School Board 7/12/21

001so uh um [Music] uh [Music] is um [Music] um [Music] is [Music] at all ends of the spectrums or teachers in classrooms um or catch up depending on wherever they are on the spectrum and push forward in the past we had supports that were leveraged by building ace or in this case our intervention specialists are all highly trained teachers that will be working with classroom teachers to help identify all the different ways that we collect data on students in terms of the progress in math and literacy but help teachers not only identify areas where they can improve their instruction universally but also provide specific interventions to support students previously specific intervention packages that we'll be able to bring to bear this fall i have really high expectations to see the amount of growth that our

002students have potential for this is interesting in one of our elementaries so i'm incredibly proud to see the potential that we're going to see additionally we know that students are going to be coming to work not only in the elementary both presenting secondary schools as well as support and additional attention by their teachers to that both in elementary and secondary very exciting report that we're going to have some of the lowest class sizes that have ever been recorded in carson schools to work with students in smaller groups [Music] help them own and grow their basic skills in terms of math and reading and literacy but also looking at as they go up to the secondary or in previous years might have been more linear in terms of your class presentation based on the student's experience

003and how they tolerated over the last year they have smaller class sizes also will enhance our ability to identify students who need supports along the social emotional side we know that many of our students receive struggles they might have encountered over the past year need an additional supportive relationships with their teachers to help them get to the next level additionally our teachers in this capacity will be able to serve as the first round to help identify students that might be struggling more socially emotional than other other years and we feel like we need to have our eyes and ears in cooperation with families to identify students that might have longer term repercussions of covid both on their mental health and their physical health as we push in this year to that end as we identify

004students and we look at our ability to support both in terms of social work and counseling where we need extra gaps filled in if there's more students than we can service on the immediate our buildings are working on secondary plans to make sure that we can enhance our capacities in the mental health and support areas to make sure that our students needs are met in that realm too on the whole clarkson will not only have low class sizes and new programs in terms of being able to support our students that grow forward in the next year i'm excited to see that potential moving forward over the next several years is almost limitless in my mind our students are going to leave clarkson schools better prepared not only in their basic reading math thinking skills but

005really be able to excel and pursue whatever they decide to go past clarkston and with the thought of the filling of these positions and being able to prepare to start the school year we were very fortunate to really draw in a significant number of very highly qualified teachers from not only coming out of colleges which has become less and less and less each year but also teachers from other districts that are looking to come to a more uplift community possibly in terms of uh of everything that clarkson has to offer of attracting people to come and live and be citizens here as well so i'm really excited to see how this year is going to unfold i really have high hopes that we need to take a strong stance on making sure that our our

006students have a good not only support network but that we as a school district be able to identify where they are in point in time it's not about judging students of being behind or not getting it or being in a spot where they somehow failed quite the contrary i think we plan to meet each and every student wherever they are and to be able to push them forward across the next school year and i again i'm very excited to see how this is going to start to manifest and be able to really kind of push the overall caliber of all of our students and our programs forward over the next several years so that's in kind of a encapsulated nutshell obviously i feel like i could go on for hours talking about some of the

007the micro details that relates to this but i think that's a good survey for at least our board of education this evening for our community to hear as we get ready to start the upcoming school year so thank you president horse thank you dr ryan any questions or comments uh for dr ryan from the board i just wanted to say my middle schooler who also struggled really hard this year was something you had spoken about earlier the summer programming that we put in place he was able to take advantage of that i just want to publicly acknowledge the amazing job the teachers who were part of that program did in a three-week small chunk he made leaps and bounds he did very well so it was just something i really wanted to thank the teachers

008for and the district thank you appreciate that thank you miss crane uh item five is presentation items we have none tonight item six is action items 6.1 is approval of personnel changes may i have a motion please i move the board of education improves the personnel changes as listed on the attached sheets support any questions or comments from the board all in favor say aye aye any opposed the motion carries item 6.2 is approval of contract agreements for assistant superintendents may i have a motion please i move that the board of education approves the contracts for the assistant superintendent of instructional services and the assistant superintendent of administrative services as presented support are there any questions or comments from the board all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed the motion i'll sit back

009item 6.3 is approval of district-wide radio purchase may i have a motion please i move that the board of education authorized the administration to execute a contract for renovations to our district-wide radio systems a base bid of 291 295.66 and a contingency of 14 564.78 a total bid award of 305 thousand eight hundred and sixty dollars and 44 cents to com source inc as presented support are any questions or comments from the board i see ms harrison is here in the audience tonight in case there are all right seeing none all in favor say aye aye any opposed the motion carries item 6.4 is approval of various device purchases may i have a motion please i move that the board of education approves the device purchases as presented from cdwg for a total of eighty

010one thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars and 70 cents as presented support any questions or comments from the board all in favor say aye aye aye aye opposed the motion carries item 6.5 is approval for board member attendance at conferences or workshops related to their responsibilities as board of education members for the 21 22 school year may i have a motion please i move that the board of education approves board member attendance at any of the attached conferences as in compliance with board bylaw 0175.1 support any questions or comments from the board and again these are just potential attendance right we approve this a year ahead of time and uh knowing that our schedules may change our interests may change but these are the things that we may attend we just approve it in one

011fell swoop ahead of time all in favor say aye aye any opposed the motion carries item seven is report items we do have one report tonight 7.1 for our from our board operating procedures committee which uh was created two academic years ago right pre-coverage pre-covered and then really kind of put on hold obviously when our attention was well elsewhere last year but i know as creatives catalina spent some time working on this over the year and uh we started talking about it again over the winter and um i asked them to just sort of come and and give us kind of a report because rather than just sort of redo the draft and present it to everybody i think there were sort of some sort of structural and operational kinds of issues that that they

012just asked for some feedback and some discussion from the rest of the board so i'm gonna ask mrs crane to kind of lead us through that discussion here so i i know this says it's a report i'd like it to be kind of a cohesive discussion instead i'd like to just talk about it really quickly when i was first when we first did it two two school years ago i was the newest member on the board so president horace asked me to take this committee and just to be able to look at it with fresh eyes and i wanted to do that without having a discussion first which i actually now think may have been a slight mistake and an overreach but i think it'll go well in this next year so when i read

013it with fresh eyes one of the things i'd like to talk about especially mr heyer with your institutional knowledge i'd like to kind of have an understanding for a long time long time long time what the original purpose of it was because it was really hard for me to ascertain when i read through the original document it read in a very slightly disorganized manner it read as something so i was looking at it from two ways kind of trying to figure out what in it i wanted to keep and what was needed and what i wanted it to be moving forward so i guess to do that i need to understand why it was created but what i would like to kind of get your opinion on as well is what i want it to

014be going forward because there's there's a lot of redundancy in it there's a lot of pieces of it that are already covered in our policy that are already covered in our bylaws i don't think those need that needs to be in there so what i think it should be and what i'd like to see moving forward is that it's kind of an agreement amongst the board on how we treat each other even in times of disagreement in times of contention in times of agreement and maybe that we affirm it every year at our retreat is kind of what i would like to see that was what i was thinking so with that i'd like to clean up the redundancy i'd like to clean up the organizational part of it outdated content relevancy so that's kind

