Center Grove Schools Board Meeting - July 2021

001i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you all our mission statement here at center grove is we develop knowledgeable confident and responsible citizens through inspirational and innovative learning opportunities and with that i'd like to read a little note this morning first of all we'd like to welcome all of you here this evening uh be great if we had a lot of you had lots of board meetings but we would like to thank you for being here this evening we appreciate the opportunity to hear from our parents the partnerships center grove has with our parents is what makes this district a great district and a great community i would like to

002remind everyone here that our board meetings are meetings that are held in public we conduct our business and voters aboard with the public watching either in person or online our meetings are also recorded and posted on our district youtube channel we invite public comment on topic topics related to our agenda items at the appropriate times as outlined in our board policy we ask that you respect these policies tonight and in future meetings we will have an opportunity later in the agenda for public comments to be shared we will listen to those comments it will not be a question and answer session we will have other opportunities for questions from the public to be asked and answered in the coming weeks and you will hear those opportunities tonight during the presentations so again we do thank

003you we welcome you here this evening we hope to have a very productive evening tonight so on our next thing is to the adoption of the agenda do i hear a motion mr president i'd like to uh amend the agenda and add a report for the um back to school there it is the return to school plan the 21-22 return to school plan i'd like to move that up to reports thank you mr alexander just as a report and then we'll vote on as an action item exactly thank you any questions on that i do want to remind people you'll see that there's only four board members here present but we do have uh mrs counts is present on the phone she will be popping up on the screen hopefully once in a while because

004tonight when we do votes we will have to do it in a roll call situation so bear with us technology and it's raining so who knows so thank you mr alexander do i have a second on that thank you mr hubbard all those in favor or nope i gotta go down through it mr hubbard i or nick thank you mr alexander aye mr daniels aye aye mrs counts are you with us i i am i okay do we have to have her on the screen yes yes she's on screen okay i see her now and you look fine mrs counts and myself that makes the motion passes 5-0 thank you our next area is reports and our first area is critical race theory delineated nope sorry back up our next area is the covid report

005back to the school plan thank you for returning back to school plan thank you yes i've had five meetings today thank you so um thank you thank you mr russell as they come up to the podium we have uh today with us uh this is uh amy norman she is our uh director of health services and also our assistant superintendent of human resources and health services mr jason taylor so i will turn the podium over to them thank you very much um we're pleased to share the return to school plan for this school year last year it was all inclusive of academic changes and a number of other changes we had to make to start the year this year's really just going to be focused on health and safety changes some things that we're able

006to change from last year going into this school year i want to start by just sharing some of the recommendations that we received from the indiana department of health are listed here in front of you it was a recommendation for mask for all under vaccinated individuals social distancing of three feet and in classrooms and with the students facing forward assuming that they're masked if they're unvaccinated and then six feet in all other areas individuals should stay home for 10 days following the onset of symptoms if all students are are masked you see we have a difference in how we would contact face those students and eventually quarantine students if they were masked it would be contact racing quarantined at three feet if they were unmasked and not facing forward it would be at six feet

007and then um they did offer three options for students to return early um on day eight after exposure on day 11 and on day 12. and you'll see some of the day 15. thank you you'll see some of this play out as ms norman and i present through the slides tonight we also were very pleased to receive some some some recommendations from the johnson county health department that we really felt fell more in line with our community's expectations this was that schools would still continue to contact trace positive cases that they would be able to use the three foot distance for that tracing whether no matter if a mask was worn or if it was not and that three foot could also apply in the cafeterias they allow they will be willing to allow individuals

008to return on day 11 without a negative test if you'll remember at the state that was actually a day 15 return and without enhanced precautions which we'll cover again a little bit later in the presentation a positive test in prior school years would only allow students to avoid quarantine if they had been positive in the last 90 days our county was willing to expand that to six months and we talked a little bit there about home tests that should be independent for that qualification and that schools may also accept an antibody test which which ms norman has been excited to be able to accept that option looked at it last year and we just were not allowed to do that and then finally they do have a number of rapid tests available and no appointment

009necessary you walk right in at franklin it's near the masonic home and you can get that test very easily anything i've left out on the state and the county recommendations no no those are the main ones thank you we also know that the state legislature and the governor really transitioned some of the loca the decision decision making on on covet and the spread down to the local level and so after july 1st 2021 local school boards will be responsible for implementing whatever measures and restrictions are deemed necessary and prudent to address the impact and spread of covet 19 for their buildings facilities grounds and including transportation so we really took that to heart we spent some time gathering some input from the school board and other community members working with our our staff our teachers

010and our principals and our administrators to kind of look at what are things that would be right and a right fit for center grove schools that maybe weren't fully in line with what the state had mandated in pri in we also are extremely pleased with the vaccination rates in white river township you'll see our three major zip codes are represented here um and their percentages are all above 60 percent with bargersville and and some of the areas in the south being about 70 percent that's really amazing and awesome we feel like that allows us to make some decisions in our community when we know we have a high saturation of vaccinated individuals i'm going to turn over to ms norman she's going to cover then some of the recommendations we'd like to make tonight and

011some of the policies and procedures that really she lives in day to day um and this ultimately falls on her responsibility our school nurses and they work with our principals on it so this woman thank you face coverings uh what we are proposing is that face coverings will be optional under most circumstances this would include classrooms hallways cafeterias the athletic facilities um one thing to keep in mind i know previously it said you know that the school boards had some jurisdiction over the transportation but currently there is a federal mandate per the cdc order so regardless of vaccination status currently if kids are riding the bus they would still be required to wear a mask the center girl bus drivers though will not refuse transportation um to any student due to the lack of a

012face covering if a student requests the face covering we will do everything we can to make sure we have those available to them so that they have them when they get on the bus there may be situations though in our schools where face covering would be required for example the primary one is if you're a close contact and you've been quarantined and you opt to come back on day eight with a negative test in that situation on those days 8 through 11 you would still be required to wear a mask that's an enhanced precaution that would still need to be in place it's also possible that it would be required within our school clinics particularly for symptomatic people who come into our clinics um if somebody were to come in with um scraped knees i'm

013probably not going to mask them up for that we'll just take care of the scrape knee if they're coming in with complaints of cough sneezing fevers things of that sort we're going to ask them to put a mask on while they're in the clinic with us they may also probably be seeing their nurses and masks still this year in looking at kind of what our classrooms will look like kind of the goal is to get to business back as usual from what we had prior to the pandemic our classrooms are going to continue to try to use at the elementary level pod seating with the goal of three foot distance where possible if you get out a measuring tape and measure three feet generally speaking that's it it's not really that far it sounds far

014when you're trying to think of it in your head but when we would sit in the chairs last year when we were at six feet that was really really hard to manage in a crowded classroom i'm not saying that three feet won't still result in some close contact but we were doing three feet at the end of the school year last year and we were able to dramatically reduce what quarantine looked like for students our our cafeterias in the elementary standing setting are also going to be we're trying to still get to that three-foot goal [Music] and you know in situations where there's increased exhalation which is kind of a difficult thing to sort of determine you know we would probably look at trying doing our best to kind of increase that to six feet

015where we can um we're going to still do recess if the kids you know if students have you know families have chosen that they want their students to wear masks at school because they're not vaccinated which is still a recommendation but again we're going to have masks be optional so that's kind of a family choice of what you want to do when they go outside to play on recess they won't need to wear their mask but that's something for you to talk to your child about if you want them to do that instill that in your child you know but we won't be requiring that at recess and we're going to resume field trips i think the key and the field trip component is that wherever we are traveling to we will be required to

016follow whatever this you know whatever their requirements are if they're more stringent than what we do okay um and so that is you know we're going to be sending home information in regards to those field trips and and be mindful that stuff can change rather quickly so maybe have a few masks on hand just in case if you need to send them secondary school we're going to return you know again to normal seating hopefully with a goal of still three feet of distance to be honest when you're sitting about you know 12 inches from somebody it can be kind of uncomfortable so hopefully we can kind of still maintain a little bit of distance there cafeterias also will return to that normal seating again if we are noticing the exhalation issues and things like that

017we're going to ask that they try to space kids out a little bit more if it's possible our ecs are going to return to normal and again field trips are going to resume so through all of this we're still going to ask if you have a positive case if your kids are symptomatic you know we want them to stay home if kids are sick number one whether it's covet or not if kids are sick they don't learn well at school so please keep them home i would rather they're home for a couple days and get to feel better and then come back raring to go to learn please if they're having covid symptoms consider getting them tested it's not a requirement but consider doing that if there is a positive test result we will be

018looking at contact tracing so we're still going to be looking at seating charts checking out classrooms probably talking to teachers to see you know is there something that we've missed was there you know intense group work happening in a space those types of things that might not show up on a seating chart so then you as as parents we are going to utilize parent square and email to make those notifications there will also then be a hotline number that you can call so that you can get you know if you have additional questions please let us know i will probably be the person returning those calls so i i do try to make it my goal to get back to people very very quickly because i know that this this is a lot it's a

019lot to kind of deal with so i do try i take that very seriously um if the impact you know what what we're looking for is kind of that direct close contact that is going to be we're concerned about transmission of disease okay and and the likelihood that that your student maybe is going to be testing positive as well so um again you know if there is a situation and we contact you you know my request is just if you have questions please let me know i'm here to try to help and educate and and i know not everybody agrees with everything but we will do our best to try to keep everybody as safe as we can with things um i think the last thing there was parents may have the option to quarantine

020their kids oh yes yes so we're still awaiting guidance i know last year um you know obviously if you have cases in your home that's honestly where we're most concerned about spread so if if somebody in your home tests positive we're going to ask that you continue to quarantine your kids in your home and let us know about that the one big question that we have not been that's not been addressed for us is how those absences are going to be counted so looking ahead so i know there's been some obviously quarantine stinks and nobody likes it my goal is to keep it as much of a minimum as possible for our kids in 6th grade and younger this is something that they kind of have to deal with more than our 7th and above

021just because the 7th and above have a little more opportunity to to get vaccinated you know their ages warrant that if that's something their families choose the one thing is that covet is a communicable disease by indiana code communicable diseases have to be handled in a specific way to try to contain spread it's not much different it's not any different than if we had a chickenpox case i have dealt with that in our schools we usually don't quarantine for chickenpox primarily because it's a school required vaccination so when we find close contacts of somebody with chickenpox they've been vaccinated therefore they don't have to be quarantined so you don't hear about this as much this is kind of a little different one of the things that the county health department has changed for us is

022that going from the six foot to the three foot they've also changed that it's a 10 day quarantine regardless of you know you don't have to get tested to come back on 10 days if you come back on day 11 you don't have to have enhanced precautions which that was something we were not able to achieve last year so that was why we stuck at not you know you had to return on day 15 which if any of you had children who were quarantined as i did it was hard in the situation of extracurricular activities you know those are going to be handled on a case-by-case basis depending on what's going on particularly you know we're going to be looking at what type of conduct uh contact um last year at the beginning of all

023of this you know we had to quarantine the entire tennis team you know now under this new guidance we probably would have maybe quarantined one person if any because it's it doesn't now fall under the same parameters as what we were kind of dealing with last year so this is kind of what returning from quarantine looks like the key to this is the being asymptomatic which means you don't have any symptoms after you've been exposed okay and a symptom can be if you've been exposed and you didn't have any symptoms before and then you suddenly are having you know you have a kid who's never had a headache in their life and two days after the you've gotten a call that they're close contact they suddenly have a headache that's a symptom okay so that's

024something to kind of be thinking about um what we've looked at is on day eight if there's no symptoms we could do a net you know if you have a negative test it would have to be an independent test a rapid test that's through the health department would work for that and then you agree to follow the enhanced precautions until day 11 meaning you mask up the entire time you sit six feet away from people at lunch things like that then you could return like on that day eight um day eleven after exposure you would not require there's no test required um and you just come back there's no enhanced precautions needed you just come back to school like you normally would the other key to this that's changed is that previously you know we

025didn't have vaccine last year so this year if if we have proof of someone being fully vaccinated they will not have to quarantine if we have proof of an independent covid positive test which means an at-home test is not cannot be used for this purpose but if you have an independent positive covid test which are free at cvs and walgreens in the health department in those places it provides you with a piece of paper that verifies the proof that will last for six months this will go back to students who tested positive at the end of the school year last year if we have record of that or we can verify that through the health department then they will have six months kind of a free pass they won't have to quarantine i am leaning

026towards i still want to notify families if their students were in it were potentially exposed just because i think it's important for you to know because you could still become symptomatic and i want you to be aware of that and monitoring your kids but they are still able to come to school if they've had that positive test within the past six months the other key that the county has offered us is antibody testing and so if you have proof of an antibody test within the past six months that states that you have positive antibodies that will also work so that you do not have to quarantine or your student does not have to quarantine um down at the bottom there's kind of what that enhanced precaution thing looks like so that's that's again more for

027that day eight component of it which again is just there's no exceptions you gotta wear your mask all the time thank you and really want to thank miss norman for being willing to look at the day eight option for our students that's something i don't think you'll find in the other school school corporations nearby either we feel like we have a strong staff and we're able to offer some of those options and keep kids safe and get them back quickly so we're excited to do that we're going to allow the return to visitors in our schools we're kind of taking an approach thinking about when are our buildings when are students mandated when do they have to physically be in our building to get educated and we've got some rules for that and then when

028there's outside of the school day more voluntary opt-in activities taking place we've got a second kind of set of rules for that and that's where you'll see some of these breaks so currently we would allow volunteers and visitors into the building we would ask that they wear a mask again to protect all students within the building at the time if they are able to willing to provide we would provide an opportunity that they could provide their proof of vaccination and then we could um we could allow the mastering to not happen at that time but again that's to protect the students who do need to be in our buildings every day and have to be right now in the elementary schools we're not ready for lunchtime visitors to come back we're still spreading kids out

