Saline Area Schools: Board of Education Meeting (7.12.2022)

001you is crack good like to call to order please the board of education meeting for saline area schools on july 12th 2022 at 6 31 pm if everyone could please rise for our pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all happy summer everybody um now is our first opportunity for public comment a member of the public may address the board briefly for up to three minutes or request to be scheduled on the agenda of a future meeting please note that students will be given priority to speak on any topic the first public participation portion of the meeting will be limited to one half hour 30 minutes and limited to

002agenda items a second public participation portion will be offered at the end of the agenda to allow for any other comment the presiding officer is guided by the rule set forth in po167.3 which has been reprinted on the public comment form collected this evening individuals addressing the board should take into consideration rules of common courtesy the public participation portion of the meeting cannot be used to make personal attacks against a board member district employee or student seeing no student public comment forms we will go to parent tiffany alexander from spar and tiffany i know i know you know this but um secretary jones has our cards for our three minutes all right whenever you're ready just toggle the mic on okay am i on yeah there i am so hi i'm tiffany's everybody knows um

003i'm here speaking on behalf of sparr that's selene parents against racism for anybody who doesn't know that um just very quickly we're really glad to see this information being presented today by uh superintendent latch and shannon washington this is much needed validation for multiple communities uh people of color um the lgbtqia community special needs families other marginalized groups who have been screaming this information for several years and while the school has offered validation and some action steps at large we're often invalidated told that we're exaggerating these things are isolated incidents that does a lot of damage so this is an opportunity for the community to hear what we have known for a very long time so we're really happy to see that um what we're hoping for is that this is followed up with some

004serious action steps including a much stronger hate speech policy uh something that enumerates um what's going to happen if and when and something that is required to be enforced across the board um while so many people don't believe these things are happening we know that they are in the meantime the n word is basically a daily occurrence in the middle school we had a jewish student who was exposed to jokes about the holocaust and i spoke to a member of the special needs community today who was very upset that there was a listening session for special needs parents but they didn't even know about it until after it occurred so there's better communication that can happen there are other action steps that can happen and if we can get away from having to argue that

005these things are happening it may be easier for everybody to collaborate and get together so thank you very much that's all i have to say you for feedback tiffany um moving on to the agenda um revisions or approval of the agenda items may be added or deleted from the meeting agenda and or the order of items may be changed at the request of an individual board member or the superintendent the agendas much must be approved before proceeding further i'd like to please entertain a motion to approve the agenda as revised moving number 13 the order of our closed session i would like to move item 2 forward so superintendent latches quarterly evaluation goes first per request i i would you want a motion for that or you are making the motion i i i'll let

006you make the motion okay i would i actually was going to um ask about that too so i would like to see that go first too so i'd like to make a motion to switch the order of the closed session all right thank you jenny michael thank you all those in favor please say aye hi opposed hearing none motion carries 7-0 scheduled reports superintendent equity listening sessions dr lodge okay well uh we're getting a presentation ready to go here uh i'd like to make a couple announcements and one as many of you now know shannon washington has been appointed the director of culturally responsive instruction equity inclusion and we're very excited for that unfortunately tonight she had death in the family and that she is needing to attend to her family this evening so she's

007not here to present on this session with me together kara davis is going to fill in as part of the teaching and learning team but i just want to assure everybody that shannon's actively involved in the process of gathering information in these superintendent listening sessions and i'll mention mention her throughout the other people i want to introduce tonight and say thank you for attending is some representatives from the city of saline and the dei committee and mayor marl and grace wu they they are helping to be a bridge together with our district and our own dei advisory committee to make sure that the moves we're making as a school district are in conjunction with some of the moves that the city of saline wants to make because we know that this work has to go

008hand in hand and we want to make sure that we're partners in this work moving forward so with that said we'll go ahead and get started we can go to the first slide so we'll start just talking about that partnership between the the city of saline dei committee and our district and our dei advisory committee so over on the left-hand side we're talking about a few highlights of many of sort of the the city of salinas dei committee is that the task force started in september of 2020 became a committee in september of 2021 and then uh have been meeting monthly a website social media presence to make sure that they are communicating the work that they're doing but one of the things that they're finding that is consistent with what we're finding is that

009a survey that they did the city of celine did with roughly 400 participants did show that um almost 36 percent of the people responding in that survey did report on a form of discrimination or harassment that they have experienced so i think that's important because that does tie into some of our findings in the school district as well so as a uh in conjunction city of saline the school district here's some things that we are committed to moving forward a few bullet points around continuing to support training and education around this work we talk a lot about the importance of professional development and making certain that we are all being educated you know certainly myself included i have so much to learn as superintendent around this work so we all can work together on that

010professional development piece and education part secondly continuing efforts to diversify the city of saline itself and the and the school district meaning city of celine is one entity but we also have pittsfield township york township in that we want to make sure that we are a welcoming environment and continue to look to ways to diversify the third which is a very important point is promoting civil engagement we're talk we're talking more about the importance of the bridge to civility which i'll get into in depth in the presentation but the focus moving forward this school year certainly needs to be about unity and developing common ground we need to make sure that we're doing this work together and that we truly are being inclusive of everyone in the district and and that'll be stressed over and

011over okay next slide so the context of these listening sessions so who was involved well selene families who have experienced harm due to bias discrimination micro or macro aggressions and i as the superintendent needed to learn more so um you know there were there was invitations sent out using our powerschool database system to invite uh various groups of people also in response to a survey that we sent out of you know who would like to be involved in in some listening sessions and the why was there is to provide a safe space for the school district and our families to share stories and experiences uh to the exam to examine the extent of how is you know this being installed institutionalized and and primarily to listen for me to listen so how we did this

012was we received email invitations out in k12 insight survey inviting both participation and feedback so this was sent to the entire district and it allowed for feedback electronically if people wanted to send it that way but it there was also a question that asked if anybody wanted to be included in a listening session they were given that opportunity to let us know that information as well and as a result invited people to participate that way so we did this in the high school and middle school media centers and some people were able to zoom in if they weren't able to participate that way and we tried to make these in accommodating listening sessions by providing food at the el with the el group in particular we had transit translation services available and some child care

013when needed i think that's an important point that when we reach out to families and want to seek input and want them to attend events we need to make sure that we're providing accommodations so that they can do so because that's that's another um an important equity move that if we're asking for feedback we need to make sure that we're providing spaces that actually allow that in terms of documentation this is where shannon played a really big part in that she was the recorder uh both taking in the information from the survey itself and also the notes that were developed from the sessions that that we held and and what she did an excellent job of she created and developed the themes that were being set that were being talked about throughout the evening so

014uh you know before we begin some of the content that you're going to see here may may cause discomfort and because what what you're going to hear is the true account well the accounts that people are sharing they're not it's not shannon saying this it's not me saying this it's the accounts that were given in the listening sessions and and shannon made sure to take all identifying information although you won't there won't be any ability to i you know identify who this would be that was saying this or about who it's just uh important that we're you know listening intentionally observing and reflecting because this is the stories being told by people in the district largely about their students experience so we need to keep that in context when we go through this okay so

015we'll go to the next slide and these are a little bit harder to read because we tried to make sure we were giving the specific account so i'm going to step aside so i can get a little closer so we have these were three different groups that we had three different listening sessions one was black african-american which if students were being identified in power school that way and the invites went out to those parent and guardian groups same thing with asian pacific islander and then we also had a group with latinx native american native hawaiian that in power school we sent out invitation to those groups of students parents and gardeners so that's how that came about so i'm going to go through all these because i do know it's difficult to read and i

016will just read them i know people that are looking at it up front and read but i'm going to go through them all so that people can reflect so with our black african-american group the n-word is used by white children around black african-american children beginning as early as upper elementary school we didn't receive reports that they were hearing that in the k-3 buildings but as students were entering heritage this started to become an occurrence that that families have reported hey steve i'm really sorry to interrupt you with this important content but i want to make sure that anybody who's watching at home can hear you as well jenny would you mind putting your mic on and kind of putting it over here oh okay perfect i just didn't want anyone that might be listening at

017home to to miss the content that's that's a good point okay i'll take it away this way thank you uh so the second thing is that middle school children face both the use of the n-word and a variety of racial microaggressions including games like slave that's been reported to happen in the hallways and and we have heard that a few different times third parents are concerned about bias against students that will manifest as both a lack of fair discipline and over discipline and what that means is sometimes they've seen over discipline to the students that cause harm and as a result it seems to create a potentially more damaging relationship with both of the students that were involved that that's been reported uh next some parents are considering different districts as a result of some

018of these things that have developed in the schools next parents express praise and satisfaction more so at the lower levels and greater fear as students get into the higher grade levels primarily heritage and beyond and then the next one is colorism within the black african-american community plays a role colorism meaning the shades of skin color seem to be playing a role within the context of the school district and in the community and then finally just concern about student safety so those were the themes that shannon organized amongst the many comments coming from this focus group and from the survey itself next we look at asian pacific islander and here were the general themes and reports and concerns brought up wanting more white allies to speak up and stand with them want supportive systems in place

019for parents and students to be empowered to speak up want parents of younger children haven't had issues but are concerned about higher grade levels a theme that was also expressed in the previous listening session students using coping strategies such as trying to fit in avoidance not engaging in other words recognizing that it's better to remain quiet or figure out ways to to not potentially bring attention to their asian or pacific islander identity it was pointed out that science olympiad was a a organization after school club that felt like a very safe space that a lot of students in this focus group were participating in and felt really good about that to be able to be part of that group and then also this comment about intersectionality of racial and ethnic identity and ability and their

020ha their the theme that they have seen improvements over the past 20 years at least the families that were reporting in this group have made comments about that then if we move on to out of range native american hawaiian group uh here were some comments that had some themes that we definitely want to be looking at that teacher comments attitudes responses having the support source of some harm related immigration status that was reported from um at least one of the parents in in the in the focus group and that uh children aren't always protected in this way and sometimes it's certainly not always intentional it's just not realizing that that is causing harm uh the second point microaggressions revolve around nation of origin related questions sometimes parents have also not always shared what has happened

021in kids not always shared with their parents so that that's that sort of theme of sometimes students don't want to share what's happening with their parents because they don't necessarily want the parents to go up and talk to either school administration or teachers out of concern of you know what might happen some parents don't know where to report issues with teachers it's this who who is the safe person to report this to and then some principals have responded to their satisfaction while others have not in this group and finally some parents have experienced exclusion from parent groups that meant that they were trying to participate in parent groups like for a pta and felt like they weren't being included that was it was a parent specific an adult specific issue that that was brought up

022okay so if we can go to the next slide uh we had two other focus listening sessions and i'm gonna start with the religion group uh we had a group this was at the immediate of the middle school media center and here were some general themes within the religion listening session group that students don't feel safe in their beliefs and are fearful of expressing or identifying as who they are belief wise and when asked to elaborate things like sharing in class speaking and writing about that not necessarily about you know being targeted in class because they're religious by a teacher or anything like that but more that they weren't able to contribute something important to them in uh when they're sharing because they didn't always feel that they would be included and or at some

023times feeling ostracized next teachers haven't always welcomed students dissenting differing religious slash conservative viewpoints in school discussions and writing projects things like that are going to play into a bridge disability piece that we're going to talk about later next feeling that diversity equity and inclusion is more divisive than uniting and that's that's a theme that we need to work on i mean if we're going to do this work together we need the entire community to feel that we can do this together and that it actually is being inclusive of all our students and that's going to be an important point that we need to bring forward this is more related to if parents feel that they wanted their children to opt out of a specific activity that the option or the way in which that

024was happening felt punitive now in sex education in that program we've always had a specific opt-out policy that allows for parents to opt out of any or parents or gardens to opt out of any lesson but this goes further than that that sometimes parents want to opt out of an activity in the general ed curriculum beyond sex education curriculum and have felt that some of those options have felt punitive a lot of as a result of not being yet not partic uh the next part is children being forced to declare pronouns or change religiously identified clothing those were some examples that were brought up on multiple occasions more that the pronouns part was brought up multiple times and then uh next was students who would not participate in or support religious or conservative affinity affinity

