BOE 2022-09-20

001they have demonstrated across our district and other places that if you provide for them the environment for them to thrive they can do the unimaginable now we have four priorities that we are focused on columbus city schools will be whole child focused and what that means is that we were focused not only just the academic but also social emotional well-being of our students equitable opportunities for all students in columbus city schools means that every student regardless of your background will have an opportunity to be successful strong learning communities in every region means regardless of where our students go we have to make sure that our students are learning in 21st century facilities authentic engagement is so important why because we want to make sure that everyone has a voice and that we're intentional of making

002sure that we are including all stakeholders in order for these four priorities to be realized it is important that we have a foundational system of support so there is a role for every one of our employees to play to ensure that we have 21st century classrooms our students are leading the way and that portrait of a graduate is realized the past two years have been incredibly challenging but we know that as one community working towards one goal that we are up to the task at hand every journey begins with one step and our journey begins today so we're in this together be committed to the next steps with us we're going to be committed we're going to be transparent but together we can be transformational you are far smarter than i was when i was

003your age and you will be far smarter than any of us ever will be and this is because your generation is so innovative so creative and you understand your role and your civic duty in making our society better senior the sophomore will definitely benefit you in the future and i am so happy that you guys chose to take your senior year to packing on with so many college courses i know it was hard and you're probably so glad that it's over but i promise you it was worth it i was a part of ohio state's academy and whenever i had an issue miss rasberry was my first person that i went to you know she is really an amazing person and she is very passionate about what she does i couldn't ask for a better

004support system in this program and i'm just very thankful for the program and thankful for you too thank you but most importantly i now understand that taken of course shouldn't just be about making the a's but actually learning to love like whatever course you're taking because that will really pull you through even and like in the times you don't want to study you're like i really like this class so i'm just going to do it anyways i actually found myself becoming really complacent in high school classes it was really easy there was no studying it was just do the work and you get an a so i'm really grateful for this program to allow me to challenge myself and kind of gain back my drive that i have lost and get me to who i

005am today [Music] exposure changes expectations but experiences changes lives we always have to make sure that we give our students more and more experiences taking them on to college campuses they can do it just listen we have students that are going to be the next scientists the doctors the lawyers you are the next generation that's going to make america great and greater it's because of you and your foundations that you have here in columbus city schools and at the post-secondary schools that you've attended [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music] good evening everyone i am calling our september 20th a regular board business meeting to order we have mr roush here filling in will you please call the role president adair president ms beckerly present mr brown here mr cole dr pierce vice president reyes ms vera

006you have a quorum madam president thank you will you all please stand and join me in the and to the pledge for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all good evening before we begin i want to highlight the fact that we here at the columbus city school district we are a safe place safe space for all of our students and right now we know that our state school board is considering uh progressing and moving forward on some resolutions that we believe could really harm our students in our community the columbus school board and district has always been advocates for our students no matter who you are who you love where you come from everything about you you know we really value and appreciate and so we're going to

007talk a little bit more in detail about the resolution and what the steps this board will take uh further in the agenda but i wanted to highlight that all of us here today want to show and we're all wearing our shirts want to show our community that we here in the district are a safe space for everyone so i want to thank my fellow board members and staff who are demonstrating this by wearing our shirts today in support of our lgbtq community and all of our students and the diversity that makes them uniquely them um so on our agenda this evening we will appoint our president oh no we're gonna do that first i'm sorry so we also because um treasure bohoric is gone today we need to appoint a treasurer pro templar and um

008that tonight is going to be board member brown um i need a motion in a second who has the motion nobody okay i will make the motion for board member brown to be our president for temporary for this evening's meeting is there a second second please call the roll president adair yes ms beckerly yes mr brown yes ms vero yes motion carries thank you so much um on tonight's agenda we do not have any public comment on agenda items we will be doing a monitoring report with our superintendent we are expecting a executive report from our internal audit team no report from our treasurer's office we have one item on our board matters which is to discuss the um the state board of education education's resolution we have items on our consent agenda get to

009the end we do not have any comment on non-agenda items and we will go into executive session at the end of the meeting come back for public dismissal and adjournment is there a motion to approve our agenda all right we approve the agenda there's second second are there any additions or changes to our agenda hearing none without objection our agenda has been approved i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to our superintendent hello madam superintendent hello everyone so thank you president adair and good evening everyone earlier this month our chief performance officer dr russell brown provided a detailed update on our academic performance data the state report card changes and alignment between our outcomes and the board goals so tonight's monitoring report will focus on board goal 1 strengthening reading proficiency so i'll

010ask my colleagues to come to come up that would be dr russell brown dr todd walker and dr angela chapman and we're going to have a collaborative discussion on ways in which we were successful in working toward increasing our reading proficiency so i would turn it over this time to to dr brown and then we will after his presentation we'll dive into some discussion around how well we did all right dr brown good evening board president adair members of the board superintendent dixon and the members of the community pleased to have the opportunity to speak with you again this evening today we're we're going to have our first opportunity to talk about a board goal to date we've spoken about interim measures but not really a board goal and this is uh our firstborn goal

011strengthening reading proficiency today i want to go over a couple things i want to talk about how how our students perform relative to the board goal how do how our students gains compared to those of the state as well as then looking at the the strategies that work this year that we wish to consolidate and deepen as we move forward and those things that we're going to do to to foster continuous improvement and produce additional gains as we move forward so again this is our first board goal and i just want to reiterate it for everyone it's again the objective here is to strengthen reading proficiency and the goal is to increase the percentage of third grade students proficient in reading on the ohio state test the ost it will increase from 43 percent which

012was observed in 1819 uh or in this case a decline in the benchmark because we dropped all the way down to 23 during the pandemic to um a total of 55 percent by june of 2026. so it's a fairly steep trajectory a fairly steep expectation of change and and just for context uh you know the the state on this at this point in time has about 60 percent of students meeting this goal currently and prior to the pandemic only about two out of three students were meeting this goal uh prior to the pandemic so we had really substantial gains this year in terms of the percent of students who met uh the target proficiency rate we had an increase of 10.5 percentage points uh from the what was observed last year so we went from

01323 percent to 33.5 proficiency this year it's a double-digit gain and proficiency rate and that like in my career i can count the number of times i've seen that on on one hand we really saw some very substantial gains in proficiency and i think that that's a testament to the hard work of our teachers our principals and everyone at the school that contributes to our students well-being and their academic outcomes this is a larger improvement than what was observed across the state as a whole the state as a whole only had 7.9 percentage points of gain so we actually exceeded the rate of gain uh within this system and with respect to the state our students did this through exceptional growth we've talked about this before our our growth uh helped us exceed our proficiency

014target for this year and and the reason we were able to exceed uh the target and the projected target for this year was again the exceptional growth that was observed by our students during the third grade year so while this goal the the goal of 29.4 is a target for the system as a whole i'm pleased to say that nearly every student group has exceeded that target as well so again the target was set for the system as whole and i think that that was wise for for the board to take the target given that again roughly two out of three students aren't meeting this target at this point in time so setting an overall target for the system made sense and also aligns to the board guard rails and the work that's being done

015around the board guard rails as well again not only did again the majority of student groups exceed this target they also exceeded the improvement that was observed at the 797.9 percentage point gain observed at the state our students almost every student group exceeded that as well i want to spend a little time talking about the groups that didn't hit the target this year because i think that this doesn't tell the whole story our afro african-american students hit 91 percent of their target they were very close we had a 26.9 percentage point uh proficiency rate this year but they actually had a larger gain in proficiency than than the other student groups and the system as a whole so the system as a whole had a 10.5 percentage point gain in proficiency but our african african-american

