CPS Board of Education — November 15, 2021

001i called to order the november 15 2021 business meeting of the cincinnati board of education we welcome everyone and request everyone in the audience to please silence your cell phones and electronic devices mr messer please lead us in the pledge thank you mr gustin please call the role mrs bates president president there's some balance here just below semester president mr morrowski here here thank you members of the public who wish to speak may do so by clicking the chat button now the chat feature will be open for your request for five minutes please submit your name your affiliation to the district your school community your topic and your contact information if you want to directly respond to any questions you might have okay i need a motion to approve the minutes from the special meeting

002october 25th 2021 at the business meeting october 25th 2021 their second always um all in favor signify by saying aye opposed then it's our approved that's presented okay we're at the item on the agenda for committee reports i'm going to ask committee members since we have quite an expensive agenda if you could please do your report in five minutes and yes i am timing you okay i told you i was miss bolton please present october 21 budget finance and growth thank you very much uh well the first major topic that you have the discussion about i think last month and indeed that has been concluded it was a need to change some aspects of the escrow agreement we did that with the legal counsel outside legal counsel then also the treasurer presented to us for

003budget update as to process change as you all recall we've discussed it for almost a year now as evolving into a new budget process that's outlined for you uh on page three of the minutes uh and see all those things up for the susan bunty uh icing example they're trying to explain it but the important dates uh are on page four uh where it says he's going to be involved with the process at what time then also we talked so briefly about the growth uh regarding moving ahead of cpf and the topic in this particular week was really talking about where our schools may be under enrolled or where we are not using all the spare footage of the building and so that's uh i'm going to try to evaluate that because it's wrong to

004talk about growth this indeed what kind of suggestions do we need to make some of the places that look like they're under enrolled might be under enrolled because the special ed classes are kind of taking more space than some of the other classes and also in a number of our states we also have uh health centers and health services and other uh kind of non-instructional but full-service kinds of activities that are happening the uh financial uh pieces are here as a monthly reported an outline for you and we did start this past month to have the treasurer's office point out maybe five or six highlights that might be particularly interesting to us or might be relevant to some of the discussions we continue to have a discussion about how much the charter and non-uh cps

005schools and students are costing us and the fact that charter schools students on an individual basis get more money than our cps kids we continue to show the evolution of our grants how many there are for what cost and how they're being spent and maintaining a time left unstable for each uh we also uh sell reports back from the cras community investment areas and uh is getting back to it and has gotten back to us in a memo uh regarding what she found out about the city and the cra also what we've already talked about before is the idea of maybe having a study and survey to figure out what is possible about transporting seventh and eighth graders uh on yellow bus and the pilot would involve um schroeder and clark thank you so that's

006a pilot but the survey will take place before a final decision is made we also talked some more about some of the possibilities regarding transportation there does seem to be an interest as um sort of slash metro has not really shown any particular interest in returning to the extra routes there is some interest and and i think expressed by all board members i mean all committee members that as we do a new rfp for transportation for the following year we start to think a little bit more out of the box and start to see if there's a way that we ourselves might be able to deliver services and then finally as we all know the dot maps or the prop proper maps um that we have uh it's been suggested to administration that we'd like

007to see those those maps pertain also to this year rather than the previous year also finding out how many of the dots the students that are depicted are actual staff members kids that are going there or they are special needs kids that are there because their unit is there and we felt that we would need to know that in order to really figure out not only the under enrollment over enrollment or more particularly figure out uh what we're really talking about about magnets and neighborhood schools and what that will impact on transportation force i submit and hope for approval thank you okay do board members have questions or comments on that report okay miss bates please present health and safety committee meeting report yes thank you uh what the recurring uh agenda item was discussed

008which is uh the report of our governmental liaisons on particular and immediate legislative topics and that was presented by george glover and eric kearney our governmental liaisons we also had a presentation by jessica shelley who's the director of food service here in our district on the good food purchasing annual findings and that was very um very in-depth and uh very informative and what we wanted to do is get this information out to the public about especially about our good food purchasing program which is an initiative to purchase from local farmers and ohio farmers so this committee recommended that at the upcoming meeting with senator blessing at gamble high school that this presentation be made available to him as well and uh urge him to sponsor legislation on the good food purchasing program so that it

009becomes uh statewide uh with some uh financial incentives that are attached uh there are over 13 other states that are doing the same thing to encourage um buying purchasing from local uh farmers instead of you know out of the country or california for instance very very large farms so we keep our local farmers and smaller farmers uh in business and we had a report on our uh the implementation of the sexual abuse discrimination and harassment prevention policy and we also had our report on uh our discipline uh and that is pretty well outlined in the minutes uh so please take a look at the minutes for uh the data regarding discipline and generally showing uh reductions uh in discipline uh in their measures and [Music] an update on the covet 19 pandemic so uh i

010urge the board and members of the public to review these minutes for the full report so i thank you for this opportunity thank you the board members have questions or comments about the report all righty thank you miss bolton please present the uh audit committee meeting report thank you uh yes the the largest issue that was discussed is a proposal regarding succession of the chairmanship and the length of term for the chairmanship of audit the vice chair presented a plan and the committee discussed it and we're going to continue to discuss it in the next meeting as well and it uh so it's a detailed effort about how long the chair will serve and how long the vice chair might serve and about paralleling the terms um so that's going to be discussed again no

011decision was made and they did ask the finance committee to review that possibility uh of their proposal and see if the finance committee and the board which would have to approve of it uh had any other alternatives or thoughts about succession and the chairmanship of the audit committee our community audit committee we continued to have a presentation once again on the benefits uh efforts uh benefits audit and uh that the discussion was somewhat suspended by the by the chair and then we moved on to developing the internal audit strategy in that the audit committee members expressed an interest in being a little bit more involved with some of that particularly in the risk management and that more and more options be presented perhaps for them to select or better guide our wonderful internal audit person

012and then another item which we've all talked about before is that uh it was requested by the administration uh that the internal audit or person uh miss roberts uh be able to kind of review the charter for the workforce preschool workforce development committee because some of the discussion has been we're not sure what they're supposed to be doing what they are not supposed to be doing and who's doing what so she's in the process of that and then the policy committee board policy committee asked the internal auditor to also start to review or develop a plan as to how we measure the implementation and the rigor of the enforcement and implementation of policies our board policies of equity and excellence in education anti-racism parent and family engagement the federal programs purchasing of goods and services

013and she'll be has already reported back to the policy committee and has a plan for doing that the treasurer then uh submitted to some more data and more documents that are attached in the back and we were happy to have mr kevin ashley director of financial reporting update us and those are uh items that were already appeared in the finance committee and then there are i don't know 20 some pages of appendices uh that to verify and substantiate the material that was presented uh at the audit committee and again we are thrilled to be able to have a community audit committee school of experts that serve as sort of our outside advisors i submit the minutes as presented thank you the board members have questions and comments about the report thank you mr marowski please

014present policy and equity committee report thank you president jones uh the policy and equity committee met on thursday october 28th at 9 00 a.m we had a very jam-packed meeting so i will make my way through this um as quickly as possible uh the first bulk of the two pages are about the proposed student vaccine requirement so uh you know in lieu of recounting all of that i can't wait to board matters but at the end of the day the punchline is i think you have three committee members that were on three different points on the on the spectrum which i think caused for a really good uh you know discussion you had one me squarely in favor um eve who had a lot of reservations that gave me a ton to think about these

015past few weeks we could talk about later so thank you for that and then ben somewhere in the middle i think um so uh i'll i'll i won't go into all of this i will just say that uh we did have a good discussion we asked at that time that the communications department administered a survey to families which we have not as of yet done of course with the faculty and co-located partner one we surveyed a lot of folks and so anxious to see the results of that um regarding this proposed new policy um related on it to covet 19 um and just in brief this board is well aware that there was some confusion among families regarding quarantine policies are quarantined policies regarding say if there's 20 kids in a classroom they're with the

016same kids all day teacher contracts covered 19 the kids don't exhibit symptoms they don't have to or don't have covet they don't have to go home right we're not sending children home because we want them to be in school there were a number of cases enough that it brought up uh the the need to talk about a policy committee that there were outside folks um with whom we work that say come into the same kids same classroom say they're one of our community partners have coved kids test negative same exact situation but not our employee we were sending kids home um you know we we were following guidance of cincinnati health department which we are happy to do because they are experts um and after some digging and looking it turns out that we we

017could implement our policy and not have to send kids home the punch line is kids don't have to go home if they don't have kovitz so that was a good discussion it's long in the minutes you can read up on all the reasoning there but that's a good thing i believe um i heard enough concern from this board about that confusion that it seems like a positive thing attendance boundary lines and enrollment policies ms bolton uh talked somewhat about this from her committee reports um committee member bolton reported the district's been evaluating for a number of years how the district is organized uh she also say the discussion has been about enrollment and the boundary lines general counsel holing updated us on our own policy 5120 which is regarding enrollment in neighborhood schools and our

018preschool and enrollment magnet policy and our high school school of choice enrollment program um ms bolton advised the administration to look at neighborhoods and report back on the legal process of redrawing boundary lines of course with the clifton area neighborhood school i think everyone's aware the experiment there that seems to have panned out was that it's gone actual neighborhood lines i don't pretend to speak for miss bolton i'm not that stupid but i do think you know a lot of this is born out of the fact we have these sort of gerrymandered neighborhood lines you have kids you know living in college hill that are driving across town instead of going to pleasant hill and like what would it look like to reimagine the district again miss bolton has talked about the center finance minutes

019so it will not beat a dead horse i express my desire to make sure our neighborhood schools are diverse and reflect the neighborhoods they're in you've heard me talk a lot about some of these meetings that we're never going to program racism or implicit bias out of you know white folks in urban areas um where the schools are prominently black and they want to live in those areas i think we need to approach going into the living rooms getting families excited about their neighborhood school this is why hayes border is a good place why rhode humburg is i just feel the need to constantly say this and then also i brought up my my long my long uh standing desire to get rid of open enrollment so that's in the minutes and maybe we can

020talk about that again someday um we discussed a lot of uh about district organization um we got a great packet uh that sort of outlines the way the district is organized this was born out of our last policy committee meeting ms bolton had suggested that it should be updated to include the operational side of the district but also i think if i may editorially it's a good thing for the new superintendent to have decided what is the operational structure of the district and so we looked at that um and committee member lindy expressed uh concern about how much time it might take from someone's work to restructure this document it's like a one sheet sort of easy here's the here's the thing miss bolton myself stated the document is time sensitive and would be beneficial

021for the search um mr lindy advised an extended timeline to revamp the document which i think everybody was makes sense and um i'm wrapping up wrapping up uh you already addressed our our chief audit executive lauren roberts uh outlined a great strategy you'll note we have revised policy minutes um for this section only um the the high level uh stuff here is that the uh the process is one does management have written procedures that address the board policies that ms bolton already outlined um and again goods and services parent engagement federal programs equity anti-racism if so does management's procedures support each significant aspect of the policy part two is there evidence showing the procedures have been implemented if so are the procedures providing the intended results committee member lindy reported he's interested in how evidence

