BOE Special 2022-02-08

001[Music] good evening everyone i am calling our special board meeting full order on february 8th a treasurer please call the roll president adair present mrs beckerly present mr brown mr cole here dr pierce vice president reyes here and miss vera and dr pierce and bournemouth are joining us uh via zoom so they are virtually uh participating and the four members here constitute a quorum um on tonight's agenda we are going to be working with dr blue uh on looking at our equity focused vision of governance for the district and that is all that is on our agenda so is there a motion to approve our agenda so moved second any additions or discussion seeing none the no objection that the agenda is now adopted um before i turn it over to dr blue i just

002want to remind everyone that we are in our fifth annual relationship week and every day this week has a different theme today's theme is one act of kindness and i know school's over but you can still you have until 11 59 tonight so do your one act of kindness we want every member of our um of our district to commit to performing at least one random act of kindness anything from a small compliment given to a stranger sharing a seat on the bus to offering an inspiring gesture that could be life changing imagine if everyone in columbus city schools took part generating more than 60 000 total acts of kindness in just one day so you still have some time tomorrow just as a preview it's forgiveness day and being able to apologize is a

003sign of humility and courage be brave and offer an apology for something you may have done unintentionally that offended another person or find an opportunity to forgive someone else you can repair broken relationships by removing grudges ask the simple question what can i do to make this right so let's work on forgiveness tomorrow and you still have some time for your one act of kindness today remember cole you wanted to make a quick announcement uh thank you madam president i just wanted to just have a quick moment of silence if we could uh for the recent and tragic passing of uh mr sean martin mr martin was one of our safety and security staff he worked between two buildings being walnut ridge and columbus downtown high school it's just a moment for us to acknowledge

004our fallen brethren and staff here in our in our district but more importantly an opportunity to honor the lives to honor the lives of our men and women who serve us as safety and security as teachers as bus drivers as any number of things that uh contribute to the well-being of our students and the protection of our students and staff just a moment of silence please thank you madam president thank you very much we'll turn it over to you dr blue all right thank you president of their vice president reyes members of the board dr dixon it's my pleasure to be here this evening for our kind of our third work session and we just have a couple things on the agenda for today and i'm hoping for some robust conversation but then also maybe

005some action steps at the end of the meeting so that we can kind of move some other work forward so i will go ahead and jump in um ah it works so we just you just never know what technology sometimes so today i uh the first thing i want to do is talk to you a little bit about the department because even though there's been a lot of work that's been going on you all may not have always heard about a lot of it and and the community as well and so i want to just run through a few things with you in terms of the work that we've been doing over the past several months and year and then also really dig into the equity policy you know and and kind of see where

006how far we can get in terms of um finalizing some of those those pieces of really what is a effective equity policy look like for us here in columbus city so just some background about the department it was it started out as a department of one which you all know i was hired in 2020 during the pandemic and so i really spent a lot of that first year getting a sense of our systems our policies uh kind of the way that we work just just to get a sense of what are some of the barriers that people see that we can address in terms of doing equity work both as it pertains specifically to students but also as it pertains to our employee experience and so being able to see all of those pieces so

007in 21 in the summer i brought on a couple of folks we're kind of building out the team but also the social emotional learning work also came under my department so so then it wasn't just equity but also starting to look at how do we really think about social emotional health of students and really adults too but but for us focusing on students how does that connect to equity work and so really building out that idea of the connection between the two and this summer also as part of so that came under during my first year but this summer we expanded the idea because as you know we're looking at attendance and some other things and so really trying to approach the work from a whole child perspective instead of just looking at cell or

008just looking at attendance or just looking at mental health supports but seeing how does all of how does all that connect and so we hired an executive director which obviously you know as mrs ward to be the executive director of whole child supports and so really kind of overseeing and bringing together that integration of those pieces so our attendance office it was new this year and then you know of course our social emotional supports were kind of brought in together with those pieces so the way that we're structured even though we're the department of equity we're kind of split into two and i talked about the whole child piece but then the equity sort of division if you will still a small shop for right now and i wrote down probably three or four different

009times what stan said at the board meeting last week gotta ask for what you want gotta ask what you what i said okay so so sir when we come back and start asking for what we want i'm gonna say hey this is what you said so um so right now we're starting out with a director and a supervisor and just as a small team we are doing some work together to look at um equity from a systems standpoint and that's really important in terms of not just seeing um equity as the outcomes of for example graduation or or mentoring programs or things like that but really what are the what are the systems what are the policies and that's kind of where the you know the board conversation comes into play is how do we

010really mitigate some of those things from the systems level from the from the front so that we don't have to then on the back end try to put band-aids on on larger more complex problems so so this is our team um tanya mclanahan who's our equity director sitting beside me and then our equity supervisor dr rhonda peoples so just to kind of go through a few of the things that we have been working on so far uh throughout this school year and one of the things i'll mention before i jump into the partnerships is that uh one of the things that dr peoples is working on is finalizing the administrative guidelines for the student gender non-conforming policy that you all approved last year so she's been working very collaboratively with academic services operations hr you

011know various departments technology to really put together some strong guidelines around that policy and we'll be doing some upcoming training soon to to make sure that folks know exactly what the policy is about how do we really support our lgbt qia plus students and and what we you know what are some of the supports that we need to have in place of the knowledge that we need to have in order to better support support our students in that way and so those are that's one of the bigger projects that we're that she's working on so that we can make sure that we have that guidance for folks because we do have i have definitely noticed that our adults want to support our students in that way but they just are not sure what to do

012and so we're working on that so one of the things that when i first came in as i mentioned as a department of one brought in hanover research to help with some of the support and kind of build a building capacity for me as a one-person uh shop as we were getting some things um kind of outlined and so uh one of the one of the bigger things that they they were sort of three areas really that they that they did for us and so the first one being collecting data on various aspects primarily academic but not all but looking at both behavior and academics to see what are some of the areas that we may want to look at when it comes to equity and so one of the things that we talked about

013a lot at the beginning if you recall was an equity audit and so just the idea really of an audit being let's look into let's dig into our data to see what do we have what do we need what you know where are the gaps so they they kind of got some of that work started for us and there's still more that we want to do in terms of that and which i'll talk about soon but the one of the things that we want to be able to get to depending on how things are in terms of the pandemic is student focus groups and and we kind of came in at the end of some of the portrait of a graduate work and i know that folks were maybe focused grouped out and kind of

014zoomed out but we we do want to hear from our communities so that is something that's still on the list in terms of ways to triangulate some of the data that we're that we're seeing but we'll we'll we are they are working on um kind of a final report for us around that and so we'll be able to share that information soon but the other piece was a survey that they did for us which um we just got back a few weeks ago earlier and um and this is so i guess it was in january with some results around our very first equity survey which we had a fairly decent response considering how response rates can be sometimes but we we want to see about how to really leverage that and to kind of a