029quite a bit it's hard to find those little nooks and crannies for parents to come in we need all that space for our students during the day and then building rentals again will resume visitors should be vaccinated or wear a mask while they're in the building that's something we're not going to really check at the door it's going to be a lot like going to kroger or one of the shopping centers where it's we expect folks to be open and honest about that and their current status we are going to continue all of our focus on hygiene and cleaning we will still have hand washing campaigns out and about the all the buildings and sanitizer available our custodians will continue their extra cleaning of high-touch surfaces in areas much like last year we are continually

030improving all of our air filtration systems um in all of our schools we're very fortunate that we were ahead of the game in a lot of our buildings there and we're catching up any building that may have not have been where we wanted it so that's that's been an awesome project that our operations team has really tackled and then we'll have bottle fillers available drinking fountains can come back we may bring some of those back too but the bottle fillers are really popular and it's working really well we're going to definitely keep those in place so a summary something that we'll talk about and again we'd ask the board to take action on later tonight are these recommendations that we've made again i'm just going to summarize this slide that it's mask optionals optional it's

031the continued use of pods trying to get kids spread out socially to avoid the quarantines as much as possible individuals shall stay home for 10 days following those symptoms or a positive test result regardless of masking we're going to stick with a three foot distance as we do contact trace and quarantine students and again that's for 15 minutes and then asymptomatic close contacts may return on that day eight with those that negative testing and precautions or all cases could return back and quarantine students could return back on day 11 that are asymptomatic i think is the key word there kind of continued on these recommendations we do want center grove we're going to continue to monitor our covert related absences we will publish that on a dashboard online much like we did last year so

032folks can be informed of how our buildings are performing and if there are if we are seeing spread within our buildings we'll work with the johnson county health department to offer the rapid testing option ms norman would like to try that on site we're going to work towards that we need to secure the test and and we'll work out those logistics so a student could pop in that morning get tested and the parent can take them on to school that's really where we'd like to get to and then finally this is going to change it change this morning on us it will probably change a little bit next week um it's hard to tell which direction it may change loose or tighter kind of thing so really would like to ask the board that well

033we do want your your support on these recommendations that you um we offer that we give dr arkanov some empowerment here and some authority to to plan some changes after consulting with you so we can make some quick changes if we need to throughout the school year however anytime we do make those changes we're going to bring those back to the board we're going to allow the public to have some public comment and input on those if necessary if it's some sweeping large change and we do want the community to be informed but we also know we may have to make some quick changes to keep our students safe and secure anything i left out there miss norman no i don't think so i i guess i would like to make the point that when

034we're talking about quarantine quarantine happens from the date of exposure um i know that last year i got a lot of questions in regard to that like well how come you know that it dates back five days well if somebody has symptoms and waits a couple days to see how they're doing and then they get sicker and then they go get a pcr test which takes two or three days it can be five days before we know um and so that's kind of why that sometimes happens and how that sometimes happens parents some parents run out the second their kid has a sniffle some parents will wait it out a week and a half and so again i think the key is is that if your child is not feeling well please have them stay

035home for a day or two and and see how that's going um if they're trending upward you know or if they're trending downward you know maybe get that checked out a little bit more so but i also think you know one of the things that we have i think with this plan that helps is the johnson county health department is monitoring kind of where spread is in the community so as of today we're at like 2.6 for the positivity rate so that helps us to be able to be a little more open you know and a little more business back to usual because that positive positivity rate is so low um and my hope is that's going to stay in that position so thank you one last note i know folks will have an opportunity

036for some public comment tonight but this doesn't have to be the end of that input miss conrad has already set up some great webinars we will speak with our staff next tuesday online in a coffee chat setting and then on wednesday we'll have some time available for parents so look forward to getting more back and forth comments and feedback that way as well thank you both before we get any questions from the board i also want to remind this evening later in the agenda will be a vote on on this so right now it's just really your opportunity to ask for some clarifying questions and so forth and as uh jason shared we will have more opportunities we have a coffee chat coming up and this will be one of the major topics during that

037process okay board any questions for mr taylor mrs norman i don't have any questions about the report i'll save my comments when we go to vote on it okay i have no questions at this time either okay amy do you have any questions mrs counts i do not okay thank you well at that time thank you so very much for your report i know it's thank you fluid report it's ongoing and as they said just this morning we got some changes on this and that can happen in another week when you're dealing with federal state county guidelines and those three don't always work together it can be changing but we would like to publicly thank both of you the work you have to put into this is something else thank you so very much okay

038our next order of business okay is uh under reports is community mental and behavioral health services not yet i was just going to skip over that is that important okay back it up our next order of business critical race theory delineated dr arkanov thank you thank you very much mr russell and i'd like to thank everyone for being here i appreciate it you may not have heard about this topic critical race theory or crt but i'm going to talk about that this evening i just also want to remind everyone that this is a live stream and we save it online so you can go back and watch it and particularly i share that tonight because of you know you probably have a lot of questions swirling through your head over what we just shared on

039our back to school plan so you should be able to get back in there and watch it later tonight or tomorrow so or if you enjoy this talk you can watch me again so so this is really a report to the board but i'm sharing it with all of you why am i here today i'm sharing this is that my leadership team and i and many of you board members have heard from parents that we do not want critical race theory taught in our schools others have reached out following a presentation made to fifth grade students at pleasant grove elementary that presentation was not approved by a teacher by the teaching and learning department of center grove nor would it have been based on some of the terms and concepts included in the slides some

040of the concepts in the slides or associate are associated with critical race theory or otherwise known as crt why is crt not appropriate crt is an academic concept that is studied at the post-secondary level it's not part of the indiana state standards for curriculum and we do not think it is appropriate for k-12 education in center grove we are doing what we are doing here at center grove well as you know center girl's vision is to provide exceptional educational experiences for all students and we are doing this by providing a guaranteed and viable curriculum in our schools we have a system in place for our traditional subjects and we have now extended that system to our counseling department to ensure oversight of the content and continuity in those lessons they provide across the district dr

041hoover and mrs burglar will be sharing more about the our counseling department in a few moments we want to earn your trust through transparency and by listening to you we will be posting social emotional learning lessons planned by counselors for our elementary students on our website for parents to view we are also planning an on an opportunity for all of you to learn more about these lessons later this month wednesday july 21st at 6 30 pm in the innovation center we'll be providing a parent information meeting where we'll have an opportunity for more feedback we value our partnership with parents and we will be looking for volunteers to be a part of our strategic planning committee as i kind of shared in our last meeting and i see familiar faces now so i'm hoping that

042you'll come to that as i shared in the past we we are finishing up and wrapping up strategic planning 2.0 that we were really fortunate we asked for at least 100 parents to get involved we pushed and we pushed and we got 300 parents involved and it was it was fantastic and it really helped and a lot of great things came out of that process through working with our parents so as we get ready to launch strategic planning process 3.0 we will be seeking more parent input and parent participation so i hope that you keep an eye out when we start sending out all the messages that we send out to get you involved and ask for you to be a part of that so that's my report as to the issue of crt and

043the fact that center grove does not use critical race theory and will not use it so any questions from the board i'll be glad to take on i got a couple yes sir turn your mic on so you're going to roll out a way for parents to be involved in the strategic planning committee later yes yeah yeah we're going to be doing that um we'll be doing that here in a couple of weeks we need to get a little get the start of school going and then we're going to organize out kind of a we do we do a big push through social media through our websites through our email and all of that and really try to get people from across the board to get out to participate why does that benefit the schools

044for parents to want to get involved in the strategic planning committee like why oh yeah that's great great question i mean you know there's so much that goes on in the schools as you know it's a k-12 process it's actually p pre-k we have pre-k sugar growth and there's a lot to be considered and the the last time we had our strategic plan um we heard from parents about the need to organize our crit our character education program for example we have six schools six elementary schools and they were all doing something a little bit different in character education and we found that it would be really beneficial to all of our parents and our students that that kind of thing was organized across the board so that it's guaranteed and viable no matter if

045you start at pleasant grove and you end up at maple grove for whatever reason particularly when we redistrict not saying we're going to but if we have to and you know that it's going to you know going to be the same did not hear that but it that also too um mr hubbard uh it's a great question because parents bring things to us sometimes that you know we're not thinking about that's important and so we need that input and a lot of times too we educate parents on what we do that they go wow i didn't know you'd do that i didn't know that was something that we needed to think about so it's really good to do that and a couple of years ago when we did it we had we had uh realized

046some issues with our extended learning program that's our enriched program we were able to revamp that and provide and grow that program a little bit more so those are just some examples of that in fact i believe too one of the process created the complete revamp of the the website we we launched a whole new website based on feedback and and so forth so yeah okay so uh obviously you were talking about crt so crt is something that we're not interested in doing at center grove but do you in your opinion do you see an overlap between crt overlapping into sel at all not not in center grove now i can see where people will make that connection in some cases when you look online and you can see where some organizations have tied some

047things to it i i get that but in center grove that's not the case and that's what you're going to see from dr hoover this evening and christy berger fair enough yeah anybody else i would like to reiterate on the strategic planning committee that hopefully we can get going this year health and safety stays good i've been on it twice and as he says you don't realize sometimes what you're seeing out there what we think you're seeing out there so that that combination of working back and forth and it really does help if there's at least a hundred people involved with that and the way the process works uh and new programs come out of that or a new direction uh as he also mentioned we work very hard to make sure our elementaries are

048all on the same avenue so to speak because we have become a more mobile school system of in and out but also within our elementaries because of just the way things work with where you people need to live sometimes so strongly urge you to to keep your ears open and we'll be reaching out to that for members for the strategic committee any other comments mr president i want to make sure mrs counts doesn't have any questions thank you mrs counts with us do you have any questions for dr arkanov i do not thank you thank you dr arkanov thank you now our next order of business is community mental behavioral and health services dr arkanov thank you uh this evening we have a report from let's see who's coming up i say okay dr dr

049hoover is going to share with you some information along with some members from community health so dr yes thank you i want to introduce becky mills she's the program manager for center grove school-based program through community health network we started our partnership with them last year in july and she wants to provide you an update of the work that they've been able to do this year to support students she oversees three six excuse me six therapists and five life skills clinicians she serves as the liaison between community health and center growth schools works very closely i'm with our director of school counseling and mental health i'm along with our principals and our counseling team and so that really inclusive work is is providing a lot of supports to our students and she's going to be

050sharing how they've supported in this last year along with some data and also the plans for the upcoming year how they're going to continue to enhance the programming that we're able to do for our students thank you very much yes i have been fortunate enough to be part of this transition from the previous mental health center provider to the current one i came on board again i'm becky mills program manager with community health network school-based programs but i came on board to this partnership last well it officially started july 1st of 2020 i was fortunate enough to be part of that partnership a little bit prior to that but when we started we we began with one there one clinically licensed therapist and one bachelor's prepared life skills clinician serving all of the buildings within

051center grove schools and um we quickly learned that the need is definitely here for those mental health support services in center grove schools and in november we hired on an additional clinically licensed therapist as well as an additional life skills clinician january february time frame we added a third clinically licensed therapist and life skills clinician the referrals kept coming in kept coming in unfortunately as in many professions right now there is a national workforce shortage in terms of mental health providers and it became very clear that our therapists and life skills clinicians were doing the best they could but did not feel great about the quality of services that they were providing because they were stretched so thin and so it became very clear that we needed to support our therapists in different ways because

052we wanted to provide that quality care that that the students here deserve in conjunction with the director of mental health and counseling services we made some decisions that we would need to put a pause on enrolling new clients so that we could provide that quality care we did not want to put the youth that we were serving at risk and so we did put a pause on that while we were looking to hire additional therapists and life skills clinicians and so and then in addition we made the decision to not limit ourselves to those therapists who are clinically licensed but also bring on mental health professionals who are masters prepared difference being the ability to serve the commercial insurance population clinically licensed therapists are able to serve private those with private insurance whereas mental health

053professionals without that clinical licensure status are not able to serve commercial insurance um just the medicaid population and so um we were we recognized that we were potentially limiting the service delivery in doing so but we wanted to make sure that we could still offer our services out beyond the scope of where we were at the time so we ended the school year with um four therapists and four life skills clinicians and at the end of the school year we were at um well presently at 233 active clients um we have enrolled a total of 276 some have successfully completed services some have transitioned out of services um or transferred to an outpatient office that sort of thing but we have been really excited about the services we have been able to provide and throughout

054the summer we have hired additional therapists we are now at six therapists we have three clinically licensed three um three licensed therapist but not clinically licensed and then um five life skills clinicians so that's where we are um right now and our goal in the very near future um is that we will bring on additional therapists whether it's clinically licensed or not clinically licensed so that there will be one therapist per building is our goal because we recognize what that does for the partnerships communication with the school to address the needs of the the individuals that we're serving as well as supporting the school as a whole in addition as the school year does begin we do we are at this time actually opening up enrollment again so that we are no longer putting a

055pause on those enrolling new clients so what are the trends what are we seeing historically in school-based services we are serving a wide array of diagnostic categories so we're looking at anything from anxiety depression trauma-related disorders impulse control what we're seeing here and this is the data in center grove so for our active clients matches what we have seen across the board in terms of our school-based services so what you see here is the majority of our clients in center rove are diagnosed with an anxiety some form of anxiety disorder we also ha at 30 um i'm sorry anxiety disorder is 31 34 adhd and 24 depressive disorders um so what i want to highlight there is um the mental health disorders that the youth we're serving experience um run on a continuum so you're

