Robla School District Board Meeting - August 11, 2022

001okay uh call this meeting of um artist 11th roblor being intercession please stand and join us for the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you how dare you moving on to roll call at the record show that all members are accounted for with the exception of dennis boyd our board president uh as you know or maybe um many of you do not know at home um dennis boyd our board president passed away a couple weeks ago um i think it's appropriate to call for a moment of silence to honor dana so let's have please thank you and um let we get to the board member of course i do

002um i i think it's appropriate to open it up for any words that you would like to say at that particular moment and i do have some big shoes to fill so bear with me a little bit as uh i do miss uh my colleague dennis moving on to open session item three uh board action taken in closed session there were no actions taken in post session so moving on to the adoption of the agenda and there have been no event uh they're called to adopt the agenda second in motion at a second although say aye aye oppose uh the abort uh the agenda has been adopted moving on to section four um public comment the public comments section uh individuals wishing to address the board on any non-agenda items which are of interest to

003the public and within the board's jurisdiction may do so during this time the board may not act upon items presented during public comment but may briefly respond to statements made ask a clarifying question or refer speaker speakers to district staff or other resources we have a procedure for this to submit a comment and assembly gamut um enter your name and email address um i'll just keep reading this um the board assistant will review and provide your comment to the board and enter them into the meeting minutes submit a comment on youtube type your comment in live chat during the live stream of the board meeting the board president or i will review and share your comments with the board as appropriate so we'll pause for a minute give those online time to catch up i

004don't mean alright give me a heads up or something okay we're good moving on to reports the roblox education foundation fireworks [Music] uh another 700 million dollars thanks to the uh so for those of you that are here today that's all we've got a bunch of flyers thank you and um i uh a special thank you to you john reverend for all the hard work you put in uh to this into the fireworks booth um and for those that don't know he really does work hard um i've witnessed that in past years not so much this year because i was able to get my son to volunteer for me um but i did see john drummond and he puts a lot of work and a lot of effort into this so thank you very much

005for all that you do moving on teachers associated classified school employees association no and i would say that um we built a big term because we really love hearing from them superintendents report thank you um mr burns uh good evening everyone um i guess i do want to start my report tonight of course i'm saying a few words about our our dear friend and colleague dennis boyd definitely have very heavy hearts at this time um still kind of uh thinking about and dealing with the passing of dennis which happened very suddenly when you think about dennis you think about the impact he had in this community and i think that um we all have dennis stories about um ideas that he had and things that he brought to our attention because somebody had expressed a

006concern to him um he truly is the definition of a community-minded person and i think the fact that he was on our board for 20 years exemplifies that um better than anything else um of course our hearts go out to his family and um we know this is a huge loss for them but we too are his family and this is a huge loss for us as a community um we'll continue to honor them in ways that we can and we are working on developing some plans for some somewhat permanent recognition of the work that dennis did in the rebel school district and i want to assure the community also that i as superintendent and the rest and the board we understand our responsibility to move forward and to get a fiscal member of the

007board and we are having conversations and making decisions about how we will be taking those steps to move forward and have a complete board um here in the rebla community um so to continue with business um i will of course remind everyone that school starts in the middle school district this next monday on august 15th um we have been working very hard to be completely staffed for the start of the school year and i must say that i want to give kudos to our chief of hr nicole sullivan who's been working um like crazy to help find and to vet and to make sure that we are ready for the arrival students i want to assure everyone that we are indeed ready there are a few positions that are are not filled and um we

008have plans to have people cover those positions i assure all of you that there will be no students who come to school on the first day of school that do not have a classroom teacher in place and all of our services will be available to students going forward but we we have some work to do to find permanent people and and we are continuing to work to do that we have some wonderful new facilities i'm not going to say anything more about this i often get accused of stepping on mr flores's toes so um he has a report tonight and i won't say anything about facilities other than we're we're thrilled to have so many new classrooms opening up at the start of the school year over the summer roblo kept very busy not only

009were we working to hire lots of new people but we ran a summer school program at every one of our elementary schools and freedom school um at taylor street school and we'll be hearing more about that um over the next few board meetings uh and talk about the success of that program i do have seven told mr robert smith i got the most wonderful phone call most of what the phone calls i get from parents or about concerns um but she just wanted to thank me for bringing freedom i took complete credit mr roberts for bringing for bringing freedom of school to without the school district and she wanted to thank me for making that happen because it was such a successful endeavor for her child this summer so i think that's a wonderful testimonial

010to um the wonderful things that happened this summer we did a new teacher institute for all the new teachers that we hired um and mr penman is here i want to thank him for the work that he did to um orient our teachers to all of the programs and services that we have i know that he and his staff put in a lot of work to make sure we were ready and as we move towards instituting universal tk um we have worked really hard to make sure we are ready for that uh miss erhart who has retired put in a lot of work to help us to get ready and we're grateful for that um our new director miss marco um is not here tonight you will meet her soon and she um i think

011will be a wonderful addition to the to the preschool and we are very ready for tk and one of the ways we got ready was to have a tk institute that took place late last week and earlier this week and i think that our tk program is going to be very very strong um to mark the start of the school year um we have our annual employee picnic that will take place tomorrow at 11 o'clock it will be under the beautiful tent that is out in the field here at robles school now we will serve lunch we will have words of welcome from some some very illustrious people um in little old me we will be giving out longevity pins to recognize years of service in the robo school district we have encouraged all of

012the schools to show their school spirit by wearing their school shirts we did design new district office shirts and um these have been sized for your board members and i'm going to pass those down we encourage you to not only come to the picnic but wear your new shirt and we will of course have uh gifts for all of the employees as well we have a few things that we're taking on this year and one of the themes that we are taking on um is what we're calling contagious positivity we feel like it's really a time to focus on being positive and um we've been worrying about things being contagious for some time and we thought we would kind of play with that and say oh let's catch something good from each other let's do

013that and so we are going to have that be a theme for this year i feel that getting back to mr boyd he is the personification of contagious positivity wherever dennis went he brought a smile and he brought joy and he brought a positive outlook to things and i think if more of us could live our lives like that this world would definitely be a better place so in honor of him we will continue to have that be a theme this year we will focus on the mental health of our staff and the mental health of our students and i want to thank our mental health team who's been really helping me to put together some information around how we can roll this out to our employees and to the community another theme that we

014will have this year is safety with recent happenings in the world we really feel that it's important to reassure our community that roba is a very safe place where your child can come to school every day and our employees can feel assured that they will be kept safe at the school i'm happy to say that this is not a focus area because we have an outcry from our community in regards to concern but we enjoy a great deal of trust here in our district with our community and this is the one of the ways we maintain the trust by being proactive and being reassuring even if they don't haven't expressed any concerns to us so um we will talk about that um we will talk about how we have upgraded our facilities um in efforts

015to be safer we will talk about the fact that we do active shooter training something that's unfortunate that we do but necessary that we do that's called alice training and we will be talking about how we do mental and physical uh we will keep students mentally and physically safe so each year i do a welcome video i used to do a welcome letter and and um smarter people than me taught me that when you need to you know kind of get with it and maybe do a video so i've started doing a welcome video and i have a draft of this year's video as fun as it is to watch myself i'm going to show you to show you um this first draft of our welcome video [Music] hello i'm ruben reyes and i'm the

016superintendent here in the roma school district welcome to the 2022-2023 school year whether you're returning student family or staff member we're excited about this upcoming school year and look forward to welcoming our students and our families back to our classrooms and to school events keeping our school safe is our number one priority in the rebels school district both physically and emotionally increasingly our families are asking about planning and preparedness for school emergencies as well as prevention efforts we are dedicated to ensuring that our campuses are welcoming and safe places for our students and families and i would like to share with you the ways that we ensure our schools remain safe places for our students to learn so that we can thrive in every aspect of our lives each one of our schools has reinforced

017their entry points with locked gates and doors so that campus visitors cannot access classrooms without checking into the front office [Music] over the past few years the rebel school district has invested nearly 50 million dollars in modernizing our facilities thanks to the generosity of the rebel community who passed the facilities bond in 2014 and again in 2018 these funds have allowed us to build more security into the designs of our schools we continue to implement the alice program alice is short for alert lock down inform counter and evacuate this approach is used for dealing with school shootings and other emergencies while it is unlikely that an active shooter situation would occur all leaders in the robles school district have been trained and certified in the alice approach we also perform regular safety drills so that

018our staff and students are prepared for an emergency and we have strong partnerships with local law enforcement and emergency response agencies to keep our schools and the community safe our visitor check-in procedures also keep safety at the forefront if you'd like to visit your child at school you will be asked to show a form of official identification such as a california driver's license your id will be scanned through a database and once you've been cleared you will be issued an official visitor badge which must be worn while you are on the school campus when you leave the school you will check out the office before departing not only will this help ensure our schools are safe but will also help us to know at any moment who is on the school campus should an emergency

019arise we also strive to keep our schools emotionally safe for our students and support healthy school climates our staff has completed two years of resilience training which focuses on the diversity of our students and staff and equitable and inclusive policies and practices our positive behavior interventions and supports or pbis program support students behavioral academic social emotional and mental health and improve students social emotional competence academic success and school climate we have social workers and psychologists at all of our schools to support students staff and families we have added additional clinicians at our schools over the past few years to increase the support it is important to acknowledge the role of students and families in looking out for one another and creating safer schools they may be among the first to recognize warning signs of someone

