WSD Board Meeting, Regular, August 8, 2022

001[Music] here mr minor here miss newfoundland here mr phillips ms willis here dr jessepanger here my first item on the agenda this evening of the consent agenda are there any items in the consent agenda which board members would like to remove for separate discussion and action thank you doctor uh members of the lawmakers school board value the input of students parents staff members and community members the boards regularly schedule meetings provide an opportunity for opinions and concerns to be expressed publicly the board values all comments and will respectfully consider this input the board requests that individuals limit their comments on each item for three months following any public comment an individual board member may respond on the issue grants however it is not the intent of the public comment portion of the agenda for the

002board to enter into a debate with the number one members computer because non-attempted items are not publicly posted in advance no action will be taken on public economy regarding non-agenda items so this is uh open public comment it's only for things that are not from the agenda is there any problem in the world for any non-journalists seeing none jamie is there any online there are no hands raised we then move to the consent agenda are there any items on the consent agenda which board members would like to remove for separate discussion and action not to move one but can i just highlight one which is that we are again hopefully approving the student and family assistance program for health care which allows for six free sessions for families for medical health care um so just

003want to highlight that as a benefit um that's available to all of our families and students also under finance and operations um i would note that 3.08 shows up later we in the that in the consent agenda as it would be a separate point of discussion any community comments for any board any other board motion to approve the consent agenda minus section 3.7 second is [Music] yes mr phillips yes miss willis yes dr jessepanger yes next up is from the academics performance division the discussion on the renewal of the human growth and development chief officer dr nicole marvel did you get a presentation as we're working on the media perhaps i can give an overview verb for policy 24-14 human growth and development curriculum must be reviewed every three years so i want to point

004out that her war policy you have an obligation at the board to review this every three years in the fall of 2021 it was discovered uh that in the wallace school district the human growth and development curriculum had not been properly reviewed in 10 years and what that means is that there were revisions made at the middle school level but it did not go through the policy uh process and so therefore after the united states committee was born human growth and development is dictated and guided in the wisconsin state statute the statute that actually won 18.019 i board policy of 24 14. um it indicates that there must be a committee of external stakeholders uh consisting of parents teachers school ministers people students human uh health professionals members of the clergy and other residents of

005the school district uh to guide this work so that's really important to know that it is it's mandated that we're supposed to uh take in external guidance around this this work um [Music] the the work that you will hear about this evening i was guided through our national sex education standards which is a national uh standard that was created and identified by the society of health and physical educators or a organization called shape america so our physical education and health instructors around the nation they have identified the six national education standards that we are utilizing um as the standard that we should reference in addition the wisconsin department of public instruction has identified these standards as the foundation where most school districts should start their development of human growth and development so it's really important

006i think as we set the context for this conversation is that we came to this conversation because we were adhering to board policy we also are utilizing a standard that has been identified by again shape america but it's a national organization of health educators and physical educators as the foundation and it's really important to note that our department of public instruction has identified these standards as the foundation for any school district to to have these sets of discussions and then finally i would be remiss if we didn't talk about the fact that there is an external uh group of community members who have given i believe a significant amount of guidance and invested a lot of time and guiding this work as well so that's why we're here this evening i know there's been a

007lot of question as to why now well when you look at our policies and one of the directors that this board has given us as an administrative team is adhere to the politics as much as you can that's why they're there uh 24 14 really critical um the last thing i i promise is my last comment we talk a lot about mental health and social emotional mental health and what you will hear this evening is that a lot of what we consider to be issues that deal with mental health and how we treat one another within a school culture is embedded in this conversation so uh i'm i'm really proud of the work dr marvel and miss stever invested um it's important to note that they they didn't have a leader they were they they

008did this work on their own uh during the course of last school year it was a very heavy lift um i i saw firsthand uh the number of hours invested in listening to the external group and all the type of research that was involved in it but i want to give them an opportunity to really unpack this curriculum um that's before the board and the community this evening thank you for that introduction dr means um and thank you to all of you for the opportunity to bring forward the work of the human growth and development committees this evening um i am nicole marble the uh not director of secondary education anymore uh chief academic officer excuse me um i'm joined by another under other individuals who have participated in this process and i will allow

009them to introduce themselves starting with our director of curriculum hello everyone i am the director of curriculum jessica ebert i am dr jacqueline smith i'm a psychologist at children's and served on the external committee hi i'm kristen bell cover i am the owner and clinical director of clara healing institute in wauwatosa and i'm an lpc licensed professional counselor andrea antia and priscilla i'm tia mohassy and i teach at montpello middle school and i also have a student in the district as well i'm andrea powers i was formerly a classroom teacher in the district i am now an academic specialist hi i'm priscilla skyberg i'm a sixth grader long fellow and i'm here to get the student voices on human technical difficulties i apologize before i turn it over to mrs ebert um just want to

010acknowledge our internal uh committee members that participated in this process and mrs ebert will go in a little bit more depth as to what their role was and also just acknowledging our external committee members so if any of the individuals that are either on our internal committee or external committee are here this evening um if you could please stand and just let us know who's in the room thank you all right to really kind of start us off um just want to acknowledge that our human growth and development curriculum was guided by these four resources that you see before you um the first is policy 2414 which dr means um referenced it communicates a review to be conducted every three years which is why this review is being brought forward to you this evening and

011to reiterate uh some of dr means commentary already i want to acknowledge the community's curiosity around around why this is coming before the board now and as mrs ebert mentioned per policy 2414 the human growth and development curriculum must be reviewed every three years we discovered last fall that it had been 10 years since the curriculum's last review and as such we initiated the process immediately to bring the curriculum back into compliance with board policy so we commenced that in october of 2021. additionally this work was guided by wisconsin state statute 118.019 this statute communicates what must be included in hdd curriculum districts are not limited to this list but these topics must be included furthermore statute requires that a citizens advisory committee must be a part of the development process as such an internal

012committee was developed this committee was to be composed of parents teachers school administrators pupils health care professionals members of the clergy and other residents of the school district to advise the design and implementation of the curriculum no one category of members shall constitute more than one-fifth of the membership of the committee except for parents and that is written within the state statute therefore in october 2021 an interest survey went out to our community participants selected our participant selection was grounded on the again the no more than one category members shall constitute more than one-fifth of the membership of the committee respondents were sorted by their self-identified roles in the committee such as medical professional clergy caregiver etc per the identities listed in the state statute assurance also of varied school representation was taken into account

013when forming the committee the third document communicated on the slide is policy 2210 and policy 2210 served as another grounding resource this policy is what guides us throughout all of our course and program revisions finally the national sex education standards supported the development of the human growth and development curriculum these standards are communicated as guidance for districts to use per the department of public instruction publication human growth and development resource guide to assist school districts in policy and program development and implementation the external committee reviewed discussed and determined which of these standards should be included in the development of the proposed human growth and development curriculum the selection of standards are what the external committee deemed the most critical to be taught and at what grade level so that's where local control of the standards

014was initiated and communicated so as previously shared there were two teams that served in the development of the human growth and development curriculum renewal the internal committee supported the work production of the human growth and development curriculum the external committee which was that advisory committee was charged with advising and providing the perspective on what should be taught and when it should be taught there was dialogue discussion and ongoing feedback between these two committees next you'll be hearing from representatives representatives of these two teams about the specific work that occurred and again i wanted to take one more opportunity to thank the members of the internal committee as outlined on the screen as well as the members of the external committee as outlined on the screen so at this time i'm going to invite jackie and

015kristen members of our external human growth and development committee to come forward to share about the worship that this team um participated in thank you um so the first thing that we were really tasked with as the external committee was to work together to try to develop a prevent statement that would guide all of our discussions and work um and this really happened in multiple iterations including developing a subcommittee that really tried to gather the viewpoints of all of the members of the committee and really boil them down to the essence of what we all felt was important so you can see where we landed and i will just read that for everyone to kind of take in together with a community of educators and families students in the wauwatosa school district will be empowered

016to develop healthy relationships to engage in respectful communication and to practice responsible decision-making that is grounded in the importance of self-worth and the dignity of others prepared instructors will provide grade level appropriate information on sexual health that is current factual consistent and inclusive i think we can move to the next slide please um so after we really and i would say spent hours on that purpose statement um our next tasks were really going standard by standard through all of those national sex education standards and having robust discussion about about them and when i say robust there was not you know consensus every time i think it was a deep and fruitful conversation that happened over the course of many hours and many meetings there was a lot of discussion about what should be taught and

017when it should be taught but again that was also going back and forth with our internal committee so we would develop our thoughts share it with them and then we would also hear back from them um and i want to just say that i think we leaned heavily on the expertise that we had in the group and the diversity of opinions so we had you know people that were able to talk about the american medical association the american academy of pediatrics we had people um like myself who could talk about the american psychological association and child development and how this pertains to the work that we were doing we had obviously many educators on the part of it as well and so i think that that really was a strength of our group um that

018we could hear a variety of opinions and those opinions really did inform the discussion and the choices that were made so things were maybe moved to different levels because of that or to different ages as a result of feedback a couple other examples that come to mind are the transparency of the lessons that are being taught and how important that is to the community and also how opting out could happen that it wasn't just across the boards but that it was less than by lesson that that would be an option to try to meet sort of the diversity of opinions in the group i'm going to that was my high level overview of what we did and i think that they're in addition to crips and who will speak next a variety of members who

019also can lend kind of their experiences working on the external committee thank you hi everybody um i wanted to just second everything that she said um regarding that high level overview of the work that the external committee did but i also thought that based on just my experience of being part of this external committee that i might kind of walk you through a little bit of what that experience was actually like when we um all you know started to gather several you know many weeks back in the summer and started to plan for this this project and um as i was sort of reflecting on that i felt like i might need to sort of include some of the reasons why i was compelled to be a part of this um external committee as well

020as some of the things that really um that were very profound to me in terms of the work that we did as well as um the really difficult things that as a community it felt like we successfully successfully tackled together i originally learned about this committee through the wauwatosa school district females to district families and i was interested in participating due to my roles as a mom so i'm a mom to two wauwatosa school district students uh one is now a sophomore in college and he graduated from west and the other is actually just starting senior kindergarten at wilson in august but i say that because i think it does um you know kind of jumping off of and building off of what jackie said about the very diverse perspectives in this team there were

021a lot of folks that had sort of stories and standpoints similar to mine from across the lifespan where there they were parents of students from a variety of different backgrounds and so it was really a very rich and um integrated process um additionally i own and i'm the clinical director for a mental health practice and we're called clara healing institute we're located in the village so we have this sort of specific and unique placement in the community of wauwatosa and because we have a family based and a holistic model where we sort of look at whole health of the whole family across the lifespan i do um work with several youth from all of the wahwatosa schools that find their way to our clinic for a variety of reasons and trust us to be their

022confidants in their journey through their development whether that includes mental health or just trying to figure out how to navigate a really complicated world so the committee's process has been very collaborative from the beginning [Music] in the early stages we spent time together doing the following to prepare us for developing that purpose statement that jackie read earlier we looked at this purpose statement as the anchor that would drive our decision-making feedback and discourse throughout the review process we looked at the national sex education standards the wauwatosa school district vision statement the statement of the vision of a graduate and how we want to send our graduates out into the world state statute 118.019 board policy 2414 that's been referenced to introduce this process and the department of public instruction statement on k-12 human growth and

023development curriculum a notable piece of this process towards the beginning was included a review of the most recent youth risk behavior survey that is administered to wisconsin students i am um familiar with the survey i was familiar with the survey because when i was a graduate assistant i was sort of enlisted to help write a report on the status of girls in wisconsin in 2014. the data from the most recent data that we have from this survey is actually quite a bit lagging because of kovitz so i believe that the report on that data is supposed to come out in fall of this year or maybe spring of next year um so i wanted to you know make sure that we underpin that because we're working with data that is pre-coded so when you think

024about the way that mental health and relational health and social emotional wellness are relevant for your students um the data that we're basing this on is before the traumatic you know impact of kobed and how that really changed the landscape of learning and living for our kids and like i said you know the last time i really deep dived into this data was 2014 but it was really gut wrenching to see the numbers continue to trend in a frightening direction regarding the mental sexual and relational health of our kids for example in this last body of data once again pre-coded we see that suicide attempts were highest among females at 11 black non-hispanic students at 12 and by far the highest for students who identified as lesbian gay or bisexual at 23 reported so then

025we looked at the desired outcomes for lessons across grade levels and we discussed where and how in these identified lessons parents and caregivers could be given the option to opt out of lessons that are delivered to their children and this was a much more nuanced broken down process where we could look at specific elements even of specific lessons and be very transparent about the places where parents could be responsible for looking at the transparency of that documentation and decide what they did or did not want their children to be what they did not want in terms of lessons being delivered to their children and how that would look and the way that they would um you know be sort of received space and time for either independent study or whatever else was needed if they

026were not going to be opting into those lessons [Music] and also sorry it also touched on where the content from these lessons take place in universal instruction so other classes that teach about biology anatomy human behavior current events or relationships and we also discussed in great depth the scaffolding of information per grade level so what we mean by that is that concepts are introduced they're built upon they're returned to reinforced and then to return to you again so that we can account for changes over the course of development and understanding in a year over the summer over the variety of changes that might happen in say a fifth grade year sixth grade year in terms of a child's understanding then we got to dive deeper into the curriculum itself and upon um doing that we

027worked through trying to take um a well-rounded outcome on sort of strengths and areas for development um and just areas where we thought there might be more support needed it's it's clear that the curriculum uses humor is age appropriate it is very much based in current medical evidence in lessons about relationships for example i felt like kids who identify as part of the lgbtq population may need some extra support around the concept of identifying unhealthy patterns and relationships including friendships simply due to this population's unique needs and risk factors so kind of giving feedback on certain themes and areas where there might need to be some extra support from a social emotional standpoint [Music] the process allowed for discourse clarification space for tension and dissonance and revision after revision and the interdisciplinary nature of the

028committee allowed for many perspectives overall i anchored myself to values of safety and health that also drive the ethical care of my practice and many of the people around me also voice similar values mitigating risk empathy and compassion a holistic whole life approach not just sexual health or sexual education offering education that is accurate and clear in a time where inaccurate and skewed information is so very easily accessible and harm reduction [Music] overall going through this process we can see that this curriculum goes beyond educating children these developments and updating and evolving this curriculum for this complicated time of life leads to trusting relationships with healthy adult figures in their lives and trusting relationships and trauma-informed information can save away as you know too many kids struggle with their mental health and feel like they

029can't talk about it the majority of kids and adolescents that attempt suicide identify as being part of the lgbt community in addition appropriate anatomical education keeps our kids safe safe to talk about someone who is making them feel uncomfortable and safe to put words to somebody or something that could be hurting them so we look at this curriculum on a much deeper level than just education or providing information that's providing a safe space for kids to be able to build these relationships with the adults around them and as we all know in cobit that was one of the things that has been the most challenges children feeling isolated all across all developmental developmental levels feeling like they don't have anybody that really understands their perspective i also just wanted to invite any of the other

030members of the external committee to come forward if they wanted to add anything about our process or how we arrived at some of the different points that have been already brought forth in this presentation hi i'm dr caitlin berry i'm a nurse practitioner i currently work in palliative care but my previous clinical experience does include some extensive teenage sexual health um i wanted to highlight a bit more of the medical perspective that we brought to the table um we knew for example that rates of sexually transmitted infections are unfortunately rather high among the teenage youth in our area of wisconsin and they are rising and this is certainly a concern for us we also know that in verbs for younger children men are key for the age of first period and girls is becoming younger

031and it's not unusual to encounter a child perhaps of nine or ten that's experiencing their first period so we wanted to make sure that those children have the vocabulary and understanding of their inanimate physiology so that you know what has happened to them is not scary or something to be ashamed of and hopefully that their peers can also offer some sort of understanding so that again they are not frightened or ashamed or remodeled and the mental health of our children is really important to us here we are also concerned about the influence of social media on our children i think that everybody here from a wide range of perspectives is probably concerned about this and we are aware that many of our children were being exposed to the concepts that we have covered in the

032curriculum not first through exposure by parents or by school but through peers and through whatever social media is popular tick tock or whatever it may be and so we wanted to have all of our students have the opportunity to encounter reliable factual accurate information from trusted adults which would include our educators and also have the opportunity to raise those topics with the trusted adults outside of school their parents and guardians by providing them with the vocabulary for some of the things that they may be seeing either through their peer group or again on social media hopefully they're able to raise this topic with the adults in their lives [Music] we needing board members and instead bartholomew as a member of the external committee i'm a 30-year resident of wauwatosa and i was a student in

033the school district i'd like to share a different perspective on the community i'm here to express my strong strong disapproval of the proposed hdd curriculum the hgd executive summary states quote the external committee's role was to set perspective and quote the external committee with all due respect had no role in setting the perspective when i asked why we were using the national sex ed standards as a starting point i was ignored so i'm speaking up now the committee no discussion was held on what the starting point would be and contrary to slide two there's no state law that we that requires the national substance standards to be used the committee process i respectfully submit was biased from the beginning why not use the current hdt hdd curriculum as the starting point pat why not use

034wisconsin state law as the starting point which requires quote abstinence and skills to remain abstinent and quote does the committee look at choosing the best and accident-based hcd curriculum that other school districts use here in the southeast wisconsin area there was absolutely no discussion as to what the starting point would be somewhere without parent input the decision was made to use the national sex ed standards i respectfully submit the committee with process was biased from the beginning so what's the problem with the national sex ed standards national success standards are not reflective of our community values the national standards promote a political agenda that silences local input and real dialogue i'll give you some examples if you compare the current hdd curriculum to the proposed hdb currently the proposed hdd curriculum quadruples the content with

035gender ideology and sexual orientation misinformation that this when tulsa students are losing ground in reading and math and if i can share this with you if you want to cast it to that respective board members you'll see what i'm passing you is a worksheet that we use during committee on the left hand side it shows the current hd curriculum and on the right hand side is the proposed http curriculum when myself and other committee members said gender ideology is medically inaccurate and should not be taught to second graders as is currently proposed in grade two lesson two we were ignored when i asked how teaching high schoolers to put on a condom is consistent with the state law of abstinence i was ignored there was no subcommittee assigned to discuss the medical inaccuracies of gender

