School Board Meeting - Workshop Session 11/8/21

001are we ready to go well welcome to this evening's workshop session um we will get the meeting started call to order next we have our roll call all board members are present except for jennifer wills williams she is attending virtually watching watching the meeting thank you next please stand and join us in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all next on the agenda we have presentations we have a series of presentations that melinda stevens is going to share with us dr beresford and members of the board it is my distinct pleasure to introduce the carmel high school students who were recently recognized by the college board's national

002african american recognition program national hispanic recognition program and national indigenous recognition program each of these programs identifies students who have demonstrated academic excellence while working to create pathways to college for underrepresented students students eligible for this program have a gpa of 3.5 or higher have excelled on the psat and or have earned a score of 3 or higher on ap exams the students recognized tonight can include this honor on college and scholarship applications as a way to help them stand out during the admissions and scholarship award process carmel high school takes great pride in presenting these students to you through the following video presentation [Music] [Applause] thank you well thank you and we're extremely excited to to recognize our students and well congratulations to all of our academic scholars next on the oh and i

003do want to just point out there was one particular academic scholar whose mom happens to be on board so we are very excited to have kaya thank you laila do you want to put a little plug in for your daughter and tell her congratulations i just want to pull a plug in for all the students that were recognized today thank you for your hard work your persistence it is noted and wish you continued success and your mommy loves you next on the agenda we have consent and in consent this evening we've got the personnel report claims and payroll may i get a motion on the table to approve consent so moved second second any discussion all those in favor of supporting consent please signify by saying i i motion carries 4-0 and i do want

004to just comment as well um jennifer williams is online she is listening but she is not part of the voting um the voting group this evening we won't have that we have a policy that we're hoping to pass next in our next meeting so then whenever we do participate virtually we will be able to have a voting voice but until then we're happy that jennifer is able to join us ann is going to be hearing some really interesting exciting information about our workshop topics which is what we have next on the agenda we have our mental health workshop topics and tonight we have ms stephanie whiteside who's going to be presenting do you have a which one is ours okay i didn't put it on here so do you have it in just give me

005a second okay go ahead and okay for those of you who are watching virtually we're having some technical difficulties and we will be starting the we'll be starting the presentation momentarily okay dr beersford do you have anything you'd like to share with the community maybe about your your beard well thanks for pointing that out um and i probably can't see it very well because i'll go ahead and do a you know exposure there there it is and uh i would apologize for the gruff or the scruff but it is november and uh now for several years it's been a tradition of mine to uh offer the no shave november uh challenge and uh what the challenge is is to grow a mustache throughout the month of november and earn your mo bro status which would

006uh be if you go for that mustache or you could join bearsford's band of bearded brothers and just go for the whole beard and uh and for those who are not participating it's not a problem at all we welcome support of anybody but the challenge is to bring awareness to mental health reduce that stigma that surrounds mental health and encourage folks who are struggling to reach out and and really we want folks to know that it's okay not to be okay especially in this season of pandemic we've seen up ticks and across the board kids and adults that have struggled some we've also recently seen some examples of olympic athletes and professional sports folks that have come out and and talked about their their battles with anxiety and depression in different settings and and also

007talking about the steps they've taken uh you know to get to recover from that and to and to deal with that and uh and they're encouraging others to do the same so uh i've come a long way since the very first time done this uh challenge and uh and i feel like uh uh you know we're kind of maybe turning a corner where mental health has gotten getting the same status as physical health and so uh so anyhow for all of you guys that want to get away from the razor uh this is your big opportunity and uh but uh so we'll be uh sporting the beard uh you know at least through the month of november and uh and then we'll see how it goes a lot of uh guys across the district are

008doing it they've taken a picture of clean shaven picture and we're going to try to get a picture when we're in full for full beard mode so uh but it's kind of a fun way just to bring attention to a serious topic and uh one that uh we really want to uh to just take it uh you know this this little bit of time to uh to acknowledge uh the folks that are struggling with mental health and it's okay and and let's talk about it and let's get the help that you need so that's it so i apologize in advance that your superintendent will be looking pretty pretty rough for for about three or four more weeks are you guys ready to go yes we are okay we'll hand it over to the professionals and

009looking forward to this workshop all right well thank you so much and i apologize for the delay there um and it looks like we're still trying to get it projected but i'll just go ahead and get started i know that'll get going here soon so it was just a little over a year ago um last year when we discussed that we had partnered or started a contract with extension st vincent to provide mental health services to our students and it was very timely as we've definitely seen a need with our students and in the community and so i'd like to share just a little bit of information about what we've been doing this past year and then what we're going to continue to do as well so looking at the continuum of services as we

010know it's not a one-size-fits-all for our students so we want to make sure that we have a variety of services and supports and programming in place that can address different needs all the way from those that might be more preventative and really just there to spread awareness to help with you know healthy coping habits bullying abuse prevention also some of our building buddies are mentoring looking at our culture and climate as well as sel and diversity equity and inclusion efforts all of this really helps support the whole child and starts to promote some of those resiliency factors that really helps them find a good place for them to be in to learn and then we start to move into more of our supportive restorative type of services with that we're looking at our mental health

011partnership making sure that we're making referrals as needed but also even internally looking at brief interventions so that might be you know two peers may have a disagreement and just helping them with some conflict resolution it may be somebody's feeling really stressed about a test and we're just providing them some support for strategies on how to manage some of that stress with our teachers it may be professional development on what resources are available for our students and how to make a referral if they feel that our students may benefit from one of those resources and then also our social workers and counselors providing skills groups that really just help develop those characteristic traits or really looking at those resiliency pieces and then also coping and calming skills as well and then we get more at

012the um the more intensive end here with the responsive services and that would be our crisis assessment so if a student has expressed suicidal ideation or threat assessments that might also include assistance with coordinating services at a higher level of intensity or assistance so a hospital referral referral to residential services but just also making sure that no matter what that referral or where that referral goes to that we're coordinating care so that when that student returns to our buildings they receive additional support and also you know we're just looking out for their well-being and making sure that we're making that transition as easy as possible and as successful as possible as well so our mental health referrals in 2020 from august to october 18th when i ran this data we had made five mental health

013referrals for mental health assistance and um much of that was we did not have that partnership fully in place yet we had just started and just started hiring um but we also saw across the board that there was just a lower amount of those referrals this year um just just this year from august to october 18th we've already made 99 mental health referrals and we are sending referrals every day and this does not include self-referrals so some of the information john will be presenting you'll see that number look a little bit different because parents are also able to call extension st vincent and make an appointment to have an intake for their students so these are just those that are social workers our counselors are referring with parent permission and then we did have last

014school year a total of 323 referrals and that was from that october 18th date until the end of school suicide risk screens right now are where we're really taking a look at what we can continue to do to support our students so last year around this time so once again that august date the beginning of school until october 18th last year we did 41 suicide screens and those are completed by one of our social workers our counselors who are trained in the salon in the columbia suicide screening process this year from those from that same date range we see that there's been 101 suicide screens and so that's just within a few months um i do monitor those we continue to screen almost daily and so one of the things that we're really looking at

015is just the the stress on our students and the day-to-day stress that they may be experiencing and how we can continue to support them through the transition as we know um through media and then just through you know reading uh different research articles the pandemic has been very difficult for many students and so and for many parents and adults as well in our community so we want to continue to identify strategies to provide that support and also we're just grateful to our social workers counselors and our partnership for all the work that they have done to really support our students and to ensure that they are aware of any risk factors and that they're responding to that and that goes out to our teachers and our administrators as well i do think with this number

016going up it does demonstrate that they are very much aware and that they are making those referrals whenever they see risk factors present which is very important for prevention and you know harm reduction so looking at moving forward we always talk about that we want to continue to address the whole child and so as we look at what we are hoping to provide this year for families and students we're we've started some workshops so a workshop series related to social emotional learning and mental health and in a minute i'm going to show some of those workshops we have coming up we just last week did a conscious discipline hands-on workshop where families were able to look at the experience of conscious discipline within the classroom we had some make and takes where they were able

017to recreate some of the strategies and tools that we use in the classroom and they were able to take that with them we also are going to continue to support referral and linkage to some of those resources that our families need as we come up on the holidays we know that there's a lot of services available and resources in our community and our social workers and counselors are really at the front line of linking families with some of those resources we've also started our social emotional learning parent advisory and so we have over 26 members on our advisory we've already had our first meeting and we're going to continue to work with our parents and just really hear their voice as we start to um or when we actually continue our efforts with social emotional

018learning and then we have also updated our social emotional learning and mental health web pages on our ccs accounts so families are able to go to those web pages and they can find resources there's some videos as well that are helpful and then also if they're needing a resource many of those resources are listed on the web page we're also going to continue to work with our students just to develop those you know internal coping and calming skills so helping them just with that goal achievement and goal setting but also looking at strategies that continue to increase motivation really support positive social relationships and those healthy coping skills we also are continuing to look at stress management skills and promoting not only mental health but physical health as well because we know that our minds

019and our bodies are very much connected and so when we are able to you know really you know regulate some of our emotions and recognize some of the you know some of the indicators that we may be feeling stressed we often can feel that within our body and so just helping students be aware of how the brain works and then how that influences physical health as well is so important and then with our staff we have started another book study for some of our incoming teachers who have not had experience with conscious discipline we also are continuing to do workshops for those who do have experience but just want to be able to share some of those tools and continue to grow their knowledge of conscious discipline we've also been doing um just working with