020at risk of hurting themselves or others we encourage students and families to speak to a principal teacher social worker law enforcement or another trusted adult to get help we are looking forward to a great school year for our schools and fun and engaging learning activities for our students with protective systems in place preparation to respond and proactive prevention efforts to keep our schools safe and secure [Music] okay [Music] [Laughter] yeah but thank you thank you a lot of people put a lot of work to put that together thank you um moving on i do want to talk about the budget for a minute as the process goes where the school board adopts our budget for the upcoming school year in june this year in particular some things have changed since that adoption in terms of

021the state adopting its budget and so uh mr castillo is here tonight um we've asked him to take a few minutes to just just give the board a little bit of an update about um how the budget has continued to evolve mr castillo thank you i think it's working now um um good evening vice president foreign members um is it working [Music] our state budget on june 23rd about a week before the final step budget and we actually did our adopted value based on the main revised and this year particularly there were some significant changes so we just want to update the world our community although for those changes so um there were some major topics in the governor's new budget and then one was a new two block grants and one is the expanded

022lemming opportunity um even though we include um those grants in our budget there there was the amounts of the total there was some there's some changes how those funds can can be used one um as a big picture as we hear the the new funding the schools obtain we receive about 60 of the new funding is considered one time and and 40 percent of our ongoing community one time it's very clear we're gonna receive it in this fiscal year and even if we establish new programs with the funds we're not gonna receive new funding for the upcoming years so this this um these two programs um the our programs and the lender recovery they're actually new when we adopt a budget we call it a one-time discretionary program we anticipate about 2.4 million dollars and

023then we also had a spending learning opportunity so in particular this one-time discretionary so it still became one time but it's not discretionary anymore so what it is is we came down um learning recovery medicine program and this is um as the type of cells is pretty much requisite for um for any uh learning for for the students instructional um i want to point out that this has a deadline about six years we have to expand there by 2728 so it was even though it's one time we don't have to spend it all in this year we had about six years to to spend it and we had to track it very carefully uh in our in our quarterly report in the year and reporting and then what our sonos does allow uses then this

024is um this is the most the most restricted of the other two grounds is anything related to how we can help our students recover the learning learning laws due to corey kobe 19. so it's i would call it this instructional block grant and then we have the other background that is the arts music and instructional materials black ground this is um a little bit more on discretionary and we have actually one last year to to expand these currencies we have only like by 25 26 we have to encumber um pretty much expanded by this year one thing about the difference is this one we will come to the board a request for more approved we had to discuss it and now pull this this this this plan in uh during the world meeting so a

025lot of our users again this is more discretionary more unrestricted when you when you had a world operation or cause pretty much we could use it for any legal purposes that they that we that we are allowed we can of course combine these two grounds you know and do something with with those those glands so that's where we are um as we discuss this with our our superintendent we discuss about how could we use these glands to helping us the transition from the current 19 funds to this new fund so the landing or the programs that we start doesn't go too down down that cleared up programs that we start and then the other one is um spender learning opportunity grant so that's um so this one is we we receive less money than anticipated

026on this more money than the other ones um but this one is a continuation we pretty much have worked on this since last year we are ready to um to start this program we are working with the city to start this program again this this program the expanded learning is we have to offer some students with opportunities to attend before and after after school activities so although overall with these three three grants the district is expected to receive about 1.5 million dollars more than we anticipated at the doctor budget um something that is new for 22.23 um this is uh um transportation transportation has a big a challenge for for the school district throughout the county the state i even even through the whole nation so for the first time in ever in the longest

027time that there's funding for transportation and then what it is is um there they're still not covering our cars but they they will um they will cover about 60 percent of our transportation cost so we will receive i'm sorry just getting too many buttons about 200 and 235 000 for for for transportation so that's we will come back to you with um with a plan the good thing about our we are already doing a lot is a lot of transportation we are so we just have to put a plan together about what what are we to present it to the board um because with a spend the lender opportunity or high on duplicate account we might have to provide transportation for a photo for the students for the before and after schools um these are

028the major changes our staff we listen for about six hours so budget updates we update you in about like six minutes but i think these are the major changes right mr castillo thank you i know i know me having a long report tonight but that won't always be this long my final thing is just to extend to the board the invitation to the meeting of the sacramento county school boards association um you might recall that pre-pandemic the county office of education would pull together the boards from all of the areas of school districts for dinners a couple of times a year and so we're going back to in person and the next one will be on october 12th at the county office at 5 30 and a dinner will be served and the speaker will

029be retired police chief daniel hahn um do you know if you're available or do you if you want tonight let us know and or if you need to check you can let us know what's the date again october october 12th also wednesday okay looks like all four are able to attend great and finally tonight we uh gift that we gave out last spring when all the board got their bento boxes does anybody not have one of these okay it doesn't have any food in it but anyone else yeah you didn't get one i got one i got one i don't know if i did or i didn't oh i would you might have smell okay okay we can deliver all right that's my report thank you okay moving along to uh board member reports uh

030trustee divine i'd like to take my time to say how much dennis will be missed when i was first elected he called me the next morning and we talked for about three hours on the phone and he made me feel like my input was very valuable and that what i was going to be bringing to the school board was something that was missing because i have a child with an iep and disabilities and he made he validated my my decision to run and he just loved this community and we will all miss him rusty cardona sure i also like to express my our loss i had the opportunity to meet dennis and he was a good friend i i have a i use a coffee shop i see him daily and for me he was

031a good friend and he always say he was a so positive person and he was my tutor here he helped me through at the beginning of my career as a good member from anything else he was my friend i i really miss him we do love a beautiful person and our community community owned him a lot because he was always always this i remember always put the community first trustee duluse yeah um you know the first of all being a school board member is uh let's just say nobody's getting rich becoming a school board member um it's also can be very uh it can be taxing it can be a lot of work it can take a lot of energy and you can put a lot into working to bring people together um when i

032started on the board almost 18 years ago dennis was already here and that was after well over a decade of serving on the on board over in the north sacramento school district dennis even before retirement for him community and serving being a servant of people always was a part of who he was whether it was rotary whether it was on the school board whether it was part of reading partners i know very very few people who were as giving of their time giving other talented as giving of their treasury as dennis he was a model and set forth an example that i think we all need if if everybody gave a fraction of the time to their community and to others that dennis did um i think about how much better this community would be

033um robla california as well as this is is a lesser place without him being here and uh he he's going to be missed thank you um for those of you who are not in this room or at home watching um and even for those here um but mostly those here know this this this is what makes our um our district and our board um special because uh you know we really are friends we act like family uh we argue like family sometimes um and i've been told time and time again that um this is rare that you ever have a board that gets along this well and uh dennis was a large part of that um you've heard how he has treated other board members and helped them and my story is pretty much the

034same he's he approached me um saying when i was sitting out in the audience and approached me and said hey you know mom can i talk to you about running for board and i'm sitting there an introverted person in the audience um and he talked me into it he told me about the commitment things he could do that's the kind of person that dennis was you know he really helped make this a family but not just aboard the district and so i'm definitely going to miss uh my friend dennis and i remember going home and talking to my wife about this dude who looked like popeye that was talking to me about you know how the school board um such a wonderful wonderful person so i would definitely miss him um i do have more

035an era of uh optimism for this year and part of that is because of the things that um dennis has helped instill in this um but also because we have a lot going on this year you know we have a lot of new people we have a lot of new classrooms not new buildings and it's exciting really i'm looking forward um to this school year and um you know i mean roblox is a wonderful place and we always try to make um make every day count um the last couple years have been tough you know we've had some challenges we've always worked hard um but you know i'm feeling very optimistic so very happy right now i mean i look like it because i miss my friend dennis but i am very happy okay moving

036along to presentations we have our first presentation is a facilities update with ron hickey from cfw or actually no sorry you guys got so used to ron the uh emilio with cfw uh first off before i get into the presentation i do want to share our condolences uh with the passing of dennis um you know we've had a relationship with the problem since 1992 i believe um you know and along mr raven uh and uh and ruben superintendent you know uh dennis was robla um that is you know or is roblox in many ways and you know it's going to be tough looking over there and seeing somebody else in that seat eventually and for now having mtc but you know he was a great supporter of what roblo was trying to do in the

037classroom he was a great supporter of the facilities program that we were trying to put in place um you know and i think that's very fitting that you know he was able to see some of these transformations that occurred um you know i'm a little bitter that you know we didn't have another 30 days or so that you can see you know all these classrooms coming online but i think he really was uh the actions i have very positive about what we were doing and how we're going and i think it speaks to the board's legacy and the district's legacy and the dentist's legacy of the accomplishments that the district district has been able to achieve over the last six or seven years um and hopefully uh you'll see dennis in the classroom and with

038the teachers and the students and a little bit in the facilities as well but you know um did want to share our condolences to everybody at the the roblo family just really like i said i mean i've been exposed to dennis and mr raven over here for 25 of my 35 years living so um you know it is uh i know you're laughing at me you're guessing ages okay but um but no he will be missed and uh you know it's it's something that uh so it takes a while for all of us that have been involved in the rebel community um to get used to so with that uh superintendent asked me to share photos instead of text so we try to comply uh but over at bell avenue uh you know first off