016students actually had an 11.4 percentage point gain in proficiency and again when we think about carrying these goals out over time if that student group continues to make that gain over time those proficiency gaps close as we move towards that 55 target for 25 26. and again this also exceeds the the proficiency rate that was gained that was observed for the state as a whole american students in this system outperformed the system as a whole they also outperformed the state as a whole our homeless students had a 6.8 percentage point gain in proficiency and they approach the the gain the rate of gain that was observed across the state so they saw six point eight percent change the state saw seven point nine fairly close to what the state saw as a whole they exceeded

017the rate of gain that was observed for homeless students across the state as a whole so homeless students in columbus city schools actually showed a greater gain in proficiency than homeless students across the state of seoul while we didn't hit the target we're moving in the right direction finally the the last group was special ed special ed students across the state struggled this year they had the lowest amount of gain of any student group across the state our students actually had a relatively stable score they lost to about 1.8 percentage points but if we think about it and this is part of the national dialogue you know if you look at nape in the national dialogue around ape we saw across the country when the the fourth grade scores came out students who were furthest

018away from proficiency were the most likely to be hurt by remote instruction and the impact of this and we're talking about students who had nearly two years of their instruction done remotely and these are students who frankly need high touch support services they're really hard to deliver and zoom and it's not to say that our teachers didn't try it's not to say that the you know good it's not the ideal way to provide early childhood education particularly early childhood education for students with disabilities again population that's most likely to be impacted by that so this process that we've talked about is always anchored in in just an overall continuous improvement process we've talked about this off and on throughout the year and there are some things that clearly worked very well we met our goal

019the majority of our student groups exceeded their goal we saw double-digit improvements for most groups and really saw substantial gains when you think about those comparisons to the state as a whole we actually exceeded again the gains for the state as whole so there are some wins here that i think we should be celebrating and again i think we should acknowledge the hard work of our schools and our students in in this process and and the parents who leaned in to help with this as well i just want to be very thankful to to all of those folks again last year was our first uh in-person opportunity for our teachers to use our new common curriculum that was the first in-person opportunity for that it's our tier one instruction it aligns to our mtss model

020and we saw some some again gains associated with that and we need to deepen that that process our whole school improvement process is aligned to helping folks think about improving first instruction so we'll be leaning into that we saw again significant improvements in proficiency and growth and we want to continue to improve that tier one instruction we want every student in the system have an opportunity to have access to high quality first instruction in terms of continuous improvement we've got a guard rail that's around this idea of mtss and beginning to implement mtss and this year you know the objective is to have about 10 of our schools implementing that tier 2 model so we're just leaning into tier 2 for mtss so special education again as planned in this guardrail work is implementing system-wide

021training on mtss this year which is a natural and logical way to move forward with this and again really looking at tier two and tier three opportunities for our specialized students and again this includes both time for extended learning opportunities and standardized [Music] supports for students as they move through that process again the idea is to begin to work in this tier two model and tier three model to provide students for students with supports as we move forward again just wanted to provide a little contextualization before we start our dialogue but i think we're around now to questions and discussion okay so before we begin questions and discussion let's um do our before monitoring exercise to ensure that um the report was able to be monitored tonight so um board members you have the report

022in your packet you also just for your own knowledge have the board questions and responses they are i think in the maybe the pocket of your bind of your binders and then don't forget we have our handy dandy little cheat sheets for our monitoring so you can take all that stuff out so the first question is does the monitoring report clearly show what is being monitored which specific policy and goal interpretation etc i just need kind of a yes no thumbs up yes okay does it clearly show data for the three previous reporting periods preferably on a line graph does it clearly show the current reporting period and does it clearly show the target reporting period's annual target and deadline target seeing head nods and thumbs up does it clearly show the superintendent's evaluation of

023the performance yes does it clearly show supporting documentation that evidences the superintendent's evaluation if the district is not at target or the superintendent's evaluation indicates implementation is not on track does the monitoring report clearly describe any needed next steps which we are exceeding our goals so uh there is that second part doesn't apply to this one but does it show supporting documentation being head nods okay so uh beckerly is this one we would then approve the or accept it or it would be after the monitoring okay all right so we are going to go ahead and move into our question portion remember board members we are going to spend um the goal is to spend two thirds of our time on the who what why questions of the past and then one third of our

024time on the how questions um and so i'm going to go ahead and open the floor to anyone that has questions on who what or why we are got the results we did in third grade reading we'd like to start can ask a question of clarification of me yes yes in the process probably board member becker lee or vera can can help as well as we do these monitoring ports i thought i understood aj to say if we did not have a certain allotment of who what why questions we could move to the strategy questions and spend more time there we can i just want to make sure that there's no questions okay excellent um so i'll ask you a question then on the past um you have one too okay um so you mentioned

025in the report that uh you know we had we have these results because of the hard work of teachers and community and parents which is true do we know though any anything a little bit deeper about what it was that especially for um our african-american students who you show um you know had really the biggest growth if there if there was a particular strategy or strategies that we know about for that group or others that would that worked so i'll speak to part of it um and then others may wish to fill in as well the one thing that was i think very consistent throughout last year was messaging we messaged the importance of growth that no matter where students started it was important for students to grow and we started messaging the importance of

026using the tools that are available to us to monitor students growth over time we revisited growth as a part of the conversation at the board table and i think that attention to growth sends a message to the system about the importance of attending to the needs of every student where they are and and beginning to to to move them forward i would also add that that again and we mentioned this the the implementation of a common curriculum across the system that's aligned to grade level incredibly important because again it sets the level it sets that first instruction that we expect for all our students across the system so i think those two things in and of themselves uh really point uh you know again are promising and point to the direction that i think you're

027you're speaking to remember beckerly i have a i guess it's a why question and that do we know or do we have a plan to kind of survey the teachers to see what they think worked and you know i'd just be curious to know their feedback because it's their first year with the new um program as well so are you asking sorry you asking about did we in the past or as a future strategy in the future okay did we for now passed do we have any sense of how how the teachers received the new curriculum was there a grand swell or you know i did not put a survey in place to to address this um it it's always a balancing act in terms of time and demand we use the the panorama survey

028currently and that has a fairly heavy footprint in terms of time so how many surveys right i always i'm a little worried about survey fatigue to be honest we also have an opportunity through the school improvement process to gather feedback from teachers at each specific site so teachers serve on their tbts and their blt which drives the school improvement process at each school which again is aligned to the board goals and each school has an opportunity to choose those high impact high leverage strategies after reviewing their data that they want to focus on to support you know this k through k through 3 reading goal and so there's lots of opportunities at the building level to get feedback on what's working what's not um is a part of that continuous improvement process the curriculum you

029know what what do we need to refine what do we need to improve on is it more pd that we need do we need more time do we need more resources and so there are lots of opportunities at the site level to provide feedback as a part of that continuous improvement cycle so it sounds like you've got procedures in place that allow you to capture at the building level what's working what's not working and to lean into the things that the teachers are excited about okay that's that's pretty cool absolutely yeah uh i wanted to ask um what we've asked about so far is strategy and what works and what does not um but the question that i have and we've broken these down by ethnic group or race um is there anything within each

030of those groups that tells us what factors the student brings to the classroom that allows them to benefit or not to benefit versus others in that in that group i would say that certainly attendance is a is a big concern we certainly want our students to be in school so that they can have access to this guaranteed and viable curriculum that we have um ready for them um and i would also say that you know we certainly want to start make sure that we are providing lots of opportunities for our students to start with us in pre-k um so you know this is an early literacy goal and we're looking at third grade achievement but it does not begin in third grade right and so the more that we the more access that we have

031to our students so that we can make sure that they have those basic foundational skills helps to prepare them to be better prepared for the ost when they take that in third grade that makes sense have you looked i know this wasn't part of the plan necessarily but have you looked at these students to see whether they did or did not attend pre-k and whether that factor it makes a difference we have not but that would be a good project for someone on our data team thank you we did look at attendance though um so in the 2018 19th third graders uh they were out of 43 which is the highest in the latin that we're looking at in this set of data what was different about that cohort of third graders um you know