020our advisory so we do have the whole child committee which is um it is uh comprised of principals assistant principals some of our psychologists social workers and counselors and so just working together to continue to identify strategies and continuing to develop that common language and then just providing consultation as needed um we often are meeting with teachers or with principals just to talk about those strategies for supporting students and then also ensuring that you know that they're able to identify beneficial resources that are really going to help support their mental health as we know um with the current mental health needs it's made it's made it so that a lot of our mental health providers not just with extension but in the community are very strapped and so people are seeing weightless and so it's

021really pushed us to be more creative and think outside of the box as far as referrals and supports so looking at is it you know putting in place a mentor in the meantime going to be helpful supporting those academics if you know they're really stressed or really struggling and how can we continue to support them so that they feel accomplished and effective and so just identifying some of those those other you know dimensions of wellness that we can continue to support to help them especially if they're you know getting into those services but i am very grateful because with having those services we have definitely been able to get our students in sooner they're able to get an assessment and then they're able to get the support that they need so before i hand it

022over to john ferguson i'm going to share some of our upcoming social emotional learning and mental health workshops that we will have available for our parents so we're really excited this year we really wanted to focus on k-12 and making sure there was something for everybody and so we will be doing workshops all the way through to may our next conscious discipline will be in january and then we also are going to um in december be doing our qpr which is our suicide prevention that we do for parents who are interested in becoming a qpr gatekeeper and qpr stands for question persuade and refer and so that is the same training that we provide to our teachers and to some of our older students as well when it comes to just recognizing some of the

023signs and then being able to respond effectively all right well i am going to go ahead and introduce john ferguson who is the program manager of extension st vincent mrs whiteside would it be all right if we ask we pause for a moment and ask some questions sure absolutely first thank you very very much um i'm extremely excited about well that we have made such an effort to provide the services within the school day for our students and that we're providing professional development for our professional educators for recognition um and as well as i guess educating the student that it's okay to not be okay and to reach out um a couple questions that i have and i know other board members have for the the columbia so the the suicide um screening you had

024said there were 100 over 100 this semester so far between august and october 18th what is the age range that we are looking at i mean is it across the board is it middle school in high school is it predominantly high school so we do see it predominantly in high school and middle school but what i will say this year is we are starting to see a rise in those that are coming in from elementary schools and so i've done a lot of retraining because i have had counselors and social workers reach out from our elementaries and say you know i i've just had to do a screen and i haven't had to do one in a while and so just making sure that we are re-educating has been so important because we have seen

025um that we are doing more screens for younger students and then all of these opportunities for people in the community for board members for i guess everybody these caregiver and student workshops are these all located on the the sel page on the web page yes we continue to update it i'll be adding these specific dates and then that will be updated but we had our um our fall lineup is on there okay with the dates and then also a link for them to sign up as well okay thank you mike well i'd like to echo layla's thank you and thank you for what you do every day for our students we really appreciate it the question i have is can you explain to me what the screening is is there something that triggers it or

026how do we you know why do we get those numbers that's a great question and so all of our um well our teachers that teach grades 5 through 12 do receive training in qpr suicide prevention training and so what that does is it really teaches them on how to be on the lookout for clues and cues and so they we talk about situational clues so you know maybe failing you know a a class that they really were trying to pass or maybe they've had a recent breakup or they've experienced some type of you know environmental stressor also just being aware of verbal clues so that might be direct statements or indirect statements that may allude um to just feeling depressed or feeling hopeless and helpless in their situation and so it goes over each of

027those clues so that we're just aware and on the lookout and i always say it's really important to pay attention to frequency and intensity so you know sometimes we might have somebody who's just having a bad day but if we start to see that okay there's many situational clues they've also made some comments i'm a little bit nervous or a little bit concerned and so that's when i may need to make a referral to the social worker or to the counselor and at that point it really becomes a discussion between it could be a teacher principal and then that social worker and counselor and they will kind of discuss what they're seeing and then the social worker and counselor would meet with that student in order to provide that columbia screen and the columbia screen

028is very brief it's only like five questions um they are very direct questions and really what we're looking for is um just really the where they're at with their wrists so it might be something where there's thoughts and maybe they've started to consider some of those thoughts and that might be related to you know some mental health issues however it all goes all the way to having specific plans or you know specific ideas for how they're going you know how their mind is thinking how they're feeling and also just not really being able to see kind of the light at the end of the tunnel there don't know that i have questions but i just want to express um how i truly appreciate this work that you're doing miss whiteside um this work is extremely

029important emotional intelligence and conflict resolution is something that we coach on in the talent development and hr part of corporate america and so it's great to see that we're getting a head start on ensuring that students not only have that support at home but have it at school and so um i think that it's a combined effort uh you know in ensuring that kids have that emotional support and so you know we know students learn first from what they see at home and experience at home but they also learn from what they experience at school and with their peers and seeing that emotional health is important in all areas is just really invaluable the next thing that i will share is i just love that you guys are putting together or offering a program around

030mentoring it's great to see that students are learning the value of either being mentored or mentoring others in school because they'll carry that on in a college setting or in a trade and trying to learn from someone else right so i really appreciate that and then with you know covid last year and this year we expect so much of our students we expect them to constantly be willing to adapt and pivot and that that can be a lot for younger minds and so this avenue providing children the opportunity to say you know i need help or i don't feel the best mentally right now i need support i think gives them that outlet there and as a last thing i'll share as a person that went through breast cancer last year knowing that my children

031had that support at school to feel free to come in and say you know i'm hurting or i'm sad i just needed that so thank you so very much thank you my question um stephanie and also maybe dr o um we didn't talk about it a lot but i know that this year and stuff has been a ton of stress and anxiety for our staff and our teachers so could you talk a little bit maybe perhaps about some of the things we're doing to support them also absolutely so we are very fortunate that we do have um the employee assistance program here at carmel clay schools that and we also do have mental health therapists located in the wellness center which i can just say as a therapist myself and then of course as a

032mental health coordinator i think is phenomenal because as i talk with my counterparts elsewhere i know how how important it is to have that support available to teachers and staff and i do know that many of them have commented that it has been very helpful to have that available as well this year we did do mind-body medicine workshops for each of our schools so we did hold those after school and we had them online and we had them in person as well and i continue to follow up with that and plan to continue to do that it's a really really great workshop and then there's also an eight-week group session that really helps as well but um the big part of that or the big takeaway with that mind-body medicine is it's all about that

033work-life balance and really taking care of our needs and being aware of stress so sometimes we're able to take something off our plate but sometimes it's not just because of the environment the pandemic sometimes things just feel like it's coming at us and it's not necessarily something we can just say well i'm not going to do that but really how do we look at that how do we regulate ourselves and how do we do things and prioritize things that are enjoyable and things that get our creativity going and really just build that resiliency and so that was really exciting to be able to provide those to our teachers and have those available we started those in august and were able to get through them by october and so now i'm doing a second round of

034reaching out just to see if anybody else would be interested to continue doing that everybody who has attended has says has said that it has been very helpful and that they've learned quite a bit from that as far as just you know things that they can actually apply today you know that would really help them with managing that stress and stephanie did a great job the only piece i'll add to that is i'm very thankful to serve in a district where not only are we taking great care of our students but also our staff and also a thank you to mr mcmichael recently we just extended or added hours on for our mental health therapist at our wellness center to uh serve our staff members and our teachers and i'm very thankful for that so

035thank you to mr mcmichael also thank you both thank you all right well i believe we're ready for is it justin ferguson um john furrier john john ferguson thank you well i just want to thank stephanie for for including me in this discussion tonight and i want to thank the board for giving us the opportunity to share this program i'm really proud of what we've been able to accomplish in the first year of the program whenever you have a new program that you're rolling out particularly when it's a partnership and a collaboration between a lot of different um organizations um it's hard to get that momentum going sometimes and we have not we haven't experienced that um in this program at least from a treatment perspective so i'm excited to share a little bit about

036what we've done i do want to read this quote really quick because i think it encapsulates so perfectly the spirit and the philosophy of school-based behavioral health programming successful and sustainable school mental health systems do more than co-locate services within the school building they seek to integrate partners seamlessly so that the diverse complement of mental health supports and services are tightly coordinated to meet the student body's needs efficiently and effectively working directly with community partners broadens the availability of potential supports that can be available to students and families enhancing access to mental health care so let me let me kind of break that down a little bit for us there's kind of four guiding principles as we looked at building and sustaining this program the first one is that we want to have high quality

037care and you get that by hiring licensed staff who have gone to school and received you know excellent training to have the skills and have the experience and have the knowledge to be able to provide mental health support to students you want to hire experienced staff staff who have done this work who understand how to engage students and families you also want to make sure that you provide curriculum so that it's an evidence-based process and treatment program so that there's some intentionality behind it and then you want to continue to develop your your professionals so this is this is a component that we looked at obviously when we were building the program but it's really an important component of sustaining the program as well a strong multi-disciplinary team is really critical for the success of

038school-based programming so not only do we have our ascension statements and counselors we have bachelor's prepared behavioral health techs who provide skills we've got prescribers that can prescribe medication but we really see our team as much larger than that and so we're going to be working with the school social workers and the school counselors we're going to be working with the school nurses and the sros so that we can collaborate around what are the needs that the the that our students have and how can we best meet those needs and then the third guiding principle is that spirit of collaboration um and that's that's really the component that i think is is that magical component that makes this partnership so strong in in many mental health interventions or treatments you take your child to an

039office it may be located 30 minutes away you've got to wait with your child they're going to get great care and then you take them back to the school there may be very little collaboration between that professional and what happens in our school-based program in a school-based program we can talk daily with the school social worker we can talk with the teacher frequently certainly parents are a lot more involved in school-based programming because parents are involved in schools a lot more and available so that's that's really a critical component in making making this program successful we have dedicated time that we set aside to to work with teachers school administrators school social workers so that we can really provide the best care to our students probably the most important guiding principle though of this program