039uh as we've been talking about for for many months we knew that august was going to be the the nexus point of all of our of our major construction projects i'm happy to report that you know the vast majority of those activities uh have been completed we are still uh addressing a number of items at uh at bell avenue as well as fun wood but we do believe that we will be in a position to have students in the classrooms on monday with teachers there might be a couple boxes in the corner and we will clearly find something wrong monday afternoon you know a a sink faucet or a a piece of carpet but those will be addressed by the contractor one of the things that really really struck me uh was when i was

040walking around bell avenue and if you've been out there a long time there used to be these walls uh between what was now the new building and the existing classroom buildings if you can see the photo on on the right hand side here this is taken from the back of the new two-story classroom building and you can actually now see all the way down through the campus we have these walled in breezeways before where these courtyards um and uh those are now gone uh and all of the uh the covered walkways were replaced uh we were hoping that we were able to repair them uh repair was not an option and the board graciously approved uh additional work uh to be taken underway to replace those but now uh that campus does feel like a

041integrated campus as a whole um and uh we're looking forward to having all the students there uh later uh i guess monday uh some couple other photos just kind of showing uh some of the progress that has been made over there in addition to the modernization of the three existing classroom wings uh we did also install two uh three additional uh kindergarten classrooms uh over there as well and created a little kindergarten village for our youngest learners we are still in the process of working with the state on uh getting additional um funding uh for tk and preschool classrooms that's an item that we brought to the board earlier uh earlier in the year uh we hope to have the determination back from opsc office public school school construction uh later this month or sometime

042in september uh with the funds if awarded allocated to the district uh probably that's september or october um state allocation board meetings over at glenwood we were putting down asphalt today for the uh the parking lot so uh on monday a teacher's lobby placed the park um and so we are working on that and just showing some of the exterior of that um kindergarten playground uh the classrooms over at glenwood uh you know one of the things that uh you know i really want to commend the district for is a lot of school districts um spend their time really concerned about how the schools look like industry um and from the very beginning it was about making sure that you know students had a high quality classroom teachers had a high quality learning environment in

043which to uh to practice their profession and you know from that perspective you know i think that really has done a tremendous job with that and as the as the community support us we've been able to look at some of those things outside the classroom as well and that's something we'll continue to look for but i think in terms of accomplishing the board and the district's goal of providing 21st century learning environments at all the school sites we knew that august of 2024 the 22 23 school year would be that time where uh all of our classrooms would reach that particular milestone so very excited as you can see we had some industrious uh teachers that were able to unpack and arrange things which was very nice um another room uh we have not quite

044unpacked the library yet over at glenwood but when that does occur i would encourage everybody to go look at it the support spaces that we were able to install in there uh were a far greater improvement to the accordion style uh walls we had previously i didn't know we had space behind those walls even though we have many of our boardroom board meetings there at one point um but uh this space looks wonderful and great and uh i would give all the teachers maybe about ten ten days or so uh to settle in and then you know i'm sure the superintendent and staff would welcome you on site to take a tour but let everybody get unpacked and going but uh it's it's truly remarkable to see the transformation over at glenwood uh see it

045over at bell um and then to add obviously that's in addition to you know the past success we've had in terms of opening up roblox improvements to maine and taylor so uh i i think it's just been a lot of hard work over the last few years and i think uh staff would be relieved to know that the majority of our our major construction will be ceasing in the next 30 days there may be a project or two that pops up along the way but you know in terms of having to deal with the bulldozers and the beeping sounds and things of that nature cutting off water or gas and things that uh yeah i think we'll be pretty much out of the woods uh in the next 30 days looking ahead like i said

046we're going to see some major construction activities in 30 days um the only caveat to that is if we do get notification of the grant funding for the preschool and tk classrooms uh to be constructed about if that funding is received uh we will be working and launching into a procurement program someone who've done before in terms of architects engineers and so forth on board the good news is you should have a whole year of design uh before uh we have to do any construction um and so forth on that side we're also working with district to plan a ribbon cutting or a dedication ceremony um and so i'm sure the superintendent will have details with that as that is finalized um and then uh lastly uh you know we're continuing to work in the

047district and update facilitation and providing the board updates and we'll continue to fight for updates on future projects uh there are some ancillary projects that are out there uh installation of shade structures uh site drainage uh project and silver that will continue throughout the year uh but like i said before the major construction the idea of walls and um and things that nature will uh will be ceasing uh in the next 30 days with that happy to answer any questions the board may have at this time questions [Music] you know it's wonderful to see pictures of beautiful buildings but for me the most important thing that this exemplifies is the equity that is now true in the rebel school district you know so many school districts have this beautiful school over here and then over

048in this neighborhood there's this other school where that where the children feel that they're not as valued as much and and seeing what those that level of classroom now exists at all five of our elementary schools i think is something that the board should be very proud of that that um everyone has access to that technology everyone acts has access to a room where they can feel valued and where we can maximize the writing that takes place there that that to me i think is something for the bird to be very proud of thank you yeah um emilio i i i want to say that um there's been a pleasure working at fw um and i say that because you know when i joined the board i knew nothing about this nothing about bonds nothing

049about buildings or anything like that and you know i think i'm a smart guy but that's a lot to learn um so it was a pleasure working with you the cfw and learning but also seeing the commitment that you had because um just like you you mentioned today you're still going after after more funding uh to help us out and i i i so appreciate that aspect um because there are a lot of things that i wouldn't have known um and maybe some of my colleagues might have but i'll admit i did so it's nice to know that we have a really good working relationship and that you do go the extra mile of trying to make trying to get more funding and help our dollar stretch even further so if you can take that

050back to cfws thank you absolutely i appreciate you saying that and like i said it's it's been a long-standing partnership we've had many different roles with the district over the years and by far this is probably the most involved that we've been with the district but it took a tremendous amount of trust and i think um you know having very candid conversations about along the way about what it is that we wanted to achieve and really having the support of not just the board but also district staff and leadership uh being able to accomplish this i mean sometimes we start programs like this and you finish that first school and says you know what hey this is not what we're looking for it's not what we want to go do um but i mean i

051think to to the superintendent's point the fact that you now have um that level of equity in terms of a facility uh across the board in those in those in those classrooms now um i i love your sentiment and and i'll be the first to tell you that you know us finding more funding is a little self-serving uh but uh and uh but you know i do appreciate that in terms of what we're gonna do and there's still a lot to do i mean i think that's the other thing if if roble elementary has taught us anything you know we want to provide a similar level of facilities you know we were able to touch the classrooms we know we have other challenges that are that remain um and we're gonna work very hard with

052uh with the superintendent and staff to to see if we can address those as well as we go forward because um i'd love to say we're done uh i i think we have a little more work to do but i i do want to say that thank you for this opportunity and then this this is one of those places that you know um uh as my father's son my father was the one that started with the relationship over here in naropa you know this is really uh a part of his legacy as well and and having to um share that with all you guys you know this is this is a place that we're very we're immensely proud of the work we've been able to do here and i've joked about it but i'm i

053am serious that when csba is here in sacramento uh we're gonna get a school bus we're gonna take delegates from the conference and we're just going to drive them through robla uh have tours of that so very very proud of the work and thank you very much for the opportunity to serve you guys you did a beautiful job thank you thank you thank you okay next we have new hope charter school update with render pagani uh director good evening vice president trustees superintendent and staff um i'm going to be brief because otherwise it won't make it through the presentation there is no new hope without without dennis boyd okay let me get into the presentation i'll come back so um we're launching into year two and um of course it is something that we're very

054excited about and that's a it's a powerful thing to watch students and staff coming back for year two and then very excited about it so these are some of the things that have been happening since the last time i was here in june and just as we're preparing thank you elliot so we've uh actually had staff reported uh august one so we've been working for the past two weeks um really just working relentlessly to really get off to a great start this school year and this is just a schedule of our first week august 1 through the 5th um you can see that there's been a lot of time that we've spent on just relationship building just internally with our staff with our team you know as we've added a grade level we've nearly doubled

055not only in our student population but also with our staff so that's been such an important time for us to really build uh this time for our teachers and our entire staff to really connect if we are strong and well connected and known and really build that trust amongst ourselves that transfers over to our students and our families as well so we've really been really working through it very methodically but at the same time preparing for our students and so this past week this is the schedule from this week and on tuesday and wednesday we actually had our seventh grade students come in for two day orientation before school started so we did work with our students just introducing them to their teachers to one another they're coming from all the different schools in robla

056and it's been a really powerful experience for them but also gave us an opportunity before the school year started to have our students come in and really work um with us to understand what they're coming in with what their strengths are what goals we can set with them and so now we have a path that we can follow without us trying to figure that out after school starts so those are some of the things and then again just continuing to implement all the systems strengthening all the different areas for us to really have a great launch to our school year so launching into year two it's also about again not just what's happening internally with our staff it's also about reconnecting with our families one thing that we really enjoyed in our first year was

057the home visit so i'm going to talk about that in a moment but really just encouraging our connection through technology and we use the text messaging system um that allows us to communicate in multiple languages to our families because like roblox school district we have approximately 20 languages spoken at our school we're such a small school so this system that we use allows us to communicate out in english so i can send a text message out but the parents can choose the language that they receive it in and it actually translates quite well so parents have been connecting with our teachers fairly quickly and that's allowed us again to really set things up for uh success our advisors are like our homeroom teachers so they continue to lead that communication with families and then i

