MAS Board of Education Live Stream

001do actual temperature microphone are we live i bet on the youtube channel i can't see how many people are watching anymore oh yeah thank you everyone for coming this evening uh just a reminder if you haven't signed in there's a sign-in table right at the entrance i'd appreciate if you signed in we might start a little bit after seven uh mr gearbot is going to get the presentation for us for the for the board members because we're going to stay seated here while uh paddock gives it so once mr gearbot is back with that presentation we will get started i know oh i was gonna bring you the things and show you what oh i took a picture okay um i mentioned the andrew about other board members i love it no i um it

002i got so i went on oriental and they had like construction bookmarks and i also got some ones that were like six steps because i thought they had little tools um and then they had some little points so i'm like you know like one of the best plays katie was ever in was guys really yeah it was awesome they did this everything was so much fun no i don't think so you're good my regular meeting wednesday february 9th 2022 would everyone please rise for the pledge of one allegiance under god indivisible with liberty and justice all right good evening everyone thank you for coming all board members are present thank you our student board members are excused this evening i do want to make one announcement starting tonight the live feeds and recordings of these

003meetings will be conducted and stored on youtube the mas board youtube channel can be found on at mileinaryschools.org under our district board of education and then board meeting the district decided to make the switch to youtube in order to afford all community members the ability to watch our meetings without being required to have an account of any kind with that our first order our business is we're going to receive an educational program from paddock elementary school again prior to covid we had received these updates regularly from the schools last time we had a great presentation from the milan middle school and we expect the same from mr desarbo and his team at paddock mr desarbo just a lot it's a lot of pressure what am i doing here oh it's already on okay good evening

004everyone um it is so nice to be able to once again be able to come and share some of the things that are occurring at paddock of which that we are very proud of when helping our students grow as you know this has been a very unique year the amazing staff at paddock and i realized well before the school began school year began that we would be met with many challenges and we would have to make many adjustments to meet the needs of our students our goal and our theme this year has always been to meet our students where they are we knew that our students would be returning to face-to-face instruction with many different experiences for example our second graders have never completed a traditional year of education our kindergartners that started this year

005many of them never experienced preschool and some of them had never been able to socialize with their peer groups our first grade students many of them had never even stepped foot inside paddock because they attended kindergarten virtually so you see meeting our students where they are meant we had to quickly assess where our students were academically and we also had to assess where they were socially emotionally and then we had to be prepared to give each child what they needed to be successful so if there's ever been a time when teachers and parapros and bus drivers and cafeteria staff and office workers need to be acknowledged and thanked it's it's now it's it's been a a really challenging year um but we're handling it and we're extremely proud and we have a lot of growth

006occurring um so i continue to continue to be that proud uh principal at paddock and so this thank you so this evening um what we're going to do in this presentation is we are going to show you how we're meeting students where they are academically and socially emotionally and so because we are we continue to be an early l building uh we take a lot of we take on a lot of responsibility making sure that we have the uh you know helped our students gain those um foundational skills in literacy and math and so this evening we're going to talk a little bit how we're meeting our students where they are in literacy we're talk a little bit about the science of reading and what that is we're going to talk about some of the

007research supported instructional practices that we've put in place we're going to talk about a really cool program that we started called win and that is what i need we have are going to talk about needs-based small group instruction because that's how we're finding our students are growing the best is in small groups and then we're going to talk about some professional development that our teachers some of our teachers are involved in called letters training which is the language essentials for teachers of reading and spelling and that is that program is supported by the dyslexia foundation so i'm really proud of where we are with literacy so at this time i'm going to introduce uh tracy terrace and ask her to come up tracy is our literacy specialist and she's also our instructional coach okay thank

008you for the opportunity to speak with you tonight and share how we're meeting kids where they are at paddock in literacy so there's a really strong movement right now in the nation that educators are really following the science of reading when it comes to reading instruction in order for all kids to be successful and become readers so one of the things i want to share with you tonight is that at paddock we want to make sure that we are following the science and that we are using research supported practices in our instruction in in the assessments that we use fortunately at paddock we've been doing this for a while but there are schools across the country that have not so this has become a really big topic right now there's also some new research that

009we have that is changing some of the practices it's we're making some shifts and things that we were doing so we're excited about that and want to share that with you what you're looking at in this slide is really a model that will help you understand when we're talking about the science of reading what it is so when you hear people talking about this because you'll hear it a lot right now basically the simple view of reading can break it down for you to help you understand what we've learned from science based on research so in this model by goff in in tumnur they discovered that word recognition there are well actually i'm going to start with reading comprehension which is at the end there reading comprehension is the end goal and reading comprehension is

010a product of word recognition or decoding and language comprehension so in order for students to become successful readers we have to develop skills in the word recognition component and we also have to address and develop skills in the language comprehension component when we do both of those things that is what develops a successful reader if a student might is is strong in word decoding but lacks skills in language comprehension or that's a weak area that reader is is not going to that reader is going to struggle so we understand now how important it is that we're focusing on these two components so but that's why you see the multiplication mark there like one times one equals one um but if you're missing one if you're missing word recognition zero times one equals zero so we've

011been doing a lot of professional development around this and just so you know when we're talking about word recognition we're talking about phonemic awareness skills which are essential for students to to learn how to decode so we have to develop those skills first then we're making sure that all students are learning to decode words and then we're also making sure that they're developing a sight word vocabulary so they aren't essentially decoding every word all the time but they have words in their site vocabulary when we talk about the language language comprehension part we're really talking about background knowledge and this is something that is more recent learning for us it's just essential that we help kids grow in their background knowledge and their vocabulary because that leads to comprehension so one thing that the district

012added at paddock and simon's is stem and we're really happy about that because kids are growing their background knowledge in that program and they're growing their vocabulary which is essential for reading comprehension we're also talking about just their language skills uh their knowledge of how books work in genres and then their listening comprehension so we have to develop that in order for students to be successful readers so we're going to move on to the next slide oh i get to do that i'm used to sean clicking for me so now i'm going to share some of the shifts that we've made based on the science of reading one of the things that we're making sure is happening in all classrooms is systematic instruction and phonemic awareness and phonics for all students even if you have

013a reader we're going to make sure that they have those phonics skills because if they don't later on in reading in fourth and fifth grade that can cause problems for that reader and that's based on the science again we were really fortunate i think five years ago about six years ago we really realized that our kids what we were doing was not enough and we adopted award study program foundations ryan supported us in getting that so our kids have been getting solid phonics instruction for the last five years the next bullet talks about opportunities to apply phonics or decoding in a decodable text so this is what is newer for us because we were mostly using leveled readers now we understand they need phonics but they also need to apply that phonics within a text

014so they're decoding words in isolation and then they're getting little books and practicing decoding the words so we've worked really hard to implement that this year we also have learned how import a new new way an efficient way of teaching sight words based on what neuroscience has taught us about the brain and what is happening in the brain when students are learning to read so that's really exciting we've shifted from guided reading to needs-based instruction and essentially this means that we assess and determine where the breakdown is for individual students and we instruct them exactly where they are so we meet them you know with the breakdown is in segmenting which is phonemic awareness that student is going to meet with a teacher in a small group to focus on that and develop that skill

015for our k-1 students they're spending more time reading decodable books during their reading time versus reading you know leveled readers and then we've changed the way that we prompt readers to solve words we're making sure that we always ask them to decode words first and then confirm with meaning so we're making sure that kids aren't guessing what the word is they have to actually slide through the word and do the hard work of basically sounding it out to to lift the words off the page we are addressing building background knowledge and vocabulary and i shared with you like through our read alouds through our science and social studies and our stem program and then it's just important for all of you in the community to know that our all of our interventions utilize research-based practices

016and programs to support our struggling readers and those readers that are at risk so one thing we've been saying this year we got this from maya angelou when you know better you do better so we're not saying what we were doing was wrong when science gives us new information we know better so we're going to do do better and make changes and these are some of the changes that we've made okay so the next slide i wanted to share with you to give you an idea what this looks like in a classroom you'll see mrs gervins in the first picture students are looking at a word saying the word and then they have to segment it into the three sounds that you can hear in that word they're using the little fingerprints to help them

017segment it and say each sound and then you'll see the next two pictures are mrs miller's room second grade classroom and these kids and this is you know being living in a pandemic time these kids are working on the same skills that these first graders are working on they're learning how to segment but mrs miller is meeting them where they are and they're actually using puppets which is very popular right now to push the poppet and say the sound that they hear in the words the next one here is we have miss pinkowski a first grade teacher i know it's hard for you to see what she's doing here but she taught the students the and word family and how we can use that part of word to read and write new words mrs may

018check at the top first grade is working one-on-one with a student during small group instruction to help that student understand we need spaces between words when we're writing and then you can see mrs smith at the bottom this is kindergarten the kids have an alphabet strip and she's supporting them and learning letters and sounds in this small group so now we're going to talk just a little bit about wind time because this is a new thing for us this year but essentially all kids are getting what they need during wind time so we do have students that need to work with a reading specialist or have intervention so during win time students are getting that they're getting needs-based instruction with the interventionist but at the same time the classroom teacher is meeting with small groups

019so all kids are being met in small groups throughout the week and we're meeting them exactly where they are this is really a collective effort you know we have our interventionist meeting with groups we have our tc's teacher consultants meeting with groups we have peer professionals that work with our our students and meet with them in groups the literacy coach i'm talking about myself what i often do is i co-plan with the teachers and support them in looking at the assessments and determining what those kids need and instructional practices that we can use to help them and then the principle is really important too because he protects this time and as you know this year with a sub shortage he's had to cover classrooms to make sure that wynn doesn't get interrupted and is still

020happening so we're really making that a priority i just wanted to show you when i talk about a decodable book it means it it's a book that gives students the opportunity to practice those skills of phonics so you're looking at i am kip is a kindergarten level decodable book that our kindergartners use in helping them slide through words with three sounds like the word kip they also get practice with the sight words like i and am that we're teaching them and then on the right side there is an example of a first grade decodable book kids are learning to slide through words with three and four sounds at the first grade level i want to give another shout out to ryan because he's really supported us in this there are many schools that don't have

021any decodables and they're kind of hard to find right now so this grad student under the direction and guidance of dr nell duke developed these decodables and ryan found a way to get them printed for us and we have class sets for our students to use and then our second grade teachers have them to use in small groups as well so so that's been really helpful in us doing this work and then we're just really proud there's a group of us we're very committed to ongoing learning and professional development and the michigan department of education is really trying to put things in place to help michigan do better for kids in the area of literacy so we applied for a grant to go through letters training and basically letters training is is one of the

022most extensive trainings you can get in literacy in teaching literacy so we'll be learning a lot about what when and how language skills need to be taught scientifically based ways that we should be assessing our students and how we should be differentiate differentiating our instruction and letters is approved by the international dyslexia association which is really important because we're also going to learn about what those kids need that are at risk for dyslexia or other learning disabilities so we're going to grow our knowledge in that area as well so that's really all that i have to share with you but again i just want to thank you for the opportunity it's good to see all of you in person so you can see we're putting a lot of time and effort into meeting our students

023where they are academically that gap is very wide and we knew that coming into this year and a lot of that goes back to the different experiences that all of our students have had so we are proud of what we're doing that wind time has been really nice because you know our struggling learners are getting that one-on-one or small group time but then our other students who are you know where they are or maybe even a little bit above where they are or where they should be at this time they are still meeting with their teachers in small groups so all the different levels are being met um and so it's it's been really nice um it had to have been it something that we're really committed to that's been the biggest challenge because things

