001thank you katie [Music] good evening [Music] today is tuesday february 22nd 2022 we'd like to welcome you to our school board meeting uh board members present in the board room our members wilson lessons jacobs holloman donnelly and bellamy remember higgins uh will be joining us on is online not yet but he will be joining us online so with that i'd like for ms shaw our student representative to lead us in the pledge and the land acknowledgement i pledge the united allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under allah indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Music] on behalf of the anchorage school board i want to take a moment to recognize and offer gratitude for the sacred ancestral lands of the denia people we acknowledge and appreciate that our
002offices facilities and schools are on these sacred indigenous lands and we honor the traditional care that has been given to this land throughout generations we are grateful for the opportunity to grow learn work and create educational communities on the sacred land we extend continued respect for the many cultures creativity and resilience of his indigenous people chanan thank you ms shaw again we'd like to welcome you to our meeting and thank you for attending and supporting the work of the anchorage school district and of this board the board thanks its students parents teachers staff school business partners and the entire community for your investment in our district those investments of your time your talents and your tax dollars that brings us to the approval of the agenda madam president i move to approve the agenda as
003presented [Music] is there a second second it has been moved to approve the agenda as presented is there any opposition to approving the agenda as presented could i speak to the motion yes you may thank you madam president um i know this has always been our tradition and i'm not going to object to it tonight but i'm thinking that in the future it would be the better policy if we put contracts on the non-action item list first and then two weeks later or whenever the next meeting was sometimes it's only a week these days that it was on the action uh policy because i think the significance of the ratification votes really important and i just think it would give the public more opportunity to be able to think about it but i'm not objecting
004to it okay i'm just thank you member donnelly i'm just trying to understand what your comment is could you just well traditionally whenever there's a ratification vote and it's ratified it goes right to the action calendar yes and i'm saying that i would like to see that i'm not asking tonight because it has been our traditional policy but i'm making a suggestion that we really reconsider that for the future and that there be additional public notice for these contracts before we actually have the actual vote that's all i i don't have an objection all right thank you member donnelly uh your point is well taken with that uh is there any opposite we have before you you have before you a motion to accept the agenda as presented is there any opposition to the motion
005[Music] seeing none the agenda stands as presented and that brings us to item b our student advisory board report okay so student advisory board or sab met on february 15 2022 at 11 15 a.m here in this board room we started the meeting by playing on the back pictionary and then we heard from the delegates who traveled down to juno for the association of alaska school boards conference and here's what they shared with sab about the trip um the attendees were maggie lydia and josh from polaris and then myself from south so we traveled to juno to be in our state capitol which was a first time visit for three out of our four student delegates we had the privilege of meeting with legislators like senator tom begich representative guarantor and representative harriet drummond we
006got to see firsthand the diverse student representation from around the state we got to meet with commissioner of education and early development michael johnson where we were able to extend to have extended opportunities to meaningfully and delightfully engage and connect with our school board members pat higgins kelly lessons dora wilson we got the opportunity to understand the anchorage school board and the aasb legislative police priorities uh we were able to attend legislative meetings with board members in the capitol uh we had the opportunity to be introduced on the house floor and we got to have dinner with representative calvin shrogi so that was a recap of the juno aasb trip um and then after those reports we heard about the alaska center of education fund school board candidate forum the assad or alaska association of
007student government report from region 4 representative maggie from polaris we then heard each from each middle school and high school about any dances or assemblies they have planned for the rest of the school year following reports i gave the school board report and then we heard from our school board member carl jacobs after that we did elections for the president-elect position or the person who will be sap president for the 2022-2023 school year where i was re-elected and i'm very grateful to be able to serve my position for another term after that we had small group discussions turned out the meeting and our next meeting will be on tuesday march 22nd 2022 from 8 15 a.m to 10 15 a.m thank you miss shaw are there any questions for ms shaw great report thank you
008so there were how many of you four okay great awesome thank you [Music] okay moving back to our agenda that we that brings us to item c which are go which is our goal monitoring and [Music] so we are now at the point on our agenda where we are going to have our goal monitoring conversation for uh february um first i'd like to confirm the report was given to us by the superintendent and to the public uh uh at our first meeting and that will be the case each time we will give a report uh the superintendent will give a report at that time and on the second meeting of the month we will have our conversation so first i'd like to confirm that all four components of the monitoring report are present and what
009i mean by that is that the report clearly shows what is being monitored and this year it this year this this at this time it is our um math uh goal and that would be goal number two and guard and gold number 2.1 uh the report also shows uh the three previous uh reporting periods the current period and the target reporting periods in addition the superintendent's report shows the evaluation of performance via map growth and that is uh that is shown on page three as above target and and uh finally the report shows supporting documentation that evidence is the superintendent's evaluation via the tables and data that's uh presented in the report and it also indicates our next steps so with all of the components being present we're ready to begin our monitoring conversation so
010for the first part of our conversation we will dig into the data itself so that uh we we can uh in the latter part of the uh looking at the who the what and the why the latter part of our conversation will focus on the how category of questions and so as we've done in the past we will follow this logic model uh uh so that board members can uh ask their questions and we will do it um we'll do a round-robin kind of process so who has questions for the superintendent um at this time member lessons sure um i wanted to start off on page five please uh with respect to sixth graders who demonstrated the only fall winter gains in the percent of students at or above the benchmark across grades three through
011nine so i'm wondering uh what's your sense of what worked well for them or what differentiates these sixth graders from their peers thank you that's a great question um at this time when we look at data and what works and what doesn't generally you have to look over trends and since we only have two data points we don't have detailed information such like that so i will just say excellent teaching way to go sixth grade teachers so um it could be the curriculum it could be the efficacy of teaching um all of those things the on targetness of kids uh that is a transition year what we would want to look at is divide these kids up into elementary in the middle and see where the effect was gained um but all of those things
012haven't been been completed at this time given that uh we only have two data points and the beginning of these uh but we will keep that in mind and and uh find out from schools what they did okay did you have a follow-up yeah and maybe this is a request for board connect for further information would it be possible to split those sixth graders so we could have a better understanding of how well our elementary sixth graders are doing versus our our middle school sixth graders absolutely that's a great question um in the board connect following every monitoring we give you all schools and their scores and we can break those down into grade levels so that you can see the difference between uh those and then we'll collectively take the aggregate of elementary schools
013in the aggregate of middle schools so we can do that for you this time great other questions so oh remember donnelly i'll hold one thank you mr president um the the period that we're examining here for uh the math proficiency interim goals that's on page two is really complicated by the fact we both were coming out on an earthquake and we adopted a new math curriculum and we had a pandemic um so i'm just wondering how we rationalize the the number that we do have there given all those variables that were injected into the into the goal itself uh well this um when the goal was made uh we had peaks although this is uh demonstrating the math proficiency interim goal this is map growth and peaks we have about a 40 mean so we
014were looking to go from 40 to 55 which is 15 in five years that would be three percent a year uh but uh the data that you have before you is about the interim goal with math growth now what even complicates that more um mr donnelly is uh that the peaks test now has changed to a map nwa product so to your point of things and the goal post kind of moves around as absolutely correct and back to uh tying that back to member lessons question is that we do need trend data to kind of determine where are we exactly again the math proficiency interim is with math growth data and the kids that are meeting the target hit the 40th percentile so of all the students that take map you know they're again they're
015lined up on a a centimeter or a meter stick and they fall into categories and so meeting it means you're in the 40th percentile or above um but to your point we we have to make sense of it with trends and given uh as we finish through this year we'll have a better understanding and i would assume that the math department leads dr bellamy she might uh suggest a change in the interim goal after they take a look at that follow-up question sure we had a lot of resistance to the new reading curriculum or how do you have a general assessment of how the instructional staff is is um dealing or or have we even done a major distribution yet with everything else that's going on the new math curriculum um that's a great question
016we have and i think because it was released last year and we had to use i ready assessments for math during the pandemic that the i ready assessments that go along with this curriculum were pretty much accepted because that's all we had at the time to tie people together so i think the uncertainty of times and the availability of what you had to use really assisted with this program and you know there's still pd going on because there's still some understanding and some feedback that it's just too hard for kids but what uh has demonstrated time and time again that when we present them with the expectations of higher standards that they they meet them but what they do have is the individualized computerized i-ready program that actually supports the teacher in the learning so
017the independent work and classwork are connected um and another thing just since you had us on this slide the manner in which we made the goal was with the data we had in 20 and then 2021 and since the last time we've inserted the n or the number of participants and look at the growth in the number it's over twice as many kids this year as last year so that had something to do with the estimate of the first interim goal but we're going to let this year that those are the data that we had to work with and so understanding that we um and again we made the goal um utilizing um very few students so we didn't know who took it who didn't were they more advanced were they not hence there might
018be a recommendation to change the interim goal and again those interim goals are admin schools and yours is the the primary goal thank you okay i don't see any other hands i i'll ask a question kind of going along with what you were just talking about so i know we have the i ready in reading and math that data when will this data today that we have is is map data um any uh estimate of when we might see uh iready data um will the format irony data is not in our reports to you those are curriculum measures and we have um we most any textbook has their own curriculum assessment to test through it so we utilize those at the classroom level but we were not planning to bring those to so we won't
019be seeing they weren't built into unless they're newly built into the interim goal but they are not okay and i guess uh if the other question i have because i has to do with growth and versus proficiency because tonight's report if you could explain maybe for parents the difference you know between the growth of a student and the proficiency sure so we have a couple of interim goals are built around that and proficiency is just understanding um when we set standards and content that kids need to know at a certain grade level we want them to be proficient in the that content uh kids that are not proficient in that grade level content we still expect growth and then kids who are behind in the content we expect growth and we call that um one
020and a half times or catch up growth but kids who are ahead as well if i'm a third grader and i'm testing at a fifth grade math proficiency by the end of third grade i should be at sixth grade math proficiency so depending on a year for a year in school you need to grow no matter what so we are not trying to close the achievement gap by having the top end get lower to close the gap thing what we want is for everyone to learn and those behind to learn catch-up growth so if you go to um let's see the math proficiency here's math proficiency 2.2 and this is um so that i'm just going to share 2.2 and then 2.3 interim goals so this is looking at the percentage of three through ninth
021grade students on track to be proficient in mathematics on the summative test the prior summative test is what mr donnelly was mentioning which was peaks and that's highly aligned to nape or the national assessments and we score about 40 percent of our kids statewide as well as anchorage wide are proficient at a grade level what we can do with this nwa growth assessment that we're talking about is that we can predict kids passive and the predictability while like proficiency on map is in a bell curve and the beginning of that bell curve on the um percentile is the 40th percentile to the 60th percentile if you're ever familiar it goes like this up and around and the 50 is right in the middle to be proficient on map is at the 40th percentile to ensure
022with 99.9 percent certainty that a child will pass the statewide test and nape essentially because they're so aligned a child would need to be at the 50 or the 65th percentile so what we've done is it's called interpolation where you use one set of data to predict something else and we have that on map which is about 64 map to peaks 64 65 but percentile if you're there but um we don't have it yet because the new nwa product is like we're we're starting all over again but the since they're the same company they should have a very tight um predictability built in so we should know um kids who score at any given time on any given assessment if they'll uh be able to pass that test in addition i don't want people to
023think oh these are just tests for test's sake when you're on map it will go higher if you need to be higher or it'll give you low end so it tests kids where they're comfortable so that whether you're skilled in math and that's your thing or whether you're just beginning and maybe trying to gain some skills everybody finishes the test with about 48 to 52 correct incorrect so it targets your learning level and so when it targets it it shares with the teacher and the parents and the kid what next they need to learn to reach the next level so you could say that everyone who takes this assessment has some sense of like i did my best i got this far there isn't the frustration of i can't do it at all because the
024test is dynamic it moves it's not static so it's a pretty excellent tool to use kids like it parents like it because it not only looks at their individual child it looks at their individual child in his or her grade level in our district and the grade level across the nation so parents have a good insight about uh the kind of education they're getting here so okay thank you so the next goal is um the catch-up growth and this is mentioned in your growth model so even students who don't quite meet the 40th percentile which is the mean or the average or the expected you know bell curve area that we want them in we want them to grow one point times we need them to make catch-up growth because if they never make catch-up
025growth if i come in to school or maybe by third grade i'm at the first grade level if i don't make catch-up growth i'm going to be two years behind my as i matriculate the whole time so we focus on ketchup growth and we look at um children learning a year for year and the map is actually it has some arash unit which is kind of a just a new algorithm that they design for growth and you'll see that in the lower grades kids should grow about 12 rash units while in the higher grades they grow three or four rush units so the growth is determined um by this algorithm of the company and again when we took uh the cat assessments or those things when we were kids i remember taking those types of
026it is from a normative group in one section of the country so you'll take like 1400 assessments and everybody is ranked across to that norm this product norms puts everyone who takes the test in the normative group so there's 30 million children at the same time taking this assessment which gives you the accuracy of where kids stand now on ketchup growth this is what we want to see and we did see that we lowballed this so i am sure dr bellini and her team are going to come back and ask for a bigger ask on catch-up growth if you look the first column is grade level second one to get ketchup growth you need to have two testing times where the same kids took the test so you have a first score and a second
027score of that each grade level the third line down shows you how many kids you have and the percentage of kids you have now of the kids who did not make it that's the first column that doesn't have like a little asterisk or percentage sign at the top and those are the students who tested below the 40th percentile in the fall and then we want to see did they make it to the benchmark in the winter and as you can see a good portion of those kids did and the percentage um we would like all the kids to catch up but we're not doing too badly we shot for about 20 of the kids and we we totaled together we had 29 so i would say that the efficacy of the pd the new curriculum
028being standards-based teaching what kids need to know the efficacy of teachers using it along with um a practice i ready where it's kind of like a game when i was subbing out in schools uh when we didn't have subs i did a couple math classes and i could watch this program in action where the kids were working on different problems because it targeted the areas that they needed and shoot it looked like a little video game to me and um they would answer questions but when you read it i mean it was pretty detailed it was um kind of a cool little game but it was a math game which um for a math teacher um trained that was the perfect kind of game to play and so if individual kids are just having that
029individual practice with highly motivated game-like program uh that coupled with direct instruction by the teacher i i see it happening now we're nowhere near where we want to be but we are moving in the right direction okay thank you uh other questions okay we'll circle back to member lessons um thank you for that discussion about the goals and understanding they can be dynamic and we can set the bar higher i think i think that's really important um later tonight we're going to be talking about the budget and the report on page four um which is where i'm at uh we're almost there there shows that along with our other gold monitoring reports um our e our english language learners our special ed students and our economically disadvantaged students are demonstrating significantly lower rates of proficiency
030it also shows a fall to winter increase in the number of schools below or near target and a corresponding decrease in the number of schools on or above target and so my question is how do these outputs inform the fy23 budget what budget interventions do we think are going to have the greatest return on investment sure to help with those problems yeah thank you member lessons and uh the plan if we can go to um that's just the action plan uh with the these types of things the implementation stages there are funding put towards those implementation stages especially for the i-ready classroom and implementation taking you know teachers that need additional assistance but as you know we do have coaches in our elementary schools and the coaches time is now divided between math and reading
031and knowing that we still need to make growth in math and this is a goal as well as the reading you'll see that your budget demonstrates 12 additional positions just in reading so that the time is not taken away from math so we're valuing the math time not just in the first year of implementation but ongoing to support teachers the the primary resource is in the curriculum and the training for teachers and having them feel supported as they teach these new standards as well as new curriculum thank you okay other questions okay see man dr bishop i i just wanted to see what page it was i think you just you were just on the page i'm sorry so the the implementation stage is locke's work has been uh completed and there's still some to
032be done and i'm just so is there anything that's missing that we in your opinion is there anything that we're missing or don't uh you know relative to um [Music] i'm really looking at the professional learning piece uh i is it your sense teachers are struggling i i would say that this year and everything i mean keeping our doors open so right so so if you took a survey if you look at national survey i guarantee our teachers will fall in this category as well elementary teachers do not generally consider themselves as math teachers and so they feel as though um that's the most difficult for them because they weren't as comfortable maybe in school or college didn't prepare them as much and so we want to build uh the you know competency and so
033that they feel confident in teaching math so just generally as elementary teachers they're not but i'll take it back to the team to ask them um one of the things that we would say and this is going back to mr donald he's going to love when i say this but time time on task matters and i know time in classroom learning a subject matters and one of the uh most difficult things that we uh most precious is time and so i would say time for professional development time on task for kids to get re-taught when they need to finding that time in the day after summer school all of those so our most precious resource you know to serve our children is the time needed to do it thank you okay other questions on our
034report before i go back to member lessons all right remember lessons oh i'm sorry uh remember higgins is online uh just raise your hand if you need to say anything mr higgins welcome [Music] could you just to help me understand what are the testing windows when do they occur and how how widely spaced are the intervals and are those intervals standard standardized across our schools um the windows are standard devised um because this is a national assessment across the nation but i'm going to ask um dr aches to come forward do you have it off the top of your tongue the testing windows they're in the fall winter and spring over about six week period of time but if you test outside of that window you can't be included in the norm you'll be a
035separate norm so dr axe if you wouldn't mind you probably can roll this off of your tongue can you share the testing windows for map fall winter and spring yes ma'am um the fall uh testing window should have been right at the end of september first of october it was delayed a little bit in the fall because of the already testing window and we did the winter one right before we went to break three weeks before we went to christmas parade we'll do it one more time at the end of year in may for the last calibration and uh so schools have that opportunity over three weeks and three weeks seems like a long window but you still are in that same normative group just around that time we do the two weeks for the
036hard press to get them all tested at that time and we did get a lot of tests that the schools did a really good job you saw the 20 000 so we feel very confident in the data um and it does give them a lot of good instruction yeah generally a student taking the test could be on at about 20 to 30 minutes answering questions kids that move up and are really get some complicated they'll i've actually asked kids just start hitting exits so you can get out of there because they were like third graders way up at eighth grade work so they would be longer because they have more complex questions but the percent of [Music] right to wrong is always the same for everybody who ends it's 48 to 52 right or wrong
037and that's your niche learning right there it really is nice that we are above target in on this particular growth um and i just as a um you know performance evaluation i think i think that's good because most most of them have been below but we know that we have work to do and so if there are no other who what why questions we can move on to our how questions um [Music] are you dr bishop do you think there is any do we need to do any adjustment on on interim goal number 2.1 or will that be coming forward later if you did thank you so the adjustments on the interim goals would be presented at the end of the year so they would um uh the recommendation from the math team is it's
038trend data you need more than just two they want more than just two points and a timeline and then of course those trend data um will inform the new interim goals and we've set interim goals over time but they might just boost them up but they would uh bring that back to the board for next year okay great okay final questions you got any house kelly or any other questions that we did not get to in our discussion no i already asked my big how how do they how do the outlets inform the budget fish i know i just want to thank the math team um they uh the two leaders of that dr bellamy and amanda barr as well as the all the principals and the leaders that really shared the responsibility of teaching