058mentioned the seventh grade orientation but tomorrow our eighth grade students actually will show up as well they're going to come pick up their schedules they're going to choose their electives and you know we talked a lot last year about music and dance and theater all the things that they did that really students gave us feedback that they want more of and so they get to choose those electives tomorrow and then continuing with home visits we've really experienced that in such a powerful way last year even as we're trying to be as safe as possible in doing those this year families have both seventh and eighth grade families have welcomed us back i just came from a home visit myself with one of our families and that's such a powerful experience for not only for the

059family the student in particular but also for us as a staff that we get out of our comfort zone and we go out into the community and when teachers and staff who have not done these home visits come back it it's just a powerful conversation listening to their perspective now as compared to maybe some assumptions they made about our community and so that is something that again we will continue throughout the school year probably through november is when we will finish having visited every single one of our families and then we'll do a back to school learning night um we will do i think it's going to be a math and science focus for us in early september so in about about three more weeks so the home visits um again how we connect matters

060and so that as i said is something that we're continuing to do and will do um and for some of our families and now this is really something that they look forward to so the back to school night is great but this is really seems to be what they look forward to what we're doing after the visit you know the home visit that's important too so one of the things that we're you know with new staff who may not be familiar with roblox the community we're trying to really help folks understand that this is a community with a lot of assets as well and what are those assets so every time we go out for a home visit we come back we have a large map in in our office and our staff will come

061back and they will do this asset mapping activity so we're looking at you know where in robla uh you know what what do you see in roblox throughout the community and throughout the year this will be it's something that we continue to map out right and so we're looking at you know where they come into the at a sticky dot like this is a community center here or a park there and so we just want to recognize again the assets in the community so our staff really begin to look at the community from an assets perspective as well as therefore looking at our students and families with the same mindset and then we did as i said the 7th grade orientation this is just a lot of text not a lot of pictures so but

062just wanted to show the level of detail our teachers are you know going to and our staff and our leadership team and just working just really to make sure our students have a really positive and productive experience especially when students have their first experience with us okay and this was our ongoing effort so i always give you updates and so i will do that again tonight we have approximately 240 students now enrolled in grades seven and eight so we're very excited about that we continue to enroll students um pretty much on a daily basis we have like one or one or two students uh enroll and we'll continue to do that because sometimes you know we don't always have everyone show up um even though they might be enrolled so the enrollment will continue um

063even after the first day of school through august and uh as necessary if families are interested in joining new hope our doors are open to serve okay and again these are some of our class of 2032 students these are our seventh graders but we talked to them as the class of 2032 because that's the year they'll graduate from university only 10 years away but they can always graduate sooner save a little tuition so [Laughter] right so thank you to each of you as well for all your support and uh i will pause here and answer any questions any questions congratulations on completing your first year you did a great job thank you all right thank you very much okay moving on to the roblox resilience project report good evening everyone giving me to the board

064vice president mr attendant and all the guest attendants uh we're really happy to be back here on our second night or our second uh year of reporting on the robot resilience project i already set off an alarm let's say oh okay first off i want to start off by offering our condolences sisterhood for equity um in terms of the loss that you've had and it sounds like this was you know just was just an amazing individual we had an opportunity to um be here last year and present to him and uh it sounds like he left he really left a legacy and the sense of community given that my sisters and i have been many very different types of school districts it's really hopeful for us to be able to see that sense of community

065here so our deepest condolences and i had the opportunity to interview him last year as i interviewed you and i remember when i was calculating the mean time of the interviews this was like triple everybody else's because he gave me like the history of the board and the history of the community and it was just really clear from the time that we spent on um on zoom how committed he was to this community so i'm norma jimenez hernandez and my sister marita jimenez silva we represent sisterhood for equity consulting um just as a background and for those of you who are listening at home we're former classroom teachers we have been in k through 12 grade settings we hold master's and doctoral degrees from the harvard graduate school of education a jd degree law degree

066from loyola law school and a master's in public policy from ucla we have i think it's over 70 years combined experience in uh k through 12 and higher education so we come with very deep roots we come with a rich background in qualitative and quantitative research skills and we've been both in the public and the private sector we come with that experience we come also with the lens of knowing that we're here as external evaluators so our job is to be able to look at did the goals that were set out in the robot resilience project were they met to what extent were they met what are some recommendations we have what worked what didn't work where is the room for growth where's the room for improvement um so we are four sisters if you

067notice the similarity uh i won't say who's older but our our group has been focused on doing we actually do do professional development as well but our role here is looking at it from an external evaluation lens again what um what goals did the project have were they met what did it look like last year did we see growth from the previous year we're really invested having served in the in the public sector in the private sector we know that um funds allocated for different projects are really important and they are in short supply in many places and so to what extent is their um diligence in terms of how the spend funds are spent and we want to make sure that they are being uh put to good use so um as external evaluators

068in year two we participate in the leadership meetings in 2122 that's not something that all evaluators do we're committed to that because we think it's important that it adds contacts in terms of us understanding the project we our work is done through an evaluation lens and we are confident that we are ex i would say 99.9 confident that in terms of a peer review process that it would stand up to that level of review so our roles we wear hats um not only through our company but also professionally in higher education looking at k through 12 settings and and higher ed as well so we are confident that if somebody took our data they'd be able to come up with the same conclusions that we did that is um our wheelhouse that's where we come

069from and so i just wanted to set that in as a context so part of who you're contracted to do in conjunction with the leadership team from the robot resilience project is to develop surveys administer and analyze survey data develop interview protocols conduct and analyze interview transcript present data and then we have a complete report and an infographic for for the board and for the public to examine as well so what were our data points for 2122 so in october we did a pre-survey of um rrp participants actually was sent out to everyone not just rp participants so even people who were who didn't intend to participate and then in march uh we have this developmental sprint we had a pre-survey the developmental sprint in april of post-survey of the developmental sprint and for those

070of you who do not remember the developmental sprint was a very intense experience that participants go through to enact or take risk in terms of addressing some of the goals within the roblox resumes project for tier for year two and you'll see that in just a second and that we had a post survey for participants in june of 2022 and then we have this qualitative um uh piece of it which were the interviews that we were connected with administrators teacher specialists the cras were ambassadors and classified staff if at any point you have any questions and some of this terminology isn't clear you don't remember please please let me know um there are three years to this the proposed project the first year if you remember from last year was this novice tier and the

071goal of the project last year was curating a safe space for anti-racist conversation the second year which is the year that we're in right now that's what we're going to uh talk about countering and redressing a legacy of racism how by exploring best practices for modeling and applying anti-racist beliefs and behaviors as well as demand dismantling racist curriculum the third tier the advanced age is enacting an equitable racist society a full examination of district policies um looking at behavior curricula achievement and hiring practices as well so we're not we're not there yet what we're going to look at is year two i want to just give a brief summary of what we found from last year from year one so the goal was to create a safe space for anti-racist conversations 72 percent of participants

072who filled up the survey said we agreed or strongly agreed that this goal was accomplished so that was a tier one there was a safe environment three out of four people said it was a safe environment we're really proud of the work that we did this year this was a useful activity we had a shared language to talk about racism what that man and that the amount of time that we spent on the project nine out of ten people agreed or strongly agreed with that so this year we're doing this middle tier exploring best practices modeling and applying anti-racist behaviors and beliefs and then dismantling the curricula and again 72 percent of people agreed or strongly agreed that the tier for the gold one last year was achieved so i first want to give you

073a rundown of who completed the survey and i have this set up as a prenup post so the pre was october 2021 and the post was june 2022 so we had 61 people approximately 20. not approximately 20.3 percent of the um staff here in the roblox school district completed the survey in october we had 15.7 in uh for the post serving 47 percent of people completed the survey say i plan to participate in the roblox resilience project it was voluntary for this year um of those who completed the survey in june 74 participated which means that 26 percent of people did not so our survey captured people who didn't participate in all of the sessions i i want to make that clear because this is not just simply preaching to the choir right and everyone

074who filled that the survey participated in the um participated in the professional development the cras are these ambassadors who get exposed to the curriculum or professional development ahead of time they lead these sessions of other professionals in the district as well so about 30 percent 29.5 pulled up the po pre-survey 38.3 filled out the post survey and just to give you a sense we had a good mix of different professionals i just pulled out the teachers but we had teachers administrators staff classified staff so we kind of uh made sure that there was a balance there we didn't want all classroom teachers we didn't want just administrators filling out the survey and 67 percent of females 60 of females in the post survey which is reflective of the district so to this first question was

075did we meet the goal of exploring the best practices for modeling and applying anti-racist beliefs and behaviors so sixty percent or six out of ten people said yes i agree or i strongly agree that this goal was met we had uh a few setbacks i'd say that no this was a really difficult year for people so i'm really actually happy to see this is 60 because we had some times when we didn't meet there were i think a lot of challenges that are not unique to robla but throughout the country we were seeing this in k-12 schools in k-6 schools and middle schools in higher ed as well and you addressed some of that earlier in terms of the mental health crisis so there was and margaritaville talked a bit more about this but one

076of the most difficult years that teachers have had inside the classroom and outside of the classroom as well so to see that six out of 10 people said yes we met this goal on top of all the responsibilities that they had and then we had 99 out of 10 people um agreed strongly agreed that there was a clear understanding of racist behavior 91.5 a greater strong belief that there's a clear understanding of racist language that becomes the basis for being able to address that second goal so i think there was a lot of learning that was happening and we saw that reflected in the survey the second goal in tier two was to what extent we dismantled racist curricula did the professional fulfillment dismantle racist curricula 49 of people or about half of the people

