001We'll be starting in about 10 seconds or so once we get the thumbs up from Ben Goodman. We have the thumbs up from Ben Goodman, Good Evening friends I'd like to call to order the Board of Education meeting of May 13th, 2025 uh all standing as you are able we will start with the pledge of allegiance led by the inimitable Grace Oberski. Thank you Grace I told you it wouldn't be terribly hard She asked us to say the two words and the rest of you just chime right in it's like you've you've heard it before right uh I'd like to pass over uh the microphone to Superintendent Laatsch to to uh recognize a few interesting folks this evening okay we're starting with the fabulous Grace Oberski who is in the Daughters of the American Revolution
002Good Citizen Award recipient and we're going to start by telling you what that's all about the good citizens award and scholarship contest created in 1934 is intended to encourage and reward the co qualities of good citizenship the award recognized and rewards high school seniors who possess the qualities of dependability service leadership and patriotism their home schools and communities these students are selected by their teachers and peers because they demonstrate these qualities to an outstanding degree and I've been working with Grace for quite a while now on the foundation for Selen area schools and I can assure you she is excellent at supporting all these um skills and and qualities uh the program is only open to students whose schools are accredited and good standing with their state board of education only one student per year
003may be honored as a school's good citizen us citizenship is not required additional rules and guidelines can be obtained by contacting your local DA chapter so that's some of the requirements once a student is chosen as their school's D.O.A.M. good citizen the student is invited to participate in the scholarship portion of the program consists of a personal statement and essay and participation in the scholarship program is optional scholarships are awarded to essay winners at the chapter state division and national levels so at this point we'd like to welcome up Sharon our DAR good citizens chap local chapter um who is going to present Grace with this prestigious award and yep step to the podium and we're going to make sure the green light is on so that you all can present right there is it
004is the light is the green light on push all right just soft spoken it's not yeah help her out was gonna double check ah okay it looked like it was on right okay is in in case that that didn't come through um I'm here representing the Sarah Caswell Angel Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution and we are very happy and pleased to present this award to Grace she exemplifies all of the qualities of a good citizen and she has a wonderful academic record and um her participation in sports and community activities is outstanding so Grace on behalf of D thank you very much thank you you guys have been amazing we do want to do a picture with the board we're gonna do a lot of pictures today okay so our board's going to
005head over here as they say on TV but wait there's more okay next we are here to honor the 2025 state champion Seline High School boys swim and dive the 2025 Seline boys swim and dive team completed another very successful season representing Selen High School by winning the MH MHSAA Division 1 swimming and diving state championship on March 13th the Hornets led by captains Jonah Bentley Connor Luritzen Nathaniel Sarmment and Diego Valdez earned the program's fifth state championship which is incredible they continued the 16-year streak of finishing six or higher at the MHSA finals on route to this impressive accomplishment several Hornets earned awards the Michigan Interscolastic Swim Coaches Association All State Ty Lorettson Connor Lorettson Diego Valdez and Jonah Bentley Nathaniel Sarmment Carter Mitten Isaac Adanon and Brilan May the National Intercolastic Swim Coaches
006Association All-American Awards tyler Ritson Connor Luritson Diego Valdez Jonah Bentley Nathaniel Sarmment Carter Mitten Isaac Adanon and Brilan May the MHSAA individual state champions Diego Valdez won the 100 butterfly and Isaac Adan won the 200 IM and the 100 breaststroke and the MISCA swim coach of the year the incredible Todd Brunty the team achieved all this through hard work dedication a commitment to each other and a longstanding expectation to represent their families peers district and community to the best of their ability also of note the boys swim and dive has a cumulative unweighted GPA of 3.7 and a weighted GPA of 3.9 which shows you their demonstration both in the classroom and the pool i'd also like to recognize Connor who will be swimming next year for San Diego or Sagenov Valley State and Diego
007who will be swimming for Xavier University next year in college congratulations to this outstanding group of student athletes you made us all very proud and we're so thrilled to have Coach Bundy with us today as well so let's give everyone a warm and we're thrilled to have so many of you here today what we'd like to do next is have the swimmers and divers line up um going this way we're going to start here at the podium and we want each swimmer and diver to come up to the podium and tell us your name and then tell us what events you competed in and then we want the coaches to follow at the end and introduce themselves and then we're going to gather over here for a big group shot which we're going to figure
008out how to fit everybody in so if we can just literally have all the students come up and let's just start by lining up there and and then let's let's kind of make the line going that way we're get we're getting good at these recognitions and knowing how to do it and then Yeah so we'll make sure that the green light is on right there and Yep and just let's just start learning who you all are go right ahead hello my name is Nathaniel Sarmment um I'm a senior captain uh for the 2425 uh season and at the state meet I swam the 200 freestyle the 100 freestyle i also was in the relay of the 400 freestyle and the 200 freestyle thank you so much for having us all right my name is Connor
009Lorson senior captain here for the 2024 2025 season i swam 200 IM 100 breast and I was on the medley relay uh hi I'm Diego Valdez i was also one of the senior captains um at the state meet I swam the 200 IM the Hunter Butterfly and then I was also part of the medley relay and the 400 free relay my name is Jonah Bentley i was also a senior captain and at the state meet I swam the 50 free the 100 free the 200 free relay and the 400 free relay uh I'm Gabriel Romero i'm a junior and I swam the 100 free i'm Will Lovelin um I was a senior and I swam the 100 butterfly and 2 IM i'm Joseph Rosales i'm a sophomore and I competed in the one meter diving
010i'm Isaac Adan and I'm a sophomore and I competed in the 200 IM 100 breast 200 and 400 free relay i'm Tyler i'm a sophomore i competed in the 100 back five free and two medley relay uh I'm Jack Min i'm a junior and I competed in the 500 freestyle and the 100 fly i'm Jason Oyama i'm a sophomore and I competed in the 100 yard fly i'm Carter Mitten i'm a sophomore and I competed in one meter diving i'm Brilan May i'm a sophomore i competed in the 100 and 200 freestyle and the 200 and 400 freestyle relay uh I'm Eli Zachik i'm a junior and I competed in the 100 fly in the 2M i'm Caleb Summers i'm a senior and I swim the 100 breathstroke i'm Thomas I'm Thomas Gunnerson i'm a
011junior and I swim the two and 500 free i'm Donovan Darnell i'm a sophomore and I compete in the one meter diving i'm Carson Razac i'm a freshman and I compete in the 50 free and 100 fly i'm Carara Smith i'm the dive coach and I had the privilege and honor to be part of this great team and work with these awesome divers who qualified for state meet all right well I'm Todd Brunty head coach uh thank you for having us here tonight appreciate all the uh recognition from the board it really means a lot and I'm so proud of these guys and I am the recipient of all their gifts that they give me and I've been really happy and I said a year ago somewhere around a year ago I told you we'd
012try and be back here and win one i think it's time to say that again try and get back here again next year so you can do this again so thank you very much one more hand jackie Jackie there you go one two three there you go all right next time Oh my god dr lotch is there more yes we we have one more fabulous person to honor tonight and that is Steve Vasseloff i want to formally honor and recognize Steve Vasseloff the Michigan High School Esports League Coach of the Year thank you i have a few things to read here uh so the Selen High School esports team had an incredible fall season winning their first state championship in Mario Kart as well as runner up and top four finishes in Valerant top eight
013in Smash Brothers and top 16 in Overwatch this spring the team began the season with a perfect record and after three weeks that earned them the number one spot in the USA Today National Power 25 esports rankings the spot was held through week six with the final team rankings for the season still being determined although I think that's kind of progressing now every team made a deep run in the playoffs this spring and freshman Hunter or finished the first season at or finished this first season as state runnerup in Madden the team also had multiple all-state players this year including Marco Matthews in Mario Kart Dominic Matthews and Shepard Orwig and Valerant Ben Berg twice in Smash Brothers Anthony Williams and Braden Marian and Overwatch and Owen Block in Rocket League there are also many
014seniors many seniors and I find this very impressive continuing their esports career in college next year with some earning scholarships mr vaseloff worked hard to help get the esports program off the ground at Selen High School he worked with our technology department to ensure more robust gaming computers in order for our students to compete at a very high level he's been a tremendous motivator for our students and has brought them together to create one of the best esports teams in Michigan and beyond in addition like to thank assistant coach Mr pickicket and parent volunteer extraordinaire Stephie Stephanie Stall who've done an excellent job at supporting the students in so many ways so here's to Mr vaselop this year's MHEL esports coach of the year thank you very much now you could say a few things
015here but he's also going to present with the CAD program and tell a little bit about esports later yeah we're in a double dip so I'll I'll do the esports we'll we'll speak to the CAD students okay sounds good okay thanks thanks thank you very much Mr vess well done wow you got it all worked out photo ops are on the horizon thank you uh public comment time uh Betty Yonke is there are there any slips there is no uh one lined up for public comment i do have a response uh to previous public comment in fact I have a response to 140 uh comments that were made over the last two weeks as we were interviewing candidates for our next uh Selen Area School Superintendent and um so as I said 140 comments came
016in electronically and on paper and we also had on the first night about 937 views of the six candidates the first two nights and on the second round we had well over 1,200 views from the community taking this very uh seriously as we took the job seriously as well resulting in Dr rachel Kowalsski who will be coming here uh we're hoping July 1st uh she is very very excited i've been in touch with her i've been watching her Facebook feed as well uh we're we're we're Facebook friends now and uh she is so excited on a second day after uh we offered her the job pending contract negotiations she already had her s her Seline uh uh t-shirt sweatshirt so she's very excited and looking forward for you all to get to know her so
017thank you very much uh members of the community who paid so much attention to the uh process uh revisions and approval of the agenda please items can be added or deleted from the meeting agenda or the order items changed at the request of an individual board member and we need to approve it uh are there any recommended changes uh thanks Michael i'd like to uh please approve the agenda as revised adding item F a recommended motion to approve the final draft of the superintendent contract for Dr rachel Kowalsski just want to make a note to that and we have that in our emails is that correct uh that's correct but it wasn't part of the packet is that correct also yeah just to to add a little definition and thank you to uh Carol Diglio
018who's been working with us a lot on this um we heard back from our lawyers this morning um so it was emailed this afternoon um to the trustees who hadn't been able to see that final draft yet thank you um all right then motion to approve the agenda as revised so move is that Tim do we have a second i I think I was the first and then Tim was probably the second if I made the motion to revise it all righty we'll do it that way since you spoke on it just press the go button sorry all in favor please say I i post i Yes we can have a discussion okay um unless there's some serious urgency to do it tonight i did not get a chance to review it um I received
019the email today while I was at work okay and I have not had time to look at it all right well perhaps uh is there during F at least we can have a discussion about it uh and discuss any throw out any clarifying questions thank you i appreciate that uh so are you does your vote still stand or no we haven't voted yet all in favor please say I i opposed hearing none thank you so much for that revision i appreciate that thank you Darcy Burwick secretary Burwick uh we have a student showcase tonight now both our student reps today texted me separately and were unable to uh to introduce this group so I'm going to let Mr steve Vasseloff to do the introductions well thank you so much for having us we've got the
020um SWWC CAD class here and we've got a lot of the students who competed in multiple different competitions but most notably the Skills USA competitors so we've got a little slideshow that I set up here to kind of talk about what occurred in the CAD program this year and if you want to go ahead and take a look so we we did a number of competitions this year um the first one that we got involved in was the automotive society of body engineers competition which is a new one for us um I had one student who got involved in it last year on his own and took the initiative to do that Aiden Shaes and ended up finishing sixth in that competition and he said I had a great experience we should all do this
021so we all hopped on board and we competed in this and we had um nine students place so there's two different competitions they give out awards through eighth place and we had nine students place in the top eight in both categories um one of our champs was Micah Gray come on up here Mic there we go and he did extremely well in that competition and earned some awards on that and um if I'm not mistaken we've got Aiden Sha's drawing up there that won some awards they had to design either a hood scoop or they had to design a truck bed accessory that was going to hold things down so as you can see I've got kind of a write up on there that I'm sure that you can take a look at but if
022you want to go and go to the next slide I've got some pictures up there of the awards banquet and the list of all the winners that we have up there and I actually have your drawing up there i couldn't find it try to get that but regardless that was a great thing so with the nine students that placed I was awarded the ASB teacher of the year which um I'm going to be honest with you I did not know they awarded until I was at the banquet which was very very flattering i might have dressed slightly nicer had I known that but either way I was very flattered to receive that award so that was our first big competition of the year then next up is Skills USA and so with Skills USA that
023is probably the biggest one we do that is a state and national level competition um I have to give a shout out to Jay Roberts of Lelay Bear because they actually became a sponsor for us we've got a number of students standing here right now that actually complete drawings for Lelay Bear for their Taiwan division so that if a part breaks instead of having to order it from Lebe and have it shipped over they can actually manufacture the part themselves based on our student drawings so um the funds from Lelay Bear allowed us to take 10 students this year so we had six compete in architectural drafting and four compete in technical drafting and we swept both competitions um did extremely well um a little bit of history we are now I've been here 12
024years now in Selen that's doesn't seem that long but 12 years um we've been state champions nine times in technical drafting and we've been national champions twice in technical drafting um just last year alone Nate Yonak come on up here nate won a state championship in technical drafting and finished third in the nation as a junior in technical drafting in architectural drafting we've been seven time state champs and for the last four years we have been top 10 in architectural drafting as well um this summer we'll have Abby Alexander was our state champion in technical drafting so she'll be representing Michigan at nationals in Atlanta so we'll be heading out there at the end of June as well as Izzy Seedlick who couldn't make it here tonight but those will be our two students representing
