ASD School Board Meeting 02/02/21

001good evening thank you for joining us tonight it is tuesday february 2nd 2021 and i am calling the regular school board meeting of the english school board to order in the boardroom i have myself elisa vicilis board member hildy board member marsette on zoom we have board member holloman board member donnelly board member mitchell and board member bellamy also in the boardroom with us tonight is our superintendent dr dana bishop as well as several administrative staff we do have everybody here tonight next up is the flag salute and i would like to ask emily would you please guide us in the flag salute [Music] i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god individual indivisible with liberty and justice for

002all thank you [Music] before we begin i would like to acknowledge with gratitude the denia people both past and present who have lived on these lands since long before anchorage was here may we all be good stewards of these lands and emily my name is emily hicox and i am the student representative to this board i was elected to serve through the student advisory board and my votes are advisory so i offer a student voice to the body we want to welcome you to our meeting and thank you for attending and supporting the work of the anchor school district and this board the board thanks students parents teachers staff school business partners and the entire community for your investment in our district with your time your talent and your tax dollars thank you i'd like

003to at this time just turn it over to board member marsette she had one or two things she would just like to add an appreciation with her opening statement uh first of all i i want to uh shout out to our counselors it is uh counselors uh week of recognition and the great job that they do and the sacrifices that we ask them uh to make also along with our other staff i also want to point out that it's a black history month it is a time for us to recognize the contributions um that have been made um by um and i'll just read a little bit it's on our website here and it just talks about um that this started out as a one week uh celebration back in february of 1926 and then

004it encompasses the birthdays of both abraham lincoln and frederick douglas response was overwhelming black history clubs sprang up teachers demanded materials to instruct their pupils and progressive whites not simply white scholars and parent pathanthrologists step forward to endorse the effort the celebration was expanded to a month in 1976 the nation's bicentennial president general art ford urged americans to seize the opportunity to honor the two often neglected accomplishments of black americans in every era of endeavor throughout our history that year 50 years after the first celebration the association held the first african-american history month by this time the entire nation had come to recognize the importance of black history in the drama of the american story and since then each american president has issued african american history month proclamations and the association now the association of

005the study of african american life and history continues to promote the study of black history all year thank you thank you next up is the approval of the agenda i would entertain a motion i move to approve the agenda a second i think you have a first and a second are there any uh changes edits or anything of the like to the agenda as written hearing no objection the agenda is approved as written next up we have our military report and i see that colonel de la mater has joined us and would like to turn it over to him thank you for joining us all right thank you mr kalas good evening ladies and gentlemen just a couple of quick items for you here from the uh from the installation so first thing i wanted

006to do is just um make sure everyone's tracking that uh colonel aguilar the installation commander um rescinded the public health emergency here on the installation effect of 29 january and at the same time she also took us back down to health protection condition bravo so we did that because of the sustained low number of rate um cases that we've been seeing here on the installation which is much of what we've been seeing in the local community uh low test positivity rates as well as um the fact that we've got good capacity in the installations medical facilities so those are the main reasons why we went ahead and made that decision um she's been in close coordination with the acting mayor to make sure that the um adjustments we've been making to base posture are in

007alignment with what is being done in the municipality and we'll continue to do that so that's the first item the second item i want to do is to um is to thank the board and dr bishop specifically for letting um mr tom roth and miss heather philp come in brief virtually at our installation um staff meeting a couple weeks ago they actually did on the first day of school and what they did is they were very helpful in articulating to our installation leaders some of the classroom and bus transportation mitigation measures that are in place as the kids go back to school and i can tell you a lot of us were out of the schools on the first day to kind of help give our thanks to the teachers and the faculty and to

008cheer on the new kids as they came back to the classroom and very very impressed with the the diligence of the bus drivers and following those protocols and also with the school faculty so uh big shout out to mr roth and miss phil for uh for helping us there we're very grateful to have a great relationship with the anchorage school district um that's all i have for tonight i'll pause for any questions from the board thank you did any board members have any uh comments or questions for the colonel seeing none thank you so much for joining us tonight and for the update and we look forward to hearing from you again in a month next up in the agenda our student advisory board report emily how's it going it's good we're super excited we

009had our first meeting on the 21st of january um we're super thankful dr johnson came and talked to us a little bit and gave us her full support and so we're super happy um our biggest thing is over sort of our break from student advisory board i worked with mr wheelis and miss lewis to rewrite our constitution and so we passed that um and so we added some changes to our executive board as well as our committees and so we're hoping to get that rolling we're going to elect a secretary and a public relations officer in february and then at our march meeting we will elect the president-elect who will become the president for next school year as well as the student representative so hopefully in march we'll have a new person for you guys

010to meet and work with for the upcoming year and then sorry our next meeting is on the 18th of this month [Music] thank you did anybody have any comments or questions for miss emily nice to see you back emily we missed you indeed and we are looking forward to working with some student youth representatives this weekend for the alaska association of school boards has their annual youth summit and i'm just looking forward to getting the student voices um you know out with our legislators so uh thank you to all of that uh member mitchell yeah i just had a question for emily um i in the past has it you've asked for somebody who's willing to be the student rep on school board and it sounds like maybe now you're making that part of the

011duty of being president is that a shift yes so we came to the conclusion that we thought that it would be best for student advisory board for the president to also be the person who is communicating with you guys on the board just because it sort of gives the president that responsibility which is one of the main things that we're really trying to encourage with sab is getting that communication between us the students and you guys and so we think that it's a good shift um it also sort of consolidates our executive board a little bit and then there's more opportunities for us to really work as a group and less separation as like an executive board and a body where you want to work as an entire student group to get things done well

012and that way whoever's running for president knows that's part of their duty so it's just a done deal that sounds great thanks thank you emily next up in the agenda we have our board conference and committee reports i will just start with governance and chair hildy [Music] thank you we have not met since our last meeting um we'll have some non-action items so we'll wait for those when we get to them our next meeting will be february 9th at 3 30 and you can be on zoom to join in thank you and the chair of communications uh chair bellamy yes thank you we have not met since our last meeting um which was uh i think it was the 12th of uh january our next meeting will follow the uh com the governor's committee meeting

013on uh february 9th and we will meet from 4 30 to 5 30. thank you thank you and next up uh chair marsette for finance yes we haven't met since our last meeting um our next meeting we've changed our meeting times around so that we'd have more work sessions so finance next meeting date will be february 10th it'll be 12 to 1. it'll be held remotely it'll be a zoom link posted on the school board calendar and agenda and don't miss it because you know numbers are exciting and worth talking about thank you and as this is budget season there's always a lot to talk about uh next up on the agenda is community outreach and so didn't know if any board members had any comments or things they were hearing around at community councils

014uh that they wanted to share with the board remember marcep um i failed to share last time and i have passed this on to dr bishop but there was a question about uh the changing of the name to from east high school to betty davis high school and they were just asking me the uh costs for that and i i had no idea so i'm i'm i'm sure when dr bishop will get to it it's not a priority um i'll be able to pass that on um the other thing is i've attended several meetings i've had problems getting into some of their move zoom meetings with the links and have communicated that but um for the most part it's been pretty quiet and i haven't had a lot of questions thank you next up i

015see member bellamy yes thank you i'd like to uh thank uh member marcet for uh reminding us that it's uh black history month uh and i'd like to just add real quickly that the theme for this year is the black family uh representation identity and diversity and so and i'm really um i'm really uh uh encouraged i'd like to encourage uh people to uh look into uh what that some of the information that miss marsett shared that's on our website as well as engage in your communities and your schools i attended the um aedc and i think members marsett and mitchell also attended that um that that um i think i don't even know what to call it a meeting community summit about our economic situation here in anchorage uh the forecast for it the

016current condition and the forecast for it and uh that was uh i mean it had some it had some bright spots but we've got a ways to go uh in terms of recovering and from from cobid and regaining our economic strengths uh the other thing is um at the federation of community council we had a a little preview of the bonds and i will say that i was so happy that asd was not on the list for bond this year uh but there will be several um as and as soon as they are i think they've been approved by the muni i don't have them all but but there's several uh fire department roads the usual and then there is a reading program going on at fairview elementary and uh that the representative to the

017council um is looking for gifts for the students so if anyone would like to reach out to the school to donate those gifts that would be great and my final comment is this is a fifth year um that nea has joined with the i think it's nea justice um to recognize uh that this week uh for the fifth year is uh black lives matter in school week and there are a series of activities uh on the nea uh website for people to uh peruse so i thank you thank you oh member merced sorry i forgot something i didn't know if this was the right time to do it or not but hey what the heck um i did go out and visit 10 of our schools last week very impressed with what was going on

018[Music] i saw happy kids not smiles because they had their mask on but i saw happy eyes teachers were happy it looked like school to me like any other day except for the mask and the distancing and the barriers but you know one preschool teacher told me she said you know my kids are so um on it we prepared that they're going about their routine doing everything they need to do their masks washing their hands sanitizing whatever they need to do she said we actually got done 30 minutes early because they knew what they needed to do and they're so excited about being back in school that you know they they are doing this um i i was just over uh went to several uh elementary schools i went to three middle schools in one

019high school and i can tell you i mean there's concern i won't lie to you but for the most part i saw kids that were happy that were engaged and i i it just supported everything that i've been supporting about getting our kids back into school so thank you thank you all right moving on in the agenda next up is our goal monitoring section and grades for secondary and i'm at this time i'm going to turn it over to our superintendent dr bishop thank you madam president and i wanted to just share with the board as well as publicly that outcome monitoring is going to be a focus for our board meetings as we move into the future with the board adopted new goals and guard rails the uh charge is to respond to the

020board and and demonstrate growth and um evidence that we can meet those goals and then also uh be able to articulate um you know what is being done and some of the changes that we might need so this is an accountability accountability measured by the anchor school board for its programs and its system and especially for the learning of children until we get to those initiatives in regard to the goals and guard rails we are engaging in outcome monitoring and this particular one although it is off the schedule of the goals and guardrails somewhat secondary grades i would like the board to know that i are evidenced as success in post high school education so colleges find many times there's been several studies uh one through uh gallup and the others i'd have to get