036ideology there was no subcommittee form to discuss how teaching anal sex to sixth graders in lesson six help students remain abstinent in their state statute there was no subcommittee to discuss a pairing of 10th graders to pronounce condoms in class help students identify skills for remaining abstinence the national sex ed standards silenced real dialogue and diverse viewpoints during committee as an external committee member i respectfully ask you to send the proposed hed curriculum back to the drawing board and use current hdd or state law as a starting point and allow real dialogue and real liberating viewpoints to be heard why would closer kids deserve better good evening board and internal external videos and community members hi my name is virginia finnegan forbes i am a proud educator um in our english for multilingual department here

037in the district and um i just want to share that my experience on the external committee was one of um great awe there was an incredible amount of work that was put in in a respectful and a very thorough manner and i stand incredibly um uh in awe of of all the educators parents and stakeholders uh that that put their time and effort as an educator i can say that we have to start with standards and that these standards of the national sex standards gave us the ability to anchor ourselves in a curriculum that is sound um and second i would say that i was very grateful for the input of our medical professionals our mental health professionals those who could speak to um not a belief system but of our medically accurate information and

038i um was very encouraged by this space that was made for dialogue and for dissent which was uh mentioned previously i would ask that as we move forward it's so wonderful to have so many community members that we are mindful of our rhetoric and we really um pay attention to how our words matter and our students are listening they are watching and they are coming to school and our colleagues our staff members are coming to school with feelings of safety or fear and so as we have these dialogue as we have this dialogue i ask that we are mindful of the impact of our language and that i i know we are all here because we all love students and just remember that what we say and how we say it really matters thanks good

039evening board members my name is nathan robinson i have three children uh one will be a first grader at madison and i participated on this one i will second that it was a outstanding forum to discuss how things need to change as far as our human broken development uh this is my we've we've been doing community for seven years now and i have not been part of any of this before so this was very honorable i will say there was a lot of discussion that was going on and even though there was a lot of differing opinions everybody got a chance to have their voicemail we we went through a great example would be our opt-out we really took extra time and care to look at how the pop-down process even starts instead of all

040or nothing can we slice it you can move it around and look at that size um as far as any additional concerns i have i i would push hard to put to have this curriculum go i know we um certain teams surveyed other school districts to see what they were using if they were teaching and one of the big things that came back from that is the the source that we use that we're proposing is open and transparent which was far easier to look at and see and understand when we were originally selected and i tried to look at any curriculum it was very hard he received what was going to be taught at any degree level and the proposed curriculum and the sources that are being provided as a proposed source gives us that

041transparency um and i understand that you know with different opinions a lot a lot of things that are being introduced in a younger age people are concerned about you know innocence of children wanting to make sure that they have you know they keep that innocence and i would challenge back and i did challenge back which is our kids have to be put through adventure uh exercises my i i am a minority i know my child is gonna be called a racial sport at some point way earlier than they should so the innocence of children is lost early so having this having all the correct information as soon as possible to help get our kids education i think is just as important we will invite our internal committee breakfast to explain the internal work the purpose

042of the internal team was to execute work in response to the external team's feedback we started with drafting outcomes to for feedback from the team then we went through the process of vetting resources which i'll talk about next our last step was lesson development which included aligning resources and lessons to the learning outcomes so this included scripted lessons and modifications were made if material did not match the outcomes so really our purpose was bringing the external team's desired outcomes to life in the classroom so for resource curation there was input from the department of public instruction in an environmental scan so seeing what other districts are using and then a very specific process for vetting the resource the team was asked to name the resource and the great levels that it aimed to support and

043then providing a desired outcome score of one to five and looking very closely at portions of the position statement from the external team this included is it grade level appropriate information is it current and up-to-date publication factual information does it support the consistency of learning so again the scripted lessons and it includes inclusive supports for all of our students so you can see on the screen the different resources that were reviewed by the internal educators and again as ms powers noted this is where they landed in terms of scoring the different resources based on grade level whether or not it supports the desired outcomes uh the position statement whether or not it was copyrighted materials again for that transparency that transparency element and i will turn over to miss mahasi um so as ms potter

044stated once that um curriculum was chosen um we looked at it very thoroughly um and took all of the feedback from the external team um worked to adjust and modify the resources where it didn't match the proposed outcomes um and put that all together and then worked to make that available to the community so that everyone could see all of those things transparently and then per our policy 20 to 10 this proposed curriculum also went before our curriculum council which serves as part of an advisory committee to all of our curriculum renewal processes and this committee reviewed the lessons and shared positive feedback as well as opportunities for improvement the chart in front of you communicates the synthesis their feedback and their feedback led to further revisions in the proposed curriculum also as part of

045the review process members of the internal committee considered learning accommodations and modifications for students with individualized education plans though unless a student with an iep accessed up his alternative learning standards they would have access to the human growth and development curriculum with their grade level peers supported by those accommodations and modifications as indicated in their ieps students accessing alternative learning standards would focus on three to five big ideas for the unit which is determined on an individual basis by the student's iep plan and the ipt you've heard me mention already a number of items in regards to opting out state statute does not require parents to get permission for human growth and development instruction in a public school however wisconsin state statute 118.019 does allow parents to opt their child out from instruction with written

046request this is referred to the opt-out policy wisconsin state statute does not provide nor does legislative history support the use of an opt-in method therefore we are heeding the guidance by the state you've heard me mention already some rich discourse around um shifts for operation with opting out the current practice is that students opt out of all of the lessons for the unit as you've heard me mention already the proposed changes is that caregivers would have the option to opt students out of in particular particular lessons also there was strong communication on the external team about consistency and educators on educators end of following up with caregivers on their choice for opting out um so we want to streamline that and have a better process in place so that when a caregiver decides to up

047their child out from the learning that that triggers a conversation between the caregiver and the educator rather than that just being the end of the conversation uh our external committee members also shared that when they did opt out their children from the learning that they were not aware of all of the options in front of them and were dissatisfied with the way in which their their experience held for them with that with on the school's end so again we want to trigger that as a conversation point so that the educator and the caregiver can have a conversation about what that time will look like when the student is not engaged with the rest of the class in the learning um our when we took this to our curriculum council they gave some additional um thoughts

048on how to logistically work through some of that so what that was helpful one of the things we really wanted to highlight for our families is state statute 118.155 which allows caregivers to exercise release time for religious studies so we want to make sure that that is highlighted for uh caregivers and that our educators know that that is something that they would want to make sure to communicate with anybody who is choosing to opt out i'm going to invite ms priscilla up um hi i joined the committee because i found it to be um problematic that genders were split up while we learned about human growth and development and i thought that because it doesn't include everybody and not everybody is able to learn how i think they should be able to it doesn't include

049non-binary and transgender people and they don't get the education that i think they need and also it's just it's body science it's not a big deal to learn about it and i think that if we do it together people can be more empathetic towards each other and they can uh help each other and learn about each other's needs and i think it's really important that we all learn about that together um because if we don't it can lead to kids just not getting working need or other kids bullying them on things because they don't know what they're going through and i think it's majorly important that we do this so last week our community received communication about their about the proposed lesson plans and we've been gathering stakeholder feedback um along the way and i'll

050talk a little bit more about that momentarily so as part of the review process the community will have from well they had from august 3rd to august 17th to review all electronic materials and the following dates to review copyright materials two of those dates were prior to this board presentation so the community members would be able to preview that before this evening but there will be two additional dates to preview those copyright materials as well and that can be done right here at the fisher administration building at the main entrance um at the main entrance so uh we have been looking at the community feedback over the last number of days so we can confirm that communication did go out to 425 um mailboxes we suspect that it has gone to a number of other

051mailboxes but we can't quantify that at this time um how many that made its way to um but as of four o'clock this evening there have been 183 responses to that survey and i'm going to take just a brief moment to give an overview of what those survey results are currently showing so you can see that the majority stakeholder group that has responded are caregivers of current wauwatosa school district students we've asked three different qualitative questions to quantify them just to get a general sense of community feedback there's a lot of comments in the qualitative form for at each grade level as well uh so you can see this is senior kindergarten and it's trending uh currently for grade level outcomes whether or not they're appropriate to 64 strongly agreeing whether or not the desired

052uh resources support the identified outcomes at 63 percent and then whether or not there is support for all students learning together as described by miss priscilla not too long ago and there is a caveat that in each one of the curricular guides if there is going to be additional conversation with um subgroups of students and that was noted in the curricular guides same questions for first grade again you can see that it the community is weighing in to say that they are strongly in support of those different outcomes at that grade level and for all learners here is second grade again at the 67ish percent third grade trending at about 65 strongly agreeing fourth grade trending at about 65 percent strongly agreeing fifth grade again 65 strongly agreeing [Music] sixth grade we no longer separate

053um or have have traditionally no longer separate common middle school so that question has dropped out of the questionnaire uh we're trending at 67 percent eighth grade trending at about 66 between both questions 67 for eighth grade and 70 for high school i strongly agree and then overall we asked the community whether or not they thought the curriculum is supportive of the human growth and development committee's purpose statement and 62.5 of those individuals have said that they strongly agree the external committee's position statement highlights prepared instructors will provide grade level appropriate information on sexual health that is current factual consistent and inclusive so should the following proposed curriculum be approved we would begin the process of developing a thorough professional learning plan which would include working with the three r's to utilize their customizable professional

054learning option this learning will be inclusive of the universal instruction as well as modifications and adaptations necessary to support diverse student learning needs additionally we would have success metrics in place whether whether to tell us whether or not uh we are seeing the improvements that we have so desire so it would be improvements in the youth risk behavior survey that you heard kristen mentioned earlier uh we do have the um results of the most recent one however it's embargoed so we cannot share that publicly until it gets released from the department of public instruction later on this uh this year we'll also be looking at improvements in our student perception data uh when we go through the the strategic plan we'll be hearing about milestones i know dr means uh gave a brief overview about

055milestones a number of meetings back but we'll be targeting into milestone number dates around our student perception of feeling like they belong and they have support currently we don't get feedback from students after the human growth and development unit on a systematic in a systematic way so we'll be looking to get feedback from students whether or not they are feeling supported and they're learning what could be tweaked about the learning what our strengths and opportunities for continued growth and we would be remiss to not be tracking the opt-out trends we currently don't have a systematic way of tracking that and so we would want to take a look at the data over the next year to see are their specific trends and what does the data tell us and what might you need to dig

056into a little bit further overall to get this up and running we're looking for about eighteen thousand dollars for materials and professional learning that you heard mrs hebert talk through uh recommendations to the superintendent we got here because we weren't monitoring the curriculum revision and policy so as the supervisor of myself um just asking for doctor recommending doctor means oversee the work that i do um i clearly articulate a seven year curriculum cycle which will be showcased um or mentioned in the strategic plan and noting that in that curriculum review cycle that human growth and development does show up every three years per policy 24-14 also making sure that there's an assurance of a professional learning plan that is executed annually so educators are better prepared to deliver the lessons uh we have a director

057of instruction um miss leanne nazi who will be working in concert with to make sure that that comes to fruition and then in assurance that there's oversight from the division of academic performance that the curriculum is monitored as articulated through the curriculum review cycle so a lot of that when we get into the monitoring phase of a curriculum review that's where we'll be looking at the student feedback and the opt out data to make uh tweaks to uh to the work again thank you um and i was a member of the external community um it is recommended that the board of education approve the revised program at the august 22nd 2022 moving for the majority of our responsibility thank you and that is the conclusion of our report thank you all very much uh for

058those in the room uh kind of our pace and agency meetings tonight is the first presentation um [Music] folks are welcome to uh contact the board or phil [Music] um we'll go ahead and start um i just want to say thank you to you dr marvel and miss weber as well as to everybody who participated in the external and internal committees that was an incredibly um [Music] robust experience it sounds like um and i'm really impressed with all of the thought that went into creating the curriculum that's in front of us um so you know my perspective is that um my perspective i should say been formed by both being a parent of elementary age children as well as a pediatric psychologist which means that in alignment with my practice standards i have a social

059justice lens in my role i know for example that children who identify as non-binary transgender or just gender non-conforming have a significantly higher rate of depression missed school suicidality um and the gender um is expressed um as early as ages two to four so i think there were some questions that i saw about why are we talking about this in elementary school and it's because children very young have a very clear idea of what their gender identity is so um you know i feel very strongly about that i also feel very strongly about the importance of naming body parts and knowing that that's an alignment with best practices that you know in the lineup of the american academy of pediatrics with my professional organization the american psychological association and know that it is a protective

060factor to actually talk about and may anatomically name body parts of children that keeps them safe and protected and it improves their sense of confidence and identity so all of that to say that i think this was grounded in research which i really appreciate i do believe based on what we've seen so far what we've heard from our community that this represents the values of our community and it certainly does align with our strategic plan and our mission statement as an organization so i just want to say thank you and let you know that i'm very much in support of this curriculum thank you and thank you for your presentation um at this point i also wanted to say thank you to the many uh people in the community who have contacted me um and

061the board uh a lot has changed in 10 years and and this is why this curriculum the when my daughters went through this curriculum certainly um i took the opportunity after every class to talk to them and really lay out their uh you know our specific family values and our beliefs and and our support structures for them so i am hopeful that whatever curriculum we have that is certainly being done by our guardians and um and by our parents uh the other thing i just wanted to say thank you to miss priscilla because your statement was very moving and i sincerely appreciated it um no questions but i will just say um how much i personally appreciated sitting on the committee i took a very sort of uh step back approach i didn't contribute much

062in the way of what i thought or reviewed and i really was looking to listen to all the different folks in the room um and provide guidance when there was a question about what does the board want to know and i'll say the board's gonna ask this we're just gonna ask that um and i what i said in the final meeting that anybody can um speak to is that it was the most civil discourse um because we disagreed on a lot i was pushed on some things where i was like you know should should we do that that young and to hear a medical professional say here's why we need to say these words at that age where it pushed me given how i grew up and those words were definitely not used when i

063was that age um and i like sort of heard my dad in the back of my head what um and so i i really was pushed myself in a number of areas um and um i i think what's really important to understand is that where we landed um not everybody did agree there this was not a we're all going to come to consensus on this um there was a lot of back and forth um i think you know there was some real disagreement about does gender identity exist or is it you know appropriate for us to talk about um sexual orientation with kids in elementary school um and sharon i think you said it best 10 years is a really long time when we looked back at previous standards it just felt like they were

064from really another era um so i was very appreciative of the process of being able to just sit and listen and the amount of time that people gave was exorbitant and i will say the thing that i was most pleased with was the transparency factor um this idea that there's consistency of instruction happening around the district um is really important and for those of you who are calling out this like we need our kids to read and be able to do math better absolutely please stay for the conversation around our strategic plan because this is not an allure of that um this is this is a part of instruction that really gets at us having students that graduate that are prepared for the world whether or not it's the world we want them entering because

065the world's a really scary kind of difficult place right now so um i thank everybody on the committee for having the most civic discourse i've seen in at least two or three years people were very respectful of one another um especially when we didn't agree um so thank you for leaving our process i know the timing feels like oh my gosh we're going to bring one more controversial thing potentially to the community but we did exactly what we asked which of the board asked dr means to do an audit of what wasn't happening and this came off and so you tackled it and i'm very appreciative and i also want to say i really appreciate the curriculum council's commitment to giving really tangible feedback that could inform some of those lessons as an external committee

066member we we didn't design lessons we created standards um and and the work that went in by the teachers in riyadh and the curriculum counselor council really appreciate it because so many eyes on this only made it better thank you first i do want to say thank you to all the community members to everyone who dedicated so much time and resource and energy to doing this work it's really important especially our students i love when students voices are centered and i think that this community did a really good job of doing that i'd like to make a couple comments and then if you have a couple questions um i really appreciated seeing the um intentionality behind the intersectionality of our students um you know i've mentioned a couple times that you know students there's not

067just one thing that impacts who they are you know they might be female they might identify a certain way they might be black they might be hispanic and i really appreciate looking in lessons that we really i think put an emphasis on the intersectionality of our students um i also really appreciated the scaffolding aspect of these lessons as an educator i know how important it is to introduce topics in ways that are developmentally appropriate to these students and i think that this curriculum took great care to do that um also to the point you know we got a lot of feedback about math and reading but i can tell you as an educator and someone who's done academic research that when students see themselves in curriculum then they are more successful and their outcomes are

068more positive um and that's all curriculum so when these students see themselves in these picture books and some of these conversations that we're having it's going to promote more success for all of our students some of the questions that i have and i'd like just to get some more feedback from dr marvel or any of the team i really want to put an emphasis on our training for teachers and maybe even getting feedback from our teachers you know they are in the classroom with these students delivering these lessons um have that been considered a getting feedback and can you talk a little bit more about the training that our teachers will receive to deliver this instruction absolutely and miss nazi i'm sorry to step on your toes here with the director of instruction so if

069i misspeak um you'll have to correct me matter of fact unsolicited i've already had some conversations with some teachers um around what sort of learning needs that would be supportive for them um so absolutely they're going to be our um they're going to be one of our fountains of information of what here's the curriculum what sort of what sort of learning would be supportive for you to make this come to fruition um also the three r's if that is what we are able to move forward with they do have um miss ebert did mention that you have customizable professional learning so we would um engage in that customizable professional learning um as one entity of the learning process and develop a train the trainer sort of um mentality so we would train a a cadre

070of individuals in the district um with that that professional input and then be able to scaffold that out or cascade that out excuse me that's a better term cascade that out into all of our learning spaces so that uh teachers feel supported and educators feel supported do something today i do i think the one thing that i would add is that in the past um some of that learning has been on the ownership of the classroom teacher and how can we really include more of our counseling staff our special education coordinators our administrators our physical education teachers so that it is a vast array of educators that are coming to the table to participate in that learning and therefore have more opportunity to lean on one another in the delivery of that instruction and i

071will also add that we have the fortitude to have um additional mental health specialists at the secondary level and social emotional support specialists at the elementary levels to be able to tap into their expertise to support um the delivery of instruction will also be paramount and also help support and coach up our teachers if if that's necessary and does that include specific training around um our special educators for those who have to deliver this instruction um to those those students that are alternately assessed absolutely that's also paramount to where our um our special education coordinators will come in to support and coach provide resources to our case managers and um i see miss clem out of the corner of my eye i'm giving a little bit of a nod to as our director of special

072education who would be able to support that work thank you guys no thanks everybody for all the time and all the energy to this i really like hearing the process play out and seeing it happen you know you mentioned that at the end of the first year gonna do some feedback gathering but also that that you know it would be renewed uh minimum every three years can you speak to like what would be the process after the first year you got that feedback you know what are some of the things that you would do with that um to tweak uh the curriculum and then and then what would be the review and uh you know uh adjustment period like for the 16 years yeah so i'll get started then feel free to chime in i