025our program there but you can see all the students up there they did really really well um it's kind of amazing to be able to say to our students that even a student that placed sixth place to be able to say had your classmates not been there you would have been a state champion so when we when we go there and we sweep it's it's a very flattering thing to be able to say that to my students and it's really a testament to their hard work and buying into the program if you want to go ahead and go to the next slide what we have on here is actually um this is the drawing that had to be produced so you can see the names of the students that placed first through sixth in the
026state um I believe there was 14 or 15 competitors in that competition um they had to design an ADA compliant duplex townhouse and it had to adhere to zoning codes and be aesthetically pleasing and have an outdoor living space that was shared so this is actually Izzy's drawings that won her a state championship i believe she scored about a 95% on that and as I said she'll be representing Michigan this summer and on the next slide we actually have Aby's drawings right here and like I said Abby took first place in the state and will be representing Michigan at nationals as well um they had to create a set of drawings for a miter saw adjuster so they actually have about maybe five six hours to sit down and do all these drawings so that
027these parts could be reproduced and manufactured and it was extremely impressive to see the students these four students that competed also competed last year the order was a little bit different in finishes but they are an extremely tight-knit group but also extremely competitive and to see them drive each other to that i believe last year the four students were separated by two percentage points out of a thousand point contest and then this year is about 5% but the consistency is really incredible by these students and what they're able to accomplish in a short amount of time and on to the next one then we just found this out actually the students found this out today we also do another competition called MITES this is a project based one that's built into my curriculum every student
028takes a part of it i'm a huge fan of competition i feel like our students are competing whether they like to compete or not whether they know it or not they're competing for college spots they're competing for jobs they're competing for everything now and in the future so with MIT I have every student get involved um we actually turned in 180 different projects into over 40 different categories and we get a plaque if we finish top three in the state in that category and this year we broke our own record and we received 104 plaques um by mathematics 25% of what we turn into this competition can't place we typically turn in four things per category only three can get a plaque so we eliminate a lot of stuff ourselves by defeating ourselves in the
029competition but this year was really amazing our record before that was 85 plaques so to beat that record was really amazing we had 36 individual state champions uh 35 runner-ups 33 third places and then we won three divisional awards meaning that that was deemed the best project in that category um across the board so really really incredible stuff and all these students competed in that as well so I think on the next page I just have some pictures of the students some of them are standing right here but these are some of their projects and the awards that they won and if you go ahead and go to the next slide as well I've got a couple more pictures and you can see just some of the amazing work that they did and then I
030added in a couple more slides just to give you a little bit better idea of the things they produce so in architecture it could be just about anything it could be a topographical map it could be an interior design board it could be an interior rendering or an exterior rendering of a home or a set of plans so a house could be constructed on the next slide you'll see that we have some of the technical drafting stuff um I had to highlight some of Jonah's stuff here because Jonah did an amazing job with the robotic arm and as well as the manifold exhaust but we can do all kinds of different things from renderings to technical drawings so that parts can be manufactured yep and we have students that are going to colleges all over
031the country a lot of them on scholarship which is great in technical drafting we have students that are going to Michigan Tech University of Michigan Michigan State numerous other ones um architecture is one that I really like to highlight i feel like Seline has a love of Ann Arbor and a love of uh the University of Michigan we actually had three students both last year and this year get into the Toddman College of Architecture and Urban Planning which only allows about 60 kids per year into that program so the idea that three students came from our program this year as well as last year really speaks highly to that but not all students are actually headed there because we found some really good opportunities at other universities like Cincinnati Lawrence Tech LSU so we've got
032some really good opportunities for these students but overall it's incredible what this group has accomplished i wish I could bring them all in and I don't know if you know this or not but we've got about 70 CTE CAD students so there are year-long students taking CAD classes we have about 70 of them next year we've got three full classes running so it's some really exciting stuff and exciting times for my program mr bass and and team the board may have a question or two first my only a couple of my comments are that's a lot of lumber 104 plaques yes thank you it is um when I when I walk out I typically have to I have to have a cart i take a cart my wife actually had to take the cart this
033year but it's very kind of her to collect those plaques for me because I actually had to go get the esports award so I had to leave her there to pick up projects but yes it's um it's a it's a very exciting time very nice to to count those plaques out and see how many we can get each year fantastic so do we want to do picture first with this group and then you can talk about these sure absolutely well sure if um if the board does have any quick questions though of of the team or the uh the CAD group anybody have any questions for the students we love That's what I mean yeah put them on the spot sure um I had the pleasure of substituting a few times in your classroom and
034uh the energy that you create and the inspiration that you instill in these students is pretty amazing you have some of the the coolest kids and I say that in the way that they are cool because they are excited to be there and they are excited about the work that they're doing um so it seems like you have a lot of repeats that you've got kids coming back and back um anyone want to say what it is that brings them back every year it's an easy question I promise um I think CAD is the place where I found what I wanted to do in the future like I knew I always wanted to do engineering right um but CAD is where I found really where my path was but not only I found where my
035path was but I found the confidence that I could follow that path too and then also just like the friendships that you make you go in there you don't really know anyone but you come out and you know so many people and all of that you're really close to them too thank you and I will add too that um our art students in Selena are amazing uh and I want to include uh the artwork that you all create because Mr mr bassoff was very kind enough to loan out some drawings uh for display in the library was that Aby's the the Millennium Falcon was amazing it's a really great job others great um yeah let's take a picture thank you appreciate that how's my hair one two three i think that's me then doing the
036two laps to hear that yep i'm I'm back up for esports to talk about the accomplishments of the esports team this year i know you got a little info about that a little bit earlier um but really it's amazing to think that this is only our second year competing so we have two seasons per school year and we just concluded our um spring season this past week and it was a really amazing run so I've got a little breakdown and Dr loch gave a lot of that information right there but what I think people don't really always grasp is how big esports has gotten in Michigan and if you look there are 203 high schools that are competing in Michigan currently so you've got 203 schools 848 teams and then you have 3,777 students in
037the state of Michigan competing in esports currently and we're one of the newer programs on the block and it's been a really really exciting thing to see these kids come together and learn sportsmanship and working as a team and leadership um I've said it before and I'll say it again but I believe that the esports team is one of the most student- centered and studentled programs because I can attribute my CAD teachings to these student success i cannot say that I made these esports students particularly better at the game that they play i created an environment for them to get better in but once again I am not the person who taught them which button to click and when that is not my role my role is to basically put them in an environment where
038they can thrive and learn from each other so if we go to the next slide you can see that we won our first state championship in Mario Kart in the fall so that's the Mario Kart team and that was at um Michigan State which was really exciting to have that hosted there michigan State has one of the most amazing collegiate esports programs in the country so it's a really widely known one and they do extremely great things and if you go to the next on Valerant we were state runnerup and final four in that so we had two different teams competing in that title um for two years in a row those two teams had to face each other in the state semi-finals which is very very interesting so it was exciting to know that
039one team was going to make the finals but always a bummer to know that one team wasn't so it's a good spot to be in though on the next slide you can see that we were top eight in the state in Smash Brothers and top eight in the state in Overwatch and then if you look here we actually had a new title this season where it was Marvel Rivals now I'm still learning how that one works myself but we ended up having three different teams competing in that um that was an Eastern region game meaning that we competed in the Eastern time zone um not just in the state of Michigan it was a pilot year for that title um there was over 275 teams competing in that and our teams all finished in the
040top 16 except for there's a rule you can only have two teams make the playoffs so our other team was six and two record-wise and was unable to make the playoffs because of that rule but we had an amazing run in that title as well so we're looking forward to that to being a Michigan title next year so we can hopefully win a state championship in that and then in Rocket League we were top 16 now I have to talk about this team because this was just a phenomenal one these were three soccer players who came to me and they said "You know what high school's wrapping up we want to try something new we want to try something different and we want to form a Rocket League team." And I said "Okay are you
041guys you guys any good at the game?" They're like "Yeah we're pretty good." Well they were ranked third in the state going to the playoffs uh they only lost one regular season match um here's another really interesting tidbit is that Owen Blocks in the middle right there i got an email from Men's Health magazine and Owen Block is being featured in um the the top 25 in 25 high school graduates for athletics so I thought it was really amazing that we had that opportunity to have that showcased and that's actually going to be in the print and online version so I'm really excited to get a copy of that when it comes out um but that's just one of those moments where you're having a conversation with someone that you never quite thought you'd have
042and it was just amazing to see esports highlighted and spotlighted in that fashion um and then we have Hunter or our our freshman phenom who walked in and said "Can we do Madden i noticed you don't have any Madden players but could I could I play Madden for you?" And I said "Well absolutely we'll get you all set up." So every single day he brings his PlayStation 5 and he plugs it in and he practices with the team around him and he went on an amazing run um he actually finished second in the state so state runner up but he had to face the returning state champion number one seed and already declared player of the year in the semi-finals and beat him so it's just an amazing run to see this freshman come in
043and sit down and do that um he's a football player as well so he plays football in the fall and he'll play Madden in the spring for us so just really really exciting to have that connection which has been great yeah and then as um Dr lot said we had numerous all-state honors so some really amazing stuff and then I put some information about the men's health magazine article that'll be coming out soon but really amazing to see that all state honor for that many students and then the part that I'm probably most proud of would be the idea that these students are continuing on with this into college so we've had over $25,000 in scholarships offered this year we didn't take every single offer that was offered but it was really amazing um for
044Coach Pick and I to be able to be with Ben Burke on signing day and have esports represented at signing day was really amazing so he'll be playing um Smash Brothers for Adrian College next year owen Block is going to be has a closed tryyout scheduled with Michigan State to play Rocket League for them um we've got numerous students going to Michigan Tech and we already have some former students at Michigan Tech playing esports currently um and then we've gotten offers from LTU as well so Lawrence Tech has a prominent esports program that we're hoping to send kids to in the future um as Dr latch said um because of our great uh run we were ranked first in the nation after three weeks we maintained that spot after six weeks and now we're just
045waiting for the final season rankings to come out and if we hold on to that spot that would be great but I'm pretty content with where our team has gotten to already this season and really amazing to to read that article um I think I actually got a text message um before I read that and I was like "Wait what?" And I looked and I felt a little bit of fear to be honest with you because to get to that level and and try to maintain that is is pretty daunting uh for us and for the kids and because of the amazing run that the students have had this year I received the uh MHSL coach of the year award and then I just want to give a little bit of a shout out to
046some people um first off like the the students um you know when esports first started there was a stigma surrounding it it's kind of that idea of like well well what is this who's involved in this do I feel comfortable getting involved in this and as time has gone on it's really become this amazing as I said student centered and studentled program uh that I could not be more proud of i've got to give some thanks to Jason Picket my assistant coach who does an amazing job with our students especially over in our Nintendo room we call it we have two different rooms we run titles out of and Coach Picket works in the Nintendo room and is just phenomenal with those athletes um I want to give a shout out to Brian Puffer and
047Ashley House with community ed they have helped me along the way since day one really get this thing up and running because we did not know how to categorize it it's too big to be a club it's not under the MHSA yet but it will be eventually um and until then it's uh housed under community ed in our district and they've done an amazing job helping me with that our entire tech team so I'd like to thank Jay personally and Elijah Newton who helps me out all the time um to get these titles up and running to get through security stuff that you have to go through to get the titles to run there's anti-che software all these things that our computers are programmed to not play nicely with so they've helped me greatly getting
048the ball rolling with that and I am extremely appreciative of that as well as to Stephanie Stall and the parent squad I call them we do some outside tournaments that we go to and these parents come just like you would in any other sport they've got the the tote bags full of snacks and food and they settle in for the entire day to support our athletes and their students um I also want to thank um Teresa and Steve for the support that they gave when we first came up with this idea to run this as well as the school board because it doesn't seem like that long ago we were in if I'm not mistaken a Zoom meeting and I was applying for a grant to really help kickstart this and getting up and running
