001this week is teacher appreciation week and we just want to make sure that we appreciate all of our columbus city school teachers i appreciate my teacher because she gives us the good books to read i appreciate my teachers because of all the opportunities they have given me this year i appreciate my teachers because they help me understand what i learned i appreciate my teachers because they have made such a big effort this year to help us learn in the way that we have and connect with us hello my name is maria and i'm a student here at columbus downtown high school and i really enjoy all the teachers here because they're so friendly just so nice and they really encourage all of the students to participate and to really just do our best i appreciate
002my teachers because they have helped me with a better career and future for myself i appreciate my teacher because they have helped me and my grammar since english is my second language i appreciate my teacher because she gives us fun work to do i appreciate my teachers because they allow me to think freely and not suppress my thoughts i appreciate my teachers because they teach me things and we appreciate all of our teachers too happy teacher appreciation week thank you students for the wonderful video it is board president adair and i am calling our may 5th 2021 a business meeting to order mr treasurer will you please paul the role president adair present ms beckerly president mr brown mr cole he's excused dr pierce president mr ragland here vice president res here you have a
003quorum madam president thank you so much and you know it is teacher appreciation week ccs community but it is also a lot of older uh professional appreciation days and weeks and so the board has also put together a video to say thank you to our wonderful staff during these great weeks and days and so i'm going to ask oh that we play that video now hi team ccs it's board president adair and it's may and do you know what that means no not just the last full month before summer break it is the month that we get a chance to say thank you to so many of our amazing team members each and every day you work hard to help us meet our mission and we appreciate you so much in fact we have so
004much appreciation i couldn't even do it myself so take it away board members hello ccs teachers it's teacher appreciation week and in a year like no other it is entirely fitting that we express our profound appreciation for all that you have done for our students this year throughout this year we watch you recreate your craft in a virtual setting and build community and provide instruction to our students and then we watched you pivot again when it was time to bring our students back to the classroom throughout it all you continue to inspire and amaze us and we are deeply grateful thank you also to our substitute teachers who were able to fill in again under difficult circumstances when our students couldn't be there we appreciate you and all you do for our students thank you
005board member tina pierce here and it's national physical education and sports week we want to thank all of our gym teachers coaches and our community partners that are providing activities to keep our students active healthy and safe during school after school and during the summer thank you so much for everything that you do remember an active body leads to a healthy mind this is columbus school board member james raglin coming to you in celebration of national school lunch heroes day may 7th of 2021 to all of our cafeteria workers here in ccs and abroad we just want to let you know how much you are appreciated you do the work that we know takes care of young people and makes sure that they are given nutritious meals and they have the sustenance that they need
006to be productive in school so for every extra chocolate chip cookie every french fry that you know we may not need but you give it to us anyway and for the fiest status lord for the fiast status we say thank you and job well done good evening to our remarkable ccs school nurses our dedicated resourceful and compassionate school nurses have been doing so much to help our students and their families during this incredibly stressful and challenging time i'm eric brown and once again it's my privilege and honor to celebrate and to recognize you our ccs school nurses on national school nurses day 2021 and most especially to thank you thank you for all you do you know how important your work is to our school community we also understand that you protect our students in
007times of crisis serving on the front line and helping to address our students health issues kate you and your team are wonderful we appreciate you all and we respect the great work you do for our students from all of us our parents students and community we all offer our sincere thanks thank you i am out here on the streets of columbus looking for some of our amazing bus drivers you know these individuals worked uh so hard during the pandemic and even though we were um at home during part of it they were still working transporting our chartered public students you know our bus drivers are more than just the people that open the door and hit the gas they really do provide a level of social emotional support for our students they're the first and
008last people many of our students see bus drivers you are so important to the way that we serve and how we serve and we appreciate you so very much we also want to thank the members of transportation team that help these bus drivers get to and from their schools picking up all of their students across this district we have some of the largest transportation operations in this country and it is challenging we think and appreciate you as well you are truly amazing members of our team thank you so much for all that you do every day to serve our students and community hello ccs principals it's principal appreciation week and we want you to know how much we appreciate you in this year that was like no other we watched you rise up your leadership
009and creativity were truly inspiring we owe you a debt of gratitude and we want you to know that we appreciate you take care and have a wonderful week and we do we do appreciate all of our team members and you deserve so much more uh thanks uh every day and so we hope that you are getting all of the wonderful things from your building communities and your students and each other um because we are really all are in all of in this together and it's been a very challenging year and so again we just want to say thank you as a lord and we sincerely appreciate each and every one of you so now into your little hearts yeah love okay um so now we're going to go ahead and do the pledge of allegiance
010and board member backer lay will lead us i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you board member becker lee all right four numbers you have a copy of your agenda uh we have public comment um then we are going to have a public hearing and reemployment a retired employee we will have the internal auditor's report the treasurer's report and then the superintendent's report this evening uh we have to look at the uh the uh this the uh proposed amendments to the charter of the policy committee and our board matters of course we have our con consent agenda um and then we will have sport announcements we will have an executive
011session this evening and we will come back to adjourn our meeting in public sessions are there any uh is there a motion to approve the agenda [Music] second second are there any comments questions additions to the agenda seeing none please call the role president adair yes ms beckerly yes dr pierce yes mr ragland yes vice president reyes yes that motion carry thank you so much all right and uh just let's let it reflect the board remember brown has been here they're getting him set up he's coming in right now but he's present in the room okay we have public comment this evening we actually have two speakers this evening the first speaker is rebecca hinkle mcgrath and the topic that she will be addressing is facts stands for families acting for community traffic safety she
012would like the board to consider the survey results and consider safely safety solutions for our students board they is on nickels do we have miss hinkle mcgrath president there are speakers on the line thank you you have four minutes to address the board you may begin is she still there uh can you hear me oh yes you have four minutes to address can you hear me okay okay good evening president adair vice president reyes treasurer internal auditor smith members of the board and superintendent dr dickson i am rebecca mcgrath alumnus of jorge's career center currently my 22nd year at ccs i teach at currently downtown currently at columbus downtown high school in the fall of 2019 at the fccla family community and career leaders of america fall leadership conference my students were challenged to to
013survey this community as part of the families acting for traffic safety sex around that same time a ccs middle school student was walking to her bus stop and unfortunately was struck by two vehicles and passed away from her injuries my students immediately began filling out the sccla facts survey and we passed out 50 more copies including in december of 2019 my cdhs advisory committee members completed the facts survey 2. we ended up getting 35 plus returned by january of 2020 and please watch our video created with our results and thoughts at this time [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] okay i think the video stopped um in november of 2020 after the covet pandemic at home schooling had ended and my career tech students returned to the ccs classroom we decided to take the paper
014facts survey and create a google form to survey more people as of april 2021 we are still continuing to get cert similar results at the march 3rd 2020 board of education meetings in jasmine pennywell um presented on issues of 20-minute late bus condition at her child's bus stop and she was asking for help from the board for some type of bus watch program for parents to sign up for with years of similar stories and same problems i'm suggesting the a form of a committee one who reviews previews routes and for our busters and walkers at the time that our ccs children will actually be using those routes and possibly assign safety and security officers to be at certain locations until buses can arrive and get them safely building relationships with our students and families starts
015even before they get to our classrooms thank you and i hope that you hear and have seen the seriousness of some of the issues that our walkers and busters face in ccs and um i hope that you will help us to find real solutions for change uh thank you for your time thank you so much for addressing the board and happy teacher appreciation week to you um thank you for all you do it sounds like people you've done an amazing job not only teaching your students about this issue but how to advocate as well so thank you for that board members do you have any clarifying comments or questions okay seeing none we do appreciate the video and this topic is obviously something very important it's actually something that we also i need to continue
016to work with our sister government and city council on um in ensuring that all of our students have have safety access up to two bus stops and uh to and from the bus stop so thank you for bringing this to our attention and uh we certainly will continue to uh to monitor this oh board member becker lee actually has a comment and board member raglan sorry okay um i just wanted to say that um we will circle back in touch base with you from the culture and climate committee because safety is part of our overall um uh the jurisdiction i guess for the like a bit award so um please stay tuned once we're up and running with that committee we will um make sure we address these issues thank you for remember remember raglan
017thank you madam president and um thank you miss mcgrath for your service to the district my uh my question is more to the administration could we take a look at costs to the district for eliminating the two mile radius for walking uh to the to the to the bus stop and and those types if we could if we could lessen that to maybe stay a mile uh could we see what that would cost us um you know just if we were if we were to take those routes that are currently you know 1.9 1.8 uh 1.7 and just make that you know a mile uh could we could we estimate what those calls are and get that get that information back to the members of the board please thank you madam president thank you we
018will have uh borderlands and nichols add that to the question list um thank you again uh uh ms mcgrath for addressing the board and taking the time to advocate not only for the students you teach but for all the students in the community you're more very welcome thank you for your time thank you okay ours we have another speaker um tonight and that person is michelle uh dolzell the topic that she would like to address the board on is the adjustment transfer process the request is she would like the board to change the adjustment transfer policy so we'll wait for for these on nickels to come back to the caller president there are the speakers on the line thank you so much you have four minutes to address the board you may begin good afternoon
019board members um thank you for your service and your time i see all of you as equals and respect each of you at the same level a little background about me my name is michelle delzell i'm a columbus native i live and work in columbus i'm also a columbus city schools building substitute teacher currently i am the granddaughter of the legendary carol j stewart the woman who saved central high school from being destroyed and dedicated for decades of her life bettering the city of columbus so the apple does not far from a fall far from the tree also i'm a community leader and advocate i graduated from east high school columbus state community college franklin university indiana wesleyan university and currently walsh university i believe i have served on a few committees with some of
020you i think eric brown looks familiar we have something in common tonight all of us we are both here to improve the columbus city schools and to make sure our families and community is supported and cared for my degree from franklin university is in business forensic and then forensics investigating white-collar crime i am well-versed in separation of duties checks and balances opportunities for unethical behavior including fraud and collusion i share those qualities with you because they directly relate to my requests i was denied an adjustment transfer and was told that it did not align with the policy so i checked into the policy and i found the policy to be useless and only serve to destroy and deny fame as a need that could have been met the policy is located in the administrative guidelines
021book in section 5000 under students the title is processing adjustment transfers the code is ag 5113.01 d it was adopted in 2015 the reason for the adoption is not stated in the policy it was last reviewed october 8th 2020 it does not state who reviewed the policy my request is that the policy is abolished or done away with totally any transfers that need to happen with students shall be handled solely by the central enrollment department the district has an open enrollment policy and does not need to need another policy to complicate the transfer process if the board decides to keep a policy there needs to be immediate changes made the first change is to remove the chief accountability officer from the process a person at that level should never be in an approver status that
022role is for planning implementing organizing and managing also in the policy it states that the chief accountability officer has the final say that should never happen ever a person at that level should never ever have sole power to approve or deny so where is the accountability for this person's actions is he or she reporting their denials and approvals to the board there should always be a hearing process option for any denial made to a family i am requesting an audit of all denials and approvals that have been made to ensure fairness and equity have been served how do we know this is not an accusation in any way i'm just stating how do we know that the chief accountability officer is not denying someone because they are black or brown or whatever or because they
023are best friends with a principal and want to do that principle a favor right now we don't know the role of the chief accountability officer is to make sure laws have not are not it will not be violated my son's case clearly violated state and federal funding laws because he missed 145 hours of instructional time and the chief accountability officer never knew about it until the request was made and made it to her desk she needs to explain how her system let that happen or somebody does because the very policy that allows this to happen is a policy that she is part of there are many people waiting for the answers to this request today so i'm asking for an exact time and date as to when we will hear something from the board this
024is a serious matter it needs to be addressed right away we live in the age of accountability and technology we are actively dealing with racism and we need to make sure that we are ensuring fairness and ethical procedures are followed to hold anyone accountable who might think to harm another person thank you thank you so much uh for addressing the board are there any clarifying questions or comments or number brown then talk to your peers okay is that better thank you uh sorry for the delay um i just wanted to check um sharing the uh policy uh soon to be the policy and governance committee i believe um i'll be i'm happy to take a look at that and to consider those kinds of changes but i'll need to have a bit more if you
025would provide your contact information to misty after we get off the line and if you have your comments in writing that would be very helpful or if you just have notes provide a copy to msd and she'll get them to me and that will be helpful as we proceed and take a look at it thank you so much so we will have the policy committee look into that dr pierce yeah so my clarifying question is you indicated that your son missed hours of instruction um can you give us an estimate about how many days or or weeks um your child was missing that instruction due to this lack of response or decision on our part as a district can i ask who was speaking just now i apologize this is board member dr tina pierce
026oh um i'm sorry so your question was the specific time that he was missed so you indicated did you say 144 hours like what does that equate to did he miss five days of school what um so what happened was march 21st i emailed um central enrollment to have my son withdrawn from the digital academy and placed into valley view his home school so i'm just giving i got to kind of play through the dates the reason for that was to do the adjustment transfer wait i can't i can't hear are you see i think there's a delay i'm looking at the screen and someone's talking and then i'm i can't hear anything okay don't watch the screen there is a delay when you're watching youtube versus what we hear so just just talk to
027us on the phone okay so i'm not going to look at the screen anymore yeah all right so um i'm addressing dr tina pierce's question march 31st march 21st i'm sorry i sent an email requesting that my son is withdrawn from the digital academy and that he is placed back into his home school which is valley view because i was requesting an adjustment transfer that my son go from digital academy to starling where i was currently teaching substituting in the building the process started march 21st um i submitted the actual application march 23rd or 24th it was given to my building principal or to mrs r trip she forwarded to my building principal my building principal signed it april 1st forwarded it to the superintendent the superintendent had the form um i i don't even
028know how many weeks he had it so the whole time i'm waiting to hear back from someone from the central enrollment from the principal from the superintendent and in the meantime my son was not he didn't have access to i ready he wasn't even given a cohort to attend valley view it was weeks that had passed so three weeks passed i heard nothing i did send a follow-up email to the superintendent just asking um has this can i get an answer for this i need to make some decisions he did not respond and so this whole time my son has gotten was getting zero education i was going to withdraw him completely and just withhold him and so that is what i'm saying he was not getting an education at that time and nobody was
029even following up with me no one was giving me any answers does that answer the question that does answer the question but i have one more question for clarification so you indicated that on the document the document went to the superintendent it was it the superintendent are like a regional uh superintendent or one of our regional ads so the person that that i so i was copied on the email from the secretary um and the print my build my building principal and it went to a scott nelson and i think he's a superintendent i don't know what level of superintendent he is but i did send a follow-up email directly to him because his name was on the email that was about april 12th and i did not hear back from him at all um
