more about these exciting opportunities. At this time I'll turn it over now to Miss Torres. [Applause] Good afternoon. I'm a little nervous. Good afternoon Madam President, and doc superintendent Reese, members of the school board. Thank you so much for this opportunity to speak here at the school board meeting. I am Delia Torres. I'm a history teacher at Centennial High School but I'm also the Outdoors club at Centennial High School sponsor and these are my students. Hi I'm Katie Graham. I'm Gavin Elfman. Today I want to share a

013little bit about our club. We have this wonderful after school program started four years ago. And we offer an after school program that engages students in the outdoor activities but also engages students in cultural and linguistically relevant activities. Our goal is to encourage and involve and engage students who are otherwise would not be involved in other type of after school or school wide curricular activities. With alternatives to after school programing. Which involves mostly playing in the outdoors. Hiking and riding bikes. Our program includes self and social awareness and social change. And we work with our students to find ways to create change in our communities but also to engage more students in outdoors. Our club has a recipient of the state of New Mexico's outdoor equity grant. We received $13,000 from the state of New

014Mexico that has made our program possible. Some key roles and responsibilities of our club we meet once a week for after school bike club which includes bike safety, we want to teach our kids how to ride bikes safely. Specific riding skills. We also teach them how to maintain their bikes. And we go for mountain bike rides in the desert surrounding our schools. We plan weekend hikes and other outdoor activities on our beautiful Oregon Mountains-desert Peaks National Monument. Also offers some volunteer opportunities for our students to engage in local mountain bike races and running races. One of the key things we want to continue to do and really expand on this is how do we analyze and look at the deserts that surround our school for new and existing trails. My dream of mine has always

015been how do we get more kids to ride bikes or walk to school. Maybe save the district a little money on busses. I don't know. We also do a lot of great community cleanups. To make sure we conserve carbon protect, and serve our lands surrounding our school and around Las Cruces. I want to allow one of my students to share some of their experiences in the outdoor club if that's possible. Hi again my name is Katie Graham. I'm a junior at Centennial High School and I've been in the outdoor club since the beginning of freshman year. I think it's an amazing club. It does such amazing things. It was one of the first places I felt really welcome. As a student at Centennial High School and it was just such a great opportunity to connect

016with other students who cared about the outdoors and wanted to be outside like I did. I really enjoyed our mountain biking club. We meet about once a week after school starting pretty early in the school year and around this time we are getting ready for our annual bikepacking trip up here called Baby Bird. We did that for the last two years. I participated both years. We recently had it as a great experience again. It's just really amazing we can have those kind of opportunities at our school and that we can also get outside. We go to White Sands every year on a trip and a lot of years we've taken the off leash club with us from Las Cruces High School. And we also do camp out on our school grounds. And our clubs open

017to anyone who wants to join. Every kid can come from the beginning of the year here. Right off the bat we have so many partners within the community. We partner with Oregon Mountains-desert Peaks in southern New Mexico mountain biking and Las Cruces safe routes to school. The monumental loop as you see here. It's great that we can have those partners come with a very supportive of our club and I think we do a great job of getting kids outside. [Applause] We've been really fortunate to have many students from all grade levels be a part of our club we currently have about 40 members that are involved and engaged in our club. Students have different opportunities to engage. A lot of them like to ride bikes others like to come out again and help us do

018community cleanups. Others will join our weekend overnight camping activities and everybody's invited to go on these White Sands National Monument trips. There's a lot of opportunities for all of our students at school. We also have annual camp we have our kids participate in talking at the freshman orientation where your kids or members actually share why they should join the bike club. I have here Gavin Ilchman who is the president of our club and he's a senior this year. We'll be having new elections early on next year and he also would like to share a few words. Hello and it's an honor to be here. My name is Gavin and I've been a part of this club for four years now. I've been the president for the last three. I'm happy to be part of the

019Outdoors club. The Outdoors Club is not just your average club at Centennial. It's more of a family that loves to engage with the outdoors in our public lands. Engage with protecting them. We've gone on many different trips. We went up to Santa Fe to talk about our public lands and why we need to keep that public. The outdoor club opens up so many opportunities for kids. Specifically at Centennial Park for example we have the baby bird which is our club that we take anybody who wants to go out and backpack for the first time. I was the first one to do it. My friend Ray Kaba our vice President Obama to go on the annual Danger Bird, which if you are new, that's about 130 miles for half the loop. That's what we did in

020three days. It's very rough and challenging. Pushes you to your limits but I would not have been able to do that at all if it wasn't for our community members supporting me and my friends. Giving us different bikes we can use. All of our bikes are gifted. So the kids can use them for free. It's very inclusionary for our club. And we are just so happy to have this club going and happy to see it and see where it's going to come in the next coming years. Thank you. [Applause] Finally, just a little bit about our school, the goal of our club and the school is to create a bridge between community and our students and our families and our schools. And also allow students to meet and greet with local and state leaders. So

021that they become more engaged in their community. We also create community events. Our holiday light bike ride happens in December, where the entire community comes out. We do a little fun ride with lots of Christmas lights. Really the goal is to have more students participate in the outdoors. And engage students in physical activity, which is really important to their learning in the classroom as well. Really just again approve access to the outdoors and we've just seen so much growth and change in so many of our students where they learn grit, resilience, they automatically see their physical strength improving. It's been really wonderful experience. Again, we are open to just all of our students to be physically active. Yeah, I think that's all I have. Our pictures really speak for themselves. We have a lot of

022great work and lots of good work to do in the future. What better place to be to not only share my love for mountain biking and backpacking and all that but to also be able to share it with my students and spend quality time with our students outside of the classroom. As young people. And I'll just say our young people are very inspiring. They teach me a lot about myself. As we are out there on these group rides on a weekly basis. I wanted to thank you again for this opportunity to share with you the work we're doing and thank you very much for your support. [Applause] I have a question. Because I don't know baby bird endangered bird, are those actual terms or did you give them those names? The trail is part of

023the monumental loop which is part of Desert Peaks. Dangerbird is a ride that's been around for about ten years and it's about a 350 mile loop. So two of our students have done the Southern Loop so that's Dangerbird in November. With our partnership, we came up with baby bird. There's a safety bird during the danger bird. For beginning bike packers. But our community partners and I and our students, we planned a baby bird that's specifically for students. And we leave on a Saturday. We go up to Sierra Vista trails above -- University here Vista trail is. We ride up Centennial and we camp out on Sierra Vista Trail and then we return on a Sunday afternoon. And it's been absolutely delightful to see our kids out there bikepacking. Thank you. [Applause] At this time I

024would like to invite Miss Christine also from Las Cruces High School. Give you a little more information about their adventures. Hello. This is a different format. I'm miss Christine. I am Alex. A senior at Las Cruces. He's also our vice president. My name is Emma, I'm a freshman at Las Cruces. Annie very valued member >> I'm Sophia I'm the president of Outdoors Club, I've been in the club for four years and it's super important to me, really excited to talk about it today. Kind of a general overview, Centennial did a great job. It's a tough act to follow. But we, I had the kids do all the work so I'm going to let them present to you but the basic goal is that we're fostering kids wellbeing, getting them outside. The kids decide everything they

025want to do and thank goodness for friends of the Oregon Mountain Desert Peaks because they help us get all the money together and do everything for us. So I'm going to let you guys -- >> As I said, Alex, senior, I've been off leash for two years. And I currently serve as Vice President of Recruiting and Scheduling. So I really joined this club because I saw it as an opportunity to bring underclassmen who are coming into high school that are kind of not understanding how to make friends or are very shy when it comes to these adventures and our club is open to anyone and they can come and go anytime they please. We like to give them opportunity to have adventures and have fun making friends. Yeah. So. Thank you guys so much for

026this opportunity to speak on our club. Right now with a lot of students we are seeing like technology being integrated more into our society and we see our outdoor club as kind of a way to combat that a little bit we're giving students a chance to disconnect and experience the outdoors. So, this program is made possible by all of our community partnerships. Most importantly friends of the organ desert peeks, I know some of you are here today, they have been super helpful. Bridging these gaps towards funding, accessibility, transportation, getting supplies, they make all of our adventures possible. So we had the privilege of going on a couple of field trips. Alex is going to speak on these real quick. We really like to make a lot of our trips day trips. It helps with accessibility

027with some of our students. Some of our freshmen commonly have busy schedules and they can't figure it out yet so we are able to give them opportunity to come on our day trips and so we carpool up there. We take school busses. It really just depends what happens that day but we really want to make it accessible to all of our members. And yeah just to speak on some more of our partnerships COB we've also been able to partnership with the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. With the newest idea Conservation project we've also been able to partner with the Boy Scout Adventure Club. This was a little bit before my time period but some of our students were able to go ice climbing in Colorado. So that's really cool opportunity. We've also partnered with Downtown Desert

028and Indigo Yoga Partnerships. This has been such an incredible opportunity for students to practice mindfulness and get away from the classroom a little bit. Now Emma is going to talk a little bit about our community volunteers. Hi I'm Emma. We do a lot of community service. Doing river cleanups. Trail maintenance. We think it's very important to be able to give back to our communities. And just take care of the trails that make it, that give us the opportunity to be outside. Disconnect. Enjoy time with our friends. Connect with each other. We've also had the opportunity to engage in community service. This has been through our bike clinics we've been able to work with younger students teaching them how to bike. We've also done toy drives and toys for tots rides. So that's been a really

029awesome opportunity. Many of our students have also been able to engage in leadership opportunities. I've been able to get an internship with friends of the Oregon Mountains-desert peaks. I was able to help students learn to rock climb. I was belaying these little elementary kids teaching them how to rock climb. Building them skills. And just showing them how to be independent. We were also able to lead a workshop at the district. This is us teaching students how to tie rope and also how to make s'mores because it's an important skill for sure. [Laughter] We've also been able to do workshops Kama just showing our appreciation for the outdoors and sharing that with the community. It's such an important thing to us and also yeah, so, the mountain biking clinics. Alex is going to talk about some

030of the water activities we've been able to do. This is one of the examples of some of our events we have. Our club is very important. We really find it important that we get involvement into activities. So this right here, we have Caballo lake trip right here. And we also have inflatable water park. A lot of our members they want to try new things and they bring it up to the meetings and we will plan for the empiric a lot of our events come up most of the events are just from the members and what they want to do and what they're interested in. And we want to just help them out with that. We've also been able to do a ton of rock climbing. It was our goal to go rock climbing about five

031times common building that skill set, and then going to sessions. We have this partnership that makes it possible for students to build on their skills from last time. We teach them how to tie a rope, also we've got a couple of students certified so they're able to help other students get up the walls. We've also gone outdoor wall climbing. Rock climbing is super important to us as well. We did go on, I believe it was 2 to 4 camping trips a year. A couple of our normal places are Ojito Springs Camila Cabello Lake, and City of rocks, you know, it just gives us the opportunity to get outside and give those who don't often come and go camping and spend a lot of time outdoors and an opportunity to go and do so. Right here

032we have some pictures of the Donia ice skating rink. And it went up to rudo. So a couple of months back. We don't get a lot of snow here. So we got to give them the opportunity to see and experience that. We try to go camping or hiking 2 to 4 times a year. We like to start the year off with a hike just to get students introduced to the outdoors. Our club is all about accessibility so we're getting a lot of students from all backgrounds and experience levels. We want to make sure it's accessible for everyone. So we want to start our year off with a hike. Some of our favorite places to go are Baylor Canyon Dripping Springs and -- we also do a lot of mountain biking. We actually went just last