015larger data collection process in terms of really being able to hear from folks around what they care about when it comes to equity or what what their concerns are or what their needs are so they did that data analysis for us they also did some other projects around teacher quality so just kind of working with them with hr and other departments around what are some of the things that we want to know more about that we don't have time or capacity to collect data on that they can help us be able to find evidence-based practices on so so that's the work that they have done with us over the last couple of years this particular partnership i just have been so in love with because it's been so nice to be able to connect with

016other districts around the around central ohio we are part of a small cohort called leading anti-racist change through ohio state and it's a collaboration between the college of education and the college of business to really think about what are some of the ways that you can that they can support uh dei leaders who are in k-12 because a lot of the work looks at higher ed but not necessarily what does this look like for k12 so it's still a fairly new idea for k-12 so so they provide support professional development coaching we've been really approaching equity from a learning science standpoint and so to the point i made earlier around really wanting to think about equity from a systems lens that's what the learning science piece does and so it really asks kind of what

017are the problems that you're trying to solve what are the root cause analysis of those things and so we're not just creating strategies but we're actually looking at what might be some of the reasons that we are having some of the problems and knowing that we obviously can't control everything of the things that we can control what are the things that we can do to to impact some of the problems that we you know that the problems of practice that we may see in our in our work and approaching that not just from a standpoint of what happens in in school buildings but also what happens in in terms of the way we make decisions in our departments so that every department is beginning to think a little bit differently about uh equity so that's

018the way that we are approaching our work in terms of um looking at equity so that started this past summer and it's and it'll um culminate this coming up summer with um we have met quarterly uh and they're going to be doing a site visit to kind of help us work through some things and then we'll meet again as a larger group this summer so any questions so far i feel like i'm talking a lot i just want to make sure this yes sir oh i'm sorry my s thank you um what were the barriers to success if you will you mentioned that you know there was fair success with the survey what do you think were those barriers to you know making it you know something optimal in terms of identifying a random sample

019and then getting that the responses you were looking for in that random sample in terms of the hanover survey so and so i guess when i what i meant was we really wanted to see high participation so it wasn't that it wasn't about a random survey sort of thing it was more around really want to hear from as many people as possible so making so let me move to rephrase making your random survey larger increasing participation what do you think was the barrier to that oh i see so when it comes to surveys you know the what they would tell us is both working with them and working with panorama and other surveys is that they don't really ex they don't expect always a high participation rate so people get fatigued as i mentioned or

020in the case of a survey like an equity survey you're asking people to say things that may that might make them uncomfortable to be that vulnerable in a survey to say how they feel about things related to equity and so that can also be a potential barrier we try to make sure to to say as much as possible that it was anonymous but the culture sometimes being what it is people are not as trusting and so they don't always know if i say this is there going to be a repercussion so i think for us when i think about a barrier it'll just be we'll be just be moving at the speed of trust if you will so as we show that we really do want to know and that we really do want to

021utilize what we learn and let people know what we did with the information that they gave us then we expect for that to grow just organically interesting in a random survey folks felt vulnerable or distrustful of sharing information i was asked i mean um do you think there might have been a language issue that this might have been i don't know too socially scientific in language do you think that might have been a barrier too that folks are hearing all of these you know high level you know even the even the simple term as we would see it as equity is a socially scientific term that you know has a nuanced let alone complex definition absolutely it's very nuanced you think that that was an issue just understanding what they're being asked so the interesting

022thing about the survey is that it was very simply written do you think it's important for students to interact with people who are different from them so it wasn't in um that kind of you know ecwid or education like jargony sort of language at all yeah everything was very simply stated for that reason just to kind of get a sense of you know how do you feel about people who are different than you are is this important you know that sort of thing more so than than the way that we talk about it you know outside of that okay and then the last thing is what were the modalities of it was this a phone call was this go to your infinite campus and fill this out what was it so we did it internally

023for this first one we did it with uh with our ccs employees only so the next time that we do this survey it'll be with families and students but we did this first survey with just our our ccs employees so it was a link that went to email and there were um let's see we also offered the option of a paper copy for those who wanted it we didn't get responses of people who wanted it but we had it available in several languages paper as well as the as well as the link okay um thank you thank you very much remember beckerly um i just have a quick question um i i love the idea of realizing that you know you're going to get better response the speed of trust was that the language right

024yeah the stephen covey book did love him um did you get uh does hannover i assume because we rely on them for the to give it the scientific stamp of approval did they feel like they got enough so that it's a meaningful survey or was it not even did it meet certain thresholds and allowed them to draw conclusions i guess well interestingly they told us that they were very um impressed with how much response they got that we did get on the survey so the you just want more we uh yes we just want more and and then also you know really the way we want to use it is not to say you know x percent said this i mean it's not about the results in this case it's giving people getting them used

025to being able to give us feedback in this way is really what the purpose was for this first one so thanks make sense absolutely you want to add please do um president there just uh to add to that the first survey was really um given to our staff to be able to say your voices matter like we want to hear from you right so that the campaign kind of in the messaging around that was like all voices matter we want to hear from everyone who is working in the district to be able to give us information back about where you see that we can improve and so just to kind of add to what dr blue said i believe that with hanover's response back to us that they were you know very pleased with the

026first 48 hours in terms of the responses that we received and as we gave reminders that the window was closing you could see the response rates going up i think that there's great confidence that as we move forward with continuing to ask our staff to give us feedback that we'll we'll see even higher response rates terrific thank you okay so so then we'll move on to our next partnership which is around our guard rail 3 work so you'll be happy to see this and this is work that i'm we're collaborating between stan's office human resources and my office to dig some more into really learning more about how to bring about resource equity so we were approached by the national equity project and educational resource strategies they have this partnership called the the equity alliance

027or equity resource alliance and we are a part of that part of that part part of their the cohort of districts that they're providing technical assistance to and it's a going to be a two a two year cohort and throughout that um throughout that this two years will be we've already kind of given them some data that um that for them to act to analyze that we'll be sharing back with the board but really their their role is helping me for example to work closer with hr and with our finance team to think about what what counts what do we mean when we say resources and how do we both acquire and distribute those resources more effectively so we so i kind of framed it in terms of time talent and treasure because it's really

028it's about the financial resources but it's also about human resources and it's also about the resource of time in terms of you know in the in the classroom or in school buildings how do we use teacher time so so it's it's been actually quite different than maybe we first thought about that guardrail when it came to resources but it's a lot more comprehensive because it's not just about you know how are we spending money if you will but it's also about how we're utilizing our people which does end up also kind of being a financial you know resource so so um so i think that we're going to get a lot of really helpful information about how to really restructure [Music] things in a way that that really can that is kind of more than

029just about formulas and things but really about what's the mindset change in terms of how we think about resources so so there'll be more information to come about that we've just had a couple of meetings but they also have uh individualized coaching and so we'll be meeting with them they'll be meeting with our finance team and hr team in the in the weeks coming up to kind of go through some of the analysis of the data that they've collected to to kind of give us more information so they've worked with um la unified which is much bigger than us and so that gives me hope that they can help us get there because they have helped uh other districts to get there so so i'm really looking forward to kind of what that what that