039math it's my favorite subject so i love talking about it thanks all right okay thank you thank you very much not seeing any more questions we are going to go back to our agenda thank you dr bishop [Music] and that brings us to a public comment section on our agenda this is an opportunity for the board to hear from the public on items that are of concern to them [Music] so this is our first opportunity of the evening for public comment the board has set aside one hour a one hour time slot at the beginning of the meeting for public comment comment in excess of one hour allocation will be heard at the second opportunity for comment which is at the end of our meeting uh several individuals have submitted comments in writing and they
040are attached to the agenda online during public comment board members will not answer questions or engage in discussion with members of the public it is uh the public's time to speak and our time to listen the school board welcomes the public to observe and contribute to our meetings through their comments but for to be productive our meetings must be structured and civil uh asd conducts uh our the anchor school board conducts its business under robert's rules of order which is a set of rules for orderly meetings that have been used since the late 1800s these rules require uh that there be civil and respectful uh statements and opinions expressed here are a few requirements under robert's rules and i just want to briefly review them do not attack a speaker's motives or members of the
041board speakers may point out what he or she believes to be a natural consequence of a board action but may not engage in speech that personally attack others we ask that you refrain from disturbing the meeting this means no cheering applause or outbursts unless you are testifying you must be polite to the board and other speak and other speakers attendees will be permitted i will not be permitted to interrupt the business of the school board and of course no profanity or foul language uh in the boardroom uh additionally please keep your masks on at all times including during your testimony your mask must cover your mouth uh and nose unless you have a medical waiver uh no waving of signs flyers or posters if you have items that you wish to be distributed to the
042board you can give them to katie seated at my left and she will make sure that each board member will get a copy and finally as the president of the board it is my duty to enforce the rules of civility and decorum as such i have the authority to rule any speaker out of order for violation of these rules further i will have removed from the meeting anyone who does not heed these rules and failed to conduct themselves in a civil manner additionally when you came in there was a handout at the door hopefully you picked it up uh it's this handout that shows that welcomes you here of course and reviews other audience participation points many of which i've already covered so with that being said we will start our public comic section off
043with our students i'd like to welcome i think it's adeline brown did i say that right yes thank you welcome adeline you have three minutes good evening my name is adeline brown and i currently attend ernest greening middle school as a seventh grader let me start off by saying a simple thank you to dr bishop thank you for ridding us of our mandatory masks and to the board thank you for honoring and supporting our superintendent's decision in august of 2021 i started school along with my peers wearing a mask i was so excited for the first day of being a seventh grader so far it has been an almost perfect year i joined the cross country running team and got 10th of the championships i have gotten good grades and i made a ton of
044friends so what's the problem you ask masks for the first month of school i got headaches every day at the same time after lunch we tried everything to figure out what was causing them we looked at all the possibilities and made a very short list of potential causes masks and the blue light from my new chromebook seeing as we couldn't remove my mask we worked on the chromebook possibility it didn't work so we had to face the fact that i was getting daily headaches because of the masks and we couldn't do anything about it during the first week or so school every teacher works on learning the students names right this year it took two weeks or more to learn the students names of me and my peers every single teacher i have said that
045was because of the masks i kept being mistaken for someone else this was because when you are wearing a mask all you have to go off of is eyes and hair the mouth and lower half of the face is crucial for putting names to faces another problem with masks is that i can't always hear what my teachers say let's take math for example this is my hardest class seeing as i'm in p algebra and i'm supposed to get b or higher to stay in the class if i miss one of the key points in the lesson i might not understand the whole thing i take spanish as one of my electives and the stamp tests are this week there's a speaking portion if the people grading them cannot understand us through our masks we may
046not get a good score some teachers are more worried about whether or not we are wearing our masks properly instead of our academics if i don't understand something i should ask the teacher right but if this teacher is more worried about my mask i don't want to go to their classroom during lunch or even ask them after class because i feel as if they're just focused on my mask in my gym class we are allowed to take our masks down if we're doing a high intensity activity such as running which we do daily i'm very grateful for this but i recently learned that my brother in grade school cannot this upsets me he is a very active kid just like me and they do play a variety of high intensity sports such as kickball but
047he said that if his friends take their masks down while they are playing these sports they get in trouble my brother does not want to go looking for trouble so he does not take his mask down but i hear how frustrated he is each day after school this is not right and i am very grateful this will change next week thank you again miss dr bishop for bringing us of our masks thank you asd board members for honoring and supporting this decision thank you for giving me this chance to speak here tonight and i hope you have a wonderful evening thank you very much adeline next we have reid davidson [Music] reed is online read star six to unmute [Music] i believe i'm unmuted yes you are welcome you have three minutes all right thank
048you president beldy hello my name is ray davidson i'm a sophomore at south and i have quite a few concerns surrounding the removal of the mass mandate yes cases are trending down from their all-time high in january however to analyze statistics we have to look at the whole picture not just one part the seven day average case rate in alaska is still in the top 20 percent of all days recorded here even asu's own case chart marks anchorage in the high transmission red zone additionally the wave of omicron in other places has demonstrated a plateau of cases after a downward fall for example in south africa cases plummeted and then plateaued at a case rate roughly 10 times the cases post delta moving to talk about quarantine since the superintendent's email regarding the mass mandate
049only proposed a change in the masking situation i assume that all other protocols will remain the same this brings a lot of issues allow me to quote an email i got surrounding a classmate with cobin quote since all students were appropriately masked they can they are not considered close contact and can continue to come to school end quote by reading this i can reasonably assume that when a classmate has coveted surrounding math those table mates will need to quarantine either that or they will come back to school after spending hours with that infected person both of these situations can cause students to be infected and quarantined or just quarantined it is detrimental to student learning to have students in and out of the building it is certainly more detrimental than having students wear a piece
050of piece of cloth on their face much like they must wear a shirt to school another problem presents itself when we look at quarantine regulations right now asd has moved to a five-day quarantine i assume this will remain the same as there's been no word to the contrary from asd currently the cdc says that five-day quarantiners should wear maps until day 10 around other individuals evaluating based on current asd requirements these potentially infectious individuals can come back to school not wearing a mask moving to talking about vulnerable populations by doing some quick math 2.6 percent of children are immunosuppressed multiplied by roughly 46 000 asb students one can see that roughly one thousand two hundred asc students are immuno suppressed i am one of them due to my chronic illness i have to take two
051immunocompromising medications trust me managing this during a pandemic is not easy what makes it harder is when the school district decides to remove virtually their only layer of mitigation cases while cases remain high i explained in my last testimony how other mitigation measures are ineffective due to the nature of math to one has to rely on others to protect them by keeping mass asd protects all students but particularly its vulnerable students moving to talking about staffing high school staff members interact with roughly 140 students every day it only takes one of the students having covered to infect that teacher asd is struggling with staffing right now and teachers are overworked and overwhelmed teachers do not have the bandwidth to cover extra classes and substitutes are under qualified and unavailable this again hurts students education so
052what will the removal of maths look like it will be detrimental to students education both in quarantine and in staffing and risk the health of asd students as cases remain high while asd removes their main mitigation strategy please keep massachusetts schools thank you [Music] thank you reed next we have nathan warden in person nathan welcome you have three minutes hi my name is nathan warden i attend south anchorage high school recently superintendent bishop released a message stating that asd students and staff will no longer be required to wear masks after february 28th with this the superintendent states that the decision has been made as a way to improve the quality of life for students i would argue that this decision is not being made for the students at all one of the primary reasons stated
053for lifting the school-mandated mass policy is that masks have been negatively impacting the education of the students and their emotional well-being to which i ask is it not more detrimental to my fellow students education to be out of school for up to two weeks at a time due to contracting cobit is it not more detrimental to my fellow students to sit in classrooms being taught by national guard members who don't know what they're teaching due to staff shortages is it not more detrimental to my fellow students emotional well-being to see their loved ones get sick because they've been exposed the reality is that everyone knows somebody with an underlying condition some of us are that somebody and there is nothing more detrimental to our education and our emotional well-being than watching someone we know and
054love be locked away in a hospital bedroom all alone coveted numbers are down sure but they've been lower and spiked much higher still which it would it be so difficult to simply wait until the end of the school year to reevaluate the mass policy you have us here today sitting spaced apart requiring the use of masks so there's clearly an understanding that the safety precautions work and are necessary to protect you but when it comes to the students you do not hold the same standards of safety is my life not as valuable as yours what about the lives of my peers and their families despite asd's efforts to make this look like an action being taken for the students it is clearly nothing but an incoherent decision that places politics over practicality i urge you
055to make the logical logical choice and go back on your decision ensuring the safety emotional well-being and quality education you claim to be in favor of thank you thank you nathan okay continuing on we have eve green online eve green case she's not in the queue danielle kemp [Music] star six to unmute mr kim can you hear me yes you have three minutes welcome thank you my name is danielle kemp i'm retired army combat officer teacher in the asd and parent of tsd kids also the president and co-founder of the coalition of blackhawk educators the district should not go with a parent choice for masking this is playing politics for people's lives and it's not funny nor cute and needs to stop before people get needlessly sick or worse die however if you are really
056adamant about going on with this parent choice of masking then that choice you come with responsibilities either show a negative coded test for each morning or show that your child is fully vaccinated full stop last year hb 228 was pre-filed and later introduced into the floor of the alaska legislature this is an anti-truth education bill designed to cater to the sensibilities of white parents who are scared that their school children will learn about the realities of race racism and other various subjects told from the perspective of non-white peoples i know this bill doesn't realize the legislature but it still affects what happens here in the district even if it does not pass teachers across america and even right here in the asd are fearful of these types of laws they are fearful of being targeted
057for telling the truth indigenous history is under attack black history is under attack heck even white history is under attack the true history of that is if the folks introducing these laws have their way in american history will be nothing more than a collection of fairy tales and stories of benevolent white folks told from only white points of view the asd must therefore be our line of defense against such absurdities we need to know that the asd has our backs all right that we won't be constantly under surveillance or harassed by administrators for teaching the truth educators of color won't be punished in their speech curtailed or centered for sharing the history literature and yes music of their own culture one surefire way to keep the asd's teacher workforce all white is to punish teachers
058for telling the truth that'll send a clear message to any prospective teacher candidate i mean no black or brown indigenous teacher in their right mind would their work or stay in the district for fear of making white parents administrators or even fellow white teachers uncomfortable that's why the acbe is challenging the asd to stand up recruit more teachers of color and filter the ball do what it takes to keep them which is going to make a lot of white folks uncomfortable that is until they learn to get comfortable with the truth otherwise our teacher workforce will be all white from here until you attend look even your own equity audit today revealed that 93 percent of white students reported seeing white teachers while only zero percent of cystic islander students reported seeing their own all
059right we've got a lot of work to do asd nobody's getting any younger so let's roll up our sleeves and do what it takes to make it right thank you and have a good night thank you mr kim next we have uh christy brown welcome christy you have three minutes hello my name is christy brown and i have two children in the asd school district i'm here in support of and to thank dr bishop for her proposal to move to parent informed and optional masks within the schools and facilities i concur that continued mandatory math squaring is counterproductive and negatively impacts our students education intellectual development and emotional well-being as a parent i'm grateful for this change in policy but i am wary that this board will make a different decision health must be addressed
060on a holistic broad spectrum level in the last two years covet has been addressed as if the virus and all of us live in a silo we do not there are no randomized control trials proving the effectiveness of masks in the real world none instead masks are used as a way to help some feel safer but also fostering fear and division health is about so much more than mask squaring social distancing and contact tracing as a professional who works in the health and wellness field who talks daily with clients on how to reverse chronic conditions and deals with people that are immunocompromised and has to build their resiliency i can assure you masking has never been a topic of conversation we may have been grappling for research in the last couple of years on how
061to best navigate covid but we have plenty of long-standing research that outlines better outcomes for long-term health and vitality in fact there's a study out of harvard with nearly 80 years worth of data this study followed men and eventually more cohorts over decades the objective was to find the biggest influencers of our health and longevity they studied finances relationships jobs blood work genetics you name it they studied it you know what the biggest influencer of health was relationships and how happy people were in those relationships loneliness was the biggest killer on par with smoking and alcoholism relationships proved to be most protective of mental and physical decline community matters a lot now i ask you board members when you go home to your spouse or partner do you continue to wear a mask when you
062spend time with close friends and loved ones do you continue to wear a mask if not why not our kids were unable to attend school in person for nearly a year they were cut off from their social connections overnight we as parents had to pick up the pieces and quickly find new ways to allow our kids to still build those connections they so needed we tried then when they were finally able to return to school finally able to have day-to-day interactions with their peers and build upon those friendships they so desperately craved they had to do it all in a mask for a year social connection smiling with friends and laughing are not as significant elements as the word health students being able to hear their teachers see how they enunciate words and make facial
063expressions to support how they communicate are not thank you thank you thank you [Music] next online we have robin harris [Music] star six to unmute [Music] good evening welcome you have three minutes thank you good evening my name is robin harris as the anchorage principals association president i received full support in writing a letter endorsing our school resource officers sro program in fact you can find that statement from apa written in the testimony tonight submitted by our vice president lieke mccauley while i received substantial support from our membership today i'm speaking on behalf of wave school as principal as i'm sure you're aware whaley school is a separate day school for students with profound behaviors learning strategies and tools to transition back to their neighborhood school some will do this and others will graduate with
064us and i consider both successful let me tell you just one story that truly shows our need to keep sros in the anchorage school district this happened on a thursday a few years back whaley was about to embark on our third annual gala and silent auction a fundraiser and a big deal while everyone was finishing up all of the galatas i was on the phone with a student this adult student had left school early that day saying that she was tired and find herself out right after school she called me hysterical she was sobbing and telling me that she didn't want to live anymore she kept telling me how she missed her mother who had passed away just a little over a year before and she wanted to be with her the student had also
065just recently two lost two of her cousins to suicide she was depressed she began saying that she was going to run out in traffic and get hit i asked her to find a place to sit there so she could talk to me and calm down but she hung up i immediately called our school resource officers and let them know where the student was based on the information i knew from the beginning of the phone call they headed out to what they thought was her location while on the phone with the sros my student called back this time sobbing so hard that i couldn't understand what she was saying other than the suicidal ideation i left her on speaker phone so that the sros could hear her and so that they could try to ping her
066phone you could hear the cars passing by as she walked near the street she finally gave me a vague idea of where she was and the sros headed to that location the sros found her and picked her up and took her to the hospital for a 72-hour watch and for her mental health i thanked the sros and knew that she was in good hands this is just one story of one asc student that the sros were able to save in all of the many they had done in fact this student went on to present at our principal's conference about the support that she had received from asd and our sros i cannot effectively tell you in the short three minutes i have how important our sros are to asd whaley school supports our sro program
067their commitment to safety strong relationships and to our communities thank you so much thank you next we have uh heather land uh online heather can you hear us yes i'm here we can hear you you have three minutes welcome [Music] hello my name is heather land i have two students at chugiak elementary uh tonight i didn't prepare a long speech because i feel that every time i've spoken it's just fallen on deaf ears with the board so i i just simply wanted to say that i wanted to thank dena bishop for her proposal for math choice as it is long overdue and i hope the board agrees masking is counterproductive and ineffective if math did work there would be zero cases in the school for this entire school year which we all know is not
068the case um it's time and i hope that the board will move to vote for mass choice and i feel there's no need to wait till next week i hope you start tomorrow i would like to send my children to school unmasked tomorrow there's really no need to wait until the 28th the only other thing i wanted to say was to thank board member donnelly for his continued support of mass choice and i want to thank all the parents who showed up tonight in support of mass choice and i'm sorry i can't be there with you and hopefully this is the last time we have to have this conversation with you thank you you very much next we have daniel pace [Music] is he online [Music] okay we'll come back what about eve green is
069she online okay moving on uh louis embriani in person [Music] louis imbriani okay let's try kristen bush christian bush ashley mark [Music] star six to unmute ashley [Music] hello yes we can hear you you have three minutes welcome thank you i want to thank dr bishop for moving towards parents choice masking i have uh speaking to this board before both online and in person about some of the hardships my special needs daughter has faced while starting her first year of school during masking and i am just so very happy and excited that she's going to get to see a more traditional idea of what school is going to be she has struggled with speech all her life and school has so far not helped but i'm more hopeful now that with other students on mass
070she'll be able to see their their faces and see how they pronounce things and it will help her speech as well so i'm just very thankful and very excited and i want to thank you all for giving me as a parent this opportunity to send her to school without a mask thank you thank you ashley uh next next we have don buckleman in person don welcome and you have three minutes [Music] good evening and thank you my name is dawn buckleman and i wanted to thank you all once again for considering removing the mask mandate the amount of outrage that i've noticed that seems to have been sued by many members of the school district and community since the announcement was made last week is pretty mind-blowing but as we know it's often the loudest
071minority minority of people that are often heard the most the truth is this shouldn't have this should have always been a choice if anyone one would like to confront me about with all of their scenarios i'm sorry about why they think masking should continue indefinitely please feel free to approach me after the meeting i'm happy to oblige but i'm not going to sit here and regurgitate all of the studies most of which can be shot down in an instant when we all know this is no longer just science but politics as well it's funny to me that teachers and district members that are worried about their own children continuing to mask uh when the mandate is potentially removed but the problem is that no one is saying that they can't i fully support your right
072as parents to ensure that your child wears a mask if that's what you would like and as a teacher i fully support any teacher who decides that they need to do the same what i cannot understand though is that people that are standing up for this right to continue masking and simultaneously demanding that everyone that disagrees with them continue to wear masks as well even more confusing are those adults having nothing short of a tantrum thinking they should be able to decide whether or not someone else's child wears a mask this whole my mask protects you your mask protects me idea that we're shoving down kids throats is ridiculous unless we're all actually wearing something better than cloth masks then i don't see how this logic sticks not to mention the mental manipulation that's connected
073with it another argument i'm sure you're going to hear tonight is that children under the age of five aren't able to be vaccinated yet and that's great and i understand that people are worried about their kids but i'd like to see a study a reasonable study that says children are even at risk because i have yet to find one that's because statistically they aren't vilifying people that point this out by insinuating that they're okay with even one person dying from this virus is childish and wildly off base i don't know a single person let alone a single teacher left right or center that is flippantly okay with death so what's the argument going to be this time last time it was that we need to wait until after winter break to see what happens um
074and i'm sure this year or this time it'll be let's wait till the end of the year um and here we are holding on i'm not sure what the science behind only masking at school is and no place else because who's really going to do a study about that because it doesn't make a lot of sense it sounds like mark twain was right when he said it's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled i know i personally was fooled at the beginning of all of this and have come to change my mind a lot i let it go and i am hoping that the board decides thank you very much uh joe i think it's bartle [Music] in person joe b-a-r-h-o-e [Music] christina kluber did i say it right christina
075no okay welcome you have three minutes good evening my name is christina kluber i testified in january asking you to end the mass mandates and i'm here again last time i asked you all to consider children like mine with anxiety and speech issues when you make the decision and clearly my voice has been ignored the same things keep getting repeated that we have to follow the guidelines the doctors and the scientists for our children's health i emailed alaska's chief medical officer i've emailed dr singh several times over the course of this pandemic and she's always had the class and courtesy to respond despite our differences and opinions on certain subjects i would like to add that not one person on this board besides mr donnelly has ever responded to my emails i've even left you