073think part of our process through continuous improvement in the curriculum development is monitoring data and i'm looking at individuals of our team that would help to do that we have an advisory committee as i spoke of of our curriculum council and really wanting to lean on them in aspects of here's what we're noticing these are the trends that are being presented what kinds of tweaks and feedback can we make to this curriculum and then therefore bringing that back to the board as necessary do you want to add anything to that and um i think as as you said uh a lot has changed in 10 years and so knowing that's where why we started with the standards and not the current curriculum because we knew the current curriculum was um very outdated and so uh

074the next time that we come forward in three years depending upon whether or not additional standards have been developed but typically standards go into 10-year rotation so we'll probably be leaning on these same standards we'll look at the current existing curriculum we'll then have three years of data to be able to say is there something also fundamentally flawed in um in a particular grade level particular lesson that we haven't already made some minor tweaks to um or are are things continuing to trend in a good direction we're seeing a correlation between outcomes on the yrbs or the youth risk behavior survey and our success metrics as identified by uh milestone eight which we'll talk about during the strategic plan um but the the minor tweaks will be things within each individual lesson um yeah and

075then when will when will the community have their next opportunity to have input into those versions of this curriculum so in three years we'll trigger the that review process where we'll go through this whole process yes um my thoughts are not to speak to what i wish i had been taught when i was five or six or seven weeks i'm not speaking to what i wish had been available for me as a widow and father of girls who were five years two weeks every kingdom and 22 years old when um their moms departed and the help i would have liked them to have my thoughts are that regardless of what i think that there are things that are in the province of the parents and i especially know that now as a grandfather there's a

076lot of things i think are not my decision and the parent's decision so struggle for me is the notion that we are as a public school approaching some privacy of the family areas and there's there's a much longer conversation and down to the line item details here as we followed as i found with the discussion of masks and trying to wordsmith proposals from the board share with motions and such that it's not particularly effective so but i do owe the community my statement of what i think here and there they're in line with my concerns that regardless of what i think there is this aspect in my voice of what is in the province of the parents to decide or not decide and the question is whether the opt-out options are adequate considering the pervasive

077nature of what we're doing so you know i'm not asking for an answer tonight it's far too complex of a conversation for a meeting like this but just to let you know the basis of my vote when this comes up to roll home that if anyone in the community wants to direct comments to me with regards to the privacy of the family and those notions and how those considerations should win my home thank you i don't say i as i become observed uh as you walk us through the robust and rigorous process i'm excited to see what we will continue to do involved in each of the different areas as we examine the curriculum and you want to really try out the district worth of this lessons um even calling something on the ground and

078i will not take advantage of time um this evening i would like to take them just a little more time they have one more question i think this is important because i do think that this is an issue that many parents uh believe in the place for the home to instruct their kids around these issues and so i think it's important to talk about the opt-out option um i think there's some confusion about opting out um and i'd like to get some clarification of what that looks like so will parents be given um you know broad overviews of what the lesson will be would they be given topics under each lesson i mean how much information will they get so that they are equipped to decide if their child if they want their child to

079be in this lab absolutely so we will be um notifying families that lessons are coming out and we will have a good leeway so a minimum of two weeks that this will be coming out to put them on notice and within that communication there will be a link to that website that has every single lesson so they'll be able to see every single lesson the the letter will have the lesson and what the topic is for the lesson but then it'll be linked to the website where they can see exactly what that lesson entails and for any copyrighted copyrighted materials they will have an opportunity to come in and review any of those copyrighted materials we also triggered another question i had that they didn't write down is that will parents have access to the

080information those parents have want to maybe support these topics at home but it sounds like they'll have access to all of these lessons absolutely that was another point of conversation that came up with the external team saying it's not that i don't want my child to have this information but i want to be the one to deliver it and so by providing families with a resource not the resource but a resource if they choose to use it at home uh to deliver the instruction themselves with their with their child thank you for your time thank you um so with my opening statements i want to say uh that for a yes vote for me i have to be very confident that the educators know the actual information that's the biggest question for me and we

081have had experiences in the district where that line has been crossed so it can be highly sensitive to that topic um so i'm going to i don't know how you will answer my question but again the way we can encourage families to contact us continue to contact and continue to contact us up until below because we must have all of the information before we vote on august 26th so the thing that i wrote when you talked about tweaks this was a big thing for me the thing i did speak up i think the most about is the consistency of what teachers are saying so i am not an advocate of scripted lessons direct instruction i'm not very fortunately laughing um i'm not a huge fan of it in this case this is what we need

082parents need to know that when they look at that lesson that that is what's going to be taught that um that teachers are not going to sort of go off on like what they believe or why not this is about we'll get one back to the physician statement about factual medically based information i'm not going to say that there still might be some disagreement as to whether or not something is medically factual or not but that is hugely important to me as a board member i want to know that what a student is hearing in mckinley it's the same thing with the students during eisenhower and jefferson um and that our assessments are also common as well so that we really know the data we know what are the lessons that the most parents opted

083out of like that should be telling us something and that when we would make a tweet something that we have not done well with the district in the past is that when little changes are made there isn't the retraining done so it's not just about the training the first year it's about training so if you have a new teacher or if you have someone that just doesn't have comfort with the curriculum that they're not forced to teach you thank you i think the partisans also come with some questions at this time um for the opportunities for you to come back and i'll certainly follow the questions um i want to open the floor to public comments uh reporting on the pops up to the mic i would uh cause a couple reminders available [Music] and

084this isn't a topic where it's a necessarily a yes or not this is a topic where i think particularly supposed to give them feedback on specific lessons there's a little robust feedback process and so well this is i think a completely fine and reasonable place for anyone to come and share perspectives or email reward also the the team is taking the feedback and taking a little less than that lesson they're really giving enough people about so take advantage of that opportunity as well we'll uh go through about 30 minutes um documents and i'll be tracking um the three minutes uh if folks want to come up below and i for those who are online we may not get you to see so feel free to knock us [Music] out give me a moment okay thank

085you hi i'm doug both pelican first of all thank you for allowing public comments um all members of the school board aside from jen and jessica have heard me call before i give this suggestion and use this information and this has to be done this time so i am talking about section three of the executive summary additional points i had sent an email to dr moons and dr marvel about the statement that said all staff will have access to modified and accommodated materials to use the students who need the hdd tv curriculum presented in a barrier-free way i asked if that could be included so the public could see what the most accommodated and modified materials were and rightfully so dr marvel told me it could not be because it's copyrighted but to come in

086so a suggestion we can write the names of those materials and get that done right now so those were i came in on saturday circles and my horizons i see that the committee was to look at current and update and dates of publication of materials these materials that are being used for students with disabilities in alternate curriculum are from 1988. and good news volume 2 is from this century 2001. [Music] it is beyond time and honestly i'm going to suggest a question that good committees and groups use are we forgetting anybody as we're reviewing things because i feel that this that about these committees if that question is asked at each meeting maybe somebody would have thought oh we are forgetting some kids and i did look at every slide deck from each meeting i

087looked at every slide every agenda item nothing in there about looking at the materials being used for our students with intellectual and cognitive disabilities so what is my suggestion it's the same suggestion i came before five of you before minus jenny and jessica did you know that about a mile and a half from here maybe two miles because of the north avenue construction we have a national expert on sexuality and teaching of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities right in children's hospital i have purchased okay i spoke with her today um she travels around the country helping school districts helping organizations i literally shouldn't be surprised you begged her would she help in the lobby tulsa school district she gave me her contact information we're going to have to pay her but this curriculum cannot

088be approved because it is not inclusive of all we did not look at these materials for these children and i will close dinner he was just about me okay even when staff are motivated to provide sexual and sexuality education they often lack information about resources or do not have the support that is necessary to provide quality instruction some parents and professionals still have difficulty recognizing people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are sexual human beings who have greater needs for information rather than us this denial interferes with advocacy efforts has to be done [Music] thank you for your efforts i've i've prepared a three-minute statement i'm proud to say welcome joe my name is jeff nicholson i am 60 years old and i consider myself a lifetime near-lifetime resident of wauwatosa i have a master's degree

089in education from harvard university i have a phd in educational leadership and policy analyst from uw madison i have been a clinically practicing physician assistant for 30 years and a former program director of uw-madison's pa program but the most relevant for these brief comments tonight is that i have medically treated hundreds of lgbtq patients at a local psychiatric hospital in the last 15 years and i incidentally have also been a junior high school teacher and a high school teacher i am here to say that the human growth and development curriculum proposed by the school districts makes the assumption that the promotion of gender fluidity or reassignment to minor children is helpful healthy and reaffirming to those who suffer gender dysphoria while the school district means well as we all do i am present to tell

090you that there is no uh and it will improve their mental health okay that that is your premise and i'm telling you that that premise is fundamentally flawed i am president to tell you that there is no scientific or research evidence that indicates that those who undergo that children who are influenced by the concepts of gender fluidity or gender reassignment are any happier or less afflicted with mental health issues in the long term than those who do not the vast majority as you've heard of persons with gender dysphoria also suffer from anxiety depression many with also suicidal ideation there are no long-term evidence-based studies that reveal a reduction in mental health disorders including anxiety depression suicidal ideation and suicide ptsd etc after adolescents embrace a persona or identity that is contrary to their biological sex

091the national health institutes of sweden denmark and finland have actually all reversed force in their promotion of gender fluidity and reassignment to children under the age of 18 in the last two years sweden in particular found that there was no medical basis or a 1500 increase in the use of hormone blocking therapies given to children after a gender affirming court curriculum was introduced the increase was attributed to the promotion of a transgender ideology social pressures social media the effects of the adolescent desire for acceptance and peer pressure on the other hand well-known research has shown that the vast majority of children 80 of children based on 11 studies transition out of their transgender identity by age 18 if it is not promoted and if traditional gender roles are firm these scandinavian countries are now dealing

092with the fallout of ruined lives innumerable lawsuits as will we in wauwatosa let us not make the same mistakes transgender is a psychiatric condition not a medical condition it cannot be normalized or cured with medical interventions okay give you one last statement if you really wish to protect our children you will support the traditional family and gender roles that align with what's biological sex the bottom line in lessons from europe is that you will irreparably harm psychologically and even physically significantly more children than you will help i implore you not to harm our children to satisfy non-scientific non-medically based political agenda a well-meaning but misguided activist in our midst this is the robust research that i'm not here where was this reason thank you so i'm going to ask folks when i cut you off

093for three minutes the winner's done um if not you'll just come back home so it's please stick uh my name is paul verno i have uh two students in this school district so this is something uh that i care a lot about um i don't disagree with any of the stats that these experts have stated i'm very concerned about social media mental health and social well-being i guess the solution that we're finding here is nonsensical at best i guess i feel that 90 of this is just garbage i don't get why we are teaching kids to advocate for a brand new science there are sections about advocacy in here 10 years ago we started letting people use any bathroom now we have a science that is still in its infancy and it's so ironclad that

094we're making kids activists for it um i see that you teach about two spirit which is a term that came around in the 90s to say that native americans were transgender although i have not personally reviewed the material i assume that means we're teaching kids that trans is normal um the fda just came out with a warning saying that there's brains falling for a drug that's used to transition there's cancer osteoporosis chemical castration inability to have kids are we talking about the suicide rate after transition um or are we making this kind of like a rosy dream that anyone can achieve they just try hard enough um i pick one point but really um if this one points in slot to me the rest of the whole curriculum is in question uh you know and

095the one thing i ask is why is this being done so fast this isn't subtle science it's not math it's not reading you're pushing gender theory which is exactly that theory uh it's a brand new one and controversial at best are we training activists this isn't education it's indoctrination it's my job as a parent to talk to my kids about this not yours thank you very much my name is dorian my name is dory davenport and i have been a sexuality educator in unitarian universalist congregational settings for over 30 years and i've had the privilege of teaching several hundred young people junior high senior high and college age students and as well as overseeing the teaching of this in our congregations and and working with people to get trained to teach it and i have

096to say that we have over the years there have been thousands of young people that have taken our curriculum in this in our congregational settings and have been so grateful they've come back they've sought me out they've sought out the other teachers to tell us how much they appreciated getting all the facts they felt empowered to make better decisions because they had facts they had any questions they had we answered them with facts as best as we could with science and research that we were able to use and get our hands on and they were just so grateful and they have been promoting this to their friends over the last 30 years i've had them reach out to me on facebook or other ways to just say to express their gratitude for that so anybody

097who thinks that teenagers can't handle facts and it doesn't it well i guess what i just want to say is that it really helps empower them to make better decisions when they have all the facts so fact-based curriculum like this i think is really beneficial hello thank you for giving the citizens of our school district the opportunity and again thank you for giving us the opportunity to express our opinion on this subject to you i am a concerned citizen that cannot idly stand by and see our schools divert time and attention away from traditional teaching and towards specialized new age topics it seems that the new agers seek to create issues that are dicey and controversial so that they can intervene with especially pre-tailored programs and indoctrinate the youngsters an atmosphere of difference victimhood and

098division the subject matter contains images that you would not show on your screen even to us adults the unrestrained educational elite feel that in their superiority they have to break new ground in education to create future images of themselves i stand here to vigorously protest the sexual content of your special program i would feel ashamed and humiliated if i just stood by and let it happen without my vigorous protest to make it worse we are in a stage of academic decline how in the world can you add such a program to the schedule when the basics of education need your full attention i plead with you do not concentrate on redefining pronouns in our day-to-day conversations instead teach nouns adverbs adjectives and pronouns in english class teach things that enhance and enable future learning teach

099values that complement productive citizenship not difference in closing i hope the students will not be turned into fragile butterflies that rather be turned into wisconsin badgers hi members of the board my name is rich miller i live at 6185 washington circle in tulsa i've been a tulsa resident basically all my life i have eye children mouse and grandchildren my way of background i practiced law in this community for 45 years specializing in areas where people were injured or suffered from mental illness so in that respect i dealt with a host of medical doctors with various medical specialties and in my career i also spent handling cases for about 15 years in children's court here down the road so my backbone is not one of academia it's dealing with people in tough situations in real life

100situations under a lot of stress and having said that i've never appeared to the weather while i toast the school board i know something about wisconsin statutes and how they're interpreted and there's really no basis for the school board to adopt the proposed curriculum no legal basis for that and i think those who propose i suppose those who propose the curriculum think that it's a sign of progress a sophistication a liberation for past ignorance and i am naive impractical narrow-minded old-fashioned two religious that ain't the case members of the board here as a parent grandparent and member of this community i believe that the introduction of gender identity ideology is toxic flat out toxic for our kids will only confuse them you know life experiences should tell us that introducing various modalities of genital sex

101in the sixth grade is only going to lead to chaos unhappiness depression and frankly telling kids high school kids to put on condoms is only going to lead to erotic numbness if you don't listen to any other word i say just think of the conduct concept of erotic numbness where's there's not enough emphasis on abstinence it's in the same category as wearing a condom why isn't abstinence the focus of anything before the kids in 30 seconds sure the curriculum is not age appropriate it's not medically accurate please say no to the curriculum because in my view it will lead only to more violence sexual violence in the community a dehumanizing disrespect for others emotional chaos sexual irresponsibility depression and more mental illness thank you thank you good evening thank you very much for your time

102my name is chase matthias and my address is 30 24 in north carolina i have two children that are in the district right now one about to enter into district at eisenhower elementary um so i just want to say that i'm not a domestic terrorist just because i love my children and i have an interest in how and what my children are learning my wife and i are homeowners we are residents of wauwatosa and we have three children as i stated in the school district i'm a devoted husband and father to our three children lastly but perhaps most important is that i'm a christian and i've been a faithful member of my church for the last 20 years my faith is the bedrock and foundation for my family my wife and i wholeheartedly urge you

103to reject the new curriculum on the basis of religious grounds and that it violates our faith i am asking that the district focus on math reading science technology stem the arts history and the trades i'm asking the the district focused on the fundamentals of education the u.s public education system continues to fall behind the rest of the world because it is consumed with grooming and sexualizing our children rather than teaching the fundamentals this is called child abuse i'm asking that you vote this down um i'm asking that you do not use my taxpayer dollars to teach my children something that violates our faith lastly i want to end on the story i grew up on the south side of milwaukee i'm hispanic my wife's african-american i grew up very poor and at one point i

104was my family was homeless we worked really hard to rise above our circumstances so that our children would have opportunity and now we're homeowners right i am willing to sell our home in tulsa to get my kids out of this district and into a private school if this takes place thank you very much for your time hi good evening uh good evening my name is rob redler and i live in 1923 north central street i've been a wauwatosa resident for the past 30 years and in that time my wife and i have raised three wonderful children who have attended the wauwatosa schools graduated from high school and went on to college i must confess this is the first time i've ever been in a board meeting and spoken at the like i've never spoken partially

105because i believe that by living in wauwatosa and sending my children to social schools i already made good decisions i believe that my children's education were in the hands of competent educators who are making sound curriculum decisions and that particular decisions while supporting our children's teachers and staying active at schools i never appeared before before because i felt that things were in good hands unfortunately upon reviewing the proposed human growth and development curriculum i find myself questioning my previous confidence in the district and having great concern for the current and future students of the school district i also like to point out my concern to why the district is directing commentary away from the board that seems a little concerning and a little bit uh suppressive but acknowledging the time effort of the folks in

106the committee and i do want to acknowledge that the proposed curriculum is fundamentally flawed and wrong-headed this curriculum is neither age-appropriate nor consistent with lauritos community standards it sexualizes their children at an early age i'm in great law too as i read these curriculum points i stand before you petition the board and say no to the current proposed curriculum as part of the wisconsin state statute definition of age appropriate it concludes consistent with adolescent development and community standards the wauwatosa community that i have grown to know and well over the past three decades does not support the secularization of young children or any efforts to steal their child their innocence the toe security does not support five-year-olds kindergarten students will be introduced to graphic body part powerpoint lessons the tosa community does not support eight-year-olds

107being exposed to lessons plans with body part illustrations with some physical graphic detail that if you present a child with the same material on the street you'd likely be arrested but in the proposed curriculum it is termed as grade 3 lesson 2. by statute's own definition this is not age appropriate in the curriculum by the time absent is finally introduced in our 12 year old [Music] but it also includes animal oral sex investment and they have eight years of preceding sexual sexualization topics are selected in derived agendas in this court and in many cases running direct competition to family values we were built on since i'm right out of time i want to state that our schools should be the duel of our cultural community but as a preceding speaker challenge pointed out this is