040is that it's student and it's parent driven there are a lot of services that we can offer we can offer skills support in the classroom outside the support or outside the classroom we can provide individual therapy group therapy family therapy there are a lot of different services that we can provide it's really going to be the parent and the student saying this is what's going to work for me and for my family obviously i'm going to protect you know private information but we had a student recently that i was talking with one of our counselors about who got services last year for about three months in the spring and this is a child who had severe anxiety every day it was a fight to get the student to school the mother the father they were

041really wiped you know and there were lots of physical symptoms upset upset stomach headaches this kid was really kind of pulling in and not making a lot of those social connections and so the school social worker talked with the parent and said hey we have this program would you be interested in maybe talking with one of our counselors to see if this might be a good fit for you so the parents spoke with our counselor got the child into services we started doing some individual therapy we connected the child with one of our skills techs who could do some classroom work to some skills work and we we kept seeing these incremental changes you know school got a little bit easier to engage test taking wasn't as anxiety provoking at the end of the school

042year the family decided hey you know we're going to take the summer off we can see families and students in the summer but this family decided to take a break well about three weeks ago three or four weeks ago that student you know came down the hallway and she was checking in with her counselor who she hadn't met with since may and shared with her how well she was doing and she said i enjoy coming to school now i look forward to coming to school now and i've made a new friend and so that's really i loved it i love that story because i think it's a great example of what can happen when you've got the parent and the student and the community and the school system really partnering together to provide these services

043it's also a great example of it doesn't have to be an enormous intervention this kid did not need two years of intensive therapy to meet their need within a few months they were able to engage some conversations and build a relationship where they were able to make those advancements um so that's that's that's one example of some of the work that we're doing to get into a little bit of the program operations the referral process comes through the school social worker and so when the school or when a parent identify a student who might benefit from services they'll have a conversation and then the school social worker will then work with our team to make that linkage and to make that referral we also want to be open to you know families and students might

044need different resources and so part of that assessment part of that screening is to really find out what services are going to be best for that student is it going to be school-based work or would it be beneficial to link that student with something outside in the community that's really a conversation between the parent and the school counselor to kind of determine what makes the most sense also during this time we talk about insurance and benefits you know everybody has different types of insurance and insurance will cover different things and so one of the things we found over the last year is that we really do want to spend time with the family talking with them about what their insurance will cover because that's that's how we fund these services for the most part um

045also we talk about medication service linkage so currently we have about 20 percent of our students who are connected with an ascension prescriber and so it's within this referral and intake process that we explore if that's something that could be helpful to the student and then school placement and coverage currently all of our schools have ascension staff counseling staff located in in those schools and we're really proud of this because i think when we started the program we weren't sure how quickly we would be able to cover all of our schools and so over the course of the year as we've hired in new staff and placed them in schools it's really been a priority to make sure that at some level every school would have some coverage um and then consistent ascension in school

046meetings you know it's it's very important that you know we're collaborating with our school partners and so many of our many of our teams will talk daily they'll have daily huddles or they'll have weekly meetings or they'll have monthly meetings where they can collaborate and talk about the needs of the student and then we're in a constant state of program assessment and development and so we're always kind of looking at you know are the interventions that we're providing effective and really meeting the needs of our students and if we need to make changes we can do that here here's a few pieces of data that i'd like to share um currently since the program began we've served over 400 students we've served over 4 400 therapy sessions since students and families began and actually this

047morning knowing that i'd be coming to the board meeting i wanted to get the most up-to-date information we've we've provided over 5000 therapy services since the program began that's just in one year that's that's a real huge number and i i don't think when we started a year ago we really thought we would be able to meet that level of intervention so quickly we've provided over 3 800 care coordination services and what these are these might be skills services where our skills techs are working one-on-one with a student it also might be collaboration with the parent so if the parent wants some information or wants to be included in some aspect of the treatment that's that's what's included here as well i mentioned 20 percent of our active students are receiving medication services through ascension

048prescribers and we have a great linkage process to make sure that if a student could benefit from a higher level of care or medications we can get them connected quickly our staffing we currently have nine licensed therapists and seven behavioral health techs we do have some open positions we have four open positions for licensed therapists a behavioral health technician and then we're also looking for a clinical supervisor sharing a little bit of our outcomes you know when we look at you know an assessment of the program these are some of the things that we look at so we want to look at functional outcomes you know how is the student functioning in school how's the student functioning in the home what are some things that they have identified as goals that we can help them

049achieve student and family perception that's really important to us because from the very beginning we're sitting down with our students and our families and we're asking them what are your goals what do you want to get out of this experience and how can we help you meet that so these are not goals that are driven by me or a teacher or even a school social worker these are really goals that are driven by the family and by the student saying these are the things these are the barriers that are in my way and this is what i'd like to focus on obviously grades and attendance are outcomes that we can look at as well we find that you know many of the kids that we're working with after a period of time in services you

050will see an improvement in grades you will see an increase in attendance obviously that's not the only factor that you want to look at when you're assessing a program but these are some of the things that we do look at to help us identify the success of the program and then finally just some program success and barriers you know student feedback you know when we talk with students about what is it about this program that you enjoy you know we're hearing i have some place i can go to to talk about solutions i have somebody else that i can go to who's a caring person who i know i can trust the counselor feedback from our own team members one of the things that they have noted a lot has been the collaboration with the

051school system as well as the partnership with the parents many of our counselors have years and years of experience working in school-based programs and very often the feedback that i get from our counselors is i've never worked within a school system where the parents are more engaged and more involved than ever in this school system and that's an enormous indicator of success when you're working with a kid you know to be able to work with the entire family to have parents who are engaged who want to know who want to be involved it's a huge indicator of success for our students so it's a it's a wonderful piece of feedback to get and then school feedback i think the feedback that we get from our school counselors and our school partners is that it's nice

052to have another resource within the walls of the school that we can connect our kids to it's wonderful that we have a resource within the school where the parent doesn't have to take the kid out and miss school for half a day or an entire day based upon you know where that appointment is you know often with our appointments they're 45-minute appointments or maybe 30-minute appointments you can get the kid you can provide the service and the kids back in the classroom doing what they doing what they need to be doing so it's um it's wonderful to get that feedback and then finally some parent feedback another another story that i want to share with you about a kid that we were serving this is a kid who actually was doing pretty well in school

053however at home the parents were really really struggling both parents are professionals take a lot of pride in the work that they do work very hard very very busy people and they started having these conversations with some of their teacher partners about i just i i don't feel effective as a parent i feel like i'm i'm not giving my kid all that they need and i'm really worried about how it might impact my my daughter in in school so the school social worker the teacher they they said well hey why don't you talk to one of our counselors and see if that might be something that's beneficial and so one of our counselors they they started working with this family and very quickly they moved from doing some individual work with the the student to

054doing some family work and two weeks ago the the dad called our counselor and said you know i want to tell you they were doing some some structured reward system at home and some positive reinforcement and doing doing some things at home and the dad said i just want to give you feedback that for the first time in a long time i'm actually enjoying being a parent and i feel like i'm pretty good at it and this was something that they hadn't been feeling for a very long time and so they they wanted to pass this along challenges to our program so i think workforce shortages is definitely something that we think about and we talk about a lot we do have open positions i think nationwide we know that there are workforce challenges and

055so we're always trying to look at creative ways to make sure that we have the staff that we need to be able to provide the services that we want to provide to our students so that's definitely something that you know we're thinking about and talking about a lot and then the other challenge is just insurance and reimbursement there are lots of different insurance payers and some insurance payers you know have really great mental health benefits and then others may have high deductible plans or they might be out of network or there might be a lot of rules around reimbursement and so one of the things that we've really discovered that i think coming into the program i probably didn't realize i would be spending as much time talking about and educating about insurance as we

056have but you know it's well worth the effort because when you are able to kind of work through those barriers and get the kid into services get them the services that they need um it's it's really great to see kind of what can happen for our kiddos and that's all i have if you have any questions i'm happy to to take them well john thank you for being so thorough i will open up the floor to questions and then i have a couple of myself mike i guess first a comment i'm i'm really excited that we've got coverage of all our schools i know when we started this process we were trying to lay reasonable expectations out there so to me that's great news um and then second of all i just really want to

057thank john and stephanie dave woodward dr bearsford all of our staff because this is an important thing and i really also want to thank our community who supported the school safety referendum which is a key driver in allowing us to do that so um and i know jan you said about parent involvement we have an awesome community here um and it shows what their willingness to pay and it shows what their willingness to be involved so thank you thank you well john one of my questions has everything to do with i guess the workforce challenges and for our students consistency with a therapist and a counselor is very beneficial so i'm wondering what does that look like what has our turnover been and have we been able to be successful with having a a reliable

058resource for our students yeah well it's you know it's definitely been a challenge because you know i think we we have not been a hundred percent fully staffed yet um we've been close but what that has meant has been we we've kind of been required to to shift some of our staff to different schools or instead of maybe just being at one school you know our staff are split between a couple of schools um and so you know you you do have to be you know communication is the key when the when those kind of when you have those challenges because you need to make sure that the school social workers are aware of who's coming into the building you know what are their needs how are they going to be working with with the

059kids we did a lot of planning going into this fall year because um we knew we had had a little bit of turnover over the summer and we kind of anticipated that we might have a little bit of turnover in the fall that's not uncommon and so we really wanted to kind of think through how do we get people placed in schools where we're not going to have to worry about if if we have a hole or if we have an opening that we're not going to have coverage and so one of the ways we've done that is we have multiple staff at all the schools so we have a skills tech at all the schools and then we also have counselors who are covering covering all the schools and so in the schools where

