WSD Board Meeting, Regular, July 11, 2022

001i call the july 11 2022 school board meeting to order it is 702 pm we are in conference room c of the fisher administration building at one two one two one west north avenue miss newman would you please call the roll miss braley yes dr hoyt yes dr jessica banger yes mr mayer mr phillips president miss willis here ms neufeld here thank you um [Music] so opening this evening's meeting we uh were preceded by an executive closed session and this evening we will also follow our regular meeting with an in-service public comment on non-agenda items members of the wauwatosa school board value the input of students parents staff members and community members the board's regularly scheduled meetings provide an opportunity for opinions and concerns to be expressed publicly the board values all comments and will

002respectfully consider this input in decision making the board requests that individuals limit their comment on each item to three minutes following any comment an individual board member may respond on the issue raised however it is not the intent of the public comment portion of the agenda for the board to enter into a debate with a member or members of the community because non-agenda items are not publicly posted in advance no action will be taken on public comment regarding non-agenda items this evening do we have anyone for comment on non-agenda items please state your name and address thank you uh 772 north 116th street um i'd like to comment on the preceding uh closed session meeting that was held prior to this meeting which was likely done in violation of the wisconsin open business laws as

003noticed in the agenda the purpose of this lead was to discuss specific security measures and protocol without police department representatives find it quite shocking that we would be discussing the um security mentioned protocols in in closed session instead of discussing it was in the open public why would we not want our families to know what procedures are being put in place for the security of their students i would think this is something that we would clearly want our families to know unless we are not doing something that we should be doing the second part to this was to negotiate negotiation of a memorandum of understanding between the wrongful police department and mark as a school district um again this is something regarding the relationship between bloghost and police and baltimore's school district and i would

004think this is something again we'd want to know in the public forum instead of being done in closed session um probably seeing this i was made aware that the representative for the police department was actually no longer maybe attendance at that meeting yet the meeting still took place with the only discussion with the remembrance understanding there is nothing in wisconsin open records or to being statutes that allow this exemption you know they can tell and it becomes clear and probably saying legal things aside it becomes more and more disturbing that this body continues to do things in the shadows so clearly an open record with input and discussion from the public to be clearly informed of what's going on i asked grace to reconsider the things that you are doing and make sure that they

005are done more clearly and transparent for the public viewing thank you for your comment will there be um anyone online people with their hands raised so oh i'm sorry i couldn't hear there are no people with their hands raised okay uh thank you and on the prior um meeting note the board will be discussing safety topic and memorandum of understanding in a open session to be scheduled the next subject we have is election of school board officers and with the resignation of school board president board members will now vote to elect a replacement of all officers [Music] okay excuse me right you've noticed replace the president okay yes so so the action is with the resignation of the school board president board members will vote to elect a replacement if a current officer of the

006board is elected as the new president a replacement to fill that position will then also be voted on so okay um so dr means then uh would you yes like to commence the yes thank you process so board members do have ballots at their desks it's a vacant officer position of for president so the first step in the process is for you to either have someone self-dominate themselves or have a nomination for someone to run for more president are there any nominations for president and you can just i can take this paper ballot yes and just so i'm clear we do not announce the vote count for the nominations but we do announce the vote count for the actual election against the nominee now we do need seven pieces of paper everybody needs right i

007did some legal research once upon a time and there are two states that have declared that in a paper ballot that must be valid for all present foreign [Music] three board members there are seven ballots three board members have been nominated um leanne charlie dr joseph danger and that leaves us with two candles okay so this is the second round of voting so now you would actually vote this is the actual vote for the two candidates either dr chester banker or mr and i'll take your value okay anger has been voted as president doesn't anger i believe you're currently the clerk that accurate sir that's correct that means based on our whole scene is that now we need to have nominations for the vacant clerk position can you tell me who all the positions are

008right now [Music] which leaves us with clerk okay thank you you two or three [Music] three board members nominated dr mr meyer and miss farley i declined thank you [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] so unanimous vote of seven zero so i'll just finish off the motion okay um so we have a motion for dr joseph anger as president and dr jenny hoy as clerk so moved second mr meyer moved spray second is there any community comment on the board officer election seeing none in the room mr price is there any online okay thank you miss newman would you call the roll miss fraley yes dr hoyg yes dr jessica banger yes mr meyer yes mr phillips yes miss willis yes miss newfoundland yes and dr justfinger congratulations would you like to switch spots or just take the

009gavel i will take the gobble from here that's fine next up is the superintendent report dr means thank you dr marvel may i ask for your assistance in uh directing the presentation from the captain as dr marvel was working on getting the presentation on the screen i would just like to thank our strategic planning steering committee members once again for their hard work they concluded all of their work june june 21st in east pacific right now our district administrative team they're working on developing key performing performance indicators that were developed through the strategic objectives by the steering community so this is really a bottom up of the strategic plan i'm really pleased that we've heard from a lot of different members of our community in terms of what they would like to see with the

010strategic plan part of what they wanted to see was a read a 2.0 of our vision of a graduate as you know we're very proud of the vision of a graduate but the feedback that we receive from our steering committee is that it's not measurable that it's aspirational um and very theoretical in nature so dr marvel when you look at the the framework for our strategic plan you'll see that our foundation is our mission vision and values that we'll we'll be working on and showing you in a few ways and our steering committee created five goals again those goals are academic performance diversity and inclusion and i want to take the time to clearly state that in the past we had a diversity equity and inclusion committee that had their own goals and objectives that

011they were striving for we really thought it was important to embed our diversity of inclusion goals in the strategic plan the third area was our social emotional and mental health high quality staff was our our fourth item and our fifth item was culture and community but there was another goal that emerged from these first five and that's operations how are we ensuring that we're doing good work with our buildings and grounds that we are adhering to timelines that we're we're being strategic with our long-range facilities planning so that goal has emerged as goal number six but in in service of our students our goals should reach and go toward what do we need to accomplish for every single student so they are reaching the vision of a graduate so what we done uh going to

012the next slide is we've identified five areas of of growth and an opportunity for a student a vision of a graduate that that should be reached strong academic foundation we want students who are good critical thinkers and problem solvers we want people who are able we want graduates who can like identify who they are and have agency uh not only in our classrooms and schools but in the world we want students who are socially emotionally aware and can regulate themselves and individuals who can collaborate and work in an independent state and so when you look at those five areas we've identified and we can actually have components that we can define in terms of what that means it's not just theoretical but it's it has a definition of what having a strong academic foundation or

013being a critical thinker or having identity identity and agency and so on we've defined what those things should be so when you look at those five components we can go to the next slide dr robert thank you we've identified 10 milestones those 10 milestones include academic foundation it includes all the components that you saw on the previous slides and what we've done from a research standpoint is we've identified the fact that proficiency is the true marker when you look at academic performance that's the true marker that students will persist through their first two years of post high school efforts be it in the military in some type of apprenticeship or even at a college or university but we've also identified areas where students are able to demonstrate again the other components of the vision of

014a graduate be it critical thinking agency collaboration independence or social emotional regulation i won't read all 10 of the milestones to you but we feel that this provides the school district now with measurements that will allow us to know if we're doing a good job in serving students individually or on the whole it will demonstrate and keep us accountable to this board and community if we are truly living up to the aspirations of the vision of a graduate it's not um you want to go beyond the aspirational component of it and have the board have metrics that you can hold us accountable for so again our strategic goals are outlined on this slide i've read to you the the six goals that um we've identified and when you look at next steps the month of

015august once the administrative team is done creating key performance indicators we will then have a draft of a strategic plan that goes in the hands of a board of education for you to make the final revisions and modifications of this work with the goal that we finalize our strategic plan and allow us to have a true guidance or normal star for this organization starting the 2022-2023 school year this is all based on feedback and information and formal and informal conversations that i've had with many board members community members and obviously our steering committee you've all asked for measurements of our work not pontification not uh aspirations i we believe that these milestones move us closer to allowing us to determine how we're doing as an organization but more importantly it gives you a a governance

016monitoring tool to determine if we're doing our jobs well i i i really we talked about hiring ms susie thomas last meeting uh this will give us the ability to have scorecards that on a quarterly basis we can come to you and tell you how well are we doing by school by demographic group of students um we will have the ability to develop infrastructure where we can drill down and truly measure how well we're doing and where we need to invest the last thing i will share with you is that this is uh an opportunity for us to really become surgical if i may use that word become surgical and where we invest our funds um and i've been telling our our staff um during my first year that identifying disproportionality and gaps is actually

017a good thing because then it shows you where you need to invest your funds and so um i'm really excited about these milestones but i'll paul i know i know dr marble is excited about these goals as well um but we we wanted to share this with you as we continue to put together what we hope to be a very strong draft of a strategic plan when you receive it in august i'm out of practice any questions or comments from the board i have one if you back up a slide oh two how you said there's gonna be quarterly updates so all this data will be refreshed on a quarterly basis some of the data will not all 10 like which um when i look at it uh our attendance data will it will clearly

