Carson City School Board Meeting 8/23/2022

001[Music] and it is now seven o'clock so we'll go ahead and call this uh board meeting to order today's date is august 23rd 2022. uh first item on the agenda is the adoption of the agenda as submitted and this is for possible action so i would uh entertain a motion i'll make a motion to approve the agenda second wilkie okay emotion and a second any uh board discussion about the motion any public comment reference this motion seeing none we'll go ahead and call for a vote all in favor say aye aye aye motion carries thank you we'll move on to agenda item number two it's a flag salute and be led by ramirez i mean trustee ramirez united states of america an eternal republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty

002and justice tomorrow we'll move on to the next agenda item which is a superintendent report superintendent fueling okay uh thank you president varner uh good evening trustees so if you didn't know school started which is pretty exciting and it's been really exciting getting around and just seeing a lot of happy faces i think everyone is ready to be back parents at some of the events we're clearly very excited to see their kids teachers and and just all of the all of the pieces that come with the start of the school year so it's been a lot of fun a quick update on enrollment these numbers are not final so uh one thing with enrollment is not until after the first two weeks of school has completed do we have numbers that have stabilized a bit

003and even then sometimes not until after labor day in some cases student numbers really start to stabilize but our total enrollment numbers are very similar to last year we're down three students not counting pre-k district-wide once that is filtered out and updated today it's it's actually just down three however to to note carson high at this point is up above 2 300 students it looks like that may come down a bit but that is certainly still our largest school in the district um and it's interesting looking at the the numbers overall um a lot of mid 600s in the high school level and then it drops to the low sixes fives at the middle school level and then really lowers out to the 500s our current kindergarten class uh this year look is it right

004now at 475 i would expect that to increase but that is down well from prior years so i just want to give you a little update on that um again it was it was very exciting with all of the meet and greet events trying to get out to all those and and my staff getting out and i think overwhelmingly it was a very positive experience a lot of smiles on the faces of everyone excited to see staff coming back a big thank you to transportation for the work that they've been doing trying to keep us afloat it has been a lot for them to to make this happen and i think a lot for all of our sites to to make it happen so i just think that thank you everyone for their work and

005parents for their patience as we try to work through this last thing we've started our superintendent site meetings listening sessions uh last week so i'm heading around to the schools and um just meeting with some really happy folks right now i think just excited to be back in in school and seeing all the kids so it's a good opportunity for for me to learn a little bit about what's going on and something that i'll be reporting back to you in the near future so that is all i have for today thank you and i want to thank you also i know that you've been around to the schools a lot and so i think it's very important we'll go ahead and move on to item number five board reports and this is for information only

006we have anybody from carson high school they say we do just state your name yes push the button and if it turns green it'll be working hi i'm ava scofield i'll be the student body school board representative for carson high this year so i'm super excited about that um to get us started we have our senior sunrise this friday on the home bleachers at 6am to kick off the school year for the seniors and then we have on august 29th there's a back to school night at six the parents come meet their their kids teachers well and we'll talk we'll the principal talk and then our homecoming week the assembly is on the september 9th and then the week is the 12th through the 17th and student council is currently planning that right now so

007we're super excited about that and then we have our sports we had our first football game last friday against reunion and then this friday they have a game in calaveras california to play them and then volleyball had three games tonight against minogue girls soccer's playing at spanish springs currently right now and then boys soccer plays hug tomorrow home and then the cross countries meet i think it's their second meet is this friday i'm not sure where it is sorry about that and then the first tennis matches are next tuesday against minogue the girls will be home and the guys and the boys will be at minogue and that is all so thank you thank you very much and welcome to the board meetings this year thank you looking forward to it anybody from pioneer or

008does anybody have any update on pioneer activities seeing none move on to we'll go ahead and do the nasby update just just a quick update if you haven't signed up for the training that will be september 10th and 11th in las vegas go ahead and sign up for that and also you can get signed up for our annual conference that is going to be november 11th it's it's that weekend we've got the you've got the email let them know um and they do have a room rate um there if you want to stay up there rather than drive back 11th and 12th and and if you want to come to they are going to do a new trustee orientation on the 10th so if that's something you feel a little shabby about or it's been

009a while you're welcome to sign up for that one as well thank you for the update i may also mention that trustee walker is not here tonight he had a conflict we'll go ahead and start on the board announcements uh joe thanks rich i just want to welcome everybody back teachers students um families and of course all the staff that takes to run a school so welcome back to the school year it's always exciting and uh you know we look forward to a good school year always work to do and this is the beginning of it i do have an announcement from pioneer a couple of them a pioneer held five days of parent orientations for incoming and returning online students before classes started a second announcement the rock creek four-day adventure trip with project

010discovery they leave on august 27th and then on september 14th there's an open house from 5 p.m to 7 p.m with a free barbecue for all that attend that evening event and those are my announcements for pioneer thank you very much stacy um from pioneer the new principal mr tuttle wanted to remind everyone that empire is a governor's designated stem school they're working on transforming their school into a 3d dimensional textbook this means that they are trying to create learning spaces in and around the physical space of their school as part of this work they have started redesigning their hallways into different habitats and murals and 3d pictures more work is still to be done in their hallways in addition they are creating outdoor learning environments including two outdoor classrooms in a school garden which

011can be viewed during the open house on september 7th from 5 30 to 7 pm our team of people are focused on taking empire and its students to the next level because what starts here changes their world actually i think was that empire not pioneer nope that was empire yeah yeah okay just want to clarify you said pioneer but i just wanted to clarify for the public empire sorry no problem [Laughter] and then um we had an open space in parks and rec joint meeting last monday and they have recommended certain parks for leash and unleash and trail and trailheads and if you want to see what they're recommending to the board of supervisor it is on the carson.org website if you want to give your input on that that's all i have thank you

012very much don dr conley at eagle valley has a couple things to say monday august 22nd and tuesday august 23rd our sixth graders participated in breaking down the walls social emotional learning activities students learned what empathy means and found commonalities with other students these activities allowed students to get to know each other better and establish new friendships also the new physical building edition is working extremely well eighth graders spend eighty percent of their day in the new area with new academic teaming this year all students travel very little between classes and tardies are virtually non-existent teachers and students on common teams are collaborating collaborating well and establishing great learning and behavioral expectations and that's all thank you very much lupe so from carson high school and as we heard earlier they are having their open

013house on the 29th at 6 p.m at the big gym and the principal is super excited to have the parents come and meet their students teachers um the the fall sports um season is in full swing that includes football cheerleading volleyball soccer cross country tennis and girls golf they are encouraging the community members to come and support them during their home games and then i also had the opportunity to attend a couple of events at silicon elementary school one was the meet and greet for the kindergartners that was really exciting and then i also attended the open house and saw the smiles that um superintendent feeling mentioned um the the kids the the parents it was just really exciting to see how excited everyone was to be back in school in person um i also

014commend um superintendent feeling because really he has been attending all these events and then he is also probably responding to our email so thank you for all you're doing um i also attended um the partnership carson city i am a member of the um at that board and one of our assignments from the executive executive director was to recruit members they are missing two members for the board so if anybody is interested in serving on the partnership carson city board please contact the executive director and that concludes my report thank you very much laurel okay for fremont elementary school they're going to have a parent meeting on september 1st at 5 30 in the cafeteria and um dr ward says to please check your parent square for details and unfortunately i didn't get an email

015into mr brown so i don't have a report for fridge but turning it on and off and on and off i did watch the interview with two fridge students that was really delightful so it was on the first day of school those kids were very um cute so thank you and i have two reports tonight one from border bray principal ricketta would like to just let everybody know that so far they've had a great start to the school year everybody seems to be excited the teachers are glad to be back into school and kids and they had a successful back to school meet and greet and i attended that one and there must have been three or 400 people stacy was there there was a lot of parents a lot of kids everybody seemed to

016be having a good time they had hot dogs and some ice cream and stuff so it was a nice get together and then they also wanted to remind people that on september 18th they'll be having their second annual bordering parade day at the reno aces you can get your tickets now by following the link sent out via parent square or you can call the school for more information and then students will also be taking the fall map test this week and they appreciate all the parents and guardians of support and insurance students get plenty of sleep each night are at school on time and they want you to encourage your student to the best they can from carson middle school there again the new principal amy robinson wanted everybody to know that they're also off