025groups for fear of socialization isolation and i asked about this and the elaboration here was yes they allowed if they they did that or wanted to create an after-school group that they would be concerned about how that would be received by other that would find out about that that okay sometimes that works oh well maybe it did there okay so now we're moving on to the next uh listening session group and this was done jointly that there was a group of focused on gender lgbtq plus and ability so um that was that group was a together group okay so here's here's what we learned here parents of different differently abled children have to do an enormous amount of advocating that's primarily referring to those parents who have students on ieps feel like they have to

026advocate a lot for their their students then we have parents of differently abled children often poorly communicated with and expend a lot of emotional energy that was another report and again this is some i do want to preface this these are the people that were participating that were saying this either in the survey or in uh this group systemic change now we're lgbtq part systemic change hasn't benefited lgbtq plus youth and children who have already suffered and some have left the school district next fear of spaces is prevalent like what's going to happen in hallways bathrooms locker rooms change rooms some concern over that students are heckled trolled taunted and invasively questioned some teachers and administrations are supportive but that also meant that they didn't always feel that that was the case for all teachers

027and administrators student fatigue and reporting if the behaviors don't change that's the going to the administrator teacher and reporting that something's happening and then feeling like that that that same thing might happen again and or down the road these brands of identity harassment have been life-threatening for some students some taunting with a religious overtone has been reported there's a disconnect between what is reported to building level administrators and district level administrators and this idea of lasting pain and disconnect from the ses community for students when they leave that they either don't feel welcome to come back and or are choosing not to okay so if we go to the next slide these are some of the general survey comments so shannon captured the specifics throughout the groups throughout those five listening sessions and then also

028have some general survey comments to report first one is children of mixed race and adoptive families experience repeated invasive questions assumptions some bullying and ostracization both religious and distinctly non-religious students have been harassed discriminated against and marginalized for this identity in very various arenas within the system some beliefs that dei related work is divisive exclusionary of white families and not related to academic achievement has been reported beliefs that ses has not done enough in dei to improve ses reputation and provide safety for students with minority identities some students have only witnessed social identity harassment and it has caused harm to them indigenous families express concern over celebrations of colonialism and the portrayal of indigenous peoples students experience socio-economic and body type discrimination district-wide language doesn't always include diverse family structures and students have been physically

029or verbally attacked for being from different countries or speaking first languages on the playground or on the bus again general survey comments that we received and i will say we didn't receive a ton of comments this way in between 100 and 125 so this is not a really large sample size but it's still reports from uh the people that received the survey and it is consistent with what we were specifically learning in the five listening sessions when people were in front of myself and and shannon okay so if we move on to the next slide we want to talk about what we've been working on as a district and cara is going to talk about the next two slides because a lot of this is focused on the teaching and learning team thanks steve so

030across the last year and even before as you know we've been working on culturally responsive instruction and some of our di practices we've elevated the consultancy position that shannon washington was in to a director of culturally responsive instruction equity and inclusion beginning this year and that position will be in the admin position and will be working very closely with us as shanna has been across this past year to continue to help us move forward and then the focus on of all students feeling part of the curriculum so really focusing in these first you know moves forward around windows and mirrors we've talked about that a lot are students represented well are we using language that is appropriate for all identity groups are our spaces feeling inclusive to all students we're also working and have been

031working on policies and practices so in thinking about operationalizing our mission vision as well as our policy talking about what are the actual explicit moves that need to be made so one example would be on the installation of gender-neutral bathrooms at the high school and improving our processes in order to allow students to have some of the flexibility needed in order to use those spaces that have been made available and then of course looking at some of our other practices so our peaceful process practices our hate speech guidelines and revising our handbook so that all of those align and that the language from policy to handbook to actual practice is all the same and really known i'll reference this back when we talk about what's coming up in the future we also have the of

032course a very strong deiac group and building equity teams that have been in practice for a few years and the partnership with the di advisory that partnership together has been really productive beneficial to our staff which in hopes is of course beneficial to our students in order to provide resources for our staff on the ground and continue to provide increased education in a lot of our diversity equity and inclusion topic areas as well as to provide a lot of resources for staff to use within their classroom and their student groups and then ongoing training and education so our previous professional development cycles actually even before 21 22 through this year and then ongoing you'll see it today in my next presentation are anchored and culturally responsive instruction and we're really cognizant of the need to

033carry that work forward because we still have capacity and competency building to do with our staff and then we have been very intentional about making sure that our staff has had access to training whether it be the wisd social justice series or local training that we provided here or other book clubs and book studies offered by the wisd and we've done that by offering time by promoting those opportunities and by providing funding if it requires any resources that are financial next slide please so from here we have found that we do need to continue to clarify our mission and vision as related to the diversity equity inclusion work being more explicit about the language around that making sure our teachers and our broader staff know what that language is and so that their whole community

034is behind us as steve said this is a a group effort and it's really important that all stakeholders understand the direction that saline area schools is going and the why our focus on student safety both psychological and physical and the safety teaching and learning because safety teaching learning are irrefutably linked knowing that this is a system-wide effort so we have been really thoughtful about thinking through our onboarding and orientation processes especially in light of the increased turnover rate with teachers so we do know that as every time we hire a new staff member we have to have a process in place to make sure that they understand our mission and vision and that if we have already said it in august and they join us in september that we need to make sure that we

035circle back and provide the supports needing needed and we're looking at what that support system looks like to onboard teachers as quickly as possible with the must-have information tool to provide safe and supportive spaces for our students and then working towards civility so as steve mentioned as part of his goals really working to widely distribute uh the bridge to civility for so that we could not only engage in the classrooms but also in public meetings and with the wider community conversations that we're having to continue to grow from where we currently are anna i'm going to jump back to the to the side here this small small print but this this is an important part so i actually want to jump back to when the sling bridge to civility was created and provide a little

036more context so several years back we did seek out a process that would help us have better conversations around all of this work and that was ellington connecticut they are a district that when we spoke to their superintendent back several years they were describing similar things you know we're trying to bring the community together around important issues some related to race others just related to tensions in society and they worked to develop this tool called the seeds to civility so then we asked them about that and said that we want to develop our own and so in order to do so what we did is we put together a group that at the time superintendent graded and myself tried to be very reflective and responsive to make sure that the group represented the entire community

037in other words we specifically tried to find some people that had more conservative viewpoints some that had more liberal viewpoints and we were also involving uh local law enforcement both city of saline and pittsfield township and together we put together nine norms and then we started to use these norms in zoom sessions at the onset of you know the pandemic and we really haven't pushed it further than that and and now's the time to really get deeper into this to provide a tool for our students our teachers and community members to use when we're having various discussions and so real quickly there are these nine norms looking to find common ground debating the issue while respecting the person listen intentionally that's very important sometimes we listen but we're so quick to want to say our

038next thought we're not really being intentional next observe and reflect what are we seeing what are we reflecting on our own practices assuming good intentions that's really important assuming that all of us in the school district wants what's best for our students that's important allowing for emotion it's an emotional topic and to act like it's not isn't based on reality finally uh the seventh is speak one's truth and there was some debate about well what's your truth is different than my truth that's right that that my truth this is how i see it that should be respected and then engage directly if you have an issue with a specific person for example and you you should engage directly versus um you know we talk a lot about going on social media and things like that

039doesn't feel productive we see a lot of social media chatter back and forth about a variety of issues and it never seems very productive engaging directly is much better practice and except lack of closure this work takes time it's messy you don't walk away from the initial conversation with always feeling great about it but i will give a great example that happened not too long ago in one of our policy meetings we are talking about um controversial issues we have a policy called controversial issues and we had uh probably around 20 participants in the audience at the last meeting and our policy committee and to me that felt like a good step towards the bridge disability we had people dialoguing from different viewpoints were being heard by our policy committee and i believe we walked

040out of there feeling like okay we understand some next steps to to find some common ground with this policy and the direction of it and it felt like hey this is a good example of how we're engaged in practicing those nine norms with a diverse group in that context okay the next slide is how this all connects to goals that i've set as the superintendent and we want people to feel and well and to understand how this work is going to help move us forward in a better more productive environment and so first goal for next year is this academic rigor piece there is no question that this that the covid pandemic has been very challenging to navigate for our students attendance wise we've we've had a problem i mean kids are out a lot

041more over these last three years so consistency of instruction has been very difficult and that we need to get into you know keeping kids in school on a regular basis focused on the academic rigor that we can we know is a part of our i guess i'd say bread and butter in the district because we have very skilled teachers very supportive parents and and students that are ready to learn we need to make sure that we are focused in on that and adopt in it adapting for the various needs then we want to be focused on this culture of equity making sure that we're creating the environment that all of our students feel included third is the civility piece this bridge disability piece that we know that schools are a product of some of the

042things that are taking place in society how do we bring our district together as we are doing this work and then finally improving the future of our district this talks about improving our buildings and grounds infrastructure we're going to hear a little bit about millage proposal this evening all of those things are goals that i have set forth for next year and i want to make sure that we understand how this fits into that which is primarily supporting the academic rigor in our district okay so the next slide is simply moving on to questions and those can be to kara or myself thank you both and our thoughts are with shannon of course and and thank you for her work in this and um grace and brian i appreciate the city's collaboration and support any

043questions or comments brad yeah i have three so first of all a comment i want to thank the people of the work that went into this this is important work and it's something that i think that we've established is important to us as a team and i don't think i'm being too bold and saying that so i appreciate that it's important and it's it's important work um so is there a plan so my first question is is there a plan to revisit with these groups engage our progress that's my first question do you want me to give all three i'll do the first one so that was a that was expressed to me that we don't want to see listening sessions be a one-time thing only so yes i will work towards creating some cadence

044of being able to get back together with any or all of the five uh groups that we are engaged because that was expressed to me that that people do want the space to talk about this yeah i think it's important that we follow up and then the second thing is and i think carrie you touched on this for a second but in 2223 we also are developing our professional development model with culturally instructive instruction as part of or a core tenant of it yes in the teaching and learning update you'll see our goals for next year and you'll see the language really explicitly anchored in culturally responsive instruction okay and then you touched on new hires and then the third one is you know i noticed that you said that 50 of our staff have

045participated in social justice training right it's a four day training session what do we do to engage the other 20 50 so in full disclosure if i had had been partnering with steve and shannon on this i probably would have pushed back on that data a little bit because the updated data for me would speak to a higher rate of training because we did a full inventory of training for teachers last year as a part of our exit survey and one of the questions was justice leaders or this or that and they were able to articulate that and then we actually pulled names out of people who had not had any training and invited them to go and prioritize funding in order for them to receive that training that was last year's teachers and not

046necessarily this year's teacher we did not repeat that same end-of-year exit survey this year so but that would be something that we can do into the future but it was high 90s of our staff that were have some exposure to training and then i would add that with our addition of shannon's training across early release days this year and we did a full district training to start the year last year we are being really intentional about cycling training related diversity equity and inclusion so that it's not just a one and done and we're continuing to look at what are our next steps so as we move forward into our professional learning this plan are this year the plan is a a growth model from what we achieved this year i'll just add that the way

047that question or the way that phrase was worded specifically isd four day training and cara's point is there's other areas where training is provided where you could say over 90 of the staff have had that that's a good point yes i have a few questions so to begin you met with specific groups and i guess my question is i don't think you touched on it but i realize for example i'm thinking about the diversity within the groups so when we talk about religion i know the word conservative was used a couple of times um so um i guess i'm asking about diversity in the religion setting and then also ability was lumped in with gender lgbtq plus i don't know if those meetings were held together or um and then across lgbtq um wasn't just

048parents who like there's a diversity there as well so i'm wondering how we can capture that yeah the way those groups were set up that's a good point because in power school there's no demographic data for me for me to have specifically invited lgbtq or religious and so the way that played out was we asked in the survey if anybody wanted to be included in another listening session group and they could select what the topic was about and then so what i ended up doing in conjunction with shannon is we put together the religious group by itself because there was a lot of people that wanted to participate and then the other topics ability and lgbtq there were also enough to form a group and and that's how we did that we did um so