060we have had turnover we've often had a behavioral health tech who's been there to kind of provide some of that consistency between the program and the school it doesn't happen a hundred percent of the time but we're really trying to once we've identified a counselor for a specific school we really want to keep them there because they they learn the culture of the school they learn the staff they build those relationships with not only the kids but but the team at the school and so we don't want to constantly move people around um so that you have to go back and relearn that relationship thank you louise yes so um how are you ensuring you have uh diverse staff to support a diverse student body that's right so that's that is a great question and

061i think um ascension you know diversity equity and inclusion is is a value that is is really strong at ascension it's built into their policies and practices it's built into their their hr makeup and so whenever we have a position that's open you know that's that's something that we're looking at um we've got a bilingual counselor we could use more bilingual counselors because you know we we have a lot of kids and families who could really um benefit from having that that relationship and certainly families that are bilingual i think that's that's something that we're looking at as well to make sure that we're inclusive thank you any other questions katie um mine's really just a comment i'm so thankful this is a time so much work and it i mean it happened years ago

062i love it when we were just as a board talking you know our strategic pant lane which we're going to talk about more tonight too about how this was important to us as a district and you know we may have started gotten the ball rolling but then it was like the administration and then stephanie your team and um it was it's just so amazing to be able to see it all to come to fruition and when when i see those numbers and i hear those great stories you know if it was just if it just helped one kid or just one family like all of it was worth it and i know that there's so many more than just that one so thank you so much for all the time effort that everyone's put into

063this because our families and our students and staff are definitely seeing the results so thank you i think it really does speak to this community though because i mean you can you can refer a kid to a counselor social worker out in the community you can you can put counselors in schools and refer students to go see them but if you don't have the entire community kind of rallying around and supporting this you're not you're not going to have the success that we've seen and one of the things that i'm very grateful for is that in all of our schools you know the from the school principals to the social workers they've they've really shown a commitment not just in their words but in their actions they've welcomed the program they've supported the program they've

064marketed the program it's really clear that they see this as a value to the students um and and that's that's really been a real key component of its success thank you very much dr beresford do you have any follow-up i'd just like to kind of echo some of the words of the board but this is a dream come true i mean i remember my first interview with carmel clay school school board it was talk to us about mental health and uh and also you know like mike had mentioned the school safety referendum our community said yeah we want to support our kids this way and then to hear the number of kids that have been i mean what was it 5 000 sessions and one of the big one of the big biggest benefits from

065this program is it reduces the barriers to to kids getting the help they need and because they what you described john was that you know they don't have to leave school go someplace else and of course this is just an option for parents to use but same time it's it's a very it's a lot simpler and i think the consistency of the help that the kids get with their sessions this is fantastic if you would have asked me do you think this would be going full force helping every building in 2021 i would have said i don't know that's pretty you know that's pretty ambitious this has been going on all year and so uh big kudos to both of you because you can't do that without a partnership that works and a collaborative partnership

066that works also i'd just like to uh you know the front end what stephanie talked about it's been a lot of hard work to get everything coordinated to address the needs of the whole child and to get the training and the and the pieces all the pieces together and uh not ended up being a great hire she went to work in a hurry and uh and got so many things going to support our kids and you know that whole you know kind of wrap-around service is that finding kids what do they need and how do we get it to them and and how we can coordinate our efforts so that we don't we have some consistency across the district not a good thing here and a good thing there a good thing there but we

067hope we have some consistency it's not a simple task and uh saying i just really appreciate the work that's been done to the benefit of our kids and i know i use this word a lot i'm going to use it some more tonight but one of the things you look at as a as an educational institution is that what are the barriers to engagement we have a great educational program and the only thing that can keep a kid from from growing is to not engage and not all of our kids are engaged and so that's a constant you know constant thing is how do we keep engaging our kids well mental health services learning skills things that may not be academic but by learning you know how to calm yourself all of a sudden you're

068calm and you can engage back into the educational program so it's all pieces together so kids can learn and grow and be good people and so i just really appreciate this work's been done what a great what a great workshop where we got to see a lot of the different pieces and so if you look at these guys and you wonder why they look tired they've been getting after it and and that last piece i would just add is that this has been done over two years of a global pandemic and and we had no idea when we went on this journey or this adventure that uh that this would happen and what a need became apparent and we are so thankful that we had some pieces in place to uh to help our kids

069that way i also talked to you a little bit about one of the things we have to watch is recovery because you know we we know when the stressor leaves when this pandemic's finally over with the stress doesn't leave with it um you know we'll still have to some work to do so i love the things that stephanie's been doing with the it's the staff and uh even our t-shirt which was let's root for one another and watch us grow a beautiful picture of a tree and and just those types of things where we just care for one another care for our kids care for our families and john picked up on the secret sauce of carmel clay schools which is uh active engaged parents highly highly trained professional staff with big minds and big

070hearts and then and then the greatest greatest bunch of kids you'll ever ever hope to meet so and that's just pretty inspiring so i really appreciate it tonight thank you thank you [Applause] and next on the agenda well dr beresford we jump to you for our carmel clay school strategic plan update all right well uh typically we do our strategic plan in the summer you know a summer retreat or sometimes i would like to call them advances because we don't like to go backwards like go forwards but um you know a lot of things going on and uh we're finally to a point where we can share some i will call this uh the first draft of the three-year plan and uh and i would love to take uh resp you know the you know

071credit for all the stuff that i'm going to share with you tonight but i actually have to give that credit away right away to our you know to the three people those side of me and another three or four uh that aren't here tonight and uh what i wanted to do um tonight was to give you a really a brief a pretty quick and brief look at some components that we're looking at for our next three-year plan and what i asked the team to do was to give me uh you know what are we can finishing up on because this is year one and then also what are we looking at in the near future and what are what are your dreams uh for the you know for the third year i like three-year strategic

072plans because i think once you get out four or five years it can get out so far that we we can't focus in very tight um so what i did was i asked i asked all my teammates here to make us a slide in their different divisions and then i asked them tell me your why tell me the you know in the context of where what you're thinking on these so we're going to start out with um with our curriculum instruction and uh i've got amy driving over there so um she's going to probably determine the speed of this presentation because she's got the power of the button but uh we'll start with uh with curriculum instruction and uh and start with just the why and that's the carmel clay schools needs to prepare our

073students for the future if we're gonna break it down to one sentence one big rock that's that's our job our students need to be prepared for jobs that have been created they're going to need to tackle societal challenges that we can't even imagine and they need they're going to need to use technologies that probably haven't been invented yet so we'll need to equip our students to thrive in this interconnected world where they seek to understand and appreciate different perspectives different world views interact respectfully with others take responsible actions towards sustainability and well-being and then finally we want to ensure that all students have a rigorous and differentiated learning opportunities to meet their individual needs and have the necessary knowledge skills and abilities to be college and or career ready to be successful in the future

074so that's a very well stated thing but it's a very difficult task to to to to do but um i think we've got the staff that can do that so let's look at the the big rocks uh from um from our cia group and the first one is literacy and we've had some workshops on literacy and we're we've got some things to finish off there but the main bullets under literacy is just to engage our students in explicit systematic instruction and then here's the big big phs biological awareness phonemic awareness and phonics using a multi-sensory approach now i wish i could explain exactly what that means but i think i i got a cursory idea of it because i i know a lot about hooked on phonics but really what a lot of that that

075that piece of this is that um making sure that our kids are able to read and and if they struggle with that that we are responsive to it develop structures for response responsive instruction and literacy some of this came out of legislation that was uh pointless to try to identify kids that may have dyslexia but what would you say amy it kind of opened the door to really engage in the science of reading and how can we effectively screen students to see where they are and what they need and how can we get that to them right away and uh and so do anything else you want to say and i would just say yes just to make sure we're focusing on the foundations of um learning to read so really looking at making sure

076that they can decode the words and then they once they do that then working on the comprehension piece but really coming back to the foundations and that's what those ph words are those phonological awareness phonemic awareness and phonics and you know the number one uh predictor of success in academics is the ability to read so uh this is the fundamental fundamental of skills that we have to have move forward and then of course providing students with access to high quality texts that have are from a broad range of formats and genres that again i'll go back to that engagement world that when kids see themselves in books when they see and explore other you know cultures or pieces and they can experience other world pieces or when they're just something that's high interest to them

077they're going to be more engaged and uh and that's that's you know just just so important uh next big rock is mathematics and uh and here we go we're going to go on the math program evaluation and carmel clay school is this something i learned in the last three years has a rich history in program evaluation and that process has put caramel at the top i mean of of achievement for many many years and that met so the math program is up for evaluation along with that process we'll be developing the curriculum maps and then working on that coherent guaranteed and bible curriculum for all students so we have some consistency across the board adopting structural materials that support program evaluation recommendations and the curricular maps and then provide the professional development to ensure responsive

078instruction and mathematics and that responsive instruction again is you know when instruction occurs uh and kids get it that's not a problem but when they don't get it what are we gonna do about it and how we catch it up and the next big rock is assessment and grading so integrating assessments for as and of learning to ensure greater relevance for students and and a lot of times when we think of assistance uh excuse me assessment you think of uh grades a b c d e you know and we don't have any ease anymore i think but um but the uh the grade piece assessment is much more than that assessment is being able to sort out or understand what you know and what you don't know and then how do we access what we

079don't know and learn so that that's the assessment part that's it's very important important when we talk about responsive instruction of that assessment's what's going to lead to us to what do we need to do about it amy anything else you want to add about that did i knock did i nail it okay they're working on me to be a cia member at some point in time we'll see how it goes and finally something you've heard us talk about quite a bit and that is closing the achievement gap and uh and and uh i really appreciate this approach because we've talked about it quite a bit uh and that is to establish a strong data culture that ensures us that the use of data that that will use data to inform instruction and planning and

