CCS Board of Education 11/8/2021

001okay thank you no i think to the audit so i will now turn it over to you adrian thank you so much for coming tonight thank you for having me um we're gonna show the presentation um on the screen but i may bounce around a little bit and if you do have questions please don't hesitate to interject and ask them as we go along it's going to be very boring if you sit and listen to me the whole entire time so just as a reminder the different this is not up there but there are a few different parts of the audit so just to kind of give you an overview the very first part of the audit talks about the auditor's opinion i mean here you'll see that clarkston received an unmodified opinion which sounds

002kind of weird but it actually is the highest opinion that we as auditors can give so that's in the very front of the audit with the letterhead from the auditing firm just past that is what we call the md a or the management's discussion and analysis and i would encourage all of you if you look at nothing else in the audit report to read that section it's probably eight or nine pages long it's the most you know english version of the audit that you're going to get so the audit will be posted on the website if you don't already have a copy so i would encourage you to look at that mary beth and her team helped write part of that as well so i think it's a great summary about what happened over the

003past year and then also what the district is looking ahead at doing as well past that is what we call the district-wide statements and those are a very long-term view of the district it's a little bit different than what you're used to looking at and it's where you take all of the different funds of the district you take all of the capital assets all of the long-term debt and very technically you smush them all together and prepare a financial statement these statements are very difficult to look at from a from a school district's perspective because while there are some things you can control you can control your bonds and your long-term debt that way there are other things you can't control such as the net pension liability with the state and the net op liability

004with the state so oftentimes we don't spend a lot of time kind of looking at those statements but they are the very first statements in the front of the audit and then we get to the to the general fund which is what you guys are used to looking at and what the main operating fund of the district is but just a couple of highlights before we get to that as i said the district received an unmodified opinion which is the highest opinion that auditors can give and there were also no significant deficiencies or material weaknesses in the district's internal controls so when we come in and do audits we particularly with the federal compliance audit we actually test the district's internal controls as it relates to the federal programs and it is quite common for

005districts to get findings so there's two different types of findings significant deficiencies or material weaknesses and clarkston received neither type of those findings that's particularly significant after the year we've had with the coronavirus relief funds it has been a year of unknowns not only for obviously in the world but in your business office as you've received money sometimes you receive money and you don't know how to spend it what the requirements are and the federal government and state of michigan have had their own challenges and have made it very difficult on your business office as well to kind of know how to handle those so kudos to you guys for that because we have had an um exceptional number of findings as it relates to federal programs for the 2021 audit so and congratulate you

006as well as i mentioned before we also do a what we call a single lauder audit or a federal compliance audit where we actually look at the um all of the federal programs that the district receives you actually receive a separate audit for that that also gets posted on your website and we actually audited let me check my notes here we audited 73 of the federal funds over the past year so we did the child nutrition cluster as well as the coronavirus release relief funds and again received an unmodified opinion as it relates to your of federal compliance audit and no findings there as well so kudos to the district for that so this is the statement of net position i'm not going to go through all of the numbers but this is most like

007a balance sheet for a for profit company we talked a little bit about the different types of liabilities that are shown there you do have a negative net position of 171 million that primarily relates to the net pension liability and the net op liability there are very few districts in the state of michigan that have a positive net position and most of those have you know five students or something to that so it doesn't necessarily mean anything bad it's just kind of the way it is a statement of activities again this is the activities of the entire district we're not going to spend a lot of time on that but just it does report all of your funds and includes the changes in debt and capital assets as well but what most of you care

008about here is the general fund and this is just a graph that kind of illustrates the change in fund balance that the district had so if you want to kind of look at a statement you can look at page that's the budget to actual statement and here it is kind of in graphical form this page and the next but i just kind of wanted to give some highlights of the general fund over the past year so revenues were up uh about 7.6 million so about 8.2 percent from the last year you won't see these numbers so i'm just giving you these highlights expenditures were up 9.7 million so about 10.7 percent of that increase in revenue about 4.6 of that is cares-related funding so that's a one-time funding source so you were able to add

009three million seven hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars to your fund balance this year as most districts in the state of michigan were able to add to your fund balance but i just caution you because a lot of those revenue sources won't be repeated in in future years i know mary beth has shared that with you but i just want all of you to be aware of that as well you absolutely correct you're not storing it up correct correct and you're very limited in what you can spend those dollars on so because they're one-time funding you can't necessarily go out and create a bunch of new programs because you won't have funding sources to to continue that so a lot of that type of funding was used was supposed to be used for ppe and cleaning

010supplies and dealing with the coronavirus pandemic there's been a lot of as you all know a lot of unknowns and the environment has been constantly changing so i think what you will see next year you know i think for a lot of districts you're going to see this upward tick in fund balance but i think as some of those funding sources go away you're going to kind of start to see that you know decrease as well so we have a little bit of a one-time uptick there your so i always calculate your fund balance against your next year's budgeted expenditures so mary beth may give you a little bit of different information but your fund balance now represents 14.29 percent of your budgeted expenditure so what you budgeted in june of 21 so um your

011number from mayor beth could be a little bit different there is still a lot of unknowns that is going out there so having a fund balance is not bad but you are absolutely right you're not you're not taking this 3.8 and holding it away and saving it for a rainy day it's the timing of some of this coven money that has come through and so then to kind of look at the budget as well the budget in a school district is extremely important we have to report the original budget that the board approves which you would have approved in june of 2020 so so many unknowns at that point in time and then also what you would have approved in june of 2021 so this is actually on page 23 of your financial statements if

012you want to look there i try to just provide things i know for most people reading financial statements is not a fun treat i actually happen to like it but we tried to provide it in different the same information in different ways so it's easier for everyone to read but you know you have just shy of a hundred million dollar budget and your your expenditure budget um had a you had planned to spend 101 million you spent just under just over a hundred so you're the variance there was six hundred and two thousand dollars which is point six percent uh which is awesome so mary beth and her team did a great job there the state looks at a five percent variance and anything above a five percent variance is where they get concerned and

013you can start to get notices but six hundred thousand out of a hundred million is awesome so these are the different areas and again they're shown on page 23 as well any questions about the budget and then i'm not going to go through all of these numbers i just again just different information for you as the board to kind of look at the information graphically instead of just seeing it in in a financial statement so we did it for expenditures here and then also for revenues there so it's just always just very interesting to see how comparable school districts are from year to year which is what you want to see you don't want to see unusual outliers and again at the last page here we go through some suggestions these are not to the

014level of findings these are not to the level of saying that your business office is in any way um not doing what they should be but just a reminder that the business office has had a rough year just like everyone else you've had some changes in your business office as well so mary beth got to deal with the auditors in a different way this year and she did a great job but just a reminder to continue to support your business office as they're trying to navigate their way through cobit monies and a lot of unknowns and there will be a new accounting pronouncement related to leases so there's no longer anything called an operating lease any longer so right now we have an operating lease and a capital lease now all leases will be shown

015on your balance sheet you guys don't do a lot of leasing so that should not impact you but really i think what's useful for the readers is that there's a lot of hidden costs and a lot of hidden interest rates and leases and that will start to come to light on financial statements so shouldn't affect you too much and then there's just some guidance here related to covet related funding so again i'm not going to go through this in great detail i believe you all have a copy and can look at that but kind of just so the the three things i want you to kind of leave with the presentation today so number one is understanding the type of opinion that the audit that the district received in their audit so again just as

016a reminder received an unmodified opinion for both the financial audit and the federal compliance audit i want you to have an understanding if the district had any findings so we talked about that there were no findings on either the financial audit side or the federal compliance side the federal compliance side determines if the district is considered low risk or high risk which translates into work and dollars for both the auditors and the business office so you are still considered a low risk oddity and had no findings and then the third thing [Music] is understanding if you had material journal entries so also included in your audit packet is this letter here your audit letter is extremely boring which is exactly what you want you do not want an exciting audit ladder or an exciting audit

017for that matter and if we had come in and made material journal entries then i would be required to disclose that information to you so you can see in the letter that we did not have material journal entries that means that the what the information that the business office is giving given to you is good and accurate and i'm not coming in and making changes to that and you want to know that the information you're getting to make budgetary and programmatic decisions is is accurate and correct so again no material journal entries there as well so overall a great audit for a challenging year in particular no findings when a lot of districts are having findings particularly when you're having a lot of business office turnover with heather leaving and then her replacement so all

018in all a great audit so excuse me are there any questions that and i know that i just kind of hit the very high level i'm happy to answer any questions if you have anything all right and then i just will remind you that in the footnotes to the financial statements which are dead set in the middle um if you do have if you can't sleep it's a good place to read but if you do have questions about the the capital assets or debt or pension of the odd of the district you can go in there and get a lot more detailed information like i said i just hit the high levels um but it's available for you if you want to look into that so all right thank you trustees no questions for that

019uh are there any members of our community here in attendance tonight who had any questions for our auditor regarding the audit that's a thumbs up not a hand raise okay very good okay seeing none then we will uh take a short break i guess ladies and gentlemen and we will begin our business meeting at 7. thank you so much for do you want coming so i just all right we'll call the meeting to order uh and just as a reminder since we're back at the high school that the sign in sheets to address the board or at the entrances um of the of the room here and that's also where a copy of our bylaw is posted uh and so if you wish to address the board on an agenda item tonight and our agenda

020is fairly healthy this evening that you need to get signed up fairly quickly because we do pick up those sign in sheets when we get to item three so i can see who wishes to address the board on an agenda item that's when they are collected so that comes up pretty quickly obviously you'll still be able to sign up to address the board on item nine which is on any topic you'll be able to do that throughout the meeting um so additional signup sheets will be placed on the tables at those times also a reminder that speakers will be limited to those who follow the correct procedure which is detailed on those sign up sheets so please fill out the sign up sheet as directed and we will now move on to the pledge of

021allegiance [Music] and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Music] mrs mclean may i have a roll call please yes here mrs catalina sends her regrets she had a personal emergency come up today and will not be joining us this meeting is a meeting of the board of education in public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business and is not to be considered a public community hearing there is time for public participation during the meeting as indicated in agenda items three and nine item two is approval of the consent agenda may i have a motion please i move that the board of education approves the consent agenda as presented support all in favor say aye aye any opposed the motion carries item

022three is citizen's request to address the board you were given two opportunities to address the board under item 3.1 you can request to address the board about any topic that's on tonight's agenda and under item nine you are welcome to address the board on any topic when making comments please state your name and address and direct your comments to mrs kelly horst president each person may speak for up to two minutes for established procedures the board will not respond to questions or interact with the speaker during public comment as a reminder anyone who engages a criticism and or personal attack of an individual whether by name or any other identification will be stopped and prevented from doing so calling out individuals in this forum is inappropriate personal attacks will not be tolerated i remind you

023to please keep your remarks and your attention directed to the full board mr seaman who directs us up from uh the control room up there or let me know tonight that we have moved to the microphone slightly the one that is in the mezzanine level can you see it is over here now in the corner i see a gentleman here in a great flannel shirt it's the time of the year it's right behind him in the corner here so that is the microphone for the for the mezzanine i guess area and our other microphone here is down in front as usual so as miss mclean brings me the sheet give me just a moment to see if we have anyone who wishes to address the board on an agenda item [Applause] okay so everyone who

024signed up under equity or dei i'm assuming that all of you would like to go when we reach that agenda item right number five okay so mr osterman mr parkin mrs gianpatroni and mr gonzalez i will call all of you after we have our presentation in our board discussion then i will call all of you up at that time all right we will move on to item number four superintendent update dr ryan thank you president horse for our community this evening have a couple updates first on the business end literally earlier this evening we had a presentation by our auditors outside auditors for clarkson community schools who presented a overall review of the district finances over the last 12 months and came to conclusion with zero negative findings and provided clarkson with the highest recommendation

025in terms of overall accounting and management of district finances as they look at many many schools across the state of michigan so it's a point of pride for our business office our executive director mary beth rogers and the entire team i just want to publicly thank you for all the hard work that's especially in light of this year as many know that it's been extraordinary in terms of difficulty in managing in and out federal and other funds as they've come to try to mitigate some of the effects of covid so again my respect and my thanks for all the hard work that you and your team put in throughout this year thank you secondly as it relates to kobit one of those things that made it very difficult to manage this year this past week