024come up and but we're making it work as i mentioned in the beginning too not only academically do we want to take care of our students but socially emotionally now more than ever we want to be in tune to what our students need for me as the building principle i really wanted to emphasize that paddock had to as students returned to us face to face we had to come back together as a community and we needed to make everyone aware again that paddock is that safe learning nurturing caring environment unfortunately uh over the past two years uh families students staff have experienced all kinds of of negative things um challenges and so we wanted paddock to be that place again where when students walk through that door they know that this is that loving nurturing

025place where they're going to be cared for they're going to be respected they're going to be valued and so that all starts at the very beginning of the day if you ever drive by paddock in the morning with that long drop off line which was a challenge at the beginning year but we're we're a machine and we're getting through it we open up those doors it's very important for us to open those doors and welcome those students lots of staff at the door lots of staff in the hallway because we want those students again to know when they walk in they're cared for and so greeting those students is very a very important part of our day every classroom has a morning meeting in the beginning of the day you see mrs payne on the

026carpet there with her students and it's a time it's community time it's a time to connect as a community in the morning they talk about the day they talk about some things occurring in their own personal lives that they want to share and it's it's really just connecting with each other's community again reinforcing that it's a safe environment for all our social worker has worked very hard this year to pull groups specific to what students need there's a mindfulness group a friendship skills group in an anxiety group a lot of our students are returning to return to school with a lot of anxiety remember some of our first graders never stepped foot in school so what was that going to be like so um we're helping those those students there's monthly social emotional lessons occurring

027in the classrooms with with our social worker and teachers uh the whole district has been trying to become more trauma-informed uh unfortunately again we're having students that have experienced some trauma and we want to support them and then we are we are going to be starting something tonight actually that we're very excited about um and we feel it's very timely and that is called the the paddock kindness campaign campaign and that's why i want to end our presentation this evening i would like two very special guests to come up because they would like to introduce what this kindness campaign is and it's annabelle beatrice who is a first grader and nika gerbins who is a second grader so we welcome them up here so annabelle ready at pellock we have been working hard to be

028strong readers writers and mathematicians we are also learning a lot about science technology music art and pe but what many grown-ups might not know is that we also learning how to have a positive mindset and to be good citizens that means we work hard to show persistence resilience optimism flexibility and empathy we talk about these things at our morning meetings and we read lots of stories about them we work together to build safe and caring classrooms that means we respect each other and we show kindness i wish our teachers teach us that even though we are kids we can have a positive impact on our school and community this month we wanted to spread the word about being kind being kind means many things a few examples are letting others go first holding the door

029open for someone being extra polite sharing with others cheering someone up who is sad here is our plan okay [Applause] so our goal starting this month is to empower our paddock students to spread the message of being kind throughout the community and what these girls are doing right now is starting to spread the message by giving our school board members kindness stickers for all of them showing kindness to our community by giving their time and supporting our schools so we want to empower these students to spread this message of kindness all classrooms receive this book it's called being kind or be kind and it was discussed at their morning meetings and in the story uh the characters at the end learned that they even though they're young they can have a positive impact on their

030community in even the world so we thought this would be an excellent way to to show our students with power they have so how will we be spreading this message yes i'm working we're working closely with the pto who've been amazing this year in supporting our students and our staff and school we're going to spread the message by speaking at the school board meeting like we did this evening we have dates set up where some of our students are going to go to a city council meeting and talk about kindness and the importance of being kind there are many light poles around the city of milan and so we are going to have light pulled banners which will display some students pictures in the writing of kindness around the community we've talked to some local

031businesses where they're going to allow us to hang up posters with the students pictures and their messages of kindness we've talked to the mylon library and there will be a display containing our project and pictures and writings of the students and books will be pulled on kindness so that families can check them out and then mr evans our technology teacher is going to work with the students on posting video messages on being kind um on our social media and websites here are a couple examples of what those light pole banners will look like annabelle was was kind enough to be a model for us so there's 40 to 50 banners that will be displayed on main street in wabash during the month of march so there's uh annabelle's example kindness is getting along with your

032friends when even when they don't agree with you here are some examples of some posters that will be in our businesses again showcasing um what with the students the student messages of kindness and then we've ordered um a lot of these kindness stickers and it is our hope that students can identify peers that are showing kindness adults that are showing kindness community members are showing kindness so that all of them will receive these stickers and so we can see those around the community there is a culminating activity that i'm going to turn over to mrs beatrice that she can explain thank you um so to wrap this all up with getting the community involved and getting the kids out in the community a little more with this our plan and this is very early in

033the works so not definite yet but this is our plan is to work on a scavenger hunt that would involve these banners and posters that are in the town planning on a saturday in april and there'll be a forum forum or like a little a little sheet for them to go around and look for certain things on the different banners that are up the different posters that are up things at different local businesses i don't know how many of you participated this past weekend in the support local button from simon's but something similar to that where we'll hopefully get some of the businesses involved and have stations set up for the kids with little crafts to do or just fun activities for them um pto sponsored prizes at some of the locations you know for

034finishing the scavenger hunt and something similar maybe to like a small third thursday where we have food trucks downtown or you know entertainment and things like that um maybe at the park i think tone square might be under construction at that point in time but turning it into an event to get the kids out there their families out there people in the community out on this saturday and hopefully good weather to spend some time out there and really spreading kindness around so that's our plan and that is the end of our presentation um hopefully this gave you a little bit of a taste of of what we we are doing at paddock what is occurring at panic and truly how we're meeting our students where they are so thank you excellent thank you mr desarbo

035and team and npto as well sounds like a great program yeah you guys you guys have been here all day already so you guys are excused you don't have to stay for the rest of the meeting so we appreciate you coming this evening all right next item in business is uh public comments so reminder this is a meeting of the board of education and public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business and is not to be considered a public meeting there are two times for public participation during the meeting as indicated in the agenda when addressing the board you'll be asked to state your name the board determines the amount of time granted to individuals or groups to speak each person shall be allowed to speak up for up to three minutes and

036i'll give you a 30-second warning and then when you hear the timing if you could finish up your thought that would be greatly appreciated board members may question speakers but are not obligated to answer questions or make statements or commitments in response to issues raised by the public in general such items will be referred to the superintendent for advisement investigation study and or recommendation or designated as future agenda items for board consideration if there's anyone that would like to address the board you can step forward to the microphone my name is ashley sinclair i just wanted to talk a little bit about the the sr-3 funds first um mr gabra the presentation was great when i was at the last school board meeting i had heard of the sr-3 funds and i honestly had no

037idea what it was um and some of the parents that came up here to speak at the last school board meeting made it sound like some like super secret sort of project that you guys were working on um it wasn't it's nice uh you can find all the slides i was able to find them all on the myelinary school's website i putted some out it would be nice though if it's possible to get the zoom meeting link or playback either on there or youtube because i think the way that you talked through a lot of the slides has a lot more impact than just like being able to read it it was nice to see how many parents stakeholders responded to what was sent out in emails and most parents like the top two things

038uh that they think that the officer fund should be um given to this is if you didn't watch it i'm not trying to give you guys a whole rundown um but to continue employ existing staff um is the number one and then also the mental health services and supports and to me yes the smaller classrooms is amazing i want to focus on the mental health services um my son had issues with mental health um when we were in lockdown and it was just by the grace of something he typed on his school laptop that that popped up a flag for the for the school counselor and uh we didn't know and we talked to him all the time and it was a nice little warning flag for us to be able to sit down and

039have a conversation with him hey what's going on talk to us we were able to talk to counselors um and he's he's been getting better um but i know that that's not the case for a lot of students and and there's a student here tonight who is getting up some courage to speak um i came here solely to support her she if you didn't see it she had posted on the true friends of mile and the local facebook page um kind of a call to help to grown-ups and to adults that there's something missing students need help not just at the high school level but at the middle school level so whether that's bringing in more counselors or or something but the fact that she had to go on to social media thank you had

040to go on to a social media platform as soon as she posted it the first thing i said is what do you need from us what do you need from us as a community what do you need from us as parents and as adults do we need to go to the school board like how can we help you um she messaged me and we've been having chats back and forth and the one thing that i told her as i said i think that you need to come have your voice heard at the school board meeting because parents can come up here and talk about the issues with their kids parents can come up here and and get upset about not being able to speak for three minutes um but i think what we need to

041be doing is listening to our kids and not coming here with our own agendas thank you thank you mr sinclair are there others my name is mackenzie unsigned i'm here to speak on behalf of students at milan area schools as you know milan has suffered two losses this year and a variety of kids have struggled mentally in late october we tragically lost ryan gray who met who knew many that loss caused a lot of heartache and mental strain throughout our community and we were told we were going to have extra people here to support us through that loss but we were not very aware of anyone being there we lost tay johnson to suicide it did not feel like much was there for the students affected having support at the schools was mentioned once but

042never again and it almost felt like the grief was being pushed aside when there should have been people there to help us in such hard times now there are some amazing staff and teachers at the school that we i know we can count on however the district needs to be doing more as a whole based on my experiences the school has done nothing but send kids home when they go to them for their mental health problems if a kid is cutting how is it okay to send them home where they can do it more how is it okay the school is supposed to be a safe place for us this expands to more than just the high school it's the middle school too so schools should be doing more because mental illness is a killer

043and there's a stigma that there is purely for attention when it is not the school should teach more about mental illness we need to come together as a community to teach everyone that is okay not to be okay my mom april perez offered to have andre norman come in and speak as an assembly he is an advocate and helps thousands however that was quickly declined tammy king my mom's employer has talked to him about speaking about miss to norman about mr speaking he offered to speak however i think that we could be doing something that helped teach us more i have had many people reach out to me asking how they can help and i know there are people here to help me push for a change in milan area schools i'm tired of seeing

044my peers struggling i graduate in four months however i have three siblings in this school and i want to help make a change i will do anything to help the first thing that i think we should do is hold some sort of assembly explaining mental illness and if we cannot get the speaker i know an alumni from milan who is willing to help create want to start this very important change obviously there is more that we can do however this would be a great start everyone is so worried about the political side of things when so many students are struggling mentally which should be more important we need to spread the message that it is okay not to be okay and give students a place to feel safe with their mental illnesses 30 seconds people

045with mental illnesses tend to feel dismissed excluded because of something they cannot control therefore i feel as a community we should come together and raise awareness about mental illness and give students a safe place to feel and doing this might help even one student but that one student would be more than worth it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] reach out to you directly so that you guys can speak for this week for sure i appreciate you coming this evening hello rachel hobbs i'm going to request that my statement summary be included in the minutes please i appreciate the the paddock informational i love to hear the literacy efforts it's really important i've been pretty consistent with the things that i come up and discuss at the microphone um you know i constantly request to improve communications

046i'm happy to see that the communications committee has been put together so i'm excited to see what comes out of that i've been consistent in asking that the district values stakeholder feedback including community surveys you know respecting parents choice when it comes to mask and curriculum and testing and some other personal medical choices um i've also been consistent with asking the board to follow policies and laws i know a lot of people don't understand that but um rules are meant to be followed and the board pushes policy and we should expect the same on the board um yeah i've asked multiple times for to be able to find a common ground with the board i haven't had a single board member reach out to me about that that's disappointing in fact i have board members