017to a great start and rewarding possibly behavior is a main focus for them this year they have a team looking into ways we encourage students to make good choices and reward those who work hard and do the right thing and they appreciate all the support from the families and they're looking forward to a fantastic year so that concludes my report we'll go ahead and move on to item number seven public comment and making public comments i miss one association reports oh association force we have anybody for the association certain night with the report seeing none okay we'll go ahead now i'm sorry we'll go ahead and now move on to public comment item number seven in making public comments speakers are asked to come to the table or podium sign in speak into the microphone

018identify themselves for the record commentators are instructed to limit their comments no more than three minutes and to not simply repeat comments made by others and we have not received any written uh public comment tonight so there's none in your board package do we have any public comment joy truscinski carson city resident good evening everyone i want to bring to the attention of parents that a new school has opened up named legacy christian academy located at 1630 snyder avenue building b here in carson city there is still time to enroll your children in kindergarten through eighth grade their curriculum has nothing to do with common core which is used in our nevada government schools you know joey i i appreciate that but that's not anything to do with the agenda tonight um i have a

019right to make a comment and if it's on the agenda you do have that right and it's about schools go ahead uh it's not whether it's on the agenda or not your your public comment is limited to matters within your jurisdiction right schools outside of the carson city school district are not within your jurisdiction thank you for the clarification legacy christian at academy is in is it anyway i would ask you to please let me comment to something that's i i have i have a right mr varner to to yes i do under freedom of uh freedom of speech of the constitution of the united states to make a comment now please let me speak without hindering me thank you very much there is no critical race sex or education very specifically as on any

020matter within this board's jurisdiction or control yes free speech applies to the extent that there is anything within the sports jurisdiction or control but it is not a blanket free speech like you would have walking down the street for example well but i'm not uh hurting anyone i'm just explaining joy we're trying to get back to the rules thank you very much i appreciate your comments but i'm going to ask you to not continue unless you have something as we spoke about um i i think you are being a tyrant and i'm just trying to follow the rules uh the rules are i have a right i have a three-minute right to speak my mind on subjects and if i believe that the carson city curriculum uh in our schools are teaching critical race theory

021i have a right to say so and i have a right to say if it's under the jurisdiction of the school district exactly right i i'm i'm talking to the parents not you because i know every single one of you you don't care but i i am calling for the parents to hear me heed me and and uh make a stand against the curriculum uh in the school which it promotes sex education critical race theory and uh is not teaching really the basics and thank you your 30 minutes is up yeah and you you violated my the fact that i had three minutes here and you violated my three minutes so i i asked joey i'd have to ask you to start please president uh to the extent the comment wants to go into the

022curriculum of the school district that would be within right the purview of of the school district's authority or jurisdiction um talking about the availability of a school that's not within our jurisdiction obviously is without it but the actual district's curriculum and what's being taught is is within so you would be fine to give an extra you know two minutes or whatever for that thank you i'm surprised you said that anyway currently our government schools teach the common core curriculum which is poor quality indoctrinates our children in critical race theory which is socialistic and communistic in its its views it is pushing the lie that america is a racist nation there is no critical race there is no critical thinking and the expression of judeo-christian values which our country was founded upon are not taught the

023government schools are robbing our children of their innocence with the teaching of sex education and hedonistic ideas parents must stand up against this garbage and if it does not change go to al alternatives like legacy christian academy thank you for your time thank you any other public comment heather co and i'm here because my child asked me to be i came here two years ago starting out wanting to know what everyone was going to do about catching our kids up and they are behind no one has ever done a thing so i want some answers and instead we're going to let a bunch of socialist freaks in the legislature from clark county dictate what our kids have to take my child wants out of his homeroom or whatever garbage social emotional learning uh there that's

024being taught which was an absolute joke so far this week all they did was talk amongst each other and get on their phones because no one had it together which is not a shock but i want to know why that time isn't being taken for kids to be able to catch up if they're going to be forced to sit in a classroom together with nothing but whatever weird crap you know they want to teach with whether it's critical race theory or that gender identity crap okay which goes against science i i want to know what you're going to do about math and about reading which our kids are failing in so if someone could please get back to me it's been a couple of years so that'd be nice thank you thank you heather any

025other public comment seeing none we'll go ahead and close public comment for the night thank you we'll move on to agenda item number eight this introduction of john warren chartwells dining director and a brief update on chartwells food service and the carson city school district nutrition service program this is for discussion only and i think we also have elizabeth snyder and i believe is adrian here also okay thank you do you want to go first yeah is that cool okay go ahead good evening mr president members of the board it's great to see you all thank you so much for giving us a few minutes of your time so first off i wanted to start with a um a huge feat that we accomplished last year district wide we served over a million meals to

026our students now to give you some context in a typical year we serve 600 to 650 000 we not only did that but we did that while being critically understaffed like the rest of the district so i to say i'm proud of my team is the understatement of my life um so just very very very proud of them for doing that also quick side note athena and adrian are passing out some parfaits for you guys to sample one of our breakfast items that we serve our students another update this year you've heard on the news i'm sure that all students eat for free in the state of nevada this year and that's wonderful it's one of the things i've been most excited about this year we don't know if that is going to continue because

027it's due to state funding and it wasn't actually passed until the end of june this past june but the school nutrition association both our local chapter and our national association is advocating for free meals to continue and i am going to be the vice president of our chapter this year the president is the head sorry thank you um the head of our division of the nevada department of agriculture is the president and that's both both of ours main advocacy is for free meals either nationwide or statewide so that's what i have for our program for general things but i also wanted to introduce john and athena and adrian so adrian is our district manager with chartwells john came on our team two years ago when we brought chartwells in as our executive chef and he

028did a wonderful job last august our dining director through chartwells took a job with the nevada department of agriculture and so john has been doing the job of two people for the last year in may he was officially promoted to dining director and we've been working so well together this last year i'm thrilled with the partnership we have july 5th athena peter started as our executive chef and she has proven to be friendly a very hard worker and a very quick learner so with that i'd like to pass it on to them for some updates with what we have planned this year can i ask you a question real quick before we go on yes and aj i don't know who to ask it to but with this this the students need for free you

029know great idea how does that impact our contractual agreement with chartwells supplying food i'm wondering if this is financially helps us or or does it really not make a difference in terms of how our contract is structured so really it's a great thing for everybody the kids get deep for free the district gets to continue to collect great reimbursement rates and chartwells gets to continue to collect our fee so it's a it's a win all the way around for everybody really um it's going to help drive participation which is fantastic because the more kids we can feed the better um hungry kids don't learn well so we want them to eat um it's really no different than any other year other than the state is basically going to subsidize the school district on the reimbursements

030we get so there's no change to the contract whatsoever um and yeah sorry president so the in in really kind of bottom line our concern over the last years has been that financial guarantee part so in in terms of that and the impact on it when the state is giving these these reimbursement rates that we otherwise would see from the feds for across for all kids while our revenues likely wouldn't be as high as they were last year they will still be much higher than normal especially due to increased participation so we would expect it to be another strong year financially because of that so the the the guarantee that that has been provided at this point is still the guarantee but i would fully expect that we'll we'll go beyond that are there any

031other questions before i do my little spiel um thank you for having me um again i'm john warring i'm the director of dining services for chartwells i'm basically your man on the ground here for chartwells two years here starting my third year with the carson city school district and it's been fantastic it's been a great lifestyle change for me um i worked at unr for like 15 years serving freshmen uh all the way up from a line cook to basically an executive chef there switched over to this k-12 division and it's a whole new world and i love it so much more than anything i've done in my whole life um now that we are no longer in so much of a survival mode that we're kind of crawling away from the coveted years i

032mean we can get out there it was great hearing all the stories about the meet and greets and people coming together and the smiling faces and the happy kids we as chartwells partnered with the school district want to build on that now that we can we've been working on a lot of things behind the scenes for the last couple years that we haven't been able to attempt just because of the restrictions and safety regulations and everything we plan to be out in the schools a lot more with some fun engaging events um food and nutrition education um just getting the kids excited about school meals uh letting them learn who the lunch ladies are what the staff is like just kind of bringing a lot more fun and joy into the cafeteria while still getting

