001meeting the board of education to order and join me in uh the secretary is going to make a motion to appoint acting secretary support will just afford any discussion i can't reject this i'll be represented hi thank you for doing that today as your first uh duty yeah um so we have the 22 23 plan for return to school exam which is a requirement so um the clinton county superintendents got together to take a look and have a county-wide plan so all the superintendents have put together the same plan and we're presenting that as an fyi for your information only it's not an action item so the first big point is that full in-person instruction is where we'll be and there will be mitigation strategies as part of the plan it is m mid-michigan district
002health department supported so the plan actually went to dr morris and she went through it had some comments and feedback on the plan and then it will help with any decision making as far as school next year so the development started in march we had a meeting with kevin waters walters from mve um and he talked a lot about um you know this plan and what the requirements were for the plan for the grant funding and he actually mentioned at that meeting that varian county superintendents have had gotten together to do this so in march i reached out to the superintendents to see if they were interested in doing a county-wide plan and kind of facilitated that effort in april um we sent the draft to dr morse so we worked on it through throughout
003march making some tweets so obviously there are several different districts in our county and you know we had different mitigation strategies throughout the year so coming with a consensus on that in april went to dr morse and then um in april i also reviewed it with the central office directors here at central office and then we went to the faculty theresa in may to review it and then cabinet saw it in may we talked about it in may the dep dea president saw it also in may and then in june cc risa cabinet dea board all was at it for final review and then in june i met with um pta and ptsa presidents and reviewed the plan and then here in july i'm here to just kind of review the plan for you so
004there are several requirements so by federal law we need to have it updated within six months of taking funds and it needs to include the instructional format things about athletics cleaning hygiene extracurricular face coverings food service gatherings and other mitigation strategies so that the plan is developed based on low medium and high these are the new levels of cdc and what the health department is looking at and then the plan itself will be linked on the website under our code paging and transparency page but i have some screenshots in here for you to kind of see what that plan looks like so it goes from like i said all those particular areas full in person is what's expected under high we might see depending on health department maybe because of outbreaks or something i think
005we only have two or three times when classes had to to do at home or had to take some other strategies but for the most part we stayed fully in person athletics will be following the mhsaa and then cleaning and disinfecting will be just like it has basically the last two years depending on the levels uh so we're going to be doing everything we can to stay in school cohorting we're not you know we're not really going to be cohorting students we're going to be mixing but we might have to see some activities testing will not be required unless it's part of testing to stay and so face coverings again the plan is not to have those required unless we hear that guidance from the health department and i really because we're in a different
006place we're going to be in different places fall than we have the last two falls see this as more of a situational basis so maybe a classroom or maybe a building or a grade level depending on you know the guidance that we may get but food service pretty much back to normal and then gatherings hopefully back to normal but again if the numbers increase and we need to do so to mitigate any spread we will do so hand hygiene isolation and quarantine meetings and conferences the offices and we don't have remote learning so it'll be full in-person learning but again pretty standard practices under low and moderate but could be some additional precautions if needed at high and again we will follow the recommendations from the health department social distancing we you know this past
007school year we really didn't have social distancing um it was pretty much full at full in person health screening we're just asking parents and guardians to not send kids when they're sick and we have some information for parents about illness on the plan as well transportation operating pretty normal procedures and then we're not requiring vaccinations but the health department is recommending that so again like you said we're in a better place than what we have it's not really different from what we've seen the last couple of years these are some you know requirements to receive this funding so the plan is is put together and being presented here in six months so in january i'll come again with kind of an update um on the plan and so any questions on that i know that
008you haven't had access to it but i think you just said it at the end but this is a six month plan every six months it has to be reviewed yes thank you yes hi dear for thompson uh i just want to quickly talk about the plan that was just the presentation that was just made um it's my understanding that the sf funds require community input for the return to school plans and i'm not sure if that is exactly happening you've got the cc resa you've got the eea you've got school involvement and school authorities involvement but i am not seeing parent involvement or you know the community on a whole and according to the federal law it does say that it requires to seek public comment on the development of the plan it must
009be public and skipping input to take such input into account so once again i'm here asking for public input and an opportunity for parents to have input on the plan and i'm wondering if this plan is actually going to be voted on by the board thank you a treasurer's report on those repairs of june 2022 treasury journey debits in the purchase card and finally a professional hired michael hi so kind of back and forth between borrowing and repaying this year we're in small repayment mode but it's an annual thing that comes before the board in july hi it's recommendation by superintendent speaker of the board of education awards 2021 building the site capital project and clark construction we're geared to maximum pricing for the new maintenance building project four thousand hundred ten dollars um the