076mrs bellamy some voice messages i understand that you may not want to respond to someone with a different opinion is yours but that's part of your job and being an adult we teach our children to take on conflict with open communication and open minds but that principle also needs to be applied here one of my biggest concerns during the two years of dealing with this pandemic has been our children's mental health mental health is a huge issue we face today with our children and in my opinion a much more pressing one than cobin these closures ridiculous rules and masks have taken an absolute devastating toll on our kids that has been one of the things i had emailed doctors think about i emailed her asking if there was any information she might be able to
077give me that i could take before the board and i told her i would bring this information here if i thought that it could some change someone's mind she did open her email by saying thank you for your email christina i hope you and your family are well and we get asked a lot about mass these days and this is what we've been sharing from our health team as the coven 19 pandemic evolves strategies for how and when to use these masks continue to evolve not wearing a mask can be more comfortable increase a person's ability to interpret facial expressions and may be beneficial for social development and mental health please hear those words again carefully when you think about all these kindergartners and little kids going into school for the first time wearing a
078mask and kids like mine who are in speech therapy one of the other key points to her email she states masks offered the greatest benefit to those with severe illness these are not our kids we're all watching these videos of children rejoicing as they get to remove the masks in our school state by state these mandates are being dropped and it is time for anchorage as well thank you thank you very much next and on the phone we have uh niall sirwood williams [Music] now sherwood williams right there um natalya in person natalya grubbagal can you help me out with that please grimogle okay welcome you have three minutes thank you good evening my name is nathalia grivogel and i have two children in the district that i'm here to testify in the district and
079i'm here to testify in support of dr bishop's proposal to drop the mass mandate in the district approximately one year ago i testified here and shared my concerns as a licensed professional counselor about the psychological impact that our children were experiencing with the mass mandate and so it was no surprise to me to hear from dr bishop that there has been a developmental and psychological impact on our children this is my third time testifying in front of this board and after hearing other testimonies this past year i highly suspect that the continuation of forcing children to mask has nothing to do with the science or the data that has everything to do with receiving millions of dollars from the federal government i understand that in order to receive this coveted relief money the district would
080have to follow cdc guidelines which require every child to be masked in school it makes sense now why private schools were able to stay open have mass choice policy and why i've heard testimonies from various mothers with special needs children that their mass exemptions were denied for parents and asd employees they're in favor of keeping every child masked i want to ask why we have a vaccine for families and employees that wish to be vaccinated numbers and anchors are dropping and the omnichrome variant is no worse than the common cold for the parents that are in favor of keeping the mandate if the board vetoes to drop the mandate you can continue to mask your child at school because you know what's best for your child there are many decisions as parents make that differ
081from yours so why do you want to impose your beliefs into another parent's child every parent has the right to make decisions that affect the psych the physical developmental and psychological health of their child i want to share something that my daughter recently shared with my friend my friend asked my daughter what she likes the most at school my daughter answered when i get to sneak a peek at my teacher's face when she pulls her mask down to drink coffee my daughter is in kindergarten and she thinks this is normal to not see her teacher's face the federal government does not have enough funds to correct the psychological impact that these mandates into our children excuse me i have lost all faith in the anchorage school district not only with these mandates but even academically
082it's apparent to me that what parents concerns their tears my tears and student testimonies have no effect on your policy and decision making but i know money has an effect so i'm going to stay here on the record i will be removing my children from the district and sending them to private school or homeschool program thank you for your time thank you very much [Music] next we have rachel reese or is it risa rice reese welcome and you have three minutes i need to remind the the decorum in the boardroom is no applause thank you thank you and good evening my name is rachel reese i am here to say that i support dina bishops proposal to make masks at parent choice i've testified here many times about the masks and you've never heard me
083i have a disabled child he can't go to school as long as we're wearing masks you are disenfranchising an entire section of the student population by making it mandatory to make it parent choice doesn't mean that your child can't wear a mask to make it employee choice doesn't mean that you as an adult can't wear a mask it does mean my child can go to school so i would ask that you vote to get rid of masks sorry it makes me upset when i think about how much my child has lost in the last year i'm also here to say i support the sro program and i am appalled that there is even a discussion to defund them police officers have very few opportunities to interact with the public in positive ways this is a
084way for them to do that they provide a valuable service you cannot measure it is this a defund the police action is that what you're doing i would want an answer to that question and finally i've heard a member of this board say that you're not teaching crt in school but your website says aggressively support social emotional learning and reparations but crt thank you very much uh next we have martin hansen martin hanson oh there you go welcome mr hanson you have three minutes i'm here to talk about inlet view school wow as requested by the south edition community council can you turn yeah there it is am i better now mm-hmm thank you better thank you all right so we have two members uh added to the end that used school building design committee
085at the request of the south edition community council these members were elected by the community council and they brought valuable suggestions to the building design committee but on february 8th uh there was a school board meeting school board's checking in to see how neighborhood concerns and you've heard many of them about the interview redesign were being addressed every member of the building design committee was informed or invited except for those two members the two new members uh i would have thought after we heard from the office budsmen about open meeting and openness uh that wouldn't have happened and i'm sorry that it did i have a second point the school district has find them online educational specifications for elementary school includes planning specification sets for the design of schools and campuses and the one i've
086been looking at of course has been for elementary schools [Music] the proposed design that we've been looking at since september [Music] violates these specifications [Music] well i was counting them back there uh i came up with nine and i'm not gonna do a powerpoint and read these off to you but i'm gonna do a short list and then i would like to email them to you later i think it fails accessibility goals um safety and security because the new school ground layout makes it harder to see where the kids and people who aren't kids are on the school ground uh disaster contingency schools are supposed to be a rallying point in case of disaster well this school's on the highest seismic risk zone in anchorage or the proposed school is community use and collaboration well
087we're losing one of the few good soccer football training fields in anchorage because the school is going to be built on it there's an odd one about site planning that says plan should reference the manuals and i haven't seen any manual references on the plan general site goals it should be sensitive to the neighborhood scale context and climate and it isn't um thank you that was all i wanted to say and i i promise i will send you the link to all that and thank you all for doing your work here i do appreciate it thank you mr hansen next in person we have uh raeanne there's loris you can correct me please the laurier okay thank you um i'm coming to speak in front of you guys i don't really have anything written up
088because i have emailed you guys i have given you statistics i have sent you guys links on the damage that masks are doing to our children and because of the decisions that you guys have made my children are suffering mentally and physically i am not going to go into detail about their health issues but they are documented health issues that they have because of masking in school and you guys did that by voting for that and so now i need you to support dr bishop's proposal today to unmask our children or i'm going to have to make the hard decision to pull my kids out of school which my daughter loves school she loves it so much but she hates wearing a mask my son hates it every day that they go to school they
089complain that they don't that they don't get to see their friends that they have a mask on and so i'm gonna have to make the hard decision to pull them out of school and homeschool them or make the hard decision to leave my husband for the last year of his station up here and go back home to where my family is where they live a normal life with no mess and my sisters get to go to school and have a normal life and i will do that for my children and take them out of your school district if that's what it means for them to live a normal life and that's all i have to say thank you very much [Music] next we have uh in person ginger jackson welcome you have three minutes good
090evening thank you i am here in support of dr bishop's proposal of parent-informed optional masking i'm a high school teacher as well as a mom of two asd students i'm not here alone i have the support of many parents and staff who agree that it's past time to release the mandates as teachers we're continually pressed to make data informed decisions and yet the district has continued to enforce mass mandates that are not informed by data as board member donnelly shared at the last meeting the study supporting masking in schools that is cited by the cdc has been found to have serious errors and should be considered invalid i know there are many teachers who are scared and to them i ask why have so many european countries and even the world health organization recommended against
091mandating mask in schools the truth is that there's no conclusive evidence that it is beneficial why does the cdc continue to recommend universal indoor masking then perhaps because they are nothing more than political appointees they don't care about our students their job is to further the message of the administration who appointed them and just as i teach my students i will remind you to check your sources and be aware of potential bias furthermore like we've heard more evidence is coming to light that masking children may actually be harmful evidence suggests that mask enforcement promotes isolation and breeds fear which only fuels mental health struggles we can all agree that masking is a serious hindrance for students who struggle with speech reading or experience hearing loss i'm deaf on my left side and i know my
092students are tired of me constantly asking them to repeat bottom line it's not right that our youth who are at the least at risk of serious illness from covid have been and continue to be burdened with the most restrictions in fact more youth have died from fentanyl overdoses last year than coven but here we are still debating mass mandates while the true killer remains at large i love my job as a teacher but by far my most important job is a mom and along with my husband i will no longer let elected officials and politically appointed bureaucrats who don't even know my kids continue to overreach and determine what is best for my family's health my husband and i will decide if it's necessary for our boys to wear a mask my husband and i
093will weigh the risks of the virus versus the risks to their mental health my husband and i will do our own research and we will be the parents lifting these mandates doesn't eliminate the opportunity for someone to decide if they or their child need to wear a mask it simply transfers the decision of power to parents where it belongs and as we talked earlier about the math testing data i was sitting there thinking about the fact that students who have parental support and involvement typically perform better so don't close the door on parents by making the decisions on our behalf thank you thank you very much uh next telephonically rihanna gay star six to unmute [Music] yes i think we can hear you you have three minutes perfect thank you hello board my name is
094rihanna and i am a community member and a member of the last black caucus tonight i will share two items the first being a thank you for approving our thank you in advance for approving our collective bargaining agreement please note that your staff is doing everything we can to make asu the best place to teach learn and grow we do need that in return listening to educators supporting students and following science is how we move to as a cohesive body the second item i would like to share is culturally we are a diverse district research has shown that bypoc individuals are affected immensely by kova 19. please think of our diverse students and community the thing the thinking that mask wear plays masking wears mask wearing plays a huge role on the mental health of
095our students is a little off or observed there are many other bigger factors that include poverty home life family dynamics health etc that take priority in mental health to think that we use science to tell us what reading programs best suits the needs of learners is wonderful which is why which is why in turn we must use that same science piece to understand the importance of masking and caring for others a math is not a big ask since over 19 our attendance and student count is lower with this new policy i can only take an educated guess that our attendance will decrease as well it is not a huge it is not that huge of an inconvenience and if it means saving one child teacher or relative it's worth it parents my parents i love
096you i really do but instead of worrying about when we will master unmask please educators have other requests bring your child on time every day to school ready to learn teach them the kindness and compassion and for those parents who are already mastered these skills a huge thank you and an air hug as an educator i honestly have never walked into your workplace and demanded to make safety decisions you have trusted us this far in the process to what is in a quarter for protecting all think about the end of the year activities such as prom graduations and ceremonies could be jeopardized if we unmask do quickly there is an article that stating that listing math mandates makes sense during the times of low case count but asp please be ready to re-map if variants
097emerge please let us use what we continue have had such as reverse testing and symptom checking strategies we can't wear masks forever i know but if you can but if you can't have five to ten kids missing of school each day thank you asb i know that we can do this together we are in it to win it thank you next we have dave carter mr carter are you on yes i see him [Music] can you hear me we yes we can uh you can't you have three minutes thank you well first i'd like to uh thank dr bishop for her january 7th statement wherein she noted that january 6 2021 was not only an attack on our on the capitol building but on democracy itself and she also reminded us that it's incumbent on
098public school educators everywhere to teach our children to respect our institutions and the various processes that make our government function one of those processes of course is confirming the popular vote and the electoral vote and the actual facts for those can be found at fec.gov which is the federal electionscommission.gov and so joe biden and kamala harris won both the popular vote and the electoral vote these are just the facts from our accepted government institutions about the final popular and electoral votes for our 2020 presidential election it is important to note that one of our various processes to ensure fairness includes the right of a candidate to request a recount of votes within the prescribed time frames after the election the ex-president did use these opportunities on multiple occasions it was wonderfully reassuring to everyone who
099believes in federal elections in in the various processes that make our government function that those recounts very accurately verified that the hand recounts match machine recounts another one of these various processes that we respect is our court system like recounts the legal assist process was used and available to ex-president trump in approximately 60 cases and legal challenges of course must be supported by admissible evidence unsupported or false statements did not do not support legal challenges when the courts repeatedly told us that no evidence of irregularities existed then we can also rest assured that another process to ensure that their elections worked again in 2020 presidential elections because the of the timelines involved our processes did not allow losers to continue challenging election results the states need to certify their presidential electors after the elections the
100they did so on december 14 2020 and that's why uh dr bishop could in early january say that you know the attack on the capital was an attack on democracy itself i just didn't want to wrap up with a basic point that we need to unite and not divide americans about how fair our presidential election was and that joe biden and colin harris are our fairly elected president and vice president thank you and good night thank you very much next telephonically we have joan wilson [Music] thank you madam chair um i came to testify before this board in september very concerned about the mandatory math decision and i recall at that meeting that um what was really stated was that the desire of the board to follow the recommendation of the superintendent and that's why
101i am so pleased today to call in support of superintendent bishop's decision to make mass optional and i really welcome and i expect the board to honor and support that decision i have a daughter in eighth grade at golden view she's had detention three times this year this is a girl who's never had a an issue like that in her in her entire history when one of her friends was over and i came down after reading superintendent bishop's email to tell these five unmasked children in my home that they didn't have to wear masks at school beginning next monday one girl said oh but i want to wear a mask and i said is it because you're afraid of coded and she said no i don't want people to see my face this is an
102eighth grade girl with a beautiful face where is it a saying from saint ignatius that i've used for my life and it's learned not to be afraid and i ask everyone who is afraid of letting parents make the right make the choice for their children or high schoolers to make the choice for themselves to not be afraid we are not here to hurt you i hope the teachers and the entire student body encourage the children that want to master who the parents would want them to ask to not be singled out and that it be just a welcome environment for children to make the choice that they prefer i heard those two beautiful kids from south high i want them to be safe and i hope they have end 95 maps because the cloth masks
103are not working it's time learn not to be afraid let's address this in other ways as well please encourage healthy bodies encourage good food encourage everything we can do to make our immune system strong this pandemic is an endemic thank you very much next we have frank reuter telephonically [Music] star six to unmute can you hear me now yes thank you welcome hi i'm frank reuter i'm uh principal at benny benson we're an alternative school in anchorage and i've worked for the district for 30 years and i've been an administrator for i think i'm the only administrator that's still working that was working before the sro program started and at the time we thought that they were going to replace the school security and we were all real worried about that and that turned out
104not to be the case before we had sros we um we meeting administrators in school security we were constantly dealing with non-students that came to the school to find someone that they were mad at or that owed them money or that potentially was a new business associate and so since the sros have been involved we haven't had to deal with all of those factions from the community that would come to school for all the wrong reasons and so that's been it's been really nice and it makes schools a lot safer um i'm trying to talk on my phone and read my notes on my phone at the same time um so a couple of weeks ago we had a student that you guys probably reviewed his case earlier in your closed door meeting about being
105expelled from school and he had to melt down and put our school into stay put mode and um our sergeant reynolds came and dealt with that student and at the time um i was i was amazed at how sergeant reynolds talked that guy off the ledge and got him calmed down defused the situation and worked with a kid that was having some psychological problems um that's not always the case when we just call the muldoon cops to come in you know i i'm confident that kid would have got tased and thrown in the cop car right away and that didn't happen and so i it's just one example and like robin said her story i have many stories and i'd be happy to come in and talk to the school board about that um getting
106rid of sros to increase funding for mental health supports for kids is kind of like getting rid of math to focus more on reading and so the answer is pretty obvious we need to do both um it's really important that we can support kids emotionally but that we have the partnership with the police and finally thank you very much uh next we have sandra tompkins sandra tell him phonically okay i don't see her let's try um in person is it marta muntine welcome you have uh three minutes thank you did i turn this on or it's on it's on okay hi my name is marta menteen i'm here to voice my support for mass choice last fall when the majority decided to reinforce mass i pulled last minute my two two of my three kids
107and enrolled them into a private school where there is choice it ended up being a blessing in disguise for my two children it's an academically rigorous school and i am now watching them thrive at the school where mass are choice are a choice for parents there are some families that choose to have their children in mass and that's their choice and i'd just love to invite you guys to come and tour this school it's just amazing um but side note i still have a young my youngest child who has trisomy 21 and she is in kindergarten with a special special education and for her the special education is a the best fit so she remains in asd a vital component of learning and development is non-verbal communication and in facial expression for my child who
108is um speech delay cognitively delayed and many other delays um this is a vital part of her development and her learning and um and it's it just breaks my heart that she she not only is she not able to express herself but she's not able to read uh her teacher's um expressions and such not only is asd not meeting her iap type ep um but you are inhib inhibiting her development with mass i want to reiterate that there are thriving private schools here in this community and and thriving people in the community who choose not to wear masks you see them in the grocery stores you see them in restaurants i myself rarely wear a mask um and and and we've been exposed to kobe but we've also thrived and my children's grandparents are doing
109well and and so we're doing well we're family and we're choosing these things for ourselves so i just really want to encourage that you um take dr bishop's recommendation for mass choice um not only for children like my daughter but also for typically developing children who really need and thrive that interpersonal communication [Music] it feels like at this point in time mass just feel like a political theater and so i just want to encourage you just to let's just cut through and and allow families to make decisions for their children and for their families thank you for your time thank you for your service and i hope that you do the right thing thank you very much next we have dave bronson mayor bronson welcome you have three minutes [Music] thank you madam president and
110board i appreciate this opportunity i just want to speak in favor of the sro program the continued funding of the sro program i want to commend anchorage school district leadership for including funding for the school resource officer program in the 2023 school year budget my administration recognizes the valuable partnership between the municipality of anchorage and the anchorage school district to deliver this important program to ensure the safety of our children while they are at school miss valley of anchorage remains committed to the safety and security of our students teachers and anchorage school district staff through this program we strongly encourage the school board to keep the funding for this program in the budget our children our children deserve a safe and secure learning environment through the funding of this program the municipality and the school
111district district demonstrate our collaboration and commitment to our students safety and security the copy of this letter i'll leave with you uh madam president and just as a sidebar i just have to add how important this this this program is history will not treat well those people who defund a program that literally saves lives in our schools if we defund this program something's going to happen eventually it's going to happen we've had some close calls that were averted by the school resource officers if they're not there history will not treat us as public servants well if we defund this program thank you very much madam president thank you very much next uh we have and thank you mayor next we have rob is it you lee yulu looks like you you i you or ulu