018be there our our citizenship data will be available on a quarterly basis um what about star our star data will also be available as well so i would say at least three of the ten okay what about the other seven how are we going to progress measuring the other the majority of them yeah unfortunately that's more annual data that we receive right dr markvilles i hear that and i would uh like us to think about how we would know at the midway point how many kids are on track to score a three on the ap exam even if it's that we're creating a sample midway through the year test that we feel like alliance similarly a ct benchmark date like i it's really hard for me as a board member to only get data once

019a year i know we do um you know assessments um i know the consistency of assessments is something you and i have talked about um in terms of across the district across schools so that we know that students are getting the same um high quality experience so that was going to be the question that i asked is how can we ensure that we're getting some data more than once a year and that we are ensuring that that data is consistent um and again i'm okay personally i'm only speaking for myself if it is a district generated assessment but everybody's using the exact same one so the teachers know where they have to be on content by a particular point in time um so that we actually have a better sense of where we're we're doing

020or where we are um this is just for my own clarification this is a three years strategic plan yes ma'am okay um and then my second question is um i appreciate the ambitiousness of 90 in in so many of these goals can you clarify that we're talking about not just 90 of all students but we're talking about 90 of subgroups as well and we're not just saying okay so we're saying 90 of students with disabilities ninety percent of our kids on three and reduced lunch ninety percent of our kids who are uh uh kids of color etc um because if so kudos that makes me really really happy and and wanting to be able to see um where we are now against all those things both in totality and subgroup would be really a great

021way i think for board members to be able to start the year because we're we're talking about some pretty significant jumps here um so if this is by the end of the third year what are we talking about by the end of this year versus next year i'd love if you can get to 90 this year awesome um but what what is the the goals are they district-wide are they school-based are they like because we're talking about growth here um and for some schools making those jumps may be harder than others grades et cetera so i'm really excited about the data um that we're looking at here um and i would just love us to see as a board more versus less um and you don't totally overdo it but like if we could have

022this data quarterly that'd be amazing i would just if i'm if i may um we i think the one caveat would be our special education population we would want to work with mr um opinion and our director of special ed ms klum to identify what percentage of our special education students 10 yep who are eligible to 90 eligibility absolutely right so that that'll be important um but yes every other subgroup that you or our student group hate these sub groups every other student group that you mentioned we're going to um our goal is 90 we do have an incremental step for for the three years um our principals have been begging for these milestones because it's hard it's great for them to develop through growth plans their their request of the district has always been

023so what do you want us to strive for what is our goal what's our north star um and so it's the responsibility of the district to provide that that north star and then uh i hope in august we can have a deeper conversation um with you as a board in terms of those quarterly anticipatory [Music] assessments what dr marvel and i want to be cautious of is not being accused of over assessing students um and so how we develop those markers that can give us indication if we're moving toward um our goal will be important and and how long those those assessments are because i think that's something that we want to guard against people not i appreciate what you're sharing that's where we want to be as well of having some level of an

024assessment that can tell us where we're going but we also want to balance it with i know that our our colleagues who are in the classroom and parents may say don't over assess my child either so we'll try to find the balance if i may just lift up that that was one of the concerns of the strategic um steering the strategic planning steering committee is overly assessing students so just trying to be mindful of that balance that doctor needs is talking off so so can i just respond to that question so do you think quarterly or biannual assessments is too much so the way that we have it currently outlined in our assessment plan draft is um is quarterly assessing students so currently with the star assessment um we don't assess students in grades nine

025intense we're going to be extend expanding that into grades nine and ten so we have some more um data on their growth throughout the year um and currently in grades um first through eighth grade we do assess students utilizing the star assessment three times a year we're going to add it in two more times so that we have some additional data points and the part of the reason why we moved away from map and two star is because that assessment takes um less time than the map test does so we are confident that we'll have some additional data points but in the spirit of continuous improvement we want we we're going to use this year to study how it goes and then we might need to make some adjustments moving forward if we're not getting

026the right data sets that we're looking for um moving into the the subsequent years final question i promise act and ap could those are year-long courses that's could they not could the midterm exam not be the gauge that we use for where we are against this for ap ap or act or sorry just ap because they don't take it yeah um so that is something we could look at with our every single kid would have the same test across the entire district yep so that may take a little bit of time for us to clean that up but that is definitely something that we can look into absolutely by year three that's our goal absolutely mr martin so i'll try to provide some calendar specifics to why a mid-year assessment could be considered to be

027important so this is a three-year plan and anybody cut in on me if i'm impressed with something right a three-year plan our administrators have two-year contracts and late in the first year an additional year automatically renews so administrators have an automatic extension on their contract the [Music] mechanism to to change administrators is by the end of january if the board is not happy with an administrator the board can vote to issue an intent to non-renew am i okay so far so if we don't learn anything about performance of administrators until the end of year one all those administrators when we find out how they are doing we'll have two year contracts so the given that this coming year is year one a change in administrator without filing out a contract for large dollars a change

028in administrator could not happen until year four so for example next spring there's four board seats up for election so on the day those four board members some incumbent some knew probably you know who knows on the day they take office every administrator on board will have a two-year contract and if those newly elected if that newly elected board has a mandate from the community to change something they will the that board will have to wait until the third year of their first term to make a change in administrators which would be i think no math gets hard in my head at my age but four years out so now let's talk about teaching contracts teaching contracts are signed by state law teaching contracts must be signed by the end of april so if we

029wait until the end of the year to find out how the teachers are doing regardless of the performance of the teacher the teacher will have a one-year contract on the day the board starts to look at the key performance indicators from the annual review so in that sense accountability to the goals here does not occur for teachers until year three that does not occur for administrators until year four so if we don't have some kind of mid-year barometer about how things are going the board has a as a practical pragmatic matter taken itself out of the accountability business for most of the duration of this plan now i'm not saying we want to non-renew people but i am saying that it's it's to me not acceptable to allow any midterm to not only to not

030have some kind of mid-course indicator about are we going in the right direction or not before we sign a whole bunch of contracts and get locked in for a whole bunch of money until the third the fourth year against the plan i'm not trying to be negative here i'm just trying to lay out for people how set in stone things are by the time we come to the end of a given year everything's already decided for the next year for teachers everything's already decided for the next two years for administrators so the board has precious little opportunity to assert itself to change a direction without writing a lot of checks to buy people out which of course we don't want to have to do so i'm all in favor of any educators we could get

031somehow before the end of january as best we can to see how we're doing thanks i i would add to that mr meyer um maybe more importantly we're another place where we have a significant role is the investment of where do we invest in things that are working effectively and right we make sure we're advocating for it uh i think that's a key piece if i may perhaps we want to staff an additional role or an additional certification for a change in role or a change in certification by the time we get to the summer we're already locked in for the following year and even you know whatever we want to do we have a one-year delay on anything we might want to do because the money's already spoken for for the following year yep

032thanks so that's why we've made that our our goal all along has been to provide quarterly updates uh into mr meyer's point um i is really hopeful i'm hopeful based on the conversation we've had here this evening that you will be acceptable in us finding some level of balance so we're not accused of over assessing students and i would just i would conclude by saying this is dr marvel took the words out of my mouth this is all part of our continuous improvement work i know i've talked to many of you about implementation science and making sure that we're implementing and not just talking and when you look at an evidence-based leadership framework it's about having goals but it's also about investing in people and making sure that we're providing the professional learning that we

033want them to have that we're setting expectations and i think this conversation this evening is very helpful to to our team because the community and the staff they're hearing clearly that you this is this is your work um i've tried to take i tried to download everything you've shared and invested in the strategic plan so i think people are hearing it um but we're we're committed to showing improvement because behind each data point is a child behind each data point there's a child who has an aspiration and a goal of being that vision of the graduate we want for kids so we're um we're excited we're excited about next school year we've we've already changed the name of our early release days they're not they're no longer early release days but they're pace wednesdays and

034the pace stands for we're going to prepare we're going to align we're going to collaborate and engage around the work of our kids so they're no longer just just early release days but they're paced wednesdays and we're going to use that time where teachers and administrators are to mr meyer's point they're not just looking at it even quarterly they're going to look at you've invested this community's invested in those pace wednesdays we have a lot of new administrators who they they light up when we tell them every wednesday we have time for our our teacher teams to work in a collaborative environment we don't want to waste that time we want to make sure that we're looking at the progress that kids are making weekly uh so that it's leading up to really good progress

035and growth i think i think the last thing i would just share with you is that the messaging that we have been using internally is that this is about growth and if we can make incremental growth we will we will arrive at the performance that we want for the kids that's uh outlined in the milestones i'm going to swing around to each of the different board members who we've heard from so dr hulk um well thank you so much for putting this together these are obviously really um these are very lofty goals so i appreciate that they are um we're setting our sights high is there a point dr marble where we'll be able to see baseline data about this and then are we using that data to start the school year like to deploy