033week. This is kind of the culture we created with our club. We have kind of a plan what we want to do and do it system and it works really well because the members get to voice what adventures they want to go in and we are all able to do that. We work around their schedules and make sure it's possible for everyone to get involved. It's been a really awesome opportunity. I'm really sad to be graduating and leaving this club it was my first club I ever joined. I got so many opportunities from it. Thank you for letting us talk about our club and we appreciate this opportunity. [Applause] Any questions? I always have a question. I really appreciate the diversity of things you all are doing and what goes along with being outdoors and

034it's really going to take you a long way because you can take these skills with you wherever life takes you and I really appreciate that you guys are exposing so many kids to that. Not connected to that, I was just curious, given that you guys do so many active things, is there like a first aid response protocol that you have? Are your kids >> No, but that is something I want to do this summer. A lot of these kids are in Hoso, so they really do have the skills and they practice. I would get injured like the first step out. As a teacher I'm looking at all these slides and as a district you're looking and thinking oh my God the liability. That's why we put everything, thank goodness for the Friends of Organ Mountains-desert

035peaks. So that we can have those. So that we can have that. But yes. And they're amazing these kids are amazing. It's a pleasure to be able to do whatever they want. And to call friends and be like hey come on we need some money. We need a bus. Thank you. I think we're good. Thank you. And finally president core members of the board a couple of months ago this board nominated a number of groups for the 2026 Nsba, Excellence in Student Achievement Awards, I would like to ask Mr. Silver to come up and help us in recognizing these award winners. Good afternoon. President, Corp members of the board, good afternoon Mr. I joked with Matt, that everyone was here with his budget presentation. And I told him not to take it personally if everyone

036left as he was getting ready. I think you all know this. My name is Josh silver. I serve as the Chief of Staff for the Las Cruces Public Schools and today I get the very fun task of presenting to the school board the 11 groups that you all have nominated for the 2026 Nsba Excellence in Student Achievement Awards new Mexico Student -- excellence and student Achievement Awards program seeks to promote student achievement and school districts and assist local school boards and recognize school leaders come on staff, and other individuals who have played an important role in improving student achievement at the local level. Logistically, I would like to do this a little bit like we did with the SAC students and invite the board to come back up front. Along with Miss Kelly and Miss

037Robyn who will assist with plaques and certificates and in this case I recommend we do pictures, sort of by group, I would like you all to come up and we will get started recognizing our 11 groups. Good question, yes. Or you can sort of walk back and forth. We begin today recognizing the activities, arts and athletics team nominated by vice President Crawford. Representing athletics come up Michelle Ronga, Bobby Campos Michelle Lucero. [Applause] Representing fine arts, Paul hosted, Jennifer Rogers, and Emily Bennett. [Applause] And recognizing our activities team, Marisa Prentiss, and Melanie Stewart. [Applause] [Background Conversation] [Applause] (indiscernible) [Applause] [Background Conversation] [reading names] [Applause] [Background Conversation] [Applause] (indiscernible) [Applause] If I could introduce you all to those 15 teachers and their (indiscernible) [reading names] From Centennial Benny Medina Picacho middle school Nicole Stott and Picacho Middle

038school Victoria Papadakos David Morales -- David Morales. Vincent from Mayfield High School. Laura Valdez from Mesa Middle School. Diana Hernandez Arrowhead Park early College high school Henry Hassell from University Hills Elementary School. Jesse Gonzalez from Oregon Mountain High School. Miguel Salvia from Vista Middle School. And lastly director Miss Del met foi. [Background Conversation] Congratulations. [Applause] Mr. Frank has nominated the eight Las Cruces public Schools special education administrators. If I can introduce these eight to you. Diana Wilkinson. Ellis Harold. Dana Critchlow. Caitlin Schroeder. Patrick Jimenez. Jamie Benavente. Laura Morris. And Sonia Arias. [Applause] We were sitting in the back of the room during the outdoor clubs presentations and all of us were talking about how much we would like to be in those clubs. You've heard from these two already but our school board also nominated

039the outdoor clubs from our Las Cruces public schools high schools. Delia Torres from Centennial High School. And Miss Kristen Gustin from Las Cruces High School. [Applause] Miss Torres was also with the group. She keeps changing shirts. Congratulations. [Applause] Miss would like to recognize the Las Cruces public schools community schools coordinators. [Applause] If I can introduce you to them. From Alameda Maria Zuniga from Booker T Washington Jessica Barnhill, from Conley, Aaron Boyd, from Dona Ana, Jacqueline Rivers, from Lynn, Diane Nevada's, from MacArthur, Tatiana Del Toro, from Osseo Park, Jeff Nevada, and the Las Cruces Public Schools community school manager, Johnny Rivera. Congratulations. [Applause] And finally Miss Tenorio has nominated our academic coaches and school support teams. These teams are in five groups. Four represent our feeder patterns and the fifth group works as a teaching and

040learning center serving all schools. We will recognize these groups by feeder pattern beginning with Centennial. The Centennial team, Mindi Tapia, Joel Hutchinson, Darcy Deshan, Briana Dickinson, Gabriella Edmondson, Liz Gonzalez. [Applause] Congratulations. The Las Cruces high school feeder pattern, Isabel self Miranda Belizean, Jessica Ramos, Marci Dieteman, Erika Melendez, Nicole coca. [Applause] [Background Conversation] Congratulations. [Applause] So much read in the Las Cruces High School. From the Oregon Mountain High School feeder pattern, Kiana Marlow, Josie Miller, Abigail Hassan, Soledad Gonzalez, and Carla Daniels. [Applause] [Background Conversation] [Applause] From the Mayfield High School feeder pattern, Davis Holmes, Leah Pearson, Christopher Nunez, Tina Parra, Cynthia Romero, and Esmeralda Quezada. [Applause] And finally our teaching and learning center content specialist supporting all of our schools, Jamie Patterson, Tammy Miller Doug, Michelle Estrada, Tana Miller, Kathleen Gardner, Rachel Knight, who has a

041birthday today. Andy Placentino, Maria Gallmon, Jennifer Hamilton, and Bill Fox. [Applause] Congratulations. [Applause] That was very smooth. Yes a. President of the board, Mr. Reese, that is the end of the NME SB awards, and I think Mr. Signs is just a little disappointed that everyone left. Mr. Signs I am also super disappointed. I did mention as they all got up to leave, this is what's happening right now. Yeah a couple the most exciting part of the meeting is about to happen. President, members of the board, thank you very much, it was great to recognize all these awesome folks, and this concludes my report. Thank you Mr. Superintendent. And truly the best superintendent report ever. We got to recognize our kids. We got to recognize all the great employees. Those are some heavy hitters. Seriously. We

042truly could not function without everyone in the heart they have for the kids. But we also know how to clear a room. All of our new business was on consent agenda so we're going to be moving to our strategic plan benchmarks. And so to talk to us a little bit about AI we have Doctor Miller Tomlinson. Michelle Dickerson. And Miss Jamie Patterson. Triple threat coming up. Thank you all for being here or staying I guess. (laughs) We have another chair. Oh come on that makes more sense, yes. I could awkwardly wheel it out to you. We were all waiting for >> I could sit on it and go we, all the way down the ramp. Welcome and thank you. I'm sitting here with my colleagues Jamie Patterson who is a content specialist for the Teaching

043and Learning division, and Charlotte Dickerson who is our director of Assessment, research, and school improvement, and they are kind of self experts on artificial intelligence and so they have taken on an additional role within the district to provide guidance and expertise. They attend conferences. Trainings. Just so we can be kind of on the cutting edge of what's going on in a rapidly changing environment regarding artificial intelligence. Our presentation this evening will really talk about what currently is our status in the district regarding generative AI. Artificial intelligence tools. What we are doing to train teachers and staff. And where in policy we have language that might cover these artificial intelligence by both students and staff and at the end we will share some next steps and future plans as we plan for the ensuing school year

044which will be here before we know it. So, just a little bit of current guidance and implementation. These are things we have in place and then I'm going to let Jamie and Charles speak to some of the specifics. We do have a guidance document or a set of guidance documents we're using. Technology, including AI in the classroom. That was developed by a group of educators, teachers, people from our Virtual Learning Academy and that was over the course of the last school year. Each year our impact conference sessions have been provided for attendees regarding use of technology in the classroom and this year there were of course some very robust sessions regarding AI. We do have a tool called Magic School AI which is a resource for teachers and students and it provides a safe environment.

045For students to learn about AI. And it also provides additional tools for our educators. Last year we developed a course in media literacy. It was really good timing. Because as graduation requirements shifted, there was kind of a natural spot in the ninth grade schedule for a half credit course. Miss Patterson, along with some colleagues, developed the media literacy course. She also taught the media literacy course. For the first time last summer. And she learned probably as much as the students did during the course of teaching media literacy for the first time and so that course is continually evolving. As things in media and technology change. We do have digital citizenship that is offered at each level. In the elementary school it's offered through our technology teachers. Every school has a technology teacher and digital citizenship

046is part of what they offer to students and then the upper grades it's offered through advisory and also media literacy course and then we do have teacher professional learning. Jamie has developed some training for teachers come up both in media literacy and around Magic School AI that has been offered. These are a few things that are going on. As I mentioned, we will, I will turn it over to Jamie to talk a little bit more about some of these things we have going on. Can you hear me? Madam president court members of the board what we have before us right here is our SSP s guidelines for technology use. Mr. De La Torre is sitting behind me here because he was an important part of all this development as well. We were together for a

047lot of this as we were working with educators and came up with some feedback around this idea. This really started with some knowledge about what's happening nationally. We went there first. We did some research. We came back here we got feedback from educators and in the guidance of what we have is kind of a red, yellow, green structure. The red indicates when technology, and especially AI tools should not be used in the classroom. There are important times when that is true. Anytime we're working on foundational skills. We're doing AP exam tests. Anything like that. There are definite times where there should not be technical support in classroom and that's what that indicates. A yellow is looking more so at being transparent. Maybe partially we can use some of this technology in the classroom but that

048has to be decided by the educator or with the educator together and everybody has to be very clear on how it's going to be used that's what that yellow means. Example of that would be if you had, like maybe we go to AI for brainstorming, before we come up with a solution to a real problem. So we go there, we look at ten different ideas, we use that to brainstorm the purpose and then we go maybe forward with our colleagues afterwards or our classmates. Another example of a yellow might be something like I'm going to go do some research. I come out, I have permission from my instructor. I get to go do some research here. I show what the AI gave to me and then I use my own thinking skills to do a

049work around that. Green is kind of exciting. We're playing with this one a little bit more but it's kind of this idea that maybe we're starting with the AI at the ground floor. We start with AI at the very beginning of what we're doing and then we take it to go and build something. For example the media literacy class come with the project after they learn some engineering skills, like question engineering and image design, they now are going to go and build whatever they want for the future. They can build a business. They can build a restaurant. They can have their new invention for what they want to do in the future and they get to use AI at the beginning of that process and work with them all the way through to bring that

050idea to life. And then they write through the process of how they use that to get to whatever they're trying to get to so that's kind of the idea behind that. There's times when we want red, no use at all because we're doing foundational knowledge that we need to have. Yellow, there's kind of an in-between where the teacher is going to indicate how you can use it and you need to cite that and tell us how. And green, we're going to start with that at the beginning and take it to its limits and see where we can go with it. That was the idea behind that structure. Magic schools is what we're currently using as our district AI. The reason that we went with this is because it's what we like to call a walled