030and then i waited a little bit longer because i know some you know things happen but i believe april 22nd was the day i just gave up i said i'm just withdrawing him i can't take this stress anymore um and so that's what got me to looking into that process of why did this happen how is this allowed to happen and if it's happening to me an employee of the district is it happening to other people and what can we do to not complicate this process so that this doesn't happen to anyone else so i apologize another clarifying question when you say withdrawal you completely withdr drew your child from the district or was it i was planning on yes but my plan was to completely withdraw him because i was so frustrated and so
031overwhelmed and so emotional at this lack of support and care and just the whole thing that i was going to completely withdraw him but i sat down with my five-year-old son and i asked him what do you want to go to school and of course he said yes mom i want to go to school so i i got an email from pamela r tripp who is the valley view principal who has been the most wonderful part of this process and she gave me my options once she was given the denial that's when she felt that she could follow up and give me my options and that was on april 21st or 20th i don't know what day that was i would have to look but it was very close to that time um so so
032that's when i decided she said he could go to this cohort and i talked with his dad and we decided that we were just going to send him even if it was just for a few days a week for the last few weeks of school thank you okay one more dr pierce now this isn't for the caller i guess this okay for us all to consider it sounds like a very confusing process to me and and given our plans to move back into the classroom um i would like additional information to know how we're handling those transfers when students are moving from the digital academy back to their home schools or into a lottery school however they're transferring i would like additional information about that process okay we will add that to the list as
033well as look have the policy committee look at the policy itself board member raglan yes thank you for calling uh with this issue ma'am my question is around uh the march 21st date when you um requested the initial transfer out of digital academy were you given specific instructions as to what was to happen with your child while the transfer process was taking place um i was so this is another issue um march 21st um i did not hear back from anyone i did get an email so to answer your question the answer is no and to add a little bit to that i actually had to call central world by myself to find out what was going on they had actually transferred him back to valley view um on march 21st or 22nd but i
034didn't even know it no one even called me emailed me sent me a letter no one told me anything at all i thought he was still with the digital academy so i didn't even know that he was back with valley view it could actually physically attend school okay um i i would thank thank you for that clarification uh madam president and i i would hope that uh that timeline as far as the process is concerned once the parent articulates a desire to transfer i'd like for that timeline to be articulated as long i mean as well as with lines of communication to the parent when we get some information back from administration please coupled with uh dr pierce's yeah well yes thank you yes we will add that to the question list for administration thank
035you for bringing this to our attention i'm sorry that your family was frustrated through this process that is certainly not how we want anyone to feel um and thank you for being a substitute in our district thank you for being a substitute in our district and uh you are appreciated in that capacity as well so we will um you heard that we're gonna we're asking the administration a few questions and then we're gonna have our policy review committee look at that policy board member brown will get in touch with you um and uh so i will definitely keep you looped in on this process so thank you so much for reaching out to us you're very welcome and there are other people that are waiting for me to give them answers that's why i asked
036for a specific time because other families that are are going through similar not quite exactly like mine but very similar troubling um experiences so i'm kind of the voice for several people right now that's why i'm asking for specific time you know a time frame so um understood we will have someone from we will have someone from the administration follow up with you in the next few days and then we will loop you in on the rest of the timelines about what's going to happen with the review of the policy but we will have someone from the administration definitely reach out to you um and if that doesn't occur you can always let us know no that's fine i i really i don't really need to hear from administration anymore i've kind of given up
037on them um i just really want to know i really want to see something happen with this policy because i feel like this is this is what's hindering it's complicating the process it's creating a lot of people to be involved in something that should actually be a very very simple thing moving one child from another one school to another should not be overly complicated like this um so i'm very eager to talk to mr brown um and work with him to to help modify or abolish the policy that's really the goal i don't really need to hear from administration anymore i'm i'm sorry i just feel like i've given up in that area and i and i hope that it's understanded and respected that i feel that way i was very very very upset it
038took a lot of courage to call and share this with all of you but i know that i'm not i'm i'm the voice for many and it does take courage to do this it does and we very much appreciate it we will have um board member brown reach back out to you okay thank you so much for bringing this to our attention this evening i will share my president i will share my information with misty nichols as mr brown requested yes thank you no thank you thank you all so much for serving and i appreciate your questions have a wonderful evening you too bye-bye all right board members we're going to go ahead and move on uh to our direct reports reports so the first up is our internal auditor hello internal auditor smith how
039are you this evening i am fine thank you very much i'm just not used to being first no i know okay um board president of the dare vice president reyes and members of the board my report is actually going to be a little bit shorter than what i had planned um because i was planning to go over some highlights from our recently released auditor of state report but that report has not been released because of i forgot about the state auditor's blackout policy where there's an election they don't release things because they don't want to possibly sway any type of vote so our report should be released tomorrow which means i will have an update for the board at the may i believe 16th meeting so with that said i will go over my normal
040reports that i provide to the board after the auditing accountability committee has their monthly meeting so a a met on april the 22nd the committee reviewed a draft of the redrafted committee charter but no vote was taken the committee was requested to provide me with any changes or any comments that they had regarding the charter i will input them into the redraft and send them back out to the committee for a possible vote at the next meeting in at our next meeting there was a vote to release a report on the human resources employee benefits processes that report was approved for release the audit revealed a very hard-working group of individuals and the audit also provided opportunities to make recommendations to gain efficiencies and increase effectiveness audit noted seven issues two issues were rated as
041high four issues were rated as moderate and one issue was rated as low a response has been received from the administration and at the appropriate time the office of internal audit will go back to the human resources department to perform a follow-up procedure to see if the implementation plan is effective in addressing the issues that were noted the audit also highlighted the cooperation between the office of internal audit and hr as hr implements the recommendations from the council of great city schools peer review which was released in spring of 2020 there were a lot of things that the office of internal audit had planned to review during our review but because the council of great city schools had already reviewed those issues it was definitely more cost effective and more efficient for us just to
042perform follow-up procedures on those recommendations versus doing our own audit coming to pretty much the similar and same conclusions the a final copy of the report has been sent to the board and is on the district's office of internal audit web page now if you'll bear with me i will share my screen and go over the office of internal audits dashboard am i able to share my screen scott or ryan okay okay can you all see that no uh we just see the window that's got the uh file the file folder okay you might have shared the wrong window i'll try this again oh okay i see what i did um can you see it now okay great okay um for the month of march for the month ending march 31st this is the status
043of the activity that took place in the office of internal audit the first graph shows a bar graph of just the activity broken out into three buckets the first bucket is the audits and as you can see the planning is the blue bucket the in progress is the yellow field work is gray and then the report issued is your orange what i do want to highlight on this graph here is that you will notice there are no items that have been delayed we were delaying some work on some school artists but now that the personnel are back in the schools we have been able to go back in and basically complete that field work and i anticipate we will be able to issue those reports by the end of the year if you wanted to
044see more information as far as the names of the audits you will be able to see that on this report here which shows you the audit name and the status as of march 31st and then the final view if you want to actually see the movement of the engagements we'll just take capital improvements which is the fourth one down you can see that the planning and scoping has been completed field work has been completed and the report has been issued so it's the same information just shown in three different formats the next item did require a vote of the committee and this was to make a change to our work plan we asked a committee if we could add to additional engagements to our plan and removed to engagements from our plan the additions the
045superintendent did commission the council of great city schools to conduct a peer review of transportation that engagement has been completed by the council of great city schools and similar to our work with the human resources department we're going to be working with transportation as they go through and implement the recommendations that the council of great city school made the second edition was a mid-year risk assessment update we don't normally do that but because of the situation with coleman we really have wanted to keep an eye on events that are happening in the district to see if we needed to make some adjustments to our work plan the items that were approved for deletion we were planning to do some follow-up activity on the pdk curriculum audit but the superintendent is bringing that to the board
046so there was really no no benefit for us being an intermediary in that process and then the other deletion was a talent acquisition and recruitment engagement that we had planned but once again this area was thoroughly covered through the council of great city schools when they did their engagement so we are just going to work with the human resources department as they go through and address the recommendations made from the council of great city school so once again um the committee did recommend that these additions and deletions move forward finally you've seen these before but just in a different format prior to us purchasing our automated audit work paper system we used to have to generate this through excel and word now we're just able to basically push a button and this generates this type
047of information for us so this identifies the issues that are outstanding the page that you're looking at right now is for the treasurer's office this next slide is for the office of business and operations and once if at all the superintendent's office has um some time and we can actually go through and sit down with them and verify the information you will see a very similar graph for the open issues in the superintendent's office and as i've kind of mentioned before in addition to the engagements that we do we also like to keep track of engagements that other external entities come in and do uh regarding the district so this is just a flow shark a float not a flow chart a slide that shows the status of just for example the wcbe online to
048the wcbe office of inspector general's engagement that they did last year and we will continue to do this for any type of engagement that a third party comes in and does and where the superintendent or treasure asks for our assistance in this manner and board president that completes my report and i'd be happy to answer any questions thank you so much on auditor smith are there any questions from the board or are there any comments from our co-chairs of board member beckerly and boymer raglan i can't see all of you because oh i'm sorry are there any are there any questions or comments no i i'd like yes ma'am thank you madam president i'd like to thank auditor smith for uh her continued diligence in working with the office the entire office is working very
049very hard uh i'd also like to take the time to thank uh both uh uh treasurer orrick as well as superintendent dixon for the spirit of cooperation i do believe uh and i'm hoping uh that my co-chair would echo this but i do believe that we are fostering a very good spirit of cooperation between our direct reports and the entire district along with the office of internal audit um they've just done really some yeoman's work and you'll be able to see that when we report out uh next month on some of the the findings that have taken place and some of the things that have have been done over over the last year or so i'm just really really proud of the work that has been done and i want to thank all of you
050uh for your diligence in making this happen so um thank you that that is it for me today madam president thank you board member beckerly can you hear me now sorry um i am your your co-chair compares mr radwin um yeah i i don't want to belabor it but the the cooperation and the collaboration that's happening between on the office of internal audit and the superintendent's office has been really inspiring and i do think it's wonderful and uh wonderful work and we appreciate all of you very much you board member beckerly any additional comments well thank you for your report uh auditor smith it's always good to talk with you um we will go ahead and go over to uh the treasurer and um board members no i did accidentally skip item five so we
051will come back to item five after the um the drug reports reports so sorry about that so so uh uh treasure for horak thank you president adair and vice president reyes and members of the board um tonight if all those well i will have for you a report on the uh update to the five year forecast there we go this is the may update uh you know we do this report twice a year and this is the update to the november 2020 report it was presented and reviewed by the finance and appropriations committee back on april 14th it is presented to you here for discussion and questions and information and then it will be presented to you once again at your meeting on may 18th for final approval as you know i begin these reports
052with some catchy quotes about the uncertainty of forecasts this one is one of my favorites that forecasting is difficult especially if it's about the future and then um i will have to credit board member brown for uh adding one uh for me uh and this is a a quote from paul saffo who is a technology forecaster in silicon valley he's also a consulting professor in the school of engineering at stanford and he's done a lot of forecasting relative to the dynamics of large-scale long-term change but his comment here is that the goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present and i think that's fits very well with some of the early indicators that we point out in our
053forecast in terms of of calling our attention to when the board needs to take action to have an impact on the financial future of the district you know there is a legal requirement to do this as i mentioned in november uh 30th of each fiscal year to file the original one and then do an update uh somewhere between april 1st and may 31st or any time a significant event takes place and lastly my quote here it was attributed solely to me and that is uh our forecast is always just a snapshot of what we know today coupled with a long list of assumptions and it's always subject to change i think i found that when i went to present this to the board or to the fac committee back in april that days before i
054presented it things changed and that's just what happens so i'll go over some of those variables and uh assumptions here in a moment this is the may 2021 five-year forecast and my presentation is organized uh in this fashion i'm going to start at the top of the pyramid with the summary go through the major revenue and expense groupings and then get into some line item detail i'm going from you know whatever you might call the 40 000 foot level down to into the weeds and this is primarily uh so that as each section comes up gives you an idea when some of you who don't want to go that far want to not off and just ignore what i'm saying that this will be the the trigger point for you so let's get to the
055summary of the forecast and look at the major items summary lines on the forecast you have total revenues and total expenditures at the top and the blue and the orange lines and then ending cash balance the yellow line the blue line is a reserved cash balance meaning we we subtract out 30 days cash balance to give you an idea what it is on a reserve basis and then the difference between revenue and expenses is shown by the gray line so the takeaways here you can see in fy 21 expenditures begin to exceed revenues and that's when the gray line goes in a deficit position and then in fy 25 you'll see that the reserve balance goes negative meaning we don't meet our 30-day cash balance target but we are in fact positive in cash putting
056some numbers to it revenue during the forecast it's going to grow from 2000 uh in 2018 from 925 million to about 998 million and at the end of the forecast this is an annual growth rate for total revenues of about 1.1 uh compounded annually on the expenditure side we're going to grow from an actual number in 18 of 871 million to 1 billion 1 billion with a b 77 million at the end of fy25 this is an annual growth rate of just over three percent a year and so you can see here it doesn't you know take an mit degree to realize that if your revenues are growing at a little over one percent but your expenditures are growing at over three percent that is an unsustainable condition and we'll see the impact of that
057here as i move along uh this this is the revenues over and under expenditures again indicating here in 21 that we begin to spend more than we take in on an annual basis and then that deficit spending will accelerate in the out years of the forecast indication our reserved indication as i mentioned this downward slope for your cage balance line is unsustainable and again we're positive here at about 72 million dollars at the end of the forecast but relative to 30 days case we're actually negative around 17 million on a projected basis moving on to major groupings of revenue here we have property taxes and state aid or the blue and orange lines and as we all know those are our two major sources of revenue all the other line items of revenue while to
058most of us they're in the tens of millions of dollars and it seems like a big number but relative to a billion dollar budget they pale by comparison to uh property taxes and state revenue i would point out in this graph that note that all of these revenue lines are pretty flat meaning there's very little annual growth in them over time hence the 1.1 percent annual growth in total revenues putting some numbers with it property taxes are growing from an actual number in 18 of about 500 million to 570 million um i forecast property taxes on a calendar year basis because that's when they're levied and collected and i allow for about 1.2 percent growth in property taxes in the off years that is in between reappraisal and update years and then in those reappraisal