049it is a little trickier in that for the you know the focus group on uh black or african american students we we were simply going into power school and inviting the families who had students that identify with that whereas we weren't able to do that for those other groups so we do need to work on um getting the word out that these listening sessions will occur so that more people are able to know that they're happening i guess i would say yeah that's i mean that i think that's good to keep in mind that you know it's a diverse perspective right that may not capture other groups or voices so that's that's good thank you um so i had a comment about um just sticking with with your part the bridge to civility i've heard

050a couple times from people and in meetings about that some it has been problematic um in for example i'm going to give an example i've heard people talk about speaks one true speak one's truth one of the the seven and needing to respect their perspective or um and so i think like it comes up that um you can't respect whenever it's something like you're hating someone's child or identity and so um i know some sessions have turned out i think when you when it was initially happening specifically i've heard at least one story where um had to do with transgender topic and it wasn't facilitated well i'm not saying like you know there's a couple facilitators um but yeah i think and for example i think uh the sex ed committee um we you know

051some people were like oh well i don't agree with this point and so the committee itself was like okay we'll change that for our group so i don't know if there's something um around that i know groups came came together to talk about these points and stuff so um i'm just curious i mean i i think it is a work in process it's i guess i would equate it to any time a teacher uses a a set of norms or a guideline they have to practice with the kids and they get better i would say that's the same thing with our community that as we're introducing it um there's there's two things one we need clarity around what all these nine norms mean and and develop um norms around the norm so to speak in

052other words what what does this really mean so that before we're engaging we can all understand those and i think that takes practice and work that yup you're going to have sometimes where wow that feels like a violation of these norms and then that's where you know a skilled teacher or facilitator are going to have to work with students for example if they're having a conversation a group of four for example and they start to see that um the students aren't clear on on what that norm means that there would be some intervention and say oh that that would be where you're not um you know respecting the person debate the issue and respect the person so i do think it's going to be a work in process and that there are going to be

053um i don't want to say missteps but just areas that we need to get better at along the way that's cool like some talking points and training around that i think that would be wonderful um and then i think let's see kara um so um the section about policies and practices um i was just i know some drafts were sent out um and the policy committee sent a policy um as well for the dei ac to review and so um i'm just wondering as far as like the opera operation of these and um handbook and things like that i know the dei ac has helped contribute to some um and so i'm just wondering like how you make sure that happens and make sure that the iac as a whole um is able to have

054their input on these very important i mean that's why they're there right and and you know the equity team and stuff like that yes i think a number of those documents you know actually the origin was from the diversity equity and inclusion advisory committee which is wonderful like raising the the need to come and look at more closely the the alignment between the documents that are student facing that they read documents that are parent or caregiver facing and then our policy documents and some there's a lot of language that might not align and or might not represent the the way in which our vision and our mission is for selena area schools and so we want to make sure that yes i will cycle back so the handbook in particular i think was open to

055the diac for comments there's a note taker on it with a number of members have put some pieces of information in that we've got the work group set up and i could see shannon who in her role one of her job responsibilities as the director now is to be leading the work for the direct uh the council and i can see here looking at that three-year plan like we reviewed in this our last meeting and instituting a cadence of when these documents come up how do we bring them forward and where do they they land on the agenda so as we continue to look at a lot of these documents and we get really much better at that cadence of bringing um you know connecting the dots between the administrative work and the diversity equity

056inclusion council and the board i think it will get stronger and stronger and we've already seen some benefits from that yeah the um for example the dress code hasn't come to the dei ac yet sure on our policy end and so um yeah making sure obviously i know you're looking at policies and practices and how those actually align um and so i think that's um there's some important ones to make sure that there is input yeah and sharing thank you appreciate the work you are doing thanks i just have two questions two questions one for um actually for the city of celine i know they were going to speak a little bit to that first slide so curious about now that you've heard from i don't know why my mic is going in and out

057let me try this one it's good from here it's fine okay the sound is going in and out for me um curious if you all after listening to the feedback that has come from the district the various groups throughout the district if there's anything that you know comes to mind in terms of responding to to this from a community-wide perspective so i don't know of grace or brian morrow so what we really wanted to do out of the survey was to really gauge um the really the climate of the community and i think um dee i know that we're um you know we started as a task force now we're a committee um we've engaged a number in a number of um i would say outreach um activities within the last year and we'll continue

058to do so for the next year so some of these have been um the dei coffee hour so those were sessions with community com uh community members having conversations and those have been done on zoom and the city of celine welcoming community pledge pride flag raising pride in the park partnership with our local non-profit organizations so and they could be with you know we have plans to work with the library with business small businesses and our community and also just really educational material and information on our social media and that's you know talking about juneteenth pride black history month um you know american indian day and just really different religious holidays and bipod community members business highlights and things like that and for the remaining of the year we have um outreach at salty summer

059sounds uh ceiling farmers market we have a couple of book club um coming book clubs coming up um a book club meetings coming up movie discussions and other training sessions so um you know we're a group of volunteers that do this work and we do what we can to engage the community and so if there are feedback from the board or other community members please so feel free to contact us we're happy to engage with people and and come up with new ideas to outreach great thank you may i trust you yes well good evening it's odd to be on this side of the uh the deus um uh grace's answer was was perfect she outlined uh what our dei committee has done and will continue to do i would add two things to your

060question trustee jones obviously based on on the feedback that was presented this evening and what we've heard over the past several years it's clear as a community and as a city we have much more to do tremendous progress has been made but much work remains undone what i would add to the list of items that miss wu just articulated is that for the past two years now the city has hosted mandatory dei training for staff members and we've extended invitations to community stakeholders boarding commission members business leaders etc that is something that we will continue to do we will likely use um deonardo pianza and his team at the msu extension he's been working with municipal clients i think for the better part of of 25 years he actually comes from tecumseh so a town

061a city very comparable to selene in many ways but if there are members of the school district other community members who would like to attend those sessions we would we would welcome that and we will likely hold another dei training if not later this summer than certainly this fall great thank you appreciate that i really think it's important that connection between the city and and the school district so glad you all are here my other question was back related to the training um i know there have been a couple of questions regarding that but one of the things that we heard or i heard in the session that i participated in was that teachers had a hard time dealing with um comments that were made by students that may have been inappropriate and not not

062necessarily feeling like the teachers had the tools to um to respond in the moment so there was a you know kind of continuation of the work and and not and addressing in front of the whole class you know what what could have been a great teaching moment so i'm just curious specifically about um support for difficult conversations or facilitating you know um particularly challenging topics and making sure that there's support for that ongoing support for that absolutely and um to tie in susan's our trustee steps question from earlier i do want to say that you know when we look at specifically hate speech within the handbook and then we've got layers to continue to go through we haven't looked at the whole handbook yet and so when we think about hate speech or things that

063come up in the classroom and teachers feel taken aback one of the ways in which we have addressed this reactively this year is shannon engaged with staff upon request to actually have direct instruction and educate teachers for example on the n word some of the history work that she had done with some of our student athletic groups in the fall and then offered an opportunity in a safe setting to practice conversations around challenging topics in which the staff members were able to and this was in an isolated situation it was not every single building because it was in response to a situation from earlier this year but that model is something that we're looking to do proactively so at our admin workshop in june she ran that same protocol with our administrators in order to

064continue to build our competency and our confidence in engaging in hard conversations and responding to concerns or incidents or conversations that go in a direction that feel really harmful to help our administrators feel more confident i'm engaging in those in a positive way with all of our stakeholders and so um there's a piece of education there's a piece of scenario building based upon experiences that we've actually had and then there's some rehearsal pieces and i do know that she's planning to integrate that into some of the trainings that she's planning in this upcoming year so that the whole staff has the opportunity to experience that that's great thank you um so first i just want to begin by um congratulating shannon um i i if i know shannon i know she'll watch this later she'll

065want to have these questions and this information too so i want to congratulate shannon on the move of her position to something more permanent and what a benefit that will continue to be for years for our district um i also want to extend condolences to her and to her family tonight i want to thank the city for coming and and the dei work that you're doing um just some things that came to mind especially um after hearing um secretary jones um when shannon did the history of the n-word she shared some of the information with different groups and i don't know if it was as a trustee or a parent that i that i got that information but i am really curious about that in particular because we continue to hear so much harm especially

066in the data that you shared today but it seems like from our middle school and high school um community groups that that just continues to be um something and we keep hearing cries for how can how can we you know um how can we make this stop so i'm i'm really curious um and i'm just brainstorming and thinking that potentially um joining with the city and making that information more widely spread throughout the community so that it's not just school-based groups that are getting that information but that it's really important that our community understand the history of that word um so that these conversations are happening beyond our school community groups that they're happening throughout our community so that was that was one thing that came to mind in thinking about the work that grace

067shared and that mayor murrah shared tonight um i i also was really um struck being on the on the policy committee we've been hearing um stories and not stories but recounting of um feelings of students feeling um that the opt out or opt-in can feel very punitive and can feel like um even it's putting teachers in a difficult situation so um i while i'm disappointed that that is a feeling that's permeating many of our groups i hope that this is something that we are um more aware of and that we're working towards solutions um for our policies and for administrative guidelines um i building on what what trustee estep was saying and also what um secretary jones was saying i think for the seeds um or sorry i always go back to seeds i'm sorry

068bridge to civility i remember when it was brand new and it was seed so when we were hearing about it from ellington um i do think that the idea of having norms is really really important for us to come together and to work collaboratively in groups and it is i think a positive step for us to be thinking about role play and practice around those norms and examples or non-examples i also wonder if there might be some way for [Music] when when someone feels like maybe a norm is um needing to be addressed if there's a safe way to pause maybe say can we pause for a moment and talk about this particular norm or something is there a way for us in groups to make it safe or feel more safe for um for

069us to stop potential harm that might be happening um as trustee estab said i was in a group one time where it felt like um you know someone was speaking their truth but it was um at the at the cost of of someone else and so um just trying to figure out how we might work on those actionable steps yeah um i don't know if you want to say more about that well i think it's one of the reasons why i'm so grateful that the board and the district valued the consultancy role so much that we elevated it to a full-time position and made it part of the administrative team because we do need the leadership that shannon offers in this role to help lead the way in this work because what we're talking about

070um is often in adult circles right these are in those adult conversations that we're having with our friends our colleagues people on social media whatever it might be and we're also talking about how do we bring this to to students and the work is imperative right we want to be a healthy thriving community with whom we have a diverse set of ideas and thoughts that we can have really robust conversations around without oppressing any identity or group and as we can see nationally and internationally that is very tricky and there's a lot of work to be done and if we model it here and we model in our admin meetings and teachers are modeling in their classrooms and the city is partnered with us we hope to see an exponential growth as we we all

071do our best to engage civilly with each other even if topics are are hard at times so what we're hoping is that um part of shannon's role the you know director of diversity equity i'm still working on it yes you got it culture responsive instruction equity and inclusion i got it now um is that piece which it's not all just about teaching right so she had her four year plan for this year and she's had some different spaces that she was looking at to examine for us as a district and bring forward some of her findings and then make recommendations which she has fulfilled and now we get to actually like bring that work to fruition and take that next step and that's i think i'm i'm personally really excited and optimistic about the future

072definitely yeah i think the last piece that i was thinking about is i understand the importance of of removing the identifying information from the statements that parents and guardians and family members shared in those sessions i will say that in this role as a trustee we hear feedback from community i'm sure as administrators and and city officials that you're hearing feedback too and there is nothing more heartbreaking than hearing the first-hand um recounts of of the things that students are facing so this work is a high priority for me personally and i think for the rest of the board um that we want to see school and our community to be a safe place for for everyone who chooses to be a part of our of our community so um thank you for the work