112rob is there rob in the house no that's cool okay dustin darden [Music] you need to wear your mask sir thank you all right [Music] i request a interpreter does that have a speech [Music] that request has to be made before the meeting sir we do not just no we you do i don't think you requested one i don't see on the record where there was a requested is there one available one i'd like a white board was it possible to get a white board [Music] do we have a whiteboard anywhere is there a whiteboard so uh paulie kendall said we need whiteboards so i'd like a whiteboard this is my disability so i can express myself through that mr darden special requests [Music] special requests need to be made in advance you did not
113do so so either you testify now or we will go to the next person on the list okay yes ma'am i will actually start my presentation once i transfer the data from the we're going to start your time okay so you want me to wear the face covering during the oral presentation i'd like to not wear it for the record okay now this medical device which you're insisting that i wear is a violation of the nuremberg code and it's a crime against humanity because it is in fact a medical device so the indictments are coming and you have failed the people you everyone on this diocese has not done everything their powers to stop the biomedical tyranny of making children where oxygen depriving bacterial pneumonia inducing social normalities hindering children made in the image of
114god muffling vibrations of healing dowsing are going to be held and the maximum penalty for violations of the nuremberg code when tried and convicted by your peers is death and that's where you guys are headed so the best thing you can do is come clean and stop this insanity stop coercing the children to take an hiv injection and stop taking money from pfizer and the intel and the italian militarized contractors that want to biomedically implant the children as you radiate them bartlett high school and romig windler high school i've seen the numbers what you're doing to these children with your so-called intercom systems and you just stop censoring people it's disgusting and kelly lessons i'm going to take your job do not you may not be according to us new york times versus television you
115cannot hinder my speech and it was clearly stated in the highest court of the land that you can't censor people and i'd like that time back on the clock point of order point of order [Music] we have a point of order mr darden and you do not oversee you do not supersede that [Music] supreme court your time is up [Music] next on our uh our uh agenda or not our gender but our list is star marsette she's not on okay so that completes our public comments section we will take a five minute and you are oh you i did call you sir i did why don't you come forward i did i just called you just minutes before yeah sorry thanks for the opportunity to come and speak to the school board uh thank you
116dr dina bishop for your recent decision to stop mandatory mass squaring for children i was um i sent you an email regarding an incident that happened over at meers middle school on february the 8th it was on the same evening that you were actually having the board meeting to discuss bringing masking in as a option for parents i don't have the email in front of me but i'm just going to kind of speak to a couple of the salient points of the email and i sent that to dave as well basically i went into a gym auditorium to observe my son's basketball game and i was approached by various faculty members uh insisting that i wear a mask and i i my son goes to hanchu middle school never been required to wear one went
117into mirrors and uh i was just literally just badgered about this mass thing by the the faculty coaches and and then the assistant principal and i i basically was telling look i i'm looking around in this auditorium and there's probably 200 people there the children are not wearing masks thank god uh participating in an athletic activity [Music] the um coach was not wearing a mask the referees were not wearing masks and yet for some strange reason there's a magical line between myself spectating and encouraging my son and the rest of his teammates and even his opponents to hustle have good sportsmanship interact play hard let's enjoy ourselves being out for the evening at a sporting event so here i am sitting there watching uh referees officiators and coaches and so forth not wearing their masks
118and walking up to being but insisting that i wear one i just i just couldn't believe it i'm like listen it it is hypocrisy it's unscientific there is no magic line between me as a spectator and a parent of two children enrolled in asd and a person that was born and raised in anchorage and a business owner and an adult it's like look only a rational mind can see that there is no science between me not wearing a mask and the referee that walked up to me and insisted that i wear a mask he then threatened me and said look if you don't put the mask on um he looked at me and i said or what and he said i'm going to call the assistant principal and have him come down here and i
119said look please do let's have a conversation my point being is there was a lot of hypocrisy there and strangely enough one of the uh people in the faculty said that i had been screaming the effort became a falsehood i'd like to have some form of video evidence showing that i was out of hand or causing a disturbance to that game because it would be completely out of character for me i did not do that i would like to have that judgment expunged from my record and be reinstated [Music] thank you sir thank you dr bishop will follow up with you thank you [Music] okay that brings us back to our agenda and we are now on item e our consent voting on our consent agenda madam president i move that we approve the consent
120agenda as listed there's a motion there's it's been moved in a second to conclude the consent agenda consisting of memorandum number zero seven four and memorandum number zero eight two we'll have to do a roll call vote because we have one person uh virtual remember holloman yes remember jacobs yes remember lessons yes remember wilson yes member higgins yes remember donnelly yes president bellamy yes [Music] there it is oh yeah yes that uh memorand that uh motion passes uh seven years [Music] and so that that the consent agenda is uh approved we will now take a five-minute recess we will be right back [Music] um [Music] i'd like to call us back to order [Music] we are now back in order [Music] [Applause] i can't hear them thank you we are back this brings us to
121action item if [Music] i moved to to approve the [Music] expulsions we're going to call a five-minute recess [Music] okay we would like to welcome everybody back we now call the meeting back to order we are on f1 on our agenda [Music] madam president we moved to approve the expulsions of the students associated with asd incident numbers 133-4703 and 133-4701 as was discussed in executive session tonight need a second second it's been moved in second uh to approve the uncontested student hearings uh report that we were given in executive session we'll have to do a voice vote remember higgins yes remember holloman yes remember donnelly [Music] yes remember jacobs yes member lessons yes remember wilson yes president bellamy yes and the uncontested student hearings motion passes seven to zero thank you next item f uh
122f4 which is our memorandum number 91 madam president i move to approve asd memorandum number 091 and adopt the tentative agreement between the anchorage school district and the totem association which will establish terms and conditions of employment for individuals in the association during the period between july 1 2021 and june 30th 2024. a second moved in second to approve memorandum number zero nine one is there any public testimony yes come forward please welcome good evening anchorage school board dr bishop and the anchorage school district team i am sandy thompson-wallace president of totem association of educational support personnel the dedicated group of employees who have been working tirelessly for the past seven months across this district without a contract tonight i am pleased to notify you that our members have ratified the tentative agreement memorandum 91
123that you have on the agenda for approval at this meeting first i want to recognize my negotiations team for their hard work and fortitude we began our negotiations in october of 2020 16 months ago no one could have foreseen the length of time it would come to take would take to come to an agreement their perseverance should be commended and i appreciate each one of them for their expertise and experience they brought to the table my thanks to alicia woods amanda marley joan kirkpatrick karen lowder strobe gene carpenter and jennifer madsen you are all rock stars in my book while we have taken important steps to recognize the value that totem employees bring to this district through the negotiation process there are those who still feel it is not enough totem will continue to speak
124for our employees and work to lift them up as we move forward this successor contract has good positive changes that will be a benefit to our employees and we will strive to keep that forward momentum in the forefront when we come back to the table in just 20 short months it will be here before we know it i thank you for your consideration in approving the successor contract this evening thank you thank you very much cindy um did you that's bishop madam president may i just uh take a moment to make a statement yes thank you uh it is my honor as well as the honor of the administration to uh grant uh sandy thomas her 25-year pin sandy began in our district uh actually uh september 4th 1996 and so she has earned this
125and a few months and uh seeing her here this evening we wanted to publicly thank you for your leadership and your steadfastness and your support of staff and students and asd we thank you greatly oh thank you very much good job phantom thank you and for those that were wondering it's a green stone every five years we get a different stone all right so we have uh a motion before us to approve memorandum number number 91 the adoption of the the totem tentative totem association agreement is there any discussion yes um yeah thanks for the opportunity i will be voting in support of this reading the contract earlier today i took the time when you look at the range of positions that are entailed within totem it underscores the importance of our entire school staffing
126system and i feel like this year has really brought that whole system that whole infrastructure to light and so i hope to each and every one of the totem employees that this new contract language shows how much they are deeply valued in our school system yeah thank you member lessons other comments yes remember holloman and then member wilson i'd also be voting in support uh i do feel like looking ahead that we are going to have to look at positions in schools um having spent some time working as a teacher i know what totem does i know what does this uh i know what the certificated staff does i know what the support staff does and it's all critical in that or so many different kids come into our buildings every day somebody has to
127connect with them and it's not always their classroom teacher it's not always a librarian it is sometimes a person in the front office or as the person working hallways or as people in the cafeteria they're all part of the team that makes a good school work and the job gets tougher it gets tougher as positions are eliminated it gets tougher as the expectations rise it gets tougher as people have less time to do the job that they feel like they need to do so i do think we don't recognize our support staff enough um i'm hoping as we move forward we can do things to to fully have them involved in the education process that we need for them to be involved in but approval of a contract is always a good thing but i
128do think we've got a lot more to do in the future thank you thank you very much member wilson so one of the things member holloman just said was sometimes students connect with a variety of of staff members and it reminded me that one of my my daughters who attended denali montessori so they were in the same class for three years for the first year and a half did most of her communication through one of the totem members in that classroom so she she was a vital part to her education and and i really appreciate that and she knows who she is because we still love her um i just wanted to say that that i was a totem member i actually worked for asd years ago as a bilingual tutor and and i understand
129how much heart and soul these members put into their students put into their schools and how hard the work is so i i really do appreciate all of the work they do and i appreciate our total staff very much thank you member wilson all righty so uh as a person who i also want to thank the totem uh negotiations team the asd team you guys found some common ground and uh you made it work uh and it will only get better uh together so i think it's time for us to vote i see no other comments katie [Music] the student vote yes [Music] remember wilson yes member lessons yes remember donnelly yes remember higgins yes remember jacobs yes remember holloman yes president bellamy yes and memorandum number 91 passes unanimously thank you very much madam
130president i moved to approve ast memorandum number 092 and adopt the tentative agreement between the anchorage school district and the anchorage education association which will establish terms and conditions of employment for individuals in the association during the period between july 1 2021 and june 30th 2024. i'll second it's been moved in second to uh adopt memorandum approved miranda number number 92. the tentative agreement with the anchorage education association is there anyone who wants to speak testify or speak to this [Music] um item see none is there any discussion comments from the board remember jacobs thank you madam president i just wanted to thank the aea and administration for the thorough and fruitful negotiation process i think this is a contract that rightfully puts resources in the pockets of our educators as well as demonstrates our
131value for the hard-working folks at the front of classrooms every day i think with the hopeful passage of the contract tonight so we can turn our attention to other ways that the district and we as a board can support our educators like by working with our our partners locally in juneau to address the retirement system and then as well here in the district to address uh making sure the communication up and down the chain of command here is viable and folks are feeling heard so thanks again i'll be supporting us thank you member jacobs any other comments remember holloman also say that i support this contract and it it ultimately whatever the board does whatever the administration does every morning on weekday it follows to teachers to make it work [Music] and i think at
132times we we forget that that we just just have to give more credit to what has to be done in the classroom to make make it happen every every day and kind of the same thing i think settling a contract helps lets everybody refocus as member jacob said and focus on what they really want to be thinking about i hope in the future that we can settle them closer to the expiration date and with a lot less controversy but thank teachers for voting in favor of this thank you member lessons on the radio the other day i heard a story about a teacher in a district somewhere else and all that teacher really wanted to do i don't know if this is appropriate was to make kick-ass lesson plans i hope this contract allows our
133teachers to do just that to really focus their energy on [Music] the work of teaching i appreciate their work thank you very much remember donnelly thank you madam president um just to for a frame of reference here my mom joined the aea in 1960 she was one of the first five school nurses ever hired by the anchorage school district so i kind of grew up with this bargaining unit and one of the things this contract does is eliminate the requirement for a master's degree to receive the full increase for university credits that would be equal to a master's degree not actually having to get the master's degree and i just remember how hard for how many years my mother worked to get her master's in public health nursing and i think actually getting the master's
134degree has meaning it has meaning and so i'm sorry to see it go in this contract in that aspect [Music] there are other concerns that i have that i have articulated since december of 2020 regarding these negotiations most of the members weren't here at that time but i strongly advocated that we negotiate for a longer school day because even 15 minutes would be very helpful i believe to our students it would it would give us the leeway to go from 45 minutes to a full hour for lunch and recess which our youngest kiddos i think really need and for our older students who are given a more instructional time and we know that over the life of a student in in our district from k through 12 they're getting as much uh as as little
135well let me put this this way we have the shortest school day and the the shortest school year of any state in the union the combination of the two and what happens over 13 years of that is that some of our our kids are getting as much as a year and a half less actual instruction time as kids in some other states that's a huge gap now it's the point has been made that that's not the only reason why why we have the scores we have and i agree with that but it sure seems like a reason for what's going on and so i was really hoping if we get just another 15 minutes for kiddos there and that's for our kids and once again everything i'm going to talk about here is focus on
136the children what was best for our students in my personal opinion [Music] so i also advocated that we tried to seek a longer school year so once again even one or two days of more instructional time i think would have been helpful to our students and then i supported the administration's original request that we restore the authority to principles that was taken away three years ago to actually go in the classroom and ensure that there's a lesson plan they're available at all times so whenever a substitute teacher comes in they can go right there and they'll be guaranteed that what they're going to be having to instruct that day is there in front of them and that clear authority was removed three years ago and the administration asked us to advocate for its restoration and
137we supported that but it's not in this contract and i think that's not serving our students as well as we should have in this contract there's no agreement in this contract for the minimum number of direct instructional hours if we ever have to go back to pandemic virtual learning again and i was a strong opponent of the decision that this district made to only have one hour per day instruction four days a week of actual minimum instruction by our instructors now lots of them did better than that some of them didn't do any at all and but the minimum i felt was not appropriate and i advocated that we negotiate into the collective bargaining game doing the collective bargaining process something better than one hour a day if we ever have to go back to
138that virtual learning again that's just not acceptable and we all know what happened nationally in the united states with the scores in the in the amount of learning that our kids lost in those years my children lost learning that year and one hour a day was not enough to keep them up to where they should be and they deserved better so i thought for our students we should have fought for that harder [Music] i was particularly disappointed that we weren't successful in achieving a clear understanding that we could pay more actually pay more to some of the hard to find positions that we've got particularly in in speech therapy and uh in other specialists in the special education area uh where we've got many many unfilled positions because we're not meeting we're it's supply and
139demand it's simple economics but the union opposed giving us that authority and we have sort of a tacit understanding now that we might be able to give some extra funds but it's not clear in the contract i think we should have made been able to achieve and i still am befuddled by the union opposed this paying their members more for the high the difficult to fill jobs that we need to fill to provide for our students i think that's really a gaping hole in this contract we as employers should have the ability to pay more if we have to fill a position that our kids need and the union fought that and i i still don't understand that logic so you know you you put it opposed to where i grew up in construction trades
140people there are people doing blasters blasters got paid more than if you were digging a ditch and that was fine we never objected to that i don't understand why that doesn't come across into the educational system too and if there's people that have extra skills extra abilities we can't fill those positions we as we have a duty to our students to to try to do that because merely contracting out is not the same as actually having employees so i'm really disappointed in that and i tried really hard beginning in december of 2020 to get the board at that time and it was mostly different people here you know different board members to begin to go point by point and be very clear about what we were going to advocate for and what we wanted to
141see in this contract for our students and at the time i was told repeatedly by other board members well we'll get to that we'll get to that we don't have to do that right now but i i was very concerned then that it was going to get delayed and then get confused and then when it came time for us to actually as a board vote and that's all i ever asked for it was an up and down vote are we going to fight for this are we going to fight for that and whatever the majority said that was the way it was going to be but we never did that and i think there was a huge mistake we should as a board the seven members of the board voted up or down but the
142top priorities were now we had kind of a round robin where three or four people would say yeah we support that and one of those was the request by the administration to make it clear the principals absolutely had the power to make sure there was a lesson plan available for kiddos every day and and and it seemed like it just got dropped by the wayside during the negotiations and and it's and i'm just sorry to see these these really important things for our children didn't get accomplished in this contract um i'm glad we've got a deal i think it's it's really important for this school system moving forward but i think there's a lot that didn't happen here that really should have happened for our kids thank you thank you member donnelly uh member higgins
143i see your hand is up thank you um i guess i'll respond somewhat to um remember donnelly's comments a little bit i've been in human resources for a long time uh not half a century but getting close and negotiated contracts and i know that when you walk away from contract negotiations they say if both sides did a good job both sides walk away disappointed this was a difficult negotiations our teachers deserve what you know what we are able to provide we've gone five years with flat funding from the state we don't have a defined benefit retirement system uh that is something being requested that option for employees uh at all you know we've we've given the flat funding over 10 years we've got 70 million less from a from a cost of living uh perspective
144of where the budget's been um and the money we've got from the federal is limited to be spent by september 24 and that's it we've we've got tough financial situations so it was a difficult time to really negotiate a contract i appreciate what the district did standing at the table with that many other challenges i appreciate that the fact that the aaa the membership the leadership came in there negotiated in good faith to reach agreement both sides will walk away saying i wish i got this or i wish i got that but the end of the day it's a give or take situation give and take uh it is a difficult environment when you limit it with the funding as severe is what the asd is and with such unusual um uh impacts a pandemic
145where millions of people are deciding to hang it up and retire early uh filling positions we filling pool positions the staffing for temporary for the um uh on call for the for the for the teachers you know we've had to reduce dramatically the requirements the educational requirements and then we still can't find the people so uh the same thing with the other areas we've got difficult times i think aea membership uh the leadership understood that uh there was good negotiations on both part i am very appreciative to both sides reaching an agreement i know it was a long time i'm the what i regret most is the stress associated with it that has been expressed by so many of the members who work so hard during these last couple years particularly with these challenges and
146not having a contract for this period of time the fact that we've reached an agreement and we're able to move forward i just i'm very appreciative of that i'm appreciative of the of the staffing that we've got and i and i hope we can move forward on the difficult times under the best situation we can and my appreciation again thank you thank you member higgins uh member wilson pat i know you love it when people say i agree with you [Laughter] i'll go ahead and say that but i will not reiterate everything you just said i i do want to just briefly say that i i recognize the last couple years for our educators have been it have been very difficult um i live with one so i really get to see it every day
147but i really do appreciate the commitment of our teachers your work to educate and advocate and and i'm gonna emphasize the advocate because i i know there's a tremendous amount of of advocating being done for for our students um above and beyond educating them and and so thank you thank you member wilson um dr bishop [Music] thank you madam president i would be remiss if i didn't have people going to to know mr donnelly that we do are able to go into classrooms and look at lesson plans the compromise that was made is that they they all don't get turned in at a certain time in a certain week but if we ask to see them they should be there uh and especially for if there's an underperforming person they can be turned in so
148that was worked out and i just wanted to to share that that is in the agreement and i wouldn't want to leave without that but i also um i'm just going to take a personal liberty to give hats off to corey aced uh for the union leadership he and i do don't see eye to eye lots of times in fact we meet over conflict but i want to thank him for his skills on the mountain i found myself on alias on a place i shouldn't have been skiing after i followed my husband and children and uh he is a mountain safety person and he rescued me and uh so i just appreciate uh his leadership of course and um his expertise skills on alaska but uh thank you really to um all parties involved we
149can move forward and do what's best for kids thank you thank you um as the individual who was present uh and in 2020 when the process started um i agree with member donnelly that we had a laundry list of wishes there were seven of us we each had numbers of things that we felt were important we also heard things that were important from the staff they don't call it negotiations because it's fun or it's easy uh we're gonna it's a give and a take uh but i do think both sides came together in good faith and i think they gave uh all of our wishes which is what they were uh consideration uh and did what they could in terms of uh opportunities both sides worked for the best deal that they could get not