077who responded agreed or strongly agreed that this goal was achieved in tier 2. we also had and i just pulled out we had a very very uh long survey and intensive survey but i wanted to pull out some of this data 76 or three out of four people agreed that there's a shared anti-racist language in the robot school district and just to point that out i mean this is these numbers are really high and that i think reflects the work from last year and the investment that people had in this project from last year 55 percent or slightly more than half agree that there's a safe environment for anti-racist conversation at roblesville district and then this i thought was really interesting eight out of ten people agreed or strongly agreed that the project resulted in

078more positive changes and we're going to see a bit closer look at that in terms of what was going in the classroom as well as what was happening inside this classroom so this personal development that people are going through and that trickles down in terms of classroom behavior and in the district we have this question that we asked for last year that we asked last year as well when you talk about race in the district you feel and i made a word cloud uh that shows all the words that people felt so curious comfortable fine hopeful uncomfortable annoyed empowered right and then we coded it for positive neutral or negative words and what we saw in comparing the um that should say june 22 22nd the post survey to the pre-survey so did we see

079any growth in this and the answer is yes and what i'm looking at is comparing here the orange and the blue graph so you look at positive so in the pre-survey 41 percent of people uh had a positive comment to say to this question of when i talk about race i feel blank and you get to fill that in and in the post survey in october in june 62 percent of people isn't that june 2020 yes sir it should say june 2022 thank you i should say june 2022. um the and really where they moved was from this neutral comet right so there's this neutralness i'm not quite sure how i feel about when i'm talking about race i guess it's okay it's fine i'm sure unsure was a word that came up um and

080they moved into this positive column the new the negative comments pretty much stay the same we don't see a difference there but we see a more positive uh perspective in terms of when you're talking about race how do you feel about that and that is hopeful to talk about you know one of the things that that is under the professional development through this project is to push people out of their comfort zone that's one of the things we ask students to do that's one of the things that we ask communities to do to go into this learning zone in this growth zone and if you notice from that chart you gotta go from the comfort zone through the fear zone of being able to talk about things that are uncomfortable of being able to grow

081i have three i have two teenagers in a tween myself and i can tell you that in times of stretching them and i know it's good for them it's not always fun and sometimes there's tears and sometimes there's pushback but that is part of growing and that is part of stretching as well so where did we see the changes well we saw it in what respondents said about the curricular changes so 76.6 or three out of four people intentionally sought out anti-racist curriculum when we asked them hey did you do this because of the project of those people said that they sought out 97.3 said they did so because of the project 78.7 percent say they intentionally implemented anti-racist curriculum and almost 90 percent almost nine out of ten eighty nine point two percent did

082so because of their experience in the project that is in effect a positive effect of the project in terms of what is being presented in the classroom we have this um we ask these questions about whether they believe that the project should continue were they glad that there was another year were they stretched in their understanding and were they proud of the work that they accomplished and so these are the percentage of people who are greed or strongly agreed is in the orange and then that kind of pinkish mauve color on the right is a percent that we're unsure and remember this includes people who did not participate and people who did particip did participate as well and so we saw these numbers we saw this ambivalence i call it ambivalence that they're just not

083quite sure they weren't sure whether they believed the project continued glad there was another year where they stretched in their understanding and when i remove that ambivalence in the sense of okay let's just take into account the people who either say agreed strongly agreed or disagreed strongly disagreed what does that look like in removing that ambivalence now we see that that number jumps up so 85 percent believe that the project should continue 78 that there was glad that they were glad that there was another year 83 percent said that they were stretching their understanding and 83 said that they were proud of the work that was accomplished and you see on her the percent that disagreed with that as well either disagreed or strongly disagree but an overwhelming sense of this is really good work

084let's continue to do this despite the stretching despite the sometimes i'm not sure i'm a little afraid this is going to be uncomfortable that's okay um these ambassadors that we have these these individuals serve this this secondary role um i also want to see oh how does that work out because you have these people who are being exposed to the professional development twice and they're having to be leaders within their community so there's this more buy-in from them right there's a greater investment in time that i believe that this work is important and if you look at the difference between the non-cras we call them cras and the cras right a higher percentage of them agreed or strongly agreed in terms of the belief that the work should continue that they were here another year

085stretching their understanding proud the work accomplished and i have to tell you that not all the cras said strongly agree and agree we had some cras that were critical the project we had some people who didn't i mean those numbers are not at 100 but they are higher so this investment of time and energy right in something that you believe in matters and if you've ever played a sport or if you've played a musical instrument been invested in something your role as a school board you know that the more time you invest you say okay i know we still have some things to work on but this work is important and we believe in it i wanted to find out if how they participate their enthusiasm and participation in the project mattered or not so

086this is a pie chart of the people breakdown and this question did you participate in the roblox resilience project this year yes enthusiastically those that are about 13 yes maybe not enthusiastically uh close to half yes i didn't think i would participate but i ended up participating that was six point three percent no i plan to participate with i was not able to do so those are still people that are interested but for various reasons we had some people with cobed ended up dropping out they just had a lot on their plate for a variety of reasons it kind of ran the gamut no i never intended to participate um and i wanted to see you know does participation matter so i pulled out by the people who said no no but i wanted to

087right i wasn't able to but i wanted to and then yes and so if you see the gray and the orange sharp charts right the grain the orange bars you have this really high percentage of people who agreed or strongly agreed that they were glad there was another year they were stretching their understanding and they were proud of the work that they were accomplished the blues are the people who said no i don't want to participate this year agreed or strongly agreed that they were glad there was another year 33 percent said that they were stretching their understanding these are people who did not participate but they were stretched into understanding they were proud and 70 proud of the work accomplished so what i believe is happening is you're having this trickle-down effect because what's

088happening is you're having a change in the culture you're moving the titanic to a certain because changing a culture is really really difficult to do and so you're seeing this shift and even the people are saying no i don't want to participate for whatever reason or i'm not too enthusiastic about it we're still having some of them for the stretch in my understanding one out of three people who didn't participate it were still stretched in their understanding and that's pretty empowering i think because you're beginning to see this trickle-down effect or this change in the district overall our big takeaways are that it's been a very challenging year right the context really matters in terms of mental health of not only the students and the families but the teachers teaching professionals in this country that's

089been documented um in this past year we saw that the tier two goals were met in terms of exploring best practices remodeling and applying anti-racist behaviors and beliefs and dismantling racist curricula we also think that there are there is more action that's needed so willing to speak up we saw more people willing to speak up willing to take charge so taking ownership of the project that is not just coming from up but this is our project and this is our goal here to create a district that's different for our students i mean you spoke about equity earlier today and that's what this project is about this project is about equity that is the civil rights issue that we're dealing with the cras were more positive and we had some agreement that maybe there should be

090some sessions that should be mandated to and margarita is going to talk a little bit more about that as well so i did the qualitative part of this project we had 10 participants who agreed to be interviewed three cras three staff two teachers one specialist and one principal uh each of the interviews lasted between 25 and 60 minutes they were done via zoom nine were recorded and transcribed one individual asked that only notes be taken then they did not consent to be recorded so that's the data that we're looking at overall out of the 10 participants 10 believe that again this is a sub-sample of the folks that norma was speaking about 10 believed tier 1 was met 10 emphasized that the work needs to continue 8 out of 10 commented on this idea that

0912021 21 22 is especially uh challenging for them seven out of 10 said that they would appreciate more time with peers to address specific issues within their roles so there were a few individuals who said meeting with teacher i'm not a teacher and meeting with teachers isn't helping me understand how to best implement what i'm learning and so they they asked for that or that came up and the next steps that came out of those interviews was um can we expand can we spend more time talking about how this work applies directly with students and with families also thinking about differentiating for people that are different understandings of racial issues so we get new folks every year how are we bringing those folks up to speed or folks that need a little bit more time

092to think about these issues and then going deeper the issue of time and that came up last year too that we're going 50 miles an hour and obviously we have to stop so that came up as well so just a couple quotes and i'm not going to read um all of these but a couple of quotes about how context matters um the third one there since coming back from cove but it was rough it was really really rough and that teacher went on to talk about all the things that she had to deal with all the fighters she had put out this year that weren't necessarily part of what she had to do uh last year so those first three quotes are around covet and the covet context that we've been in the last one

093talks about the racial climate that we've been in uh with this political climate that we've been experiencing the last six years it's just so important that we're having these discussions you can and i'm sorry i don't have my glasses you can't escape all of these issues it impacts everything that everybody does every day so i think it's really important to be talking about race to be talking about how we're handling these issues to be working on as individuals they just list the most important things that we can do and that was that's from one of the cra so when we're talking about context we're talking about the covet context but also the racial um cultural context that we're in right now as far as whether goals were um accomplished um yes again all of them

094agreed that the goals had been accomplished uh time to think about um and not just about race but there were conversations about abilities um so thinking about diversity in lots of different ways um they talked about the value of jackie who's a specialist in the district talked about and again these are all pseudonyms um just in case you're wondering these are all particular stories that were their stories they've been shared in small groups that allowed people to learn about each other and have more uh empathy in a lot of ways towards each other um as norma mentioned one of the big takeaways from both the survey and the qualitative was that last year was a lot about thinking about these issues this year was a lot about actions these are the things that we did