108going to be something that people leave tosa for not come to support good evening personally 25 to 28 malls 93rd street regarding the proposed human growth and development curriculum i want to take a moment to appreciate how detailed and transparent the communication from august 3rd was put together that being said there's a lot of information and material to review and digest so i wonder why you are giving the stakeholders so little time between receiving this huge information package and the opportunity to bring their thoughts concerns and opinions to a board meeting we often get the impression much of our emails and feedback forms disappears in some black hole in the betas never to be seen again our only opportunity to really be heard is here at these meetings also to hear what you all are

109saying whatever your opinion is you're entitled to it but i don't know what you're emailing what you're emailing your emailing i don't hear that so this is the place to speak so um i really would urge you to push out the vote and put another meeting where you have community feedback and allow a little bit more time for people to review this huge amount of information i haven't reviewed everything it just wasn't possible by the way it's august it's school location and many people are not in town so they don't even have a chance what are you going to do about them it doesn't seem clean i do appreciate appreciate that you have an opt-out option hopefully the school district will respect peace completely although they were personally progress we talked something about this also

110influencing other classes so if we opt out of that lesson then i get in a different class i'm not sure i totally understood that i think that needs to be clarified because if you're then bringing it in through the back door not in the human growth and development class but in the whatever american history class or math class then what's the point of opting out are you going to opt out of the whole year home homeschool private school that's not the resolution right so um speaking of i know it's been touched on opt-in maybe i'm the only one who thinks that a lot of the information is not necessarily wrong but perhaps a little too early too soon the kids are too young maybe i would prefer to not have vaginal anal and oral sex

111at age 11 but perhaps i'm fine at age 14. so how about giving people the opportunity to do this at a later point so um since my time is up i really urge you to at least allow more time and perhaps consider pushing some of these subject matters to a slightly later age thank you i am responding can we please i just want to clarify there is no vote tonight there is another two weeks to review the material and provide us with feedback i am mary phillips and i'm a student at whitman my pronouns are she her i live at 9006 west clark street and i'm here to talk about the lessons on gender identity and sexuality these lessons are incredibly important and i want to thank you for including them in the curriculum i

112personally am part of the lgbtq plus community and want to combat anyone who wants to remain with you classmates it can be important to teach young people of any age about these topics so they can be respectful and everyone can be welcome on pride day this year at my school i ended up educating some people myself on sexuality uh so many people more or know less about this than you would expect additionally misgendering can be incredibly hurtful and insulting which makes the gender lessons even more important we should make sure to keep the clubs such as gsa and the spirit days like friday in place and that's it thank you hi um let me call it a natural effect sorry i'm sorry for time right now okay hi uh signiamonsky 2546 north 71st street i

113am a current parent in the district with children who are at long fellow and elementary school um i have spoken in front of the board before uh although remotely and so i thank you for this opportunity i thank dr marvel and the rest of the curriculum team and the human growth how do you follow that first of all how do you follow that that is so humbling so great job um i want to say a couple of things i've heard some things today and i think board i heard your comments this is not about the parents we're centering a lot of parents in our comments this evening this isn't about parents this is about children this is about equipping our children to survive in the world in a world with social media in a world

114with porn in a world with sexualized video games we are equipping them to have good reasonable and respectful conversations with each other to care for each other anybody who thinks that a kid who hears a lesson once in school is automatically going to develop gender dysphoria either knows nothing about children because children are not that valuable nor are they really being realistic about what these kids need so i would like to point out that i've spent my career working on messaging messaging requires repetition so reinforcing the message at home is very important being able to equip our families to care for their children at home while reinforcing these messages important people who want to opt out can opt out but if we want to be best in class at equipping our children for the world

115we can't ostrich our heads into the sand and pretend that these things do not exist in the world i'm going to give you two comments that are directly in response to comments i've heard today children are losing their virginity at around the age of 17. i would like them to know how to put a condom on before they lose their virginity i don't want them to discover how to put a condom on three years after they've lost their virginity i want them to learn before i will also tell you that i have heard what children who are not taught about sex think sex is and is not because we come from an era i'm almost 50. we come from an era where abstinence only education was a norm people thought anal sex was a good

116way to not have sex and if that offends anybody they should think about what is happening in the world around them i'll just close with this is about the kids that we are raising this is about the world that we're putting in the two and equipping them to tackle that world effectively thanks uh so we'll go probably two more folks and i'll check in with the board to see where we're at so next two speakers 2122 north 107th street i taught elementary for six years and i also taught college and i did other things too so i have some background with children um first question how do i get a copy of that survey i'm not seaman [Music] um i would like to answer the state of wisconsin statute 118019 it was relied on by

117the committee and it starts with a parent school partnership i don't see that in the proposed standards also one of the first standards is communication between a parent and a child how the school can foster that about sexual matters so i would like to see that in the standards um the this national sex education standards is from the future of sex education group i don't know anything about them but they sound pretty um progressive far out advanced from what i've seen of their material that's included here i don't know that that relates to wauwatosa community standards sure there's a lot on the media about all this stuff but can't the parent help with that wouldn't that be the best place to start especially for kindergarten first grade second grade third grade maybe fourth grade let

118the parents take care of that what's some guidance from the school that was even suggested here the state statute refers to community standards and that age appropriate should be defined by community standards and i would propose that what is being [Music] given to us here as a curriculum is quite a bit beyond our wabatosa community standards thank you my name is heidi bach i live at 2446 north 70th street and first i want to thank everyone who served on the committees to build this curriculum um and i want to express my support i was definitely not planning on speaking today but when i heard all of the negativity surrounding this i felt controlled to speak but um i trust our educators in wauwatosa i think that we have an excellent team of teachers and support

119staff and i trust that they are making the best decisions for our students in the world that we currently live in um i trust the medical professionals and the mental health professionals that helped to contribute to the proposed curriculum i trust that they base their decisions on standards that we use to do what is best for our students um research data i think those are all really important to consider when we develop new curriculum um and i don't think that what we want our world to be or what we are afraid of should guide our decisions in teaching our children i have a second a fourth grader and a sixth grader in the district and i did go through very detailed each of those grade levels and what i read was extremely appropriate um the

120conversations that i have in my home with my my kids are more in depth than what was covered in the curriculum um in the second grade curriculum when they were talking about um gender identity it was based on stereotypes you know these are girl stereotypes these are boy stereotypes why do we impose stereotypes on people and why is that maybe not a good thing how do the how do stereotypes limit what our stup what our people can can accomplish in in life so i think that's a really important thing for kids to be aware of um in the sixth grade curriculum um point i was going to make about that i just everything seemed very age appropriate um i did like in sixth grade there was a lot of information about social media and making

121good decisions in social media and what you how you interact with people online i think that's extremely important for kids um and then also there were portions of the curriculum that talked about um if you have a question who can you go to for information how can you find a good reliable online resource and helping kids kind of distinguish between those different ways of getting good information so i support this curriculum and i hope that my children have the chance to experience it so thank you important colleagues i know we've got two uh significant additional agenda development succeeding strategic plan insurance uh it is 902 i propose that we continue that we cease for the camera right number one um we will have our studios certainly in the next two weeks um continue on the

122sunday you can welcome to contact the school board individually or collectively by both [Music] there's several people still in line i'm just sort of curious if we might entertain the idea of just shortening public comment a little bit or the folks feel like you you have something to say that hasn't already been said i want to make sure that what you have to say is capture either in the forum or something but what we're talking about next is actually going to involve children the entire experience at the district and so the strategic plan is something that i don't want to see getting the short trip because that's the reading that's the ela that's the math and stuff so but my preference is that folks feel like they have something to say that hasn't already been

123said i am willing to think of that but that i'm one of seven uh i don't have a conclusion in my head but considering the importance of the two regular agenda items to follow and the in-service to follow that [Music] are we actually not going to adequately address something and that we should decide to table something from the agenda all together for another evening and gosh i don't know which one that would be but i mean i don't i think if we keep all this stuff on the agenda tonight something's going to get short-changed and none of it should research him so i i'm not drawing a conclusion i was throwing that out there that maybe we just there's too much here tonight any topics i know he was doing other things and that's wrong

124too so it's i feel like we have a lot of opportunity to gain additional feedback over the next two weeks i'm concerned that we're going to push this out so far that when we get to the point of actually having to use our brain to talk about our strategic plan we're past 10 o'clock and we're not our best selves um so i would i would agree with you just listen to what i mean to say is that even if we stop this topic now i'm not sure we have enough time for the rest of the topics in this evening as well and that we may have to decide to postpone something else as well even if we stop this topic now i mean i'm in favor of hearing folks who are standing up we've been

125waiting patiently to um you know give us their feedback i know there are other opportunities but some people don't feel hurt unless they're standing before us and i appreciate the friends that are standing we are going to exhaust ourselves in consuming this information and not be able to make good informed thoughtful decisions um even as we hear presentations around sexual education was extremely important and we hear the presentation around our teaching plan when we're going to really kind of drive the direction of our community i know that wasn't a solid answer but i i mean i would like to hear some more voices i don't know how to put a cap on it um um why don't we take the rest of the folks who are standing gentlemen in the furnaces and jacket back there

126i think in the last one standing are you standing and i'm sick i can also say if there's anybody in the audience who has not been able to stand in line that you know has been waiting patiently you know whatever physical limitation they may have if they weren't planning to speak off to allow them so is everybody who is standing in line right now are we never good for stephen i would say gravity is appreciated uh also you've got three months um why what will people rolling through uh anything you could do to give this kind back the corpses all right jim riddle as one of the previous people said i have note that my ability to review the proposed plan has been negatively impacted by the difficulty in accessing the source material you made

127reference to one of your source materials which is the national sexuality education i believe you also drew on advocates for youth that website so there's an intermingling i would ask that you update your posted material and put links on every one of your sections so we can back reference what you are actually talking about in terms of each grades section [Music] right now that is not available you have to link in individually and right now i've got three to four hours into it and i've not made much progress also you have some material that's available on google drive access by which you have to request access and then get access and right now i have no response to that so some of your posted publications have not been able to be reviewed and i don't

128know what the issue is so based on this and the difficulty others may have i'm asking that you extend the comment period past august 22nd to allow people adequate time to thoroughly review and get the material as a general statement from what i've read i would eliminate a large portion of the k-6 program as being marginally appropriate and possibly consider starting the sessions at middle school and saying that the current program does not make reference in a timely basis to legal issues only at the end of the last year of high school for example the age of consent in wisconsin is 18 years so what you are teaching okay what you are teaching and exposing people to is illegal so you have an obligation each time you bring that subject up to note that that

129practice in that age group is illegal and there could be ramifications in terms of detention jail sexual predator you name it [Music] good evening my name is florida crave 2447 north 65th street i am a community member and i work for a nonprofit in the community that is centered on the health and well-being of children at that agency i do trauma-informed care education and primary prevention of child sexual abuse and i am so encouraged by the conversations that have been going on today just even hearing words said that i think too often as adults we shy away from and we do not talk to our children about so i am encouraged by the school district and by this committee of bringing up this curriculum so that we can give our children words information and empowerment

130so that they can be a small portion of keeping themselves safe as adults we have that responsibility and so to all of the adults the parents the caregivers the community members in this room i encourage you to continue to educate yourself so that we can have conversations with our children to keep them safe not only in kindergarten but into middle school into high school and as adults as well so that our small people can grow into people that are advocates standing in rooms like these so i just encourage you again please keep educating yourselves so that we can keep our kids safe and also teach them that it's okay to be the way that they are um and i also appreciate the word inclusivity has been brought up a lot today and i appreciate that

131means a lot of different things including people with differing abilities so i want to acknowledge that that was brought up and is so important in what we're doing so thank you and i appreciate your time good evening i'm bridget julio 1857 north 85th street i am a mom of five kids uh two of whom are on ieps in the desperate with special needs and i am a former director of youth ministry who taught educators about safe practices safe environment training in the wake of obvious abuse scandals and i also taught teens about sex and i would always start by teaching them that sex is good and then i would go on to unpack it i think there's a lot of really good stuff in this that helps with that portion having said that i am

132rising to speak against implementing this implementing this curriculum as is currently written for a few reasons school stays a difficult choice on the one hand you must create a school culture that is inclusive and allows students to learn despite profound differences among members of the community you must also strive for increasing equality in the classroom which is the desire to see the spirit of law applied in favor of historically marginalized members of our community we are so grateful my husband and i and my family to have been the recipient of an inclusive environment in the wauwatosa school district with our daughter anna who has probably syndrome she will probably be opting out of this curriculum if it is past because it is in no way appropriate for her needs that said i also think that

133this curriculum is slightly divisive and the reason i think that is because in many places in many places it is not grounded in well studied and researched science and this is why the american academy of pediatrics still says that teen sex listed as a high-risk behavior out there with drugs up there i know they do it anyway right which is why i think they need good information but when you're teaching these teens to use a condom are you going to also teach them in that curriculum that that condom does not prevent every sti that you could get that you can still get hpv even with a condom and that atv can give you lifelong cancer if you're a woman [Music] will you also um you mentioned mental health a lot and i don't think that

134the curriculum adequately addresses mental health in teens who are sexually active because it is more than just as some people have mentioned here body science it involves your whole person and we do not this curriculum does not address the emotional social content the consequences of sex before kids are ready [Music] and we said too that before the age of are there a lot of a lot has changed in the last 10 years and that is so true i mean i started doing this 20 years ago that is true and one of those things is kids are kids see pornography pornography before the age of 11. the chances everybody who has 11 year old has seen pornography are we going to address that as well in this curriculum because it is a well established medical fact

135that pornography is addictive and harmful um furthermore i think it just well i'm going to sum it all up by saying i think this is a divisive curriculum in some ways and i think we need to look at it and try to make it a little bit more inclusive or i mean we're talking about gender inclusivity and we're not talking about including kids with special needs and i think we need to talk about the social and emotional consequences of this curriculum thank you so much for those of you making some really specific points about the curriculum i really do hope that you submit the form um that it's important to kind of think about to get that feedback at that level uh it's really helpful and beneficial as we think about um how to make

136this quickly as strong as possible but regardless of what the decision is when you need them so please do make sure all right my name's robert jones i'm a resident of 2556 north 67th street i have two students in grade school in roosevelt i had not spoken before this board before but i was watching online and felt compelled to come down just so that you could hear my unequivocal support for this curriculum for the work that you've done and for the board that we so recently elected thank you um i'm a resident of tulsa five years and a homeowner in this community for two years a proud mom of three in this district um or not yet in this district or gm but they could be dr means you spoke to the importance of mental

137health and in your statement of purpose you talked a lot about the importance of self-worth and that's exactly why i'm really concerned about this curriculum um in particular the thing that concerns me most is gender ideology taught at such young grades a lot of people have touched on this so i don't want to rehash this point over and over again but i think this asks really little kids to make big decisions they're just not ready for um they're in very basic stages of developing their own rationality their reason their sense of self and it just asks them to make decisions they're not prepared to understand the consequences of um a couple people also touched on the opt out and particularly kind of noticing the trends of the app down this signals to me that the

138board is not confident that this proposed hgd curriculum is the best choice for all the students in wauwatosa or even the majority of students from wauwatosa as a mother of my own children and a member in this community i know we can improve this curriculum to better support our kids and to respect the innocence that they need so i implore you to vote though um just lastly i've been very disappointed in the lack of publicity these important changes have received in the community i wasn't informed about any of these changes until a casual conversation with a neighbor yesterday i just wanted to second an earlier comment that it's kind of discouraging that you need a google drive request to review all the materials mine has not been accepted as a community member i feel that

139we could be better informed earlier in the game and i hope that this improved in the future thank you good evening my name is michael long i live in 26 22 north menomonee river parkway i have two uh students at wauwatosa west one's a junior and one is going to be a freshman and i wanted to remind the ward about the statute 118.019 where it talks about the whole purpose of the statute and this curriculum is to foster a partnership between parents and the schools in the district and a partnership suggests some collaboration well this is i have not had a chance to weigh in on this at all and didn't participate in any of the processes going forward that created this curriculum to some degree i feel like this is being crammed down my

140throat and and also if i choose to up my children out of this program somehow that sort of goes against the whole mantra of diversity equity and inclusion all of a sudden my child is being excluded because i have a problem with the syllabus of the curriculum i don't necessarily disagree with the intent of what this board and what the whole curriculum is trying to accomplish i just think that some of the topics especially related to [Music] gender identity are being taught and being forced on our children at a very very young age so i asked the sport a couple of questions first off is this curriculum really going to foster a partnership with the parents is this going to promote the health and well-being of all of our students is the information in the

141curriculum age appropriate and is the board somehow confusing the term medically accurate with the term politically convenient that which really concerns me is that this board and this district has gone 10 years without doing anything with its uh human growth and development curriculum and all of a sudden now there's an opportunity they realize oh gee we've gone 10 years it hasn't been a priority for 10 years and all of a sudden now we've gotten redo the entire curriculum um but it just doesn't seem like you're really truly getting the input from all the residents of the city of wauwatosa especially the parents so i asked this board down the road please use the same level of [Music] i guess passion when you're coming up with a curriculum for reading and writing and improving the abysmal

142test scores that have been plaguing us for a while thank you reverend tyler rasmussen 1333 martha washington drive and also pastor of mount zion lutheran church across the street and i was um a representative of the clergy on the external committee i just want to say that i really support this curriculum as it has been updated as a christian i believe our primary call is to show others love in an academic setting that me includes learning how to show respect and acceptance of others and i really support that unlike the previous curriculum this current curriculum is inclusive of those who are lgbtq of which i know in my own congregation and in this community there are a number of people who are part of that community and to say that they are included and respected

143and supporting this curriculum is very important to me um and having had the opportunity to minister to people who are lgbtq many times in my life to be able to say that that anyone who has lgbtq um often the biggest challenge they face in life is simply being accepted simply being respected being shown love by others whether they agree with who they are or not but just being shown that respect and love and appreciation and i like this curriculum provides that space for students to learn how to show respect and love and appreciation for each other thank evening i you tiptoe i have spoken before the board before my name is kerry sverlana i live at 147 3-0 junior boulevard in elm grove um however i am a lifelong resident i've been in toast since

144i was seven years old i am a former educator in this district um spent half my career here currently entering um year 29 of teaching um and i my last teaching assignment in wauwatosa was teaching fifth grade in the classroom that i was a fifth grader in a mckinley before the building was demolished the same room that my mom taught in as well so the roots run deep i care deeply about the community and i feel like i'm one of the only people here that can tell you that i have taught life and in this district that's what we called it back in the day like that and um i i'm not going to get into certain specifics i think the intention is as well i always want to be a school board member i