051garden. It's a safe space for students. As students get into the platform we can actually see everything on the back end how they are working with this platform. It also will flag anything that needs to be addressed by the educator. There will be a little flag that indicates. There are two different platforms here. One is for students. And so when it comes to students, they go into a room and in that room they have a very, I mean they have a space where they can be very creative. There's like debate the bot. There's taking your ideas and making songs out of it. Image generation. Lots of things kids can play with it can be anything from using it to enhance your own learning on concepts you're not familiar with with pushing your learning to the

052extremes. There's lots of interesting ways students can access this but it's all within the confines of how the teacher sets it up for the class. For teachers it's also a great resource because it provides different supports for lesson planning peer assessment design. Differentiation. And the team we have. Somebody from Magic Schools designated for us and she'll build specialized tools for us for our staff. A good example of this is we worked with Magic Schools to design a shuttle specified tool and that tool will help teachers lesson plan with the knowledge of what shuttle is and it will build some of those structures for us. And then also just administrative tasks such as any kind of documentation. That we have to do but it does cut down some of that time and helps us start the

053structures and speed up the process. That's how we are using magic schools at the moment. Just a note about student expectations because I know some of the concern around generative AI is students not doing original work and so we're trying to be thoughtful about how do we teach students how to use the tools responsibly so they are still developing their own academic skills critical thinking skills problem solving skills. But also using the tool because as we're doing research, we're also finding many employers want employees that can use AI to increase productivity. So having a workforce that is savvy in the use of generative AI is to the benefit of our students. But we also want to stand firm on student expectations. We do have some language in our student and family handbook around the expectations

054about students completing work honestly. Doing their own work. Following teacher guidelines for an assignment. If the teacher does put the red yellow green guidance into place, the expectation on student side is to follow those guidelines and of course we value honesty. Academic growth. All of those things. As Jamie said, Magic school provides a walled garden where the teacher can monitor, see how students are using tools within the platform. However we know there are lots of other tools that students can get their hands on and earlier in the year you had a presentation about the line wise student monitoring system. So there is another mechanism to see if students are using some of those other tools. We can monitor and make sure they are using those tools appropriately. If there are any red flags or anything

055that needs to be addressed. That is a safety net that we have. Current policy and regulation, so, one of the areas where we found a gap, so, we have some language in our student and family handbook around student expectations and academic integrity. That is not tied to regulation or policy. So, reviewing policy, there is a natural spot where it will fit into regulation and that is under instructional goals and learning objectives and that revision is in progress, so we have drafted some language and put it out to, we are gathering some information from schools about student expectations they may have on their campus or how they work with students in cases of academic dishonesty periods so academic integrity and really about what is the expectation on student, is kind of where we are going with

056this regulation revision. If we need to add additional language and a grading policy or grading regulation, that may come down later. But we really wanted to start more in a positive way about setting expectations. What does everyone need to know. What do we need to do peer exciting sources. What kind of skills are we developing. What are our instructional goals goals. We also have language around current policy and regulation around the acceptable use of technology. So our AUP, acceptable use policy, and that kind of guides what we can do as students and staff with district technology. District technology infrastructure. And then there is policy which is a staff policy that governs internet and electronic communications with students. Those are some things we currently have in place. Some things we have in progress. And again we

057are working to get feedback from our principals, our educators, just to make sure that we are getting multiple perspectives. And with that I'm going to turn it over to Cesaro to talk a little bit more about some tools that we have available as staff and kind of where we might land if, with this in the future. Thank you. Good evening. I think it's almost good evening. But anyway come on president, madam president, superintendent Reece, and of course the LCC school board, I think it's very important that we really try to look through the lens of professional learning. By ask a question in this room right now, how many of us have been using an AI tool, again AI tool, more than likely most of us, many of us have, and we'll raise our hands. Don't

058make me do it. [Laughter] but again our level of exposure and expertise varies. Depends on our desire and likelihood of, because we want to use it, but the more you're going to use the tool, just to put it in perspective, any Gen AI tool is a tool just like back in the day. When the internet came into the picture. It is a tool. Also with computers came into the hands of consumers. As a tool. We are not saying the AI will replace the human brain. The human authentic work is still the very essence of what makes things functional and beautiful in our society but, we do need to give the opportunity for our teachers and even our central office staff to really have the training. How are you using it? What are some parameters and

059guidelines we need to be aware of? So we don't also abuse or misuse the use of the tool. Definitely we are very aware of technology regulations. But we also need to make sure that we, as adults in the classroom, and I'm speaking about the teacher role, we need to be very solid with our knowledge of AI and how can we use AI in order to prepare our students for the future. Right now we do have some academic programs and assessment platforms that AI is already embedded. It just depends on how it is being utilized by different partners in education. It's just rightful to say you need to be aware of that and how it can be leveraged. The opportunity to teach our students and our teachers. So they really know the right use of the

060tool and not just do, regurgitate the same information. Because if you're doing that, it's no different from just googling information. And pasting that information into your file. Also citation references. Within academic work of students. Eventually we'll form a rubric or rating where how much AI are we allowing to be present and if it will be present, that should be cited because then the teacher can gauge. Authentic work of the student and so on. Also it's very important for us to have at least a standardized understanding. And increase our skill when it comes to profit. Maybe prompt engineering. That is something that is, you, in order to be more efficient and effective in the use of the AI tool. Similarly in the industry, just like in White Sands military range, they've already been hiring students, whether

061they're interns or college graduates who already have AI background. We see the benefit of it. There's even a lot more job opportunities out there that we're not aware of. That we are preparing our students for. We need to make sure that we are equitable and provide equal opportunities for our students to have a chance to be successful through that lens. Also instructional design for AI. I think we started with, and I was guilty of that too when I was first dabbling with AI. Let me just ask a very simple question. That's the answer. Copy and paste it. But now there are different pedagogy, AI pedagogy out there, such as instructional design, development, that we can utilize and leverage and train ourselves and district staff and then share that with our teachers so we can also

062accelerate and increase the thinking process period that's the thing, the thinking process, don't just get stuck with a very basic question dig deep because it is a tool. Again, understanding contextual scaffolding. When you're trying to acquire information and generate product. Thank you Saro. So as we chart the course for the future around AI and instructional technology in general, one of the key things we need to do is think about teaching professional learning and Jamie has provided some training on Magic School and the plan for next year is to get kind of wall to wall coverage for teachers. Sees the tool Calvados the tool cover knows how to use it cover and the same with the guidance document. Just to make sure that all teachers are comfortable with it. Know how to use it. Know how

063to plan. Using it with that in mind. And then again, additional guidance for use by students and staff. The red yellow green guidance document was really our first attempt at technology as it continues to evolve. The expectations and workforce continue to evolve. Our guidance will change and evolve with it. So having something that is static, does not really serve the need of something that is changing and so rapidly. So other staff at the Teaching and Learning center, our partners in TS, we put a lot of thinking into this. Again, next week we have a group of folks going down to El Paso to an AI convening. So we're really taking every opportunity that we can to stay one step ahead to make sure that we are changing and growing alongside the technology. Today Jamie and

064I were talking, she showed me, so we have our graduate profile, there's a graduate profile for an AI ready learner. And so thinking about that and how do we embed that into our course work across the board so students can synthesize information and ideas. Some of the things, connect storyteller, researcher, learner, which we want for all of our students. How can we, how can we use all of the tools at our disposal. Disposable? A lot of things are disposable. But anyway, our disposal, to get our kids their. At a workshop one day and the presenter said, the same kind of panic that educators feel about AI, was the same one when the calculator came out and kids had a calculator in their pocket. Oh my god. Nobody is going to be able to add on

065their own anymore because they have a calculator. I think we have learned how to use calculators and still use our brains to do math and think about math. Computation. I think we'll get there with AI tools as well. With that we will stand for questions. Thank you so much. Board members any questions? I was actually there when the calculator was invented. And yeah, there was lots of controversy and actually, it turns out you could actually use that to enhance understanding of difficult concepts. It was really a positive thing. Anyway, with this AI, I'm so glad we're broaching the subject. My first question, to do with red yellow and green, I really have to understand, how do we communicate, are they getting a copy of that graphic that you showed us. They're the ones that need

066to fully understand how it >> Sure, and I can start and then Jamie can jump in. I think fundamentally it starts with the teacher understanding. How the teacher comfort level, and some of the classrooms, it's all red all the time. There's really hesitancy on the, on behalf of the teacher. Our first order is ensuring teachers are comfortable. But yes, students should have a copy of that. Know what the expectations are. Clearly communicate it. It could be an assignment by assignment. A normal level of AI interaction. It's the same thing with the calculator. Other times it wasn't. And teachers had to fully understand that. My next question, it has to do with magic school, so the students can use this as a tool. What kind of hardware do they use it on? Can they put it

067on their own phones? Their own school equipment. They use it on a calculator. No, I'm kidding. [Laughter] I mean could I install magic school on my phone, could students do that? Basically the way it works right now is everything's embedded through clever and accessible through campus. The teacher sets up the room. So the student at the moment can only utilize the rooms themselves. So as the student or teacher sets up the room, they decide what tools are available to the students and then the students use it that way. It's also possible a teacher could set up a room and the kid has access to it for the entire year or they can set parameters and limitations on that. It's a little bit different than a ChatGPT where you have full access all the time. This

068one is a little more controlled. The student gets a code to go to a room. But they can also set up an account. Thank you. And member Frank, there is also a free version. Of magic School that kids could access on their own. I think there's also an app that the student could access. But the Magic School AI that we are providing is as Jamie described. Thank you. Well thank you for the presentation. I don't know whether to take it literally or like the most, but when you were talking about this, Walter garden, where does that concept come from, and how do you (indiscernible) So, if you think about, I think about it this way and it is a nice visual image. Think about letting kids out to play and you know they're safe out

069there. The space where they are playing is secure. It is the same kind of virtual space that we're letting students into that space and they can play if you will. Try things out. Use these tools. But in a safe space because one of the concerns I think we all had is students going into spaces on the internet. Putting in personal information. Putting in things like that. That could compromise their identity or their safety and things like that. The walled garden is essentially just a safe space that is monitored by a teacher but also not accessible from outside. Think of it as a walled garden with really high walls. Hopefully inside the garden is safe as well. Not just safe from the outside but growing things that would not be toxic. My other is a comment.