026is looking at the overall covered rates within the clarkston school district area is a rate about 51 and a half per 10 000 which if you look at the overall path over the last two years that does not represent as significantly as we've had overall in the past of the height of the pandemic last year which we had rates as high as you know upwards of 150 plus so we're very operationally sound right now overall we are feeling the effects across our district in pockets especially with classrooms that are being managed more aggressively in terms of the district looking at distancing other things within those classrooms i'm here to report we're doing our absolute best and i see no reason that we're going to be able to have to deviate from keeping our kids in

027school now and throughout the rest of the school year we're managing ford and it's to the credit of our principals our teachers and the entire team that's helping to kind of keep this school year uh on the rails and we think it's absolutely critical for our kids to have that consistency obviously we're going to continue to keep our eyes open to manage anything that we have in front of us in terms of making any changes or moves and recommendations to keep us all in school but i see the foreseeable future in a really positive light of keeping us in that direction so that being said some things of celebration over the last several weeks that i want to share with our community is i want to congratulate our wolves diver zoe paxton and madison verbiki

028on friday night this past friday at the oa blue league championship zoe and maddie both broke the 11 dive school record which is a huge significant piece in clarkson as you guys know how competitive our diving has been so congratulations ladies second i want to congratulate varsity golf coach leslie hallman she was selected as a regional coach of the year by the michigan golf association will be honored at the hall of fame coach of the year banquet in august of 2022 this past weekend also our clarkson high school marching band competed at ford field it's an extraordinarily competitive field that they took part in and of the top field of the state the crest of the teams they took sixth in their flight and it's an incredible honor having watched them also perform here several

029weeks ago at the regional invitation here we had in clarkston you know we really bring a tremendous amount of pride not only in athletics but when you see our marching band take the field the pride that they carry for our community it really gives it lump in your throat and gives you goosebumps so i just want to say to mike lewis an entire marching band family that we have out there congratulations this weekend coming up looking forward the collection junior high school drama club will present little mermaid this friday and saturday this past friday we also had a visit we hosted northern michigan university in the women's in construction it was at the at carson junior high another example as you heard uh weeks ago when we presented the career focused education that we have

030here in clarkston of giving getting young women especially focused into the construction and trades industry it was literally a big part of the entire junior high was taking up with with hands-on construction everything from heavy equipment to futuristic type blueprint designing and a lot of different fields in between we think it's really really important to make sure not all of our students get exposed to this but we really want to encourage our girls to enter into these high paying and very lucrative careers along the way and with that i also want to tip my hat with the help of our community and the chs kids care club i collect and disburse over 100 costumes for halloween for students in in community children that were in need and they're now collecting children's coats through november 26th

031in the high school main office so if you have an extra coat laying around that you feel like might help a child in need as you see the temperatures begin to drop here this fall and have time we really appreciate if you could drop that off at clarkson high school and finally another tip to our community ed in clarkston this past saturday they hosted the mother sundance having been a veteran of many many years of the father-daughter dances it's been an event that's been growing in popularity and at last had up over 440 students and their moms attend this great event and i think it's another example as we try to get back to a sense of normalcy in clarkston a feeling of community of having the type of events where we can really kind

032of showcase and give opportunities outside the classroom and for our families to kind of engage together with the support of our school district so i want to again tip my hat it's actually miss rogers again who is has a large part with community ed and because of uh staff tonight she actually rolled up her sleeves and was a big part of actually managing all elements of that event that night so again thank you so that would be my it's a little bit of extended update but a lot of good things to celebrate in clarkson and i don't want any to follow through the cracks thank you thank you dr ryan we'll move on to presentation items we have several tonight 5.1 is an art history presentation and we'll call it mrs fuller mrs kalinowski and

033our art history students [Applause] oh good evening board that that is on that was loud sorry greetings to all the citizens of clarkston i'm mrs fuller i teach art history with miss kaplan rudolph who couldn't be here today we take a field trip to detroit every year and miss kalinowski brings her architecture students with us and then we have today also our art history club uh manager i guess we could say really morgan and then we have caitlin and it's her birthday today [Music] [Applause] and we also have emma and stella with us they were all on the field trip and said that they would come in and say a few extra words that go along with our video presentation [Music] hi i'm mrs fuller and i teach art history with ms kaplan rudolph and

034this is such an extraordinary class because we have unique opportunities like our two field trips we go to the dia and we also have our architectural art history tour which you're going to see some videos and photographs from and what i love about this particular field trip is a lot of our students have never really experienced the city of detroit other than the stadiums and so they are always very surprised when they get inside these buildings and realize how beautiful our architecture is [Music] so [Music] do [Music] uh [Music] you push me [Music] theater flash mob in the park with a breast cancer survivor this is awesome and american coney is really great [Music] highlights hi fox theater so far it was amazing to get a tour and just be the only people in there

035and hear about all of the history and look um my favorite part of our architecture field trip thing like going to detroit was probably going to the fox theater and seeing all like the cool like designs on the ceiling and all the cool like facts and then we also got to go on stage which was very cool and also just like when we got to like choose between the two coneys i know it sounds funny just coneys but it was that was a lot of fun my favorite part of the field trip was walking around the city and i like american planet yeah hi i'm mrs fuller and this is patrice our exchange student from spain and when we were on our field trip to detroit we ate at the national coney island and lafayette

036coney island for the comparison of the ponies and um padre was with me at the national coney island and she said it was pretty good yeah yeah it was pretty good and then she went next door and got the uh and she said it was better yeah and then she checked out the bathrooms at both coneys and after she came back from lafayette what did you say do you remember uh i don't remember she says but uh this is better here this is better because the bathroom is nasty so nasty american architecture at its finest a bathroom seeing the green room where all the performers signed their names and stuff i thought that was really cool uh my favorite thing was the fox theater and i was only at one conley island and it was

037the american one okay so what excited me most about the architecture field trip was the fisher building it was the first building we went to and the moment i walked in i was surprised the 40 kinds of marble were absolutely beautiful the acrylic paint and the gold leaf that was used for small arches [Music] those were incredible too it's funny to look at [Music] and the level of detail in the arches above on the second floor that was incredible too all right that's it i just really enjoyed walking around and seeing all the places because i had been to detroit before like multiple times and i had never seen it in the way i saw it on this turret i thought the floor of the fisher building was pretty cool i liked how there was

038a hundred different kinds of marbled on the floor and i also enjoyed the uh fox theater i thought it was really cool how long i walked in i was just taken away by how big it was what was unique about the fox theater was how many mistakes there were throughout it and how much how important those were to the actual fox theater itself i thought what else was cool was the spirit of detroit and the sculpture that was put and made out there in detroit [Music] no one ever believes us that that's canada [Music] yeah thank you for watching and you know the student who was talking about the flooring um i i have to say that i learned about him after the field trip was that he wants to be a geologist and he

039was fascinated by the marble and he kept talking about it and kids are like why is he so obsessed with the floors i said well they're beautiful but then i found out more from him later that was pretty neat and i forgot to mention um we had enough room that mr kest was able to bring our foreign exchange students with us also so that's why you heard some pretty thick accents and that was an awful lot of fun to be able to include them all right next up do you want to hear from the kids hi i'm morgan and as you can see i attended the architecture field trip in detroit and it was just absolutely breathtaking all of the buildings that we went to were amazing in their architecture and not just the architecture

040but the stories that um in the fox theater are we had a tour guide and he told us all about the history of it and all the different things and i remember they were talking about how there was this one elephant at the top that was um the trunk was supposed to be pointing up but it was pointing down when they finalized it and mrs fox was very not happy about that and just hearing all of these stories and in class we also learned about like the inspiration where um the things that inspired this architecture and these architectural trends at the time periods that these buildings were built and not only getting to learn about that in class but then see that in real life just was absolutely awesome because it's like oh yeah we

041learned about that in class oh yeah that's a ionic column or that's a corinthian column and just like all the things that were so far away were now just within reach for us so thank you hi i'm caitlin and yes i am wearing the same sweater as i was in the video i just noticed um i really had a good time on the field trip because we you know like as morgan said we were just learning about all like the like you know just like columns for example we were also doing a project alongside like this field trip so after going and seeing like all the cool like architecture like i could incorporate that into my own project we had to like draw something and you know make our own like castle almost and so

042it was really cool just being able to see like not just stuff on like a presentation like on a google slide like we actually got to see it in real life and it was very like beneficial for our school project hi i'm emma and i thought it was really cool when we were seeing all the architecture in detroit how all of it was so like different from one another based on the types of parts that were put into it and it was really evident in the things that we learned why they were all so different and it was all the different time periods like kind of combined together in the history of the different architecture styles and i thought that was really cool hi i'm stella and i did not make it into the video

043for an interview so but as many other people on board now yes i do get to be included but um as they said like in their interviews and now it was very cool to be able to like apply what we learned in class into seeing it in real life and i've lived here all my life been to detroit like a thousand times never once have i like taken a moment to appreciate what goes into building these buildings and like how they look and i've been to fox theater at least twice i didn't know that they left like the piece codes on the ceiling so if you go in there now you know you can see ceiling tile 61a because they didn't cover it up because they ran out of paint and i think it's super

044exciting that like our foreign exchange students got to learn this along with us who have lived here all our lives and i don't know i thought it was a very cool field trip and i like that we didn't get lectured the entire time about like learning it while we were there it was nice to learn it beforehand and then like see it and get a real life experience thanks again for letting us come and bring our students to showcase some of the things that we're doing in our class i think one of my favorite parts of doing this field trip is a lot of times we miss that moment of awe in our classroom when students are learning and it's just so very evident and every time we go into one of these buildings even

045i still have that moment of awe but especially for the students to see it firsthand is what keeps you coming back every time so thanks again thank you thank you i'll tell you what we've missed we've certainly missed that moment of of just having students in the boardroom too and hearing from all of you so this is probably the first group we've had in the last well certainly 18 19 20 months so thank you very much for coming tonight and sharing with us i'm so glad you got to go on the field trip and we're certainly glad you came to share it with us we appreciate it ladies thank you thank you very much caitlin happy birthday go celebrate now thank you all right our next presentation 5.2 is a construction tech experience at northern

046michigan mr wykoff will come share that with us i love that it's about students tonight thank you very much uh first thing i would like to say is ladies where are you did they all disappear already they ran they were fabulous i have 18 seniors all boys i asked them all to come up here to say something two of them said okay [Laughter] somehow they came up with a better option i don't know so anyways this is the second year or yeah the second trip we have taken up to northern michigan we went up there two years ago made a commitment with northern that we'd come back up they're wonderful hosts the kids who get through our program that end up going to northern they get to skip a couple of their classes we have

047a really great articulation that way and they really really look after our students you know i'm on the phone with the head of the department more than once a month how's so-and-so doing how's so-and-so doing okay i'll see him when he gets home okay oh they want to jump to another college that's all right we support them and mike up there is like steve you never know when they're going to come back it's just a great thing for the kids so we want to continue to do this every other year so the support from clarkson is wonderful um so let's go ahead um how do i work this right or left it goes up and down all right thank you all right okay we had 27 students go um 10th 11th and 12th graders four

048adults um instructor adam goring neil grenlin counselor sarah hester and myself we departed at 7 00 am on a friday morning that was my biggest fear that they weren't gonna get there on time because so many times they can't seem to manage that little thing but we got out before seven it was wonderful we were at the bridge in no time saturday we did our tour we of the university we did marquette city for a little while and then um cruised home so totally we were gone 38 and a half hours and on the bus for 14. about six kids said they'd never been across this bridge i said you can come sit next to me and close your eyes if you want it's only five minutes across they're like their faces are right there

049so it's a great opportunity for them to get out of clarkston and see what's over the bridge of course we were we promised them mcdonald's because they all wanted mcdonald's wouldn't phillip they wouldn't take a charter bus so we went into st ignis knocked on the door said uh could you handle 31 people they said well we have two waitresses do you mind it was the best food we ever had it was wonderful they treated us great jumped on the bus for another three hours and then we turned out into uh the super dope the superior dome there it's the largest indoor football stadium in the world the kids were kind of fired up about that but they were also dragging and there's mr mister's head right in front of the camera so after we

050went through the superior dome we went to the rec center stretched our legs played volleyball ping pong they did some weight lifting uh they beat on the other instructors in basketball and then none of them could beat me in ping pong though this was the highlight for a lot of the students went to the hockey game there's mr growing there with his thumbs up a wonderful new new teacher for the program a bunch of seniors right there they were playing um bemidji college ranked 19th in the country northern wasn't ranked and they lost five to four so it was a pretty good game now willie the mascot is loved by our counselor sarah sarah was throwing the little kids out of her way just to get this picture it was not a character moment for