036resources to certain areas or schools so that we are setting our our students up for the most success knowing where those gaps exist already yes we have um we have baseline data for um for all of these indicators minus the ninth and tenth grade star testing because we have not done that in the past we'll um we will gather baseline data over this next year and um similar to similarly we don't have good citizenship mechanisms in every single one of our schools some schools do have it but not also that's another pending data point that we will look to establish baseline data on um when the strategic plan is rolled out we will have um a most for the accountability um assessments we will have 2020 2021 data until the state lifts the embargo on

037the 21 2022 data and so once that that is public will be able to um shift what is the current baseline into into the 20 20 21 2022 data data mr phillips sorry i just want to clarify so that will also tell us how we will allocate our resources to start out the school year and then when we review that quarterly will we also allocate resources based on some of the disparity that we see yeah so for example our elementary academic specialists um we teased them originally our um reading specialists they wore three different hats they were the hat of curriculum coordinator curriculum developer instructional coach and then interventionist so we have now teased out those three different roles so we have an um an elementary ela coordinator who solely works just on ela curriculum

038coordination then we have five ela instructional coaches that are assigned to two different elementary schools and then the building principles are utilizing their data to deploy the instructional coach to the different teams and or individuals whose data is showing that there needs to be some additional assistance to help move um a b or c um so that'll be more of a building based decision and then with the academic specialist those individuals are really looking at the intervention work in which students really need additional support in reading or math at the to be called the church or the tier three level um and so those used to be again all reading specialists there's one reading specialist at each and every um elementary school and some needs are just more extreme in some of our buildings than

039in others and some students were not getting the services that they really needed to the extent that they needed because there was just no time left over um with the one individual that was in the building uh charged with those three different tasks so we have now made them agents of the district so we can look at our data moving into fall here from the spring to see which students were utilizing we're getting tier three interventions which ones were getting tier two reading interventions for example and we can now deploy those individuals into the buildings um as necessary so there might be one elementary academic specialist that spends all of their time at one particular building because of the need and then there might be one um then that one individual might travel over to

040one other building because there's two or three kiddos that need additional services and support so it allows us to be a little bit more flexible rather than having um individuals anchored to a particular building and i guess so similarly how are you going to measure like seo needs and deploy those resources uh so we have the annual survey data to look at that i would turn that over to um mr opinion i don't know that he's prepared this evening to answer those questions but um it will be a partnership where he will be looking at at um different data um i'll just we have a beforehand we have a student engagement survey that we've been using i'll step in for you also we also have the youth the risk assessment that we utilize every year

041so between those data points we have areas where students are sharing with us where they feel secure um and where we can do and i think this is really important where we as the adults can do a better job in helping them feel secure um so none of these data points are about kids failing or succeeding it's really about where we need to to your point i love your questions where we need to deploy to support so that children can be the very best they they desire to be mr opinion did i you did a great job answering that dr means that's one of our first tasks of our team and people and family supports us to unpack and look at the data that we received from last year around that student engagement piece and

042really hone in to the high leverage pieces we want to keep tabs on and bring to the board and kind of look at those year by year as we deliver those surveys thank you can i can i ask another question about specific to that um so the that youth-based survey that's really for high school students right the youth-based risks the youth risk behavior survey that's done um i know the state does it every other year on the odd years but that is secondary so six through twelve six through twelve okay and do we in our student engagement survey that does that go down to our elementary students okay oh thank you uh thank you for the presentation one thing i don't see it attached to board docs i'm not sure if it okay so okay

043good yes thank you i mean the public can't see it but um so my questions are really around next steps and how the board is going to be involved and how we're going to wrap up and vote so can you explain that process the work that's going to happen and you know are we on schedule i think we are on schedule right now for the board to review the strategic plan which includes these model milestones we initially had put aside the date of august 17th to be strategic planning work um it's our goal to have a of the strategic plan including all these metrics available for you at least based on data to you by august first so it gives us about two weeks or so to complete our work where there's a deadline that

044i've asked our team to develop their defender finalize their key performance indicators by july 15th um so we'll revise those that's a really hard it's been a hard timeline because many of our new staff started july 1st so i immediately said and by the way i need this really important work by july 15th to stay on the timeline but no i'm i'm i'm concerned that we will have a draft and you buy all this first [Music] mr meyer uh this is uh as i've been sitting here trying to absorb everything that's said so likely this is a silly question but and i don't know anything about the practical realities about what might be possible for an answer so i'm just going to stick my neck on here and ask the silly question given that we

045don't want to over assess and given that many of our commitments to staffing are made between january and april for various reasons you know at various perspectives as we said contracts and set budgets are there any of these indicators that we could effectively have on a calendar year cycle by student instead of on a school year cycle like attendance from for a student from january 1st through end of december i understand that student changes grades and might even change buildings and teachers and all that stuff but are there any of these indicators where we could align the assessment cycle with our staffing decision-making cycle well i believe that once you solidify and pass the strategic plan that the data that we produce on a quarterly basis will inform what we bring forward in terms of

046our initiatives that we would like to have funded for the following school year okay well that'd be wonderful but i'm willing to and for my comment given say hey if there's something that as a practical matter to avoid over assessment it really needs to be an annual metric then i could accept that okay well for two we will only have six months and then we're going to start our one year cycle to get our results in december now i don't know if you accordingly you know wonderful that's great love it but i'm trying to hear the feedback you're giving to us and try to be open-minded to some accommodation and at least for what i think as the outlook as the educators we would say we would prefer quarterly but we're also we're acknowledging that

047there are some teachers there are families there's some students who will feel that that's that's too much so we want to have a thoughtful conversation with you on how to find the right spot um but we i'll i'll step out of it from an educational metric standpoint from a governance monitoring tool you need quarterly um all the research all the literature around affected school boards state that effective school boards are consistently discussing student performance and the only way you can discuss student performance is if we are accountable to you by giving you quarterly data um and being accountable to you so going back to your first statement mr meyer and being accountable to you and that we're showing incremental growth i think those are those are really critical components to this discussion thank you any

048other board comments or questions on this item dr joseph anger first of all i want to thank dr marvel she answered more questions than she was anticipating to do so i just asked you to help with this lie so thank you for answering soda questions um i think dr white made the comment that i think is really important and that we're going to want to i want to brace everyone now because dr marvel and i've seen the data i would say that these are not lofty goals these are not these are goals that when you sit down i like to always say that these are the uh pool conversations when you talk to a group of parents at the pool they are assuming that their child are hitting these milestones that's the expectation that they

049have um when people buy homes and pay their taxes they are expecting that this is happening and so i and when people compare our district to other districts they're they're using this lens we're not where we want to be um when we show you that the baseline data it's not it's not where we want to be um and overall and then when you disaggregate the data for certain student groups is even lower so we have a lot of work to do um but i think i'm optimistic that we have a framework to even have the conversation when you look at uh milestone number 10 again i know that for this board and for this community diversity inclusion and equity work is critical um that's why i was so excited to be here we've embedded this

050work in our strategic plan it's not a standalone i think in other districts the diversity plan is a standalone from the strategic plan so we want to look at what is the demographic makeup of our theater productions what's the what's the makeup of our student council and our student government well i just i wanted to point out to you that we i i really am optimistic that this is going to allow us to get to some of those diversity equity inclusion conversations candidly the the your appointment of susie thomas is just as as our director of data quality analytics is as vital as hiring ms holland as our director of diversity and inclusion because if we don't have the right data to show to our educators here's the work we have to do here that

051here are the children that we're leaving behind um then then it's for not i some people have been teasing me in the fisher building but on one of our white boards as we walk out of the the building i've started to say here's the countdown until the children come back children are coming the children will come back to school on september 1st we have 37 days to get ready uh for it because they're depending on us to hit these lofty codes and some some people call lofty goals i think it is what i affectionately have always thought wauwatosa to be which is one of the premier districts in this this state but we can't make that claim unless we can show it from from a data standpoint so we have a lot of work to

052do um but i wanted to share with you that we're not hiding we we're we want you to hold us accountable through these milestones in the strategic plan i'm excited that we've got a plan and we've got some milestones to track our our capacity to rise to the expectation of the community and all of all of ourselves one of the things i'm curious about as we go to and i think these might be different than milestones but i'm certainly looking based on the baseline uh kind of showing growth at the in the different uh components of that at the school level the grade level um demographics and so on i'm also curious about um one of the things that parents are curious about is that they want to know like their kids are not just

053hitting baseline but how are they kind of achieving i used the phrase earlier um achieving their best their best self or their kind of their best outcome um and and how are we kind of that may be a little bit stickier thing to track but i'm curious kind of what the team might have going forward of how do we measure uh how do we track how do we understand whether or not students are being supported and achieving their academic expectations um and so whether it's theirs where their capabilities there's a lot of responsibility for the student on that as well having been one of those myself at one point of achieving that but how are we putting supports in place so that we are making sure that they aren't having to overcome barriers um on