056going to see some who um experience them at a much greater level than others you're going to have some that are manifested in externalizing behaviors some more internalizing behaviors not one is more important than the other and that's what we want to recognize and just because someone has one payer for their services versus another not one child deserves more support than another and so we want to make sure that we're serving everyone the pandemic unfortunately has created more challenges in this area we're seeing more depression more anxiety and unfortunately for some people we haven't even seen the symptoms begin to manifest at all so while some individuals as i don't know if we call it life returning to normal someone normalcy um as things begin to open up as they previously had some people's symptoms

057will diminish and things will get back to some sense of safety and security and and normalcy for them however others it creates just as when the pandemic came on feelings of uncertainty fear worries um and so unfortunately for some some people it's only going to get worse from here on out and that's what we want to make sure that we're doing is providing the available supports for the youth no matter what the challenges are that they're facing so if you have not heard of ace scores you probably will at some point but adverse childhood experiences is what the ace stands for and that is a screening tool that is utilized linking trauma experiences to higher rates of depression um and other serious illnesses or diseases so what is important here is that 35 so um

058it's a 10 question screener and each question if they answer yes for some traumatic experience they get a point and so if you have individuals who scored a four or higher which here in center grove 35 of the enrolled clients that we have scored a four or higher what that means is that the likelihood of them experiencing a serious life event um illness or something of that sort is increasing significantly due to the fact that they simply have experienced four traumatic perceived traumatic experiences in their lifetime the reason i bring that up is because it is important to recognize that these the trauma is there people are experiencing it and we do need the supports i want to highlight our have hope pathway so the half hope pathway is an extra level of care for

059individuals who receive our services who also happen to rate as being at risk on the columbia suicide severity rating scale all of our clients receive the screener of the columbia at every visit so we're constantly assessing for suicide risk at each session with our clients when someone is identified as at risk on the have hope pathway we do identify a greater level of care more supports sort of like wrapping our arms around them they are assigned an intensive care coordinator that will be providing additional support checking in on them after hours in the evenings so it is an extra support and we've had 22 students here in center grove who have been identified to be on the pathway and receive that extra level of support so the need is here for sure this graph just

060highlights the insurance the payers in terms of the services that we have been providing for active clients 39 of the service of the clients that we are serving here in center grove schools have private insurance or commercial insurance and therefore what we have been able to do is expand the service delivery to those individuals who have private insurance solely we do have some that receive both or some that have um mental health i'm sorry have insurance uh support through both medicaid and commercial insurance but strictly 39 percent there are 39 of our clients who are receiving solely commercial insurance or have commercial insurance paying for their services so i do want to highlight a little bit of a difference between those who are receiving commercial insurance and medicaid because commercial insurance clients can only receive

061clinic option therapy services which means our schools are considered a clinic site so they can receive services here in the school building medicaid provides an array a menu of services for the students unfortunately is a huge difference when i talked about those life skills clinicians that the bachelor's prepared staff the bachelor's prepared staff can only work with that medicaid population what happens is someone who has medicaid receives a package of services that includes case management skills development which is coaching on any skill as well as home based and community-based therapy services so as you can see it does open up a lot more services for those individuals but we don't want to diminish the need for services for those with commercial insurance because it is just as important this last slide just highlights the services

062that have been delivered by our staff beginning january 1st through june 30th of this year so if you look at it between the six therapists and the actually not even the sixth therapist because it was four therapists and four life skills clinicians who have been providing those services they have provided over a hundred family therapy services and over a thousand individual therapy services you can see the array of services telehealth is still something that payers will support right now at this time we're not sure how long moving forward telehealth will be supported but we're going to continue to provide it as long as we can but you can see the different types of services including the individual family therapy as well as skills training and development which is that individual coaching which can include pushing

063into the classroom to provide that support or pulling out and coaching the students one-on-one so in summary i just want to state that the problems are not going away and we're happy to continue to provide those support we really just want to be able to provide them at a greater rate serving more individuals this coming year and we're excited to hopefully be i know we're already bringing on more than we had last year staff but the plan is to obviously like i said have one therapist per building as soon as possible thank you great presentation does the board have any questions on the diagnostic slide what's other so other could include any of those trauma related disorders we also we just i always say in school-based services we serve every diagnosis you can imagine but

064um some of the primary ones that you would see that fall under the other might be oppositional defiant disorder conduct disorder we do serve those on the autism spectrum disorder as well trauma-related disorders um adjustment disorder to name a few i absolutely had all the others pretty well defined couldn't figure out what else was left so this is more of a logistical uh situation from personal experience of having a son that had autism with asperger's uh and mom and i were pretty ill versed in how to get through medical things as she was a doctor it's a maze so i'm wondering are your people trained to help families get through that maze of paperwork and get to that source they need because it's so easy to throw your hands up and go i can't do

065it absolutely so it is amazed and as i'm bringing on more staff i am providing that training not myself i'm bringing in people to provide that training for those those staff because you're absolutely right the medicaid waivers bureau of developmental disabilities all of that is so critically important and getting them connected to those resources as soon as possible not when they turn 18 but well as you said understanding insurance also yes well why do you think coverage is covered yeah that has been definitely that is a huge help to families that otherwise would go my staff are happy to explain as much as they can and when they have questions they come to me to because we want the families to know we truly do we want them to have an understanding of what services

066are provided what services are available what services are we not getting right now that we could have access to okay thank you any other questions sport i i have a question on the last slide the individual skills training and the individual therapy piece are there limits to any of these therapies but and also too can you talk a little bit about what those the difference in those two areas absolutely so i'm going to answer the second question first the difference between individual therapy and individual skills individual therapy is provided by the master's prepared therapist or the clinically licensed therapist and that is anytime you are processing their the thoughts and the feelings linking the thoughts and behaviors um and emotions together for the client skills training is strictly coaching them it may be teaching them

067a skill and when we say teaching them a skill it could be communication skills anger management skills problem solving communication skills but it is teaching the skill and then ensuring that the skill is able to be replicated so there may be some modeling and some practicing of the skill and then praising for use of the skill in the appropriate ways so that would be the easiest way for me to describe the difference between individual therapy and individual skills i also want to add that individual therapy would be something that's done in a confidential one-on-one setting whereas skills can be done in any setting i mentioned earlier it can you can be pushing into the classroom and supporting them to stay focused and you know stay in their seat um stop tapping their their foot or

068their pencil um it may look like um them pulling out and teaching them the skill and then going into the classroom and ensuring that they're um exhibiting that skill appropriately or practicing that skill appropriately there could be in the hallway some opportunities for skills training if you see a student maybe not keeping their hands to themselves you know taking something from someone else grabbing something off the wall there's so many different opportunities for skills training and development that our staff have the opportunity to do um and then the other part of your question limit so when it comes to the skills training and development and i should say that any of those medicaid rehab option services that i mentioned there being a package of services that they have access to i could get into all

069sorts of nitty-gritty but if someone has medicaid as their payer cans is completed um every six months a cans is a child in adolescent needs and strength scale and from that cans an algorithm spits out a level of need that level of need identifies the amount of services that each client would receive for a six-month period of time so for example a client with a level of need three which the majority of school-based clients tend to be a level of need three a client with a level of need three would have would be eligible for 150 hours of skills training and development over a six-month period of time okay i guess the distinction you raised between the commercial and the medicaid we're talking about this kind of plethora of service that's out there for the

070for the medicaid what about the commercial what happens to those kids are they thrown to their own insurance carriers to provide find that kind of coverage i mean what what happens to those kids so i wish i could tell you that commercial insurance coverage is fantastic and offers this array of services just as medicaid does unfortunately clinic option therapy is what commercial insurance providers are willing to to provide to support so clinic option therapy could include individual therapy family therapy and group therapy but it would have to be in a clinic setting again i mentioned those schools are considered a clinic setting but it would not allow us to go to the home for example and provide home-based therapy so those are still provided within our program it's just they don't have the broad array

071that the other side absolutely yes okay thank you and and that's what we ran into on that one i assume also you work very closely with our special needs department as far as ieps because that's a whole nother guidance absolutely and our staff are very well aware of the need to be maintaining regular communication with teachers of record and other individuals who are working with our clients so that we're aware of what goals are being worked on through their ieps how we can support them if there's a behavior plan in place etc mrs counts do you have any questions i do not um just curious so you've worked with other school districts and what can you say are we looking when we look at our numbers are we you know what does it look like

072what do we i hate to say but how do we compare can you clarify are you talking about the number of students leading services the need yeah i will say that if we were to compare the startup this past year in center grove to the startup in other districts the referral rate far exceeded here in center grove far exceeded the other districts that we have been in um recently starting up in and i don't know if that's because the i know that in some other districts that we've been in they did have a previous mental health school-based mental health provider some of them did not so that might be one difference but i will say the the number the rate of referral and right off the bat was extremely high it was consistent we were

073regularly getting them and we could not i what we ended up doing honestly because i had started out with one therapist and therapists are the ones required to do the intakes to enroll new clients the we had to identify therapists in other districts to assist with enrolling the clients into our services because my one therapist could not do all of the intakes and see the clients that then became enrolled in services so it it was definitely a higher rate of referral and like i said it was it broke my heart to say we had to put a pause on referrals back in in april but i just knew that we couldn't provide the quality care if we kept doing the intakes at the rate at which we had been thank you and i i don't

074want to blame it but i i could lean on pandemic for causing those high numbers at the beginning here let's hope that numbers go down so if there's not any other questions you have one more mr hubbard i got a few first of all i didn't get your name becky mills becky okay thanks for coming becky um in your one of your slides you said life skills clinician and then i saw someone said family skills clinician what are what are those two roles they're the same family skills um it's the service provided so there's a life skills clinician who can provide individual skills training and development or family skills training and development family skills training and development would look similar to individual skills training and development but it would be providing that coaching for the

075family often times what that looks like is coaching on behavior management plans in the home setting limits rules structures following through with things at the home that's what that might look like and these are things you work with with parents absolutely okay um you had a pie chart at the beginning too where was all that data collected from the was that data that the school collected or data that you guys dated that we've collected based on diagnoses um in our electronic medical record okay um and out of those 122 cases or whatever it was um did you give any feedback to the school on what caused some of those whether it be social media whether it be bullying or like what caused some of these issues that maybe we could address it at a school

076level to try to circumvent some of these things so that's a great question we are in constant communication with the schools and i will say that is something that we it is an area of improvement because we only had starting out the one two and then three therapists throughout the year moving forward i anticipate greater communication with the schools and that could be with the school counselor with the teacher of records special education department whoever is working with and collaborating um you know on behalf of that child because we do want to make sure that we're talking about these on an individual basis about what is what are the referral concerns why where are these um you know issues stemming from and it does take a little bit at intake you're you do gather a

077lot of information but you don't get all of the information that explains everything but with having a therapist moving forward like i said the goal of having one therapist in every building we're the plan is for that therapist to have at least a monthly if not weekly meeting with the school to talk about the referrals active clients so that we're maintaining that regular communication we were not there this year because we just frankly did not have the staff to be able to maintain that rate you know those regular communications okay so when you guys come in and talk to students or do you talk to the parents before you talk to the students so the intake process requires that the family is present family and client must be present for that intake assessment family engagement

078throughout services is something that we highly encourage and is critical to the to the success of our of our clients in our services we look at it as though we cannot create lasting change if we are only working with one member of the family one part of that system we need to be working with the entire system in order to be able to create that lasting and sustained change positive change for the youth that we're serving so can we force that no but that is something that we really do strive for it is part when we do that intake assessment at the intake assessment ideally that first family therapy session is scheduled so that we set that expectation right up front okay well thank you very much i would like that to see data on

079the whenever you do have like um like hey i see a social the reasons for like a social media issue going on in school there's a bullying issue so maybe we can try to address it here and kind of try to bring that number down be great thank you it would be nice for what are our directions we need to go thank you if i see no other thank you board uh thank you for the presentation very informative thank you thank you do you have anything else to do no becky's just doing a great job and i'm just waiting for the next one okay yeah shall we move on our next uh report is on social emotional learning you want to do an introduction yeah thank you very much so again uh dr hoover's uh

080up here uh today she is accompanied by christy berger who is our director of school counseling and mental health and she works closely with community as well as you just heard so with that i'm going to turn it over to the both of them to share with you uh an update on our school counseling mental health department thank you dr arkanov for the school board and i want to just start by talking about um just a little introduction um meeting our student social emotional needs it's just has been a critical component of helping students to reach their potential for well longer than since i've been in education the adage you know kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care and that really comes to those relationship pieces and how

081our teachers and our school staff really just get to know kids because it's those connections that often motivate and and help us to strive to really become who we can be as young people and i know we all had those teachers in our lives that really meant a lot to us and we know those connections are important and the affective needs and students academic success are linked in so many ways and the more needs a student has that aren't being met and and those run across all demographics the more needs they have the more that support they need so that we can help them get to the learning piece and so we've been doing this for a long time as individual teachers i'm in our counseling programs and we really pair that with our academics

082so our schools have worked to create the kinds of cultures and supports within them to meet the needs for all of our students so that we can meet our our academic goals um with with every student um so i just want to share a timeline and dr arkanov you did a great job of teeing this up um in our strategic plan 2.0 this really came from our parents that said we need some character education components to our schools and they saw that there were some things happening in different schools and it didn't have a centralized this is what we do and from that we had a committee that included parents and teachers and administrators and we landed where we have 10 um traits that we think are things that kids should have to to build