051uh miss hester here's a couple alumni there's jagger woody i've known jagger since he was in probably second grade and there was no way jagger in the northern uh jersey was ever going to go to college here he is a sophomore with a smile on his face and he's going i don't know how i'm doing this nate nate is uh up there as a freshman he's going into electrical engineering and livvy there mike the dean of the program he says steve i've been here for 20 years i've seen a lot of resumes this young lady has the best resume he's ever seen she came down this uh past friday set up for women in construction she was leading the show she is an all-star and you're gonna she's gonna buy our program a lot of

052tools down the road okay then we took them around the campus next day checked out the dorms interesting thing about this the dorms behind them fairly new the parking lot in front of them used to be where mr mister's dorms were when he went to northern so he was saddened by that somewhat the kids all thought that was pretty entertaining toured the academic buildings the construction management building they have a building about as big as this room just for scaffolding set up it's an amazing place they got and they don't think it's good enough so they're going to pump about 58 million dollars into a new program there it is right there it's really really super long it's hooked to a room with 60 welding machines pretty cool stuff then because neil mr mister is

053from the u.p going down to marquette he gave the kids the yuper tour and he is the voice of clarkson so everybody was tuned into them you can see how beautiful it is up there none of the students knew what that is that is how they put the ore in the ships we got a close-up look at that they were off fascinated he said hey you got to google it you guys so for about five minutes they were checking out how that uh that worked out there's a city and really the nuts and bolts what did the kids get out of this they got mostly out of it was i have students who never dreamed of going to college now they go to this atmosphere with these kind of professors and they're like i can

054do this this is exactly what i can do math isn't that hard anymore this is infractions this is measurements it's a whole different arena when you look that way you know the one kid at the bottom quote there college is not as scary as i thought you know some were afraid just to go into the cafeteria and i don't know if they did it just for us but that was the best cafeteria food i had in a long time i mean salmon which cali well how many colleges serve salmon i think it was they're just being nice to us we spent an hour with counselors we learned about the tools to use to gain access to financial assistance there are things they didn't even know existed it was just they didn't even know how to

055apply as i said i have 18 seniors seven of them have applied already three have been accepted so they're pretty fired up about that and i guess that's pretty much it i'm sorry i didn't have any music or students or very sweet girls to talk about the program but in two years i'll be ready thank you mr wyckoff i think on the heels of our last presentation last month on college and career readiness and that whole piece i mean this really is so well timed so thank you and as mr dr ryan said the women in construction function high school girls from all over the community came in they got to work with the operators union they got to work with the ironworkers they got to work with barton mallow they got a goodie bag

056where they probably had 200 dollars of tools and and cool swag in there it was really really a nice situation and uh adam kern thanks for helping setting everything up because he had to do a lot of organizing my job was to get my students out of the way okay i do have a question for you is a comment you made you said you know they don't see it as math as fractions they see it as measurements do they really see it maybe as a continuation of what they're doing here because i know the math you teach i mean you've kind of changed it a little bit to really fit you know the program so did they just see it as like oh i'm doing this already i mean so this so they started there's

057a correlation you know so it's like a square shingles 10 feet by 10 feet so 100 square feet they got to figure the area yeah but when it's on a piece of paper and you don't know why you're doing it you know you don't know why you're doing it but now they're getting it and it's it's it's fabulous to see them change their mind i mean i have another student i give home or give a ride home you know every other day and uh it's like hey what are you gonna do with yourself he said well i was gonna go on the field but you know and he was the one who said college and i can do college all you gotta do is not quit because up at northern they're like you're not gonna

058quit because we're gonna be on you and if i'm not on you we're going to call your teacher and then he's going to get on so just the way it is and you know as long as we can build any of the construction teachers in the in the state we're not competing against each other we're competing against um the kids not wanting to do anything and motivating them to get going because you know i'm 58 and i'm going to be 88 soon and i want to have a nice well-built old person's home i want some really cool shuffleboard lanes in there the putty and green so yeah anyways it's our job and it's what we do and we love it and you have to really recognize not only the work of steve whitecough over the

059last five years you know him the team adam curran principal to junior high was sitting in the audience you wave please see where he's at they've literally built it where they start the kids building the stool that they're going to sit on in class and now they're to the level they're going to be building houses they built a small one out back at the junior high and now they're going to be expanding it and just the sky's the limit so i really appreciate all you guys have done to kind of build the program that's going to help build the future of clarkson thank you for all the support thank you mr whitehouse our next presentation item 5.3 is our elementary math and literacy update welcome mrs mahoney and team [Applause] good evening board of education

060dr ryan very excited to be here to celebrate elementary literacy and mathematics tonight i am standing here with two wonderful leaders that i would like to introduce who will be speaking as well our elementary literacy coordinator she's the subject area coordinator at the elementary leading literacy and that is megan burkett brazier alongside another wonderful leader is our elementary math coordinator rachel raddatz and we're excited to share the work we've been doing to lift up literacy and math for our elementary division one of the goals in our strategic plan is to increase student academic and dispositional skills and this certainly starts at the elementary level our board of education you have been incredibly responsive to the needs of our youngest learners by approving the system of support model that we have put in place we have

061spent the last year and a half in a pandemic and this of course has impacted our world our state our community and our students but the system of support is going to help our needs and increase literacy and math achievement for our children and so tonight we want to share with you our model what we're doing and what we continue to believe in as it guides us through this support model and i love these pictures of our children in action when it comes to literacy and math and we believe that joyful engaging practices develop a strong foundation to enrich students lives now and in the future recognizing that all children are different and that we must be responsive to this in our instruction so developing a strong foundation requires high quality instruction to be adaptive

062to appropriately challenge every child to be responsive to data and learning must be joyful this comes in two-fold we build this through successful experiences when children are feeling success we know this motivates their learning as well as we connect to students interests and passions and this is what we remain committed to i'd like to hand the microphone now to megan so when we think about early literacy and math we know that these skills truly are foundational for life and we work hard to build those skills strategically in young fives through fifth grade we know that literacy skills reading writing speaking listening communicating these are skills that cut across all subjects and into the fabric of our daily lives as we build literacy skills in our students we know this as an opportunity to connect with

063our learners and help them find their voice and build agency in their learning giving students choice and voice in the topics and genres they are reading and writing about is critical as nancy said earlier we want learning to be joyful and engaging we want our students to be curious to wonder to try things out and try again if they don't work we want our students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers and know that learning is both individual and social our instruction ensures that our students passions and interests are honored in the classroom and indeed connected to what they're learning for example one of our standards right is that students learn how to write opinion or argument pieces so when we teach that we teach that standard in the context of what matters to them

064our students have written about things that matter to them a lot like having bigger lockers right in elementary school that's a big deal for kids different food in the cafeteria and even things like more sidewalks in the community right these are these are things that our students want and they can develop a claim and provide reasons and evidence for that and when our learning becomes personalized our engagement is stronger and the joy is there both in their success and in their connection to school we also know that we have to be responsive to the very wide range of needs in our classrooms and make sure that we have materials and strategies to challenge and grow every child's literacy knowledge one-on-one conferring and small group work is a focus for us as we work hard to

065make sure that the materials and concepts we present are tailored to the needs of our students along with this we know that there are skills that our young learners need to be explicitly taught we can't leave these up to chance this explicit instruction might just take a few exposures for some students and many more for others you know as we kind of think about the impact of the last year and a half we know that the needs of our students have changed and we feel proud to be in a district that continues to be dedicated to responding to these needs and i'm going to let rachel talk a little bit about math good evening when thinking about elementary students and their lives as mathematicians we want them to see and experience math around them it's

066everywhere whether they're using their imaginations during play like if they're playing store counting or sorting toys building with blocks playing games with their family or friends students are utilizing their math skills our sis our students are excited to share their mathematical thinking and this is a purposeful move in our mathematics instruction we communicate about math sharing ideas using manipulatives drawings words and numbers we also expand our own understanding by listening carefully to the thinking of others within the classroom building conceptual knowledge is paramount students use manipulatives such as tiles pattern blocks five and ten frames to provide tangible aids to help build understanding by physically moving the pieces students are able to fully interact with the mathematics over time students begin to draw pictorial represent representations of their math thinking these are drawings that explain

067their understanding and finally the mathematical thinking can be shown through numbers and symbols as megan just stated we must be responsive to the wide range of needs in our classrooms some students will readily move from the concrete manipulatives to drawings to our number system while others will need additional experiences building conceptual understanding provides for multiple entry points this means that there are many ways for a student to begin to solve a problem and in fact there may be several ways a student could solve the problem without the limitation of just one right way to answer a mathematics problem students are flexible and able to engage in multiple ways so tonight we wanted to share some data with you as you can see here this is k-5 math data this is based on this past fall

068this fall currently 2021 we have a brand new screener that we purchased and have implemented called fastbridge and so what you're seeing here is that 69 percent of our students are likely to meet end of the year benchmarks while 31 of the students in the district are indicating some or high levels of risk for meeting these benchmarks we are being responsive to data so you will see not only in this slide but in the next slides a snapshot of our current data for our elementary division we also wanted to show this math piece this is by grade level across the district and one thing i'd like to remind you is that these are national benchmarks that were set before the pandemic and so these our students took it this fall and this is the way

069they've turned out as you can see it's interesting and we have questions around the data like look at third grade and so we're wondering about you know their success being stronger and so as we continue to look at data and ask more questions it continues to guide us same thing with fast breads for literacy this is showing 62 percent of our students are likely to meet the end of the year benchmark while 38 of the students in the district are indicating some or high level of risk for meeting benchmarks and as we look again at grade level data the national benchmark was set before the pandemic but again we see stronger in third as well as fourth grade there we did want to reflect and share m-step data this was taken in the spring of

070this last school year and again this is for third through fifth grade and so you'll see yes we want our percentages certainly to go up 53 percent proficient while at the state this is for ela was 44 so we were well above our state and as well as math 45 percent where the state average there was 36. our system of support is really made up of three roles and i wanted to define those roles for you and so the idea and we know that we had literacy coaches but we are super excited that we now have math coaches serving our teachers our coaches work alongside classroom teachers to ensure outstanding core instruction that supports and appropriately challenges all our learners this is speaking to the differentiation that has to occur within our classrooms our interventionists

071again super excited these are certified teachers that are serving our students they use data to design deliver and monitor progress of targeted interventions for small groups of students in literacy and math and we're very fortunate to have our aides our aides continue to guide our students and they are guided by our coaches and interventionists they support they support small groups of students with targeted instruction megan we'll talk more now about coaches so if you take a look at the pictures on the screen you'll see our coaches meeting meeting with building administrators meeting with teams of teachers they're collaborating planning using data to create and revise plans and this is the heart of coaching work our coaches are continuously using data to support instruction inside the classroom for all of our students they help make instructional

072decisions for whole groups small groups and individual students they're modeling lessons in classrooms recommending strategies to support small groups helping to differentiate lessons and using the data to design and lead professional learning for staff in literacy we launched the year with a focus on word study instruction our literacy coaches have led sessions around decoding phonological awareness development and more effective phonics instruction making sure that our students are understanding and applying those letter sound relationships when they're reading and writing our math coaches launched the year by leading instruction around using our online resources to support instruction increasing engagement in math and supporting math development with games protocols and questioning techniques the best part is this isn't a one-time professional learning our coaches are on site to deliver and work with educators around these topics all year

073long and we have a lot of new teachers we have a lot of new staff in clarks we have over 40 new staff members in our elementary buildings and it's been amazing to see the work and the impact that our coaches are already making with those new staff it's been an incredible gift to hear from teachers who've come from other districts and those teachers have said to us we've never felt more supported and that's amazing when we hear that in this time that's very difficult for our teachers and we know that so our coaches are leading just amazing work and in addition to working alongside teachers they're also engaging in in their own deep professional learning so that they can can continue to support teachers and students with the most up-to-date research so math coaches

074are currently immersed in math recovery training and our literacy coaches in statewide training around the literacy essentials and in the next couple of months our new literacy coaches as well as all of our literacy interventionists will begin a comprehensive orton gillingham training so i'm going to let rachel talk a little bit about what our interventionists have been up to with the approval of the certified teachers as literacy and math interventionists earlier this year clarkson has brought a new level of support to our elementary students in need of small group instruction outside of the classroom together with coaches and aides our interventionist carefully analyzed several points of data including our fastbridge screener classroom assessments and observations the data not only determined which students would be in these small groups but which learning goals we would target