073that you're doing and and the work that that you're leading um dr lotch and if the board can do anything to continue to support um you know we're here thank you appreciate it any other comments or questions yeah david go ahead sure um just kind of echo what everybody else has been uh saying i'm glad to see this uh work being done thank you so much for taking these issues seriously and um doing so much work to to um ask the hard questions i know that um we all know these are not issues that are unique to celine but these are things that we can either choose to sweep under the rug or to uh to try to address and and this is a place where we've tried to address those rather than sweeping them

074under the rug and that's that's a great thing um just a couple of of questions um looking at the general survey comments um i noticed that there were a few um groups that people brought up in their comments that we didn't that didn't have listening sessions like um socioeconomic status and body type discrimination i wonder if those are things that you were contemplating um you know since they're going to be more more rounds of listening sessions in future years those are things that you might incorporate yeah i think i mean you know the debate is do we have sort of a general listening session where anybody can come and share things that maybe aren't addressed in some of the other groups because from my perspective it might be hard to have i don't know 12

07513 different groups and we got to think more about that because to your point uh trustee hayward we do want to be able to be inclusive of hearing from from everyone so how do we create that space so i think it's something that i need to think about as what would be the way to reach the other people that have not been included in one of those listening sessions yeah i think that would be um that would be great um and especially um going back to to you know commenting on on the strengths of what we've done i was especially um happy to see including not just kind of the things that we expect to see in in dei listening sessions but also incorporating um you know having the thoughtfulness to incorporate um a religion

076specific religion uh listening session um um because we're often hearing um how people feel excluded along that line and even though that's something that's not always incorporated under this framework i think it's it's great to see that being taken seriously and it would be good to to um you know to reflect more broadly on these other sources of of um lack of equity and i think that could could um going back to another one of the sets of of um comments to the general survey we saw kind of two dichotomous things there are some people who think that there's too much di dei work being done in the schools and another group of people thinking there's not enough being done but maybe if we can if we can broaden the scope of what what we're

077doing under the rubric of dei that can kind of bring more people into the tent and get people to see oh this this does include me and people have more more of a sense of buy-in in the whole project um so i think that would be nice and my other question was the listening sessions were focused on parents and families um is there any thought put into it i know it would be probably a little more difficult but student listening sessions yeah i can touch on that we we were potentially wanting students to come if parents and guardians felt like they were able to and and and some did but for the most part it was adult so i think the question is how do we get more specific there i know that at the

078high school level for example we have had some more informal sessions with leaders of clubs and organizations student council where we've asked about you know how how are we doing to include all our students at at the high school level specifically and we could do more of that to to create a more natural environment where students can come down at their launching lunch with us and and talk through through all that yeah i think those are quite interesting yeah i was going to say there are a number of informal um inconsistent examples of listening sessions with students um through a variety of whether it's in a teacher's classroom who's asking questions whether it's a principal who's surveying its equity team that's surveying or we're meeting directly with student groups i think what we can get

079better at is having a set cadence similar to what we're trying to do with our district surveys so that they are expected and you know the participation increases and when they're predictable more people will come and participate especially if they can see that we are really using the data to drive improvement cool thank you if i could just add um ms davis mr dr lotch mayor marl citizen wu um i appreciate all of the work all of you are doing and as i was listening and reading that litany of statements from the parents it was it just was so frustrating it made me think about how easy and casual it is to do harm to other people through our words and actions and i i'm hoping that we can because i've been here i've been

080listening really closely for the positive signs and i'm hearing there's there's some here and there and i'm really hoping that we can find a way to showcase some of the positive things that are going on in the district while at the same time not down plowing down playing or or or seeming to disrespect those other statements of the things that have happened in our schools so i'm looking forward to any showcases of the positive things that have happened not only in our schools but also mayor marlon the town as well yeah if i if i can touch on that quickly the i do feel like we're really moving in a more uh proactive positive direction because i do feel that people are reaching out to me and saying you know thank you for you know

081trying to make sure that we are providing unity with the work because it is important that people feel as stressed you hear it said like how am i included how everybody wants to feel part of an organization a team um whatever it may be and we as a district need to help bring that together what are the ways in which we can truly support you know all our students all our community members even though we know we're going to have disagreements just like we're seeing in society but um i actually feel like we're moving in that direction even though we were hearing a lot of harmful examples tonight but we you know we we do want to focus on that unifying positive energy around the work we just need to do more to bring people

082together thank you thank you very much cara i don't know if you want to say oh yeah go grab some water oh yeah go ahead okay are we ready to move to the next presentation i think we are okay all right well kyra's getting i wasn't going to add this but while kara's getting her water um i liked that you mentioned onboarding i see the hr reports and all of our our wonderful new staff members getting ready to come in the fall and i like that that was included as part of part of the presentation so whenever you are ready thank you yes and assistant superintendent ellis and i have been working really closely with molly garcia director of student services as well as the teaching learning team specifically jen nelson and caroline stout and

083kelly woodman and katie o'keefe to look at our onboarding process from lots of different angles and really restructuring how the cadence of even new teacher meetings goes what does that first day look like so that that fire hose of new information isn't i mean it's a lot and we want you to have all of the key essentials to be successful here and and to create safe really engaging rigorous spaces for our students so i'm appreciative of the team that we have yeah all right so um i'm still here so good evening everybody [Laughter] so the teaching learning update tonight is really focused on an overview of the continuous improvement process at large as well as it incorporates some highlights from our saline 21 22 data story and our improvement goals that we have begun to

084orient for the upcoming years as well as a sense of a timeline for our continuous improvement process at large so we will provide another teaching and learning update in september uh with more information related to our continuous improvement process so know that this is an overview because in 2020 21 the state launched a new continuous improvement process called my kip and that was in the middle of a pandemic in a number of challenging years and so we have um this coming year will be what i would consider our first official launch year even though the state was supporting all districts and increasing capacity across the last two years to understand the different components as well as to build the capacity to actually implement continuous improvement under the new structure so i am going to spend

085some time tonight explaining some of that so that you have the background that you need to articulate that to the community and that the community who is viewing today on this beautiful summer day has a sense of that too and these are some components i've already shared with the building admin team central admin and we'll be sharing it out with staff as well so um next yep slide next slide so one of the things you know to michael our trustee mcfae's point the idea of reflecting on what we have actually accomplished feels really pertinent to me when i think about standing here last year around this same time while it seems like 10 years ago that was a really imperative time for our district and the decisions we were making about our continue to learn

086plan and at that point in time we had committed to and now i can say we achieved you know five days a week of in-person instruction our goal was to create a sense of normalcy to the extent that we could for our students inside of those five days a week while still providing outstanding instructional programming co-curricular classes extracurricular activities and a first-rate athletic program while keeping students in school and as we all know there was a shadowy side to that commitment we did achieve that i mean by and large we stayed in school even though we might have had pockets where students had a lack of continuity in instruction because they had to quarantine they were ill a staff member was so on so forth so if you go to the next slide you know

087i want to acknowledge that admits those accomplishments right there were some incredible challenges that we recognized that that five day a week instruction it needed continuous support throughout the year you know we recognized that students needed the opportunity to learn how to be students again to build up those the stamina to understand structures and routines that help them maximize the learning by our excellent that our excellent teachers are providing and we also know that we had ongoing absences as a result of illness and our quarantine on the impact of the continuity of instruction and that there's still trauma and there will be trauma that's ongoing across these you know foreseeable future for some students and staff and we want to be really cognizant of that as well as we were trying to be last year

088too so steve framed for you his focus areas moving into 22-23 which i think are a great overarching aspiration for us as a district to think about when we start in the fall and so he's already explained those to you and to the community viewing so i think we can go on to the next slide but holding on to the idea that as we think about improvement for at a staff level we'll be zooming in sorry to use that phrase we will be narrowing in on a more specific focus i'm hoping to do less and less zooming across the across the coming year so when we think about continuous improvement the state launched what's called the michigan integrated continuous improvement process thankfully it is a lovely acronym it's mykip so we can stay with that

089i'll be using that phrase for all my presentations moving forward and that mindset is really about creating sustainable con consistent progress that positively impacts student achievement if you can go to the next slide so the then and now of this if you've been in education for a long time what it used to be called the school improvement and it was exactly that like it was very isolated building level improvement where the teachers within the specific building along with their building administrators would elect a goal monitor that goal submit the the data at the beginning the middle and the end there was usually usually a flurry in may and then then we move on to the next one but they weren't necessarily integrated across the buildings and or the district and so the state recognized the

090flaw in that plan and they developed this con this idea of continuous improvement and essentially the continuous improvement now is 2021 and beyond and it is oriented around a district unifying goal and the buildings at the building level are essentially working to help the district achieve the goal that has been decided upon and i'll get more into that in the future along with improvements made to the process the state also recognizes the need to center the whole child versus solely academic achievement so there's now a really nice balance in both recognizing social emotional needs psychological needs physical needs financial needs and academic needs as well which has been really interesting for us to examine as we look at some of the data points across this year the other piece that's really important about continuous improvement

091versus the the old school improvement process is that it's really iterative which means that it's fluid and flexible we can come back to our goals uh we can update them we can change them it might take a goal five years it might be two years if we say that it's five years we accomplished it in two years and we can move on to another one it's not on an annual basis so that feels like a really good fit for the way that our district operates and the vision that we have for how learning works too and then the other piece that it has highlighted is the connection of the key organizational component so when you think about continuous improvement it used to happen really just at the teacher level but we know that students are

092impacted by transportation by food services by buildings and grounds and bringing all those systems together along with finance to make sure that we can fund our initiatives to actually achieve continuous improvement all of those now are integrated inside of the my hip structure and as well as the platform that the state has provided us so those are some important shifts between the two so if you could skip two ahead that outlined some of the things that i just said one of the questions that mike hip has really encouraged districts to ask is how can the districts better connect stakeholders to create interdependent and align processes in people working toward a common goal to bring about desired results and it feels like this question for us moves us into an opportunity for me to share how

093we're thinking about this as a saline school district so if you could go to the next slide so we were well positioned pre-pandemic and pre-my kip so the changes to thrive in this kind of structure because we already had a growth mindset continuous improvement orientation in celine and so we have some some pieces that are already in place that are going to work for us really well as we continue to support students and staff moving forward one of the things that our continuous improvement um calls for is having different teams that work together in order to look at both the big picture the external picture the internal picture the local picture and all of that so there's three teams that we will be leveraging as a district uh there's some mykip language in here and

094there's some like local sleen language so we uh mike calls them district continuous improvement teams and that would be our teaching and learning team essentially this you know our team will is district level it's internal but it's bigger picture it helps connect you know young fives all the way through 26 and looking at all of our programming and ensuring that the um you know that the cadence of looking at goals is is moving along according to you know a timeline that makes sense based upon the goals of the districts and the buildings that are implementing different strategies there's the building continuous improvement team which we already had in place as well it's made up of our school improvement chairs at the building the teacher leaders and the building administrators and that team will be looking

095at their local data it's more internal localized to the building itself and um they'll be working on their startup implementing the strategies that they've selected in order to help reach the overarching district goal and then we are updating the name if you were part of the strategic framework goal groups in the past which was a mouthful we're going to update that to strategic council and that is our groups that have worked on the strategic framework goals that we agreed upon in the fall and that is made up of the community members it's external it's varied perspectives it's really healthy for us to bring in whether they're parents caregivers trustees students we have on the on those school groups and that would be our strategic council and the optimal interaction between these three groups if you

096just click once is to have a cadence of meetings that are collaborative that are sharing information from building to district to community from community to district to building and so on and so forth so that we're constantly having checks and balances to make sure that we're hearing all the varied perspectives and moving forward next slide please so when you think about the timeline of a continuous improvement cycle i'm summarizing it by quarters so we're technically in quarter three right now also known as july through september so we are setting up for success and launching uh this would be like the reset and luckily enough the launch of the official my kit platform and it actually working is in line with us organizing our strategic goals and us needing new building goals as well so the