032understanding you know that the pandemic and all of that but you know that um you know for us pretty high i think and so is it was there something that that cohort experienced that was maybe different for that time and i know that you weren't here so that might be uh hard but you know that uh what accounted for that high number the 43 on the chart so the one thing that stands out to me that's very different about this cohort versus 1819 is you know that cohort had in-person instruction from kindergarten all the way through i think that's a very significant impact when you start thinking about the pandemic and again the impact of the pandemic on particularly early childhood instruction yeah i think you know sometimes when we look at secondary settings sometimes

033remote can work you know there are there are students for whom that works just fine i'm yet to talk with anybody that thinks it's a good idea for early childhood and pretty much anybody that has a young child wasn't real happy with that so these kids had a significant disruption during that that process and again what we see with our data mirrors that of the country and if anything i think we saw a bigger bump than most on this i think it's a good news story we've turned a corner and coming back away from and beginning to recover proficiency rates from from pandemic and we cut the gaps for most of these by by near half so i again i think it's a celebration for the the system on this and as we move forward

034and we have consistent in-person instruction i i would be hopeful that we will continue to see these gains though we do have uh a couple cohorts of students coming through that will still be adversely impacted early childhood cohorts that are adversely impacted by the pandemic remember vera thank you president there um so do we know if i mean have we looked at this data from a region breakdown like i guess i want to understand [Music] are we noticing you know a trend in a specific region that has more significant decline or needing additional support like who who exactly i see like the the big numbers here but who is is there a region or is there a specific portion of our district that really needs additional services is that well part of that it would

035be future right but maybe is there something causing i guess i'm trying to understand like i see the big overall numbers but like i also feel like i still don't know who these students are like is this region one you know i mean like that's i guess what i'm trying to get to the like i'm trying to figure out who the who are kids in this data that actually need these this level of additional support so there are two two pieces that i think i would lean into one the board goal is set for the overall population right and so we're tracking that yeah the last time i was here we talked a little bit about regents i if our students consistently attended their their home school you know in their in the catchment area

036for their home school i think there's a great deal of value for regional analysis because that then tells me about equity of opportunity and equity of outcome for kids based on their neighborhood 45 of our kids go to schools outside their their neighborhood and so it really clouds that picture for me it makes it hard to to you know so the regents to me are and actually dr chapman would probably be much more articulate about this that's a management structure put in place to help get somebody closer to the school so that they have a relationship with the school and help provide individualized support to the school i if we're going to come at this from an equity lens i i think we have to think very deeply about that no and i i i

037understand that but respectfully i think if we talk about equity you know we're not talking necessarily from this context about the neighborhood i want to understand what buildings and what region are we finding that we need additional support additional staff so i'm not looking from the lens of the economic neighborhood situation i want to understand is there a red flag of regions or buildings that need additional support so i guess when i when i think about regions i'm not necessarily thinking about even though those factors are important but that's not what i'm getting to when i'm asking that question yeah i think it goes along with board member brown's idea at the beginning who are these students and what are the additional you know pieces of them that are maybe are making this uh change

038and so maybe it is or or having data about or maybe did you let me ask a question do we consider looking at it based on like school performance uh kind of figuring out are there hot spots where different resources need to go is that at all part of this analysis currently that's really more anchored to the school improvement process okay where we again leverage that management structure as a way to lean in and do individualized plans by building to try to meet the needs of students and again dr chapman could probably speak to that much more particularly than me so um our state as you know issues this the district report card they also issue a school report card and so each school is rated on those individual indicators that the state has as

039a part of that process every school is required to write a school improvement plan this is my current data they look they analyze their data they determine where the gaps are where the strengths where the areas of opportunity are and the school with the building leadership team principal and building leadership team they write a school school-specific school improvement plan um this year all of the schools improvement plans were aligned to our board goals right so every elementary school in our district has a goal to support early literacy so that's not a surprise to anyone in our organization all of their strategies are aligned to support that goal every school's improvement plan will be customized and will look very different because their data is different so it's at the school level where we're having those very

040differentiated conversations about what does our school need to meet these goals perhaps it's more professional development perhaps it's looking at the amount of time the interventions that we have in place perhaps it's adding additional supports perhaps it's collaborating with the department but this we support the schools in their process of looking at analyzing their data and developing school improvement goals as well as strategies to support those goals and then um in monitoring that process um the area superintendents are working with the school principals to monitor their school improvement plans their strategies to ensure that they have the resources that they need to stand up those plans that they've laid out we also have support from our state support team that comes in and provides feedback to our schools they select different school improvement plans randomly

041and provide feedback on the feedback that we're providing to our schools and then also soon i believe in september and another maybe another month at the end of the month we'll be receiving school improvement statuses for all of our schools from the state so they'll say these are the schools ranked in order of priority status that should be receiving additional support so that ranking has been on hold for the last two years due to the pandemic but absolutely that's another way that we are able to triage the support that we are providing to our schools very clear and transparent process these schools need more these schools need less in one particular area and there's a monitoring process attached to that to ensure not only is that clear at the building level but also at the

042district level in terms of the supports um that need to be in place to support our schools so i'm sure there'll be more to come on that later once we have that information additional questions on the past why we are where we are with this data former beckerly um so we haven't seen that for the past year because they haven't done it that improvement the school improvement thing the school improvement plans schools always every year they have a school improvement plan irregardless of you know the two the years that we did not have the state assessments okay so what we hadn't seen from the state was the rankings of the schools that's what they had put on pause during the pandemic because we didn't have the state assessments so that was the piece that was

043on hold but every school writes a school improvement plan each year okay i guess my other one is forward-looking but can can i just say one thing like at some point we need to stop and say this is really exciting and we are very excited and thrilled and grateful this is something that every person in the process from the teachers to the instructional assistants to the principals to reading specialists to coaches everyone needs to stop and take a bow i mean this is you know something to be celebrated and um we need to figure out a way to market i don't know what we do exactly but let's um take that as an action item some way to acknowledge this success um i teasing about lapel pins but you know something well don't don't talk

044about lapel pins i'm working on flip palpatine helping okay sorry um good comment board member beckerly but i want to remind you that isn't part of the monitoring all right so we can talk about that at the conclusion of the session and give kudos to all that we're involved deal deal okay all right um are we ready to go forward all right dr pierce do you want to start thank you president of there appreciate it um so i want to take us back to a couple of meetings ago um dr brown where you indicated that we have the opportunity to see a lot of growth with our students who are in special education and emergent bilingual students my question is how are we working to ensure that additional instructional assistants are hired to assist these

045populations especially given that our students receiving special education are 19 9.7 percent well below our targeted rate so [Music] i guess two points one again the emphasis is the importance of growth that for students and particularly students who are well below proficiency two two or more years below the only way we're going to get them to proficiency is to focus on growth with them this is the one student population where we didn't see that this year and so we definitely need to lean into that the hiring practice piece around that i can't speak to right now so so definitely understand that growth piece but i i want to challenge us to continue to tackle this problem around hiring additional support staff to help our students be successful great mike is can you hear us hey

046that's hold on no that's um true true what she's saying but that we don't need the extra commentary on it yes i just wanted to feel the the dead time did you have a what was your question remind us of your question the question is how are we working to hire additional instructional assistants to help our students that are in special education who have nine point seven percent met the goal the additional um what is that the additional larger percentage of 89 plus did not meet the goal so that's a forward thinking it is but the question has a lot of assumptions that that is the strategy because the questions are associated strategy and i'm not sure we've heard from the administration that part of the strategy to improve special ed education is to hire

047makes total sense probably is but we need somebody to say that to us it is not in our paper um i don't see any clear strategy in our paper so i mean it is a forward forecasting question maybe what are the strategies so someone can say this well two meetings ago they said i swear the strategy yes and um mr defabo stood up here and oh you said two meetings ago yes yes i'm very clear on what was stated um well it wasn't stated in this monitoring report so if someone wants to state it from administration that that is in fact a strategy is that no longer a strategy maybe you could tell us what the strategy is we know that mtts that was kind of highlighted in this report but what is the strategy