080the significance of that is in education i think we've collected data for so so many years and sometimes we've collected meaningful data and sometimes it hasn't been so meaningful but the most important piece of data collection is is collecting meaningful data and then how do we get that data in the hands of the people on the ground floor which would be our teachers and then and have them highly trained on using that data in order to make a positive impact on kids and so um so establishing that culture that you know this is the data and what we can do it and how we can use that instruction how we can do that in planning along with that eliminate gaps in opportunities and access and achievement for all students so that's what this introspective look

081to see you know is there anything any barriers that we have in place that we need to remove in order all kids can can achieve and then assuring that all students have a rigorous academic content and and that they have the support they need to be successful in that rigorous that rigorous comment content and so that is the big rocks the big fours literacy mathematics assessment grading closing that achievement gap in the world of curriculum instruction and assessment so any questions for me or amy in this juncture and i know i'm hitting you guys with a lot of information so uh you know this is going to be an ongoing process so tonight's uh just our first step into the pool um lots of questions uh where do i start so one point one there

082was talking about the math evaluation evaluating that program um i just wanted to hear a little more detail on how do we evaluate a math program um what's the steps we go through that kind of thing sure so as as dr bears mentioned our program evaluation process is a very rich process that we've used for many years and we do this every six years for our major programs in the um in our curriculum and instruction division and so with our math program evaluation we start by looking at what are what what is the current practice what is happening now we look at the data and we do a really a deep dive into the data we look at what are the best practices out there what does the research say about math instruction and then

083also we do some unpacking of the standards because the indiana academic standards they change every so often so the last time they changed their in 2020 um so where we unpack those standards in this process as well so this committee is made up of teachers of parents of administrators and at times students typically will have high school students on here as it works for their schedule and so we first look at what what are those best what's what's happening now in our math programming and then what are the best practices what needs to happen in our math programming and then from there they develop recommendations of what what is happening what needs to happen and where where is the um the gaps and so from there those recommendations are formed and then those recommendations are

084used for the next steps of our program evaluation cycle and our curriculum writing and materials adoption so we look at those recommendations then they help form the curriculum development of the math programming and then also looking at the materials adoption of what are those materials that we need to adopt that best support the curriculum and those recommendations made in the math program evaluation so it's that first step in a series of other processes that we use and how long does that evaluation period or process take so typically the evaluation period um takes about a year so we're getting ready to start this in january and so we'll start that process this january we'll go throughout this second semester and then we bring in the curriculum writing and the materials adoption in the fall but still

085working with the program evaluation and so then by the next spring we would be bringing to you recommendations for materials for math to be incorporated in the next school year okay and then how do we feel like we're doing with you know you're talking about the differentiated learning um and just supporting that how do we feel like we're doing that with our with how do we feel like we're doing with that um when we look at our class sizes yeah so really when you're looking at the structures that are in place to really differentiate it's not necessarily the class size that makes the difference it's making sure that you have the instructional practices in place to be able to put those structures in place for example a math workshop where you might have the students

086start with a mini lesson a whole group lesson that may be 10 minutes long and then you may break into smaller groups so you may have the teacher working with a small group of students you may have another group of students that are doing partner work they're doing collaborative work and you may have another group of students that's doing individual work and then you rotate through those different groups so the class size i mean a class size of 50 students you know 60 students that may be a little difficult especially because the room sizes are not that large but having a class size in our middle schools our class sizes 29 30 31 32 that can work and in our high schools as well those larger class sizes work our elementary class sizes are not

087typically that large but it's not necessarily the number of students in the class size but it's making sure you have the structures in place okay and the last question i have is [Music] how do we ensure we have a good balance of formative and summative assessments in play for students and and so as you can see on um you know the strategic plan in the math and then also in the assessment where we talk about integrating the assessment for as and of so the assessments for would be those formative assessments those assessments that give feedback to the student as well as feedback to the teacher on how the students are doing and how the teacher might need to change their instruction so that's that formative assessment piece the um assessment as learning that's a part

088where we've not incorporated a lot of that but that's really where the students are doing some of their own assessments on how are they doing how are their reflective practice on how are they learning this how are they setting goals for themselves and that's a new area that we'll be looking at and then that assessment of that's where the summative assessment comes into play so the assessment of is how did they learn that that's the after the fact that um you know final exam that would be that summative assessment piece and so really having that balance and making sure that you're using those assessments for feedback for not only the student but then also feedback for the teacher and then how are you tweaking that the instruction for the teacher and the student on what

089do we need more of what do we need less on what do we need to practice more and so it's really finding that balance thank you with that one it's um near and dear in my heart i mean i i was a student that learned for the test and i would throw it away and so i'm always trying to figure out how to avoid that with my students or you know my kids just so that formative versus [Music] the formative versus summative i think is is a way to help with that thank you it's also a great skill uh to have because that's the way we operate you know we we're none of us are perfect and and in our profession but we probably go down the whole line here and find and talk about

090how um to get a little bit better you got to get feedback you got to make changes and you got to you know to get improved that way so it's pretty solid okay moving on i'm sorry so we were talking for the math program during the program evaluation i'm wondering if you recognize that there's a significant gap do we pivot and do something about that immediately or do we wait until [Music] this comes full cycle and we have new textbooks and we have an adoption i mean how do we approach that if situations pop up during a program evaluation so where you're referring to a significant gap in um right so so we don't wait for um oh you know we're continuously improving so in in all of our programming we have we do have

091every six years we have our different program evaluation pieces however we continue to look at our practices reflect on those practices and then uh make tweaks to those practices all along so if we're seeing that you know we're having um an area in a certain course say algebra one where our kids are really having a difficult time learning specific concepts and that's part of that um plc process or that professional learning communities process where they're looking at how are our kids doing and oh i noticed that mr mcmichael's kids are doing much better on this skill what what are you doing to help teach them that that i need to incorporate with my students because my students may not be doing as well and so that's that continuous learning piece so it's not just waiting

092until that program evaluation piece but it's continuously looking at our practice and and how do we get better at that but the program evaluation process allows us to take pause and look at all of the components of it and so we so that makes you sure that we're not missing one piece and not just tweaking and just you know going a lot of different directions we want to be able to align those arrows my second question on the assessment and grading um in some of our classes actually some of the grade levels it's not abc it's mastery and standard space yes there you go thank you standard space i know some schools like mit use some standards based which i find fascinating and challenging at the same time um what are your thoughts is this

093something that we're looking to do across the board i know my student my children um some of their classes at the high school were standards-based um but then at the end they actually received a grade i i'm not sure how that all works so if you could just touch on that that would be helpful sure so really all of our grades are standard space because our curriculum is based on the indiana academic standards and then you're looking at our grades are criteria and reference so how are our students doing compared to the standard now the difference is in the elementary school we call them standards-based report cards and the students receive a one two three four or five on very specific standards at the high school or at the middle school like you're referring to

094maybe in science class there might have been a class where they're saying okay here's the grade and the way the teacher shared the feedback on the grade was this is how you did on this specific standard this is how you did on this specific standard but then all of those indicators were then put into a grade you know an a b c d or f great so it's just the the reporting of it is how are you looking at as far as mastery towards that standard and reporting that but it's really they're all based on the standards we're not necessarily looking to change the way we're reporting the standards in when we get to middle school or high school that's not something right now that we're looking at i'm not saying it would never ever

095happen but right now that's not what we're looking at but it's really how are we making sure that the grades are reflective of what the students are learning and not reflective on other practices such as their responsibility that they turned in their assignments on time or that they did other pieces that really don't have tie into the grade itself there is a way we do want to report that out you know how do they work collaboratively in a group but that shouldn't go into the grade as far as the learning part of it and so we want to make sure the grades are truly reflecting what the student has learned and then also share information on how the students might be learning but not as part of the grade yeah i thought that was well

096articulated in the second bullet point under assessment gradients it's to accurately communicate what students have learned and really whether it's a 1 2 3 4 5 or an abc that's trying to communicate what the student has learned and then we have to make sure that we are we as parents and educators understand what does that letter mean so good ready to move forward all right next we're going to go into human resources so as i i go through this maybe you can hear the voice you know of the person around it but go ahead and pop that slide and see look at the big rocks there and karma clay schools has the absolute has the absolute finest teachers administrators and support staff that serve our over 16 000 students it's critical to continue to recruit

097hire develop and retain a diverse and premier workforce in order to serve our students families and the community at the highest level our students deserve the best and human resources team in partnership with our building leaders will strive to attract and retain the most qualified supportive staff in the state we are in a challenging time and we've well noted that with respect to hiring classified staff members during the labor shortage it's always important to look at creative ways to attract employees to the district especially now in the areas of transportation food service educare and substitute teachers so with that we'll go to the three big rocks from our human resources team and the first one of course is staffing and and i've always often said this is that um the most important thing we do

098is is to you know attract and and hire the best teachers that we can find and the best every every person that touches a student uh we have to have a very very high quality person we have to um continue to professionally develop that individual and uh and then make that environment that opportu you know the very best that that point of contact can be and to do that it's just um uh it's just imperative that we we get high quality individuals and we're fortunate because um we do have a lot of good candidates that want to teach at carmel clay schools but with a you know with the shortage the teacher shortage and it's not going away and it's not getting better um we have to we have to look creatively creatively and and

099look at different ways on how we can do that and they've got some great great strategies so we'll start with the first one staffing both certified and classified and there's some exciting things for me as a former hr student services guy but partnerships with universities and uh and under that cultivating teacher pipelines and what that really means is let's go to student teacher level and bring in the most talented student teachers we can find and then teach them the caramel way and and hopefully keep them and find the best the best as they're developing um one of the things that we've been looking for is to have more teachers that look like our students and teacher recruiting historically black black colleges and universities might be a way to do that so how do we form