033the job done in the time frame that the principals need and just we are definitely committed to meeting everyone's needs the best way we can financially and socially we have a couple programs that athena is going to be heading up now that i have a chef to work with me discovery kitchen is our main one that's going to be focused on education fun um just engaging the students and letting them know that what they're eating can contribute to their mindset and what does this what does this particular vegetable do for you other than tastes great so um we are still kind of in the planning stages we got some events set up for september um once we get some things rolled out i hope to be able to come back and kind of present to

034you um the great results of our hard work and showing you the happy faces of the kids that are going to engage in these programs with us um i'd like athena to tell you a little bit about herself and some of the stuff she's going to be heading up this year okay hello i'm athena peters the executive chef um a little bit about my background i was able to transfer out to this amazing company um i was in california i was working for bon appetit at google so i was on the campuses over there feeding probably like i don't know 4 000 meals a day so i'm used to this um but you know k through 12 is a little bit different for me and it's honestly i've been here for i don't know since

035july and i've got to meet you know the lunch ladies i've got to um serve at the schools already and it's it's been great everybody is just so nice and you know it's such a great program and i'm really excited to be a part of this team over here uh so some things that we will be launching this school year we have um discovery kitchen that we talked about we have a thing called mood boost and then we also have student choice so for discovery kitchen what we'll be doing is we'll be setting up um like a little pop-up area in like the cafeterias going in and during like lunch time and teaching kids like cooking demos introducing them to new fruits and vegetables just educating them and bringing a fighting experience into that and

036then for the mood boost which is really cool we have these six moods that um kind of relate to children it's a little bit more accessible for them to kind of understand but eating these certain types of vegetables or whatever it helps them understand like hey if i eat this it's gonna make me calm or if i eat this it's gonna make me happy excited um and it's really it's such a great program we have we'll have um like swag we'll hand to the kids there's like little like quizzes and stuff like that and kind of get them engaged and then we also have the next one is student choice so we will be bringing in like concepts to children in schools and giving them options to so it's like we'll be starting with like

037two to three concepts of different types of like restaurant meals and stuff like that and giving them a choice to vote on what they would like to bring into the school or into the menus and so they could try out new things and you know they have a voice and you know like hey like this is going to be on your menu so um yeah i'm really excited it's going to be a great year and i'm looking forward to it thank you and you know we're totally expecting all these engaging events to again boost participation which is going to just be a win for everybody so hi do i have that on i am adrian carcass i am the district manager for chartwells um i bring experience that i uh was a director for seven

038years so i have that operational experience but to kind of cap off what john and athena have told you it really comes down to i'm excited about the partnership that we have with carson city school district our mantra is happy and healthy and really it comes down to it's more than just food service we're here to make sure that what we do aligns with the mission statement for the school district because you can't tell me that if we don't do a good job in that lunchroom that students not going back into the classroom we need to make sure they're ready to learn and so we've got to keep them happy and then also the other the other part of it it's just beyond feeding them because we're feeding the mind teaching them what they put

039in their bodies makes a difference and helps them in that education so it is a truly exciting partnership that we have here i was kind of teasing elizabeth a little bit we really want to showcase what we do and keep that happy and healthy going all the time for all students so thank you thank you very much any uh questions comments from the board laurel i was just going to comment um i spoke with several moms of quite a few children each and they were so appreciative of the lunch services being available and all just talked about how much their kids enjoy it and i know my my two youngest um just really enjoy it as well and i i having had having still have five boys um they're much happier when they're fed and

040that that's a good thing that this is available and and we know of course that kids can't learn if they're hungry and they have difficulty focusing so thank you for what you're doing joe go ahead now we're happy to have you guys in the school district and chartwells you know we were intro i was introduced to chartwells during one of the nasby conferences a long time back and i always thought you guys did a great job and so we're happy to have you here so thank you for that i think the challenge we all have and obviously chef you have is that balance of you know health talking healthy food is great we want to provide healthy options but you know when it comes right down to it a kid just wants a chicken nugget

041or something and so what's your strategy to kind of balance that so that we're you know i'm guessing at the end of the day you're if you have to throw something away you're throwing away a lot less chicken nuggets and maybe salads but how do we balance that so one thing i've learned in the first few weeks is different schools and obviously different children have different tastes so what's really great is the kitchen managers that we have they get to understand what these children like and then you know we'll get a list of like hey they like all these vegetables or like they don't like these ones so we know not to put them on the menu and we kind of cater to those schools so what we'll be doing we have an amazing selection

042of menus um obviously we'll deal with seasonality you know what looks good colorful um but yeah you know we have a huge array of things that we could be pulling from but mostly mainly the kitchen managers our biggest resource and catering to those schools specifically yeah go ahead stacy so i can't tell you how excited i am i can't believe it's year three already and when we projected you guys came on with your guarantees and you're supposed to be year five when we actually broke which i think you guys and the legislature and the governor for that i know that has something to do with it but i know that when we were when we went through the rfs you guys talked about the discovery kitchen so i'm really excited to see how that goes

043because it was exciting then i'm a little worried if you're going to let them pick out the menu because they're going to pick pizza or chicken nuggets four to five times a week um i did have the chicken and the corn dogs at eagle valley middle school and they were pretty good i was i was pretty shocked i'm not a corn dog person so but i am excited because it's my last year and i worked on the nutrition getting the vendor for three rounds so um i've seen a lot and done a lot and so i'm really excited to see what you guys do with with this year and and i'm excited to go out with a zero transfer to nutrition services but just one more thing how are you getting out the word and

044getting the participation to everybody knowing that it's free so so far i have put out three parent squares this year if we see a dip in participation bless you we all put out more we also have it on the website it was an immediate release at the beginning of the school year i know dan davis has put out a few media releases i'll have him do stuff throughout the year on social media that's so far my plan do you think you'd be able to reach out to those that aren't taking participation i know it's a lot of time so i don't want you to spend a whole lot of time there but to find out why they're not if it's free i know some of the kids have different dietary things and things like that

045and you guys have a great website to find out what exactly those dietary things are that are on the meals but if there's a chance you know with all those fair moments that you have you can find out that would be great and the other thing is there were a lot of people at these meet and greets and there were tables of different vendors and different groups in carson so that might be one of the ways and we talked about that at when we had the group meetings about going to the open houses and the things that people are actually there and sampling because it's really good i gotta tell you um the food and that the participation is free so something to look at going to them instead of having them come to you

046yeah thank you i actually am going to the high school's open house next monday i wish i could have gone to more but it's been a little hectic lately but yeah that's also part of the discovery kitchen and the mood boost and everything and the student choice is a huge one for getting that feedback from students i've heard one plan that we'll probably put into play during the student choice of actually going to the cold lunches and saying hey why why don't you want to eat our food because the corn dogs are good but they're also low fat and whole grain [Laughter] they don't taste like it they're really good thank you for all you guys do we do appreciate it and it is important for our kids to get any other comments or questions

047i'm excited about these initiatives i think it's exciting that you guys are going to educate us the students why they should eat the vegetables i know that they may listen to you guys because they did not listen from the parents oftentimes i know my daughter didn't she's like no no thank you but they will listen other you know to other people so i think it's it's exciting and um and i would agree with previous comments i think the parents need to know about these because i think it's you know working together and and getting the parents excited too about what their children are receiving in school so thank you any other comments from the presenters see and then oh go ahead i would just like to say that again we're extremely excited about the opportunities

048that we have available to us this year with the nutrition department and the partnership with the school district and we fully intend to take advantage of them and thank you for having us tonight and thank you for the presentation and thank you for all the good work you're doing we appreciate it we'll go ahead and move on to agenda item number nine presentation of the civics test results for the carson city school district class of 2022 and this is for discussion only and we have cheryl macy and is brittany here brittany is coaching her first volleyball game of the season so she didn't want to miss that there was a lot of students or i saw all the cars on the market line yeah um next year we'll do this in june so she can