015of what i was thinking but i would like to open a discussion and see maybe kind of where it came from and what you guys would like to see out of it so that maybe in the next six months i can have a final draft and then we can affirm it yearly going forward you and i noticed just now that this end of the table like all of our eyes just sort of went like this because this is the more experienced i know well this way so maybe we'll let you guys uh certainly the more experienced trustees are kind of on this end of the table how do we say that well we were on the board at the time when we really felt we had to develop them so i don't know mrs mcginnis

016we chuckled not because it was silly no no not useful it didn't read as silly but we chuckle because we went through some tumultuous times and as a as a board of education we operate as a board yes we're seven individuals but we operate as a board we're not congressmen or women we don't get to just go out in the community and say what we feel and not worry about the impact of it on the board of education for this district and at the time that the document was created we had multiple voices of the board in the community that were doing a disservice to the board of education and the document in its um original form was not created here in clarkson was created in another oakland county community i don't honestly know their

017reasoning why but we took their base document and added and or deleted from it as we felt necessary i think one of the i think one of the good tools of the document is it's a little bit of a cheat sheet of the policies can be very dry and redundant themselves so for a new board member to come in and try to inundate themselves with to read through all the policies and to grasp all that information in a short period of time and we all joke about the number one thing we suggest to all new board members is to sit quiet for a year because there's so much to learn there it's great to have an opinion but it's better to have an opinion based on the policies and procedures of the community so it's

018a great tool for a cheat sheet um but it was also a tool as you said to use as an affirmation of how we wanted what kind of board norms we wanted to establish in how we professionally spoke to one another and how we as a board of education presented ourselves and the work that we do on behalf of the community to the community so it established some very um basic isms to behave in a way that is conducive of an elected official we are entrusted by the people of our community to do a job on behalf of our community and we should behave accordingly professionally and so not to say that there isn't some parts of it that can be eliminated because you say it is redundant the problem just becomes that when a

019new board member comes on and we remove that redundancy we remove that safety net for a new person who has yet to grasp all the policies where the board operating procedures may provide them an initial step into what it's like to be a board member okay we haven't looked at it from that i mean i like that idea and i think there's a deeper discussion on how much of that we want to keep in there because i would have probably said let's remove all of that but i think that is a really and i do think depending on the makeup of the board you can use least little less of it and or more of it well there are probably becomes when you need more of it and it's not there then the need to

020have a majority vote we always know that we need four votes right to pass something the the need to have four votes to put something back in that you might have taken out that keeps decorum in the in the boardroom i was going to say classroom in the boardroom um now you have a pickle you're in that you're not maintaining decorum or professionalism in the boardroom and you have a board that is not um in agreement of what that professionalism looks like yep so to take out some of the professionalism redundancy may be a disservice in the future right no that's the part i really want to keep in i really want it to be an affirmation of how we treat each other how we present to the greater community and that was my thoughts

021and what i really wanted to be so mrs egan so just a couple quick comments i won't reiterate what mrs mcginnis has already said but um you know every time one person leaves the board a new person comes on it can change the dynamic of the board so when we bring a new board member on we go through what's called a new board member orientation so that they understand what you know how to access the policies how to read the policies get them oriented in terms of what committee memberships they probably want to jump in on to make them more effective sooner things like masb training and professional development we all want our board to be professionally trained and educated so we participate in those leadership conferences so my opinion is this is certainly still

022needed it will always be needed it should be part of maybe the cliff notes if you will of good boardsmanship we want to perhaps make this a part of our new board member orientation packet it should be streamlined so that it's easy to read i think referencing the policies that maybe are the best priorities in terms of read these first get to know what it is that you're supposed to be doing at the board table how to behave things like caucusing we we are not allowed to caucus meaning the only time we can have a discussion as a board is right here at the table when we are in a meeting we don't walk out of here and then go have a private meeting we are not legislators so we do not have that right

023we do not have that power our powers are established by the state of michigan so those are very important um in fact i think it's what michigan statute 380 point i don't know what number but um that might be part of the reference in terms of policies so i think new board orientation this is where it really belongs yeah i think that's good and and as the newest member the orientation was a whirlwind it's a lot of information at once right yeah so i i think there's a lot that could be eliminated um but just because it's contained somewhere else i don't think immediately warrants it to be eliminated i ideally this is a document that really contains the unwritten rules and so when i got on the board there was a lot of experience

024on the board and all the rules were unwritten and i tripped on a couple of them um inadvertently and i was you know spoken to and then i knew the rules and you know we went through a period where we had several different board members that had different ideas of what the rules are and we're all equally elected so the only way to establish rules is for us to come together and vote and say these are the rules that we're going to abide by and and generally those are more detailed than what's contained in the bylaws like the bylaws are how we operate right you know we can change the bylaws if we want um with a a super majority vote uh but it's not something you just like oh i don't think we're gonna

025do that today you know i mean the bylaws are the the foundation of how we operate and so this was to go to that next level how do we address each other at the board table you know who speaks for the board how do we handle email inquiries like there's a lot of logistical kinds of things that are in here um a little bit more detail in terms of officers and how some of that works um but but by and large it's it's it's writing down the unwritten rules and so if there's if there are things in here that like they're just so obvious and they're contained elsewhere we don't need to say them great if there are things in here that are contained elsewhere and it's still a really good idea to reiterate them

026like it definitely makes sense you know i mean no individual can take any action outside of the board right that is in every document policy bylaw open meetings act right i mean that's probably worth repeating in here as well you know where i mean maybe how to how to turn in an expense report or something might be a little more detailed in here than it would be in a bylaw for you know for example but i i think very you know and and how public comment works is very well laid out in the bylaws i don't know that we need to reiterate that you know i mean it why why repeat the exact same thing again and so i think we can definitely shorten this i think we can clean up formatting i think we

027can you know uh definitely improve the document and make it more relevant to our um operations the only thing i would add to what has been said already beyond that is that there's a piece in here for for sort of our interaction with the superintendent as well um because i think at the very beginning of the document it talks about the board superintendent team right and so you know there's some information in here about all right something happens how do we expect the administration to communicate out with us you know what's an email i don't when we did this um i mean text messages are we had paper packets when i started on the board that's how old i am um you know we didn't have a lot of electronic communication at that point so

028you know what's a phone call what's a text message what's an email you know i mean just kind of spelling that out because you know if i was a superintendent i would definitely want to know how does the board want to receive information you know is it if it if it's normal regular run-of-the-mill information there's a process for that if something happens you know how are we notified and i think we i mean we have no issues there we've done an excellent job of keeping the board informed i mean there's very few times that i get hit with something that i've never heard of and then if i ask that it's usually the superintendent hadn't heard about it either which is why we didn't find out um so that's kind of the 10 000 foot

029construct i think the process that you suggested is a good one you know if there's maybe a uh you know going through and maybe figuring out what you want to eliminate and giving us a redline version and just you know we could just maybe give you a thumbs up along the way or tell me why you don't think it should be eliminated right i'm so okay what i'd like to do is have that probably you know within the next four to five months so that we can really dig into it in the few months after that so by this time next year it's an actual thing that we can affirm that's what i'd really like to do yeah and i i don't know that like there's probably a little bit of cleanup of what we