048then can we can we go is that okay so mtss is part of the strategy and so that is ensuring that each student is receiving that guaranteed and viable curriculum that first instruction but more to dr pierce's question we also are looking at increasing co-teaching opportunities for our special education students and so specifically at 28 elementary building sites we're expanding those co-teaching opportunities so that's increasing time with special education students that they're authentically being educated in general education settings that speaks to that year one instruction around making sure they have quality on-grade level first instruction and then moving into the intervention which is tier two uh making sure that where where there are gaps or where students may not be attaining the curriculum or demonstrating achievement that we're then intervening my second question and you

049could probably keep your line of logic going then is how are we using our regional management structure to enact strategies to improve scores for our student populations below our targeted range um let's see there are lots of strategies so first i'll start with the continuous improvement cycle or school improvement cycle so as i mentioned before this is um we are well positioned this year to ensure alignment across all of our schools regions aligned to the board goals if you remember last year when we started with the board goals we started those were finalized in the fall maybe september october it was after november okay it was after the school year started so dr pierce the schools had already started their school improvement plan or developed their school improvement plan with that process actually starts in

050the spring and summer and so they had already written their school improvement plans last year so they did not have the opportunity to align their school goals to the board goals so as i mentioned earlier everyone is aware in our district that we have an early literacy goal why because we were able to get in front of that process the board goals were finalized and so starting with the board goals we developed our district-wide improvement plan aligned to those board goals and we picked out those key priority areas that we wanted to ensure that every school and our district was focused and developed strategies around those key areas so early literacy is one with without that alignment schools could have perhaps chosen a different goal and been in focus on a totally different strategy so

051we wanted to ensure that that alignment was in place for all of our schools so there'd be alignment to the board goals and our school improvement process and so every within every region the area superintendents are responsible for providing the schools with feedback on their school improvement plans as they're developing their school improvement plans as they are monitoring their school improvement plans and making sure that they have the supports and resources available we work hand in hand with other departments so like our academic services department department of equity to ensure that those supports are aligned so that's just a little bit about the school improvement process in addition to that we also in collaboration with the other departments we have asked that they align the resources from their team to support the regional model so

052for example i'll take dr brown's department as an example instead of schools reaching out to different people we have 113 schools instead of each school reaching out to different departments or different folks in dr brown's department each region has what we call a a leadership intern that's focused on data and so they have an opportunity to build relationships with that region and provide support as it relates to data for that specific region so that regional expert i like to call them has an opportunity to learn the data within the region learn the needs and provide support in that area similarly similar structures are in place for almost all of our departments across the district to provide supports from the central office it's really providing more customized supports to the regions in addition to that we

053are also aligned as i mentioned how we had the opportunity to align our school improvement goals to the board goals we have also worked collaboratively across multiple departments to ensure that our pd days and our pd time is aligned and so all of the professional development time for our teachers as well as for our principals is focused on those key priorities that we are focusing on so mtss all of the regions we have brought all of the principles together for those region meetings and all of them are being provided with support on how they lead and lift up the mtss work across the district the instructional coaching model again a new strategy that we are implementing this year to ensure that all of our schools have an instructional coach so they are provided with job

054embedded on-the-job uh pd to support an alignment to these board goals so those are a few of the strategies that we are implementing but what i want you to hear loud and clear is that there's alignment to the board goals what we're saying at this table what matters most alignment to our pd how we spend our time how we spend our resources and the the goals that the schools are setting for their school improvement plans excellent thank you so much dr chapman for that and explaining that and sharing that with us much appreciated the next questions that i have are it's a two-part question and i'm going to take you back to about three meetings ago where we discussed that transportation is an issue i recall you specifically saying we are losing instructional time that

055we cannot get back so here's my two-part question how do you see foresee our transportation challenges impacting our students and our schools ability to achieve our target goals and how are we working to lessen that impact so i'm sorry i need help so the unresolved issue now the unresolved issue was transportation which we've pointed out in multiple sessions but not in this one so i hear you you're absolutely right dr pierce but what we are monitoring is what they have brought forward right now and so transportation has not been part of this now you're right that these things are very logical um but you are making assumptions instead of us basically for a better word grading the administration on the assumptions and strategies they've brought forward so can i just clarify the assumption is not

056being made i am basing the question on facts that have been given in prior meetings and they should be able to totally that's totally what that's what i agree with you what you're saying but the problem is that has not been uh made part of this presentation to us yeah maybe assumption's not the way where there's a premise in your question and we're not supposed to we're supposed to ask open-ended questions what is how i just want uh i i appreciate that that we're we're we're staying true to uh the student-focused out student outcome-focused governance we know we have an issue in our district right so just ask the question differently without without there's no sense there's no it's not an assumption they have shared it they have shared it in multiple i totally hear

057it i mean the question could be we could go part of the way back to why president adair to say why wasn't transportation even brought to barron to this report was transportation part of the consideration this report that's the question dr pierce i mean you just have to ask the question in the right framework of rules that we have agreed to as part of this process okay rules are impacting the success of our children no they're not no the rules are how we govern this process and participate in the monitoring so if you're identifying a deficiency in the report because you believe transportation should be a strategy that's a different conversation i'm simply identifying the obvious we've sat here and we said that transportation is impacting instructional time we have a report here that's talking

058about academic gains and achievements but we're not willing to deal with that unresolved issue i don't think that's a fair assessment at all what i'm saying is this is the opportunity for the administration to bring us a report about the goal and they are telling us what strategies and what information is here that transportation is not part of it now you can ask them the question well the question has been asked in multiple ways was transportation taken into consideration when you thought about this and that was a passed question which you did not want to participate in but if we can go ahead because it's logically moving how is transportation going these are the framework this is the agreed framework of which we have are doing this process and again our recent spend some time

059thinking about that during our sacrificing the success of our students i disagree with that but we agree to disagree how are we going outside that monitoring framework for a moment and just get an answer to the question not the second we can look my job right now is to ensure the monitoring session goes like a monitoring session we can debrief about it we can even talk about do we want to change the rules later but right now i'm timing us because that's what i'm supposed to be doing and ensuring that we are asking the questions in the agreed-upon format okay that's my job right now i don't disagree with anything you're saying on content or strategy or why isn't it here but we just need to ask the questions in the right way please that

060is what we have agreed to do so her question is and i will allow it go i'm going back to the past even though that wasn't we were past that was transportation and the issues of transportation considered in this data i did not uh consider transportation as part of this again we looked at the outcomes connected to the board goal we do know that attendance is connected to student performance and there's a logical thread there but it was not part of the analysis here so i don't i can't answer with with any surety about how transportation impacted this performance for this group of students on this that's the answer but are there any more future questions from rivera thank you president adair um let's see here so i guess this is since it has been

061mentioned about personnel how are we going to how are we how are we going to recruit the teaching staff that we actually need for what has been identified here oh good sorry um board member vera it's a really good great question um i think that we have to look at how we recruit differently when i got here three years ago most of our teacher recruitment well i know all of our teacher recruitment was focused on part-time employees who were retired administrators they've done a successful job for a very long time and for many years not a lot of recruitment was required other than a quick handshake that isn't the case anymore and we are now competing with everyone especially when it comes to special education and so we have to look at this differently so

062we have some opportunities now where we're reforming our team in support of what this is going to look like we've also had our talent acquisitions teams working with former chief talent officer from cleveland who's really getting them set up for what does it look like to do more holistic recruitment and we also have to do an assessment of what our current special education program is and whether or not it needs to be adapted so i don't think this is going to be a one solution or one size solution fits anything i think we're going to as usual look at this from a multi-faceted lens i also think that we need to do some very intentional pipeline work we have a very good some very good contractual language now where we can incentivize our teachers to