049be here she was very disappointed she couldn't be here okay president varner mr fueling members of the board for the record my name is cheryl macy thank you for having me here tonight i am here to give our annual update on the government's civics test that is required in accordance with sb 322 just some background as i mentioned the civics test is required under sb 322 which came out of the 79th legislative session you can review the law on the link if you'd like to but i'll go over some details on that students are required to participate in the civics test for participation only for graduation and it must be modeled after the u.s naturalization civics test so we actually use the same questions and students can receive a waiver for special circumstances for example

050some of our online students did receive a waiver for for because of covid and not wanting to come in but for the most part students take the test and i'll go over that data in a minute just a little bit about the u.s naturalization test there's two parts to it there's an english portion and the civics portion and it's the civics portion that we are required to model our test after so i went over this last year so i just folded the part in yellow that's specific to what we do we give the assessment in government at the end of the semester we have 50 questions we had to decide what would be a passing rate we kept it concordant with the naturalization test which is 60 percent but most of our students do quite

051well on it and are far above the 60 percent and we do make it 10 of their summative course grade because we do believe that this content is important and in case you're curious i just put in a couple sample questions that come right from the naturalization test and this is our data for this last year and we had 502 total students taken by the way i want to say thank you to dr medina who did all the leg work for gathering this data um 430 completed the assessment which is 6 of our students and so i really want this to be a hundred percent next year so we're going to work on that the main group that surprised me was our students in jumpstart and that was a group we did not capture they

052take political science 101 at wnc and so we're going to have to make sure this year that we capture them with this assessment um of the other students who didn't take the the assessment it was a mix of out of district transfers so we'll need to make sure we capture those students online students and then students who didn't take government because maybe they're going to be graduating the following year even though they're seniors that year as i stated our goal is 100 participation so we really need to work on that last year we had 84 participation and i was expecting this number to be quite higher so um brittany and i will be working with carson high school pioneer and jumpstart to make sure that we're getting all those kids assessed with that passing rates

053um out of the 424 students who took it all but six past they do get an option to retake the test if they don't pass but again they only have to take the test for graduation so they don't this isn't a proficiency exam they don't have to pass it to graduate but that have been said of course we want all of our students to pass it and i'll give you a minute to look at that data cheryl i had a question for you sure i understand the jump start and some of the other factors but our online students how come what was stopping them from participating and taking this exam it's a matter of bringing them into the school to take it they do so much of their work you know at home these are

054our fully remote students these aren't kids who are you know taking a few classes here and they're online these are fully remote i thought we had captured more so that's definitely like i said a process that we need to work on and brittany and i've already had some discussions about that cheryl did i hear you correctly they don't have to pass this exam to graduate they do not they have to take the exam to graduate per state law we include it as 10 of their grade for government what happens the kids who did not participate they went and graduated or they yes they graduated this is an issue of a system and not the student's fault so of course we're not going to hold them back so we're working on a way that we can

055track this more systemically most likely an infinite campus so that we have it locked down next year good questions thank you um before i thought i had one more slide i'm sorry so any questions any questions laurel no i just want to come commend all the women young women who took the test yes yes 100 passing rate any other comments or questions right now okay thank you uh cheryl thank you for uh the presentation and the information is good for me to know and uh i did pass the two questions i got the right answer glad to hear that thank you i remember one year though they made us take we had like a 10 question test and i was like i was thankful you didn't do that to us but uh thank you sheryl

056thank you okay we'll go ahead and move on to agenda item number 10 adoption of the carson city school district test procedures and security plan for the 2022-2023 school year as required by nrs 390.275 for possible action and dr ricky medina will be presenting thank you yeah good evening board thank you for having me yeah ricky medina for the record i'm presenting tonight the district's test security plan and i've been here for 15 years now and we've pretty much have been doing the same test security plan for most of those years and the thing that i would stress is that when it comes to our state assessments especially the ones that are required for accountability there's not a ton of flexibility the us department of ed basically tells the nevada department of ed you could

057do whatever tests you want to give at whatever grade levels you want to give them as long as you do them at these grade levels and follow these very narrow rules when selecting your tests and so really where the tests that they choose are the ones that are available the ones that are most appropriate for our state and for most of them they do a really good job of sticking to our nevada state standards and with that with each year that we give these assessments not only does the u.s department of ed and the state get better at kind of providing clearer policies clear procedures but so do the test vendors so we have this test security plan but for every assessment that we give there's a test security there's like a document a manual

058for the teachers to follow a manual for the site administrator to follow a manual for the district to follow and so in here this test security plan really closely resembles what you would see if you looked at the state plan there haven't been any changes since last year any substantial changes we've already actually have started testing under the elementary and middle schools elementary started with their map test this week middle school will start with next week we got permission from the nevada department of ed to use their training videos with the old dates on them because they they haven't had time to update the new dates but they said pretty much that's all that's going to change all of the content's going to be the same in our test security plan we kind of lay

059out kind of what procedures we're going to follow i would say the the most important thing for the community parents and staff to know is that our state assessments they're not optional and the feds require that the state gives them the state requires that we give them and schools are held accountable if we don't meet our participation requirements and for most of our assessments that's kind of a big task we have to test 95 of the school population we have to test 95 percent of every subgroup that you could think of whether that be an ethnic or racial subgroup our special ed students our ell students and so and if the group's smaller than 25 that means there's only one kid in that group that we can't test in order for the school not to

060have their star rating held hostage the test security plan kind of lays out for our district our site administrators kind of what we expect of them we meet once a month throughout the school year we are back and forth with communication we have our group on sharepoint where we kind of share what we're doing back and forth because one of the big things that's in the plan is we have to provide training kind of over and over again to our teachers so the there's one kind of initial training that kind of covers like general test security but then for every assessment that we give there's additional test security training that they have to take so for the smarter balance assessment that's like one set of training for all the tests but then you also have

061the gnaw assessment the science assessment for are we to access for ell learners there's like four or five different tests and they all have different training requirements so it's important that teachers get not only that first initial training like this is kind of the basics about testing but then they get that individualized training as they get closer to each assessment in years past we haven't had any major like testing violations we the state hasn't had to come in and do any investigations because tied to this testing a teacher's license could be put at risk or a school principal's license could be put at risk typically what we see during a normal school year there's usually like three to five students that have cell phone or smart watch violations and the vast majority of those aren't

062during testing it's typically the test is over most of the kids are done the kid forgets that he's in the classroom he's not supposed to have his phone but then he pulls it out to text mom to say that i'm done and that's like a major like test security thing because the kid might take a picture of the test while they have their phone out so those irregularities usually result in the kids score not testing even though they're already finished with the test so there's typically like three to five of those at the secondary level at the elementary and middle school level it kind of depends on the test with the map assessment it's typically issues with kids logging out of the test early and then they have to log back in and depending on

063what button they click sometimes it's easy to log back in sometimes it requires them to call me and for me to do something special behind the scenes and there's usually just a handful of those and then the only the the biggest kind of test security things that we've ever had is like maybe the fire alarm goes off or somebody isn't aware that there's testing going on in the building and they get on the intercom and start to make announcements but usually we're trained up now where it's like if something like that happens everybody knows to like yell at whoever's making the comments to stop it used like when we first started we keep like cell phones in the back of the room and a cell phone would go off and instead of just turning the

064phone off a teacher would let it ring for like 30 minutes but we've gotten better at those types of things and with that i would leave it open to any questions that you might have any uh questions from the board any comments i i've seen none but i just know that uh the teachers are pretty well aware of how important test security is and i know that you guys provide a lot of information to them and so thank you for your hard work and i'm wondering on the cell phones could they just be like you said turned into the back of the room or when the kid takes a test haven't just put them up if you would i don't know i know you're not gonna search them but yeah so typically what what happens

065now is either there's some teachers that collect the cell phones like they kind of have their box and it's like put your cell phone in and at the end of the test you can get your cell phone back otherwise they're left in backpacks at the back of the room or outside of the classroom and usually there's like one or two kids that they're going to keep their cell phone like they see it as kind of a bigger than test security that's for them that's kind of their safety and so they're sometimes they don't tell us that they have a cell phone right well thank you i seen no question so this is for action so if somebody wants to make a motion don i move that the carson city school district board of trustees adopt