075when examining all of this very recent data groups are flexible and responsive and this means that group members may change and already this year in a very short amount of time students have been saddened when they aren't in these groups anymore they have gained the skills needed and when they aren't pulled anymore they're expressing to the interventionists like why can't i go with you can't i go still it's very exciting that they feel that success and they want to continue in this picture you can see three of our interventionists leading lessons our interventionists are currently using a variety of resources such as hegerty enhanced alphabet knowledge and differentiated phonics instruction for literacy interventions the bridges intervention program is used during math interventions and the math interventionists are currently attending professional learning and anticipation of using

076math recovery with our students as well plans utilizing these programs are created and adjusted as needed with careful reflection on the learning evidence produced by every child the small groups are engaging in supportive environments where our literacy and math interventionists are experts in building positive experiences for students in order to increase their skills and their confidence we also want to share with you information about our aides our aids our literacy and math aids remain an important part of our support model the aids assist with data collection at the school and classroom level the data is then used by the coaches the interventionists and the aides to determine the next steps for small groups co-planning with our interventionists is integral in this new system of supports and the whole team benefits from the collaboration whether supporting

077inside of the classroom or leading a small group outside of the classroom our aides give students immediate feedback and provide learning opportunities and mrs mahoney will continue and we end this presentation just looking towards the future and again we just remain very grateful and very excited in terms of next steps and so as we focus in on the foundational skills that we're thriving to instill in our students to increase student academic and dispositional skills for their knowledge their curiosity and to be confident learners to build agency for their future and they can hold on to and guide their own pathway and to develop collaborative skills that we believe is a life skill for their future that is highly necessary we continue to look at the supports to empower staff to use not only best practices

078but effective practices to analyze data to make informed decisions to deliver targeted instruction to support small groups and to extend our programming opportunities the system of support we are building for elementary students in clarkston is absolutely incredible and as we look towards the future we believe this model will make a difference for our students and set them up for greater success in all of their school years and beyond it's imperative that our students develop the foundational skills around reading writing and math and the dispositions necessary to confidently pursue the future pathway of their own choosing we also want our students to leave clarkson community schools being clear and confident communicators that have strong collaboration skills and to value the thinking and the perspectives of others the sports that we have in place with our coaches

079our interventionists and our aides at the elementary level are going to help ensure that this does happen we are also looking into extended program opportunities for summer and after school we're excited about the present and even more excited about the future and what this means for the children in clarkson we look forward to coming back we want to update you on our progress in the coming months with data and the programs that we're putting in place for the years ahead thank you thank you mrs mahoney trustees oh thank you trustees what questions or comments do you have for mrs mahoney and her expert team mrs egan i'm just curious when i look at this data and thank you for the data um do we know how our kids were how those bar charts might have

080looked say two or three years ago pre-covered how how how much lower of the success or how much more kids are at risk do we think than what we had do we have any idea and we can compare but the fast bridge screener is new and so we wouldn't be comparing complete you know yes there's been a drop there has i i don't have those numbers off but we could pull them from wendy but we wanted to start this year with the fast fridge and then continue to build from there yeah yeah but thank you for doing this i i appreciate looking at the data and i am very appreciative of the fact that we have the resources that we can put in to you know address those kids that have perhaps you know just

081couldn't quite push through some of the virtual learning and and my experience being in other school districts has been this past couple of months since school has started is seeing how socially behind the kids are that the teachers have their hands full i mean teachers are going through you know getting over their own social isolation and some maybe some of their own issues with their families maybe someone has been sick or whatever but it's very interesting to hear from some teachers who have been really struggling with if they're teaching seventh grade the last time these kids were really face to face full time were as fifth graders and there's a big change that happens socially and emotionally from fifth to seventh grade so um i'm actually um i feel very optimistic that the numbers are

082not so bad actually but and that we can address this i would agree i would agree absolutely yeah yeah anyone else mad in paris with this um i'm curious am i correct to assume that our coaches are being pushed into the classrooms coaches are being into the classroom yes they model they join plc's they will be pulling teachers for data conversations yes i'm also going to be curious in the future as the data continues to build as to what kind of successful progress this fast bridge tool gives us versus our other tools i think in the business that we're in some of these tools are getting better and better each time we move to the nexus session one so i'm looking forward to see that our students academic progress increases at a higher speed with

083the newer tools because i think each time we've changed we've learned just that much more about what their needs are for sure and i think that this model too this um this you know top-down model is also going to be very successful in application to the tool and so i'm really curious as we move forward how much our data shows the trend growing greater faster yes and the fastbridge is a screener it is a snapshot and we took the bottom 30 percent and took a deeper dive in terms of you know what what is actually happening around literacy and math we have other pieces of data as well that we would like to share in the future in terms of our own local assessments that we can provide and compare as well i do have

084one question um how would you say maybe the teachers are feeling now that they have this extra support i think primarily for maybe those students who are struggling and they have this these extra layers and so now you have these kids who aren't at risk right who may be ready for additional challenge i mean do those teachers feel maybe a little more oops sorry a little more equipped or have a little more time maybe to focus some attention there i mean you mentioned differentiation that the coaches are able to work with teachers a little more on differentiation so is there a little more sense that they have a little more time to do that now in in the classroom now that they have sort of that support on on the back end for students who

085are struggling yeah that's one of the ways that our coaches are really supporting our classroom teachers is that we could they can help with differentiation for all levels of students right so when we for example in math take a look at a pretest we're able to not only look and see which students might be pulled for intervention in order to gives more support for certain standards but we also look at the students who are scoring well on that and we think about how we can you know enhance their experience and bump up their their learning as well and so coaches have had a really strong hand in that and able to support all across the differentiation spectrum i'm not just looking at some of our students that might need more additional support great i just

086remember back in the spring we talked about differentiation being the focus of professional development so yes and having a literacy coach and a math coach in a building where they're right there and they're able to ask a question and get an answer very quickly is an amazing amazing thing as a classroom teacher excellent coming from my own experience so just as a couple final words on it you know what i heard from conversation i really appreciate the questions and the presentation if you look at how we beg we brought this all uh online this fall it's really a going work in progress you know it's gonna take time for interventions and coaches to kind of fully get up to speed in terms of their roles uh the training to be able to address and and

087work with our teachers uh to meet the needs and i want to remind everyone you know my observations this year is the academic although there is was some slide through kovid right now i think our primary focus and listening to our teachers as i had an opportunity to visit and be with the staff of every every building over the last week and a half and really the message has been to me and what you had said uh is making sure that our students are back on the rails when it comes to their we call their age appropriate lanes that they come to school um part of it might be socially emotional but i think it's a bigger thing of freezing in time that happened two years ago we're really fighting really hard and look to

088our teachers that are here this evening and everything they're doing to try to make it happen when it comes to making our students kind of make that jump you know to be true fifth graders to be true eighth graders to feel that way onto their senior in high school maybe and and it's a challenge right now and i think this part of the academic piece is incredibly important as everybody who's been at our meetings for the last several have seen that we're really broad in that whole child perspective but the academics is is a priority within that so you know looking at that whole ball of wax that whole child the whole piece of our mission within the within the school district you know this is going to be a critical movement now in the

089data we look at uh and it's great that when we talk about systems of support too that's not just you know some sort of abstract concept you know we're identifying kids who need it and then getting them the supports or the acceleration that they need but i really think this is a proposition that's going to be easily three to five years in the future before we fully actualize and can appreciate the full power of it what we can bring to our school district and uh i think along that way we're going to need to see and be able to present that case to our community with progressive data of our uh achievements within these different areas i just want our board and our community to be prepared that you know it's something we need to

090support for for at least again three to five years to fully actualize it and then i think we need to course adjust and continue to look at what what those best screeners are what best practices and how we can support our classroom teachers each and every day so let's thank you guys for the presentation very well done and uh more to come we're going to be doing updates throughout this year on our progress in the core areas thank you and just by way of context dr ryan i think you mentioned kind of getting this up and running this year i think i mean this has been multiple years that you know we this year we just got some additional pieces up and running really and i think exactly what you said we're going to take

091some time to see the real gains in what we're doing but we're going to course correct along the way too right that's what's so exciting about having data to look at to see all right and we are where we are because you know we started with literacy coaches and social workers and some other components and we we saw gains right it was right we were getting where we wanted to go and so we said all right we need to we need to do math coaches and we need to have more supports and we need to work together with interventionists just i mean just like we'd used technology integrationalist to promote you know technology growth so i really like the flexibility that we have as we go forward i mean this isn't like this is what

092we're doing and we're sticking with it um it's like all right we're using this we're looking at the data we're adapting you know how we're using coaches is completely flexible and in education we tend to go in trends i mean there's a period of time it was like if you weren't in the classroom you weren't load-bearing you know it was the terminology at the time you know you you were extra and it wasn't wasn't useful at the time this made any sense you know i mean i think the model we're looking at you know when you you mentioned 40 new elementary teachers i mean we have 70 some total new teachers this year how is it possible that a new teacher knows everything they need to know on day one i mean we get some

093great great new teachers here but i mean you just don't have the experience right i mean you you two have a lot of experience right but you probably haven't seen everything right and that's where that's where you're putting work having these you know additional folks that's really that team approach and i really i'm so thankful that we're able to do this and i'm so thankful that we're going to continue to do more and and adapt and work together and continue to have these conversations and as a board i would say like i feel like we've seen this but like every time we look at this it's like a slightly new wrinkle and i so much appreciate that so much want that to continue because i want to be fully engaged as as our part of

094the team you know to say this is what we're all about and this is where we're going so i really appreciate your summary and i just i wanted to put a little longer term context to it because it is you know it's not like we're there and you know we're going to get there it's it's it's very much a all hands on deck full team effort and that's what our kids need because nobody says everybody's where they need to be right i mean there there isn't probably one kid that has everything they possibly need um anywhere let alone here and and so that's why we're going to continue to work at it and do the best job we possibly can and i very very much appreciate the dedication and partnership of all of our administration

095but ultimately the teachers that are on the front lines working with kids dealing with their challenges what they bring to school from elsewhere it's if you i wish we could spend more time in classrooms but we haven't been able to lately um but that's what you know that's the front lines and i very much appreciate the the fact that we prioritize that so much and we're using data to evaluate the effectiveness of our our approach thank you very good thank you very much okay as we move on to 5.4 our equity and inclusion update where is mr vickers who had signed up to speak okay i'm sorry i did not mean to overlook you before um was it your hope that you would speak at this item or did you want to wait till item

096nine because i feel like i could go either way it doesn't matter i'm i mean it fits really with this topic as well i just didn't mean to overlook you before and i sort of sat here and thought about it and i thought if you like i can certainly add you in now when everyone else speaks here but if you want to wait till item nine that's fine okay i just didn't want you to think i overlooked you or forgot about you so okay item nine very good so we have mr lucito and mrs pusio the floor is yours all right thank you good evening we'd like to thank you for this opportunity to share our important work of diversity equity and inclusion tonight john and i are going to be sharing where we've been

097where we're going and some of the things that we're doing currently when we look at our mission statement we have highlighted students staff and families and this is the heart of our work for diversity equity and inclusion and we want all of our students to be challenged healthy engaged safe and supported and this is the heart of what we want to do here when we think about the purpose of diversity acting and inclusion here in clarkston we want to ensure that our schools are safe equitable and inclusive in learning environments for all and we want to ensure that all voices are heard and valued that every individual feels a sense of belonging and is ready to learn and that cannot happen unless everything else happens before that so we look at our why for this

098work first when we look at whole child development it's part of our mission statement it is the shared responsibility for students parents and family school and community we also recognize that all students can learn when given the necessary supports and opportunities to do so we have high expectations for how we treat others as well as how we engage in learning and we know that this promotes academic success for all we do have changing demographics in our community there are interpersonal challenges that do distract from education sometimes that might be between staff members sometimes that's between students and that might be in situations of bullying that might be based on race ability sexual orientation and this is something that we need to address we expect exemplary education for students and we know that this is true