021the university uh they did demonstrate that secondary grades especially are a better indicator of college success because they do have somewhat of more than just knowledge of the content in them generally secondary grades are about willingness to work as well and those are some of the things that we find in our sports and our competitions as well uh taking feedback moving on finishing something so i'm i'm happy to share with you secondary grades in fact that uh this somewhat does tie to a board goal for uh college life and career readiness so with that we'll start with the numbers and uh again this is just the distribution of the marks and i want to say that again it is about the marks it is the number of grades given not children uh not because we

022know a child could have up to three grades or up to six grades uh so these are the number of marks and we have uh basically just compared two years uh in an uh instance this is really to demonstrate the board has asked about how has uh really learning through this pandemic influence children's success and so therefore in general years we'll have three to five uh trend lines uh we just took one year to the next knowing that this is such an outlier year uh that we're just comparing it last year to this year so 19 and 20 is uh the full secondary grade mark distribution if you look at the total at the bottom it's nearly 158 000 marks and so multiple marks per per student uh the ina at the bottom is basically

023an incomplete uh it's really more more um of a non-grade or null uh it doesn't show any value it's just laid out there so that it wouldn't interfere with the gpa uh it is basically a non-mark more so than than any type of mark um in you can see that the number of marks decreased and um it really had um to do with um the having less students and especially having students take less courses at a given time and so we just wanted to demonstrate that um both of those enrollment as well as how schedules were organized may have influenced this nonetheless what we've chosen to do is to utilize percentages so that you know within the subset what are the percentages rather than the exact numbers but the exact numbers help you understand the

024significance of the percentages so they they do have a relation again in the uh incomplete remember it's kind of a a null grade it's it's it's no value yet the increase was at three hundredths of a one percent we had uh last year and certainly last school year rather [Music] last calendar year was part of this school year we have five uh almost five and a half percent of our grades and i'll share a little bit about that you'll notice in grades six seven and eight uh we really have our schools working towards allowing flexibility in grades and pushing out the incomplete or the final marking period for that grade at the next slide we'll just take a look at the count of marks earned for fall of 2021 if you notice is lower again

025there's the 157 984 at the top and the 84 339 so the data that you just saw is now demonstrated in this graph and we took the liberty to to use a new graph uh with this as we're not um on a line item because it's not necessarily too much change uh the stacked graphs can demonstrate the total is a hundred percent and then you can see the distribution of that hundred percent between 19 and 20 20 21 1920 and then 2021 uh f's did increase by about three percent and a's decreased by one percent and for the aggregate that is not statistically significant when we run uh through the test of um regression however we are continuing to look at individual student groups to see if any of those changes were significant in those

026areas in the simple statistics method anytime we um fall behind it's significant i'm speaking in statistical terms when i say that it's not significant so roughly the largest drop was in the b category at four percent so we're going to move on and we always want to look at who are the students that fall into these categories and what's happening but the first thing we did is look at grade level and if you notice i had shared the large number of eyes or n's n a's those really resided in the sixth seventh and eighth grade if you can see there are some nine through twelfth as well but if you notice uh in the one year to the next the the the missing orange if you will orange is f an f grade uh and

027so we really continue to work with students to find success in their learning and so that's if you take a look there i uh primarily i would um guess that we will find over 90 percent of our eyes in our middle schools because they continue to work with students at this time to really it's not about earning a grade they are focused on filling the gap of learning that was missed um likewise you can take a look if we just stay with the f's one of the things that you might notice is that that is the the a significant increase on this chart in regard to last year to this year and uh most likely what's what's the elephant in the room is is really our pedagogy switch from face-to-face to on line but i'll

028share that in 1920 the f's accounted for about four to eight percent and as i said they really jumped uh and they're from one to sixteen percent in this present year uh the grade levels that really demonstrated the most struggle with apps were our ninth and tenth graders 10th grade is a key grade that's stabilization in ninth grade if students struggle at the end of ninth grade without supports generally we have students leave school or drop out there are levers by 10th grade so this is concerning uh to us and between 19 and 20 uh 1920 and 2021 the trend for high school students was a decrease of b's and c's and an increase of a's and f's and so essentially what we've done is really polarized uh the achievement uh so the middle kind

029of um moved to the ends and um i think if if you're showing up and online then you you potentially have uh with the additional time given to raise your grade but by the same token we do have and our teachers have shared we have students that don't turn on their monitor they're not logging in our teachers are looking at a blank screen so they're finding it difficult to reach some of our learners from home uh but again uh it's especially um concerning for us in grades nine and ten because those are such critical years to have the finishers in 11th and 12th next we want to look at student groups by ethnicity and once again you can take a look at the stacked graphs they're called and they're divided by the distribution of grades

030by each ethnicity by the two years that were selected 2019 and 2020 and these are fall of the school year 1920 2021. uh and uh just to share in both 1920 and 2021 the alaska native american indian student group struggled the most with apps and the rate of fs for the alaska native american indian uh was 14 and it grew to nearly 19 this continues this student group continues to be the one for which we need to really uh review our past thoughts on learning and how learning happens and to really look at how our system is set up for the success of all students and then we ask ourselves how do we um impact this knowing uh education and educational attainment is so important the largest change of any student ethnicity group was the

031increase in fs for the native hawaiian pacific islander and they rose from a little over nine percent and the fall of last year to 17 in the fall of this school year the trend for letter marks when viewed by ethnicity is a decrease in a's and b's and an increase in d's and f's and this is all with the exception of the black student group which increased a's by two percent between those two years an important consideration though when viewing these data is that the alaska native american indian student group shows that 12 and a quarter percent of their letter grades fall in the n a or the i um while the native hawaiian pacific islander shows about a little over eight and a half percent in this category this means we don't truly know

032the distribution of these groups uh yet even if we took the the twelve and a quarter and eight and a half of the uh incompletes um and put them in the a category this would still be well below the two highest categories of asian and whites at uh 50 and a half percent respectively and 52 almost 52 and a half and so you can just the stat graphs what that allows you to do is to see the picture of right away the green right away the orange and the differences in those and again it doesn't um we know that whether it's a student's you know uh zip code where they're born or the ethnicity or nationality or race for which they're born that that is not an indicator of intellect that all of our students

033have the potential to learn and it is upon our school district and our educators to understand and review our practices on how we ensure that all means all and these are some of the the tough um conversations principals are having with their teachers teachers are having with teachers supervisors are having and certainly that you are having with me and really accounting my uh evaluation on these data and the success of students [Music] looking at other groups we also look at interest groups of students and these are interest groups and and just for those that don't know within the school system in the federal government there's certain student groups that they have recognized that may need more revenue as an input and certainly anchor school district as well as most school districts if you take federal

034money around the entire nation uh could receive additional revenue uh in particularly with these student groups to really have additional inputs into their success the largest change of any of these groups was the increase for apps for economically disadvantaged students and the total free and or reduced lunch and there's some other indicators that can put you in the slot if you don't um have those data or actually are in the lunch program um that is about 40 of our entire school district but many of our schools this number is a hundred percent and so we really have um some disparity uh uh among our schools as well in these types of um student groups um and their representation in our schools so between 19 um fall of 19 and fall of 20 the trend for

035all groups of interest was a decrease in a's b's and c's and an increase in d's and f's basically those grades that moms and dads like to see when you take home um they decreased and the grades that we consider leading to to failure or school dropout are the d's and f's and while d is a passing grade it's generally um you don't know is that really close to a c passing or is it really close to failing and uh therein lies kind of our our we don't like to see the d's and f's and we certainly want to work with students an interesting pattern for the groups of interest is the consistency of the letter marked categories for economically disadvantaged students or eds you might see it on your paperwork or reports that you

036read and ell and students with disabilities were within a few percentage points of each other for the letter grades this fall students with disabilities saw the smallest decrease of a's um while economically disadvantaged students saw a decrease of uh almost four and a half percent uh students with disabilities was less than one percent uh language learners were in between those at a little over three percent for a's but despite each group having a unique challenges and situations it is interesting that the just distributions were relatively similar i do want to add that um the column all the way on the right is all students so that you can have a comparison of when you look at data you want to know to what to what am i comparing it but certainly the ends and these

037categories could overlap in fact i could have one student that is represented in all of these categories and i just like to to review that with you that a student could be an english language learner while receiving um an uh learning on an independent learning plan or individualized learning plan students with disabilities as well as being economically disadvantaged so these are not um it's not a zero-sum game here they they could add up to be one student represented in all three categories hence the marks go up and down up and down um in not a pattern that you would expect uh when we take out um when we looked at all students and took out 9th 10th 11th they would add up these don't add back up just so you can understand that because the

038student can be in multiple categories um but um i leave you with the information um there is work to do i would say that online learning and having to zoom uh without a choice and supports interest or or disposition to to do it uh there's lots of many things that uh impact that that we are not doing as well as our teachers have and have the success with students face to face and and i think that that has been something that we have talked about in the past that we have encouraged for getting back to school um certainly as you saw an increase in the students there are some that did better so this isn't uh just uh ubiquitous one way or another but certainly many of our students are finding that this is a

039struggling time in their grades did any board members have any uh comments or questions for uh dr bishop or her team um i did want to add one thing sorry um madame president i do want to add one more thing doctor stopper mine i keep getting turned on um he reminded me that uh in the middle school grades part of the plan was that if students um they saw students in the fall falling behind that they were going to work towards after school activities in summer school uh to to again dress the learning it's not so much about getting a grade anymore our kids have to be able to have enough knowledge to matriculate up and be successful at the next grade and simply giving a grade and a passing grade may not be enough

040to be successful and we don't want the domino effect to happen that if i was unsuccess unsuccessful in one grade when i matriculated that i would be unsuccessful in that because i wouldn't be ready we are trying to meet that learning gap and so we're really taking a rethinking what summer school means and what uh how do we assess kids and find the gaps without having them do everything all over or repeating a grade that doesn't serve them well we want to uh specifically use um machine thinking if you will i use what we know in their assessments to actually target the space that they need to learn um essentially not waste their time and maximize their learning so that they can be successful as they move on all right we have some hands up