083good character um those are all on our website there's a information about all those and how we teach those in our our buildings and our counselors had worked on those um for since 2017 was the first year we implemented that starting in august um so we've had those for for five years in our district um also in 2017 um a group of counselors had formed a study group and there was a counseling grant available and the study group they were supposed to find what are we missing how what are where are we not serving students well enough to help them in their academic life and through that study we did not get the grant we didn't do any of those things but what we did learn is our students have of in our district overall

084have a very high level of anxiety and stress which makes complete sense we're a very high achieving school district our kids go on to do amazing things homes with very high expectations teachers with incredibly high expectations for those students and it's often good stress right good stress is motivating too much stress is debilitating and so we really wanted to work to help with students in those areas those students that needed it had that identified need i mean while we didn't get that grant we did know that was something our counselor started working on in support of kids especially as those kids came to those with them so they tried to build their toolbox of support um in 2019 uh three different things happened and one was the do ido the department of ed released um

085sel competencies and those were not mandated they were just said hey we know some schools are suffering and actually mrs misberger is going to give some more information on that um but and those are a reaction to some things happening around the state and in our nation and but they're not mandated they're not required that year though there was an indiana code a state mandated legislative action that was schools needed to teach employability skills and that was part of our move to college and career ready standards and so they understood the states not now these academic things need to leave things kids need to leave high school to be successful in what they know but there's also some um employability skills some ways we need to behave that make us good you know whether it's

086college students going into the military um getting a job whatever those are um these are things and that came from a big committee that included employers as well as educators saying this is what peop young people coming to us don't have so those are state mandated through through indiana law and she's also going to talk about those a little bit later in the presentation later that year we also had a referendum for safety and security in our district and while that did not pass there were some really important mental health things that we considered in that about 30 percent of that referendum had it passed was going to be dedicated to things we could do for students mental health and well-being we could not do all of those things but we've tried to do what

087we can with what we have and we've added some supports in the counseling department as well some things we've done in safety and security um throughout the district um in 2020 in that fall or in february right before we went on shutdown and couldn't be at school anymore we had hired our first director of counseling and mental health and she was instrumental in onboarding the community supports that mrs mills just went through and all the support we've been able to give to students this year and thank goodness because this year was needs unlike any we've ever had with the pandemic and that effect has had on students and adults so she spent a lot of her time and energy making sure that program was getting off the ground and we were identifying kids and doing

088the things we needed to do she also was instrumental in the administration of a survey called panorama and that was given to all students grades three through 12 in the fall and in the spring and it had been because no survey is given to students without school work and said i know you had voted on that last year and um we had communicated with families before those surveys so that they know what those were about and we use that to help support what what are those needs with our student is anxiety still high we knew it was high in 2017. were students still struggling with that and then we wanted to help support that in the ways that we could for those students that did have those needs we had also in last year started

089talking about what we could do for they're called tier one supports what can we do to help every kid proactively to learn those employability skills to learn those things that help us get along in the world um and we were able to to adjust some things in our elementaries and we're going to offer some of those tier 1 supports um next year which we'll explain later and then the last just june 1st of this year we had a director change and miss burger came to us and just started just last month and she's been helping to get particularly that elementary thing off the ground connecting with our community health partner to make sure we're ready to start the year and have those things in place we need so that's kind of been our journey this

090isn't we've been traveling this we knew the need um which was a great um part of feeling like we needed that that referendum to um fast forward things more than we could have otherwise so i wanted to just give that background and um let christie talk about our our plans in the future sure thing okay thank you all for coming tonight i'm chrissy berger and i am the director of school counseling and mental health here for center grove a little bit of background about me i am born and raised in indianapolis i went to anderson university for college got my bachelor's in social work there took a year kind of tried to figure out what i wanted to do did some case management down in nashville tennessee and decided to come back my passion was

091really working with students in schools and so when i was in nashville i got to see how school counselors and school social workers work with students and so i decided to come back to iupui to get my master's in social work and then i started my career here in center grove schools i was at north grove elementary for about six years serving there as their school social worker and then was asked to come over to the middle school to be the middle school counselor and i at that time went back to get my school counseling degree so i actually had my masters in both social work and school counseling which is helpful because that's the team i lead here in center grove they have both of those backgrounds and then about three and a half

092years ago i went to the indiana department of education to work on what's called title iv funding which is federal funding that helps support whole child learning and teaching and i was there for about six months and within those six months we had two school shootings in indiana and the superintendent at that time felt like we needed to hire somebody who had a mental health background who could really help schools as they come around and support the whole child so that we don't continue to have these crises in our schools and so i was promoted at that time to director of social emotional and behavior wellness and then as dr hoover said i came back to center grove excited to see a lot of familiar faces and families i worked with over the years but

093i have been back since june 1st and have been working with my team and a team of administrators and teachers so why whole child wellness so why do schools have to do things around whole child wellness that don't include our academics and so here are some national stats at age 13 20 of our students are diagnosed with a mental health disorder and 5 of our students are diagnosed with a substance abuse disorder a lot of times we know that those can go hand in hand a student may be coping with a mental health concern by substance or maybe using substance which may create a mental health concern students who struggle with their mental health tend to be absent a lot from school and they are in that definition of chronic absenteeism which means they're missing

09410 percent of their academic day youth are six times more likely to receive school-based treatment such as community which is why it's been such an important path for center grove to take to partner and to provide that school-based services because our families are more likely to attend those services because they're at school it helps to eliminate the barrier of transportation also with parents schedules it tends to be a bit more flexible so that they can do that at school so in indiana so let's talk about some indiana specific stats so this data was taken by the indiana youth institute and this was done pre-pandemic and there are two stats here that i'll get to that are actually from 2015 because we have as a state have not had any current data since then and so

095students claim about 36 and a half percent of our students have claimed that they have been cyber bullied and this is one of the stats that i believe will increase um due to being online 24 7 with a pandemic i only could assume that this would be higher and in johnson county specifically for every 1149 youth and children that live here we have one mental health professional for them so that's when becky was talking about our staff and the national shortage and so that's why we're doing this work we're doing is because we want to be proactive and preventative so that our students may not need that mental health support about 26 percent of our high school students don't feel safe and that doesn't mean just physically safe that doesn't mean that they are afraid

096to come to school it might mean once they're at school they don't feel like they have a place to go if something was to happen they might not feel emotionally safe they may not feel mentally safe and so 26 and prior to covid 33 of our students 6th through 12th grade reported feeling sad or hopeless for two weeks in a row and being a middle school counselor for the years that i was this is something that i saw on a daily basis here in center grove and the last two stats are the ones that i set are from 2015 and truly is where mrs hoover was sharing about the counseling grant and the funding that came from that was because of these stats so indiana the second leading cause for our students dying that are

09715 to 24 is suicide the first being automobile accidents and then indiana ranks second in the nation for students who have made suicide plans and that data to me alone honestly is what keeps me up at night and is what i would say is our students are asking for our help and they're crying out for some supports and some needs day in and day out so let's look at center grove's specific data so prior to last year there was not necessarily a formalized way that all schools were submitting their suicide assessment data so this data is if a student comes to the school counselor possibly a dean assistant principal and says that they're having thoughts of suicide a parent could have called it could have been a friend coming to report that we go through

098the columbia screener and so you'll see last year alone for elementary students we did 106 of these and for secondary schools we did 137 two things to note our kids weren't in school every day at the secondary so would this have been higher if they had been or was school their safe place and it maybe wouldn't have been as high something to think about and again i spent six years at the elementary and i can tell you that this number is extremely high from when i was there not too long ago dr hoover also shared that we did some panorama data last year and so this is the spring results for grades three through five and again these are the students report this and so it's electronic and some of the questions that are asked

099on this we focused on classroom effort emotional regulation and grit and the type of questions that are asked is how hard you work in class do you try to be a part of classroom discussions what do you do when you're upset are you able to calm down and then for grit questions like if you're working towards a goal and you fail at that goal do you try again or do you stop trying and so when i first look at this and i look at the percentage i'm like that's not terrible right 76 tile 40th percentile but that is then we take it to our national norms and you'll see so 52 of our students say that they do well in grit but compared nationally to their peers we're in the zero to 19 percentile the

100same for emotional regulation and then classroom effort we are up higher above the norm and that space for our students three through fifth grade and then if we look at our secondary students you'll see a little bit of shift their classroom effort actually went down so that's them saying they aren't trying as hard at school and then emotion regulation went up a little bit for them and grit is still down in that zero to 19th percentile so what is social emotional learning at center grove so here's the definition that we use what i really want to point out about this i'm not going to read everything to you is that this is a process not only for children but also adults this is something that we have to continue to practice day in and day

101out i have to practice conflict resolution day in and day out i have to practice public speaking right and my stress around that so those are things that i have to practice day in and day out and those are skills that we're teaching our students and the employability standards that i'm going to get to here in a moment tie to all of the definition here that you'll see in the black boxes so we're teaching the skills for our students to be able to understand and manage their emotions which ties to the regulation piece of the panorama survey set and achieve positive goals establish and maintain positive relationships feel and show empathy for others and to make those responsible decisions what is the benefit of this work well i kind of laid the why the foundation

102of why we do this but again as dr hoover and dr arkanov shared this is something we've been doing for a long time it may have been under a different name it may have been called soft skills character education but there's been a ton of research about this and the research shows us that our students who receive daily social emotional learning skills practice and instruction we will see an 11 gain on their academic scores we will see an 11 dollar return on investment to the community which means what we're doing is we're seeing less of our juvenile students being arrested we're seeing less medical bills we're seeing less of public assistance and substance abuse and so this really invests money back into the community we know that social emotional learning has its greatest impact when

103we start with students in kindergarten and even really preschool we're so fortunate to have that here and we are really supporting those students right away and then social emotional learning also has a positive impact on our teachers they're teaching their students how to handle a tough situation maybe they're coming in that morning and they just got into an argument with their children or their husband and they're feeling frustrated right they can explain that how they're working through that because they're here to teach and to do their job just so we can get our students brains ready to learn so again social emotional learning at center grove we're focusing on skills that support college and career and life success we're really helping to develop productive responsible community members as our community businesses and stakeholders have said

104they need to see this from our students when they come to their space and again really just being intentional to align to the vision of this district which is to provide an exceptional educational experience for all the students that we serve here at center grove dr hoover talked a little bit about this the tiered supports and so tier one is something that all of our students receive so in center grove we talk about the conditions for learning we know that if students come and they are hungry or their pet passed away or a grandparent is sick and they come to school they're not focused on learning right they're focused on what they came to us with and so we want to have an opportunity to talk them through that and get them ready to learn

105we want them to have access to their school counselor their school social worker a lot of our students participate in health and pe classes to really focus on that wellness aspect and we have school-wide expectations for our students and that is again a tier one support and if we look at tier two and tier three some and few you'll note that if your student is receiving any of those supports it is parent permission we just like becky was sharing she would not do an intake unless the parent was there and as a counselor sending her a referral i have to have parent permission before i even send that contact information to community so some of that tier two support might be a small group with the student service personnel some one-on-one skill skill building a

106mentorment tea program and then for about five percent of our students they need some additional support so that might be referring them to an outside agency like community providing them a 504 plan or a special education plan to support their needs so the new thing that is coming in august is the elementary special rotation a lot of this has been highlighted but i want to show that these are the three skills that we will be working on and those are the employability skills and that was shared several times that um that was through indiana code and i want to say it's senate enrolled act hold on i wrote it down 297 so that was in 2019 that that came about so senate enroll acts 297 required that all schools k12 provide employability skills to our

107students what was also shared was that we will be posting all of those lessons on our website and nine weeks excuse me nine week increments and so you will know what day your student will be receiving that what will be taught we will also provide a teacher extension so if teachers want to support the lesson or if parents want to support the lesson we'll also have a parent resource there as well and then as was shared earlier something new starting june 1st going forward is that all school social worker and school counseling lessons will be reviewed by the teaching and learning team i'm not going to go into depth of all of these but i just wanted you to be able to see here are the actual skills and standards that are required and when

108we put up our lesson plans we will tell you which skill we're teaching to so that you know what that student is receiving and how we're tying it into that specific employability skill so you'll see the ones for regulation again this is just k5 special rotation so i obviously didn't put up all k12 but those are on the department of education's website and then connection and collaboration think of collaboration just really working well in teams working well with one another what happens if we have conflict how do i work through that so that i can get my project done and then ways to get involved a lot of this has been said already but the strategic planning that's coming again we'll provide that home to school connection and then next wednesday we will be hosting

109a parent information session and i believe yesterday we've already started to see some responses come in we sent a form for you to fill out for your questions so that we can make sure that every question is answered at that meeting next week any questions from the board board movers one of you go first i have a few all right okay um so when you said the lesson plan is gonna be posted online would is that the last plan that specifically is gonna be used or you use are you posting more of a curriculum online no we are creating that we are creating our own curriculum we did not buy a national curriculum we wanted to make sure it was center growth specific to the students we serve so the actual lesson plan will be

110posted the resources we use if we read a book if we show a movie clip all of that will be posted in addition to the standards it matches okay um i got a few questions i do appreciate you being here and being transparent i think that's real important to the community so um especially with all the things around sel right now you know you kind of i try to you know we talked earlier in the week and i did a lot of diving in online and i can find a lot of stuff that says how horrible it is i can find a lot of stuff that says how good it is so i kind of create i kind of made a list of questions here to kind of separate facts from fiction for me so