049so I appreciate your approval on that we would not be standing here right now if that hadn't happened so thank everybody for the support and know how much that we appreciate it thank you very much yeah I appreciate that we we had in the early days two of your students explaining trying to explain to us old-timers what Smash Brothers was all about and those machines that you're using are not your grandpa's computer that is for sure water cooled and I should stop you know next do we have any questions from the crowd from the board i have one sure dare say of course I have a question um just a couple things um yes so my son started when your first year and I felt like at that time you had a lot of interest
050i feel like visually for me when I walked in this year maybe double the participation can you speak to how many kids you had from first to second year it varies by season so we actually took a little bit of a dip in numbers so what I noticed is we actually have a lot more students that are doing multi-titles but um last year I think when it first came out we had a lot of seniors who really expressed a lot of interest and said I really want to try this and I I think that's kind of a theme we're noticing is we have seniors that get interested and they say "You know what i I think I'm going to give this a go." Like we saw with the Rocket League team um so we've got
051a really strong senior class this year as well really strong senior class last year um but really just to see the student involvement across the board not just coming in and doing one title but playing multiple titles if you were to look through the pictures that I had in the slideshow you'll see a lot of repeat faces in the different titles and they're just truly amazing with each other and at the titles they play in thank you and thank you for all the work that you do to make it happen thanks well thank you very much Mr vassel thank you so much thank you see you next year we have a few action items ahead of us uh now I'd like to entertain a motion to approve the resolution designating someone as a representative for
052this of this board for the bianial election of the board of Intermediate School District on Monday June 2nd 2025 and someone else as an alternate in the event that the designated representative is unable to attend could I have a motion please am I picking names well we're going to have a discussion about the names and fill those in after then I'll have a may make that motion then the motion is made i can second it michael Stein and Steven seconding so let's discuss this briefly on June 2nd uh two years ago in fact uh I was our representative and Jennif Jenny Jennifer Miller was our alternate and I actually needed the alternate to show up i couldn't make it that night as the last minute so I'm happy to go up and be a representative
053but I if you concur with that that's great and I am looking also for uh somebody else so this is your chance volunteers just to step up and be the alternate i'm off on Mondays i can do that i can be the alternate okay thank you uh the chance that you will be is slim to nil at this point i'm quite ready to go up and anxious to be there it's going to be an interesting election uh so Lauren Gold is the one insert and the first one is Michael McVey and if there's no more discussion all in favor please say I I opposed thank you so much so thank you very much Lauren for stepping up for that i'd like to entertain a motion to approve the TRUN bond sale resolution dated May 6
0542025 for the sale of bonds at a total purchase price of 59,998,52068 so moved to thank you second thank you Tim Austin I believe um I don't know if there's a discussion any questions no oh Steve would like to add something dr l would like to add something yeah just thank um Miranda for all her work with this you would not believe how many people are involved in this so I'm watching the flow back and forth with emails and there are 20 different people involved this is a very complicated process and somehow Miranda puts it all together and made it happen with the even better rate for for the district so she did a great job with this are there any questions for Miranda no hearing none all in favor please say I i i
055opposed thank you 70 uh I'd like to entertain a motion to approve the updates made to policy 5540 interrogation of students as requested by the district administration and submitted by the policy committee so moved gold thank you second Berwick thank you uh Lauren could you walk us through any of these uh changes this is technically the second reading then and final for this um I think you know as uh for those watching we were updating um the policy regarding when uh students are um I hate the word questioned when CPS is involved with a student um and there's also separately mention of when the police have to be involved for other reasons um the the part that we were most updating uh last time uh had to do with making sure that uh it was
056part of the policy that the principal or other designated guidance counselor be present during uh those interviews except when uh expressly prohibited uh by CPS i I can answer questions i don't know if are there any questions well it sounds like we're ready to put this to a vote then um all in favor of the motion please say I i opposed well great thank you very much miss Yonke will send that up to Niola then and like to entertain a motion to approve the purchase of 500 Chromebooks through Trafera as submitted by Jay Gman director of technology trafera is an approved vendor on the REMY Consortium bid contract just looking for a motion so move thanks M should we have on there the um amount that was missing i have the amount right here it's
057164,500 i I think what Trusty Austin was saying is that typically in the in the motion we have the should be part of Yeah it should it should be part of that so Miss Yonke will add the amount of 164,500 in the appropriate spot there yeah that just was an oversight I think this time thank you very much for that call now do we have a motion tim still stand yep do we have a second second is Thank you very much i think there might be some discussion for Jay and uh about this particular purchase or any questions from the board uh I I just have one uh what's the expected life cycle for these five years does that mean the current Chromebooks are at the end of the five years the old ones are
058also five years or they're actually approaching six okay what do we Oh sorry about that what do we do with the Chromebooks after I mean 500 Chromebooks could they go somewhere for somebody to use that they do is Okay yep um so um we don't throw them out we recite We have a recycling company that will take them from us and then they usually give them to other school districts in need that can't afford their own and help give them some Chromebooks that they can use they'll go through them make sure they give them the good ones the ones that are swollen with batteries or batteries that don't work anymore they'll discard your use for parts okay awesome that's what I was hoping was happening with them we also keep some of them for ourselves
059because these things like the the screens are interchangeable with the new model so we'll keep a few on hand some of those that don't work and use them for so we can do self insurance and replacement parts jay um I had reached out today because uh I guess I should have been but was not aware that um we have a oneto one um young fives to fifth graders they each have a Chromebook is that what I'm understanding with one well um prek through second grade is one to one on iPads and then in third grade we switch them over to Chromebooks three through five they have classroom sets of devices and we have one device available per student per class so they can all use one and not have to share and I guess before
060I voted for this as somebody who's really really really intensely concerned about uh screens and young kids I I feel like this is my opportunity to really have an impact or at least understand better um why we need that many iPads and computers in school for young kids um and I'm not saying we don't i just wasn't really aware that that was the situation and I would personally like to have a better understanding beyond what we can maybe talk about tonight as to um how and I appreciate you know it was late me getting back to Cara and I I just haven't had a chance to review things but I guess I would just like to have a better understanding of in what ways we have every student with an iPad it just I'm just
061concerned about that um and I'm concerned about contributing to something with my vote that I see as problematic frankly I I don't I just I would like to know more sure i asked Cara to come up here so she can explain more of the curriculum side of it yes and I I just um to clarify for the board at large I did share an email with Dr this um morning regarding what our district journey has been related to our onetoone devices so we have been onetoone uh for probably a decade by this point in time and being onetoone does not imply that the students are on a device all day long they have access to the technology in the classroom because we of course in Seline we believe in the power of technology and the
062opportunities that the technology can provide while also balancing uh the importance of peer relationships developmentally appropriate learning um them being fully present and not on devices because there's so many other important skills they have to learn um and so a decade ago I will tell you being a classroom teacher who myself I was probably one of the first ones to bring cell phones into the classroom and try on and pilot and see what that looked like and then be a onetoone classroom and then a nextgen classroom that evolution um the district has been following the research and by the district the teaching and learning team has been following the research around specifically screen time as relates to child development um and device time as relates to learning so actually a couple of years ago we
063invited Dr jenny Roeski to speak to our families um in the fall she did that was at the recommendation of Trusty Gold and she is an expert in this area she came to speak to the families and in that moment it was October of 2023 I I said to my team and to some of the administrators I said "We we need to explore this we need to look more deeply into this research um so that we can critically examine our own practices as relates to instructional technology in the classroom for us what does that look like?" Uh Dr rodeski described it as what's on the plate how like healthy is the like you can put lots of food on a plate it doesn't necessarily make it a complete meal um so we started investigating screen
064time and we started investigating the types of uh digital licensing that we had and had access to um and so that journey has led us to this spring we convened a collaborative group of teachers who wanted to have this conversation about what does it look like we're starting with the earliest grades young 5 through three um what does it look like to be uh a student in 2025 in a classroom that we are still making sure has access to all of the technology and some of those opportunities that are avenues for equity um as well as productivity and creativity um and learning that because it is a part of technology is a part of our our world um while also ensuring that we still have access to all the other things that we are we
065know are so important for child development so play um analog writing pencil paper coloring recess the things that children just need to be whole healthy human beings and so we met with that uh group of folks and we have drafted internal technology use guidelines for our elementary staff uh we did pre present this to them in August of 2024 we actually used a tool that Dr weski brought to my attention it's called the edtech triangle we had asked them in August 2024 to think about what kind of technology and how much they were using technology in their classrooms back then convened this group in the spring and now we've drafted internal guidance um that we are currently in the process of getting feedback on you haven't seen it yet even I did share and would
066be happy to share it with anybody here um to get your feedback on it um and we plan to roll this out in 2025 and that is the intention of really and I'd be happy to read a few of these um things on here uh you know really focusing on um time for play purposeful use of technology as a creative tool rich opportunities for talk and discussion um hands-on learning and medives with real games read alouds and shared reading experiences collaborative problem solving projects Those are aspirations for our K3 uh learners and technology should be complementing that not be it um and so that's some teaching we have to do into this um for the for the next couple of years because it's a little bit of a shift in mindset um from where we
067were a decade ago before we started following this research and really knowing and we didn't know or we didn't know then so that's where we're at with that journey um and it is important to note like we do have a number of um opportunities for our students curricularly that don't involve technology and many that do as well so there's a nice balance there and so having updated Chromebooks will go a really long way in supporting our teachers in the curriculum experiences they create for students so I'm happy to answer any other questions too dr l would like to add something yeah I just want to add that um you know last board meeting we heard uh an excellent MTSS presentation and that is really dialed in on the importance of the core foundational skills and
068and that is not something where we're saying okay and we're going to do all that through a technology lens it is really based on the importance of kids learning how to read and write and therefore to take it a step further Jackie and myself are in classrooms every week and if you ask me well how often when you're in the we'll talk early elementary grades here um young fives through third grade do you see that kids are on technology devices it's less than 20% of any observations that we're having and I my point is yes it's needed as a tool but in terms of magnitude it's not that um you know elementary classes are sort of you know kids just run and grab devices whenever they want to use it half class is using computers
069at various times it's it's not it doesn't look like that and I just want to assure you that it's a tool that's needed but we're very aware of the you know social emotional development of our students what social media is doing to some of our lags and and social skills and so to Cara's point um developing those guidelines over time has been very thoughtful and um understanding the ba the appropriate balance and the development appropriate nature of it um particular at the elementary level thanks appreciate that other other questions from and did you have more Dr b probably I I'm just still sorry I it's not that I don't trust that people are going forward with best intentions but in a situation where we're always talking about funding and making I've never voted against any
070like thing that has come up here for us to pay money toward for the students i just I think about a salary of a parapro or it just I'm just struggling with it i I'll just say that um and I I understand that it's being used in best practices but once the iPads are in a room once Chromebooks are in a room uh they get used and um I'm not saying that I don't think it's appropriate for our students to be on technology understand it's 21st century i just think most of them learn all the technology that they need on their own with an incredibly steep learning curve and I want students to have what they what they need but I'm just struggling to understand if we're trying to back off on the technology why
071we need to buy more of it and um yeah I'm just a little uncomfortable with it and especially when we're like negotiating salaries with teachers and it's a it's a budgetary line and um we you know I I just know from my own God I promised I wasn't going to talk about my kids i know about ch from children I know uh uh who are past this age that they come home seeing things on YouTube which is banned from their uh computers and and I know that we try to do our best and everything but they are very sneaky some people's children um I'm sure not everyone's and um you know we got impact we got really I thought telling input from a dad here in the district that I really appreciated who found out
072somehow to track his child's screen use on non-school stuff while in school and I just remain I consider it like a moral imperative to speak out and not that I think anyone's being immoral i know we all have best intentions but sometimes people can have good intentions and not be doing the right thing that's all I'll say um if I could just answer a couple speak to a couple of things you said first um sorry so right exactly first off it this is not coming from the general fund so it's not coming from any salary lines this is coming from bond fund um which is not able to be used for salaries so this is money that had already been pre-allocated or dedicated towards the replacement of devices and secondly it is just that it's