095so again gary said last year was about opening up the learning this year is a deeper understanding and a lot of folks talked about this idea that it's not just about relationships at work that have been impacted but this is also going home conversations that i'm having with relatives with neighbors with folks that i know outside of the context of robla there were three of the individuals that i interviewed that talked about what happened with black history month essay contest this year and then in the past there had been just a handful of teachers that had their students submit proposals for this this year there were 12 to 13 that had never done it before and how there were conversations about the topics that could be addressed and one of the teachers shared that she

096had a white student who decided she wanted to write about uh things she had witnessed racism she'd witness on the playground and she was too scared to speak up but now she was feeling empowered to to say something about what she was seeing i didn't put the rest of the quote in but the rest of the story goes that she ended up being one of the winners of the contest and a few weeks later the mom came in and had a conversation with casey the teacher about how her daughter had been telling her about things that she was seeing but she wasn't being brave and standing up and she the the parents said to the teacher and the daughter in this conversation what would your teacher do your teacher is taking risks and speaking about

097these things you committed to it you need to as well and so again this idea that it's not just it's trickling down as norma said it's trickling down the kids and it's trickling down to the parents um this is a way way long story and i'm we're happy to share these slides but this also had to do with casey who uh participated in the sprint and challenged herself to have tough conversations with her kids about race and the kids asked if they could have these conversations at home as well and she said you know if you feel safe doing that feel free to do that i'm not going to make you but if you feel free go ahead and do that and a few of the kids came back the next day and said oh

098my god i spoke to my parents about this and i had no idea that they believed the things that they believe in terms of i thought they were going to say you can't marry someone who's this race or that race but they said all they want they don't care who i marry they just wanted me to be happy and it was again transformative and the teacher got feedback from the parents that they were happy that they were having those conversations at home as well as at school in terms of the work that needs to continue it does again all of the teachers and the specialists and the staff that we interviewed talked about how they want to focus more on implementing it and the actions so how are we going to bring this into the

099classroom how are we going to bring this to the parents and the families that we're working with a lot of them spoke really highly about the sprint too and how transformative that was and can we have more opportunities for our colleagues to engage in the sprints um another theme that arose is intentional groupings and going into these deeper dives again because of the issue of time so again teachers want time with teachers staff want time with staff so in addition to the mixed groups having more intentional time with folks that share similar roles um and again just having more time to talk about it oftentimes you know i talked about we run out of time so more time and again this goes back to the same michelle i was talking about connecting to students families

100and communities the um the principal interview talked about how the goal is to create anti-racist environments so that the kids leave and go out into the world with these ideas um but we need to then think about how does this apply to my classroom like tomorrow can we can we brainstorm about that i also wanted to highlight that we presented this work in we as in roblox presented this work at two of the leading conferences national international conferences so aara is the largest um national conference usually about twenty thousand um it's the premier international conference for educational research and we presented on this work and it was very well received um and then we also presented at name which is the national association of multicultural education and what's wonderful about that that conference is that

101it's got a lot of different stakeholders it's families organizers not just uh educators so again well received um some actionable recommendations that we have is you know i mean overwhelmingly we are seeing that the work should continue that perhaps this year is voluntary perhaps there's some mandatory meetings two or three during the year where you could really concentrate the work that needs to be done especially around the curriculum uh targeted sessions again for just administrators or staff and time to go deeper and then again overwhelmingly we heard more opportunities for others to go through the sprint so what we're seeing is this changing of the culture as i mentioned earlier and again this trickle down a fact even from people not 100 on board which is really hopeful to see i have to say we

102wanted to end with this um with this quote by jane goodall you cannot get through a simple through a single day without having an impact on the world around you what you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make so our teachers robles teachers staff everyone who works here impacts children you know whether you see children every single day for eight hours or not and i think this project our professional opinion is that this project is making a difference in ways that we couldn't have imagined from the very beginning because it is having this trickle-down effect and it is having an influence even with people who still continue to feel comfortable that's expected that's going to happen but we're seeing some really positive effects and nationally

103internationally because of the presentation of the conference roble is seen as a leader now in terms of what can happen in districts that perhaps have a more diverse group of students in terms of ability in terms of socioeconomic status in terms of ethnic makeup as well and i think that's really really inspiring to see the community here being leaders and showing other districts and other places in this country about what is possible thank you i'll open it up to questions thank you questions comments how many total employees do we have 300 so out of 361 participated in the pre-survey was it 47 37 yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes i'm participating in the post how many people who participated in

104the post were people who did not participate in the in the whole program we have that up there well it's it's difficult to say to a certain extent and i'll tell you why where is it so in the post 26 percent of people did not participate okay so 26 percent of receipts did not participate so that's where is that then put us somewhere around thirty thirty some odd people actually participated out of three hundred employees so about ten percent of the overall employees yeah i'm finding it hard to i'm finding it hard to find it i'm finding it hard to identify substantive analysis when less than 10 of our overall employees participated i think the very fact that such a huge percentage of our employees opted not to participate also said something about their concerns

105relating to the uh relating to the program um i have to be honest because i participated in only but i think one of the sessions and i was very concerned because some of the things like some of the some of the things like about like the concept of growth the concept of growth is eventually you're going to agree with us and as you agree more with us or with the teaching of the curriculum which is anti-racism about uh white supremacy white white privilege um you know oppressor versus oppressed uh dynamics unless you agreed with that then that was not seen as growth conversations that where someone brought up uh disagreement with that was seen as resistance and when you look through a lot of the teachings along with the writings that's seen as resistance that's

106not seen or taught thought of or thought about as real conversation the goal of the conversation is to get people to agree um i agree and i really would like to see i mean i think we first of all you were doing resilience long before we started the the anti-racism training and i i for one thought the way in which we were doing it and the way in which we were focusing on it really did a lot and and really got to bring uh bring our community together in my opinion what we've been doing the last two years uh there are some aspects of it that are really good and about people and and really helped to add to the discussion there are some aspects of it that are very divisive and i think we've

107seen those conversations both outside of roblox we see those conversations uh within roblox if there is a way to have these sorts of conversations and get rid of the stuff that is that is the divisive part because i think teaching uh i think teaching kids that if you are white then you are inherently racist is or you are racist is wrong i do because i think it treats people as a group and not as individuals and uh i think when we talk about equity the concept of equity in education is about giving students what they need right not just about it but but what we're talking about doing is not giving students what they need like the individual student johnny mary uh uh joseph or whoever the students are it's about i it's about categorizing

108them via race and then saying because you are a member of that race this is what you need and i think that that just works contrary to to want to to what we should be doing as educators um i think anyway that that's my perspective that's what i've seen in in what we've been doing i think that when you look at the data here what it tells you is a small percentage of our of our staff have actually participated in it and and even of that small percentage that participated in it not all of them especially those who are not cras necessarily uh feel like it was a benefit right so one of the things that i did for this participation matters of whether they participated they didn't participate they want they didn't participate but

109they wanted to participate or they did participate is i actually ran some analysis to see if these were significant so what that means in layman's term in terms of being statistically significant it means that i'm very very confident that based on the sample that we took that if we took another sample from roblox we would still find these differences how big was the sample i mean how big does a sample have to be to be considered statistically significant well that's a really good question so we try to shoot for 60 people in the sample however if you find statistical significance with a really small sample the differences have to be pretty big for it to be stitch disease significant so you can get a sample of 10 people your difference has to be pretty large

110for it to be statistically significant if you have a sample of 500 people you could probably still find that significance with a really small difference because we believe that the sample represents the population and you can't hand pick necessarily the people to do that and so these differences here are statistically significant which means that there is a difference here in the way that people do then in the way that we perceive so i am very very confident that the numbers that we see here is what is happening with the district if there weren't significant differences what we call statistically significant differences and what that means is that there's a less than five percent probability that we would have found these differences by chance so when i say i'm pretty confident i'm pretty confident that this

111is actually what's going on now everyone did have the opportunity to fill out the survey okay and in fact we gave out amazon gift cards where people develop the survey do that it was anonymous if we didn't collect their emails or anything along those lines um last year we had um a couple of people who had very negative comments who filled up the survey twice so that happened only on one occasion this time so somebody who really wanted to say something negative filled out the surveys twice and we could see that it was from the um same address so i'm very confident that even though the sample is small so in order for the sample in order to find some differences the difference had to be large in order for it to be significant and

112that was actually the case and i was i think with the exception of one at all the trainings and with all due respect i don't remember anyone saying that white people are inherently x y or z i think there is a framework that's presented in terms of understanding i'm a big peloton junkie you all know peloton i hate to sweat i hate it i get all dirty and stinky but i have to sweat because then i know that i'm really working out and even though it's really uncomfortable for me at the beginning i'm really glad when i get to the end of it but i hate it takes me a lot to get on there but i know that it's making a difference in terms of and i look at my numbers my blood pressure

113my weight you know and you know all these other stats that i keep and that's why we collect statistics so we can see well is it making a difference do we see a difference yes or no so even though the sample is small and i'll be very honest with you that when i looked at this i'm like oh my gosh we're not going to find any differences because the sample is just really small but i have run data sets where we have not at this district but in other places we have a sample of or 20 and the difference is large enough that we can say yes i'm confident that this is what's happening in the school district this is what's happening in the sample this is what's happening with all due respect though what

114you're talking about is a survey now if we surveyed people when they got off the peloton bike bicycle about how they felt we might get a different reaction we might they might say oh yeah i feel great but until you actually go when you look at the body mass index their body fat ratio the reduction in the change in their heart rate when you actually not look at how people feel but actually look at the actual outcome that's when you know whether or not you've made a difference and the challenge i have here is everything you're talking about is a survey about how someone feels about how people feel and not whether or not for example we don't know we didn't do a test to find out do people really know or understand or have