111anyway i'm gonna go ahead and get started um are you using uh school counselors to talk about scl um are you gonna do that yourself if you are gonna use school counselors to work with you because you referred to them as your team earlier yeah um will parents be notified on what school counselor will be where and talking to which their students yeah it's actually already posted on the website um which sel counselor will be there are there's three of them and they will be sharing two buildings and they will be on every other week so one week they're at north grove one week they're at sugar grove and they go back and forth those three counselors have been in the district i have been working with them this summer to create those lesson plans

112i will be in there evaluating and hearing how they present the information to students and again those are the lesson plans that will be on the website but in addition for years our school counselors and social workers have provided in classroom lessons so one of the reasons for that is if something happens with a student they have a death of a family their parents are going through divorce they have somebody at school they can talk to if they want to right and so how students know who a safe adult is is by that person coming into their classroom and teaching lessons so every school every elementary school will have that full-time person that they've had and they will provide like a intro who i am they're required to provide a bullying presentation to make sure

113that our policies and procedures are up to date with that and those things will post as well so the same counselor will stay at the same school so there's so the addition is there will be one person always at that same building but then a half person will be or a full person will be there every other week so they have one and a half but students will get sel instruction in the special rotation twice a month by the sel counselor that floats okay um i know i asked dr archanak this earlier about the crt when he was talking about that but do you see the overlap in between crt and scl do you do you personally see an overlap on those two things sure i would honestly agree with what dr arkanov said in

114center grove no i do see if you look at national organizations that are doing sel work they're using it in certain spaces i could see how people could connect those two i see how they could connect the words that are being used to support that but really the social emotional learning that we are teaching here is what i shared on the screen and really those skills that our students need to leave to be successful to deal with real life to deal with conflict to deal with stress to deal with day-to-day things that come up so in center grove no i do not see the connection i do see how other people see it as a connection in other spaces and especially in some national spaces okay um how are you going to measure sel here

115at center grove and it being successful how are you going to measure that great question the panorama survey um that we shared that data and again that is an opt-in opt-out that survey last year there was a form that went home you had to turn it uh the bottom part in if you did not want your child to participate same same thing will happen again it'll be fall and spring again this year and you can always opt your child out but that is the data that we will look at to see if those seo lessons are making a difference which is why we tied them to classroom effort emotional regulation and grit okay um i think you mentioned this earlier but well parents have full access to all media videos pamphlets anything that's presented to

116the child they'll have access to that prior to that and nine week increments yes okay so um before the first lesson will be august 9th our goal is to have that up two weeks before so it'll come to yeah be on the website so what if a parent sees something that you want you're going to present to their child that they don't they don't feel appropriate to you know to be given to their child is there a contact person for them to to reach out to yes we will actually have on the same page where those resources are an input form that they can provide input that will come to me and we'll discuss that if their child is at school that day they will receive that instruction we don't allow our students to opt

117out of special areas so but that's why we're putting it on the website so they'll know which day and what time their students will be receiving that okay and what would you consider it like an appropriate time frame like if a parent reaches out to to a point person oh sure would you try to have your team get back within like within a day oh yes okay 24 hours okay at the latest um is is is this only going to be implemented twice a week or is this going to be something that you would like to see implemented like into other courses like english maybe or things like that to of course it just specifically to wherever i guess what i'm asking is if a parent is concerned about scl um is this what they

118need to focus on because you know or is this something that that you see kind of being an english class or maybe specific books they're asked to read or things like that so this is where they will receive explicit instruction um i believe that good teachers day in and day out talk with their students they model things with their students if there's a situation they walk them through that they share how to deal with conflict that ties into social emotional learning but explicit instruction that two times a month at the elementary level k5 yes okay so in your opinion i think i asked you this when we talked last time but in your opinion do you think the parents should be asked for permission before anything is discussed with their kid in mental health counseling

119direct counseling in general in the schools so those are two separate things so if you're talking mental health and counseling yes we need parent permission for that in the school when a student comes down and they're in a crisis i don't always have the time to call the parent it is best practice to always call the parent after i have had that interaction or a lot of times honestly i would just do it while i was with that student if i was a school counselor the sel instruction that we are teaching that our employability skills that our academic instruction no i don't believe that we need parent permission for that because it's in line with all the other academic standards that we teach okay last question yeah uh our indiana attorney general todd rokita he

120wrote a thing called parents rights i think it was called um have you read that have you ever read that in your opinion from what you interpret from that do you do you interpret that parents have the option to opt their children out of anything to do with seo based on what his rec with his what he recommended his parents rights or not so i think it goes back um to what i just said about it being the what we are teaching in center grove it is employability skills it ties to regulation connection and collaboration so no i think in that document when he spoke to scl i believe he even used castle's sel that's not what we're doing in center grove that is different and so i think the way that he spoke to

121it was more general and the way that i'm speaking to it is specific to our students in our community okay all right i lied i got one more question so uh would you be in favor you know if there's let's say we've been forward with this and there's a lot of questions and concerns from the community would you be opposed to having any kind of audio visual equipment in the room so parents could kind of hear what's being told to their children or would you not be opposed would you be opposed to that or not so we can't do that due to student rights if you would like one of our team members to record a presentation that doesn't have interaction with students yeah we can post that so you're saying the parents can't see

122they can't like live stream in or watch what's going on in the classroom no because of student rights of those in the class right so this is a presentation let's listen i mean is that you mean like video wise and audio or or both i'm just trying to escape myself no that's fine and i'm not gonna call this one uh jason taylor but i think for hr i think you don't have to you don't have the answer that's fine i think for parent right or for student rights if a parent says they don't want their child to be photographed or a part of live stream we cannot do that okay okay it's fine um any other questions yeah so anyway i appreciate you doing that and i i really truly believe that every teacher at

123center grove wants what's best for the kids here i mean i don't think they'd be teachers that they but the concern i have is what a teacher feels what's best might not be what a parent feels what's best and i really think that line [Applause] i just really want that line to find because i would hate for a teacher to ever infringe on what um somebody's family standards might be you know what i mean i agree um and i hope you agree with that and you know i'm a firm believer in it it's a it's a school's job to educate a child and it's a parent's job to raise the child right and i also make sure mr alexander did you have questions yes so in in terms of the opt out and obviously listen

124please in terms of the opt out and opt in um do so the do they do it before each nine weeks presentation so like if the first nine weeks the parents are like yep i'm good with that and then the next nine weeks they're like i'm not so sure i like that so is it all or nothing the curriculum is not opt-in and opt-out like our art classes or our music classes which are also state standards and those are actually recommended classes these are supposed to be they're mandated for us to teach so um the um the panorama survey is what we families do not have to have their students take and we did have some families last year that that did not want their child to do that and so that that they can

125opt out um i think what she was talking about before families would know when the lessons would be for their child's class and families always have the option of not having their child in class during that time mr daniels i have no questions at this time thank you this counts do you have any questions i do not have any questions thank you mrs counts dr enough thanks for that question uh oh wait we still have thanks we still have some questions don't be sneaking away dr arkanov has a couple questions all right more just some clarifying things too i know because uh i've been asked this i'll make sure i said the right thing but that panorama survey that we do that's anonymous correct no that is not anonymous however that data is not shared

126widely okay that data is um currently i have access to that a parent could call and ask for the access of their child's response okay uh-huh okay good good to know so okay and then senate enrollment act uh was it senator enrollment act 297 correct that's what i believe yeah yeah it's okay so um in in that um act there we we talked about the employability skills and i liked your slide number 13 slide 13 where you talked about connection regulation and collaboration and i know in talking with a lot of employers um is part of my responsibility out there is that these are three of the major areas of concern um in employing you know a lot of people hire folks that are really good at their job but they can't collaborate or they

127can't self-regulate and they have trouble connecting and so hence the need for this work to be done within schools and hence the law set forth by our legislators um i i just wanted to kind of just touch base on that and see if you had any other thoughts around that as you you've had the experience of working around the state and um you know districts trying to work towards this in particularly these these three areas is this what are you seeing around what did you see around the state as districts were working to implement this type of of work sure um i would say majority of the districts i saw teachers i spoke with students i talked to regulation is the number one concern our young people are really struggling with managing their emotions that

128might be outburst that might be internal self-harm those types of things and so i would say for the majority of the districts they're really leaning into the regulation they're really leaning into that support and especially after coming off of a pandemic providing that not even just for our students but also for the educators and the staff and then collaboration always working together in teams i think we've all been in school we did group projects and some people love that and some people hate that but that's life we have to do group projects and we have to know what to do if one person isn't pulling their weight or one person's being a little too bossy and so that's a skill that we have to teach our kids and so i would say that that that

129to me is just teaching that's interacting with kids that's them being in a classroom that's them going to school and then connection i think is again goes back to the fact that you and i might not agree you and i might not have the same belief but we're in the same space and so we need to work to get along while we're in that same space and so i think that these three skills honestly from kindergarten to seniors we are seeing the need for these skills for our students to be successful day in and day out at school but also when they leave our space that's our responsibility yeah absolutely i appreciate that and i know as you've been working through this we've talked about this before that these three issues we see that in

130just our own employment and we have conversations about how do we get people to work together obvi you know a lot of times people are not dismissed because they're not good at their job it's a lot of times because they can't get along with one another and so we we definitely um need these skills work done so thank you so much i appreciate you guys i actually have a follow-up question with that if you would because because i see the connection regulation collaboration up there and i don't think there's anybody that would say that those are not three important skills for not only as dr arkanov said children but for adults correct so with teaching connection regulation and collaboration how do we measure success how do we how do we then say this is having

131a positive impact or or how do we measure failure how do we say it's not working i mean what do we look at what metrics i think in the moment again we'll look at that panorama data we'll look at office referrals discipline and referrals we'll look at attendance if kids don't feel connected at school they're not coming to school so can we see that can we see how that works out and then our ultimate goal would be right in five to ten years that our business owners in center grove are saying we're seeing a difference in your kids who are coming out ready to either work go to college or to be in the service and so i think that's the long-term goal but in the in the right now we're going to look at

132attendance discipline and the panorama data and i know we've at least since i've been on the board it's my second term we've talked about educating the entire child yep about how you learn in the classroom you learn at show choir you learn at band you learn robotics you learn in the athletic field you learn all these different places so do you see connection regulation and collaboration as part of that whole package yes yeah i believe that again that these skills are good teaching what we're doing is because we've been seeing a deficit we're doing explicit instruction to make sure that all students are receiving that twice a month to make sure that we are building those skills but i believe all the great teachers i know do this day in and day out when kids

133walk in a building appreciate that thanks anything else great questions great presentation as always thank you our next order of business is public comments we do have four people speaking before we do get to that process i would ask you to listen intently to what i need to read here persons desiring to address the board concerning a scheduled public agenda item must register before the start of the meeting registration will close five minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting each person's statement may not exceed three minutes if several people have indicated their desire to speak the time limit may be reduced in order to allow more people the opportunity to speak no more than 15 minutes will be allotted for public participation this evening i also need to add to this that during your

134speaking time it is not acceptable to have a derogatory remark of any participant of report this evening or towards a board member or another community member let's have respect for one another this evening we are only have four speakers so we will be able to lot three minutes to each one when you come up you'll give your name and your full address please our first speaker this evening are there any questions our first speaker yes are you going to allow people to like we talked about earlier speak on behalf of a group like what persons can speak for four or five we only have four speakers so we have plenty of time that's what the doctor they can do yeah explain that again yeah yeah we only have four speakers we only have four speakers

135we don't have to worry about that yeah they each are going to get there full time this is a public speaking situation where you're allowed to come up in a board meeting that is being held in public you are allowed to give your your information and your ideas and your thoughts if we as a board want to ask you a question and there may be some go back and forth we may have that it is not for the community to start questioning during that time frame i think mr russell do we do we know what topics the four people have signed up to speak on is that all three are uh crt and seo all three of them are four i'm sorry all four okay so no one's here to speak on the covet issue

136everybody no one is here on covet no okay just checking we all know we can speak on covert tonight and it will be different tomorrow and just a point of clarification on it just a point of clarification for the board's policy per the board's policy you had to have signed up here you were supposed to put your address down no one did um and we need you to state your address because of that that's really important as that's part of showing that you're part of the community here so that's why mr russell's asked that you state your address since you since it's not there we have four individuals that have signed up and um if they're so that that would consume 12 minutes of time of the 15. um my guess is that if you

137can't like get it done within the first in the three minutes he's going to probably give you a little bit of lead way since we have a total of 15 minute time limit um and um we we don't know everyone's viewpoint that signed up they may be the same they may be different so um that's that's why the process is like that if you were hoping to speak but didn't sign up that's unfortunate because it per the policy we we have that ahead of time and and that was out there um again if you're hoping to speak more we will have the uh parent information meeting next week so um but with that i'll just turn it back over thank you dr agnel so this evening rich did ask this group specifically it would be

138best if you guys talked together as one person for the you know he explained it in the 15-minute time he told him that instead of having five or six of you guys get up here and talk and say maybe the same things maybe it's best if you all collaborate with one person designate one spoke person and they could eat at that the whole amount of time that they i mean we've already talked enough that they could already said what they have to say well yeah i agree with you on that yeah yeah so i mean i guess what i'm saying is i'm assuming whoever the spokesperson is i don't know who it is they probably put their name down as one person assuming that that's what was being told to them but nothing has come

139to us have been explained to us ahead of time that they themselves have worked that out amongst themselves well the directions are part of the policy that is public knowledge so who who is the speaker these two women and parents want to speak in response to specifically the crt and fdl but there i'm sure there are others right this has been board policy and practice for years that you sign up when you come to the meeting here that is on our website and it's what we have followed then you will be able to speak yeah if you're signed up if you're signed up you will have time to speak tonight because we allow 15 minutes there are only four of you making it 12 give or take minutes so all four of you will get