100relationships there and uh and again maybe it'll be the student teacher pipeline as well as the teacher pipeline uh then you know having when we go into non-classified look at things kind of out of the box like when we had our drive a bus event where we were targeting uh where we uh you know brought that uh you know the buses out and i got to drive one for the first time in my career and found out it's not that hard and we had quite a few folks probably our best hiring in the summer ever i think was our at the end result of that of course we lost a lot too but but that was a great event and then also targeting messages to the candidates in other words instead of posting and hoping

101uh actually going to what's in our candidate pool right now let's target them right away and ask them here's some openings and we found some success that way too talent development onboarding evaluation is once we get a talented individual on our on our rolls how do we grow that talent and part of that's through an evaluation system but um i've said this before but you know when the state moved to a more prescriptive what i'd call a raider system of evaluation i think it really was a step backwards now we've had some relief from that and looking more at a talent development type evaluation model which is more motivational and actually focuses on specific skills that can be a much more positive experience for our for our employees but also can grow skills quicker and

102better and then enhanced and efficient onboarding processes for new employees so uh and that's one area it's grown a lot in the last couple years they've really put together a lot of different pieces to uh to get folks on the team and getting into the information that they need immediately and then to set that that that professional growth and professional development in in process and that's pretty exciting too and then the final piece was the working with our teachers association uh carmel's teacher association and keeping that relationship strong uh we have an amazing uh relationship with our teachers association and uh i can't speak any more highly of that it's you know their colleagues work very closely together and uh the most uh descriptive thing i can say about it is that everybody at the

103table wants the best for kids and uh and so that's pretty special and i don't think you find that everywhere so uh so that's the uh the big rock for human resources and we'll take a pause here if you want to ask any questions hey i got some questions okay um easiest question first so roger i think i alluded to this before so i'm just going to ask it one i can't say last time another time um can we survey our bus drivers to find out what motivates them and how we can do a better job of recruiting them that's a direct question can we do that yes okay what is to stop us from actually doing it since we can i don't know that there's anything stopping us i think it would be something

104that would come out of hr um as they both when we and we do some of this now i know i don't tom would be able to be more specific but when employ when employees leave for example that we we do exit interviews and try to gain insight and also as we we do talk to our drivers they have they have at least an informal representation and so there is dialogue it's not as formal as with the cta but but but they do we do talk to drivers and and get feedback from them on all sorts of things including um you know what they feel would would attract drivers and and some of that came out and was reflected in in the new agreement that we have with the drivers yeah i'd like to see

105some um exhaustive feedback from them um to just ensure that they have the opportunity to share any you know ideas and thoughts for how we can address this challenge with getting more bus drivers because my heart i mean it breaks when i see the long lines of traffic and i'm driving my son to drop him off and i want to drop him off down the street so i don't have to sit in the trap like and then it's getting cold and so my heart is still like aching at the idea of my kids having to ride their bikes or parents being inconvenienced you know and that one mile radius so i just anything that we can do to change the game i'm like open to that so i'd love to know a follow-up on what

106we're gonna do in terms of at least getting input from them or looking at modeling or looking at other districts outside of the state that are doing it well in retaining and attracting additional drivers and just if there's strategies they're putting into play i would just love to know that we've kind of done that research and found some well i think we have already we certainly talked to our counterparts in other school districts this is a common theme throughout the state and throughout the nation as you know and so we have we do interact on a local level as well as a state level and in some cases we also interact outside of the state i don't i don't believe there's um something that somebody's doing out there that's kind of a silver bullet that

107we're not aware of because if we weren't we may we haven't gathered all that information just ourselves but i mean collectively with all the transportation administration around the state locally and around the state i really doubt that there's anything that we're missing as far as somebody coming up with something that we haven't you know aren't doing or haven't thought of in some cases we've been recognized for being one of those districts that have has employed um some you know creative thinking and and in recruiting drivers yeah i think i mean i think we're doing a great job i mean and talking to some of our bus drivers they really appreciate how we take care of our buses and how we take care of them um i'm just wondering what we can do that's outside of

108the box even if it's the way that we are financing to pay for that position and if we can switch that up to better compensate i mean i i'm speaking for louise not the whole board like i just want to kind of push the envelope on that um louise before you jump off of that um uh one thing i failed to mention is um these are the big rocks and then once we establish and we're all tight on what our you know what our big areas are that we're going to focus on and then the next section of that is uh what strategies are we going to do to try to make those big rocks happen so the idea of surveying the bus drivers or any any of those things would fall under our strategies

109part of the of the planning process and i'm glad you said that because i should have said that start and fail too thank you thank you um and looking at uh building our staff recruiting um kind of our recruiting uh strategy and methodologies are we looking at how we're building our bench with ias absolutely and one of our best recruit recruiting tools that we have is working with our instructional assistants um over roger did a recent study over a third of some of our recent teachers have been ias with us and so one of the pieces that we do is we have an internal teacher recruitment fair that is just with our instructional assistants as well as our student and our student teachers and so each and every year we have that uh recruitment fair

110and it yields a high number of teachers that we currently have in the district thank you that was my next question what was our conversion rate so you said about 33 yes and then um do we do we gauge or do we assess our student experience in preparing for developing our teachers that kind of thing do we evaluate the student experience in classes at any levels i'm not sure i'm tracking with you what are you asking if we're surveying students on how their what their what their perception of their classroom is what their experience in the classroom is yes yeah i'm not sure how many of those we do that probably more under dr dudley's area well so just recently um we did a survey with our students and some of the questions were does

111your you know how does your teacher how do you connect with your teacher so does your teacher help you does your tea you know what what other things you know do you feel like your teacher cares about you how are you connecting with your teacher and so that's a survey that we did do some questions on that teacher-student relationship and how the student might get help with the teacher or do they feel like they have an adult in the building that is somebody that they can reach out to and so we did do some surveying on those pieces that are specific to the student-teacher relationship thank you um substitutes i'm assuming that's part of that classified strategy that will be coming because i know that's the sore spot right now absolutely and we've been doing

112better with substitute teachers and have put in putting many strategies in place and working very closely with kelly hackett and the team and we continually bring new substitutes uh on board but one of the things about substitutes it's a it's a trickle-down effect when you mention ias you mentioned substitutes so when our teachers go on maternity leave oftentimes the ias who have their teaching license will fill those maternity leave positions and then the substitutes may become the ias and then we're refilling so it is cyclical and we continue to do our best with populating our substitute teachers and we're also looking at strategies for that too absolutely all right we're moving on to business finance and facilities and uh it looks like roger's already warmed up so we're good to go um i tell you

113i i'm real proud of the work that roger and his team has done first off with her comprehensive financial plan and he's provided him and his team have provided a financial planning model that can be modified as different needs arise and priorities change so um you know it's not a locked in pieces because you don't know i wanted to steal the line was uh that roger shared the other day was that sometimes programming can make a facility obsolete before the actual facility it needs to be you know is having any issues because programs change and you have to be uh nimble and and keep a capacity to be able to react to the the uh the situations that we were come up upon and there's never been a better example of that than as we

114went through this pandemic we had to do a lot of pivoting um also uh you'll see and you're very well let me hear about a lot of the capital improvement plan and uh that allows school corporation leaders to identify when and how projects will be addressed and then they have to prioritize those needs also it enhances the budgeting process enables school corporation leaders to determine appropriateness of debt issuance and or cash on hand so we have to they that balancing act about having a a cash balance that's favorable to bonds but also um managing debt and keeping that uh you know that tax level uh when coupled with a comprehensive financial plan the cip helps school corporation leaders identify funding sources available for projects while maintaining a balanced budget and meeting the reserve and tax

115rate targets and then finally third big rock has to deal with continued development expansion of the culture of well-being so employee well-being is essential to providing an exemplary educational program in other words we have to take care of our people because they take care of our kids improving the health and welfare wellness of employees and their dependents minimizes healthcare expenses thus providing more financial resources to support the educational program so kind of the double the double edge on that is that by supporting our folks and helping them to be well and in the different areas um we also it also saves us money and uh which makes more money available so it's a it's a a good uh a good plan that uh is comprehensive advantage as if it's done as well um when you

116look at our slide here big rock is the long-term financial plan and uh of course when you're walking working with finance you're going to have some numbers so uh so the the big rock is that that carmel clay will maintain a minimum of eight percent cast balance reserves in the educational operating referendum rainy day funds with a goal of building a 12 cash balance reserve and so i know we've talked about that before and uh the advantage is to that is a lower um you know bond rate which we've experienced some real um some real advantages to that saving the taxpayers a lot of money um also continuing to maintain that level tax rate and uh and that's where the man i would call it magic but it's really strategy to how we manage money

117to be able to keep that tax rate level and then maintain the district's outstanding debt at a level not to exceed three percent of the gross assessed valuation of school corporation annual debt service does not exceed 15 of the total operating expenses and the net direct debt per capita not to exceed two thousand dollars unless approved by the board of school trustees those are all metrics uh that the state requires correct to manage debt and uh and so we have to follow those rules tightly from there i'll bounce down to continue development uh excuse me comprehensive facilities plans i'll go to the right there still facilities can be become programmably obsolete before they become physically physically obsolete so there's that line that i was so impressed by and thus facilities must be maintained both physically

118and programmatically at the highest level to support the educational program and you can see that there's a lot of that going on around us and touching a lot of facilities that haven't been touched since 1993 or were when our student population was much smaller and so a lot of good good projects going on and more to come and then finally in response to need increased mental health and physician services wellness center um i think dr ostrich mentioned that and uh that uh mr mcmichael authorized uh some increased hours i think we raised our capacity about 33 percent so that we can handle the and meet the needs of our employees um increase participation at the wellness center by a minimum of five percent so we're going to try to bump up the number of folks