047that can't even look at me out in public i've asked that a political agendas be removed from education as well as these board meetings and when it comes to making decisions we are here for our children's education they should be taught and be prepared for life after high school i've requested feedback on [Music] several different items that i never hear back from the board on and i've had board members tell me that board meetings are two-way communications i'm not seeing the return some of those things that i've requested are school safety what are we doing covet funds it'd be nice to see some updates and i have reviewed them brian it would be nice to know if there's going to be an updated covid fund list i'd like to know about the subscriptions were they

048renewals or are those new will there be alice training that's rescheduled since friday school was closed [Music] i've always requested that the the district be transparent especially when it comes to expenses and disbursements i've asked that those expenses and disbursements be part of the meeting packet so people can see what's being voted on to approve and if you guys aren't receiving them you guys should be receiving them because that is oversight and that's public information it should be made available to all of us um yes i agree with the sr-3 funds um video i couldn't find it anywhere on the website and i couldn't even find the powerpoint so that'd be nice thank you miss house um hi my name is madison daniels and i came here with kenzie to speak out about mental health

049i came to tell my story personally because a lot of people have the stigma about mental health where it's just attention seeking or it's just laying in bed and there's a lot more to it than just that so i've had problems with mental health since i was in middle school i was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder and severe major depression in july of 2019 then this past november i was admitted to the behavioral unit at st chelsea hospital for major depression suicidal ideations ptsd and being at risk for intentional self-harm i am a recent graduate of milan high school and i'm not saying that the teachers don't do anything but the teachers don't know what to look for they don't know who is struggling at home they don't know what is going on inside

050their minds while they're walking through the hallways so the news of me going to the hospital shocked many my own parents weren't even in town that weekend and they didn't they had no idea that i was feeling that way i've been on medications for a couple years now and i've had to have adjustments but i feel that this needs to be a common discussion among parents among teachers among uh coaches everyone this it needs all of the students need to know that it's okay to not be okay so i don't have qualifications but i do have the personal experience i understand what these kids may or may not be feeling so if telling my story can help others i think it's more than worth it and if there is more than any or if there's

051anything else that i can offer to ensure that something can or will be done i'd be more than happy to step up and help and volunteer create a group do anything create an assembly at the school spread awareness i have a younger sister who's a freshman in high school right now and she's my world i don't have kids i'm only 19. i graduated with the class of 2020. so our class also kind of went through a little more of the mental health aspect because we didn't know what to do we were all stuck at home i was stuck home working doing homework i didn't get to see friends i had zero human interaction and that is something super important for all of these students to have as well as being safe so thank you thank

052you so much [Music] [Applause] hi my name is dawn wilkerson first i want to thank mackenzie for bringing this attention to everybody is something that needs to be told their kids are standing depression will hit anybody it can hit you it can hit me it can hit your kids my kids it doesn't matter it don't play favorites um these kids need to be heard they need to have a chance at life they're they need to know that there's support out there for them and there's a lot of things going on there's bullying that that contributes to it other things in those classrooms contribute with the pressures some of the pressures and other things um there's things going on like i know those in the middle school i know a couple kids that had some problems

053and they were trying to get onto the sports well i thought the middle school was a no-co you know no um i'm trying to think of the right words no cut no cut that's right yeah and they had tried out and they were told that they were on the team and they practiced for three weeks straight i mean they were told you know you're on the team they went and got their shoes they got their coats or their jackets or every other uniform and stuff and then at the end of the three weeks in the middle of the three weeks the coach sent out a text stating that if you don't attend and attend practice you will either lose team time or you will be kicked off the team while these couple of kids that

054i know of they were there daily they had their physicals they had attended every practice that there was and on the second day back from that three weeks they were cut from the team they come home crying that's given them they're losing their self-esteem they're losing their feeling they're no good they're sending them i can see it in them i mean obviously we all have seen depression it it runs around with all of us and then there's just so many things to school men that can cause it it doesn't matter what it is and then 30 seconds and then one other thing is i was wondering why why the parents are not were not um contacted when there was a stranger in the school trying to sell drugs why nobody was contacted the mother of

055the one kid that was approached didn't find out well he she found out that night but wasn't called until the following day thank you if you if you could did you have mr gabriel's email if you could just some details regarding the the sports in that last comment that you made just so we can look into those those is that possible that'd be great thank you debbie allen i will email you guys there are classes out there courses out there for adults and youth on youth mental health first aid that are offered through michigan state university i took the class four years ago it was about 25 bucks parents you can take it too there's a contact on michigan state's website i encourage you to look at it it was an excellent class it teaches

056it teaches teachers social workers what to look for i don't know about the youth program but it's for 10th through 12th graders to help their peers i highly encourage you i found out about this from a relative of mine when she worked at msu it's an excellent course and i think it would be something beneficial for the school to invest in and maybe use on a professional development day thank you [Applause] annie cruz for the reasons stated about mental illness parents and students alike want choice regarding math wearing it concerns me that milo and k-5 students are not getting the education that our kids received because of my kids receive because of math squaring they can't see teachers faces they can't read lips and therefore struggle to learn how to say words read words and

057understand emotions because they can't see their faces much like this meeting i have no idea what you look like underneath that cloth body language and facial expressions are vital to young students learning sadly these kids are now developing learning disabilities that will become apparent as they move up in grade levels your policy choices teach our healthy kids their breath is dangerous and directly responsible and are directly responsible for their learning disabilities how is that kind you state your hands are tied to the washington county health department statute or order under the statute stating that they have the power to mandate masks in january of 22 otsego county judge ruled this past ruled in the iron pig restaurant lawsuit that this statute is unconstitutional these health department orders have no teeth if the judge ordered this

058count on this statute unconstitutional and the governor signed a budget stating no mass for 18 and under and the state and counties are not in an emergency and the u.s code for health departments state that the state and counties only have the authority to make mandates in a state of emergency which means they don't have the authority to override state and federal laws why are your mask policies still following this unconstitutional mandate students have the right to breathe and be seen after all smiles spread kindness mylon school district is receiving us or funds and you have to justify procedurally on how to keep receiving these i have a document that states so3 funds require a local education agency plan that includes how you will maintain the health and safety of students under the cdc's safety

059recommendations which include mask wearing social distancing contract tracing and testing cova's not deadly especially to children and as a school board you know this mayors and governors and departments of education know this esther funds are the carrot for you to collect millions of dollars of relief money 30 seconds stop holding our kids ransom for this money brian i challenge your intent what makes you decide what county to follow regarding the milan district why do you follow one county for education that doesn't give a choice to breathe fresh air to these students and the other county for athletics is your image more important than students right to breathe every pillar to your mask mandate has fallen in the last month nationally you have been wrong for two years make a better choice admit your policy failures

060and get rid of this mask mandate giving students a choice and honor the voices of your stakeholders my kids have the right to be in school where 83 counties washington is one of 10 left for the mass mandates brian you claimed you're a champion to the district in 2020 i now would be a great time to be that champion an mas board to these students and get your political agenda off their faces thank you thank you ms chris [Music] hi everybody jeanette halliday um i wanted to say thank you i wanted to say thank you for giving my kids um the best shot at a as close to normal healthy year that they can have um my elder son already graduated he adjusted to life in college where he still wears a mask and he's

061he's excelling so i wanted to say thank you for that my senior has hasn't missed a day of school yet this year and i think that's a little bit of a miracle but i'm also really grateful so i want to thank you for that experience thank you for providing an opportunity for them to make the best of the situation that sucks we all admit it sucks but they're making the best of it and they're they're thriving and i really appreciate that opportunity so thank you [Applause] hi my name is elizabeth satterly i am a parent as well as a staff member at paddock and i just wanted to give you a different perspective on what i see with kids in masks i'm with them all day every day i work with the k-2 population i

062wear a mask all day they wear masks all day those kids get their expressions across just fine to me and i'm sure that they are getting mine they can tell when i'm smiling they can tell by the tone of my voice my eyes we are communicating really well i'm sure we would all prefer not to wear a mask all the time i 100 agree with that but we are healthier for it right now and as a somebody who's worked in that building for five years previous i'm a lot healthier with these masks on in a lot of other ways there were a lot of other diseases before covet that i could have used a mask on for but the kids are doing a fabulous job at least in our building and they seem to be

063adjusting to it and handling it well and they don't argue with us and they don't have a problem with putting the mask on and they don't seem downtrodden or like their liberty is being infringed upon or that their free speech is being quelled they are able to talk express themselves share what they need be nurtured be loved and learn in person which is i think again we can all agree the most important thing for these kids is to be able to be safe and in school so they can get their education so i just wanted to share that's my perspective working with them every day all day thanks thank you hi i'm beth alleybath vandergrift and i first of all want to thank mackenzie for coming tonight i told you i would speak the first

064time i've ever spoken at one of these meetings i think she's incredibly brave and i absolutely want to second what ashley said that if she had to take to social media to bring awareness to this problem then we as a community are not doing this right we absolutely need to increase both awareness of and access to mental health resources in our schools i'm the parent of a middle schooler and a high schooler and i don't know about the rest of you but honestly i would have to do some deep digging on the website to find out what my kids easily had access to and other than the email of my high schoolers guidance counselor i'm not entirely sure where they would turn i wouldn't even be a good resource for them so i really would

065appreciate if we could sort of amplify the messaging here and really get across to our students where the resources are so that they could take advantage of them whatever it is that is available i'm not entirely sure what the answer to that is i'm absolutely willing to be part of the solution if you want parent involvement several of you i'm familiar with several of you i'm happy to give you my email and i would love to be involved if you need a community member i also just want to say to the room that i am grateful that the majority of this mental health discussion has not devolved into mask bashing and it's been just sort of a repetitive refrain from the same small number of people and i really don't think that the majority of

066the community feels that way i am thankful that we are masked and as healthy as we can be so that my kids are back in school because we were both virtual last year and it turns out that was really not a great fit for us so i'm just glad that we're back in person at all i wanted to reiterate that mental health is health and i appreciate that we are slowly as a community reducing the stigma around that like you said so many times it is absolutely okay not to be okay i'd also like to say thanks to all of the board members who sit up here night after night it is often kind of a crap job and keep showing up every week and i really appreciate that um and lastly mr gerba i

067just wanted to give props to your office every time i have had an issue and i have emailed your offer so called i have received an immediate reply and once when i wanted to talk to you about school lunches and thought i would just get an automated email you actually called me and we had a 15-minute discussion on the phone and i appreciate that thank you thank you [Applause] hello my name is lori ingleheart and i am the parent of a current high schooler a recent graduate i am also a licensed professional counselor and i work in adult education at the community college i just wanted to give a little bit of a shout out to some of the resources that we do have that i know of that i felt have affected both of

068my children in a very positive way and that is both of our health teachers in middle school the um health teachers lessons and the conversations sparked conversations at my house that i was happy we had and the same with high school and i think it's wonderful that we have that opportunity but at the high school level it happens for the students very early in their education so freshman or sophomore year and students struggle throughout and they're probably not going to remember back to what i heard in freshman year so the information that the teacher is getting out is wonderful or at least has been for my students or i'm sorry my children and i appreciate that we have that but i do think we should put some more effort into and tap into those resources

069because they do have lessons that really prompted conversations in my home and it really isn't because i'm a counselor because my kids i have been for a long time and they're over that but it's things that they said to me and it was a lot of ms kenzel said mr gillis said and then that brought on conversations that i was glad we had thank you are there others thank you very much your comments are heard we appreciate you coming this evening there is another time at the at the end of the meeting to address the board as well we respect what you brought to us thank you very much uh next item on the agenda is the approval of minutes of the workshop meeting of january 26 an approval of bill's reimbursements of expenses i