099when we have professional growth of staff and we have continuous school improvement and we also recognize that education promotes a healthy sense of self and encourages personal achievement so we look at diversity equity and inclusion we recognize that it's not exclusively about race it is about race but it's also about socioeconomic status it's about sexual orientation it's about gender identities it's about learning abilities and we recognize that we need to have trust and respect no matter what we honor and uplift the unique identities voices perspectives and stories of our students to create a sense of belonging and well-being for all in doing this we have the opportunity to offer windows into the experiences of others where we can look out and see the experiences of others and we can have mirrors for our students to

100see themselves reflected in the classroom we recognize that empathy is something that is taught where we honor and cherish the humanity of every person the definitions that clarkson uses for diversity equity and inclusion may be a little bit different from what is seen in other places but this is what we look at in clarkston for diversity it is the practice of intentionally creating meaningful opportunities for personal connections that foster value and respect our similarities and differences when we look at equity it is an imperative process of removing barriers to ensure access for all and matching district resources with student academic needs you heard in our previous presentation about the systems of supports and this is equity and to us inclusion is intentionally ensuring that all voices are heard and valued so we'd like to take

101a step back of what is some of the work that we have done starting in 2015. now we do recognize that diversity work though is not new and it's not just from over 20 years ago there was a diversity comm committee under the leadership of dr l roberts and that is where a respect code was written today as we move forward and we look at from what we did in 2015 to now we recognize that we've reinstated more of a focus on diversity equity and inclusion and we have thoughtfully engaged in various learning opportunities some that might be slower than others some of the learning has been for key identified personnel while a few have included all of our staff i'm not going to read all of this there's a lot on the screen but

102there's a lot of detail intentionally one of the things i'd like to lift up is the social justice cohort work that we did starting in fall of 2015. so we had two different cohorts go through two different years and some of that work was to be able to understand and where our students are and the different needs that they have two things that came out of that work one was a fishbowl with students and we had high school students who engaged in a fishbowl and they again represented a lot of different identities race learning abilities social economic status and they talked to us about some of the things that they experience as high school students later on that spring our high school staff then watched a video of that and they had the opportunity to

103hear from their students students that they have in their classrooms at that time talk about some of the concerns that they have and teachers had the opportunity to then think about what are some things that they could do to think through that we also in 2018 started some of our work on trauma-informed learning we understand through this learning that what happens to the body and brain when there's trauma it does have an impact on learning and so we have to learn how do we respond and for us it's about recognizing and understanding the power of strong and connecting relationships that it has for a child to help them in their learning we look at page two you'll see again some more trauma-informed learning you also see anti-racist leadership institute where two of us participated in

104that and it's important for us to do that work because it gives us the opportunity to understand how do we address bias and bigotry in the moment how do we recognize it and how do we respond to it you'll also see a couple of times about culturally responsive teaching now i would like to say unfortunately has the same initials of critical race theory crt these are not the same thing so culturally responsive teaching is about having inclusive classroom practices that allows us to understand the learning styles of students and the needs of our diverse student learners and then provide opportunities so that all may engage in learning you heard mrs mahoney say responsive in our instruction this is what culturally responsive teaching is all about this year we have started culturally responsive leadership work with

105our ad staff when we look at the dignity of individuals is not guaranteed unless the dignity of their cultures is affirmed and preserved this is something that we're learning to understand as administrators and how do we do this what does this look like what does it sound like and what can we put into place to ensure this we've also started restorative practices for our secondary buildings where we have administrators counselors social workers and key teacher leaders who are practicing in this and the importance of this work is that it's about building healthy relationships it's helping to address the needs of school community it's about resolving conflict repairing harm and restoring positive relationships and it's helping to reduce prevent and improve harmful behavior and these are just a few of the things that we have done

106from 2015 up to this point and we will move forward and so at this point i'd like to move it to john husito thank you good evening i'd like to talk about diversity that conclusion moving forward clarkston community schools so for the 2021-2022 school year we have created a steering committee and this committee is going to guide our work going forward we plan on meeting on a regular basis but the members have been appointed based on their previous experience and work in diversity and equity and inclusion the committee is going to consist of administrators teacher leaders a board member and parents and community members we're going to actively participate in learning opportunities to grow our understanding and capacity for work around diversity equity and inclusion we're going to align our diversity equine inclusion work to

107our strategic plan and then we're going to meet to evaluate and reflect on work and continue to move it forward now our focus of the work here in clarkston around diversity equity inclusion is for students and staff to be able to affirmatively answer yes to these four questions do you see me do you hear me will you treat me fairly will you protect me from a district level engagement we are going to continue to provide learning for staff that gives them tools to ensure all students feel safe and ready to learn are multi-tiered systems of support that is the process of looking at data and what's working and what's not we've implemented a new streamline process in this area that allows for teams of teachers and staff to examine data that will help inform them

108for next stops of students whether that is to advance students with additional rigor or provide additional supports for students who are struggling as we talked about the structures of support that we've put in place we have interventionist coaches in the area of math literacy social emotional learning and we now have an adequate number of staff to teach to the needs of our students studies have shown that students of color achieve greater academic success when they have at least one teacher of color during their academic career because of this data we're going to be mindful of our hiring process in an attempt to diversify our staff we're going to continue to work in on the formation and facilitation of committees interactions with our community groups and dialogue with students staff administrators and community members who want

109all students to succeed for school level engagement we're going to provide professional learning to our teaching staff in the area of culturally responsive teaching social emotional learning trauma-informed education restorative practices and our multi-tiered systems of support for the culturally responsive teaching we are going to provide our teachers with education on different cultures so that they can have a greater understanding of the culture of the the students in their classroom to create an inclusive environment for social emotional learning we're going to try and build the skills knowledge and attitudes in our students to be have them effectively manage emotions reach their goals show empathy for others form supportive relationships and make responsible and caring decisions trauma informed we are going to give our teachers the tools to be able to recognize and respond to the impact

110of traumatic stress that some of their students may be facing as stacy mentioned with restorative practices that's building healthy relationships that address the needs of the school community resolve conflict repair harm and restore positive relationships and reduce harmful behaviors and then multi-tiered systems of support it's a comprehensive framework comprised of research-based strategies designed to meet the individual needs and assets of the whole child at all achievement levels additional school level engagement we are going to be creating classroom and building safe spots for students to take a break for regulation and connection the use of restorative circles for staff meetings discipline follow-up classroom management relationship building we're also going to be supporting the creation of student clubs that will create safe places for students and provide opportunities for them to have a voice and grow their

111leadership skills we're going to be honoring recognizing and celebrating clarkson's diverse cultures and backgrounds from classroom level for classroom level engagement we're going to be soliciting feedback from students through surveys to adjust curriculum design access and resources a culturally responsive teaching is we're going to be using prior knowledge as an on-ramp for curriculum awareness of other cultures and we will be celebrating advocating those differences we're going to nurture student voice through academic service learning projects student-led morning announcement and book clubs and lava novels at the various grade levels socialization as stacy mentioned the respect code that was created several years ago i'm in collaboration with student staff and administration and basically what that respect code was is that i set expectations on how we treat each other with civility and respect in our school community

112one of the some of the work that we plan to do is revamp that with the input of current staff administration and students and redistribute that in our classrooms as it once was we're also going to examine curriculum resources for inclusion we're going to update our media centers with current copies of fiction non-fiction titles that represent all people with no barriers in choice and then our for our sel we're going to work with the teachers to have inclusive classrooms and our administrators to create inclusive buildings parent and community engagement we're going to work to build trusting and understanding relationship with parents on current future initiatives we'd like to get parents actively involved in our school and district level committees and hopefully have a diverse representation partner with community entities faith-based businesses our political representatives born

113in our board of education and what this looks like currently as stacy mentioned we're currently going through culturally responsive learning with our administrative staff it's throughout this is planned throughout all of 2021 2022 we've had three sessions so far a restorative circles learning we did this learning earlier this year it was with our our secondary administrators our essential off administration administrators and then staff key identified staff from all of our secondary buildings and that they've had additional training since then we've created diversity and equity and inclusion coordinators this is the equivalent of one hour release time in the elementary and it is one hour of release time in our secondary and then as we discuss we'll be developing a cohesive mtss process at the school level we are going to be supporting the creation of

114student clubs our restorative practice leads that we have identified for each each of our secondary buildings will be working directly with students on discipline alternatives and creating restorative circles equitable participation in school um sponsored events so for this year our homecoming the high school a group of students from the high school a partnership with some teachers created a homecoming closet and that's where students had the ability to go in and go shopping and find a homecoming dress without the stresses of the finances so they could be able to attend attend and enjoy that event we also created sensory rooms at the actual event for students who needed to self-regulate and take that break from from the at renaissance high school we have a mentor program this has been running for a number of years it's

115in partnership with waypoint community church and it's where community members church members and even some of our own district staff have taken on mentoring students at renaissance high school and as mrs mahoney and mrs puzio mentioned we have our interventionists and coaches for math literacy and sel at the classroom level peace club is one of the clubs that was created at the high school they are actually providing mentorship opportunities for pine knob elementary students they give up their lunch break at the high school travel to pinehub elementary to spend some time with some students who who have chosen to be part of that project we have academic service learning projects morning meetings at the elementary level and restorative circles at the secondary level and then in our parents the parents for the parents and community

116continuing our partnership with the parent advisory team clark scenario youth assistants easter seals the clarkston rotary with our shoes for kids program and our great relationships we have with our area churches so at clarkson we want safe equitable inclusive learning environments for all where all voices are heard and valued ensure every individual feels sense of belonging and is ready to learn and and as we said our focus will be for every current student and staff member to be able to answer firmly asked to these four questions do you see me do you hear me will you treat me fairly will you protect me thank you right thank you so much and the trustees we had um four parents who requested to address us or citizens i don't want to make any assumptions who had requested

117to address us on this topic tonight so before we get to them i wondered if you had any questions or comments or discussion from mr lucito or mrs puzio just to look forward to the work of this committee thank you can't see everyone's faces here in a straight line okay okay [Applause] all right uh then we will go down our list and just as a reminder we have two microphones set up here and here and when you when i call your name if you'll approach the microphone state your name and address please and you'll have two minutes we'll begin with robert osterman good evening madam president members of the board um i've been involved in a lot of social media robert osterman 6338 almond lane walking distance the amazing clarkson elementary and junior high and

118high school thank you i've been involved in far too many social media conversations over the last month and more than once i found myself saying a lot of things in support of this district and the actions of committees like the one that we just heard from and i got really tired of typing because i thought we better talk to you directly we have a very diverse country and it ain't perfect it's a lot like me i'm a great guy but i'm obese according to my doctor i have problems and i think the more we think about our country and the people in it and we forget that there are problems that we can fix the greater disservice we do to our students i want my children to grow up understanding that our world is very

119very creative that is very very diverse and i want that diversity to be celebrated and not lost in our desire to push color blindness as an ideal because that erases the experiences of those in our community who are not white christian males i don't know if the statistic is significant to the dei conversation but the median value of a white family in america is 188 thousand dollars fifty percent of americans have less fifty percent have more the median value of a family median wealth saved by a black family in america fifty percent is twenty four thousand the more we push color blindness on our children the more we rob them with the realization that we still have a long way to go with our efforts in diversity equity and inclusion to ensure that all students

120in clarkson schools and beyond have equal opportunities to succeed as a taxpayer and a voter i implore each member of this board to do everything possible to encourage diversity equity inclusion and culturally sensitive teaching to my children thank you [Applause] thank you for your comments next we have tim parkin uh tim parkin 910 mishigami over 25 years ago by working hard in very competitive and at times unequitable automotive industry i was able to move my family to clarkson enroll my three daughters in the esteemed clarkson school system shortly after enrollment i realized that our family values which included the golden rule hard work that life was not fair and that failure was necessary for success were being undermined by the very same school district i pursued upon volunteering to run the baylor lake elementary school

121annual field day i was notified field day name would be changed to activities day as field day implied track and field and ultimately competition i was given the task to organize games with no winners or losers as a girl had thrown a softball over 50 yards the year prior and the staff was very concerned and wanted to protect the self-esteem of those who did not throw as far in essence these people had stripped my daughter's opportunity to compete all under the guides of the marcus market marxist equity of results not equality of opportunity i found much irony but little equity in the fact that the same people asking me to conjure up a utopian game where the very same people who are getting paid from the salary iron competing in a world of winners and