115a better understanding of the language surrounding anti-racism than they did before did we do did we do a a vocabulary test beforehand and then did we do one after to see if people had a better understanding no we didn't we did a survey to ask them if they thought they knew more how many people are going to say yeah you know i i mean imagine if we let our students tell us how they felt about the material that they learned in math class today right how many of them are going to tell us no i really didn't learn anything today i just once again i'm headed i'm having a hard time finding value in in in both the work as well as your analysis of the work with all due respect last year we actually

116did a survey where we looked at whether people had increased their knowledge in that very the vocabulary that's actually what we did we asked them about these different words and to what extent did they feel that they knew these words it was a list of about 30 different words and we saw an increase we saw significance did you did you test them on what's the meaning of this word what's the meaning of this word do you just ask them do you know the meaning of the word see that's the difference it's well it was it was more with the rest it was more nuanced than that we asked them to what extent how confident do you feel in knowing this word those were the knowledge questions and it was what we call a likert scale

117so do you feel or not and i've worked with enough teachers in enough districts that and we have used the surveys the kcu survey in many many different contexts we know that it's a valid measure we know that it's a reliable measure and having talked with some of the teachers and terms and and the cras in terms of the groups i'm pretty confident that respect the professionalism of the teachers in the robles school district they would be honest because there's no reason for them not to be honest and so what we saw in the pre-survey last year year one where we did test them about the knowledge right we had teachers say i have no idea what that word means i don't know what it means i have i if i i wouldn't be able

118to define it for you and then we saw this growth over time i don't think there's a motivation and in our work we haven't found that there's a motivation for teachers at that large scale to fabricate information to fabricate their learning after all they're educators so they're in the business of teaching and learning and so i think it would be hypocritical for them and it would be disrespectful for me to think that they would not be honest and in our interactions with teachers in terms of and and administrators and other staff i would have to say in terms of the qualitative interviews we saw that that data was also supporting that growth over time and so we're able to see and especially the developmental sprint we didn't talk about a lot about the developmental sprint

119but that's really where we're seeing that growth that people are really taking the risk where they're really having these deep conversations about what do these words mean and they're not doing it not only here but also at home and in their communities and that's really powerful so we don't we're not in the business early and when we do the kcu the knowledge of confidence usefulness we don't have necessarily people give us a definition we think that's a bit um i don't think that does a service for them in terms of their the profession uh we have other ways to measure that and because of the people have uses and we have used it we know it's a reliable and valid measure to test our knowledge and we haven't found that people have necessarily lied about

120that so there is a way to you know go into the classroom i think that's really intrusive i've been a classroom teacher and there's a lot of performance that sometimes happens when you're being observed um i'm gonna trust teachers that were able to see that if they said they sought out anti-racist curriculum and it was because of the project or they intentionally implemented anti-anti-racist curriculum and i'm going to go back to what i said at the beginning when you have a limited number of funds and how they're being used and in my experience and my greatest experience within k-12 public school districts people are really keep an eye on that and so they want to make sure that whatever they're engaging in is worth their time and it's worth the districts money in that regard

121and so for them it was was this worth our time in doing so and i would have to say based on the data it was an overwhelming yes and in fact what we heard was we want to continue to do this but at a deeper level perhaps a restructuring of instead of having a one-hour session maybe having um you know three or four hours but this is another thing that we found we didn't present it today but here's another thing we found we found that people were taking this work and they were diving deeper into it mostly were the sprint participants but other people as well so when you really want to learn something when you're committed to something and you really want to explore it then you're going to take that deeper dive whether

122it's at work or whether it's at home you're going to invest yourself in that and it is a growing phase i would disagree that it's all about just agreeing with the people i have been in the classroom myself as a college professor i oversee a program now but you know it's not about agreeing with me and this is what i would tell my students i don't want you to come into this classroom and just say yes yes yes because nobody learns nobody grows in that it is about let's you know tell me what you're feeling tell me where you're at and let's try to tackle these issues together with all the with all due respect i just i still have an issue because you know while i think the the challenge is that first of

123all you had people participate in the work who really want to see the work continue and then you have evaluators who really want to see the work continue the problem is is that i think that what happens is it's not that people are encouraged to lie but people want to present information in such a way that they believe in this they want to see it they believe in it and they want to see it continue or some people want to see it continue and it's presented in the information that is presented and i think i brought in some very valid concerns both both last year when you did your presentation as well as this year when you've done in doing a presentation that demonstrates that a large percentage of our community just in our staff

124community in particular just is is not participating and what we have is we have a small percentage of folks who want to see the work continue and i'm all for continuing well i'm all for the work continuing what i would like to see going into the future is one i think we need to look at both uh new and different uh service providers for both the the presentation of the content as well as the evaluation of it what i'd like to see for me personally going forward is i'd like to see the content and information and the plan put forward ahead of time as opposed to basically receiving it peace sorry we didn't even receive it piecemeal we received it as it was being presented um i had i had a major issue and a

125major concern with that it's why i didn't support i didn't support uh the the continuation of the contract for this year and that's why i have a very difficult time and don't know that i would continue it at least with these the same service providers going forward with all due respect i appreciate the work that you're doing uh but i have some major concerns with uh with the information that you've provided regarding this project in the royal school district no did thank you um i just wanted to put out there that anything that opens up dialogue and makes people look internally and change their attitudes or behavior as a positive i necessarily can't follow your data because as craig said it is a small sample size and people got to pick if they participated or

126not so not a lot of people did but i think that we need to instead of like oh nine out of ten or six out of eight people instead we need to look at how our schools are changing and how curriculum is changing or things like that so how things are actually occurring or the actions are happening from the dialogue would be a much better test of how beneficial it is but like i said anything that opens dialogue and makes anybody no matter who they are maybe look internally and realize oh i didn't realize i was doing that or oh i need to work on that you know it's not a bad thing so anything with dialogue is always good oh yes sir clearly you have someone who disagrees with you um i enjoyed listening

127to both of you speak um it was i was really close over here it was really loud um but i i enjoyed hearing you speak because i was sitting there thinking okay i want to say this and i want to say that and and um the things that you said were really in line with what i would have said but she said much more articulately um so i was glad to hear that so i'm going to make a few comments i won't be as verbose as my colleagues because i think anyone can um but um i found the based on what i know about statistics um and i'm not a statistician but i do try to make sure that i'm up on um on statistics and being statistically sound having a good sample size but

128based on what i know um even with these numbers these are statistically found so i think that it that your your results are good so i appreciate that um i i disagree with saying that ninety percent of people um if ninety percent of people didn't participate that means that they disagree with the program the nine percent of people um didn't participate um based on what i know if someone disagrees with something they're going to say something about that you know and we have a whole country worth of um evidence that that to show that so someone um did participate but they disagree with it they would make that that known that opinion known especially in a district like global award we have worked really hard to make sure that people feel comfortable um expressing their

129their opinions and and and i really think that people know that if they disagree with us uh we want to hear about it because that's how we're going to grow so i don't believe that because 90 of people didn't participate that they disagree with the program um [Music] we can ask different questions we can ask the kind of questions that trustee duluth um proposed but based on the questions that you asked in your survey it clearly shows that the people who did participate did find um value in it and that to me that's a good thing you know when you get that that many people and yeah it's not a huge percentage of our total number of employees but it does show that people find it valuable and they're using it and they want it

130to continue i like that i think that if more people did participate or if we didn't make it mandatory i think we would just be saying those with a larger sample size so i'm fairly confident in that so again that would be as verbose i enjoyed this this clearly shows why you know boards are effective because you're going to get a diversity of opinions that's why we have five um and that's why we hold votes on things and we move forward and i'm glad that trustee duluse clearly feels comfortable to state his opinion and i'm glad that we have other here to state our penis so can i say thank you i request a question to ask if will you do this next year can you ask for like a paragraph or something to how

131people implemented what they learned into what they were doing like either in the classroom or how they implemented things that they learned so that way it's like a good and we definitely include that in the interview questions well here what we've found in the casey news and i think he's at acu for i don't know 20 years now is when we do ask the definitions and we say can you write especially teachers find that offensive and and they don't do it so we have lots of cases that we've delivered where we say well can you distinguish between anti-racist and anti-this or you know can you write the definition and they won't we're all struck for time we just don't get the kind of rich data that you would hope if you do it in an

132interview and they can just tell you about it they do and i'll tell you that all the teachers and the cras that were interviewed as part of the 10 gave very specific examples long examples like the one that i didn't read through but long examples about how they were implementing what they learned it was a little bit harder for our um classified staff who maybe aren't in office one of them said i'm in a 10 by 10 office all day i really don't interact with very many people i i haven't implemented it but in terms of the teachers and the cras they had they all had examples of how they did it so we could ask it we'll see if um if you know i think if we do it then we provide time for

133them to actually fill it out and get some data that way okay thank you before we ask them is there anything else you would like to share is there anything else that you know so we did get some feedback on that and overwhelmingly positive we did have some uh negative feedback actually using the exact same language about divisiveness but i would say that that was in the uh minority and that that was a word that would use divisiveness and you know it this work as and as i said last year i'll repeat again it is difficult work it is difficult work to do and you're going to get some you're going to get some resistance that is par for the course actually i would be really surprised if you didn't get any pushback then i