054their own and that we are doing everything we can to support their success so that's one of the things i'll be curious in hearing from we have an answer i'll save that for our next conversation outstanding i believe our next agenda item is that consent agenda are there any items on the consent agenda which board members would like to remove for separate discussion and action mrs franklin i just had a question um and i i think it was that the name caught my eye again we had tyree gamble who is a coach on the last consent agenda and i didn't know if there was any difference between this one and that one or if it was just a duplicate the only difference that i saw was this one said um [Music] this one said i

055don't know they're both the same the other ones looked they both said july 1st 2022 i'm just trying to figure out is this on for a second time because something changed if that makes sense uh i do not believe so i think this is a little bit of the uh lag of the transition in the division of human resources got it sorry for the error yeah all good because the other one was got it i'm learning to allow other people to answer the question absolutely seeing none may have a motion to approve the consent agenda motion to approve okay thank you [Music] any board comment on the consent agenda i have only one um i'm very excited about one of the hires um one of my daughters ellen uh kindergarten teachers is now back in

056the district and it was outstanding and i uh was just delighted to see that she's returned to wauwatosa after taking some time away so very very exciting any community comment on the consent agenda jamie anything online we have one hand raised kendra kovar you have the microphone please state your name and address um actually i have a question that goes back to the vision of a graduate um my question relates to mr myers and mrs braley's comments in using tests and scores to evaluate the success of the teachers and the building administrators um to check and see if we've met milestones of the vision of a graduate i'm also wondering if we're going to be using those tools to evaluate building administrators and teachers and i brought this up at the last meeting too i'm

057just wondering what tools or scores would be used to evaluate other positions in the district and how successful they are in helping meet those milestones on the vision of a graduate and those roles would be directors coordinators coaches officers chiefs and specialists i'm just wondering what tools we're using to see the impact they're making which then end results in the vision of a graduate meeting their milestones kendra thanks for your question a reminder that this is only on the consent agenda we will have an opportunity to close to come back for any comments uh or any comments that folks might have jamie are there any other questions or comments there are no other hands raised thank you ms newman please call the roll ms framley yes dr hoy yes dr jessepanger yes mr meyer no

058[Music] mr phillips yes miss willis yes ms mitfeld yes and that passes our next item up is academic performance reports proposed purchase of computers at the west high school art studio log out here that's been saved let's go no fulfill the time i think is ironic that it this is about a technology agenda yes that was going through my head as well we're good we're getting there it's always it's always fun you know when you're working with it working as it should turn over okay i'm clicking um hello my name is jesse bellick and i'm the art department head of the test um so thank you presentation this evening [Music] you're about to hear um was created in collaboration with beth kimmel instructional technology coordinator and jamie price director of technology so um the art

059department at toza west i've enjoyed actually hearing the vision of a graduate again because we very much pride ourselves on helping students with their college preparations and career readiness so a big piece of that involves technology the art world is becoming increasingly digital so when we help students with college admissions portfolios it's all digital art uh when we help them with uh submitting to ap it's all done digitally and so it's really important that we help students with digital literacy but also really becoming adept at software so um currently the art department is sharing a computer lab with tech ed and launch uh what we're finding is that it's just a little difficult with seven hours in the day for three departments to share lab so there's just a practical aspect there um but also

060what we're finding is that um these software needs for art students are just a little bit more taxing on the current computers we have so it's not unusual for an art student to run multiple software at one time and these are also pretty heavy visual software um they will toggle between these currently we're finding um the computers we have are lagging or freezing and things like that going on i would say about a third of our curriculum uses computers heavily and with the opportunity to have a lab we could have courses that maybe seem unexpected use that computer as well for example a class like ceramics even though students are working three-dimensionally they will have to photograph their work and really create a professional visual output to submit to things like colleges and ap so

061um it will be used extensively by art students i think we can even skip that one too it's okay okay oh okay so yeah um i think i kind of covered that though um so in looking at the strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats of this proposal i was able to oh i guess i should go back okay um so the goals of um having this lab dedicated to our students really are that we can prepare them i was able to reach out to several grads and ask them just what their experiences were like in college did they feel prepared by our art program and even those who graduated and are now in creative careers what was their experience with technology so many of them indicated they were using apple products in college um suggested that

062it would be helpful to have learned that a little earlier to beat that learning curve so our goals are really to help them get more adept at that type of computer but also software we want to create a contemporary approach to visual art teaching in high school encourage students creative and lateral thinking and not have the technology be a barrier to what they can accomplish so when a computer freezes it kind of you know cuts that creative flow um and so we definitely want to avoid that should we be able to um it's very easy to share work with others when we have got that whole lab dedicated to the art program um and so i think all of those things would really be supported by this new technology we're proposing i was able to

063order one mac studio computer which is a newer mac offering what's great about this machine is that it has an m1 processor which means that i was able to run three different adobe softwares at the same time i did not find that lagging or freezing or anything like that happening i was also able to use a digital drawing tablet and it was responsive so i again wasn't having that lag as i was digitally drawing which was really nice to work with uh the weakness of this machine is that it does not it's not an all-in-one unit so we would have to additionally buy monitors keyboards computer mice uh to get it all set up but i do think the opportunity to prepare our students uh is going to outweigh that weakness uh one glitch in

064the plan for starting us up um the beginning of this next school year is just the world wide shipping delays um should we be able to order these right away we're hoping that they'd be there very shortly after school starts if not before and we are preparing a space so that we've got everything an easy workflow for students and i do have a backup plan if the computers are not here in time [Music] so yeah our timeline is essentially if possible to order computers as soon as we can to get the room completely set up and usable and again that like easy workflow um for my students um there's a good number of classes offered for a semester that would be using the machines pretty actively but again there would be an opportunity for other

065courses um to be able to get into that space as well um and there would be other courses in semester two that would also use the technology i believe that kind of covers all the basics that i wanted to present to you um is there any questions i'd be happy to answer them and uh full support of your request i would like to add you commented that the art world is becoming digital i submit to you that the digital world is also becoming increasingly demanding that art be included in business communications it is just phenomenal how much an advantage a person in the business world has by being able to creatively artistically compose communication documents with some artistic flair to them it really helps yeah so yeah to visually communicate i would encourage all young

066people interested in business to consider your offerings in the art world to help them in their business endeavors thank you thank you dr um i know one of the things we've talked about kind of more globally as a board is trying to have certain groups weigh in when we're going to be making kind of these these ships um i appreciate that you reached out to some of the alumni um so that we're getting kind of that student perspective um the only group i don't see kind of that i would we've talked about before that i don't see represented here is our um special education or disability um advocacy group and i'm wondering if there's an opportunity where we can reach out to them kind of get their input about this particular purchase before we proceed

067yeah um just to address that briefly one of the things that i have found in working with students with disabilities digitally is that especially some who have kind of like a sensory um it's a little hard for them to maybe get messy or touch clay or you know things like that um the computer is really engaging and it's really been a bright spot in their day and so i absolutely would yes support reaching out and finding out how um that those staff could maybe even give me more ideas and more ways that we can support that group of students but but yeah i have found a lot of success in the past so thank you so just to clarify so students with disabilities have just as much access to these courses as degenerate students um

068a couple technical questions so um is this already in the budget do you know is this already in the budget so this is this is not on top of what we've already talked about no we have a line item for this purchase okay yes okay question number two from like an equity perspective does east already have a computer lab that looks like this so we're we're making it equitable across the district so that there's just the same opportunities as that east desert west yes um east just i believe last year got a brand new set of mac computers yes great and i'm curious what did you learn from them in terms of like what they wish they would have done differently that is a really good question um the only thing they had indicated to

069me is that um so this max studio is a release that happened after they chose their model um so they kind of had said you know you're coming in at a great time because that is going to be a really great machine to just handle especially animation which is such huge files that take so much processing um so that was the only thing they had kind of said like you're you know you're fortunate to come in at this time if this works out because um that will really be the machine that can do everything we need and do we have a sense of like how often you would need to rotate these in i mean i know max or you know apples are great and everything but i feel like they get outdated very quickly

070in terms of like storage and capacity and and all that kind of stuff jamie do you want to speak at all to the life of these machines yeah i can speak to that uh generally you know we we also need to take into consideration the operating system life and the security and the support that comes with that so while the hardware may certainly last a lot longer than four years we generally tend to approach things with a four-year lifespan because you know like i said from support and a security perspective especially a security perspective we need to we don't need to be cutting edge but we need to uh operate within the realm of functionality from that that regard and then also you know it'll reach a point where the devices themselves don't receive the