030looks like for us okay um this is something that and and this may be too soon to answer it but when i think of equitable budgeting and we got to be careful about you know understanding what equity means versus equal uh like just a hypothetical could it be sort of like well if let's take third grade reading guarantee that our third grade reading scores these this building's you know performing at and this is you know maybe 20 percentage point or 10 percentage points below does equitable budgeting mean you come up with a formula that says they get more resources in order to bring it up is that what equitable budgeting is so or is it should i just wait until you come back yeah some more that would be awesome thank you thank you so

031much fair enough always jump in the gun i was loving when board member beckerly answers her own question she poses a question that says yeah maybe i shouldn't do that this is the big project yeah no it's exciting this is really exciting this this will this will be a major change in how we view mindset budgeting and it will it'll be more expansive uh in terms of the resources we consider when we talk about budgeting and it will be i think more expansive in in the folks all throughout the district that have to be engaged in that process um and it's a little bit daunting because i mean i've been doing this for over 40 years and we've we've always done it in a way that quite frankly was not equitable um and not doesn't

032address equity and um so it's something that i i've jotted down several times that this dog this old dog needs to learn new tricks so to speak so it's a big project and one thing that i really my ears perked when i heard is that you're looking at it both from you know a stand where do the dollars go but you're also looking at it time talent and treasure because and and and so doing you're breaking down silos right and it's but it becomes much more complex but that's that's what we need so it's really pretty exciting and to your point an interesting thing about that is i don't have the expertise around finance or human resources i'm just kind of serving as the pivot point to bring it together and so a lot of

033the work of our office will be similar to that that makes sense though thought we'll hear from them we'll probably invite them you know um to to you know provide information or to do presentations at that point them being the right the equity resource folks yes thank you you're welcome and so moving on to thinking about our guard rail guard rail for work uh one of the things that we were able to do thanks to dr dixon uh and you all was to get research interns for some of our departments so equity had has a and a team member who's online from ohio state he is a doc student from greece unfortunately he has to leave at the end of the school year but we would love to be able to keep him on because

034he's really been great but he's created he's creating the the menu of professional development modules that we referenced in uh guardrail for interim goal interim uh guardrails so what we have right now the the vision for is right now there are 12 kind of large areas of topics for our modules they're broken down into smaller pieces so that you can easily if you were on a lunch break or on a planning period you could do a module during that time so we didn't want them to be too too long they we want them to be easily accessible and to have a variety of learning modalities so there could be something to read something to watch something and listen to any of those sorts of things and and understanding that right now we are in a

035place where it's going to be obviously voluntary but we want to work on how do we get to a place where there's a core of modules that everyone onboarding you know has to take or something like that you know so so those things will continue to come we also want to think about can we put this together in a way that we that someone can get ceus for it so just what are the things we can do to make it more attractive to folks but it would come in at three different levels so if you were just kind of in this emerging sort of beginner place then the the material is at that level if you're kind of in the middle or if you're advanced then you get different then you get different things in

036your in your module so uh so they can be customized in different ways to to create a customized customized learning path so it's really exciting the idea of it and we've built all these things out and so now we just kind of have to test it so we have several groups that want to potentially volunteer to kind of go through them with us there are some folks from certified classified different departments so we'll you know have just kind of a small cadre of folks who just at their own pace and just give us feedback and input on how they experience them so that we can tweak them before they um but you know before we start to really use them we want to make sure that we're as collaborative as possible so as much input

037as we can get as we do that madam president have a question yes go ahead thank you um do you intend for this this paradigm that you develop to be cross-departmental uh cross-cutting in terms of employee classification is this something that every one of our district employees across the line and maybe even some of our student leaders across the line could actually participate in absolutely it's on canvas and everyone with the ccs email will be able to access them the only thing that may be a little bit different than maybe a path that's that's specifically classroom based so there may be some there'll be some pieces that are specific to culturally responsive teaching or pedagogy but everything else and then and probably also some uh kind of what is culturally responsive customer service if you

038will look like which can be easily given to you know that could easily apply to a lot of different of our job classes too so are all other topics are topics that you would and you could potentially encounter no matter what you do for the district okay thank you i got something too jen so she's not even is this okay yes okay make sure you have enough time and or if you're going to cover any of this that's true that's a good point i mean i just because you want to get us to the policy yes so okay this is quick and it's six o'clock board members can board members do this yes and if you wanted to um somehow use that as a board members are doing it too for parallel processing and the

039value of that absolutely i love that idea take a video of us and i just completed my module yes or if we even did it together after a meeting or something absolutely right let's let's put a pin in that okay absolutely we'll do that we'll definitely follow up i know i'm not always quick but that was kind of quick yes yes so then um so so just to kind of tie these things up a little bit just this is just i just want to show you all you know kind of what we're what we've been working on so the last piece is just that um and this may end up being a longer conversation so i'm just going to ask you to just kind of put a pin in it if so and because we

040will come back to this but one of the things that we noticed in what we the response is that we and it wasn't really the response it was maybe more so the questions that were asked by hanover um considering that next to the the things that we want to learn in terms of the guard rails we thought that it would be a better idea to pivot to panorama for the equity survey because they have much more targeted scales around some of the things that we know that we want to get to around around being able to show culturally responsive staff so these are just for the skills that they have and we'll be using some of that sense of belonging diversity and inclusion um to to start digging in and we already have a relationship

041with panorama they already are very good about how they outreach to families and students and our staff so and considering the cell surveys already in our department we're going to pivot that way to just bring those together and then last but not least um you know obviously what we really want to kind of get to today is um the is the discussion of the policy so the idea is if we can get to a place where once that policy is adopted then what comes out of it in terms of what we would typically call an administrative guideline would be for us an equity framework a kind of a go forward plan that is kind of already being built into the work that we're doing around the guard rails as i shared as well as our

042strategic priority area to equity equitable opportunities for all so that we um can start bringing some structure to the work so that people can kind of see and understand the fuller vision so the the policy will just kind of provide some backbone for that um and then let's see and i think we i probably i think i've already covered probably all the rest of those those aspects so are we ready to talk about the policy all right so the um this this um question about the policy uh it's been kind of it's been coming since really before i moved here or before i started i should say so but when we first started talking about an equity policy maybe you know back a year or more ago we had other things that weren't quite in

043place yet and so now i have kind of brought it back around to ask if we can kind of put it back on the table because now that we've gotten some other things in place in terms of goals guardrails strategic priority areas now is a perfect time to kind of come back to this conversation so when we think about why we would even develop a policy around equity i think the other piece is for us as staff and the board to understand what it is that what's the purpose that it's going to serve so so the first of course is just the the confidence that the board provides to both in the internal school community but also the larger community that you all are committed to this we know that and a policy is a

044way to kind of show that because policies are obviously things that will you know live beyond us in a lot of ways and so just showing that you're eight year you're willing to put those commitments down on paper in a way that um shows yes we we are committing to this so that's kind of the the first piece but also it provides uh helps to provide intentional focus for us those of us in terms of leadership and staff that we have to focus on this because that is what the board wants and this is very much a community of is there a policy for this what does the board say what did dr dixon say so they so people want to know that our leadership is committed so this a policy provides that but it