070Not so much a question. But I guess at my home I think I am kind of on that graphic with my own kids. They come home and the youngest one was like I'm going to do this and we're going to use this and I'm like no you're not. Using ChatGPT. I can't remember but I told them no, you're going to just use your brain. But I have to be honest with myself. I use Siri and Alexa to find out someone's age period that's awful. And that made me realize the whole phrase of why walk when you can run why run when you can fly. Most humans are the opposite. They try to have the quickest come as shortest pathway to do something. I don't know if it's lazy. It's a smart way of doing it

071but it could be detrimental. That's what I worry so much about with kids. Is it developmentally appropriate. They still have those neuro pathways that are growing. And then also we are just setting them up to kind of just take the shortcut. Which, I don't agree with the whole calculator thing. I feel like this is different. AI is only as smart as we allow it to be. How much information should we give it? I haven't encountered the smart eyes, because the ones I use are pretty frustrating. Maybe I'm the problem. That's my concern. Thank you. Board members? I'm curious, we attended the National School Board conference and there was a lot. Schools are clearly across the country wrestling with this idea. They have this guest speaker. Zack Cass or something he's on the business side of

072things. Honestly very engaging. I don't know if I agree with everything he was saying but I would look him up. He's an interesting character. But I'm curious, if you're talking to a teacher, what are they most concerned about around AI in the classroom. What is the thing that would keep a teacher up at night around AI. I'll start. And then feel free to jump in. So, Secretary Nolan, I think that there are two things. I think that the foremost thing is the erosion of critical thinking skills. Next to that, the erosion of academic skills. Being able to write, construct, paragraph an essay paragraph put thoughts together in a meaningful way. I think that is the foremost thing on folk's mind. I think second to that is plagiarism. Academic integrity. Which is always, with the internet

073came, I can find something, there's sources out there that will write an essay for you. So I think that, I think really top of mind is ensuring that our students can think on their own. I'm also going to add, just like we differentiate learning among students, I think this is a pretty good opportunity to differentiate how AI can look like in the classroom and so we are always afraid or fearful of something. We are not knowledgeable of. So possibly we're going to be afraid of that. But I think we can't run away from it and keep on saying no. Something that will keep on going and developing because we are a small number compared to the entire society is really gravitating into. I think it's critical that as we continue the implementation of such of

074AI dependent on what we agreed on, we can take a look at how can, what are the pros and cons what are the things we are going to allow. I really believe we can't just say no. Again what I mentioned earlier, the students will be on the losing end. As we move forward, all of us are pretty much successful already in our life. Just because we have had our careers. Some of us are still on the journey of completing it, but the kids that are in the classroom, yes, I understand safety very much so. 100% important. The best way is to have the dialog come and have those conversations. Kids are not going to admit to an adult, especially their parents, right, or their guardians, what tools they have been using but they also need

075to recognize they're going to have that trust, we need to have that constant conversation. And that's where as adults we can emphasize the importance of safety. The importance of academic integrity. That's where our experiences as an adult can come in and give them specific examples. The other thing I want to add is there's a lot of fear. I don't want to say it's a huge fear but in the back of our brains fear of. It's an actual thing. These are conversations I'm having. Like do you think that's going to happen and just as I think about that, the analogy, there's this great influencer named (indiscernible) and her example was electricity. She used electricity. She talked about how when electricity came out, how people really kind of, not everyone had access to it it wasn't readily

076available. But now could you imagine going in for a surgery without electricity? We would almost say it's unethical to do something like that. We wouldn't want our surgeons to do it in the dark. But also use all the tools that are on the table. Exactly right. And so, she used AI and very much in the same way. This is going to be a thing that not just how do we use it as a tool but it's going to be incorporated into the work we do, no matter what that job is. We need to be incredibly careful about what we do with it. There's a lot of ethics and conversations around it but also this is who the kids are competing against already. My son is in first grade and he's going to be competing against

077AI 20 years from now and those Littles are who I'm thinking about. How are they ready for the job. When they graduate from LCC. Thank you for the forward looking what you just said to Mr. Nolan. We do need to recognize this tool is developed massively just two years ago. And we need to make sure that we are on top of it in terms of educating our kids because I see a real shift in process here from how we talk before to what we can do to implement and how to help them see ethical implementation, as well as something -- perhaps he doesn't Google as well as she might. I'm lazy, that's all it >> That's human nature. So how we do an assessment is going to be real quandary as well. Are we purchasing

078any outside professional development agencies on this. Are we at this point, are we discovering trying to figure out what we do differently in our practice. I see a lot of professional development where we help teachers see how they can use this so they can help students and how they can use that and then a ton of time with professional activity. We you two do the overview of here's what it is, you need to drill back down into math department. Second grade. I am assuming that Magic School has a, it's been at least two years since I've looked at it. Some of the elementary stuff was very colorful and fun and I assume they have different levels that are available, depending on what grade the kid is in and how much freedom they can have and

079that's all built in with the purchases, did we also purchase an AI detection system for the high school and middle schools? Because when you look at those, you get people caught on plagiarism for using not just word, offering them a, because that's technically AI helping a kid compose. And so how we look at how we integrate those AI detection systems. Thank you. How to get that done. Did we buy one of those detection systems ourselves? So, vice president Wofford, we don't currently have, so in the past we had plagiarism detection tools. We do not have one that is specific to AI. There are some out there that are free or low cost that some teachers use. Their reliability is still a little sketchy. At this point, so, I think as we are trying to build

080it all together, you know, I think we are encouraging teachers first to understand what the tools are and how they can be used to work alongside students instead of on the academic integrity side. Jumping over everything. Trying to catch you. That's really exhausting. To try to live their. If that is the goal. Just to detect and catch them if you will. Instead of help them figure out how they're doing or how they can use it. The other thing I looked at, you mentioned -- we don't have any specific language on those policies on AI. And at some point when we go back and look at policies, I know we've talked in the past, the idea was to use different policies as it occurred. Because we haven't talked about using AI for social, emotional help with

081kids, or any of the other uses that are going on right now. What we need to be revisiting is those policies or do you save one policy to bind them all? Vice President Wofford, that's a great question. Right now we are looking at gaps and as I noted earlier, one of the gaps that we recognized was around student expectations and academic integrity. So, we're in the process of filling that gap and I think that is some work we could do together. With the board staff to examine policies and where does it make sense. If we were to have a standalone AI policy, I think it would be something about like we will adjust other policies as needed. Which I think we can do without necessarily having a standalone AI policy. I think if we put

082language in the appropriate places in the policy that we have, I think it will make the work easier around those things and as situations occur that are governed by those policies, its there. President, Mr. Wofford, along with doctor Wendy mentioned when you go to an AI policy, because of the fact that AI is evolving on a daily basis, the challenge becomes keeping up with it through policy which if we look at where the gaps are and we start filling those gaps, we point to, where at some point we may get to that. That parameter of being able to now we are ready for a policy. We go looking at those policies, looking at those gaps, and then filling and ensuring that we are creating those parameters around that before going to that policy because of

083the fact that it's evolving so much and we have to be keeping up with the policy wise. When you play with AI, put whatever parameters in, I used to get Folger coffee when I put in Folger Shakespeare Library into AI, it's really come a long way in terms of what it's figuring out, and you have a Herculean task in front of you, to get all that together. [Laughter] and finally thank you for being forward looking. We do not run from this. We embrace it. We want to be on top of the game teaching kids and I spend a lot of PA time, professional activity time, PT time with teachers, so thank you. Thank you Mr. Walker, president, core members of the board, as we're grappling with this and looking at charting the course and what

084does it look like for teachers and students, we also have to be careful in consider not creating a digital divide as well. A digital equity piece. What we want to make sure is that students aren't receiving this resource depending on what classroom they're in. That's where the teacher comes in. The other piece of this is also, really AI, how can we utilize AI to reduce barriers. For example multilingual learners. Other pieces that are incorporated. And then just that we don't reduce or create or students don't have access to knowledge because that's a tool that has knowledge. Again going back to, we just have to be careful we're not causing a digital divide. The other piece of this is the parent engagement on access to the resources. Not only in school but also at home. Those

085are a lot of those things as we're grappling with all of this that we need to keep in mind whether it's policies, regulations, we keep this equity piece in mind as well. Thank you president. Thank you. So thank you so much for all of this and as Vice President said, being forward thinking with AI policy. In your opinion, and I meant to look at policy e a and I did not, is that something you think we'll need to be looking at before the school year starts. Are there going to be, I mean, we want to make sure when the school year begins that we have our ducks in a row as far as this is concerned and you can just tell me later if you want to but as we look at this and we

086look at it together, do we need to put in some things into that policy so it's clear to students our expectations and all of those things. Madam President I'm glad you asked that question. One of the things staff is currently working on is looking at policies kind of across everything. And seeing what needs to be upgraded. What needs to be revised. What's okay period so we are in the process of maybe that work and the summer when we get to setting your policy calendar for next year we will bring those with a rationale. These policies might be revised and then you all can kind of prioritize which ones as your policies. Okay, awesome, thank you. I forgot. Hang on. No it's okay. My brain is not AI, clearly. So, just also I know a big

087concern is cheating and I did some reading and shockingly high amount of students who cheat but the students who cheated, the percentage of students who cheated before AI and the percentage of students who cheat after is the same period it's the exact same amount and as an educator and a foreign language educator you can tell when the kids have looked it up and you can tell because you know, the teachers know all of it. They know what their kids are doing and you get a piece and you go oh, that's perfect. How does that happen? I would just ask them, look at this verb tense. Tell me how you found that. There are ways. I think when educators are worried about cheating, I don't think it's really expanding the amount of people who cheat and

088as a teacher you know you can look at their work. That's what I was going to say. Somebody else please go. I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts, and I don't know if this will come out in the end, but two of my older children are seeing more of the AI being used by their classmates and come to me with the observation of like they're kind of using , so they don't have a voice anymore. So I would like to know how we can make sure the teachers are encouraging these kids to find their own voice. And then secondly, I'm going to use, and I'm going to guess, maybe an antiquated term at this point, but Silicon Valley, and maybe these private school families, last time I heard, they weren't letting their kids

089use smartphones. Or even maybe like the flip phones. Not giving their kids that kind of access. With this mindset that they're going to be using their creativity and I don't know developing more leadership skills. When we talk about this digital divide or parental engagement, I guess we could argue it from both ends of it because you have this beauty of public schools how diverse we are. We have kids at every level. They're going to leave high school come a 12th grade, we want them to all be successful wherever they're going to do. Whether it's CTE related or college and beyond. I want to make sure our kids have that choice. So it's not all AI for everybody. If the parents say hey, that's not for our family, we respect that. I just hope that's a

090possibility. Thank you. It is about balance. I think overreliance on any tool is dangerous. I don't know if that's the right word. I think that's one of the things post pandemic where we were so reliant on technology and computers. We are now examining our practice and when we have capable teachers in the classroom, can we get the balance back of not being so digitally reliant. I just want to make a comment to that as well. In the media literacy course, that was something that I was really concerned about because of the national conversation right now is still developing. And in the AI unit that we do have, there is an opt out for parents at the moment for it. Right now before these kids ever touch it, there is notification saying we're about to go

091into this AI unit please look at magic schools. If this is not something for your family at this time, I have these alternative assignments and in that it's all about looking at what AI could be in the future. Doing interviews with family members about it. Having conversations about it. Because we are right there. You're exactly right. As we are moving forward with these things, parents who want kids off technologies. Just the last comment, also, I think through the lens of teachers, when we train teachers, we always start with the why, and then also through (indiscernible) well, I've been a teacher for almost 30, so pedagogy is critical, that's foundational, it builds one's why and philosophy of teaching and from there I think once that's established, then you dive into your content. And use your tools.