073not we're not purchasing more technology for them this is replacing existing technology in the classes um with the devices we have they would be managed by us and so they can only speaking to to how they get around things which I do agree they find ways to be sneaky and get around hopefully not in third grade but I do know that as they get older they they spend most of their time looking for that these are managed devices so we have I want to say complete control over what's allowed to be on them they can't install apps they can't install in extensions unless we've already gone through and approved them we've worked together as the ID and IT teams together to actually identify and reduce the number of extensions um and apps that are allowed
074for these to try and hone back exactly how much time is spent on this technology so we're we're really trying to make a focus especially in the upcoming years of reducing that amount of screen time but still providing the best experiences because again in 2025 there is the expectation that it's it's a digital world there are digital curriculum there are digital projects that students need to do in real time um that they can't do just on their own necessarily with with um pencil paper so for the parents who might be a little like me on this Cara can you just give me like one example of something our third graders would do on this or kids around the third grade not trying to put you on the spot like second third fourth grade in that
075age group like one thing they would do on this Chromebook that I might be like "Oh that's so cool." And can I give you an iPad example instead okay okay um so like I always think about this in an incredible uh project that one of our young fives classrooms did where they uh were looking at animal extinction in the biomes as part of their science uh curriculum and just exploring the the the world around them and so they created essentially advertisements of videos on their iPads to share about this animal that was going extinct the animal of their choice um and and created a a project around that to share with their families um it's highlighting and bringing awareness to the extinction so that would be an example of one um one that I was
076just informed of even today that they use is um in third grade I believe they do um like a tour around Michigan and so they make a digital tour that's going around visiting places in real time getting those updates and trying to keep current as they're showcasing the state and they do that on their Chromebooks and I'm sure there are many other examples as well um Jennifer Brad you had your hand up probably before me did that answer Oh your question okay all right perfect okay thank you for saying that yeah yeah yeah thank you for saying that because I was also curious um I I am also cognizant that we're in collective bargaining with our SEA right now and so I'm being mindful of spend um so thank you for for talking about that
077um I also share I love technology but I also share particularly at this age the real reinforcement of traditional play and getting kids outside doing maker space doing things um in the classroom um so I appreciate Lauren bringing that up because it's incredibly important when paired with with NextGen we used to call it i guess it's not really NextGen it's our gen but um so thank you um for talking about where the money's coming from and I do I do want to make sure to elevate the the teachers voices in this and the practitioners that they are you know because we're having these collaborative conversations because we're constantly striving for continuous improvement and that doesn't mean continuously like keeping up with the Joneses and technology and the fastest newest thing that's coming out being really
078thoughtful and intentional and purposeful about how we're using technology and the the professionals that our teachers are the structures and routines they create in their classrooms as Steve said it's not like whenever I'm in a classroom and technology is being used is being used in a really purposeful meaningful way um and I really respect the fact that we've worked collaboratively and the teachers work at their grade levels to continue to create great experiences in balance with um all the other things that we know are so important for development and they're continuing to be on this journey of thought with us because the research is changing pretty quickly and it certainly is if you've been here for a long time it's different than it was 10 years ago 15 years ago and I'm proud of our
079district for continuing to take on some of these challenging conversations and in this case being very willing and vulnerable to walk back perhaps some of the things that we've done in the past so just speaking to the responsibility and respect that we have for technology and the importance of the environments we're creating for our students that we're always minding that and looking to be better i really appreciate that all of that and I don't want you to take this or the teachers to take it as any kind of it's just something I'm really watching it's on our minds too so Dr gold I don't know if I'm out of line but I'm sure if you would ever want to visit and see what the classes are doing with the devices anyone here you're always welcome
080to come in we can set that up you can see some of the projects they're doing with this technology to to make good use of it or the balance between screen time and non-screen time thank you unless there's more from the group I'd like to put this to a vote so all in favor please say I i oppose nay one 61 thank you thank you and I'd like to sorry I'd like to entertain a motion to approve the purchase of 150 Mac mini computers with wired keyboards and monitors to replace the current devices in use in the iMac labs at Selen High School Middle School and Liberty in the amount of $140,92.50 as submitted by Jay Gman director of technology do I have a motion so move to Thank you support stubben jay Stubben thank
081you very much uh Jay what can you tell us about these machines uh same sort of deal uh these are 2019 machines so they are approach finishing up their sixth year um they are no longer supported for security updates these are lab devices that are used by students in uh middle school classes high school and Liberty where we have Mac labs what we're actually looking at doing this time again using bond dollars um that we are going to be replacing the iMacs that we've been using which is an all-in-one computer and um this time I'm actually going to replace them with Mac mini computers uh monitors keyboards the intention of this is going to be that the keyboard and the monitors are going to be more sustainable and stay with it past the fiveyear time
082frame of the computer so when actually comes time to replace this again um in the next cycle that we'll be spending even less to replace this um also at this time the Mac Mini computer is a less expensive not only less expensive than the iMacs but it's actually more powerful now so it's going to give the students a faster more reliable device um with the IMAX that we had purchased in 2019 we've noticed some storage issues some performance issues so these are going to correct and replace those while also keeping up with security updates so the students can use them mostly like in our CAD labs um our video production where they need high quality high resolution devices um that these computers are are really well known for any questions from the board great well
083hearing none let's put this to a vote please all in favor say I i opposed hearing no opposition 70 thank you very much Mr gman and thank you company uh now we're on to the additional uh item F approval of the draft and uh I'm it's going to take me a few seconds to dig up the copy of the contract but if you want to lead us off then Vice President Stebon go ahead sure um so I'll I'll make the motion to open up the conversation the motion just um for Betty because you're probably recording this uh recommended motion to approve the final draft of the super superintendent contract for Dr rachel Kowalsski and are you did you make the motion right do we have a support i'll second the motion for discussion only of
084course it's one motion to approve to sorry to enter into a discussion on the draft of the contract for Rachel Kowalsski we won't if there's another motion is to approve i'm not sure it's going to be tonight but it might be is that correct yeah so I was putting it on under an action item if the um board has consensus to move forward but to open up a discussion and have clarifying questions on um the contract that was emailed around this afternoon i will start the discussion i will start by apologizing to the board and to the compensation committee for not more appropriately reviewing the contract my assumption upon my initial cursory review of the contract was that our attorney was going to create a contract and I have significant concerns with this contract um
085the substance of which is fine the structure of which is not structured as a contract um there are no definitions in the contract we do not define employer we do not define employee we do not define board we do not define the titles on the board we do not define board policy we don't enumerate the sections even though there's two parts of the contract that refer to enumerated parts of the contract the contract written is not at all a signable contract it it needs to be structured as a contract we need to have whereas statements we need to have a list of definitions and none of that contains or is contained in this contract okay I can I can take some of that so this is the um the same contract that we reviewed in
086compensation committee um a few weeks ago it's based on Steve's current contract um which was executed um by the board when he joined us as superintendent roughly four years ago um we had reviewed in the compensation committee several other schools to look for um best practices or things that we may not want to include at that time um since then I think some of us have have read other contracts looking into other um language that we might want to use um Carol had described this today as a robust contract and um it is the one that uh was executed and it was the one um that went to the attorneys today it was trun that um it went to the attorneys so I hear what Jason's saying with regards to definitions um and we can
087look to restructure um I would it would have been nice to have the comments in the compensation committee i I well I apologize for that i I had assumed and it's my mistake in in the compensation committee I even said this is my first goaround with a superintendent contract i am I am more used to government contracts or executive level contracts which are structured slightly differently um okay true but uh to to get to my point in the education reimbursement section that is all bulleted which by the way they're all the same bullets they're not even sub bullets they're they're they are they are tabbed bullets but they're not sub bullets it refers to number one there is no number one in that section that's where I have a problem because that clause would not
088be enforceable so where the the substance of the contract itself I don't have a problem with um it's how it's structured for example the reference to the board appears 39 times of which 25 is just board and then 14 are board of education and various titles referred to as the board but doesn't it define what the board is employer is not I that's a that's a fair point that you're saying for definitions for definition purposes so so if you saw something like throughout the contract references to board mean the board of education it should it should be defined that board means board of education called up front yeah okay then for the employer it refers to employer and refers to Selen area schools and Selen School District we need to define that and needs to
089only be referred to as employer from that point forward so capitalized terms within the contract needs to be defined did you also notice that there was also administrator and at other points it said employee I and that's a and superintendent and it there's there's a number that's why I'm saying the when a contract uses multiple different versions of a term that is supposed to mean the same thing when they are listed separately and capitalized they are intended to be viewed as separate entities within the contract so we we need to define that okay so so if I may I'm looking at one of the copies that we also reviewed in compensation committee i'm looking at Dexter Community Schools contract so an example of what I'm hearing from Jason is um it is for example it
090opens it is hereby agreed by and between the board of education of Dexter Community Schools here and after board etc and then follow that language through um and insert the individual's name here and after superintendent and so it it models um district school district etc and so you're looking for those to be specifically called out um this particular contract with Dexter does that not all of them do that we reviewed so it's it's a little hit and miss i I don't disagree i'm I'm just saying that we we should follow proper contract formatting yeah I don't disagree that other school districts don't do it correctly i'm just saying that we should do it correctly and and if we can So totally noted um and if we can back up a little because I did want
091to um address Darcy's uh comment earlier which I totally recognize um we had been going back and forth for about a week we got the the note um that it had been through legal this morning which is why the the call and the email and today is definitely a work day um from from what I understand and Michael you can perhaps elaborate on this i I believe that um our candidate might be looking for a signed contract so they can begin their process um on the other end with respect to what happens next in in that school district so I think there is a little bit of a time thing um also acknowledge what Jason's saying about structure and about um definition but I wanted to just come back to Darcy's comment from earlier the
092the term is there was some anxiety but the the the Carol Diglio I believe phoned her this morning and just to reassure her that we were diligently working away on the contract and not delaying at all and I think that was one of the issues under the whole education reimbursement section and I note that there were several changes made since I first looked at it i had highlighted the entire section probably like you did Jason and just said yikes um sometimes they refer to administrators and general policies and then it's very superintendent specific in other parts so it really needs a fine tooth comb through it and um I know Carol's been working hard based on the former or the old contract um but I I your points are very are quite valid Jason that
093you had made earlier and before before Brad goes um I just did want to have the opportunity also maybe after Brad speaks to go over what some of the changes are since um Steve's contract is the basis of this so as we're reading and continuing to discuss and and draft um just calling attention to several things that are a little bit different but Brad go ahead um the biggest thing I guess I would say is that yeah I agree like I like the idea of clearly stated definitions i think that's good insight it's good that all seven of us are here because we see different things so thank you for for pointing that out the only thing that um I would say to the effect of Darcy's point and I'm more than happy to give
094the time is I also want to be able to provide the um best onboarding process for our new superintendent and so as long and I know Steve's going to be a part of that and I want to um realize his expertise for as long as possible so my point is this i just would like Steve's thoughts as to if we did not approve this until the 27th right two weeks from tonight does that still provide you and her with enough time to properly onboard her and all of that or should we be or should we be looking to call special meeting to approve her contract just a point of order i don't think Steve really should have anything to do it's got nothing to do with him at this point although the onboarding is something
095that we are responsible for i'm starting the onboarding regardless of he's starting the onboarding so um quick question because I was of the belief that he could not begin until we had some legal parameters about like her being employed here so I'm fine with that like I I think it's great Steve for the record like I hear you that we on board but he but he's he's a great superintendent and he's going to want this school district to be in the best place possible when he leaves right so that's what I mean by my comment quick clarifying question are you speaking as treasurer or uh who are the members of the compensation committee for people watching tonight i'll ask Jennifer that uh that would be me Jason and Brad okay thank you um so that's