045also impacts the the outcomes the success that we want to have around academic success for students who may be marginalized social emotional health of our folks it helps to impact those things because we're looking at equity in various areas that impact that also impact those things and then finally it can serve as an anchor the same way i talked about being a pivot between you know finance and hr around resource equity and equity policy does a similar thing so it provides an anchor to say if we're making this decision you know what does our policy say about what's important in terms of what we have to accomplish and and be accountable for so it can provide that in terms of not just the the the way we make decisions as leadership and staff but also

046the way that you all make decisions as a board because policy is what ends up changing or not changing the direction that we will go as an organization anyway we think about larger culture and so being able to have that conversation even as you're you're approving policy about something that may not on the surface seem like there's an equity component it can kind of help bring that together so i i was telling um tanya earlier i was impressed with myself yes thank you i just had a question on this and it may be something you're going to cover later but isn't it important especially with this type of policy where few people understand the word equity and many people get it wrong or they confuse it with equality or something else that we use this

047opportunity of publishing a policy to explain precisely what we mean by that term yes sir absolutely and uh if you recall the last um maybe twice a couple times we were together that was the whole conversation is what does this really mean right and and it can be tricky in a lot of ways and so we are definitely going to um put down a definition that this is what we mean when we say yes and that's something that we're working on in conjunction with some other departments getting some feedback from community members and having some focus groups around that just to make sure that when we say it to a board member cole's point earlier that it's not a jargony academic definition that people don't understand but as simply and as easily as we can

048frame it to where people know what it is and can see themselves as part of it and i guess also by uh contrasting it comparing it to other terms that it's easily confused with yes yes so that'll definitely be part of as we dig into the draft that we will consider and bring back to you for further discussion thank you just a very quick add-on to that and thank you madam president um we do have a glossary in our policy piece in our policy section so um you know we worked that out with neola so just so you know that's that's where i think uh board member brown definitely would like and i would too like to see that housed okay in our glossary section our policy okay okay thank you for that so when

049we think about um the development of the policy it does also come down to these three things when we think about what are the components of an equity policy and so the first being the movement so what is it that the board is trying to act upon or the needle that we're trying to move by having this policy and so that's something that these these three areas i want us to kind of you know just reflect on a little bit because i i and this is just you know my kind of personal off offline opinion is that i don't know that we were necessarily very clear about that at the beginning and i think now that we've done some other things portrait of a graduate i think we're a lot closer to knowing what it

050is that we want to move you know as a district as a board the second piece is the measurement in terms of what the policy will do so how will you as a board know that the policy that you have um approved is being implemented with fidelity in the way that it's the spirit of it that you've outlined so that's the other piece is is putting being specific in the policy about not so specific we want to see x number that sort of thing but just being clear about how you want to see it measured and then finally the monitoring of it which is you know this is the type of policy that you will want to be able to come back to in whatever cadence you decide to say hey how are we moving

051on this some of that is going to automatically come out as we go through my work with the goals and guardrails but not all of it will so there may be some other opportunities that you might want to take to say hey we need we need reporting you know around the policy at these uh certain time frames and so those are the three things that will likely be primary components in terms of what's in the policy so to to get to some of this analysis of where we are with what we have i looked at um 25 26 other districts some were very similar to us in terms of student demographics others were larger than us or had or were in larger cities than ours just to get a sense of both in a district

052our size and ones that are larger what governs their district in terms of an equity policy obviously i looked at the ohio eight and our council of greater city schools districts as well because those are also um peer districts for us in a lot of ways uh and then spoke to some of the leaders of some of those districts and as i mentioned earlier there's you know i'm i've been in uh either plc meetings or other meetings with some of some of those leaders and and have been able to have some of those conversations as well and so each you know district had some version most of them had a board approved prop policy but also most of those policies were only a year or so old not terribly old and so it is even

053and so i would say that the idea of equity and equity work at k-12 is fairly new but having an equity policy is also new and so it's also a good time for us to revisit the idea because it is something that now we're being able to see that this is something that school boards around the country are committing to so interestingly i came upon two versions of our policy one was an actual and and you all may already know this but there was an actual adopted equity policy uh and it was adopted you can see um 97 quite a while ago but in the switch to neola that particular policy never carried over for whatever reason so even though it was something that the board approved at that time it's not something that currently

054exists in our policy manual so in reading through it it was primarily focused on resource equity and even in that sense not resource in the way that we've been talking about it even just tonight so mainly resource in terms of finance but some of the references and language were also sort of outdated which i thought is a good call out to the fact that we want to keep the language as general and macro as possible so that in another 25 years folks aren't looking at it saying oh this this language is very dated so um so that was so even though it had um those as i guess you could say cons there were definitely some aspects to to think about in an updated policy primarily the piece about looking at resource equity but we

055had we also have a a draft policy that is much newer that has been worked on by various uh folks over the course of the last year or two that has much more updated language it's it has some definitions and things like that but it also has primarily belief statements and which we'll talk about here shortly and to the point about the dated language of the original policy the the language of belief statements may not translate over time and so that's something that we have to decide do we want to keep it keep all of that or some of that or which pieces of that and that'll be something to kind of mull over a little bit but because of that it reads less like a typical board policy whereas the original is about is

056really based on what can the board do what is the action and there may be some opportunity to meld those two ideas together but kind of building off of what we have right now as the current draft policy so if you recall and you may not because this has been a year ago easily but the last time we were together um and i gave homework and i appreciate dr pierce appreciating the homework even though i know not everyone appreciated the homework but one of the things that i asked is what are your non-negotiables so what i did was just kind of took what you all said and asked for you to to rank these ideas in terms of how important is this idea in a um in a board policy so this is so there

057were six of them and i just ranked them kind of in order of how you all um voted on them and keeping obviously in mind that since then there's been some change some turnover in the board but still you know more or less these were the uh largely the the um order that they were in so i'm just gonna throw this up there just kind of for you to read and just think about him just for a second and i'll then we'll go over the next three but just think about whether those are still ideas that you um want to be sure to include with that the one at the top being the most important thing as a group that you all said i would reorder them now you said you would reorder them okay

058okay so i guess my question would be um i could we can talk about the reordering now or i can send something out then you can kind of reorder without it being a public thing i i don't know what the best process is for that i mean obviously former rivera who's not able to participate tonight she didn't participate in purchase this right and now we have our you know we've gone through more strategic planning and have our goals and guardrails where equity is uh you know something that we're looking at so it may be better to have the board kind of reflect on it and do a little more homework um instead i mean because we're missing and i love that they're here virtually but it'd be great to all be in the same space

059right as well because i know it's hard to participate that way right good point can i have a quick question about how do i remember quality first um just as a recommendation in terms of the reordering piece because i agree with president adair um but i do think that our definition of equity must be inclusive that that aspect of it and more particularly what um board member brown and even myself alluded to would be the first priority that we establish a sound definition an understandable or comprehensive definition of what equity is right i think that would be priority one okay and then like she said i i think it makes sense to kind of mull over everything else absolutely okay so then remember becker lee i just have a question so these are in terms