119you know working out and going through the programming there and then increase the participation in fitness classes minimum of 10 percent and then expand the financial wellness services with a goal of reducing student debt a by a million dollars so uh we uh he added that was that last year or i covered years i don't know it might have been two years ago but uh we added pete the planner and uh and access free access for our employees to uh to seek financial wellness which is also a big cause of stress in a lot of people's lives and so uh and one of their direct goals is we have a lot of uh teachers that have a lot of student debt and how can we get some of that debt forgiven and and with a

120lot of programming that's out there that they can access so uh good good solid balance plan and with that i'll pause and take any questions i just have a comment is to direct the public's view to that third bullet point up there at the top i think that that is something that i know that we strive very hard is to continue to main a level tax rate um i think we're slightly biased but i believe that we not only live in one of the greatest school districts but also on the greatest cities and one of those reasons is because we do have such a great tax rate and i know that as a school board we and as administration we work really hard to make sure that stays that way so thank you for making

121that a priority that's because roger talks about every every school board meeting you guys get to get the scoop every time we're going to move into student services now and and really our student services you know why remains the same and which is karma play school seeks to establish a safe non-threatening learning environment that addresses students academic social emotional and physical needs so student services consists continuously working to lead the development implementation of a safe learning environment for our children and um and some of these you'll see we're finishing up on some of our our previous goals which is the completion of the school safety referendum goals so 2019 was when the the first school safety referendum was passed in the state of indiana and and with that referendum the goals of that was to

122have one highly trained school resource officer in every school district in the district adding additional mental health programming for students in every school across the district professional development and training for our staff to improve school safety and then the hiring of sros and establishing a partnership with a fully staffed mental health provider was initially laid out as a three-year plan for implementation with an internal deadline of the fall of 2022 and i'm happy to report that we are on schedule we're way ahead of schedule with mental health supports as you heard tonight but we are on schedule to to have an sro in every building at least one in every building this coming fall so the fall of 2022 that promise is completed so uh uh and that's another echoing okay to your thoughts uh

123that's our community that's our our city that's our schools and that's all of us together saying we want this for our kids and uh and it's gonna happen so uh and you can see the increase with the sro unit this year there's some really cool stuff going on and uh and that's only gonna get better and i can't uh uh you know when you guys uh you know uh hired me and i always had the the blessing of becoming your superintendent one of the big charges you had for me was uh um you know how can we make our schools as safe as we possibly can and uh and uh when i think about then and now um we've come so far and uh of course well it's it's a never-ending process and it's our

124priority every morning but uh i'm very happy with the way things have come to come out so far the second big bull is something we alluded to a little bit earlier which is covet 19 recovery and since the onset of the global pandemic schools work to provide education stability to students while grappling with the ever-changing requirements for contact tracing and quarantines that impacted both staff students resulting in increased behavioral and mental health issues which you heard a little bit about tonight student services staff will navigate supports and resources for staff and students in the post pandemic environment so a little bit about similar to what i i talked about but at this point in time as you can tell um if you've been monitoring our data cover data every week i think we've got our

125eighth week of uh single-digit positive cases at the high school level i think we're like six or seven in a row for the middle school but our elementary cases continue to bounce up and down and up and down we actually lost a whole classroom with uh i think maybe six or six kids maybe that were tested positive 20 were close contact traced and then so it made more sense to to have the teacher teach the class virtually for uh for those uh quarantines so we're still battling uh those quarantines we were fortunate that when the guideline changed if you have a mask on you will not have to quarantine we went from approximately right around 700 probably quarantines a week to drop to under 200 right around 200 just under 200 a week so uh

126um and that's uh something we really struggled with last year was the number of kids that were quarantining out and uh trying to keep up in school that way is very difficult um so anyhow we've got those pieces and uh you can with numbers trending and the new immunizations uh um i've told the staff that i feel like we're kind of turning a corner but we're not turning it like this we're turning it like like a barge we're just kind of crawling around the corner uh but uh but uh we feel like we're you know things are progressing and and we're hopeful for a you know a much different second semester um so there's that piece of it uh and and working through those challenges and then like i said before the next step will

127be what do we need to do to recover uh once the we we get back to the next normal instead of the new normal it'll be the next normal and then uh we'll go from there and then finally he has student assistance programming and local agencies and schools within our district have not had a formalized mechanism for effective collaboration so student services is going to establish a formalized process for increased collaboration and training amongst agencies and that includes carmel clay schools the carmel police department department of child services and probation with a goal to improve outcomes for students facing adverse life circumstances so i don't know if you're aware that we do have a probation officers and we allow give them space in our high school again to keep kids in school so they can

128have kids that are in those settings can easily access their probation officer and keep them in class and then also department child services works very closely with of course the carmel police department and and we just have a a lot of different services to wrap around kids but the goal of the student assistance programming going forward is how can we collaborate together so that everybody knows what everybody's doing and we can surround and kind of wrap around those students to try to to help them get on a good trajectory moving forward which is always the goal and so it's a good goal and it's a difficult goal but we feel like we've gotten a good position to make that happen so and with that i will take any questions you might have moving on i

129think so okay so just for the record uh mr woodward's uh did not have any questions on his uh his his area so he's he's winning the thorough award right i'm just just kidding oh you just yeah that takes him out i want to go to bed too but just real quick with the kova 19 piece if there's any um challenges learning challenges is that does that go under the that rock or does that go somewhere else meaning if there were any gaps that we've assessed through uh different scores or whatever or grades and classes is that under that rock or is it now that would go back to dr dudley and cia to uh to pick up that and their you know in their assessment and uh and hopefully um you know we just

130had a profession dr dudley did a really nice um presentation to our administrative staff about we really need to change the the nomenclature of learning loss because when you think about learning loss it's like you know you knew something now you don't but really it's about maybe how we can accelerate learning from the things we've learned you know from using some high engagement things with technology and and really uh how do we move forward now of course part of our normal everyday work of a teacher is kids that are behind how do we catch them back up you know and identify those areas which we talked about earlier so i think there's some real growth that can happen there okay moving on all right let's talk about technology and typically when i talk about technology

131with you all i'm talking about the integration because technology works with everybody and they're kind of like like a support service or you know or they're connected to everything so uh you know we're always talking about what they're doing for all of us and all the different divisions but actually um we're moving to some things very specific with our strategic plan in regards to technology and you know the fact of it is is that carmel clay school students and staff have access to to technological resources 24 7 365 days a year and that's the environment that we we work in and live in so it's our responsibility to ensure that the network that delivers these resources is secure and available to all of our students and staff so that's those sometimes can be contradictory how

132do you give access and make sure everything's available at that same time how do we make sure that it's secure and so we're talking about data security data integrity and data availability so with that um one piece that we're going to continue working on is cyber security and continue to harden and strengthen our network environment to protect it against unwanted access and of course that's includes everything from phishing to more sophisticated attacks um always review you know the constant review of our firewall firewall configurations implementation of recommendations from msisac association which is the association that works with cyber security and further enhancements to email security uh port security denied unauthorized access and administrative account review so all those are pieces on how are we going to keep our you know our systems uh secure and

133then we go down to a new thing that i think i've maybe hinted to you a little bit about but there's a thing it's basically a certification that you can get called the trusted learning environment and what that piece is well as far as the big rock goes is one of them is that we currently have posted a position to hire a data privacy specialist so that person would be really focused and not particular on cyber security but really more about how do we protect student data staff data how do we how do we keep that secure and safe and so with that we'd be implementing this process of a trusted learning environment which is from cosine which is a another technology leader and with that we would develop data privacy you know data privacy

134website and so uh you know as the world becomes more digital this is becoming more and more of an issue i mean you probably hear a story every night about someone's had their identity still on or their you know they're finding out private information so how do we protect that and what steps do we need to do to be a trusted learning uh environment and this will be a three year or more process this is not something could be can happen overnight but it's time for us to begin that journey and then finally uh the communication platform and of course that's our website which is a big part of our information sharing to our parents and community and then reviewing of existing communication products and needs analysis one of the things that happened with the

135pandemic is a lot of things were offered for free and and a lot of folks took them up on that but we didn't have a good handle on what all was there and and so it's really more backtracking and going back with uh do we need these things and what's what's the most secure way to accomplish the educational goals of that so any questions with that moving right along i'm glad because i was afraid you're going to ask me to say what all those acronyms meant and i was then christie's not here i don't know if you guys know him or not or did i wrote them down but dodged a bullet there finally we're going to talk about um our communications and uh and what our strategic plan is going to look like with

136uh communications and so the first one i'm going to kind of do these one at a time so for the first one with the district as large as carmel clay schools there's an abundance of information coming at both students and families each day just a plethora of information so we need to continue to establish reliable consistent and concise information delivery process in other words we don't want to overload folks we want to get the information that they need and and how do we do that in the most efficient delivery process and the best way to do that is to analyze the pathways with the people who are receiving the information to see what's the best way that to do that from there with so much that goes on with our district and and many of

137our families have limited access to and you know they may learn a lot about their school or their child's school or at one grade level in particular but how do we enhance our school-to-home communications so continue to train our school representatives on best practices in communicating home maybe increasing our branding established standards for branding frequency and content so the idea is to get our community more in tune with how are we going to receive information and where's a consistent place they can look and find what they need to know uh quickly and then finally is you know our students are the most appropriate storytellers and content creators we have because they're the ones that are doing all the amazing things so how do we tell the ccs story and we've already begun utilizing our twice