022would be collected to determine if they've been implemented and would prefer a small number of items in a randomized study committee member bolton informed i think this is germaine uh uh informing the community that the audit committee i think initially might have some concerns like why are we doing this um but came around and uh uh we are to give credit i think to our chief audit executive ms roberts for that and thank you and then continued review of policies all of which are in front of you tonight to vote on i hope you uh enjoy them and pass them and i present these minutes as written okay do board members have questions or comments about the report okay mr lindy please present november 3rd committee of the whole meeting report thank you president jones

023uh the committee the whole met on november 3rd and had i think two really important presentations one was about changes to the state report card and how cbs is doing i lied three presentations um part of that was about enrollment and then the last piece that i want to share here is an update on transportation specifically metro and the elimination of the extra routes i won't go through all of this because i think the minutes do a nice job of explaining everything but there are some significant changes to the state depart card most notably the change from receiving a letter grade to a through f uh to receiving a star rating and it's unclear at this point in time exactly how the star rating is going to be calculated but that will be a big

024difference i think for everybody um and then i think you know as we looked at some of the data that the administration shared it felt like there were two important punch lines one was you can see the impact of some of the things that the district and the city have been trying over the last five years we looked at some of the early literacy scores and you can see how kids starting in cps today are doing significantly better than they were doing a year two three years ago and how that that could very well be the impact of efforts like the cincinnati preschool promise and the hard work of all the teachers and staff at cincinnati public schools and preschools and kindergartens across the city and that's good news i think the thing that is

025also true it was very clear in the data that we shared is how much work we have to do that was already the case uh and is particularly the case uh after the pandemic in the last two years that i think we've had together so there's more to read in the report if you'd like i think we heard an update on enrollment and we saw um i think because of covid a little over a three percent reduction in enrollment uh and then about six two percent has come back this year uh so overall still down from before covet but moving up uh in the second school year if i'm wrong on any of this i'm trusting someone to interrupt me um and then on on metro um i wanted to try to spend just a

026minute on this uh i think you know i found this part of the meeting to be just incredibly interesting really important um and frankly fairly distressing it seems as though we have not received from sorta um significant uh parts of data requests that we have received in the past specifically we haven't received a comparative ridership data to really understand how different is the student experience this year from past years so i just want to commend the administration for what they shared at that meeting we've collected a bunch of our own data we've surveyed principals uh and i think the numbers are are pretty striking um more than half said students um or around half of principals are saying that kids are not on time to school uh 82 percent said that times are worse this

027year than previous year 73 percent said there are more parent complaints than previous years and 73 percent said the wait time for metro buses on the way home is worse than in free we also learned that um we have found as i understand it almost 8 000 metro bus passes that are not being used um so that's a that's a 52 reduction from last year in terms of how many students are actually using the metro and the only thing that's changed is the elimination of the extra rounds uh so that that comes out to almost a two and a half million dollar reimbursement that we've requested from sorta uh and that um i think the the piece that i took away from this is that um the current state is just it's not good uh

028we have lots of evidence that it's not good um we continue to receive a posture from sorta that they're not changing things and do not seem interested in changing things and i want to commend our administration for i think collecting hard numbers on this filing a public records request so that we can get the information that we've been asking for and i think not letting letting off the gas on trying to create a better situation for kids and families um because i do think the situation they've put us in uh seems to be a distressing one so um there's more in the report thank you for listening and i present the committee report as written thank you the board members have questions or comments about the report okay the the final report uh committee report

029ms bowers please present the student achievement and district instructional performance committee meeting thank you president jones um the student achievement and district instructional performance committee met on november 5th we had a presenter mr matthew jalen um he is the executive artistic director ceo of the american legacy theater he presented to us information about the theater was the ideal of collaboration on an extensive level in 2022 there will be a phase one pilot january 22nd through may 22 january 2022 through may 2022 um he is already providing some of those um services and after schooling in our district and he's working with dr rutnik around the pilot the action item from this discussion was of committee member bolton um had requested data to see which schools are already having artistic programs in school after school and

030as a part of summer scholars we also had miss emily campbell present on accelerated learning and we had miss stacy hill sammy's report on the keys to everson's success um around um around the learning of their school and success of evanston academy we also had uh the action item from that discussion was administration wants to provide an update on the assessment of um at the end of this school year of this year meaning in december uh around the um the assessments the two-week cycle assessments and other action items from um committee member both and was administration what's the research why evanson is under enrolled i think she mentioned some of that in her financial report about the unenrolled schools and and why that was we also had dr rutnet uh present on fine arts um

031an action item from that was the administration was to provide an inventory of the arts program offered at the schools within the district mr hardin updated the committee from the athletic department around elementary school athletics junior high in high school athletics he also identified um the schools that were running had a state tournament run in football as well as cross country he talked about the triple a pathway um and one of the key things that i thought was important for me was that he talked about the um beyond the field mental health conversation that happened over the last week um regarding our students being involved and coaches being involved in understanding the importance of mental health and athletics we had a vision 2020 update um from from administration identifying if we were practicing true authentic

032school visions do the schools have everything they need there was a request from um committee member bolton about identifying that she referenced also in her um committee or her finance committee about magnet schools montessori schools neighborhood schools um and there was a comment about aiken being branded correctly um additional business was our committee discussed um being true to the language and the um superintendent's 90-day first year contract in her 90-day qualitative review uh for superintendent or interim superintendent of mine and so what we agreed upon was that mr lindsey would follow up with a collaboration with interim superintendent of mine about a measurable outcome and report back um to the committee after sharing with us on december 3rd about what those outcomes might be we can present it to the full board through an executive

033session we also have two members from hearing of the public miss kendrick phelps and miss um julie seller csc president these are the stack minutes that i position thank you any questions or comments about segments okay i need a motion to approve the committee report demo second second all in favor aye aye any opposed minutes are approved thank you okay superintendent ahmad uh please introduce this evening's presentation yes it is a great pleasure to introduce the principal renee corford of bond hill academy for our cps is bright go highlight good evening okay all right sorry about that thank you to our interim superintendent tiana for giving me this opportunity to highlight bond hill academy i am the principal of fine hill academy my name is renee crawford and i'm just going to highlight some good

034things that are taking place at our school you go to the next library the bond hill academy students faculty and community partners collaborate to investigate the wonders and possibilities of math and science our school is an elementary school we serve students in grades pre-k through sixth grade students are prepared in our school to pursue careers in math and science so when we were going through picking pictures for our slideshow i felt that these pictures would be very appropriate because what it shows is that we are working on grade level instruction that takes place in many ways so you see the use of interactive whiteboards where students in grade six are working on coordinate planes because that is one of their standards for math you also see a group of students working on fractions using manipulative

035and what you see in that right hand corner is one way that we are analyzing data with our students collaboratively on our temperature checks which are our two week assessments that take place so the stories that you see show how the students how many of them are at those levels so when we first started out a lot of students were at the bottom of the thermometer but as you can see more students are reaching mastery as we continue to do our two-week assessment which are also known as temperature checks because it gives our students the opportunity to be instructed with on level um on level instruction on a daily basis so they're not remediated on a daily basis and so you'll see that as they go up you normally have three temperature checks that are

036in a unit of instruction so as we're covering a multiple um standards on the first temperature check you'll notice that the scores are low because they haven't covered all of the standards that are introduced to them at that time so when you get to the second temperature check because it's a big picture you'll see the score start to go up even more because more of the instruction has been covered by the third temperature check you should see the most growth or mastery in that particular unit of instruction so that's how we prepare our students for these careers in math and science by making sure that we are not remediating our students but giving them what they deserve which is one level instruction next slide please moving on into academics which kind of overlaps what we

037just covered but some of the advantages that i like to highlight and i'm not going to go through this whole slide you can read it on your own is that we have our four-time stem teacher and we have two stem labs at our school one that's more focused towards primary and the other is focused toward intermediate students we have small class sizes for our students to get that individualized instruction and one of the things that has been very helpful for us is our tower house partnership because we know that a lot of our students have come in with a lot of things taking place in their lives from covet from being displaced because we have a lot of project connect students so it's very important for us to have partnerships with our mental health agency

038and not only help us with the students but also gives teachers pds like on trauma informed care and this year we are working on restorative practices for our disciplinary issues that we see in our building next slide please we have a lot of partners and one thing that i was kind of worried about is when coveted that we will lose a lot of our partner well we didn't it just changed how we had to communicate with them so what we did with our partners we had during our time of being afrikovic we still had our meetings but they were virtual but now that we have our partners back in the building we've already had our monthly meeting and the things that we've discussed is that we've moved from just what do the students need to

039actually giving me the opportunity to present our one plan with our partners so that they can see how they can connect to the academics of our building so now we are trying to move back slowly into having some of our partners in the building to give our students not only mentorship type of relationships but also to give them some of the academic help that they may need so that we can use our partners to help close the gap while our teachers are continuing to teach on grade level instruction next slide please our vision 2020 update and keep moving and i'm going to turn it over to my instructional coach mr christopher anderson and he's going to cover the next last okay thank you miss crawford thank you guys for uh having this here this evening

040those of you have not met me my name is chris anderson i'm an instructional coach with hanson county esc and part of the uh my job is to produce and host a couple video series that i want to teach i want to tell you guys about and how we're integrating that into the classrooms of pond hills so the first uh first video series is called science around scentsy it's a web-based series that features scientists and engineers in our in our city in cincinnati as a teaching tool these videos teach science concepts we say the middle school week between like third and second uh sixth grade but can be scaled up to seven through nine as well what we try to do is we try to make the science relevant to the kids lives things that

041kids can see they can connect around town and that's really important for us so what we've been able to do is we've been able to provide a hands-on stem experience for the students at bond hill so what happens is we have the videos that teach a science concept it's linked directly to the instructional materials that are paired with that video which is also linked to the standard so it's a seamless integration for teachers every single video that is that we produce is standard space so it is a teaching tool for uh for our teachers uh and it's been really impactful we've been able to take some data from uh from our work here at bond over 50 of the students increase their interest in stem careers and more importantly increase their interest in learning science

042which is really really great we've also been able to get some funding through uh philanthropy ohio and ocer grant that provided us the opportunity to print thousands of textbooks and we were able to get a workbook for every fourth fifth and sixth grader of bondhill there's about 120 pages of discussion guides and labs modeling activities that all go with the videos that we produce if you can go to the next slide please the second series is called outsider classroom uh it's similar to science around cincy except we've expanded it to the national parks what we do is we've gone out to national parks and we've we've filmed there and we use that to teach these students science and it's been really great we've uh been able to pilot some things in class the kids have