063go into high need areas we're going to be starting that up really soon and we know we have some teachers right now who are in programs getting certifications so that they can move into those positions and then we can backfill as needed into positions that are not as high need thank you mr defauvo my follow-up question to that was dr chapman you mentioned um the region's superintendents essentially monitor those those plans the building level plans i guess my question is how how often are regions superintendents monitoring like is that is there a sequence to that monitoring and i guess i want to understand how how often are they monitoring the plans once they're created so the the plans are being monitored on an ongoing basis so every quarter the area superintendents are looking at the

064the data because usually the data is coming in to us it's being updated every quarter right and so they provide the principles with feedback in the development of the plans in the beginning as they're analyzing the data let's say at the end of the year as they're planning for the new year and then at the end of each quarter we're looking at the data as it's coming in so like for example at the beginning of the year once we complete our beginning of the year assessments for early literacy we'd be looking at iready data as a diagnostic assessment to see if we're on track for meeting our goal those are some of like the leading indicators that we'll be looking at so whenever that data comes in if the school has a goal around attendance

065then they would be looking at their attendance data more regularly more frequently because that's data that they're receiving on a daily basis at the end of you know weekly you can look at the the attendance and you're charting your progress and working on making improvements so on an ongoing basis regularly and then they're also providing feedback on those school improvement plans and then remember the our state support team is also monitoring the process and providing the area superintendents as as well as the schools with not only feedback on the plans but also support so members of our state support team also come in and they are participating in our professional development that we're offering as well as providing schools with support at the building level so if a principal says you know early literacy we're

066having a challenge with let's say implementing fundations or phonics we can ask for support from our curriculum team we can ask for support from the state support team let's you know what do we need to do let's look at the data let's provide some targeted professional development experiences for for staff and so they're helping to brainstorm provide feedback but it is an iterative ongoing process as a part of that continuous improvement cycle we're not waiting to the end of the year to figure out if we need to intervene or respond to the data so it's an ongoing process where it's not just one person that's monitoring the plan it's the responsibility of the blt to monitor the plan it's the responsibility of the principal to monitor the plan the responsibility of the area superintendent our

067sst our team we're all looking at the data and then dr brown if you want to talk a little bit about the new process that we're going to be implementing this year as we look at data throughout the district and invite school teams to come in and share a little bit more about their data yeah so part of again what i think you you should have heard sort of time and time again here is alignment alignment alignment alignment alignment of our goals alignment of our school improvement planning process alignment of our instructional resources and and interventions to to support students and again we're starting whole system and as we iterate over time and we learn then we're going to be able to dig deeper and answer some of these other questions that you guys bring

068up a lot of very interesting questions that we'll have to dig into as we we move along over time um in terms of this this year one of the things that and again alignment as we meet with the school teams we're ensuring everybody's looking at data the same way so we got one version of the truth as we're sharing data so we're all looking at it the same way we can have a common conversation think that's incredibly important and the board goals help with it they help us lying and say we're looking at this the same way the second piece when we get together you know we're trying to to turn that school improvement plan into a living document there's no reason it should be static so as we're going through the year we should

069be revisiting and and there's sort of a balancing act here from the top we're trying to align downward and say these are the resource these are the goals we have common goals here are the common resources but we also want bottom up we want the folks who are closest to students doing a root cause analysis and thinking about what what does this mean and how what do we need to do at our building in two levels first when we're talking about first instruction we're asking we're gonna ask every building based on their data and we've got updated data now because again we did this planning process before we had the end-of-year data we'll also have new data from the start of the year so let's look at that data and say okay based on what

070we're seeing with our current students and what we learned from last year at my school what do i need to do to improve first instruction and what does professional development look like that then how do we lean into dr walker's team for that support around professional development we're also going to ask buildings just to begin to think about differentiation as well so if i'm at a building what student group has the largest gap who's struggling the most at a given building what are we doing over and above first instruction what what are we doing in addition for that group of kids and that has to do with again a lines what i'm describing aligns to the mtss model it's it again is a guardrail from the board and it's this idea of how do we

071strengthen again that first instruction then how do we get really intentional about differentiation of time and resources to meet the needs of students who aren't performing at the same level as the rest of the students that are building that is the process that we're supporting with our schools as we move forward and one that we will iterate over over time with and and i think again the balance there is sort of a what i would call a loose coupling you know we've got the alignment to goals we have alignment to resources but at the same time we want to offer the opportunity for agency at the building level and insight because let's be honest from even with a regional model that that gets us closer to buildings i'm never going to be as close to

072a building as the teacher in front of the third grade or the principal with that building and so we need to leverage that wisdom and that knowledge that folks have at a building level to inform as we move forward it's it's really trying to allow for both as we move through thank you i appreciate that roman beckerly um to dr walker mentioned something how are we able to staff the co-teaching so thank you for that uh follow-up so co-teaching a lot of it is about reorientation so because we have special education teachers currently in place some are still teaching in a more resource-setting model we want to have an inclusion model and so when we're talking about co-teaching it's not necessarily within the context of needing to hire more staff it's more about how do

073we how do we work with teachers and provide professional development around the co-teaching process and so planning together working together as both a general education teacher and a special education teacher to maximize the instructional platform for those students so to dr brown's point making sure that each student is receiving an optimal first instruction that guaranteed and viable curriculum and research shows that even our general regular education students benefit from having that special education teacher in in the classroom and so that is a strategy that we have readily available to us because we have those staff now it's really more about rethinking thinking differently providing professional development about how to redeploy a model that would be more effective to move student outcomes i mean i assume well i'm not supposed to comment so i won't say

074that thank you next how um i i noticed and i and i appreciate that um your presentation observed that guardrail one about mtss ties to what we're doing they kind of reinforce each other i'm thinking that what comes out of this data the continuous improvement data and i think at some point dr chapman you talked about what will percolate to the top or become more apparent as some buildings are in need of more and some are in need of less that strikes me as a guardrail three and and i guess the question is how are we looking at guardrail three which talks about aligning resources equitably and making sure that we all have we have strong learning communities um it seems to me because then i think that comes yeah how are we using guardrail

0753 to align and this may be a to be determined but i just see that connection as well i would i would just add on um certainly guardrail 3 is a work in progress right right just but certainly this strategy isn't new to us right and so when we think about the funding that our schools receive for title 1 allocations those are based on need when we think about school budgeting process and staffing allocations that's where we want to go in this under guard rail 3 of thinking about the schools that need more how do we allocate resources across the district to ensure that those schools have additional right now we're still operating at a space where we're trying to ensure that everyone has just the basics right and so when we talked about like

076this year we're implementing a new instructional coaching model this was the first step in the direction of ensuring that every school re has one coach under guardrail 3 we might get to a place as an organization where we say this school needs a coach for early literacy and this school needs a coach for math and this school needs a coach for science we're not there yet but certainly we're thinking about what those conversations may look like and how we could allocate resources differently but it's a part of a more robust process that will need to happen and also include stan this is that guardrail that he's closely aligned with so making sure that we go back and look at that budgeting process right and informing the board earlier of what those needs are all right

077thank you dr pierce how do we know co-teaching will work as a model a strategy well we definitely have to evaluate it and just put some metrics in place that we are evaluating the effectiveness of the model so that's one way that we'll look at do we have yeah yeah i mean i think there's you know there's research that that talks about co-teaching when done effectively so you know i think one of the things that we're looking at is making sure that that's why for us as part of the mtss process when we're looking at really continuing to deploy that this year because what we're trying to ensure is that we're not just saying co-teaching but that we're actually providing professional development around co-teaching and so because a critical part of that is co-planning is