030decide to keep it's probably pretty good is my guess of what's there you know i think um they're like i said the communication methods and some of those things but like the the how we address each other and how we respond to things i think that's all probably pretty accurate stands on its own yeah there's some organizational it was very it was very interesting there was a couple of things where you know we make a joke at work when there's a rule it's because somebody did something wrong at some point there's some of those things that think oh what did somebody do that made somebody put that in there so there's some very specific kind of things but yeah and i would say when i when i looked at it after you know you shared

031it with me that was my reaction was well a lot of this stuff we don't do anymore you know i mean just as as things have evolved and so those were the things going through certainly having gone through now agenda planning for the last couple of years i i think just and as laws have changed as evaluations have changed and become so prescriptive through the law there were a lot of things in here about goals and timelines that just aren't even relevant anymore i mean they just don't matter i mean those things are prescribed to us and so i wouldn't want to see those in a document anymore and give the impression that something is or isn't happening um because it's being dictated to us now in a different format so i thought there were

032some things like that that we could definitely get cleaned up yeah i think along those lines the dip and sip sure that's pretty challenging brings back some memories yeah you know i don't know that that's especially important but like for for instance like how we do an annual retreat and set goals is not particularly described elsewhere no and the fact that those are board goals you know i mean that would be something that i think needs to be in this documentary i agree and it really as you go through it you know if like how we do agenda the agenda right now is pretty straightforward and clear right if we have something we want on the agenda we contact our board leadership they meet they create the agenda and i can't remember like probably in

033the last you know three four years of you know any issues where somebody said hey i wanted this on the agenda and i didn't get it and and that's just a realm of where we are but i mean we could be in a place where you know mrs crane you want to talk about um you know directional boring under sashabot middle school and the rest of us are going that isn't particularly relevant like why would we talk about that no thank you like we just we need a way to work that out yeah right that you know we're we're you know going through that and that's you know that's what this really spells out is you know what what is the expectation of the officers because just because kelly's mrs horse is having a bad

034day doesn't mean nobody gets anything on the agenda right i mean we've gotta we've gotta cover those those possibilities maybe i think the thing to remember is this is how we choose as a board to self-regulate ourselves i like the idea of it being the place to write down the unwritten rules because we've all blundered over those i mean at some point so i kind of like that yeah mr need yeah and i agree with everything that the experienced into the board is experienced and i think mrs crane and this catalina it's a lot of work i know being having been on the policy committee before gonna be a lot of work well i didn't tell you that when you took a theme um the only caution that i have with regard to redundancy is

035that you can get into a situation where you're not redundant but you have two things covering the same topic that are a little different when you change one you forget to change the other so i'm worried about references or emphasizing the bylaws that are important but we ought to try to clean that part up yeah i agree i was worried about that and i thought part of making an annual affirmation is making sure that whatever board up procedures committee has to make sure that it still matches whatever part is you know policy i like the annual affirmation like at our organizational meeting i think it's a great a great thing to do and if there are things we want to talk about we could certainly punt it to our retreat to get more indeed that

036happens to be the same idea but you know typically right it's a little bit of a i promise to treat you with respect this year for one year and then we'll see if i want to affirm it again it it is a good thing to just see like what what has changed because things do change and typically not in the span of a year but i don't remember when we last adopted this it's probably been six years or something that was another question i had you know you know since i think we reaffirmed a couple times when we as we were using it and um you know it it served us well um there were you know points of disagreement but you know i mean in terms of being a high functioning board i mean

037this this is what it is and you know it's just how we operate because we can't we can't be communicating with all different voices i mean we need to i mean the basics of what this outlines right is that we come to the table we all have our individual opinions we share individual opinions we discuss and discuss and we have different plans and different versions we get input recommendations and ultimately we vote and then we're all supporting what we've voted on yeah right communicating with that and that that's what that's how we operate as a board and how we could be successful and to avoid i mean obviously their our focus is dr ryan very eloquently laid out in his report our focus is on students showing growth every year right and if our focus

038is on other nonsense it's not on that and that's why this helps us get rid of all that you know kind of distraction to focus on kids which i think is why we're on the board i believe it is all right thank you if there's anything else please let me know i've taken some really good notes and have a really i think clear idea on how to move forward so all right i appreciate it very much and uh i know it was in our consent agenda so i don't know that everyone had a chance to you know see everyone's assignment but um catalina and ms crane agreed to continue their assignment on this ad hoc committee which i believe is in existence until i say it's not so thank you very much for continuing the

039work on uh i think we've now just said it has to be here every year yeah thank you all right i appreciate it thank you so much we'll check in on that again then maybe in four or five months and see what else you may need from the board at that time okay thank you thank you we'll move on to item eight discussion items uh which is our 2122 board priorities uh and trustees last week i asked each of you to send me say three to five items that were kind of on your radar in terms of what you wanted to kind of track or learn more about over the course of the year and in the past years we've done this discussion differently where we've gotten around the table and maybe whittled this down

040to you know say our top three sort of goals if you will for the year sort of big picture items that we really wanted to dive into and just being that last year we were kind of so singularly focused um i felt like there was a lot more that i think we were going to be interested in in following or tracking this year and so i wanted just kind of input from everybody um and just see where everyone's where everyone's heads were and where your areas of interest were uh also knowing that we were going to go to monthly meetings for this coming year and really have you know kind of weightier uh meetings and be able to you know play with the format a little bit differently and not maybe just have workshops but

041try to build in content in some different ways i really wanted to you know just see where we were thinking and where we had some kind of common ideas and so having kind of condensed all of our ideas really down into four categories um so we had some some ideas under academic performance and measurement there were several ideas under district finances several ideas under programming kind of broadly some of that was i would say more classroom kind of programming some more under the support programming category or co-curricular programming and then more of the operations and management side and that includes both our sort of management piece as well as you know the district management piece and so uh you may not see your own language here specifically but i kind of categorize them if you

042will put them under bullets and then i just wanted to have some discussion here maybe just kind of category by category and see if we wanted to whittle them down more fine-tune them more and then this really will be the charge that the agenda planning team takes with it into the room um really for the year so i don't know that you'll see this kind of once a month necessarily but some of this will be things that we track over the year and bring back to the boardroom i think you'll see this in a lot of different ways some of this may be workshops that we do where we do more of a deep dive stay with the special education director and look at new trends new thinking what's she bringing you know to to

043the district um once she's had a chance to kind of settle in some of this where we say we want to follow the data and we want to follow xyz program maybe that's something we do a little more over the long haul so that's kind of why i was thinking you know how i got to sort of this format in this structure this year um just wanting to do it a little differently knowing that we would have i think a lot more interest in a lot more kind of content on our plate that we were able to you know have just have a lot more activity this year than being so singularly minded as we were last year so with that um we'll just start at the top uh looking at the kind of three

044big areas that rose to the top under the category of academic performance and measurement um and so you may recognize if you don't i have kind of the master list here with people's initials by it if you don't recognize your own um thing there um but i'll just let you all sort of talk this first one i think we're um from uh mrs egan and mr heyer so i'm just going to let you kind of talk a little bit about the bullets and sure we can sort of see if we want to keep them on the list fine-tune them a little more well so the michigan department of education their michigan integrated continuous improvement process actually i think is a is a good priority to adapt because i think it's going to impact some of