043really really responded to uh to all the activities and the videos we're exposing the students to our public lands many of whom uh may have not visited them let alone maybe even heard of them uh we were also able to adopt a classroom and this is really great this uh this previous spring when we were out filming out west we were able to adopt the fifth grade classroom and it was really cool actually if you can go back to the previous slide the the kids here in this picture they're they're doing an activity with mammoth cake and what they're doing is they're learning about different processes that break down and move rocks they're learning about erosion they're learning about weathering and so they they had to watch this mammoth cave video and i had done

044this activity with the students on a teacher and shortly after that i was leaving to go film in uh at western the national parks i'll film five parts and what we did is the the kids were already asking me questions and we decided to say let's just adopt this classroom so they would send videos of questions to us while we were on the road and we'd answer them while we were in the parks and the the crazy thing is that the questions got better it was like an iterative process the the few times we were able to connect this you know of course at the end of the year at the end of may we were able to connect with the kids and they really got excited and it's been really great to see uh

045just just the growth that the and the interest that the students have gotten and in science and and in the parks and in conservation you know anecdotally when i walk through the hall halls the kids the kids say are you coming in are we doing science today with you are they you know they're that's like oh i subscribe to your channel like oh we're like i was watching the science videos like they're getting really excited and that's really great so uh i just want to thank ms crawford for all her support uh she's a fantastic principal and i also want to thank liz wolfe she's the science curriculum manager here and she's been very supportive of all our work as well and i'll turn it back over to ms crawford thank you mr anderson we

046can go to the next slide extracurricular activity and that's our last slide next slide so some of the neat programs and activities that we've been doing at our school so one of the things that we took advantage of was the month of october and so we called it think pink thursday for the whole month of october and um and to bring about the awareness of breast cancer awareness on thursdays all of the staff and all of the students would wear pink in honor of those even staff members at our job who are battling cancer or kids who have made who have known or kids who have known people to have lost the battle are going through the battle so we've got to bring in something that they may be able to relate to because we're

047uniform school so on thursdays everybody was in the color pink and we called it think pink thursday and so on the announcement it would we would have a thoughtful thursday and i would always give them something motivational to think about others more so than what we were thinking about ourselves on that day another um neat program that we had is um ge brought a field trip to us back in september so they come into the building on a saturday from like 12 to two and they work with our sixth grade students and they worked with the students on creating a vacuum chamber and creating a website through coding so instead of us being able to go to them because some of the things are limited to the locations where we can visit they brought the

048field trip to us which was very exciting one of the pictures that you see on here that i like to highlight is that bottom right picture and that's our gym teacher and so this was the first year that he did cross-country team for our students extracurricular activities and so it was so exciting to know that the young lady on the left-hand side she came in 19 out of 40 and the young man on the right hand side he can't he plays number six out of 40. so being able to tap into some of the skills and some of the talents that the students have that they've not been able to do over the last year and a half so that was very exciting to see some of the students who wouldn't ordinarily participate in extracurricular

049activities to really get out there and have fun with so i leave you to say that i am a proud principal of barn hill academy where our vision is stimulating young minds one student at a time thank you thank you [Applause] okay we'll open up the floor for questions or comments mr messer mr moroski and miss bauer thank you um and you can't help but to be excited listening to you i think that you kind of casually walked up and then you just came to life and that just got me excited and i know that must get people in your building excited of course your students uh mr anderson good to see uh old friend over here at cps um you know uh and i love all the extracurricular activities i don't think we can

050do enough so i just love the variety and how you're building that in i was curious um was it maybe two years now there was a charter school that opened its doors in bond hill what impact has that had on your school and uh enrollment et cetera and what are you also hearing in the community so i'm not hearing much about the school um i have had some families to come and enroll their children at our school coming from there so i have had that to happen um over the course of this year with parents saying how dissatisfied they were with the school and they have come to enroll their children in our school i won't say that that school has had much impact on our enrollment um our enrollment did take a dive down

051when covet hit because we were had a lot of parents who were very anxious about whether or not they should send their students in person and so on a pre-cover year we were hitting the enrollment i'm about 3 40 to 3 30 to 3 40. so that was a normal number for our school so when cover hit and we were competing against charter schools who were bringing their kids in five days a week when we were listening to the safety of our students through cdc versus trying to field seats we took a dive downward and i think the lowest that we hit was 254. since we've come back in five days a week and the kids have more of a structure and a continuance not back and forth but are able to actually come to

052school we've been going upward since then and right now we're sitting about 288 to 290. so we're not where where i would want us to be we're not where we were doing covet and this is not where we would stay i know that we will continue to go up and i don't think the impact of where our numbers went down had anything to do with the charter school i think it had more to do with what the parents were feeling as far as is it really safe for my children to go to school because we experienced some deaths with some of our students losing grandpa's and grandma's and some of their parents even having colby so the anxiety level went up but i think they're trusting us more because now we're back in five days

053a week where some of the charter schools never stopped coming in five days a week now we're back in five days a week so we're seeing our numbers go up they're not where we want them to be but i'm sure that they will go up even more thank you president jones i just had a comment but now i have a question thanks to uh mr messer's question and so um from where we sit which is a different place and a whole lot of ways and where y'all are sitting you get to see you come on good to see you chris um it it would appear that we're we are doing a good job safety wise and so how do you feel how do you feel things then i have my comment but how do you

054feel things are going on safety protocols good i mean have put people's fears kind of obey a little bit so i think that parents have become more trusting i never let up off of the safety protocol it is a part of my daily attendance part of my daily announcements that i do every morning i give them words of encouragement and i also remind them of why we are able to be in a building five days a week i'm very strict on wearing the mask covering the mouth and the nose the three feet of distance keeping your hands clean and i make it a part of the announcement so it's instilled in the kid i had a parent to come in one day and she said if we got vaccinated why do we have to wear

055the mask i said because we have to protect all of the children through that door that has not been vaccinated nor do they have a choice at this moment and so i don't let let down i have some parents who a handful who didn't believe in covet and i told them you know you have a right to how you believe but the way we're going to run our school is based upon a cdc recommendations and so if you want to come in this is just the way we're going to do it and so not putting down anybody's belief system but allowing them to understand why we do what we do at our school it makes them more accepting to the choices that has to be made we haven't had a big um influx of colby

056cases i only saw where numbers started going up right after labor day we have not been seeing that here lately so i feel safe i would send my child to the school that i work at the safety protocols are in place i'm not annoyed by them i told my staff yes we would like for students to come in with math well if they come in without they made it to school we'll provide them with money so i'm very strict on those protocols that we have in place and it makes a more comfortable safe and healthy environment for our students i appreciate your vigilance and diligence helping us keep our doors open so thank you for that and also i just want to say i had the opportunity to come to your school a couple years

057ago to visit bonds of unions and i just want to say you know been to a lot of our schools like i think all of us have it's it's remarkable i you know i walked away from that day and now you presented here and i heard a lot of things you said much more eloquently obviously but the cohesion between the teachers and the math classes and what the partners were doing during the school day was most impressive and if i'm maybe so bold in my educational opinion the reason scores are increasing and i know the superintendent uh signed the letter of support for bonds union for a grant from the department of ed which is really cool um such as kudos to bringing everyone and then again the cohesion between the two it's a big

058deal so a lot different than the days of pulling kids out of class to go tutors somewhere it's a mystery but like doing it together so and we were able to still do that during covet we just did it in a different way now you get on a computer they get on a computer but it never stops thank you miss bowers yes thank you miss crawford mr anderson this is a wonderful presentation um i was i'm glad that you provided a visual i'm a visual learner i'm glad you provided a visual about the importance and explanation of the progress of the two-week cycle assessment that was good for me to see because i know that that's important to all of us who are members to see some of that progress um vision 2020 as i

059mentioned um in in my report was something that our uh stat committee was concerned about and uh committed member vote and going to make sure we were being authentic or who was being authentic um i applaud you for explaining that you guys are being authentic in your vision 2020 focus and i preferably uh or what stuck out most to me was preparing students for careers in math and science we are so focused on the cte and the high school i just loved hearing it brought back to elementary that you're providing those stepping stones early so thank you for that um and if you can answer one question either one of you that you see surgical nurses can you explain what they do when they come because that was fascinating that that's probably a hands-on kind

060of um interaction that you have could you explain more about that collaboration so we have a group of nurses that come to do a lot of screenings for our students so we're partnered in that way where they come they do the vision screening they do the hearing training and so they were with us maybe about a month ago and it was very interesting because it was one of those days we were sure staff and so i was telling the kids for safety purposes we're going to have an end day because of safety first we can take them into the cafeteria they love trivia do a trivia contest give them incentives so the nurses heard this so they come to the office and they say we'll help you cover the lunch we've all been bci fbi

061background check we can go on the playground and help you so that the kids can have reset so if they come in to do those type of screenings and offer us to be able to bring the kids to get dental work done and things like that and get glasses and things like that however it's bigger than that because they heard just on my announcements that we're going to have to reroute for the safety of our children and them thinking about our children was like no we're going to pitch in we got enough nurses we're going to pitch in and help them out so that they can still get recess for that day so they come in for one thing but the partnership is there that's very important thank you um any other questions or comments

062miss bolton and mr lindy yes another question um but glad to see the use of the effort by the national park system glad to see you reaching beyond the walls of the school glad to see you using uh sources out there it certainly is very much true to the vision 2020 but also the cps outside uh initiative by so many of our community groups so it's just wonderful so i appreciate that effort thanks thank you mr lindy i truly just wanted to say thank you i think for all of your enthusiasm for the wonderful merging of i think academic rigor joy and real life application in kids lives uh just say thank you thank you any other questions thank you so much for your presentation we look forward to seeing you soon thank you [Applause]

063okay so we're gonna move on to our board matters as you might know the board matters agenda item was moved up on the agenda and that was intentional um we have a very special presentation under board matters and uh i'm going to ask mr lindy or miss bolton to sort of introduce um the first presentation under ford matters thank you president jones i'll be quick so we can give most of our time to our guests but one of i think the most important things our board is working on at the moment is the search for the next superintendent for cincinnati public schools uh and community engagement has been just a crucial part of this effort from the very beginning so much so that before we even created the job description we wanted a process that

064would engage community stakeholders to understand what we should be looking for in our next leader so we're going to hear from monica santana rosen from the alma advisory group about that process and where we are in our search process and i will turn it over to monica good evening everyone am i coming across clearly sounds great okay great thank you so much it's a pleasure to be with you all tonight and i believe maybe rob um i can put out the slides that i have here to share with you this evening thank you so much um and ben thank you so much for that introduction we can actually move to the next slide um every time i meet with the board to discuss the the superintendent search we always begin by thinking about our shared