138monthly message to the community to highlight important and interesting stories along with the school board recap [Music] create social media tips and tools for schools to better represent the community online increase frequency and utilization of new posts on our website it's a whole package deal is how do we tell our story how do we get the information out and uh and get that communication out so uh our teacher you know not only our our kids but our teachers our you know our staff our parents our community is aware of what's going on in carmel clay schools and then finally um recently and you saw tonight on a slideshow that was created by students so i want to increase student internships and experience in community relations and marketing or whatever we have to offer here so

139they can have real life experiences and create and utilize student positions for content creation and on the ground reporting so uh we've got a lot of talented kids at carmel high school and even in our middle schools that are already in to journalism and communications and what a great experience for them to be able to put together a program much like tonight where you can see their work on the screen and so we'll continue that and that is the final set of big rocks well thank you dr beresford before we get to additional questions with regards to communications what are the next steps that you are going to be taking with unpacking the big rocks and presenting to us either through a report or what are the next steps yeah next steps was to get

140your feedback you know on the you know on these all the different big rocks and the different divisions and then uh once we get that feedback and then the next step would be developing strategies and uh and getting our strategy list going and uh and then we want to do pretty much something similar to what we put on the website um with our last strategic plan where we have um everything laid out and then and then we can mark how you know where we're at at any particular time with any of the big rocks so uh that's kind of the the the process we're looking at right now okay thank you now i know i've hit you guys with a lot of information so uh as you digest that and uh and uh you know

141um and then we'll just just keep playing this now can we receive your powerpoint absolutely yeah absolutely okay yeah questions with regards to the communication plan or yes katie um well you know this is like my cup of tea so i love this good job um emily and team um my first thing is i love the fact of establishing the standards because i think definitely with social media you see parents are like well my school told me this well why i didn't hear about that what is my school doing that so i think having like that standard of every school is different has a different personality but making sure that we're having some clear messaging that goes in between school so that people um aren't necessarily filling out the loop and maybe they were not

142the loop they just didn't get the memo or whatnot so i love having some of those standards i'm i think similarly to how we looked at canvas and making sure that there was like some standards across the board with there i know we're always continuing to work on that but just kind of in other forms of communication so i love that um i also love the part about telling our story i think definitely we've seen like there's a lot of misinformation out there and so i think by utilizing the um the opportunities that we have to making sure that we are telling about um what's going on in carmel clay schools i think is wonderful so i appreciate and applaud these efforts and i look forward to hearing more about them [Music] and just to

143piggyback on what you're saying about misinformation i do think it's important that we continue to utilize our website and other avenues as a way for people to find out accurate information because i think people recognize that there's a lot of misinformation out there and they're seeking what is actually the truth and we are the best at telling what's going on okay i think that covers this portion as well yeah so the next time i say i'm going to do a a like a strategic plan light i understand that's going to be a couple hours now i really appreciate you taking the time and good questions and that gives us all you know good feedback that we can use as we go through the next steps in developing the plan so appreciate that well thank you

144and next is reports and dr b that's all you yeah the last thing on the agenda is the superintendent's report and so i already hit number one because we talked about no shave november uh so first uh what on my list here is i'm excited to report that this afternoon we distributed a communication to the district everybody everyone in the district parents are launching our new curated resource web page and that explains the details for instructional materials and the differences between curriculum and supplementary materials and library books so by using this new website web page of the materials webpage parents can learn more about the three types of instructional materials used in carmel clay schools get the answers to a lot of frequently asked questions and then review a step-by-step instructions to log in with

145your student and view the books that's been checked out from the media center and then also in that same that same resource you can read book reviews and a short synopsis of the various works or books that kids check out so what a great tool toolkit for for parents to be able to to get actively engaged in that now these tools will allow families to easily access information about books and materials that are aligned with parental preferences so it's important because what may be appropriate for one family may not be appropriate or seen as appropriate for another family and so the collection of resources this collection of resources and these tools for parents is one of the good things that came out from that july board meeting where some concerns were raised about a handful

146of books that were located in some of our media centers now typically when there's an issue we work with individual families who have concerns about reading materials and by handling each case individually this promotes collaboration between the schools and the families and to ensure that media the reading materials are both challenging and appropriate you know to the student and then also it prevents unjust censoring of books so to address those concerns that were raised in in july we created a committee of district and secondary administrators media specialists classroom teachers and parents who read and reviewed each of the material books that were discussed during that night and then they shared their recommendations with me and that went through one of our policies uh in our policy where the superintendent can uh can form a uh

147a committee to do that and uh and they did a really nice job so i just wanted to report a little bit to you that two of the titles from that evening were not in any carmel clay school library four of the titles were removed from circulation due to really more periodic weeding process this is things i've learned you know through that but they have a weeding process where they review older materials that have not been checked out over multiple years in order to make room for new stuff coming in current more relevant materials so in other words just hardly kids check them out for over many years and then three of the titles remain available either in the library or in a resource collection and so i wanted to say that i appreciate the

148thoughtful work of that committee and i also want to give our media specialist a shout out for all the work they do like i said i learned a lot about our media centers through this process and all the work they do in curating our collections and making the media centers the media center such a special hub in our and most importantly i just appreciate their work and instilling a love of reading and also being a great resource for students and and parents you know they become really primary instruction on you know research and especially at the older grades on on doing research and finding good resources versus you know resources may not be as accurate and that's that then i have some in other news you can't ask questions sorry to interrupt but um one

149of the the statements i picked up on is that you said there were four other books that were that we're we were keeping but their resources so could you touch on what what do you mean by resources where are these located yeah well there's three titles and um and one stated in the stacks the other ones the other i think two were put in what i call we call a resource collection and what that is is uh like a lot of books uh like i mean i remember buying you know for my own kids where you'll have a story book and then the storybook is really to help parents uh maybe work through a you know a topic that their kid doesn't understand so you'll have like the book will be the story book in

150the back it says for parents or for caregivers and they'll say here's how you can use this book to help your child understand like i remember getting one that was about grief and loss and how to help a child you know manage that through a story you know so uh so those are what i would call something that would be put in a resource collection so it wouldn't be available in the library you know like in the stacks but uh but if there was a situation where a family may need some you know some resources that would be what we would call that resource area that makes sense resource collection so a resource for families not resource for the student at the school yeah well these these books are more intentional about for an adult

151and a parent okay to to read together a lot of the recommendations from the committee which were very thoughtful was that you know maybe this would be best uh you know this this topic would be best covered with an adult present and using the resources in the back of the book so uh and so how would parents access those um they just need conduct school oh okay and uh and so they're they're going to be in the library but not in the stacks i guess but okay thank you okay um any other questions about that before i move on to yeah and then i promise this won't take very long but it's pretty exciting though but first i wanted to just talk a little bit our football team season came to an end on friday

152night and they had very high expectations of course and uh but sometimes seasons come to an end and we want to say congratulations to brownsburg the bulldogs played a great game and and and the hounds came up a little short but i also wanted just to congratulate um our team and coaches and parents and really all who contributed to an outstanding season i've often said as a coach and as a as administrators it's uh easy to be a champion when you win um but when things don't go your way and that's when character is grown and uh as coach hebert said uh he shared that this team was a special group they were kind of like a band of brothers and uh and they met challenge after challenge you know with a great strong resolve

153and uh so i'm extremely proud of their efforts and uh and their heart both in victory and defeat and uh real proud of that group and uh they they did a they had a great season i did make it downtown to lucas oil stadium to catch the marching greyhounds who were named the 2021 isma marching band state finals runner-up on saturday night and i got to tell you um carmel was the first to perform so i got to see all of the bands that were in the finals all 10 of them and it's amazing to see uh you know that much talent on the on the field from all the different schools i mean hundreds and hundreds of kids but when i talk when i watch the hounds it's amazing to see such precise performance

154it's just so the precision of it is just incredible and then you mix that with really a high level of musicality i mean it was it was like being in at a concert but along with that was dance and the design of the whole thing and there's a lot of emotion in it and and they're moving all the time you know the only time they stop is for a big note you know it was just amazing it was incredible performance and and i'm just going to go on record by saying don't count the hounds out for the bands of america competition because we are right there and uh and i will tell you that i think indiana will be well represented um because band after band proved how groups of students can create art and

155music all movies and in a lot of detail so i'm very proud of our kids and the directors and parents i mean the parent crew that pulls that off is an amazing team and uh just all the people that are involved in such a wonderful experience that was really really pretty special and jim dandy did accompany me and he made it through two or three bands before he uh sacked down it was a long day for him because we also attended the uh the cheerleading state competition that morning and after early afternoon and uh our carmel clay schools high school state champs they took home the top prize in the large varsity timeout state competition and timeout i guess is a shorter time time you know span to do the performance and then also uh

156they just nailed their performance uh in the second competition uh again with uh like kinda like the band with incredible precision and spot on timing i said the only time that they stopped was when they were so precise that when they would stop all of their ponytails would hit their back at exactly the same time i mean they every detail was there um they were the runners-up in the afternoon for the division division a and i can just tell you they just nailed their performance in both competitions and uh and i was really taken back by the speed of their performance and uh um you know there's a certain cadence to it and they were just going so fast it was like and it was uh really impressive to see so uh and uh we're

157kind of coming to the close of the fall competitions now so uh i wanted to say for all the amazing students who worked so hard this fall and accomplished so much congratulations and i wanted to give out a special thank you to the school staff the volunteers the parents of these students who put in so much time and effort and uh support the hard-working kids that we have just a really really good fall so and that concludes my report thank you dr bearsford any board member have any comments i'd like to make before we close out the meeting fantastic well then all those in favor of journeying the meeting signify by saying i i motion carries thank you oh