122losers i suggested that the pe teacher do the job that i paid her to do and teach those that wanted to compete the proper way to throw softball 25 years ago i told the staff that this socialist doctrine was not has not ended well for any society throughout history so i stand here 25 years later witnessing the result that i feared a generation and a generation that society and educators have created terms for including cancer cultures snowflakes microaggressions woke-ism safe spaces and of course last but not least equity insanity is repeating the same thing over and over expecting a different result it's difficult to fix a problem you created as a former clarkson school parent now grandparent whose grandchildren attend local private schools with your tax base in mind i recommend clarkson schools exit the

123social engineering business leave the parenting to the parents and return thank you mr parkin for all great things appreciate your comments thank you mr parker thank you mr park and appreciate your comments all right christy g and patrony hi christy giampatroni from clarkston i come today with wisdom not the wisdom of man or the wisdom of intellect of the wisdom of the heart and truth for with the heart one believes i look around at the people today at this room and i look at our members on stage and you know what i see i see our community and i see my caring neighbors not a system of racist people i came to the school with some concerns after reading that equitable schools are shifting our values according to the equity toolkit and bell framework given

124to clarkson schools from oakland school services and dr j marks that was mentioned tonight it states equitable learning environments require a conscious shift in our values what are these shifts generic vision statements and a shift to making equity and justice the center of our vision statement another thing it states it says racism as an isolated situation is now going to shift our value to a systemic racism is what we want in our equitable schools and the third thing it says is accepting white was what we believed but now we're going to shift our values to de-centering whiteness as if being white is a negative thing and this is by dr marx that was stated tonight in the dei when i read this it was really disheartening and i came to the school because i wanted

125to know does our school believe in this surely not but i did not get a clear answer clarkston does your heart say to you that this is wrong it should we are not systemically racist and you know that i know that we're not systemically racist because i was able to walk through those doors today and i was not oppressed i never was and i was given the freedom tonight to come here and speak and you know i've always have been had that freedom and of all the years i've walked down the hallways of our beautiful schools never once was systemic racism there you know why because it never was there and it's not there today does racism exist thank you yes but let's use the wisdom of our heart and spirit discern thank you very

126much appreciate your comments tonight and finally we have rudy gonzalez all right good evening mr gonzalez name and address and you have two minutes please hey y'all uh my name is rudy gonzalez and i live at 5411 morgan lake drive unlike everybody else i didn't prepare a speech tonight i kind of found out at the about the meeting today so i figured i'd take my two minutes to come up here and talk to you all about the experience that my child has had here at clarkson schools so basically i think i don't know if we're doing the right thing or not but i think we need to keep going forward and keep pushing that because i know it's not at least every week my daughter comes home and says dad this is what i had

127to deal with this is what happened at school this is the teacher who was standing there this is the principal was standing there and this is how they did not address it right so regardless of what kind of training we did we do we're not doing enough and i know we're not doing enough because tonight whenever we put our names on the list i wrote down rudy gonzalez and i know i wasn't the only person that wrote down their first in their last name but i was addressed as mr gonzalez and other people were addressed as misses right but that's an assumption that's that's a social assumption that we made that we put on these people right so who knows if if just that right if we're making an assumption about something as little as

128that that shows how little we know about diversity equity inclusion right because it's not about or what i think it's all about is this not being a bully and treating people with dignity and respect and i think that our our faculty and staff need to have an understanding of that and when they witness an incident they need to take some action and they need to take action right away and whenever something happens the last thing i want to hear from from a school administrator from a principal is i know this kid and that is not what they meant when they said that to your daughter that's the last thing i want to hear i want to hear okay i talk to them and you know whatever but i don't want to hear i know this

129person i have a relationship with them and i know they didn't mean that because that it doesn't matter what they meant what matters is how it was perceived so thank y'all for the time i guess i didn't use it all so y'all have a good evening thank you very much i appreciate all your comments tonight and just a reminder that if you do wish to address the board when we get to item nine on any topic this one or any other topic tonight there is still time you can sign up on the sheets out there they will be collected when we get to item 9 and we still have several items of business to get to until then we'll move on to item 6 which is our action items item 6.1 is approval of personnel

130changes may i have a motion please i move the board of education approves personnel changes as listed on the attach sheets are there any questions or discussion uh hearing none all in favor say aye aye any opposed the motion carries item 6.2 is approval of the memo of understanding regarding additional compensation and dual modality instruction may i have a motion please the board of education approves the memorandum of understanding with clarkson education association as presented are there any questions or discussion from the board hearing none all in favor say aye aye any opposed the motion carries item 6.3 is approval of board bylaws may i have a motion please i move that the board of education approves the changes to bylaws zero one zero zero definitions and zero one six seven point three public participation

131at board meetings as presented support and these incorporated feedback that you received from the last meeting correct mrs egan yes any other questions or discussion from the board all in favor say aye any opposed the motion carries item 6.4 is approval of the audit may i have a motion please i move that the board of education approves the audit for june 30th 2021 as presented support um mrs rogers do you think we could have mrs schrodin from hunger for nickels come up and just give a brief overview of the audit and its findings since we have so many community members in the audience this evening before we vote i would like to introduce adrian travin she is the lead partner on our audit and they came out in september and completed an audit of the

132district so i'll let her just give a report of a high-level report of the findings excuse me thank you mrs rogers um i did give a presentation at 6 30 in in more detail so i'll keep my comments very brief tonight as mrs rogers indicated i did go out to the district the second week of september and we did an audit of both the financial audit and the federal compliance audit the district did receive an unmodified opinion which is the highest opinion that we as auditors can give so that's like a grade of an a we also go in and determine if there are any findings of the internal control system and we had no findings there's two different types of findings material weakness or significant deficiency and there were no findings noted and then

133we also try to identify if there are material adjustments that are needed to get to the to get the books in line with where they should be and the district had no material adjustments as well so all in all a great audit the district did add to the fund balance excuse me here about 3.8 million dollars to get to a fund balance percentage of 14.29 of the district's 2122 budgeted expenditures and a lot of that money about 4.6 of excuse me 4.6 million dollars of the revenue this year was related to the cares act funding which we did significantly audit and look at what was spent on those funds using those funds so all in all a great audit thank you to mrs rogers in the business office for their preparedness and their dedication to

134audit quality in the district thank you very much board trustees any questions or comments i'd like to make comment president morris please um i'd just like to commend mary beth rogers for the work that she's done over the years in the district with myself with 20 years experience in accounting i know the um the work is because of the control audits you have in place without those and the work that the staff does to keep those control audits on on target as to what their intent is really makes a big difference when it comes to the end of this audit and i just think that the consistency year after year after year of the work that you've done for this district is definitely something that we appreciate and i want you to know that thank

135you very much all right we have a motion on the table to approve the audit all in favor say aye aye any opposed the motion carries item 6.5 is approval of the resolution to authorize issuance and delegate sale of the 2022 refunding bonds may i have a motion please i move that the board of education approves the resolution authorizing the issuance and delegating the sale of ccs 2022 refunding bonds per the attached sheets support great clarkson has the opportunity to do so refunding early next year to increase our bonding capacity and also save the taxpayers money i'd like to introduce rj naughton and his assistant kristen from pfm there are financial advisors and he can go over this opportunity thank you mary beth it's a pleasure to be here um as mary beth had mentioned

136there's a refinancing opportunity for the district and i'd like to briefly go over some of the slides that uh that cover that christine would you like to review the existing debt so we're going to take a quick review of the debt that the district has there are seven issues altogether two of them are school building and site bonds for the purposes of improving the schools the other five of them are refunding bonds which are the purpose was to lower the debt service on previously existing months so the two issues that we're looking at refunding this time are the 2016 refunding months and the 2016 school building and site bonds if you take a look at that final column there for the total debt service that's the amount that the school district currently owns owes on

137those seven bonds um the payments are made by a levy that the school district levies on the district and that's largely calculated by the taxable value which rj's going to talk to you more about thank you and so here's the taxable value growth history of the district um it's it's been growing at a good pace four four percent the last couple over four percent last couple years and uh five percent the previous year and four percent back in uh 2017. so i think that's very interesting information the good health healthy growth of the district and that's important factor of the um of the millage that the district levy is to repay the debt and the districts participating in the school bond loan fund program at seven mills this is the millage projection before the refinancing

138proposed refinancing and on the left side we have the projected growth of the taxable value and to the right of that we have the school by loan fund activity the district has a loan with the state of michigan that's similar like other what other districts have when they're participating in the school by loan fund levying a millage of seven mills or more and that's because the district is not receiving enough debt levy tax receipts to make the bond payments and is borrowing the difference needed to cover the bond payments from the state and has an ongoing loan with the state at a variable rate of interest on the before schedule it's projected that the i don't think you look at my copy here the the loan is projected to repaid in 2029 and then we

139have the proposed refinancing of two different bonds one is the 2016 refunding bonds which have a first call date of may 1 2025 and call dates are approximately 10 years after the bonds had originally been issued which means maturities 2026 and beyond could be called in when the bonds are refinanced and those maturities have a coupon rate of five percent this uh on the left side we have the estimated bond payments for the refunding bonds and to the right of that we have the bond payments being replaced and the estimated savings on this portion of the refinancing at current market rates 721 921 which is a present value of 727 529 as a percentage of refunded principal that's 3.85 percent so that's one of the bonds uh to be refinanced the next one is the

140larger the 2016 school building and site bonds and on the left we have the projected bond payments at current market rates that are associated with the poor this portion of the refinancing and on the right side we have the bond payments being replaced and the estimated savings 3 million eight hundred ninety seven thousand six hundred ninety present value savings three million five hundred thirty five thousand three eighty three which as a present value savings as a percentage of refunded principle ten point zero four percent combined the savings are estimated at four million six hundred nineteen thousand six hundred eleven and the uh the districts projected to be repaying the school bond loan fund four years sooner based on their the existing debt after the refinancing and there's some school bond loan fund issuance or interest

141cost savings because the district will be repaying the school bond loan fund at a faster pace due to the refinancing estimate at 247.305 for a combined savings of 486 0916 the present value savings 4 million two hundred sixty two thousand nine hundred twelve which as a percentage of refunded principle seven point eight seven percent so that that's a good level of savings and that's based on current market rates the interest rates wouldn't be set on the new refunding bonds until the day of pricing which is expected to occur in january or february the the resolution before the board is to allow the district to proceed with ruthless refinancing and as long as the minimum level savings are met then the district is okay to approve the terms of that that bond pricing and one of

142the parameters is that the present value savings as a percentage of refunded principal is not less than two and a half percent these bonds are taxable because the refinancing occurs more more than 90 days before the call date of the bonds being refinanced and the interest rates are set on the day of pricing but they're set as a basis over treasuries whatever the treasury yields are on that day and also based on the demand for those maturities and this chart just shows how volatile the treasury notes have been uh the past couple years um so we hope the uh taxable rates continue to be low and that there are sufficient savings for the district and we'll be able to report back the results after the bond pricing if i didn't mention already the underwriter is

143the same underwriting that you've been using on huntington's securities so just to reiterate this does not save clarkson schools district any revenue but for our local taxpayers by the actions of the board tonight can save can you please repeat the total amount that can be saved to our taxpayers sure the estimated amount of savings is uh four million six hundred nineteen thousand six eleven plus the school by loan fund estimated interest cost avoidance two hundred and forty seven thousand three oh five for um estimated savings four million eight hundred and sixty six thousand nine sixteen thank you any questions for mr daughton i like the number okay and that might correct rj2 as a uh shortens our debt by five years approximately also uh you're staying in the school by loan fund approximately four years

144so we're well ahead i mean right now that's like a 20 35 deadline for us to get out of that and we're already ahead of that right so now we're going to be even farther ahead that is correct okay all right uh mrs mclean we need a roll call vote for this please as it's a resolution yes thank you very much the motion carries you're welcome all right mrs rogers you're up next we'll move on to report items 7.1 is our monthly finance report tonight i'm presenting a september 30th financial update and real quick um the budget to actual okay there we go oops there you go the budget to actual revenues is um just over seven percent with the majority of that from our summer tax collection so our local revenue will start receiving

145you'll start seeing the state and federal revenue probably a little bit in our october and then more as we get into the year because we can't start asking for reimbursement for state and federal until october because the state and federal time calendar year is october 1st where ours is july 1st the budget to actual expenditures is this is 13.74 and our september 30th fund equity at this point is 9.1 million and as you heard our audited fund equity is about 14.49 million so you were presented with all the september check registers and data so does anybody have any questions about anything that happened the month of september any questions for mrs rogers on the september financial update okay you want to continue then with the covered funds yes as part of the financial update this