071the proper updates and the the applications that ms belich is using requires certain operating system versions that you know usually will find beyond that four-year mark difficult to align great and then final two questions about how many students do would you say over the course of a year would end up working on these computers that's a really good question yeah yeah so um i would say our average class size is anywhere from 25 to 30. um i'd say probably more in the the 25 26 range so in semester one um i've got six courses running that we'll be using the computers pretty heavily um but other students we really have an open door policy in the art program meaning if you've got a study hall come on in despite how amazing they are because they

072were music yeah and language and every year i go to the art show and and i'm just amazed at what y'all do so that's that was my last question i know we will other people have access to these computers yes we love to have them you know come on in and use that study all the time and support them the best we can great and then finally i'll just say whatever you can do to be recruiting students who are not traditional art students via students with disabilities students who you know maybe just haven't done art in their first or second year of high school it's just such an incredible program thank you so much yeah really keep sending us stuff before it started just a quick comment from you of a parent of a child

073who's uh studying film at university um 90 or 80 use max so she she did not get that experience and so they're they they teach you know eight and then they come to the two which one is her and to tell her how to do it on a pc so this is really cool i think it's a good leg up for for the students thank you any other final questions or comments from the board if not i think we'll go into our next report and take community comments at the close of the three reports textbook subscription renewals thank you both very much excuse me okay um so i don't have a slide deck prepared for this evening um i wasn't intending on having one it's really just taking a look at the executive summary that

074you all have access to and seeing if you have any questions um around the textbook renewal um subscriptions that we have in front of us um just to give a quick little overview for those online and in the board room um we have uh three different um textbooks that are coming up on two expiration dates for their access through our publishing partners one being english 10 another being advanced placement calculus a b and b c and then sixth seventh and eleventh grade um access to their online textbook so um that gets us to a total of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a hundred and twenty thousand six hundred seventy five dollars and eighty cents um again all the executive summary is online for anyone who would like to take a look at it all

075of these texts were um part of the last time that these particular courses went through a curricular revision process and so in in accordance with policy 20-10 um there was a vetting process that the different committees that brought forward these different texts at that approval process went through to select these texts so this is really to keep our students and our teachers having access to um these textbooks um for the next several years thank you questions or comments from the board i have a question so these are all online textbooks that's correct are there physical textbooks available for students maybe with learning differences who don't do so well with access to online grant they're they they do have um some physical elements as well so yes like the complete text i mean would they have

076access to the complete text in a physical i would have to double check with i don't have that information off the top of my head but i do know that you're able to print um as well so if a student needed a physical copy of some sort of particular text that they could um also print it as well and you're unable to answer that confidently because some of our textbook companies that moved away from even creating a hard copy that is correct of the digital version that's correct and they've been so they've been advising schools to actually print um the actual digital access yes and and part of the reason for why many of our curriculum committees um that go through the review process tend to prefer the online version is because it can be

077differentiated for a variety of student needs um and also it updates in real time so if there's an error that the publishing company catches they can update that in real time whereas if you go to print then it's locked in sure just making sure it's accessible i think teaching virtually during code would really you know shine the light on you know some students who struggled with online access virtual access stuff rather than having a physical copy so even having that print element making sure that it's accessible thank you seeing no other comments thank you very much the next item is the edis license renewal so again the executive summary um is available to you online and to anybody else um that would like to take a look at it edis is our data warehouse that

078we're utilizing currently and have been since 2017 um to help us manipulate data to drill down to the different subgroups of students that we um are collecting data around so with the ap exam forward exams um act aspire our pals assessments are in there we can look at behavior attendance all of that information is there um with our director of data quality and analytics ms thomas joining us she will really be integral in going through a formal audit of this platform to see whether or not this is the appropriate platform for us as a school district to be utilizing um because we have not done that since its implementation in 2017 so that'll be one of the areas that i will task her with um doing moving forward so that um when we get to

079this point next year we can either come forward with yes we want to be continuing with the edis platform or here are some other options that we think would be better meet our needs so that we can have the different milestones um in a comprehensible fashion um presented to you along the way as well so um this proposal is to renew this product for the price of 28 eight thousand eight hundred dollars for the next school year fully um knowing that we will be doing uh a review of the product with our data at data analytic data quality experts moving in next week any more comments or questions on this item and a reminder these are all reports coming this week two weeks from now they will come back as action items for the board

080for consideration so kind of key questions that may come up between now and then can be directed to um dr means or dr martin it's really an extra question so dr means will that be what's used to give us the quarterly data it will be and i think dr marvel says something that's very important um we're going to analyze and see if that is the right tool mr meyer said it earlier so that how to visualize the data and to put it in a way where the scorecards are easy to download should come from our data warehouse we should have to create more work um we we have some questions about edis but we did not feel that this was the right time to look at a new tool we have ms thomas coming in

081so we know that there are other tools available that will help us visualize our data this is a one year holdover i would suspect that you will see an rfp of some sort go out for this type of service and we hope edits will continue to evolve and show growth with their tool but there's a possibility we'll bring forward another recommendation to you as well thank you any community comment on this item this would be inclusive of the proposed purchase for the art computer for the computers at west high school for the art studio textbook subscription renewals or edis license renewal jamie anything online they're not hands-raised thank you all for your presentations we look forward to getting any questions answered between the meetings and voting two weeks next up is our technology department reports

082first one is microsoft services renewal that would be me i'm actually going to bring up the executive summary on the screen because the price tag on this one is a is a little bit higher and there might be some questions as to why we do this renewal when we when we first brought this product in or this subscription service in i believe miss moonfield and mr meyer were the only ones that were on the board um [Music] we use and i'm not going to go through it verbatim i'll just summarize but uh we use microsoft services quite a lot in the district uh while google applications are sort of like the front-facing and the use am i creating that feedback loop i think we're good now well um google is sort of like the front

083facing and the one that most people teachers and students are familiar with we do actually have a lot of microsoft uh products running in the background especially on the operational side but also with the students as well uh tim can you mute something there i'm getting feedback on this i believe it might be the laptop maybe the presentation laptop uh so ultimately we've got about 1200 devices in the district that run windows operating systems microsoft office programs etc am i the only one getting that feedback loop or can you guys hear it in the room i cannot hear it just you jimmy okay i'll just ignore it and keep going then um so in 2012 we were faced with having to upgrade microsoft office and windows operating system versions and and microsoft really has a

084program uh where education can subscribe to those services at a discount so we evaluated financially whether it was better to purchase licenses or enter an annual license subscription agreement uh so what i've gotten that executive summary just shows here that you know it's it's around every three to four years that offers desktop operating system and the server versions updating their major versions which would require another purchase and then i really just threw together some numbers to say here's what it would cost if we were to go to windows 11 office server etc and buy those licenses up front the number would be about three hundred and thirty six thousand dollars or eighty four thousand dollars a year using the four year rotation window however if we do the subscription program um it turns out to

085be fifty two thousand dollars a year or two hundred and eight thousand dollars over a four year period so when we look at that you know the price differences is quite substantial we can see here over four years 336 000 if we were to buy it and renew every four years 208 thousand on the subscription model savings 127 thousand dollars flashing that out to five years uh there's still a seventy five thousand dollar a year savings or a seventy five thousand dollar total savings i should say and even in in year six if we were to really stretch it out which i really wouldn't want to do uh but if we were to stretch those things out to six year renewals we're still at a financial win however it's quite slight at that point they

086have changed their license plan where before it was an open open value agreement and now it's a monthly agreement but you pay for it a year in advance um and much like google services microsoft has uh a1 which is this tier of services okay and this is the free stuff but we can't survive on the free stuff we can't operate with free stuff not especially from an operational site so we are in this map there are two other tiers there's microsoft 365 a3 and then there's a5 as well we are proposing that we do the a3 version which is more or less the equivalent of what we have now but there are also some other security features in there specifically multi-factor authentication that we can turn on we're going to do that with the staff

087[Music] defender and a few other features in there as well that are going to enhance our security all with a view to laying a foundation to investigate at least moving up to a5 at a later date but that's not part of this proposal i'm just giving you a heads up here interestingly with a5 it also includes power bi pro that if suzy thomas decided to develop a system or a data warehouse with power bi that would be included in that licensing as well and make that a uh no additional cost so that's basically the crux of it the uh you know the request is that this year we just renew at a cost of thousand one hundred and ninety eight dollars and eighty cents that really is a negligible increase i think is less than

088a thousand dollars over what we've had in previous years and that that's that negative increase that we see every year before i move on to the blackboard one are there any questions on the microsoft services remember i'm not seeing any from the board jamie okay and then the other one i'll follow ms marvel's lead on that is just for blackboard renewal uh that's actually two products that are both less than twenty thousand dollars but they're both going to the same vendor or or yeah the the same provider uh one of them's through our website and the other ones for our mass notification systems and that's just the renewal uh with the caveat that we are actually going to look at both of those platforms this year and uh in conjunction with mr teda to see