059update years between two and a half and 2.8 percent increase in property taxes for those time periods state aid is kind of an interesting line um you'll see here for 21 our estimate for the end of the year there's been kind of a bump uh and you know we did go through a reduction in 20 which carried forward to 19 but then in 21 this current fiscal year there was a partial restoration of a little over 5 million dollars in state 8. plus we received a rather large dividend payment from the bureau of workers compensation that ends up on that line from an accounting perspective of about 19.5 million dollars so it creates that little bump there but the real comparison is is here to 19 to 20 you can see that it's down about
0609 million we there was about 9.2 million in that cut and it was restored about 5 million so you can see here from 350 to 355 and a half million that that's that's where my forecast is flat for the balance of the of this forecast through fy25 of all the lines here this one is undoubtedly going to change in the next couple of months because we are in the middle of a state budget bill and they're talking about doing a variety of things relative to the fair school funding plan um school wellness and success funding and how that's going to be handled how that is going to be handled will affect our expenditure side and what they may or may not do with how they fund school vouchers and charter schools will also affect us
061on the expenditure side so both kind of above and below the line this is highly likely to change between now and the end of june uh down here the gray lines property tax allocation that's the homestead and rollback pretty much follows property tax revenues and as you know our last levy in 2016 is not subject to that rollback payment from the state the next a couple of major revenue groups um other local sources uh the bump here in 19 is due to a rather banner year in pilot payments uh the drop here down to 25 million flat for the balance of the forecast uh is due to a change in my assumption about investment income uh short-term rates which is where we uh participate on the investment site in in the one to five year
062range rates in the short end of the yield curve have fallen about 100 basis points over the last year and so we i've backed out a pretty good dollar amount on investment income to reflect that drop so that's the explanation there and then you've got non-operating revenues that remain flat those have to do primarily with some advances and transfers in and this graph just shows you that the two major sources of revenue account account for 92 percent of our overall income state aid continues to be a right in that 37 to 36 to 37 percent of our total funding moving on to expenditures i just broke this into operating expenditures personnel and non-personnel you see that that's obviously the clear majority of our expenditures and then non-operating and debt uh much smaller portion there at
063the the bottom of the graph putting numbers to this you can see that personnel is growing at about a three 3.2 annual rate and non-personnel grows at about 2.1 percent annually and again you can see i'll go into some detail about what's included in that personnel line in a minute on the non-operating expenditures the non-operating expenditures have to do with transfers and you can see here in 19 that was the 30 million dollar transfer to fund the dominion brookhaven north program realignment and then i have i'm proposing a transfer of 80 million dollars to fund a school bus purchase program i will be detailing that to the finance committee next week when we meet but and you'll hear more about that later but i've included in the forecast when we get to considering that funding
064that program and if i'm asked what's the impact on the forecast i've already got that built in when we look at personnel and non-personnel expenditures together it accounts for about 97 of our overall expenditures but within that non-personnel number we have charter and vouchers and i just wanted to show that while it was 30 some percent on the previous slide you see here that charters and vouchers account for a significant portion of that and so uh they they're in that 20 to 22 range of our total expenditures one of the things i uh point out as well is that when you look at our personal expenditures running at 67 66 percent other school districts typically will be in that 85 to 90 percent range so i share with the committee and with you this evening
065that if i were to back out the deductions for charters and vouchers exclude them from this calculation you'll see that we actually do operate at about 85 percent in personnel expenditures this is just a blip because of that transfer that i've included for the bus purchase program now getting into the weeds line by line you can see this is broken out or for all the revenue lines in the forecast again putting numbers on property tax and state revenue that you've seen and roll back this is all other revenues the blue line and again banner year and pilots and then a reduction for investment income this gray line is the reimbursement from the federal government for our qualified school construction bonds our transfers and advances out and other funding sources are broke and broken out and
066detailed here the this green line for operating transfers in drops off because debt service payments in the fund that debt service gets retired for those bus purchases that we did so that's why that drops off going into the expenditure lines you can see there are many many more expenditure lines in the forecast that we track uh than revenues again the major ones personnel personal services and benefits the personnel line grows at about an annual rate of 3.4 percent it includes the negotiated wage increases through fy and a 1 increase assumed for the years after that it also includes a portion of the five-year personnel plan that was presented to the finance and appropriations committee uh um in yeah a month ago the total fte included in the five-year plan which runs from fy22 to fy26
067is 259.65 additional fte in this forecast since it only runs through 2025 is uh of that 259 positions there's 241.65 positions shown here benefits grow at a rate of about 2.9 annually compounded purchase services here um this begins the non-personnel section where we change the methodology for forecasting in november we forecasted based on the budget basis this time period i this time for the may update uh we are forecasting it based upon uh expenditure um actual cash expenditure history so while we budget at a certain level we actually spend some something less than that and so for instance here um we're at about 94 of budget on the purchased services and so that picks up some that improves our cash balance on when we change that forecast methodology the reason why i did that is
068because the finance committee over the next 12 12 months is going to be looking at the need for operating levy and or permanent improvement levy and so i want this to be as close to a cash flow document as possible so we can hone in on the true need for a levy from a cash flow perspective so you'll see that we with that change in methodology we pick up and have an improved ending cash balance uh fairly significantly this breaks out charter from the overall uh purchase services and you can see that without uh charters growing at the from 186 million to about 234 million the growth rate for purchase services without charter is about 2.2 percent annual uh this green line is going to change uh the proposal uh now as it as it
069exists is to directly fund charters and vouchers so if that happens this is the expenditure side that would go away while the revenue side is reduced as well to pay for the charters and and that deduct the expenditure side will go away um hopefully that's at least a net zero if not a slightly net positive for us from a cash uh balance standpoint but we'll wait to see what the legislature finally comes up with capital outlay and supplies and materials the bond parent and supplies materials at an increased level even when we do it on a cash flow basis is ju is increased because of textbook purchases plain textbook purchases and learning materials purchases capital outlay it just isn't that three to four million dollar range um and there's nothing significant going on really in
070that line on the debt related lines you can see the the green line is the bus purchase debt and it drops off to zero here in the blue line are the payments we make for the uh qualified school construction loan qualified school construction bonds and the brown line here is the just the interest related to both of those debts and you see it declines over time as debt is paid off lastly other objects mainly this is auditor and treasurer's fees and you can see here that the year in 2020 when we got a refund uh this was posted because it was in the year that those expense expenditures occurred we posted that as a a refund in expenditures a reduction of expenditures rather than a revenue item and and so the accounting for this is
071uh quite frankly a little odd but i think we've decided that here on we're just treated as revenue regardless of which year it comes in it smooths things out and keeps it a bit more consistent transfers out advances out again the 30 34 million here in fiscal 19 for the dominion brookhaven north realignment and then my proposed bus purchase program here and the advances out are for cash flow needs in other funds they typically become advances in on the revenue side over time do some comparisons for the committee um i like to show them that what we're estimating for uh the end of year 21 separately and looking at plan uh that that we had in place versus our into your estimate and then looking at uh 22 to 25 and that's where we really
072hone in on that change in methodology from a budget basis to a case flow basis a lot of numbers here and i'll just pick a few to look at first of all here in state aid for fiscal year 21 you can see that we're going to be about 27.6 million above plan again 19 and a half million dollars in a bureau of workers comp payment we had pulled casino revenue out of the of the forecast in november and in fact we did receive about 2 million in casino revenue so that's accounting for that and it drives that total revenue uh about 22 million above plan estimated to finish this fiscal year out on the expenditure side again very good example of why i'm switching to a cash flow methodology because we do run under budget
073and so these changes uh for 21 are all relative to that uh along with some pandemic issues in the uh personal services uh you know not not having as high of expenditures as we might have expected in all by the end of the year we should be about 77 million under plan for fy21 what's that mean to total expenditures we should be right around on plan before four million dollars above but essentially we're on plan and again this is the 80 million dollar transfer uh just to point that out to you and how that impacts the bottom line on expenditures overall when we get to any case balance we'll actually build a cash balance by about 17 almost 18 million dollars by the end of the year versus what we had estimated original estimate was
074250 we should end about 268 million for the balance years 22 to 25 um quite frankly on the revenue side the only thing really notable is here in line 106 for other revenues and that's the reduction that i made to reflect my reduced estimate for investment income um up here i'm sorry in state aid see the 5.8 that's the restoration of that cut that we added in and it carries forward in all those years again that will undoubtedly change by the end of the year overall total revenues and other financing sources since november over that entire four-year period up only 1.7 million and it doesn't even register as a percent change on the expenditure side uh again uh adjusting for actual expenditures versus budget you can see some over the four year period some fairly
075significant pickup there in the forecast debt service pretty much unchanged because we know what that is going to be total expenditures operating expenditures then are over this four year period total about 160 million uh that will increase our ending cash balance some minor changes in that four-year period for uh these other financing sources uh i'm sorry other financial uses and at the end of the day total expenditures will be over this four year period about 158 billion less and in the end the impact on cash balance we pick up 17.8 that number right there is what what we picked up in the fiscal 21 estimates and then uh the 160 reduction in expenditures and some increases in in revenue and we go from 106 million forecasted deficit in uh november forecast to a slight positive
076of 71.8 million so that was about 177 million dollar swing largely due all to the change of the philosophy of how we're forecasting uh expenditures just a summary over the total five-year period of the forecast we pick up about 23.6 million in revenue again largely due to the restoration of the cut the bureau bureau workers comp dividend and casino revenue we we have a net gain of 140 54 million in reduced expenditures and so we we have that pickup of about 177 million and we'll end the forecast at 71.8 million again short of our 30-day reserve balance but still positive what's next as i mentioned earlier state budget the school funding formula and student wellness and success funds all up in the air we've given testimony numerous times in support of the fair school funding
077formula we have our fingers crossed and our hopes high that something comes through on that uh substantially as it has been uh presented in in the bills before the the house we have to see what the senate might do with that we are as you know in the middle of strategic planning and oftentimes that involves staffing while we do have a five-year staffing plan in place uh as the superintendent uh you know works further to put together the street strategic plan and and the board finalizes all your guards and goals and guardrails undoubtedly there could be some staffing changes down the road um and i know i have a reorganization plan in place that involves staffing and i believe the internal auditor has some things too so your direct reports are doing a lot in
078terms of organizing uh our respective uh pieces of the of the organization here to get ourselves aligned with one another wage negotiations uh we'll we'll have uh one bargaining unit this year and next year there'll be another bargaining session that goes on so that will certainly impact the forecast one way or another we continue to be mindful of our planning how we're spending the federal dollars so that we don't create a fiscal cliff um and so we will watch that but uh you know again that's a that's a unknown and a variable that that will potentially affect the forecast in the out years as i mentioned the finance and appropriations committee will be the planning arm for the board to look at uh operating levy and permanent improvement levy just those two types of levy
079to address operating needs and life cycle replacement needs perhaps so we'll be we'll be having those presentations at the committee meetings over the next 12 months then we have as you know an ongoing fmp process that will be running concurrently and i uh anticipate i believe and some of you may know better than i that you're shooting for early next year to have some output from that process this process typically leads to a bond issue rather than a pi levy of bond issues intended to fund large capital improvements you know entire building renovations or reconstructions and so those are different types of issues and while the committee will keep an ear to the ground on that and i will certainly participate in those discussions that really won't be part of what the fac does but
080again it is a variable and will have an impact on our financial picture for the future that is the end of my presentation on the may five year forecast and i will do my best to answer any questions you might have and again i'll bring this back to you uh on the 18th for your final approval thank you so much thank you i'm just always just so in awe of you your ability and the uh this your staff really to do these reports um you know it is i know we don't always ask you questions and um you don't get you don't always get the highlight but this is so important the financial health of our district i mean if we don't have this then we don't we can't build the portrait right and just
081so to you and your team thank you you are so critical and and just the amount of work and the amount of just thought behind this and the way that you are helping us approach uh the way that we're looking at our finances has just been really incredible so thank you stan and team uh for this uh work that you do every day and thank you and and it truly is a call out to the team because rest assured is as this might have seen it might have seemed to be a little bit in the weeds and some of the line items even deeper than that um folks on my team we look at you know individual transactions we look for large receipt items large expenditure items we sit and we discuss and talk about
082what's the likelihood that will continue we we really do execute a lot of diligence when it comes to putting to the forecast together and i'm always pleased with with the end result um we you typically are if you understand the assumptions given the assumptions we are you know pretty good at being on on target and i like and i really feel that it's it's um you know we we overuse the word transparent i think at this point but we really do disclose much of of how we arrive at where we get and i like the process too because we always make sure that the the catch is worth the chase so some line items just aren't worth spending a lot of time on quite frankly but when we get into property tax revenues and state
083revenues and some of those things we do really dig into them i'm i'm and i get a lot of help and i have um not just a second set of eyes but um four or five different sets of eyes on on on these numbers so i'm i'm real pleased with the outcome i'm very pleased that we do it in house and um i'm glad you appreciate it so i think you do have some questions or comments so board member brown and then others if you do let me know thank you stan i just wanted to uh every time i go through this and i you know i've read it i heard the presentation uh with the committee um but i struck me this evening as we were looking at the chart and it may be
084helpful to go back at the forecast on personnel cost it visually looked like the the increases um including this or especially from 22 to 25 uh were in you know increasing at about the same rate as those before even though you're making an assumption about those at one percent per year am i correct stan you're muted trying to do two or three things at the same time i was searching back for uh the slide and see if i have the one that you are referencing was on uh expenditures that's it wow you're good uh yeah i was uh you've made as i understand it um we've been on a contractual increase that we agreed to with uh the association uh and that runs through 22. from 22 to 25 the slope up of that line
085the blue line appears to be you know continuing to increase pretty well even though as i understand it uh you've made a one percent per year assumption about those is that correct well it's a one percent assumption about the across the board increase on the base uh beginning here in 22 and continuing through 25 is the addition of that 241 positions that that come in i don't have the year by year it is phased in over this time uh but there are 241 be between uh the end of fy21 and beginning in 22 through 25 there are an additional almost 242 positions uh well that helps explain uh why the graph continues to rise as much as it does i was wondering whether some of this beyond that one percent that you assumed uh was
086the result of step increases and extra years of service and degrees and things like that yeah we do we do make um some estimates of that and include that in our projection and and keep in mind that this year is a the kind of these two years 20 and 21 are odd years they i believe our costs for personnel are are depressed i mentioned to the committee both in terms of overtime pay and substitute cost it depressed that so i reach back here to 19 to do a better trend um to get that line out here especially and with the addition of the new staff so it it may appear that that slope of that line and that rate of change um well it is greater than in the previous years but the 20 and
08721 are are artificially depressed as a result of covet got it that's helpful and i know because this is uh i guess our single largest uh expense every year i just wanted to make sure that i understood exactly what was here thank you thank you are there additional questions or comments remember regularly um i'd like to pick up on those 241 hires that are in that projection that eric was just referring to and i'm not sure if this is a dr dixon question or a stan question but um are they teachers are they what when where what's where are they coming from and is that part of a plan to you know reduce class sizes basically is what i'm curious about um i don't have the plan off the top of my head my apologies