066the carson city school district test procedures and test security plan for the 2022-2023 school year as submitted in accordance with nrs 390.275 we have a motion by dawn second by laurel since this is an action item is there any um more discussion about the motion see a nun any public comment reference this motion saying none i'll go ahead and call for a vote all in favor say aye aye all opposed nay thank you motion carries thank you very much for the presentation thank you and i was going to bring dinner but then i saw i was after nutrition services so dinner would be nice but thank you we'll go ahead and move on to agenda item number 11. the annual review of the carson city school district policy and regulation safe and respectful learning environment

067free from bullying or cyber bullying for which no changes are proposed per nrs 388.134 to include and outline a safe voice anonymous reporting system used to report threats to the safety and well-being of students and this is for discussion only and mrs fuson is presenting thank you thank you president varner tasha fuson associate superintendent at services for the record um as president verner uh already read we have a requirement under state law nrs 388.134 to review our district's policies that provide for the provision of a safe and respectful learning environment on an annual basis so this evening's presentation will serve as that review in your packet you have a copy of both the policy and regulation we are not suggesting any changes um to the policy and regulation so we'll just walk through it as

068we walk through it very briefly if you have suggestions that you would like us to entertain for updates please let me know and we can go back and make those changes in taking a look at policy 543 obviously our policies typically start out with a policy statement so in accordance with nrs 388.121 and 388.145 the carson city school district strives to provide a learning environment that's safe and respectful in which persons of differing beliefs races colors national origins ancestries religions diverse gender identities or expressions sexual orientations physical or mental disability sexes or any other distinguishing characteristics and backgrounds can realize their full academic and personal potential the board of trustees and the district declares that any form of bullying or cyber bullying is prohibited and not will not be tolerated so that's basically the premise

069of our policy the rest of it kind of goes into the requirements of state law for us to provide for training for staff really around bullying and cyber bullying prevention as well as suicide prevention intervention and postvention before we move into the regulation which really gives us more detail are there any questions or suggestions about the policy any comments questions concerns say none go ahead please okay thank you so heading into the regulation regulation 543 really part a just gives us a really in-depth definition of bullying and what bullying it means under state law so again that's quite long i'm not going to read that i know you've all had the opportunity to review that we haven't updated it in the last couple of years if you look at page two part b goes into

070again another definition of cyber bullying and what that means for schools part c talks about education and training this is really an important part of our regulation so we are required to provide training to students and staff and board board members regarding raising the awareness of bullying and cyber bullying we are required to train staff in particular on how to report bullying in cyber bullying we train students on how to report if they're being bullied or cyber bullied or if they notice or see anyone being bullied or cyberbullied part of the trainings that we have provided this year this is where my powerpoint comes into play these are trainings that we have provided via absorb so with our we work with pool pack as you know one of the benefits of working with pool pack

071is that they have a suite of um trainings available to districts on an absorbed platform so it's uh it's a asynchronous learning so our our employees all the way from transportation bus drivers nutrition services teachers parapros clerical support staff trustees you all get them are are then assigned to these tasks so in the spring of 2022 um we launched the suicide prevention intervention and postvention module as well as bullying and cyber bullying for any of our staff members that were new this year they were also required to do that as part of new hire but this way we were able to get some of the training done for our staff in the spring instead of putting it all in the fall we also have an online training for mandatory reporter i think as you all

072know we are all as educators and working with students mandatory reporters if we witness a student or hear of a student being abused or mistreated and or bullied or cyberbullied we're required to report so there's training on those requirements we also have a module on autism or autism spectrum disorder what that looks like for students an awareness piece that's a new piece that's come to fruition as of recent legislation and that is because many students with autism are those who are on the autism spectrum are not often necessarily served in a resource or a cls classroom right there's a whole spectrum for students who have autism and many many many of them are served in a general ed environment so that module goes over what those characteristics and treats are so that we can better

073serve our students that might have that disorder we also had a module for making schools safe for lgbtq students this was new this year and it's specifically around just being able to be respectful of people and their individual differences and making sure that no matter what you know what characteristics our students have that they are at school and they feel safe and they feel secure and they're not bullied or cyberbullied so that's what that that uh module is about and then we also have a module on students experience inspiring homelessness or children in transition also known as mckinney-vento so again the same thing helping our educators understand the telltale signs so that sometimes our students don't ask for help or sometimes their families don't ask for help so if we reach out and we're proactive

074about it we can make sure they get the services that they need so those are some of the trainings that we did and have been offering or actually not even offering it's required because i do have to report to nde what trainings we do and what our participation is so every year i fill out a report says we train this many administrators this many teachers for our students students in particular receive training on suicide prevention intervention and postvention type activities in their health classes so in seventh grade and ninth grade and then every school does a week of respect which really focuses on so all the way from elementary up through high school which focuses on again getting along making sure that you're an upstander that you report bullying if you see it again providing

075for a safe environment for all students is really the point of that if you move to or transition to page three of our regulation part d talks about complaint procedure and resolution so again we actually have and regulation here for any of our families that need some guidance with the step-by-step process is for reporting the fact that we are required to keep confidentiality there are very specific guidelines from the state on what the investigation piece needs to look like on page four notification of all parties involved there's time frames that are attached to that process if you look at page five it goes into interviews so all parties must be interviewed parents again must be notified timelines for investigation if we get a bullying or cyber bullying report we have to investigate within two days

076and we can request in a third day if if because of the nature of the large nature of that bullying investigation which they are extremely time intensive because you're having to interview all parties we can request from the family of the victim and the victim the self-a day extension so that's what the timeline part is we are required to do a written report of that investigation whether it was founded or unfounded and we are required in number eight to follow up so not later than 10 school days after the report we have our social workers that will do um follow-ups with the victims and actually even with perpetrators so if a student was in trouble and put out um we do re-entry plans with them to make sure that we we're addressing the the i

077guess the core of the reason why they're acting out um on page six it goes into action what actions may be taken as well as discipline and the important thing to note is in a bullying and cyber ruling investigation if the if the claim is found founded uh that we as a district have to um make provisions on behalf of the bully uh victim the bleed victim so in other words if for instance you have two students that are in the same class and one student is bullying another student and it's made the decisions made that we need to split them up it is the victim that gets to stay in that class and it is the student who is doing the bullying that gets removed those types of things so we take the victim

078into account with any discipline action that we take to provide for their safety we also are required to write safety plans for victims of bullying and cyber bullying so that we can make sure that they know who they can go to on campus if it's a situation where they're avoiding a specific area because um you know when they're walking home and they might have to walk through um you know an area that they they don't feel safe in we work with them about how can you you know avoid that area what is another route home those types of things can we get you a bus pass so we do safety plans for students um and then of course those students who are actually the the students who are doing the bullying or the cyber bullying

079then we actually take a restorative um stance with them in terms of yes we do discipline but we also try to make it a teaching um a teachable moment so we do work with our school social workers we we joined um we're working with jpo this year to do some tier two interventions within our schools with students um so that they can come in and work with us hand-in-hand with small groups of students to try to help them learn alternative behaviors instead of acting out in that kind of a way and um so those would be positive things just for people that are listening might know no what is g oh sorry juvenile probation office i apologize they're wonderful partners to us and i'm actually they'll be doing some um like i said groups with

080our seventh graders and eighth graders um this year and um meeting with them in social studies classes to talk about legal matters and um things like curfew things you wouldn't think about maybe as a parent from the legal perspective to talk about to students about what you know that that they're required to adhere to and what um what will occur if they break those laws or you know go against those laws what a citation means what that looks like so it's going to be good thing and in addition to that then they're going to come in like a set and do some small group targeted work with some of our kids who are maybe frequent flyers to our discipline offices and might need a little bit more intervention so i'm excited about that that's going

081to be new to us this year um at the bottom of page six again it goes into the disciplined pieces um on page seven uh there are some exceptions at the bottom of page seven so um you know for instance a student who's enrolled in pre-kindergarten if the behaviors are just through measures to intended to modify the behaviors there are certain things that's not appropriate to discipline in other words that's what it's saying we handle those in a different way and also bullying this policy when it comes to discipline does not pertain to like adult against adults so sometimes we get that this adult is bullying that adult not that we don't intervene and address those issues we do it's just addressed under a different policy regulation than this one is referring to and then