146month we're also going to go over all the streams of covet funding where we're at with covin what we did the last year year and a half on covet funding where we're expecting to do this year and then it also we will be carrying some of it over at this point to 2022-23 so 2020-21 coveted funding that would have been last school year though that's all been audited um at this point so we are and what we ended up spending it on is um esther our first amount was esther one funding which was a hundred and seventy eight thousand and that was spent on um two north sashabot elementary teachers in pine knob instructional aids it's pretty much to lower class sizes the mission the michigan coveted relief funding was 2.996294 another stream of funding

147and you can see the entire list of what we spent that on we spent that on a lot of different areas a lot of professional development to get ready for virtual learning as we were starting last year with a virtual learning distributing technology as we went to a one-to-one initiative a lot of ppe equipment covitt coordinator sub teachers that were we had to hire because of covert relatedness related absences and um we did purchase a new car clarkson virtual curriculum and then we had hot spots for our um families so that's what we spent the majority of that just under 3 million on and then we received 1.049783 million from oakland county they had a portion of crt funding and they shared all that with each of the school districts in oakland county this was

148kind of unique to our county i don't know how many counties were given this how many schools were given this so this was an extra amount and we spent this on lower class sizes by recalling teachers back and hiring additional teachers adding a technology staff member to help with the one-to-one initiative and some more ppe supplies and then we also received a device rebate of 110 000 that we were able to put back in to our capital projects bond just to redirect 110 000 to other capital improvements this was a rebate that was given for all the technology we bought for the one-to-one initiative and then we also received uh connectivity funding of just under 50 about under 45 000 and that was just mainly to buy connectivity software and to allow connectivity during the

149covet pandemic and then we received in 1 500 469 that we spent in 2020 also on ppe equipment and now we're moving forward and in 2021 we are at this point have been approved of sr2 funds of over 1.4 million the application has been approved and we will start receiving the funds as we're spending the money we are spending it on the systems of support program that the board approved last year and we implemented this year of all the uh coaches the literacy math coaches and interventions that were talked about earlier um this board meeting we this uh steam of money will cover 11 of those 12 of those coaches it also will continue to pay for the two nsc teachers in the pineab aids that we spent money on last year this has to

150be funds that has to be spent on federal allowable expenditures and i will share that slide with you towards the end of the presentation of what some of those items are and then we also have received 2.442 million of michigan supplemental funds we have already received this funds and our plans are to spend it on the similar items that we spent it on last year just to maintain the same virtual programs the same ppe the covert coordinator the all the items that we added in 202021 with the covet funding we're going to continue to support with this funding and to this funding um it does um also have to follow the federal allowable expenditures that we'll talk about later and we are required to provide 20 hours per week of person instruction to be this

151school year to be able to continue to receive this funding the astr 3 funding which is just over there's two pots of that there's the two thirds that we've already received we haven't received but there's an application out there that we have until december 15 to apply for and that's just over two million and we're planning on trying spending that this school year and then one just over a million which is a third which has not been allocated to the district yet but the state did get approval on october 8 of this funding from the federal government so hopefully the next month or so they will start allocating that to the school districts we will move push that out to 2022-23 because we're allowed to um carry it over until june 30th 2023 that way

152we don't feel such a um a tick down when we start losing all this one-time money we want to try to save some for 22-23 uh see the these also have to be spent on federal allowable expenditures now there is some requirements to assessor three funding that has not been required by other s or funding or other coveted funding one is we have to spend it on 20 on learning loss we also have to get community stakeholders input so there will be some meeting surveys going out in the next month or so asking for community parents student staff we have to get everybody's input on how to spend this money and uh so and then we also this was some just some little other pots of money that we've spent this past summer we also

153received fifty five thousand dollars in credit recovery funding we put on a credit recovery program this summer for ninth twelfth graders we have received this money already we've been approved and we spent it and we have received it we are also expecting i'll know in the next month or two to receive another 10 000 of innovative funding to help pay for this credit recovery program and then we also received two hundred 7 fifty dollars to help pay for help give some extra stipends to the teachers and support staff that help provide this credit recovery program here's the list of federal allowable expenditures that we are allowed to spend our esser cares sr2 sr3 pretty much all the federal funding that we've received for covid these are the 12 items that we're allowed to spend on

154we don't have to spend it on all we can spend it on whatever we choose it just has to fall in these 12 categories i'm i i'm not going to go through them all but if you you can see them and then i want to talk about i just learned about this in the last week that there's some potential future funding we have not received any of this funding we have it's not been allocated we do not even know 100 if we're going to receive it and um we no idea what the amount is but it's called section 11t equalization funding and this from what i've heard from mde so far is that 20 of it will have to be spent on loss of learning we will have to do the community stakeholders input just

155like we have to do with this sr3 funding and it can only it will it doesn't will not follow the federal allowable expenditure list that i just shared with you on all that all the other funding followed this will be only allowed to be used to impact subgroups of disadvantaged students like i said at this point this funding amount is unknown it's unallocated and we will most we hopefully will know in the next two or three months how much we're receiving if we receive this funding and we will push it out to 2022-23 school year budget and that's do you have any questions on any of this covet funding or streams of funding or how we've spent it any questions on all these coveted streams of funding i see none please please keep all right

156thank you very much appreciate the report [Music] all right we have two discussion items tonight 8.1 is participation in jewel lawsuit are you leading that discussion sure nationally began in california there's a lawsuit with the jewel labs which makes the jewel vaping and they're being held potentially liable for their marketing and other practices of steering their products towards children nationally as part of a larger lawsuit school districts across the country are joining the lawsuit to be part of things that we've seen with respect to juul and other vaping devices in school i think many of our community as you many you know it's not any surprise and mr curran could speak volumes to this of the struggles that our administrators and teachers have on a daily basis of discouraging and trying to regulating those type

157of products those devices out of our schools they see it daily in the hallways in bathrooms students can do it now to where they have it to where you can if you can make even emotion up to your mouth not even leaving any kind of smoke or trail behind it they're very very difficult to stamp out of our schools they're obviously very very addictive and a gateway to you know other nicotine other products which are very unhealthy for our kids so it was my recommendation as part of this discussion to join with this and with the intention to the board and publicly that if we did receive any funds from a jeweled lawsuit that we would use it to support smoking and vaping success secession programming within our buildings exclusively that would just be it

158for that but i don't have you know overwhelming confidence or any crystal ball to say it would produce much many results but definitely wanted seeing the impact that has had on our school district and all schools feel that something i wanted to bring to the attention to the board and this evening because of the timing of it in december i would like kind of a consensus to move forward with pursuing clarkson schools to be part of it as well drawing this letter is dated november 3rd which i assume is when we got it and why we're seeing it now and at the end of it it says respond by august 31st so i just wanted i assume i can address that the original one this has been going on for several months i believe they

159updated it and i think they failed to update the date august 30 with the original one we're still in the win the window into the beginning of december right that's that's the sort of rub right now is we wanted to put this on for discussion to see if it's something we even wanted to join then the question is if we have a consensus that we do want to join i'm going to need someone to make a motion for us to go ahead and approve that because we have to sign on to this by december 1st and we won't meet again until after that so this is sort of a two-part i guess discussion if you will so that would be kind of uh question number one here at this moment is are we even interested

160in joining this action if you recommend it dr ryan and you're willing to put the few hours that they say it might take you know and i'm happy to support the resolution i'll do 100 of it i agree mr need i reviewed the contract and it says represented there is no cost charged at all to the district if in fact they're not successful any fees or court costs would come out of any recovery so it's a i view this as a no proposition we may or may not get anything but we're risking nothing and we have the potential of having something that'll you know at least partly address an epidemic problem in our schools so i'm fully supportive of this certainly yeah i think we it seems to me mrs rogers brought this forward to

161us maybe made us aware of it about a year or a year and a half ago no am i not remembering that correctly but it seems to me that we've talked about this before and we all agree you know we supported it then for the obvious reasons is you know as mr need just stated that i mean no harm comes to us for participating and i think it does i like the idea of taking those funds if there are some funds distributed eventually to be supporting educating our students and you know about these products and the risks i think certainly having had uh students in the high school for the last what five-ish years you know i think the anecdotal stories alone that i've heard you know weren't me understanding and believing that we certainly

162have a problem in our schools and i i would be very supportive of of joining this if you're willing to take it on absolutely mr needy um unless there's anybody who disagrees i'm prepared to make a motion or a motion i would move that the clarkson community schools announced the resolution authorizing the district to join the jewel lawsuit and approve the attorney client fee contract between clarkston community schools and the france law group and designating the supervisor i'm sorry superintendent sean ryan as our authorized representative support any further discussion from the board mrs mclean may i have a roll call vote please this is the beginning yes mr higher yes yes the motion carries all right thank you everyone thank you all right uh item 8.2 is our master plan facility update mr goodman joined

163tonight by tom vandegrind from gmb good evening so last month we were here to go over the updated master plan originally started in 2016 and and so we've presented that and part of that meeting we wanted to move into programming of a junior high a replacement to the junior high based on our our findings in the age of the building um we wanted to just dive in that a little bit more so tom is gonna share with you tonight uh how busy we've been over the last three weeks since that meeting and uh kind of explain that process yeah so with the master plan most of those items you saw were very uh easily quantifiable you know new roofing in this area some extra restrooms air conditioning those things are fairly easy to quantify the

164one item of you know what about replacing the junior high which has been on the list for a long time um certainly was on the 2016 master plan it's not unlike saying i want to buy a new car what does that cost well what kind of car so we've gone through that process of starting to figure out what kind of junior high what does that involve so the first component was developing a programming team adams put together a team of representatives from the junior high basically all the different departments so they can bring different perspectives and help us look at look at that uh what a new facility might include that's the first piece we put together and then um throughout the components uh from there on out we've been having educational discussions about what

165a 21st century learning environment looks like so we did some things we'll talk about that when we get to that in a minute but so we're looking at things like project-based learning is different than what it was in 1959 when your building was first designed and so what are those kind of things how do they affect what what you might want to do at clarkston and so those discussions are weaved in all the things we've been doing with the program um some of the things you heard tonight you know we're looking at environments can help a child learn and environments can help you feel safer and so we're looking at things like that what makes a child feel safe which the environment helps with some of those things in individualized learning things are not you

166know 30 kids in a room look at the chalkboard and take notes so how does the environment help that so the first step we did was develop some tours and we toured uh two different days uh four different facilities uh secondary facilities throughout the state of michigan mostly lower you know lower michigan but so four different facilities a picture's worth a thousand words kind of a thing with the whole group going to those facilities it really helps people see things and say that's really what i like or that maybe doesn't make sense at clarkston so we did that for two separate days and then that group um we've we've gotten together twice now two full days with that group um the first day focused on takeaways from those tours what were the things as we

167were touring we're all very busy taking photos and looking and having the school that we're visiting explain kind of things they're doing we looked at some different kinds of of delivery models that schools are using so they were not all exactly the same kind of school but things to challenge us that are that are a little different than what you're doing but then we spent that first day uh with all input from that uh programming team that adam's put together what are the things you saw from these four different ones went through them one at a time what are the things you think that resonate that we should be looking at for clarkson what are things you think that do not that we should avoid that don't make sense um excuse me so that's that

168was the first day and then we did some more of that a little bit actually today was a day we spent a full day today uh finishing that up and we began the process then of going through every department i'm going to call it if you will that and talking about them specifically and developing pro developing a program and that program is is an architectural language it's not necessarily like a program like you might have in educational language but it's a list i think i described a little bit last time it's a list of all the spaces that might be in a building the quantity of those how big are they and then some idea of quality some idea of the function of that room what it might be happening in that space that can

169change the value of it and then some relationships where do spaces belong next to each other etc those are the things when we get that all together that let us start to understand what kind of car we're trying to buy what kind of options does it have etcetera etcetera and so we're we went through that full day today and we got about 70 through i would say the the departments of the building so our next steps are to finish that that input from the the different departments as to what they think um their area should be like and then we'll move into a process of uh once we've completed all that input of starting to create that actual program that might be a little more with some of the administration at this point to create

170that whole document that lists all those spaces review that kind of analyze where it's at usually when you go shopping the first time it's a little over budget and have we have we you know are we reasonable with this we have to do some of that prioritization and look at that um and then the final step after that will be to take okay we have a good program we think this is what should be in that building and the relationships and educational goals that kind of stuff how do we overlay that on the existing facility because the the at least the plan we're going through right now is that it it it's a rebuild on the site where the existing junior highway is now and what does that look like that'll be a very complex