041in the queue we will start with board member hildy thank you um you did mention you know data by school and we didn't see that i don't imagine it's i know this is just a confusing data set and you know thank you for providing this um are by school looking at to see where their students are and presuming these are grades through second quarter and then addressing that in bringing small groups back um or bringing you know increasing the number of small groups they're bringing back uh that's that is a great question and and i would like the board to know that as we provide you the aggregate and then pull apart and disaggregate it just by uh student groups and ethnicity uh we we also have uh schools and we can share those data

042as well i want you to know that principals and their teams do exactly that um one of the things that secondary did is on their first request uh to um have school the third quarter they wanted to target equity uh and equity of attainment and um face-to-face learning and re have kids in new schedules uh they had about i'm at the last board meeting they had a little under five percent of students back uh they've grown that i think to about 12 or 13 so they continue to uh communicate with families about uh coming back in uh really receiving uh services to assist in supporting children so uh unequivocally i would say absolutely yes uh our elementary principals secondary middle school principals were really using the data to inform our decisions because um time is

043of the essence if you will if the board would like a report per school we absolutely can do that we'll put it in the board connect these data are are public so they're not by students names but we can locate them to schools and share those as well okay thank you next up is member marsette so a couple of things um thank you very much i know it takes time to do this and we're all trying to work at getting our students back in school um one of the things i would be very interested in seeing is 19 school year 2018-2019 because that would be before the pandemic and i'd like to see where we were at there as to how we progressed because even in that's when the pandemic started so um it would

044be interesting um to see that year before that through the presidential memoir said absolutely we'll do that when we have the spring uh this was for the fall so these fall grades were pre-pandemic but to your point this spring we will need to do that because it'll be two springs of learning and if we can recall our kids as of march will be out at the secondary level for a year and that's why it's really imperative to to return them uh but absolutely we will uh really it'll be interesting look from the spring initially the you know what happened uh to getting up on this last semester um really the pandemic happened in the mid-semester right at spring break which is exactly the midpoint so we'll get those for you as we move forward with

045the second semester grades uh these were um we waited so long to see if the incompletes would get done but we still have until um today actually the second was the opening day to really work through some of those so we will have those updated for you as well okay can i just one more follow-on um and and this is no secret i've shared this with uh dr bishop but you know i i and i don't know how many board members are aware of this but you know when we talked about sending our middle school and high schoolers um that small group back my understanding if you look at everything that was published it said in-person learning what i've discovered is that a lot of that is kids sitting in classrooms on zoom with no

046in-person learning taking place that it's babysitting some schools are doing a great job and i know that some schools probably think they're doing the best job they can but as a student i'm very interested in seeing what our grades look like in those particular situations i will say that i've heard from students that said they feel like they're being punished because they are required to sit in a classroom uh be on zoom and that they are not responsible enough to um and some of these probably you know maybe they need that but it's not doing what we what i as a board member had expected from our schools um i know that the direction might have been different um but i just i just want to put out there as a board member i i

047am really kind of disappointed in how we are providing school in person to our students who really need that interaction and need that in person not just babysitting and some of our schools are doing it exactly like as a board member i thought it would happen and some are not so um i guess i just wanted to share that because uh i think that's very important for the reason we went back to school through the present to remember more said i do understand and i take responsibility for that i was the one sharing the plans my notification wasn't deep enough i guess i need to really um go more granular with the details uh to be able to share accurately uh we do have um many schools did um create new classes and and uh

048do that and we'll continue to work with them really to benefit um children and uh i take that as feedback and i appreciate it thank you [Music] next up in thecube board member bellamy yes i just uh dr bishop i just wanted to go back to grades um six seven eight um and i and just tell me if i'm correct in my thinking i know you i think i know the answer you pulled the data but and you pulled the data before kids had an opportunity to make up those d's and f's is that correct uh six seven eight six seven in it yes yes uh not um so the ones that are um there are some kids that uh have will move uh to summer school and those are in six seven and eight

049we may not see theirs but for the high school as well there were a few incompletes yes and the request was for um the monitoring now and it just so happened that uh the the today ended up being it it's not a significant number to where i believe it would sway too much but that is correct that february 2nd was kind of this day that high schools pushed out as well primarily for the middle school though they really uh as i reported i had reported before that they're um right before christmas when i reported on the first quarter grades uh that they were working towards uh capturing the students and really not allowing the failure to redirect and and put in extra inputs and some of those inputs would be summer school so that's six

050seven and eight i would say that we will remain to have that open and as eyes until they finish i don't think we will see failures uh however 9 10 11 and 12 there were instances where students were given incompletes uh and the call date if you will is today so i will uh present if the data changes significantly i can represent those but you are accurate in your assumption okay and so where are the incompletes on here they're not showing on this chart right now they they are not uh they're basically a null grade so they're not they don't have value but we know how many are in that category okay all right thank you next step in thecube board member mitchell so staying on this chart i'm just curious um they it looks

051like in grades six seven and eight they there are more d's but the f's went down significantly are those teachers just giving the students the benefit of the doubt um um remember mitchell um it's just what we um we're talking about with member bellamy uh that these students uh received an eye and incomplete the middle school was very after the first quarter very interested in meeting their kids needs and the fact that some they just knew they weren't you know whether it was um not having someone home with them not having the best equipment not you know the bandwidth or the computers are not really feeling comfortable enough to turn the the video on in their home uh that the middle school assigned any student that was in trouble to fail because they weren't participating

052in learning that they assigned an eye and they're going to continue to work with them through summer school and after school programs and again it really wasn't based on giving a child a grade or a no grade at a certain period of time the interest uh shared with me was really in capturing the learning that needed to take place for them to be successful next year okay and of course at the high school it's very different because grades are related to credits credits are statutory as well as policy that's why the two different approaches were taken and then the other so the few f's that there are are people who kids who were engaged who did have their stuff on and just didn't earn correct for for whatever reason and they they may not want

053to move on and they might have done you know decided to to be finished in 6th 7th and 8th the question i actually had wanted to ask was the chart i think a couple before this where you have um [Music] the number yeah this chart for the secondary so our secondary i don't know if it's true our middle school students didn't do the quarter thing did they where they do three classes a quarter it was just high school students no it was all of secondary it was all of secondary okay so um this does count both quarter both quarters worth of classes i'm just trying to understand why the n is so much bigger for the previous year because in theory it should be the same for both years right because you're either taking six

054classes for an entire semester last year or you're taking three classes per quarter this year which adds up to six for the semester and that would be correct for a semester but we offered seven classes to middle school students in prior years if you recall and um with a grade so it's a mark we we you know assigned more marks uh for for um reporting back on progress uh in prior years as well as it's much fewer students but this is um to your point um this does represent a six period schedule because we had three and three it's just that um significantly at the middle school that changed as well as uh in the um the the enrollment so do you have any idea what um i mean we went from 158 000 marks

055to 84 000 marks how many of those um are attributed to the one fewer one seventh fewer classes at the middle school level i mean i would think that's not a huge part of that we we can look into that but they're also the students who did not get a mark or the eye they're not included so were there more kids who went um virtual at the secondary level than at the primary level i can get you the data um i would like to be accurate we'll get you those numbers okay yeah i was just i was just wondering it just seemed like a huge um description uh virtual grades are not in this these are just for our um schools that are on the same schedule with grading which would be our eight large

056high schools and ten large middle schools so a fair amount of that difference could also be the kids who went to virtual yes yes you're right thank you and uh to note that if um kids in middle school don't um engage in the summer school or other programs that they're offering that they're doing now those eyes would revert to f's at that time in at summer time so we're trying to keep kids engaged as much as possible next up on thecube board member hildy thank you um so just i've tried liking our policy before on what defines a passing grade at d i know some school districts have it at sea i know i think even some states might have it or maybe it's just so popular in that state um what what did because

057where whatever you set the line at you know it's going to be a bunch really close right beneath it so if it said c you're going to have fewer d's and f's you know or in theory so do you do you know off the top of your head where that comes from i would guess it's very traditional but i'm going to defer it's probably um 60 to 69 percent is that our d's yeah but where does that is that in is that a school board administrative regulation is that a school district administrator it's in um administrative regulation [Music] and uh we do have some schools uh that are alternative schools that grade in different ways for instance polaris has um a portfolio and so those were left out as well if if the schools did

058not follow the traditional sense in the ar then it was um not included in these data set um remember mitchell i i was just updated that presently there are more elementary students in virtual than secondary however to your point um the students from one year to the next there are a large portion in virtual anyway and or other homeschool programs such as uh frontier or family partnership so that was also significant thank you all right one last uh opportunity anybody have any questions for dr bishop and her team on secondary grades all right and as always you can submit questions uh to dr bishop through email and she'll be happy to get those answers for you moving on next in the agenda uh public testimony i will read a brief statement the board welcomes public

059testimony we value public comment as it ensures that we remain aware of public thoughts ideas and concerns and informs our decision-making process there is a one-hour time slot at the beginning of the meeting testimony in excess of one hour will be heard at the end of the meeting or may be submitted in writing each person will have three minutes to testify when 30 seconds remain a time will ring to inform you so that you can finish your sentence additionally it is not our practice that board members answer questions or engage in discussion with members of the public this is your time to speak and our time to listen the board will consider all information shared by the public and when deemed necessary issues raised in testimony will be referred to the administration for follow-up we

060have nine people on the list the first person up and let me see if she is here okay uh speaker number one is not here yet so i'm going to move on speaker number two on the telephone karina ranella are you on the line with us and karina if you can hear us i believe it is star six to unmute all right we will circle back around to karina and we will try again uh speaker number three on the telephone danielle kemp danielle are you on the line with us tonight all right can you hear me we sure can thank you for joining us you have a few minutes and the floor is yours um thank you good evening everybody my name is danielle kemp i'm a retired army combat officer teacher here in the

061asd and co-chair of the education committee also the uh the the human and civil rights committee of the aea first off i would like to wish everybody happy black history month and black lives matter at school week of action all right uh remember that black lives that uh black history is not just um you know black history but it is american history to be embraced and celebrated by all americans um tonight i would ask for clarity uh from the school board uh to answer real estate questions here that i have online zooming from what i hear online zooming stops around february 8th and many families are concerned i see facebook posts all the time here uh they're concerned that for instance if your class shuts down due to covert right they go back to online