045these other bullet points that we actually have on this um so for instance conversation you know over the last year but like we have so many enrollment pieces now that like just coming up with a you know a blended count is more challenging than it's been in the past so i think probably in the january time frame because we don't have a lot going on in january um is when it makes sense to really dive in you know not necessarily in context of budget creation but we're gonna have some parameters and we're gonna need to project out you know what what does this look like if we if we roll the money forward as far as we can roll it forward and you know what do we have on there and morph and change and

046tweak and you know what are those strategic priorities you know it's certainly including um you know our staff students in clarkston and i think keeping that stability over years we haven't had a year we haven't had 10 growth in our our shared service partnerships or anything on top of what we've already been able to produce which is great but also you know looking long-term you know a lot of change you know patterns of student enrollment private schools that our partners change all those things can kind of be up over time and i think that it's really important that we stay really tight on the wheel to make sure we can guide um those policies also reflective of uh fund equity because that's the other message and i don't think that's changing from the board is

047that we operate in clarkson within our means period we maintain good facilities period you know these kind of things are now i think directions from the board but i think they're very strong kind of reflections and projections from our community and their expectations of parts and schools thank you dr we're top 10 and my translation of that is we we have room to grow when it comes to innovative programming and i say that it's just but in seriousness like we have the staff to be able to go after our innovative programming and i think as a board you know whether that's a budget parameter or something cultural like we have a cultural well it's a budget parameter it's cultural that we understand our budget every year right i mean that's just the way it is

048here it took a while to get there but i mean we're not one of those districts where it's like hey we better spend it or we're going to lose it right that is not how we operate and so the same way we want to keep our our foot on the gas when it comes to innovative programming and that may be taking some calculated risks i mean we're very conservative financially but we could certainly invest in a program we've invested in having staff to manage the innovative program it's paid off you know that's not typical in education right that's not something you do in a school district to say hey let's hire these people to manage and grow this program and we've done that and it has paid dividends and it allowed us to do some

049great things and even a lot of the supports that we have in place were well underway before we get any federal money well before there were any pandemic i mean we were preparing for this for years now and so i think that's a really important piece that however we work that in whether like i said i don't know if it's a budget parameter if it's just something we we hammer continuously like we want to continue to innovate we want to we bring us some crazy ideas some of them may go somewhere some of them may not um and i know we're always you know looking for those things and trying to uncover them and even i mean does it make sense to hire somebody else in another district that has some experience with something that

050we want to do here and we've we've worked that way which again is not the way education typically works but we've had such success with that i want to keep that going um that's a lot of money you multiply that by students five years from today from 1994. it's a lot of money those other districts have had to educate their students that we haven't had and you go into the halls of other districts or you have other districts come to our halls and they are like you're a base funded district how did you do this but i know where clarkson is so we've got we've gotten this from the tenacity that we have to have better programs for our students to give money for uh education educating our students about what the state gives us

051what i would really like to see on this under the budget planning area because i'm always a little bit of a pessimistic when it comes to what they're going to give us is be very very cautious of how we layer out the moneys especially the federal money that we've gotten in the buckets of when they can be spent and when's the last deadline to win it has to be spent how it's supposed to be spent you know with every dollar we get there's 100 strings as to how it can be spent but i'd really like to see a timeline the graph of what money goes from here to here and what it goes from here to here and so on and so forth so that we can back into those buckets in that planning to

052decide how we're going to use when we make a jump to another program or would we look at making fundamental changes in how we teach any of our students and i think that we have to do it with a lot of planning it's not just quickly spend the money even though there's so much of it there to be spent um i just think we need to be extremely cautious and i think having a good timeline of what we want to do is going to be crucial to making sure we don't miss any points of where we ramp on and grandpa okay thank you it almost sounds like what we're talking about is committed versus discretionary funds you know kind of like how we have the buckets in our fund equity our operating dollars just maybe

053the board just doesn't because you work the administration works with it all the time all the time maybe we just don't really understand it as well as as we should but so many buckets have come in over the last year and been promised right yeah yeah so i'm getting interested mr said i mean we know what our peer allocation will be next year but remember several years ago it inched up instead of intercepted in one year we had a state budget shortfall and we went down several hundred dollars in school districts statewide were just a horrible predicament so i think we do need to be conservative we have been conservative as matthias said we need to continue that and we need to understand you know the likelihood of those funds that funding continues knowing that

054at the end of the day most of it is at the back and call of our legislature and that's just unpredictable and just to reiterate the points that have been made i think it was my first year on the board we had a 475 per pupil cut and we had very little notice very little notice 490. yeah it was just it was not insignificant and it was very painful yeah um so i i totally agree that this this could evaporate very quickly and it's it would help us to understand what's really yeah what's what's how much of this is vulnerable and see the timeline i agree with that yeah i don't think we want to make any changes i think it's really it's our understanding we want to be engaged in it on you know

055up to speed and i mean this is an area where we just haven't spent as much time as a board because we haven't been together in the last year and a half yeah um i think you know when you look down at the bottom piece here i feel like we've covered certainly the first two i think the third one really is filtered throughout the others i mean when you talk about a staffing and resource plan i think that's going to come as we're looking at budgets as we're planning uh and then really the last one i'll kind of leave out there i know it was mentioned specifically in terms of mentorship and professional development and so i that's how i characterized it was that for us or was that within the district um well i

056think it was the district it was it was written more of as a goal statement you know kind of continuing the the mentorship and and commitment to professional development within the district and i just thought it was i thought that i would say what i've noticed um certainly in the last couple of years sitting in this seat is that when we talk about when the district talks about professional development i feel like those are where we get maybe some of our biggest pushbacks from the community um biggest questions from the community is is and that's why i wrote it as the role of professional development i don't know if it's something that we would want to focus on but since it was mentioned by someone when they when they questioned me i just thought you

057know if that was um if that was something we would want to learn more about um or talk more about it could be something that we learn about together not only us but our community as well is why is it important um what does it accomplish because we have talked about it a lot even recently is professional development for our teachers along with some of the initiatives that we have that we that the district has introduced so that's kind of how i characterized it it could be a parking lot issue to quote one of mrs egan's presidential um presidential items when she ran this discussion but um i did want to honor the everyone's suggestions throughout this process it was written by myself and it had a lot to do with professional development wednesdays and

058how we use them how they're spread across the calendar year how we intend to continue to use them and the role of the board being happy and this board is a very good board in their role of professional development we take it very seriously we budget it and we most often go to conference i mean i applaud stephanie in her first year she as a board member and she was at conference like the next weekend so we take it very seriously and i think that the information that we have to guide this district and to tell our only employee the superintendent how we want the district to run only comes from us being taking the opportunity to go to these we all serve our community in different professional positions we didn't go to school to

059be a board member out of college out of high school and so this professional development for the board members no different than for our staff is crucial to the academic success of our buildings just even an initial reaction to that you know the needles really moved with respect to education after the last several years obviously last year were very ingrained in just keeping afloat all different educational formats and getting through cobit but looking forward to next year the whole idea when i say coaches and those kind of positions they're not static i mean most of us in this room and probably on the board no matter what profession you're in you've had different type of development on your job and i think most of us look at those type of opportunities where they call us