145don't anymore um i currently have six children and i'm a biological a foster and an adopted mother of ages two to twenty three two have graduated from toast east one is currently at wauwatosa east and one is going to be entering third grade at lincoln i will be honest i am concerned about some of the content not because i feel it's inappropriate because i am straight shooter my kids got the big lecture before they went to longfellow we told them every word every this ever that i had parents say to me i can't believe you did that but we did because i wanted them to know what people were talking about at the lockers so i'm not shying away from content but i do think some of this content in my professional opinion as an

146educator and i think there's something to be said for that i may not be a medical person but i have spent nearly 30 years with children and i have taught them in a classroom and i will tell you i don't necessarily agree with having everyone together if you've ever been with fifth grade girls they are very insecure about their bodies so i would ask the board to think about that please and boys can be quite immature about their bodies and i would echo some of the things that the board members have said about training i am concerned about training the staff that i worked with at mckinley we were very sensitive about these topics we involved the male gym teacher so we had different perspectives but no one really trained us our role was to

147talk about body parts girls getting their periods what happened to boys but we were strictly forbidden to talk about having sex and we had a question box so when we talk about that that's when things start to go off topic and we were very specific about you know what that's not a question we're allowed to answer go home and talk to your parents we have to ensure that that is what's happening because it is a political climate right now and i'm sorry to say we know some teachers do start to talk about things they probably shouldn't be talking about so i am asking possibly for you to examine a few things as a writing and now a literacy coach we always go back and revise revision is a beautiful thing like i said i have

148a third grader going who still is working on his vowels he comes from trauma don't really know if he's ready for some of these topics right now he's just trying to figure out where he's going to live i think that we need to think about children are still children and we talk about anxiety and mental health i have to be honest some of these things create that anxiety thank you for your time thank you for the committee for your service i serve on curriculum teams i know how much work it is so i'm not here to be disrespectful or critical but i would ask for another look at some things and uh just just be mindful of you the things that i mentioned thank you so much um hi lisa krueger i live at 2550

149north 82nd i've lived in wauwatosa for 20 years now one child just graduated from west and one goes right downstairs and he's in seventh grade at montessori i support this curriculum it is so important to have kids know their body parts how they in relations to others what is safe touch and bad touch what is who they can trust who they can talk to and if you wait too long it's too late so you need to have kids who are equipped to be able to tell you if there is an uncomfortable situation you might need to have kids who understand who they are and how their bodies work you need to have kids who empathize and understand kids who are different and believe different things than they do and by high school you need to

150be let these kids come out and understand the world and we need to prepare them for the world they're going into not the world could walk but not anything that's been said before but um clearly i didn't i was compelled to speak by some of the things i heard today but it's so important for these kids to know who they are to know they have people to trust to know i think someone mentioned age of consent they need to know these things so they don't have others taking advantage of them they need to be under able to understand dynamics and power structures and you know who cares for them so i'm full of support of this um and i hope that the community is too these these kids deserve it these kids deserve it thank

151you last but not least rickshaw third 1962 argonne this will be the last one shall i go ahead changes to the sex education curriculum being presented to the school board parents in the greater wauwatosa school community this evening i also encourage parents to take the time and look closely at the details of the program and avoid the surprises the i had no idea surprises you will find the program as presented is an indoctrination of our children beginning at kindergarten and continues to build through high school years they may say that your child can opt out if you prefer that is not the point because the same dogma of the doctrine will also be found in math lessons writing lessons english lessons and all the existing all the other existing common core curriculum across the district

152we need to simply say no right now to the changes and broadening of the human growth and development education being proposed for the children in the wild culture school district just as parents experienced during the virtual learning period when they got a close look at what was being taught to their kids they found quite a few things being done differently not better than when they were in school in that same spirit give the parents a little more credit for determining what's best for their kids during that period we also learned to take whatever the so-called experts are saying about what's best for you with a huge grain of salt it's a tough subject and the circumstances can be really challenging when it comes to sex education conversations i can also assure you that the current

153times are not unique it was challenging in the past and continues to be a challenge in parenting today i am nevertheless quite certain that we parents and grandparents will survive and thrive without this national sex education standard embedded into the school district our local community our parents have no desire to serve our local community and our parents have no desire to surrender this responsibility to the state the federal government let alone to a group of strangers from some bill gates sponsored think tank on the other side of the country who do you trust give the benefit of the doubt parents they've done it before and they will be successful today the proposed program or experiment is untested that the experts say that this is what's best please keep these unproven distorted false ideals out of

154our children's head what happens when it doesn't work you can't just look the other way when things go wrong and remain unaccountable for anything and let someone else the parents clean up the mess for heaven's sakes many of the younger kids are just trying to figure out the tooth fairy and santa claus are real not their sexual identities i suggest simplifying the content shortening the program time duration and deliver it through the parents and use the savings to invest in advancing the foundation of math english and science thank you just a quick response to an internal module tonight piece theory santa claus is [Music] congratulations thanks everybody who stuck around still to walk through this um we've been building towards this moment for quite some time um i'm really excited about um where we are

155leading the agenda next uh it's a first kind of review to the board um [Music] this evening but thank you thank you for a member of the community the process of developing our strategic plan started in august last a year ago through the process of having superintendent listening sessions candidly it started even before august during my entry into the district i met with each individual board member and a common theme emerged and that b was that the community and staff members felt that they did not have eight points they felt that they were not heard and that was coming from you before members and that you encouraged me to [Music] get into the community and to conduct listening uh sessions so between august and october that's what we did we went to every school um

156community center we met at senior and i listened to communications in addition um we also distributed surveys to ask the community what do you believe our our focus in our future should be in the walt children's school district and so through that engagement of listening to stakeholders through surveying stakeholders we started the process of then asking very interested uh stakeholders to work with us as our steering committee and our steering committee was formed in the spring on this path spring that steering committee started to meet in late april they met from late april through june and that committee took all the data that was collected from listening sessions and surveys to create not only our to to refine i should say our strategic goal but to do the very important work of developing the strategic

157objectives and if i could ask dr marvel to go to the third slide brevity will be our friend this evening [Music] you will see that there's a structure if you will if you consider strategic planning a house then the development of the mission vision and core values is really the the top the roof if you will of the house but the goals are those those real strong components the the studs if you will the home that really creates disability and through the listening sessions and surveys we identified that there were five main components that started to come from our stakeholders the first was that people were concerned are concerned around the academic performance of the organization they want to see greater um and improve performance i think we've heard a little bit of that tonight

158the second is that they really felt that diversity and inclusion should be a focus of our our organization from the poor the third was that the social mental and emotional health of our students and staff was critical to the future of our organization high quality staff was identified as a very important component to the future of the waltosa smooth distribution the component of community and culture ensuring that each school community and that our general uh culture of school was welcoming and inclusive and diverse became a focus and as we continue to refine these five goals that emerge from the data uh a sixth goal emerged and that came from our steering committee but also our administrative team and that is if we're not focused on operations ensuring that there are long-range plans to attend to

159our our our overall enrollment and where we perceive our enrollment to be in the next five to ten years uh attending to a long-term plan around the maintenance of our facilities things of that nature started to emerge not only with the steering committee but also with our administrative team and so the six goal strategic goal became operations and so from there our strategic planning uh steering committee created strategic objectives those objectives in essence and you can see it in the graphic here the strategic objectives is what we must do in order to achieve the goal so the goal of the goal itself is very broad in in many ways but the objective is really it drives the system to work the steering committee did that work they really they put in hundreds of hours uh

160in our our our and i'm gonna introduce uh steering committee in a second uh but this steering committee was amazing and outstanding they they led us in a direction of saying this is the work that needs to be accomplished from there our district administrator team administrative team many of whom did not start until july first so they it was uh there was in essence an issue of here's where you're going to work and oh by the way here are the key performance performance indicators you have to develop um so the last i would say five and six weeks our team have put together key performance indicators i want to volunteer for a second and talk about that that component of the key performance indicator you will see in the strategic plan that one of our

161main goals which again came from the board in an indirect way but nonetheless it came from you you wanted a strategic plan that would give you the ability to monitor the health of this school district in a more transparent um obvious way our current strategic plan which uh expired in 2021 there are different ways you can build a teaching plan there's some strategic plans especially and school districts are aspirational uh in nature they they give you a goal that you're trying to strive to and achieve at some point there are other strategic plans which are not often found in school districts that are very metric driven that are very uh goal oriented and results oriented your feedback to our administrative teams that you wanted the latter you wanted something that would allow you to monitor

162the help and respond to the community when people make the statements we're not moving in the direction we want to go in at the school system and so the key performance indicators are very important to us um and so what we've done at this level is that we've created a strategic plan in a draft mode that allows us to outline a mission vision core values the goals strategic objectives and key performances okay so a draft mission statement that we would present to you the board and the community to consider and over the next few weeks is that uh this this work that came from our syrian the statement uh reads as a connected inclusive community of learners we serve as active advocates to provide equitable access to excellent academic and social emotional learning opportunities that

163empower every student to thrive as passionate productive and creative citizens with a mission statement that is the statement that should drive every individual regardless if you are working in our buildings and grounds team or if you are part of the academic performance team this should be the mission that you wake up every morning and you are committed to ensuring that we execute every day as a school system so this is the draft mission statement that we offer to you a vision statement should be something that you can measure that is succinct and it's to the point and so the visual statement that we offer to you is that we uh believe that we should eradicate inequity that we should eliminate disproportionality and we should exceed proficiency for all that speaks to we believe the vision

164but also the values of this community this came out of all the listening sessions and all the data we know that we have inequity in our students we know it we see it we talk a lot about it we dr merle and i like to use the appraisal we admire our problem but we don't put action into play and so that that phrase of eradicating inequity means that we want to get to the root of it and have it disappear from our school system we want to eliminate this proportion now we know again that there's disproportionality across our school system and in every school in every classroom uh in wauwatosa that's not a criticism um but it is a reality one thing that i like that i want to point out that i know mr

165opinion and miss plymouth are going to speak about the special education audit a little bit later one thing and i've been here a year now and i've heard us talk a lot about special education one component i have encouraged to talk a lot about is the disproportionality of the identification of certain students in special education through all the conversations we've had about special education that is that is a crisis that we have in this school system to the point that the department of public instruction at the state level has identified us it's over identifying certain students and so the ability for us to talk about eliminating disproportionality of certain students not only in special education but across our school system is really important and then finally is c proficiency for all when students are taking

166assessments the goal is to ensure that they are if they have the cognitive and intellectual ability to at least be proficient we can't be satisfied with only having a certain group of students achieve proficiency historically and matriculate through our system a few months ago people compared the school report card score of a school district to the west of us in the wauwatosa school district and one of the components that we didn't lift up in that conversation with that the school district to the west of us has a higher number of student store proficient for all their students but in particular certain certain groups of students are more proficient than others and we'll get into this a little bit more in terms of how we're looking at how we we can really measure ourselves so that's

167our vision statement in terms of core values there were eight that really emerged from a core value standpoint our team wanted to rest in these we believe all students can learn and excel that's a really important value that we have to ground ourselves with we believe in respecting and promoting diversity and inclusion we believe in continues and continues growth and improvement we believe that healthy relationships are the foundation of successful schools and let me just kind of stop here for a second that healthy relationship conversation is critical if you are an administrator at a school and you have a high school you have students who tend to walk the hallways and not go to class you can approach the conversation in two ways you can either approach the conversation by saying why didn't those students

168go into class or you can approach the conversation by saying what can i do as an educator to create a healthier relationship so those students do come to class that's what that value really stands and it stands for we believe that everyone has the right to psychological emotional and physical disabled that first one psychological safety is really important if you don't feel psychologically safe in an environment then you can't sell and be your very best and that's not just for students that's for our our staff as well they don't build psychological and emotionally safe and physically safe there's a challenge we believe in a thriving school we believe a thriving school district is transparent and trustworthy one thing that you will get from our team is that we will give you the data we will

169provide to you plans for how we're going to attempt to improve and work with people we can't promise things overnight we want to we want to deliver on it uh but what you will find is that we're going to continue to give you the data you don't have to guess we'll give you the information you don't have to assume or pull it from other other sources and we believe that that builds trustworthiness we believe that all community stakeholder input is valuable i think we saw a little bit of that earlier this evening there there was something valuable on every stakeholder coming to speak to this evening it is democracy at its best and uh i think it's going to form it's going to inform dr marvel and her team and what we do moving forward

170around that topic we want stakeholder input and then finally we believe in collective access there's a term in education called collective efficacy and that's what we're really trying to get at the concept of collective efficacy means that when the entire team believes we can do something special then it happens that's when excellent comes um to the forefront we believe that when the entire community believes we can do something special that that astronauts will encourage so i talked about the six uh goals that we've created and i want to pause here and say thank you to our steering committee because again based on the feedback i received in my entry to the organization from school board members it was important for us to have the community's voice drive the work uh to this point in the

171process and so i would ask any state strategic plan steering committee member to please stand if you're an audience thank you thank you very much hey thank you for it was a staying process what we would like to do now is allow a stakeholder group member and an administrator to present to the board in the community to unpack their strategic objectives and talk about each goal so i'm going to turn it over to dr marvel and ms curley and i know there are other members of both uh sub goal subcommittee goal number one in the congress as well [Music] well um i am currently an academic specialist in the district but i've had many roles in my 25 years in the wauwatosa school district um as part of that work i have also been a

172part of a lot of committee work which you may know already as i know many of you however i'm very proud to have had this recent opportunity to be a member of the steering committee for the strategic planning of the wauwatosa school district this work was so impactful for me because it was an authentic process led by dr means and dr marble and the collective conversations stretched my professional thinking so the strategic objectives created by the academic performance subgroup including parents and educators are a reflection of our diverse thoughts and extensive conversations so we'll look at the first one i'm not going to read the strategic objectives because they're already up there i'm just going to provide a little bit of insight so strategic objective number one as our core value state we are committed

173to continuous improvement which includes review of our local curriculum instructional resources programming and assessments so that we are aligned with wisconsin and national standards strategic objective number two 1.2 throughout the three-year process we need to develop how we plan to measure the vision of a graduate and showcase our milestones at a building level the dashboard will offer transparency to all stakeholders regarding the academic results we discussed the importance of your role the school board that we'll have in reviewing it and analyzing these results strategic objective 1.3 our newly designed pace structure which stands for prepare align collaboration and engage will provide an opportunity for educators to collect and analyze data in a timely manner to impact all levels of student learning strategic objective 1.4 the key performance indicator which is on another slide that you

174have is a proactive measure which provides clarity on what high quality learning looks like sounds like and feels like to ensure there is equitable access for all to excellent learning and as a result and as a result result opportunities to exceed proficiency strategic objective 1.5 during the past few years we've been leaning on digital communication as many of you are aware of with our family families this objective describes the need to reflect on current communication to ensure we're offering various types of communication with all families to meet them where they're at additionally in the near future we'll be engaging in an audit on grading and reporting practices thank you miss sterling thank you i want to thank that the entire subcommittee for goal number one because they took their job everyone took their job very

175seriously but i i think the this was the one subcommittee that would stay after uh our our meetings they really wouldn't be we would love to answer your questions after all that they all the groups have had a chance to present but uh thank you to our academic affairs i would like to call up uh mrs holland now to go over diversity and inclusion and goal number two i think the staff enforcement terminator as well i'll be here [Music] hi i am lashonda holland the director of diversity and inclusion and i had the opportunity hi i am lashonda holland the director of diversity and inclusion and i had the opportunity to work with dory davenport we are working on the diversity and inclusion goal number two and we have six strategic objectives and overall our

176goal is to provide an inclusive environment that is equitable that provides all students with the opportunity to receive the same academic excellence regardless of any disability gender age etc so i'm going to turn it over to dory who's going to share with you how the steering committee members came up with the actual strategic objectives so um i'm going to take a little bit more of a broad view of what we looked at and talked about when our subcommittee met and began our work um as as was mentioned by the all the co many of the comments that we heard during the last discussion people were talking about wanting to prepare our students for the future that they're going to be living in that future is going to become increasingly more diverse they're going to be

177faced with challenges that we probably can't even imagine right now as the world of technology keeps growing and changing and so we want this we want our students to be able to um really coming at it from a standpoint of acceptance understanding and respect um not tolerance but really getting beyond tolerance to this understanding and respecting and accepting people for who they are what they bring to the table what their backgrounds are whatever their race or um well whatever their race is or their other orientations and so one of the things that came up early on was a discussion of representation one of the teachers in the group said that she was really surprised at how many students came to her with deep appreciation for the fact that the visuals in her classroom were representative

178of the makeup of the student body and she heard that from all a lot of students whether they were students of color or white students and so just representation is a simple thing that is a technical kind of fix that can really mean a lot and go a long way for teachers in the classrooms and um we also talked in our group a lot about being uncomfortable with or being comfortable with being uncomfortable that as we learn and grow as we start to unpack the white privilege that many of us have grown up with and and benefit from we have to be on com we have to let ourselves be uncomfortable as we learn to appreciate the differences that that people bring to the table that that they have experienced and the way they've grown

179up so um those were kind of the background things we talked about so the objectives the six objectives we have a lot of kind of technical things in them in terms of implementing strategies and programs and um and then also some things that are a little bit broader in terms of helping to people to learn and grow as a result of what what they will be doing with these objectives thank you okay i would just uh highlight i think it was damn did important excellent job giving an overview of this subcommittee's work but when you look at the objective i would just urge you to see how broad they are they're not simply focused on racial diversity um but we really had a lot of conversations about accessibility and that component of bpi were and

180how special education evolved into an outstanding identity and there was just a lot of different components to our diversity and include network that we wanted to highlight with this skull and the objectives thank you it's been a great deal of time um and it was maybe our largest uh subcommittee group around social emotional withdrawal and how we talked a lot about that component of our aspirations and school district and to really be purposeful with this work and so i'm going to turn it over to our next team of a stakeholder steering committee member and an administrator this year good evening board members luke opinion and the chief of pupil and family supports i'm chastity burmeier i'm a pediatric psychologist in the area and a parent of two tulsa students and we're very honored and excited

181to be representing goal 3 of social emotional mental health something that's very close to my own heart professionally and personally um this section is really all about creating that psychological safety and safe environments characterized by that mutual acceptance understanding respect and caring um that we want to have all students feel and see in our school settings so we'll have chelsea kind of talk about the development and how we came to these objectives and i'll sort of supplement that sure um one thing i wanted to point out was this subcommittee wasn't made of just mental health providers which was amazing there was a variety of perspective with school guidance counselors teachers students which was particularly great and members of the community that don't have a mental health background so we all kind of came together with