088but it is it is a mix of staffing um and that re that report was given to fac i'd have to go we could go back and do that well maybe we'll just put that on our father misty to find the answer to that i'm curious about that and and we have charts on that as well i just didn't bring them in the staffing plan tonight no that's fine um i i don't know if i um well let me ask this question first um and this is this is a forecast in the future question i guess um as it stands now in terms of the um what's going on at the state house [Music] are the charter and voucher funding that's going to be um separate from us uh the the house version of the
089bill has them funded directly right okay now the senate is is considering um their proposal for the the budget okay um i'm just wondering if um i mean we've talked about this and i guess for the answer is we don't know if the direct funding is going to hurt help or be neutral to us relative to um the fair funding act formula well the the fair school funding formula um assumes that they are direct funded it assumes that student wellness and success funds are folded into the funding to help pay for the the the the formula there is a phase-in period of the formula um i believe it's six years so um is it beneficial to us to direct fund charters and vouchers i believe the answer to that is yes one in terms of
090i think clarity um and um you know two then you know any changes that the legislature would want to make to the funding for vouchers and charters would would be done separately it wouldn't be run through our accounting for that um and i think that just is is clearer and allows them to stand on on their own um and not be convoluted i think in our in our funding formula right because i mean we talked about you know if the pie stays the same size it doesn't really matter whether it's coming through us or going out the other way and i guess i was wondering if there's any indication about the size of the pie i'm sorry this mask no no no i'm i'm just i'm tilting my it's probably my here and just make
091sure i hear you correctly um you know we won't know the the size of that overall pie until you know this house and the it's too early okay you know we've seen in the simulations are out there from the house version right uh dr roush and i uh were able to to verify that calculation which is very exciting to us because often times we can't get their number but we're able to verify what what they've put out publicly uh and it you know it is in line with our expectations for the phase in of the of the fair school funding model um so i that's all that's i can't say any more until we hear more about where the senate might go with it dr roush do you have something you would like to share
092the only other thing i would like to add um to the discussion is that there is a a statutory appropriations limitation um that's in place that the the budget can only grow by a certain percentage unless unless they get i believe it's two-thirds super majority to say that they'll go beyond that which does not appear likely um so the pie can only get so big at the at the present time so there are there is a limitation there on on the um i think they just they call it the sal and it's the the um i'm missing what the s is off the top of my head but it's the appropriations limitation and so there is a limitation on how big the pie can get um so i did want to know that but you
093know as we continue to go forward uh through the senate um we'll know more we'll know more about what's happening there is some additional dollars i think above and beyond uh from the house version where we were and so we'll just have to wait and see how this shakes out we'll hopefully know by june 30th this year and not june 46th as we did two years ago okay um thanks i mean i do have another question but i think that uh i can tell james is anxious to ask his question so i'll stop taking up your time i might circle back with you later okay remember raglan yes i uh i like pie a lot so let's let's stay with the pie there the pie discussion um theoretically mr prehork if columbus city schools sees
094an increase in enrollment due to students leaving charter or non-public schools would we increase our revenue and you said did you preface your question with the phrase in theory yes sir of course actually board member raglan the good news is the fair school funding formula is in fact a formula and it is in fact driven by enrollment numbers so as our enrollment numbers go up or down our funding should change and that's that's another um you know it sounds odd to say that you know it's a formula and you think well don't we have a formula now well it looks like a formula but it's really a resource allocation model because the overwhelming number of scholarships in the state are either capped or on a guarantee there's no formulaic activity you know this model will
095be a will it be a formula and so the answer to your question in i think both in theory and in practice is as enrollment changes so will uh funding for us in in any other school district and that that's the idea behind a formula thank you that that would be my charge to the board is that we continue the very good work that we have been doing uh around equity around our strategic plan our long-term strategic plan really place emphasis on the portrait of a graduate those are the things that make columbus city schools competitive to the individuals who are taking their children out of our district the harder we work on making sure that we have an equitable district the harder we work in making sure that our students are accountable that our
096teachers are accountable the more we will show the public that they can entrust this district with the future of their children and so um we'd all like to see more revenue coming in to columbus city schools i think that we have engaged over the last several years in embarking on that path and so you know we could say what we want to a legislature that numerically may not be designed uh to do what we would need them to do but i think the real work for us in the more enriching work for us is the work that we are already embarking on and uh and that we do on a day-to-day basis that's how we're going to get where we need to be financially thank you madam president thank you board member any other comments
097for the treasure all right well thank you so much treasure river horror yeah man just one closing comment we have a fac meeting finance and appropriations committee meeting a week from today it's online it's 4 p.m the agenda is in addition to discussing the monthly financial report for april uh we will have this we're actually i called it tonight a bus purchase plan but it's really a student transportation fleet replacement plan and we'll be talking about that i will also have an analysis for the committee that i've worked with our municipal advisors to prepare on our tif revenues to verify the tif revenues that we receive this is the first time we've done that and then lastly i'll be reviewing for the committee doing an overview of the reorganization of my office for there just
098informational for them i'll be rolling that plan out um here in in the next few days and over the over next week as well so we're really excited we're really excited about all of that um you know i i know we need to move on but it's it's you know you talked about the cooperation between the superintendent the internal auditor and my office and one of the things that internal audit turned up in the transportation audit was that they had specifically written there there's no bus no no bus replacement program that's funded they have a replacement program they just haven't been funded so um this is exciting because i can i've been working with them on the funding side while they give me ideas about what the replacement strategy should be and so when the
099committee gets it we won't talk about which bus we'll talk about in overall how you manage a replacement plan uh and and the tiff revenue um review is great because it it confirms that we are receiving what we should receive which is another kind of close the loop and i'm sure uh folks an internal audit will be nice to know that we do try and verify that kind of of revenue and then lastly my reorganization plan which uh is hi carolyn we we we tend to be the full employment act for internal auditors over in my shop um but we're really excited about the reorganization plan it's it's the largest undertaking i've i've i've done in my 40 years and like i said we're gonna we're rolling that out here soon in the next uh
100couple of days to a week so thank you very much i'm i'm done and uh good night i love that you're so excited and i took a peek at the at that plan and it does look excellent so i'm excited too well thank you uh thank you treasurer to you and the team all right it looks hi superintendent hi all right well actually wait you uh i know you've been here listening for a while i hope your event earlier went well and i'm sure it did excellent so we are on to you for your report all right so thank you president adair um for tonight's report i will be turning it over to my team to tell you about the planning and preparations that are underway for next school year even as we are working
101diligently to finish this school year strong and also planning an exciting summer experience program our teams also have an eye towards next fall as we prepare to welcome back our students in person five days per week before we get into the reopening presentation i have some very exciting news to share with you tonight after extensive planning including health and safety preparations i am delighted to announce that we have finalized our graduation plans for the class of 2021. this year we will get to celebrate the class of 2021 with in-person graduation ceremonies june 2nd through june 5th taking place at the columbus convention center east high school columbus afrocentric early college field house and the district's southland administrative building located at 3700 south high street these sites have spaces large enough to safely hold ceremonies for
102our graduates and their families following all health protocols the spaces will allow for each student to have two tickets this ticket limitation is based on the size of the event space and the need to comply with the six foot social distancing requirements each venue will follow covet 19 health and safety protocols including the requirement of attendees to wear face coverings and social distance at all times we will also live stream all of the graduation ceremonies on the district's facebook page and youtube channel for those who can't attend in person unlike the pre-pandemic ceremonies guests will be permitted to enter the venue sites no more than 15 minutes before the ceremony and be required to remain in their seats while at the venue more information will be provided to families from each school's administrative team we're
103looking forward to offering these in-person ceremonies as they would be the first time since their junior year that this group of seniors would get to see their entire class and celebrate this milestone in their academic career the complete schedule of ccs graduation ceremonies is currently posted on the district website including our summer graduation which will be held on august 14th i look forward to celebrating in person with our class of and their families next month now i will turn it over to deputy superintendent dr john stanford who will begin the presentation about our plans for the next school year dr stanford thank you superintendent dixon good evening madam president and members of the board it is hard to believe that we are just three short months away from the start of a new school year
104superintendent dixon directed our small a small team before spring break to start working on a reopening 2.0 plan for the fall although there are still some details that we have to work on we are here this evening to give you our families and the community a general overview of the reopening plan as it stands today as always if there are changes beyond our control that requires us to make adjustments to the plan we are definitely prepared to respond appropriately we have reached out to the associations and columbus public health to initiate conversations about the plan we understand that there is more dialogue that we have to have with each of our partners i will open the presentation tonight with a few assumptions that guided our work i will then turn it over to dr breden
105to share our plans for academic acceleration blend ed and latchkey miss werner verde will cover technology dr clano and dr hill will address extracurricular activities mr gary bright will share some brief remarks about transportation mr odom will report on our facility readiness he will then turn it over to mr ward to share our safety and security readiness for the fall i will then briefly review our layers of covert mitigation and monitoring plans that we will have in place and then we will conclude the presentation with a brief collective bargaining summary from mr john dean our director of employee relations and so with that let's get started the start of the school year assumptions that we started with as the superintendent has already indicated students will return to school five days per week students will also
106have to fully bring their fully charged devices with them each day because there will definitely be work in the classroom where the devices will be used and there will also be assignments uh for homework that the devices will be useful for as well and so we will be asking students that you know to bring them to school take them home and then bring them back the next day and then last but not least staff and students will follow covert 19 health and safety guidelines so those are the assumptions we we use to to guide the the work that we're about to share with you and with that i will turn it over to dr terry breeden our chief academic uh interim chief academic officer dr breden good evening i am so excited to talk to
107you about our plan for academic acceleration one of the things that i know is when there has been a disruption of learning and i don't think the world has ever seen in our recent lives a disruption like we've had totally worldwide about this but the one thing that research always does say is that you cannot remediate yourself out of the problem you must find a way to accelerate learning and so that is why that is going to be a word you're going to hear over and over again one thing that i'm very excited about is as i have prepared this there are a lot of reports coming out talking about learning laws unfinished learning and those topics just today i got a copy from the council of great city schools they have sent out a
108report and the information that we have planned here in columbus is aligned with best practice research and so we're very very excited to talk to you about it today all right let's go to the first slide and this is really the what what is our strategy for accelerating learning the first thing i want to say is that some students have lost learning but i also don't want to forget to mention that some students have flourished in the more online blended learning approach so i don't want you to think i am saying everyone is lost learning and no one has done well i am not saying that we have seen uh evidence of both things in our work all right i have a five point plan i just always have heard you have one hand with
109five fingers and that's all the strategies that you should be having you should really think deeply about this and get to the root strategies and that's what i've tried to do the first thing is i must say one more time that i am so thrilled that we did the pdk audit when we did because it has been a guidebook for issues that we have needed to work on and things that we prepared for the audit also came in to be invaluable to us as we've moved forward and the very first thing that i want to talk about is over the summer last summer and in the fall we were able to look at all the standards that teachers have to teach and we identified what we're calling priority standards we had priority one standards two
110and three priority one are what it is said to be absolutely essential you know if you're in an algebra one class this is what you must know to be able to go further into deeper mathematics so our teachers have been armed with that information all year because we know you can barely get through the standards in a normal year let alone a covet 19 year so we have focused our curriculum on the essential priorities and that is critical to teachers as they've worked throughout the entire year we're not scrambling now that was in place and was ready to go the next thing that i want to talk about is learning loss there are lots of things that i could go into about learning loss but let's just talk about one that is upon us and
111that is summer break no matter who you are sometime summer you are faced with learning loss and that is one reason i am so excited about our summer experience and i just want you to know that over 600 people registered today but i want you to have the latest and greatest numbers so first i'm going to ask elise clark if she'll tell us where we are with numbers and do we have any more room for anybody elise there is more room however as you stated before uh space is filling up pretty quickly so we are up to um 3 800 students i'm really excited because as you stated just in one day that number has jumped by six hundred so get your seat elementary is almost full but there are still spaces elementary middle and
112high school yes and one of the things that we want to say is you know even if you don't think that your child is behind this is a wonderful experience a lot of our activities are going to be outside and i think this would really help the students you know feel like they're getting back to normal by participating in these very engaging activities i believe kelly rivers is with us tonight and she has a rising kindergarten uh summer experience and we have some openings there and if she's here i'd like her to hear about that thank you dr breden we are very excited about our rising kindergarten program and our registration just opened on may 1st and so we have about 140 of our students already enrolled but we still have about 100 spaces left
113so we definitely want to encourage all families to register to get that new kindergarten experience we're excited to have you all right parents if you're listening please please please register your students your children for summer learning experiences there's also about 10 of our school sites that have customized summer programs too so you may also want to check with the building principle all right our third of five strategies and i know i do this every time but i think it is very important i want to turn again to our multi-tiered student support book i have just finished reading part of a study and john hattie was one of the authors of the study that said one of the most important things that we can do for unfinished learning and learning loss is to have a multi-tiered
114student support uh place a system already in place and let's let me just give you a really quick example let's suppose that i am a fourth grade teacher and i suspect that frank has a problem one of my students with vocabulary and if scott would open up the link under mtss i'll just i'm just going to show you a snippet because this is such an uh important strategy in our mtss there is a three through five reading decision tree and so if the first thing that it tells me in the first part of that sheet is what assessments might i need to look at to see if my hunch about vocabulary is spot on you'll also notice to the side it reminds me that i need to involve early the parents or the guardian of
115the child so that also i can explore what's going on at home what's going on in the classroom as i'm gathering my evidence of how to intervene with what i suspect to be a vocabulary issue and if you'll notice there are flowcharts there and the center one really speaks to what do you do after you assess and after you determine that vocabulary is the situation what are the next steps and this helps because it talks about what interventions that we have in the district that address this problem it also helps you clarify your thinking about it and it also tells you uh what exactly the child needs so you can see and i'll go back to my slide now you can see how effective this is and really how simple it is and how streamlined
116it makes it to individualize for uh learning situations or unfinished learning that we are dealing with so we have that in place we've had it in place all year and now that tool will be essential to our strategy for acceleration of learning number four if i had the golden ticket to how to accelerate learning it is number four you cannot accelerate learning unless you have a guaranteed rigorous and viable curriculum and the pdk audit told us that we didn't have a strong curriculum and we have been working on that in making great strides and ms clark will be back to talk about that a little bit later in another board meeting but what we have learned as we have corrected those errors what has come to light is that our real issue that we have
117to deal with is to make absolutely certain that the curriculum gets into the classroom we have it it is beautiful the pdk people tell us that what we've done is amazing but we're still struggling with delivery so what we have done is on june 2nd we're going to begin a learning technology office that is going to focus to be sure that our curriculum is one click away from teachers students and families and we are so excited about that because you can have a great curriculum but if you do not have it delivered to the people that need it you might as well not have it just to quite be quite honest about it so i hope i get to come back and talk to you a little bit more about the learning technology office but