065purpose and the board has established the shared purpose of recruiting screening and selecting the next superintendent of cincinnati public schools what's really important is that the board has a stated purpose to lead a transparent search process with integrity guided by the input not just of the board but of the greater cincinnati community and designed to mitigate bias every step of the way what's important about this is that from the beginning of this process it was important to the board to listen to the voices of the community and not just to in a traditional process have big town halls where the person who has the microphone has the opportunity to speak but to really engage in authentic dialogue and conversation in small round table conversations and really have people tell us their stories share their experiences

066with us and so it's been really wonderful to have the opportunity to get to speak with as many people as we've had the opportunity to speak with and hear from as many people as we have and tonight we are here to share a little bit as much as we can about what we've learned and how that information is informing our process we can move to the next slide i wanted to first share a little bit about where we are right now in the process as ben shared at the very beginning we began with stakeholder input the board did not want to rush and post a position or create a job profile until they'd heard from members of the community so we've spent the last six weeks meeting with individuals and i'll share a little bit

067more about that in a moment our next step is now we have a job profile it's up it's online and the alma team is out there advertising and talking to as many people as we can about the role trying to find candidates who meet the criteria that has been established through this process after that uh it will be our job to begin recruitment recruiting and screening candidates and actually putting candidates through an interview process that's really driven by the skill sets that community members said they cared about most the board expects when we get to the finalist round that the community will have the opportunity to engage with finalist candidates to meet candidates and to provide the board their input before the board makes their final decision it's worth noting here something that eve bolton

068shared this morning which is that this the board the current board has made it a real priority that new incoming board members have the opportunity to participate fully in this process it's the goal here as much as possible is to find a candidate that all board members can feel good and get behind incoming board members as well as outgoing board members we can move to the next leg i'll share a little bit about the activities that we have taken part in to gather input from the community we held three community gatherings in each region of the city our focus was to help share with community members about the process and to engage in breakout group roundtable conversations uh to hear from individuals and to hear their thoughts we asked questions like imagine the future that

069you see for your child the future that cincinnati public schools has prepared them for tell us what you see tell us what you hope for your child we wanted to ground the conversations in family members aspirations for their children and then ask them about the things that they saw as barriers and challenges to reaching those goals the things that districts could be doing better to meet their goals for their children we then ask them about their hopes for the next superintendent and so that was the level of discourse that we had not only in those community gatherings but also in interviews and focus groups we met with teachers we met with students principals district staff community partners union leaders business leaders in the community as many different people as we could sit down with to

070allow for deeper discussions from their unique role and their unique perspective their vantage point of the school system and finally we issued a staff and community survey it went out on october 25th we had it open initially and then we extended the deadline for a week to maximize participation as much as possible we can move on to the next slide so to share a little bit about what has occurred over the course of this time we've been able to engage in 40 different meetings we've met individually with 234 participants across all of these different meetings and gatherings and heard from from each of them personally if you move on to the next slide i'll share a little bit about the survey thank you so our survey had just shy of 3 600 survey responses and

071that included an additional 1051 survey responses that came in after we extended the deadline and i think the next slide is a little bit more clear on some of the demographic pieces there so if we can move on to the next slide if we can go to the next slide please thank you so uh we had we were very pleased with the participation in the survey our top three groups represent 81 percent of respondents over half of the respondents were parents or family care or caregivers of students in cps 21 of respondents were teachers and 9 of respondents were students when we looked at the data we saw that we had respondents from every single one of cincinnati public schools and 92 percent of principals participated in the survey in addition we had 224 classified

072staff 166 central office staff and 110 community members that participated in the survey we can move to the next slide please nearly half of all of the participants were people of color so we really saw strong diversity in the participation um with 34 of respondents coming from the black community in cincinnati we can move on to the next slide and when we looked at the zip codes nearly every zip code in cincinnati was represented in the survey as well i'd like to move on to the next slide so we really wanted to share what we've learned you know one of the questions that we asked uh in our community gatherings with individuals was what would you want alma to do to demonstrate to you that the time you spent with us the things you shared

073with us really made a difference and one of the top things that people said was well we need you to come back and tell us what you heard so we wanted to share tonight what we learned and we want to just take a moment and acknowledge people were honest and open they were vulnerable and candid they were emotional at times sharing with us their profound experiences their hopes for the district um their hopes for the next superintendent of the district we can move to the next slide the thing that you know of course the city is not a monolith and there are diverse points of view but there were certain things that really emerged as strong themes across across groupings of people across role across function and the first thing that we want to say

074is that cincinnati really wants a leader with an unwavering drive to do what's best for students what we heard from community members is that they are seeking a leader who really values and seeks to understand the needs of cps students the schools each unique schools and the communities that surround each of the schools there is a great desire for communication which i'll talk about in a moment and collaboration and transparency people are looking for someone who can demonstrate that they respect the cultural and racial diversity that exists in cps that so many people are proud of and that that transparency and communication is something that parents in particular are really looking for as well as many of the staff in the buildings one thing that we heard was that individuals want someone who leads with

075empathy and not ego someone who can elevate the voices of students staff and families over any other political agenda these thoughts came across clearly to us across a multitude of meetings and came across again very consistently in the survey that we launched we can move to the next slide you know it's it's a core part and it's in cincinnati public schools mission statement and on on there right next to their logo on their website um so this wasn't really a surprise but we wanted to share that um you know in addition to board members that emphasize this with the alma team from our very first conversations people emphasize the need for student learning first but they partner that with a desire to really think about the whole student and serve students holistically and so i

076want to talk a little bit about what we heard from family members and from parents when we ask them to imagine who their student was in the future they talked about wanting their children to be to grow up as critical independent thinkers people who know that they're valuable to society and people who are ready to contribute and to make a positive impact parents staff talked about accelerating learning and growth for students and to really take the lessons learned from the pandemic uh in order to um to continue to innovate and improve in the school system and we also heard from students in particular a desire for schools to foster and for leaders as for the next superintendent to foster a commitment to caring for and belonging to a diverse cultural community and when we thought

077when we talked about the holistic supports for students and and frankly for staff too people really talked about a great priority to provide the resources needed to support mental health and well-being for students and to provide environments where students feel safe where they know who they can talk to and where they feel cared for as whole people and finally there was a lot of conversation about site-based leadership of schools and really wanting the district to support site-based leadership to allocate resources equitably and provide proactive development and support to staff we can move to the next slide here i want to share some of the things that we heard um the challenges that were shared by multiple stakeholder groups and these are things that are important for the incoming superintendent to be aware of that these

078are the perceptions in the community and these are the things that people will need to be able to address i'm getting a message that there's a problem with my network so i'm wanting to make sure everyone can still hear me sounds great okay great then i will keep talking thanks so um you know first of all there there are there is a a common sentiment in the community that decisions feel top down at times and that at times it feels at the school level at the community level that leaders are prioritizing politics and power over students and staff we heard from people a sense of broken trust and at times a feeling of lack of honest communication and not clear accountability and we heard from many people both in the surveys and in our conversations

079real concern about operational deficiencies people discuss transportation food and safety as top operational issues that they felt were not meeting schools needs and people talked about what they described as out of touch leadership really what they meant and what they were saying is that people feel unheard and undervalued um what this says for us for the alma team is that what the community is saying is that the skill set around open lines of communication are going to be really important and to know that community members are feeling this way right now that this is something that is a priority uh for the superintendent to be able to acknowledge um and and and address i want to share a little bit about equity and anti-racism we know that the district has passed as my understanding is

080the first anti-racism policy in the state of ohio we heard echoed among cps students and staff strong support for the district's goals for equity and anti-racism but this is a difficult and polarizing topic and we see based on the survey respondents that there is a clear need for greater understanding about the policies and practices that impact equity and that the next superintendent should be someone who can really navigate difficult conversations around matters of race and racial equity we'll move to the next slide please we want to share that people really are invested in seeing cps succeed we saw over 2300 open-ended responses people really taking the time to write down their thoughts to share their suggestions to to add their voice to this process and if we move to the next slide please there was

081one idea above all that came through in many of those comments and it's this desire for partnership and collaboration there are three things that were said over and over again in the surveys and in our focus groups people are looking for a leader who will be visible visible was a common phrase a common word visible and present in the community and in the schools and people desire a sense of open lines of communication feedback loop and responsiveness to parent concerns we can move to the next slide please i wanted to share that in this presentation there's an appendix i'm not going to talk through the appendix but it is it has been shared as part of the materials for tonight and what we've done is we've outlined the five to seven themes from every single

082one of those questions that we asked during those community gatherings so they're there they're intended to be unfiltered um and we welcome and invite anyone uh to look at those um as well but as i wrap up my uh presentation here tonight i wanted to share back with the community how your input will support the process the community input is the driving force behind the job profile so as you read the job profile that the job posting that's out there you should see reflected many of the ideas that i shared this evening we use the input from the community to work with the board to clarify the competencies those are the skills that are most necessary for the role and every aspect of our search process is designed to screen for those skills it is

083the most important way that we mitigate bias in the process first by ensuring that the entire board is in agreement with those skills right from the start and then developing interview steps where candidates have the opportunity to truly demonstrate those skills we use the input from the community to clarify those skills and then to design a process that really is measuring those skills and finally the board has made it clear when we get to the finalist stage they want to have the community participate they want to have the opportunity for authentic engagement for community members to get to meet with finalists and to be able to provide their input to inform the board's final decision i have one more slide if we can go to the next slide i wanted to preview for everyone the

084key highlights of what emerged in the job profile we think of the job in terms of the responsibilities needed and the skills needed so if the responsibilities are what the superintendent does the skills are what they are how they do their job it's what's needed in order to do the job well and there are five key responsibilities that have emerged from this process the first is the need to foster an intentionally inclusive and diverse school system supporting the whole student for strong academic growth and achievement the second is strengthening relationships and building trust the third key responsibility is developing a clear strategy the district strategic plan will expire at the end of this school year so the next superintendent will need to collaborate with community to create the next strategic plan and vision for the

085future for the district in partnership with the board this the superintendent will need to support a thriving workforce that means recruiting engaging inspiring retaining developing staff and creating the conditions where staff can do their best work on behalf of the students that they serve and finally the superintendent will lead effective systems and operations in terms of the skills needed we have first student-centered decision-making that means that every decision the superintendent makes is centered in what is best for students the second is this commitment to equity third is innovative and inspirational leadership fourth is effective relationship building and communication and that includes with community partners it includes across all schools with all stakeholders with families with union leadership and of course with the board and finally extraordinary team leadership and management so these are the skills

086that we will be looking for as we're looking at potential candidates we're looking for proven track record for those responsibilities and demonstration that they have been able to in the past uh carry out the things that are evidence of each of these skills we've detailed it all in the job posting which is available on alma's website at www.alma advisorygroup.com we encourage everyone to visit our lines of communication remain open the we are regularly updating uh the um the cincinnati public schools website people can continue to check back on our progress throughout this process um and are welcome to reach out to the alma team anytime with any questions comments or feedback and with that i'll turn it over back to uh to the board okay thank you monica and i'm going to ask ben and