082of course it talks about record-keeping and how we have to keep um what kind of documents we have to keep so i have a few other things to chat with you about and share with you about but are there any questions on this regulation piece or any idea or questions or suggestions that you would like me to add any comments right joe sorry for my clarification i might have missed it so this this document this policy pertains to student against student bullying and cyber bullying we have a separate policy for adult to adults yes there are separate ways that we handle like employees if for some reason you had adult bullying a child or child bullying adult how was that handled so the reporting would be the same and we would ask students and families

083to report in the same manner and that is you just call a school administrator and or you can report via safe voice which we're going to um i'm going to show you in a minute and then we investigate that it's simply that rather than the processes like the 24-hour notice and you know the it's it's managed in a different manner it's still it's still investigated it's still communicated to those families but then when it comes to if it's an employee an adult employee discipline is much more specified by their contract so is it a warning is it a reprimand is it admonition is it suspension from work you know so we have to take both parts into account back to the slide you have up the education and training so this is this is all

084dated 2020 too so this is like the new kind of the newest stuff we have on education and training we so these are the modules we just assigned so the top two we assigned two staff in spring so i think we launched them in february and we gave them until june 3rd to complete them the other ones we launched right on the first day of school and they actually have until december to complete them and we still have modules on like when i was in school on you know folks bullying people due to their various ethnicities race that kind of thing that's still part of this whole thing yes that's part of the global one the bullying in cyber bullying the reason for the lgbtq and autism one is because new updates in state law

085i think it was the 2019 a legislative session it might have been 2021 but the point is is that um they required for us to do additional training for those specific protected class areas okay that's where i was going thank you [Music] now that we've kind of defined it with our policy although there weren't many changes do you see us reporting more just because there's more knowledge that certain things are bullying i think um we have had um i don't have the exact numbers but we have seen an uptick in bullying and cyber bullying reports simply i think it's more due to safe voice so we'll chat a little bit about that but um it's really given families and students an opportunity to have another avenue to make a report or express a concern versus

086trying to call a school administrator so i think it's because of the accessibility that we've seen um that kind of it's not it's not a huge uptick but it's being communicated more we actually had a real decrease in in bullying and cyber bullying investigations during covet as we were out and students were you know working remotely that's an unfortunate thing because what we know is actually there was just as much if not more bullying going on but i think because the location of the students for learning was in the home they didn't think to bring parents and students nothing to bring the schools into the in into the solution of that um so we saw actual declines and then we saw it rise back up again last year i just have a real quick question

087too then do you see more incidents of physical bullying or is it more uh now cyber bullying so you know that's a that's an interesting question and the only reason i think it's an interesting question is because we've recently realized that even fighting we now have to do like if students get into a mutual combatant uh fight on campus we are now going to be required to do bullying investigations for those which we haven't done that in the past so we might see if you add those together physical might be more than cyber bullying in terms of what's reported i don't believe it's it's more prevalent than actually i think what is occurring i think cyber bullying is probably much more prevalent than physical bullying but that's not necessarily what our data is showing us

088unfortunately we still have families and students that don't necessarily report all of the cyber bullying that's going on you know and that's just from an educational standpoint that we really need to work with our students on you know it's it's not okay to feel like you're anonymous behind the screen and therefore be saying unkind things and um you know sometimes that disassociating with that you know person versus seeing them face to face it's harder to say something mean to somebody's face than it is to be able to type it in or say something online but we don't have it reported as much however if you look at the fights that we have on campus or the physical altercations or even verbal altercations they typically are tied to cyber pieces as well there's obvious in most

089cases there's online bullying that goes along with it it's very common thank you so in addition um this next piece this is just a snapshot of the front page of our we do have a bulling cyber bullying manual for administrators in our district we do train all of our new administrators on this manual we've taken everything that was written in nrs and required and put it together so you'll see for instance the table of contents here so we have put together a resource for them so what are the investigatory processes how do you have to report what are the procedural requirements we put together a list of all the forms that you know can be used um how you do an interview how you do reporting how do you do a safety plan how do

090you that kind of thing with resource list or different resources within the community that can be students and families can be referred to so we do do additional training other than just those modules i was showing you on from the procedural standpoint of how you manage this as a building administrator and what your requirements under a state law so that's an example of that we also for families and community members that may be listening i want you to know that we do have access to safe voice and bullying and cyber bullying materials on our district website so this is a copy of our front page of our of our district website currently this is my favorite page or by the way favorite picture of new superintendent fueling absolutely i love that picture that guy in

091the front looks suspicious i told him i think this is a fantastic because that is just how welcoming superintendent fueling is um but if you click on departments and then you click on educational services um one of the drop-downs is how to how to be and stay safe we had a lot of conversation about whether or not we should change that but we figured many folks might not associate safe voice or bullying cyber bullying because sometimes it's beyond bullying and cyber bullying that you want to report so how to be and stay safe in school we thought it was more general and maybe would make more sense for families if you were trying to look for things around safety this is not the only place we have it so i'll show you that in a

092minute but when you click on that here's what a copy of that web page looks like and you can see it has to the left hand side additional subpages for defining bullying and harassment how you contact your school social emotional learning as it relates to that's the prevention piece being nice to others you know how to solve conflict versus um being in arguments safe voice has its own page being an upstander being an upstander really is about um not being a bystander and watch what's going on it's about you need to step in and intervene not necessarily physically but you need to interview intervene by reporting right so if you witness something so we talk to our students about that if you're witnessing somebody being bullied or cyberbullied you need a report so that we

093can intervene and then um we also have on the bottom of our very front page so this was under mr fueling's picture at the bottom of that front page there is actually a link to safevoice as well it's difficult to have all these things front and center on you know a webpage when you have all that information so we also have for every one of our schools our schools have links and information about safe voice on the individual school website as well so they live there in addition to that in every office in a within our district so including at the district office but all school offices we have pamphlets that have been put out on bullying in cyber bullying by the nevada department of education in conjunction with safe voice so this is the

094front page it talks about bullying the law how to report what your rights are this is the back page what is bullying and how to report it and what happens next and it has information again how to get a hold of safevoice this is also available in spanish so all of our students again in their health classes that's kind of where we have a tendency to focus the direct instruction component at middle and high school regarding bullying and cyber bullying as part of their health curriculum so all of our students will be receiving these resources as well in those classes and again for families they are in pamphlets physical pamphlets in the office if they want them and or on our district website so you can actually download this information these pamphlets from the website

095so that's how we try to just communicate other than in classes [Music] so are there any other questions comments or questions from the board i do have a question so this information is not available to parents through parent square these templates um these are not apparent square itself i mean we can send them out via parent square but they are on the website and on school websites i mean we could send them out that way as well as an attachment i think it would be very helpful okay especially for those parents that do not look at the website absolutely we can do that i was just thinking along that that would be like an annual hey here's for your information here's here's the procedures that's not a bad idea absolutely i know there's not a

096lot of room on the front page but i really would like to see that marker go to the front page the one be how to be safe okay because i have to click three or four times to get there or scroll to the bottom i know and i don't think people put that together with safe voice yet i don't think there's that connection because there's a lot more other information in there than that it tells you how to report bullying which includes safeways but i would really like to see if we have room to talk like on the quick link piece quick link piece i think it's more important than some than the air quality index that we have on there yeah absolutely and i do agree with the i think that brochure should go

097out because it does detail everything and it's a really good good process i i see no other comments right at this time but i would just say that i think safe voice is a good vehicle for kids to use and i think that kids are starting to feel more comfortable using it and i think it's a i think it's a great thing and i support it 100 and i think the rest of the board does also thank you well i appreciate your suggestions we will definitely take those into consideration and send out the parent square and i'll see if i can get mr davis to to bump something from the quick link so i i appreciate your input and thank you very much for the presentation absolutely thank you i appreciate it and we'll go

098ahead and move on to agenda item number 12. discussion and possible action to approve a 2023 legislative session bill draft request from the carson city school district to allow specific flexibilities and reduce workload in state reporting as allowed by nevada vice statute this is for possible action and superintendent fueling will be making the presentation thank you president varner and good evening trustees this evening before you and for this item is i i don't know the the language of it is is a little strange to me so i i guess i will present it as it's like an intent to file a a bill draft request because this is sort of like an application um to file a bill draft but it says local government bill draft request but this isn't really a bill draft request