060all into a room and there's 60 people and there's the sage on the stage it's kind of telling us how it is for a number of hours is not the best type of experience i think most people agree no matter what kind of industry you are job embedded professional learning or development is where it's at you know if you're going to teach a teacher how to teach better in terms of their literacy practice you don't do it in a conference room you do it in a classroom you do with live kids there where there's professional feedback there's the learning going on in terms of the practice and it's integrated nobody learns in a room and then you know that's the whole idea of what we're trying to push with more hands-on and more integrated learning

061for students in classrooms and so that would be kind of my goal would be to have that at a next level and part of that is not only to have better learning from our our teachers but also less time out of the classroom i feel like when we do things that pull teachers out of classrooms sometimes you need it we can't get around it because a lot of times improvement education is like changing uh the wheels on a moving bus has been the kind of a descriptor but it's still every day that we don't have a teacher in a classroom with kids is a day of class learning when you have a substitute teacher guest teacher it's just not the same so that combination where you actually could have an extra teacher in the room

062that day not only you get the learning of the primary teacher who can improve their practice and yes it might take longer because you don't have them all but the quality is night and day difference think over time and i think that's panned out in research in terms of supporting that kind of development the one exception looking at levels is to make sure that you know there's got to be days and times where teachers at different levels can integrate if we just operate on an individual teacher improving their practice but they never really take a look at from a third grade teacher what's going on in second grade and what's going on fourth grade or what's the middle school is seeing lapses in terms of needs then the program over period of year starts to

063separate in terms of its overall integration and we can't have that either that should be more of a minimum approach um to kind of pathfind to be able to range fine i should say not pathfinder range fine to make sure that we're in the same bucket together well and i have to say that i cannot be more grateful for the individuals who have chosen the profession of teaching and have come to clarkston to teach because there are schools who have and will start the september school year with substitutes who are not certified teachers who are not highly qualified who have 90 college credits could be in basket weaving it could be in whatever and those are the types of teachers that are available because there are not enough teachers going into the profession and we

064in clarkson have highly qualified certified teachers and i am proud of that and at the risk of maybe stating the obvious i think our goal is you know to have kids show at least a year's worth of growth right we've said it a few times tonight who's delivering our instruction it's our teachers i mean does is anybody happy with where we are now no we want to do better i mean that's the whole point of this discussion is how do we do better really the only way to do better is investing in professional development for our teachers i mean it's the only silver bullet that we have and it makes so much sense right it's obvious that if if we want kids to to do more and achieve more right we have to invest more

065in our in our teachers and that comes in the way of professional development and i echo 100 it's not sitting in a classroom learning the theory behind teaching kids it's working with individual kids of totally unique circumstances of where that kid came from what they have going on in their life what is going to be the right way to structure a literacy lesson or a math lesson so that kid grasps it and can move on to the next concept right it's different for every single kid in the classroom and it's that teacher's job with the support that we can provide to move all those kids along and not every teacher is good at everything and i think you can have new teachers coming right out of college that might have some aspects of their practices

066that are really high level and you can have obviously master teachers but even master teachers it's almost like you're looking at your scratch golf game you know nobody's perfect on and even professionals have people watch their swing to see where they are at a point in time and there's always aspects that you can improve and i think people are looking again the magic bullet has some sort of program and really it's really dissecting maybe you teach fractions a little bit differently next year because we've analyzed and looked back that your practices could be you know based on actual results and what you're doing you know or hey you know a teacher down the hall how do you get these type of results you don't always have to look way outside of your own uh district

067to find an expertise that you can really educate and bring everybody's game up so i think both those things are pretty awesome a hundred percent and i've had the personal experience of having my kid in a first years teachers classroom i mean it was a little scary because how how could somebody coming right out of college have a clue at how to meet the needs of kids in their class you know or more kids at the secondary level how how is that even possible that they would have the skills like think about it like if you've if you've been in college and your student taught i mean you just don't have the skills so how do we provide a great experience so we have literacy coaches and we have folks to back up the teacher

068and help them and we have that teacher collaborate with their fellow teachers right i mean we have the system in place and it was a great experience and i think it continues to be a great experience and you know i'd see mr lucito sitting in the front row if it's not a good experience they don't last very long you know here i mean we make sure we provide the supports that teachers get on the train and do what we need them to do and so this is such a crucial crucial item i don't know that i don't see a necessarily a vision of how we as a board could engage or support more beyond what what we have going on except for the fact that when it comes time to the staffing piece and the

069supports i think that's how the pd rolls into our level of us providing the resources for it so i i would say i don't know if we need a separate item but i feel like we're going to discuss that when it comes to the coaches and support folks and interventionists and that component okay fair enough nuts okay um great discussion i mean i feel like we can combine a lot of these things and i think looking at my notes i probably had six to eight ish kinds of topics and um i'll work on that and you know we'll we'll have that going forward so i i feel like we have a board operating committee right so i mean that one we can kind of kick there we've got a bond facilities committee right mrs egan

070that maybe we can own that one in that committee and move that board goal forward of you know kind of laying the groundwork and then i i don't know in terms of budget you know or um you know the discipline piece or a couple others and i don't know what else you had on your list but i don't know would we want a a finance committee to take the lead of something like that stop looking at me i don't see you looking at you no we're don't be looking at each other no i don't know about the finance piece i mean i feel like that's an area where all of us are more interested in the role more education and the reason why i suggest that maybe committee is the wrong word but we've had

071liaisons in the past where it was sort of the liaison's job to structure the information for the board so it wasn't the finance committee making decisions it was really them saying this is what we want as a board you know here it is uh where it wasn't like the committee was making recommendations to us it was like the committee was packaging things because if we don't have something like that it falls to the president vice president and if you're willing to take it on i mean i'm certainly willing to put it on you but that's i don't know what out of these pieces what you're willing to do how about i how about i sleep on it yeah absolutely we don't know how to chew on that okay now there's a horse i also have

072one item that i not that i found was missing but i would like to get feedback in terms of the board administration piece and it has to do with what we've learned over the last year in terms of a couple things one is being able to leverage what we've been able to put into place for the district and for individual students um looking at the experiences that our teaching staff and our administrators have had they've really had to grow a stretch to try to meet needs this year that they've never done before there was a tremendous amount of learning because of had to you know they're put in a position where they didn't have a choice but to try to trudge forward and obviously across our district teachers did at all different rates some are

073probably better than maybe as a face-to-face but others obviously was a struggle but we learned a lot from that and i know from feedback from community there's not interest in kind of pursuing kind of any kind of like hybrid schedule for our district but i started thinking a little bit deeper and would like feedback to look into with our teaching learning council our curriculum review committee of trying to make options for individual students to more individually design their learning pathways and when i say that is that we like to think that everybody fits in a cookie cutter square box but i think mr hire kind of eliminated earlier our kids are going all different directions and sometimes it's really impossible to try to find a program for each one but what if we had thought