097timing is perfect for us so we will be um clarifying the path for this upcoming year and inspiring teachers and then it's you know we're we're making a change like we're moving forward dr lotch has articulated his goals for this coming year and it feels like a really great time so we did have to do some leg work prior to coming up into this august so if you go to the next slide anna what i want to make sure that everyone knows is that the context behind the work that we had to do so in fall of 2021 we finalized the strategic i'm calling them frames versus goals because there's a number of things that we're calling goals it's kind of like guidelines and policies we're trying to organize our language that everybody knows what

098we're talking about and so the strategic frames are our four strategic frames that were agreed upon the fall we were also taking stock at that time of the status quo and that like what needed to happen in in that year this past year to best meet our students needs uh meet them where they're at and frankly we learned an awful lot because we had anticipated a number of things but we hadn't expected necessarily all of the things that arose as challenges and so we were you know spent a lot of time responding to those identifying the reasons why and then continuing to bolster our systems that we had in place to to more strongly respond to the pandemic version 2122 and winter of 22 we were building capacity with mycap and what that looked like

099was me working with central admin i was starting to integrate some professional development for administrators so that their competency and confidence in my kip would increase and then of course monitoring the data that we were receiving from the multiple uh points of feedback surveys testing that we were receiving throughout the year and then this spring we spent quite a bit of time energizing and visioning around future goals so thinking about like what is this going to look like now how can we take where we've been and lift up all the great things we have accomplished what we have overcome and recognize that yes there's still more work to do but we've we've got this and what does that look like because we still have big hopes and dreams for all of our students so we

100did some work with the admin teams the teacher leaders we brought together a cohort of up-and-coming leaders to get their input on what we might be thinking about for future years what they might need um talk to some students and it was really exciting work uh finishing up this june with our admin workshop days to get closer to the goals and i'll talk a little bit about that more in the next couple of slides go to the next one all this was while i wanted to name this just because i think it's important while we were also leveraging existing structures to continually like address student needs in the here and now because we did feel a tension between but wait we're still doing this work of the now we need to meet a lot of

101student needs here and we're talking about 2223 and that was an entrance interesting dynamic which was very real and i'm really just grateful for the leadership teams that we have to know that there is a future beyond here that was really important for us to talk about so that we could set up for success in this upcoming year so this was wow these conversations were happening while we were leveraging our existing structures to meet student needs and be responsive to some of the data that we were seeing as a result of the pandemic this these two slides are actually lumped together from the literacy report that you saw in march next slide please so this is not my infographic but it's my kip's infographic and so it articulates the whole process so when you think

102about my kit focused on whole child whole school whole community anchored in your district's vision beliefs and mission while also providing a process that really makes a lot of sense where it's showing this reiterative assess plan implement monitor and evaluate so we're going to dig into that a little bit more because as a saline school district if you hit um we forward one for me and then again and again thank you so celine is currently in the assessed needs and then one more click and the planning process so we've spent some time examining our data story and doing some thinking work and like i said working with our teacher leaders and gathering up information to make decisions about what our district needs right here and right now to be our best for the upcoming years

103and click on the next slide so when we think about a data story when you think about assessing needs we really had to do some work around like what are all the data points that we can gather when we think about whole child so our general areas of inquiry to assess needs have to do when we think about academic success indicators or behavioral and social emotional success indicators academic we tend to use our benchmark assessment system called acadiance fonteson panel which i narrowed down to fnp there which is a reading assessment that's local to the teacher nwea which is fourth through eighth grade course grades ninth through that's nine through twelfth grade and of course standardized test results as well as behavioral and social emotional success indicators such as our pbis and swiss system and

104the data that that produces attendance discipline logs survey results and feedback we're using a lot of different data points and we're i'm not going to go into all of those the things that we've learned but what i did do was put together some slides around here are some trends in connecting the dots that we've talked about a lot that have risen to the top so if you go to the next slide when we think about bright spots some of the trends that we are noticing is when we look broadly across some of the if we do a crosswalk across a lot of our opportunities for data we can see that the end of the year acadian's reading testing indicates that around eighty percent of our second through third graders uh met grade level benchmark which

105is excellent our data from nwa math and reading indicates that approximately 80 percent of the fourth to eighth grade students reached average or above proficiency data from course grades and ela math indicates that 80 percent of our ninth or eleventh grade students met grade level proficiency of a c are higher uh when in terms of survey feedback greater than 80 percent of our respondents that was parents teachers and students indicated that learning standards and expectations are clearly explained to students same with the teachers having high learning expectations and standards as well as a belief that the over 90 percent felt like there's a teacher counselor other staff member to whom a student could go to for for help with a school problem um and that we have a variety of opportunities for students so when

106we think about a number of the talking points related to academic health social health physical health across our district these are the bright spots that you know trustee mcveigh was talking about earlier that i feel like we can really anchor in and then of course we want to inquire and we want to look at where are those places where we still have some work to do so if you go to the next slide some focus areas of inquiry to address needs comes out of you know what our noticings were and then we're looking at the different opportunities for data that we can examine more closely we were really intentional or want to be really intense about monitoring and reflecting on data related to content mastery and achievement social emotional wellness behavior regulation as well as

107disparity in data between subgroups and so when we look at that so if i if you look at the puzzle piece on the next slide it's all connected there so we do see that there are spaces where like for in their k through third grade approximately 20 of the students did not reach grade level benchmark and reading and that's something we want to be really aware of that's the number of students whose needs we want to address and we have systems in place that we'll be working on to help those students continue to grow additionally there's almost 45 percent of our k through third grade students do not reach grade level benchmark and math um and you know we're really cognizant with about where that data is coming from why that data looks like that

108uh what the acadians test does that maybe classroom teachers do differently what classroom data says that acadian's testing doesn't necessarily say but it's still a data point that feels like we know foundational math is really important if 45 of our students did not reach benchmark at the end of this year then that's going to be a high priority for us moving forward to look at the systems and structures and structural practices we have in place to address that the data from our spring nwa reading and math nwa sorry that's repetitive indicates about 20 percent of our fourth or eighth grade students are not reaching average or above proficiency from our survey data less than 80 reported by parent or caregivers students and staff that teachers not necessarily successfully showing students how lessons relate to life

109outside of school there is emerging data that indicates disproportionality and academic performance so i know i shared that 98b report with you if you looked at it closely and there are some spaces that we can see that certain subgroups are not achieving at the same rates of success that other groups are achieving and so we are noticing that we've got some more exploring to do around that and especially to look at what are our next steps around remedying that we also saw that less than 80 percent of survey respondents noted that social emotional needs of students are being met that was only indicated by students and staff interestingly enough our caregiver respondents they were over 80 percent so there's a disconnect there but we noted that as uh you know a disconnect that was important

110to write down and think about more deeply why is that the case and then less than students go back thank you and then less than 80 percent of students in the school receive support that address their individual needs so we looked at the um data that was coming out you know being really cognizant we want students to feel like all students have their needs met and we would like those numbers to be over 80 percent or even higher so these are areas that we're noticing uh there are focus areas to improve upon let's go to the next slide so when we consider all that data again the whole child focus of my kip overall really like leans into looking at them together as a whole package and not in isolation and i think that's incredibly

111helpful so it after a lot of brainstorming and work and talking with our teacher leaders our administrators and listening to anecdotal evidence evidence while also examining qualitative data and quantitative data we landed on a district primary goal so this would be our focus goal for this upcoming year and this is what's actually submitted to my kip it's an increased overall rates of mastery in content areas as measured by local assessments k-8 course grades 912 among students regardless of subgroup by increasing staff competency and the use of evidence-based cultural responsive instruction so that would be our primary goal and so if you i know we'll talk about this probably in a minute and it's coupled with the building strategies hand in hand with this academic goal we also as mentioned we know that we don't know

112what the next few years will look like from a social emotional standpoint of our students it's really important that we continue to offer supports for our students in that area not that we didn't always as an organization but being really attuned to the different needs that have come up as a result of the pandemic so it was really important to all of the the teams that were working on this to have a complimentary goal around social emotional wellness so we did write a second one the my kip facilitators recommend somewhere between one and three total we've landed on two as a district so the complementary goal is strength and social-emotional support models in order to positively impact staff and student self-reporting of sas services as measured by the biennial perceptions of equity survey and that

113is a survey that the diversity equity inclusion advisory council gives every other fall so we'll be looking at that and in the hopes of impacting how our students and staff feel about the social emotional needs being met all right next slide thank you so the district goal that is the overarching goal and the hope is with the my kip system that the building level work that happens is going to influence success with a district level goal so the building administrators considered their journey across the last five years with their previous building goals consider the data they were seeing this year and the feedback that they had gotten from their staff their teacher leaders and their various building communities and they work to generate these goals in the last few months and what's really important about

114this is it's really anchored all this is anchored in our district focused documents so if i think about it like an umbrella often with um that didn't make a very nice image for our slide deck but where this sas mission and the strategic frames are really the center of our work because it's important that we're starting to connect the things that we've made decisions about and move those forward so our strategic frames the four that we agreed upon in the fall as well as the cultural response instruction our di three-year plan the sas compass and then social emotional health and well-being like those focus areas that we have should all live inside of the strategies that the different buildings are implementing and they really do so i will have to step closer and i can

115probably read them from here so the k3 buildings their primary goal is you know building teacher capacity for culturally responsive instruction to support high academic achievement and build relationships that promote social and emotional wellness heritage by supporting standards-based learning sorry about the acronym standards-based learning with common and responsive instructional practices and assessment measures heritage will meet the needs of all learners the middle school build vertical and horizontal alignment and standards learning targets and equitable practices and curriculum in order to increase student engagement and achievement and shs the high school common rigorous experiences for all students through the implementation of balance assessment culture response instruction and align pacing and standards liberty using common engagement collaboration and collaboration liberty programs will prepare students for independence careers and citizenships in a globally connected world and student services align

116and refine department practices to be more culturally responsive through tiered behavior supports intentional collaboration increased professional development opportunities peer-to-peer programming social thinking and expanded use of communication tools so these will be the focus areas for each of those buildings on which our professional learning plan hinges so that we are aligning the time that we have available the resources that we have in order to support implementation of these strategies so that overall as a district we can grow and i'll i think i speak to that a little bit later go ahead and click so when we think up to that timeline like right now we're really the next couple months will be about building capacity with our entire staff because the staff at large hasn't heard about all of our goals and all the planning that

117we have been doing and so that'll be part of our august rollout and that will be part of the pieces you know around professional development related to how like what that actually looks like for them and doing again like some inspiring bringing back some of that joy and then really clearing the path we've heard a lot like what does it look like for us to do this work well and please help us with that and part of it just being really clear and explicit as well as time that's another place that we've heard a lot about and so we've worked really hard to develop a plan a professional learning plan that carves out a lot of time for teachers to do the work that they need to do to be successful with the goals that

118their buildings identify so the the overall timeline though in the other quarters of the year you can see there's a cadence of monitoring adjusting some impact assessment and updates and monitoring and summarizing and as a part of this unlike with the old school improvement process when you get to the quote unquote the end of the year the april the june part it isn't one and done where you turn your report in it is reflect and revise as needed and keep going so it gives us an opportunity to look at the data that's come up across the year really assess how we're doing and then decide what are our next steps from there and me personally having been on this side as well as on the classroom side to have a study of data and a

119discussion of continuous improvement be something that impacts change and feels more empowering versus punitive is i think has so much optimism in it and so i'm really excited about where this will take us if you go to the next slide some of the things as a teaching and learning team that we are doing to support success with our continuous improvement process obviously one of the things i've mentioned is just building capacity so we were really intentional about spiraling some opportunity for professional learning for our admin team central admin team teacher leaders and then we'll get to the broader staff here in august and the decision around that was really how much was too much too quickly in the year that we had so we were trying to be thoughtful about rollout so that we could

120achieve more success implementing a professional learning plan that's aligned to and addresses the goals that actually is a direct link if you wanted to link on it there's a link to our professional learning plan for 2223 reinstituting curriculum cycles so this has been something that was on our mind that felt like too big of a lift in the circumstances of this past year where we have really clear cadence of curriculum cycles for each of our content areas in order for them to look at do we have agreed upon viable curriculum resources and maps do we have diverse materials that our students are accessing are we using inclusive instructional practices and starting to develop a cadence in which we're doing that regularly more intentionally so that that we start to see some improvement overall and for