010maintenance building was part of the bond we went through just a quick process um with ownership with our uh architectural partner dmv and of course the clock and partnership manager um reps um kind of facilitate the process so on may 19 documents were issued um and then the adversity publicly you know the period meeting unfold bids were received on the 24th of june go through a referral process um you know check and bids posted area music clark does the gmb and um ownership of myself or on board there too basically go through just make sure all the identities are crossed the scopes are current they're correct everything in performance and specs we did go through prior to that a pretty detailed value engineering process to make sure that things were over the budget and as
011we get through that process and we are on budget and we ordered um clark award builds um contracts to you know set some contractors and clarkson so and in a nutshell i can answer the questions um design service to gmb architecture plus engineering three million seven hundred thousand three hundred eighty six dollars plus reversals any discussion the board of education adopted the new public schools student handler because of conduct transportation athletic campaign elementary school um can you talk a little bit about the changes to dress code perhaps as well just some of the changes yeah so um the the changes are district-wide so the district um they're in the district handbook versus the district code of conduct um so we don't see infractions for dress code as much as not following the requests to change
012if something is not within the guidelines and then really working to create some gender-neutral language as far as making sure that you know the school is respected as a place of business and we're preparing students so i guess a couple questions i have about the changes um i'm in support of a lot of them but as we think about things that might be infractions um have we discussed one or is there a plan in place for how who will address this okay so if we are dealing with a young lady okay so let's let's just say we have two individuals body types are different the top is going to look very different on a potential individual who is going to address that individual is it going to be an expectation that a male staff member
013address that individual which might promote some issues or concerns with again a female staff number like where are we at so each of the buildings will have designated people to work through the protocol so it's not a one-size-fits-all so we have the counselors we have um school office officials to help as well as as the principals um so it's going to depend on the building it kind of depends on the student but it's not a one it's not a one size fits all um but i know that matt you know matt's here too and the conversations have been about you know making sure that they understand what's what's acceptable so i'm the assistant principals also before the approval kind of talked about to kids that this is something that would be on the agenda for
014back-to-school shopping and then once it's approved there'll be some additional communication about um you know what's what's accepted and then obviously we don't want to make any staff member or student feel uncomfortable with addressing the situation yeah so i mean these are these are um it's a district policy but the entire cabinet worked on it with input from you know stakeholders back in their buildings um each building will have protocols that they work for to make sure that there's the dignity of everybody who's involved um and so so if there are other questions i want to address those but i have some updates to kind of here as well i have one other question in relation to like the whole section where it revolves around um before we're seeing defensive languages symbols i can think
015of an instance where we had a tire that was born that was racially sensitive how is that included or expected to be addressed in the terms of the world right now what category does that fall on right well i mean it's definitely inappropriate so i mean i think it would fit under depending on the symbol several of those particular adjectives i just didn't know if there was a way to make it clear well we also have epic harassment which you could end up following under that right so that may be more serious than a dress code violation okay all right i just wanted to make sure the documents were drastic because i feel as though in the past it perhaps was a part of the policy that maybe wasn't addressed in the way that it
016could have been addressed so with these changes and the conversations that have happened why i'm assuming that there's been a conversation for returning teachers new teachers on how to handle a protocol situation so that when these issues do come up there is not well they left lisa's class and it was okay with me because lisa wasn't sure but they did john's class in time at home and i get that but um also teachers are here to teach they're not the clothing police right so i mean we have to keep that in mind it is easy sometimes for a kid to make it to second or third hour and something because of maybe a sweatshirt on or something wasn't wasn't noticed but um you know through through i think the building work that all the leaders
017will be doing they'll be making sure to have conversations because this is a this is something new right it's one of the newest things out of all the handbooks to make sure that they're they have these protocols in place right i'm just asking from the standpoint of making sure that we have transparency of what the policy is and how it's actually going to be impartially addressed as a counselor because having some levels and consistency the students see that yep absolutely and when they see the inconsistency they have the opportunity to feel as though they've been targeted or dressed in a way that was inappropriate so if you don't have a system or mechanism on which everybody is on board to understand and then put the policy in place we create a gap and then we