140a chance to speak tonight [Music] i'm being transparent from the standpoint this is the practice we have done i'm not changing it from any past practice i was not at that meeting so no i do not know what transpired at that particular meeting [Music] this also let's also your your meeting next wednesday is really going to be a good time for you too yes it is it's okay no it's not it's a free screen sending your questions they'll get some contrived answer for it and you know have that answer and four weeks ago at this board meeting we were told that we could come ask every question we had and to change appropriately four weeks ago we'll go ahead and start with the people on the list we're going to start with people on the

141list and follow the procedure we normally follow let's see where we go our first speaker is angela elliott please right after if if you would state your name again an address sure so my name is angela elliott and my address is 421 governor's lane greenwood indiana 46142 i'm a parent and a community member i came tonight because of the topics that were on the agenda and the concerns i have about a lot of the misinformation i've heard going around and so i really appreciate so i didn't know exactly what i would say when i came up here because i came to hear what was being said on the agenda and i want to use my time to say that i really appreciate the detail that was given that the position of center grove on critical

142race theory and that dr arkanov gave was very helpful to have just have it out there to say this is what we believe it is and this is how it is or is not being implemented in our school district so i really appreciate that and then the sel was the other thing that i've heard a lot of misinformation going on about and how it is being applied within our schools and so i came to hear that as well and again i was not disappointed i thought that the explanations that were provided were very helpful and my request in my time up here would be that we continue to provide more opportunities for parents and community members to have the information and specific examples of how this these theories and concepts are being implied at our

143schools with our kids and giving us real examples so i think there's lots of generalities that are thrown around out in in hyperspace and it would be really helpful i think to calm some of the concern if we had real teachers sharing real examples from real curriculum that happens in our classrooms and so that is my i will leave this with that is my request to the board is that as you mentioned you're having one coming up that answers my question as a start but i would say it's just a start this is a big topic nationally and we need to focus locally to combat any misinformation and make sure we're all staying on the same page for our kids so that would be my request if you have any questions for me i'm happy

144to answer them okay i'll go one angela um thank you very much for taking the time to come up and talk to us i'd like you what you said about the real teachers kind of giving real stories is that something you'd like to hear like in a board meeting or or like how would you like to hear like maybe a you talk about like a success story from a teacher is that what you're talking about not necessarily success stories i'm just talking about like real examples of how um sel is provided in the classroom and how it not only in the explicit instruction but when we do uh you know group projects how does that connect and how is that an example of sel being implemented in our classrooms whether it be good or bad

145i think that would be i think we'd have to hear the examples yeah so i'm saying you want your example whether it's good or bad it doesn't matter yeah not just success to hear the glossed over sure you know i want to hear the truth and i want us to focus on real life and what's really happening with our kids and not generalities and um you know inflammatory life butterflies you want the nuts and bolts yeah i want i want real life i want to hear i'm you know i'm concerned about my kids thank you thanks any other questions for angela thank you thank you thank you [Applause] and our next speaker is amanda ennis you state your name and address amanda ennis 1209 millstone drive greenwood and i'm a parent and community member i'm

146going to make this easy on myself and just read i want to say i strongly support addressing the unequipping students in reference to social and emotional health i'm saddened that the state sel curriculum which has embedded links to castle which has been brought up so many times tonight and does little to meaningfully address social and emotional health which is needed now more than ever i know dr arkanov says the school teachings will not be influenced by organizations like castle but the state's lessons are in its current form this castle teaching has hijacked true social and emotional learning and aims to divide students and promote causes such as systemic racism equity and social justice a quick search on this castle website just one search led me to articles and teacher trainings on topics such as how

147to be an anti-racist teacher and student how to be a social justice warrior and how to teach that black lives matter and while black lives certainly do matter if we're teaching our students anything other than the truth that all lives matter we are failing them this website has articles from the author robin d'angelo the district is familiar with her she's contributed to books that i know the leadership staff has read and her works are featured on the district website or at least they were it teaches that all white people are basically white supremacists that would mean that we're all here white supremacists and we know that this is not true this is racism in reverse teaching these ideas will cause social and emotional damage not healing transformative sel and crt go hand in hand and

148they teach that racism is everywhere and everyone is guilty these ideas hold contrary to the real civil civil rights heroes of our time like martin luther king jr and frederick douglass these brave individuals never promoted hate and division so i ask the administration to address sel independent of the state curriculum you say this is what center grove is doing and i look forward to being able to see this in a transparent way i've been told that as long as the state standards are addressed any curriculum would suffice i'm glad you welcome parent involvement in this area and so i'm not just going to gripe i would love to help i would also like to know if there's a plan if a teacher or counselor goes rogue and decides to inject race or division um into

149their teaching if they decide to teach crt or transformative sel instead of board approved curriculum um i think the district i know i was at a meeting where one of the board members um said you know what that's going on let me know well i think that there probably needs a better way to be a better way than just emailing one board member and lastly just related to what i saw tonight when i read under connection cultural sensitivity and social awareness these are big broad terms and i expect as a parent that individual educator beliefs won't try to make kids believe that unless you think believe and act a certain way you are not socially aware or you're not culturally sensitive and that's a big concern of mine with this thank you real quick dude

150you have any questions for amanda board i'm sorry i didn't give her a dress 1209 millstone drive what was the drug millstone thank you and your name is already on the list for strategic planning thank you amanda i appreciate it thank you and our next speaker is theresa west all the way up if you would state your name and your address please hello everybody my name is theresa west and i live between arnie's and target basically so 1075 south state road 135 and i'm not exaggerating um easy to find um i'm going to speak from my own experiences because i have retired now 39 years of teaching 36 and a half thank you 36 and a half of it at center grove i'm a center girl graduate um gosh it's the whole gamut i bleed

151red and blue or red and white i think right now but i've gotten the chance to see it evolve and you know and some changes have been good some not so good some great some wonderful and all along the way and a lot of these people sitting here and in the back i've never been shy about what i didn't like or what i totally approved of but i always gave reasons why and one of the things um for sel for me and i think the misunderstanding perhaps and i liked i think what angela said of talking or listening to actual teachers that that work with it it's not a moment where we just say okay everybody we're going to have an sel moment for instance when you develop a classroom and you develop your rules

152you come up with what you want your classroom atmosphere to be and most times i learned with my age a little wisdom came along i let the kids and it was mostly fifth graders that i had they came up with the rules with me they had ownership and so with the kids they would come up with things that they thought we should stick with and you'd be surprised at some of the kids that were maybe the biggest talkers don't talk when somebody else is talking and it's like bonus package because they got the connection and their part in it that's an sel thing you know when we worked on a project for reading i forget who said this now but anyway um the one of the ways that i would bring the kids and let

153them have involvement is a group project they all have their parts and you know how group projects are sometimes everybody doesn't do their equal share adults are the same way but what they were able to do then is evaluate their own involvement privately with me but then they were able to fill out a sheet and tell what they they thought how the group did together now the rule was they could not be rude they could not just say oh i don't like him he didn't you know couldn't be any of that they had to give a reason what they didn't like or how they thought it could have gone better that's an sel moment you know we had kids somebody's christy did such a wonderful job i just totally threw out my nose because i

154don't have to use them anymore but um i had a little boy walk in when we were doing istep testing okay he literally came up to me and said he was crying he says i watched my puppy get hit as i was waiting for the bus his classmates got involved that's an sel moment so all these things are things i think if you're parents i'm a parent that's what you want your kids to do you want them to be a productive citizen you want them to see how they fit into the whole thing you want them to have ownership on what their part in it is you want them to grow academically socially responsibility-wise accountability-wise it's all enveloping so just my two cents thank you teresa okay we're gonna work with a little bit oh

155thank you you may be seated did you see the teacher look you just got i know not your first time we grew up she just give me that look many years okay we're going to have an sel moment here of collaboration since there seems to be some confusion we we have discussed that with one more speaker with your three minutes i'll put that into who would you like that to be what is the fourth name that signed up tonight oh i'm sorry but so i wanted to tell you that our fourth person coming up is john jacob if you'll come on up to the podium at the moment but i did want to work have you have time to talk talks amongst yourselves and figure out who you would like to come up and have

156another three minutes if you'll state your name and address please uh i will state my name my name is john jacob i'm state representative for house district 93. if you don't mind i will not i as i i'm because of my address i have a lot of threats i've been getting at me so i would rather not make my address public okay well i again uh mr jacob why don't you give us your uh office address i'm sorry your office address not your it is the state house indiana state house 300 300 west 300 west washington okay we got an address all right okay so i thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak i had a lot of notes actually to talk about sel and crt however given that it was discussed as

157crt was not going to be implemented in center grove and also it's been discussed at sel as it's going to be implemented in center grove is not going to be traditional sel as it as it has been taught across the country however i am grossly concerned that scl and crt are just inextricably tied there is a lot of ambiguous and subjective information and ideology that is in both that is that weaves back and forth so i am a little bit concerned about the information that was given tonight because i feel like it was very vague and it was very ambiguous i do believe that sel and crt as it presently stands in its present form being taught across the nation i believe it definitively pushes a marxist ideology that definitely undermines the very fabric of

158our nation and that is greatly concerning to me and i believe it's very concerning to the people here [Applause] in addition it's been talked about i noticed over and over the state mandated employability skills and you reference i believe it was senate bill 297 i believe from 2019 so i am more concerned about the what exactly are the details of those state mandated employability skills i would be very interested in the in the explicit detail that's being plumbed out with that in addition i am i worked for state board of accounts for almost 30 years as an officer of the court everything i did as an auditor for the state board of accounts with the issue of government was the issue of transparency everything that government does should be transparent and i understand that there's

159issues of concern with children and their privacy however i think there's always a way to do things and i think that the issue of video in the classroom and keeping our teachers accountable i think is an incredibly important issue i think teachers need to be accountable as to what they are speaking and teaching in the classroom not what they're going to say say that they said that they taught but that people can go back and look at the video footage and also that that if if necessary to make sure that that students are not in those videos you don't have to video the the students but discussion okay so again i think that the bottom line is is i took an oath to uphold the indiana constitution of the state constitution and also this the

160laws of the state of indiana you also took that oath and what i'm asking is that you respectfully uphold your constitutional oath and anything that undermines or conflicts with that as it relates to anything within sel or crt that you make sure that that information that that is not implemented thank you mr jacob we have some questions please my apologies any questions any questions sorry please well one thing i was going to share with you uh mr jacob thank you so much for being here by the way thank you you know it's and thank you for serving the state and and our constituents um you know one of the things you you asked about the employability skills um if you reach out to the the department of education and it's um jason callahan you can

161see that guide that was put together so i would i know that's one of your questions that you had asked and i know some of the board members might have some some questions for you but would it be okay if i asked you some questions since i have you here and i don't you know i don't always get i love to get the chance to talk to uh representatives so i will try to do my best okay um i guess my my first thing is um and i'm gonna get on my soapbox because i did i've done it my entire career but i'd like to know where you stand on state assessment standardized assessments and the millions of dollars that are being put into them i am greatly concerned over the issue of state assessments

162i am a big believer in the control of the local school boards and i believe that our schools have have greatly deviated from education in other words reading writing arithmetic and we have [Applause] i'm greatly concerned that we have overlapped in it and and i'm just using that as an example here tonight sel mental behave mental mental behavior uh the the physical well-being of our children i i'm all for we i have my wife and i have six children i'm very concerned about our children and i believe that many of the parents here i can tell but just because they're here that they're concerned about that but i think there's so much the school teaches that is outside of the scope of what i think education really should be teaching okay and so so in

163regards to that um you know so like the state assessment piece and you know i i can't remember what the crazy number was spent um on you know just standardized testing right like istep or ilearn or all those things i that's the really my question is so as we work as a school district and we put so much resources into that because that's how we're judged that's how we receive our funding and so forth i'm just curious as to has there been talk at the legislative level about just really that large waste of money that continues year after year of all these different assessments and quite frankly creates a lot of stress not just for our our students and you know but our teachers and i just i wonder you know if there's been some

164conversation that's my that's been my biggest soapbox as a superintendent i've personally watched the this never really work um and every couple of years you know the legislators say okay we're going to throw that test out and we're going to spend millions and more dollars again and you know what we could have done with all those millions of dollars how many teachers we could put in classrooms how much more we could pay our teachers and i just wonder if anyone's really having that conversation there you know in all honesty again i'm a freshman legislator but uh there was no as far as i know there was no discussion of that this past legislative session okay well i i appreciate if you i hope i'm not i i feel i don't want to put you on

165the spot somewhere okay and if you have further questions i would be i would be open to a meeting and if you would like to further discuss things i am i'm open to this yeah absolutely i would i would because i i think and i've been telling this to people i'm not afraid to say it but standardized testing is just wasting our taxpayer dollars i agree thank you thank you thank you dr arkanov board members hey john um so i take it you're on the fence with crt and scl i know there's some other people at the state house that are as well and i i'm rumored and well it's not remember i've talked to michelle davis and i know that she's kind of writing a bill um do you know where that stands like

166last i heard it was kind of in the attorney's hands like do you think that'll go through um do you think that'll get passed where we ban seo as far as legislation yes your talk on it joe i think i think you know where i stand with i'm going to be actually very polite i think and i will be limited on my comments regarding the gop in the state of indiana we have a republican super majority and primarily they typically fail in standing for the republican platform fair enough i think in as it relates to crt specifically i think it it's an issue that we need to protect our children our nation and i don't see the republican party doing those things and it's really angering to me okay mr alexander actually mr hubbard covers