078those teachers thinking together about uh the lesson before those students are in the room uh but as a as a general strategy there's there's a lot of research that supports that that is an effective model but to dr dixon's points we're going to want to make sure that we're monitoring our implementation of that to see to ensure that we're being most effective in it thank you for that much appreciated um how do we know that we're going to continue to see an um an upward trend and this is not just some anomaly that we're seeing with the data i know it's hard because it's only one data point but but how how do we know that we're going to keep seeing success with an upward trend you're asking me to look in a crystal ball

079super futuristic um if i'm utterly blunt i don't think we do okay no with any certainty one of the challenges that we have right now against we have this massive interruption so there's no stability to our data over time you get two or three years in oh we're back in in-person instruction we've got the same curriculum we're using the same assessments asked me that question three years from now predicting out two years and i'll i'll feel a little different than i do right now with with the massive disruption we have i just don't feel like i can say that with any surety at all with the interim report around second graders that we had so we we had challenges with our interim reports for uh growth kindergarten first second right and that gives me pause

080to be honest um but again um and i think we've had this conversation a couple times with the board once the data stabilizes here we'll probably want to revisit goals we'll probably want to revisit the interims and the thresholds for the interims because then we'll have a more stable pattern of data from which to make prediction we did i the team did the best that we could with very disparate data at the time um and we're coming back out of it had you asked me would i've expected a 10.5 percentage point gain this year i would have thought that that was incredibly ambitious um and not very likely and yet our team exceeded that this year and i that gives me promise and hope that we're moving in the right direction but a surety right

081now no that you know we have two cohorts of kids who were really very adversely impacted uh so the kids who are now in third grade and the kids who are now in second grade um they're gonna need additional support to get through this and we know that that's that's part of the mix so um i have hesitation about saying you know that i have a surety that we're gonna continue to to see this that i would be shocked at another 10 points i'll just say that that that i think is a huge uptick for one year are there other questions all right how do we do the voting on the okay so this is a new part i guess we haven't been doing this before but we are supposed to vote then to approve

082i think it's accept or accept is that someplace do you have i i move that we accept this monitoring report okay so there's been emotion is there a second we please call the roll i'm sorry is there any discussion about whether to accept it all right please call the roll ms vera yes president adair yes ms beckerly yes mr brown yes dr pierce abstain motion carries um all right so now we are going to do our quick um review of how we just did on that session sorry i'm looking to grab my time here or how long we spent okay so board is supposed to do a assessment of how we did the first category is around preparation the categories that we can grade ourselves in are effective approaching effective effective and highly effective board

083members where do you think we were tonight in our preparation i think we were effective there were three people myself becker lee i think i saw a veer so people did submit questions ahead of time and read the report okay what about around data and opinions were we affected i'm sorry ineffective approaching effective effective or highly effective i would say we're approaching effectiveness um we as a board need to decide um if we want to advocate and truly govern in a way that leads to academic success and proficiency for our children as opposed to a process okay that's your opinion i disagree with that but we can discuss it and so i'm sharing my opinion my points during this time of discussion any anyone else have thoughts on data and opinions so i kind of

084thought we were effective partly because you were um policing us but uh i didn't i didn't hear much opinion or we reframe the question if it came up okay so somewhere in between those two maybe yeah border brown and with respect to his question i think that we do need to have the discussion and we think we talked about at the last meeting about what we want out of this process and whether the focus is on the process or is on the outcome and and i think that's what i heard i i hear that um absolutely we need to have a discussion just not in the middle of a monitoring session questions and statements i was just gonna say i think we were closer to effective on the data and opinions i feel like everyone

085you know i would give us effective on that all right so maybe closer to effective um data and statements ineffective approaching effective effective or highly effective i think we're approaching some people are policed more than others so some comments go un uh unresponded to whereas other comments are responded to immediately thank you for that opinion dr pierce so you believe that we are in approaching any other opinions all right uh past and future so we um are not we are ineffective we spent opposite tonight we spent 33 minutes on future and 18 on past so we did not make it into that maybe somewhere in between ineffective and approaching effective process monitoring and project management were we ineffective approaching effective effective or highly effective probably approaching any other thoughts remember really says approaching i think

086i mean i think we're still struggling i think we would be more of in between the ineffective and approaching because i think we did we got a little into the system operation yeah okay so maybe in between so i do think we graded ourselves down on this one than we have in the past so we definitely need to consider that and continue to have more conversations about uh this monitoring process and how we would like it to work all right uh thank you board members for that thank you administration yes thank you for the report all right sorry i'm getting back to our agenda here lost my agenda we are now going to the internal auditor's office hello good evening president and air members of the board it's my pleasure to offer tonight's internal auditor's

087executive report the executive report will touch on three items one is a piece of legislation on tonight's agenda one is a recap of a recent audit in the county audit and accountability committee meeting and then one is a recognition of a collaborative effort that the office of internal audit is underway with with the talent department first item is the board agenda item that is a resolution to adopt the revised internal audit charter we annually will review our charter and make revisions to it when necessary in order to keep it aligned with professional standards and practices we recently presented some revisions at the september 1st a a meeting at which that meeting the board suggested an approved adoption of the charter or the revised charter the board of education approved the original charter so any revisions

088that we make to that charter also have to come before the board and they come forth in that in the resolution that you see today most of the revisions were stylistic in nature however two to point out um were added in order to assure the the reason for the provisions that were added are really to assure the independence the organizational independence of the office of internal audit and what those two revisions were one is to specifically call out in the charter that the board is responsible for the hiring and discharging of the internal auditor as well as recognizing in the charter that the board is responsible for setting the remuneration for the internal auditor as i mentioned the audit and accountability committee did recommend adoption in its meeting secondly is a summary of that september

089first audit and accountability committee meeting that took place on the first and took place here at 3700 a couple of things that they heard information on as well as discussion on was the monitoring of open items that are reported in external audits and management reviews that's an ongoing conversation that's taking place among the audit and accountability committee we also talked about the addressing and closing of items in open oia issued audit reports that too is an ongoing conversation the committee also heard information on the fy 2022 fraud waste and abuse reporting activity and then also a summary of the status of oia's fy 2023 audit plan and those activities that are part of that plan during the meeting they also discussed the oia's general general ledger and financial reporting audit report as well as the

090revisions to the charter that i mentioned and then took official action on both approving the oia audit report as well as suggesting and recommending the board approve the internal audit charter finally i'd like to just recognize and call attention to a collaborative effort that is currently underway between the office of internal audit and the talent department as you likely recall a short while ago the council of great city schools performed a review of our hr function and offered a report that had some opportunities for improvement in it we'd really just like to call out mike defabo and his team for the collaborative effort that he's shown with the office of internal audit to try to make progress and address those items and and so we're very thankful to mike and his team for that i

091also wanted to point out that the collaborative effort is going to be the subject of a joint presentation performed by i believe either mike or someone on mike's team and the office of internal audit at the upcoming council of great city schools fall conference in october the internal auditor is very appreciative of mike's trust in the office of internal audit to provide some assistance and be that collaborative effort or that collaborative resource for him and his team and we very much appreciate the opportunity to assist that's the end of my report and i will be happy to take questions should there be any thank you let's turn it over to the co-chairs for any comments first i just that that last item is particularly worth noting we're very excited about that and we see it

092as an opportunity to build and grow on that collaboration because it's um you know it's it's it's taking the audit function into the proactive role and that's exciting are there any questions for the internal auditor team seeing them thanks for being here tonight certainly thank you um and we are not expecting a report from the treasurer's office but hello mr roush hello how are you this evening good are there any updates from the treasurer's office the only thing i would think i would like to note is just to congratulate the team the treasures office team for achieving the certificate of excellence for from the governor government finance officers association for the 22nd consecutive year so it's a it's a great work team effort that makes that happen so i know that if stan were here