089if we want to move away from those to something that is more suited to our current environment and that's all i have any questions from the board on the second item thank you no question mr price very thorough thank you and jamie i'm excited that they let you out of the basement actually no one's in the house uh so i'm in my kitchen right now i'm just hoping the dogs don't start barking it's good to see you any community comment on either of these two technology department reports seeing none we will move into public comment final public comment on any agenda items or items not on the agenda jamie i'm not seeing any in the room is there any online no there are no hands raised [Music] may i have a motion to adjourn into

090an in-service to discuss future board work that this is as this is a working session on the board no public comment will be entertained at this session thank you for the second discussion sing none this new one please call the role ms fraley yes dr hoyt yes dr jessepanger yes mr mayer yes mr phillips yes ms willis yes miss newfoundland yes let's take five minutes and we'll come back um we are in um an in-service uh which by intention is meant to be much more conversational and discussion um discussional discussion based um i am not particularly prepared this evening to lead this in service um so my proposal is we kind of cover some really short-term uh discussion of what some of these future meetings are going to be that's up on the um up

091on the board right now and then i'd like to convene with dr means um and come back to do us somewhere in service into the future but just not in a place i think stepping into this role unexpectedly this evening to be able to lead us through this conversation effectively and so just like a little bit of time for that um yes sure thank you um so i'll just explain that based on some feedback we agended this tonight so that the board would have an opportunity to speak on agenda topics that they wanted to see in the next 60 to 90 days so there's a lot of work to be done and what we had heard from the board at the last meeting was prioritizing what topics should we take when in what order that

092was along the lines and i know this is new we've not done this before but that was the spirit in which we created this session to be very narrow only through september and to talk about the important work we had to do and the dates we had available to do that work so we're very narrow tonight on just agenda topics and dates and any like round table on other agenda items that the board wants to make sure come forward between now and september does that help so dr means put together a tentative future meeting schedule on the hold dates we gave the board for special sessions which are outside of the regular meeting dates so we also have regular meeting dates that we could consider for some of the topics um [Music] and i guess

093maybe i'll ask dr means to speak on the sequencing sure okay thank you um considering some of the topics that have been discussed in the boardroom in the past the august first date has been confirmed in there is general counsel from wasb the wisconsin association of school boards mr barry forbes will come and provide his general overview of how he advises board members to deal with open meeting laws medical records what statutes the board should pay attention to as it pertains to these types of topics that have been discussed earlier in this this this district then mr dan nerad who came and worked with the board this fall has agreed to come back and discuss what is that just go over roles and responsibilities of the board and what does the statute state what what

094does the literature around the key keywords of school boards and the lighthouse school board project that came out of the came out of the state of iowa in regards to what does research show um the the attributes and characteristics of a high achieving school board um he plans to go over those types of topics on august 1st on august 17th if we're going to stay along with our timeline of having the strategic plan ready for the first day of school you have a boar meeting on august 22nd where we're hoping that you would approve the strategic plan at that point so we would want to utilize the 17 um to to really do a deep dive on the strategic plan to make sure that you're you're in a good place um we may i'll come

095back to some of my concerns with these dates on august 23rd um if the board approves the strategic plan on the 22nd i think many of the items that you will want to discuss um or you you anticipate that you need to discuss will be embedded in the strategic plan um and what the vision is that if we could talk about what do you want specifically from a board's perspective on a weekly monthly and quarterly basis in terms of governance tools we should have the ability to finalize that work on the 23rd to give you the ability to truly keep us accountable i'll use that word again around the achievement of the strategic plan there's also um you should evaluate me i'm your one employee and that process of having the ability to deliberate discuss

096uh the component of my performance uh should should be on your radar september 19th was the fourth date that the board identified as your this is prior to mrs willis so um but you identified that that is what was a common date that all of you would be available today if we do our work well um that that's an open date where you can continue to have discussions my counsel my recommendation would be that we discuss policy and what that work should be but i didn't want to presume that i i would have a voice in how you're doing your time but my my recommendation to the board would be that we we discuss uh the role of policy how you're gonna go about developing policy moving forward oh okay so i have um oh

097i'm sorry just whatever i have okay so i have um on my list two i had policy work how to work together protocols uh committee structure that was something that uh was coming up how do we better create a community feedback loop um but i don't think we can have that session until we've had the board governance session which includes open meetings and um ethics and you know so and that could happen [Music] that actually could happen at one of our regular board meetings in august right after the board governance possibly yes you know how to communicate better can we use electronic communications in some way shape or form and what would that look like um but the policies the policy work is key because we have some key deadlines even from the cla audit

098that are october 1st so i think in lieu of you having a deeper conversation around how the board wants to if you recall in may there was a discussion that you had on if you wanted to look at policy as a committee of the whole or to have a sub committee if you will i think that those types of conversations will emerge either on august 1st or august 23rd um but to your point ms moonville you also have the ability to discuss these items on august 8th and august 22nd which are your regularly scheduled board meetings the 8th and the 22nd so when you look at august you've identified right now five days that you will be meeting the first the eighth the 17th the 22nd and the 23rd do you do we want to

099talk about other things that [Music] others want to discuss or do you do you prefer we hold that conversation i think what i would really benefit from is if folks want to send those things to dr means who can collect it share it out with the board and that we reconvene again and i don't have any i didn't but i have no plan for tonight so i don't know how to structure us in a way that will be really beneficial coming off this conversation um so that would be my preference i'm also more than happy to make this payback on this if i may you know um if the board is open to it if board members would like to send different topics to me i would then share it out to the full board

100and we can make this an agenda item for your july 25th meeting so you can keep progress moving forward what's up it's an option yeah i'd be very open to that okay mr meyer so i'm i'm going to try to step away back um and say i'm this is getting kind of tired i keep saying this so i've been doing this for a long time and as as has sharon and so i'll just speak for me it it seems that if history rhymes as has happened with to my taking every other board every group or you know generation or whatever you know the year 19 for me whatever we do now will largely be abandoned in three years it'll be just left behind and somebody else will come on and not on purpose but it's

101just kind of how it's always gone and i'm i struggle to try to get some idea about how to do something that's lasting and not as a legacy about us but for the district and for the children that we figure out how to set up some structure that somehow we'll want to be adhered to and i don't know how to do that or right i would i've never seen it done right i don't know how to do it i was president for three three years not continuously but it just never happened and so we have had our no short-term borrowing rule and we've held to that that's been good um but when it comes to uh positively proactively doing things to it improve student behavior and i however you want to describe it self-regular i

102mean i don't know we've never known as a board how to monitor what student services is doing and in the past student services has come up with numbers and statistics and data and in the end at the time i thought and currently i think those numbers never mean anything it just happens to be numbers people put up and you know it's almost like arrest statistics you know you don't really know if the right people are being arrested or why or you know who's not being arrested and who's being targeted for arrest and you know and so the other the next thing is student learning i mean how do we you know right and now the plan structure the strategic plan these milestones i've never quite seen anything like that before so that looks really really

103good so that looks like a framework that as we talk tonight about what are our indicators and what is our reporting cycle and does it align with our management cycle that here we are we're stuck again all the contracts get signed all the money spoken for all the staffing decisions are made by the end of april and now in the summer time board looks at data and well there's at best a one-year leg in our ability to affect um behavior or structure of the organization in response to the data so um so you know how do we really truly effectively monitor student behavior so that board members don't find out whether things are working or not based on distressed parents calling or anecdotal conversations with parents how do we as a board get the data

104about how we're doing in student service you know student services similarly with student learning how do we do that the third thing is we've lost sight of promoting enrollment and we've all been a part of it and i so i think we need to get back to that to because enrollment is our lifeblood so and and sure good student behavior and good student learning um is huge right it's really what it's all about but then there's the idea of having an attractive exciting product and i think that's where the the equity and the diversity content for example could come into play you know that we have the extracurriculars that people kids want and we have the classes the kids want and you know so there's the third pillar we have the governance thing and we

105just kind of neglected that we really have neglected that and we've we've gotten sloppy bad reckless i believe reckless to tell you the truth so but i think the three pillars of behavior learning and an attractive product i sure wish we could worry less about governance and less about the finances and focus on the three things that are directly student related the behavior the learning and the attractiveness of the product but i truly don't know how to do it but i truly don't repeat myself it's i don't i've never seen it done well and i have this hope that if we do it well with a calendar with very clear timing for reports and decisions and things like that we lay it out in some we get our art people to lay it on some

106artistic graphic that people can like oh yeah now i see what we're supposed to do all year you know that there'll be something four years from now that will have a an ongoing life not about us but about we've made it a better place for wauwatosa with how the board our board culture i don't want culture to become about us i want our cultural focus to be about the students so there i hope i've shown some humility of this it's i don't think it's been figured out in 20 years and i've been here so my fault too okay thanks i'm not suggesting i figured it out but at all believe me but i think what mr meyer have shared that's what we want to accomplish with this strategic plan um i think in terms of