062zooming but the kids who chose not to take the risk would still be stuck with virtual they are completely shut off from their teacher and all their school friends the majority of kids who would stay home and suffer this inequity as you know would be children of color this wouldn't have to happen though it's an easy fix just keep the zoom option for our kiddos at home not to do this easy thing you know would not be good to all our families who cared enough about their health to stay safe at home and share on us you know shame on us for not doing such a simple thing that could do so much good um so please you know if you could provide clarity on that i would appreciate that so much and before i

063go uh i would be remiss if i if i did not uh remember and acknowledge the fallen us capital officer uh snik who currently lies in state at our nation's capital rotunda he died as a result of the violence inflicted upon him by a 21st century insurrectionist lynch mob motive motivated by racism white supremacy and the fear of losing their white privilege we should not forget nor should we allow our fellow americans to forget that infamous day of january 6th all right thank you very much for your time and have a good night thank you i'd like to go back up to speaker number two karina ranella karina are you able to join us tonight sometimes drop me off if you can hear us uh sometimes if you hang up and then call back in

064or log out log in sometimes that can help the connection i will keep an eye out for you as we move forward next up in person speaker number four miss sarah price thank you for joining us you have three minutes and the floor is yours good evening over the last five months i have tried to understand why you won't send us back to school and i've waited patiently for you to fulfill promises but i've been met by deception the main asd core value is the district will be open transparent and accountable to the public however as you mislead the community violate alaska's statutes and use children for political gain you fail this this entire school year you have told the public that schools are closed for the safety and well-being of our community but you

065and i both know this is not true i was told in october and i was told in january by asd administrators that the only reason we are not back is because of the teacher unions so when were you going to tell the public or are you expecting parents who work and children who are drowning in homework did you take the hours required to find that corrupt information the power given to the superintendent to implement long-term school closure is found in alaska statute 14.03.030 which states she can do so for the public health or safety however as everyone present knows we are not back because of the teacher unions every major health organization and our own state dhss has stated schools are safe so if this is because of the teacher unions call it for what

066it is a strike and do not exploit the community's concerns of covid by saying this is for our safety these actions also violate two other alaska statutes but far worse than that these actions are not victimless not only have failure rates doubled not only is absenteeism shocking not only has there been discrimination but children are suffering around our state mental health issues and depression have skyrocketed in the adolescent community yet you have chosen to keep students in middle and high schools in idle in isolation where no one can tell if by text or by zoom camera if they are suffering and many are you have taken away students lives for the last year you have made us hate school and as a result many students have to be the one to bring our friends out

067of the darkest of places we are children what are you doing to us as board members you do not represent the teachers you are meant to represent the needs and wants of students and parents eighty percent of families have consistently chosen to go back to school that is what we want if you do not want to stand up for your constituents you should resign and allow a community member to fill your position who is willing to be a leader even when times get tough this is no longer about public safety this is about choices made by this administration this is choosing to keep students out of school knowing what they must endure alone simply because you're afraid of what someone may say is despicable it is time to be honest with our community enough is

068enough send us back to school next up speaker number five noreen price [Music] thank you for coming in you've got three minutes and the floor is yours [Music] good evening i am a proud parent a voter and a taxpayer i am disappointed in the administration's decision to not send middle and high school children back to in-person school until mid-march the recommendations of the cdc world health organization dhss and pediatricians all over the world are clear the risk of children contracting transmitting or developing serious covet health conditions is extremely low i won't belabor the supporting statistics or the serious consequences of your decision to close in person's learning you know them what i don't understand is the why the school board and teachers have been stating for many months that they too want kids back in

069school but not until it is safe safe how do you find that word since 1998 over 1500 children and adults have died in school transportation related accidents in 2017-18 school year we had over 186 pediatric deaths due to influenza b all horrible and tragic yet teachers did not demand that schools be shut down for safety there have actually been fewer pediatric deaths in 2020 than in the previous years kids are at home fewer car accidents drownings injuries should we then keep children cloistered inside forever for their safety of course not they need to be in school and it is you who have shut down schools not the virus i work as a safety professional in the transportation industry safety is never the goal of an organization it is a value that is prioritized while achieving

070one's goals the risk assessment process calls for re-evaluating decisions and making appropriate adjustments when the risk level has changed and it has most the nation is back to school since september my daughter will be out of school for a whole year this is an unacceptable precedent there will be more viruses two of my teenagers worked as essential employees in stores at the height of the pandemic they probably packed your groceries why won't the teachers support them i have lived all over the world in this great country and now i enjoy the life in alaska and i do so appreciate the rugged individualism the resiliency and diversity of the people but this unfounded government response of fear is not in line with alaska values i cannot help with my family's favorite movie groundhog day if you

071haven't seen it you must life now like the movie seems like the same thing every day over and over devoid of smiles human contact sports social gathering and inspiring education roll out of bed sit on a computer do homework repeat the protagonist in the movie phil connors was able to figure out what's real goals in life for and he learned much from his many mistakes and eventually woke up to a new and better day i ask you that you be bold put children's education first work for the families of anchorage not the teachers unions and maybe we'll wake up to a better day before it's too late thank you thank you i am looking on my list of callers and i do not have speaker number six or seven so while we're on a roll

072let's do speaker number eight mr ethan jennings he is in the boardroom thank you for joining us you have three minutes and the floor is yours good evening school board members let me start by saying that one of my biggest fears of graduating early was that i was going to regret it however after the decisions this school board has made i regret absolutely nothing since the beginning of the school year i watched as my friends and other students have struggled with online school school is once an appreciated place and has been transformed into a toxic environment because of your choices students are what students were and still are forced to sit and stare technology all a day and faces have been replaced by black screens along with a poor education students across the district have

073become poor have become stressed more than ever because of the failing virtual school system you have created also it is also clear that the mental health of students in this school district have been put at the bottom of the list of your priorities it makes me sick to think that you know you are doing this to the students yet you sit back and do nothing and they still suffer and the part that is most disappointing is that you have deceived the public into thinking this was for their safety as i worked as i watch firsthand as a love for school is stripped away from students i become infuriated because this administration could have acted with courage and stood up to the teachers who are unwilling to do their job the anchorage school district is entrusted

074to provide an education for 40 000 students but you have thrown most of them to the curb it is quite clear that you're all too scared to stand up to the teacher unions use the excess use the excuse of student safety to hide from their jobs of providing real education we're letting the teacher unions walk all over you your job is to protect students and act with their best interest in mind not to turn your back on students and neglect them while you neglect students in this district there are teachers who are getting paid to deliver and provide a pathetic education to their students now whether it's you now whether as you as board members want to admit that that is up to you but don't sit on this board and claim you're doing what's

075best for students when it is quite clear to me and many others that claiming to withhold reopening schools for the safety and well-being of students is just a sad excuse for your failure to stand up for what is best for your students i am not here to ask you to reopen schools that is already happening in march rally to inform you that you have failed the students in this district by acting out of fear and self-interest along with making terrible decisions you cannot even implement what your what you tell the community what you tell the community you are going to do i remember when this school board said that students who failed classes after first semester will be able to return to in-person school early however i know students that were never offered the option

076to return to in-person school for extra help that was promised so not only has this administration developed a school system in which students cannot possibly learn well you now pick and choose who gets to go back to in-person school based on the beliefs of a few though there's slight hope for students in march this terrible situation could have easily been avoided with the decision to reopen schools months ago regardless of what happens for the rest of the year it will be remembered by students and community members that you from the start of this school year that you from the start of this school year you set your students up to fail thank you i'd like to go back up to speaker number two karina ranella karina if you're able to hear us will be star

077six to unmute can you hear me yes thank you can you hear me yes we sure can awesome thank you thank you for your patience three minutes go ahead all right great thank you i appreciate your patience i was unable to mute my um speaker all those times um so i um my name is karina ranella and i have been a mental health clinician in and around anchorage for 20 years for 10 of those years i worked with adolescents and i am calling to give testimony in support of the anti-racism policy that is being proposed i really strongly feel that all of the youth in anchorage will benefit if the school board will adopt this policy not just people of color and that's it that's my testimony so i appreciate the time i appreciate your

078consideration and i really appreciate that this is um this is an issue that's being considered i i i realize that there are a lot of other important issues that are requiring time and attention and i i believe this one is also a very strong a very important issue thank you thank you very much next up going down the other way speaker number seven who just joined connor johnson connor can you hear us [Music] try one more time star six can you hear me yes thank you so much thank you for joining us you have three minutes and the floor is yours all right i just wanted to thank y'all for the opportunity to speak i'm not going to take long but i just want to tell y'all like the experiences i've noticed and like my

079myself and my friends i've noticed that like everyone since we've been out of school we've all been like depressed not happy with our lives we feel like a lot of people feel like they're like worth nothing because we're just staying at home not doing anything and we're our friendships are like falling apart there's nothing to do and i've had seven people since i want to say september come to me and tell me they want to die i've i've had to save seven lives from being taken from suicide because they're just staying at home depressed not able to go to school no social life and it's sad it upsets me i've seen failing grades people that are normally 4.0 students are having s and it's sad seeing that their education is going to waste and it's

080just like it makes me shake and i it's just tough being at home all day that's all i have to say thank you for your testimony thank you next up speaker number nine elizabeth mcgee elizabeth are you on the line tonight hello can you hear me yes we sure can thank you for joining us you have three minutes and the floor is yours good evening superintendent bishop school board and community members happy school counseling week 2021 to all my colleagues that worked so hard each day to serve students staff and families it is an honor to share our week during black history month as well my name is elizabeth condon mcgee and i'm a proud school counselor at whaley school i just want to share with you all the important work that i do in

081my role as a school cancer and how i run my program my goal is to spend 80 percent of my time with students last year prior to covet hit in our city with full force i had 633 requests and visits with students this did not include my classroom visits or check-in and checkouts with students this year with face-to-face start at my school on january 19 i started with my data again for the last 11 contact days with a shortened day of 5.5 hours of student contact i have had 15 requests and spent over 40 hours with students in my office and with classroom visits this does not include my time greeting kids when they come and seeing them off at the end of the day the rest of my time is spent collaborating with teachers