150for themselves it's for our kids so for me it comes back so i will be supporting that um because i think our kids deserve it thank you member holloman if i could follow up with one other item you know we only discuss these priorities in executive session i i don't think we can vote in the way you describe an explicit up or down vote that we have that discussion we'd have to take the vote openly in this meeting which the bargaining units would probably be okay with i also want to say i'm a little disappointed in the superintendent for deliberately sabotaging corey's chance the second term that that just seems uncalled for thank you thank you see no more hands we're ready for the vote uh the student vote yes thank you member holloman yes
151remember wilson yes remember donnelly no remember higgins yes remember lessons yes remember jacobs yes president bellamy yes and memorandum number 92 passes seven years one day thank you moving on madam president i move to approve ast memorandum number 072 and authorize the superintendent to utilize the general contractor construction manager gc cm project delivery method for the aquarian charter school renovation project second moved in second to approve memorandum number 72 uh which authorizes the superintendent to utilize this uh c the gc cm construction delivery model uh delivery method i'm sorry for querying charter school renovations is there anyone here to speak that would like to testify [Music] on the motion scene none board discussion any board discussion on memorandum number 72 saying none i call for the vote uh student vote yes thank you remember wilson
152yes remember higgins yes remember holloman yes remember donnelly yes remember jacobs yes member lessons yes president bellamy yes and memorandum number 72 passes seven yays seven uh yes thank you item f7 and president i moved to approve asd memorandum number 081 the fiscal year 2022 2023 preliminary budget and authorized an upper limit spending authority of 851 million 548 476 dollars a second it's moved in second to approve asd memorandum number 81 which is the 2223 preliminary financial plan and budget is there anyone here who would like to testify on the budget on this item see none uh we will open up for board discussion there president i found i saw a hand in the audience did you oh i could have put my glasses on maybe but is there someone wishing i might okay [Music]
153okay [Music] what is your pleasure board i know remember donnelly you've got some amendments do you want to start i have very few this year i'm president i think that should make everybody happy and most of these you've seen before so yeah currently we're a member of the alaska association of school boards and this can you are you oh you're making your motion now i'm going to talk oh no okay you have to talk to yourself [Music] for consistency though i remember donnelly would you mind making your motion and then speaking to it if i'm allowed to do that without a second madam chair because robert's rules doesn't require that but if if with the understanding that i'm allowed to speak to my motion i'd be yes i would do that yeah you will always
154be allowed to speak to your motion thank you then then i would move yeah but if you get amendment number one madam chair [Music] i'll second for discussion okay i'm trying to find my copy of did you put it up katie [Music] does everyone have copies of the the um amendments from member donnelly [Music] no [Music] katie we'll put it up in just a minute we'll give her a minute here [Music] okay kelly's second [Music] so you have a second member donnelly thank you man chair uh amendment number one would uh delete approximately the the funding that we currently expend for our membership in the alaska association of school boards and anchorage students are simply not fairly represented within this organization it's just unquestionable um it's the ratio of the third next largest school districts
155their students have about you know which is kenai and fairbanks in this organization their students have four times the voting power per student as anchorage does but be that as it may that's not nearly as shocking as the fact that the smallest anchorage school the smallest alaska school districts are represented on the alaska association of school boards per student with 740 times the voting power per student as anchorage students are that's simply not fair and and they have no interest in changing these ratios because it's so dominated by the smaller school districts it's hugely to their advantage they advocate multiple positions that are against the interests of anchorage taxpayers they've opposed the formation of local government i strongly believe that every citizen should pay something towards the cost of public education but here in alaska
156that's not the case there are something like 20 percent of the area of alaska where citizens pay zero towards the cost of their local schools and i believe that's just a duty all americans have to public education is to pay something i'm not talking about oppressive taxation here i'm talking about something because i believe their schools will be better if they have some sort of local contribution to those schools in the form of some taxation and they oppose that they oppose increasing the number of students to constitute a school and for currently it's only ten and you all heard my story the last time i attended the uh alaska association school boards where i was advocating that they not continue to oppose there being any limit like 10 minimum which they they do they oppose
157and just creating a school makes the cost extraordinarily high per student and as we know the national studies the number one criticism of the experts are that our education funding system is broken because there's such a great disparity between urban and rural schools in favor of the rural schools that it's so large the disparity that it's unconscionable and and when i said well you know you hear stories about that the rural districts hire folks because they have students they you know have kids to be in the district and that gets them over 10. and a really sweet lady in the back room stood up and said that's not true mr donnelly that's not true and i said okay she says we hire everybody based on how many children they have not just our teachers but
158our janitors and our maintenance workers and that just distorts the entire system and the whole purpose of this of the system it's nonsensical and yet the alaska associated school boards doesn't even want 10 to be the minimum number for for them qualifying as an independent school district or independent school they refuse to support our efforts in asking for a district cost study be completed which under some estimates is costing these students our students something like 32 million dollars a year in revenue that we could be using to improve the anchorage school district and to meet our duties here and they also amazingly oppose parental consent for surveys of personal information students thank goodness the legislature had the good sense to make that a state law because the alaska association of school boards doesn't like it
159they don't want parents to have the final say and that's i just totally disagree i don't think it's in our best interest to be in this organization and this would simply delete um the funding for it in this budget thank you [Music] any other board comments [Music] okay okay i'll let you go before i go um this is my first year on the board i've attended i think three aasb training sessions events uh most recently uh a long weekend of advocacy um down in juneau and i think that the aaa i agree with member donnelly that the aasb represents a huge variety of districts across alaska going to the delegate assembly really imparted on me the sense of how how much of an anomaly anchorage is and absolutely i agree that we have a disproportionately
160small representation when it comes to the number of votes that we have when we agree at that delegate assembly on the priorities of aasd and i think that's not something that's unfortunate but i also see the value of the organization in onboarding and supporting members in helping them understand the lay of the land uh when it comes to how to effectively advocate our legislators and i think that the net value for anchorage is still a positive so i i see a lot of what you're saying here but um i have personally benefited in my role as a board member from the aasb organization and so i will oppose this but i thank you for bringing up some really important points any other comments remember donnelly and then i and then member higgins first uh i
161mean uh holloman i did it again we gotta get some names i gotta get i gotta do something yeah all right remember holloman and then we'll go to higgins yeah to a fair degree i uh i think the points number donnelly makes make sense there are positions we disagree with they do have fundamentally different interests and it is tilted uh the power in the organization is tilted towards a collection of small rural districts if it was proportional it would simply be anchorage we'd be the majority [Music] i suspect everybody else would drop out despite the differences there are a lot of positives that they do and a key one i think is communication between rural alaska and urban alaska which is in bad shape there's there's not a lot of communication in other ways um
162i think we have the opportunity by being in the organization to have a voice there we don't always win that's frustrating but it is the case i think that we help those districts i think they help us uh i still support us being members and uh continuing the discussion with them outside of the of meeting each other in juneau or other places accidentally i think we need that time to have the discussion with them so i i will not support the amendment thank you member higgins thank you um i'm not going to support this request as well i i will simply say you know i will not always agree with most organizations on every issue and i clearly i don't agree with everything with the alaska school board association school boards but as a member
163with the national school board association they they advocate for a role for the board to play that i think is important and they do a good job of it the role of the of school boys from the uh national school board associations was the alaska association of school boys is that we are the voice of the public we provide directions and we hold accountability uh that is not the direction of things such as the uh council of great city schools i think this organization providing that level of of of training and support and advocating for what roles the board should be playing we are responsible for the final for the budget we are responsible for curriculum we heard these items recently and presentations to the board i think is very important we're moving into a
164direction this current board which was not here a short time ago and that is we've we found we're finding our voice and i think alaska association school boys is an advocate for that um i know there are controversial issues that are out there that aasb and nsb uh the national school board association has taken that that some people are going to latch on to locally or nationally but i find them to be a very valuable supporter of schools in alaska and the support we got recently when we were in juneau and the presentations they provided in the training i thought was excellent and so i um i appreciate what aasb does and i will not support this request thank you thank you member higgins uh i i will not support uh although i have a
165i think i need to declare a conflict i currently serve on the board of directors for aasb um [Music] and i also hold the position of treasurer so i i will abs uh abstain from voting um but at the same time i had i voted if i were to vote it would not be in favor of the amendment so i will abstain [Music] frozen i'll also declare the same conflict as i'm currently a board member of the aasb also [Music] so we need so we have yeah we so we do have two board members sitting here in the boardroom who are on the uh board of aasb um i will leave it to the individual members to make that decision but i don't see any conflict there i mean you're doing your duty as a
166board member we appreciate your service on that board so i for one don't you know i don't see any problem with it but i also respect your individual decision on that [Music] okay so we uh we have declared a potential conflict what is the pleasure of the board [Music] member higgins i'm going to join member donnelly on this one um you you do not have any financial conflicts of interest the fact that you're serving on that to provide directions you could easily vote either way you're doing you're just more knowledgeable of it i don't think the fact that we have kids in school grandkids that we have we serve on different committees trying to get things done should be a basis where we are excluding members from voting i want their voice on these types
167of issues and the fact that you're more knowledgeable about it to some degree because your involvement makes your voice even more important so i would uh support not declaring this as a conflict of interest i don't think there's any personal benefit you have and uh so i don't see that as a conflict at all [Music] thank you member higgins anybody else want to speak on the conflict part all right so the motion before us right now is memorandum number 81 i'm sorry uh mr donnelly's uh amendment is it up okay yes so we can vote uh the student vote no uh member wilson [Music] no [Music] remember jacobs no member lessons no remember higgins no remember donnelly yes remember holloman [Music] abstain and president bellamy abstain [Music] so that passes one one yay okay four
168i'm sorry [Laughter] it fails i'm sorry it fails um with two abstentions four nays and one yay all right thank you [Music] president would you like me to continue yes please um first of all i want to really thank the board for its leeway in allowing me to move and then speak to things so i really appreciate that thank you i would move amendment number two [Music] is it okay if i speak to it we're waiting for a second there is no second well there's no second then i would just withdraw my motion and then just speak so if you would like to do that member donnelly that would be fine thank you ma'am sure um again would you verbally just draw here yeah we already resolved under robert's rules that a member is allowed
169to speak and then to make a motion so um did you withdraw your motion yeah okay and i'm just gonna i'm i'm just gonna speak at this time um one of the groups that the school district belongs to the anchorage school distributor is the coalition for education equity and the last i identified the budget the cost of that was about 32 000 a year and pretty much everything applies to the conflicts of interest with the alaska association of school boards and this also applies to the coalition for education equity the last i checked and historically this has just been the fact is the anchorage school district is the only large school district that's a member of this organization the other members are the alaska gateway school district well let's just say they're pretty much 12
170or 14 of the smallest school districts in the state so fairbanks is not a member kenai is not a member matsu is not a member juno is not a member none of the other urban areas are members of this and we by far pay the most dues per member of any of the other members for this organization so for those reasons i would now move and so i believe that we should delete the funding for the cost of this membership and i would so move by amendment number two [Music] there is no second do you have another one remember donnelly thank you madam president um it's it's been a tough year um we've we've been strained but i always believe you know it's just like the superintendent says if you set the goals high you
171can work towards them and so there is a category of funding that's determined by the alaska department of education uh there's two functions uh state function 510 and state function 550 that are within the budget documents at pages 63 and 64. and those are administrative services that that do not are not classroom related they're segregated out from the cloud classroom supports these are pure administrative costs and i believe that we should make an effort to you know additionally reduce the costs that appear in these budget this budget on those pure administrative non-classroom related administrative costs and and one way to do that would be something that i've imposed in past years to have a just a two percent reduction in these administrative cost functions in these particular categories and i would move amendment number three
172to do that at this time [Music] i'll second it's been moved in second [Music] to reduce [Music] i could speak to the amendment if you wish to explain it thank you because uh amendment number two did not um receive a second remember donald you're we're calling this number three number three but yeah it's labeled number three yeah okay [Music] well in the in our packet we have it as number three correct okay for the voting okay i see what you're saying okay [Music] is it okay if i speak to it yes sir thank you ma'am um this would be a 300 000 reduction in the state function code lines of 510 and 550 within our budget proposal that's before us now that's a that's something less than it's about two percent um and you know
173i'm offering this with a sincere um recognition of the stress that's occurred for the last year with covid and and the challenges we faced but i do think that we're looking down a a cataclysmic event in two years when the covid money is gone and the state money to absorb the reductions of pupil reductions that we've experienced it runs out we're looking at a over 60 million dollar gap to fill and i would like to get a little bit of a jump start on that gap this year um it's going to be tough we're looking at some amazingly difficult decisions over the next couple years if some you know mana money doesn't fall from the skies here real soon and so this would just be a little tiny step and i think starting to address
174that those that huge gap projection we're looking at out next year and the year after that thank you thank you member donnelly [Music] any board comments uh member jacobs and then we'll go to member holloman thank you madam president so i guess first a question for the maker um in i'm curious in the preparation for today's meeting and working with the administration what positions have we identified maybe not the specific job code but what types of positions would be eliminated by this reduction and how would that impact indirectly students and staff thank you madam chair yes my intent is to leave full discretion to the administration to figure out a way to absorb this reduction [Music] the the budget book this is just the bottom line number that's reflected in the budget book for those
175two specific codes and um i want to give them the flexibility because i know it's you know it's with what our staff is facing i fully acknowledge it's really tough [Music] do you have a follow-up [Music] sure yeah i appreciate the motion and i i share interest in making resources uh be funneled to our classrooms whenever and wherever possible i am equally unsettled by what not just what this budget may look like but future years based on the impending fiscal cliff we've been expressing to stakeholders both here in juneau but without more specific information i'm struggling as to what this might look like we saw an administration save roughly a million dollars with the installation of the pa systems at western romig recently administration was responsible in securing millions in funding for covet testing and
176things of that nature um i'm concerned that we're going to be losing more than we're gaining with that 300 000 without more specifics and if we don't have any specific proposal as to what that might look like i don't know how we can genuinely consider this at this time my understanding is this motion may have been made before in years past have specific metaphors i guess i'm curious about learning if there have been specific job types that have been on the chopping block before um as this motion has been considered that would be a question for the superintendent or staff doc bishop thank you madam president through the president's member jacobs uh actually those functions include more than just people so we would take the privilege of this pass to uh make a plan for
177that um it is everything from i.t contracts to people to payroll and the like [Music] one last follow-up so to be clear we the board won't have any knowledge as to what specific departments within the district will be impacted through the president member jacobs we would like share that once we figured it out but right now we don't have that yeah [Music] um who did that say was next remember um i'm opposed to the general reduction in that i think this board is close enough to the ground uh that we would need to see things that we wanted to see eliminated that we're not working with a budget of the size or a situation where we simply um put money in a container and go spend this much if if we look at those areas
178that are outside of instruction like the business office or like payroll or other areas and see excess i think that would challenge us to really hold the superintendent accountable we i don't know that we've ever voted to say it but it's just a given that instruction is where we want every dollar we can put and all the things that go into these other areas are simply essentials that have to be done in order to keep things running and we don't want to spend any more on i.t than we have to we don't want to spend any more on transportation than we have to and my experience with the district is that well in a given moment you may be able to find some excess that ebbs and flows it's a large organization people make mistakes
179people it takes a while to change things but there are not people sitting at desks with nothing to do they're not people sitting places that have a lot of spare time and i've seen the administration shrink i've seen the support staff shrink over decades other than times when we have cut specific programs i couldn't tell you i don't think specific duties went away so we're still doing a lot more per person than we did a long time ago at times we have cut programs and i think if we were going to make a cut of that size it would be incumbent on the district i mean on the board to say this is what we think is in excess and we're we're willing to cut that unless the administration can justify the need for for
180that particular thing [Music] i can see this if we think the administration members or directors are overpaid i don't think we've looked at it close enough to be able to say something like that [Music] i i don't support this as a way to reduce the budget effectively thank you member holloman remember higgins did you have comments yes thank you um you know i'm i'm going to be inclined to go ahead and support this for a couple of reasons one is i'm convinced that there are opportunities here but more importantly the board has the ability to come back and with unrestricted reserves make your changes if it's supported by the administration that there's a need to do that and other options aren't available sometimes we're setting goals and clearly i agree with mr holliman our job
181is to put every penny we can do into the classroom if there are issues here specific and and you know that are identified i've looked at the changes in admin costs based on my review and there's changes that uh are going up and and there's you know prior time i was on the school board nine years in a row we we spent the time talking about the budget we identified areas and we actually reduced administration nine years in a row now at this particular point we haven't really devoted that time to it but i still think we need a clear goal and a goal is putting more in the classrooms and i think this is a modest and reasonable goals and i think there are ways for the administration to achieve this and in a
182variety of ways and so i'm going to support it [Music] um yes remember uh lessons yeah i spent a good portion of this afternoon before coming to the board meeting at the ymca with my budget book and appendix g while my kids and some other kids played in the pool trying to keep it dry and i say that because appendix g itemizes all of the schools that show where teacher reductions are happening it's almost all of them and yes it's due to smaller enrollment um which is jim's head's nodding um but but i do but i'm also thinking about um a community council meeting now is that last night and community council members um they also know that this fiscal cliff is coming and you know when i look at the in particular the district
183administration support services um and i look at the historical trajectory from 2019 um that particular state function has gotten bigger and this doesn't seem um like a very large slice of that pie and so i think it is a baby step towards the fiscal cliff so i'm going to support it uh i kind of want to hear from the administration thank you member lessons dr bishop or whoever you'd like uh thank you madam president um actually uh this we highlighted this for you in our budget presentation uh whereby the unfilled positions or changes used to all be collected and put in that one fund and then what we started to do is put them in the funds that the positions that weren't filled in so we purposely showed you that and we purposely told you
184why that was increasing you want to talk about that jim so that you would have better transparency sir i'd love to um we we talked about this at the uh the board meeting the finance meeting i think i also put it in board connect so the district's negative attrition account is about 25 million dollars a year and we had that all in one state function and that was the district admin support so what we did was go back to fy19 and it's been that way for for many years um so andy and i decided that we really wanted to take those attrition accounts and spread it out on all of the state functions because it's more transparent it's not that district admin support went up a lot in one year it's that we took this
185negative attrition account and spread it across all the state functions so for district admin support if you look at [Music] and might i add that prior to 2016 in our budget process review when jim was hired we didn't the district didn't even account for that and disclose that so we started in 2016 um sharing it and keeping it in this budget brief so that you could find it very easily and then this year we took the next step to be highly transparent and demonstrate where that attrition was happening so when you look at the attrition account you would have had 24 million dollars minus in district admin support services where now you have a million and a half so that other almost 23 million dollars was spread to the other state functions so it really
186isn't this huge growth over time it's taking this negative number that helps balance out the budget and and to try to explain why we why we do an attrition account we look at the positions over time the percentages that are [Music] that we couldn't fill vacancies leave things like that and if you don't put that negative number and you just budget all of your money then in reality you would be having 24 million dollars that you couldn't use as a resource to put more educators in classrooms and other places across the district because you budgeted for x number of positions but they didn't all get filled so this negative what it allows you to do when you when you get accurate on an attrition account it creates that negative which actually frees up 24 million