107legacy in the boards i've worked with in the past it's through your policies have a quick story i'll make it very quickly because of the hour in a prior district that i worked in we developed a policy around equity in ensuring that all students were treated in an inclusive way and that policy led to that school district that school districts high school having a transgender student elected to the prom court which it made national news that happened because of the policy so those board members have the ability to say i was part of developing a policy that really [Music] represented our values so i think that's where legacy comes into play i we are if you if you can give me one more week with this team that started july 1st we are close to

108having a timeline that we would provide bi-monthly updates from each division in terms of metrics that are being completed reports that will come to you on either a weekly monthly or quarterly basis all of those components are really important i gave you a book i think everyone has it which is uh it's by someone who's really respected education for michael fullen and he talks about good governance and the five themes of good governance and perhaps as you think about what you want to accomplish if we can just review the that again or you could go back to the works of school boards and and what and that's a really quick read as well but i think what mr meyer has shared we are we would ask that if you give us a little bit of

109grace as we put these systems in place but as in my first year um and it's not accusatory or or anything um those systems that you're referencing that most school districts rely on that boards rely on so they can make good decisions um we have to rebuild or construct but we're going to get there we're we're we have ideas on how to create those feedback rooms for the community and how to structure the work in a way where the board has you don't have to ask for things but we're responsible for giving it to you you shouldn't you should never have to be in a mode of having to trust our data um you get to decide what's important in student services to measure within the strategic plan and then we're accountable for measuring it

110so on the 17th when we're discussing the strategic plan if there's something you want pulled out of student services that's the time to tell us so i i'm saying i like what you're saying dr means but i'm saying something different i think perhaps we need a policy that's plain language simple that states our annual board calendar about what we're when we're going to review what and what the criteria will be and i'll give you an example to me the proofs of how we failed the superintendent's annual evaluation used to be in the summer and we've almost laughed ourselves with we don't do the super we've lost almost a year on the superintendent's evaluation over time every year it takes a little bit more than a year to do it so over 18 years we we've

111lost a year how can that be when the budget cycle is annual right when the student data cycle is annual that the the board has on a regular ongoing basis over generations of board members slipped on our superintendent evaluation by maybe what nine i don't know it used to be done in the summer and now it's now we're we're working you see what i mean there's there's something that's not tight about how we we organize ourselves and i'd suggest it's gotta affect the students you know i i i'm just but maybe i'm wrong so i'll just throw that out there you know what i say mr right when i step into the presidency last time i had asked for that calendar and was surprised it didn't exist i had asked for that calendar and was

112surprised it didn't exist or or if you finally got a calendar did it really speak to you and it did you know it was but it was implicit the learning curve yes because of the board policy of yeah and i am pro a term limited to the presidency after two years last time i was i was ready for to not depress it um but it also means that institutional knowledge is lost and so the documentation of it i understand what you're saying i think to make sure that we've got kind of all of our reports in place and i think dr means i'm experiencing doing that of packaging reports of here's all the technology here's teaching and so i think there's ways to do that over the calendar year it may take a little while

113for us to structure that and there certainly will be other things added in but we know that there's certain times we know when the budget meeting is going to be um and codifying that i think is he's a changing culture you asked a question earlier this evening during the war meeting around the life cycle of technology you should know you should know and and annually we should have and i think we i shouldn't say i think i know jamie has an inventory of our life cycle of the technology but you don't receive it annually and i think those are the little things that you're asking for so then you're not i don't want to be in a position where you're i'm asking you to trust me i'm i want to be in a position where

114you are clear you are clear as a board in terms of what tools you need to govern and then we we do we create those reports but all that all that comes out of the strategic plan and so your your ability to be explicit in an israeli key that's one piece the strategic plan the second is policy and so if you if this board doesn't want to ever short-term borrow and i've worked in districts where it's in policy that we say here's the here's the threshold of our fund balance we will never go under it and it's in the policy so if that's the work of the board and then you take the strategic plan you take your policy and you you utilize those tools as your north star to build the budget so then

115that's when you're able to ask the questions such as so where where are we sending our personnel are we actually addressing the the disproportionality through certain things i don't believe you've been positioned to have those types of conversations yet you are thirsting for it i would just ask if you can give us two more weeks we would which is best and i'm proud of our team of being in a position to do it in the next two weeks but i believe in the next two weeks we we will have a foundation for you to really dig into and we want you to tear it apart and and make it your own because ultimately i think mr meyer said it the tighter you are the tighter the organization will be in terms of our focus on

116student learning and social emotional mental health and then diversity and inclusion those are the things that have bubbled up through our strategic planning process mr phillips sure um you know where my mind goes and i hear it peppered throughout everyone's comments is after we have a strategic plan how do we enable that right is it through what we can control i feel like resources and being proactive about our resource and making sure they're aligned to to the strategic plan policy is aligned and enabling the strategic plan what else i mean i heard communication and feedback like what else could we do to your point mike about creating structures that outlast us right we could all not be here tomorrow right so how do we enable that strategic plan to be enacted with that fidelity you

117know whether that's through a bunch of different committees or whether that's through one committee or the whole or like how does that happen that feels like that's the next step for us is not only not to create the you know that's great to create the strategic plan and approve it but how do we enable that to really hit the ground running and align our resources and our strength as a governing body so that he knows exactly and everybody has a clear understanding of where we're going how we're going to get there how we align the resources to ensure that it happens tearing down pathways whether it's legislative advocacy whether it's you know tearing down you know hindrances to us enabling the work that we uh we need to do so i hear what everybody said

118i hear the exact same thing and that's that's where my mind goes to so so something comes to mind when dr means started you said we don't have systems well from what you're saying it makes me think well as a board we don't have a system we're just kind of winging it with help helper reminders from the superintendent well maybe what's good for them is good for us too and he could help us get a system in such big chunks yeah at such short intervals like to be able to break them down and really get proactive about them and kicking them out there and thinking about them in a smaller group and with some with community engagement and stakeholder engagement i think would be helpful for us i want to shift informal we'll go to

119jenny and then leanne thank you um yes this is exactly what i've been asking for because i appreciate all that you are doing dr means and your administrative staff and kind of how they're lining things up for us but what i feel like is missing here is how the board functions so as somebody who's new i can tell you it doesn't make any sense like when we get information in what order things are how they're connected and there is no you were saying before i think eric that things are like there's an implicit calendar that someone's supposed to know about but when you're new you have no idea what this is until it hits you and so you can't three years in you'll get it right yeah exactly second term really great so if we

120could i mean i would love to see there being consistent work and part of our toes spent on board culture and board education like that to be built into what we're working on because i agree with you mike i wish that we never had to talk about board culture and we could just talk about our what our students need but i think they're interconnected and when we don't have a really strong functioning board we're not doing the best for our students and so i think we have to have these two things together lock and step and it's not just for right now it's not just for you know summer 2022 but like you said we're going to probably have some new people on our board and so on and so on and so on and

121so how do we build that structure and system in place so that everybody coming in has the same readiness to be able to function as part of this board so the two things that i was going to say is that one from what i've learned from talking with other board members across the country we are not alone in the struggle um and i hope i feel like all of us who've been here a little while longer feel like we have been asking for this for years and so to your point like we haven't figured it out but nobody has we wanted this right but what gives me a little bit of hope here is that the moment you came in dr maine's and said we're missing systems and structures i was like yes there's not

122actually a project management plan that has all the things where you can say here are all the things that we need to come back to next year or in 18 months or in two years or whatever so um i appreciate what you're highlighting and i i think part of the challenge has been the work has been in such silos um jenny to your point like it all seems very disparate um i think you know when when i think about the next several months and and whatnot what would be very helpful to me and i'll just speak for myself is being able to see three months out six months out what are we checking in on in january what are we talking about even if we just did it quarterly and i know eric that quote

123i've seen that like calendar um so what kind of the fake calendar like this is what we should be talking about we actually won't talk about this because there's going to be 18 million emergencies um so that is something that i know i would find really helpful so that i could be making the connections to how these things fit together because tonight i'm like oh that sounds great about this art technology but is that in the budget like is this just some random ask because that used to happen all the time um so i would be really excited about seeing this as well it feels really good that it sounds like we're all on the same page and wanting this um two things that i would just ask for um one is with the waspi

124um presentation i would i'm sure you all have been in the same boat where you just sat through really long sit and get if there is reading that they are asking us to do ahead of time if that expectation can be made and if we could actually do application based stuff so i don't want to be told what i need to be doing i want them to bring me a here's the situation work through it as a board what would you do and then then say like did you consider this did you consider that what resources did you consider who could you talk to should you have called in legal et cetera et cetera here's why that board meeting is allowed here's why that board meeting wouldn't be allowed um so that's my first request