070need a motion to approve the consent agenda that includes the minutes of the workshop meeting of january 26 2022 and the approval of the bill's reimbursement of expenses moved by tiger she her hers second by pharaoh move like tiger in second by feral discussion mr sister if i may i apologize to the community for not being here at the last meeting i would like to however voice a few of my concerns about the change in the um many minutes change seems uh very drastic to me after years or decades of the milan board of education providing a short summary of individual comments either by the public superintendent or the board of comments or board of education it would seem to me that we have a well established president oxford was used as an example of

071not summarizing comments yet i provided the board with two examples of meeting minutes where they did include a brief summary of comments made by either a board committee member or a board trustee even they have done it our way within our own isd there are nine districts ann arbor has over two or twenty thousand staff and students which isn't very comparable to milan however all other eight other districts chelsea dexter celine manchester whitmore lake lincoln ypsilanti and milan have had in their minutes a short summary of comments as does the state of michigan's board of education our minutes have only included detailed or verbatim wording of superintendent gearboss statements to include four of the six pages that caused concern for our board we're not approving the minutes it was not the case where public comments

072nor board member comments took over the main issue is in amending the minutes as we have learned this is only necessary to follow the meetings act and the directions and how to amend them there have only been about three or four sets that need to be required amended and surely that's very capable of doing as was the case with the closed session minutes we figure out what we did wrong and fix it move forward simply deciding to not include a statement as to bypass the amending process seems rather foolish as we cannot fix our mistakes and learn this has been a constant the board has constantly stressed the importance of transparency communication and trust we have to trust that our community will understand our errors and allow us to fix them and help move forward

073moving on without any disclosure accountability does not lead to trust real communication or transparency when we make mistakes we need to own up to them and allow our community to help us to fix them and trust that we are doing our best and moving forward and encouraging us to be the best we can all be together my overall suggestion is to move this item to the communications committee to gain insight from them and their opinion as the minutes are officially bound together and kept in the consensual office for the public's potential review i would also like to request that my summary of comments be on the minutes thank you this rate other comments or concerns regarding the minutes and the bill bill's reimbursement of expenses it's been moved by keiger and seconded by pharaoh to

074approve the consent agenda that includes the minutes of the workshop meeting of january 26 2022 and the approval of the bill's reimbursement of expenses miss haika cislow yes pharaoh yes freight no haika yes tiger yes landing ham yes macchio yes motion carries six to one next up on the agenda is personnel issues uh this is the time that we're going to do uh mr garaba's evaluation planning and goal setting we do have a guest mr scott morale from the michigan association of school boards to help us in that regard we conducted mr gearbaugh's evaluation in december and with our calendar goals goal discussion occurs early in the year such that those goals are evaluated at the end of the year in 2022 so if mr morrell can help us in that discussion i would appreciate

075it good evening everybody thanks for the opportunity to come out and spend some time again with you guys we talked i emailed you earlier this week about starting to pre-load some discussion so really what we've got to do tonight is is identify those four or five a priorities that we've talked about and anything that you need that you want focused on beyond those five priorities so what we want to do is go through the five sections and and make sure there's no clarifications that are required and see if there's any priorities in each section until we can work down to five total so let's start with section a is there any ones that need discussion first i don't have any discussion i don't have any from section 8 either okay are there any that you

076feel are priorities in this section potentially a1 just to evaluate uh potentially a new vendor for policies right any other ones in the a section that we might need to focus on okay let's look at section b which is the community relations community leadership one two and three okay parent feedback communication with community and community feedback okay i have um b1 and b3 as well okay um i agree with what was stated earlier that um we could look towards having some town halls at some point coffee's with the superintendent meet with the board members 30 minutes prior to a meeting things like that okay any other ones in this section that you feel may be a priority i also i had b1 and b2 okay any others let's look at section c i i'm sorry

077i would be b3 as well you b3 yep okay thank you yep section c staff relations [Music] any priorities i had a c5 c5 c5 i also had c5 any others c5 as well okay any others do you want us to tell you if somebody has already said the ones that we've had or did you need to know how many people well i'm just kind of marking down as they come so we get some priorities so that one obviously is going to be a high priority that was left over from last year d section d business and fine business and finance i had um d3 right um and that has to do with financial controls i think mr gerbal's aware there was a deo stone asset figure we just need to make sure that that

078ties at the end of the fiscal year any other in the d section how about e section i have e3 e3 i had e5 curriculum got it and i have e7 and e9 e7 i had e7 you guys like bad numbers [Music] as i'm well scott e uh and i've lost the number eight as well any others for the community i'll share in a second what each of those numbers mean so that you understand we're just trying to get a scorecard here to get us into a discussion area so so i would say c5 would be the number one priority i think that's left over from a lot of discussion c5 is recruitment and retention of staff what that's a high priority what are you looking for to be successful what are you looking for

079i think obviously in in this um situation that we're in it's it's obvious with the substitutes that we're using the teacher shortage that's going to be upon us it's it's quite evident that there's a shrinking resource that that's going to be available to myelinary schools and i think that's the that's the importance of being able to recruit and also retain the talent that we have scott do you want us to bring the podium back over for you nope okay i scribble so i think we need to focus on the recruitment piece um i think we're doing a little bit better job of casting a wider net but i think that if we have very specific talent that we're looking for specifically in diversifying some of our staff so that our staff matches the diversity of

080our student population i think we have to be a little more intentional in how we identify candidates and i think that we need to expand upon kind of the grass roots that's happening with our grow our own initiative especially that the governor's budget has come out and the proposed budget is allocating funds for that initiative and we should try to maximize our resources there so i think that we've made some progress in reaching out to racial minorities for um amy yes can you turn this week turn okay so i think we made some progress in reaching out to racial minorities but i think we need to look into um other sort other types of diversity lgbtq for instance um and that tagging onto what michelle said having our teacher population be a reflection of our

081student population okay so that's really what you're trying to achieve is as close as we can to a staff that represents your student body that is why we get there's brian's deal yes what we're trying to figure out is what what's the bullseye and what i hear and what i know from you guys is you want a staff that closely resembles your student your student body and your community is that clear is that agreed let's agree that's clear brian you're clear okay so that's the first priority uh the community relations had the most second most um b1 was current feedback b2 was communication with the community b3 was community feedback what are we looking for what what's the end result there's a board that you're looking for in this section from my perspective i think

082that the communications committee is going to help quite a bit um but i you know we've heard several times the need for occasional town halls perhaps coffee with the superintendent being having board members be available before meetings okay right that's house what's the what what are we trying to get it what's the outcome you desire a second what's the outcome we're trying to get to a direct line of feedback between our staff our parents this is our this is right so we're looking at what i am looking for is parent and community feedback correct the very direct parent feedback and community feedback so i would like to see a two-way communication has become a bit of a buzzword in here for us but i think that that's really important i don't necessarily think it has

083to be town halls i think it can be zoom i think it could be coffee i think it could be there's a variety of ways to do that but i think the two-way communication the ability to have a conversation is really important and i just want to speak to something that tom just said because i'm afraid there's a misconception in the community about what our communication committee is going to do right the board's communication committee is dealing with board communication okay what we're talking about right now is brian's goal in the district and so this is district communication i mean i know you know but i just want to make sure the community is clear that's good clarification there's a difference so so far we have that we're looking for a direct line of communication

084and yet we're looking for uh open two-way communication correct is that what the group is focused on again remember our job is to figure out what we want it's brian's job to deliver brian and his old people that's the best part so we don't have to figure it all out we just got to say here's what we want as representatives of the community let brian and his team go figure out how we get there we monitor it as we go through the year all our quarterly touch bases okay does that those two pieces cover your parent feedback communication and community feedback goes to the two-way communication and direct line of communication cover those adequately for you guys yes yes yes okay i don't want to assume anything we appreciate it scott [Music] um you had

085a one briefly policy involvement a as an apple stock apple is one apple a1 yeah the policy involved i didn't write anything down for a but i think that's more of a board goal okay if you're looking at a new policy provider that's really on the board because you're responsible for the policy so it's really not on brian it's you directing what you need so if you want an rfp what you're looking for that's really on the board and then brian does the leg work for us okay so it's not really a priority for brian's it's a priority for the board gotcha and then section e educational leadership we had uh e85 curriculum let's talk about the curriculum and a lot of people said that that was a priority to them what are we trying

086to accomplish what's the goal what are we where are we trying to be i kind of tied all all of mine together in that section okay with um [Music] with some of our strategic plan goals and our focus statement around environment and so the learning environment and culture is improve and foster a safe learning environment that supports the academic social emotional physical creative and cultural needs of the individual okay and so i know that we've had a diversity goal on the books for a while and research shows that the best practice to move an initiative forward is to appoint somebody a lead to drive that and i support mrs landingham's suggestion that we partner with the city and hire a dei lead okay i think that would help us move our initiatives forward i think

087there's pockets of really great things happening and uh having someone in that position could actually um further and expand those great things that are happening and embed them a lot of the talk at our strategic plan was about cementing alliances with the city and using sharing and using resources to maximize those i think this is a great a way to accomplish that also as part of the so i would like the board to adopt as a priority mrs landingham suggestion that we coordinate to hire part-time with the city a dei instructor and i would also because i saved all my power for this one i would also like the board to adopt as a priority for mr gerba in this area to contact mr j marks out of oakland schools and to see if we

088could have him come and present to the board and possibly representatives from the city the feasibility of a comprehensive plan to assure and build on our cultural competence our ability to have courageous conversations around race and closing the achievement gap okay so the desired outcome is you're trying to improve the diversity culture because you've already got places in place with a strategic plan and again how we do it brian's listening to the suggestions but again how do we get there that's brian's job to bring it back to us with a plan so it could be mr marks it could be a lot of other things what we have to do as a board is tell them what what our desire is if it's to improve the mental health social diversity those pieces that's the priority

089we need to tell them what we're looking for that we want that to be a direct focus this year that we want to see movement on the strategic plan goal yes yes yes they had a focus how do we get those buy-ins well i guess i'm just wondering if that's not more of a vor gold than a buying goal like you know what everything that we're wanting to do it sounds more much more of a board type of direction that we want to go more than a brian goal this would be brian's focus which he already has the strategic plan as part of one of the strategic plans ten percent of his goal his overall uh evaluation is progress towards historical strategic goals the strategic plan so we've already got that in play it's just

090a matter of are we focusing on this one over one of the other ones and i think that's what i'm hearing you see you want this one to be kind of right at the top of the list right behind the communication and the recruitment is how do we make a better job which handles some of the questions from your community about mental health tonight because you've put it right in your strategic plan so three years ago you identified it cold it just kind of slowed you down now that we're back now it's time for all of you the eight of you as leaders to get the strategic plan fired up again and get it focused and get it used every meeting so that you're getting that job done which will take into the account exactly

091what you're talking about jen okay so brian do you understand what they're looking for okay any other well i i just have a question about the curriculum piece because i think that there have been several discussions we were having prior to kovid that i think got very sidetracked by covid in terms of curriculum so and i may be misremembering but i feel like we were talking about some social studies curriculums um i can't it's been so long we've been so focused on other things um but i think that we need to get back into looking at what curriculum we have where we need to improve it you know back to fixing the curriculum where it needs to be fixed or implementing new curriculums where it needs to be implemented based on our data and i

092feel like we haven't had that conversation in quite a while um and so that's why e5 maybe that's the inappropriate number but that was why e5 was on my list one of the other goals that we talked about pre-covet and we had been working on was to address the transitions between our buildings you know from second to third grade and then from fifth to sixth grade and then into the high school um and so i'd like to see us focus on that once again um so that we can make sure that we're supporting the kids as they make those transitions um and it was a pre-covered focus i think it needs to be a postmoderate but maybe not post covert was probably the wrong term but focus what is it pc yep ac before forwarding