187dollars so you can now infuse that into other positions across the district and madam president prior to this time you would end your fiscal year and then have a whole bunch of money and that you couldn't keep at the time when it was over ten percent you couldn't keep that in your fund balance and so we have begun to use it through our budget correct it it certainly avoids that end-of-year mass spending spree because now we've done 20 million dollars what this does is level everything out over the course of the year so you can put more resources in the most important place across the district and and this is the best practice this is the way we should be doing the budget and i don't know i just wanted to share that um if
188you look at that we need to be very transparent about why that is that way it's a mathematical choice um but the district did increase in positions in areas for which the prior board during my tenure here asked to increase and that was in communications as well as human resources there were deliberate asks to get better in those areas over time since 2016 we have added positions to those two administrative areas and i can go through this again um at the finance committee meeting i've done state function charts i think everyone knows that's where hr payroll um i t 57 of all district admin support is i.t either contracts for everything from business plus which is our erp through hardware servers switches routers things i don't even know what they are but mike talks about
189them all the time that's 57 of all the district admin support so there's a lot of things involved in that other than negative attrition account hence we can go back look at it if this passes to find uh where that would be best met i i specifically recalled uh the board asking for changes in and and just as the superintendent just shared so now we're going to um almost punish uh what we ask them to do i mean the consequences on the she did what the board asked her to do now we're going to um take an action that is going to disrupt what we asked to be done so and if that is the will of the board that's fine um but i will not be voting supporting the motion member wilson i'm obviously
190fully aware that that physical cliff is in our future i'm also not comfortable asking for a reduction before we know what we're asking to be reduced so i i as a member jacob stated until i understand how it's going to affect our students and our staff i i can't support a motion that to me randomly asks for a two percent reduction without the details of how that affects our students and our staff um there was one thing that remember are are you a homeowner donnelly i'm just joking [Laughter] remember all of it's david um sorry couldn't resist that member holliman stated that i know that i've heard from the community some community members that there's a perception that folks in the administration are overpaid um my experience in speaking with people is oftentimes you're asked
191to um step into that that administrative role because your leadership skills have shown have proven um to show that you would be a great person in that role but sometimes that comes at a financial cost so it's not that they are necessarily coming in to make more money um [Music] sometimes they're barely breaking even and sometimes they're they're taking a a bit of a decrease in pay so i i cannot like i said i can't support this motion at this time other con member jacobs thank you madam president um i'm going to join member wilson and saying that i can't support the amendment at this time asking for staff to cut without identifying direction to me walks right up to that line of fiscal irresponsibility um that i'm just not comfortable with personally when i
192was working to identify with the administration how we could as a district provide more mental health supports to our students i asked for a list of areas that could be cut and i was told educators programs and the list was given to me i would assume that we could get something similar for this proposal and review it later as part of a budget revision but at this point i don't think that i have enough information to make a decision so i'm absent the motion being withdrawn and referred to finance for further action i'll have to vote no today unfortunately thank you thank you member higgins i see your hands up thank you i just want to add one thing a budget is a working document that's going to be changed over time if there's a
193need for additional funding if the administration can't do something they can come back and justify to the board make them changes to it i think we're sending a message and that's what i want to do is that we are looking to try and take to look at areas with least impact and that's what we want the administration to do we're not trying to select what the administration and they have more knowledge than we do of the best place that they have to cut to do that and if from their standpoint they feel like there's a it's not possible to do it and they can explain that to us the board can add that back in during the year that's there's always budget changes but what we're doing is sending a message that we are looking
194to try to get cuts outside and we're asking the administration to be the one to take the lead and identify where that's at it's the old joke and the washington and the in public sector that if you've got to cut the budget most in the first dollar they have to cut and sell the washington monument i'm i am totally confident that this is something that's achievable without selling the washington monument and and to accomplish that it may well be that needs are going to change to a year they're going to come back and ask for more than 300 000. i don't know but i think all that being asked here is to send that message to people not comfortable with it i respect that but i just don't want anyone to think that this is
195a final financial document they make changes tony all the time but we're asking them to look to find the best place to cut this thank you thank you any other comments from the board before we vote not seeing any let's vote the student vote no [Music] and remember holloman no remember higgins yes remember jacobs no remember donnelly yes member lessons yes remember wilson no president bellamy no [Music] motion fails three years four nights [Music] president yes you have one more um yeah a few years ago the board adopted something called the middle school model that added a planning period and the superintendent can correct me if i get any of this wrong but um to our middle schools our day and it had the effect of us needing to hire additional instructors for those middle
196schools to keep the the ratio of students and teachers uh equal because it it the teachers were teaching one period less and at the time i opposed that just for basically budget reasons and it had a 2.4 million dollar impact on our budget and if we were to go back to the way it was a few years ago it would be a reduction of 18 middle school teachers but we would incur we would get a savings of 2. 4 million dollars and so that is what amendment number 4 does and i would move it at this time [Music] so your motion uh is to would you just state your motion discontinue the middle school model is that your motion yes ma'am is there a second [Music] not here in a second your motion dies thank
197the board for their leeway thank you member diamond so that completes remember donnelly's amendments we will now move to mr jacobs [Music] thank you madam president i move to amend the fiscal year 2022 2023 preliminary budget as proposed in asd memorandum 81 by allocating the estimated 5 million in remaining sr2 grant fund balance for the purpose of student mental health supports and related programming okay it's been moved in second to allocate the estimated 5 million in remaining estro2 funds remember jacobs will you speak to your motion please yes madam president thank you for the opportunity uh as we well first of just a couple of um operational notes the funds uh that are being proposed to be reallocated currently exist in the proposed budget so this is not an increase this is uh funds that
198we uh anticipate being rolled over to the next fiscal year that will go on spent this year um in terms of priority uh we do have a guardrail that speaks to mental health supports in schools as i know each of our board members here knows youth in alaska are disproportionately affected by minimum behavioral health challenges i see it myself as a licensed therapeutic foster parent well before the covet 19 pandemic youth were negatively impacted each and every day at just about each and every of our campuses by mental health challenges and i know the administration is currently working hard to re-envision how we're delivering those supports for students who need them in schools i am aiming to ensure that uh resources as we re-envision will not be an issue and that uh to that end
199i'm asking for these funds to be allocated for that purpose for our new director of mental health to utilize as they see fit this is intended to be an upper limit and the funds can be relocated prior to the expiration date uh which they must be used by 2023 should the department not require those funds um so we'll ask the board support in supporting the staff and our students with an area that's very of much need thank you member jacobs uh i'd like to hear from the administration dr bishop [Music] yes um i was just reading it again sr2 is a little bit different than sr3 sr3 was wide open jim are there any precautionary measures for s or two [Music] okay yeah that was my question were there restrictions on sr2 funds that we
200that would prevent us from using those funds for okay with title esa planting we're all good okay okay remember there are there are strings i don't want anyone to think it's it's easy um procurement has to be done in a specific way with competitive procurements and um contracts i mean there are rules to the money but mental health in general is not it is not a banned use just how we can use the money to get what we're trying to do we'll have some strings attached with as it is with answer three okay uh remember lessons this is a question um i have also been thinking about those sr2 funds and we've had a bit of a dialogue about uh ptr reduction but i think one question that i have is for that four and
201a half or five million dollars what number of ptr could we lower k through three class sizes by because i right now k is at 21 first grade is at 22 second is at 24 and third grade is at 25. could we lower each of those by two three two and a half to three no no if you were to just lower k3 down to 20 and kindergarten's at 21 so that only drops by one but to lower all of k3 down to 20 it's 10.3 million yeah my question is what if we didn't lower them all down to 20. it's a little bit you know if we lowered each of those grades by two or three so it would still be a stair step up so you know first grade would maybe go down
202to two to twenty and second grade could go down to twenty two and third grade could go to twenty three fortunately andy has his computer he's at home because he can't be here okay and he's on zoom and we will give him a moment okay thank you figure this out um as i'm going to tell a joke or something so the most andy's ready he'll have the answer so to just to clarify though so is your question related to the motion the motion that microsoft related to the motion because i am interested in the similar pot of money the s or two funds that were unspent from once when they were allocated and memorandum zero zero two in twenty twenty and members when you're trying to one if you're going to i'm trying to understand
203my ability to support the motion on the floor by thinking about um what i understand are the board's goals for improved reading proficiency and the acute level of need that i see in our schools for reduced class sizes [Music] okay other questions while andy andy you ready i am ready thank you okay um so if we were to change the ptr by about one and a half grades k through three that would add back uh 40 almost 43 teachers at a cost of just under 5 million thank you [Music] so so oh yes remember uh donnelly thank you mr president um my question has to do with if we what happens to the next fiscal year budget if we do this the projections i mean my understanding current projection for the fiscal year following the
204one we're dealing with tonight is approximately 40 million dollar gap if we use these esser funds in this fiscal year is that gap going to increase understand that that we're talking about next school year's budget and these funds have to be spent by september 30 2023 from from sirsa or esser 2. the arp money or s or 3 money is september 30 2024. [Music] so none of these funds that this amendment proposes to utilize would otherwise be used in the fiscal year following we will have to spend it by the end of summer school in the summer of 2023 so it won't affect the fy 24 fiscal cliff drop-off [Music] um matt i i would say until you unless you get a push you push these next year and then you take five million push-ups
205but if you're seriously talking about additional positions you can't do that um you know i i mean i'm happy to spend five million dollars but we just had a discussion about 300 000 without a plan and now we're talking about 5 million without a plan so to clarify the the the pot of money that we're talking about for this motion is already in the current budget it will be expected to be used through the end of this fiscal year and it wasn't for a number of reasons a lot of the health teachers ended up not being health teachers last year there were other vacant positions there were when we actually applied it to teacher salaries there was a lot more junior teachers instead of senior teachers so there's a lot of different things that caused
206this um original budget for sr2 to have savings part of that is is just the reality that we didn't know we were going to have such a hard time hiring people and and i think all of us have seen that the whole year okay so it's essentially fun balance this year emily did you have a did i see your hand up michelle i mean oh ellie i'm sorry miss shaw um can i ask okay this might sound silly what is the sr2 grant fund and like what is like involved with it so it's like if it's getting like the remaining is getting put to mental health is it taking away from anything no and that was what i was trying to clarify just now is that the money's already in the budget it's a savings
207that's up that is already in the budget so so esser is um the funds that we received um sr stands for uh what does esther stand for again emergency what elementary school secondary elementary secondary emergency relief fund from the these were federal funds these were funds from for co when we were dealing from kodia the cobait response just be for elementary schools no no no elementary and secondary okay okay yes yes remember wilson so i i do actually want to speak in support of this motion we've heard testimony from parents about the mental health issues that their students have been dealing with due to the last couple years of covid i've heard from many many teachers about the behavioral issues and and the struggles that their students have from pretty much from across the board
208for most educators that i've spoken with and to provide some additional support to help them transition back to ideally a more more positive mental health state i i just can't find a negative with that so i will support this motion thank you member wilson any other comments before we vote remember jacobs yeah thank you madam president just wanted to address the the timely and important question by member lessons earlier that um i appreciate the focus on maintaining a as low up uh people teacher ratios as we can i think the important distinction here as we've discussed is the limit on the timing of when we can spend these funds and then in addition um i think it's also important to recognize that these funds will be able to impact all every student potentially based on
209how programming is implemented and while there may not be a concrete plan by the administration at this point as much as i've pushed for there to be uh as they would attest to i'm confident that they're working to reimagine quickly and that i'm confident at least some of these resources will be abused so again with our support i thank everyone for the questions and consideration [Music] okay let me go to member higgins and then i'll come back because you've had one time to speak and then holloman okay thank you one of the discussions in juneau this past weekend had to do with legislation trying to develop a a mental health plan no funding of course from the legislature but but deal with the mental health issues that are out there significantly my concern is not
210the idea that we don't need to put money into it my issue is trying to develop something to better spend it for one year not having secession funding after that how long will it take to develop some plan of action how can we use that money effectively in a short period of time and if we don't have ongoing funding for it what will be the how beneficial will this money be used that's the only issue that i have um the need for it i think is completely established and i think the fact that all schools in the country within this state right now with different legislatures all kind of expressing the same concerns for their students right now for the impact that we've been under the last few years but but how we can how
211can we use this money on a one-time basis if we don't have continued funding and take so long to even start up the program or even design it that's my that's my concern and i'd like to hear from the administration on that sure dr bishop thank you that's a great question member higgins and i just want to bring it back to the reason that we have a fund balance is that this was towards supports for students this school year for health additional services and the reason that we have it is primarily because we couldn't hire the people in the positions due to the workforce and so [Music] i would say that we're building partnerships with outside organizations that were looking for help to help support but even prior to this time we received a grant
212from the city with their esser funds through a local provider and to increase positions mental health from four to sixteen and we carry about three open positions and in that grant uh simply because of the workforce and so our sharing in the past hasn't been about not having the capacity or the ability to create a plan we're just saying that a plan to increase mental health and supports is going to take time to scale it it's difficult to scale again the reason that primarily the reason that we have these funds is for the same thing of the attrition account that we shared before the workforce that's available to us um is strained right now and so we can put it towards it and then we might be looking at you know a later time of
213finding and it's not to mention that all would go towards that there's other services that we could utilize and i i have confidence in mark stock and um jenny knutson and kate mclellan to come up and and work through that plan but it would just take time to work with the providers as well as our own counselors so i mean we just need to be realistic about hiring people to your point mr higgins you work in the healthcare field so you understand this specific thing remember holloman thank you dr bishop um i'm going to find it thankful to not vote in support of additional mental health resources for students but this is dedication of one-time money or i mean we know that these emergency funds are going to come to an end and if we
214establish a department [Music] i think we'll see value from it i think there's a need there i think over the past year and a half it's been recognized more than ever that schools provide mental health benefits to kids that they were just kind of taken for granted before i'm going to say that we saw a similar thing happen with the funds that came about during the the economic issues of 2009 the stimulus money where we took stimulus money and created some programs that definitely work it definitely had benefits students and when the stimulus money went away the programs went away because then it became balanced against classroom teachers once again which is kind of the gold standard of of any um position that's not directly instructional or not required like you've got to have a
215bus driver you've got to staff your cafeteria but when you're looking at tutors or mental health or counseling or other things like that you balance against [Music] that comes out of classroom teachers so to create a program that's going to face that test in a few years um without any assurance right now that we're going to see the kind of funding that would cover it what i would expect is that the superintendent would come to us if they saw a critical need to say we need more mental health resources here and here because it's critical to the point it's impacting kids in their classroom work and at that point we would have to look at shifting resources from somewhere in to fill that but i i worry greatly about creating a program in the millions
216of dollars a year it's going to face that test uh and unfortunately it it'll be doing good it will be helping students um i i would want us to have a long-term plan for funding it before we took that step thank you are there comments uh member jacobs thank you madam president to advise uh to address the the comments made by vice president hallman uh i i share the concern as to long-term funding not just for mental health supports but for uh the significant drop that we're allocating towards ptr next year going from roughly 56 million to 8 million there's a significant drop off in a number of areas and that doesn't change the need and doesn't change what staff are asking for right now which is supports for youth that don't necessarily include adding
217a teacher to a classroom but still would benefit the work they're doing i want to also be clear that the administration has indicated that that a re-envisioning is coming whether or not this amendment passes and so um in my conversations the administration has been equally clear that uh it is within the realm of possibility that some campuses may face unequal access to mental health professionals like counselors or other supports that they enjoy right now based on need and my goal with this amendment is to ensure that financial resources aren't an impediment to ensuring that staff have the support they need and like every year we'll address it here in about a year's time with the next budget and i would still encourage support for this amendment thank you [Music] thank you yes ms josh uh
218yeah i just want to say that i am in favor of the amendment i know it doesn't really matter like voting count but just from a student in one of the high schools point of view um right now the counselors you know our counselors in our schools there's maybe seven six or seven of them to cover over a thousand students like they can't there's no physical way you can expect them to take care or be there for someone's mental health to take care of their classes to help you know seniors and juniors figure out college situations you know should i apply there like what does my resume look like it especially with covet it's hard to expect counselors to take on so much for so many different students you know it's like they can only
219do so much and so like with this i would say i'm not being biased because i am in high school but like start off strong with high school because we are the ones who are you know we're going having to take this next step into our lives and i just feel like mental health is a bigger impact on that age level of high school students so i i just think mental health supporters would help high schoolers a lot you know just someone else to go to that's not your counselor who you maybe not have a deeper connection with because it is hard for counselors to make deeper connections when they are in charge of hundreds of students at a time of different age levels and different situations so i do think mental health counselors supporters
220social workers would be very beneficial for at least high school students and it doesn't hurt for middle school or in elementary to let them know that they have someone there who they can talk to things about if they're not sure you know if it is a question for their counselor or something they don't necessarily want to talk to their parents about thank you michelle [Music] i do i'd like to amend the amendment uh shall i read it first so i move to amend the amendment um so that it will read i move to amend the fiscal year 2022 to 2023 preliminary budget as proposed in asd memorandum 81 by reallocating the unused sr 1 and 2 funds from memory memos 002 and 110 to ptr reduction for fy23 for grades k through 3 at schools
221that remain below or far below benchmark and reading or math as of spring 2022. and i'll be happy to ship that with you [Music] ask for the right to uh have a ruling as to whether or not that's in order or changing the intent of the main motion but can i see it written first let me see i i have to so the amendment as its as the current the amendment promotion before us is to amend the fiscal year 2022-23 preliminary budget as proposed in asd memorandum number 81 by allocating the estimated 5 million in remaining sr2 grant fund balance for the purpose of student mental health supports and related programming that is the motion before us the amendment just submitted reads i move the first part of it is the same i move to
222amend the fiscal year 2223 preliminary budget as proposed in memorandum 81 by here's where it changes reallocating the unused sr1 and n2 funds from memos zero zero two zero zero two and number 110 to ptr reduction for fiscal year 23 for grades k3 at schools that remain below or far below benchmark it essentially changes the motion yeah point of order so it essentially changes that that isn't an amendment that's entirely an emotion we must this would be a whole new motion this is not amending this is not an appropriate amendment for the motion before us but uh i will leave it up to the board you you could see both katie can you put both up this essentially changes from mental health support [Music] to men more than once but you can do a substitute
223by an amendment [Music] but wait first of all um [Music] so you want to substitute the motion before us yes please [Music] i would there's not may i second for the purposes of the discussion to make sure that there's a second to it so that's not an issue okay thank you she needs a minute [Music] um [Music] okay [Music] uh [Music] it goes back it goes back if the substitute motion fails it goes back to the the original passes if it passes right it's a motion and we have a second to substitute the the current [Music] okay [Music] um [Music] this one it's also [Music] okay we have before us a substitute [Music] motion [Music] i'm sorry a substitute amendment [Music] and you can see it before you it changes it's it but it it