060of priority they are listed in terms of how you all originally voted for them yes and it's one two three four five six there's seven right there's seven yeah okay and some of them we may decide we don't like it all i mean i'm not saying that i'm just want to understand i'm not i i didn't know i'm not voting on anything one way or another i just want to understand what we're asking to do i'm in terms of what i'm asking you to do right now well what we're deciding to do i think it's about she's asking us if this order that we came up with more than a year ago is still applicable to where we sit right now and and i think we all need to take a moment and think about

061that all right got it and so these are prioritized the way they are send us the thing apparently right but we'll we'll definitely reshuffle them and we will uh send that back out because the other option the other aspect is there'll be there's always an option to add if these if there's something that isn't here anymore then we can or something that isn't here i mean you can always add that in all right okay thanks so then we'll skip by skip past this uh the second um set as well so um one of the things that so we'll we'll come back around to that piece so the other piece of the the newer draft is as i said it it had um a set of belief statements so that those are kind of the the

062answers to questions of answers the question of what do you believe as a board about equity and and so i guess i would ask how much do you want the policy to state the things that you believe versus the things that you will do or what would be an action so um so we can go through you know you can just kind of read through the belief statements but i just i really want to have hear your input on do you see the do you see an equity policy being we want to do and see an action or is it primarily this is what we believe about equity about kids about you know kind of whatever the those aspects are i'm not sure who who had input on what in terms of the original statements

063so that's why i'm just kind of asking it inappropriate um board board president adair dr pierce speak to this thank you so much so dr blue and team thank you so much for this i think it's important to note that the entire policy governance or policy committee had input on this and we approached it as a belief statement and what our board understood to be important oh dr pierce i think we lost you well she's correct um she's correct when we started this discussion even longer than a year ago um can you hear me now yeah oh yeah we got you go ahead doc um so it was really about those belief statements we were looking to you and your expertise to then come in with those administrative guidelines to really give our board the

064direction for how we could begin to act out those statements okay thank you dr pearson i believe that um i remember brown had his hand up as well that when i looked up there i i did briefly and uh i just wanted to uh say that uh i agree with uh with with cana and i agree that both things need to be covered in their policy we should have statement of beliefs and yes they i think they do need some work um to make sure that they're consistent with what the current board uh believes and and to make sure that they're uh the kinds of beliefs that we can um hope uh i guess will last uh for the long term secondly we do need to also state the actions that we want taken whether

065that's by us as the board itself or various administrators and and people that work for the system or do business with the system will will will take action or refrain from taking action about um and i think it is important that we do both thank you board member beckerly um i'm i'm gonna play devil's advocate here i guess in the sense that i think that we should be really clear on how we define equity and that should be absolutely you know attended to until we really get it right and it's you know what we really want it to say and then i think we should have a almost like a general statement that it's the board's policy that equity will be taken into consideration every decision we make and then go into the action part

066i don't think that we should have the belief systems the belief statements because i think i'm fearful and i think this is this is the lawyer in me i'm fearful the more we put in about that kind of stuff the more it will almost dilute what we're trying to accomplish because well the or or almost like send people down rabbit holes well everybody can learn well everybody can do this and i think that um clarity about the action what we expect is the most important thing defining what needs to be defined in order to have that clarity and then that should be how it's structured now i'm sorry dr blue because that's completely counter to what everyone said before but i guess i should weigh in remember cole i i actually don't think it's counter

067at all i don't think it's counter at all i think it's in direct alignment with what we're all saying a is that we want a clear comprehensive sound definition of what equity is b a belief statement that says just what you said it asserts what we value you could call it a value statement a belief statement whatever you want to call it at the end of the day it's it's exactly what you're arguing it's a statement of premise of where we are on this and how we expect it to be utilized and then finally what its intended impact is to be in terms of required action how do we intend to act upon this the board shall blah blah blah right right right are we saying the same thing you know can i speak i

068almost think that some of these belief statements are really going to be translated into action like you know the board policy you know we believe that all students will learn our equity policy says we must structure our instructional practices such that all students shall learn like so i'm wondering almost if some of these belief statements get repurposed as what the action is and that would be a more effective use of those statements than in the belief section i like that and i like that because it i think it aligns to the work we're doing around the strategic priorities and portrait it provides concrete things that we're all working towards um so i do like that example i think you know again we're just in a different spot than we were when we were doing this

069right and so i think at the you know back when we did this uh you know i think having these sort of more general belief statements was appropriate because we didn't done this work and so i do think we can come back in and refine it just as my board colleagues are kind of putting together here um and kind of have more action oriented things and things that certain people are responsible for right so responsibility type of statements things that we as a board can monitor um i think that is that is important so you know and definitely definitions and all that has to be in there or somewhere else that's in the in the policy so that we're all speaking the same language because that's really critical um so you know i don't know

070until we start drafting how much or what weight goes on what thing i suppose um but i also want to make sure the policy because i mean in just a year think how fast we or you know we've moved so i want to make sure in another year whatever we write still gives us the flexibility gives staff enough guidance um and you know is still continuing to align with the work that we're doing around goals and guardrails because you know we're still learning there and so we we need flexibility in the policy to be able to adapt and grow in that space too where's president right here president and therefore my um major peers yeah so i think that again i agree with everything that um you and board member board member co have indicated

071um again the policy committee had very rich dialogue on this policy and the specific concepts and the belief statements that we put in there one could literally take those first five statements educational equity racial equity and put those in the glossary of definitions and then when we come down to how we're going to achieve it again those can be used to inform the actions that we lay out so again i agree with you 100 and want to reiterate that as the committee did this work again this work was conducted in 2020 so two years later we're now coming back to this policy and saying let's move forward with it when the committee initially was doing this work we were at that point where we were establishing a foundation to build a really sound policy that

072would last for several years within our in our district you know and a perfect example of like what i think what we didn't really fully understand two years ago when looking at this is you know what has happened through the pandemic and you mentioned neurodiversity right the impact of trauma on the on the on the formation of the brain we're going to be dealing with that for a long time and so how how do our students who have now been affected by this trauma what kind of things are they going to need in order to get to the benchmark you know it's something we don't know right and so that actually may be an area of equity and you have now sel under you and the whole child i mean that we have to have

073that flexibility to kind of learn and grow in that space um and in reality that might end up being a bigger area of diversity than ones we thought in the past so we need to be able to shift kind of focus um and so kind of thinking about diversity uh in ways that maybe you know like i said we didn't we didn't really have we knew but we didn't know right uh that impact sitting here today and president adair if i may i would say that um we had a number of different identities backgrounds of our students that we wanted to bring into account i know emily white spoke of the neurological diversity and it was hard for us to think about what were those most essential and salient identities and characteristics that were impacting

074the learning of our students and so i i again agree with you that given where we are right now some of those identities have come to the top and become more essential and more salient and their impact on our student learning well that's a per i mean that's a perfect example that she gives right there anyway about the concept of equity so for every student the identity that they need help with will be different so we have to have a policy and measurements and the way to look at it in a way that is to each child right which means that it can't be too prescriptive because they will miss that yes but generally stated in a way that incorporates and i love how this even aligns to our current mission statement we don't say