121teachers to feel more supported because they are doing a great job you know especially in so such trying times and um i think they are really welcoming and looking forward to being able to study their curriculum more going into 22-23 leveraging the teaching and learning team for support so um you know we established the teaching learning team last year and also some instructions and routines to support teachers so you heard me mention that shannon was moving into spaces where she was responding to needs and able to provide professional learning to be responsive she also proactively created like we set up a system where we knew she was going to take the lead on every early release day jen nelson as our literacy coach was coaching in with all of our our reading writing teachers to

122lift up the level of their work our instructional design team at large was working to help bolster the opportunities for staff for compass connections which is our localized staff development based upon the needs that our teachers have indicated and then of course the entire team is available for for all of the support that teachers need in a one-to-one basis too so there's sort of an on-demand as needed not just the things that they develop ahead of time so we continue we'll continue to leverage the teaching learning team supports our our role as a teaching learning team because that's the district continuous improvement team is monitoring and analyzing the results of the building strategies plans and helping buildings implement those and then of course reflecting reporting and adjusting so as a part of continuous improvement it's

123also regular board reports and work with the strategic councils to make sure that everybody that those loops are closed and that we are have a continuous cycle of communication and collaboration to because we know this is this is bigger than just this room and me standing here at this podium so that is what i have to present for you and i'll look forward to circling back to this in the fall and i'm open for questions before we do that though um yeah can you move back to slide 20. because this is something that i want to reiterate as right there this is really important in my opinion the most important part of the presentation i've heard from various stakeholders that if we spend too much time on culturally responsive instruction it's going to take away

124the focus on academic rigor in the district and what i'm what what this goal expresses the district goal that you know i'll be held accountable for increasing overall rates of mastery and con content areas as measured by local assessments in k through 8 and course grade improvement in 9 through 12. so we're centering it around academic achievement and supporting culturally responsive instruction i just think that's a that that's something that that is is important for us to note that um this isn't a if we do one thing it will take away from the other and i just feel like that's an important thing to clarify before we get into questions thank you um i do have a few really fast ones but i think i'm going to have to talk quickly because your presentation was

125so fast so quickly pace it might be yeah no sorry i felt like somebody had pressed one and a half speed underneath but anyway uh first please ask no i love it i think it's great i really appreciated that how integrated the continuous improvement plan is at slide whatever 13 i think a quick question about the building continuous improvement teams and the teacher leaders how are they selected so currently it's a contractual it's in the sea contract that teacher leaders every spring and their departments determine who the next teacher leader will be or will continue to be moving into the upcoming year so it's determined by the departments themselves or the grade levels within the buildings and then district administrators can weigh in as needed and there's a lot of turnover year to year is

126an opportunity to for growth and that's right um not necessarily it depends on which department or grade level you are in um so we do have some really experienced teacher leaders and we appreciate that leadership and the continuity because they've you know they bring a lot to the table we do have five teacher leader meetings a year we start with a two and a half hour launch in the summer and that leads into consistent communication expectations for them teacher leadership is very different than it used to be in the past we really depend on our teacher leaders uh with that said i would say it's probably 50 um and that's that's probably overshooting it's probably 75 25 more than enough information so i love this slide this is an important one for sure i noticed

127that the goal is to increase overall rates of mastery and i'm glad you didn't specify a specific target like by x percent or something like that done i assume it is and actually this is again i'm very hopeful about the state's intent with this process because the actual platform won't allow you to move like you have to look at the data you decide on targets later and they don't necessarily have to be by x percent um and i really appreciated that as well and as our team did and they do also ask like what's your what is your overall target like what how you know you'll be successful it's a question you asked me last fall and so we have in mind what that looks like uh when you look at our numbers in terms

128of growth looks like you have a very clear baseline so that's great all right i only have i only have a couple but um one one thing that i would love to circle back to and and i know you're here frequently and your team is here frequently um but especially recently and it's been kind of a growing body of um articles i i don't i i'm not gonna say research because i can't quote exactly where um it's coming from off the top of my head but um there there's been a growing body of criticism of um pbis and so i'm just wondering if um in light of that um that has been circulating more it seems to be more predominantly if that um we could maybe highlight that in an upcoming um uh report and

129how that's used in our district um in a positive way to support students thank you i thought you wanted me to highlight the criticism of it now um and it's being heavily criticized i'd like for us to um speak more clearly about what we're doing instead of just that acronym that might be getting negative absolutely yeah yeah i think that would be a great idea because it's it is pivotal to some of the work that we've been able to do right students to support them individually and the tools that it provides us the systems that we have created that we are expanding in order to offer more supports and i think from from what i understand in my limited knowledge of of um or experience the way that celine is using it is unique to

130what is being reported um in in a lot of the criticism so i just want to give an opportunity for us to um come out proactively and be clear on how we're using that because i know it's an important tool for our students and teachers another thing that i was curious about when you were presenting some of the data and the data was very positive in terms of literacy while there while still some room for growth but one area that struck um me was the the math data yeah and i know that recently um the math essentials um i mean they were supposed to be launched and there was a pandemic and they kind of lost some of their momentum but definitely the state is putting a lot of a lot of energy behind those

131and so wondering about the kind of support that we have for teachers and i in rolling out some of those concepts and ideas and the math essentials i also know that districts throughout the throughout the state have acquired money for math coaches similar to the literacy coaching funding so is that something that we're looking at and and finally i know that sherry has done a lot of work with math at pleasant ridge and so how is that being maybe used as a model for the rest of the district to support the math work especially in our lower grades there's a lot packed into that comment so i'm going to go a little bit at a time uh when we look at the math data and i mentioned as i was going because i know it's

132somewhat then when you look at the number it feels like 54 and caroline's obviously not here you know a lot of our teaching learning team is taking the opportunity to have a break this summer and i i spoke you know we i spoke to her dr lodge spoke to her you know because they the mtss team administers the acadians testing for our students we did not give a mid-year math assessment okay beginning of the year and end of the year in two of our buildings and we gave all three at all three points at pleasant ridge um and it was it's really interesting to think about what that data shows us if you're not familiar it is important to just articulate that the students can know the content like they can know the math and

133so you might find that in the classroom assessments the students would know the standards that are assessed on the accadence test acadians adds a layer of automaticity where you have to know it quickly you have to be able to recall and answer on a timed fashion and we are examining okay so how do we look at the bigger picture i provided you with acadian standard but there's also data to complement that that might tell another part of that story that's really important and we've had really good conversations at the classroom level with our teachers and teacher leaders around okay so what does this tell us well one thing it tells us is that we can provide some more recess resources to provide automaticity practice for our students in math and those foundational skills because we

134know that that mathematicians who have stronger automaticity will do better later on and so we're thinking about what do those instructional practices look like uh we are currently if you in my journey that i showed you for the teaching learning team that road to supporting success in this uh the curriculum instruction cycle we're starting with math and science you know some of our areas where we are seeing the biggest um discrepancies in the performance that we would prefer to see as a saline school district to examine that and ask those questions so what's happening what are the values because there's actually when you look at timing timed tests have a component of equity you know there's some pieces there that we're really thoughtful about so when i present the data to you i put it

135in that order i didn't want to put it in a because it's there's so many components and complexities to it that as a team we're really thoughtful about examining all of the different components and not just painting one picture of one of our mathematicians by one test and that's something we've been you know really trying to do for multiple years and we'll continue to do the the programs that we're using you know with sherry's work we shifted her position a little bit last year to an intensifying intervention specialist and so she can work with the other buildings and we had hoped to do that more last year to talk about how can she start to work with other teams in other buildings to share some of the expertise and programming she's developed um some of

136the complexities of the year prevented us from doing that at the level that we would have wished but that is on one of our hopes and dreams list for this upcoming year um and examining um like when we get to the edm we're currently using edm and we've talked with the teacher leaders not this year but the past year about is this the best fit based upon when we look at math essentials does it capture everything we have so that'll be a part of the cycle of review as well as looking at the resources that we're using and are they meeting the students needs and what kinds of skills we know will propel them to be great mathematicians and great scientists in the steam fields and that's all coming up yeah the the work that

137seems to be coming out of the michigan department of ed around the math essentials and coaching grants and math recovery training seems to be really um shifting um the mindset of educators so that it can be more tangible and more accessible for students so i wondered about that and we've talked a lot about the art of teaching math we spend a lot of time talking about the art of teaching reading and writing the art of teaching math is really on our minds for this upcoming year of review definitely and then the last thing i just wanted to say as i was thinking about my kip it was just resonating with me um the coaching essential four that talks about effective effective coaching and i would say effective teaching is is done in a multi-year school-wide

138and district-wide initiative focused on student learning that is supported by building and district administrators and i think that that this plan that you have outlined for us today exemplifies that goal and and we know that these essentials are based on mounds and mounds and mounds of research so um i think we're we're in a good we're positioning ourselves in a way that's going to lead to great results so thank you for your work thank you great thank you any other questions or comments see them um i'm just wondering um because this is a new platform and everything um do you find that it's in alignment well i guess you've proven that it's an alignment what we're doing in the district and everything and so i'm just wondering um how you like uh the platform really

139and um in moving forward and what you've used compared to what you've used in the past uh what i really like about it and i've been sharing this with the team and and to their credit i do need to give a shout out to michelle checkowitz and teresa steger who were sort of our first boots on the ground and understanding the my kit process back in 2020 when we really weren't sure going what was going to happen when the pandemic hit and we closed down it's like february they got onto some training or something like and so they helped us sort of ease in and get us started on the platform and then as i um got my legs under me in this role began to assume more and more responsibility with it as i

140mentioned it's closely lined to the way that we did business in the past in terms of being really intentional about looking at a variety of different pieces of evidence not looking at only academic data which we do believe in very much as an important measure alongside of other measures of success that honor what students know and all the different ways that they know it and so it allows for you to input different data sources that are not necessarily state data sources that don't come at opportune times for us to do anything about so you i use the phrase local assessments because that's what we have at our fingertips all the time it's you know while it's not the state assessment we're hoping that it leads to improvement in our state assessment results but it's something

141that we can measure in the moment and i'm really appreciative that the state has seen the value in this bigger picture and that the system itself just from a tech person i like how it guides you through all of the things the other thing that holds us accountable to and i feel like this is really important and it came up in the earlier presentation is it holds us accountable to looking at data and using the data to drive improvement and that should be something that feels empowering and not punitive and i'm really excited about that too if we can start to engage in really cool conversations around what are we noticing let's look at the bright spots and let's also look at what's happening that feels like we need to narrow in and make some

142decisions around so that we can get get the best out of all of our students so i'm appreciative of that too because there's a really clear cycle the structures that they've provided are are great awesome yeah i love how it's um really supporting the whole whole child right yeah um so i'm excited about it and um i'm glad that it's helping um others in the district to kind of hone in on what what our goals are and how to like you said improve um upon it so i'm excited about it too thank you all right thank you um incredibly comprehensive report so thank you to you and the team thank you you should have seen all the slides i left out thank you i i have no doubt absolutely okay go get another water carrot

143thank you very much um moving on to our action items this evening item a i'd like to please entertain a motion to approve the preliminary qualification application to be submitted to the michigan department of treasury for the proposed november bond issuance i'll make the motion kirby said thank you support susan easton susan thank you our friends from king scott would you like to approach and uh and discuss a little bit here [Laughter] you should have seen him we're going to go through every pit no page one um so uh what i'd like to do is just address the board and highlight the uh meeting we had yesterday with treasury department so it was actually our final review with treasury so at this meeting uh your financial consultant is there pfm along with your legal counsel

144troon king scott clark construction superintendent losh was there and miranda and um the goal is we went through every piece of the bond app which is a pretty comprehensive document that lays out everything um so real quick we in this bond app is the actual bond proposal language that you will see when you go vote so we do a final review of that and that's what troon has prepared superintendent losh was latch was asked questions about the process and how we came about this bond application and the work that um the entire team has done and the engagement efforts that mr raft has done in order to come to this proposal and um carol densmore who leads the review with treasury and i don't know if treasury if anyone else does it it's always carol