093so when you're looking at curriculum you know it has been on your radar as long as i've been out here with you working it's been there so now we're putting it as one of our top five priorities brian do you understand what they're looking for share with them what you heard so it makes you all on the same well i page to me building transitions is clear we need to get back to doing some of those open houses and different things that we've done to help the students and the parents transition between the buildings for curriculum we are still working on curriculum we just haven't been had the chance to bring anything to the board yet but mr mcmahon's working on social studies curriculum he's looking at um some science purchases looking at math so

094i think some of that's we just need to bring that to the board and get back into some of those regular updates so that you know the work that we are doing and i think too brian i would include in that is um we had approved some curriculum in the last four or five years i'm thinking specifically about i think it was the eighth grade ela curriculum because much more online and you could diversify it and so maybe just some updates too on how that curriculum because i remember during those discussions we talked about it takes about five years to really get one a new curriculum implemented with fidelity so some of those programs that we had previously implemented some updates on how they've been implemented how they're working things like that i think would

095be very helpful so just like we're going to ask for a strategic plan update on a regular basis it sounds like curriculum is going to have to be a regular update be it a part of your board packet written communication or oral presentation from mr mcmahon or his team to the board am i understanding what you're looking for yes yes that's right and the last one in this section was the student feedback what were you looking in for that let's just go back to the communication piece earlier with parents and community this is where i put my power in scott these are my two most important e7 is student feedback and e9 is support for our students um as several of our people are here tonight to show a support i think it's imperative that

096we have the support for our students in more than just curriculum ways and i also think that we desperately need to hear from our children we need to hear from our students we need just as much of a direct line of communication from our parents as feedback we definitely need it from our students as well okay so it does tie into the other one it's just another prong of that different way right okay which i think was also kind of a fallout from our strategic plan right communication is a huge big right cool right i had that one as well and i i do agree with kirsten on that and just a more formalized way of getting some feedback from our from our students i think we all agreed that during the strategic planning process

097it was so great to have some students you know involved in that and get their perspective and we definitely heard that here tonight and have repeatedly so yeah just i think you know brian is is always very open about accepting you know conversations and and suggestions but maybe like i guess i was thinking something a little more formalized about reaching make being a little more purposeful about reaching out to some students you know who you know because some students need that you know that encouragement to do that because they may not feel comfortable i think that comes under the two-way communication that you talked about yeah we just need to say all stakeholders instead of just this group and that group it's we've got to improve now let me change the board because it's a

098board thing too you've got to make sure that you're doing the same thing that we're going through lines of communication with our community those that are here and those that aren't here the students that are here and those that aren't here we gotta work elected officials the sudden of you represent all of mine and so we gotta you you're gonna be challenged at the same time as we're challenging brian when it comes to communication which is where your communication committee comes in and so you make sure you're ramping that up uh parallel to brian it's a brand new recruitment piece what is your understanding of it um continue to focus our recruitment and try and bring in diverse candidates you know i think i will admit this is going to be tough during this time

099of staff shortages and and the state admitting that every district is struggling with hiring any candidate um let alone a diverse candidate but we will do our best to put plans in place to make sure that we are getting information out and postings out and doing everything that we can do to effectively recruit good candidate that's it what the board's desire is fit clear everybody agrees can i can i say one thing because to me it's more than just um a broader posting it's it's a more purposeful plan that goes beyond posting the the um the job itself so it's um where other what are other avenues to recruit candidates what are other avenues to identify candidates maybe it's a way that you recruit them yourself when you meet teachers you know we poach them

100from other places i don't know but i think it's more than just finding different websites to post the job posting on i think it has to be a little more purposeful and perhaps be a little just more planned i think i think we've had some discussion about reaching out into some of the teaching university programs for education in you know trying to forge some connections there get our name recognition through them and and let them know that we're interested and and again making sure that when we have student teachers come through here or we're encouraging a diverse population of student teachers to come through that they they know that that milan is a place that they're welcome and we want them okay i would agree with that i i'm so fearful you know we've all

101everybody in this room and everybody watching has heard about you know the the issue with staffing everywhere you know it's not just education and you know it that i feel that that's just going to get more competitive you're going to be fighting other districts to get people and i think the more the more tools we have right in our tool bag because i just um we've been fortunate so far you know some of the larger districts suffer a little more so we sometimes have that advantage but it's i you know everything is saying it's going to get worse before it gets better so yeah but i was glad to see um the governor putting some some real money behind that so okay so hopefully but yeah i just think we're whatever stops we can pull

102out we need to be um like we said perth was falling so we're asking for it to be purposeful retention and hiring staff that matches our student body is that the outcome we're desiring right yeah not to add to the thing i think andrew kind of pointed this out too as far as retaining the ones we have as well you know making sure that so he says retention the pot fast enough if the water's leaking out the bottom you can't put water in the top fast enough to make it i just want to make sure there's a category to touch on andrew's spot of making sure that we keep what we have because we do have a lot of young teachers that are showing a great deal of potential and they're going to be the

103first ones to be snatched up if they're out there's snatchers so okay brian what was your understanding of the communication priority i think the biggest thing is to get back to direct two-way communication possibly getting out into the public more now that we can i'm always available but i think being being the leader of going out and seeking that input more than just always accepting it when it comes to me okay is that what the board's looking for that's the outcome you desire okay we agree and then the fourth one was the culture the strategic planned piece of improving the culture and mental health all those pieces that we've you talked about strategic plan three years ago what you're understanding well i think we've seen today in in our other building presentations we're going to

104see that we have a lot of work going on with that so part of it's getting that information in front of the board so they see the work that's going on and then obviously starting to take a step forward with the dei work and looking at how we can wrap that back around and get that more as a focus okay is that what the board's looking for d-i-d-e-i right but it's also the safe because you use the word safe safety environment our culture the culture so we have seen it we talked about it with your plan the cult the mental health and all those wrap-around services that we know kids are suffering but not only children the staff the community at large so when you're talking about the communication piece not only do we have

105to let the board know but we need to make sure we're letting our community know because you guys are doing we're schools are the worst people for cheerleading on ourselves we do all this stuff but we don't share and so our community thinks we're not doing anything because they don't know and so we have to do a better job which is on the challenge time to chair that committee communicate who is who andrew andrew you are so i'm going to challenge your committee to make sure you have a purposeful quarterly communication update to your community where your purpose for every quarter to put something out that updates your community be it on the hell any of these four priorities so you're working with brian but your job as a board is to get that out

106also okay so that's one of your goals so you have two goals quarterly communication and the policy rfp for policy to see if you want to change providers for policy right and i apologize um andrew and kirsten and amy because this is very late in the game and i had put it in my notes at the conference and it got pushed to the side but part of my suggestion for the communication committee would have been putting a couple of students on there i think that was something andrew and amy and i had discussed but we were going to first try to get going on and moving to that so it's not lost yet well i think you need not only students you need a couple parents a couple community members we push a lot out

107but we need to check from the receivers are they getting the message are we doing it in a way they understand it can you know grasp it and utilize it we think we're pushing it all out there but we forget to talk to the ones that are getting it and so we think we're doing a great job you know friday packets we send all this stuff home but we know by middle school and high school those aren't getting home but we're assuming yeah or put it on the website everybody has the website we know that's not true and so you got to be purposeful so that's something for your committee so you have four players for brian and two for you agreed quarterly touch basis if not more often right so your next touch base

108would be in just over a month march which is where brian would probably be most of his plans to you because it's going to take him a couple of weeks work with his team to start putting those together so your first touch basically more about what the plans look like and where we're at so that you have an agreement on what the outcome you're desiring right questions we're all in agreement brian you're good you know what they want lord you're good right i'll keep in touch with andrew as we go forward to make sure you stay on that track as we go forward anything else from me no thank you thank you scott thank you scott thank you drive carefully all right next on the agenda is the nasb region seven board of directors representative

109election it's a first reading in your board packets you you did receive the uh the packet from the masb um our region um the the people that um are running for that i think there are three candidates first region seven two or two two three yeah there's three right three yeah yeah so review that and then at the next meeting um we will vote on the representative that we want to send that we would vote for region 7 for for m for mesb any questions on that all right next up on the agenda is a board meeting calendar discussion this is some other feedback that we've received from the community in regards to um the best night for for people to attend so we thought we would have a short discussion about the rest of

110the meetings that we have scheduled through june um potentially a couple of those or a few of those to a different day to allow for attendance at those meetings i did send out a schedule that we could look at as well as how what the schedule for the the auditorium is to make sure that we don't uh have any issues overlaps with that so did anybody does anybody have any first thoughts on rescheduling some meetings if we if we want to so rescheduling meetings before april 1st is going to be tough for me most of my weeknights are tied up i've kind of built my life around being here on wednesdays but after april first my schedule loosens up some and that would be easier to do okay [Music] tuesday june 7th is that but

111aren't we supposed to have a budget hearing you to move both right we could move that meeting as well i think that way friday night's about the only night that would be good for me friday nights would be the only night that's good for you isn't it yes tuesday june 7th works for me myself i agree on tuesday i can do tuesday june 7th yes would that work for you carrie yeah i'm good so we'll definitely uh i mean we're gonna we need to vote on this so this we're just gonna have this discussion now um we'll consider this uh so we're gonna we can definitely look at that [Music] potentially we can move to a different day of the of the week oh i'm sorry i finished um i didn't have a very specific

112meetings but i wondered if maybe once a quarter we would have a meeting on a tuesday or thursday and then that way board members could plan because i agree with amy my life is pretty set that second and fourth wednesday i'm here um but then also the community could plan to so sure once a quarter there'll be maybe it's the regular meeting is on a tuesday or thursday and then the workshop is on a wednesday something like that did you did you say april 1st yes after april 1st after the first of april well that's right i mean june 8th meeting um you know potentially maybe there's an april maybe if we could move maybe the april 13th or the 27th meeting to the thursday potentially or tuesday can we just clarify miss geiger's um

113comment did you say that week friday's the only day that would work or in general wednesday or friday are the only two days that week that week oh okay that are going to work june of june of june 8th oh so that does okay in general oh so should we go to the oh i see june 7th works for everyone else correct just so we're understood for everyone else are we voting on this tonight we're just discussing we're going to come up we'll come up with something that we can yeah i mean just so that we can look at calendars and i mean this is something that we can we can communicate offline about as well but i just i just wanted to have a quick discussion here that we can take a look at

114so andrew my only other suggestion is that we don't meet on monday nights because that's when the city meets and so i i know there's some overlap there people would like to attend both so if we could avoid conflicting with the city council meeting i think that would be helpful yeah i can do a um i could do a tuesday or thursday mondays do not work for me okay so maybe when it was april 13th um or april 27th meetings we can move um if we were to move the 13th andrew just looking at mine if we could go to a thursday because there's a wasp or the executive board meeting i have on tuesday so april 14th might be potentially if that works for anyone else 14th it's a thursday instead of a tuesday

115did you say the 14th yes yeah the 14th all right we'll take this feedback and then we'll be more intentional about the scheduling of our meetings going forward um like it's like i suggested um at our at our planning meeting we'll look at potentially once a quarter having a meeting on another day besides wednesday i agree that more likely tuesdays and thursdays tend to work as best moving forward so we'll have something to vote on at the next meeting in regards to the the future schedule and then when we set our meetings going forward so any other questions or concerns regarding that all right next up is the book study discussion safe is not enough better schools for lgbtq students we're looking at chapter eight and the afterwards i guess i'll go first again i'll