075every we say each right yeah and i think that there's a very clear delineation between what is every and what is each so i i love the fact that there's this look from any number of different perspectives on how we want equity encapsulated in a in a designation of a kid right yeah that's something and so the um another piece of that is to think about uh to dr pierce's point a bit uh how much of the of how we define it is not necessarily how we define it but how much of what we prioritize in terms of identity is specifically listed in the policy versus in you know maybe uh whatever the guidelines would look like the framework equity plan that sort of thing which may change every three to five ten years because

076of the very things that we're talking about but the policy itself still holds as is absolutely mm-hmm you know thinking about how we're teasing out um the neurodiversity thing that mean that kind of gets you to every child has to get what they need and if that finds its way into the definition somehow well that is i mean that shouldn't be the death that is the definition right right right i just picked that out because it was a diversity that um you know i know was discussed but may not have like we might not have prioritized it because i think we are prioritizing others and i guess what i was saying is what dr blue just said we should we don't we shouldn't prioritize because it it is each child and each child is a

077separate prioritization right because it's them but to dr blue's point there could be things that we see obviously through data and trends and disparity that she and we need flexibility on to be able to address um certain points in time so if if we see disparity is huge in a certain population certain that we have that ability um to go in and kind of look at this macro level of groups and and and look at it in that way as well and also drill down to each child all right so the vice president runs back to the board you know i'm trying to listen here and also so like when i look up baltimore city schools they talk about educational equity um their definition here um says an educational system ensures that every student has

078access to the opportunities resources and educational rigor they need throughout their educational career to maximize academic success and social emotional well-being and views each student's individual characteristics as valuable these characters include but are not limited to because one of the so we we've looked at the equity policy very often and it's gonna change as as we change we change so i i mean um i guess where i'm coming from it's like there is a lot of equity work that i've seen uh going for to national uh school boards association i mean i'm looking at baltimore right now i pulled up philadelphia uh we met the folks from boston um my question is uh you know it sounds like this is should be like a working session and maybe i'm not understanding because i'm trying to

079figure out where we're going with your presentation with sorry dr blue there's a lot of questions there's a lot of feedback and i feel like i'm we're supposed to be sitting here doing stickies and and help helping i don't know if we're helping or not helping um [Music] i don't know if we're reinventing work we're not to be quite honest with you to answer that question directly because michael hold on hold on i'm sorry my apologies my apologies and then actually respectfully then yeah so so i mean i i just don't i'm trying to figure like what what you need from or maybe you know i know we haven't let you finish but um you know there's a lot of questions there's a lot of stuff and i feel like as many equity policies that

080i've seen since i've been here which is a little while this work exists but we need to tailor it to us so so i must mean this is an introduction of where we're at and then you're going to have next steps to say this work is going to continue within your department with the help of feedback from us i'm just trying to figure out where we're at as it is 6 42 right now um well to be fair you just talked for like four minutes so that's the only um i i think i mean i i think maybe the purpose of this meeting to give you some feedback about where we are in terms of this policy or thoughts about it all right the work of the policy is with the committee not the board

081so that where it's not it's a work session in the sense of figuring out where where what the appetite is with the current policy but the work that is going to happen is going to happen with the committee that already exists and absolutely talk about it so a few thoughts that i guess i'd like to toss out is um and i'm just looking at one of these excerpts here about um the district must disrupt and dismantle inequities in every area of our work is one of your excerpts and but it made me think of something and i think the hunter i mean president there often talks about needing to disrupt and be disruptors they blow it up blow it up i've heard her say blow it up a few times um and and and and

082it's the every area of our work thing which kind of gets back to what we're talking about earlier about breaking down the silos so that you're working and and this is i'm just tossing this out um because i uh i happened to be married to a policy geek in a hospital setting and at some point i guess in order to make sure their every decision aligned with what was best for the patient the um the caregiver i can't remember what the third one was they sort of required every decision to have an impact statement like what is you know how is this decision right so so if you're in the custodial world and you decide to do something differently about how you sweep the floors how is that decision going to impact the caregivers the

083patient and their families maybe it was that three but whatever it would be like it's almost like we need to define equity and i think you know the including but not limited to was a good point that one member or vice president reyes pointed out it's a mindset really that i think we need this policy to do to say we're that serious about equity that we need you to defend you principal you teacher you custodian you budgeter um to defend every sin to look through this lens as it's defined in our policy with everything you do and you know i mean i it sounds very burdensome to say you have to do an impact statement for every step but i think something akin to that maybe is worth thinking about would that be that would

084necessarily be something that would be in a policy yeah but in the guidelines i guess the policy would probably say it's the policy of the board that we look through an equity lens on every decision we make and then your guidelines would say if you're a custodial services you do this if you're transportation it wouldn't this it may be the idea yes yeah so it's it's hard to dictate down equity you guys right equity and this kind of work di work has to be embedded in the culture of the people doing the job so dr blue's job is that really everyone like stan is a great example he gets now oh my gosh actually to do some equity work so um and how does that come into play in the everyday business of the treasurer's

085office that's how you know it's successful right so so you can't really it won't work that way people will not do it they will not adjust they will not accept it there will be not be buy-in it has to be more organically put in and they have to understand the why why is this important and that's our job that's part of our job is to demonstrate that why um but you can't really dictate it down that way it just doesn't work right but i think yeah and then dr pierce do you have your hand up to or did you just not put it down oh i do have my hand okay so just put it up but remember brown and dr pierce i'm sorry did i skip you doctor okay i'm sorry can hold pause

086up a virtual space i forgot bournemouth cole and then we'll come back to board member brown and dr pierce uh thank you i just wanted to very quickly kind of inform that about 60 percent of the work has been done we took from myriad districts throughout the country we looked at baltimore we looked at portland we looked at several different districts throughout the country and created a framework by which we wanted to personalize this or customize this to columbus city schools i i do understand that i looked at 25 districts also as i mentioned so really all i'm doing is making sure that where it is now is still where we want it to be to your credit big up thumbs up right to clarification to my colleague that's whose question i'm answering i'm okay

087yeah yeah so we started a lot of this already by putting that that type of structural framework in place with language to a company in that kind of format too um ramona uh boardman reyes so i just wanted to make sure folks at least here who might not have seen it understands what we've done thus far thank you i appreciate that okay uh boy member brown and then dr pierce uh thank you um i appreciate the questions that ramona raised and then carol echoed uh about the process and where are we what are we doing here now this evening um because we are running through time and i'm not sure if we're accomplishing things or not um what i did hear that i liked is that um dr blue said that uh whatever she gathers

088from this meeting um and please correct me if i've got it wrong but this is a sound session um to inform us of where we are and what's going to continue but that work is going to continue in the committee it's not the board that is going to be writing this and and working with language until sometime later when it's recommended to the board one of my questions is dr blue when you say the committee that is going to be working this what committee specifically are you referring to is this your committee a committee that you're working or is just the policy and governance committee so interestingly i you probably should see me more at the policy and governance committee but i have another meeting always at that same time but i am supposed to