087or eve for any final comments or do we want to open up for any discussion i just have one comment um and that is that uh throughout this whole process that began in june um i i am thrilled that the board has shown great unity and consensus about what to do and i'm also thrilled having gone through this maybe not as many times as mrs states has gone through the superintendent search but i have i cannot tell you how pleased i am uh with the with the search group the alma advisory group uh i just think it's it's as we try to um pursue excellence they really are our roadmap so i'm i'm very very pleased and very supportive of this group and so proud of the board as we've gone through this thank you

088any other comments i i just want to add um it was a great very comprehensive presentation um monica um i ditto ms bolton's comment and i also want to acknowledge that the three incoming board members are here so they heard the presentation as well so we were very grateful that they decided to stay it shows a level of commitment um they're ready and uh willing and uh so just wanted to take that moment but um anything else then from board members around the presentation before we move on okay well monica we thank you and uh we will see you soon next week yes absolutely thank you well thank you so much i just want to say thank you for the time and the thoughtfulness you've put into this process uh it's an extraordinary partnership and

089and the alma team is honored to be on this journey with you thank you so much thank you okay so we're going to move on uh fairly quickly and uh mr morosky um discussion of the resolution on the uh policy there should not be a resolution i was wondering about that okay uh i just noticed it and there's none okay okay good um no we we put the uh the student um vaccine requirement policy and by we i mean miss bolt mr lenny and myself uh we all were in agreement that it should be on the board agenda full board agenda um for discussion because we really haven't talked about we've talked about it two committee meetings we'll talk about it again on thursday um at 9am which is our we're not meeting on thanksgiving

090even though i suggested mr hoy and make us turkey and we meet on thanksgiving but nobody liked the idea so we're gonna meet on the 18th um which is a few days away and so this would just be instructive i think for us not to speak for the my committee members to hear what everybody else on the board thinks and so as promised during the presentation minutes um which i just sort of like flew through um just give a little background of what was discussed it was very robust very good discussion um and uh also for the edification of the the public there's a decent amount watching it looks like um well we started with a 30-minute q a with the doctor of pediatric infectious disease and control from cincinnati children's uh we asked him

091a number of questions and i'll just sort of hit the high level and then again my colleagues when we discuss can fill in gaps that i miss but sort of the things that i sort of called out to present um is uh set the stage for this discussion um dr shafson talked about the pros and cons of the vaccine he reported the pros that the vaccine safe and effective and more superior to vaccines that have been licensed for years in terms of efficacy and safety he highlighted the pfizer vaccine as highly effective he reported as more people get vaccinated community immunity will grow larger and the increase of the likelihood of getting virus under control um he informed uh that precautions are put in place but there's still limits of course deficits and potential harms

092with the precaution in the vaccine with that risk benefit the doctor stated he would still recommend the vaccination um obviously he did not give a recommendation on the policy because if mr lindy asked him to and he's like no thank you i will not be doing that um in reference to the cons he stated he would need to know the percentage of students being vaccinated schools in order to see if there would be an impact in population immunity a few more that i'll highlight i promise i won't read it always think this will be good stage setting um he had referenced that if people are not you know when we talked about the cons if if people are not ready to accept the requirement the pushback of course could be significant i'll let ms bolton

093speak for herself but i know this was one of her concerns of course leaving the district and um being careful about when we wield our authority um he also informed us that again he could not tell us what to do regarding a an actual policy around vaccinating students he recommended to do the steps necessary to accommodate as many as possible mr lindy asks about the possibility of creating a policy mandating the worry of wearing of a mask if the choice is not to get vaccinated he stated the doctor stated taking the vaccine is not a pass to stop wearing the mask and recommended continue wearing masks until we have control of the virus and then lastly committee members express their opinions and concerns about mandating or not mandating concerns include students needing to be vaccinated

094to attend cps the risk of families leaving the district supporting students wearing masks then being vaccinated high contact sports requiring vaccination and athletic directors supportable athletes and coaches being vaccinated a couple actions were taken we asked for further follow-up on vaccination requirements for specific groups what might that look like as opposed to the overarching policy what would it look like to have vaccination requirement for extracurricular close contact sports and special needs population and i'll let board members talk about that that were proponents of it another action was that we would discuss this at today's meeting which we're doing now um and that we would seek parent feedback um which hopefully we can get an update on like when we may be able to see some of that from administration um and then on november 18th

095we will revisit this discussion i would assume uh largely influenced by what we talk about now okay so you just you wanted miss bolton to add something well i'm just looking for i'm feed what people think i mean we've talked about but we've never really we thought it was important to give the four who are not in the committee an opportunity to say something about it if they wanted to um so it's going to influence so the question for board is do folks have questions or comments just with the presentation and like given about the work of the policy committee and where things are now go ahead mistake i appreciate the work uh i think that this is a good basis as we follow the approval of the vaccination progress so uh you know instead

096of starting from scratch in six months or nine months or a year you're laying some groundwork and doing some really good research to build on so as as we know there will be changes uh that uh a lot of the work will already be uh you know under under our feet and uh you'll be ready to go with uh with the policy as the environment uh changes and vaccines get approved for very young people other questions or comments mr lindy i was hesitant to go president jones because i was in the meeting it's okay if i go anyway yeah um i think um mr morowski one of the things that came back i don't know if you got a chance to see it or not with the results from that possible survey did you see

097other people get those not the only only ones yes i'm just gonna ask that question okay yeah uh so i'll bore them to you again just make sure you got them um but i was other people it was um pretty clear from those results that this is not something that even close to a majority of parents are supporting and i'm trying to make meaning of that myself i think i shared my kind of cast me i think accurately as like a middle position being like a new year um and i like i signed my son up next week to get vaccinated i think everybody should um but i i do have great cause about um requiring something that's such a clear majority of parents at least based on that information don't support um i think

098that you know things we could revisit just as i read it but the way the question was worded it just set a requirement for vaccines you know and i think there's i would advocate something like we did for teachers you know that said like either you can have a vaccine or there's some alternative um i don't know if that's testing or if that's continued worse wearing of a mask once we don't have to wear masks anymore i'm not sure um but i did want to at least give air time to the fact that there were some striking numbers i thought um and i the last thing i wanted to say on this was um you know one one argument that i did find compelling on the pro vaccine requirement side was if it's true that

099kids are needing to quarantine at home a lot they're missing instruction and that's really that that's a real challenge given how much ground we're trying to make up the thing i didn't know the answer to was how many kids are actually being quarantined at home um and so one one request i wanted to make for the future it doesn't have to be tomorrow it doesn't even have to be next meeting but at some point uh in the next couple of weeks could we get some kind of numbers on like how much home quarantine is happening and how big a problem is that or isn't it um and should should we be trying to take a posture of trying to convince the community to be in this with us or should should we really back off

100off of this kind of crime yeah and if i i'm gonna insert my comments next because i always forget i always go laughing um i i think it's great for us to have this kind of conversation now and continue with it i think this is very different and i think everybody knows that and you know because um if it's kids we don't want we're not kicking kids out of school um while while i want all of our kids to be faith and vaccinated because that's my personal value system we're not dealing with kids really we're dealing with parents and and their desires around it i think there's something to be said and maybe we can look at how we might support those who want it by offering uh venues to get it or direct them

101in the right place or thinking about incentives or something like that and the the one area though that i am most concerned is around some of the extracurriculars where i've solved some data that suggested that we have high numbers of quarantine for our athletes and you know extracurriculars are privileged they're not necessarily require their privilege and so we may want to think is there anything different about that or should we be doing something about that but i really appreciate you bringing it up now so that we can just stay on top of it and and i do agree with mr lindy that we need to look at that data because it was very telling yeah and i i found that document mr lindy was talking about he's right i mean the number is 66 of

102all respondents did not support right student vaccination 34 did and that's out of respondents or 26.9 percent of the people who sent two and notably 48.2 percent from non-title one school said they did support it fifty one point eight percent of families from non-title yeah uh yeah i got that right 76.5 said no from title schools yeah okay so lots of stuff to think about um miss bowers and then mr messer yes thank you president jones and thank you um for remember marowski um for um even um coming back and wanting to hear this feedback from the entire board and um for me um just thinking about what president jones said it is apparent of conversation even though we're talking about our kids um and it looked different to me and i think i was

103asked this question before and i said i would really have to see what that all entails as we gave teachers options in our uh vaccination requirement it's not a mandate it was a requirement policy we gave them options of either being vaccinated or having weekly testing if we are following and so i'm not mistaken i believe of what member morality says to be the same um alignment for the children or students um the same type of vaccine requirements as a public school how do we go about if this was to go into play how would you go about the options for parents the undue burden that would cause them if they choose not to vaccinate would it be their responsibility to do the testing that is parallel to the adults which is the undue burden

104and then we talk about sports they roll back to not just high school sports and extracurricular we have triple a pathway in elementary school so that will affect all of our kids and all of our grades even if we did the requirement as a privilege you know extra because of privilege but we push that we want them to do more art they want to do much correct extracurricular activities so that will also be an undue burden for the vaccine requirement it's not a mandate we have a policy for a vaccine requirement which gives families and adults choice so how at the public schools we have already said we're not kicking kids out so how do we accommodate that do we offer testing at the school and demand that if they don't get vaccinated probably not

105so those would be some of the concerns that i would have as a board member deciding on something like this when those came up and the committee and answer your question directly the way the policy is currently written it does mirror the faculty and co-located partners so at present yes it says it's on family to figure it out so if it were to pass which doesn't seem quite frankly very likely at this point um which is good you know fine um yeah i mean there would be a world could you make it more accessible because it would be an undue burden on a lot of fans again i think miss bolton brought a point similar to this or exactly like the meeting so but yeah that's currently the policy mirrors in many ways the other

106one thank you um i think on this topic in most topics it's hard to argue with engagement data and i think you know it's very clear that our families um spoke loudly in their opposition for a mandated vaccine uh but i think there are a lot of parents that perhaps are like me maybe like i think mr lindy talked um my daughter turns five on wednesday and the middle two have their appointment that day to get it done we want that it's just i don't feel like i wouldn't mandate that for others so i'm i was actually going to say exactly what um president jones said which is i do think there are a lot of families who have a lot of questions because it has been confusing and i think an educational campaign 6

107a.m at the gym this morning there's an editorial that said we're not trying to push the vaccine on children we want to make sure that you have access to the information because people are confused and they put up a qr code and then they kept saying we're not asking you to do this but we also want to make sure you have access to the information and i think getting that information and that if we could have sites available because it's not easy to find the places that will actually do it and so i think a well thought out communication plan to educate our families and make sure we're bringing that information to them and then let them know on these dates that these schools you can register and here's a process i bet a lot