018have an issue as a district and having seen it happening before i'd like us to think of all the ways that we can mitigate that in advance so that we don't end up in those places and i totally agree with that i think that you have to get the handbooks approved and then the administrators will work on putting those procedures in place my question is just about one word um offensive language or symbols i feel like offensive leaves so much up for interpretation i don't know any other way to do it but when i think about keeping the district out of trouble because this is as an attorney i mean does that is that an issue at all that we just have this very subjective word offensive is a word that is used as far
019as whether it's language actions it's stress okay and so i mean and then it's it's it's something becomes substantially disruptive too that's actually those and so the um the enrollment or the the permission form um so there are just some differences we're going to be doing we actually just launched our virtual or online enrollment so that looks going to look a little bit different but the back end is loaded in board books so you can kind of see some of those questions that parents will be asked and then we will work with any parents to be helped so tracy's really good and deb as well and supporting parents who need some help kind of getting registered online and helping them through that process as well we've also included in the code of conduct some more
020information about bullying we've also updated our language on threats to include information from the letter from the prosecutor so so students can understand the severity of that in addition in the handbook you've included information about child fine and social media and then in the code of conduct of seven factors when you consider investor funds that we're required to consider those factors before like suspending or expelling a student so those are some additional to working with uh so in the spring i attended a legal um like uh on updating your handbooks and some things that they said to make sure that they were in there and this was one of them because again something can happen off school grounds but it becomes disruptive to the learning environment within the school than the school um all right
021thank you good evening um i want to comment on something that came up at the special meeting um it was certainly shocking to hear that hundreds perhaps thousands of books were thrown out by the school a few weeks ago i give my thanks to clay for doing a dumpster dive to uh to save those materials and reclaim them because obviously they had a huge value but the whole idea brought up a lot of questions in my mind after finding out about this um first the obvious question is why was no effort made to find out if somebody wanted or could have used these books clearly it sounded like there were a hundred people that lined up for those books so they add value to a lot of people second what image does this bring or
022send about this community i've talked to several people i've talked to board members about the image and i hope we're all working to make this the best school system in the state um but you know i watched the clip on wlns it was not pretty and in fact it made us look pretty awful we talked about dewitt and how we receive not enough funds at this school to do what we'd like to do in fact i think we have one of the lowest per student allotments in the state and how challenging that is to pay subs because we pay them so little and get teachers here but then we turn around and throw out that many books it certainly makes our image look like we don't really care about money and that is not an
023image i think any of us wanted to see third question that came up is i really would like to know how books and study materials that are used in classes are selected seems to me there should be some review by the board some input or ability for the board to review those but i've never heard a word in any of the school board meetings i've been to and i've been to most of them over the last year and i haven't heard about any of it at the curriculum committee either just seems to me it's important um the people know what's inside our teaching materials i think you know in the past we just kind of trusted that everything was okay but that trust has dwindled in fact i would say a lot of people don't
024trust and they would really like to know before these materials are brought into our school what's contained in them but i don't think there's really any opportunity for that finally it was interesting to hear that the books were discarded because they did not meet the district schools for diversity equity and inclusion which brought up more questions what are the district's goals for diversity equity inclusion in our teaching materials are they anywhere i couldn't find them um who reviews all the textbooks for adherence to our goals for dei it's kind of sadly ironic that our district is focused on dei but yet no one can find out who's making the decisions for the is there any community voice in our dei efforts i've heard there's a dei committee in fact i've emailed board members to ask
025who's on the dei committee who can join when do they meet and i've gotten no response which brings up another question is there any policy for the board to respond to comments and emails all of us are interested in making the best district in the state do it for months i've spoken the front of this board asking for more transparency asking to have an actual meaningful two-way conversation there's been almost no improvements in transparency i do appreciate the presentations have been posted but there's been no two-way conversations with the board i'm not going to stop asking because i feel transparency and public input are critical to making this a great district thank you okay amber warner [Music] questions about the student representative that will be joining us this fall um how is the student representative
026chosen i believe it may be by the principal high school so if that is correct i just want to um the other thing is i just want to make sure that the student representative is representing all of the students in our district and um and at all at boarding and in school during school and i was representing them and supporting them and um encouraging them to be so um i will send an email to the principal but at the same time i just wanted to make you guys aware that i am looking forward to a representative that's representing everyone also along with will i was unable to make the last meeting about the extra meaning i do not support throwing away books i was very disappointed to find out um what a waste that was