116try to be brief my daughter gave me a hard time about giving a book report um so the full thing that i got out of it was the avon district that's described in the book the gsa avoided potential conflict by framing the gsa and its activities accurately and unapologetically the primary focus was school safety and the silencing of lgbtq individuals against marginalized groups they also focused time and attention on the anti-bullying message i did want to point out too that avon gsa and invited religious leaders to talk about how to integrate spirituality with lgbtq identity or support as an ally the book references an english teacher from the avon district explaining that there are kids that do want to have a real spiritual life but they are not sure if it's possible if they are

117lgbtq or even uh if they are straight allies so with the changing demographics the avon district hires somebody by the name of gary howard he's the author of the book we can't teach what we don't know there are seven basic components of cultural competence that have relevance on work with lgbtq youth they include students being affirmed in their cultural connections teachers being personally inviting learning environments that are physically and culturally inviting stables being reinforced for academic development instructional changes that are made to accommodate difference in learners in classrooms being managed in a consistent manner and interactions that stress collectivity as well as individuality the book goes on to talk about focusing on the core so for example again in the avon district described in the book the core values have been articulated for an entire

118community in their mission statement students and members of the community walk into their buildings and they immediately see this is what we believe in or if your child goes to this school there are the educational these are the educational ideals that we try to uphold so advocates who wish to move their schools from safety to inclusion should first look to existing school-wide policies goals procedures and philosophies uh just a few more statements the book talks about trying to a man trying to imagine not just better schools for lgbtq students but an ideal educational experience for them so the two important questions are why should such an education for lgbtq youth not be the norm and how do we justify settling for anything less finally while the conditions towards an ideal school system for lgbtq students

119has improved they have not improved enough educators to support students in fostering quality such as self-efficacy empowerment and pride among lgbtq students and the fact that some are doing it in the face of intense political religious opposition makes clear that achieving a standard beyond safe is possible anywhere thank you mr president so the piece that i was going to share kind of segues perfectly from what um what tom was just saying so on page 150 um and i usually don't quote the book but i don't know i was looking for something you know as it wrapped up that that i felt really kind of encompassed um of course the meaning behind the work but also some facts behind it and some data so it said despite all the gains of the safe schools movement and

120the tremendous difference this work has made about one in four lgbtq youth still attempt suicide at some point in their adolescence fewer than one in five have the opportunity to study lgbtq issues than any of their classes at school and more than half experience harassment based on their gender identity or sexual orientation these statistics were even worse 20 years ago but even if conditions have improved clearly they haven't improved enough and i felt like some of the discussions that came up tonight from our from our students that spoke kind of um you know were a parallel to some of these so i just felt like that kind of came back full circle to the title of our book which um was is called safe is not enough um that we need to do more it's

121exactly tom's tom's point i think um so for me i just wrote down what really came full circle for me back to the title was that we can't just be satisfied satisfied obviously with safe that we need to be welcoming and we need to foster trust and power voices of our lgbtq students and articulate core values as a district that demonstrate that we're all in when it comes to helping students reach their individual full potential and to me that's really what the book was was about was was fostering all those things which is our mission statement and goals and everything exactly yeah i just feel like it yeah it all just segued perfectly together so i um the the second or the i guess it's the afterward that we're reading the ideal school for lgbtq

122students one of the things that struck me is everything here that's ideal for lgbtq is also ideal for any racial minority it's ideal for any disabled student it's ideal for any group that isn't the majority and i think that part of tackling any bullying issue is teaching children from a very young age that different is beautiful that a student who's lgbtq or comes from an lgbtq family or has mental health struggles or is disabled or is taller than you or shorter than you or blonder than you or lighter than you or darker than you all of those things are beautiful and are to be celebrated and i think that this kind of goes back to what jan was talking about with culture we have to get to the root of some of these issues and

123part of that root is creating what's in this chapter for all students not just the lgbtq students but certainly including them um and i'm i think there's a lot of work to be done here um but it has to start with us and it has to start with the leadership of the entire district amy i think that that's a very important point because i think a lot of times um there's a tendency to assume that when you have a more welcoming environment or you you know you're teaching d e and i that it's kind of this zero-sum game right like you're kind of divvying up a pie or something when the reality is and there's data and i've talked about it at other meetings there's data out there and surveys out there that demonstrate that

124when you are more inclusive when you have when you're teaching cultural competency that you know productivity increases this is with employees they're you know happiness at work increases and so it's not a zero-sum game you don't help one group and then not help another or even to the detriment of another the reality is that when we rise when everyone rises we all rise together and i think that's a very important piece to keep in mind particularly as we move forward on some of these d e and i issues so kerry was talking about the segway and it was very appropriate for me because today was my final day of the justice leaders and we talked a whole lot about the intersectionality and that you can you know it's you can't just focus on one group

125because there's oppression that people people experience in many ways and so you you have to be able to to take all of that on but just some statistics that i wasn't aware of that they gave me today and they said 41 percent of transgender students attempt suicide and one out of every four transgender student experiences homelessness on the day that they come out of those students are kicked out of their homes so yes definitely school is that safe place for them in a lot of instances and we need to do everything we can to make sure that it stays that safe place actually the acronym that i got today is lgbtqia so it also includes the intersexual and the asexual the eject i don't know how many of you remember taking it it has grown

126the education justice assessment and transformative tool it's now 174 pages long wow and when they were talking about the celebrations and i know shayla when she had been with us had talked about celebrations and pictures and and things they had a about how important it is for all students be able to see themselves and they had a quote there and it struck me and i wasn't fast enough to write it down and it was in the presentation and so i emailed lois and i said can you can you get this for me at least who is attributed by uh when someone with authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing yet you know

127you exist and others like you it takes some strength of soul to resist this void and to make yourself visible to claim that your experience is just as real and as normative as any other so that that struck me and uh and it tied in nicely with us finishing this book as part of uh we were broke into sections for our eject this discussion and of course i chose to be in the policy because that seemed to fit where we're where i can do the most good and so i i um i hope that our policy committee i know i'm not on it but i i'm a ascribing work but i hope that we can uh firm up some of those policies and make sure that we're supporting students yeah i mean the finish of

128the book was just it did come full circle and i think it fits well with this meeting as we discussed mr gabriel's goals and the district goals and i think about the energy that we did have with the strategic plan and we were all ready to go gung-ho with that and there was a lot of excitement around it and then of course this pandemic hit and put a lot of that on the back burner unfortunately so i appreciate this landing him suggesting this book and the and the board um embracing it and and reading it and discussing it because again reading avon's mission statement and then their diversity statement afterwards was very powerful and i think there's a lot of words that we said and you throw around but you know you know there's there's

129words but then there's myland and it's one of those things that you just experience in island and if there are kids out there that aren't experiencing that we need to make sure that they are because that's just not right and it's not fair to those kids so i i am excited about getting back to getting that strategic plan out the communications committee and living out the mission and vision that were developed by by that committee that included community members and students as we move forward so many others so with that the next item of business is the the approval of the communications committee community member so i need a motion to approve the communications committee community members as provided an attachment b moved by pharaoh seconded by macchio it's been moved and seconded i'll just

130say a little bit about this well kirsten can obviously join in as well there were a lot of great candidates and it was difficult to uh to make to make the choices um just so to make you aware of the process again um i provided the uh anonymously i provided the people that were interested to three board members to to go through their interest statements and they provided rankings back and there were people that were obviously they were chosen by by the committee based on those anonymous that interest anonymously um so we took that back to kirsten the meaning we looked at those we did want to try to limit the number because we were looking at you know maybe at least two per school because we didn't want to have such a huge committee

131but in looking at all the people that were chosen and their backgrounds we decided to bring you forward to these 12 people that we feel do bring a diverse perspective on milan area schools in many different ways first blush obviously it's just the school that they're that their children attend but the backgrounds of these people there's a lot of diversity just in their activities in their families in their culture their race their religion their upbringing their current status there's a lot of perspectives here in maryland that we do need to that we want to consider as part of this communications committee to make sure that we are getting the word out to to everyone so i don't know if chris and amy want to say any more in regards to that i just think you

132did a really great job and i hope the community also understands i think we've said it a couple times andrew tried incredibly hard we had 33 candidates um to make everything as anonymous as could be for amy and i and carrie to look through um um to provide us with that background um and an end i believe we have 12 like we're coming forward with today and i'm very thankful that all 12 of them i think some of you are here today thank you um accepted our invitation so very excited to move forward with our um committee members appreciate you taking the time to be work with us yeah so just second i think that the process was as unbiased as it could possibly be when andrew showed us the names and who we had

133chosen i was surprised at how many people i didn't know like i still don't i haven't met several people on this list um so i think it was as fair and unbiased as possible i am really excited about the diversity the different backgrounds the different voices and different approaches that i think we have on the committee and i think this is i think we can do some really good work i'm i'm excited about this moving we do forward our first meeting uh scheduled for monday february 21st uh we do realize it's the day off of school but um we most people are going to be home in the evening to attend that meeting so we're kicking to go as as we get started once you once we're they're approved by the board so there is

134any other questions or concerns regarding these appointments yeah i just wanted to say too that since i i did go through those when i opened it up i had i had no idea what the list was going to look like so it was just funny to be involved in that process and then to realize that i had no idea who that actually was so yeah i did want to i wanted to reiterate what everybody else said because we just had some just some awesome candidates with just some really interesting backgrounds and experiences and um so much more than than i had even hoped for and so i want to i want to give a shout out to everybody who applied i don't know who else it was but thank you for that because um i

135really feel like based on what i saw that we ended up with a very well-rounded committee so thanks to everybody for that volunteerism we appreciate it any others all right it's been supported to approve the communications committee community members has provided an attachment in the be misaika pharaoh yes freight yes haika yes tiger yes landicam yes macchio yes sislow yes motion carries 7-0 next on the agenda is public comments just another reminder that this is a meeting of the board of education in public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business it is not to be considered a public meeting there are two types for public participation during the meeting as indicated in the agenda when addressing the board you will be asked to state your name the board determines the amount of time

136granted to individuals or groups to speak each person shall be allowed to speak for up to three minutes i'll give you a thirty second warning and i'd ask you to finish your thought when the beeper goes off board members may question speakers but are not obligated to answer questions or make statements or commitments in response to issues raised by the public in general such items will be referred to the superintendent for advisement investigation study and or recommendation or designated as future agenda items for board consideration is anyone that would like to address the public yes good evening my name is tammy king my children did not attend marlin schools however my husband and i own and operate preschool and child care in saline for over 28 years this month now so we have cared for

137your alumni we care for some of your current students and we're probably caring right now for some of your future students i'm here tonight to speak in support of bringing andre norman to speak with the students in the community regarding mental health i had the pleasure of hearing him speak last year which was very moving and impactful andre gave out his personal cell phone number during his time and i sent him a text message right then asking for his assistance for someone that i knew that was struggling i was so thankful that he responded to me right away and has since been in contact with the family in need of help mental health is too often overlooked or pushed aside since it is most often not a visible disability however it affects so many and

138their ability to function naturally they suffer with this quiet pain and i feel that if we are able we need to let them know that we are that they are not alone we need to act and show up for those who are suffering now while they are here we do not need people to show up once they are gone if my action helps even one person it was all worth it these students are from a generation that was already was limited to in-person social interaction then we have spent the last two years in a pandemic which has also hindered not only their normal daily routine but in addition has isolated them even more those that are suffering from anxiety and depression need to know that there is always hope we need to normalize talking about