182very different perspectives and i'm really proud of the work that our subcommittee did um so to give some insight for objectives 3.1 we did not want to just assign more training for training purposes our goal with this one was to really foster consistent tools across schools that actually make psychological safety and self-regulation part of our tosa school culture we wanted to just be embedded in part of our day-to-day life so that was kind of our inspiration for 3.1 for 3.2 we wanted um based off the results of our student engagement survey particularly with secondary students there's a lack of connection and we really wanted to kind of informally create opportunities and prioritize time during the school day to have students make those connections with staff 3.3 simply we want to know how our staff and

183our students are doing and we want to have a better film on that pulse and we want to be able to connect them with resources as easily as possible so for 3.4 once we identify the needs we want to make it very simple as simple as we can for staff and students to kind of connect with resources that they need for their mental health and also just really build up and amp up the internal and external support services that we have and finally for 3.5 we wanted to ensure student service staff supports were equitable across schools so i want my daughter's amazing social emotional learning education to be available at every elementary school every secondary school in tosa and two we also wanted to really respect the roles and the talents of student services staff

184they have training there's a purpose for that training and they have a role and we want to give them time to really invest in the schools and do what their intended job was to do so that's sort of the broad overview of our intentions for these objectives and if i could i'd like to speak just a little bit to some of the metrics that are associated with this section certainly there's a lot of different data points you can look at when we're talking about assessing social emotional and mental health growth as a system and at the individual level so you'll see a lot of the key performance indicators really scaffold out year one year two year three and what we're trying to accomplish but certainly we'll also be looking a lot of metrics that are

185in section two around diversity inclusion and accessibility as well as section 5 culture climate they all intertwine and i hope as you read through this plan you're making those connections and seeing how these aren't just in isolation but there's that common thread through um they also certainly connect to several of the milestones we'll be monitoring as a district and then one data source that isn't really implied in here because it's not as sensitive to time but certainly the yrbs that youth risk behavior survey is another large metric we'll be looking at every other year um it's just with the lag in it and it being every year it's not as sensitive to some of those yearly key performance indicators i may just add this subcommittee did amazing work and that they identified three major areas

186of social neutral and mental health that we wanted to really focus on trauma-informed schools pbis and restorative practices because in this field of social emotional mental health there's so many different lanes you can fit um and i think the fact that they landed on three uh that were very clear and and definitive i think it just opened up um a level of clarity um for our school this system that that is going to it's going to really help teachers and students and families thank you so much thank you all this work can't be done without staff you need staff to really do this work well and it was really it was really an honor to to work with our our subcommittee around high quality staff they have very robust very distinct conversation that led us

187in a very uh definitive way i'm going to let our chief of talent ms delagatsky provide an overview of the work from that site thank you dr means um i had the privilege uh to meet mary pat foley um today and to get some uh insights uh and uh true wauwatosa school district um history uh in my conversation with her mary pat foley is in our audience i think sarah i want her to talk around it's all good we're a team already you're gonna do it well yeah um mary pat has invested in our organization not just as a resident of the community but as an employee and a parent as well her insights in terms of the experiences of staff members as well as what she hopes for our community are really inspirational we

188had a lovely conversation today and mary pat helped me to really understand the evolution of our strategic plan gulf war one of the things that she shared with me today is that she recalls when wauwatosa schools were considered to be a destination district um and that that is part of her hope for our future is that we become a place where educators want to be and so goal 4 is really focused on the internal and the external systems and processes by which we not only attract and develop and retain staff members but really how staff members are supported by our organization i'll talk briefly about some of our key performance indicators and how we will measure our success or our progress that we're making towards improving the experiences of staff members in our schools um

189strategic objective 4.1 really talks about how we are bringing educators into our organization um clearly we have a need not just to go ahead and and have a reliable pipeline for future educators we educate some amazing uh young people in this organization and to bring those folks back with their talents and skills that they've honed is really a great opportunity um one of the ways we'll know if we're successful in terms of creating our own pipeline for talent is that we'll be able to count on that pipeline for a percentage of staff members that we can hire on an annual basis and that will know then that that's an effective source for our future employees in the organization one of the things that i've really been excited about with the strategic plan so far is

190what i hope you can also see are the intersections between each of these goals so one of the things that we need to be cognizant of with strategic objective 4.1 is also to ensure that we are increasing the diversity of our staff members to the point that we are reflective of our student body and there are some great crossovers with with goal 2 in that respect as well strategic plan objective 4.2 again talks about how we can show others that they can count on us and the work that we're doing um we're going to be developing a dashboard so that we can not just share um internally at our meetings which we've enjoyed for a couple of months now information and updates not just on our recruitment and our our retention efforts but on the

191other areas of employee experiences that make a big difference and make employees feel valued in our organization strategic objective 4.3 uh is um is one that should be a bit familiar to you uh with the board's recent approval of a new compensation plan for teachers in the organization and so while um it is important that we are competitive with our total compensation which includes salary and benefits for teachers there are many other members of our organization uh who who need to be valued in terms of their compensation in the benefits that we provide that being said when we look at total compensation uh with salary and benefits we're very competitive with our peers we don't have enough money to go everywhere even though i keep assuring mr breitman you can find a money tree for

192me um and so we really need to go be thoughtful and talk with employees about their priorities in terms of where we should be investing in them from a benefits or a salary perspective and so this goal really talks about how we're going to know uh that we are continuing to be competitive in that respect uh and finally um goal 4.4 talks about the strategies that we'll use in the organization to ensure that we're providing the types of experiences for employees that will help allow them to make wauwatosa their career destination and so in terms of helping to support employee health and well-being in terms of allowing and welcoming feedback and dialogue with employees and improving the feedback that they get to improve their work in the organization those are the types of things that

193are included in objective 4.4 it became abundantly clear to our steering committee that in order for a school district to be susceptible [Music] to be successful you have to have a strong community and you have to have strong school culture and i want to thank bill and laura and scott for doing really good work they were they were our smallest subcommittee but i would say our most powerful uh subcommittee that they invested a lot of time and energy thinking about the intersection of community support and the school culture that we actually have in each of our schools they felt that it was important for the schools to reflect the values of the community and that if they were not safe communities and cultures that students can't achieve all the other things that were discussed earlier

194uh and so i want to just turn things over to our director of student success emily o'connor and she'll introduce bill thank you um so i'm sure you will begin to notice a lot of overlaps as you heard from uh mr pinyon and mrs lazaski say um goal five really took a much broader perspective in terms of our school communities that we're developing and fostering across the district um and as we all began on july 1st it was really exciting to ground in this work and understand the spirit of this goal and sort of the aligned objectives and the key performance indicators to guide us goal five centers around creating that physical emotional and safe learning environment characterized by meaningful student staff and family engagement and it really highlights transparency and data shared voice and

195decision making through multiple means of engagement um and sort of outlines our commitment to students staff and families um so that they can see their schools within the wauwatosa school district as a place where they feel valued and um and that they belong what else would you add okay well let me understand i'm the old person in this group understand when i walked in people looked at me said what is this old man doing here and i you know my stake in the district is i've been a waltose resident for 70 plus years i graduated from wauwatosa there was no west my three kids went to went to uh went to west and now i have four grandchildren who are spread between washington and east [Music] i really admire you people in sitting here and

196what you do because you are the gatekeepers and you bring a lot to the district and i really had to respect your willing to listen to the community because that is what we call culture and what we struggle with is what do we mean by culture and we had to deal with dealing with the definition and i know we had discussions with dr meads to what extent because culture really goes through the whole thing i mean it really covers all of the particular goals so for laura and i and the other people we had to really look at where is the district now what how do you define culture and dr means provided us with some data some surveys that gave us some real direction in terms of what objectives would make sense for this

197particular goal the key is to give you as board members the ability to have a dipstick to find out where people are in the district in terms of feeling comfortable in their environment and so if you look at our particular objectives the first one deals with how do students and staff feel now the survey indicated that there's a percentage of teachers who don't feel valued who have some concerns about i think does anybody really care and that concerned us and so we feel that we need some more data how widespread is that is that current because this was an old survey and i don't know how far back those things go but i think you as the board need tools and this this document that you're dealing with is worthless if you just print it

198put it on a shell this document needs to guide the things that you're doing as you're taking the district through these different particular points and so uh i was really impressed with the various people who worked on it and the dialogue that that took place and poor dr means was flying around like crazy trying to keep us all on task which wasn't easy anyway if you look at the objectives one and two that's dealing with how do kids feel how does teachers feel and what do we do with the community what is their particular feeling towards the district do they feel included do they feel satisfied with where we're going and you as the board would need to know that i would think um the objective three again if if you look at the i

199like i like looking at the uh performance indicators for objective three because it's looking at staff referrals and how are those reflected in terms of dispersion the proportion of kids in your district are they all stacked in one way or another so and the other one is suspensions this all deals with school culture and what are we dealing with if we have a high degree of suspensions why is that we need to know that and use the board need to do that the whole idea is to give administration some clues as to where to go so they can come back to the board and say here's where we are here's where we're going and here's our results the one i really feel excited about is number five five five the survey indicated to us that

200teachers felt in some ways there's a lot going on we've had a pandemic kids are coming back they're in all different places how do i deal with these how do i how do i help these various kids i'm overwhelmed um this kid's having a problem i got to call these parents i mean how much time do i have to spend dealing with that and what are some ideas that i can have who can i talk to to get some help and get some ideas in terms of where i can go and this this crisis team i think and maybe you have something like it now but our point is that we wanted to really define that bring people on board to meet with a teacher who has some difficulties talk about this student because the

201key is proactive rather than reactive and too often we've been reactive the kid's in problem he's being suspended can't we deal with some of those things before that happens and that's what this is all about this crisis intervention team to me is crucial is really crucial in working with teachers and giving them the support they need telling them that we value you we concern about you and you're really doing a good job and here are some things that we're going to help you with um [Music] another thing we came up with was leadership decisions sometimes teachers felt that they were pushed aside they didn't quite understand what could they have some input and what are decisions that they can have input i understand sometimes use administration you know you have to deal with it now

202but there are many decisions that teachers should have some input in and what are those will need to be defined the other aspect is sometimes teachers felt how do we get recognition they felt they weren't recognized so administration is there some way that we can recognize those teachers who are really contributing to this culture not only that but students now we found out that schools do things differently so is it up to each school to define how they're going to recognize students and teachers or is it the district going to have some uniform things so oh my god you're doing a great job you know what just passed my bedtime i want to turn it back to you well i think you covered most of it um it was really when we were looking over

203the key performance indicator that there were some really natural fits in in terms of what phil highlighted for the data for us to use in terms of engagement surveys um suspension rates referral rates and then also um some artifacts to kind of show progress towards growth in terms of process or stakeholder engagement so thank you thank you so much thank you this one in particular i saw another strategic plan i was really pleased to see because it really tied together [Music] a broadly of different areas and thank you so much please come back for me i need more going through the world there we go and we have one last goal we have our slides uh and so what we found through our our steering committee work was that in in order for us to

204achieve all these different goals and the objectives that we have that we have to extend to some of our operations a much more uh operational and very systemic approach and so alternative work to mr reitman then we'll go into detail in terms of some of the items that came up from the actual steering committee that mr brenton has identified and his two months or so in the organization that will help us reach our cj problems and i think i'm trying to write with you so my first note was when i see strategic objective i think strategic approach and so the first one we look at enrollment and i think back to june with the budget approvals and that wasn't strategic right we had discussions on enrollments and history enrollments and future of enrollments at that

205time uh we're gonna be leading into those discussions much earlier as an example for that one september is the count that feeds into our financial resources that will then feed into october november of having a strategic approach to enrollments which then drives the budget process so in june we already have that laid out and well vetted as we get to that point so that's an example of that one so that's six one uh for six two we have facility planning a long-term approach there looking out ten twenty years at what the deferred maintenance needs just to keep the rooftops replaced and the asphalt replaced as well as looking at what the enrollment trends due to the need for capacity and space planning for future enrollments for six three we have fund balance and we set

206the target at 35 percent of our next year's expenditures and the rationale for that number is the bond rating agencies both moody's and standards and poor's uh put the minimum at 25 to have the aaa bond rating which is the highest best-in-class rating that they have with our self-funded health plan we recommend having something higher than that we need to have a buffer because we're taking on the risk as the insurance company as a district so having that plan so 35 makes sense to us as a safe place to be to keep that in check uh with that that logic 6.4 is long-term financial planning so just like the enrollments facilities all feeding into a longer term discussion not making decisions on this year's budget that may negatively impact next year so thinking long-term with

207all of those different aspects of that one 6.5 having a collaborative and again strategic approach to our employee health and wellness plans again we're self-funded so we have more flexibility as the employer to do things that we'd like to do within that plan but we also want to make sure we're planning into cutting edge technologies and cutting edge ideas there with that plan i'll discuss a couple of those at the next agenda item 6.6 is the purchasing and transparency and trust related to the cla auto reports and the purchasing discussions that happened over this last year so being much more strategic in that area and then 6.7 is having inventory and life cycles for technology it's called out here but i would also add as we look at classroom furniture that's another item that could

208be added into this mix musical instruments replacements those kinds of things all having a strategic approach to those items so we don't get stuck or caught with a big ticket item that we weren't aware of or didn't plan into uh for the future so we think this encompasses the operations and financial side um really well and so again looking for feedback on this section as we roll this forward also thank you i'll leave a few final slides and then hopefully you want to encourage more member questions we discussed the milestones at a previous meeting but we we understand that there is a direct correlation between our vision of a graduate 2.0 and these milestones the milestones allow allow the board and the school district community members to see how our students progress not not just

209one year but throughout the duration of their time in the district we're able to disaggregate that data we're able to see how certain groups of students are performing um and it gives us we believe uh an opportunity to look at our students not only through an academic ones but when you look at uh milestone number nine for example that it's to the engagement component when students come to school that's an an element of engagement or when you look at number 10 again engagement in our greater waltos educational community what is the demographics of the young people who are performing in our fall place what's the demographics of our student uh government uh and this young people are going out for student government we believe that that's important that data show that when young people are

210involved in co-curriculars they do better in school and so our ability to track that information is really critical this is the time for me to point out to you that you will know that we don't have an equity plan or an equity strategic plan in this it's all embedded uh because it can't be a standoff or standalone it has to be part of who we are as an institution so um if we go to the next slide these five components do align with the 10 milestones and that's why we're really excited about the vision of a graduate 2.0 it gives us the ability to not have an aspirational vision for our graduates but to actually measure and allow you as a board to monitor if we're meeting that what i would like to call the

211wallets across um that we're we're giving a promise to each and every one of our families that this is the experience that their young people will have if they're enrolled in our schools so if you go to the next slide thank you team when you look at this at the top of this focus and the top of this work should be our students they are the pinnacle of this work but it starts with the board it starts with you it starts with the district office team and our principal and our our teachers and what you will see that ultimately this is about accountability a strategic plan that is worth its uh insults is really grounded in ensuring that we're being accountable to each and one of our students and so what i would just share

212with you um in our the last slide that i will share here is that what we discussed at the steering committee level is that those individuals so bill they've been going away dr joseph anger bill isn't going away because we have asked that our steering committee stayed with us that our administrative team will be responsible to bring them back on a quarterly basis to share with them this is where we're this is what we've achieved and this is what we haven't achieved uh our steering committee invested a lot of time and effort and now it's our job to prove to them that we're executing on the work that they've laid out for us so we will have a strategic plan dashboard and that if you go to this presentation and click on the hyperlink you

213can see that we've put together a dashboard where people can monitor how we're moving forward we will have quarterly meetings not only with the steering committee but we will also have quarterly meetings we'll bring this information to the board in a war meeting we will have the measurement of the milestones that we spoke to earlier and then number three uh each of our schools will have school growth plans that are two-year growth plans that if you want to know specifically what's happening in your student school you can go to your school website and see how they're progressing on their school growth plan in short we have developed i believe a draft strategic plan that allows the board to monitor in a way where you don't have to ask for the data but it should be

214here if it's not here um obviously you have this is the time for you for you to ask for certain information that is not being lifted up in uh the presentation that we brought forward i want to thank again our steering committee members they did amazing work i think they pushed us um they they shared with us a vision of what they want this new district to be um we believe that that's expressed in this draft plan and i will pause now our team will fall now to see if you have any questions a couple things i want to do is set the stage as well for the board members a reminder we will be on august 17th uh spending some time in um in session uh discussing the strategic plan it'll come back i

215think also on the 23rd for more conversation around plan so we'll have kind of multiple conversations um for this to continue to come back so i'll we'll certainly entertain conversations special tonight and go and dig in as much as we want but we'll also have additional uh is the typical decisions i'd also say is as the board works in the strategic plan this is a key function of our government uh and it's really important for us to be effectively working together to the greatest way possible so the word development like we started last monday we'll continue that through this process and figure out ways how do we work most efficiently and effectively together uh and we'll be doing that certainly along the sides of microsoft i want to start off with this default we will

216continue on the table to see if there's any comments or feedback and you can pass and we'll come back to you but um i kind of want to go back that way thank you i just had one content whoa really great i'm really looking forward to beginning my question is how would we um like to best receive questions um this is a lot um and i likely have i don't know like four pages of notes and have lots of questions um i'm trying to keep them at the highest level and be cognizant of time so what is the best way to get into the group's question and then how can we get the questions and answers back to the whole world so that they're not being inundated with the same question than having to respond

217i think it would send me the question by the right and we can just do it by goal and by uh objective okay then i will just say click on my all pretty good tonight um wow and um my big push is um i'm excited by the objectives i'm gonna probably be um more intrigued by the metrics and actually the fidelity of how we implement all of these really really important things um because this is an enormous enormous plan um and so mr kenyon like you said about your one year two years like it's gonna be helpful for me to sort of like ground in that as well um just so that we're being ambitious and we're also thinking about like attainable goals so that we can show the community progress is happening like every

218time i've met with someone whether they're happy or angry i've said to them what does success look like for you in six months or a year what does it look like for your student um and so i want us to ensure that as a board you've got the the data we need um but to your point dr me and play can we make sure that we're getting some quick wins can we make sure that we are are showing some immediate uh growth and it's not like wait three years and then get back to us um so that's that's what i'm thinking about right now but thank you i i've led strategic planning processes i know what a beast this was so thank you for doing it and bringing it to the board so back to