089be there with you uh so my my hope is that once we get this input that we'll come back to to the policy and um governance committee to to have a discussion about what what revisions we might need to do okay and then at some point this will emerge from uh policy and governance with a recommendation to the board correct absolutely okay just want to make sure we're all on the same page thank you absolutely dr pierce thank you so much so dr blue my question is is it possible to begin to lay out what some potential administrative guidelines would be given the framework of this policy the work that we've done around our goals and guardrails i want to reiterate to my colleagues again that the policy governance committee spent a lot of time

090thinking through this policy talking about this policy and we handed it over to administration with you know the encouragement with the the um the enthusiasm and the passion and the directive to to say hey come back with those administrative guidelines that align with us ensuring that students are learning that we're in the district and so i guess right now in this meeting i would echo the sentence of vice president reyes and saying i'm not sure where we are it seems like we're just doing a check-in on the framework could you give us a teaser of what you have in mind for some of the administrative guidelines given that that you know where we are strategically so that's a great question uh dr pierce so the way i envision it is the the administrative guidelines they

091are technically our administrative guidelines but it it turns out to be the equity framework so the work that i am then kind of charged to do is based on the um what what we have in terms of the goals and guardrails and the the the strategic priority areas that's also part of the work so as we're building the framework for the department that becomes what the administrative guidelines are because administrative guidelines are in a traditional sense can't look the same because it's an equity policy so so actually once this is kind of approved and in the place that you all want it to be then we can continue to move on with the work that we've already been doing which is part of creating a framework that would undergird how this policy is enacted so

092it won't be you know here's administrative guidelines 10 pages of to do's and not to do's is going to have to look different because of all the things that we've already talked about so so i guess in terms of why we're here today it goes back to the point that the it felt as if there was still not a full ready to at that time to approve and i just want to make sure as we bring this forward and it can be approved then that's that begins to be our official language in terms of the definition of equity and in terms of how we create you know all of what the equity work looks like that would be what an administrative guideline would sort of be and and it would be we would have something

093that would be that you could kind of get as paper but but it begins to create that framework i'm sorry i'm interrupt no you're fine i was i apologize for interrupting so it sounds to me like if we look at the guardrails that you've established related to for example culturally responsive teaching and the implementation of various measures around equity that those will become the administrative guidelines for this policy am i hearing you correct right and because all of that it's going to be much more complex we'll need rubrics for some things you know how we're going to measure a commitment to racial equity it won't be in a traditional guideline sort of format we're going to have to do other work to to bring that about so that's that's why i want to make sure

094that we are are are clear and concise and done with in terms of how we feel about the policy so that everything that we're creating builds off of that so i thank dr blue then when the committee sent the policy to you an administration our thought process was the expectation that you all would come back with those guidelines so it seems that at this point we would want to see the guidelines along with your recommended revisions um to the framework that the committee gave you so once you put your guidelines in that then you go through and you know make particular revisions and if that becomes okay we we've thought about equity more broadly more inclusively so we want to remove these specific categories away um then you know i would venture to say that

095the committee is looking for that and welcomes that right so i think at this point it it's difficult for me to i have some uneasiness saying this but i would like to see your specific administrative guideline recommendations the ris the reserve the um the revisions that you would like to make to the framework and your your voice your input your expertise your guidance on how this becomes a better policy okay i i second that these two okay and then i so i guess i would only ask um one quick question which is do you see the current like the belief statements is that a framework in your mind when you think about a framework is that what you're thinking of dr pierce so again i can only speak to how the committee approached the work

096and please board members brown and cole correct me if i'm wrong but the way we approached the work is we wanted to give those identities that we know are new at the time were impacting student learning and we did have to make the hard decisions to say include this one take this one out deal with this one let's not deal with that because it's picked up in another policy and so what i would say to you is that we've given again a framework of what we have in an introspective way and talking to our community and understanding our student demographics at the time saw as important if those have changed we definitely want your expertise to come in and just note those changes you're the expert right and so let us know those changes uh

097submit those revisions to us i don't think you'll get any pushback you will get rich dialogue that will carry us i think to another point in developing a a sound and good policy okay remember becker lee i kind of have two thoughts about the policy generally as that is drafted in its draft form and also um about something jen just said and about um tying in what dr pierce just said and and i think maybe to answer your question how do we feel about these belief statements and the the policy as it's currently drafted i think and and to honor the work that's come before it to get it there um making sure that the the you know so it may be that for example one of the belief statements really finds its way into

098an action statement so just so that you know we we can track it and we don't lose the the thinking behind it and it may be if it's structured a little differently just as long as the the intent is there i think that maybe would be a a rule of thumb about how to look at the next draft and and then that way we're honoring what came before and maybe um taking into account what we know now the other thing that just occurred to me that not didn't just occur to me but that um jen said that maybe is going to also should or should also inform how we perceive the policy in terms of how it should be structured and that it's different from other policies is that jen said this is ground up

099work and so i would imagine a policy that literally can't be dictated from the top down the policy itself the broad vision has to be dictated there has to be leadership which we totally have but we can't in order for it to work to change culture like you can do measurement benchmarks and write you can do accountability but to get true belief people have to understand why it impacts them on a daily basis and in their jobs and that you can't dictate that's what i was trying to say but it also and maybe i'm i'm missing okay keep going yeah no i want to hear what your reaction to this is and maybe some for us to be intentional and mindful about the culture change we're trying to accomplish something needs to find its way

100into the policy that acknowledges that does that make sense the interruption of the system i don't mean that explicit i mean well so that's a whole i mean so i think that's something that in the left side that came up that maybe isn't in there like when we start to talk about systemic equity issues where you started getting to which again think about all that we've done in this area just as a district and board in like lobbying and you know speaking publicly on on systemic issues in education we weren't in that same seat when we were doing that first policy and so we know that there are systemic equity issues both outside and just the system inside the way we process things and that also kind of goes back to your idea around the

101time tax right that's an inequity some individuals depending on their groups have a tax on their time that's different you know why do some groups have to stand in a line for an hour while some get to just pay to get a service like that that is an example but um so there's lots of different ways to to kind of look at it yeah but but all of that i guess this this work is still growing and learning and so it is hard to capture what might be the next thing that we need but i was yes i was trying to think about the words from carol if how do you ensure that the system understands that we're doing something different right so it's more of that that's why i use the word interruption of

102the system right so how do we become more explicit that we're saying we're going in a different direction and it's explicitly stated so i think that's what you were trying to get to in a way that jen said you can't make people do it but you can let people see that we're going in a different direction oh yeah right and i think being explicit and that was why the some of those other and this may be a little bit too um something that dr pierce mentioned but one of the reasons that i just added the the sample language was just and i'm sure obviously you all looked at that when you were looking at other districts it's just to say how strong of a statement do we want to say as a board this is

103how we [Music] i mean we have the belief statements but you know are some things you know more that no we don't necessarily want to say it that way or is this bold enough language that we have in the policy because i know that the things that we're going to have to do and see in order to really reach equity are going to be have to be bold to your point board member call so so these were just examples that obviously we don't have to discuss but since you all have already probably seen some of this in other policies that's the reason that i wanted to bring them up today to say hey is this stronger language than we may have or is this language too strong or is this not a direction that we