092Use your resources in order to deliver the content. I think we use that same kind of framework. Then we can comment like what doctor said, when he said balance the tool, we don't just teach the tool, we start with a heavier foundational background, and then use the tool to elevate. Thank you so much. Fantastic. We have lots of questions and thank you so much for your thorough presentation. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Nicely done. President, as I may, as we get our next group up here, I think this is something that we will bring back to the board periodically to give updates. Along with some of the policy work. Potentially. Thank you. Mr. This is the moment you've been waiting for. You and Mr. Liu coming to talk to us about the budget. Yes

093of course. I want to apologize quickly, I have to go to my daughter's school event. And I know I'll get more grief from her if I don't go then if I leave this. I'll watch you guys later. I don't know, I'm already working on all the grief I'm going to give you. Just kidding. So president, superintendent, thank you, Matt and I here today would like to give you an update on the budget process and some information about the proposed budget. First of all I want to say that all the detailed information and presentation will be available this Thursday at 4 p.m. In this very boardroom. So May 7th. 4 p.m. We're going to host our budget town hall meeting number three. And I will present all the detailed information to the public. I want to

094use every opportunity to advertise for my budget town hall meeting. Refreshment will be provided. And also I want to say thank you for all the people who participate in the budget development process. No matter their participation in the local school level helping the principal develop their school budget. Or they help out in the district level. I just really want to say thank you for all the parents and students and staff members that participate and provide input and guidance to us. This is really community budget. Every school develop 1% or 2% of the budget and finance to be able to pile it up for the schools. And make it a district budget. As superintendents I always say the answer is in the room. We believe that the answer is in our learning community. And we heavily

095rely on that. Turn it over to Matt. Good evening come on President Cord come on members of the board come on superintendent Reese my name is Matthew science Club budget director of Las Cruces Public Schools. It's a pleasure to be here today. I don't know where everyone went. I thought they were here for the budget presentation. But we're happy to present this to our community and maybe they can watch online. So for today's discussion we'll give you some background information about our budget process. We'll look at our priorities for the year and we'll take a look at the district budget for 2027. For our budget process our foundation for our budget process is student success. Our budget started back in September with a group of volunteers as well as our facilitator to develop the budget

096survey. Our push this year was to get student involvement. So we are able to participate in several promotional events which we are very happy to be proud of. We offered an ice cream party to the school's top participation and we were able to, I wanted to thank the principal at the time, Mr. Lewis Lucero. We were able to eat a lot of ice cream there. Also at Sierra Middle School and Miss Martos. At Leadership Academy. We had over 2000 responses picked up ice cream really worked for us this year. The survey was followed up with several town hall meetings. Alongside with Doctor Barbati. In November. And we also had a presentation in March to announce the result for the budget survey. This year our priorities are safety and health and wellness, and instructional material. Along

097with our budget process one of the most important pieces in here is the Public Education Unit value. This value determines our revenue for the year based on various legislative mandates and requirements. We recently received this number in April and we've been working with public Education Department along with our school site and departments and our community to develop our budget. The next steps for our budget process as our final comment period for the Board of Education and the Finance Subcommittee on the May 14th and we look forward to bringing forward the budget for adoption on May 19th. Just to give you some information on how the schools are funded, the district is funded by five different bucket funds. These funds are specific, are used for specific purposes and they cannot be co-mingled. So our total district

098budget is $614.3 million of which the operational budget, the red one, is 365 million. And we use these funds to support district operations such as personnel, supplies, services, and utilities. Next we have special revenues. Estimated at 78.7 million. These are funds that are restricted for specific purposes such as grants. Also federal and state funds. Next we have the capital bucket, the yellow bucket, estimated at $126.4 million. This is used for construction, renovation, repairs, and major equipment. So when we speak about renovation of Mayfield High School, this is where the bucket will come from. Next we have debt service bucket at 44 million. These are funds that are collected from property tax and used for one specific purpose and that is to pay the principal and interest on the bonds that we use for our capital

099projects. Last but not least we have our agency funds. These are our trust funds that we hold with our community partners such as the City of Las Cruces and those funds go to help support programs at the schools, such as community schools. And that one is estimated at 190 000. Taking a look at the priorities for 2027 we have safety projects estimated at 39 million. Various projects such as installation of district wide cameras. Also Hvac and Reroof project at various schools throughout the district next we have instructional resources. Estimated at 11 million. For items such as Stem outreach expansion. I do want to mention the bulk of this budget is going to be allocated towards the math K-12 textbook adoption. We have health and wellness estimated at 7.6 million. This includes nurses, health assistants, and

100athletic trainers to support our students. Next we have wellness. It's estimated at 36.4 million. I do want to note that after speaking with Doctor Lozano, we did adjust this amount. To support academic counseling and behavior support curriculum for social and emotional learning and school based supplemental school based counseling. Here's the legislative updates. We have the approval of Senate bill 151, which provides for a 1% salary increase. We also have the approval of House Bill 47. This includes insurance changes, such as the 8020 insurance contribution. So this is basically the district is going to pick up 80% of the premium and the employee will be responsible for 20%. We did see some increases from medical at 9.95%. And vision of 4%. We are anticipating increases over the next several years in these deductions. I do also

101want to point out however we did see those increases the 80/20 the district will be seeing those increases. It would be a benefit. If I may cover members of the board, I just wanted to really quickly give you an overview with HB 47 just to make sure that some of the perception around, out there, is we are being fully funded to fund our 8020 after HB 47. Our initial analysis, we're still working on, the way the funding was allocated, it was approximately $73 million legislative that was allocated for this period the way it was funded though, it wasn't funded where the district was getting an allocation separate. It was incorporated into the SEG and the C G goes by student enrollment. Etc.. As a district we represent about 7% of the total state enrollment which

102means that's about 7% of that $73.2 million which for us, and again this is our initial analysis on this, it's a little bit over $5 million per our cost for 80/20, as well as a 9010, for our C-sec employees, because that first year we had enrollment increase of about 300 employees second year we had not as many but we still had close to about 100 or so. Which then our total cost is around $14 million for this well-deserved period we want to make sure we're investing in our team and our people and when you look at that initial analysis, out of that $73 million, you're looking at an allocation that you are receiving a little over $5 million. Make sure you understand that perspective. Although we've been funding this for the last few years, saw

103the importance of the people adding more money to folks pockets. So when we have situations like the 1% increase, we still have that support for our employees just to give you a little perspective on our initial analysis around this HB 47. A clarifying question, so, healthcare is going up, what a racket so, how much does that cost, how much is it costing the district? In millions of dollars I would guess. Yes, thank you for the question. Superintendent mentioned, we implemented 8020 and 9010 two years ago and the first year we see a huge increase of new members signing up. The second year we had a lot of plan jumpers. Taking off the increase of the last two years which is about 10%, 9%, we are seeing a lot of out of pocket increase for LCC

104at $14.4 million for medical alone. For the increased portion that's coming in for medical 9.95% because we have 8020, 9010, majority of that is going to be absorbed by the district, not by the employees. And based on the plan they selected, we choose the highest possible plan. Which is Blue cross blue shield, high option PPO, and that increase will be 9.95% times 2000. The district will take 80% of that small portion and the employees will either take 10% or 20% of that portion. I might need that in an Excel document. It would do the math for us. Kidding. And I didn't mean -- the superintendent asked the question and we're on the school board. If we want to continue with the presentation, that's helpful. I also had a question about the slide. So I thought

105it was appropriate that we deal with them as they come along. My question is, I'm concerned about employees. Projected to get a 1% raise. But I -- you compare that increase to what they're going to have to pay, the 10% of the medical they're going to pay. Is there any way to compare them at this point. The last thing we want is they end up really taking less from one year to the next. Thank you for the question. So based on perspective, the 1% is applied to the base salary. Level one about $60,000 per year. 1% of total 60 while that 9.9% only applies to the risk premium which is maximum at $2,000. So $2,000 for 10% increase is $200. Which the majority of them will be absorbed by the school district. The actual cause

106of the medical increases will be pretty minimal compared to the 1%. Okay, that's good. Salaries are significantly lower. The 10% we are dealing with, 10% of the amount. Yes, you're absolutely correct. So it might be impacted more. That's my concern. We really don't want that to happen. We don't want their take home to be less. A lot of classified positions do see a benefit. (indiscernible) for the employer contribution. Yes, thank you for the clarification. To clarify, we have been paying the 80 2090 ten for the classified employees. So we have been covering the cost. And for the HB 47, the state was supposed to be covering these costs for us. So, what's the bottom line cash difference going into next year? Yes, thank you. That is the question. Thank you for the question. Board member,

107we are looking at out of pocket over $9 million. Even with the help of HP. What I heard was five. Thank you. 14 minus five. It's a relief. It's not a resolution. All right we made it through one slide. We are clear on all of it. [Laughter] we're getting there. So this is looking at our fiscal year 2027 proposed budget by function. So if I can direct your attention to the second to last column on your right. The very bottom our total proposed budget is $354.9 million. This is a half percent increase from the prior year. For the most part our budget is pretty consistent with the current year there are some variations within the different functions. I also want to direct your attention to the squares at the top. This is for the three

108functions which are 1000 instruction and 2100 support services for students and 2200 support services for instruction. We are maintaining the 77%. Also, just for comparison, I know Mr. Liu took a look at this, but taking a look at our neighboring districts, we had gadsen within classroom use at 59.75 dimming, and (indiscernible) which is the third largest district in the state. So this does show our commitment to students success. To clarify this is operational budget. Yes. Thank you superintendent. This is a visual operational budget by function. You can see there, the 1000 instruction at 63%, the 2100 support services for students, that's things like social workers, health services, speech pathology, and occupational therapy. At 11%. The 2200 function for instruction, that's library services at 3%. 77% which is multiplied. We also have general administration which is

109your superintendent office. At 1%. 2400 for the principal and assistant principal at 6%. Central services, which are services that go to support the students, such as business office human resource, technology, 5%. And we have operational, operations and that includes construction, custodial, operations last but not least we have a subsidized portion for the 2700 function for transportation. We also want to give you a look at our proposed, excuse me, our estimated state equalization guarantee period this will be the money we will be receiving from the state of New Mexico, estimating $326.3 million. Of this the expenditures that can apply to this are mainly salaries and benefits. You can see salaries are 65% and fringe at 33%. So that's a total of 98% for personal. Which leaves the district with 2% for operations to include supplies, equipment,

110services, and utilities. Just to give you a few examples. With that, I want to thank you for your time. I'm going to turn it back over to Mr. Liu to discuss the strategic plan goals. Thank you. For next year's budget we, it's not just operational it's including operational, federal, and capital dollars. We want to tie our budget expenditures to the board to strategic goals. We identified some of the expenditure tied directly to a specific statistical and some of the expenditure applied and tied to multiple and supporting multiple board strategic goals. In the later slides we're going to show you some examples of some of the expenditure that supports some of the goals but in front of you right now come to the table it's showing that the dollar amount that supports each individual specific board

111strategic goals that are determined by our Board of Education. For the first one is the instructional outcome for literacy. Item $567 million expenditure support that goal. Salary and benefit for the literacy personnel letters. Related in the letter, literacy area professional development. And also Martinez Yazzie expenditure, that is special education, bilingual, at risk areas, for literacy purposes. For goal number two, instructional outcome for mass couple we identified 74 million across all three buckets and the salary and benefits for mass teachers and mass related personnel. Instructional material adoption which is $7.6 million for mass adoption this year. Professional development in math and also Martinez Yazzie area for special Ed, bilingual, and at risk, for the mass focus. Environmental health and well-being. This area of this 44 million support services, salary services, behavior support counselors, T, T, and

112psychiatrist, social workers, and also going to capital projects such as nurse, suites, staff, wellness center as well. I just wanted to let you know that Secretary Nolan was very excited to see his picture there. I sent that to them. He provided us amazing photos Who is that nerd in the back. For goal number four, environment safety, we see also from operational fund salary and benefits related to safety. Related personnel and also personality related to make sure we provide safety and clean environment for students to learn. So that includes a custodian and support for operational support staff but also capital project, as you can see, this is a big number that we invest heavily into capital dollar to ensure safety of our students. This is not only a board goal, but also a community priority. Hvac,