118i've got to keep moving number five is also an extremely powerful uh has an extremely powerful effect size on learning it is rated right up there with the mtss and it's really being sure that we have inclusive pr practices and an environment where we will support our students and at this time if cure is on i would really like her just to talk to us a little bit about that thank you dr breden hello everyone so we know that as students transition to a full traditional school week supporting their social emotional health will be imperative to their overall growth and this will be a priority for all of our teams as we begin next school year we also know from our recently adopted board goals that our teams are committed to growing incre inclusive practices
119across the district inclusion will help improve achievement and accelerate learning next year this work will begin by regionally aligning services providing professional development in the areas of co-teaching scheduling inclusion and collaboration for all team members from building administrators to teachers support providers and our assistants it is our intent to refine our practice and set long-term plans in motion to ensure that all our students reach their full potential so that is the five big strategies that we have and those strategies are wonderful they're research based and we are very excited about them but how do you do them and so that's the next slide the how the first thing that we did was as we were working with our planning and that also involved the general fund budget which i've learned a great deal about tonight
120thank you very much is we had to stop doing some things and start doing some other things and already in our general fund budget we knew that we needed for example just two examples are we were going to need more nurses and we were going to need more psychologists and so we increased those at the level that we could afford to just like a family doing their own budget but with the federal funds the esser money we are going to have a supercharged acceleration of learning in this district and let me just talk briefly through these this is just a big overall summary there's lots and lots of details but since stan did his report i don't think we'll go into them tonight one we're going to have an administrator who is specifically focused on
121accelerating learning for example we've learned that to determine who is on track or off track in the high school is a tedious job that we must do but we really need a system that alerts us it has items that are flagged and when those are triggered the the early warning system speaks to that that would be just an example of something that i believe this person could be really being the champion of in our district we're going to add 33 additional counselors which will lower the ratio tremendously so that students can have time to spend with their counselors and working on any issues that come up with them or their families we have we're concerned about literacy but we are super concerned because we have some goals to meet here that we are going to
122be working on extra hard and we are adding literacy specialists at all schools pre-k through 12. there are liters literacy issues at the elementary school and there are literacy issues in the senior classroom and we are not going to leave anyone behind when it comes to literacy we also know that research tells us that students who have english as their second language are impacted more so than english speaking students during the pandemic basically that is what it says and so we know their families need support and so do the students and so we're increasing our bilingual liaisons in all regions another thing that we've really learned a lot about this year is attendance and that we need a systematic research-based audit kind of attendance plan and that is also going to be a key responsibility
123we can have the greatest plans for addressing learning loss but if the students do not attend school it will not serve us well also another population that has been impacted by the past year or 14 months is our homeless students and there's probably more homeless students i haven't looked at the numbers but nationally i know homelessness has gone up and then we have other students who have other issues that need additional support so this is not the what of our plan but this is how we are going to be absolutely certain that we're going to be able to execute so that is our basic acceleration plan but i've also got some more good news and the next slide i hate to say but i think i'm going to even act more excited than our budget
124our treasurer did in just a minute ago when i talk about blended ed you think what in the world is blended ed well if we go to the next slide the big secret will be revealed as you know the digital academy was rolled out very very quickly and we appreciate all the hard work and we have over 4 000 students in the digital academy but we know that's not the model that we we really felt was best in all aspects so recently we now that we've got things rolling and i can't help but thank the staff so much and all the dedicated teachers uh of how we've been able to work with that this year but now that the dust has cleared we had some artifacts of some of the times when things weren't going
125quite so well that we sat down and looked at i had created a stakeholders mailbox where people who had issues especially about the curriculum could send me examples and other concerns that they had and so we went through those and we said we're just going to do a very simple protocol here which is look for the big themes we also had the artifacts left from our staff on feedback that they had given and so we also went through that and what you see there in the bullet points are the big things that we heard from our stakeholders one we want full-time teachers we want those teachers to be available during school hours we like the flexibility we feel there needs to be a better balance between synchronous learning and asynchronous learning you just didn't get
126it quite right also we're worried about screen time with our youngest learners and then occasionally we would like to be together in some ways perhaps there's a book club or when we do testing so we can have the correct testing environment when we do orientation when we do a field trip so this was the feedback that we got and i would love to spend lots and lots of time on this but you can also have me back to talk about that but let's just talk about a quick summary here of what's going to happen next after getting this feedback on the next slide the biggest feedback we got is we were not satisfied with edge annuity i'll just say it and so we began to wean ourselves off their curriculum and as our curriculum is
127being further developed we believe by 2023 we will be able to be not long not needing edge annuity anymore because we have canvas and that's going to help us because edgenuity is not just curriculum it's also the platform and so we have to make sure we have that build out we're also very pleased with the software called seesaw so next year we're still making progress to our goal but in 2023 we will have the curriculum ccs curriculum in blend ed and we will also have full-time teachers and you can see other information there of our plans moving forward on the next slide i just want to kind of wrap up blended by talking about how i talk about blended ed i say it's a school without walls and that seems to help people kind of
128get the picture we also believe that if we take blended and we adopted into our open enrollment procedures that we will be better served right now i i know heard earlier the speaker who talked about some difficulties and we do believe that moving into more of our other protocols will help it rather than you know we've had children coming in and out of it this year and those kind of things so open enrollment begins may 17th through the 28th and parents are being notified immediately that digital academy model is going away but blended is coming their way we've set the maximum at 2 000 so that we can plan and have the staff on board and be ready to roll when school begins students will enroll for the entire year and like i said we'll
129follow the open enrollment protocols we also are happy to report that the model we have created is allowable by the ohio department of education so we can move forward with our plans so that's blended the next thing that i want to talk about is very brief latchkey that is one of our parents favorite programs and i want to give you a quick update on that we will if we go to the next slide we have all 21 locations will be open the hours and days of operation will return to pre-co the pre-covet schedule and now rather than just five of our sites being able to process registration and payment digitally all 21 sites are able to do that so that concludes the academic service portion of our back to school plan so at this time
130we'll turn it over to technology good evening everybody this is vanda navirni um chief information officer for the district good evening board members and dr dickson uh ms smith and mr pahurak glad to please present the technology plan for the reopening dr breden went through a few key things um the main thing being mitigating learning laws and how do we create inclusive classrooms and how do we create them with intentionality and equity so here is the technology plan all students will have access to a computing device that can be used in the classroom and outside of the classroom dr stanford began the presentation by saying we want students to bring fully charged devices to the classrooms because even dr breden alluded to it about the office of learning technology we're going to be integrating technology
131into our curriculum so we want students to completely benefit from it so every student will have an access to a computing device we have established a consistent process for technology repairs and replacement yes every student will have an access to a device and these are mechanical devices if something happens they need to come up for repair we have established a consistent process with building leaders the principles so the students would exactly know what to do when they have a device up for repair or a damaged device okay we have given every student a device but they cannot do anything with their device without appropriate internet access we know digital divide is a huge problem in central ohio in our communities in the students and families we serve so we have come up with multiple measures
132to conquer the digital divide we're making internet access available for our students and buildings and also from home we understand now you know the name suggests digital divide internet access is not equitable today in in in our students homes and in the communities we serve so how are we going to do it one we upgraded wireless access points in every classroom in every school building elementary to high school pre-k through 12 so that students will have adequate coverage during their time in the school and we are coming up with multiple strategies for providing access to students when they're at home we have distributed over 5000 hotspots to the students and families that needed internet access but that is not the be all and end all of it we're working with multiple partners like the city
133of columbus and smart columbus we're actually they're we're working with them and we've distributed over 3000 routers to 300 routers to 300 families and what is called a private lte network where you know you have radio towers and with the routers you can get internet uh access in your home you don't have to have a hotspot it is wireless internet access we've actually distributed routers to 300 of our families and that is the pilot as the data comes in we are working very closely with the city of columbus in providing them um you know where uh there's a bigger density of our student populations so they can um continue to offer that coverage that kind of home internet access coverage to our students and their families we are working with the franklin county digital coalition
134which is organized it is a group of about 27 organizations we were one of the first members of that alliance and we have been working with them closely to see how further can we bridge this digital divide for our students so there are a lot more strategies that are in the works but that will be available to our students and their families in the beginning of the school year and we're also making sure when they you're using your devices in in schools or at home our students have a safe and secure learning environment we have put multiple filtering internet filtering so they cannot go to sites that they shouldn't be accessing and will only be able to go to authorized sites by the school and the teachers and what our curriculum allows for them to
135go to and uh you know that they will have a safe and secure learning environment um away from predators and other cyber crime that occurs um in an internet learning environment that concludes my uh presentation i'll now turn it over to mr dr clardnow to talk about summer training and fall sports good evening everyone thank you very much uh for the introduction um to say that the last year from an athletic standpoint was uh difficult would be a little bit of an understatement but i want to send a big congratulations and thank you to all of our parents of student athletes our coaches our student athletes themselves our athletic directors for really all of the hard work that they pulled together um to make this challenging year an opportunity and a possibility for um our
136student athletes who came out and participated we're going to take a lot of what we learned obviously and roll it right into our summer activities and if uh someone thank you very much so the reality is that um while the hand sanitizing and the social distancing in the face mask are not completely behind us um those are still practices that we will have to adhere to and continue to try to do our part to um to get us out of this place that we're at you know as a country um coaches will have the opportunity this summer to work directly with their school athletic director and their principals to put together their plans for their summer activities um in preparation for fall sports and ultimately also for winter sports you know there are some winter
137sports that do things in the summer in preparation for their season uh coaches will obviously they will put together those plans with their athletic director and they will be in compliance with all of the health and safety regulations that are in place and it's just important that coaches and ads and principals work together because when you have students on your campus you want to make sure that your students have um you know just are there in a safe environment and they're following the protocols so coaches understand those but those things will obviously be reiterated and shared with them in preparation for the summer as we transition from our summer workouts into our fall sports this season um we've already provided our coaches and our teams with their full schedules for the fall so we're in
138preparation to have a full fall season of um of of the fall sports that participate during that time period um schedules for the fall season for for those sports of football uh so i mean football soccer volleyball those things are underway and have already been set teams and coaches i know are excited about the start of the fall season i met with football coaches um within the last week or so and they were all pretty excited to be able to get some things started up this summer so that was really exciting to hear and obviously our teams will still follow all the protocols that are in place um to the fullest extent to be able to make sure that uh we don't have any interruptions um and hopefully that we're able to you know enjoy
139the entire fall season uh with that being shared i get a chance to turn it over to dr betty hill now who will share some of the non-sport extracurricular activities that the district will be participating in thank you everyone thank you dr clareneau um and i am very excited to uh share this evening um that following our current safety guidelines that all non-sport extracurricular activities will resume um our summer activities will move forward with the current safety protocols in place and they will include marching band and drill team as in last season our directors and our coaches our drill team coaches will submit individual practice and performance plans that adhere to the current health and safety protocols and uh our directors and coaches will submit those to the to the unified arts supervisor and their
140building principal but we will move forward and move forward with what we've learned what looks different this year is the plans for fall that will include the return to a full schedule and a full schedule of extracurricular activities and more more excitingly uh district district-wide student enrichment activities so we're excited to get back to that we will also continue to follow the art specific health and safety protocols and these include the usage of specialized face masks for instrumentalists singers and theater students um we'll continue to use bell covers for musical instruments will limit the sharing of resources such as sheet music instruments um theater and show choir props uniforms and performance attire the district will supply additional ppe and instructional materials to support the stafford district uniforms we're going to use them this year i'm
141excited about that because we have brand new marching band uniforms uh so we will be using our uniforms this year uh students will sign them out for the entire season and they'll get to wear their uniforms our activities will include live spectators as recommended by uh the cdc guidelines so we will continue to follow the current cdc guidelines uh for live audiences and uh with additional guidance from the ohio department of health for our arts events so we're excited with about all of these new developments but um uh we'll continue to monitor with that i now turn it over to gary bright in transportation thank you dr hill appreciate that i'd be remiss if i didn't comment about president adair's comments in the video that started out about her appreciation for transportation that certainly warms
142our heart when the president of the board recognizes the hard work that our people do and also they almost equally heartwarming for transportation when our cfo talks about bringing in new school buses nothing touches the heart of a bus driver greater than a new school bus we recognize too as dr clarino mentioned there will be similar precautions that we've had with covet 19 moving forward we have currently prepared for summer school routing and we're just making a few tweaks has been mentioned that continues to grow so much so we continue to expand the routing for that and those precautions will be in place for summer school data is coming in now for the new school year the 22 school year and so our routers and supervisors are currently routing for the return of woodcrest in
143full on july 29th and all ccs schools on august 26th also appreciate mr odom the co for continuing to pester stan bahrik to get those new buses and i turn it over now to mr odom thank you mr bright my test today is to talk about the facility readiness and one of the things i want to mention dr stafford mentioned earlier this planning process it's ongoing it started last year and continue to be ongoing our focus in getting the facilities ready is to ensure all facilities are clean safe and healthy for students staff and visitors who enter our facilities in order to do that when we look at our classroom preventions the focus would be to set up the desk to to accommodate all class sizes students and staff will continue to wear masks when
144they return in the summer as well as in the fall and we will put sneeze guard barriers on all student desks as well as the teacher desk as a layer of protection we also from a health and safety measure we'll make sure that we continue to have personal protective equipment in all of our district facilities including our school buses that would include hand sanitizers as well as masks will be available just to name a few we also will focus on cleaning and disinfecting i just like to make note of as well in our cleaning process we do use a hospital grade disinfectant and as well as when we go through and clean in the summer process cleaning we do what we call a total deep clean or i like to call terminal clean from a
145hospital term where we pull all furniture all items out of the room we sanitize and disinfect clean and disinfect those areas and then we go from the top of the ceiling down of cleaning lights washing walls all the way down to the cleaning and shining on the floor all schools will continue to have separation rooms identified and be in every school water fountains we are disabled the standard water fountains but where we have bottled water filling stations we will be able to utilize those and over the summer we are adding additional water bottle filling stations in some of many of our schools in ventilation over the summer we will have our maintenance guys continue to go through and inspect in making sure all of our uh air intake systems are bringing in fresh air we'll