096the meetings that you're referring to regarding that another point I'd like to make is that it is possible with all this discussion that we could still have a vote before two weeks from tonight if we called within the the proper calling of a meeting have an emergency meeting and and that's not a problem with me at all and even if you if some of us could not make it we only need four of us to make the decision you safely and wisely um before we get just so you know it's possible yeah yeah that was the gist of what I was getting at just so that we don't take away from that transition piece right exactly and and and um I like hearing what I what I heard earlier about just reassuring things are moving
097along we have the absolute same intent that we had uh when we were at our board table the last time um things just move a little bit slower sometimes so um but if I could just call out a few things to to um pay attention to in the contract I think that would be helpful that were different from Steve's um the term of this agreement is a three-year contract so that is a change from five-year um from what we understand and looking at other contracts legal talking with Carol um right now that is the standard um a three-year contract um moving down here we also um increased under reimbursement of expenses travel conference attendance and professional dues um on one two the third bullet um it went up from $750 annually to $2,000 annually just
098based on how much conferences cost and and what is happening in the market right now and that is um in line with other superintendent contracts as well um I had made the mention and it didn't make it to this this version but on the last bullet in reimbursement also I had suggested that we take out the reference to her family because we are employing Dr kowalsski and so um we would love to have her family at events as they choose but doesn't necessarily need to be in the contract um so I had called for that to come out so that would be an edit um you'll see under education reimbursement in the next section of the last bullet beginning with for the first year of the superintendency um this support is something that um was
099put in to um there was a lot of feedback about wondering um you know we're going from a school district x number of students to a school district of um just under 5,000 despite having you know some very large school district experience in the past um and I believe this was a little bit of a missed opportunity with with Steve as well i know that ML I had um like a monthly coaching thing and I don't know if we really took advantage of that but I think having wraparound supports for someone entering our school district um is a very very good thing to do um and this can be in alignment with the costs that we have here in the contract and with discussion with us um not necessarily using services that are used um
100within the district and other areas this can be something separate to have executive leadership coaching and also um consultancy around being a superintendent that could come uh we don't want to be too prescriptive that could come in the um way of former superintendent support it could come in the form of one-on-one coaching which would be a confidential support um but in today's age um this is very standard when you have a leader of an organization or um it's a little bit more corporate um but I think it's a very good pre best practice to support her in coming into this um district um I did want to call out that we left the doctoral degree um uh stipend and I think all of our uh offerings around continued professional development and and and the like
101really support the lifelong learning uh purpose that we have here in Selen area schools you'll see that the superintendent salary schedule has been integrated um this was something that Steve had to have as an addendum on his last contract because of the changes within the state for how superintendent are um evaluated through the superintendent tool so um the normal salary increases section um which discusses superintendent evaluation ratings has been taken out because it's just not happening in the state of Michigan they've moved on so that's why that section looks a little bit different um the vacation and holidays is now 25 instead of 20 so that's in line with the rest of the cabinet um so there's par there and I think that was that was it as far as changes off of his contract
102i drew attention to a few spelling errors and I think we're down to one i I found two but yeah oh okay good and under um evaluation the it successor provision shouldn't have an apostrophe it is just it then there's three oh good well if you find them correct them we'll call those scriveners errors there's been a lot of back and forth great so this was a vote to as to whether we were going to go into a discussion and it sounds like we've just gone into the discussion uh and I are we leaving it at that for now there's still a lot more work to be done in this contract correct so I think what I would recommend is we could revise the motion that I made that Jason uh seconded um to incorporate
103some of the um additions around definition and structure as well as three scribers errors that we found and the um deletion of the word family from that one section um and then uh bring this back potentially with the special meeting my preference would be if we kind of get it looking a little bit like like we want a little bit more my preference would be to do a special meeting because I I would not want to hold anything up um I don't think we that I don't think that we necessarily have to wait until the next board meeting i think that this work can be done very quickly knowing that legal is okay with what we have for right now i am prepared what I was going to say I I will volunteer to reformat
104it so we don't have to go to trune i mean if this is language that they've already approved it can be but I think that's if if tr if tr if tr was acceptable with how it's defined here I certainly can't do worse than that so I would be more than happy to Well I think we could do better though so Okay well thank you based on what I heard and your qu and your your points were well made um I am prepared as the board president to call in a special meeting with uh the proper amount of warning uh so uh we'll keep you all posted keep the community posted too was it the edge of a question oh sorry yes no um uh more of a preference I guess that um this felt
105like a surprise to me coming into this meeting and um I'm hoping moving forward that uh unless there's something that needs to be done fairly expediently that we are allowed time to to read and process the materials that we are voting on because I want to make sure that I'm doing the job with fidelity and I was not given an opportunity to read the contract today i hope that I would be as diligent as Jason was on his points and I can see just from this discussion how hard the three of you worked on getting it to this point um but uh there needs to be some sort of equity and time given when we're making such large decisions moving forward absolutely i I was prepared to hear questions about it but certainly not to
106vote on tonight i didn't realize people hadn't seen it outside of the four of us so thank you any other Oh yes so the lawyers would have the final read through be because just because I think it could even if you just change formatting just from you know I think like the lawyer should bless it and hers as well yeah I understand from Carol that the lawyers have reviewed the parts that could be called into question from a legislative perspective but so I think we're okay with formatting going forward but if Carol has any nervousness about it we will certainly ask our lawyers to take a peek at it again great so are we moving on then as the Have we landed this plane i think we have but we um should probably uh I
107should recommend a change to the motion as written because it was written as a vote change away yep so um we'll change it to uh recommended motion um or we could add how about we add it as a discussion item as our first discussion item instead of an action item because it's not an action item so you can just add it to the end and we can say that we we The motion is to move this whole conversation to item oh see okay no a unless you want to no but um we can just say asked and answered and it it becomes a discussion item versus changing a motion since there's no vote that's fine all in favor please say I oh Jason are you backing that one up i I will yes I will
108second the the reaffirming your support i'm reaffirming my support for modifying it to a discussion item thank you all in favor please say I i I post thank you and Monica we have a U going on to the one important scheduled report for the evening on special education the annual update right exactly well good evening thank you for giving us some time today to talk about special education from this year jay is gonna add or sorry Ben and everyone at the board table is gonna say kiss the mic perfect thank you um as I was sitting here thinking about last year at this time it's been one year since I came before you and met everybody at the board meeting where it was announced that I had accepted been offered and accepted the the role
109so I just wanted to say thank you for such an incredible year um I'm honored to work with such a talented dedicated committed team across the whole district as well as our core team and to co-lead such an amazing department with this amazing human being being Monica um I have learned so much from her this year and I just really appreciate all the ways that you've supported me so with that and she is not a newcomer anymore so every meeting she goes into she can't say that she is the newbie not anymore she won't let me all right so we have um short presentation for you mr mcvey um asked me to trim it down gave you two watch words what were they um short and sweet beautiful thank you yep okay so um our
110special ed department our mission and vision is that we are dedicated to providing all students um including those with disabilities equitable access to education individualized support and meaningful opportunities for social connection we embrace diversity and foster collaboration and are committed to preparing every student for success not only in school but in life so this is our mission that was actually written in 2000 so we're approaching 25 years here and um I've seen all 25 of those years so uh when I read the mission it really still holds true today and um I think the effort um that our teams put into this um the stakeholders that we involve um it's more than just one person but our primary goal is always to have the students be as independent as possible and I think the last
111line is very telling because every student's journey is different and we prepare them and support them in the best way we can so that they can get to that journey so the next part of our um presentation is to talk about our programs and services so special education is a very large department there are lots of things that we um we do for and with students and so I'm going to speak first about our programs and I'm not certain I just want to make sure everybody is aware of what each of these like program terms mean so um we have teacher consultants in our district and they provide support to the teachers and the staff by bringing expertise and coaching and strategies to improve instruction so they're actually working with the adults to help them
112hone their skills and you know work through differentiation and accommodations to meet the students needs we also have resource room programming and these folks provide specialized instruction either in a pull out model or a pushin model so either they bring kiddos to their classroom to provide services or they push into general ed classrooms to provide services and these services look like helping them develop skills in areas such as reading math writing possibly executive functioning there's a lot of things that they do but these are just some examples of that we also have life skills programming in our in our um district and this focus is to provide specialized instruction for students um in the areas of essential daily living skills in social and vocational skills and it's we're working to promote independence for these students
113in the school in the home and in the community settings you are also aware that we have early childhood specialed programs as well as young adults so for the early childhood programs we support some of our youngest learners ages three through five and we provide them with um instruction in areas of communication motor skills physical therapy speech language therapy social emotional development and foundational early learning skills to help them as they transition into kindergarten um for our young adult programming we focus on students that are a ages 18 to 26 michigan is one of the only states that it is actually the only state um that provides education to 26 instead of 21 or 22 um and we support these students uh to develop independent living employment independent living skills employment skills and community participation
114as they transition into their adulthood so to get all of these programs in place and services in place it takes a really large team and you can see here um this is a very integrated team approach we have speech and language pathologists occupational therapist social workers uh physical therapists school psychologist and this last area the board certified behavior analyst and registered behavior technicians so as our students are coming to us with greater needs and especially in behavior and social emotional um wellness this has been an area that we've really had to um increase and we'll talk about that a little bit more but the goal is always to have an integrated approach so that the student can be addressed and the whole child can be um uh programmed and serviced in the appropriate way for
115their needs so some of our successes this year we just wanted to highlight a little bit as we're giving you some information um you know we have a very strong peer-to-peer program here in this district it's the strongest one that I've ever seen in my 20 plus years of working in special education um we have our connecting program at the high school we have STAR at Heritage and we have our PALS program at Seline Middle School um through the connecting program and through just the hard work of the the the classroom teachers and staff we have a lot of social opportunity that's built into the special ed programming um we have things like bowling events and lunch groups and this really helps foster inclusion for our students and friendship and social growth both for students
116with disabilities and for students without um amazing unified sports program here uh I actually went to a conference and I met with some folks from Unified Sports that were from all over the country and when I said I was from Seline everyone lit up and talked about this program so we are really lucky and we have some amazingly dedicated professionals at the high school that lift up unified sports do all the work around programming for it and scheduling for it this year we partnered with Dexter and Milin and we were able to run different events in basketball and track as well as we had a very very exciting time um at Little Caesar's Arena where all the kids got to play on the court with with refs like NBA refs it was very very cool
117it was exciting for everyone and this uh slide goes over our team so again we talked a little bit about um the integrated approach but these are the numbers that we have so we have approximately 232 staff members um in all different areas so one of the largest groups is our pair of professionals and um we could not do this job each and every day without them uh they know the students very well they um are very intuitive they respond to their needs they provide personal care um I just can't say enough about them and uh in terms of being a part of the team they are just as important as any of the certified staff on the on the team so we have resource room teachers uh we have teacher consultants i won't go
118over every single number but we are growing in the needs of our students um as they come to us um we have some very littles um that have some pretty complex medical needs that we are really going to have to look at over the next couple of years and how to best service them and um you know what do those needs look like in the classroom and and how can we be uh very responsive to those needs um as I said the staff is growing and uh Julie and I have a very busy couple weeks uh ahead of us in terms of hiring and we have a lot of hiring to do so our next slide we I just wanted to highlight so that folks can have kind of an understanding of the student demographics
119for our littles that um are eligible under special education so we currently have 895 students that qualify for special education either programming and or service services in Seline um and so there are 13 eligibilities in the state of Michigan under which a student can qualify um our students represent 12 of those eligibilities currently and as you can see I've broken it down be by kind of grade level program level um and I don't expect that you can probably see exactly the numbers but I thought I would just walk through them a little bit for um our students that qualify under autism spectrum disorder we have 14 52 students in the district um under cognitive impairment we have 45 under um an emotional impairment there's 47 um deaf and heart of hearing we have 14 um