074a little bit more flexible in our mindset for students that had a plan of study that maybe involved more of a separation from the regular school day why do we have to be bound to the into the four walls a certain number of hours a day when we can really use some of the flexibility that is out there now to have different educational experiences why can't it be more the design of the student and family to select some of these options over a period of time not just a single class you know but be able to really structure it and it could be based on their interest it could also be along the lines of their individual needs i mean as a principal i don't know how many times i heard exceptions we tried to

075make a student that might be a figure skater that wants to go on to the olympics and how could we amend the school day or they're a gymnast but it's way bigger than that you know you have students that might based on their own challenges in schools psychologically you know maybe they would function better with a little bit different uh format i'm not saying in mass but there's individual kids that i feel like we could be providing a better service to it's not going to be lights out in terms of our ability to do it i never want to stretch out to do anything that is as you said a calculated risk of being able to be successful at it but i feel like we should continue to stretch when it comes to making those

076programs individualized and i think that goes in the scope of our families too i mean some of the exposure and desires of our families to push their students and give them experiences why can't they be integrated uh within the school overall plan and how can we be a little bit more flexible be able to be able to mine the store now obviously it dips into all sorts of areas of policy school procedure budget because it's not you just don't write a blank check to say go out and find your education program i mean that we can't put our name behind that but if we were thoughtful about it and if we looked at it more in terms of individual needs and getting kids to be the best they can i mean my vision i'd see

077everything as you mentioned not everybody wants to be a pipefitter but if you didn't wouldn't it be great to go work with one half day your senior year as opposed to being you know immediately tied to our construction program maybe there's room for more flexibility or parents want to pursue a more unique part of their study why can't we help them kind of structure that but i wanted to kind of just get a little pulse i think at the level of our board of education and policy and working with our community that would be a great place to start to look at those opportunities because i think if we don't if we don't we're going to become one of those school districts that kind of like rests on tradition that's how we've always done it

078and i really want to kind of we have an opportunity here to start to break the mold a little bit it could be exciting i mean again please do not interpret free for all i'm saying there's a lot of students that are perfectly fine within the regular clarkson program but there's some room for variability as well in my mind so mrs crane wanted some history earlier on in the meeting and i would say once upon a time we would get together with our administrators and we would hear what i would consider to be some out of the box ideas and that may be even polite because some of them were pretty out there and we got away from that because we went through a period of time and we needed to write the unwritten rules

079of you know if you present an idea like that i mean we had we had some folks at the time who were like well you know what about this question and how much is it going to cost and what's the policy and it's like what am i it's just an idea like all we want to know is like is this fitting clarkson and should we explore it more like it's not a finished product and it still might not go anywhere but it's our job as a board to say does this fit with our community research and development absolutely and so i mean my suggestion as you were talking is to do something we did that i've suggested um you know as we get out of this is maybe go back and do something we did

080in many years ago and let's do a maybe a board administrative retreat where we take a day come up with your best crazy ideas you know that that we might want to discuss and let us interact with the administrators who have you know have an idea could talk through and let us give some feedback you know it's a good way for us to meet the administrators we haven't met yet because we've been virtual for so long and even with some newer board members i mean you haven't had the chance to be in places where we would have met them maybe that's a way that you know we take a day and funnel through some discussions and you know go through some things and discuss and give you feedback from you know our thinking and ultimately

081some of them might go forward some of them might not but maybe we can knock off two or three birds with you know one one session if we're willing to you know put the time and schedule it as we continue to survey our community moving forward to some of their interests because i believe some of the crazy ideas can come or you know possible benefit is out there absolutely is not what you're speaking of we have provided students who have had unique training schedules alternate schooling schedules so that they can train and work a schedule that isn't home so i thought we had a policy or at least we as a as leadership team we're doing that i won't just wonder if how many parents really know about it gotcha i think that's more linear

082in terms of where students have the flexibility to be able to take some online classes or university classes are integrated in their program we're always looking for students that are outside the box that way but why does why do you have to be somewhat special to look at more of a unique program and i can't even paint how many different times i've talked to people who said if i just had a little flexibility right i can make this work and they're not trying to game the system or trying to work around things they're truly trying to kind of create a more enriching program and i'd be proud to be able to be able to there are a handful of students um not unlike a handful of us employees that worked very well remotely so i

083do see there an opportunity for students who remote education work good for them and give them an opportunity to potentially expand into something that they might not have been able to do if they were in the classroom monday through friday eight to two every day so you know i'm all for giving our students and our parents more flexibility more choices we've always allowed our schedule at the high school junior highs to be driven by student selection so i don't see why this should be any different at least we can examine it more right and we do have obviously if you want to select into a full virtual program you're more than happy to do that because we've entertained a lot of families already this summer who know that you know my plan moving forward is

084that we're going back without distancing without masks without mandatory vaccinations or anything like that [Music] thank you but they but we want to make sure that the other families who aren't ready for that don't want that that we can provide services so i'm just saying we have those kind of opportunities right you know i think that's kind of the name of the game and that's america you know you need to have those that flexibility to kind of write your story so you're you're talking about something in between right so these are these are families because we still have the virtual program so you're looking about a little more individualized a little more flexible if it came with a plan yeah just right willingly right right options for kids right i mean when you get to

085the high school we have different even the middle school and junior high you start to have options right and you know the the integrated science and math program is not for everybody the ap program is not for everybody the ib program is not for everybody the construction tech program is not for everybody i mean wouldn't it be great if we had a program for everybody yeah you know and that i think is what you're you're really referring to we can't right we've got to have them right we've got we've got some new tools in our toolbox is there a way to leverage them in a way that students could opt in and try something new without taking away any options that we already have or forcing somebody into something that they wouldn't need or would

086want you know is there a way to leverage that for a student or their family right and i think that's certainly worth exploring i think ideas on how to move forward with this now are you looking for maybe a blessing on how to start exploring it now or do you feel like you need a bigger i mean i think i'm not against the idea of a retreat where we could present a whole bunch of ideas around but it is related to it i'd like to bring it more to our community in a workshop so it could hear some hedges to it it's not something i think we just want to flip a switch and rush into right but but it seems like it would be huge dividends so sometime this year i would say when

087you're ready i mean if you have 12 things you want to present to us or six things you know i mean sketched out on a napkin that you know has had some thought to it but clearly it's not a plan and there's a lot more work there to go into let us react to it i mean we might say nope that's not gonna fly here there's no way that would fit for our community we might say you know what this is awesome let's let's do a survey let's get some more feedback you know let's let's see if it makes sense to spend more time on it and that has happened in the past not so much recently but i think i think that's the way we get we get some you know innovative programming time

088to look to the horizon yeah mrs crane did you have something you wanted to no i just think the whole idea of this kind of speaks to i know we've spoken before and i think this past year showed how important it is for upper upper students to um maybe have a different schedule and sleep in and how much better they do and how hard that is it's their life at that point and i think just going forward and thinking about this um offering those other options kind of takes care of some of that so it's always been on my mind i've always thought we should flip the schedules and little kids should go early and the bigger kids should go later but it's hard it's just hard to do up until covet that was the