145yeah and she was very appreciative of the effort we went through to land on this this scope and he gave the example we had some initial ideas at the beginning of the process but through all the improvements or all the engagement efforts we landed on this scope which is very heavy in educational improvements so the financials are reviewed by miranda and pfm brendan uh put the application together with clark so if there's detailed questions that you may have regarding the application brendan can answer those questions the meeting went a little less than an hour it was very efficient we went through everything just like clockwork and what you are being asked tonight to do is approve the final application and uh so that the district can then submit to treasury and then treasury will start

146the process to get it on the ballot so that's it in a nutshell what we went through yesterday we're glad to have your guidance um should i start with brad or any questions i mean the only thing deferred or a treasurer the only thing i will say is i appreciated the the comprehensiveness of the project sheets right and i also was overwhelmed i'll find out i'll tell you like i'm glad that i don't have to pay attention to every single you know detail of one in two and architecture and structural and plumbing and blo you know so um i'm glad that those things do we have an on-site person is it going to be david who is going to ensure that like each of those things is met on our side of it yeah i

147well mr raft and rex uh rex is very much key in this too because it you know it's impacting all your facilities uh so those will be the two for the on the district side that we will be reporting really day-to-day as we execute the bond improvements who will those reports go will they go to dr watch or will they well we do have a core team that has dr losh raft and other administrators um along with king scott and clark and we report to the core team and give updates just like we're doing now on the middle school gym project that's in construction okay so and i'll add i appreciate it miranda's critically important oh yeah following every single step and knows really um exactly what's going on at each turn and for every

148move because she knows we have to be following the scope and making sure it's we're we're in compliance with that um you know the selling of the bonds the the paying of the bills is all going through her so it's going to be important that rex dave and miranda are always working together at every move yeah i just want to make sure we had some type of compliance-based piece to make sure we're hitting every single piece here well the other thing too is at the end of the bond uh you will go through an audit so everything we do is to prepare you for the audit as well so all the documentation so there's a formal audit at the end but um when you spend 180 million dollars there's a lot of a lot of

149documentation needed as you can see in the app for sure and yeah every time i saw series one series two series three i thought of you i'm pointing at miranda so uh i appreciate it and thank you that's all i have yes a lot of oversight and rightly so yeah absolutely yeah susan so um were there any major uh changes um or minor changes that were made from like the last presentation i just want to make sure that um because you said it was a quick meeting and um so if there's anything as far as scope goes no um the scope that we presented is what's in the application a lot of this review is to make sure we're meeting all the treasury and state requirements um so there's a lot of accounting and the

150finances are very complicated and i'm so glad miranda is part of the group because that's her world and it's our job to execute the projects in the scope but to answer your question the scope is there that we presented and this app is really the review is to make sure all our eyes are dotted t's are crossed and we're meeting the election requirements as well for the bond if i can add one more thing a lot of this meeting was spent on explaining how the debt will work and how it gets paid off and when it gets paid off so there was a good chunk 20 minutes or so with that explanation um with paul's daughter and and then obviously working very closely with miranda on how those payments are made along the way along

151with your current debt that's gradually falling off too so it's it's very complex i just wanted to echo what uh treasurer gerbie was saying that in in looking over and seeing the paperwork that you're holding it is really nice to know that we have a team to support this so as i was looking through the pages and pages in our packet and reflecting back on what you shared in previous sessions um thinking about miranda's role and thinking about your role and david's role and um our finance committee and just thinking about how integral all those parts and and pieces are in creating um this plan and making sure that we have like you said all of our eyes dotted into he's crossed so um i appreciate that work and i have um full faith that

152moving forward that with that team in place that we're going to be successful in navigating um this process so thank you thank you any other questions or comments yeah mike i was very impressed with the magic that you used to get the enrollment numbers rolled out five six um yeah and i was also impressed that we were within you know 1.2 to 1.7 increase in regardless of the method we were using so um i don't know how you did it and did you outsource that math middle cities is the entity that does the actual enrollment projection they hired the actuarial numbers onto the page didn't even take into account climate migration or anything like that so thank you yeah okay and thank you for being patient i know we had um one meeting month so

153we have a lot of a lot of business well those are very important topics so that's right absolutely so um okay uh moving to vote i have a motion are you going to be giving us a copy oh yeah not tonight you got a copy believe in this yeah we have so yep so what happens is uh these logins sign and then two of them go to troon you get to keep one i think um and then uh clark gets one pfm gets one um we get one we get one right so thanks for clarifying there's a whole signing all right excellent thank you um so moving to vote all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed hearing none motion kiri70 thank you very much thank you yeah so how about a motion

154we're at a little over two hours so how about a motion to recess anyone jenny makes a motion to recess i'll make a motion you need some more while always do that uh second brad all right all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed hearing none motion carries seven zero for recess um okay just a short short water bio all right i think we're all back ben are we all set okay we are back um thank you for alleging us a short recess um i'd now like to move to action item b and recommend a motion please to name the following banks or depositories for the various funds of saline area schools for the fiscal 22 2023 year bank of america comerica bank michigan liquid asset fund and old national bank michael thank

155you support miller jenny thank you um i don't believe we have any discussion or questions on this all right moving forward to vote all those in favor please say aye aye opposed hearing none motion carry 7-0 item c i'd please like to entertain a motion to authorize dr steven lodge superintendent as the primary signer on all checks written by the district with miranda owsley assistant superintendent of finance as alternative on all accounts listed bank of ann arbor 2020 2021 bond checking account comerica the katherine steiner burst scholarship michigan liquid asset fund 2021 bond investment account and at old national bank the general fund the general fund payroll community education recreation and cares food service student activity student activity the edge flex benefits maestro 2016 bns debt service 2018 bns 2 debt service 2021 bns 3

156debt service 2018 refunding debt service the sinking fund the paul handy scholarship fund tom corrally memorial fund horticultural award jeremy tarlia scholarship fund randy hoffman fund rachel townsend fund and dora mayor memorial scholarship move by i'll make the motion miller jenny thank you support easta susan thank you um assuming no questions all those in favor please say aye opposed hearing none motion carry 7-0 moving on to item d i'd please like to entertain a motion to authorize dr steven latch superintendent and miranda owsley assistant superintendent of finance as signatories on transfers of investment monies motion kirby brian thank you support jones candace thank you assuming no comment um all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed hearing none motion carries 7-0 moving on to item e i'd like to please entertain a motion

157to participate in the state of michigan loan revolving fund as submitted by assistant superintendent miranda owsley motion kirby brian thank you support miller jenny thank you any comments or questions on this one from miranda all right assuming no uh move to vote all those in favor please say aye opposed hearing none motion carry 7-0 i please like to entertain a motion to appoint um trune law firm pc of lansing michigan and collins and blaha pc as legal counsel for the school district for the 2022-2023 school year in addition the district is authorized to utilize other law firms pending areas of expertise moved by so move jones candace thank you support miller johnny thank you assuming no questions moving to vote i have a question okay um so i think last year i inquired about this

158as well but i don't think we received anything about like the cost of asking um i guess asking for advice or and i know it was kind of maybe a set price or something i don't know i just don't think the board ever received the finance piece on that i think we were showing the pattern of how much we spent with the legal firms um year after year but that may have just been in a finance committee meeting are you asking like to bring that to the table and sort of go over our financial costs for uh legal legal firms over the years we could do that and show the pattern no my my request was to just know the cost of the inquiries each one or i guess i'm not sure oh yes yeah

159okay okay yeah and we just never see i haven't seen that non-finance but that's all i was wanting to know okay okay so miranda had stated that we're billed per hour and susan is at your request to for steve to follow up on the hourly rate for the the two firms yes okay all right any other questions or comments okay moving to vote all those in favor please say aye aye opposed hearing none motion carries seven zero um item g i'd like to please entertain a motion to accept the recommendation of student services director molly garcia to appoint misty cluck to up to fulfill a two-year term in the role of saline area school's parent advisory committee representative for the wisd pac motion kirby thank you misty brian thank you support miller jenny thank you

160um i actually had a question about this one i was just wondering if we had a little information on misty i don't have specific specific information but i can find out and make sure that all of it is passed on to the board of education all right just curious on her background and trust molly garcia's recommendation here absolutely i i was also wondering um i think this is a position in the past that has been held and i'm i'm going to i'm going to regret that i said this but i can't remember the last names but the kelly's kelly vincent okay kelly van single but then there was another kelly also right handsome yeah okay so um uh this is in addition or replacing um someone on the council from what i understand it's kelly

161vince singles term is up right yep i'll find out more specifics about misty and pass that on the board of education okay perfect and trusting in molly's recommendation um any other comments or questions all right hearing none moving to vote all those in favor please say aye aye opposed hearing on motion carry 7-0 moving on to item h i'd please like to entertain a motion to approve the minutes from the june 14 2022 closed session for the purpose of discussions under section 8k um candace do you want to make the motion i'll just volunteer because i know you're on top of it uh candace thank you second yeah okay brad thank you um and as people have probably seen in the past our procedure with closed session minutes is for secretary jones to create minutes

162pass each of them out to the seven trustees they're all numbered we take a minute to read them she collects each copy and make sure all seven copies are there we move to vote and if voted upon thank you if voted upon they are placed with buddy yankee in a sealed envelope so we'll take just a minute okay everyone all set or need another minute so i want to make candace has a busy night thank you okay all set um moving to vote all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed hearing none motion carries seven zero um administration updates i just have one very quick one and it's uh administration administrative staffing update in just reiterating shannon washington's appointment as director of culturally responsive instruction equity and inclusion and also welcoming james rafko

163who is going to be an assistant principal at saline high school and we'll meet james at a future board meeting and then also acknowledging the switch with michelle checkowitz going to the middle school and laura washington going to woodland meadows feel like that's a a good opportunity for both principals to exercise some of their strengths and feeling that it was very collaborative in the process of coming to the conclusion that this is going to be a really good move for our students thanks all right thank you seeing no student representative until next month-ish um michael were you raising your i was just a question about james rothko is he an outsider hire or come from within or he's coming he's coming from south carolina where he was involved in middle level education and has some

164experience in um administration in a as when when he was being interviewed spoke about in south carolina being in a turn around school is what he was he was talking about and working in so feeling good about his ability to come in and support our student body at the high school i hope he likes our winters i i do i have one one other question will there be additional um assistant principals at the high school level because i know there's been some shifting shifting there um and i wasn't sure how many how many we were going to to have this level right oh the model moving forward is going to be centered more around principal teresa assistant principles in museeta and james and then two additional deans that the theory fill the void of the

165additional assistant principle because it is important to um you know outfit the high school for success and enough administrative support and i will say this this has been an exceptionally busy hiring season kurt's working constantly to try to manage this with tons of new hires with a lot of retirements but just a lot of transition in the district and that's happening in every district but you know there's just so much of it occurring that it is it is difficult to keep up with it and he's doing a really fine job in that yeah the hr report was uh was um no and i i appreciate that i just i was wondering how that how that process was was going because i knew there had been some shifting so thanks for that clarification okay any trustee

166updates brand vm i just have one item on the 20th of july i'm going to participate in a school aid budget seminar with masb and msbo to just walk through the school aid budget for the year recommendations from the governor those types of things so i'm planning on doing that noon on the 20th and i will report to finance and to the board anything that is mind-blowing i hope it's good news please don't say that when you say the word budget um and we'll have a finance meeting uh the same day as the next board meeting so we can have it in the update anyone else i guess um yeah i just want to share with everyone i spent an incredibly intense seven days in new orleans with uh the international society for technology and

167education so isti what the cool kids call it iste some of you some of you know i'm on the board of directors so we were kept going from morning till night um and i won't go into any of the to to belabor any of the details but i just want to say that uh richard culatta the ceo made a encourage he based on something he had seen at an airport he goes to airports a lot he's you know he sees the military folks getting onto the planes early and so often they're they're thanked for their service on the way in and he thought to himself well why aren't teachers being thanked for their service so he's challenged every he challenged every of the 9 000 people in that event to uh thank teachers for their