146continue doing the school year to continue our same process of making sure fresh air is being brought in two hours minimum prior to students enter and two hours when students leave the facility for the day also we'll make sure that appropriate signage is up and out throughout the facilities as we continue to pair for facility rentals and as we prepare for the summer due to the kovic 19 pandemic indoor facility rentals throughout ccs buildings would not be permitted over the summer until further notice and when we update we will update the facil district website as soon as we are able to safely permit indoor facility rentals at this time i will turn it over to mr chris ward for safety security all right so good evening everyone and i just wanted to share with you
147a few highlights from the office of safety and security for the upcoming school year so we're really excited for the upcoming school year next slide please we're excited for the upcoming school year and just a few highlights here we will be hiring training and assigning 20 additional safety security personnel to our school buildings we want to make sure that we continue to provide a safe environment for our students and staff and as we look at the needs of our district we will make sure that our staff are assigned accordingly so we are excited for the additional 20 safety and security staff that will be joining us for the upcoming school year we will also be revising and updating our emergency operation procedures and safety plans as we continue to look at cdc guidelines and district
148guidelines regarding student safety regarding covet 19 and making sure that our kids are are wearing masks and doing those things to keep them safe we will add those procedures into our new emergency procedures and safety plans throughout the district we will continue to install digital cameras looking at access control devices and other physical security to ensure that our buildings are safe not just from a presence of security staff but also just from physical security and those things that continue to help keep our communities safe while students and staff are working and learning in our school buildings we will also upgrade our communication devices we've uh we'll continue to assess our buildings for a radio upgrades equipment upgrades and other software solutions that will continue to improve our communication internally and externally and most importantly to
149make sure that when emergency services are needed that we can communicate clearly and effectively with them so that they can arrive as quickly as possible and we also understand the importance of training and professional development and so we will collaborate with franklin university um over the course of the summer and into the new school year along with ohio department of education as we continue to work on those things that will grow our security staff we have um a pretty robust training schedule that we will be putting together a lot of the training will be put on our psw training site so that our staff along with teachers uh administrators will be able to access those trainings the trainings will be self-paced and for our teachers and administrators they will be able to get ceus from
150the trainings so we are excited we're partnering with franklin university who will have uh a lot to offer uh columbus city schools and so we're really excited with the things that we're looking to do in the coming months and the next school year with that being said i will turn the president presentation over to our deputy superintendent dr stanford thank you mr ward um as uh we we look to go into the uh fall uh school year we know one of the most important recommendations from the cdc the ohio department of health and for columbus public health is that you create a layered mitigation strategy and plan for students and staff in the school district in addition to a layered mitigation strategy we also have a layered monitoring strategy in the district so what is
151that that covet 19 mitigation and monitoring layered strategy look like well first and foremost we will continue to follow the three w's what are the three w's wear a mask wash your hands regularly and watch your distance secondly we will continue to implement the osu cats monitoring system that we adopted uh earlier this year um our our internal team of four team members monitor that data on a weekly basis and uh the way the system works uh if they identify anomalies with the spread of kobe 19 in the district they will then bring together a larger team to identify whether or not that anomaly is being driven by uh covet 19 or if there is or if there are other explanations for the anomaly in the data and so we've been very happy with the
152way the cats monitoring has has progressed uh this this semester and we are looking forward to continue working with osu to uh have it uh for our students and staff members in the fall um contact tracing is another important monitoring uh part of our system that we will continue to implement uh so that when uh someone is identified to have tested positive you know we our nurses go through uh that extensive process of of of identifying uh who are other individuals who may have come into contact with that that person when we have uh completed the con contact tracing then we will provide family and caregiver notifications we have provided that uh this entire school year of the 21 or 20 21 school year and we will continue that process in the fall we are
153also in conversation with nationwide children's hospital to continue the the covet testing program for our students uh it has been a program that has worked well uh this spring and uh and so we're going to work with nationwide to continue that program in the fall and we are also in conversation with nationwide children's hospital and columbus public health reached out to us as well about uh covet uh 19 vaccinations um it is uh as as most of us already know the cdc um is looking to expand this the vaccinations to students who are 12 between the ages of 12 and 16 and so you know having a plan to make sure that we can offer the vaccinations to as many of the students in that in that age group as possible is going to be
154very important and hopefully we will be able to also continue to provide vaccinations or have a plan for providing vaccinations to those students who were in the first cohort of being 16 years old and older and so that is our covert 19 multi-layered mitigation and monitoring strategies that we will use for the fall and now i will turn it over to mr john dean our director of employee relations to give a high level overview of the collective bargaining uh process as well all right mr dean yes thank you dr sanford uh the goal of this entire reopening plan was to accomplish as much of it as possible within the confines of the current collective bargaining agreements that is to have as few exceptions as possible as we put these plans together so within that expectation
155labor management employee relations serves two roles one internal consultant working with the offices and divisions to review plans make suggestions and offer an opinion on whether something can be done within the confines of the collective bargaining agreement which leads to the second role which is external liaison with our labor partners is keeping them informed of the plans um and our thought processes on these processes um and then also engaging in formal negotiations where there is a deviation from the terms of a negotiated agreement uh so that impacts an employee's terms and conditions of employment so that is what we have been engaged in to support this plan and at this point i will turn it back to dr sanford for questions on this presentation thank you mr dean madam president members of the board of
156education uh that concludes our presentation this evening and we're more than happy to answer any questions that you may have thank you so much team um i do know we have some questions and i'm sure board members will let me know if they have more but we will start with board member raglan and then go to ford member brown thank you dr dickson uh deputy superintendent dr stanford i appreciate all of your team for a very thorough presentation or reopening um i want to just say it up front that obviously this is not set in stone um obviously will be subject to change uh based on everything that we know can and might happen moving forward uh but with some of the things that were said i have a couple of questions and really maybe
157some comments or some suggestions first and foremost regarding the chrome books have we identified a preferred protective book bag [Music] that students would be able to use moving forward the reason i'm asking this question we know as reopening plans are going to be announced our community uh one of the things that i see here in columbus that we don't necessarily see all over the country but our community does an exceptional job of doing book back drives uh for our students we have local television networks pretty much every single community organization has some sort of book bag school uh supply drive understanding the importance of our chromebooks and in the fact that we've made such a substantial investment uh in them i would hope that we would have a preferred very protective book bag that we
158can articulate to our partners immediately so as they engage in their book bag drives which uh have become a corporate process uh really i mean they they they buy them in bulk and uh it's a very corporate process i would hope that we would be able to accommodate the book bags for our children have we done that and is that something that that we think that we can do um so that our students are using book bags that can include their chromebooks and they can transport them knowing students will do what students will do and and protect our investment as we move forward that goes to anyone in the administration who might be able to answer that um thank you board member ragland uh this is vandana i i i can answer that we have
159collected enough data from all the repairs and uh you know damages we're seeing and we have some recommendations for protective cases we are also working simultaneously on our long-term one-to-one plan and we are actually going to pilot it um the summer school so that's new news and we're actually piloting it with the protective cases so through the summer school we can collect the data so we'll know exactly what we need for our students um in the fall and if i thank you if i could piggyback yes to the cio's comments i think as you've already mentioned board member raglan you know this would be a wonderful opportunity for members of our corporate community to make donations and to help us with providing those type of cases you know for our students and so i'm pretty
160sure our engagement team will be reaching out to our corporate partners in the city to help us with that thank you thank you very much for that dr stanford and i am i'm going gonna just go out on the limb and speak for all of my colleagues on the board we'd be willing to do whatever we could uh to make sure to that we would go out to our partners within the community uh and support your effort in that protective cases book bags all of those things are going to be very important for our students my next question is probably going to go to you ms verney you mentioned the wireless access points within all of our buildings my question is specifically around uh our legacy buildings and some of the older buildings that are
161here within the district uh we know that there are probably common areas in a lot of those buildings where we do have really good access but there are also um some nooks and crannies within those buildings that might not give us the best possible access uh to wireless service uh are we doing anything extra to identify some of those areas within our older buildings and then beef up our wireless access points in those schools yes foreign i can answer that we actually that's what we went through we went through a fine toothed comb into every one of our buildings all of our 109 schools elementary and high schools and we have a put an access point in every single classroom and as well as in some of the common areas and we are going to
162use the summer for the administrative buildings we prioritize our students first at our schools first and we went and did that and we actually because we were remote learning we were able to do a lot of work in the schools and at those access points so yes i can say for certain that we have we have added multiple access points and each school has a dedicated one gig internet line as well and there is 10 gig coming now in to our schools for distribution so um yeah i can say for certain i we are ready for that in the classroom they're going to not have any um spotty uh internet access yes ma'am thank you thank you very much for that uh and lastly my last question goes to uh mr ward and maybe this
163is something that the superintendent may want to address as uh we know our partners at city council and the mayor's office are negotiating with the fraternal order of police um right now on an overall contract within that contract is probably going to include some language around the potential for school resource officers for columbus city schools should that contract process not conclude before the school year starts and we're back in person five days a week do we have a contingency plan to open our schools without sros in what what specifically are we going to do in some of our more challenging schools where we know that the increase in security is going to be necessary so board member um i can answer that thank you um we wanted to be proactive um this coming school year
164because we didn't know exactly um where things would lie in terms of our sro program which at this point has not been fully decided and so part of our plan was to hire additional safety and security staff so that we can prepare um for this coming school year so with the additional 20 security um safety and security personnel that we have one of the things we will definitely do before we assign any staff is look at our district needs and see what school building may need more support than others we do a pretty good job working with the area superintendents and the building administrators to make sure that those buildings who may need some additional support will have the necessary support that they need so we will constantly evaluate re-evaluate where we are in terms
165of making sure our buildings are safe moving forward with or without sros do you do you thank you for that mr ward do you believe that 20 is enough so at this point um 20 is what i had asked for um for this coming school year um one of the things i've been tasked with is putting together a five-year plan um and and see what that looks like moving forward so i will tell you um this school year we will uh be fortunate to have 20 security staff um join our team um but we do have uh plans beyond the 2022 school year um for additional security support as well so we're constantly re-evaluating i'm sorry go ahead i'm sorry go ahead yeah my concern yes sir thank you my concern is that i don't
166um i don't believe that uh you know i mean that's not a one-to-one transfer with the number of school resource officers uh going out and then having an additional 20 coming in um that's number one and then i i would my my my question to you is is i know that's what you asked for yes but realistically do you feel it is enough and the reason i'm i'm speaking it like this mr ward is because now is the time for us to to really engage in in this conversation while the community backs an additional increase of our own safety and security you know officers um and if and if 20 is not enough um i would rather know that 20 is not enough and you'd like to have more so that we can do our
167job to get you to that number as opposed to you just asking for what you think we may be able to get i want to make certain if 20 is not the number tell me what you feel the number is so thank you board member raglan for the question so allow me to do this if i could and so while i don't want to make um that decision in isolation i think it's very important that we as um a district look at what our needs are so if in fact and also speaking and talking with our building administrators as well too and our area superintendents and our our cabinets so i think it's important that we sit down collectively and talk about okay if we could have everything we need moving forward what would that
168look like um and so i think that would be the best way to go what i don't want to do is throw out an artificial number now and that's not what we really need because beyond just having safety and security staff in our buildings there may be some other resources that we need that will work alongside safety and security along with other uh support programs so i think it's important um that we really sit down and plan exactly what we need if we do not have our sros uh returning for the coming school year but um i'm confident that we can sit down and we can talk about that and come up with with a good plan let me just jump in and be absolutely 100 clear there is no contract right now with the
169columbus police department and we know that because we did not renew it for from last summer right and so we also have all that work we did with the community and we have that work just as just as mr ward rightly said it's going to be with the culture and climate committee to take this holistic look at it so i want to make sure that we're still all on the same page about where we are as a district with the srr situation and how we are viewing safety and security um mr ragland your comments at the very beginning almost made it sound like we were definitely making a contract and i just want to make sure that it's it's that is that no decision has been made by this board yet we have to come
170to the public to vote we have to come to a meeting like this and vote on a contract um and so i just want to make that clear that we're very much still in the process of figuring that out uh and we have that work that's being done with the committee uh that's being led by a board member so i just want to make sure that we're all very clear about what's happening um with that situation since that is a very hot topic in the community i was very clear yeah hold on i was very clear in stating that that process is underway with the city council and the mayor that is their job to do that we don't have school resource officers in our building today i asked about a contingency plan should that
171process not be concluded by the beginning of our school year i was very specific in my language so there's you know in in mind you know decision has been made there is we we are not on the same page as a board regarding this issue and so no decision has been made i'm asking about contingency with us opening up and we don't have a contract and i'm asking mr ward very specifically if 20 additional school resource security officers are enough and if they aren't enough to come back with the number that he needs for school security officers yeah yes i understand we may need we're sending out board members i just want to make sure that the community is fully understanding where we are as a as an organization so that's exactly right that's exactly
172what you said i'm not saying you said something different i'm just trying to be 100 transparent with the community so they understand what's going on so you you asked you asked mr ward about about what was needed because we do not have a contract with uh in the sro program right now yes ma'am and i'm asking mr ward that question specifically because i want to know with security officers i i understand the other side i understand the social and emotional i understand the psychologist i understand more remember i remember ragland but what i'm saying is this work is being done mr ward is is working with the culture and climate committee and we and that is being done at that level and we'll come back to this board with any recommendation uh that we need
173so i this is such an important topic and literally we could talk about it all night but this is not what is on the agenda so i would like to just if do you have any other topics you would like to ask the superintendent about from her reopening plan um and then you know you can work with board member beckerly uh to make sure that we're getting this information around the so culture and climate can consider do you have other questions no my my my questions are concluded did we just lose board number raglan okay i think we just actually lost him completely i did not do that there he is my my questions are my my questions are concluded uh for president i'm i'm finished thank you okay thank you so much all right
174we will move to board member brown and board member beckerly okay um yeah my space bar won't get me unmuted anyway i've just got a few questions um the first um i believe uh for john stanford who initiated you know at the very beginning talked about uh some of the program uh and how we're going to reopen including that students will be expected to bring their devices to school every day fully charged my question for dr stanford is how are teachers and principals going to manage that i think we can safely uh assume that there will be a percentage of students who just don't get that done for whatever reason are there plans for how we deal with all of those thank you for the the question uh board member brown uh you know uh