082in iep meetings and working with families since we started back with students i have also made an effort to greet every staff prior to students arriving to try to brighten a day so that we start off on a positive foot as the district plans to reentry for all levels it is imperative that the school counselor is able to partner with our administrators to build the culture in our schools we as school counselors are solution focused that is what we do individually and as a group we want the best for our students families staff and community i am proud to be a colleague to some of the best school counselors in the state this year national school counseling week concentrated on being all in here are my all-ins for the first two days day one i'm

083all in for students because i believe each and every student i work with will have the potential to do great things day two i'm all in for professional development because i believe in being a lifelong learner i have participated in many conferences and trainings and bring something new out of it to help improve my program i am honored to say that the alaska school council state conference is happening this week 40th and the 49th as it represents our relationship as a charter with the american school counselor association for 40 years we are privileged to have lisa kaneki a great friend from wisconsin who is the author of being an olive a b and inclusive ally which is talking about advocating and supporting equity for all students nick hansen our very own alaska gladiator and carolyn

084stone author of ethics and law and school counseling keeping us updated on network ethics as our three keynotes with many breakups to learn more about school counseling and improve our program in closing i want to share just a few things that school counselors do to help students we help them learn from mistakes deal with grief and loss problem solve make positive behavior choices manage emotions normalize feelings find careers that match their personality process events and emotions set goals make and keep friends develop coping skills improve study skills connect with outside resources and change thinking patterns we do so much more than scheduling when we are allowed to do the job we are trained in thank you so much for your time happy black history month and school counseling week thank you so very much at

085this time that concludes all of our public testimony for the evening just want to remind board members and the public that there is written testimony out on the uh board box that's tied to our agenda which we encourage everybody to go out and read as well um so the written voice is heard next up in the agenda is the superintendent update at this time i would like to turn it back over to our superintendent dr gina bishop thank you madam president and i want to give a shout out to member donnelly i think i'm going to do a very very short nice superintendent report uh at our last retreat with the board it was uh really discussed to keep on business and i want to share that i have a habit of good things and

086going on and on but i want you to know we're going to continue to share good things in asd inside about our staff and asd connect with our community of all the good things but at these meetings we're going to stay to business i'm just going to present a little bit of data that you may be interested in just simply the school start by numbers and i just want you to know that i'm actually more comfortable with numbers that was my degree i'm a math teacher so this is good for good for me i'm back to my roots so just so you see uh elementary students as of yesterday we this is just an odd number all the schools everything added up to 8 000 students in the elementary schools that came back exactly so

087that is not a rounded number that's actually precise uh and the school numbers do vary based on the grade levels at the schools uh but we are 1 000 up from last week as we know that some schools uh took a different uh a faster roll in phase but all elementary pre-k through um eight in some schools six and some depending on the number of grade levels you have in your school are returning by the eighth which is next week so we look to see that number jump uh as of uh today in secondary we had 1757 students uh enrolled in face-to-face and um in attendance uh today was about uh 1200 so about 500 of them are out there enrolled but not attending yet but we look to increase that again with those supports

088that are needed um a question really was asked how many staff then and if you look as of february 8 there's going to be about 3 200 staff working directly with students and as of march 16th when we all come back it'll be almost our entire enrollment employment if you will roles uh 5700 almost 5 800. i wanted to share that the staff that work directly with students uh include but are not limited to all of those different functions in our district and again it's it's um importance of the classroom and learning and the relationship uh but it takes um us all to really have school work especially we've learned that uh during the pandemic times and i i wanted to share some of these numbers because of the number of classrooms back over 8

089000 students and a board member asked me about the news and how the news said covid was in schools and we had to close and i uh we've shared with the board um and we hope our public as well we're very transparent with any coveted cases uh that we record and they are of our employees or students many of those cases and i'm going to turn it over tom roth here aren't even in school yet so those are recorded cases of people at home as well but tom can you really uh talk about the other side of the story when we say a school there was a case in a school and how tightly we really take a look just a couple minute brief so the board has a general understanding of that sure dr

090bishop thanks uh through the board president to the board members and i'm going to ask you a miss ashley lawley our our director for security and emergency uh preparedness to also participate in this so we've been working on this system really really since we anticipated return to schools and how the district would respond to cases of covet uh in our schools and clearly the objective is to keep cobit 19 out of schools we recognize that that's that's that's not a foolproof thing we know that uh you know we have people coming in that may be symptomatic so we get after this through through vigilance through through quickly identifying risks when they come into schools to do investigations and then to act act immediately to mitigate those risks and then from that we we do contact

091notification we communicate and then we we give we give guidance advice to people who are in fact either confirmed positives or close contacts and i would tell you my observation so far is that it's been effective and to dr bishop's point you know that the media you know they they report facts but they kind of convey a that there is a problem of of uh transmission of cobit in schools through the their choice of words i would tell you that that is uh is not the case has not been the case uh i would just offer very briefly some quick trends and then i'll pass off to miss miss uh lolly parents are being very uh proactive in reporting when they have students at home that are symptomatic most of the reports that we are

092receiving are students uh who are symptomatic or close contacts of positives at home so they are letting us know that once they find out that parents are pretty quick to have their their students tested so we get confirmation of whether they're positive or not and that's that's pretty regular and then lastly i would tell you schools are very vigilant my my observation of just the performance at the school level our nurses are our administrative staff they are quick to act quickly report and then to address issues so so with that i mean my my quick broad stroke i'm going to pass off to miss lolly to talk in a bit more detail about the system and and her observations what do you think can you hear me [Music] is oh can you hear me now

093yeah there's one right there here we go you're good okay there we go so um i do want to make it clear that we track all cases for asd so it's not just for students that are in person students that are in virtual students that are learning online right now not in person and it is self-reported cases so we do depend on families and staff to share that information with us we currently have eight classrooms closed um that's a combination of positive cases in classrooms and not having sufficient staffing for some other classrooms so it is a combination of both of those and to give you some statistics we have currently 36 staff and students positive out of 47 464 total so that's less than one percent that are currently positive right now um of

094the current cases that we're tracking right now 58 of those are for symptomatic individuals so not positive not close contacts and then for our closed symptomatic cases so ones that are not currently symptomatic right now they were symptomatic in the past but it does give us some good data for what we're tracking um 64 of those symptomatic came back negative 28 were either not tested or refused testing or they never followed back up with us so a majority of what we're tracking is really those kids in school who have symptoms or staff who have symptoms but over 90 of those are either coming back negative or they don't follow up with us so they stay out of school for 10 days but that is really the bulk of what we are tracking we're tracking absolutely

095everything in the schools it is a lot but the whole intent is that as soon as we have a case that precipitates action being taken we're on top of it i think on monday we had almost 200 cases come in most of those were symptomatic but we never go to bed without closing out every single case for that day so never more than 24 hours before we know a case and before we close it out and provide them a return date of when they can come back in the buildings thank you uh thank you uh ashley and and i just wanted to reassure the board that um when covet is in our community we know that it has the potential to get in our schools our job is to act swift um have uh systems

096set up to address and again uh like tom ross said the schools are amazing at um really responding as well so i just wanted to share that and my report is concluded thank you board member hildy thank you um so i had a question about secondary return i remember last summer and early following talking about the design model of secondary instruction was that so that they could come in and out like the purpose was to be able to be flexible uh because sometimes you have to close for two weeks even now in elementary we'll see some of those so i'm confused on you know we have these wonderful low infection rates really high vaccination rates everybody's doing everything so well are there secondary schools um like i had an elementary school this week they're like

097don't come this week come visit the next week because we're having our whole school come back early like they were ready to come back earlier their secondary schools in that same situation where they're like no we have this plan to be flexible to come online and in person and they want to do it before fourth quarter are we anticipating anything like that [Music] that's a great question i haven't had any requests from secondary to start earlier than proposed as we did with elementary they really pushed the envelope um sometimes too much uh that's where we had to really make sure our systems were in place um but i'll defer to dr stock about secondary and the impetus of their programs and understanding of when they can return or um if they've requested maybe some of

098our smaller schools have i'm just not sure at this time we haven't had any formal requests from secondary to step forward there's still continual debates at our level about trying to get more secondary students in in the small group and the whole purpose of the phase in was to bring in more and more students and prove the safety of our mitigation we have a we have kind of a long chain here with the larger numbers at the high school and right now we're having a slow startup at getting you remember how it started with elementary and i think people forget how many raucous debates and how many fault starts and starts and stops we had with elementary until we got to the place where we are it started with those small group reading classes you

099may remember and that was only seven schools and then what we found is that the teachers that were doing that came back and said hey that was actually that was good and it was safe it felt good more teachers volunteered than more and it spread um we're hoping the same thing will happen with secondary but as dr bishop stated earlier it's a little bit of a slow startup we only had 4.7 return we're up into that 10 11 percent now but our goal was to at least get to 20 quickly and then see how much we could grow it because if we can't get students in the door we can't prove to to families that it's safe to come back to school so i don't know if dr johnson wants to represent secondary and address

100that tonight but that would be my response in my meetings with them and if dr johnson has anything specific to that she would like to provide details i would call on her thank you dr stock uh through the presidential member hildy um at this point um our focus has really been like dr stock uh mentioned to really increase our attendance at secondary the one the one complication that we really have at secondary around um kind of coming into the middle of a quarter um is is a lot of our scheduling needs at secondary as well um it's not like just one classroom they have to get scheduled and come in and the way we've got it structured right now with small groups we're really trying to help our kids who are are really disconnected failing

101classes maybe not engaged entirely um and so that that's been our big push right now we're quickly shifting um at this point into bringing our kids back fourth quarter um the one limitation that that is out there as well is um within the eo 18 um there is a 50 capacity rule um and for our secondary schools in particular with um just really large populations that that's also tricky so um so that's where we're at right now thank you um next up in the queue is board member bellamy yes thank you um i just have a two questions uh dr bishop and you may or may not have any uh you know a response tonight so is it possible to just what i get two questions over and over again one is uh the why

102can't um why can't we continue to zoom and i know some kids us kids some schools are but why can't we just continue to zoom for those parents who are not and kids who are not written yet ready to come back um i get that question a lot and then the other question is um is are we tracking i know we had 8 000 kids at elementary show up uh how many of how many kids have not shown up yet do we have do are we tracking that um that uh were expected to show up yes that we're expecting we can get those numbers um for you of who was absent we have had regular absences similar to regular years um but the head count today was 8 000. so i can get out of