139mental health issues and providing the support needed to these students andre norman has offered his services free of charge to come and speak i also know without a doubt that he will reach out to help anyone that asks for it the impact he is having on helping those who are need is one that should not be ignored we need to show up for those who are named now because the alternative is showing up for them it's too late thank you miss king ashley saint claire i came here tonight with a sole purpose to support mackenzie she and i have been talking back and forth through text messages since she posted um on true friends of milan and i stand by my point that we need to stop coming here parents need to stop coming here

140with agendas and listen to the kids because mackenzie stood up here in front of everybody and said that this is a mental health issue this is not a political issue and then immediately another parent got up and started making it a political issue and i asked mackenzie point blank because if you're going to listen to the children you have to have conversations with them and i asked for point blank before anything happened do you think having to wear a mask is impacting the mental health health issues or does it stem deeper from that and she says i don't believe it has anything to do with mental health i said i just wanted to check because i don't think mental health is a political pawn to be played with and i want to make sure that

141whatever i stand up and speak to rings true to you she says that's another thing people are so worried about masks that they are not paying attention to the real problems she says it makes me so mad masks are not the problem it could be a genetic problem even something going on with their life however it still matters so i just wanted to stand up here one more time because i saw the look on mackenzie's face when immediately her mental health thing that she came up here for and was so brave to talk about was immediately switched around into we need to take the masks off our children because it's ruining their mental health the look on her face of just this adult did not listen to a word i just said i messaged her

142i said do i have permission to read the messages that you and i have back and forth because i asked her point blank because i'm not going to get up here and say mess have nothing to do with mental health if she thinks that's an issue i would have come up here and talked about that she says that's not what the issue is so i just want to reiterate we need to listen to what our children need and what our children are asking of us and stop making a political game out of this [Applause] are there others all right next on the agenda the superintendent comments mr gabra thank you several comments to share tonight and a couple of reports to provide to the board during comments so i'll do my general comments first and

143then move on to the reports first again the district wants to remind our students and families that throughout the 21 22 school year full meal equivalent breakfasts and lunches will be free to all students on scheduled school days um a staff update bailey bryant paddock teacher who was out on maternity leave has had a change in her spouse's employment and has resigned effective january 31st they will be moving out of the area and she is resigning her position and won't be returning from her maternity leave another update regarding staff we are looking at the calendar for the remainder of the year and trying to determine the best date to provide our alice training we want to get that rescheduled it is important and our student safety is always a top priority so we are looking

144at the calendar for the remainder of the year and trying to determine the best state to be able to provide that training to all of our staff not just our teachers a reminder that myelin covadata can be viewed by visiting milinaryschools.org and clicking on the covid case data link all positive cases are reported within 24 hours of the district learning about a positive student or staff i say this next piece knocking on wood this week our numbers have been down drastically in milan area schools as we've seen across the state and the country i would say we probably have the number of cases about the number of cases this week so far that we had in one day in the previous weeks so i'm glad that our cases are coming down and that's positive for

145all of us as we try to return to normalcy military schools and all schools in the state of michigan are required to develop an annual education report in aer those are now available on our websites the district and each building has to have their own cover letter and aer report posted if you are on the district page you can simply go to our district and then reports and you will see the district aer excuse me and i'm using the navigation bar and the schools on each school's main page you can go to our school and then reports and you will see the annual aer report i do want to clarify there's a template that we fill out for the cover letter and then the report is actually a link to the state reporting site so

146it's not data that we create it's data that we have to point to that the state has collected and made available for every district in the state of michigan i also want to let everyone know that i will be posting important district updates to the district website following every school board meeting these updates can be located on the navigation bar under on the district home page if you select our district and then superintendent you will see a sub page labeled scoop from the soup and that's where i will be putting up all of the important communications regarding milin area schools an updated version of the district scorecard will be shared with the board of education this evening that is also already available on the district website if you visit milanariaschools.org select our district district information

147and district scorecard you will see the document that i will be reviewing with the board this evening the february 2022 benchmark assessment and school goal update that is required of every school in the state of michigan will be delivered to the board this evening that document is also already available on our website if you visit milinaryschools.org click on the transparency reporting icon in the upper right corner most of you will know that is that annoying thing that comes up and then you got to click to get it out of the way to do what you want to do well there's a lot of good information under that icon and this is actually the required location for this report this is the where the state tells us it has to be it's actually located under letter

148q on the transparency reporting piece of milan areaschools.org i'm last i know it was brought up a couple of times and i am going to apologize we had every intention of recording the sr3 um zoom conference that i held we clicked record we were under the impression it was recording and when we got done we did not have a recording so i do apologize that's why the recording is not out if i had one it would be out i think a lot of you know other zoom meetings that i've held i did put recordings of them out is immediately following the meeting there wasn't a recording i apologize we thought we had it recorded the slides are out there for those that weren't able to attend please understand that what we did at the end

149of the meeting when it was time for the community to provide feedback is i actually typed a bullet point as the person was speaking and i asked that person to make sure that what i typed met what they were asking for so even though we don't have it recorded in a recording each person that spoke and gave their comment was able to make sure that their comment was recorded correctly as we collected that information another thing that i want to say about sr-3 funds as we start to develop our plan to spend them it's important to know that just because sr3 funds aren't spent on something doesn't mean that we aren't going to spend district funds to do some of the other things on the list so as you start to see the district plan

150that maybe the state pushes out we will be pushing out a copy of our plan and explaining how we will do some of the other things that we would like to do with sr3 money but sr3 money just isn't enough to go around and so we will be using district dollars to cover some of those other initiatives and things that our community felt was important again those slides are on the website if you go to myelinatorschools.org just scroll down a little bit below the picture under current topics there is an article about the zoom session and the slides are right there it's actually linked in two different places on the district main page so now i have two reports again that i need to share the board has copies of these and again they were

151placed on the website before i came to the meeting tonight the first is our covid19 benchmark achievement update and building goal update board what you have in front of you is a page per building the top section of each paid list page lists the goals for that building and these goals had to be approved so you will see that our reading goal and our math goal for paddock are both to see an increase of five lit points on average between the fall and winter test and then another five points between the winter and the spring test that's true for both math and reading of a goal of five bit point improvement and another five in the remainder of the year at the middle of the page you will see a breakdown of our nwea data

152in nwea is the assessment that we chose to use there were three or four approved assessments by the state of michigan nwea was one of those we had already been using it so it made sense to continue to use that so this is the interim assessment that we are using and reporting to the state of michigan all of our data we are required to break that data down by um sub group and by grade level so what you'll see in the middle of a page is the breakdown of the growth for each subgroup starts with all students and then works through economically disadvantaged special education english learner female male race ethnicity african american race ethnicity white and wraith race ethnicity multi-racial multiracial is not required to be included the reason that we chose to include

153it is our our students and our families actually determine by reporting in powerschool their racial identity and we have a lot more students that identify as multi-racial than identify as african-american therefore in all of our buildings we don't have a subgroup of 30 african american students but we didn't want to leave that data off of the report so we actually pulled the multi-racial category to make sure that we were reporting that data just so the community understands it's not appropriate for us to report data if there are less than 30 students in a group because that data becomes too identifiable to individual students and that's a standard set by the state of michigan um so you'll see their fall scores their winter scores i i do i should stop and think mr mcmahon is the

154one that put this entire report together and i appreciate all of his time and effort and pulling all of this data together for us you'll see that he has given you the fall data the winner data and then given you the the plus or minus in the growth so if you look through the subgroups at paddock all of them between fall and winter met our five points of writ growth you drop down to the bottom and you'll see the three grades kindergarten first grade and second grade listed our kindergartners do not test in the first few weeks of school it's a very difficult thing to be able to get kindergarteners ready to even understand how to use a device to take the test so that's why you don't see growth reported yet you will see

155that from winter to spring and you can see that first grade and second grade both met that growth expectation of five brit points between fall and winter i know that was a lengthy explanation i'm going to go through each other buildings a little bit quicker are there any questions on the layout of the report no but brian i i would like you to point out that they didn't just meet the goal they exceeded the goal i think that that's very important because we do have um have had some comments about our our test scores recently and so i'd like the public to know that they not only met the goal they exceeded it yep i can i can say first grade um in reading grew by an average of 11 rit points and in math

156grew by an average of nine whit points and in second grade grew by an average of five writ points in reading and an average of six brick points in math moving on to the next page at simon's elementary and i do want to clarify the red point system is a national system of measuring growth and as students get older the amount of writ growth that you expect to see diminishes so in other words you expect to see a lot more writ growth with younger students and then that diminishes as the students go into higher grades it's just the way that the scale is built so at simon's the goal was actually to see four writ point um on average growth in math and reading between fall and winter and then another four between winter and

157spring again you'll see the breakdown of all the subgroups and at the bottom you will see the grade levels so again their goal was four point growth third grade had a growth of eight points in reading and twelve points in math fourth grade had a growth of five points in reading and eight points in math and fifth grade had a growth of four points in reading and nine points in math so again we at least met the goal exceeded it in quite a few areas and we're very pleased with that data when we move on to the middle school the middle school again has now a and a goal of three points of growth in ela and in math from fall to winter and then another three points of growth between winter and spring i

158will acknowledge that when you look at all students at milan middle school the reading growth was only two writ points and the math growth was three writ points i will also acknowledge that some of our subgroups did not accomplish the goal of three writ points of growth obviously we need to continue to focus and and work with those students and help their achievement as we anticipate winter to spring growth um if you look at the grades sixth grade did meet the goal with three points of growth in reading and four points of growth in math seventh grade is where we're going to have to put some focus they had zero points of growth in reading and two points of growth in math and eighth grade had three points of growth in reading and four points

159of growth in math on average the last page is the high school the high school is a little bit different but because they don't take the test three times a year so we are allowed to not have a mid-year goal and you can see that the goal is to have the portion of our students on the psat and s.a.t who are collectively meeting the achievement proficiencies to grow by 10 percent from fall to spring and that's both true and reading and in math and you will see that we have provided you the fall reading and math scores and we'll be bringing you the reading and math scores for those psats and sats at the end of the year in june when we bring you this report so again that's an update on the goals for

160each building and the benchmark assessment data that we needed to report and again it is available on the milan area schools website if you go to the transparency reporting link down to letter q you will see a february 2022 update link the second item that i am bringing to you this evening and we've all agreed that this is a work in progress is the district scorecard that helps us look at how are we doing on the objectives of our strategic plan this document is also available on our website and again it's under our district district information district scorecard you'll see that i have started to put in student achievement data there it's in a little bit different format than the format that i just presented because again this is growth in a year not partial

161growth of or partial year growth so it does look a little bit different and this is also working on conditional growth percentiles and s gps for the m-step so both both based on growth percentiles i haven't gotten an update yet on the participation rate and extracurriculars that's something that i'll be working on as we continue to have this be a living document and then i will get the principles to get me information on the promotion rate at the end of last school year if you look in the learning environment and culture some of the data that we wanted to report were was attendance and discipline i was able to get the attendance percentages in for each of the months um due to three snow days last week i wasn't able to get disciplinary information from

162the principal so we will be working on that in the next couple of weeks and in the future i will be bringing you an update to that section the communications community engagement piece a lot of that is going to be worked on obviously in my goals and in the board's goals so we will be working on that section as we move forward personnel and leadership i provided you as you requested a list of the new teacher hires in each of the buildings and the the the teachers who left milan area schools either through retirement resignation um finding a different position so there's an update on our our attrition and our new hires and then under the last goal for financial operations in this one under each of the the objectives i put some of the