175teachers and and uh principals are very agile uh professionals in our school buildings and i'm certain you know that if students um and and you're absolutely right right what what what i tried to communicate is that this is an expectation that we want students and our families you know to adhere to during the school year but we realize that it may not happen and if a student comes in we've got plenty of outlets in our buildings they can just plug it in and be ready to go sounds good thank you i just wanted really to make sure that that had been uh considered and discussed second for uh for dr breden uh i've got a couple of questions uh and i number one um i am really excited about everything you spoke about uh the
176blended and the accelerated learning it all sounds really good my question then is how do we inform and train all of our teachers all of our staff how do we train them to be able to implement this accelerated learning uh what's needed to get there many of our teachers uh you know are are trained in this but the other thing is we have a lot of professional development that has been going on all year preparing for this we also uh are going to be doing more training this summer and also with our learning management system which i spoke to briefly many people like three different delivery uh paths for training they like face-to-face some people that some people like doing it alone and some people like doing it with a group so everything that we're
177doing around training is focused on that it is a part of being an artful teacher to understand that we do provide resources as you saw the mtss it's really do this and that we also are stepping up our efforts for instructional coaching we are working with all of our coaches we're developing a model of coaching so that all everyone will get the coaching they need some people want coaching a lot some people don't want coaching and so we're trying to think how can we get to all of our teachers so strengthening our coaching providing professional development different ways and also working with our principals and if they need help deploying people to assist them thank you that's helpful and as i said i really uh like how this program uh the academics that focus on
178academics is shaping up so thank you thank you thank you board member brown foreign um uh just a couple of observations um one is i think that um you know this is all new for us with our students having devices and so we're concerned about the backpacks and the charging and all of that but i think that um you know there are other districts in other schools that you know they've been up and running with one-on-one devices all the time so i think that you know we can handle this i think it's just you know it's something new and um our kids will rise to it and it will be a wonderful thing because it's going to really enhance our instruction i'm really excited about that um the second thing and um this is part
179observation in part um seeking some confirmation from dr dixon and uh chris ward um i think that it's important that we understand that uh and i think i'm right about this and this is where the confirmation comes in is that wow the sros may have served certain functions in our buildings um i don't want the public or the board or anyone to have the impression that they were sort of the butt floor and keeping the peace in our building they were just part of a team and i and i'd like to just say that publicly and have dr dickson and mr ward confirm that because um they weren't um and i know this from having been in a building actually where we had a wonderful sro so this is not coming down on industry one
180way or another just more of a sense of what's going on day to day in our high schools well they may have been helpful and they've been part of the process they aren't the but for in terms of maintaining maybe that's the best way to say it yeah um thank you uh board member beckerly and you're right our uh what we think about the network of of support around our schools um safety and security is part of that support and and one thing that we've been advocating for and had in this district for years even when i was here as a principal is safety and security personnel who built relationships with our school in the school community and our sros were just yet another part of the glare thing layers right yeah another another layer
181um so right i don't i too don't want the the public to have a perception that one safety and security is a priority it's been a priority and as you recall to remind the public that um during the first year we increased safety security personnel in the district based on a conversation i had with chris ward and said what do you need what additional support that you need in your buildings and the board approved um a large number of safety security staff that started the 19 um school year fy1920 and then recently we had a conversation with mr ward and his team and said what additional support do you need because we don't want to rely on any one person to provide um any one resource in our schools we want to make sure that
182our schools have what they need if it's from safety security personnel if it's social workers it's psychologists what do our school communities need um to make sure we have that support for our students and our teachers so again thank you for that clarification that is one layer um we are continuing to monitor and getting um and and finding out additional information from chris and his team but we just had this conversation last month and asked that question will there be additional support needed if we decide to go in a different direction for this fall as we continue to have the conversation about sros being a part of our school community moving forward so does that answer would you like um some more uh do you like now that that's okay okay thank you good night
183but that's all i've got oh okay you didn't you stayed muted you stayed open so i wasn't sure you were done okay oh no that's that's that's um operator error all right thank you uh we'll go to dr pierce thank you so much and thank you administration for this presentation so i've been keeping notes throughout this time and try to put all of my questions in buckets so i want to start with we'll just stay with safety i feel at a point in our conversation we were conflating sros with our safe school strategy and i think it's important to keep those um in a balanced perspective and so with that balanced perspective in mind i would like to know how are we planning to move forward proactively to ensure that our buildings are outfitted with
184multiple spike points at doors to ensure that i've been in conversation with the number of districts that have a spotter system so if the door is open the office is alerted as soon as that back door is open if a door is open for so long you know people are alerted that there's a door that's open um how are we moving forward to proactively get systems such as that into our buildings um again noting that we want to make sure that we're creating safe environments for our staff students and and family members dr pierce and board members to your question so each of our our school buildings have um door alarms um on the buildings we've outfitted every um school building with the door alarms and so that should someone either exit or enter our
185school building that alarm will sound um it's an audible sound and security staff um or those assigned staff will go to that location but each of those doors are also there's a camera that's on each door as well too so we would know that um the only doors that would not have the alarm systems would be those doors that we use for um continuous access building access the front door um and and maybe a side door but what i will tell you is our building is always on a level one lockdown which means you know our door should be locked at all times unless there is a security i'm sorry not a security staff but a a building staff who is present um watching the door watching the access of people coming in the doors
186also we've outfitted many of our buildings with vestibules and there's ongoing uh project right now to make sure that all of our buildings um you know new and old buildings have these vestibules so we continue to look at technology we continue to look at manpower we continue to look at software what's available what are some of the best strategies out there to keep our students and staff safe you know i appreciate that so i've been in multiple buildings just kind of you know i pop up in buildings and throughout the communities to check on our schools and i've seen number of doors that don't actually have those alarms so it would be great if we could do an audit to make sure that again all of our doors have those alarms and that we do
187have multiple swipe points um and and i'll just give an example if you have a teacher that walks out to a field area to help a student and that door shuts and they do have their key card to get in but there's no swipe point then that teacher has to walk all the way around to the door that has the swipe point so i just think it might be something for us to to audit and look into how can we make sure that that our uh buildings are outfitted and up-to-date with that protective technology definitely thank you awesome um my next questions then relate to technology so as we're talking about you know students bringing fully charged chromebooks back uh protective cases and book bags um my question is is really kids break stuff and
188stuff happens if a student comes to school with a broke chromebook you know are they to turn that into the office and then wait for somebody in our district i t to fix that have we identified preferred vendors that we can work with collaboratively as a district that schools can work with collaboratively that parents can work with collaboratively so when a chromebook or a technology device is damaged it can be fixed immediately and students won't have to wait for that repair to happen so dr pierce um i can answer that question today even today when the students turn in a repair damage device they don't have to wait for a repair we give them a replacement so their learning can continue and we repair it in the back end and you know so we have
189working chromebooks that we replace for a student and we'll repair this chromebook for the next replacement it goes into the replacement stock um and you know in the future yes we are working with vendors like microsoft and ipad this is for our future long term plan where you know we actually buy insurance from them and so they'll give up to three replacement devices for a device or some such plan that we'll work with the vendors on for repairs we we they have to be authorized repair uh folks and a lot of our techs are certified authorized repair personnel so there is a lot of warranty um items involved here we can't just uh work with any third party so there is um there is so much uh i wouldn't call it red tape or uh
190bureaucracy but there's a lot of fine print involved here that uh you know that that is why we we have the plan we have today um did it answer your question or no so let me ask the question differently um my 11 year old walks into a building on monday morning and her chromebook starts acting up um the teacher says hey we can get this fixed one yeah is there an extra chromebook in the classroom and in the building that that student can have access to and two is there a per preferred vendor in the building immediately that that device is given to that can start working on it because it sounds like you take the device in it comes to the district office then it's fixed and sent back to the student what i'm
191asking is is there a process as soon as my student starts to have an issue with the chromebook within the building it's fixed or we can connect the families uh the school to vendors where they can quickly access uh devices that will work immediately in that in that time frame um like i said the texts are in the buildings um you know they can immediately take it and not all chromebooks are taken to the central office for repair those that can be repaired at the site are being repaired at the site and handed over back to the building leadership only those that are beyond repair at the site that read spare parts come to kingswood so most of the the techs are advised to repair them in the building so that you know it's worked
192on as soon as they can the techs go to every school each deck is up to four schools so they go to every school uh multiple times a week and they can they can repair it those that can be repaired immediately right like there is a login that doesn't work or the charger is broke those things are addressed right away only the thing you have a very shattered screen and i need to replace the screen that comes back to kingswood but even those are returned as soon as possible sometimes we are talking about 100 200 chromebooks coming back for repair that's a huge volume yes we don't have a vendor program right now because we cannot have it due to our you know our warranties and other things that work we already pay for those
193repairs upfront so that that is why we don't have the program but we can look into it awesome so um now that i know we have text um it would be great if we could do a cost benefit analysis to see if we could lessen or decrease the number of schools that those techs are at if they're moved from four to maybe two because as we start to bring all these students back in and they're there five days a week we're going to have issues where students are going to have you know broken screens chargers not working any and everything and i just think on our part it would be beneficial to have accessible text that can immediately respond especially if we're not sure that we have extra chromebooks and devices to pass out when
194it comes to our school supply list and i know uh deputy superintendent dr stanford mentioned that we have lots of outlets well i've been in airports i'm at the ohio state university and it's just my luck that sometimes i'm looking for outlets so is there any way we can update those school supply lists to include extension cord surge uh surge plugs and all of those things so our class outfitted actually uh the schools still have some chromebooks and they have cards each card can hold up to 40 chromebooks that can be charged at the same time so yes that is that comes with the surge protector in both that's built-in so the cards themselves up to 40 chromebooks can be plugged into one card well all of our schools have accessible chrome cards with 40
195chromebooks on them each and every one of our schools that can charge up to 40 chromebooks yes yes so okay so you can never have too many extension cords search i i just we can supply them as needed and uh to answer your um your question about more techs uh you know having accessibility to more techs in the buildings that's part of something we are considering um kind of contracting as part of the sr2 funding so we're considering that because you know they're spread thin today so if you can get some temporary help that would be nice you know and let's think creatively about that we have microsoft certification programs in our schools maybe we can start training some of our high school students to to be technicians and work on these computers so i'm
196sure there's ways that we can be creative with that as we move forward and again um i'm very concerned that we're going to need more outlets and plugs so if we could encourage people that as they're doing these school supply drives to put that on the list and encourage parents to give that i think we can never have too many outlets um keeping with technology you mentioned that there's multiple access points in a building access points are great what we need is speed right i want to know that as uh 40 to 60 students on you know the north side of a building go to a particular web page and you know a teacher on another end of a building goes to a particular web page that everybody has quick speed right it's it's not
197always about the access it's about the speed at which your devices are running right so um are we assessing and auditing the speed at which devices are connecting staying connected um and and really creating the infrastructure that our students and our staff need to teach and learn absolutely we are continuously monitoring it if you look at any school site even during the cohorts being there and using their chromebooks they're barely using 10 to 30 percent of the internet speed available to them so uh we we have high speed internet to every one of our school buildings and we just doubled that speed from 5 gig to 10 gig this year so we have um you know we are monitoring it continuously and if a school is we see a school is near threshold we immediately
198try to increase their speed we are able to throttle them up for speed but we haven't hit that uh in all these months that the students have been back in hybrid okay um but again this is going to be unique once we go back to that five days and they're all there with the with those um devices right you're continually going to have teachers that that really leverage that technology and so i can anticipate that we'll hit that threshold and i'm happy that we're monitoring it in that way and i think we also have to be mindful that students may come in with our chromebooks but then they're also you know going to have their cell phones they might have their ipads so you're going to have multiple devices with one person going i mean
199at all times i'm carrying six devices with me every day right so you know our students i'm sure some of them are up to three or four absolutely and that's why we have different wireless networks for each of those devices our devices will log into a certain wireless network and personal devices like cell phones need to log into ccs personnel so we have multiple wireless networks as well available for that purposes oh i like that so are we informing our staff and our students of those multiple access yeah they know and they can't even get into ccs private if it's not our device they'll have to use ccs personal awesome my last bucket of questions then relate to our teachers our educators um so we've rolled out this plan for returning back to the fall
200do we have um buy-in from our teachers union from cea from oak c are they at the table have they shared that they are pleased with this plan and roll out um can we go back to john dean's presentation that he presented earlier mr d uh yes absolutely we are in regular contact with our labor partners um we have reached out and briefed them on the vision for blended for example for those portions of the plan that require negotiations i am in contact with the cea president to set dates for formal discussions on it and we are working through that and are committed to having those conversations with our labor partners to ensure that we have that buy-in and that support from from the labor partners so i appreciate that the reason i asked that
201question is as as we think about the components of this presentation we're ramping up with our summer school um normally we have a really robust and engaging summer conference for our educators uh it used to be reimagine me um how are we fitting that training into our summer school schedule and then when we talk about the lessons learned from stakeholders we really have to think about our recruitment strategy for getting those full-time teachers for blend ed and so to me all of this goes hand-in-hand with really having open transparent conversations uh with our labor partners so i just want to make sure that we have that buy-in um that we're forward and proactively thinking because those three it's key and critical we still have to find time to put in that summer training while our
202educators are teaching summer school while they're prepping and gearing up to do blend ed classes which at this point until 2023 that will be an additional contract for them so they're doing that on top of their regular work we're giving our educators a tremendous workload this summer and moving into the fall um we are going to have some supplemental contracts next year in blended but we are going to have full-time teachers dedicated to because we know exactly what you're saying people are tired and uh it's you know it's it's a lot to ask for a teacher to teach all day and then to do uh digital academy at night so we heard that feedback and as we have designed this we have tried to stay and i believe john this was one of your points
203tried to really focus on the contract that exists and try to work our plan so there are a few exceptions to that um and then my last question i i appreciate the fact that we were able to see a 600 jump in our summer school registration that we have 600 students enrolled in summer school my concern is are those students are most vulnerable students are we saving space for the students who need to be in the classroom um recouping that learning and instruction time that for whatever reason has been lost are we are we saving spots for our most vulnerable babies i see that my very competent executive directors are on so elise and kiera if you'd like to respond to that yeah absolutely we have we're up to 3 but we have many many