224asks well it's propose this and i'm going to let you speak to it remember lessons but it proposes to reallocate the unused sr one and two funds from memos zero zero two and one one zero to ptr reductions for fiscal year 23 22 23 or 20 is it 22 23 23 yeah okay four grades k3 at schools that remain below or far below benchmark in reading or math as of spring 2022. procedurally uh if this we have uh member lessons we'll speak and then i'll talk about the procedure come on great um thank you for uh this opportunity to speak to my motion um so we have adopted board goals involving some aggressive growth in both reading and math we regularly review progress monitoring and in our most recent k2 reading report only 13 schools
225were on target for growth with one additional school near target eight of the far below benchmark schools had winter proficiency rates in the teens another 13 schools had proficiency rates less than or equal to 25 um our ell are sped and economically disadvantaged students exhibited the lowest rates of uh being at benchmark and crucially our first graders who started kindergarten online and missed some core foundational experiences are experiencing the slowest rates of catch-up growth uh in math we're seeing some similar trends nationally a new study uh by group amplify um has looked at data from more than 400 000 students k through five and more than one in three children uh in grades k through three they say have little chance of reading on grade level by the end of this school year without major
226and systemic interventions um the earliest grades have the fewest students prepared we have had um information in asd for years uh going back to at least the pikas autumn study showing that we need to have significantly lower class sizes i don't think that five million dollars in one year is actually going to get us to an adequate level of class sizes but i think that it's a hail mary opportunity to show the legislature what we might be able to do if we had a little bit more funding by focusing on our ptr reduction at the schools with the most acute levels of need i think we're responding to community members concerns about how we use our sr funds uh specifically with respect to student learning loss uh the needs of underserved students those were two
227core issues that community members told us they wanted to see our esser funds used for i appreciate the mental health focus that member jacobs brought forward i'm deeply concerned about the long-term trajectory for that without adequate funding from the state but i think that this year with these previously allocated but unutilized funds it provides us an opportunity to do something for the students who need it most i'll stop there [Music] thank you dr bishop madam president uh jim anderson pick up a technical piece if you want to share that yes thanks dr bishop um so sr1 won't exist because it has to be spent out by 30 september in fact it'll be spent out in weeks we're back charging stuff to it to close it out it was the most um try to close that
228out and that's partly how we ended up with the fun balance for sr2 as well there's a lot of things that play into doing that so it really would just be yes or two thank you for that then i would move to amend my amendment by striking what is the amount of so2 we're projecting somewhere between 4.5 and 5.3 million so we think it'll be around 5 million we're still waiting on a lot of invoices to come in on it equipment so we left a little bit of bumper we'd like to keep it no higher than 5 million just because we don't have invoices [Music] point of clarification so would that then take out memo two as well that is correct zero zero two is an sr1 [Music] yes are we my understanding is that
229this is already an amendment to an amendment via substitution are we amending are we trying to amend an amendment of an amendment so are we this is a in essence we're treating this as a friendly amendment just a housekeeping correction yes based on the information i appreciate the clarification thank you based on the information from the questions comments and president yes thank you um so yeah i think um the mover of the amendment via substitution and i agree on this matter of fact i think the rationale is almost the same and the concerns are the same we by our own projections are planning on investing in this next budget in positions that likely won't be funded in future years those concerns aren't changing are addressed by this amendment via substitution so to me that's a
230point i also think that the original amendment intends to address a need with youth or underserved as well men in a need that's gone unaddressed two out of three alaskan adults have an adverse childhood experience score which is an individual who's experienced some form of abuse or neglect in their life of one or more alaska ranks near the bottom annually in adolescent mental health we're spending as i believe to be the case 56 million and retaining ptr in this proposed budget we're putting serious resources um i don't see that level of commitment to this guardrail and the safeguard that the original amendment intends to put in place would allow the re-envisioned mental health services that the administration is working to configure the room to grow and support our students now as a it takes effect
231so i'm going to not support at this time due to what i see as a clear ask from our community and staff that i've spoken with as well thank you thank you [Music] remember wilson hey i don't disagree with the fact that our kids could benefit from lower class sizes i don't disagree with the fact that our students our younger students need those additional supports [Music] however the sr2 funds is an opportunity this is an opportunity to support our guard rail regarding mental health it's an opportunity to spread that to as many students within our district as we can whereas [Music] the current substitute amendment as as it states would only temporarily help to focus on a small group of students so i still really want to take this opportunity with that additional money that
232we have again i understand this is one-time money to try to help as many of our students recoup from covid and the mental health issues that it has enhanced for many of them that doesn't hasn't brought them out i mean a lot of our students as member jacobs said deal with mental health issues but it has been enhanced by cobit we've heard that from the community we've heard that from the staff i hear it every day from teachers they need help to in order to continue educating our students they need help and they want our students to have that help and our staff needs that help honestly um i've had a lot of conversations with staff that are struggling because of of the issues with covid and the issues that their students are dealing with
233so i i will support the original motion um at this time i will choose not to support unfortunately the substitute motion [Music] yes member holloman um i think this would be a wonderful discussion in normal times and what the kind of thing that the board really should struggle with um because they're they're both deep needs they both help move our mission forward i'm struck by how little we know about what school is going to look like in a few months and certainly in the fall and [Music] the i to some degree i'm going to say it's a lack of will for a board to choose to not designate all of its money but i just think there's so much uncertainty about finishing out the year and about going into fall of 2023 that the board
234ought to leave latitude where we can and we are inadequately staffed for with teachers and we would love to put more in middle school we'd love more in the early grades we'd love to put more in senior high school um and it's it's a burning need and that there are good things we can do for our kids that we don't do because we run out of money um the mental health part i think member jacobs makes really valid points we're a state with one of the highest needs and we put the least into it that's a really ugly combination but it is where we are but i'm not going to support either just for the purpose of leaving that money in the budget so that as we identify critical areas in the spring and going
235into the fall there's something there that can be utilized as everything becomes more clear and if it turns out nothing bad happens over the next four or five months you wouldn't remember the last four or five months where nothing bad happened i'm just trying to think back real quick i i can't think of it but i i'm much as i would love to spend it i'm i'm going to say we should refrain with the administration knowing that we we have that desire that we are ready to support mental health resources in the targeted area where we need to and we are ready to put that money into uh smaller class sizes at our most critical area which we we've pretty much revolved around saying that is third fourth grade reading so if if it turns
236out that everything else works well and we can do that i i think the superintendent and whoever we pick to replace her will know that and be ready to do it but i also think that right now we should just let that money sit for a little bit thank you [Music] thank you any other questions uh comments question remember donnelly i guess i'll just explain my vote too i agree with member hollam and i really see both these deeds at the same time we're looking at the fy 2324 projected budget gap of 40 million dollars and to have some money additional funds in the bank to help be a shock absorber to close that gap i'm looking for something like that so while i i think i'd love to spend this money on both these
237things but um i think i've got to look out to fy2324 and the uncertainty we're facing there member higgins i see your hand up thank you um i i am going to support this motion and i wanted to explain why it wasn't that long ago i remember when the superintendent talked about efforts to try to lower classroom sizes was something she wasn't successful with it was a little bit frustrating and i uh appreciate that it's something i i support i i remember listening to a second grade teacher just so emotional you know get students they don't know the abcs because they missed a year and a half and they're in crisis uh and that's one of these schools that's below um uh benchmark substantially we've got uh students that are in desperate need for being
238addressed they're so this is a learning stage and they need additional assistance to be able to do that and there's been studies out there i've seen in the country earlier that the success the impact of the early grades are so critical in fact they talk about lowering classroom sizes in the early grades gets you 90 of the benefits of of lowering classroom sizes and all the grades and i think it's we're in that critical stage i mean the whole intent here is to help kids be successful um academically as well of course we want to support them emotionally as well i don't know how the money would be spent otherwise in behavioral health i know it's important but i do know the impact of lower classroom sciences in these early grades they're not reading they're
239not on scale they're behind if we don't do something to intercede we're going to be paying for it every year after that and so i like the effort here i appreciate why this is being proposed remember our bottom line is to help kids be successful and you're not going to do that if you don't have these kids reading you don't have them on the map and then we're playing catch up for years after that if we can catch it early we're better off and it allows us to to really put resources in a way that's going to make a big difference uh i'll just mention before that i think i'd have in the past it was study by congress looked at head start and said these kids start off with your head in kindergarten by
240fourth grade they're on the same level because you're holding them back you don't have enough to keep them engaged while you're trying to help the kids furthest behind so lower classroom sciences in this area we know impacts outcomes and we have some schools that are unbelievably unsuccessful right now with the results that we've seen i like the way you wanted it um you know uh in regards to this really focusing in on those schools we're all about students and outcomes if i thought the mental health was someplace that we knew we could spend it well and it was critical and it would actually be out there with a program we had something thought out i'd have a hard time with this one but there was no question to me this outcome is so important so
241i appreciate the motion and it will have my full support any other comments from the board [Music] so i will you know there sometimes we uh and and this is the first of a struggle it's going to be a productive struggle but [Music] counselors tell me over and over again our kids need supports they are not learning if they are when they have those when they are dealing with the mental uh with the mental mental health issues [Music] uh wellness issues it's a it's five million dollars how many how many positions would that give us did you say ten [Music] but it depends on who we hire would depend on the type of positions if they were so we're not putting this five million dollars or four million dollars wouldn't put [Music] i mean how
242many teachers are we really talking about um um since andy did the calculations i'll defer to him i'm sorry did he say 43 yes i wrote it down point of clarification the way that i worded this it's fewer schools because it's just looking at the ones that are below manchester so it will be more than one and a half right thank you for the president it would be it would still be 43 fte it's just the way it's worded i think we would uh determine which schools some of it would be more than one and a half in some in many of the schools if we're doing the lowest performing i think but 43 fte would be what would be added back approximately [Music] we would be hiring or we would be hiring our goal
243would then be to hire 43 teachers between now and what's the date of the it would be through the full school year next year perfect full school year next year and then those positions and then those people will go away or we look to attrition for we don't know what we'll do frankly we lose about 250 teachers a year normal electrician um 43 is not something where you would assume it would be followed by a riff okay so i'll call for the vote [Music] uh we are voting on the substitute amendment which would um reallocate the funds to uh grades k through three at schools that remain below or far below benchmark reading and math or math as of spring 2022. student vote yes [Music] remember jacobs no remember lessons yes remember wilson no remember
244holloman no remember higgins yes remember donnelly no president bellamy no [Music] so that motion fails uh two years five days that brings us back to [Music] is it amendment three okay it brings us back to amendment three we'll have it loaded in just a minute madame president and wrap up could i make one last comment thank you very much i just want to address some of the the comments that were made which i i think are appropriate that um kind of cry out for a link to be established between mental health supports and academic outputs and there absolutely is a link we know that each of our 40 000 plus students don't come to school every day ready to learn we know that mental health is a key driver in that mental health supports reduce
245behavior problems improve school climate and increase academic achievements it's documented and proven this is a way to address the challenge that we see in our data every goal monitoring session across the district and so it's i think a focus we should have and it's in line with the guardrails that we heard from our community they see value in and so i would continue to ask the board's support in this thank you thank you any other comments on the amendment number three to amend the fiscal year uh budget um by allocating the estimated 5 million in remaining estro 2 grant funds for the purpose of health supports and related programming seeing no hands questions comments we can vote our student vote yes remember donnelly no remember wilson yes member higgins yes member lessons yes remember holloman
246no remember jacobs yes president bellamy yes okay that amendment passes uh five years to nays okay does anyone else have any other amendments any other amendments see none let us vote [Music] point of clarifications would uh [Music] mr anderson will that change the uh upper limit spending authority it's grant oh okay it won't okay thank you uh member higgins do you have your hand up yeah okay there it is okay wait where are we at we're asking for additional amendments at this point uh yes we asked for amendments there weren't any did you have one yeah i did that's why i was raising my hand i'm sorry okay you may state your amendment did you send it in early or do you have it no i didn't said it earlier i was i didn't know
247if somebody else was going to do an amendment with this so i was going to follow through with that okay i would like to move that we removed the 2.3 million dollars for sros and place that money and unrestricted general for unrestricted reserves budget reserves is there a second [Music] seeing no second your motion fails so that brings us back to our vote whenever you redicate yes your student vote yes [Music] uh member higgins yes yes remember donnelly no [Music] remember lessons [Music] yes remember jacobs yes remember wilson yes president bellamy yes [Music] okay that so we our budget passed uh six to one madam president might have a moment of personal privilege yes thank you i moved to direct asd administration to develop and facilitate the presentation of a clear and actionable proposal which
248reallocates the approximately 3 million in funds cost shifted to asd from the fy 22 anchorage municipal budget this proposal should present for a clear vision for how the anchorage school district will utilize this funding should the anchorage assembly choose to reverse these cost shifts during their first quarter budget provision process with a clear focus of proposed reallocation to board guardrails related to supporting employee performance development of a diverse and culturally responsive workforce and addressing underrepresentation in lottery and application-based programs the proposal shall be provided to the anchorage assembly a minimum of seven days prior to the meeting date which first quarter budget revisions will be addressed second and uh where does the meeting day do you know i don't this time i want to give flexibility was the intent with the motion [Music] so is
249this so this is a you're making a formal motion okay so we do not have and i'm trying to figure out where to put this on the agenda i mean it's not on the agenda it's a point of personal privilege not so are you to me you are asking for discussion and maybe a straw poll from the board i'm asking for a deviation from our normal course of business to provide direction outside of the adopted budget at this point and see it as tangentially related to what we just passed and so i felt it was appropriate to discuss now thank you okay so your purpose is to uh discuss it so is there so do we need a second i think we do need a second oh andy did okay so see you may speak
250to your motion [Music] thank you um and i to first acknowledge that mayor bronze and his staff have made time to sit who are lengthy although not quite as likely as a municipal budget process um sit here with us tonight i want to reciprocate and indicate that i value the the partnership between the municipality the mayoral administration and the assembly and our areas of our finances i think as part of that relationship we need to continue to advocate as we do in juneau each and every legislative session for the resources we need i think we just had a lengthy discussion as to why the district doesn't have adequate financial resources it needs right now and so i think that as part of the motion that's now on the floor having specific gas from the administration
251in the areas of our goals and guardrails to take with us and meet with our local partners that will be important as they engage in the first quarter budget revision process so i would ask the board support and directing the administration to take this action and help us with our advocacy efforts thank you [Music] and so you would have a this is a point of general privilege as it relates to the budget that we just had we just looked it up sure the i i don't see the the two is directly relating although this motion indirectly relates to what we just passed yes okay yes remember holloman um i'd like to speak in favor of it also certainly it needs to be done in a timely way we've had the discussion about sro funding before
252about 10 years ago maybe a little less [Music] our our budget comes to us to instruct students at the same time recognize the rather critical value that sros provide to students as well as the well-being of the town and when past administrations have chosen to cut back funding from the municipality or from the police department asd stepped in with funding as a way to maintain it but the feeling is that the police budget should reflect police work and the asd budget should reflect instruction or running the school district and that's that's the direction i hope that the municipality takes and that we take i think if the administration prepares what member jacobs is talking about it will give the municipality and the assembly a picture of the impact they would be having in not fully
253funding the sro program out of the police budget uh you know we we don't dispatch them we don't supervise them we don't set their duties but we do more cooperatively in a way that i think promotes the well-being of the town and certainly of the students that are impacted in a really positive way so i would not want to see the program fail if it needed a lifeline to keep going at full strength i'd want us to do that but but i don't think we should have to so i do support remember jacob's motion okay any other comments i'd like to hear from the administration if there are no more board comments oh dora i'm sorry i told them can i see your hand no okay go on dory i also support both the work
254of the sros i i've seen the great work that they've done i've worked with um as member jacobs i'm also a licensed therapeutic foster parent and i've worked with the sros who have been trained and are really good at working with students and de-escalating them i've worked with police officers that have not had that training and are not nearly as good as de-escalating the situation with students and so i i do support the work that they do i appreciate the work that they do in the schools i i do want to clarify because i i feel that um there was some testimony tonight where it was what i felt was miscommunicated that the sro that anchorage school district in last year's budget paid for the sro funding it came out of asd's funding last year
255and i i want to clarify and please the administration if you choose to clarify that the the sro program was paid out of the municipality budget last year not out of the anchorage school district budget so i wanted um that clarification out there thank you dr bishop thank you madam president um in the past um the sros have been played for um by the municipality by the district and then also jointly but this this fiscal year it is out of um the moa in we haven't paid actually since fy14 is the memo i received i i just want to share a correction that i don't believe that we receive either state funds or city funds strictly only to instruct students we provide a program that ensures safety and the well-being of not only our students
256but our staff who have been growingly concerned as you shared about instances that do cause harm for mental health um you mentioned the aces that that's inclusive of crimes that's inclusive of maltreatment that's inclusive of fights danger what happens in our community the schools are a microcosm of that and for me operationally to provide our community a safe operation for our students and staff and parents to believe that we are doing our very best their sros are absolutely a part of that and about who pays for it we receive funds from the state and we receive from from the city we could say that we use state funds to pay for them instead of the city funds i i don't i mean however you want to split the pie but we've just been talking about
2575 million for this 3 million for this i would i mean i say tongue-in-cheek but i think you're gonna have to put more administrators in the district to continue to keep planning for the work that we want to do to spend money it is highly concerning to me highly concerning that the movement or even the thought of causing any kind of anxiety just because of who wants to pay for it it's causing too much anxiety so i mean i know you didn't ask that wasn't the answer you asked for but um the money is green it pays for a program and the program is valued not only we heard from the student advisory board we heard from the teachers union we heard from the principals union and administration [Music] i don't know of one other
258thing that is aligned in this district as much as the support for the safety of young people and employees alike thank you dr bishop any other comments questions yes remember downloading so um i've been going over in my head the robert's rules on this but i'm not going to raise any objections because the board can do what it wants to do as far as taking things up i think because it's related enough to the budget you know that i'm not gonna but i am concerned about it and i hope that everybody gets the same leeway in the future on things like this um so my priority for such funds would be to increase the fund balance to be available to reduce the 40 million budget gap projected for fiscal year 2324. rather than utilizing them
259for the the three things that are enumerated in this particular proposal we're looking at a 40 million dollar gap in just two years and we don't have any plan to fill it other than go get more money from juno i mean that's the only thing i've heard i mean where is that 40 million going to come from i mean if if we were to be allocated more funds in the city budget i think we should we should you know save on to them and and start to chip away at that 40 million dollar projected gap um even you know in my personal experience from this kind of stuff is that you know you start getting a million here a million there and you just start working it down and we've only got two years to
260get there and we need to start on it so if those funds were available i don't support using them for the things enumerated at this time i support put them in the fund balance to help help deal with the projected 40 million dollar gap we're looking at it for fy2324 any other comments thank you amber donnelly yes remember a very short one i just wanted to point out that the increase this year is a five thousand one hundred and eleven percent increase uh for this cost um for what cost uh for absolutely for the uh for that for what the transfer to the municipality uh on behalf of the sro program okay [Music] remember darling you know this this particular motion doesn't say sro anywhere in it but yeah i want to be clear on
261the record i support funding so it was any way possible because we just can't afford not to have them in our schools so i support the budget the way it is where it's funded through state and local state and local taxes um but i can't imagine a world without the sros there given what has happened nationally in schools and the threat to our students and the wonderful record of success they have it's just phenomenal the and the support from our principles for it so i support it in the budget the way it is i just support the program member jacobs thank you madam president i uh want to be clear in that um i didn't allocate any um specific item or program by design and that i think there's universal support for the program on