108would opt into that this would be opposed to mandating miss bolton yes uh and i think as chairman moroski mentioned we put this on the agenda uh since we wanted to talk have a fellow board members um participate and give us guidance before we go back into committee so this has been helpful um uh i just uh coming to terms with this i think um i i just don't believe this is our role this is this is to me uh as a person that does not have children and i'm the only one uh here um that doesn't uh i i hold a parent's role as staff within their children um so having said that i think that we should do everything we can possibly do to facilitate as many of our children getting vaccinated i

109think too it was our role to insist that employees be vaccinated so that we could keep our schools open i think mr lindy raises an important topic about how many kids might be losing instructional time because they're not i think that's something to think about i think still on the table for me is whether or not extracurricular folks or even some of the special needs kids whether it's just close contact or what have you i think that's still something to talk about but i don't think the data proves to us that schools remain open if the kids are vaccinated but we did know that we had to shut down any number of times last year because our employees were not vaccinated and so i would encourage us to keep talking about this because it took

110us several months to get where we needed to get but i i do think that it clearly is not our role and most of the vaccination issues have i think this state has pointed this out a number of times those are state laws not necessarily individual school board policies and then finally i think what we really need to do is stay the course on what we prioritize right now in the district and and have this discussion but not get dissuaded from what we really must do and i think if by doing this we might reduce the number of kids that are it or families that are in cps i do think that might happen although other people said it will increase it but i also think that um if we were getting to get embroiled

111in this discussion much further than uh open discussion i think that we might um make uh how should i say bring out passions that we really don't need necessarily participating bring out passions i like that okay so we've got we've got there's nothing more important than a child's health but that's up to the parents to figure that out yeah so mr marowski i hope we've given you enough information to share the policy committee that at least you all can go back and think it through some more and absolutely decide the course of action absolutely yeah i i do i do feel i need to give a shout out to um um lieutenant bunty and her team that are making the vaccine available for the kids for whom are eligible that that work is happening right

112and so folks that don't know that um we it it it is happening we'll continue um to make it happen so we'll talk about this again on thursday you know look at the you know the other options and to miss bates point you know i think it's prudent to keep this on the table because you know things are changing so rapidly and cps is leading on it so we'll keep it on the shelf and we'll revise some stuff on thursday and bring it back sounds good thank you okay um moving on and i'm gonna try to move through quickly uh miss bolton want to give you time for the uh item transportation and enrollment challenges yes um and and uh this is a quick one i think uh to get there um we mentioned earlier

113about how the proper maps would help us if we had more data on those proper maps that show where our kids are living and then what schools they're going to so that's the enrollment part of it uh because you need a fair reading of how many kids we are needing to transport and a fair reading as to which of our schools are under enrolled or over enrolled or what have you that's the enrollment part the the transportation part we've not dealt with and it's a pretty specific one and that was and i it might turn into an assignment and i i think it will but on november uh 5th and our communications people and our transportation people are aware of it on november 5th uh metro sorta released a press pump a release the press

114release and that press release um had several paragraphs in it but two things that were said in it particularly were some disturbing to me one they said that we had not as a district communicated with them about certain things and this would have been since we asked the administration and i think they did this to make the public records request and also uh the letter was sent to i guess the chair of the board of sorta and after that they're saying we are not communicating to them and this is a press release and two they've actually stated in this press release that through everybody's effort we have now according to ridership the direct quote from the press release according to ridership data cps student ridership on metro services service has stabilized to pre-pandemic numbers with

115approximately 9 000 student trips each day now that's a spin because people are thinking that's 9 000 students which we know clearly is not the case that's true and so my point is i would think that we need to look at this press release see where we diverge from what they're saying and make sure that indeed they know we've communicated to them and have made even a public reckless request and a formal letter to their board chair which apparently they don't know and then i think we've got to find out more numbers even if we have to have a more historic view of the numbers and i think we've talked about that any number of times and i know you guys have worked on it and we have it but i'm now concerned about the

116numbers that were pre-pandemic as to how they were counting how many of our kids were writing or not writing or what a trip is versus a student past i think that we're being perhaps out communicated in this matter because again um this some of this is just not true okay any reaction comment uh you may want to make this an assignment so that we can follow up lindy i just i don't know how many folks will watch 30 rock when it was on but there's the scene where jack donaghy's character goes to washington dc and it's talking alex baldwin uh and there's a scene where there's a leak in the roof and it's hitting like al alex baldwin on the head or something i think there's a leak in the roof he says no there's

117no leak there's no leak so no i'm watching it it's like leaking right now it says no no we did a study there's no leak going on you know like that that's what this feels like a little bit to me you know where there's a there's a in a it it's um i i find so helpful the reporting and the surveys that the administration put together the whole because i think it says there's actually a very very different story happening for families uh and i just wanted to echo my support for wanting to be uh clear about that okay other comments so i i would suggest you make it as an assignment let us look at the review at the press release um i think in your last comment was you thought that we were

118being out communicated um there may be something maybe we need to relook our strategy i mean if they're putting this stuff out maybe because one of the things that i know and have appreciated is that we we are now getting data that makes sense to us you know wouldn't be a bad idea to just show up at their public meetings with our data and share with the public i mean we got to think of ways to you know um respond i will say um or not necessarily fun but just to share information with them about what we know and this legitimate data i don't know i'm just talking off the top of my head but but uh i i think there are ways to strategize around it in a positive way i agree and i

119think uh it's not that we haven't done a good job right we every day every community group yeah we talk about it but we're doing this we're doing this work in public and their sort of lord is not and they have found an easier way i guess to express what they're doing or not doing than us who try to do the people's business in public yeah okay thank you for bringing that up and um you know again you might want to make that an assignment and we'll just take the next step from here okay so the fourth item um has been withdrawn until a different another time so we're going to move on fairly quickly um we are now at the item on the agenda for hearing the public each speaker will have two minutes

120and we'll direct all comments to the presiding officer um consistent with the board's bylaws the board has the ability to limit the hearing of the hearing of the public on any single issue and will exercise the right to do so if needed once a request to speak has been granted you will be invited to enter please click on the camera icon to go interactive provide your name your affiliation to the district your school community your topic and your contact information if you want a direct response to any questions you might have this request is consistent with board protocol we appreciate your compliance we reserve the right to not permit you to speak if you do not comply again each speaker will have two minutes to speak and they only speak once when the timer goes

121off your time is up please refrain from discussing any personnel item after speaking you will briefly see the welcome screen again as you transition back to the live stream meeting we ask that your public commentary be respectful of all those listening in thank you how many ten speakers okay uh our first speaker is karen nimbus followed by michelle dillingham followed by winner oliver forehead miss embers good evening my name is karen imbes and i am a field representative for the cincinnati federation of teachers teachers are justifiably afraid of retaliation should they address the school board during the hearing of the public so on their behalf i am sharing their grave concerns about the district's new bi-weekly assessments we have heard from hundreds of teachers who are outraged about this new time-consuming top-down mandate and i

122want to be perfectly clear about this teachers do not object to the mandate uh and the the hand bi-weekly assessments because it's a hard thing for teachers to do no it would be easy for teachers to comply with the directive the reason teachers are outraged about the bi-weekly assessments is because they are a waste of precious instructional time and teachers care about students the most important role of cps leadership is to make sure that every classroom every day is led by a highly qualified teacher but what we have seen this year when we all knew that kova would cause higher teacher absent rates as that the district has utterly failed its basic responsibility leaving dozens of classrooms each day without qualified substitutes there are 165 teaching vacancies in the district we've filed new numerous grievances

123for class size violations the lack of overload parents the fact that there are not parents for specialized units and that one-on-one paras are diverted to cover other roles many intervention specialist caseloads exceed the limits established by state law properly staffing schools would have a much bigger impact on student growth and these poorly constructed bi-weekly assessments which appear to be designed to justify a new layer of bureaucracy instead of burning teachers out with useless top-down assessment mandates the district leadership should send central office administrators to the schools help provide the direct instruction that does impact student issues thank you our next speaker is michelle billingham followed by luna oliver followed by kinderfell go ahead ms billingham thank you good evening my name is michelle dillingham i work at cft and i'm testifying on bi-weekly assessments on

124behalf of our members to protect them from retaliation high-stakes assessments are defined as any assessment activity that is used for accountability purposes and we reject the use of these because they have no positive benefit for our students our teachers know this because they are the experts from their years of training and classroom experience it is shameful that this district is lapsing back to an era of no child left behind where test and drill prep of our children caused so much damage where educators and parents fought back against teaching to the test that only enriched multinational testing companies like savas and pearson to the detriment of our children in our public schools we've known this for years we've been fighting this for years that high stakes testing does not give an accurate picture of educational quality

125and that they have been used to further defund and shut down our schools and to de-professionalize and privatize the teaching profession our kids are already undergoing significant testing so let's be clear this is not really about supporting students this is and has always been about trying to blame teachers for a system that continues to fail our children a math teacher crunched the numbers and these added tests will take up to 19 percent of their total precious instructional time just to make sure teachers are doing their jobs this is a slap in the face and is unfair to our district's children and their parents who entrust us with their children's education and it's also by the way great way to ensure that they won't be grade level ready our teachers are standing up for our students

126and parents and refusing to participate in what amounts to data collection for this pearson company savas we refuse to return to the mistakes of the past over testing our children in urban districts so testing companies can make billions of dollars in profits in the name of accountability our public testimony to you is our last resort we need you to intervene to stop thank you ms dillingham thank you miss dillingham our next speaker is winona oliver followed by kendra phelps followed by edward alden go ahead ms oliver can you see me can you hear me good evening my name is dr winona oliver i would like to share some light on the impact the two-week cycle assessments could have on students with disabilities and english language learners most of these students get extended time when taking

127assessments though the administration says the two-week cycle assessments take only five to fifteen minutes some assessments take an entire class period for the typical general ed student that would mean missing two days of instruction per core content area each month for students with disabilities and esl students who have extended time for assessment which usually time and a half or double time this could mean missing up to four days of instruction per content area each month most of these students are not performing on grade level and actually need more instruction not less by the time they return to the classroom after the extended time of testing period the general ed teacher has already continued the classroom instructions so now the student with disability or esl student is more behind than they were when they left for

128testing this will happen every other week making it impossible for them to improve or more likely their deficit will continue to get worse since they will be missing instruction every other week in all content areas due to the time taken away from instructional time more instruction is needed for these students to aid in academic recovery not more in testing in addition the administration says that it's all right for students to continually fail the assessment i beg to differ many of these students already have very low self-esteem and now could possibly fail multiple assessments every other week for a social emotional perspective this is just too much teachers are asking for flexibility as it pertains to two-week cycle assessments they know the individual needs of their students much better than the district administrators please give them