204many more spots so as i said even though elementary i think our elementary parents have really tried to take advantage but we still have over a thousand slots and then for middle and high school which i think middle school is going to be really critical and when we look at our numbers uh for our high school students as well so we have many many open spots we are not um in any way uh discriminating in terms of who can attend summer school um so that is definitely open and then when we talk about there also are students that are have been and i guess targeted if you will um departmentally so when we look at our newcomer population our esl department has reached out um they are critic looking at that critical mass to make
205sure and then in special education we our program is inclusive but when we talk about some of our more complex needs students again families are being re um contacted individually uh for those uh groups of students and again our overall program um includes any student and yes we have plenty of openings so we've not one thing we haven't had is someone to say um i couldn't get in because there was no space and i guess um i want to echo what uh board member becker we just put in a chat box you know it's really about how we're reaching those vulnerable students right because as i think about our athletes who again will be doing sports and may not you know want to give the time to summer school because maybe they you know they
206have multiple competing things that are going on you want to work a job you want to play a sport do you have time to go to school well we want them to make time to go to school so it's really if the teacher isn't able to make that contact but that student is on the targeted list and um are we sending our engagement department out to knock on doors or you know what's our strategy for for getting them in the building and keeping them engaged throughout the summer i would just like more information well i would first like to say remember we said from the very beginning we're targeting 10 000 students for our summer program and what we're facing and facing across the country's face across the state i was just on a zoom
207meeting prior and from superintendents from urban districts districts in ohio it's the same scenario how do we get more kids engaged in summer schools and they are not seeing a large increases as they anticipated so what we have done we've had we have radio announcements we have billboards that are up throughout the city um our principals are working with our um with their um with their parents making sure they're reaching out we have some schools that have up to 200 or more students already signed up and do we have some schools that have lower numbers and so dr chapman and the area superintendents are working with those school principals and making sure that they have that they increase those numbers and and making sure that families know that one is free two that we want
208our students there and that that's why we were calling it too a summer experience how do we make sure that the learning is fun yet rigorous and all of our students have an opportunity to attend so those families that are listening please sell go to the website sign your students up we want them to attend we have spots available it's going to be a absolutely wonderful experience in person with your teachers and small groups we want our students to expect to explore cosi they're going to go to the zoo they're going to go to the libraries the museum it's going to be an awesome learning experience for our students and we know that our teachers are sending information out our principals are sending information out our area superintendents are working along with our instructional team
209so we are targeting we want our parents to send the kids to us please this is going to be a great opportunity for them i love that commercial dr dixon all i needed you to do was to end it with and say we've incentivized it and we're also payments to students for grades or something you know i've seen that happen in districts so well well i well it well i'm not sure it's going to happen i'm not sure what districts are doing but i will say there is a partnership with franklin county job and family services that alicia gillison is working with our team and so she is going to partner that um that group of people with our high school principals and to provide that opportunity for our students so they are providing something
210for some incentivizing for our seniors um and the district will um help them assist them with meeting with our principals so that they can meet with our kids so our job is to get our kids to the finish line we're going to make sure our students have that pathway and that they have their courses done online that we get them all the way done even if they don't get done in june they'll be done in august and if there are other programs who are part would like to partner with us to incentivize we are so open to making sure that they um partner with our students and their families so that families can understand what that partnership will look like and what students need to do to meet that expectation of that of that partner
211so thank you for uh bringing that up awesome dr pierce how many uh are you almost finished with questions because i'd like to kind of move us along a little bit well that's what i was saying those are all of my questions great way to end that whole portion thank you dr dixon and team thank you dr pierce um i don't believe there are any additional questions from board members um yes and looking around okay thank you so much dr dixon and team i'm excited we're going back full full time uh and uh it's uh obviously a lot of work has been done on these plans and back to something that board member raglan kind of started off at the beginning we still know plans are flexible because we are still in covid but we
212are very excited about what we have and i hope the community is excited as well so check it all out on our webpage right one stop shop you can find all information about school reopening and please please register for summer school okay our summer experience my daughter gets mad when i call it summer school it's not summer school summer experience okay excellent all right so board members we actually have to go back up to item five because i accidentally skipped it i got so excited to hear from our direct reports so we're going to go back up to item five which is the public hearing on reemployment of a retired employee um and so i will open the public meeting on re on the re-employment of cheryl l stevens um we actually have had no
213one sign up to speak about this so i will now close the public meeting um and we can now move on that's literally what i forgot to do so there we are okay um let's go ahead and move now into board matters and the first item on board matters is 9.1 we have the second reading of the proposed amendments to the charter of the policy review committee i will turn it over to board member brown uh thank you this will be uh the second reading of our charter uh our the name and changes to the charter itself that the charter i'm sorry the policy review committee has recommended to this board presented it a few weeks ago um i have heard nothing whatsoever uh from any of you uh since that time uh or from
214anybody else uh if you recall this particular charter renames the committee as the governance policy and advocate advocacy committee i guess we may need to figure out a new acronym but that's beside the point uh and we've made some very thoughtful and and and good uh changes in this policy both to align better with our strategic plan and our portrait of a graduate and other things and to uh include the reorganization that we've gone through with committees and i uh this committee is very thoughtful we spent uh our entire last meeting uh talking through uh all of this so uh with that um i would move to uh approve this policy thank you is there a second i second thank you is there any discussion is seeing none yeah he is will you please call
215the rule mr treasurer is beckerly yes mr brown yes dr pierce yes mr ragland yes vice president yes president adair yes that motion carried thank you and thank you for all your work on that policy uh old policy review committee now the new committee um that is a very excellent and thoughtful committee and so thank you board members who are part of that um and this is the first that's a gentle reminder that we'll be seeing other readings coming soon i know from our other committees so good job um the old policy review committee for being the first to get yours done yay okay we're gonna now move on to the consent agenda this evening our consent agenda consists of items 11.1 to 24.2 any member may request an item be removed from the consent
216agenda is there an item anyone like removed this evening saying none is there a motion to approve the consent agenda so move is there a second second um is there any is there any discussion on any items in the consent agenda this evening seeing none please call the role mr [Music] brown yes dr pierce yes mr ragland yes vice president reyes yes president adair yes with the exception of item 20.1 from which i abstained ms beckerly yes motion carried thank you so much all right um we're gonna now move into the board announcements uh does any member of the board have an announcement this evening uh board member brown all right let me start over uh i guess i was talking to myself for a moment uh i i actually have two things i wanted
217to talk about one uh i had thought about for the last couple of days and wanted to speak to tonight uh but the uh we've just had a new issue uh emerge uh that i believe requires uh our immediate attention and action and this pertains to some information that we've received about the president of the ohio school boards association he happens to be a member of his own mad river local school board he was in his school board meeting responding and talking about a newsletter that a board committee had published and he was very angry and unhappy and spoke out against the article i believe it was a poem in any case mr huddle in his lengthy talk and i listened to all of it in the board meeting uh denies the existence of systemic
218racism and he fears that something that he describes as critical race theory uh is invading our nation's colleges and schools and that he's uh very upset about that uh huddle uh there have now been uh two very recent stories in the dick daily news uh and they're consistent with everything i heard at the school board meeting where he likened parts of the newsletter to critical race theory he said critical race theory is reverse race discrimination and a kin to education under the nazis and that it will soon be forced upon the nation's students um this was very troubling and bothersome to me this is something that uh made me angry and i and i really don't get avery very often uh but this did and i think that uh i know that there are other
219groups talking about this uh and about doing something but from my perspective um i believe that we should be promptly calling for mr huddle to step down and resign his position with the ohio school boards association and uh from my perspective again if he doesn't do that i think that we as a school board should consider withdrawing our membership from the ohio school boards association i think that uh not calling him out not standing up and speaking truth uh is tantamount to uh agreeing with what he had to say uh i invite uh other board members to uh weigh in uh and and provide their thoughts but i couldn't let this go thank you board member brown are there any thoughts on this particular topic remember just that i agree 150 anyone else a doctor
220appears um so as someone who studies um critical race theory um from its very early days with dr crenshaw when she started to pin those writings and complete empirical research i couldn't agree with you more as i did also listen to his comments during the board meeting and was very struck by the inaccuracies and the misinterpretations of critical race theory um i would encourage us as a board as we decide what action we will take that um in that action we communicate very clearly very correctly what critical theory uh critical race theory is in our statement that supports the action that we take in that respect even though i do serve on the ohio school board association as the central trustee i support either action that we take even if that includes pulling our membership
221from the organization thank you and um vice president reyes and court member raglan any thoughts i think i can't tell before is trying to unmute himself but there it goes again i was yielding i was yielding to the vice president but i um i couldn't agree more with board member brown my only assertion is that we deal with our own issues of race here in columbus city schools as well uh but uh i agree with what board member brown said and uh i would support his leadership uh uh however he wanted to move forward with this uh thank you i just wanted to say that uh i sit on them as a member of the black caucus on behalf of uh our district and the osba black caucus did have a meeting about this particular
222issue in that meeting i did say i was very strong about it just as as forever brown and it's because you know we have been doing the work we've been talking about the work we have been uh you know dr pierce uh last summer we did the resolution we've been talking about this and we are a member of that organization and uh you know if if they continue to allow him to be the president it does not reflect the values that we have set as this organization and so i i did say that to the black caucus and i did say things along the lines of board member brown that i would go back to my board and ask them to consider withdrawal of membership if in fact he did not resign the black caucus
223has not made any official recommendations they're still considering it so are the osba trustees which dr pierce may be involved in a little bit later but i do think that uh uh as a member organization who has spoken on this publicly it would be good of us to do something uh and call for his resignation so i since board member brown brought it to our attention i will leave it to him with our path forward and how we would go about that but we can publicly call for his resignation perhaps send a letter and if that isn't done make a formal resolution at the next board meeting i agree entirely with those steps uh madam president uh i think that just talking about this tonight i think that uh especially since we're the largest member
224of osba we're the largest school district in the state uh that word will get back and i will help that and i know others will dr pearson and others will help make sure that they that scott huddle and osba uh hears us that we demand his immediate resignation we cannot tolerate somebody with his views serving our statewide association school board members uh and by the way uh just on a personal note uh one of the items that truly bothered me was uh his reference to uh education by nazis um i'm very familiar with that and and uh i'm horrified to see somebody make a comparison of that nature to nazi education so thank you thank you for that board member brown and just one final note on this kind of general topic uh you know
225i guess unfortunately we would say because we believe a certain way but there are a lot of people in this state that do believe like mr huddle including some members of our state board of education who are setting our statewide policy and so if this is something important to us we may also want to consider on the advocacy committee thinking about ways that we can advocate for our views because in the end they can really harm us if policy uh is against what we believe so just putting that out there as well okay other announcements okay one more quiet oh one more from go ahead it's okay i'm mute yourself [Music] yeah i'm sorry i did mention that i had uh two and they're unrelated i think but i spent a good part of yesterday
226uh thinking about this and uh may 4th every year for the last uh 51 years has been a very uh sad day for me i did a lot of uh reflection about the kent state university tragedy may 4th of 1970 um and uh but uh the part that i want to talk to um and i actually did some of this writing on facebook yesterday uh because it bothered me a lot uh as the 51st anniversary of the tragedy neil young who wrote the song ohio which talks about this event called the tragedy probably the most important lesson ever learned at an american place of learning he says it's still hard to believe that i had to write the song it's ironic that i capitalized on the death of these american students probably the most important
227lesson ever learned at an american place of learning on may 4th a uh student demonstration at kent state left four students dead one paralyzed and eight others wounded the demonstration was meant to be one of many peaceful demonstrations against the vietnam war and the demonstration was ended abruptly and violently when the ohio national guard came onto campus and fired into the crowd for 13 seconds those brief shootings ended the lives of chef miller allison krauss william schroeder and sandra shure these students two of whom were simply walking between classes and not involved in the demonstration were all at least the football field away and whether justified or not by self-defense the massacre sparked a nationwide student strike that closed many colleges and universities at least for me every year on may 4th as i recall
228this tragic incident it remains vivid fresh and clear in my memory and the sadness has never dissipated at the time i happen to be a high school junior living about 45 minutes away from kent state i did have a fair number of friends attending school there some of us and and i realized this is 51 years ago so some of us remember and we must teach the rest thank you board member baron who is always bringing up history i think and maybe what dr pierce will also say give it to her it's a very good reminder of how history seems to repeat itself and uh those similar kind of things happened this summer happened just recently to our students um and you know it is it is good to reflect on history as we move
229forward but always keeping it in the context of the present so that we can use those tools right to actually take those steps yes and and you know the truth is in 51 years we haven't learned this when we have engagement between protesters exercising their first amendment rights and law enforcement whether it's the national guard or local police uh things go bad things are not handled well not from anybody's perspective and we have to do better thank you dr pierce you know so um board member brown and president of there just your comments definitely um have made me think about the importance of taking moments and opportunities just to show um another person that you see them that you care for them um just just showing a sense of humanity to other individuals and so
230my announcement is is basically that you know we've been doing a lot of work as a district and i know this is appreciation week for our teachers our secretaries our physical education people we have these weeks of appreciation and we put these posts and pictures up and do these videos um but i would challenge each one of us that as we leave this meeting and go throughout the rest of the week that we make a genuine attempt to just have a conversation with somebody new somebody different to let them know that they're seeing that they're loved and that we care for them whether that's a student in our district whether that's one of our community partners or stakeholders whether that's a staff member whether that's a parent that is coming into our building to to
231um see how their how their child is doing you know let's just make a genuine attempt to see somebody and really appreciate them thank you for that dr pierce and again bringing it back to our our portrait principles right yeah one thing i have to add and thanks to john stanford for reminding me because i know better and i am familiar with the incident 11 days later at jackson state and you know again i think that because kent state overshadowed it to some degree and all the focus and attention was there that makes uh uh it's no less important that uh we haven't learned from jackson state on there thank you other announcements okay seeing none uh since vice president is not here today with me in person my friend carol gets just gets to
232read the script go to executive assessment i move that the board of education recess into executive session for section 121.22 g3 ohio revised code to confer with an attorney for the public body concerning disputes involving the public body that are the subject of pending or imminent court action that's a motion is there a second second uh please call the roll dr pierce yes mr ragland yes vice president res yes president adair yes ms beckerly yes mr brown yes that motion carries thank you so much board members we'll head to executive session with our invited guests and we will come back to adjourn the meeting publicly as we always do thank you to all the staff who will not be joining us you can go ahead and log off um and thank you all for your
233presentations this evening and so we will see everyone and yes we will have a tiny break okay you