219them [Music] uh two things first with respect to objective 5.3 that to me and this is bigger my comment is bigger than 5.3 there's suggestive to me there that disproportionality of staff of girls due to a cultural measure well i'm going to say it there's been suggestions for a long time from various people that somehow our teachers our teachers look through a racist lens i challenge that to say that this 5.3 is a secondary outcome for a secondary effect to failures in the 5.1 and the um 5.2 and the 5.4 that we as administrators as leaders um and even back up to all the other things the um the employee-related stuff if we don't hire um teachers of color if if we don't um invent 5.1 have students who feel that they're accepted and valued

220if we don't um you know in 5.4 somehow that better behaviors from students that's not necessarily the teacher could be all the rest of us that and so um i don't want us to take the what's to my thinking has been the easy thought process out and say oh it's the teachers we just have to push up these teachers now we are everywhere doing a lot of things that we are not that we could do better i i mean i in my life journey with my children and i talked earlier um you know that's the tragedy and all there's all kind of other stuff i could think of well my children have done their in their late 30s now they've done very well and i can tell you specifically is because of economic and white

221privilege that's structural it's not because we were favored racially racially but because we had tools and resources that that others did not have and so that sent me to my second point which is down to the goal sixth operations i come from an operations world until i retire and i would like to see suspect has been actually expanded to include specific things like do students this is a rep say to hear things about instruments and participation in arts programs i would like to see specific strategic goals and strategies to get everyone proportionately involved in our arts programs because right now they're disproportionately not involved for example and for you know a strategy just an example i think i'm talking about music teachers have told me that if we staff an administrator of some sort to

222support the arts programs that they will be able to increase involvement of students with disabilities and and students who are being economically disadvantaged and they're more often students of color into our arts programs so i'd like to see us have operational goals about our our children well do they have sufficient um food resources that they're not hungry in class do they have you know um adequate response time on their other technical um tools you know their electronic devices i mean nuts and bolts things that i know are operational and they will directly affect the quality of life of students and make they feel like they have the same resources and tools that everybody else does thank you wow okay this this is fantastic um this is so much fun thank you everybody who spent so

223many hours to commit to putting us together um it's just it's incredibly powerful the powerful mission statement and it sort of cascades out from there and i'm really excited to dig into it i have a lot of like very specific questions but i'm going to save those i think for another format before we can talk yeah a compliments oftentimes like he was very very involved in strategic planning processes and they they live in the clouds and they stay on the shelf and so what i like about this is that it's operational we just thought about how we take it down um you know to the operational level and how we measure it and that's that's that's uh that's really commendable also thinking about you know us as a board about structure how do we support

224this through committees and through policy and you know so i started really the weight starts hitting my shoulders like what what do we own because we own a lot of this there not only to support the strategic plan through our policy governance uh we have a lot of work to do so so thanks for all the extra effort in this it's really meaningful and um i'm just glad that we took it to that level so thank you guys so much i mean i'll echo many of the common stuff before me but it was very apparent the collaborative nature of this strategic thing and i really appreciate the community members the employees the students who dedicated their time to this because this is going to drive our work and it is going to um i think

225set the tone from where we go from here from here as a board um i just want to comment on mr meyer's comment if i may um you know i would like to believe that our our staff is not operating you know with these racist intentions but to clarify you know maybe their biases and i think that's something you know hopefully we'll get to in some of this dei work but that we have scientists about things we don't know and that often translates to students with disabilities to students of color to students with different cultural religious backgrounds and so i think that if we provide the rights pd for our teachers the right training and the right resources that you know we can look at it through a lens where we start to diminish some

226of those biases and you know really focus on the success of all of our students so i do have lots of specific questions i won't get into those but i am just really thankful for all the work that was put into this and excited to dive really deep into it and let this guide our work so thank you all the comments i would i would make um which i think most the implementation of this of making sure that we've got that our board needs to be in a really healthy place but we need to be honest um that we've got some big aspirations for the district the community has high expectations before it has high expectations it's pretty clearly the staff has expectations and so i'm looking forward to doing this i think the key

227of this is always is always delivering the organization uh and i think we'll continue down that conversation and police department see where that will go so august 17th and august 23rd do you have a sense of like how will this opening that time so the board is prepared in terms of how we're entering into that space preparing ahead of time august 17th is your time to dig into your specific questions i think based on what i've heard this evening and what we can do is send out some type of tool that will allow you to drop in questions for each of the goals so that we can manage it and you can you can place your your question that you see fit we'll make sure that you have access to the google drive um sorry

228but all right uh so make sure that you have access you can drop your questions into each of those areas if you can give that to us by writing that will be helpful because then we will work i think i don't want to answer all the questions by the 17th but if we are aware of it because i think it will it will harm the conversation if we just give you a response by the 17th as well we the 17th is your time to ask questions but more importantly uh we shared this with the steering committee uh it also gives you the ability to make modifications and at the end of the day the plan must be the board's plan uh as mr phillips said you have to use this to guide your governance work

229i i i was really pleased to find an article that should ground your the work of the board um and this is it's a scholarly article that states that when school boards are are focused and prioritize the strategic plan the students in that school district perform better than the districts they don't have a board that's grounded in their strategic plan so at the core so often in school board meetings people have this throwaway statement of is for the children this is legitimately for kids if we're all focused on our work on the 22nd of august we're hoping that uh after your work on the 17th that we can bring this back for your approval if we're unable to do that i understand i mean there that's an artificial timeline i mean ultimately you have to

230be a timeline that works for you uh but we initially came up with the timeline of tonight the 17th and the 22nd because our staff will come back on august 30th and it was our goal to kick off our new school year with a new strategic plan that guides our work in the strategic plan there's so many uh i think real treasures um i think it was mentioned earlier we've renamed and rebrand rebranded our early our early release wednesdays we're now calling them pace wednesdays which stands for prepare align collaborate and engage and then that's really going to change the way that our teachers work with one another to monitor how students are growing each week um in the goal number two we actually have a diversity uh equity accessibility and inclusion belief statement that

231has 10 if you there's a hyperlink in the plan if you look at those 10 statements in we're not just talking the concept of diversity equity accessibility and inclusion but there are certain belief statements that we're grounding ourselves in and expectations of professional behavior from everyone across the organization so we're really hoping that you'll come to the meeting on the 17th with the um question but also revisions this is it's it's okay you need to embrace the opportunity to to revise but it's our it's our hope that you will vote on as much as [Music] thank you i agree there's things to work on for 5.3 and i've known that about myself all through my time in life with regards to cultural lens but i do not agree that working together means that we stop

232taking pressure off of ourselves to do better on the other things and that somehow we put similar pressure on ourselves in this room working together hearing everyone and not being dismissive of anybody's input that we will force ourselves as a board to look at other things and i suggest that will help the 523 for example we 5.2 all families feel accepted how many families or parents of color are in the room right now and what do we do about that we need to put some pressure on ourselves as a board to do something about that and then we'll see maybe that helps other other other objectives as well you know we used to run robin once a month have our board meetings in classroom buildings and oh we got some comments then from parents and

233they felt like it was their school district too and they would come to my component they'd let us know a few things that made us very uncomfortable maybe we need to have some strategy for us as a board about how we have our meetings and operate to make everyone feel proportionally accepted to come to the meeting and comment about the issues thank you and dr means one thing that really struck me about this strategic plan which is different than the others that i've seen is that this strategic plan starts with academic performance and it ends not ending ending but student milestones and classroom impact and that is commendable i laid this out i work and i'm very excited for this three-year plan it's achievable and we can roll up our sleeves and we can take

234a deeper note thank you to you and the team for organizing in this way really speaks to what we're always joseph stands for with that we will open up if there's any meeting hi i'm tamahassee and i'm at 2015 street um thanks so much to the steering committee this is like beautiful to look at um and wow again for sure um i just wanted to say that i think that um having heard all the goals that the human growth and development um curriculum that was proposed this evening actually fits really well with a lot of those things so i just want to put that out there um and then also mentioned that um a couple things that could be looked at maybe were already considered um but weren't included would be sustainability just in all

235senses of the word so also our environmental impacts we have green teams at a lot of schools and we have composting programs at a lot of the elementary schools and that long fell and it's really really hard to keep that going kind of on our own little tiny groups that we have so we're really trying to get the whole district on board with that and make it a lot easier a lot of students really want to know that they're having a good impact on their community um in that way um and then also in the stack retention piece um a couple things that i think would make a big difference would be how overloads are compensated um the way it is right now is really not um reflective of the work that's actually being put

236into teaching and overload particularly in the allied arts in middle school um and also how ftes are calculated so transparency and how ftes are calculated um for core teachers versus allied arts teachers um and making sure that that is that those groups are being compensated fairly for their time and how much they are working with their students and families reverend tyler assassin um 1333 martha washington drive um and i've really had any time to look over this and digest it but so wow everything's already there um i specifically want to talk about um objective 2.4 and 5.6 um 5.6 is about the truancy rate and 2.4 is about discipline rate disproportionality and one of the things i know because my colleagues in mps are currently working with this with mps very very intentionally is that

237the truancy rates last time it was publicly released the state stopped collecting that data um last night was probably released for wauwatosa the truancy rates for our school district were nine times higher for black students than they were from white students even though the chronic absenteeism rate right now is about two point five times higher than blackstone which is still a disproportional thing um and because truancy is something that i hope you know um can result in someone getting a criminal record among other punishments i would hope it's something that is counted among in a discipline rate procedure and in those key performance indicators trumancy is not listed in there on the other hand the reason the state stopped collecting truancy rates and went to chronic absenteeism is because they found chronic absenteeism is determined

238to be a better indicator of graduation rates and so in 5.6 i know dr means you mentioned one of the milestones is that students attend ninety percent of time which is a positive way and i support positive language of saying not chronically absent right um and so i was surprised that in 5.6 that we're not also setting up some goals for reducing chronic absenteeism as well and so i thought those two oversights were important to mention that true institutions proportionality measurements um and then chronic absenteeism as a goal gaining that plan thank you thank you [Music] erin alverse again uh 2122 northwestern i'm going to start with something that will be very very heretic to most of you um the term diversity equity inclusion the concepts are wonderful that's exactly what we need that term

239is a negative buzzword in many circles and i'm just afraid you're going to put up barriers by using those terms i don't know what else to say besides that i mean what other words but i'd really like you to consider that anyway and proficiency is great how about reaching one's potential because you have many brilliant students in wauwatosa and they should be encouraged to go beyond proficiency i love the idea of the academic crisis intervention team to support the teachers i think teachers really knew that that's your goal 5.5 and i agree that you will get that by ensuring that each school has a behavioral culture that that works you know and that's standard and everyone knows the students and the teachers what to expect if a student does this then this is the expected

240uh response from the school now i know for some students that doesn't work real well and then you read the intervention the most important thing i as a taxpayer is uh page 13 the student milestones and i i just kind of like to have that being closer to the front and you're seeing that [Music] so i i think it would make a better impression on the public if that were closer to the front and i'm glad it's there and i was astounded to see that your attendance rate is not 90 um why not as a teacher i know that if a student is missing for whatever reason [Music] they're not going to learn if they're missing a lot they're not going to learn much at all so we've got to get these kids in school

241thank you hi heather burke 217 north 89th street um first i just wanted to thank mr meyer for mentioning the idea of moving meetings into the communities this is something i shared with luke a little while ago but to get to this building from my home it would take two buses and over an hour each way can you imagine what time i could get home with my kids back there um tonight um and i'm saying that as somebody who grew up in this city but a single parent never had a car there are parts of the city who are that are incredibly accessible and then there's this building and you can't help where this building is located um but you can move the meeting into the community so that is a really great idea for

242a lot of reasons um speaking on dei when we're creating promotional materials especially our vision of a branch would can we please make sure to name each group that we are focusing and identifying um if there's we talked a lot about accessibility and disability it's not named too well in some of the materials um if there's one thing a special parent knows if it's not in writing it didn't happen or it's not going to happen and until we can repair that trust within the district we really need to make sure we are naming each group that we are identified and not lumping it into etc um and then lastly as we're doing these trainings for dei and with our staff when appropriate if we could consider opening those trainings to families not to be a

243watchdog but our families can learn from those trainings just as much as our educators can thank you thank you thank you hi i'm b.j ormonds i live at 2749 north 75th street and i am a member of the wauwatosa commission for persons with disabilities and i agree with the previous speaker if it is not in writing people will forget about it or it won't get noticed by the public who is reading it and we need the exposure even something is simple at the top of the goals when you are saying diversity and inclusion here is our definition of diversity and inclusion and list the groups there then i will believe that all of those goals are high to people with disabilities and people of different gender orientations i also would ask where can the public

244send their questions is this back to the black hole of the board uh email address because it is 1105 i know that we only have three minutes i have questions and i'm not going to take up all of my time with this i think a frequently asked question page about each of these different things would be terrific and at some point i would love to have posted why were three hugely significant issues facing wauwatosa school districts put on one agenda and what is unfortunate of course is that sex comes first and one sex is done there goes the audience um which is really too bad because this fabulous document and there was so much work and thought put into it and i wish those people could have seen that and also i value the presentation

245that you do along with it especially that you're not just reading down it one other thing i do want to bring up here is that under the stamp how about we change that from high quality staff to high quality diverse staff because we make no mention in our our goals about the fact of how important it is for people and children with different disabilities to have someone that looks like them [Music] they're out there so i think i'm getting close but i have more so let me know where i can send them thank you for all you do thank you hi i'm alicia bartz i live at 1421 north 69th street i have two kids in high school i have to say now and when going to college i guess um i i like a

246lot of what i'm seeing here i agree with dr means there's some treasures here and without taking anything away from the focus on academic performance of student milestones i want to ask as a community member where we're articulating our strategic plan for our beloved music and theater programs and destination imagination and athletics and all of the co-curriculars and activities that you all talked a little bit about as you talked about this maybe events in student milestones maybe it's part of community and culture um but i believe we can do what's here and then use the staff that we have that are devoted to some of those programs to articulate a strategy not to just stumble our way along in some of those programs because they're important to engagement and what you're trying to accomplish here

247thank you thank you hi deb faulk palin thank you to everyone who worked on this and i love that what dr means is saying that the board needs to take ownership of making sure that we're getting updates and that's the way we move things forward with the dei i was really thrilled to see the word accessibility um added in there i know i had asked if that could be done um i'm going to suggest something to put in what's you know more readily used order of dei made instead of how you have it now but also to carry it over into this document here with gold two because it just stops at d so that's a suggestion i looked what the presenters said about representation in the classroom let's make sure that includes our students

248with disabilities as well and with the vision of a graduate it it's done the same cult well i just learned about the graduate too but the cultural diversity and awareness embrace differences of culture race religion etc let's never use that anymore it actually became a bit of a joke which wasn't a joke in our community that well i guess it's where they think the special ed kids are etc um and with strategic objective 2.1 in the diversity inclusion i really really ask that we don't stop at just the nine line students but we add our students with disabilities to talk about some of the things mr maya brought up about extracurriculars and arts like why are we stopping just at that group um please please include them and there's nothing i can agree with more

249is that if it's not written down and i appreciate what dr moon said that there were conversations about these other groups marginalized groups of people but if it's not written in this diversity and inclusion goal to point their goal how do we know these groups are included so can we expand on that um to include these groups so thank you again to everybody who worked on this thank you julie do we have any comments online sorry i was muted yes we do have one person that would like to speak samantha tadic please state your name and address you have the microphone hi hi um i left the meeting early but i'm still here i'm samantha tatic 1051 glen view avenue i would just like to reiterate that it's just so important that people with disabilities

250are included um i got to meet someone outside the meeting you know and they were just so curious as to like my cool hands and my prosthetics and you know you know people and children with disabilities are such a good resource for others in the schools so you know if we can get you know welcomed into you know the arts and you know sporting events and you know i could be a cheerleader you know there's just so many things that people are missing out on so we really should be incorporated into the um diversity and inclusion um and not being etc we're just so wonderful so that's my comment thank you thank you thank you to everyone that comes tonight uh your feedback now look forward to making this plan smarter so thank you for

251all the folks have um doctor means i will need two weeks ago two weeks this will come back to the board um this is where it was coming out of our service um the 17th is not ready but the plan currently is to bring it back for more development two weeks um you can also share there was a question asked about if there's feedback certainly you know and i want to push back a little bit there was a comment about the there's a black hole that there's not uh there's a public comment that we created that board members are all responsible for going and looking at i can admit that i am going to look at a kind of people every meeting and that perfect meeting i presume my colleagues are as well that they

252aren't um you would have to go back and take that with them um but you can also email members directly or collectively each of our email addresses are all located online uh then the other thing i would say is is there a spot kind of within the process or is that something that we might be able to do so the time to be collected um so that that information will be coming um so folks will have an opportunity uh and again the public comment all the global let's go and take a look at it um and then what would be what you want to announce individually or collectively um i'm i'm excited about where this will take us i think we've got some we've got some work to do over the next uh week and

253a half to make sure we're digging but i'm part of our conversation colleagues find ourselves in love with dave uh we have uh two more items on the agenda i've been i've been and mr um that they can do both their items in 15 and two minutes respectively i feel like whoever named that team is [Music] committee again cleanly appreciated [Music] board members community members i would like to introduce our chief of people with family support industries and our director of special education statesman they understand that uh how we provide service to our students with with disabilities with the families and how we support them has been a it's an area where we have to continue to try to build or rebuild trust um i was really proud and and my heart was warm by

254stacy she actually attended one of our listening sessions this past may um it was before she started the job officially but she was there to listen to our our stakeholders um in one of the listing sessions so i want to publicly say that we have people who i believe are very invested in building the trust and building a collaborative relationship i we the three of us a dollar that there have been some bumps so it's a road to road um speed bumps i should say uh in this relationship but we're committed to turning the page and really moving forward um and and hope that there's an opportunity for us to collaborate and start something new and so with that in mind uh i'll turn it over to the system thank you is this thing on

255now it's on first i wanted to thank um our wonderful parents and caregivers that stayed all night to hear this update um so thank you that shows their level of commitment right there um and to your point dr means truly we are here to talk about really our first 20 to 25 days as it relates to some of what we dove into around special education many of the items we're just going to speak to tonight do relate directly to some of the findings that have come up within that audit that was conducted last spring so now there's a lot of connections there but this is really in an effort to be transparent clear to show our community and our families and caregivers that this is something we're taking seriously and we we want to mend

256and have really strong relationships with our parents so with that we're going to speak a little bit about um some of the some of the actions that have already happened some of the work that we've dove into as well as some of our next steps um of course when we talked about the background relative to this update it's really rooted in that special education audit and some of what's been brought to you as board members over the last year or so and we were paying attention of course as we were finishing our jobs in our other districts that we came from so mrs clinton was going to speak a little bit about some of the current actions around a few items as well as some next steps and then we'll close as well um kind