129the flexibility to do what is best for their students in regards to the two-week cycled assessments thank you very much thank you our next speaker is kendra phelps followed by ed edward alley my name is kendra phelps i am a cps graduate a parent a teacher leader with cft and a taxpayer i'm speaking based on the feedback that i receive from the cps curriculum councils which are comprised of teacher leaders throughout the district we are asking that teachers be given flexibility to use the district two-week cycle assessments in a way that provides teachers with data they can use to inform their instruction and also doesn't rob students of critical um instructional time this current mandate to test every student in every subject every two weeks quite frankly is testing abuse as a parent i sent

130my child back in person during a pandemic so he can have rich meaningful learning experiences not to be tested constantly the curriculum councils have presented resolutions to the interim superintendent and her team about the end that exposes the inadequacies of these assessments the negative impact is having on student self-esteem and their motivation to learn however it seems that there's more commitment to top-down mandates instead of collaborating with principals and teachers who are doing the real work every educator knows that when several students experience difficulty with an assignment it's not the students that's the problem it's the assignment that needs to be rethought we are asking that you rethink this mandate to test every student every subject every two weeks thank you thank you our next speaker is edward alley followed by christina logan followed by

131ruth de boehner mr ali great thank you my name is ed ali i'm a parent of two boys at walnut hills high school i want to thank the board and the staff and administration for your service in this difficult time to keep our kids learning and safe however i'm one of the parents in that possible study that said no part of the 66 percent i wanted to share my thoughts on my opposition to this possible mandate for coveted vaccines for eligible students i'm not anti-vaccine i'm team pfizer my boys are vaccinated my wife is vaccinated and i believe that vaccines are a powerful effective tool in addressing this pandemic but i don't believe it's the place of the school district or school board to mandate the vaccine this decision should be the parents or legal

132guardians of those minors i advise to all parents to vaccinate their student or vaccinate their children but i understand that there are many who are really concerned about it not due to vaccine conspiracy theories but just due to normal parental worry the kaiser family foundation recently found that 54 percent of parents have not had their eligible student eligible children vaccinated of those 76 percent feel it's just because there's not enough long-term data 53 of parents worry that their authority will be taken away from them that their children will be mandated to take a vaccine that they are worried about even though we know there's rigorous safety data out there it's because of this safety data that we know that there is a small risk of myocarditis the cdc as of november 10th has found 1013

133cases among people who are 12 to 29 years of age we know that the uk and taiwan have pumped the brakes on that second dose of pfizer for those those children and that age range the vaccine there's a bigger risk with myocarditis from catching covid but is it the school board's place to take that risk for these students it's the parents risk that's the one that should be taken additionally i'm out of time thank you mr alley our next speaker is scott logan all by ruth de bono followed by danita here alright mr logan yeah good evening thank you for letting me speak i'm a cincinnati resident and parent i want to share my concerns about videos thank you go ahead um i want to share my concerns about the uh government shots for students

134and i do appreciate the direction you've um you've moved this evening on that uh realize that that these shots are an entirely new technology fundamentally different than traditional vaccines and the pharmaceutical companies are making a lot of money and paying that forward to their partners in the medical community and also the media and government and ads and lobbying cdc uh has an interest in perpetuating that relationship in fact in september the cdc actually changed their definition of vaccine and vaccination why to exclude immunization as the purpose vaccine literally moving the goal post to uh to a the traditional purpose of a vaccine the city's own cc's own uh vaccine adverse event reporting system bears uh which is also known to under report has already logged over 8 000 deaths uh and over 600 000 adverse

135events in the us uh including young people you can look it up uh you can read the specifics on those cases and this is not acceptable for children the chances of injury and death from these shots uh far exceed that of the virus itself from what i understand and in in my view no child should get these shots much less should they be mandated previously infected are known to have actual full robust immunity from covet and no evidence of perfection perhaps half the district already has this uh like i said the shots aren't even for immunization per the cdc why would why in the world would you mandate them for district children thank you mr logan our next speaker followed by danita parish followed by cfc president julian mr bonham hi hi um i'm ruth

136de bono i'm a student at walnut hills high school and i'm a member of the young activist coalition um so it's been you know it's going back tomorrow but it's still new and different it's just for everyone but the importance of protecting black brown and disabled students in schools has not changed this conversation surrounding sros and school discipline have continued there have been many questions about legitimacy and veracity of the data presented by us the young actors coalition in the aclu despite all of our data data coming directly from either the civil rights data collection which is data reported directly from cps or from a public records request made from cpd um we have sent the data directly to board members and we know that um the person we're working with at the aclu elena

137thompson and daniel hoying have had meetings have had a meeting so there's no reason to continually legitimize our data and reasoning without showing concrete reasons or to simply be legitimized perspectives because we're children and you do not want our voices to be heard the data selected discussed from this healthy the most recent health and safety meeting as well as one in september show themselves that there's disparity in the near discipline on black students and students of color and white students so your own day the school board's own data that they presented in the health and safety meeting also shows exactly what we've been saying for months um additionally the goal should not be [Music] the punishment you know the discipline's disparate oh just you know we want it we want it to be the same

138for every race no we want it send punishment and inclusionary discipline and replace it with restorative and transformative justice so that eventually none of these students are being expelled for normal childhood behavior when there are other effective and non-harmful options that will allow our students to more effectively learn and grow in their school and be punished and funneled into the school to prison pipeline especially for black and brown thank you thank you miss obama thank you mr bono our next speaker is daniva parish followed by cft president miss parish thank you i am the parent of a of walnut hills students i want to address several topics the first um being the testing um the two-week cycle testing i asked the district look at this from an equity point of view particularly looking at the

139amount of time it's taking away instructional time that it's taking away from students with disability and english language learning students and i ask that the board consistently look at the equity issues in addressing the vaccine issue and addressing the issue of school discipline and school resource office and school resource officers one request that i have of the word is to share what the district's plan is in terms of rolling out um restorative justice in the schools that's something that has been talked about and it would be helpful for me as a community member and as a parent to have specific information on how the board how the school district intends to roll that out what the timeline is for rolling that out and what to expect in terms of that for the kids who are

140negatively impacted by sros who are being criminal lies put into the juvenile justice system it's a crucial issue and it's an urgent issue so i think it would be helpful if we could have that information shared publicly in terms of what the plan thank you miss parish thank you mr the last speaker is cfc president good evening everyone um i'm here this evening speaking on behalf of the teachers and cps to protect them from their fear of retaliation as we work through this testing process um teachers across the district are being bullied um if they don't go along fully with this process and many of the tests are not valid or reliable we have heard from teachers across the district but mostly teachers who teach the course subjects about the testing abuse that is happening

141across our district creating an educational malpractice against our students there is becoming a tiered system for teachers core and non-core teachers who are in the non-core teachers are at greater risk for termination and that is where we have some of the greatest shortages of teachers we are here this evening because as you may have seen and heard at the hearing of the public at the student achievement committee on friday november 5th the one-size-fits-all temperature checks which are the two-week cycle short cycle assessments are not valid or reliable assessments teachers have been trying to address the issue with these assessments for the past six to eight weeks to no avail the textbook companies have stated that their curriculum does not include short cycle assessments and what the district is using is not a reliable information or

142data for teachers to use as a formative assessment as a matter of fact i believe that they're that we have been told that the assessments are not a measure of student growth but they are actually there just to monitor the t-shirt teacher usage i have examples from every grade level showing the inappropriate levels of the assessments teachers need to provide instruction and administer assessments that are aligned with the status state standards for student growth as they're moving forward i understand the district's desire to accelerate learning but the district needs to pause until teachers have the flexibility to do this right for the sake of their students or survey results only seven percent of teachers feel that the two-week cycle of assessments will help provide instruction that is tailored to student needs only 4.9 percent of

143teachers agree or strongly agree that the two-week assessments are beneficial um get to getting students on grade level number three 94.1 percent of teachers feel that the temperature checks are not aligned or partially aligned to the content covered in their instruction most teachers feel the assessments require a significant amount of instructional time and this loss of instructional time is not good for their students as you can see there are many concerns with the loss of instructional time across the district my greatest concern though is that the culture of the district is creating in the schools with the top-down mandate the directors of schools have been meeting with principals and mandating teachers to complete assessments or be disciplined up to termination or principles will be disciplined up to termination principles ask why the distance why the

144district wants to run teachers away their response was if teachers aren't compliant we don't want them really you don't want teachers principals feel that their hands are tied and they have to write teachers up and this is not how you build a positive culture within buildings or schools many of you have knowledge of mental health issues these assessments do not support the mental health or well-being of students or faculty my concern is that teachers are becoming and bordering on being burnt out from the positions of too much on their plate they can't get it all done and how will we return from that damage in the future our belief is that the administration's most important job is to make sure every child's class is taught by a qualified teacher and the district has failed on

145this we have way too many classrooms that are being taught by paras and others who are not the certified teachers because we have a shortage of teachers already instead they are focused on reducing teaching time and to add additional testing time we need to trust the teachers and not the tests teachers need the flexibility to meet the needs of their students to accelerate the learning of students across the district and thank you for your time thank you hold on thank you thank you for the seller hold on okay we generally don't make statements but this sounds like you can't yeah this is just one forget about the topic you just talked about there's a word that i would just ask adults to to really think before you use it an employer asking their employees to

146do something is not bullying we can call it lots of things we can say we disagree but if somebody was bullied and ultimately that bullying landed in the intensive care unit kids are committing suicide because they're bullied these this is an important word that we can't just throw out there in emotion to try to get people excited about a topic okay so if we could use a different word than bullying um when it's not appropriate i think it's best for our children thank you thank you all right we made it okay miss uh we does anyone have any kudos miss balance yes i have kudos um first to the super interim superintendent and the dsl team um i attended the osba conference in um columbus um and i've um they did a very good presentation

147um on the principal pipeline as well as uh ms fear brooks director of early childhood education was a part of the student achievement fair and she represented uh our great work that we're doing in early childhood my second kudos um is actually to uh josh harden uh with cps athletics who did a beyond the game um conference or our guest facebook live event with with um coaches and and students um and some parents around um mental health so i want to get kudos to mr harden international superintendent her team as well as our administration thank you this state followed by mr lindy yes i i attended two uh events last week that were pretty awesome so i want to give these two schools kudos one was gamble montessori high school uh that hosted our um

148our meaning the senator who's blessing and it was a great morning not only did what was breakfast provided by by the staff we received a great tour a great overview of the school two students that were exceptional who talked about you know their plans for the future and they also babysat senator blessings two children the two-year-old and the five-year-old who came that morning with him because it was his day to provide child care so thanks and kudos to gamble montessori high school and the other fun event i attended last week was a hyde park elementary pumpkin chuck it was it was a great celebration everybody was happy people were you know very uh congenial they uh there were there were booths there was a great bake sale and uh it was just a lot of