093he'd want to certainly make sure to call that out this evening yes thank you congratulations to the whole team 22 years that's um that's a pretty great run and we just expect more so um but thank you to the uh whole team in the treasurer's office who make that happen every year thank you all right we're into board matters item 8.1 discussion on the state board of education resolution to support parents schools and districts in rejecting harmful coercive and burdensome gender identity policies before i turn it over to board member brown it is our understanding that the state board of education who is actually meeting concurrently to us right now they might have just finished they just finished there was an attempt to looking at my legislative my government affairs an attempt to actually put

094the resolution on the floor no okay so we had someone that wanted to speak about it one of the board members but they didn't allow it but there is a resolution and we have a copy of it um and i'm going to turn it over to board member brown we do anticipate them putting it back on the agenda in the um october meeting so i'm going to turn over to board member brown who is going to give us a little bit of information about what's going on at the state board of education and then we will have a discussion as the board to decide what it is we would like to do more formally remember brown thank you i saw this come up just about a week ago and saw that one of the members

095of the state board of education had was planning to offer a resolution basically to support state-sponsored discrimination that term comes out of a conversation that i had with our local state board member antoinette miranda who participated in a an official statement opposing what was being done the board member who who offered this and who's behind this is uh named brendan shea this uh resolution the shea resolution is a response to [Music] president biden and the state department i'm sorry the federal department of education issuing guidelines and issuing a proposed rule to change federal interpretation to benefit the lbgtq community in particular and students that are lgbt to better accommodate their needs this has been part of culture wars in our country for at least a number of years the resolution that is was offered by

096board member shea this morning had been out for some time and bothered me a great deal i thought it was outrageous the resolution that he offered advocates lawlessness there's a federal law he argues that school districts that disagree should not follow the federal law importantly the resolution does not reflect scientific and factual realities it misstates the scientific realities about gender sex it spreads falsehoods about medical care it spreads falsehoods about transgender people whether in bathrooms or girls transgender people playing on a sport that's not their biological match it even backs up the item that came up some time ago where there might be a horrendous idea of genital examinations to determine whether a student could participate on a sport or not it misstates the law legal precedent for no good reason and perhaps contrary to

097the first amendment it brings god into the discussion that was just odd and wrong and made some very worrisome assumptions about parental control [Music] today this morning when it was offered there was public comment with at least 50 people appearing and testifying in opposition and many others present and supporting those testifying in opposition to this i wanted to be there and told you all that and i think that the approach that we are hopefully taking tonight will be effective in relaying our opposition our strenuous vigorous opposition to this resolution from brendan shea i think we do need to issue a statement immediately with the support of all board members provided that you all agree that we issue the statement and vote on it and i don't care whether it's called a statement or a resolution

098or you know whatever as long as it clearly shows our support or rather our opposition and then rather than oh this evening there were further hearings on by the state board of education at the later hearing board member shea introduced a different version of what he had introduced in the morning i've read the different version with misty's wonderful help even got a marked version already and it's worse than the original for example it's the new one specifically calls for the legislature to pass legislation to prevent any instruction on gender identity gender orientation sexual matters and some other smaller changes that were made just to make it worse and i you know believed that we should move forward post haste there have been a couple of other school districts who have taken some steps johanna lincoln

099had their board president testify this morning that's my daughter burl and i'm proud of her for that there were a few other local school board members from around the area present but they didn't all testify and testimony took long a long time it's my intent to return when the board takes this up to act on and to testify uh at the october meeting of the state board of education and i'd be uh open to any company that would like to come along um but i this is just horrendous and it's uh nasty i can't think of enough foul words to apply and i think we ought to stand up for our lgbtq community and for the rest of our school community because this affects everyone and uh and oppose what's taking place thank you board

100member brown um other comments i just want to say thank you as well for um the summary and for being there and for committing to be there and to testify i appreciate it thank you other comments i would just add that board member brown i appreciate your advocacy on this issue as well as other equity issues that you lean into on behalf of our board i would like us to put a resolution forward in the hopes that it would also spark or move us to also introduce legislation to the ohio school board association which is also taking up similar legislation that will impact our students throughout the central ohio region and so i think if our board is going to lead in on this particular piece of legislation on the state board side that we

101should also lean in and be advocates and definitely the first to introduce legislation throughout the state level i agree yeah me too i agree remember do you have any comments no i just you know i think my colleagues you know for constantly being you know aware and abreast of what's happening to advocate for our students and our staff and as board member brown mentioned it affects everyone you know and so you know we are a safe space for our kids and we want our kids to be able to walk through our buildings and feel supported just for who they are and and so i appreciate the leadership of the leadership of this board and certainly we will do what we can to help further protect our students and staff um yes thank you board member

102brown for bringing this to our attention and also being willing to um you know do testimony for us you know this legislation is absolutely disgusting it promotes just blatant discrimination and it is just full of hate and there's really just nothing else to say about it here in this district that's absolutely unacceptable and this board has continued to fight against this type of legislation whether it be around issues of race around crt and we will continue to fight because these types of policy that is trying to be pushed through have nothing to do with public education and our mission to educate our students this type of policy hurts us all and ultimately hurts our democracy and we need to remember that the people that are making this policy are elected and it is our job

103as citizens to ensure that we are informed voters and understand that our voices as voters matter and so it is extremely important that groups like ours that other coalitions and groups speak forward and up and really help everyone understand how dramatic the impact of this type of legislation or policy making can have on us as a state citizenry and our whole democracy so board members i've heard a couple of things that we or you are willing to do so i want to uh get some formalized thoughts uh on on our direction so one thing we can do is issue a statement uh right away typically that is done under the president's signature as the spokesperson it can be sent out tomorrow we can also do a resolution that is a more formalized uh document that

104can be voted on by the body at the next meeting we can also have testimony official testimony which be written testimony on behalf of the board submitted to uh the state uh school board and then can be read on behalf of the board um and then i also heard which i think is a great idea that wasn't on the list before is to use our membership in the ohio state school board association and propose statewide uh amendment to the legislative platform to ensure that this type of legislation is not something that's advocated for on behalf of public policy so we can do one some or all of those things um what is the will of the board in discussion right now on which ones you would like to consider okay um we i don't believe

105anything at this point needs a formal vote because we'll do the if we could have all signatures all board members sign that letter and yes we can now because well we might need to vote on that then or is it okay because we talked about in public session it will you've talked about in public session but certainly if you wanted to have more gravitas a formal vote would lend it to that so okay all right so then i will make a motion that we um take the following course of action we will issue a letter under the signature of all board members or statement tomorrow we will then craft a resolution and put that on the agenda for official voting at our next meeting we will provide testimony as a board in writing and then

106send a delegate to provide that testimony in person to the estate board in october when they consider and then also uh work on a resolution for the next board meeting to send to the osba to ask them to amend or add to the legislative platform so that is the motion on the course of action that the board will take um on this issue is there a second second that motion uh is there and thank you as the documents are written primarily by staff i'd like an opportunity to participate and comment on the draft drafting i support that and i also would add president dare you know if if our students feel inclined to craft something you know giving them an opportunity or staff or so i think it's important for us to make this statement

107but also i think our kids should be able or have the opportunity to submit something so if there's a way we can set up an email address for this just so that we can take that as well that's a great idea as well as any other issue i think there's still there's still all those uh crt things pending and kind of out there as well so there's a lot of other issues uh down at the state house and the state board of education um so i like that that's a great idea i'm not going to add that to the amendment i think that's something we can just do as an amendment to the um to my motion all right so there's been a motion and a second any other discussion just to be clear i

108just want to make sure i know what we're doing here we have four things we're issuing a statement tomorrow tomorrow with all board members signatures crafting resolution for the next board meeting provide prepare written testimony for the state board of education meeting and name a delegate or have a delegate provide said testimony at that meeting and prepare a resolution for consideration of the next meeting for an amendment to the ohio state school boards association legislative platform yes okay only point of clarification have we stated that board member brown will be the delegate we can i feel like i heard us have consensus around that so can we we can form can we just name that as board member brown i would take that as a friendly amendment to my motion that i accept board member