113we're upgrading the total air quality. And maintenance. Goal number five engagement. School culture and climate. 28 million we see salary and benefits. There's a more focus on principals and assistant principals and leaders at the local school level and also capital projects and family support center. Phase two and three. And we see great improvement and we continue to invest in those areas. Goal number six, engagement attendance. 16 million. Including salary and benefit for example attendance specialist and a student and family advisors. And also we include our family outreach and support effort and student recruitment effort. Together with Graduate Alliance and Casa K12. For this slide, as I mentioned earlier, those $201.9 million support multiple schools. Multiple school board strategy goals for example, and operational 179.8 million in elementary school teachers. We believe they are not only

114salary and benefit, they are also supporting student wellbeings as well. It's hard to define elementary school teachers in a specific school goal. Athletic activity and fine arts. We believe they are supporting multiple strategic goals. The federal area we identified 22.1 million. From the federal source. For example, commodity schools, there supporting multiple school board goals. And we funded the nine community school coordinator through four funding sources. Three from operational. Three from federal funds. Two from state funds. And one actually from local partnership with Las Cruces. The city of Las Cruces. With that I will stand for questions. Thank you very much. Thank you so much and I would love to see how all of this, when we set our priorities, they have to be our budget priorities. If we are saying these things are the most

115important, that's where we should be going. I appreciate you putting all of that together so it aligns with the strategic plan. That's great. Board members do you have any questions? Yes can we go back to the functions page? I have a couple of questions there, that's it, that's the one. Explain to me the difference between 2300 general administration and 2500. I would assume that's the people in the 2300 are not the part of the central. So just give me a little more elaboration on what that means. So the 2300 function is general administration. That goes to support the Board of Education. Also the superintendent office. The 2500 is essential services. Maybe we need to make that a little bigger. Now I'm kind of wondering. That's a lot of per Diems. [Laughter] And then also the

1162500 Central services is for the services that support students, like human resources, the business office, such as finance purchasing, and then also technology. And also that number is not just personnel. They can be services as well as for example in 2500 function, that's the cost of visions. The software. The cost of the audit. The central office function. You can see it. A small percentage compared to 77% going directly into the classroom. I was just wondering why it was broken up into two parts there. The 2400 is pretty specific. Going to schools. Okay thank you. My other question has to do with, the total at the bottom there, that's 355 million approximately. The whole budget is 614 million. I'm confused about where is the other 259 million that's not reflected in this slide. Board member Frank,

117thank you so much for the question. I'm going to go back to the slide with the buckets. The slide we were looking at is specific to the operational bucket here. The one on the left hand side. The red bucket. So the 365. Again this goes to support the operations of the district. Supplies. Equipment. The rest of the money is spread out through the other buckets. Which is special revenue. Which is your grants. 78.7 million. We have our capital portion. Which we're going to use for construction renovation. And also debt service of 44 million, we use that to pay on those capital projects. Basically it's a loan. So we're using the debt service to pay 44 million towards our capital. And we have the agency funds at 190 000. Which is support we received from the

118Las Cruces Public Commissary of the city of Las Cruces. Is still off by 10 million because that first bucket you have 365 but the chart on the other side is 355. Anyway. Is that anything to be concerned about. It's only $10 million. [Laughter] Go ahead. The line at the bottom. Okay gotcha. That number was probably our initial number that we were looking at. So I'll have to revisit that. Check the numbers for you. Thank you. Board member Frank, you touched the key part because when we talk about SEG coming in and there's a portion of the operational budget, we are trying to determine how much is the cash position. So we have to add the SEG amount plus the cash position. The reserve. So those two parts together will determine next year's operational budget. That

119part is hard to estimate because that rollover is fluctuating on a daily basis. Also want to point out that this is a snapshot of a budget in time. We are still working with public Education department. To finalize our numbers so that we can get that through there there are going to be some changes. And then of course you know we may have some ratification changes after our budget adoption. So there might be some variations with our budget. Until we get that approved by the public Education Department. Right, and negotiations are still ongoing. That's obviously a factor. You've given me much more information than I'm used to. And because of that it generates more questions. But I certainly appreciate it. And I appreciate the fact that we are getting this, this is two weeks before we

120have to vote on it. So we're going to have lots of time to look at it and ask questions and I greatly appreciate that. Thank you. Question. As long as we're on Ed's page here. When you have the fiscal year 2026 adopted and then proposed, by the time you've done all our bars, every first Thursday of the month and gone through all of them and what the cash balance is, explain to me the number of these adopted there, 2026, that was adopted at the beginning of the school year, when we, yes, this is what we're going to do. This is our proposed adopted budget. And we know very well that we can move money around because things happen so where is the column that shows us where we move the money around. Do you hear

121what I'm saying? You have the adopted budget at the beginning of the year. You can't know that yet. For last year. Because we haven't gotten to the end of June. It would be interesting to see that. Am I making sense to my fellow board members? No. (laughs you're on your . This is not unusual but my belief about the numbers is that when we adopted that 2026, it was the May meeting that we're going to do in a couple of weeks from now. It would be interesting to see, what the adoptions were for. A little bit of years and what happened with all the bars and where the cash balances ended up being. You've shown this to me before because those are the white pages with all the numbers on them. And it would just

122be very interesting to see it graphically done here. Perhaps the previous year or the year before that. So we can see, here's what we ended up doing at the end of the year here's what we said we were going to do here's what we ended up doing at the end of that year. What I'm looking at is here is what we said we were going to do but I don't know what we did. Does that make sense? Yes. You landed the plane. In your presentation that information would just be interesting to me. And I know Ed would have a great time with it. Okay, is that doable or, because I know when you give us the pages and things, and we look through on that detail level, it's in there. It would be very much

123-- it would be nice to see it graphically there. You're looking for the adjusted budget. The adjusted budget at the end of the year. Once you know everything that happened. We don't have a line item that says cash balance here or cash reserve or something. Although we do have that, what is prudent and required by the state. And then we have the other cash balances which cover our federal programs and all the other things we have to have the first payments out. It would just be interesting to see that information here as well. President court and Vice President Wofford is this something common some information you want to see before our final budget adoption presentation? That's a Mr. Liu question. I know you're right in the middle of putting everything together. I very much appreciate

124the level of details that you've done here. [Applause] We know how much, tons and tons of work that you put into this. Here I am asking for more in. But perhaps the Finance committee or something. To share with us. That's the reason I was asking. Because right now it could be a challenge because we are in a crunch and just to give you perspective, last year when we talk about our 910 B-5, last year and correct me if I'm wrong Mr. Liu, we went back and forth, we had like ten versions of the 910 b5. Gets to a point, it's a projection. Thank you superintendent. I know this is a year round process. And we wanted to make it that way and you guys have just gone full forward doing that. So no this is

125not going to happen in two weeks. I recognize that this is a year round budgeting. Those columns at some point. It fits very well. As you mentioned in our finance subcommittee meeting. We can incorporate that. I love the transparency about this. And that you're going to have your budget town hall as well and explaining this. But I think it really helps me to pass a budget, because I understand a little bit more, every time you all do different things it helps me understand a little bit more and I appreciate all the work that you put in to helping a non-math cabinet numbers person come a very language oriented, into making me understand how our budget works and I love that you tied it to our priorities and we are putting our money where our mouth

126is. And I love that. So thank you. The one we have in our packet, I think it was the wellness number, and you said that goes out an additional 20 million. Maybe engagement. I don't know where that is. Okay yes, we have 18. Well done doctor Lozano. But, he's not here. So, what's the story behind that money? The increase in that wellness. That would increase as we did further analysis around the wellness we discovered there were some areas we hadn't considered in the investment while making the wellness. And that's where some behavioral supports curriculum that we had not included and that's where it changed. Thank you very much for the question. So in speaking with Doctor (indiscernible) positive behavior support liaisons, also the attendance success team. Which leads to the next question. Is 16 million

127for attendance, where are we getting that money from? That's great but how are we funding that? I believe through various buckets. (indiscernible) also operational support and then we did have that -- I think it's goal number six. Yes. So basically we are taking, thank you for the question, we are taking the total expenditure that we proposed in the next year's order for those specific personnel. Their salary and benefit and also the Graduate Alliance which is $2.5 million. That's our student recruitment effort. And also they are reaching out to the people that no longer attend Las Cruces public schools. Asking whether they have other programs they are interested in and we can provide better support and a lot of students have been signing up from our outreach effort. Currently we have 270 students in Graduate Alliance.

128Recruit close to 500. 97 people and that expenditure is 500 000. So 2.5 for Graduate Alliance and 500 000 for K12. Thank you. We know that attendance has been a priority. So it's good to see that highlighted on the report. I'd like my colleagues, there's a big document called a lots to process, it's really helpful to have this pre-meeting, if you will, to look over the budget. And maybe I'll shoot you some questions via email. Yes, please do. Question about the operational funds. May I address the question about the operational funds? Let me go back to the slide real quick. On the function level, the operational side, so on the buckets, that's 354.9 million. So on the buckets, funds associated with -- which include transportation at 8.3 million and then we also have Velarium, which

129is property tax that we collect and support athletics at close to 2 million. So the total is -- I'm sorry? So that is correct. Our total general funds are 365 million. (indiscernible) that's in addition to what we're given for subsidizing. And it was essentially washed from last year. Yes. Excellent. Well, thank you. Thank you for the -- thank you for all of this. I appreciate it. Any other questions? A million, but no. Exactly. Oh just a quick point, I know the health care costs, the health care cost savings I do think we need to figure out how to talk about that. If the intention of the legislation was and we are not seeing that savings we need to highlight that for the decision makers and I hope we are doing that. Secretary Nolan, absolutely and

130not only should recommendation be this is a legislative priority for next year, we start the conversation now so I can get back to your point. As you heard Representative Small came in and spoke around this to ensure they get the true perspective of what our reality is around that. It's clearly not having its intended, the legislation is not having its intended impact. That's where we were ahead of the game. We started this two years ago. Imagine districts, and I'm hearing from superintendents, that have not been doing this. They're getting an allocation. Now their insurance is really rising. Folks are going to sign up. It's not going to be equal. Definitely to your point. Thank you both so much. Thank you all for hanging out with us for a couple of hours. And now we have

131Mr. Peterson and Mr. Dawkins come to talk to us about the technology refresh. I went to the tell a story extravaganza and I'm a little disappointed that Mr. Peterson isn't in his blue costume extravaganza. It was amazing. Thank you Madam court. I did not expect that. Thank you very much. And if you haven't seen it come and go check it out because I was sitting there and I was laughing hysterically and it was like, it's funny, but not that funny. I know him. Sure come on let me reset. Madame court members of the board, superintendent reads, to say that Mr. Dawkins and I are excited to present this evening would be an understatement we are giddy like small school children because this has been a process of the past eight months in discovery. Learning conversations

132to really understand the why and the what. Our Presentation today is really going to be in four beats. We'll talk about the process that we explored. The findings we unearthed. The product we intend to deliver. And the next steps that lie before us in a manner of minutes this process has been long and in its evolution but we still have a ways to go. Over the next several weeks to months. Jumping right in. Exciting the staff with all the numbers. Don't worry you don't have to get bogged down in numbers. This is just kind of an overview and snapshot. But currently we have about 26,000 laptops in the system. Based on our reporting and what we're seeing 14,000 of those are not in regular use and 9 to 11,000 devices are unusable. That's how many

133are checked out. And then in addition to that, the 11,000 is just our overall inventory. 64% devices checked out are damaged in some way. Broken screen, missing keys. And 74% of the devices we currently have don't meet the minimum requirements for the software. Which means for performance, freshman user experience, so on and so forth so, this is kind of the current status of where we're at. And -- >> These are Chromebooks? Currently it's a mix of Lenovo and HP windows laptops. They are very similar in form factor to Chromebooks in fact they look exactly like Chromebooks. But they are running windows. So, we think we've shared this information with the board previously back in December the sixth when we had our sort of state of division but we wanted to give kind of where we