120young people in the district for otherwise health impaired which includes kind of an umbrella of medical diagnosis that um those disabilities are impacting a student's ability to access GenEd we have 238 students in the district um under physical impairments there are four under severe multiple impairments there are 10 students that we service for specific learning disabilities it's 171 students for speech and language impairments um it's 193 and you can see when you look at speech and language that a big portion of the students that receive services and programs are K5 speech and language is one of those areas where oftentimes kiddos will grow out of and or be able to um uh take the skills that they've learned around articul articulation and incorporate them and it kind of lifts the barriers so we find less
121students that are um qualified in older grades um under traumatic brain injury we have three students in this in the districts that receive services and visual impairment is five so again just we have a a lot of students that receive services and we're super proud that we're able to keep our students in our district and service them in place with their their peers town we are also very fortunate to have the SEAK committee so that is our special education advisory committee um you can see we have uh representation from almost every building and we have a very robust group right now and they're doing some really amazing things um they're connecting families outside of just typical meetings that Julie or I would be at um for example they're doing some playground um gettogethers uh they
122did a um activity at the bowling alley for our older students so um we have a really dynamic I think parent group right now um they provide us insights about you know what what are parents going through what kind of needs do they have um they've suggested things like mentoring and um they've given us some really good ideas to think about so we meet once a month and uh uh again they've been a very valuable group for us to partner with um some of the ways that we wanted to highlight um around our work with parents and community engagement so again like Monica said we partner with the SEAK um we collaborate with parent representatives um we have offered parent trainings and providing education around special education um we created like a a process guide
123for parents to understand the IEP process this year um we work with community partners like Michigan Rehab Services that help support um some of our older students with uh being receiving prevocational skills training and then moving into jobs and employment and they coach and model and mentor and and support um we work with CH um our students are for job skills a lot of our students are out in the communities we have community partnerships around work for them so we're very very blessed around um the amount of engagement we have both with parents and the community so the next two slides are are some budget issues and um the the allocation of resources um in terms of our revenue we receive most of our our funds from that intermediate county tax so we've been very
124um fortunate in county to have a millillage that has passed and and it's again very robust um so in that area that's our local funds we also have some state funding which makes up about 30% of um our revenue sources um about 30% of special ed costs are reimbursed in that group and about 70% of our transportation um and then we have that small piece of federal funds that come in about 9% um and that is uh just a little bit uh smaller and not something that obviously the the rest of the pie is really the robust part of where we get our funds and revenue in terms of expenses um as many budgets are the salary and and the benefits are a big portion of our expenses but we do also have some purchase
125services things like um some contracts um maybe some transportation for students that we cannot for whatever reason provide transportation sometimes um we've had to use cabs or alternate transportation services that doesn't happen often but that's an example of purchase services um there's been some instances where we've had to hire um contracts because we just haven't had um the employees come in and we really need to provide the services because obviously that is obligated services right ida is federal law so we have to provide those services so sometimes we've looked in those areas um and then the rest are materials and and other kinds of supplies that we need to uh use in the classroom and use to support our programs so for our last slide we just wanted to talk a little bit about our
126future plans and goals um and we spoke a little bit about staffing earlier um we have had uh you know a some needs towards the end of the year really looking at our case loads and determining how best to support students so in pretty much all of our ancillary support groups we are hiring one additional staff so that is another speech and language person um social work uh BCBA I guess not in PT right now we still contract PT but there has been some exciting things that Monica and I have explored with Miranda and Carol and the SEA um representation and one of those things is that previously we contracted all six of our occupational therapists from an outside company um and in looking at equity and thinking about um you know them partnering right
127next to our SEAS employees we really started to think about how we could bring them into our contract so that's been kind of a bigger body of work that we have um taken on this last winter and into spring and so we are at the point now where we have been able to post all six uh positions under the SEA contract and we're working on interviewing and um the folks that were contracted before are very interested in working in the district and being part of our district so we're moving through that and then one of the other really exciting um programs that we've been working on for quite some time now with our BCBAS and just recently with our ESP union representation and Miranda and CORE and Carol is what we're calling our grow our
128own registered behavior technician program so RBTs registered behavior technicians um help support students that have some pretty sometimes complex behavioral needs and they have complex positive behavior support plans and so those folks um receive training and become nationally certified as RBTs and they are trained in applied behavior analysis and understanding how to not only implement the plan but collect the data for efficacy um so we're super excited about this we're getting ready to think about how to um create an application process and all of that so that this summer hopefully we would like to um invite 10 pair of professionals current district employees to grow their skills in this area and um participate in a 40-hour training over the summer that we we fund and support them um and then they'll sit for their exams
129and then they'll be supervised by the BCBAS and then moving forward our BCBAS are very interested in creating our own training program so that would mean that we would eliminate the cost associated with actually getting the certification and it would be held within our district and we might be able to provide it to other districts too and the locals so we're super excited about that so we have staffing we're continuing with staff training looking at IEP compliance and and working on our FBA and positive behavior support plan training for next year continuing with curriculum instruction and assessment training and social emotional learning um we continue to find ways to partner with the families and with our community um we're really working on some systems processes by developing committees to look at how to make all
130of our processes around special ed which there is a lot um you know very visible and and systematic and then when we can combine all these things and and offer this kind of support this is where we see the big um the big payoff in student achievement so that's constantly what we're focused on is the kids so thank you for your time do you want to add anything Monica yeah you're good thank you um I Dr l just have a quick thing to add and I know I have a question and perhaps others on the board table have a few questions too yeah I just wanted to say how um Julie and Monica are just doing an excellent job um diving into this year which you know I've been in the district a long time
131and I've never seen so many um not not issues but challenges they've had to come in and deal with a lot of number of compliance issues the need to accelerate professional development with our staff um more behavioral challenges with our students than ever before um the ability to dive into the unified sports realm um hiring issues of of keeping enough PAR educators in the district and they've really been doing a good job in in a in a challenging environment and then really maintaining the need to have Selene as a destination district for for so many special education parents so they've just been doing an excellent job and I wanted to point that out thank you i'd like to go well we'll start with Jennifer then Darcy then me and anyone else and Jason jennifer Darcy
132me Jason thank you for the presentation it's good to see both of you again um I'm so proud of your department and thank you for all of this and to to know that we have 895 friends that we're serving that's an incredible number and that's an important and um uh very important responsibility so thank you for all the care and attention um I had two questions so on one side you mentioned the SEAK and on the next slide you mentioned parent and community engagement and it made me think of a question that came up in our foundation meeting this morning and I think it was Cara who was talking about our pulse survey things like that i was curious if you do anything like that with specifically the special education population to just identify areas
133for um potential doubled downs on strengths something that's going really well or potential continuous improvement that was my first question so we did not this year um my apologies just being the first year i can't believe it's already can't believe it's already May but it is definitely something that we would like to engage in next year is the survey okay perfect not that we like survey fatigue because I know I know I'm a parent too but with 2,300 parents that are in our special education you know um world we there that is one of the more effective ways to get some feedback so yeah we'll have to time it well with the other surveys but yeah I really would like to to do that okay perfect and then with regards to the pie the money
134pie that we saw earlier with the Fed at 9% so on the low end that's about $1.3 million if you go with the 15 um in in the changing landscape I guess around public education do you have any commentary on um how if there have been any changes affecting that or conversations around protecting those funds for our students in our district and and um other districts in public education i guess what's the latest I guess is the question um so you know it's an everchanging landscape right now and I think about this a lot and I think it's important to understand that in 1975 when IDA was created the federal government promised 40% of spent of of uh financing would come from the feds um we have never gotten over 20% and currently as you
135can see we're at nine so yes 1.2 2 to 1.3 million will have a significant impact on our budget but I also think about you know all of the other sources of funding that we've been able to engage in at the state and local levels um I will say and so I don't I don't have an answer i'm still kind of weeding through everything that comes you know to us um often uh but one thing that I have committed myself to this summer is I am going to DC there is a special ed legislative um summit where we're going to actually be in front of Congress uh one day for 14 hours the other days are like 10-hour days where we're actually meeting with Congress to talk about um how these changes are impacting our
136our young people i love that thank you Darcy hi thank you uh a couple things you talked about a boot camp is this going to be Seline specific or is this the one that the WISD is putting on it's a great question so there's both um the what we are creating is a grow your own program for our paras to earn their registered behavior technicians certification par boot camp is also being offered by the ISD that is not a that um doesn't lead to a certification it leads to really robust learning around how to best support students so we have invited our paras to that it's a wonderful program i've participated as a trainer um I'm I'm very hopeful that uh we will have a large turnout of Selene Perez there well and hopefully in
137Arbor because maybe I will be seeing you there okay um and then secondly I just want to talk a little bit about compliance and how important that uh data collection is as difficult and as time consuming it as it is um that data drives uh the determination of services and uh allows us to reflect on what it is that our students need where they're growing and where there are where there's room for opportunities and so just I wanted to acknowledge that as someone who does that data collection it is uh it's a lot of time and effort but uh as my my teacher says if you didn't document it it didn't happen uh and so it's not the fun part of the job um but that I appreciate that you're working to uh improve that
138compliance part because it is foundational to the work that we and the services that we provide i do have a quick question before I get to Jason's then um it's about the uh grow your own program so it I yay I've been participating in the parapro to special ed teacher program which is fantastic but this is interesting though is it in-house training and and the first year it will not be we are there's where we're going to be um working with a company that provides online modules because this came up so quickly our BCBAS and they we are hiring another one they're they're very dedicated and have a big case load they didn't have time to develop the training but the way the certification works is that our BCBAS um who are certified they can
139actually develop the training so moving forward starting next year it'll be in-house training and again like I um I I would even hope to be able to extend this to the other local districts if we can make that happen as summertime training and things like that i mean this is no one's doing this work yet and it's so hard to find RBTs and I'm just really grateful for the thought partners around this and being able to to to create this opportunity i know you have a much more noble view of it but it could also be a revenue generator of sorts but we won't talk about and uh the funding for the test i mean it's a probably a pretty the examination is probably pricey is that taken care of by the by us or
140by the participants great so it's it's actually um pretty it the examination itself is $95 and the um the certification the classes is less than $1,000 per parah excellent thank you and it's a one-year cost because well they'll still have to sit for the exam but that that um classroom cost will disappear next year well this time next year i'm looking forward to hearing the Yeah results jason actually Secretary Burke and President McVey asked my questions uh and you actually extended your answer so you actually I was trying to think of something uh else but uh President McVey did have a good point about revenue generator um because that could that could cover shortfalls in the budget if uh if there uh are any or provide additional budget so uh my question is around I
141I learned RBT that term today uh so that was uh interesting my question is what is your biggest challenge right now with um with the amount of staff you have and the number of students we serve what is your biggest challenge finding time to work directly with the staff in a meaningful way to support new learning or you know current need very good question Jason and I won't let your compliment go to my head thank you we should you know what Monica with all of her wealth I mean she I think you should answer that question too sure um I think the other thing that is very challenging is um some of the turnover of our staff um the training that's involved you know hiring I I just was talking about this earlier was typically
142done in the summer we do that all year round now and you know when you bring in to the organization in August certain amount of staff we we continue to do that through the school year so it's bringing them up to speed on the culture of the district uh the training that they need um making sure that we provide all of that so that they have the tools they need to support the students so do do you know what the cost differential is between onboarding versus retention of that kind of staff we do not have that information that's certainly something that we could look into but right off the top of my head no we don't have that that that would just be interesting because as you mentioned you used to do it just in