134would be like wait why are we at 99 something's something's going on here so i think that's just par for the course and the work that we've done and we have worked on other projects where our recommendation has been absolutely do not continue this project is it's um there are other issues that you need to tend to and so um we are very committed to this work but we also want to make sure that it's going to be done well and if it's not done well we will let you know please know that we will let you know because we believe that the work needs to have integrity and at the end of the day it's the children and the communities benefit from a well-implemented program or that are not going to benefit and there's

135going to be some drawbacks so we can definitely ask that question to ask them see what they're they're doing we'll continue to ask it in the interviews as well thank can you always clarify i feel like i have two points i would like to clarify before we end uh this agenda item um first of all that um it is incorrect to say that only 10 of the people participated that thirty number that we're talking about which is ten percent of our employees are the number of people who completed this survey so that that is not who participated a much larger than that participate in the group so i just want to clarify that number one and number two is um i feel that i need to clarify that a sisterhood for equity did the job

136that we asked them to do i need to take responsibility if that was the incorrect thing that i asked them to do that is on me that is not on them so i think i want to make sure that that's clear to this community right we asked them and we approved what their plan was to evaluate this project and that's what they presented to the board today and um they have every right to defend that and if that is not the information that the rebel school district wanted then that is on me that is not of it okay that's all i want to say thank you you did a great job so you're not you have anything to apologize for and if you're taking credit for it then good job thank you thank you thank

137you any other comments questions concerns spirit or not thank you thank you thank you okay moving on on to um section six the consent agenda is there a motion to approve the consent agenda second it's spend motion in a second although very say aye aye opposed abstain motion carries unanimously moving on to section seven action items um seven a approve the madison enterprises contract for e-rate services so moved second the comments um we are happy to answer questions um shout out this is here i'm sure he would be happy to this is an annual contract and if the board wants more information we can provide that but obviously this is about just to remember this is a federal program of reimbursement for connectivity support any questions comments models in favor say aye aye opposed extensions

138motion carries unanimously item seven b approval of prime contract change order number 17 to the construction services services agreement with lint builders for adjustment of costs for the bell avenue elementary school new classroom and administration building so move second uh certainly this is a contract change order for flint builders of the bell avenue elementary project this change order addresses additional work that had to be performed in the course of construction primarily the repairs from dry rot as we were replacing the windows in the buildings a b and c the replacement of light fixtures to comply with title 24 which is energy efficiency some of the fixtures that we had in the buildings uh did not comply with the new regulations and as part of the dsa approved plans we had to replace those or we

139found that we had to replace some of those as we went through the torch construction uh and then also uh some repairs uh to uh other types of um improvements as we move forward okay the dry rod that you found that's what that kind of standard issue old age type stuff or was it something surprising right so if you may recall at we've accomplished at taylor previously we've encountered it over here at um what we're formerly the administrative offices uh over here at um at robla we typically find that around window openings especially our older windows and so it's not a surprise that we found some additional structural of damage uh due to that that had to be repaired questions comments all those in favor say aye aye opposed abstentions motion carries unanimously thank you

140item 7c approved the 2022-2023 services agreement with swing education for substitute teachers second motioned and seconded i'd like uh ms sullivan she's going to say a few words about this this contract evening everyone um so what we'd like to do and when i was discussing the renewal of this contract with superintendent reyes we thought we might bring some context to the value of this program so as you're aware this program actually is a guest teacher and also guest instructional assistant service that we use to provide when our regular teachers or ias are absent and we actually have i meet with my rep from swing on a quarterly basis and she brings me data as to our utilization and things like that um and we actually have a chart that shows this is from last august

141of 2021 through actually july 31st so a little bit more than a full school year um we had so just to share with you about 180 employees are represented by use of this service the rest of them don't really require substitutes in their position like you're not going to get a sub to fill in for me right um so there was 1 528 absences in that period 1106 were filled to a 72.4 percent fill rate so what this service has done for us is that it's extremely difficult keep a active sublist district and house in fact right now i have zero guest teachers on my sub list now i do have about six instructional assistants who hold their 30-day permit throughout the district but they have a commitment to their instructional assistant position if we

142have a situation where we don't have an assignment filled for a classroom teacher occasionally we will pull them from the programs that they're dedicated to in order to fill that assignment we also pull from our specialists and our enrichment teams when we do need coverage as well as our administrators um so 72 bill rate doesn't sound like a lot but honestly this program has been a godsend for us the cost of the program is expensive um but it's a cost that could be born anyways if we were to have our own guest teacher list and we're actually getting the assignments filled um the cost of the program is about 40 percent if we had our own employees staffing this the cost to us would actually about 32 percent so really about eight different eight percent

143difference um in terms of the overall cost of the program and we're actually having our classroom staffed with qualified employees um they have about 400 substitutes in our area those who are non-credentialed all have bachelor's degrees and swing works with them to gain their 30-day sub permit by meeting the requirements of the testing and applying for their permits so they're also trying to grow from within to provide more guest teacher service in our area and throughout the state so i just wanted to share the little bit of data as you can see there are some spikes here i would say that cova did affect some of our absenteeism last year and you can see that in the months of january especially and also in may we had another little spike covet did have an effect

144this also represents four long-term leaves that range anywhere from two to four months so about days to about 40 days of absence between those you know for each leave depending on how long the leave was so thank you and and thank you for explaining the spikes because i was curious about that yeah the spikes have have everything to do with the covet increases now i will tell you that we had 87 cova cases amongst our staff last year which is about one-third of our staff so that's actually not terrible considering yeah this is clearly one of our better investments thank you all those in favor say aye aye opposed extensions motions motion carries unanimously item 7d approval of construction services agreement for the construction for cost for bell avenue channel drain construction second any comments

145this item is related to a previous board meeting we talked about measures that were being taken to prevent additional flooding at the bel avenue elementary school site as we experienced last year during that freak uh storm we did have overwhelming uh of the city's sewer system which led to a backup into our site uh so as a contingency and at the requested district what will happen is we explore different solutions in order to mitigate that from a current if it does occur you know to prevent damage to the buildings and to divert the water elsewhere we did explore options of punching into a a separate uh storm chamber over on the south side of the campus instead of our normal collection or in addition to our normal connection uh on the um on the east

146side uh but once again you know the problem there is you're tied into the city sewer and therefore the back of your experience on one side of the street will probably occur on the other side of the street so we explored options to create basically uh a drainage uh out into the field uh so uh understanding that you know if an event like that occurs again and the system is overwhelmed that our backup would be to to drain into the field and actually percolate through the soils that we that we had out there we did run uh that originally we we had tended to um do that work through the contractor uh an architect on site uh we found that their uh their design and their the associated cost was rather high and so we

147took it uh out for bid and this resulted in a savings for that bigger project of about uh 50 or so percent so overall being able to take this project and set put out separately it was a cost savings this is an additional cost to the project because it was not uh originally contemplated um so that is an overall cost to it uh but we are asking you to uh to prove approve the contract uh going forward it's important to note that the work is underway um and so uh i just wanna know that as well just because uh if you do see bulldozers out there what is going on that's what's happening they're trying to get that worked up before a uh if we ever do get rain again and then be uh obviously

148to allow for the field to be of some use to the students going forward thank you i still think the city should pay for that but that's always you know i am limited in my ability to exert that political pressure but i would i encourage you to write your uh representatives thank you any other questions or comments all those in favor say aye aye opposed abstentions motion carries unanimously item e approval of construction services agreement with construction for costs for the main avenue elementary school blacktop pavement so moved second any comments so this project is outside of the of the measure eight uh measure age measure k profile this was a project the district determined that it wanted to proceed with uh to address a uh the the um the damage to the blacktop that's

149occurred over the years if you've been out to maine avenue uh you'll notice that there's been a lot of repair work to the blacktop over time and then also following any water uh intrusion uh we do have puddling and drainage issues at that site the district decided that it would utilize esser funds uh to make improvements to those spaces as well become more critical since that provides outdoor learning spaces um and uh pe so upgrades in terms of make sure that students are able to utilize those without the uh the higher potential of tripping over a seal or a plant that's growing out of the middle of the laptop so once again that work was undertaken this is tied to a professional service contract previously that you had approved regarding the geotechnical studies so making

150sure that we had the adequate percolation once again and drainage engineered there and then this is the actual work that was conducted at main avenue uh to rectify that so once again uh this reflects work that's been completed if you go out to main avenue there's a blue black top they're striping and what have you and just due to the timing of the board meetings we're coming back to you with this item okay when was work completed uh i think it was probably three days ago okay [Music] all those in favor say aye aye opposed abstentions motion carries unanimously unanimously um item seven f uh adopt resolution increasing developer fees mr casio hey good evening again um this resolution um last year about a year ago exactly we would approve a developer study in a

151resolution we have to come back again in order to for us to to qualify for the for the funds for the tk classroom for the hardship we have to prove to the state that we are obtaining the highest developer phase uh that we can and during that transition from last year to this year the state approved to this this um higher rate so it's actually or for us it will be um 38 cents for the third situations more for residential and four cents more for for commercial this is what the resolution is for then what then why you approve last last year okay a motion to approve second motion in a second all those in favor say aye aye opposed abstentions motion carries unanimously thank you thank you and that ends the action items section

152we'll move on to section 8 board member requests for future agenda items and reports trustee divine nothing at this time trustee doing it this time and i have nothing and with that this meeting is adjourned thank you very much for joining us here and at home thank you you