134were, where we are and where we're going and then what does that look like. But in order to really answer what we were going to buy, we first needed to figure out what we were going to do pedagogically. What was our instructional focus. Where did we want to start the conversation and it wasn't with the device that was being purchased, but, the instructional practice that was being delivered with that tool. We used this as our North Star as we did our work. We really wanted to double click on the fact that the computers were really meant to support instruction. They are not content delivery system. That's the job of the teachers. We wanted to give them reliable tools that would help them do their best work so that ultimately the students could really find their

135personal genius. So we really looked with intentionality and purpose around what our solution was going to be. And we had to sort of start from the beginning. And figure out what did the teachers want the learning to look like. With the devices that we intended to provide and that was our North Star. May I ask if the tedium was the teacher or the student? The assistant principal. Miss Massey. This was the quote she actually put on one of our survey questions and it really helped to guide our work and really was our North Star. When we first started this process we sent out informal surveys to sort of get a feel for what folks wanted. This was sort of the direction we wanted to go in talking with sort of instructional folks and her quote

136really summarized what we were feeling in a way we weren't able to express. Why not use her full name? Is a great quote. Fair. Thank you sir. This process again we spent eight months doing discovery. Staff, students, parents, 1 to 1 with parents. We met with over 650 students. We met with finance. The folks in assessment. Multiple times. And we worked with six different departments to sort of develop this because at the end of the day we are the technology department. Our job is to deliver what is needed. So from our lens, we didn't really have a lot of background in what's happening in the classrooms as much as others. So we wanted to get as much input as we could. We went to tons of meetings. Mr. Peterson spent a lot of time with

137principals to gather information. And he's going to go over some of the findings. The findings really sort of landed in six areas. Not to steal the bucket analogy from my finance colleagues. But there were six clear areas that rose to the top that guided our direction. Guided our purpose and helped us really define the ultimate deliverable. The first one is we didn't want the devices to simply be for content consumption. The teachers wanted a device that students could create something meaningful. Something amazing. Something that might be ultimately captured and tell the story of the event last week we really needed to find a device that would answer that specific question. And then they also come a resoundingly, wanted to walk back our dependance on technology and we heard that resoundingly. We knew and we know

138that certain global pandemic forced us to go 1 to 1. But, to a person, folks were clamoring for less tech. But tech with purpose and intentionality. What is the why behind the tech we were using. So really, they really wanted to focus on less technology and more layered on analog instruction. Good old tried and true teaching practices. Another thing we heard resoundingly, we've heard this for a long time, but now we finally have the opportunity to do something about it. Streamlining the login experience. I don't know if many of you use Apple devices, but I don't know if you've logged into a windows laptop recently, but it takes some time, especially if it's managed by us, because there's so many policies and updates and things. And we are using these expensive laptops . $349 or

139$360. And we bought them by the thousands. Very low memory. Very slow processors. The average login experience for students is 15 to 20 minutes period that's half your class period waiting for your computer to boot up. Most did give up and they couldn't be bothered. We've got to fix this. So, one of the solutions was going to Chromebooks. Right away it's more task focused. Not an all in one sort of can do anything solution. And it fits the application we've applied it to. Having that experience, letting students log in as guests. If they need to do something really quick. Things like that. Make the lives easier for both the students and the teachers because they're not spending half their day figuring it out. The other thing we heard come resoundingly come particularly in middle school,

140devices should stay in school. This model that we've sort of developed with everyone, the primary home of the computer is going to be at school. They're not going to take their backpacks on the bus. Back and forth because that's where the damage comes from. They're going to stay at school they're going to stay in the classroom. Again with this model there are sufficient cards to keep them safe and locked up when they're not in use and they're always going to be charged. They bring them but it's never charged. Just like our cell phones. We've kind of addressed that in a couple of different ways. If devices need to go home for support needs or just parents need a computer to function in daily life because they do nowadays, we certainly have enough room for students

141to check them out and take them home. But we don't want that to be the primary thing. They will certainly have access to computers, but it's not the default. The next thing we've done as part of this plan is, it's a very robust repair program. We worked very diligently. Vendors providing the software or the hardware to provide us with unlimited repair. Within reason, of course, for all the devices including the existing fleet of Lenovo devices, which is an unprecedented generosity from this partner that we've worked with over the years. They are actually willing to go back and repair all the devices that we purchased over the last two and a half years. Which is amazing. Part of this plan, we are recycling some of these devices for high school. We'll get into that later. But

142they are going to be repaired and refurbished before they get into the students hands. And the last thing is we are revamping the student find process. I don't know if we've spoken to you about that but in the past if a student had a broken screen or a broken keyboard, there was sort of a cost matrix associated with the damage and the cost of the device and it's in policy JQ. That gives us ability to charge for that. We resoundingly heard it's ineffective. It's not a deterrent to take better care of the device. And it results in problems that don't need to exist when we put financial strain on a family. Part of what we're proposing and you'll see in a future meeting, it will be on the calendar at some point, we are not

143going to find students for accidental damage. Or any kind of damage really, unless it's something incredibly or outrageous. Instead we're going to focus and make it a learning opportunity rather than punitive engagement. We don't want to create more problems at home. We don't want to add additional strain to the family. This is something I was very passionate about. And a lot of staff and parents were also adamant that we revisit. The other thing is the money we did recoup from fines didn't really cover the damage that was done. The hundreds of dollars. Instead of that we had made a deal with this vendor to do repairs at an incredibly nominal cost which is amazing. That was part of the eight months of work. As I mentioned earlier, really when we started the process, we needed

144to have instruction at the center of the work we were doing. The bullseye was student growth and achievement and success. And from that begat this framework that has been rolled out and will be continued to be rolled out. We'll get into more of it. We know that it's just a splash slide. But really we are trying to rethink how technology is used in the core curriculum. In the core. Obviously this doesn't relate or affect the technology teachers room for example. But really what is technology use it look like in the K-2 space. What does it look like in the three five space. 68912 etc.. We really are working deeply with our partners across multiple divisions. Really try to unpack this. And we had many many sort of whiteboarding sessions come a post-it note sessions, to

145figure out what makes the most sense. For the students and what is the right solution based on their age and grade. A splash screen to show us really instruction is at the core of this. Instruction first tool second. So, K-2, let's talk about the product. At the top you will see what the framework looks like. I just want to call out the idea here is to use tech sparingly. And if it is used it should be used purposely. And it should be used, not, it should be used in a way that makes the appropriate sense for the goals and the direction in the classroom. It needs to be developmentally appropriate and it must be aligned with the work that's happening in the classroom. Those four bullets are really the takeaways that are shared that have

146been shared with the K-2 teachers. What that looks like from a hardware perspective, is 1 to 1 Chromebooks in K-2. And I know you're thinking, if we're using them sparingly, why are we saying 1 to 1 in K-2. And one of the things is just resounding, all the kindergarten teachers we spoke with, when they are doing -- >> God bless them by the way. But when they're doing the assessments and the progress monitoring it is so much more effective when all of the students are on the same task. Previously they've been doing it inside the station or five at a time. While students were doing other things. The students were much more on task when doing it as a group. Part of this plan is 1 to 1 in K-2 to ensure when the students

147are on the same task together. It dramatically reduces distractions and we see better performance when we're able to do that. Wire charging cards are going to be in the classroom. Because this is 1 to 1, every kindergartner and first grade and second grade teacher will have a cart in their classroom. With appropriate number of Chromebooks. And the repair replacement will be no cost to families. There's a little asterisk there because obviously if there is repeated malicious sort of breakage there's going to be a conversation and there's going to be some other interventions there. But for regular break, accidental sort of damage, it's going to be unlimited repair and replacement. In the three five level we start to see students are significantly more independent and can break off into those centered tasks, we're suggesting a 2

148to 1 in this space, but really, the focus is more center based activities using traditional practices, s, but the technology and students hands should feel easy. It should feel natural. It shouldn't get in the way of the learning. Like a 20 minute boot up for example. End of keyboarding is taught it should be taught in short mini lessons but also in collaboration with the content that is being delivered. So if it's going to be taught maybe it's a couple of five minutes. A short sort of keyboarding lesson. But then launching into actual practical use of those keyboarding skills as students are writing content writing their script. Writing their essay. Whatever. Purposeful uses of the technology in smaller groups. And because we're 2 to 1, that means there's going to be cards that are going to

149be shared. The way the distribution is set up, this is just a framework. Schools are going to have the latitude to do what they feel is most appropriate but we needed some sort of guide Stone to tell us how much technology to provide. This framework says here's your bucket of devices and here's your carts and here's how we sort of come through our research, saw the best way to do this, but ultimately you have the autonomy to use it how you wish. So this grade level will have a cart and then that cart would be sort of checked out as needed based on the curriculum that's happening that day. Within that grade level and it's not just one per grade it's proportional to the number of students. Sixth grade has a lot of students they're

150going to have more carts. It's 2 to 1 like that period but, the administration and the teachers, how this is implemented is really up to the school. This is sort of the baseline. And we are 2 to 1, (indiscernible) In middle school it got interesting. We had deep and long conversations with the teachers and principals to figure out what is their why and what are their worries and wonders. And in fact they adamantly hoped for less tech and less technological distractions. They wanted an environment that was less tech rich. And the devices were used again in purposeful, small group instructions with a key component around content. Creation. Not simply consumption. And all of these you'll start to see a theme as well. We started in K-2 but we are also really trying to help students

151understand what we call the feed and watering. The care of the devices. Making sure they understand the best practice around being good stewards of the technology. Whether it's sort of district supplied devices or mom supplied iPhone. Whatever that may look like. How can we help them be better stewards of that particular equipment and double clicking on as well as the digital citizenship and making sure that they see the acceptable use policy before they're given their device. They understand. They agree. And they move forward through their expectation. And we are also using Chromebooks which in middle school we want to focus on creation. Content creation. Video editing. Engineering software things like that. Chromebooks aren't great at that. We do have applications that are compatible. Like Creative Cloud Suite. It has sort of a express version that

152runs on Chromebooks. However we're keeping some of the higher powered lab devices. We're not taking that functionality away. They still have access. More horsepower so to speak. As well as we allow the esports computers to use for things like Adobe video editing. And AutoCAD. Things like that. These are powerful machines. So we're working with the schools to convert those. Not convert, but extend their functionality, to be used for engineering and creative media and that sort of thing. As we move into the high school space, this is where we're going to reclaim the lenovos that are spread throughout the district and really get the best experience, the highest performing device to those high school students. They will be a 1 to 1 but again, we are trying to sort of move the expectation to a really

153robust tech rich learning experience. Where students can create their capstone projects. They can deeply engage with the technology and have the technology meet them where they are with what they expect to do or what they are expected to do. Again we are really leveraging the best device with the students who we expect will need it the most. In high school we are staying 1 to 1. These devices will go home with the students if they choose to and the model isn't changing a whole lot. In fact really all we're doing is we're taking away those lower performing devices that we bought early on. That don't have enough storage and we're bringing them Lenovo devices that we already own. We are sort of reclaiming those for the middle schools and elementary schools. And filtering them back