167my question oh well thank you mr daniels i i just have a question you know we talk about the state funding formula for schools you're familiar with the algorithm that goes in and determines i have reviewed it when i work for the state board of accounts but honestly it was years ago that i did can you tell us what the algorithm actually is and and the reason i ask is because center grove is almost always at the bottom per pupil you know how much money we get for each kid in order to educate is there any discussion all at the state house to take another look at that algorithm for some more fairness and clarity among the schools as to what each gets with respect to the state funding formula i'm sorry is your question

168has there been a discussion or would there be a discussion or either one pick one i can i number one i mean i i do not know if there has been a discussion i did not hear of any again in this last legislative session i know there was much discussion about education i'll be honest uh the gop was was pretty infuriated i think by a lot of the teachers unions um they felt like they gave them the world and i'm not directing that at center grove and they felt like they just kept on asking and asking and asking and they kept on giving and giving giving but as it relates to your question specifically going forward i would entertain discussion and and and i'd be willing to take in information and take back to the

169gop things that you want to discuss with me and just so you're clear on what i'm going for i'm not talking about increasing the amount in the pot i'm talking about how that pots divided right right you're talking about the distribution the actual distribution the distribution among schools right now there's there's the other issue too of you know increasing the pot and then everybody has more so i think it's for further discussion i was just curious as to what your position was on both of those and i'm not trying to put you on the spot i'm just trying to understand again i i would be open to a discussion about that further discussion outside here if you'd like and i can give you my my contact information thank you you're welcome and just for reference

170for everybody um there's 289 school districts in the state roughly 200 in high school i'm looking at dr gabriel back 97. 297. i believe that's correct 290. consolidation almost 300 and typically center grove has been anywhere from 270 to 275 in the funding formula over the last 10 years uh one other question are you familiar with the work ethic certificate program i'm sorry the what work ethic certificate program i am not it's the governor's work ethic certificate program okay and part of that program goes hand in hand with teaching students skills especially when's graduating right out of high school on how to interview for a job what you need i mean one of the criteria is simply showing up on time for things because unfortunately students don't have those skills in coming from some of

171our homes so i just wondered if you're not familiar with it i guess they won't really answer the questions because those skills we're teaching in that from the governor go hand in hand with social emotional learning skills so i didn't know if you were familiar with that or not i was not sorry okay thank you it's a great program okay are there any other questions from mr jacob congressman jacob i think she's dropping her phone so unfortunately we have lost mrs counts any other questions just connect thank you for trying to get her back i'm here i'm here yay she she hasn't listened [Applause] yeah mrs counts did you have any questions i do not i'm sorry sometimes like i try to hit the unmute button and it just keeps going up and down so

172i apologize that's okay and we're having bad weather here so that's probably not helping things uh okay so have we come up with one more speaker yes okay and as always if you state your name and address all right kathy giuliani 5875 north road 400 west and i'm a grandparent in center grove and i am a parent of two children who came to the center grove schools so we've been here for a good long time and have been very happy with center grove schools we've had to punt tonight because we had a presentation that was we had timed it out for 15 minutes obviously we got confused on that so i'm going to just try to paraphrase what we've what we wanted to get across the reason this group formed was because of outrage over

173what happened at pleasant grove when the counselor went in and did the lesson called windows and doors and just so you know i just want to read one question from that it was about teaching the kids about microaggression these are fifth fifth graders i believe right fifth graders okay so a microaggression might be all lives matter so that's a microaggression because no one denies that that's true but all lives can't matter until black lives matter another one if you didn't commit the crime the police wouldn't have to draw their guns so that of course is assuming that um they are guilty so here's here's the point in this one brief statement you've taught the kids the inappropriate and harmful concept of microaggression you've promoted black lives matter you've disparaged the police you've effectively called the

174children racist without any thought word or action to support it well done and we had a 10 year old go home how many other 10 year olds went home and were upset but didn't have a parent that called so that's what got this group going so and that's one of my main complaints this these programs what i'm seeing written are not at all age appropriate and i have taught third grade through university uh this is not your traditional character education i would say your traditional character education is like what i used to teach in health class great stuff and what's going to happen after the employability skills are taught that's what we've been told those sound great right but what's after that also we don't know what the plan is for middle school and high

175school if you want to know where these lesson plans are coming from they are coming from our indiana department of education through a group called castle based out of chicago you should should should go look at their website i want to read you one quote um the funders and growth partners for castle includes an organization called new profit their mission is to seek and disrupt systems of oppression that are the foundation of an equitable opportunity and outcomes for all and the novo foundation they are a social justice foundation dedicated to um catalyzing a transformation in global society from a culture of domination to one of equality is this the best way that we can spend 45 minutes every other week with our kids are our test scores that high that we can spend the time

176doing this we have we are not unsympathetic to the suicide issue or to other mental health issues definitely not but we're taking a sledgehammer to fix a problem that attack hammer could do and i want to say one thing about the research that you're putting up telling us that this results in academic growth of 11 i read the research what if what i found was uh in the meta-analysis only 16 of all of the studies in the meta-analysis even reported on academic gains 16 so i'm going to tell you that 11 is not only statistically weak it's also deceptive this is giuliani this is giuliani do we have any questions for mrs giuliani anyone okay thank you did you yeah well not really a question just kathy i appreciate coming in and taking the time

177to do that and and uh representing these people these fine young folks here um you know you brought up that presentation and i was pretty upset with it as well um i mean i was actually really upset and i don't think you'd find a person on this board that was happy with it to be honest with you um i don't want to speak for everybody but i mean it was it was something that we all were pretty upset about and i know what left a black eye in the community's eyes and i know we lost trust in you guys the school district did and um and then all we're doing is trying to um kind of create some guardrails maybe i think of the last board meeting doctor arghanov said he was going to create

178guardrails to maybe prevent these things from happening again or when they do we can hold people accountable appropriately so to speak and uh so i appreciate it i appreciate you taking the time to be here and i know you guys put a lot of time into giving a bigger presentation um and i apologize that that was not allowed thank you any other questions thank you mr harper thank you mr giuliani and thank all of you for being patient through some misinformation whatever we want to call it there i think tonight we saw some seotl things with collaboration with each other and these are skills we learn our next order of business is consent items do i have a motion to approve the consent items mr president i move that we approve the consent agenda as

179presented thank you mr alexander do i have a second second thank you mr daniels as before i have to go down through the roll call amy you look like you're in a home and we will start with mrs counts everyone wave miss accounts uh yay or nay on approval of the consent items yay you're multitasking you're driving aren't you mr daniels yay mr alexander and mr hubbard i'm a yay you're negative yay yay okay and myself yay celeste passes 5-0 thank you all now we will move down to action items and the 8.1 is the uh to approve the 2021-2022 return to school plan which was presented earlier i have a motion on that from a board member mr russell i move that we approve the return to school plan for 2021 2022 school year

180as presented thank you mr daniels do i have a second i will say go ahead mr alexander i'll second it so we can have to discuss so we can have the discussion okay we have a first and a second are there any questions or discussions i i think for me it's just it's more of a it's more of a comment or um you know on on one hand you know the governor issued an executive order kind of you know mr jacobs is saying they want the local local government to have more control so the governor issues an executive order and we find out an hour before the meeting that that isn't true because of i whatever code around having to quarantine and and those types of things so i think there's a definite disconnect somewhere

181between the governor's office and what's happened and what's happening and the control that the local levels of government has i'm not i like this i like the plan better than the plan that we had to go with last year because last year required masks and all sorts of crazy rules around quarantining and we've had administrators watching video to figure out who should be quarantined and who shouldn't be quarantined and continuing to quarantine healthy kids because they were sitting three feet next to somebody in class i think is quite honestly a waste of our staff's time and energy i think i've stated multiple times through the course of the pandemic that you quarantine for two reasons the hospital the hospitalization rates are going up because we're taxing the hospital system and the death rates going up

182neither of which are occurring in johnson county or in the state at the moment if i understand the idea or the department of health's website's map here appropriately so corn continuing to quarantine kids in school buildings is something that i i just i find hard to believe we're having to continue to do this year um based on where things currently are um with all that being said we have to have some kind of reopening plan why this plan may not be perfect i will support the plan tonight but i would like for the administration to schedule a special meeting with the board so we can have further discussion about the quarantining rules what does that look like so we have a better understanding of that than what we've had in the past since you know

183i think the board was on one path until six o'clock this evening and we've we've kind of had to suddenly do uh an about face on where where our open or the 2021 2022 reopening plan is and and here's the other thing i mean this is constantly evolving i applaud the efforts of mrs norman and and mr taylor i i can't believe i can't believe all the hoops and things that these two individuals have had to jump through i'd like to get them back to doing their actual day jobs and not figuring out who was sitting within three feet of somebody or who was too close to somebody at show choir practice or tennis practice or football practice um i'd like for you know maybe we can talk a little bit more about that ic

184code i you know i i struggle to give dr arkanov direction to knowingly violate uh an ic code so so anyhow just my dissertation about covid can i head real quick because i know some of them are here and they came tonight some of the great principles in the building that are the key to that contact tracing as well sorry so they really do help i i also i guess i want to make a statement is there is pam back there pam can you pull up the slide nine from that presentation is that is that possible because you refer to the indiana administrative code and i just want to give just a little bit of background of kind of what happened today just to put this in context the administrative code tells us that we

185have to do this it says we have to quarantine these students under these circumstances so i want to start with the positives the positives we've got lower coveted numbers the positives we're going to have in person learning the positives masks are going to be optional all of those things are positives we're going in the right direction let's hope we continue to go in the right direction my colleague scott made reference quite accurate 100 degree that we thought we were going in one direction with spectral quarantines and this morning an announcement came out that oh hey you must follow administrative code as it relates to quarantines i am not going to direct this school or our superintendent to not follow the law and if the law tells us we have to follow this that until they

186tell us otherwise i've got to vote in favor of this plan that is going to include quarantines i did my kid was quarantined i was quarantined my wife was it wasn't fun it's not fun for anybody nobody wants covet nobody wants any of this stuff but i cannot vote to have the superintendent the school corporation amy jason all those who put all their long hours into doing everything we had to try to keep people safe to try to keep people healthy we violate the law i i just can't do that in good conscience so even though i'm not necessarily happy that we had to make this change as scott said at six o'clock i'm going to support this plan but i do agree also that we need to continue to look at this and can

187you go to the last slide another thing i really like about this plan i went through the numbers are down in person learning maths are optional but look at the last major bullet point dr harkinoff will be given authority to adjust the plan throughout the school year after consultation with the board and administration the first sub-bullet under that says changes may be made based on increased or let's hope decrease spread in our school and our community so stay tuned well i'm going to vote tonight for this that doesn't mean this is the end-all be-all and this is going to be what the rules are the entire year let's hope the spread slows down let's hope the spread stops for for goodness sake so don't think that my vote today is necessarily thinking that the quarantine

188rule that we've been mandated to follow is a good idea but it's the idea we're being told we have to follow so thank you mr albert anything yeah i just you know i want to kind of second what they said and thank you jason and amy for the hard work he has put into this and um it kind of sucks that this kind of came down at the 11th hour from the state um you know but with that being said i'm kind of i just i'm ready for the principles to get back to doing their jobs and ready for you guys to get back to your doing your jobs and for this to kind of come down like this i think it's a slap in the face to the school district i know there's other

189schools in the state that are basically thumb on their nose um at that and so i'm gonna i'm gonna vote no i don't know where everybody else stands but i'm voting no i think thank you mr hubbard hey joe i'm not personally offended either mrs counts do you have any comments so i you know i think maybe everybody on the board spoke the surprise that we got this morning i think that you know i think that was a surprise to all of us i i personally the state and find the disconnect between the governor's office and our in our health department okay okay thank you mrs counts uh as all the comments lean towards as i said earlier we are charged with dealing with the federal the state and the county all three of them

190don't decide to hold hands a whole lot of times and that's what gets us into this mess in this last minute situation as mr daniels said i think you alluded within a week it could all change but we have to start with something and move from that point so we have where we are so the administration can also know what their marching orders are so with nothing more to add can we try and get that additional conversation scheduled before they start school absolutely i'll work with pam we'll get a we'll get a calendar out to i know they're trying to get five of us in the same place at the same time as a challenge but herd and cats so and i'm sure because the information that will come down to us we will have

191to have that meeting on that absolutely and as you know from last year um you know it changed a change of change i don't think that uh that's going to be different this year it's my guess between now and august 5th there's going to be three more changes that occur so yeah let's hope yeah hopefully for the better hopefully for that yeah we'll see if it's that long okay if there's no further comments we do need to vote on this i've had it first by mr daniels in a second by mr alexander mr daniels how do you vote i vote in favor hey mr alexander yay mr hubbard nay mrs counts i think she already told us she'll get it she has to say it again mrs counts you can write it up her name

192she said maybe she was wrong i'll go ahead i am a gay mrs counts your vote on this gotta love technology she's nice thank you motion passes three to two thank you board great discussion next order of business on action items is to approve the 2021-2022 student handbook dr arkana thank you mr russell see this evening i'm recommending that the board approve the changes to the 2022 elementary and secondary student handbooks as presented and uh dr long will provide you with some additional information thank you about cramped up after walking up here i've been sitting so long so sorry i'm a little slow getting up here dr long i'm going to stand don't take it first one feel free if anybody else would like to stand up this is not the most exciting part of

193the night obviously but tonight we bring to the board the handbooks for the elementary the middle school and the high school the one thing that i would say is our mask policy uh or we called it our face covering policy that was in the the handbook last year we modified that so it matches what the board approved tonight and it just says that the school corporation will follow the requirements provided by the indiana department of health if the indiana department of health does not mandate mask center grove community school corporation will not require mask however parents and students may choose to wear a mask if they desire so that's a change in all three of the handbooks so rather than have that individually three times i wanted to make sure we covered that um if