104would go you know the other thing this is a footnote but um i don't know that there's any organization that's really getting this right and even if they're getting a writing policy are they getting it right in practice so i think we should feel free to figure out what we need to do for us yeah there's no road map to this i mean yeah organization and every place that is this is implemented will be different and so that needs flexibility um as well i think in terms of this i see you i'll get you in terms of the statement so for me some of those statements border on anti-racism statements which is totally fine if that's what we want to do for me personally in this work that is two separate things right so an

105anti-racism statement anti-any other thing ism just like we did with the lgbtqia right that in in essence is is an anti-you know discrimination harassment type of a statement right um it's different than equity and so i think i think that while sometimes we will need to address and we do need to address because i'm the first to say we do have systemic racism in education in columbus city schools because we're built on it that's that's a little bit different of a statement than just like a bigger equity in my opinion well i think it but if we need to work on that then dr blue is the dei expert leading this work in our district i i would need your recommendation that says board you know what over the next three years we're going to

106lean into the dimension of diversity around race and we see that this is a problem this is how we're going to address it and so you know under that equity lens we're going to go ahead and move into anti-racism work right as opposed to including it in the policy right okay that's dr pierce it's hard i look up there and i said there's roof i don't know if they go up and down so i think they're both up yes i'm i i take it down each time okay um i just wanted to say that in terms of the intensity of the statements dr blue i think it's it's really a matter of you and the team determining how those goals and guardrails align with the framework that we've brought you and again as president adair

107saying it gives you um the platform the trampoline to you know really focus that work in particular areas so i would caution us in um bringing this to the board to determine how strong we want the statements to be it's really what measures do we have that will allow us to determine if the work that we are doing is making an impact we can have statements that are very strong from days beginning today's end but are not making an impact on student learning that is true very sure remember brown thank you um i was part of what i was going to say is is precisely what uh tina just said um i think we do but one of the things that that i think we need to look at you know is how this draft

108which i believe was initially created in the policy committee was prior to this public discussion on crt was prior to the use of the term and discussion of what is anti-racism and it was also before this board developed its goals and guard routes and i think that one of the things that we'll need to do perhaps to some extent administratively by at your lead dr blue and partly when it comes to the policy and governance committee is that we do rethink it to some extent by those changes that have occurred that we weren't aware of or thinking about um at the time we we first brought this together i know that dr pierce has done a lot of work on it um but i'm not sure any of us have really uh re-thought anything subsequent

109to all those changes that have occurred um in in society and in the district so i think that's very important that we do uh i too want to see the administrative guidelines worked up um knowing on the one hand we don't those are administrative guidelines not for the board but also they will undoubtedly prompt some further discussion on the policy and make sure that we're in alignment uh and and that there aren't any other things we want to do or do differently in the policy itself so thank you and if you all re recall this is really our first time since i've been here of having this discussion specifically about the policy so it was a very necessary discussion because this is part of my work and i have to be able to have this

110discussion with you also so i appreciate i appreciate that we've gotten a lot of great input and feedback and and context creation at least for me and my team and so we'll kind of go from here to um kind of look at the things that you've told us come back to the committee and just kind of go from there in terms of our next steps as a team so i and with that piece that's kind of my final we'll just you know kind of run it through the process in the same way all the other policies are so we'll take the the next revisions to into the committee were you trying to say something i'm sorry i think i did i just wanted to say thank you to dr blue for the work that she's

111done on this and uh yeah all of that work was done prior to her arrival uh in the policy committee so um it's going to look you know in many ways different the discussions are going to be different than we're going to have uh dr blue and her team participating with us at the policy committee so that will be that will all be very welcome and i look forward to it thank you thank you right different doesn't mean bad it doesn't mean that the work wasn't important it was we are just literally in a different time and space and um it's fair that we go back and look at it and we now have dei experts um that are on the team um three of them and so you know we we uh you know

112they we did the best uh you know to create that with you know um expertise that we are bringing uh to the to the table but now we have dedicated professionals to help and so you know we are excited to continue to learn from you and hear your guidance and recommendations so that we can ensure that we are truly meeting our vision of equity uh which is the foundation of really all that we're doing um and so you know thank you dr blue and team um dr dixon do you want to say anything can i just say something really quickly because there's another piece to what's new we didn't have dr blue and her team before to help and you know we were we were doing it as jen said at the best of our

113ability and with the expertise that we had the time but you're also the ones that have to implement it so your input is you know we were we were just had an organization that was supposed to implement a policy that we were going to issue now we have people charged with implementing it so that input is necessarily going to change what it looks like as well absolutely um president adair could i just add i would like to thank all the committee members who worked on this policy we do have a number of experts that are coming from different spaces ohio disability organizations that do this work in our professionals and again we work really hard on it the next thing i would like to add is um understanding that dr blue's schedule may not permit

114her to make those committee meetings uh because we have representation from someone on her team does it necessarily have to be dr blue that attends those policy governance committee meetings the interesting thing is it's our team meeting time so we're all in that team meeting so we'll we'll make adjustments to our department meeting so that we can have someone there yeah or could we could i ask my colleagues because i teach at the same time so that tells me that's something that's something to take up at that meeting yeah that's a conversation to have with the policy yeah with the governance [Laughter] all right so i just wanted to just say thank you again to dr blue and her team and thank the board for this work this is something we prioritized since 2019 you

115guys gave me a year to get a person in place and just thank you for your work we know this work is not easy it's changing but it is a priority so it's important that we get it um we get it right it won't be perfect it's all the reasons that we state it but it is about changing the system and interrupting the system so that we're focused on making sure our resources our practices all of those are equitable across the district for all of our students so this is her work and that's why she wants to ensure that we that we got it right it's great because we're going to be held accountable to make sure that this work is uh where it needs to be so thank you for your time um and

116your um and thank you for um even for staying even you know these conversations that we're having um and we are we are seeing some changes already happen it happened today in a meeting we had standing hours some team members um and we're changing the conversation so to your point carol and others the the conversation has already started and we are seeing a more equitable process more equitable processes that are happening as we're making decisions in the district so thank you for your time this evening yes thank you if i could just mechanics so you all know we've got a committee meeting of the finance policy committee this thursday morning obviously none of this will be right for placing on the agenda this thursday morning but i will tell the committee that we're going to

117be making some changes uh perhaps in the committee time or not and but we'll talk about it there and get started with figuring out a new date if that's what we should do and i would at least let you know for now that the march meeting is currently on the books for the 10th of march again 8 30 to 10 as always but uh it's movable and we should probably get at them sooner rather than later thank you thank you board member brown um any other comments just thank you and thank you all for your time this evening i appreciate the conversation thank you all right so we'll just need a motion to adjourn second please call the roll or no we can just adjourn right [Laughter] you may just adjourn hearing no jackson you

118made hearing no objection we are adjourned i thought i had another 15 minutes [Music] you