103how many were expected for you i will put that in the board connect uh and i'd really like um mike fleckenstein if you could share a little bit about um the simultaneous zooming just the capacity level uh but also uh dr stock as well in the ask of um it was really working through the school start task force right and a basically um a request and and discussion by by the teacher representative in regard to doing two jobs at once and so i'll turn that over to dr stock thank you dr bishop so the first challenge we have is that parents don't really want to just do zoom they want to keep their same teacher and zoom so that's really the human connection that teachers have built even in the virtual remote environment they've got

104to know their teachers and they want to keep them the challenge is we're going back to school and so the challenge is teachers can't do both simultaneously now some have said well can't you just turn on a webcam just let it run well you have ferpa issues you have other kinds of issues we also have issues with bandwidth and we'll let mr fleckenstein tackle that one but there's we have technology issues we don't even have enough webca you can't just put a laptop in the middle of a room and then let it run and even if you could we won't have the bandwidth for every single classroom in this district to be doing that same time so we have a lot of challenges so teachers want to keep their same teacher but they're going to

105be teaching kids soon so some schools have done we we've let people be innovative and creative on that level we do have a handful of schools that may have figured out an alternative way inside with their staffing some of those are might be title schools that have extra staff available and extra technology they purchased over the years or are purchasing now so there are some one-offs where people have figured some things out and we've been willing to encourage that uh if they can serve their communities better so that would be my response to the the question why can't we just why can't we just stay home and zoom well because your teacher will be teaching and with kids in the room and it's not the same as just turning on a webcam we have some

106short-term solutions for those who are quarantining so when students are out for a couple weeks because of a case in a classroom we're keeping those canvas course shells current and people are able to go out and get at least some content some videos keep up with their homework do those things so that would be my answer and if any further things on the technology we could refer to to mr fleckenstein well it's exactly as i explained so i thank you sir thank you next up in thecube margo did you want a technology um answer oh no i uh dr stock's response was fine i i just needed that to be public because it comes up over and over again and i just want wanted to have the opportunity for people listening to understand why that

107is not the simple solution thank you all right thank you next step in the queue i've got board member marsette so one of the things i wanted to point out to when we talk about attendance at our elementary schools is when i talked to uh principals several of the schools i visited um what they believe and and i think probably is true is a lot of these schools are walking schools they're not bus schools and so a lot of those younger students are actually being walked to school by the older students so when our third to sixth graders come back i think you will see more of our kindergarten first and second graders come back so i think there will be a real increase in that um the other thing i guess i and i

108i don't want to beat a dead horse and i know you're looking at this dr bishop but we have five weeks um i think about five weeks before uh spring break do we have any estimate or have our schools provided us i know there's lots of room i know there's a capability of doing it um of maybe bringing back some of these students or asking for students that would like to come back through the president to remember i said do you mean in secondary um i believe the the um opportunity has been there uh we haven't had those requests and and again it might be the complexities of the schedules would that be a fair answer yeah yeah i i i just always believe where there's a will there's a way and maybe we just

109don't always see the way um and not speaking to anyone in particular just my comment next step in thecube board member donnelly thank you um i'm superintendent once we're back full time in our secondary schools how many hours a day will the schools be and how many versus how many hours they would normally be in a normal year thank you member donnelly through um to remember darling through the president uh we have uh similar to elementary school uh we have a general child day is six and a half hours and it is uh going to is that correct six and a half hours and it's going to five and a half hours and uh same is true for secondary and dr stock can share uh those uh times with you um the general reason for

110that is that we have a contractual language with regarding to preparation time and you may remember that when we created the schedules we did you remember the the the whole goal of trying to reduce the amount of interactions in a school if we could so that we can do contact tracing and we can and keep students at least somewhat with a cohort group or you may remember dr bishop used the word the bubble trying to keep students as best we can in a high school for example the three period day is to reduce the amount of interaction and class changes to amount of passing periods where students would be interacting and so when you do all that when you create that and you take out that art teacher music teacher in the elementary and make

111them assigned to a cohort to help break classes into smaller groups and to avoid so much interaction what that does is it takes away the teachers preparation period which we are contractually required to give and teachers need it that's not really in question so what we're doing is all teachers planning periods are now at the end of the day students leave and then teachers have their their time for planning and that's how we're doing that [Music] all right next step in thecube board member hildy thank you dr johnson mentioned the eo and that was another issue i'd seen um with two uh elementary charter schools like class sizes in the eo and my concern is um is maybe in the planning they uh it was that you know the average class size was used in

112the calculations and i'm not suggesting what health officials should do but i'm just wondering if they have that information on the impacts of all our schools and that as you know somebody mentioned that you know we re-evaluate decisions when risk levels change right so i don't know if that's just still hanging out at 50 because that's like absolutely or maybe it's because they kind of thought it was working for everybody i just wanted the status of that um through the president to member hilda that that's uh really a great conversation and we have continually uh worked with our health department to share uh what we foresee as being a problem as well as uh sharing the concern in charter schools uh they request more data so we can provide more data for them uh it

113is um in a classroom 50 capacity of the um building code uh of the classroom and so we've been able to really uh move in in some of our uh more traditional rooms but sometimes there's different uh schools that have had flexibility they've been able to move classrooms into others i have communicated with the mayor uh in regard to the case counts you know going down and the vaccine going up that if these could be reconsidered and she did share with me that um they are looking forward to hearing our data about school and school and that uh perhaps um beginning a march if she announces another order that that could be included even if it is just about schools and so it is on their radar uh we're having lots of conversations and we're

114happy to share all of our data because again as shared by tom roth it's been a success um the honesty of parents and the swiftness of staff has been impressive and um with the goal of keeping our schools open and so i appreciate that so very diligently being worked on we haven't received the answers that we've wanted yet but we continue to work with them and demonstrate efficacy in the system thank you not seeing any other hands up in the queue we will go ahead and move on to our next agenda item which is the consent agenda and madam vice president when you're ready i moved to approve the consent agenda consisting of memorandum asd memorandum number 81 which is our personnel report and the regular session minutes for december 1st 2020. do i have

115a second second thank you uh katie if you could please do a roll call vote starting with our student representative emily yes remember mitchell yes remember merced yes remember holloman remember hildy yes remember donnelly yes vice president bellamy yes president michaelis yes and the consent agenda passes with seven gays and zero nays uh in an odd twist we have no action items however we have a big list of non-action items uh i know that we were uh remember hildy did you were you raising your hand yeah i just wanted to pull number four four okay and i believe we were also gonna remember marsett um i believe we should pull a number um where is that two okay remember mitchell i'd like to pull item number six all right any other requests from board members

116all right not seeing any we've got items two four and six on the non-action items list that we will go ahead and pull the first one up item number two that's going to be our six-year cip and i'll kick it off with dr bishop thank you madam president i'm going to defer to uh tom roth to share the information as well as uh able to answer any questions so if i can get the the host to to uh bring over mr uh tom femicep and mr george vikales from attendees to panelists so through the president uh to to the board members so [Music] what the administration is doing is bringing forward the six-year capital improvement plan to the board for action on the 16th of february by way of background we did we did bring

117the six-year plan specifically tables one and table two that we did introduce to the board for discussion and what that does is allow the capital planning construction department based on feedback from the board to take the proposal to the planning and zoning commission for consideration and for them to render a recommendation to both the school board and and to the assembly so where we are right now is we are we are bringing the six-year plan to the board for non-action during this meeting we are certainly prepared to discuss in detail uh anything that is on the six-year plan this six-year plan up front really is a continuation of the six-year plan that was presented to the board last year for approval the only difference is that this is one-year advance so in year six 2026

118represents a new list of uh projects those are primarily uh preventive maintenance there are many roof replacements as an example i've got mr feniceff and mr michaelis again we're we're happy to entertain any any questions from board members uh specific to the the plan itself we're also happy to discuss uh the the criteria that went into the evaluation and the preparation i would i would submit that this has had significant due diligence and as was mentioned uh at the previous meeting when we did discuss the six-year plan uh copen 19 has had some very significant impacts on enrollment that we recognize in in that context that there's a lot of unknowns we don't know what what the return is going to be at the next academic year as well as in ensuing years we we

119are very much cognizant of many other factors that play into this we we do believe that with regards to this this year this process the district is not going to put a bond proposition on the april ballot uh we we have a two-year bond that was passed in april of last year that this body this board will have the opportunity to to review in detail this time next year a what will likely be a significantly modified six-year plan that could portend other decisions or recommendations that would come to the board so we acknowledge that we acknowledge this a status quo uh but there's a reason for it it has been uh collaborated with in in in in cooperation with the capital improvement advisory committee as well as has mentioned the planning and zoning commission so

120again i'll pause and and we'll happily entertain any questions at this time thank you remember marseille you had pulled the items first so um thank you mr roth um having been on that committee i know that this can change um quite a bit given different factors and um enrollment of course is certainly a consideration and where we might need to move students but another consideration is you know uh we have just heard the real estate market um is a booming and it's booming but there are no houses out there as many of you might know if you're looking for a home and so we're going to be seeing more construction uh this coming year we're seeing uh homes built up in bear valley up off of diarman there's going to be i think there's a

121hundred blocks up there now that they're looking to build uh of course we've got the subdivision there off of sand lake so there there will be a lot of factors that will probably influence our decision on this capital budget so thank you did any other board members have any comments or questions on the six-year cip remember donnelly not only comment i just want to put on the record i continue to oppose building two new schools i think they're going to be incredibly expensive i think the taxpayers of anchorage are not going to entertain this very well i think the bond money where the design for inlet view was was mixed in with the earthquake repairs was a really unfair proposition to put before the voters and i don't think it represents the true intent of

122the voters because many people like me voted for the bonds because of the earthquake repairs even though i opposed building a new school soon i think we should really reconsider it all and go back to just doing the repairs that are necessary and not build new schools any other board member comments or questions seeing done we'll go ahead and move on to non-action item number four this is asd memorandum zero eight four uh pulled by remember hildy he wanted to speak to your yeah i just wanted to make sure our board members were aware that it was coming up for a vote next week talking about we've been talking about this for a few months now um putting boundary view into our policy beginning in 2022 so you have a year for some population you