143the summers now you're doing it year round you're having to constantly onboard constantly train there's there's non-tangible or intangible sorry wrong word intangible costs associated to that and I'm just wondering if there's something that we can do to help you so that you can retain the staff instead of the constant turnover because you're then pulling more staff to train staff and you end up with holes and if that's one of your biggest challenges if there's something that we can do to help with that I think we'd like to explore that because we have the best special ed programs around we want to keep it that way but we also we want to be a destination district not just for the special needs education but for the special needs educators jason the short answer to that
144is pay them more i I I know that but I was hoping there would be something a little bit more idealistic sorry Mr gerby the only thing So I want to thank you for the presentation and I agree with our quality of our programs and all of that so you talked about data and compliance Darcy and so in the past as part of this presentation we've received some of those data points and one of the data points specifically that we've been asked to keep an eye on by parents and community members has been seclusion and restraint do you have any comments on that and any could we get data at least could we get some of those i know we were told to keep it short and sweet but um but that is that so
145please thank you yes we could absolutely get that data for you um I think um overall we meet once a month and that's between the um behavior uh the BCBA's Julie and myself and then we also we failed to mention this but we also have a consultant that's um assigned to our district and that's Liz Westfall um so we get together on a monthly basis to review those numbers um I think they've stayed pretty consistent i think from the peak that we had a couple years ago that certainly has gone down um but there are certainly um the numbers have have stayed somewhat consistent um there are wraparound meetings that we do as I said we analyze that data we work with teams to make sure that they have the supports in place that they
146need to um address the issues we revise plans for students um so we are keeping a pretty good pulse on that and I believe that I just if you wouldn't mind like it's good to just see that we're we have that compliance state we have to from the state so it's just good stuff to see i think that in addition to understanding like FBAs and positive behavior support plans having a strong clear plan that's based on science and best practice and inter interventions and having RBTs that can for our really complex kiddos who are the ones who are presenting with imminent danger that might lead to a short restraint or seclusion um having a strong plan and being able to collect the data and keep harvesting and what you know disagregating that data is how
147we ensure that you know our numbers continue to decline yep no problem and thanks for bringing it up Brad are there any more from the board well thank you so much it was both short and sweet and informative thank you thank we're moving on to one last presentation oh no it's the horrible boring one from McVey are you ready sir uh I think I can do this unless we need a bio break i think I can do this in 11 minutes and 32 seconds whenever I say something like that to my students there's always one person in every class pulls out a stopwatch and says "Okay go." You're the one you're the one thank you so much this is an annual presentation uh next slide please we don't have a clicker the functioning clicker yet
148um so you have we have we have been so good evening this is please note that this presentation and sub subsequent board vote is a legal requirement uh the WISD shared this in this presentation focusing on two funding streams the general fund and the special education fund which is four times larger as you'll see later we are required to review the general fund budget next slide please so we as a board are required to review this budget and then vote to support or disapprove of it and if there are any issues you would like the WISD board to be aware of they will review our notes and take them into account um next slide please so there we go so the uh next slide please thank you i think the next slide we're just roaring
149along so the um the WISD is also known as a RISA regional educational service agency and it provides and this is mostly for the newcomers here tonight it provides an economy of scale for purchasing uh and other projects so next slide so rather than simply transfer federal and state funds to the districts the WISD is a convenor of general education services that include a lot of activities including technology instruction uh community and school partnerships career technical education and a lot more next slide please some of the county achievement uh initiatives are listed here and one of the big things they're responsible for is learning networks and we'll go to the next slide there are several projects that the uh WISD engages in some of these projects include and I'm not even sure we're on the
150right slide but uh supporting justice leaders who work on inclusive systems the 1080 grant which is an engineering project could you go to the next slide i think it's the next one uh maybe not we'll just keep going 1080 grant which is an engineering project the youth council and responsive teaching and leadership training um the community school partnership team works with a lot of community partners to support kids who struggle the most in school there we go we're getting caught up now uh when school level support is not enough this team gets involved collaboratively so this work includes uh work with homeless youth jails and uh and more next slide so the partnership group um works with a lot of external grant agencies also from Mckin Vento to the Michigan State Police uh one more
151slide or two we are one more next one we're also engaged with the my future fund the child savings account uh which before you all came on board uh they gave a great presentation to us so next slide uh so using the economy we'll stay there for a while uh using the economies of scale there's a lot of volume purchasing that takes place through the US the WISD including power school which is uh you know licenses for power school among other things so the general fund and the special education fund are shared here in this slide side by side uh the magenta is a revenue of 162 million and expenditures are in blue at about 160 million leaves a fund balance of about 7 million overall that's about 17% % so next slide so the
152expenditures are shown here where that money goes and you'd heard from our uh our special education staff just a few minutes ago about uh ex expenditures transfers to us uh that is the um I don't have the colors the SPE you can for some reason yeah the large blue on the left uh piece of the pie is the direct transfers to the districts uh the other slides are the other pieces are earmarked for special grants and so forth but that's the breakdown in general of all the monies but what we are going to look at is and pardon me for some reason my trying to follow along on my own notes well thank goodness I have a paper copy so 40 and a half% is directly transferred to the district such as the special ed
153dollars the light blue at the bottom uh represents special projects on our behalf the dark blue represents special uh direct special education services such as High Point and other services and the three blue sections make up those three blue sections make up 92% so we're going to scoot ahead past the special education and look instead now at the general fund expenditures which we are required to review um if you take a look at the uh could you go ahead please there we go looking at the general fund general revenue sources uh the yellow is local which is about 2.2 million from taxes the rest comes from investment earnings and other revenue generating activities like fingerprinting of all things uh the green is my future fund money that's come in uh the purple includes money from
154the state aid act and pays for technology uh achievement initiatives the red includes state restricted grants that's seven and a half 7.7 million from the great start readiness program among others mental health funding has also increased and we now have more CTE monies in the district in the uh county the gray uh is primarily Head Start money and some grow your own funds like Perkins Mckin Vento Title One regional assistance grants uh the next the teal is other special technology projects so next slide changes to the revenue there have been a lot of changes we've had a net increase of four and a half% um you'll read through here operations funding is from the state is up 2% uh there are certain other elements that we've talked about the theers uh 147 A3 and 147
155A4 retirement offsets from OPEB and all that fun stuff um money there have been increases in revenue uh could you go to the next slide also there have been changes in expenditure uh there's no grant revenue carryover uh the unacrudeed liabilities is uh I think stabilized according to this slide they have increased one full-time equivalent of chronic absence specialists they used to be called truency officers and there's a half full-time equivalent of a data um uh a data position next slide and I think we're almost done we're up to nine minutes now right uh okay this assumes that all vacancies are filled and assumes step increases and assumes 3% salary wage increase for non-bargaining staff and a healthcare increase at yikes 9% next slide and those are the major changes if you take a look
156here uh the 7.46 uh is projected and the 7.02 these are millions of dollars uh those are a little high right now they will stabilize back down to around five you know the 5% range or the five million range uh there was an odd spike of course in 2024 from some federal monies and changes in legislation please don't ask me which ones and uh next slide please right this is just a quick slide that shows you the distribution of their uh general fund expenditures oh and a nice picture of the kids who it's all really for so I know I roared through this and you all had a chance to look at this in your board pack um and I'm really seriously hoping you don't have any questions but each of the slides I was
157given have notes attached so if you do have a question please ask it now or forever hold your peace sorry Michael i do have a couple questions easy ones right also the best questions are just questions thank you um on the general fund revenue slide if you back which is one back or or so or two back keep going it's a that one yes ma'am uh you kind of blew through the non-educational entity 3.144 did I that would be uh from investment earnings and other revenue generating uh activities such as fingerprinting right okay i wasn't sure i Oh that's what that's what it was and um they do generate uh revenue at WISD i'm going to read their notes to see if there's an additional things um there are a lot of programs community foundation
158resources for success by six wash my brother's keeper uh educational adjudicated youth in county jail those monies do come to the WISD is my brother's keeper the Obama foundation Washington my brother's keeper I don't know much about that particular organization okay we're not sure over here pretty sure but well we'll check it out maybe um well thank you to those organizations um and I also wondered about the truency officer slash uh I don't know the new call chronic absence specialist yes um does that person only uh help with like could we have our own person or that person helps with absences only from students i just wanted to understand how the overlap happens oh some of the students that from my understanding some of the uh students that would fall in under that person's uh
159oversight may be some of ours um I think we do a lot of ours inhouse because we have a No Steve I can speak to that a little bit we we um yeah we try to deal with um attendance issues and and such and compliance with our own internal processes first but sometimes we do need to call on outside agencies and they have truency officers that you can get through county this is one that the ISD also employ you can we we've used you know contact Pittsfield and and and get a truency officer out to help with certain instances this is more for um I would say districts that have more chronic issues with this like somebody going out to homes to try to figure out what you know why kids aren't coming to school
160and such so not targeted not per se only for students who are housed within the WISD buildings i think it might be primarily but uh it is a labor intensive activity as you can imagine yeah know I was just curious because it's something that I'm always surprised at um in other districts and other facets of my life so I just wondered if that was if that person who's just being brought on as FDA is available to all the districts if they have trouble or just for the students housed it i am happy to ask Superintendent Naomi Norm in that when I write to her again and this morning in fact we were texting uh rapidly i'm sure I could shoot off a text to her i think she owes me one so I'll I'll ask
161her uh are there any other questions if anyone I'm looking at you Tim because you're the only one in seven years who's raised a note yet um if anyone has any issues or notes that to to provide to Brian Marcel and the WISD board send it to me by email or share it now and we'll make sure that it gets to them but that shouldn't affect whether you approve or disapprove or support or disapprove of this so I'd like to entertain a motion please to either let us say support support the WISD 2526 budget resolution as submitted and shared by MC so move Tim Austin thank you sir support is that Lauren Gold correct thank you all in favor please say I i oppose great thank you so much 70 I okay we will make
162sure that they are made aware of the fact that we they there is actually a document that goes up to Naomi Norman and company 12 minutes well that's there were questions well I was expecting questions thank you uh I'd like to pass this over to finance committee chair treasurer Brad Gerby all right i'll try to be short and sweet as well uh so finance met today five o'clock uh we had five items on the agenda here are the so here's a quick summary of what we accomplished first thing we did was we talked about the official spring FTE count which is only 10% of our blended total but we did see an interesting trend so um our fall count was 46.88 and our spring FTE count is 46.86 so you'll see an adjustment of two
163students now the reason why that's particularly interesting is because we have generally the last few years seen a more significant drop between our fall enrollment to our spring enrollment for example and we we looked back in fall of 23 we were 4762 and in spring um of 24 we were 4731 so we had dropped 31 students so um obviously anytime that we are not losing students and that we are um having like so we're hoping maybe like we're looking at a leveling out but you know there are cohorts and things of that nature so it's very much something to um just kind of keep an eye on okay but student count is one of the main ways that we generate revenue and so we always keep an eye on our our student count so uh
164kindergarten in fact just to kind of continue on that uh is trending really positively and really solid in the regard especially with regards to we look like we will need an additional section over this year at Woodland Meadows so like so that that's a positive thing to see overall okay um we should I should note that we saw an odd drop last year at that building so I mean like it could just be where people live and how many kids go to that particular place but um it's it's overall a positive thing to see that we're having a leveling of enrollment so um that is that uh state budget you know the state budget is is being bantered about right now you know we can only hope that by the by June 30th that the
165state of Michigan provides us with the amount of clarity with regards to the budget that we're expected to have right speaking of which uh you guys should note it is going to be budget hearing time on June the 10th that has to be by state law a separate meeting so that will be at 6:00 p.m and then during uh that night we will also make our budget presentations and things of that nature so the budget hearing will happen at 6 PM as it always does prior to the 6:30 board meeting so again that is on June the 10th u we're anticipating uh a an increase for I think that's been a pretty uh stable thing whether you're on one side of the aisle or the other in the governor's chair but it's just figuring out
166all the the devil's in the details with regards to are they going to continue to pay for food allowances are they going to continue to pay for transportation like so you know the House passed something that was called like an emergency stop gap budget but then they said like "But this isn't necessarily it we're just putting something in place later so we can change it later on." So again it's all very much in flux uh as we finish up uh 2025 one of the things that our strong fund balance is doing for us from a and I would consider this quote unquote revenue generation is we will not have to borrow to make summer payroll so we will realize some of those dollars that we would have otherwise had to borrow for um so there's