125and my second request is one thing that i don't think we've figured out yet and it could just be that i'm like not i don't like gmail um we get so much information and i know that we can't reply back to one another but i think there are some topics where there's lots of information that if it could live in a google doc that nobody can edit but everybody can see so for instance all of the communication that's been coming around in around certain topics so that instead of me having to sort through nine million emails to find the response i'm looking for that would be so super helpful and it would create a history for new board members to come in to be able to look back and say like oh that's all the

126stuff that happened around x or y um those those are sort of my i have quick answers so yes um in working with mr forbes and dr nirada sharon made the same request we have to make it scenario activity-based um it can't just be assigned it so that request has already been made i will circle back and see if there's pre-reading that the board could digest and in regards to your last comment four dots is constructed to be that portal it's just never used you've never used it that way and to mr phillips point earlier um you've talked about doing your work differently again the way that your agenda is structured if you are truly strategically focused your agenda if you go out and look at other school districts around the country their agendas are

127based on the goal statements and what what are you doing in academic performance what are you doing in diversity in inclusion what are you doing in in social emotional um and mental health mr price has shown me that for guns again has the ability to structure items in a way where we can track to see how often are we talking about these things so i will say this is i'm sure largely me and my age and my generation and i'm just going to say this just in case there's agreement somewhere google docs and google mail to me is largely worthless and i my wife loves it she's my beta kappa long ago she's really smart i can't figure out google docs whatever it is so easy to structure and organize and search and all this

128kind of stuff it seems like google is made for some fluffy generations that can't focus on organization you know so i know i know shoot me for me not thought i should say that do something to me for being generationally prejudiced but if you know a better way i sure would like to see it or don't since the whole purpose of the platform board we haven't tapped into the power of four times the power of four years nobody has literally uttered that phrase maybe it's a very it's an amazing tool and so it answers uh leanne's question there it is supposed to be a place where you keep all your information and if we were doing the work well then ms willis would have had a place to just say so what have you been

129talking about for the last year because that's what she's thinking she wants to know so where are the documents what have you been talking about if if there was a place we could have jamie put together a tutorial for jamie has been on me for the last year to say he's been saying literally we have we're not tapping into the full power is he giggling somewhere watching i'm sure there's a youtube video since every school district uses the same platform i mean there there there are elements of of importing i'll just give you the one and then i'll turn it back over to you but there there's a scorecard component to board dots where if a community member wanted to just know if one item what the vote was going to be they can get

130an alert um they could be at the baseball game but they can get an alert to say here's the here's the vote and you get it immediately um there's just so many elements support us that we don't use that we could so i i i for the last year i've just been having this silly smile as i listen to all of you i know where you want to go and it's exciting to hear when you go back into the governance core book what you have affirmed is that all seven of you have coherence around what you want to see happen uh with this this board because if again if you're tight it will trickle down to the classroom if you're not tight that also trickles down to the classroom and i think we've seen an

131element of that i would just i it's been since i've been asking for this work that we will eventually provide to you in the next two weeks um i was just talking to a couple of our administrators in the district office today there seems to be an a nervous energy in the building because they're used to the next crisis and we're saying don't don't brace for the next crisis think about your work and think about what we're trying to accomplish according to the strategic plan think about the tools that the board needs to know so they can monitor your work we haven't had those conversations um in a while here i'm gonna just do a quick summary so i'm hearing kind of multiple things and like we'll need to figure out how these fit together

132one is an annual calendar of what we want to see when we want to see it some of it will be quarterly some of it biannual some of it annual in terms of scorecards data kind of monitoring that we want to support there's also topics that will come up annual reports that we'll see uh and that we've gotten some of those historically some of them we may want to do and we want to consider whether or not to build that into policy so that that's articulated going forward and what that looks like we want to talk about what does our committee structure look like and how does that support the implementation of the strategic plan we've talked about a variety of different committees over time we have one now um that's currently active legislative advocacy

133that leanne and i are currently placed on and then i think there's a variety of different committees that we have talked about over the years uh recently or not recently of does it make sense that there'd be board committees um in different ways so i think that's a conversation point um and then there's the how do we structure the meetings in general so how do we what what's the type of information we want to hear where do we want to focus and spend our time a question i have that i would like the board to consider is to what point do we need as many conversations about the deep dive into some of the detailed budgetary approval items what do we need uh written reports on and if we want to on the consent agenda

134versus pulling off the consent agenda to allow us more time to go deeper into more strategic conversations i think that's a conversation for probably another time but i would love your thoughts kind of for you to give some thought to that but my preference would be we spend a little bit more time on the strategic the strategic decisions and not some of the budgetary decisions unless we have a specific thing that we that we want to i want to know the information about the computers for this evening but if we don't have questions on it i'd rather spend that 20 minutes on something else unless we've got one or two board members who want to pull that off they can send it something to think about excuse me phone um thank you just one thing

135i didn't hear um audits and management response that was a key investment that we made and it will move our work forward so i have just found that we have several things we're doing and there should be updates for them every month or you know so if we're you know having a calendar or however we're doing those updates the work is happening but we're really not telling anyone the work is happening and it's concerning work that we're making progress on and people and it affects the student experience so you know i i just keep hearing student experience and these the way that we put things on the agenda and talk about things on the agenda helps move those initiatives forward and helps student experience i think so the other one where i think sharon where

136it connects is leon brought up earlier when we implement an annual report on where what's the status of the implementation there's the audit and then there's the here's something new what were our metrics that we said we wanted to see how we know implementation is successful at this point in the game but that is something i think to codify codify as well so two things i i don't want to cast dispersions on google well i'm trying to correct myself here that set well i qualified it with i know i'm generational and all that kind of stuff okay but whatever our platform is we need standard practices so people know how to find stuff so that people know how to store stuff so that people know how to communicate stuff so if we if google is

137our path then we need to standardize so that things are organized structured storage files similarly across the organization i had a really huge concern tonight that the back office is using microsoft and the educational group and us we are using google how do we effective a rhetorical question wouldn't we all communicate better if we're all on the same platform so um and this calendar if it could be put forth in whatever technical environment the smart people like you know the people who know well board docs is best or google is best or microsoft is best let's put that straw dog up in the platform that somebody thinks it's really the direction to take so that we can see it as it would really be used and that would be a first step now my other

138main comment here is that um we had and i'm gonna explain my vote now on the consent agenda new positions for coaches we had on the regular agenda boilerplate renewals of things we buy over and over again it would seem to me that new things conceptually should be on our main agenda so we can understand why we're doing something new and that annual repetitive things could get some kind of review by a committee or subgroup of the board or something like that it seemed like we were backwards with not on purpose but you know we spent a lot of time talking about repetitive renewals of things and we didn't spend any time talking about new positions and i watched our policy is our policy dictates that that happens that we talk about new things in

139the consent agenda that we talk about those renewals in the in the main agenda i understand yeah i understand yeah or that i mean we have the option to pull any new thing off of the consent agenda right but i i understand but i yeah i'm not wanting to tip over the apple cart during the regular meeting i want to describe here in this meeting which is what this is for that it just seemed kind of upside down to handle it that way to spend so much time and now we're going to be talking about quarterly reviews of data indicators what we'd like to talk about we're going to have to find time for those things in the regular meeting so i i just want us to look at that you know if the first

140time something is approved it ought to be a bigger label than the renewal that's kind of how i look at things so thanks it would be nice to have some cadence of when we talk about just us like i don't know maybe quarterly or twice a year say how are we doing are there any areas where we want to make improvements do we want to make sure that all of our you know new positions end up on the agenda but to be able to do that and have an opportunity to just say those things on a regular basis so we're checking our process we have to add it to the agenda we have a suggestion box where you just drop it seriously or even right to have honestly i have heard through conversation i'm supposed

141to just tell the president that i thought i want something on the agenda but i have to be honest there's no orientation that tells you that i don't really know how to get things on the agenda that's it it's just a lot [Music] are we at a good start for stopping plays for this evening yeah so good conversation tonight uh i think it's moving us forward um i want to encourage folks to continue to think about this to shoot dr means an email um for the time being at least on gmail um you could print something off and place it on his desk which will be our current suggestion box i'm sure he'll love that um and we will uh convene this conversation again in the not-too-distant future uh we'll put this on our agenda

142for our first convenient conversation about some of the strategic timelines of how to move these forward this has been helpful for me to kind of get a sense of where people's thoughts are um i heard again and again tonight the importance of codifying and updating policy in a whole lot of different ways um from that is a way of leaving legacy as a way of documenting um for in essence a gift to future boards so that they've got a roadmap um and a gift to ourselves um and then how policy can kind of hold us tightly um to help us move forward in a collaborative fashion so good conversations every tonight um can i get a motion twitter it is 9 34. miss willis yes mr phillips yes yes yes mr meyer yes ms rayleigh

143yes dr joseph baker yes thank you