123know distribution to work out for school enrollment and then the band review process would begin in 2022 with perhaps um adjustments made for 2023 but you know but just beginning in 2022 is what the policy says um and then putting it in every 10 years so that we can make sure our capacity is um yeah our facilities are best used based on you know student enrollment so that's a pretty um pretty significant thing anytime we talk about boundary adjustments it's a very big deal for our community we haven't had any um emails or any awareness just um so i'm not sure that people are really aware of it i've been bringing up at community councils i think it's a very good thing but um i don't want it to be considered to be a light

124thing um so just just to be aware uh thank you for bringing that up i mean it's always a good reminder that our district is guided by you know our board policies and you know the ars attached to it and you pulled item number four but you know three and five are both policy related and so you know we do want our community feedback you know as these things are working its way through our system so um thank you for pulling that i don't see any other hands up in the queue to speak to um memorandum zero eight four so we'll go ahead and move on to item number six asd memorandum zero eight six which is our preliminary budget and i'll hand it thank you madam president uh our chief financial officer uh jim

125anderson as well as our senior director of um uh budgeting as well as dr stock our chief our deputy superintendent and i will present uh the overview in a powerpoint uh fashion of our budget this will be posted online as well as our budget book so that it can be accessed in addition [Music] we have these products so the budget book is a large you know as you know three three inch document but we also publish a preliminary budget small booklet that has the uh aggregate data very informative that's quick easy access this powerpoint is primarily the preliminary budget information in powerpoint terms so i will move through it and offer any questions and again this is a time for our public to be informed of the budget and uh questions that need to be

126asked looked into we are certainly uh able to answer as well as the school principles uh where our students and staff either work or learn are can also answer some questions at their school site level uh always given support from the district office and so i'll start and i'll let you know that of course we show the timeline at the beginning and it does have uh in it this is actually perhaps an extended third session might be needed we did take out a survey that we will be doing in regard to looking at students to understand um their so the budget survey this is actually not updated i'm going to share that but the budget survey in the gold star there uh member mitchell pointed this out for us so i just want to give

127her credit it's actually going to be a really an enrollment survey in april to really determine our full enrollment but with this uh powerpoint we can that was the only change i guess okay that would be great we've been doing so many drafts that uh our final draft was updated this morning after uh our principals met with us and gave us some suggestions and as well as a board member this morning [Music] is the correct one online from the finance community we could go to the work session just pull that up if um oh okay katie you got it okay um [Music] katie grant has it now we definitely want you to have the most updated which is the one posted on board docs perfect no that's not it either must have given you the

128wrong one great time for stretch break since we are on zoom if you're at zoom at home please stand up and stretch to the ceiling to the floor there we go this is not it either we're just going to go from this one thank you but i did want to give credit to member mitchell where when we really discussed the budget survey this year the community engagement was really about the board's goals and guardrails and of course the board is forwarding uh what makes sense and what we put our our our efforts around our money towards the budget and so uh the budget survey in its traditional sense isn't being uh completed as such that those the feedback about the importance of schooling and what we want to see uh the budget should support that

129that came with community engagement in regard to the goals and guardrails but we are doing a survey in regard to enrollment of uh those families that have left asd as well as others that might uh not um be in between programs of what they'd like uh or not like so that we really have a better sense of our enrollment um in this budget timeline as you know uh today's february 2nd it's in red and anchorage school district is the first school district in the state to get a budget uh moved out of its school board because ours is due by march 1st by ordinance of our city in statutory requirements across the state uh boroughs and districts have to have them there by april 1st but right before april the assembly will approve the budget

130however the state legislature is generally still in session uh they're conferring on the governor's budget uh there'll be different bills and until they actually fund uh the government we technically don't really have a bottom line of our number and that happens every year so i just want folks to know that a budget is always a plan of your revenue and expenditures that may change over time these are the inputs that we believe will be needed as well as the expenses but certainly as we move towards this summer we'll have a better idea and bring a revised budget back to this school board as i mentioned the goals and guard rails are paramount to this budget slide please there we go and if we take a look at the goals and guardrails we've shared in regard

131to reading proficiency math proficiency and of course life college and career readiness so these were always at the forefront in finding the priorities that were necessary to meet these goals within our education system these three represent the vision of the board through its community engagement the guard rails are the values of the community for which the board has asked that the guidance of management and operating whether it's the budget and carrying out actions really stays within these guard rails and they're written in this format to understand really exactly what a uh the word term is those are my guard rails in uh working with uh asc employees and moving the district forward the summary that you see is really just a quick synopsis of what our budget does uh last month or actually in december

132month before last uh time is flying by uh we provided a budget to you a pro forma budget that generally takes um the prior year's expenditures at the same rate as well as revenue forecast and uh comes up with a number of a delta of will we be able to make it with the given if we stayed exactly the same with our metrics uh and the revenue assumptions what is the forecast out of what um our budget will look like at that point in time we provided quite a large delta since that time sr2 funds which are the federal funds for recovery for elementary and secondary schools uh have come in last spring we were provided the sr1 funds these are sr2 uh and they are specifically meant to maximize recovery from cobit 19 to

133get schools up and going and starting and we've taken that guidance to place the funds in our school to be able to get back up on our feet next year and in doing so we do redirect resources to focus on the board goals as well as utilizing funds to redesign educational supports to focus on learning gaps and outcomes and those are really in line with the goals and guardrails again about the work that is to be done today's presentation on goal monitoring i couldn't highlight that enough that there are gaps there is lost learning and that it is um upon um the responsibility of the school district utilizing its assets of revenue human resources our organization to really serve children in that manner uh it does avoid a reduction in force or what might be

134called as a rift for pink slipping uh we don't see that as necessary given the influx of uh s or funds which uh will not carry into the future too much but we also have our uh trend of uh folks leaving the district our natural attrition through retirement as well as movements in the district to be about the same rate so every year we have about uh change in about 250 persons this is metric based so there are reductions in this budget given that the enrollment is lower so while we may have kept steady the pupil-teacher ratio and the inputs into schools when there aren't students and the enrollment is lower certainly the ptr dictates that we will not need as much staff and so it is real that changes and reductions may happen at

135schools but they would be driven by enrollment rather than uh other sources so the enrollment and funding summary i'll go ahead and turn that over to jim anderson thank you dr bishop this gives a quick snapshot of what we're projecting currently for fy22 so starting at the top we're expecting an average daily membership projection of less than what we had last year but certainly more than what we had this year we're projecting about 75 percent of the students who left the district for either a correspondence program private school or to another district to return to asd in the fall as dr bishop mentioned we'll do a community enrollment survey in april and potentially update those projections on the intensive needs student population we expect it to be very close to what it was last year

136which would certainly be an increase over this year [Music] in terms of revenue we expect a total of about 10 million dollars less than what we budgeted for this year however because about 4 500 students left the district naturally we we actually received less revenue than what we budgeted uh we're very fortunate that sr2 was approved in december asd will get about 50.07 million dollars in the intent of sr2 is really clear in the language and it's to uh maximize the school district's ability to fully reopen k-12 schools and facilitate um learning and closing an achievement gap there's some variables that that may require a revised budget that could be any time between may through august depending on state additional federal money and updated projections one of those is the lack of historical data to

137confidently project the number of students that would return since this is the first pandemic in many many years sr-3 funding there's two draft bills currently in dc the president's is uh about a little over twice as much as the the senate version and that's being worked we expect that to start moving and start coalescing sometime in the march time frame so more to follow on that and again the legislative timeline in alaska they have a lot of a lot of things on the plate 19 bills that would directly uh potentially affect k-12 um and they've got to pass the budget as well so we'll keep you updated every time there's a change okay as we look through our general fund revenue this is our comparison from what we adopted in the fy 21 budget to

138the fy 22 budget there are a couple of notable things that are going to stand out the biggest ones being the fund balance as you can see we did not you have a usage of fund balance in fy 21 we plan to use 8.3 million due to revenue shortfalls this year and the ongoing cost of the pandemic we decided you were projecting that we're not going to have fund balance to use within our board policy so we didn't include that as a revenue source the other one you'll see is the 4.1 million dollar increase in local property taxes and the corresponding decrease of about 5.7 million in state foundation funding within the foundation formula we have a component for a required local contribution that is based on 2.65 mills of the property values in the

139municipality and it's based on uh prior to prior year lag so that calendar year 2020 taxes or property values are used to calculate out the fy property property tax revenue um from that calendar year 19 accounting year 20 that went up by about four percent so what you're seeing is an increase of about it's about 4.4 million dollars of required local contribution that needs to come that gets shifted from state revenue over to local property taxes and then it's a little bit lower than 4.4 million and total property taxes because the additional allowable amount we can collect goes down just through our natural our lower enrollment you'll also see the other kind of big one that stands out as our interest earnings are projected to go down by about half a million dollars and that's

140primarily due to the federal funds rate going down from about 1.75 a year ago to about 0.25 percent today uh the other thing worth noting would be the federal impact aid which is which would have been a fairly sizable decrease but congress had passed a federal impact aid coronal violence relief act which provided or allowed districts to use fy20 student council for the fy22 application instead of using fy21 counts which we normally would have done so as mr anderson mentioned all that comes up to about a 10 and a half million dollar projected decrease from fy 21 to fy 22 revenues mr stock i'm sorry i was looking at my list to make sure i didn't miss any of the little buckets on there i can't read them all so this um this slide represents

141the graphic for how our board uh how we will design our work around the board's strategic goals and guard rails and so going forward we will have a group we call the strategic plan task force and since we're here talking about budget tonight i'll explain how how we will work to design that each one of those groups and we kind of call those buckets but they're working groups each one of those groups will have a project manager assigned to it whose task will be to help align and work and do the documentation and create the spreadsheets build the tools help us with all the training components and and kind of serve as that facilitator and glue to keep all those working parts moving forward this was the design it was used in building through all