257of talking about what you can expect to see from us moving forward in terms of quarterly updates yep thank you thanks for um having me here tonight um one thing that was been really helpful with that audit too was that background information helped us when we built the strategic plan with teams so that was also it was it's kind of been a nice little weaving tool that we were able to use but that's just one piece of data we've worked really hard to meet with people we've met with our parent liaisons we met with wispy and the team of other parents we're trying to meet with the building administrators to hear about their concerns and their bright spots when it comes to special education met with the coordinators so we're really trying to just gather

258all those pieces of information to be informed about what's going really well with special ed in the system and what are some areas that we can really refine and improve on some of the simple things we've done is we've really been teaming really closely with keith and his team around the budget and really understanding how are we spending our funds and how are we allocating our resources when it comes to special education and are there ways that we can make our money stretch farther are we making sure that we're allocating all of the people in the right places that we can make sure we're getting the most amount of funds back to our system so we're trying to work collaboratively we have a weekly meeting that work we're coming together with them to really understand

259our past spending consider our future spending and then to work with our building teams to say here's here is your budget this is what the budget looks like because one one of the things that we've heard from staff is just clarity of where they can spend money or where they actually have access to resources to meet the needs of our students so that's something we want to be clear with all of our staff on what they have and then really just understanding our initial staffing for me just understanding how we allocate our ftes and how other how are they are being used so right now i'm working with the administrators and the building administrators in with sarah and some of the team to say what is a structure we can have to have a really

260solid understanding about how much staffing is in each of the buildings not only with numbers but also a staffing matrix based on needs so how can we look at all of those pieces together to make sure all of our students are getting the needs that they that they are entitled to have met so working with that apparently engagement like we said we met with the parent liaisons we met with a whispy consultant and then moving forward we do plan to meet um and do some professional development that wispy is offering this fall on additional ways to do parent engagement so we're trying to find other ways that we can communicate not just what we currently have but are there other ways that we can do that as well um and then just just working with

261a strategic plan and really just getting a foundation of who we are as a system so meeting with a lot of different teams has been a real goal of ours all right and then next steps i think i kind of touched on those as well when i was going through those um but really the one piece that um we were talking about with communication oh a couple other pieces we thought about with parent engagement is i'm working with um the director of communications and another piece we heard is just transparency with communications how compared to access resources so we're going to dive into what our website currently looks like and how can we make improvements to that that parents really as they go through the stages of learning with their children in our system how

262can they make sure they have access to that information accessible to them and where is it easy for them to find and not just simple resources about um transitioning within our system but other things like what is a good soccer program that is inclusive for all students like how can we really just make sure we have all those pieces to a family available to them so they can access it and then people to talk to around those pieces yeah i think we can't underestimate the expertise that we have in our parent community and that's been very clear in meetings with some of our initial parent and caregivers it's just the passion the expertise the knowledge of navigating a very difficult and tricky world for their children and leveraging that and i think there's some opportunities

263that we have moving forward and i'm excited about the work with whispy and the training that we'll be going to about different options i also want to acknowledge when sue doyle from season 1 presented around the special education audit one of the key findings that kept coming back in her report of that was that there were some system flaws perhaps in how we deliver equitable multi-level systems of support for all students so when you think about what is guaranteed for students at the universal level into what is provided to students that that's not working for and then subsequent tiers thereafter and i want to acknowledge and talk about how the strategic plan we were very conscious when we were reviewing that right as external people coming july 1st and trying to look at some indicators

264that was an area that i feel like will really benefit all students including our special education population as we come to a stronger system and stronger guarantees at those levels of support so i hope that you can see that and that the parents in our community see that connection as well into that strategic plan and certainly some good feedback for really naming and making that more visible for our students with special needs yeah and that'll really touch on that identification disproportionality that we were talking about or i think dr means had mentioned that we really need to look at what we're doing with our students before they even are identified what are our systems that we have are in place to be proactive and really support our students outside of special ed as well that's

265really it for the first 20 to 30 days we welcome any questions or feedback you have but we really wanted to put it all out there and let you know that this is very much a priority for us i would just quickly simply state that i think a lot of the convention before has provided over a year i hope you can hear it's coming through from stacey while they haven't been here that long uh i know that there is a request from the board to create loan charts that show if you have a transportation challenge here here's the way you can solve it you can hear that we're really going to work closely with mr cheetah and our um renovate our website so people can go to sources get them right away and answer a

266lot of questions um that should be answerable right away and give information and access to our family sources trying to answer the questions they may have for their children that they care four question comments just first have a clarifying question what is whiskey wisconsin's statewide parent educator initiative yep thing yeah we can go around and have maybe more questions just a great question can you just explain what that is and you know one more time and i know there's been a lot of discussion around having a parental group what's what does that group mean in regards to being a representative to the district or for our families with children with special events sure so that's a state funded group that really is about professional development and coaching and modeling and mentoring to help us as

267districts to think about other avenues just to really um coach and question us in in a in a guiding way to say you're doing these things have you thought about this what are what are your blind spots that you might be thinking about so they're really just a resource for us that is provided by the state um that really is pushing us to make sure all of our families are engaged so yeah that's that's the intent to be it is supposed to be a safe space for our families with students with special needs to challenge and push our administrative team and our system on questions that they may have in regards to service delivery so that's the the state is that state funds this group and there are groups like this across all the different

268districts of that state to create that that safe space for discussion right yeah and and to advocate for families and for students and but then also to advocate with schools to say there's other things that you could be thinking about so they're actually here of our district the parent liaisons are parents of our district yep and they help so they they have trainings for them so our district has two parent liaisons and to be a parent liaison you have to have a student who is identified with a disability within our system um and then they are a resource to me so i met with our two parent liaisons currently that are that that are available to families so they're trained how to be an advocate for families as well so one thing that we have

269done that wasn't accessible for example just a simple correction that we made was on our initial placement papers we didn't tell families we have parent liaisons and here's how to contact them so within the first i think two weeks we added their name and their contact information so that as a new parent when you are being um address when when all of a sudden you're being introduced to the world with special education which is kind of scary for some families um that they have a person who also is living it and who could be a person for them to reach out to so so are we doing that with both like new families who are identified within our district and then new families that come into our district already yep that's what we want to

270do let's have that communication out there my only question is um we just talked a couple of months back thoughts and so one of the things you just mentioned i think is exactly the kinds of things that we want to care about like what are the little things that are helping improve communications that are clarifying processes etc so if we can hear more of those things that's definitely important to me um the other thing that i'm really curious about is um if there's been any conversation about sort of like free expectation setting and this is not a directive on one person it's question um but is there any plan to send a communication to any family in the district that has a student with a disability or an iep to say hey this is how

271this year is going to go this is what we're working on here's how you know they're apparently it's on something they're new this is what this person on our team does if you have questions like please do this first versus just showing up and knock down my door or like if there's any protocol um just because i feel like there's a place for some like resetting of norms and expectations that parents need to know um in terms of like how to communicate you know how to get questions answered that thank you whatever that is um so that they can everything so we i mean that's great feedback to hear about some of the questions that people are having so we can look into that we're really trying to understand the processes and the procedures that

272are happening within our own system who's in charge of different things but yeah really making sure that parents know where to go to questions and what the expectation is so that's great great feedback thank you even if it's just they like here's by when we expect to be able to tell you the plan or the specifics because again i think it's likely to put something in writing again like you're working with that so yeah um i just want folks to know where to find what they need them [Music] thank you um i appreciate that and uh i was just wondering do we have an orientation program for special education parents i mean the new school year we this year are going to be doing two events um august 11th and 18th where they are just

273to meet all of us and people services um do we typically do a orientation no we don't have that so that's something to consider too it's just another opportunity yeah i was just wondering since yeah liam brought that up i mean we do that in every other school and you know just an idea and then this follow-up to the special education audit i think the management response was due in november is that still the timeline yes the official response have made for the more frequent updates [Music] welcome again i'm luke and stacey um milwaukee journal headline audit exposes weaknesses in wauwatosa school district special education program i don't know if you read the article saw the article march 2014. eight years later we have decided the same headline could be there back in 2014 the

274community the board at the time was up in arms about this what are we going to do about pushing for a plan read a written plan i spent two years asking for that plan that time the board had wanted monthly updates there's a mantra going on right now how long was students with disabilities late in the wauwatosa school district so that's not on these people because they're new and i have faith in the both of you but i'm also going to suggest we do have monthly updates this is um freely i know so they know what's forgotten um back in april when the audience was presented you asked that same question what are we doing for these lowering fruits so can there be some kind of strategic plan developed around light so that we know

275what we're working on that's been identified and we can have a plan and have more frequent updates on that um with the wispy the project and i know that stacey explained it really well and mr meyer was at the meeting and i know there were three other war members who wanted to learn more about this too so the purpose i think of what they're talking about i know what they're talking about i can share the flyer if it hasn't been shared with the board yet but it's to learn how to form a group identify a purpose and structures to ensure the group works well together this is obviously targeted towards especially assess and grow personal strengths knowledge and skills for participation and leadership in the group and create a plan that will engage and support

276families their uh school and community and i know the districts that history didn't have this and that's not anything because of you but we learned about other districts that i did and we can do this too and honestly i have a lot of faith in these two people and they're listening and starting to work on this um what we learned is that these you know we heard from about old creatures oh creek there is a board member on their group that just listens in you know it's part of its and participate and the thesis starts to help you develop these goals and then steps away as your group takes form and teaching so again welcome to both of you thank you for realizing and leveraging the knowledge the skills and the passions of people in

277the community because you do have people that want to help you because ultimately what does it do it helps all of our specialized kids so thank you hi heather burke again um i have been hearing some there's always pushback from the community regarding why we keep coming here to complain that's the word that they use um i prefer advocating but i just wanted to address that and the importance of making a plan to fix this 95 of students who qualify for an iep never improve enough to get rid of the iep but over 80 percent of students who qualify for services are classified as having a mild to moderate disability that can be readily addressed our systems fail some of our most vulnerable students and their families there is no child care for kids with

278disabilities 40 of american kids with disabilities or parents raising kids with disabilities leave the workforce to become full-time caregivers for their children over 90 percent have reported some form of financial hardship at least one in five can't afford to keep their families fed properly we are 50 more likely to be in debt these systems that are supposed to help don't provide unconditional support they provide a service in exchange for a sacrifice our kids are two to three times more likely to be bullied and are at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with a mental health condition 85 of restraints and seclusions in wisconsin are done on kids with disabilities nationally students with disabilities are three times more likely to be arrested and that risk is multiplied in schools with police those numbers are significantly

279worse for students of color with disabilities forty percent of state prisoners and thirty percent of federal prisoners have a disability ten percent of the u.s prison population has an intellectual disability and seventy-five percent are illiterate for some of our kids the special education system is the express lane in the school the prison pipeline less than 23 of people age 16 and over with disabilities are employed the poverty rate for adults with disabilities is more than twice the rate of adults without disabilities we keep coming back here because our kids their futures their lives are dependent on you in a lot of ways and what happens here in these buildings there is hope in all of those statistics though because the strongest predictor of post-school employment for kids with disabilities is parental expectation when a family

280expects their child to be employed after high school that child is five times more likely to be employed within two years of leaving school the key to student success is supporting families raising their expectations of what their child is capable of and this is important allowing families to raise educators expectations of what their child is capable of we have to work together i am asking like deb for monthly collaborative meetings with families starting immediately and continuing until no parent in wauwatosa schools feels they need an outside educational advocate for their child every person in this district and in this room should already be the advocate for every child and i have been one of those parents that comes to these meetings and wants change for my kids and yes to all a lot of those

281things on that list i i would describe my son and i would describe my son as a student with a with a hidden invisible disability who struggles academically or socially when all that he needs for success are appropriate appropriate accommodations and explicit instructions no different than um no different than a person needing a wheelchair so we asked for the bare minimal just little little things in their day that would go a long way and i think i would like to speak to this um this coming out of coping so i think all of us parents have been sitting at the edge of our seat waiting to see how are our kids going to catch up to their peers because we they have missed even more than their peers so my son started third grade when

282colbot started he's starting sixth grade he's not anywhere near ready to be a sixth grade student but he will start sixth grade in three weeks and he will be expected to perform the kiss like his peers i'd also like to speak to the parents who have maybe ieps that they feel don't serve their child where they feel like they weren't listened to they the iep was done for them not with them um i had spoken um uh on many occasions to the district about this this if you you people that have read my son's iep people that trust adults in our lives my son is a tutor that doesn't even reflect my student's abilities and also too i want to speak to when i ask for help it's not to lower the bar i want

283my son's bar to be right up here it's just going to take longer so i have a teenager now who he he's kind of fine down here and that's not okay for me and my husband we want him up here we want him to be as successful as his brothers um i'm gonna tell one short story so my mother is one of six her youngest brother um he had a disability his whole life and my grandma was his champion and he was a student that went to mps and he had a hearing disability and he had he wanted to be electrician and everyone said no there's no way because there's so much math and you're not good at math and no no no no but he had some brothers that were um he had a

284brother that was an engineer he had a brother that was a teacher and so these these brothers would would help him at the kitchen table just to he had this dream of being an engineer electrician so my uncle many years later he was the lead electrician at underwood school school was about was built so um i'm here just like my grandma was championing her son to say our kids deserve better so thank you welcome and i'm sure you'll be hearing from us more [Music] jamie do we have anyone online there are no hands raised thank you i just have a brief a brief tell the truth coming board members complain when there's no one attending the meetings and no one comes to the microphone so don't let anybody tell you it's a problem to come

285to the microphone because we can't have it both with us so we want i want the microphone people keeping us promised i assure you when no one is in the room the warren doesn't like it thank you all for your updates looking forward to supporting you making sure mr brighton two minutes [Music] so in the board right up for this item we're discussing the self-funded health plan renewals um our plan date is expected it starts october 1st so you back that up a month to give our employees time for open enrollment and informed decisions on the plan that's september and so the board of approval comes in late august to approve the rates and the plan structure for the next year the fortunate thing we're looking at no plan design changes for the next year

286so there's nothing to recommend or discuss in in that format so that's that makes things easy um as we look at how the plan continues to perform from financial lens um we're tracking very well at 89.6 percent of where we thought we'd be at this point in time of the year and that's using claims through june 30th and that's the lag that we get we get those reports in late july so that's what we have to bring to meeting tonight we continue to track those as we end the fiscal year with with the plan um but we expect that to land pretty close to where it is with that 89.6 um so all the administrative costs and all the claim costs are within check uh the variable there that we just received this last week

287late last week is on the stop loss that's our reinsurance on high cost claims that that fit into the plan uh that renewal was sent out to eight companies four declined to bid because they didn't think they'd be competitive for a place to bid and a little bit was up about 29 i believe it was in in the renewal so that then drove an increase for our costs we were hoping to come tonight and say we could keep rates flat with the current year in the next year um we're now recommending the three percent that the board did approve as part of the budget back in june so i can't bring great news that we can reduce the budget but we're in within budget that was approved with that three percent uh with the renewal

288um in dollars uh the stop-loss coverage um for this current year is 1.14 million the renewal is 1.37 million increase of 19.71 the high end was the 29 on that so 19.71 is the increase uh for this renewal um and then it's important to know it also that i mentioned earlier but there are no plan design changes or anything else that will negatively impact employees within the planned structure itself another aspect we're trying to vet right now is switching the plan year from october 1st to a calendar year january 1 that is getting some legal complications that we're trying to vet and work through i'm not sure where that will land between now and when the board takes approval on the plan design two weeks from now we may need some more time to work

289through the logistics and the federal requirements of having a 12-month cycle and having minimal deductibles and you know high deductible health plans and that kind of thing in the mix so we will bring more information to the board on that um in two weeks but for now that that aspect is likely on hold for right now i will just add to mr brenton's presentation that things are well uh it was our whole a week ago that we could continue this evening with savings with actual savings um the fact that we are attracting exactly what we thought we would be with a three percent increase we're still very favorable in the school system and when we look at other school districts in the metro area that three percent increase is very good there are school districts

290that are dealing with an increase much of greater than three percent but it was a week ago this time we were hoping to bring to you savings and uh i guess we were tempering our expectations yeah the wildcat there again was that stop loss and what they were looking at what we were looking at is the current year we're about 15 of the stop-loss premium being paid out to high-class clients we're very low very very good from that perspective if you look at how they rate the district in looking at providing renewals for the next year and the reason for them decline to give us a bid is they look at a break even at about 70 percent of what we pay in premiums as far as what they would expect to see in claims

291and looking back at the 2021 year we had 70 percent right at their break even so that gives them some concern and then two years ago in 1920 we're 145 percent of our premiums pl and stop-loss claims so that's what they're seeing when they rate us and give us a bid is more risk than they'd like to take on but as those years fall off and we have good years that should make the bidding process easier on that line anymore i know we had the same vendor for a long time in terms of reinsurance and then i think we went off within the last year before and so going forward what will be the kind of strategy or it's an annual thing yes yeah and there are three or four companies that generally are more

292favorably bidding on wisconsin school districts they know the market they they understand the cultures that kind of thing um and we did receive bids from the three of the four that i recognize um there's one additional out there that didn't um symmetra was the company that had the lowest bid they're the ones we had the last couple of years and they had the lowest bid moving forward for this next renewal also so we'll do that every year we do that mr mark so i don't expect this is a surprise question but so i don't expect the answer but the information you're talking about i think very allows medicare to negotiate rights foreign we have some over 65 retirees i forgot how many not a lot but does does that affect us at all i don't

293know i wouldn't expect it you know right now because exactly what's in there yeah i can't speak specifics to the act but we have a carvel plan for over 65 medicare and so that's a separate line of insurance um that is um so i have to bring back that information on how that might be with the act but i wouldn't expect much of a change for because like you said we'd have a large sample size there right because as we know people over 65 the pharmaceutical costs can be quite high okay thanks any community comment or questions um with that we've got a completely service technology items i would like to compliment her very well before the gallery recognize the big graduation with us some folks thank you mr very much we have a motion

294to adjourn to the new service to discuss administrative reporting structure to the board and retention of mortgage and items for august september and october as this is a working session the board and public comment will be entertaining we have to call the role well this is adjourning information for her we were there over a journey into in-service that'll be wrong hoyt mr maya yes miss newfoundland yes mr phillips miss willis yeah dr jesus banger yes this is the least exciting [Music] what