154into the high school. Really, and speaking with the Student Advisory Council, those students, they are very well aware of what the technology situation is at their schools and they generally agree that the Lenovos were sufficient. They could handle the work they were doing. And were really not that bad. Everybody hates the HP. And this doesn't have anything to do with brand. It just happens to be a generation. HP devices that were bought early pandemic. There wasn't much of anything available and there wasn't a whole lot of money. That's kind of why we were in this position. Filtering these Lenovo devices which we purchased over the last two years, they are still relatively new and they run everything we need them to run. There are 7731 of them in circulation. Out of the 7750 that we

155purchased. Which I think is pretty impressive. 900 approximately currently on repair. With our service provider. So those will be ready to be put back into circulation in -- when school starts. My team definitely has a lot of work to do. Over the summer but we have a plan in place to get all of these devices done. There's going to be close to 22,000 devices that we're going to touch. Clean and scrape stickers off of. It's going to be a fun summer. Sounds like a job for interns. We have quite a lot of interns signing up. So the last eight months, what we purchased, and I should point out this is kind of a done deal period the purchase has been made and the vendor is already working on getting them deployed. We're expecting delivery within

156the next 2 to 3 weeks so we can start our work and get everything distributed which is really the big heavy lift. But what this has resulted in, a holistic approach to technology. That we've never really taken before. We're not just looking at devices and making sure they have software installed. We are looking at accidental damage. Breakage and repair. We are looking at student accountability and thinking of that as more preventative maintenance. Students are encouraged to be responsible with their devices. We are also revamping our management and work order system. In procurement for this, there's not a lot I can talk about at the moment. But we are looking for a solution that is going to be sort of a single pane of glass with life cycle of the device. Not only tracking who's possession

157of it, but what kind of work it's had done to it, how much money it's cost us, all those sorts of things are going to be tracked. So we can have better reporting and a better understanding of how devices are being used. What's up breaking. What's wrong. So that when we do this process again in a few years, we'll have better information and be more prepared to move forward with this. We are really excited about how this is playing out. Everything is falling into place a little bit too spooky for me. Trust the process Mr. Dawkins, it's going to be fine. We are also doing some staff device refreshes. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the MacBook neo that recently came out but, Apple, we got lucky on this one, they

158released a device for $499. I thought it was 7.99 at Best Buy. The educational price. We get a little bit of a discount. These devices met our needs quite well at the price point. They're $150 more than we're paying for student devices. So, we were pretty stoked. We bought as many as we could afford. Which, 500 MacBook kneels, they're going to be distributed proportionally to those schools population. I don't know, got to figure out the best way to get these out. Limited inventory. Let's do it proportionally. So we're sort of handing keys over to the schools and deciding how they're being distributed. What this isn't going to do is affect their current allotments or anything like that. New staffers are still going to come to us to get devices. This is all new additional devices

159that are going to the schools. What we're hoping is going to happen is that the staff originally wanted an Apple device they'll turn in their windows device. The staff that wanted better windows device, that will all filter down. We're going to give back those smoldering hunks of plastic. That aren't useful for anyone. Our goal for this entire project is to dispose of equipment that is inadequate and ineffective. If I can come I hats off to Mr. Reese who really pushed us in a direction and challenge us to think about this particular piece. If I'm honest with myself, I've really been focused on the student devices since I came in and didn't want to discount but didn't see a way forward and so thank you for the guidance there. Really pushing us in a direction and

160realizing something that was truly possible and in fact as we met with all the principals now, they are excited to a level that I was not expecting and I think the teachers are also truly excited to see those new devices come into the building and we begin to sort of swap out those older units. We appreciate the guidance and the direction they're. We are very excited and I think just as an additional call out comment Dawkins mentioned the price point, it is a solid piece of equipment at an amazing price point and we cannot find a PC at this point in time that can do what this does for the price that we're getting here quite frankly. Again, we don't necessarily need to get into the weeds but it is an amazing price point and

161it is significantly more competitive from a pricing perspective and a performance perspective than some of the other brands on the market. I'm not getting too much on my soapbox when we're talking about this particular subject, we started this process back in September. Staff devices. In the 650, $700 range. That was our target. By the time the MacBook was released, a lot of these increases are due to AI infrastructure taking over. I'm sure you've seen by now. Astronomically expensive. This has been a windfall. That Apple saw coming. As you know historically I'm not a huge fan of Apple. But I'm going to eat my words on this one. So what's next? Well, we've got 10,000 Chromebooks coming to us. I don't remember how many pallets that is exactly. But several truckloads. We have to collect comet

162repair, and distribute 700 Lenovo laptops and that process has already started. We have the 500 MacBook NEOs coming. Because we're working on securing that management software. That's been extended a couple of times because there's a lot of interest in providing bids for this. So we're giving them more time to get the best information. And then policy JQ, which will be coming before you in the board meeting sometime in the future. And We have nothing to add. We stand for questions if there's any details we missed. Thank you. You do have some work ahead of you. We have a lot of work this summer. I'm excited to say it will be my first rollout of this scale in this position obviously. I'm really excited to see how Matt's team comes together. The student support he's also

163leveraging. It's going to be a very busy summer but we're going to get them ready to get them to teachers and students hands by day one. That is my goal. Thank you. Board members com do you have any >> Sure. Thank you very comprehensive. Appreciate all the thought you've put into this period the laptops with Lenovo, that are being, are they refurbished and sent back the same laptop when the repair cycle happens or do we just send them one and they send us a replacement, refurbished. 99% of the time you get the same device back. Screen swap keyboard swap. That sort of thing. How much downtime in terms of kids that don't have devices. Do we know that yet? In this current plan there will be no downtime. We have enough additional Chromebooks to sort

164of backstock to fill in when devices break. With Lenovo some of these Lenovo's are already out of circulation. We previously didn't have the ability to repair them in house. These have already been pulled out of circulation and we are supplementing with Horsepowers. So our goal and the plan right now, there's no downtime for anyone. We are recalling all the devices at the end of the semester. We can get our hands on everything that's out there. With the exception of summer programs and things like that. We're pulling back for the first time, everything that's not essential over the summer period so we can distribute and get this done. But when school starts we intend to have laptops back in their hands on the first day. I appreciated the focus and listening to teachers about maybe technology

165is not the thing we want to focus on but something else. And then really appreciate it when you said k one and two teachers want to have a 1 to 1 thing going on with the kids. I wonder when you said that though, whether we have a window, if they're using them primarily for the middle and end of year exams, if there's a window that will allow the laptops to be moved or utilized in different places because if they're using them more in three five, how logistically we could move the laptops around so they weren't mostly idle because it sounds like in K through two, that was the principal desire for them. Tell me what you thought when you were looking at that? We have two applications that are sort of progress monitoring platforms. Between

16640 and 80 minutes a week that students are engaged. So they are engaging almost daily for a few minutes to do exercises and sort of check in. There's not a lot of idle time. At least for days apart sort of thing. They do need access to those computers every day. So it's not instructional already, but check in. To double click on that as well, we have really tried to affirm and share with the principals that it is their building and they should have, and do have the autonomy to make the best decisions with those devices. We met with tech teachers today and we assured them if these devices move around and other places and spaces, it's perfectly fine because that makes the most sense for the needs of that particular site. They really have Carte

167Blanche to do what they want when they want where they want. We will do some inventory. But what they do with those devices come we will leave that up to the experts in the field. Thank you for all the thought put into this work. It's a very comprehensive report. Our pleasure. Board members? Okay I have a couple of questions. And I know it's been seven years since I've been in the classroom but one of the biggest issues, and actually my daughter is currently in the classroom, is charging. And, you have your carts and they charge but what happens when they don't charge, when you walk into the building and you only have two outlets and not enough chargers for all the computers where you had planned to do a whole thing and then things have

168failed you, what kind of -- what kind of yes, what kind of backup do we have so that, because if we want technology to work for the teacher's, and I know it's been a while since I've been there, but it's still happening. What do we have as backup for charging? Started the beauty of this model of using the carts is there's now an easy sustainable way to charge them at the end of the day or throughout the day. The carts have integrated charging capability. Granted they're not always going to get plugged in at the end of the day but, we are hopeful maybe their neighbor charge theirs the night before or something like that. Every school is going to have a 10% backstock of devices that the tech is going to maintain. In those extreme

169situations, they can fall back to those devices. And because we're not assigning devices to students now, so the current model the devices sort of assigned to students and that student and only that student can use it. With the Chromebooks, it doesn't matter. It's all based on the user that's logging in. So, I can use five different Chromebooks throughout the day. I'm going to have the same experience regardless. Now we have these owners that are going to be available in every site. They can grab those. The student login experience is going to be the same whether it's the one they use every day or the one that they're borrowing. And And if I may come up thinking of my former role as a fifth grade teacher, I would ask one of my students, I would have

170my classroom jobs at the end of the day, I would have one of my students make sure all the devices were plugged in and of course that particular cart was plugged into the wall. But I would task and ask for help and support from my students in my classroom just to make sure all those USB cables are charged and the kids are ready to go and overnight they'll charge in the next morning we are ready to rock and roll. Appreciate that. It's good to have a little backup just in case something falls apart. We lose electricity overnight. Those things. So, one of your six buckets, if I may, for technology, was that the devices stay at school. However high school, they're all going to be with them 24 over seven. I don't know if I

171have a question to that. So it's only high school that are taking them home? So your reason for keeping the other devices at school but having the high school devices go home, can you tell me your rationale of why you've decided high school devices should go home? Sure, thanks for the question. And it should say devices stay at school with an asterisk. We expect the devices will stay at school for K through eight. Except on those certain circumstances where students want to take them home and they can check them out with a teacher. And staff. We heard from the high school students and staff that the work that's being asked of students requires outside engagement with that device so that when they're at the local coffee shop working in their group projects that they have

172their device in their hands and we're able to connect with the content. Whether that's canvas or whether that's one of the other tools they're using so they can connect with the content easily come quickly, and without delay. The high school was unique in the fact that they desperately expected, one two, hoped for that 1 to 1 to continue with the students, to carry those devices. And I think maybe an additional consequence would be the students learning how to care and feed for their own personal device as they move into the world of work and into the future of their career. Having that device, taking care of it, using it when necessary, that was some of the feedback that we heard from the high school folks. They're significant logistical challenges with storing and charging 2000 laptops

173every day. It's easier for us if they just take them home. It's a little easier at Central Elementary With a policy j Q, which is the fine process, you also talked about on your other slides that the kids will sign a contract saying they will care for the device and everything else. Is that going to be into the regulation of policy J q, what that contract looks like. Are you going to kind of combine that into the regulation or is that contract going to be a separate entity in and of itself? Does that make sense? That absolutely makes sense thank you for the question. We are wanting them to experience or get a handle on acceptable use policy. Before ultimately they were given their device. So in other words, here's the acceptable use policy, let's

174go through it, ladies and gentlemen come on boys and girls come on let's talk about the, and then once everybody sort of agrees to those standards and practice coming in the device will be delivered. There was some cross threading. In fact students were getting the devices before the AUP was actually assigned. I do think and appreciate the question of how we get to explore JQ, we will also be using the acceptable use policy to see how we can bring together more nicely. All right thank you, those were my questions. Board members, anything else? We appreciate all of the time and effort that you put into making sure the devices are what the students want and what the teachers need and we've learned from the beginning, because I taught for a long time, technology as a

175tool, it is not the instructor and so I really appreciate that Re-emphasis on all of that. Thank you. Check out the finance people still hanging out. Way to support. I know we are missing. We still have quorum. I would like to entertain a motion to adjourn. Second. Seconded by Secretary Nolan. All in favor please indicate by saying I. All opposed. All right, you all, we are out at 736. You came back just in time, Mr. Frank.