142of the millions of tasks involved with starting school in a pandemic and so as the years unfolded we've used this working design so this group will meet every week as a large group to report out progress from each of those groups each of those groups will have a lead from the area that it's involved with and a project manager assigned to it and each of those will then be working groups and there will be teachers and principals employees assigned to those groups to help create that energy and innovation around the initiatives that they're working on and so the goal is to begin to even do further work to align this district's initiatives with the actual budget and so that our budget process will be a year-long budget currently our budget process is is primarily a

143work to balance it in time to meet all our statutory requirements and make sure that we've met all those those guidelines in compliance but we also know that we also need to do a deep dive into whether or not all the things that we're doing whether they contribute or detract from the board's overall mission regarding student outcomes so that's the work this next slide just shows some examples of how the current budget actually includes those things so and while this isn't exhaustive these are just listed as examples of things that are in this budget such as the new you know math curriculum adoptions uh other various activities inside those uh buckets that explain things inside this budget that align with the strategic plan so going forward in closing there's a an entire process around which

144we will work to continue to try to align our work with the actual goals and [Music] guardrails so if you look at this slide um on the left hand side you'll see a list of the state functions and it starts at the top the very smallest community services and works down to where we spend the most money which is direct instruction the bars are broken out into blue and brown there's three blue bars the rest are brown and what the brown bars signify is all of those efforts of district resources that go into allowing a school door to open or close every day on time and to be able to provide safe secure for students and everything from mandatory insurance through maintenance and light bulb repairs and really the vast majority of it is school

145staff if you look down on the bottom you'll see that we do in fact still put the vast majority of all of our general fund revenue into salaries and benefits and then you'll see the other items broken out across the bottom all right and next we have just the snapshot of all levels across our system the top chart really demonstrates especially with the pink the increase that would have happened given our operational funds the bottom chart demonstrates the operational funds as well as the esser grant which keeps the ptr at a steady pace to note again that ptr is not a class a cap it's really a funding mechanism as well as the esser really did impact that whereby had we not had the s or 2 funds we would have been looking at 4

146million cuts outside of the ptr yet other people in our organization because our organization as jim uh just shared is made up of people but within schools specifically and teachers this would have really increased the class size by four or the ptr count so this is just demonstrating uh how it was used and what would have been the outcomes had it not been used in this way we're going to now hit uh individually and just go through the staffing allocations at elementary schools middle and high and alternative again these are to demonstrate the changes from year to year and individual schools can be referenced in the larger budget book thank you dr bishop so as you can see from this slide over the last four years for the board members who have seen them there

147was always the list of teachers that were reduced due to enrollment and then another laundry list of all the other reductions made at schools in order to balance a budget this year because we were able to use sr2 funds the only real reduction is metrics based at our schools so you'll see at elementary 38.5 teachers due to projected lower enrollment and naturally as we spoke about when we do the community enrollment survey that number may change uh because money follows the student at state and local level one other change at elementary level which was brief during the work session and i think a little bit earlier is that eagle river elementary and greening will also be reopening their old new schools this next spring or this next fall so we did add in a little

148bit to reopen eagle river elementary for staff allocations for middle schools no major significant changes in staffing some minor metrics based changes and overall 5.2 full-time equivalent which is fte for teachers due purely to enrollment for high school um again very few changes um in terms of metrics based or or non-metrics based although there is a reduction in just over three teachers due to projected lower enrollment from this year if you look at the alternative schools we look at alternative schools uniquely because they all have unique missions they have unique constraints and requirements and so although we initially do place a metric over it we really look at what they need to do to be able to do their mission and ultimately we only reduced their fde just over three similar to the high schools

149due to lower enrollment if you look at the school-based changes for next year i'll just do a few highlights um the one the 48.4 at the top was due to projected lower enrollment we've discussed uh several times in the last few days about the moving um teacher fte over to the yes or two grant after uh receiving uh a nod of approval from the state that that was allowable if you look at the metrics based programmatic teacher editions of some of that is planning time additions to true up the staff and the rest would be the health teachers if you look at the 17.78 metrics based staff and that was over all elementary through high school the vast majority of that fte was projected lower enrollment for kindergarten as we do the survey in april

150we'll be able to true up those numbers and potentially come back and look at it and that would be about 14 fte for kindergarten tas no other major big changes if you look at the charter school changes at the bottom the vast majority of that money um is because family and frontier doubled plus in size this year we expect them to retain a very strong enrollment in the future and as a true up of what we budgeted for this year versus what we project for them next year they receive more money in order to pay out allotments and they had to hire additional staff if you look at the special service changes for next year um nothing big and significant other than we shifted five uh pre-k classrooms into the general fund to guarantee that

151they have had dedicated funding for next year those classrooms are currently in operation today um and have been all year but with the state grant running out um and and no certainty that there would be additional pre-k from the state we shifted that into uh general funds because of the board goal of reading and uh equity on the district-wide changes for next year you'll see some of the bigger items we did reduce teaching and learning substitutes and agenda as some of the professional development that that we thought we would need um we we could reduce those costs and we did add in a little over a million dollars for ready math as part of a multi-year implementation moving down the list you'll see that we shifted a lot of the i.t personnel and equipment that

152we needed through this whole first and second semester everything from home access to chromebooks security software everything else to make sure we could conduct online learning moving down the list a little bit we did make some changes to the district's attrition account insurance continues to go up every year uh we'll be able to true that up probably about april may time frame it's a bit early for them to give forecasts for next year and down at the bottom um we're projecting about a 1.8 million dollar deficit for people transportation that will need to be covered from the general fund and once again we present to you uh in the summary of the big ideas at the 30 000 foot view of what this preliminary budget includes and as well our next steps in the process

153of meeting board goals and moving forward which is on the next slide so the budget approval both at the board level as well as assembly we will take a look at enrollment as well as revenue projections and the revenue again uh as the legislature is convening and and decides its budget uh we will confer and get a more solid number on enrollment we may need to do some revisions but again uh the big piece of this is the task force that has many many working groups uh with many many members uh um depending on on the construct uh from all of our unions similar to how we have the school start task force to give input and decisions made and meeting our goals for the anchor school district thank you thank you so at this

154time i'm going to open it up to board members for any comments or questions and i see that member donnelly has his hand raised thank you see where the budget has at least a million dollars for the ready math uh curriculum implementation uh i believe we have five schools that are going to continue to use saxon math will we be providing them with equal funding per school to be able to replace their saxon math curriculum i can answer that we uh do do that and it's not necessarily uh per book but to your terms uh equal uh because of the ability to fund uh and in a large scale uh you know the cost uh we do provide uh some support uh to be able so it might not afford everything but it would be

155at like support at the district level so yes materials at special mission schools alternative schools uh we do support that with adoptions that go forward can i get a report that shows what that amount will be yes we can do that thank you i had one additional question madam president if i may yes you may several years ago the board made a decision to change middle school so that the teachers there had two planning periods instead of just one and i was wondering how the fiscal impacts of that are reflected in in this budget and uh i see where the class size is the same as the higher grades but if we did not have that two planning periods instead of only one how much could we bring down the class size in those middle

156school classes without spending any additional money through the president member donnelly we can do those calculations uh for you we we can get those calculations back so essentially we have this amount of staff in seven periods we'll run this amount of staff in six periods um and then see uh how that um will fit we will work with the class sizes are there any other board members with comments or questions on the proposed budget remember hildy i just wanted to thank everybody for going over it you know in our individual meetings and with our budget planning meeting as well earlier today so um i don't have any other questions right now and um just remember donnelly's question i i do understand the math behind that we're going to run it seven periods with two plan

157seven periods without so i did get that um the intent of your ask we have those data from a couple years ago as well yeah and the reason that's very budget related is because that decision was made by the board within the budget vote and uh i did disagree with it at that time because it was going to raise class sizes in middle schools but i'd like to see what the impact about again changing that policy and seeing how if how it would positively impact the size of classes in middle schools next up member marcette yeah i never get enough opportunity to thank jim and his staff and mark and tom and everyone for everything they do difficult times going on right now but you guys are stars you always present to us in a

158manner that we understand and if we don't you're always ready to answer our questions uh kudos to board members for being responsive and reaching out and getting your questions answered so that we have a good understanding in this budget and again just thank you everyone uh next up in thecube board member mitchell thank you um i just wanted to um first of all i echo member marcette's um gratitude for all the work that everybody's been doing on this um and i i i'm so grateful for that federal money because we're really in like nice shape for next year um remember donnelly i understand the intent of your question but i did just want to um ask i don't think that the um i don't think the middle school really was getting two planning periods i

159think that was um the it was the design of the middle school model because um at that age my understanding is students need a lot of extra support and so the the intent for that second period was not a second planning period but it was a time i believe to meet with students and their parents and also meet with their teams to talk about how to support their students best so i think that all tied together with the middle school model so i just wanted to clarify that um and i i may be wrong about that but that was my understanding but i also understand where your question is coming from and next up on thecube board member donnelly yeah i think board member mitchell i think it did morph into that i think originally

160it was a second planning period but as implemented and the superintendent could you know more accurately portray this i think you're right i think it was turned into those kinds of things that you just explained yeah i if nobody else had another question i did have another question on the budget there's no other hands up in the queue yeah thank you [Music] my understanding is ignite is maintained at status quo in this proposed budget is that correct through the uh president to remember donnelly yes uh with the establishment also of a year-long process to uh evaluate its goals and uh within the board's guardrails about equity and representation to really look at that so this year this coming school year uh we have under the teaching and learning a parent group as well as employees

161to really evaluate uh the goals for ignite and at that time would come back with a recommendation and we'll ignite parents we have an opportunity to participate on those boards and committees or whatever parents already are members it's already established and parents are on it okay did you have any other questions remember donnelly um no thank you okay uh doing a quick look around does anybody else have any comments or questions on the proposed budget all right seeing none we are going to move on i'm just friendly reminder to public and everybody else this is coming up for its second reading uh at our next board meeting which is uh february 16th we encourage as much you know comments and uh questions from our public and you know any guidance that you may want to

162weigh in on so please email us or you know reach out to us so thank you moving on we do not have another public test well we don't have anybody signed up for public testimony number two so it brings us to school board and administration comments if anybody has any last final words for the evening seeing that i will entertain a motion to adjourn i move to adjourn so moved have a great night everybody thank you for all the participation