262this diocese we haven't expressed any differently in this meeting or any prior board meeting as a matter of fact i think my vote was six to one we just passed a budget that funded the program that was just shifted out of the municipal budget so um i think we just took action to that end this is purely a a matter to recover costs as we will meet the the funds in the future and money that we allocate to these guard rails will free up funds in other areas as member donnelly uh indicated to include uh ptr in the uh upcoming fiscal cliff so i think we are all in agreement it might not just seem that way thank you i'd just like to thank you member uh jacobs so uh dr bishop um do you
263have any thoughts on what we're i mean because i think i don't even know what the date is uh but i don't it might not even be seven day what would the impact be for um to do this uh thank you madam president and and for the record i brought up sros because it was brought up in this on the diocese so i that's why i spoke to it um and there has been discussions in the past um at work sessions in regard to um [Music] you know not paying for sros if the city doesn't pay so that's why i wanted to be clear um member jacobs talked to me about that about just not necessarily a full-blown plan but items to provide to the assembly on different needs that the district has and so
264um i i we could put together our heads and make a list of needs that the district could spend three million dollars on and that was my understanding of that um simply because of the time limits of and then expanding that um over time with a full scale strategic plan but i am not sure um i guess their first quarter january march march would be their first quarter and so this is the 22nd we get another week we have that about 10 days their their next regular meeting is march 1st as is is that ours week that is next week okay so is it it's doable to come up with something is that what you're saying if this passes when a list was a a list of items that the district could spend money on
265yes we could come up with a list of items okay uh remember jacobs is that what you is that what you're looking for yeah no doctor bishop and i talked prior to the record of one mind regarding the intent and then the the latest i heard was that the first quarter budget revisions were scheduled to take march but i don't know that to be the case i don't have the assembly schedule in front of me so all right kate okay see no more uh we have before us a point of general privilege whose hand oh pat i'm sorry that's okay i was going to speak up at one point but i decided to be quiet and surprise you all um i i just want to a couple of points here i mean we've had over
266five years and i just checked with on this but you know a five percent one percent per year adjustment to our budget because from the municipality because it's related to transportation we have not had an increase in base student allocation this issue came up transferring this from the mayor because they were not able to get the increase in the budget they would like they could have an adjustment factor for inflation but because the populations changes and all he was looking at that and trying to better show a savings we have we have not we have been on the losing end of adjustments like that but the municipality hasn't and they've recognized that in the past and trying to support us my concern is that this type of change is not a one year this is
267an ongoing situation and then and the and the assembly understands the dilemma that we are in right now too i believe so i don't mind this i i feel like the issue of how our budget is we know pikachu shows how much we're behind we know the other changes are out there yeah we can do things short term because we have federal funds and then we go off the cliff and and regards to it um i support this because he's trying to make a point i don't know if we're really going to be defined what we could or could not do because you could always use would you budget surplus for 3 million or do something else if it's a crisis but it is it's just an ongoing situation uh that has been created unnecessarily
268unfortunately i do agree i appreciate the fact that they're coming to express their concerns and the support for it i think everybody supports it the sro that is not an issue and we will do whatever we have to to continue that uh and i don't wouldn't think otherwise but i do think this is really a municipal employees doing what effectively the best way they can for law enforcement and the relationship between students and law enforcement has improved so much so that i support this but i it's not just a matter of what dollars we can spend today the problem is ongoing so thank you yes remember donald you know you know the board can find a way to do this i'm sure procedurally but can we not call it a point of personal privilege because
269it just isn't it's it's [Music] it's not a point of generation i looked it up it said we could do a point of general privilege [Music] well it's a substantive matter it's not a point of any kind of privilege it's it's just not that under robert's rules now there's things you can do you can do a sense of the body you could do we could have done when i did a sense of the body the last time i i got some feedback that that was not a process well it is a process parliamentarian uh a parliamentary process well i did it and i'll do it i can do it again i mean i'm just saying there's it's i'm not trying to cause a problem i just don't want to create a precedent that this is
270a point of personal privilege you know point of general privilege so point of general is motion pertaining to rights of the entire body yeah it's not relative to one person this issue he brought an issue up for the body to to determine so what do you recommend remember donnelly well in the legislature we do we we ask for a sense of the body that's what we would do of course we use mason's manual and and it's designed to facilitate that it takes a lot of support to do that because typically things are rules sent on to a committee but but you can do it if you want if you got enough votes you know [Music] that's why i you know i don't see a particular problem with getting there it's just that i don't really
271think it fits under either one motion okay i'm gonna uh pivot over to remember holloman uh the other robert rue supporters um yeah the the general emotions of privilege relate to what the body is has the ability to do and they're not debatable right um this is in essence part of the budget discussion so if it had come as an amendment to the budget that would have been an order but in essence it's a motion that's simply made and we're acting on it and that's not our usual procedure right we normally have to go to a committee and come back with a recommendation i think a sense to the body makes sense we're we're asking the superintendent to do something for us and she tends to do that yeah i know we probably could have
272just asked her to do it okay thank you dr bishop that was going to be my suggestion i just asked you to do it just ask for a list after all this [Music] uh so it seems like there is uh is there anybody that is not um [Music] yeah i'm not seeing remember remember it's your uh motion at this point are you comfortable uh given the discussion so far and the fact that the superintendent just said we just need to ask her to do it are you okay with withdrawing yeah if we've just conducted a straw poll sense of the body and the administration's in agreement i have no problem with drawing the motion thank you mr president thank you board thank you did you get that katie all right thank you all right let's
273get back to our agenda we are now on our thank you guys sweet this was a great discussion i appreciate all of your input item g that's non-action items they will be back before you next week um and we will have a full discussion on each of those next week we are now at public comment is there anyone left in the audience who would like to comment make a comment at this time [Music] so it looks like we have eve green on the line ever did you oops did she go yeah eve yeah can you hear yes this is this is our public our last public comment so you are you're on if you would like to talk speak to the board okay you have three men um i'm okay i'm here today to support
274dropping the overwhelming tyrannical mass mandates that have been posed upon our children for the past two years in anchorage for some reason the school board seems to think that they're doing what is right for the children and for the people the people and the parents are telling you otherwise but you're not listening first of all don't sit here lie to our faces while we pay your salaries and tell us that this isn't political or about re-election how many of you today are yourselves endorsed by planned parenthood for some it doesn't get more political than that if this isn't political then why aren't you following the actual science of the virus a virus that let me remind you in the united states of america ends in the death for less than 1.0001 three percent of the
275population between the ages of zero and seventeen that's less deaths in two years in suicide in car accidents cancer homicide abuse and neglect on and on this also isn't about our children's health if it were about the children's health then why haven't we changed how school lunches are scheduled and what is actually given to our children i've always volunteered at my child's schools and i know firsthand what they're being given if those two are about their health then why aren't the rates for bullying and child abuse and suicide dropping why aren't the rates of drug overdose going down no this isn't about the health of our children this is about and many have said it political theater so that you can look good in the eyes of people who you think will re-elect you but
276you don't look good it looks tyrannical and when history is recalled people will remember that you didn't stand up and fight against this tyranny you didn't stand up and get and fight for our children the people in our community who need it the most it's our next generation there are jewels it's not right for my daughter who's in seventh grade to fear taking her mask down or letting it fall beneath her nose and then fear all day getting detention suspension explosion ridicule and even salty attitudes from some educators in the school this is this is not the only instance of this happening this is their fight now and it's a fight that has been thrust upon them without choice the 14th amendment states that even approved medical treatments may not be imposed without informed consent
277or it is considered battery as such anyone requiring participation in a medical experiment considered coercion can be held personal personally liable for damages incurred the nuremberg code which is codified into american law provides us the protection from accepting any force medical procedure therapy or device there can be no element of coercion deceit or duress these actions are unlawful and are considered thank you very much eve okay that is our last um where did my agenda come [Music] here so that brings us now to item i superintendent update and we'll keep an eye on our time i'm going to go very quickly madam uh president i want to congratulate our asd teams who participated in the battle of the books they were able to participate because of their teachers and the librarians who actually put the
278competition on and i will read off the schools that scored so um in third fourth grade there were 32 teams statewide huffman and birchwood abc both tied for second i'm gonna jump to high school and say high school our bartlett team took fifth in the state um out of 18 teams middle school there were 23 teams and our highest asd team was greening took eighth place and now aquarian at the fifth and sixth grade took sixth place but ladies and gentlemen the state winning fifth sixth grade team who competed and beat 32 other teams for first place was rogers park fifth and sixth grade congratulations and that's all the good news i have to share thank you dr bishop yes dr uh doctor i'm i'm i'm just renaming it i have a juris doctor yeah
279mr donnelly i got the dada right um i'm superintendent you mentioned you might give us an update on the gentleman that was here and he was concerned about what happened at the school of the event in the gymnasium it was i thought it was pretty ironic that i thought you s that same evening you set out a very rational reasonable way to deal with those kind of issues and yet that's not what happened to him according to his version of the account sure i can update you in bc we don't generally um talk about it in public but there was a difference in uh opinions about what occurred so in regard to the masking you know that was kind of a discussion but what occurred after that was the point of discussion that dr stock
280is going to reevaluate and uh i will stick it in there but yes we um at this point we have said just provide a mask ask nicely but we're not going to engage and be masked police that is what i said on the 8th and his account is different um when secondary looked into it they shared another scenario as well and so dr stock will do a final evaluation and reevaluate it thank you we can put that in board connect other comments from board members dora i i wanted to [Music] say a couple specific thank yous there our um at our community council meetings this month we presented on the bonds and um i had both the toms i'm so much easier to say both of the times um that attended each of those with
281me and uh and there was community members that had some specific questions that they were just able to answer right off the bat so i i just appreciate that time i know that was um quite a few evenings that you spent supporting board members so thank you yeah i did all that i had i didn't have both times but i had one time [Music] [Laughter] you guys have been great uh doing that that takes out of your evening i appreciate it um [Music] uh because uh my boy at least at my community council meetings uh people really they don't have a lot of questions but they do have questions all right remember lessons i have two questions one is technical and one is maybe just allowing for a little bit of thoughtfulness um you um
282have we have a new you you un unleashed unveiled rolled out announced the word i'm looking for you announced um a change to the masking policy and the technical question i have is are school buses subject to tsa rules requiring that masking is still [Music] going to be part of school buses that's a great question through the present member lessons yes and uh in the summer we worked through this as well when we transported this summer that was the case as well we had masks if they didn't bring one to put on so families i mean this is sort of an announcement to families but families would need to continue their students would need to continue masking on buses as long as the tsa requires that buses and other that's correct okay the tsa changed
283on air flights as of march 18th we don't know if that's going to be another transportation um but yes schools are going to communicate be prepared and we've worked through that in the past okay and then the second question is um could you illuminate your thinking on february 28th as the turning point why why that date versus um versus tomorrow versus the day after spring break i mean what what helped you make that decision sure um i left it till after a board meeting because last time i changed it by surprising you you said that wasn't good and so i allowed time for you to discuss it with me and the public and so um the 28th was the the next um just a date that i had chosen far enough out there for families
284to make decisions if there were large-scale decisions as may have been shared some are going to enroll students and some might choose to unenroll students [Music] remember jacobs thank you so two quick questions the the first is that uh the previous meeting we had checked in about the availability of n95 mass and my understanding is that the administration ordered some to replenish some kits as we donated them to the municipality in the past i was also told that staff could on a case-by-case basis request an n95 from either their school leadership or school nursing staff is that still the case that is presently still the case yes okay and then a separate question yeah okay thank you and a work session we had about six weeks ago now i believe we had the chance to
285talk with the state epi team and they indicated that they concurred with the cdc recommendation at that time of um universal masking in schools have in our conversations with them how has their guidance changed since [Music] through the president to member jacobs that's a a good question and i shared with the board uh letter that dr zink sent uh in conjunction with michael johnson uh sharing that communities will have to determine on their own how to scale down as we move out of the high case counts of omicron that it would be appropriate um but it was very open to lots of different things we have already scaled down back in september october close contacts um some of the testimony today was really about isolation if you have um [Music] a positive case you isolate
286you don't quarantine we have not been asked anyone to quarantine in quite some time that is for those that were in association with the positive uh our policy has been if you're healthy you come to school whether you're an adult or a child if you have symptoms we have the very best fastest testing you could want pcr to be sure if you're sick or not so some of those scaling down we had already done in the past we scaled down a quarantine or isolation being out for a positive case from 10 days to five in accordance so the idea of scaling back was appropriate one of the things that that team cautioned against was removing everything all at once and so for us one of the next steps was masking i did have a conversation
287with dr zinkerself in regard to elementary schools and the idea of again the impact on educational learning and i know a lot of feedback is that i'm not a real doctor because i'm a you know [Music] a edd not a medical person and i i didn't share anything about the medical use of a mask but i am highly qualified to let this board know that educationally and the well-being of students is being affected and we should listen to our educators in the classrooms who are sharing that with me every day um so i suggested to her that um we need to do this in elementary we have to help these kids and um she talked about cohorting and that would be an appropriate scale down and you know she sees why we would do that
288and you know they're it's elementary school they're in a classroom that they're with those kids anyway and um when we brought it back to our team um it was very clear feedback uh that came from schools that it would be difficult to do just partial families that if we were at a time that we want to take masks off wait until we can do it for a large majority and so while my conversations happened in january and we waited and we waited i didn't send out an update february 1st because i wanted to wait just a little bit longer to get those cases down because they're trending they're you know we're going to have high cases for a very long time because omicron is it's going to settle at a higher rate i believe than
289others simply because it is more transmissible um so the point of your question is yes that's scaled down yes i received support in that but again they just give guidance not decision making and recommendations um but as you read the the letter did share it is appropriate for communities to consider scaling back in schools we're going to have to do that anyway um over time so i hope that answers your question it's a long about way to let the board know that quite a bit of thought did go into this and waiting and talking to stakeholders to come up with the plan thank you dr bishop uh looking at our time it is now 10 53 we need to if we're going to be going longer than 11 uh we need to go on yeah
290let's say madam president moved to extend until 11 30. second okay moved to extend any opposition to extending can we let i would like to let the staff go if if we can i i just think uh because we're just left for board comments so if this dr bishop if the staff wishes to leave they may i was thinking if i was going to get another question i might need a lifeline but that's okay um uh yeah i have my phone they can tell me uh certainly i appreciate it i'm sure they do and their families do so thank you for your support thank you guys okay all right so uh madam president um i did just get uh we are 31 active cases in the district now down from 1400 when the state team
291briefed the board okay thank you uh all right board member comments we've already had member we've had two board member comments go on member holloman i'm gonna say i know a lot of people expected us to vote on whether or not we supported that decision um not understanding that it was still within the superintendent's authority to make the changes it would have taken a motion um and and that would have put us all on the record i did come prepared to support it um [Music] there's still a lot of concern uh and i think we have to be prepared for the idea that we might see a blip an uptick just in that if we had an aggressive masking policy even without coping you could expect to see an uptick in some illnesses in the
292district if you stop masking because contrary to what some people have said there's lots of evidence that masks make a difference for air or born dispersed agents of disease i also did want to say to the public we've had a lot of feedback on both sides of this issue it's not a matter of not listening to one side or the other it saved and flows from one side to the other but but there are a lot of people in the community with concerns that want to see it continue there are a lot of people that want to see it come to an end or be a choice and we understand that the political side of it i've never really understood it has always been about a public health issue and i think one of the
293confusing things in this policy is that it's not necessarily about guaranteeing the safety of of a particular individual the mask and the mitigation steps can't do that but hopefully during the most difficult times of this we help keep the case rate down in the city of anchorage and right now we still have a high rate it's dropping dramatically it does feel to me like we're somewhere close to the right moment to take this step i can't really say exactly where it is but i think we're close enough um again it'll fall to our staff and everybody in the buildings to take the brunt of it and face the change and and see how it goes i do have confidence that if something goes awry the superintendent's ready to take a step to mitigate that and
294and i think where we're headed is into an area where it can be more focused it won't be a district-wide policy or district-wide decision it'll be in a building or a classroom or something in particular as the incidence of all this narrows down to much smaller numbers and more localized situations so i i would hope that people in the public realize all of us have thought about this a lot it's not something anybody ever wanted to do we always wanted to be focused on other things and i think we've made the best choices we could anchorage has had a relatively good experience compared to so many other areas i'd like to think that that the steps that were taken here had something to do with it it wasn't possible to avoid it entirely and uh
295but we've done pretty well overall so i do appreciate everyone voicing their opinion um [Music] i i would hope that they understand how seriously the board members the administration and everybody in all the buildings have taken this through the whole time thank you member donnelly i did that on purpose thank you thank you member holloman okay remember donald you already had your your comments no no i had a question i asked this one i didn't make a comment update no we're on comment we were on board member comments yeah we're [Music] this meeting um at last meeting we were uh meeting after dr king's uh birthday celebration and this this meeting where we're meeting after what when i grew up was george washington's birthday and became president's day and i just wanted to reflect back
296upon washington's greatness and his thanksgiving proclamation where he declared thanksgiving he said it's the duty of all nations to acknowledge the province of almighty god to obey his will and to be grateful for his benefits and humbly to employ his protection and favor and then on being an american president washington stated citizens by birth or choice of a common country that country has a right to concentrate your affections the name of american which belongs to you in your national capacity must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations and then he's in very very amazing farewell address we all remember what king george said about george washington said if he can he can walk away from leader being the leader of a country like that he'll be the
297greatest man that ever lived basically he said um and in his farewell address to americans he said particularly concerning to me given what's been happening in canada lately he said if the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we will all we may be led like sheep to the slaughter thank you member donnelly uh any other board member [Music] comments not seen any oh pat i will i think i saw you wave yes yeah i'll make it short though i i always like to thank the people who did come and address the board and and listening to what they had to say there was pretty uh heartfelt feelings both sides in regards to the mask issue um and uh there has to be a time where things are going to come to
298an end but there's also something looking out ahead omicron 2 is supposedly 50 more contagious than the current or but it's milder we just don't know what's going to be coming and how that will impact things so i hope that the district keeps an eye open in regards to how we could do it differently maybe less easier if we have to deal again with some type of major breakout because they don't know what's going to be coming in line with it but i appreciate both comments and i wish there was some way to get both sides to better say okay tell me what the other side said because what i heard on both sides was i don't want to be afraid i want to be the mask i want to be protected and the other
299side saying you know that this is the consequences to a mass you know uh whether you wear them or not and they're both right so uh we'll move forward with that and go forward so i appreciate that and with that um dude how much time do we have left i get to keep thank you very much so i think we have a finance committee meeting tomorrow at noon and 13 hours okay uh other than that our next meeting will be next tuesday yes comment only comments right yeah quick quick comment um i think it's really important for the board and the community to think about how we're going to collectively move forward um i think that we need to consider how we conceptualize and proactively prepare healthy school environments we need to consider structural changes
300to improve student well-being including renewed attention to student start times and the structure of the school day including attention to recess and lunch we need to consider all of the different ways that we we must support our whole students if we're going to see them succeed thank you and with that uh i will accept a motion to adjourn move to adjourn second all right