109brown will serve as the delegate to give this money i i i would tell you this um i rarely if ever and probably none of you ever see me get angry um talking about this tonight really has made me angry yeah um you know and uh it takes a lot all right uh will you please call the roll president adair yes ms beckerly yes mr brown yes dr pierce yes ms vera motion carries all right thank you everyone thank you all our next um and to board members point uh please ccs community flood them send letters uh call them remember that they are um they represent us as the citizens of ohio representing our education system they are elected or appointed by the governor in some cases but ultimately they serve you and so make

110your voice known to them directly as well and we'll work on setting up ways that our students and community can also communicate those ideas to us so that we can incorporate all right let's go ahead and move into our consent agenda this evening our consent agenda consists of items 10.1 to 26.10 are there any items a member would like to pull off for a separate vote tonight seeing none is there a motion to approve the consent agenda motion second there's been a motion and a second are there any items board members would like to discuss upon dr pierce thank you item 16.3 so we have renumbering on 16. so 16 are you looking at well the one authority to purchase services for upgrading digital control or are you looking at the quality security system um

111the quality security that is now 16.2 authority to enter into purchase agreement with quality security system go ahead um so so first i just want to thank our administration for responding to all the questions that we sent in advance related to this issue i think our community knows how i feel about the winding that has happened randomly at our games and in our buildings one team are are seeking the administration just to provide additional administrative guidelines around how are we selecting the schools that are randomly wanted the activities the events and what's our real strategy to get a handle on safety and security at the end of the day i believe it's not just our children but it's our entirety community our entire community that is crying out for relationships that we need to build

112meaningful relationships with people so we can create safe environments and schools so in regards to again 16.2 um i am strongly advocating that our administration continue to work on those administrative guidelines and a real true strategy to get us to safe school environments thank you are there other comments on 16.2 i think um you know i echo dr pierce's sentiments and dr dixon and the team i think also knows that um and i think we have to be very intentional about communicating you know as best as we can obviously we can't say everything because it's a strategy for the protection of our students and staff but really even understanding you know how do we prioritize things from a building buildings and grounds level that tie into safety and security and so i think that is

113a big part of what you know even our teachers want to know our staff want to know our community wants to know they see these things going up and you know they want to understand the strategy and and i think that's really um something that i think is extremely important that we're able to just have the conversation as best as we can as much as we can share so that it does feel inclusive it feels like there is a strategy because i think a big part of what the frustration has been we which i appreciate the team and all of the the work that is going behind the scenes but if nobody knows the playbook we are kind of in the dark about what's happening and how we can advocate for our students and families

114and so you know i recognize this is another investment in our safety and security it's not the be-all there's more that we've identified that we will need to invest and so you know i look forward to being able to have that conversation and really fully understand what our strategy is and can i just add uh can i go to born around first and come back to us remember brown um i too concur i want to thank dr pierce for raising that back when i served up in the greater cleveland area in the 80s throughout the 80s there were proposals for putting in metal detectors and for otherwise improving safety i was adamantly opposed to all of those not wanting schools to be armed camps not wanting the presence of those kinds of things at all

115especially when there had not been any such incident and to the extent there were incidents they're rare to a great extent i still believe that the serious incidents are rare but they get an inadvertent amount of attention i have obviously shifted because i'm willing to support these metal detectors or wands but appropriately in the ways that my colleagues have suggested but i think we need to do whatever we can to prevent our students from feeling that they are in a an armed camp and yes we want everybody safe and healthy but i think we can really work at how we do it in a way that uh that doesn't itself frighten our community and frighten our students and and that's what i want to um add on with um and dr dickson i don't know

116if you show the display that's here in the board room for community members to see but i do think we need to communicate to our families and to our students that these machines will be at some of our buildings and facilities we need to communicate to our students what their purpose is and to our staff as well but in this moment i'm thinking about a young child walking through that and immediately thinking is this space safe i mean because now that's a question you only see those at certain places and and to have never seen it in one of our schools before what does that signal to our students and communities so um i implore you um as a proud product of our district i ask that we come up with a um a real

117plan to educate our community on the use of of these items and to to bring our students in closer in relationships of love and gratitude as opposed to what did you call them the army the armed camp so thank you for board member dr pierce one of the things that i've said before that our students come to school safety is first and safety becomes for learning and we have to ensure that every space is safe for our students and in recent years we've had to change our approach and our strategy around what that means for not only our school districts but school districts across the country one of the things that um president adair has asked me to do is the opposite meetings of a monitoring meeting that we are that i am updating the

118board on operational issues and at the next meeting we plan to do for reports on security and transportations and some other operational things so you would see a presentation at the board at the next board meeting we did have this metal detector here just so board members can see what we plan to purchase but i agree the why why is needed to make sure that that our students and our staff understands why and really that our times have changed it has changed but we to your point we do not want to create spaces where students don't feel safe because of these are in or in prison or camped i mean we've heard all of those terms from others before fortresses et cetera but the plan is to provide the board and the community with more

119information of why just as we did when we had to change our approach to to athletic events for the safety of our spectators and our students to come into those and we said why so to your point we will do that again to the community we've the legislation is to order it so we have those items on order but we plan to communicate effectively and clearly to all stakeholders the reasons why so i um it is a balance right it's definitely a balance um this uh you know we had two guns in schools today and uh that is uh abnormal that isn't normal but it is we had two today and you know i know that devices like this make one group feel safe because they know that if they're on and we are using

120them maybe those guns today wouldn't have gone through um you know but devices like this are not going to solve any problem right and i think we have to be mindful of that um it doesn't solve the why does our student have a gun why is it that they feel the need to carry it into school what is going on at home or in their community um and so these are things that we know we cannot solve by ourselves this is a community problem it's a community crisis we've been talking about this for years to be quite honest um and we all need to come together and figure out a solution to it so you know i at some point was like remember brown like at some point really against these but i think there

121is a balance we must do in this moment in time and they're portable they are not permanent fixtures we do need education on the policy the rules the what happens people need to completely understand visitor student staff what happens when they you go in and and or knock up right so everyone needs uh to know about it um but you know at this point i mean i am supportive of them um for the for the space and time we're in right now and they are at this moment temporary are there other comments or questions remember beckerly yeah i i i echoing everything and i couldn't agree more with everything anyone's everyone said i mean in my mind it's a stop gap but we could also use it as a rallying cry to say to our

122community this is where we are right now we need to do something um so there may be an opportunity there as well one quick question um dr dixon when will these metal detectors um actually be like what are you able to speak to when these actually will be here or like what the timeline is i have when the team members come okay is when we put this place in process we have to make sure we're doing it that is an excellent point it will slow entry yeah possibly okay thank you for okay saying that are other questions comments on this are there any uh other pieces of legislation you would like to talk about in the consent agenda seeing none uh please call the roll mr brown yes dr pierce um with the um exception

123of 13.3 is that our ohio state contract okay um i'm going to make sure make sure formal change yes good so with the exception of 13.3 which i'm abstaining yes for everything else vice president reyes is vera president adair yes and ms beckerly yes ocean carries all right thank you we have no public comment tonight uh and so the next thing on our agenda is to go into executive session uh board member vera has that motion this evening i move that the board of education recess into executive session per section 121.22 ohio revised code to consider the appointment employment dismissal discipline promotion demotion or compensation of a public employee or official or the investigation of charges or complaints ohio revised code promotion demotion or compensation of public employee or official or the investigation of charges

124or complaints against a public employee in per section 121.22 g4 to prepare for conduct or review negotiations or bargaining sessions with public employees concerning their compensation or other terms and conditions of their employment that's a motion is there a second second in motion in a second please call the roll dr pierce yes vice president reyes is vera president adair yes ms becker yes mr brown yes motion carried thank you uh the board will now recess and go into executive session we will come back out to this room to adjourn our meeting when we are finished thank you [Music] you