089biggest board meeting we've ever had i did that wasn't on it yet but i i think having gone through what we've gone through it's certainly time to get more data on it yeah it's just a thought i mean that's and even even if it's you know the whole community isn't in supportive of it could we do it on a well that's it just these kind of case basis right that's an option these things open up more options and more options or can be a really good thing i would just add that we um not even think about grades when we think about options like that because some people are right you're right hawks right is that what they call night or night night owls and then some people are larks right they get up early

090and i've got three kids and they're all very different and i don't think it's age dependent no it isn't so but i can see where um for an example some of the kids that are like used to be jazz band and they had a zero hour and they were up and they that was like their favorite time of day and that was their one of their favorite classes and so i think if you can consider scheduling two it sounds to me like what we're trying to look at if i paraphrase correctly something more like what you would see at a college level where you have independent study and you work with an academic advisor and you have to work within the parameters of the graduation requirements but you can start to fine-tune what it is

091you need for instance if you have to have two years of science but you love material science or you think you like material science we don't teach material science we don't have a class right but maybe there's something virtual online or a community college class that the student can take that that gets them to where they want to go yeah so i i hope i'm understanding what i'm hearing and it sounds exciting and i think it's worth pursuing okay all right i feel like we've had a great discussion here thank you i know uh it was a long one probably the longer ones we've had in a long time um so we're just about ready to move on into citizen comments we're gonna take just a really short recess so if you can just give

092us a break yeah quick bathroom break can we be back within four or five minutes please yes and then we will move on to citizen comments so we are in uh recess five minutes welcome to address the board on any topic at this point and we have five citizens who signed up to address the board under item nine please remember when i call your name to approach the microphone state your name and address and you'll have two minutes to address the board per our bylaws and i will start your time once you start speaking we will begin with peter keller my name is peter keller 6450 warden woods drive good evening president horst i want to thank you for the two minutes limit you have imposed onto our comments because that's why i'm back today

093and it won't be the last time following the in-logic of equity we should close our atlantic programs and relocate coach richardson and coach facility to regular pe classes because there are a lot of students who are less gifted at basketball and football the nice and naive cartoon picture mr dr ryan sent out on february on april 30th is in reality leading to this because not buying tickets to a game and playing games with less talent and essence is destroying the game the effects of your strategic plan for underperforming schools may be little to none and my question to the school board is how many more teachers are we going to relocate next year after we see that the efforts of leveling on elementary schools did not work the plan came out of left field for

094us parents who pay school taxes and have no resources taken away for something which in my opinion is not fair and not american at all equal class sizes and offering the same programs in all schools of our school district on the other hand is fair it gives everyone equal opportunities and helps everybody to pursue the american dream and that's what we already have for decades there are no need for such a program the sudden urge in the educators community to start transforming our society is social engineering and has horrible failed in the past in other regions of the world if you think my statement is dramatizing the consequences of the strategic plan and no student will be suffering disadvantages how about you reduce your head count by 33 educators and reduce our school taxes because

095then you are obviously overstepped thank you thank you for your comments next we have christy giampatroni hello my name is christie 15 thank you for not buying down to crt thank you for listening we know there are still some kinks to work out a little levin leavens the whole alum we love our community our schools and our teachers and we love people period we know families move to clarkson for clarkston uniqueness let's not march to the beat of another drummer rochester holly schools oakland university or the nea if we are afraid of financial hardships changing demographics struggling kids and dropping test scores then the answer is to stand firm on our american principles in god we trust not equitable principles we will not follow the chaotic trend of academic and social reform with dei we

096will not compromise let's please keep social agendas out of our schools i quote dennis prager i could not care less if your racial makeup is black or brown red white or yellow the only identity i care about and the only one this school should recognize is your individual identity your character your scholarship and your humanity and the only national identity this school will care about is american your clubs will be based on interests and passions not focused on blood or ethnic racial or other physical divine ties those clubs just cultivate narcissism and unhealthy preoccupation with the self the purpose of education is to get you to think beyond yourself so we will have clubs that transport us to wonders and glories of art and music and astronomy those are the things that we should focus

097on clarkson we are not an equitable school we are an american school based on american principles thank you jason thomas if you'll state your name and address you'll have two minutes jason thomas i live on here parkway how you doing neighbor i believe the school system's focus should be to encourage academic excellence and should focus on teaching traditionally academic subjects like language math science and history without injecting social agendas into the mix please do love and respect everyone you come in contact with but it stops there when i grew up in the public schools during the 70s 80s and 90s i can honestly tell you that it was about learning not agendas reflecting back as an adult i don't even know what the politics of any of my teachers were and that's good today it

098only takes tears and tirades after a presidential election to know what's cooking the crt and dei discussion has no place in schools especially if you want to improve scores and scholastic achievement as i heard several of you board members talk about earlier and furries explicit graphic sex ed and all the other politicized causes out there are not for schools either we need to act like a school not a brainwashing camp i can tell you that i've got a few stories that i've heard around my dinner table from my kids my oldest daughter came home several years ago and said hey today in school one of my teachers told me it's okay to be to feel guilty for being white there's no place in the school for that i had my son tell me that there's

099a kid who identifies as an animal in his class and you know what that's fine until he growls at the teacher with no consequences and my youngest daughter came home at the end of this recent school year and said hey i'm learning about all the different positions of gay sex this is something you guys are not qualified to talk about that's up to me to talk about at the dinner table with my kids so let's keep it to learning in the classroom and skip the indoctrination thank you thank you next we have ryan minto ryan minto you'll please take your name and address sorry and you'll have two minutes thank you ryan minto 7320 deer hill uh heading into the school year it's very clear to me as new facts come out um it emerged

100that the cdc dr fauci gretchen whitmer they've all lost their credibility pertaining to kova 19 guidance for example numerous peer-reviewed and published studies conclude that cloth and surgical maths are detrimental to our children's health more than covet itself we cannot go backwards this fall so what should we do when the government leadership is unreliable we need to step up and be leaders ourselves use our own experience discernment and dare i say common sense please don't overthink solutions just to cater to the lowest common denominator that's not how we excel moving forward get back to the basics math science history english and the trades and push our kids to their limits please don't feel like you have to make health decisions for parents and their kids if you allow parents the freedom to make these choices

101it'll label it will enable the school board to focus on what you've been elected to do teach our kids clarkson has been a good school district and we'd like to keep our kids enrolled but if the board decides to entertain radical policies like crt or masking our kids based on the political whims of the government leaders please know this one of the unintended consequences of clarkson's distance learning program was to teach us parents how to homeschool our kids and that it might be feasible for many of us to do so if needed we can and will pull our kids and their funding out of the school district and teach them ourselves we would prefer not to we love clarkson but we will and i would like to make one quick but import important clarification to

102a comment made earlier someone said a law is a law and we must follow the law i'll add except when it violates the constitution of the united states of america thank you very much [Applause] finally we have david meyer good evening i'm david meyer uh 10 548 would be court and you have to forgive me i didn't have a chance to prepare my remarks i'm kind of like trump without a teleprompter this get a little interesting but uh i wanted to talk to you a little bit today about crt dr ryan several times throughout this ordeal you've expressed that crt is not an improved curriculum in our schools and the crt is not going to take place in clarkson schools you've talked about the transparent process that curriculums go about development in our in our