027thank you clay for getting the books out and distributing them um i was at the last curriculum meeting there was we were asking for more transparency we were asking questions about books about how they decide what books to bring in what books to take out there was no discussion that there was going to be a massive book throw away a month later i just think that's a little ridiculous we were literally just sitting in a meeting with some principal there um it's just really disheartening to know that yeah they were just throwing away books and not just books but there was a whole container full of paper and all sorts of other things that was just unnecessary um and last i guess how the new books that are going to replace these books it's concerning
028to me that um [Music] are we going to know what the books are coming in or is there going to be a way for parents and for the public to know what books are being replaced and why why are why are those books not good anymore you know so there's just a lot of questions um that i i just don't understand and it doesn't make our district look good local news you know reporting on both throwing away so um anyways thank you for listening um i would like an opportunity to respond regarding the book issue um i did take mr cohen's remarks and actions very seriously and looked into this and i'd like to make a few remarks on my own behalf obviously i don't speak on behalf of the board however i do take
029issue with the characterization of this as throwing away books dwight public schools participates in the paper gator program those books and materials were a part of that program and we're inside the paper gator the paper gainer is a non-profit paper paper collection it's actually a fundraiser for dewitt public schools so i can't speak to what those were selected or the volume from like placed into the gator but those were put into the gator as a decision made by principals and the school administrators whose job it is to make those determinations and they would have been fundraising for the school the paper gator is private property of the dewitt school district and those items in there would have gotten money for the public schools so to go inside the paper gear remove those and to take
030those away from dewitt public schools actually is a formal theft i'm going to be quite direct on that you've taken items away from the school that would have been turned into a legitimate program in which we participate and turned around for money for the district so in some capacities it's trespassing and other capacities it's actual stealing from the school so while we may be characterized as having the books thrown away or being irresponsible with it i think that is a complete and absolute mischaracterization of what happened with those one books follow-up question on that that's awesome all right i'd like to know what value how much money you would have gotten from the sale of paper i know unrelated books yeah just that i'm the student representative i've gone i've thought for a long [Music]
031of the time having to come for their position and be elected by their peers to sit on the board i don't know where where it's written how this is decided or how the board feels about it but i would just like to make that suggestion because i think that it would be a good experience for them to have to do something other than the handpicked just i also have to get the comment in relation to that i think that whoever is selected there should be a space for some training and development for that student um as we move forward but i also think as as community members we should be really careful about how we speak and characterize students in that space we create an image that perhaps they've done something that they shouldn't have
032done and i think that that could be dependent on an attack on that individual so i don't think that it's fair to ever talk about a member of the board or a student in our district that way um and then that you may have a disapproval or just a different opinion about what a student or an individual has done and may be different than what you would like done so i think we need to be very careful in that space because we are talking about young adults in this district so i just want to kind of put that on the table so i would like to allow administration to take your feedback into consideration but i do worry about something becoming a popularity contest so i know districts do it differently some districts have it
033to where it becomes uh you know the class president serves or they pick up both the male and female representative so um i think that you see if you hear your concerns but i can also pass along your concerns or thoughts on the matter so when they are selecting um they have that in mind um it hasn't been in the past here some places it is um but last year it wasn't it's being children all right but i do agree with the training and i had already talked about that because um before it was i think you know people weren't as active in board meetings and so i do think that it would be beneficial for the student that's taking this on to to have some training right so some level of understanding of the
034expectations and ramifications of being in the role as a republican figure as a public servant that happens to you by this importance to not just stand stepping into the position versus being hit by things rather um so just a couple of updates so opening week tv we've been working on getting that set so we have the 23rd 24th and the 25th i believe of august and the 2014 district day so you're welcome invited to breakfast of august um and we do have a keynote speaker lined up allison epstein who will be doing that we've also worked on our safety training calendar and in august our safety task force will be early august the august 9th to kind of review that training calendar that i'm working on for the year which is also part of our
035strategic plan we launched online registration which i've talked about and we're planning uh i've already planned the cabinet retreat which we'll do a half day of learning together and then a half day of work on strategic planning and we have secured social media liaisons for the buildings and i'll be doing that training in august so those are the updates that i have and i just want to make sure that we also take this time to congratulate rob for meeting the requirements to review both the business office manager and the chief financial officer certification which has involved about 200 hours right