167that and that that's a good thing um for 2526 we kind of opened up the discussion of some of those kinds of things uh we already talked about the per pupil in the state but we are going to add an FTE it looks like at the elementary it looks like we're going to add uh FTE a 1.0 at the at an art um it's going to be a half middle school half high school but that kind of ties into like what's already there and making it whole is what I kind of heard so there's that um you heard just now in that last presentation about some um some occupational therapy that is going to come under the umbrella of the district that'll be good for access for students and their in services for our students
168here in Seline um so there's the behavior analyst piece you heard about the behavior tech program um you know these are some really really talented individuals a lot of them are parapros so now I would call them like I I made a joke but I really believe this they are now super parapros right so um as RBTs so that is that okay um one thing that made my heart really happy is we had put on our homework and Jennifer I think you you watched this meeting remotely when I brought to the team about this thing called Michigan class and what it was was it was a way to take some of your revenues that you have as a district or some of your money as a district and um invest it in secure means to
169realize what I wanted to say in my meeting and didn't is passive income and so one of the things that we're doing is we're joining something called my Michigan liquid asset fund and we're gonna take some of our fund balance dollars and we're gonna um put it into my lap uh I appreciate super assistant superintendent she's ahead of schedule on this we had said that this would be more of a fall project but she said that they they heard she brought that to her team and her team said "Yes we can make this happen." So um so that'll be a revenue generator for us with our money that we already have so it's just good stewardship I think um so I already mentioned the budget meeting and then the last thing that I also want
170to note uh is the incredibly awesome uh process that Miranda and her team did with regards to bond sales we were one of the great things is because we had such strong interest in our bond sales this past week we were actually and I'm glad they do this and not me we were able to reduce the rate down to like I think it was 4.72% and and and long story short less less interest is more money that we get to actually spend on projects and in classrooms and that kind of thing so I really appreciate her diligence her team's diligence and all of that so next meeting of the finance team will happen 5:00 pm on the 10th and like I said budget hearing at 6 pm and you should expect that to be a
171moneyheavy night if anybody has any thoughts I do Brad we've had the consensus revenue generating or the com Sorry I've got that's already happened correct nope it's happening sorry it's on my list and it is happening actually the 16th so it is three days from now if you want to tune in as a constituent i should have a Google alert on that consensus revenue estimating conference i look forward to that every year okay the 16th then is your day i'm glad I can make you laugh any other thing questions for Treasurer Gerby now administration board updates mr superintendent Lotch uh right we had um we we had uh spoken about the transition with um Dr kowalsski we are very excited about that i know I speak for the core team and that we are working
172on transition dates and we already have a number of them established and so right I'm not really um yeah I'm hoping the contract can get resolved soon but we're moving forward with the assumption that it will be and and feeling like the transition does need to start earlier um because there's a number of uh events that we want the new superintendent to be able to experience before the end of the year and so we already have some dates set out May 21st June 2nd June 13th June 16th and we're looking forward to working with her to get her in the district and um get her acclimated to for to a number of things that are going on both at this level and at the county level um before I retire let's start with Tim so
173not a whole lot of updates outside of I just wanted to um I wrote down uh thank the whole team here at this board table for the amount of work that went into the last uh three four weeks um all the all the work that went into that so I I appreciate that it wasn't a it wasn't an easy decision we had a lot of good candidates and um uh but I think we uh made a good good choice i think we've been in this room every Tuesday for the Yeah okay yeah i I wrote down the same thing so ditto on and and I want to thank everyone who from the community who was involved with that too right anytime that we see that community engagement it just helps us to feel uh more
174secure about the decisions and all of that kind of stuff right it just helps me but um anyway so there's that and I I know that Rachel's gonna Dr rachel Kowalsski is going to do a a fantastic job as our superintendent so um the one thing I would like to since my kid endured his second AP uh test today and AP Cal was today so gosh um I want to thank everybody who puts up with the stress and and does all the things to to help our students to be so successful in those kinds of endeavors they're hard to do they take a lot of preparation um AP classes require um teachers to become like go undergo specialized training and do certain labs and it's all regulated by the college board so it is not
175a particularly easy thing to do to be an AP teacher and so I want to thank our AP teachers but every other teacher too who's dealing with students in May when it's 80 degrees too so um so thank you very much and appreciate you always echoing what excellent trustees have to say all of us um I just wanted to sort of reflect on the meeting tonight and overall uh looking at the services that this district provides which I think um are are very excellent um unfortunately funding for education is a pie and there's that balance between providing the physical materials students need and the people who implement use and adapt those materials for our students to learn grow and uh as the special education department noted be successful uh and a large part of that
176budget as we saw was for staff and I think that that's something to be proud of that we are putting our money towards people who care and show up to help our students become their best selves and you know while we need the funding for things like iPads or Chromebooks and books um it's really the people who are using those tools and I think that overall in our district for all departments teachers parapros bus drivers cafeteria staff uh janitorial staff everyone who is involved superintendent uh admin team uh I think everyone is here really with the best of intentions and I just really appreciate that speaking of that um Darcy and I both attended the STEM awards right which is pretty cool to see our young people from earliest earliest grades standing up and receiving
177awards and recognitions was fantastic and I know several of us attended the art show and every year I am absolutely blown away at the uh the quality and the level and I know I some of the art teachers have responded to my raving about it through Facebook and uh it's welldeserved praise they did a fantastic job thank you i'm going to pass it on to Jennifer um so today was our monthly meeting of the foundation for Selen Area Schools you probably all noticed some invitations coming i thought instead of just saying them at the table I would proactively go into the calendar and put some things on your schedules totally optional but there you have a few things and I know um we try to do a calendar as well um but you can find
178those um thank you to the foundation $87,000 so far in grants building and staff grants this year that's pretty amazing roughly um just over 12k left um and I know that they were talking about one grant today so they're still doing that important work even in the stretch home stretch um speaking of home stretch thank you students staff and families because I know that this time of year is incredibly incredibly busy and there's a lot to do um we also talked about the Young Five and kindergarten open houses which is very exciting if you want to go to the Ridge tomorrow from 6:00 to 7:00 harvest is next week on the 21st heritage is on the 22nd um Woodland Meadows already did theirs um so they've been working to be involved in that um and
179I also liked the brainstorming conversation that we had today around um more ideas to engage the community multi-generationally um and also with new families entering the school district to make sure that they feel included and aware of what opportunities might exist um to make new friends for both the parents and grandparents and and um family members um but the kids obviously as well so that was a fun discussion i'm going to put one more vote in for thinking about that ice cream social and uh it came up uh today and we were talking about it and I did want to point out that we do have a spelling bee award right behind Stephen Michael that we did win in 2022 which I put fingernail polish on the year um so a major award if we
180happen to have another one um if we can do a spelling bee again i know a few people who might be interested um and I also really enjoyed the conversation about how we might show off the new spaces at Selen High School to the community so not just to our high schoolers and our high school families but to all other children particularly the little so they can see what they're going towards i really liked that conversation understanding what incredible opportunities that we have in this district as you go along it just continues to snowball and what that looks like when you get to the high school it kind of can blow some people away um so I'm looking forward to helping volunteer on that and really liked that Carara and uh Jackie were a big
181part of that conversation and trying to figure out what that looks like from both the district perspective but also partnering with the foundation for Selenary Schools so that I thought was I thought that was cool um I'm in the middle of teaching junior achievement right now so I want to say hello to I believe it's 46 students that I have right now in two different classrooms i like to team teach because apparently I'm a little bit of an extrovert um and they are so much fun we did the pizza exercise i don't know if you're teaching it this year Steve but you know same curriculum as I think we've had for one and me or maybe two years they changed a few years ago um no more donuts that's not healthy i don't know pizza
182is healthy but it's paper pizza um so I'm getting ready to do the last two sessions with them and we're going to talk about voting about making your voice heard and what it means to be a member of a community and use that voice for things that you believe in so I really like that one so um hello to those kids hi everyone um I'd like to start by acknowledging that um we just finished up uh nurse appreciation day and week uh as well as teacher appreciation day and week and mother's day i always laugh a little that these all three um fall in May in thinking about which professions were most open traditionally to women take from that what you will as to the heavy lift in May um but I uh think all
183three of those are really um important to highlight i have just grown over the years in my appreciation uh for nurses and especially uh now in my role on the school board um our school nurses who do such an excellent job um our teachers who um and educators who do such amazing uh work in the classrooms and uh mothers uh both at home but also in our schools you know at any given time when you are in classrooms for class parties or uh fun runs or all the things um you know there are all parents but uh often uh quite a few moms uh helping keep things run as volunteers and in supporting the school so for everybody who does that uh I'll get to the dads next month and all parents uh but thank
184you for people who provide mothering skills in classroom uh May is food allergy awareness month um it's uh really uh appreciated and crucial that we focus on safety and support for our students with food allergies and I know that this has changed and continues to change all the time and some people listening may uh wonder why um it's estimated that about one in 13 children or about two in every classroom have serious food allergies so this is um not talking about sensitivities or or other things these are kids who uh have allergies to food that could be uh lifethreatening uh yes this is more than it was in the past yes we are working on figuring it out and yes we need your help in being understanding and supportive on that note I want to
185thank teachers and school staff for all the hard work in keeping our school allergy aware and safe i know that you're on the front lines and sometimes field complaints uh and so thank you for um doing that important work and thank you to fellow students for being understanding and considerate of your classmates unfortunately um there have been some shocking studies uh in recent years um that uh indicate that as many as one in three children with food allergies report being bullied uh because of their allergies so this can go from teasing to life-threatening like switching out foods forced exposures people thinking that it is funny uh this is unacceptable obviously and risky um but parents teachers community members can uh model uh the right behavior by always taking food allergies seriously never diminishing or making
186fun of uh people with food allergies um or the inconveniences that we might uh you know go through when when we have to worry about uh food allergies it is much appreciated um so again thank you uh if I can ever be of any support in this way to the district or if people have questions or teachers have questions or I can support our awesome already doing a great job staff um I'm more than happy to always speak on this topic uh unfortunately Julie and Monica already left but uh next week uh is speech pathologist day what i'm sorry oh I'm sorry you know I looked over there once and you weren't there i'm sorry okay okay well hey next week uh uh speech speech pathologist day so uh you know that's a that's a
187barn burner that's a fun one so uh but no that's uh uh our our our staff in special ed don't get enough recognition and that's a a great uh a great uh thing to be able to recognize also I want to give a huge shout out to our our CAD team our CAD competitors um that was phenomenal how successful they are that is just unbelievable and I want to say once again um from sitting through the Shark Tank things um and this I I love to see the ladies up there really just jamming um uh I'll say it again this is probably the third time I've said it from the board table but anybody that says uh that women are not interested in steam girls are not interested in steam are just wrong and Seline
188absolutely proves them wrong because we have absolutely the the best ladies out there competing and taking home all the trophies so I just want to give them a big shout out appreciate that i brought one of the biggest names in educational technology Richard Colada into Steve Vaslov's class a year or two ago they were clueless they had no idea because they were so focused on what they were working on on their their their drawings and so forth it's amazing i'd like to entertain a motion to authorize the consent agenda as printed this is your chance so move stubbin can't can't pass it up sure you could uh support from Bwick wow we should just assign people anyway thank you so much uh all in favor please say I i i i opposed hearing none 70
189thank you items on the next agenda sir well speaking of CAD and the SWWC direction we have the SWWC annual update coming from Cara Stummer and then also uh CTE Millage resolution so those are all tied together and then recognition of our board of ed student reps and honoring the district retirees and you may have noticed that they're not here uh each of them had a separate issue preventing them to be here and they both apologize for their lack of attendance so uh open to public comment i don't believe there is any no uh so the next board of education meeting will be held on May 27th at 6:30 i'd like to entertain a motion to enter into close session of the board at after a bio break so at about 9:15 or so for
190the intent to reopen at about 9:30 9:30 that was that Tim second thank you very much all in favor please say I I thank you so much uh oh I should have filled out the rest of that to enter into a closed session for the purpose of collective bargaining 8C of the open meetings act under 8C a simple majority is sufficient and all in favor please say I i oppos great thank you thank you very much we'll see you in whatever some period of time making me do arithmetic here it looks like seven minutes without objection I'd like to re-enter the board of education meeting at 10:17 and uh a motion to adjourn this regular meeting at 10:17 please so moved tisidus support stubben stubben all in favor please say I i thank you very
191much good night everybody thank you good