171process of of a mini design how that that that uh because you can't tear it all down in one summer and then come back in the fall and have it ready so it'll be a very much a build and tear down build a tear down multiple year kind of a thing um once we have the program that will be the next phase we'll move into i think that's kind of the process we're in right now we're right in the heat of it a lot a lot of discussion with adam and his group right now so anything else you think nope any questions at this point do you want to give us any more of a sneak preview of some of the things that we're seeing at these facilities that we might uh improve upon that

172we might want to consider and improve upon with our current sure um yeah things have changed a lot since 1959 in education um you know your your building fits that typical industrial revolution model um just a hallway with lined up classrooms you start in this classroom and at the end of your you know your time here you end up going out the end um classrooms are all very small um very uh center of the room focus front of the room focused etc so the things i would say that we're seeing um you know is there anything dramatically different with physical education some unique things but but but maybe more similar uh arts and in music you know not dramatically different the big thing is the educational spaces the classrooms and how those come together a

173lot more first of all space your classrooms are very very small they're all much larger than that but a lot more space that supports project-based learning which means you have space outside of the classroom there's more freedom to move around it's not sitting in rows much more freedom to move around these extended learning spaces that are adjacent to classrooms that allow for students to move when they're doing project work so they're not on top of each other in a small room support spaces like breakout rooms whereas maybe acoustical privacy is needed you can do a little video all those kinds of things that support the classrooms um that that are very visible especially in an adolescent range of 8th and 9th graders so they're not hiding but you can you can we've seen a lot

174of that in the buildings that we've toured which were all newer buildings we're looking for that specifically and then the scale some of these things that help the individual feel safer is smaller creating small learning communities versus a you know thousand plus student building you break that down into smaller scales these smaller communities um so some of that how you organize the classroom so i'd say it's heavily very different as it relates to the academic section of the building and then how those other components are more um not departmental and a lot more interdisciplinary stuff collaboration how does that work so how do you weave in sciences at arts and create steam kind of things a lot of those things we've seen um we have not got conclusion on that yet but that's the things

175we're discussing and and certainly i'd say it changes the most in that academic section thank you any other questions or comments at this time mrs mcginnis aside from the fact that we know that renovation to the site is going to be difficult because of the need to use the site for education at the same time do you foresee the site in total size to be a limitation at any point um i don't think so we haven't overlaid that yet so we haven't seen how this fits on the site um maybe a sneak peek if you if you said of some things i think that have to happen is it's complex i've done it i've done this actually at a different school before where it had to stay in its in its location and it requires

176you to build a piece that's out in the front lawn and then tear down a piece that you move into and then build a piece on the area you tore down and then vice versa you just keep working your way around so it becomes very complex in that scenario it's not unlikely that that school would change to be a two-story academic uh scenario because that allows us to shrink the footprint to work better on the site that you have and to fit things in better as you try to do this domino effect of working around the site so i don't think we're going to have a site constraint i i think it can be done i know it can be done but i don't think we'll regret it certainly once we overlay it we'll be

177evaluating that and saying does this look like something that makes sense so secondary to that is the possibility that building in a new building on that site under the constraints that we perceive to be existing build and break down and possibly go to a second st have to go to a second story more costly than building it on a fresh site yeah yes yeah now there's um there's a big advantage to staying on that site as it relates to your performing arts at this point we're still evaluating all options but um we're really finding it hard to say that we should tear down the performing arts section of that building that's newer it has some things it could use to make it maybe complete that project some scene scene shop adjustments and they don't have

178dressing rooms and a few things but you have the asset of that performing arts center that's pretty big that um might offset if we said what if we built it on a new site uh if we're gonna leave the performing arts center there definitely be cheaper on a new site but if we're gonna tear that down and build it new we might find that it's cheaper to stay on site but we'll be evaluating that a little bit so we know that cost but there is no doubt that um that multiple year phase thing adds a cost perspective than saying we're gonna go to a new site thank you okay thank you we'll look for continued updates and as we plan out reaching the end of our facilities planning process thank you all right thank you

179very much and we've reached item nine citizen comments i see mrs mclean already racing toward the toward the door to retrieve our sign-in sheets citizens are welcome to address the board on any topic as they have signed up to do so jacob vickers you will be first in line thank you for your patience if you'll approach a microphone and just give me one minute while mrs mclean races back and if you'll remember to please state your name and your address and you'll have two minutes to speak thank you very much hello my name is jacob vickers my hold on one moment please let me get my trusty timer up and running here okay please go ahead thank you very much hello my name is jacob vickers i live on 4577 jerome road and i'm here

180representing the clarkson gay strait alliance thank you today i was originally going to come to talk about implementing queer history into our history curriculum currently but i noticed recently that there's been a very bad bullying issue especially in the junior high there was a girl that was targeted for wearing a pride flag one day on social media so i wanted to address some of the other concerns that i have with the current bullying within clarkston an example of this would be con i have heard constantly within the junior high of experience of students including myself not in the high school it's much better there but there's still a lot of issues in the junior high being called the epsler or the teasler or multiple other homophobic or transphobic slurps i'd like to address this through

181either implementing more anti-bullying on systems on queer people and addressing this by education through either wolf times assemblies or implementing other things into our curriculum that can educate people about our very existence i notice a lot of issue comes with this topic due to the fact that our identities are heavily politicized so it's considered a inherently political topic but i also want the board in our community to know that our existence is even though political has like a very very big impact on our lives there's a culture to our community and we are heavily impacted by the negative aspects within it in the external aspects of it as well and i was also i also wanted to talk about briefly implementing more things into our current curriculum like there are many historical figures such as

182the great michelangelo and da vinci that were known queer figures within history so i wanted to implement them more so students can see themselves within those historical figures and know that they are seen and heard among our school district thank you thank you very much for your comments tonight [Applause] next we have hillary kubler okay i can come up here hi hillary kubler9244 lake ridge drive i couldn't i you know i couldn't hesitate to come up and comment about literacy tonight so um i wanted to say first of all i want to thank miss mahoney and ms brazier i think we've made a lot of great steps in clarkson i think we're moving forward and i know a lot of us have been having conversations on this for a couple of years now tomorrow michigan

183senate education committee will be holding hearings on a set of bills that hopefully will pass to make this a lot more clear for you and for our teachers and educators on what to do in the classrooms i still feel like in clarkson we have a weight to fail model i say that because currently we're not embracing the science of reading in our k through 3 instruction we talked about data tonight so data what we know in the state of michigan and nationally is that a third of our population of students learns to read no matter what we put in front of them they're proficient readers and we saw that tonight with 32 percent of our kids at the top of that green we saw a third at the very bottom and those are kids that

184struggle with learning disabilities like my daughter and we have a third that are basic readers and they're really basic readers because we're not putting evidence-based instruction in front of them from the get-go in clarkston all of our k-3 teachers need to be trained in structured literacy that's what this legislation will address if it passes if it doesn't pass it's up to you to make sure that we're doing the right thing for our kids in our classrooms research shows 95 percent of children can read on grade level by the end of first grade and moving forward those are research studies that are peer reviewed that are longitudinal that are evidence based i got that statistic from dr louisa moats at mtss technical assistance center training done by mde so it's stuff that's being talked about in

185the education community and we need to start really honing in on it here in clarkston thank you very much appreciate your comments tonight next we have rebel molina and state your name and address and you'll have two minutes my name is rebel molina i love it down just a little bit so we can hear you my name is robin molina i live on horseshoe circle it's my daughter natalie nice to meet you she attends the junior high if i talk a little and sh and she says one or two things can we just have like a couple more seconds we might not need it um i would like to say i want to start with saying something that's kind of negative and i hear people say all the time that clarkson is not a racist

186place but in august my whole family came and spoke they we told you stories we have a very diverse family diverse with religion diverse with countries diverse with languages different you name it we've got it um my husband spoke he is a naturalized citizen he's a firefighter he's a medical first responder he was a hero in covid times he's also a builder he was born in a third world country came here out of a civil war when he was speaking to you when his after his daughter spoke about what happened to her in the back there were people who are on social media today that use racial slurs about my husband and then there was another person near the middle who i won't name but is a very big proponent in the other group who

187proceeded to imitate my husband's accent racism is a very real thing in clarkston and we are not a horrible family we're not a political family we just we love people and we moved to clarkston because we adopted four children with severe special needs and i used to be a link and i'm studying to be a special education teacher and i know that this is the place for them but we are feeling very unwelcome i would like to say that i really appreciate that you hear us and that you see us and you want to treat us fair and it will protect us the other thing i wanted to just say is everybody gets mad about equity equality means that everybody gets the same thing natalie wants to show you guys her hands go ahead and

188hold up your hands natalie lost her hands in a fire guess what she can't use a computer like everybody else she needs different things so that she can access the same curriculum equity isn't giving her a handout it's giving her and my children and any child the resources that they need so that they themselves can make the same progress as everybody else and natalie wanted to say something are you nervous do you not feel like you can do it okay thank you very much appreciate you nice to meet you natalie next we have layla tanker [Applause] if you please state your name and address and you'll have two minutes evening so layla sanker 6655 eastlawn avenue clerkston michigan i'm a resident of clarkston in the clarkston school district for more than 20 years my son

189attended the clerkston schools from preschool sunshine preschool all the way till his graduation in 2019 this is my first school school board meeting and i hope it's my last i appreciate your work and the good stewardship of my tax dollars and resources and supports that this district has provided for my son you see i've always been really proud of the clarkson school district in my work i get to intersect with school districts all across the state and regionally as well as with teacher education programs and what i know is that clarkston has always been at the forefront of best practices in education as a parent i relied on this i saw the evidence in parent-teacher conferences and my son's learning and the commitment of teachers support staff and administrators to advancing the district vision and

190priorities which is something you don't always see in a school district i became concerned with a conversation around diversity equity and inclusion and the deeply held mr understandings in our nation and community about what it is the misrepresentation of misunderstandings about critical race theory which is not curriculum and as evidenced in some of the conversation here misunderstandings about what systemic racism i am heartened by the dei update i saw today using trauma informed practices culturally responsive teaching are strong practices that support student learning they're at the forefront of education practices building off students lived experiences is a strong pedagogical approach and as we saw with the building construction education literacy initiatives and the way academic service learning and other priorities have been integrated into that strategy i believe that this district is on the right

191path to continue to advance diversity equity inclusion i just want to say thank you for the work you're doing and it's work i hope that continues thank you very much for your comments we appreciate it [Applause] and finally tonight we have mark greene should be on can mark clarkston president horace the board this issue of crt that some of us believe is being filtered into the class and some of us arguing it isn't i think can be settled by pinpointing the core aspects of crt and proposing a ban that prohibits our teachers from teaching those core aspects to our children cpu is working on a resolution that will be presented to the board before the december meeting our resolution will have similar language as michigan house bill that bans crt and all michigan schools it

192just passed the michigan house and is likely to pass the senate as well it's probably political suicide if our governor vetoes but if she does we can still implement the same ban here to protect our children the proposed ban will forbid teachers to teach the following one that all individuals comprising a racial or ethnic group or gender hold a collective quality or belief two that individuals act in certain ways or hold certain opinions because of their race or gender three that individuals are born racist or sexist by accident of their race or gender four that individuals bear collective guilt for historical wrongs committed by their race or gender and five that racism is inherent in individuals from a particular race or ethnic group or that sexism is inherent in individuals from a particular gender okay

193if crt is not in our schools and there are no plans to bring it in later a ban on these five items should not be a problem we can make this proposed resolution public and leave it up to the board to inform the community if ccs is going to embrace crt or ban it it should be an easy decision to ban because the five items described are horrible destructive things to teach our children let's just get this crt issue on the record thank you thank you for your comment all right those were all of the citizens who had signed up to address us tonight i thank everyone for your participation in our democracy uh item 10 is information items our next board of education meeting is monday december 13th scheduled for 7 p.m i'm not

194sure what the location will be obviously we will be announcing it um as we get closer to the meeting i think so before we see you next we will have our thanksgiving recess for staff and students so everyone have a safe healthy and happy thanksgiving break item 11 is adjourned may i have a motion please will you adjourn support all in favor say aye aye aye we are adjourned thank you