099in terms of how i think of a bdr so this is something that is as far as i'm aware the district has never done or at least not for quite a while and for districts that are in counties less than 700 000 in population and i'm sure you can't imagine who uh that would exempt we are allowed to file one bill draft request for the legis during any legislative session this request has to be filed before september 1st which is quick approaching and i i do apologize because i wish um i would have maybe had a little more time uh to talk through this a little bit with you before we came to this meeting um just to talk through some of this and and make you aware of of the intent here um and

100then by november 16th we must pre-file our bdr the the bill um with the legislative council bureau from there assuming everything has worked out okay we will have our own bdr going into the legislative session this i guess first off i i don't like taking credit when it's not due to me um so this idea i i came across in i don't know i think it was at a conference i was at a long time ago in the state of texas they have something they call it districts of innovation and and basically um in an attempt to try to allow districts some more local control and and some more um flexibilities from what can be uh very strict parameters for how we operate they allowed this they allowed districts to if they had a plan

101and if they're boards approved to basically exempt themselves from certain portions of law and when this started in 2015 it was a brand new idea and already just where are we seven years later of the 1064 districts that are in texas 889 take advantage of it and and one of the things i think that's important within that is when you look at all of these plans have to be posted on their websites they're all easily accessible they're all posted on their texas education agency state agency website as well they're not all the same there are some commonalities within them but i think to the point that if you're talking about maybe some local flexibilities given the situation that you are in um you will see different districts doing some different things trying to utilize this

102to best suit them and ultimately provide the best experience for their students so with that if you look at this application again i guess that we've put together it doesn't ask for a lot of detail in the intent but i but i think it's just i just want to read this because i think it it's important to the overall understanding of the idea and so districts all have locally grown ideas on how to innovate to improve the services they offer to make themselves operate more efficiently and to problem solve their current situations often some of these ideas conflict with state law that was written for a past education landscape and do not allow for districts to deal with local issues in a nimble manner this bill would allow districts with with board of trustees approval

103to exempt themselves from portions of nrs regarding licensure and hiring class size scheduling evaluations reporting and processes most of these are found in nrs 391 and nrs 388 however they are spread across many many many many sections of those chapters and so i i didn't lay out every single little part of that i i feel that if if this were to be approved tonight and we submitted this to lcp they likely would kick it back and say look we need some more definition to what you're actually asking for here which is entirely reasonable um it's just i want to make them do that if they're if i don't have to do it i would prefer not to because that's probably a lot of work but that's okay um but but truly the the intent i

104i think over eight years that i've been here and mrs fusan has been here mr sadler's been here longer spencer not long enough but clearly there's been a lot of frustrations we have had over the years and you've heard it in many different ways and many different formats and many different places and if there were more challenging times in in some ways then right now i i am not sure of what those are um regarding staffing and concerns about employee retention and those sorts of things um so trying to i guess find reasonable ways to [Music] make our work better and and take away some of the fluff that maybe doesn't need to or that there maybe isn't such great purpose to in terms of what we're really trying to do here i think it's

105worthwhile to at least attempt that and so that that's really where um this comes from so one of the things i i wanted to point out um and and just kind of i guess some examples of what we're talking about here but um one of my frustrations i know ed services frustrations has to do with class size reduction um clearly um this is an important law that has been around in nevada for a long time it started back in i think i think they started measuring class sizes and air tracking class sizes in 88 and i think it came into full implementation in 91 so basically over 30 years um there is a lot of reporting behind the scenes quarterly that happens along with this program and in the event that let's say your your

106class size ratio limit is 22 and you have within a school you have three maybe a class of 21 22 22 and a 23. well your class of 23 violates right so um districts have to in those these quarterly reports notify department of education that you are over by one and you have to tell them um what what you're gonna do to to try to fix it over time and um are why why it happened in the first place and what you're gonna try to do to fix it over time and it's effectively for these situations it's almost always the exact same answer um you know if you're over by one in a classroom you're not necessarily going to hire an retire new teacher for one kid right that's not a sustainable response and well

107if you had maybe if we just had money money money money and it wasn't an issue maybe maybe we would and so that again it's not a sustainable plan of action to fix it in that manner so um the other frustration with that is so uh mrs fuson's department will put together that report send it out and there's invariably many classes across the district that have that we have 150 elementary classes that will get sent off to the state board of education of all elementary classrooms in the state of nevada file for a variance because they have gone over their class size requirements 93 percent and that is not a new number that has been it's been hovering there for quite a while the whole reason class size reduction happened is because most classes were

108over these class sizes in the state of nevada the state board of education has never in 30 years ever sent it back saying no that's not okay so so why are we doing this i i understand i i don't think any of us would argue that um that larger class sizes are a good thing right we want to keep that within reasonable margins so that teachers can operate and do their thing and manage your class and deal with the grading and all that sort of thing but it's one thing to have like this goal and to work hard to stay near there but it's another thing to kind of get slapped on the hand but it's not really a slap every single time and all the workload that comes with that so that would just

109be one example and that's one that has frustrated me a great deal over the years and so one of the things as an example that you could potentially say um you know we recognize the importance of keeping class sizes small we don't recognize the importance of doing all this reporting so we'd like to exempt ourselves from the reporting piece something along those lines and i i don't clearly i would say that nicer in in an application or in what we're submitting but um some other kind of just general ideas of things we you could consider we could consider as we would talk about this further um within evaluations that happen we are very kind of strictly um we have to follow strict rules as far as evaluation process and how often staff have to especially

110teachers have to be evaluated in the system the evaluation standards and system that we use for that and maybe we um give given the the work being done in the district maybe there would be a better option for an evaluation system than any pf and napf i mean that that's a big deal right so um but if we have something that really makes sense in terms of what we believe makes sense for us with where what our tools are and how we want to move forward and kind of judge our progress maybe there's something that would make more sense for us again how often we have to these evaluations maybe if a teacher is rated highly effective maybe they don't have to be evaluated again for a certain number of years beyond um just again

111some some flexibilities given certain situations and that would relieve some some workload there um there could be some requested flexibilities and what licenses are allowable you know and and some of this gets back to the staffing situation and what is okay within say you know within the middle school level who can teach which classes within the middle school level depending on license sometimes there's issues with we have a a k-6 license and so k-6 license can only teach sixth grade at the middle school level but maybe if they're in the middle school already there's some allowance beyond that and i i don't know that that's it but again just if we're having trouble finding teachers maybe some flexibility there even if it's temporary would would be beneficial teachers coming from out of state so right

112now it takes the department of education about eight weeks to process a teacher license and we've had this come up i think i think with three out-of-state teachers that moved to the area that their license i i believe at this point is still in process with nde it was maybe two weeks before school started that they had applied to the district and we're very happy and thankful that they did but it's kind of a strange circumstance because they still have this other state's license that maybe a license nevada recognizes in terms of reciprocity but in terms of timeliness they don't recognize so we're waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting um and we we find ways to deal with that but it's not ideal and it would just it would be a lot easier if

113um we didn't necessarily in in those terms if we have someone from a state that nevada already recognizes for reciprocity they have a valid license it's still it hasn't expired could we just recognize that from the get-go and then just you know we can wait for them they still need to go through and get the nevada license but it's not something that holds up the process so um again there is there could be a lot more to this i think there's more for us to to work through and and really a lot of it comes down to what we are dealing with locally um and some of the creative people that i have around me with ideas of things that maybe would help us do what we do better and so that that really is

114ultimately the intent of this is to allow districts to request those flexibilities if if we are bringing ideas to you in in some form of plan um and it is something that seems to make sense to you and we have good support within the district for it to at least try something out that we would be able to do that so i don't have any more to say i'd be happy to answer any questions you have any comments questions from the board joe i got to stop this going first thing it sets me up sometimes on the hard stuff you always raise your hands i do i just like just a little bit though um i think in theory this makes sense yeah so i'm i'm i'm for it i just want to make sure