194you want which one do you have first pam do you want it okay so on the elementary handbook first of all i'd like to acknowledge krista nelson she's the principal at center grove elementary she totally dismantled the elementary handbook and then put it all back together it's probably been 10 to 12 years since we've really done that made it in line with the high school and middle school so she did a really great job got input from mrs phillips mr seiner mr kelly mr rod our mrs rodman and mr proctor so they've done a really nice job and i'm really proud of the way this handbook looks and next year mrs nelson is going to help the middle schools do the same thing so we get those in line as well so she did such

195a good job she got drafted again some of the new changes highlighted for the elementary school it was a way to pick up our the way to report in absences and pick up patrol so we wanted to make sure we had that probably the biggest um change in our uh in the handbook is under our attendance policy it's an updated attendance policy on national competitions so it reads that participation in a non-school sponsored state or national competition a student who competes in a non-school sponsored state or national competition will be marked as an unexcused absence we did a lot of research on this that's in line with probably almost 90 percent of the other school corporations that we surveyed we think it's important we want students to be actively involved in those but we found

196this year that some kids miss two days for an event and other kids miss seven days for the same event so we try to try to make this uniform and that again is a a a policy that both the middle our the middle school high school and the elementary school wanted to adopt and to add to their handbook we added a little bit about in the transportation about students taking pictures and videoing other students on on the bus that just aligns more with the the middle and high school policy too and then an update is uh some updated costs the teachers thought it was important for our parents and our students to know uh what it cost if they intentionally damaged technology so mr taylor and his department put that in there and so we

197added that but those are the the highlights uh i'd be happy to answer any questions um if you have any or do you want me to go go on to the next middle school and we gotta do them as a package sure all right i'll go on middle school hold all your questions till it goes through so um mrs lawson chris griffin jake holder and jeff mendenhall all worked on this and really appreciate their uh their efforts um they i i applaud their effort they addressed three three areas in the dress code for the students i i think they're all in a positive way they added the wording that athletic shorts that provide adequate attic adequate coverage are acceptable that's more and more common you guys know that if you've had children uh the one

198thing that surprisingly is in here is that blankets are carrying a blanket at school is no long not necessary and against policy i thought that would be in the elementary one but that's a middle school one they won't wear a coat but they'll bring it i know yeah the other area is uh hair color uh our our old policy just used to prohibit any unnatural hair color uh and we've changed that now or they're proposing to change that that hair that distracts from a student's ability to learn or which causes a disruption in the classroom we had a long conversation about is does pink hair or blue hair really disrupt the educational process and we found that probably it did not so they're they're wanting to change that um they added the uh to clarify

199the um the amount of days excused if they're sent home by the clinic because not all students sent home by the nurse are required to be out the next day this change allows the nurse to determine which days would be excused based on the situation or the reason that they're sent home doesn't change our our fever policy or any of those other areas just um the uh i talked already about the national competition part and then the homework agenda this is different for the uh the middle schools uh they'll no longer receive a hard copy of the agenda it'll be online like it is at the high school and they did reflect that in their the fees that you guys approved i think are that the board approved a month or so ago so they

200no longer charge students for a hard copy of an agenda for the high school handbook policy changes um jeff harkin teresa owens laura burkhart and troy burkhart all worked on this and i appreciate their efforts really minor changes but i just wanted to share them with the board we used to just mail any a letter home about attendance but we're including a mail or an email so more people are easily reached by email than they are by the regular mail a big change for them in in the academic dishonesty area uh the new policy states that students will receive a zero for the assignment and may result in a loss of credit for the grading period and then the third offense students will fail the course and will result in a loss of credit for

201the semester so that's just a change in the second and third offense part of the academic dishonesty again we talked about the national competition part for all three handbooks the s to the fifth program you know that if you have attendance and grades we allow students to skip through part of their finals with covid they they modified that policy because not every student was in school every single day they're really asking to return back to their previous attendance requirement that it says each semester a student can be absent a total of two days in the classes they elect not to take a final exam exempted college days are defined by the school policy not included in those two days so students can do an official college visit and it doesn't count as part of those

202two days and each senior can select a total of four final exams which they'd like to be exempt and the other change that's linked to that again it was coveted related this goes back to the previous policy prior to last year is that a student must be present during the respective class period of the final exam in order to be exempt so those are the the highlights or the low lights depending on your opinion but we're recommending approval of all those changes for the elementary and secondary handbooks any questions for dr long uh real quick these now are once finished are always online at all three levels they all are all always online in the elementary schools we still give out a paper copy that we send home for the parents but they'll also be

203available online okay any other questions i'm all for that you know that yeah it doesn't disrupt class well there's a glare but anyway okay seeing there's no other questions do i have a motion mr president i move that we approve the 2021-2022 student handbooks as presented thank you mr alexander do i have a second second thank you mr daniels uh we'll start mrs accounts yay your name aye mr hubbard emma yay mr alexander aye mr daniels yay and myself yay motion passes five zero thank you thank you thank you dr our next order of business is to accept bids for the high school renovation project phase two and i assume that's dr long yeah thank you uh this evening i'm recommending that the board approve the changes to the i'm sorry i'm recommending that i

204did i'm recommending that the board accept the bids too for phase two of the high school renovation project and i you know dr long people always leave when you get up i know i think it was the pink hair comment i don't know what that was i i lost them at that apparently but uh please go ahead and provide some additional information thanks um tonight jim goalie from aecom hunt is with us and i'm probably gonna have to buy gym lunch i didn't know we were gonna be here this long and i told him get here early so i did give him tomorrow off even though he doesn't work for us so uh on july 1st of this year at 11 o'clock we receive bids relative to the renovation of the center grove high school

205phase two we received a total of 10 bids and two combination bids and after that the lancer and bb are architects and aecom hunt and jim's team did a d scope meeting with all the low bidders and based on their review they're recommending that we accept all the following bids with the fault with the alternates that include alternates one one through eight the really good news is they all came in under our budget which allowed us to do all every single alternate that we had listed so we were pleasantly surprised by that which means by the time we're done with this we'll have touched all the classrooms at the high school so it's really pretty exciting so we're recommending approval of the general trades packet to rl turner corporation and the amount of six million

206two hundred and two thousand dollars bid packet two for mechanical plumbing and fire suppression be awarded to chambon sons for 3 million 534 the electrical and technology packet awarded to james babcock for a million 386 thousand dollars uh bid packet four lighting general awarded to energy harness corporation for 131 thousand eight hundred and twenty five dollars and bit packet five lighting in general for the tunable classrooms award also awarded to energy harness for the amount of sixty seven thousand five hundred dollars that's a total of eleven million seventy four thousand eight hundred fifty nine dollars and like i said it came in under our estimate and it came in under our budget amount too so we're recommending that the board approve all of these bids or accept all these bids thank you dr long are

207there any questions for dr long on the bid process just just a couple of questions first glad to hear it came on their budget but i hate to have jim sit back there and not at least get answered one question he's been very patient oh no he's waiting on my standard question well i know what yours is but but on the general trades six million two hundred thousand two dollars we only got one bid what yeah what do we think the day it did we actually had three after the companies structural steel bids were scarce and the two bidders that were also here never received a stressful steel bed oh wow so it was a shortage of supplies you believe that led to the because i know not too long ago we bid the emergency

208operations center and i think we one of the packages we had 15 20 people submit bids and i ask that for two reasons one to see the trending as we plan as what comes next and then second i'm assuming you're you're really recommending acceptance because if it goes back out there's a chance to ski this deal is even more scarce the nice thing too is r.l turner is currently working on the pool and the uh the phase one of the renovation as well so we're familiar with the work right and so we're pleased with the leadership that they provide too thank you so with with approval here in a minute are you when do you plan to start um july 2022 he's still your second question write that one down kids and okay and bill

209jim and bill since since we do have folks here could you just give a quick overview what phase two is because i don't think um phase two will be some renovation of some of the classrooms that we didn't touch but primarily it's the backfill of the old pool and the creation of an art area so we'll put the art rooms over there and then we also are going to put the wrestling room relocating the wrestling room making that room an lgi or large group instruction room and then the old art classrooms will be renovated into being just traditional classrooms so we'll gain about seven or eight classrooms out of that by the time we're done thanks any other questions or comments new pools beautiful just fyi and just a compliment on getting done ahead of

210schedule there how far how long yeah we were about almost 45 days ahead of schedule and under budget so that means june mr alexander i got it that means june hey jim my wife was happy to hear that you were done a little early [Laughter] the students will be very happy when it's all done as well we're still waiting on the video of dr long jumping in the pool not going to happen okay scene is no further discussion uh do i have a we didn't do a uh mr president i move that we accept the bids for phase two of the high school renovation project thank you mr daniels do i have a second second thank you mr alexander start with you mr daniels yay yay mr alexander yay mr hubbard mrs counts thank you

211and i am ea so it passes 5-0 thank you very much thank you okay that concludes uh business there we're going to other business anyone not not tonight we've been here mr hubbard mr alexander any other business mr daniels dj any final comments yeah yeah i got um or if you have anything from central nine yes no um you know school board members are we're all voted in on like nonpartisan tickets i guess um and i'm kind of seeing stuff on facebook because of you know with teachers or people are kind of kind of making comments about teachers kind of implementing their religion or their sexual preference or their ideology whatever it may be and so people are trying to get political stuff around for that i really hope we don't get to that point

212you know we really don't want that on boards so that's the only thing that i got mr alexander anything mr daniels i guess i'll just second briefly what joe said i mean as as i said when when i stood up and ran the second time you know we educate all the children no matter who the kid is we don't pick our children they pick us we're a public school we'll always be a public school no matter where they are we want to meet them where they're at we want to make them better that's our job no matter what that is our job exceptional educational experiences so the only other thing i want to add is for those that support the city of education foundation know about it the gale is coming up in august there's

213still tickets available please please please it's a wonderful organization that provides additional funding for things that we don't have the money to do extra things for teachers extra things grants and the likes so please if you can make it to the gala it's a really nice event thank you thank you mr daniels mrs counts do you have any comments uh rob stole it amy i'm sorry i i should have let you done that tickets to the gala so please everybody if you've never been it's actually a really sunny a really great great time i've been several years it is a great organization surveying the board for four years please come out and support them and amy it's august 14th correct 14. correct correct besides besides it being a great event it raises a lot of

214funds that that can be are used for grant money back into the education system here at center grove especially grants to the teachers uh and uh it's just a great opportunity on that one mr er dr arkanov do you have any comments um yeah sure i know that a lot of folks left but i didn't want to miss the opportunity to share a little bit first the thing is the parent information meeting that's next week um you know it's it's not a sit and get forum i mean there will be a presentation christy by the way i think if she's still here there you are you moved around yeah so um great job tonight i know you're going to present that again it's important that people provide information questions to her ahead of time so

215her and the team can research and get answers to that it's not about conjuring up things i mean we're a professional organization and we want to address the questions ahead of time and be able to do that but not only that there will be breakouts during those meetings where her and dr hoover right over there and the rest of the teaching and learning department will be breaking out and facilitating conversations with parents so that you'll have an opportunity to have a more intimate conversation with those that formulate these lessons another thing is that i want to just say it again we do not use castle and those lessons that we're putting together will not be anything from castle so i want to make sure that was clear and and christy said that we are independent

216of that the other uh thing uh there was some question about uh videoing in the classroom and so forth and uh one of the things i i'd like to say is and i believe it's still there um mrs nelson correct me if i'm wrong but i believe that your school has put together some examples online am i correct of teaching many different subjects and so learn cg thank you thank you yes and so you can actually see those things and you've been doing that for a couple of years now um it's great work i've watched a few and really enjoyed that lastly the comments made about sorry it's on the website it's on center grove elementary's website forward slash learn cj thank you lastly the comments about employees and what we do when employees cross

217the line or make mistakes and so forth and we have policies for that and we we deal with that appropriately that is not something that we share out in a community form that is confidential as everyone should understand so when discipline is taken we don't pronounce that to the world so we have a system in place through an evaluation model that we use we respect privacy for folks when it comes to that and our our leaders do a an excellent job in overseeing that process and mr taylor and the human resources department does a great job of making sure that we do that within the law and protecting the privacy of everyone involved so i just want to make sure people understand we do have a process for that so with that i think the

218only other thing that i wanted to make sure is the um the pool will have a we're going to have a open house for the for the new natatorium and also it's in it's a along the same time that we're dedicating the track to mrs toomey and that will be on august 27th and we'll have more information out about that thank you dr arkanov um i think a lot of the comments have already been made we do appreciate very much i wish everyone was still here and i wish we had this kind of involvement at all times no matter what the subject matter is you are our checks and balances as the parents if you were here tonight you probably have a home that is a loving caring home for your child not the case

219for a lot of homes it's a different situation so that faces us with the you know responsibility of how do we get those children to be connected involved able to learn their lessons as well as not prevent others from learning their lessons so this is is the picture we we are working with and uh but i do want to reiterate by all means stay involved be a part of the strategic planning committee that's coming up uh is hopefully everything stays healthy so we can move forward with that that is where you can get your voices heard again uh so please pass that along with everyone and again pass it along about the meeting next wednesday the opportunities will be there for having the back and forth and the understanding with each other so with that

220there's a few other dates next board meeting is august 19th here in the boardroom uh september's meeting has been moved it is now going to be on september 23rd the following thursday instead uh several conflicts going on that that evening and the rest of you took the rest of the dates ahead on that one so see no further issues the board meeting is adjourned