168service if they if they have the opportunity of course we see a great deal of them anyway but if it comes up i don't know it's a it's a maybe you can rephrase it your own way but it's a kind of a neat thing just it's always good to recognize the work and effort the teachers do here in the district brad thank you for your service jenny thank you for your service i just had a small election update so as folks knew um i was talking with our washout county elections team just to clarify everything for the ballot mostly that we had two positions that were on one part of the ballot and then one one position that was on another part of the ballot um and i had made an update i think a

169couple of months ago after reading an email an masb newsletter i had a clarifying question so contacted brad bonassic specifically about the position that candace is in now that was that had elected a remedy boatswain to our board had a clarifying question reached out to the elections folks to to follow up because there was a discrepancy in the start date for the particular role so mesb was saying that the start date would be as soon as the election was certified and i had previously heard from the elections folks that it would be january 1st with the other two positions so i reached back out they had said you should talk to legal counsel for the district so i asked steve to please help and he heard back from troon last week and i shared oh

170collins blah i'm sorry um and i did out of courtesy share this with candace and wanted to share this with the team they had clarified that that that particular position would change over earlier it'll change over as soon as the election is certified so meaning if candace decides to rerun and wins we will install her in that new term immediately if candice decides not to run or is defeated that individual will um will join the board within certification so the oath will happen almost immediately so i just wanted to clarify that since we just received that information and if anybody has any questions i can certainly take them this is all a new learning experience for me on two appointments and varying terms so it all comes down to basically a single meeting really because

171we don't meet on the 22nd of november so that is exactly correct could be your last meeting or the first of many more yep that's exactly correct so it would be the december meeting but i just wanted to make sure that the community and the board were on the same page with the information we had received and shared with candace all right any other trustee updates okay great moving on to the consent agenda the following are offered as part of the consent agenda the motion noted will allow for the authorization of all listed items without discussion unless a member of the board requests that any one or all be considered individually these items will not be read aloud but will continue to be listed out individually in the minutes for this meeting i'd like to

172please entertain emotions i i probably should do this now but i would like to request one be considered individually okay which one um that would be h um i know that it contains multiple reports but the human resources reports i don't know if you want to pull the whole um so do you mean g receive and file curriculum yep right yep okay okay so motion made east up to edit item g to read receive and file curriculum and finance reports correct um and then pull human resources reports out and susan are you requesting that that be pushed to another agenda or move to a discussion item no just just as it says i'm requesting that it be considered individually from just the consent so then we can discuss it okay so let's do let's do

173it this way how are you how are you feeling if we have a motion on the table from you to pull the human resources reports out of item g for for discussion now first before we vote on consent yes okay i can officially motion okay um recommended motion to let's see um for a g yep receive and file curriculum finance and human resources reports to be considered individually from the consent agenda so that it may be discussed okay that wasn't said pretty but no that's okay it's okay if betty has any clarifying questions for the minute she can she can ask you um i don't necessarily think this needs a vote because within consent you can pull out um pull out that item so susan do you want to lead the the question or comment

174discussion on human resources reports yeah i know it's come up in the past and so i know versus having you know requests and questions come up and um that it's i was hoping that we can um discuss how it's uh laid out um i had asked about shannon washington and why um her new position um was not on the report and part of that was that we hired her as a consultant last year however i i see like consultant different than a permanent full-time position that we posted and she applied for and accepted and now is doing um so i know another question come had come out about because we don't tend if we've hired them before if there's reassignments or they move into another position that's not something recorded we do get updates and

175everything from superintendent lodge which is helpful and a question had come up previously about okay if we hired someone in you know position as a bus driver for example and then they moved into a teaching position and not seeing that like in the human resources report or you know people looking back at the human resources report because that's why we have this data um and um make sure that it's recorded um you know if we have questions about it that kind of thing yeah i can i can talk through that the um i mean it's just the practice that had that we've been doing for years is it lists here the following human capital changes including resignations new hires and changes in tenure status and in the case of like shannon's position that's not what

176this is or another example would be like cara moving from instructional designer to the teaching and learning team lead i think your concern though is that you're communicated with the board's communicated with that everybody's communicated that these position changes are happening i feel confident that we're still doing that even though you know certain position moves aren't occurring on this report so i guess i mean if your question or if you're wanting us to revisit the way in which this is done in the future it's a discussion that cur myself and central administration could happen but we're just being consistent with how we've been delivering this report for years and years and years so shannon was not hired separately into a full-time permanent position it was just a move she's not a new hire she's already

177part of part of the district and therefore as a consultant yes but this says new hires like she's she she was already part of the district yes it was a consultant but okay i just think well i mean if we just had a consultant and we yeah i just think um it's come up multiple times and yeah do you want to address it yeah that's fine i still want to talk um it's come up multiple times um not just me but in meetings and stuff and so i think like you mentioned reassessing and reviewing do we want multiple items on there like reassignments or you know somebody moving into a newly created position um and and how that would look yeah the board discussed sure i mean the short answer to your question is we

178can make that report look any way you want it to um the specific situation that we're talking about here shannon's if you think about it more this way shannon's title was that of a consultant she's been a saline area schools employee since last july so we paid her directly as a selene area schools employee her title was dei consultant so now her title has changed she still is a sling area schools employee she's still getting service credit through ors just like she did a year ago so her employment status hasn't changed her title did to give you perspective and again this can look any way the board would like it to i you know we work at your directive we executed 200 plus employee transactions over the last year and you see about half of

179that in regards to people entering and exiting the organization but to the extent i mean there's just layer upon layer to this if you want us to list when somebody goes from a 0.5 fte to a 0.75 fte when somebody goes from being a pair educator to elementary building to a pair educator or a secondary building all those things are on an employee transaction document that we do we do maintain it's just not something that we're sharing in this particular report because it doesn't infect their employment status you're either an employee of the district or you're not and in this case she has been for over a year if i can add i think there is an element of information overload that we i mean um you know how much information do do you want

180as a board and do you want to be keeping track of that all the time i think that's to kurt's point that um it seems like it could get overwhelming if if we change the method um but but again i mean we can revisit the other example i give you is for example when steve transitioned from the assistant superintendent to the superintendent we didn't list him on that very same report because he was already an employee of the district i thought consultant was more um because she her term ended the end of june yeah okay so it was like a temp one year that's why i i thought it was more contract contractual than it can be and that and and if it had been that way she would not have been on the report

181in the first place so we don't that's another question do we know who who we're contracting with or um those kinds of things like tim i mean you you do to a degree um we have reciprocating agreements a lot of them you hear relative to the um the construction reports that's a lot of the the firms that we do business with fall into that you just executed an agreement with collins and blah and troon um but as dr lotch is pointing out there's a degree of glenn granularity that again you tell us what you want to see but we have agreements with like sun belt that provides i'm talking more um providing consultation type stuff with the curriculum that kind of thing not uh building management or whatever i get i'm just saying like that

182that's what i'm trying to understand is is that can change depending on the composition of the seven of you and i'm we'll we'll do what you guys as a group direct us to do yeah i just wanted to let jenny jump in i was just going to um mention that i that um maybe because i i worked in the organization i have a little bit more of some insight but i know that there are a number of positions that are contractual like um contracts get renewed and um and sometimes they don't and um and and when they aren't that would be seen on the report um but when they are renewed it's not a it's not needed on the report and i do feel that um and because steve is my first superintendent in this

183role i don't know if this was a practice that scott did but having those board updates i think is adequate for me to understand who is in in positions and also having the opportunity to contact steve or um contact kurt if there are questions around um you know positions or contracts for clarification i i feel like you were saying steve that the flow of communication is enough for me to feel um satisfied that i know who is who is doing the work that that we need for them to do um that's just my opinion i do think that there are months where the hr report is is shallow and and then there are months like the months that we're in right now where they're very thick um and i think that we you know even

184in those reports we're getting limited information but i think it's enough information for us to understand um you know the consistency that's happening the longevity of of people in the district our ability to retain um staff so i'm i'm satisfied with the with the report the way that it is but also open to hearing if there are practices in the hr community that would benefit us um i'm open to hearing that too all right any other comments or questions for carter steve okay all right so i'm going to move to vote on i'm sorry so first we have to entertain emotion to authorize the following listed items as part of the consent agenda um would anyone like to make the motion so move jones candace thank you second yeah support gerbie brad thank you all

185those in favor please say aye hi hi opposed hearing on motion carries 7-0 um in closing items scheduled on our next agenda we have two uh we're going to have a back to school update at the first august meeting and then the second item is a k-12 insight school quality survey report we were aiming to have that tonight i'm kind of glad we didn't because we we need to report out and it could be lengthy in terms of what is the community saying about you know school quality not only from the standpoint of administration our teaching staff my performance and we'll hear about that the next time i can't believe it's going to be august but i'm excited for our new school year too brady i have one clarification question because susan asked us to

186pull out the human resources report from the consent do we then have to i want to make sure that we're buttoned up on that yeah no thank you so i i believe we pulled it up pulled i shouldn't say pulled it we we highlighted for discussion but it was part of the listed um items that were approved no it was highlighted for discussion versus pulled from the report okay all right thank you all right august sounds good um this is our second opportunity please for public comment a member of the public may address the board briefly for up to three minutes or request to be scheduled on the agenda of a future meeting we have a local citizen chiang ming fang if you would like oh you're ready um and you remember secretary jones will

187show the yellow card at 30 seconds um yeah and so you can complete your thought and read it you get three minutes okay should i do yes if you can push it so you see the green light you're ready to go whenever you are green light on chiang ming fan local entrepreneur local residents and the initiator of the project salt some of you probably already read have read some new update i can give you new copies anytime very excited and highly educated encouraged tonight by wonderful presentation and uh really happy that new platform set up celine celine schools have new future and i'm going to be supporting everything you do and please again use me at your disposal my id a sub teacher is 6 four nine nine six two i love to sub here

188rather than insulin one of the reason is my home secondly is because you are all wonderful and i see the hope america education system has a problem okay which is to some degree as parents complain everything's so perfect but a lot of things is way behind the rest of the world especially developing countries china where i came from however because of the hard work saline star forces the nine civility access finally funny dr lars i couldn't find it i see it today that is the north star and also as my friend last time talk about this is creativity is pointed to the east and also i want echo mr mcveigh just mentioned about that there's one thing we have to keep this balance about academic achievement and ex-curriculum which is teach the student to be

189full that's why i'm here i think it is very very important to understand that we are lacking of that as who we were as american that's why the salt project is about saline area light tower i present it to the city i'm going gonna present more and more new version come up why i hope like you guys just started let's do it together d-i-t do it together american hat glorious past diy do it yourself physically physically but do it yourself but actually american is do it yourself doctor uh mr mcveigh probably the best person can tell that 3d printing that time one half miles towards fourth museum and that time how many minutes seconds so i hope that we should really continue our glorious legacy and move on to new horizons again use me at

190your disposal and fully support everything and thank you you did all right thank you sir um our next meeting the next board of education meeting will be held on august 9th 2022 at 6 30 pm um i'd like to now entertain a motion please to enter closed session of the board of education at 9 23 pm with intent to reopen re-enter open session at approximately 10 30 p.m for the purpose of and we did switch this first superintendent evaluation under section 8a and second for a school board to consider security planning to address existing threats or prevent potential threats to the safety of the students and staff under section 8k so moved jenny thank you second michael second thank you all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed hearing none motion carry seven

191zero we are in closed session um if we could have all mics off and um have everyone okay we are returning from closed session there was a motion made mcphay second miller to reopen re-enter open session of the regular board of education meeting at 1108 pm i'd like to please entertain a motion to adjourn the board of education meeting of july 12 2022 at 11 10 p.m so moved brad thank you support miller jenny thank you all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed hearing down moshe kyrie 7-0 we are adjourned you