115like when we talk about the reporting evaluations and the process behind the things we need to do i think there's a lot of room to streamline and simplify and if the state could ease up on those in some you know reasonable manner i think that makes a lot of sense i just would want to be careful when we you know when i first read it licensure and hiring and class size i mean those jump out at you because we have a staffing shortage can't find people all these things but and i don't know what the answer is for sure but raising class sizes to uh you know pick your absurd amount but some certain amount or bringing in somebody to teach a class that you know we're already doing that that just has a high

116school education they can come in as a sub does sacrifice our ability to educate students to the best of our ability and we run into doing these kinds of things and then of course getting beat up about it by members of the public that you're not educating our kids you're not doing this and in some degree they're right we you know what what can we do we don't have enough money we don't have enough people and gee our solution is we're going to load up these classes with 42 kids and see what happens and so i somehow i want maybe if there can be some language in there and i don't know how to just somehow address that that we're not going to run amok with this but we've got a serious situation that needs

117you know that that needs some latitude here and i don't have an answer so i'm fumbling for words but you know we're uh i would just hate you know and i'm not saying we can't be educating these kids because we need to be but you want to make a statement to the state and the feds close your doors and say sorry we're maxed out maybe it's time you help us out for once so you know i don't know what the issue is but i think we you know we got to be careful we don't jump too far but i'm a big fan of easing on the processes and and you know the paperwork and stuff involved i think it's excessive thank you trustee castillo um what i would offer so if if i understand this

118process and mr russell if you think i'm misstepping please feel free to step in um so i i think with this process this is by law i think the last time that i would need to come to the board regarding this at all i i would very much expect to be coming back to you to show you what we come up with and hopefully that would provide some some better definition i i think the more eyes on this we have the better we clearly don't want to um you know push boundaries too far we want to make sure folks are comfortable with what the outcome is and you know maybe we get lucky and we get something passed i i don't know but i think it's uh it's worth a shot so so i guess

119just so you're aware um again i i don't know that we necessarily have to come back with it but i i have every expectation that once we have something drafted um we would be coming back just to share and make sure i mean ultimately you're your approval of this to me is an approval of the entire process i i don't want to you know seem like we're trying to not involve you kind of through that because i certainly would appreciate their approval um and don't want you feel like you're being left out in the dark after we get past this point laurel go ahead just to i was thinking is is our our district isn't hiring substitutes with just high school licenses was that just clark and washoe or is that statewide just for clarification

120i don't know i think we can i don't know that we have a couple of emergencies oh okay okay okay so anyway it is statewide then i was thinking it was earlier um one of the things i'm thinking because i do i agree that we we want to keep class sizes small but we also want to we recognize the scheduling um sometimes at the secondary levels you're going to have a little bit higher number of kids in a class because somebody wants their orchestra class and somebody wants this class and so it works that way and so i think anything that we can do to help take out some of the reporting requirements or minimize that to make sure that we've got less paperwork but i'm concerned um when you first read that last sentence

121this bill would allow districts with board of trustees approval to exempt themselves from portions of the nrs i think maybe if we add a qualifying statement after it after you say regarding licensing hiring class size scheduling evaluations reporting and processes um that you could exempt yourselves from those portions upon presentation of an innovative alternate plan because some of it we might i don't know and and maybe talked i i think um i think you said you talked with mary perzinski and perhaps that would she would have some better idea but i think somehow when drafting this to let them know we don't want to just you know throw the nr you know just say we're not doing any of these things but hey here's a way we think we can do this more efficiently we're

122going to like maybe we're going to limit class sizes to no more than this number which is gives you a couple more students and then we don't we're not going to report it because you guys approve at all anyway you know some something like that that would possibly work i don't know but that's just something i was thinking stacy so when you're talking class size reduction and i know we get that report in our consent agenda every quarter but is it tied to the money for class size reduction that piece that we have in our budget so it's it's not anymore it has they've taken the state has taken all that money and like most of the what they call categorical monies all these other kind of state grant type items they whatever the total

123amounts that were funded prior to this last session they slightly cut them and then put them into the new funding pot and said hey we just put all that money in there but unless you actually went through all the documentation you didn't realize that they actually cut a lot of that funding along the way so it that's really not the answer to your question so it is no longer tied to the number of what it used to calculate is what they thought were the number of extra teachers you needed based on ratios that you had in 1988 and as if as you're trying to improve those ratios from 1988 to get the number of teachers you needed to get down to say 22 kids in a classroom that's what you were getting funded for and

124even then it wasn't really enough to cover the cost of that teacher but it's beside the point but um anyway going forward that is no longer the case they just took that that portion of the money and put it into the larger pot and that's it and then i think it's great that you're taking this initiative i mean we've done different things with um when assemblyman crainer was in there and he got dondero loop on there so i'm glad to see us taking a stand have you talked to our our representatives that are in our district to see what they think about this um not not specifically about this we um i had a meeting with uh pk o'neil a couple weeks ago we were more talking about just the the larger pcfp funding concern

125and well i i guess in some way we we talked about this but not specifically about this just in terms of the workload the the additional workload on staff in the schools staff outside of the schools all the required trainings mrs fuson had that list up earlier and you know that that i i think is reflected in this is tr trying to find some some way um to either not not necessarily get around it exactly but to show that we're already doing it or that there's some redundant redundancy that we don't need to do or that maybe there's a better way to do it and i think you know i i would put our folks in this district against any with being creative and trying to find better ways to to do things i know

126mr russell has a question or a comment not a comment maybe just a little thought to help it along with this item before you tonight is really the identification of a problem uh that needs a legislative address or redress and it's basically alerting the lcb that there is an extraordinary circumstance that is exacerbated by extra reporting and that extraordinary circumstance is becoming less extraordinary and so at this stage i think what superintendent fueling needs is permission to go out and seek redress and that redress can come in the form of hitting all the provisions of 388 391 and everything else that touched these or it can have one extraordinary situation bill but having this application approved is a first step in the process that would allow superintendent fueling or dr pruzenski to go talk to

127the legislatures because their ears perk up when they hear that there is a bdr available that they can they can back and help pursue and have lcb fat them out so at this stage the the minutia of what portion is going to be actually in the bill is a little probably premature what what superintendent fueling needs is permission to go out and seek legislative redress for a problem that's been identified thank you for your comments okay yeah we'll go ahead and uh no more questions comments we'll call for a motion i move that the carson city school district board of trustees approved the legislative session bill draft request to allow specific flexibilities and reduce workload in state reporting and direct to superintendent to file the necessary documents second wilkie any uh board comment reference the

128emotion seeing none any uh public comment reference this motion on the table seeing none i'll go ahead and call for a vote all in favor say aye aye aye all opposed nay motion carries thank you for thinking outside the box and moving forward with some innovative ideas thank you thank you next item is item number 13 approval of the consent agenda and this is for possible action and i think everybody's had a chance to go through that and read it so i'll just go ahead and call for a motion i'll make a motion i move that the carson cities could district board of trustees approve the consent agenda as submitted i'll second it second by joe okay um any uh board discussion reference emotion any public comment reference the motion seeing none i'll go ahead

129and call for a vote all in favor say aye aye all opposed nay motion carries agenda item number 14 is uh just informational items um i think everybody can read those also and this is for discussion only uh there's a couple events coming up that you may be aware of you may want to be aware of and attend but those are all listed in here so we'll go through those uh item number 15 request for future agenda topics stacy just um have we decided when we're having our or are we even having a joint meeting with the board of supervisors sorry um trustee wilkie so i believe historically those meetings and covet kind of threw everything off uh historically those meetings i think occurred in january and june so it wasn't exactly six months apart

130but about so we're if we would stay on that that path it would be i think a plan for a january meeting um you could certainly try to push it up i just i know for us late november and december it gets a little busy with intermediates so it was brought up by sheriff furlong that at that meeting he was going to talk about school safety if it were waiting until january i kind of like to have a mini presentation or something before that because that has been a big concern about a lot of the parents that i've been talking to with all the stuff that's been happening so if if we aren't going to have that presentation until january i'd like to see if he would at least make ours earlier we can do

131that i'm sure the sheriff would be willing to do that any other topics such as the topics okay saying none we'll go ahead and adjourn the meeting at 8 54 p.m i thank you for attending and all the public for listening thank you [Music] you