103district i appreciate the explanation on that uh this leads me to two two potential issues either one we're trading dei for crt which are uh perfectly linked concepts uh crt is a part of dei dei is a part of crt if we're trying to mince words dei also has no place in our schools however crt is currently being taught in our schools i was afforded today an entire social justice unit that's taught in our 10th grade honors english class and there's uh it's a whole unit but one part is the children are choose books from a list the top five books on this list are the hate you give by angie thomas which covers racial inequality and police brutality the voting booth by brandy colbert which covers racial inequality voting rights implicit bias political disenfranchisement

104piecing me together by renee watson covering gender and racial inequality mental health academic well-being all-american boys by jason reynolds and brendan keely police brutality racial inequality and white privilege and dear martin by nick stone police brutality racial inequality and white privilege there's about 20 books on this list all of them cover the same types of topics this is crt textbook crt and it's in our classroom if it's not approved curriculum what happens to a teacher in our district who is teaching outside of the approved curriculums what are the disciplinary actions that are in place for that how do you handle that type of a situation this if this is not welcome and approved in our district what do you do now i'll be publishing this on the full unit that i have on the clarkson

105schools parent advocates page i know that clarkson schools is a member of that page so i welcome you to look through it and and go from there thank you very much [Applause] and i'll issue a final call for anyone else in the audience who wishes to address the board jessica spencer walden woods drive i previously mentioned in a previous board meeting that i pulled my kids from the district after after i was given two weeks to find a place for my children to go to school when clarkson decided to not reopen but i wanted to be clear my my husband is a police officer risked his life to protect any one of you if you needed him my son is black and i'll be damned if i'm gonna let my kids please don't use profanity

106in this boardroom thank you if i'm gonna let my kids sit in the classroom and learn that their dad would kill him my son for the color of his skin there are people 90 miles south of florida waving the american flag because they're so hungry for the freedom that we're apologizing for in this country i cannot allow my children to go to the school district that i grew up in that i am i have a successful business today because i learned fundamental values in clarkson school districts and it is not okay for me to send my kids to a school that will teach them these things if i feel it's important to teach my son the things that he needs to learn about safety in law enforcement interactions that's my job to teach them it's

107not your job to teach him that it's my job to raise my children to have morals and ethics and treat everyone with kindness this push back from on crt is not because we are bigoted it is not because i love my brown child less than my white child it's because i don't want my son being taught that he's less because of the color of his skin i wouldn't let you teach my black child that i won't let you teach my white child that we cannot continue to indoctrinate our children the way that when when miss mcginnis mentioned what happens if thank you for your paraphrasing what happens if only the poor kid spencer thank you thank you for everyone else i knew what we were headed to spencer thank you for your comments [Applause] my

108name is hilary coogler i live in 1944 lake ridge drive i've had my kids in this district for well over a decade i consider myself a true clarkston schools parent advocate i have met with almost every single one of you besides maybe miss catalina i've met with almost every administrator in this district of various issues that are important to me and my family literacy inclusion um whole child and wellness i have at every turn received an open door from each and every every one of you i consider myself a partner in education um every person i've come in contact in the clarkson school district has had the best interest of our students at heart we may disagree and we have disagreed on various things and i may come across as passionate but i know that

109everybody's coming from a good place i am disheartened by what i see and what i've heard from some of our community members i absolutely think that our community our schools need to reflect um and prepare our kids for a global world that they're going to face they're going to be in situations where culture and diversity education are going to be important the unit you spoke of my children did that unit it was fantastic my daughter loved those books these discussions are important they're necessary and they're healthy when done with a good guided teacher thank you very much for all of your everything you do i know that it's not an easy job so appreciate your time thank you for your comments i'm ray llewellyn from pineapple road clerkston michigan i just want to say you

110know if you listen to what the people are saying the parents the community they're saying no crt no dei none of this and the other thing that i want to say is a person who sat here tonight and listened one the meeting got the time got changed by a half hour so it impacts a lot of people that are working two it was very apparent that part of the game was to drag this meeting out as long as you could but the people did stay and and two when some of the people have stood up here and talked from the bottom of their hearts and to watch some of you board members kind of look at each other and smirk after they talked i think that's pretty rude a final note through this whole school

111year all any of you that are teachers were teaching the children with zoom so you had cameras that you were using to teach them i say turn the cameras on this coming school year so that the parents and people can see what you're teaching and if you're not teaching crt all these parents are going to know that but if you are teaching crt guess what you'll get caught and that's all i have to say thank you for your comment hi jill thomas herron parkway if you're gonna stand up there and tell my friend jess not to use language you might want to look at the books that some of these 10th 11th 9th and 8th graders are being told to read there's plenty of good american and global literature out there that you don't need

112to pick the kind of books that you're picking this is coming from my daughter who graduated in 2019 she had to read some sick and twisted stuff and she was in the ib program she got all of her credits by the way she's a smart kid secondly what mr meyer was referring to that book that that unit for i think it was african-american history month which is great that unit the teacher felt the need to send home a permission slip to read some of those books because they were considered graphically sexually graphic and kind of edgy in some other areas so i signed the permission slip my kid my junior has already kind of been flipped by you guys so i wrote on that permission slip okay he can read these but why don't you

113pick some authors like thomas soule or some of the other great african-american authors and the teacher actually said because i hand wrote some stuff on there the teacher actually said to my son she mocked me with my son let me see what we're up against here with your mom so i didn't appreciate that these people are correct and it's not happening there's neighboring districts that are open enrollment that we can pull our kids out there's um can home school that would be a better option there's uh parochial schools in the district i personally don't care about the sports anymore just this year i've come to find out there's great year-round club sports that my kids can compete in and maybe even do he is doing even better so that's all i wanted to say if

114you're going to tell jess not to use language please look at the list of books that you're sending home for younger and younger age kids to read all right thank you for your comment hi i'm michelle gunten i live on south main street um as a social studies curriculum writer myself i'm very well aware of the state standards and how schools go about adopting standards and while the state of michigan at this point in time has not done anything that's particularly alarming to me i do see it happening elsewhere i see it happening in other states where there are dramatic changes occurring and while i do really genuinely appreciate dr ryan saying that crt is not going to be adopted officially in the curriculum in clarkson schools i want to say that it's not black

115and white and i see that teachers have quite a bit of freedom in how they teach their own classrooms and so for instance if there is a state standard where students are expected at the high school level to learn about the causes and consequences of the american revolution or key individuals of the american revolution i want to know that my daughter is being taught the traditional and correct material and not something from the 1619 project or something from hannah nicole jones which i do not agree with and many scholars have debunked so um i i know that there are teachers unions out there national teacher councils out there that are in there they really do support the 1619 project and crt and they and these teachers are really feeling strongly um that they have every

116right to teach it in our kids classrooms and so my question really is are we going to be hearing anytime soon about what the repercussions might be for teachers who do feel the freedom to teach this kind of material despite dr ryan's promise that this is not going to be taught in our schools thank you thank you move board of education meeting is monday august 9th this is when we switch to our new schedule we will begin that meeting at 7 pm item 11 is adjourned may i have a motion please i move to adjourn support all in favor say aye aye the motion carries we are adjourned you