149fun so kudos to hyde park elementary thank you mr lindsey thank you president jones i i possibly could have said this earlier during mrs bauer's stack committee notes but i just wanted to give a little airtime and appreciation to the staff at evanston academy who gave such a wonderful presentation i learned some things in that meeting i didn't know before about what it takes to become a blue ribbon school of excellence from the department of ed and that there were only two schools in the entire state of ohio and i believe it was 2019 on that distinction and that evanson was one of them when the school is almost entirely economic disadvantaged students and earned an a on the state report card and i just think that's such a one and to hear the way

150their team talks about that building what it feels like to be a staff member there or a student there i think it is so powerful to see here in cincinnati public schools an entire school that is writing a different story about what should be possible everywhere in school districts across the country and i think it's remarkable and i wanted to offer some kudos and say thank you thank you mr morocco i along with president jones miss bowers and ms bolton were able to be at the ohio school board association conference and um our early education team had a booth uh led by ms sphero brooks at the student achievement fair um bragging about all of the good work we have done with our friends at preschool promise to expand preschool opportunities and earlier throughout the

151city and then our superintendent johnny amont and her team presented on principal leadership i unfortunately was picked up by my wife and left but i'm sure one of you can reiterate how awesome it was um but it was fun to be up there with the superintendent and with the colleagues um the cps was well represented um and uh it's the first osba event i had been to i've done a lot of the council great city schools as you all know um that was the first official osba thing i went to besides training and it was really cool um people knew about us and things that we do down here people wanted to talk about staff vaccination policies that kudo i guess to everybody now really all the different things we've done the anti-racism policy came

152up a good bit that alma brought up earlier so kudos to everybody i guess um it was it was kind of a neat environment to be like oh your cps you guys are doing some big things so kudos all right um mistakes present the retirements please yes i have several retirements to honor this evening uh they're all civil service personnel beverly early michael ewing roger hambrick bernetta johnson serena phelps virginia price dianne masters stubert russell and lynn sparks so we thank these professionals for all that they've done for our students and we wish them well in their future congratulations thank you okay so let's go to our resolutions we're going to run through these fairly quickly with the ability to discuss if we need to mr moroski first one uh this is resolution 3120 uh

153resolution amending board policy uh employment of professional employees these are minor uh changes and a lot of language added as we do from time to time to update them with the newest state law i present the resolution as written is there a second any discussion mr gustin please call mrs bates hi miss bolton hi this is bauer yes mr linden yes mr messer mr moroski yes president jones yes miss bolton please present the next resolution yes uh a resolution amending board policy 3120.04 employment of substitution i submit and hopefully is there a second any discussion disgusting mrs bates aye miss bolton aye this is bowers yes mr lendy yes mr messer yes mr moroski yes president jones yes mr lindy thank you president jones uh i have here amended board policy 3120.06 on selecting student

154teachers uh i do have one question about the policy i can i can end discussion in discussion so i propose this for uh passage has written okay is there a second any discussion mr bendy yes thank you um mr hoing i i did read through the red line and i think i just forgot i didn't write it down from policy what the what the spirit of this change was i couldn't find what the difference was on the red line but i also might have missed it i wanted to just check believe it okay we can't hear you guys sorry mike said uh it was adding the background check i just saw it in both versions i wasn't sure the second version that's great so that's just my error and i think we should vote so

155thank you okay i still don't know what you said i'm sorry no it's okay i was um concerned that i couldn't follow what the difference was between the old policy and the one that's proposed i think i was making the mistake of looking at the clean version uh which is why it should look just like that okay so thank you all right any other questions comment point of privilege real quick yes just so everyone knows when we get these so they're both identical every time the first one kind of pdf will be the corrections and the second one's just clean for like storage for later on yep okay mr destin please call though this is bolton hi this is mr landing yes mr messer yes mr marowski yes there's no jones okay mr marowski you're

156up again uh it's a resolution amending board policy 3120.08 employment of personnel for a co-curricular or extracurricular activities again um just cleaning these up to match our actual board policy in actual practice um and adding language makes compliant with all of our state masters i recommend passage as written thank you is there a second second any discussion mr gustin listen hi miss bolton hi mrs bowers mr landing yes mr messer yes mr marowski yes those ninjas yes ms bolton please present the next resolution uh i believe this is correct uh but i i might be confused on it um a resolution rescinding board policy 4112 or employee communication yes is there a second second example any discussion just real quick yeah this is just uh it sounds pretty dramatic i think they are rescinding policy

157about board employee communications this is a reminder we updated it and we have a real a good one that's like more 21st century and about what we do so just for everyone's watching like we're not getting rid of yeah thank you any other discussion mr dustin mrs bates aye ms bolton aye this is bowers yeah mr lindy yes mr mouser yes mr marowski yes president jones yes mr lindy please present the next resolution uh thank you president jones uh i present a resolution with sending forward policy 4120 this was a duplicative policy um which this is cleanup and i presented as written thank you is there a second doctor any discussion mr gustin mrs bates miss bolton hi this is bowers yeah mr lindy yes mr messer yes mr morosky yeah president jones yes mr

158marowski you're up again policy committee's busy uh i present a resolution uh rescinding board policy 4120.04 employment of substitutes this is another uh another uh duplicative one as we've gone through and cleaned stuff up i presented as written okay thank you is there a second second any discussion mr gustin mrs bates aye ms bolton aye mr powers yes mr wendy yes mr mouser yes mr monoski yeah that's ben jones yes lastly miss bolton thank you a resolution of proving students eligible for subsidy reimbursement in lieu of transportation for the 21 22 school year i submitted thank you is there a second second any discussions mr gustin mr boots hi miss bolton hi mr bowers yeah mr wendy yes mr master yes mr morovsky yes president jones yes okay it's been a long time since we

159had that many resolutions but thank you all for your patience okay superintendent of mike do you have a report yes i do can you stay for that thank you we just want to start the report by saying it is american education week november 15 through the 19th so just want to say happy education week and thanks to all of our educators for the commitment to our students we are now in the process of new science curriculum adoption um and i'm happy to report that approximately over 1 000 cps students parents and staff joined us at the cincinnati museum uh to look at textbooks um hands-on experiences i mean it was just a fantastic opportunity for our staff students and parents to have hands-on materials for our science adoption sailor park had a ribbon cutting ceremony

160uh for their unveiling of the innovative learning lab the students will be able to build robots design video games and learn about circuit boards circuit board boards all thanks to our partners with verizon heart of america and arizona state university i would echo the shout out to gamble montessori um when that they hosted a state senator bill blessings it was a absolutely wonderful wonderful opportunity for our students to express their voice in their experience in schools um and i thank senator blessings for coming out and he also i shared an innovative idea to expand our schools program so we're going to try to leverage that work huge shout out 2021 high school football playoff congratulations to our high school football team gamble montessori high school chomp chomp hugh stem high school go big red schroder

161high school gold jaguars taft high school we love the senators walnut hills high school eagles and withrow university tigers we were well represented [Applause] and lastly i would just like to announce our job fair coming up november 18th we are looking for paraprofessionals special needs paraprofessionals and student service uh assistant the job fair will take place here at our ed center two to five that concludes my superintendent's report along with the written report from your approval thank you okay i need a motion to approve the superintendent's recommendations second oh thank you any discussion mr gustin please call bro thank you mrs bates aye ms bolton aye yes mr messer yes mr moloski yes president jones um i just i want to recuse on item e page 15 and item e on page 16. everything else

162is a yes thank you hey okay do i have a motion to approve the report of the treasurer sorry discussion the troops are fading any discussion no okay mr gustin all right this is bates aye ms bolton hi this is bowers yeah mr lindy yes mr messer mr morrowski yes yes okay are there any inquiries and updates okay mr lindy thanks president jones i just wanted to follow up on some of the um lockdown issues we were having a couple weeks ago um this was there was some concerns a number of different campuses that we just heard from different parents about and i haven't heard anything in the last couple of weeks but i also wanted to check you know how are things how are we feeling about student safety how should parents feel about

163how things are going we are we are continuing um to work with our school leaders and our community leaders ensuring safety at all of our school sites there has been a decrease in the lockdown anything else yeah thank you any any other inquiries and updates miss bolton just a quick update uh from a meeting i attended today part of the growing well board and they too uh a fantastic board they too have had issues regarding employment and keeping people whether it's the nurses or other health related folks and seeing this uh job fair kind of thing for our paraprofessionals whatever i i was moved by some of the stuff those folks said at this board meeting and thought and i offered a suggestion and they kind of i think liked it but might not be

164bad if since we're facing the same thing virtually every other employer is facing in almost all of our job categories might not be bad for the superintendent to be thinking about uh you know including some of our partners that are uh manning and and and personally if you will our school-based health centers and our other health uh providers to see if we can partner in in more career opportunity opportunities but career fairs and one of the things was that it was said by a person i really trust greatly [Music] marilyn trump in this on that board and maryland said one of the things that first timers have that is difficult for them is that they get their masters in whatever whether it's psych or whether it's uh health and what have you is all of

165a sudden they got the masters and then you give them the full job and that's kind of daunting uh and maybe there's the only way to start recruiting people in all of these job areas for a school district but maybe a way to phase people into the employment meaning you don't come in right away as the full person responsible for the health and safety of this kid or that kid or this whole school but maybe there's a way to start to face people into these really huge jobs and and there are actual parts of the cst contract that actually would allow us to help um recruit people not just for teaching but a number of other ways that there's a partnership within that contract that would be tolerated and they'd be encouraged but i thought

166that was good because it really does take a village or something all the different kinds of employees we have whether it's security or health people or paraprofessionals whatever maybe or bus drivers anything else any other increase increasing update okay any assignment just folding yes uh this probably will not be as complete as it was in the beginning but i would like to assign to the administration a review and response and a validation or lack of validation to that press release by sort of metro i know that uh crystal boyle has already sent out the press release to the people that need to be working on it but i i think it would also be good to do a bit of a historic um rundown of some of these numbers pre-covered and look and see the

167spin that was there as well as the spin that has just occurred in that press release is one of the things too upsetting about that press release was that they were really questioning um that we surveyed our principles and fortunately the superintendent maintained now you don't need to meet with our principals individually sort of on that so we will find out what our principles are thinking and so it's uh i was pleased with that but they even said that something was wrong about us finding out things from our own great thank you any other assignments i have one uh this actually i thought i had made this assignment before but it could just be in my head um we need to start thinking about coming back into the ilc for our open meeting public meetings

168and i i want to assign administration the duty of um helping of figuring out the space uh capacity as it relates to social distancing and what have you and uh also for the board this is an assignment for us to just think about it um how we manage hearing of the public not asking for you to talk about that tonight but i i was hoping to put it on the agenda for next week um so if you could think about that how we would handle manage the hearing of the public piece um and uh so that's it that's the assignment so just let us know i i mean actually if you could let us know by next week that would be great because the sooner we get back in here i think the better off

169we'll be because we should have been back but anyway any other assignment okay having no other business i declare the meeting adjourned thank you