163things that have been accomplished for example under identify and attend to critical hvac roof parking lot and bus needs um i talked a little bit about inspections that we've had done and improvements that we are already making i mean i did the same for the other categories and then also you wanted the district fund balance reported at the end of 20 the end of fiscal year 2021 and what we project it to be at the end of fiscal year 2022 and then what that means for the amount of fund balance over 10 percent as that's one of the goals that the board has to maintain a 10 percent fund balance are there any questions on again i know the entire scorecard's not completed yet are there any questions on the information that is included in

164the scorecard at this time no thank you for updating it i we appreciate it and the fact that it's on the website that's that's that's outstanding thank you anything else mr herbal that's all that i have thank you mr yes i have two updates for you and they happen to be about curriculum this time how about that um so i was going to mention today about the social studies curriculum review we've been conducting it's been a while since i've updated you on that so the team that we put together for representing elementary and secondary middle school high school has gone through a process of reviewing a handful of different materials from different vendors we've sat through some presentations we've met vendors not personally all through zoom through the benefit of technology it's been actually better

165able to access more information here which has been great and we've put it down to two one at each elementary and secondary two different programs it's not a k-12 program we just found that there were better fits separately for elementary and secondary and so now the process is i'm moving forward with the vendors to get the pilot in place for second semester to get a full set of materials in the teachers hands and kid accounts whatever they might offer um to to really get to know the material see if it's going to be a fit for us hopefully by the end of the semester we'll have a recommendation to move forward with the purchase at both levels hopefully if it works um also i wanted to update you on some literacy information um and it

166just so fit that tracy and sean were presenting tonight about paddock she had mentioned like the decodable texts that we purchased those a lot of those recommendations come out of a team that we have called the literacy leadership team that we put together it's myself the principals the two instructional coaches our literacy interventionist and a tc or two joins us um at times and we meet not necessarily monthly maybe every other month or when we need to currently we're meeting every month just because there's a little bit more demand at the time um so we do talk about those purchases but the reason i wanted to mention it tonight wasn't that necessarily was that we are currently vetting some options for fluency assessments and also dyslexia screeners to be used at our lower l or

167k3 likely and so we sat through a presentation and we're going to go a little bit more in depth next time we meet and see if we can move forward with the recommendation to purchase a supplementary assessment for next year for k3 that's it for me thank you mr mcmahon uh no student board members this evening so board member comments i'll go first this time um i did want to i did attend brian's sr3 presentation and i i just want to tell them how great it was i already told them that but i particularly wanted to thank all the families that attended i just thought there were some great conversations um there was just some really great questions and feedback from from parents and and it's much appreciated so thanks to the people who who

168took the time to attend that um and of course thanks to paddock you know i said last time that i really missed the building presentation so it's great to have those back in here about the wonderful things that are going on and how mindful they are of our students and meeting their needs and i really wanted to give a shout out to to our students former students that spoke tonight because they do say the number one fear in life is public speaking and when you speak about sensitive topics and and yourself and and personal stories then um it's just a very brave thing to do so i always give props to people who are able to do that because it's very it's a very difficult thing and and again you know just like we've seen

169time and time again in this community the first response is always from business owners and and families and and community members is what can we do and it's just so so heartening to to see that response but it's really not a surprise because i feel like that's what we're all about um and just a quick thanks to scott morrell as you know now that you've kind of seen us in action with him he's been a great guiding force for us and and i love that he remains so impartial and and gets us to where we need to be and keeps us focused and um i think that was pretty much it yes mr pharaoh i might have a few things um first i i i just want to make a few comments the first i

170want to um i want to make the offer to be available to community members that want to talk want to have a conversation i'll make myself accessible please email me i'll give you my phone number because i do want all of you even the ones that i don't agree with to feel like you can talk to me so that was the first thing i wanted to say i also [Music] want to thank mackenzie and the other students and all the folks that got up and spoke about the need for us to focus on mental health i very much appreciate it i also just want to thank our school counselors and our social workers for those that don't know it's national school counselors week and you know like all of us they've just got so much

171going on and a lot of responsibility and um i just feel like it's important to acknowledge um what they do for our students and for our community um i attended the sr3 zoom session with mr gearball and with members of the community on january 27th um just a quick thank you to those that attended and for their participation i thought it went really well lots of good input and lots of good questions um i think brian gave a good explanation of the the esser dollar so i won't uh spend time there i did want to just mention briefly about governor whitmer's proposed budget it certainly looks good sounds good time will tell if it materializes right now there's a potential increase on the per pupil foundation allowance by five percent that would equate to about

172435 dollars a student so it would go from eighty seven hundred dollars to ninety one thirty five also being recommended is additional funding for districts with a greater proportion of special education and at-risk students an additional 360 million dollars is proposed to increase mental health services in schools according to the detroit news this includes expansion of trails which is transforming research into action to improve the lives of students this is a university of michigan program that trains educators and practices that help students manage their mental health the governor's budget also would continue a planned three-year expansion of the state's free preschool program for eligible four-year-olds which would be our grsp program and then finally i just want to thank the simon's pto for having me on their february 2nd meeting i also want to thank

173george elder he sent the board of education a very kind email on june 27th i also want to thank andrea benick for her email to the board of education regarding the recent sr-3 zoom meeting with stakeholders again very kind email very much appreciated thank you mr phil so i have a couple of things first mackenzie your courage takes my breath away really i have permission from my kids to share some of the things that adolescent mental health has been a real essential focus in our house for about 18 months now and i have permission to share whatever i want to and i'm still sitting here trying to decide how much to share so you coming publicly in social media and then coming and standing that microphone and being honest and transparent with us it really

174is going to change the trajectory of our community and you should be incredibly proud of yourself um that takes uh and uh man it takes us almost said something appropriate it takes a lot of spine to get up and do what you've done so thank you so much for that honesty i love the idea of bringing in a speaker or an educator someone who supports the students i think they need to be fully vetted i don't know anything about this person who's been recommended but i would encourage the administration to definitely look into him if not him someone else i'd like to encourage that we find someone who can not only support the students but can help educate the parents i didn't know which signs to look for when i saw i'm just this is

175not coming out without tears when i saw blood in a weird place on one of my kids pants i thought how did they get menstrual blood blood there right like that's just my initial assumption what i didn't know is that i was seeing blood from cutting i also didn't know that cutting and suicidal ideations are not only not the same thing but they're entirely different issues there's a lot for parents at least there was for me there was a lot that i just didn't know i don't think the school district can be all things to all people our teachers are not social workers we cannot expect them to be mental health providers we can help them know what the signs are that they need to look for in order to refer the child for mental

176health support so i think that um there's a lot here and and i don't want to put this on our teachers or our staff in a way that's inappropriate we are not set up both of my kids and myself we have three separate counselors we are really really lucky to have three providers our school system is not set up to provide that kind of support to our students nor should we but we can be a conduit to get the help for the students that they need my second thing mrs hobbs when she spoke i thought how did she see my notes like the the taking the politics out of what's happening here is huge there is and we all know there's an enormous political divide out there that is polarizing our country and our state

177it cannot polarize our school system this is not a political place we are not here to to have political agendas we are here to serve our students our students do not care for the most part what our political agendas are and we really need to get past or come back from the us versus them mentality that is starting to creep in to our our community and to our board into our school system there's no us in them there's just our students and our teachers and our staff and they need our support in a very undivided way if you pull everyone on here pick any two people up here and ask us about all the issues that our school district faces you will find something we disagree about every one of us there's nobody on this

178panel that i agree with 100 on all issues it doesn't mean that we can't work together to make our district the best that it possibly can be and i really really encourage our community to refocus on the students because it's the only reason we're here it's the only reason we're here and my last thing is way more simple um mr gearbest should i collect the books to get them back to the the safe is not enough books to get them back to the buildings or is that something that you can you get them to me i can okay i can get them right so just a reminder to everyone to hand in your book thank you miss landing him i guess i'll go next um i want to thank paddock and the teachers um who

179came tonight to present about the great things that are happening in paddock there are always wonderful things happening in paddock it's just such a great warm loving environment and i'm very happy to see that despite challenges that they're back to doing what they do best and i want to congratulate our two little presenters um about the kindness campaign and the pto i think that is the best idea i've seen out of a pto in a really long time um so i'm very proud of the girls who came to present i'm proud of the pto and just thank you to everything that's happening at paddock i want to thank everyone who applied to the participate in the communications committee i know that that's also a step because you don't know what what who's going to end

180up on the committee what the focus is going to be how much time it's going to take so i appreciate everyone that was willing to put their hat in the ring and then everyone who agreed to accept an appointment to the committee your time and focus are really appreciated i want to thank the members of our community that attended the esser presentation and provided feedback um i know that that particular meeting was required by law but it's a great example of two-way communication and provided an opportunity for community members to provide feedback to the district and so i'm just very grateful to all of those who actually took advantage of that opportunity and provided the feedback i think at our last meeting i talked about ways in which we could provide our teachers with the

181tools that they need to help deal with some of the dei issues that we've been kind of asking them to think about and so i'm going to ask again if we can reach out to our de and i team to see if they have identified any professional development already that can be brought in to help our teachers with what can be a very tricky you know subject to talk and deal with i want to lastly thank our students mackenzie and madison right i know i was going to call her layla but that's her sister i know but thank you both for coming thank you everyone who came to support them um mental health issues they're very real and you guys are right they can't be seen and so that they often get overlooked and they're

182difficult to talk about and i've often praised students in our community who live their truth and tonight mackenzie you lived your truth way out loud and it takes a lot of bravery to be able to do that and so i really commend you for doing it and i guarantee you made a difference in at least one person's life tonight you absolutely did and so kudos to you um and you know just keep saying it it's okay to not be okay right as long if we keep saying it and it becomes our mantra it will become the norm and then these issues will be talked about a lot more often and we won't require you guys to come here and tell us adults what's going on so thank you all of you thank you mr i'd

183also like to also take the opportunity to thank the students that spoke tonight hopefully your courage is what someone who needs it heard and you strengthen them to help them come forward i want to thank mrs allen for giving us a resource that we can tap into i plan on checking that out and we'll see if it's something that is available for more of the adults in our community i want to thank paddock i know i said it last time but you didn't realize how much you missed seeing seeing those people in the presentations um in fact i have to i know i've had a conversation with mrs macchio and i think one with mr sislow about the um read around in downtown milan and i had suggested that maybe i could order a couple

184of construction ornaments from frankenmuth that we could the board of education could have a free drawing for one for each week and as paddock was talking i was thinking and i could have be kind put on each one of them so it's like sparked all these things so a big thank you to them thank you miss geiger miss freight oh i'm good thank you i also want to thank the students for coming this evening mental health issues are real there's no doubt about it um just the conversation there is there are no good solutions out there i mean it is it's a huge it's a huge issue um so the fact that we just we just need to continue to talk about it um i appreciate you guys bringing your stories forward i know i

185know they're real i know that there's many others that have stories like that as well so and i agree mrs landing him summed it up very well um just exactly what she said so i'll just say ditto to what she said um and i it is it is refreshing to see uh paddock here and those two fine students introducing that program hopefully we are turning a corner and we can start to see some more fruits of what we are we're trying to accomplish for every everybody here in our community so any other questions or comments meetings adjourned at 9 49. you