001i'd like to please call to order the budget hearing for saline area schools for june 14 2022 at 6 06 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 thank you for being here early for the budget hearing um this is our first opportunity for public comment and i am seeing no public comment forms so we will move forward with approval of 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 must be approved before proceeding further i'd like to
002please entertain a motion to approve the agenda as printed motion gerby brad thank you support susan susan thank you all those in favor please say aye aye opposed hearing none motion carries 7-0 which brings us to miranda ously with our budget presentation whenever you're ready okay we'll get started um the very first slide here shows kind of a little bit of a what and why or background our fiscal year as a school in michigan runs from july to june every year and if you'll see on the picture there it kind of illuminates the fact that the state's fiscal year which gives a large percentage of our revenue and their general fund runs actually september through august so there's kind of this differential that we always deal with every year and this hearing as well as
003adopting our budget before july 1 and it doesn't give us authority to adopt our final budget after july 30th is all legal requirements that we're required to do so those are kind of why we're here and doing this action that we're actually taking tonight in the regular meeting is our fund or our fy 22 final budget and as well as our fy 23 original budget and then you'll see in some of the slides it's basically reference material only is the next two years so it's a big big jump because of a lot of our one-time funding that we wanted to really play out those next two years to see the difference in in where those time out so this one i always like to start our presentations with this because instead of people in our
004office we deal with a lot of funding and it's a very complicated topic of talking about school finance and i feel like this org chart kind of gives a very good um holistic view of things that we deal with in our department so obviously we spend a lot of time talking about general fund but as you'll see on this slide it's only one part of all that we do we also talk about special revenue funds community ed food service the consortium the techno cte programs in the high school and also our student activity accounts as well as our debt funds capital projects and multiple ones in there so we kind of are adapting all of those throughout tonight's evening so a little bit just talking about how our general fund gets our revenue and this
005slide is it stays very similar from year to year our most of it is funded by the state intermediate becomes things are collected at the isd level and then flowed to our school district mostly in our special ed act 18 local is mostly taxes but there's other little things that come in to the district pay to play or gate receipts or athletics are just two prime examples in federal is mostly just grants that they throw through flow through to the district so this document is called an l4029 and this is basically the document that goes out to each of our seven taxing authorities they're listed on their bridgewater freedom lodi pittsfield sidious lane saline township in york township we put those out and then they collect the tax bills and then comes back to us
006so in in looking at this the first arrow right there shows you that's our 18 mills that's the general fund operating dollars so with that you'll notice at the very bottom of the slide that's collected on non-homestead so kind of think about second properties businesses things like that if you only own your home you you have that homestead exemption you don't actually pay on that 18 mils and the other really big point on this is you'll notice that it expires in december of 2023 so that'll be another thing that we'll have to just renew that for another 10 years and that actually does go out to the voters to just reduce no changes nothing needed to be done on it other than just we need to renew it out in another 10 years and so
007you'll see on a couple later slides of why that's so significantly financially important to us even though it's just a simple renewal the next portion it is broken out we have to legally break them out because of the how our debt funds are set up but this is the collection that we talk about that eight mills and so that debt is made up of those four components this year then we see that the sinking fund is uh that point three number that's for the the ongoing fixing kind of cost that's there and then the recreation millage that is kind of inside of our community ed department that that's collected you'll notice that the these numbers continue to roll back it's kind of what they call a headley rollback but is basically of our tax base
008grows larger than you know a calculated number it it holds that accountable so it rolls it back so that it doesn't you know grow faster than than we're allowed um so then just kind of focusing in on that state and local taxes a lot of time time we talk about the general fund and that local tax it actually the local tax doesn't change our general fund revenues so what the state does is state sets a foundation allowance that they allocate to schools so for example i use last year's this current year's foundation level eight thousand seven hundred per pupil times and certain number of pupils gets us to a number that's what the state sets so that's represented by that blue bar then we look down to all the tax needs these are seven ones
009i listed then report out to the state what our taxable values are and then the state assumes we will collect 18 mills whether we do whether we don't they assume it and that's what they assume that yellow bar is representing then the state will only give us the difference so the state sending us 34 million even though they set the bar for that 42 million so the the real key here is that if we don't collect that eight million they don't give it to us we just don't we miss out on that eight million dollars so when that renewal comes time and we're talking more about that on the ballot it's a very significant thing to the district that we would be out there emailing if we did not collect that so one of the
010things i want to talk to before we go into the specific number slides are some of the assumptions that i use to create these next numbers so if we look in the revenue side and a straight roll up if i take the fifth grade class to sixth grade and move them up along there we've seen kind of a loss in enrollment so over these years and staying on a conservative side i've projected that 100 student loss each of those years for our foundation level so again it goes back to that differential between our fiscal year and the state's fiscal year the state we have to adopt a budget basically tonight before june 30th but we don't still don't know what 70 percent of our revenue is going to be because it's not established the governor
011has put out their budget the house and the senate have all put up theirs but it's not been it's not a for sure thing yet so this numbers i feel like a very good number for our foundation it is the governor's proposal currently this 435 dollars per student in the next two years i pulled that down the state has a lot of one-time money just as we do and so i don't know that that is a sustainable number and it's not a conservative estimate to keep going with that 400 per student number the other piece is that grants were adjusted but then most of the other stuff you'll see i left pretty flat along the way i wanted to really showcase the fact of our enrollment and the foundation level really playing the fact of
012what that will look like over those years so it really is is doing a conservative thing if we will see some reductions in our revenues on the expense side there was last year we settled the sea the teacher contract and so that is putting people on the new salary schedule and as well as those years putting them down on the different steps that they would achieve we know it's a known fact of the 14 lane changes for next year as well as i predicted out the next two years having 10 lane changes and so if you're not familiar with what lane changes are it basically is a honor teacher skill we have bachelor's and master's levels and so a teacher can as they achieve those requirements and they can move over to the different salary
013schedules and part of as we replace teachers then we have a younger staff too that's part of that that um progression that we that we see throughout the salary schedule i replaced 21 teachers a lot of resignation or retirements but also a couple of resignations and then the next two years you'll see on that assumption slide that i assumed no retirees or resignations and i really wanted to show what does it look like if we continue to roll up at the exact same pace will there be some retirements and resignations yes there will but i wanted to show kind of like this is what our current state is if we just take what we have and roll forward and you'll see in fy 23 coming up to our next school year we have on in
014this budget represents an attrition of two fta at high school and two at the middle school some retirements and we're able to scheduling we had seen some loss over the years of covid but yet felt comfortable with our revenues coming in and some one-time money that we could stay flat on our um our staffing but in terms of if we continue to lose those students we were able to find some places where we could carve out some of those fte savings um with or us the they've already put out the in that governor's budget that there's no change you'll see the other two years have a modest increase to the retirement system percentage that we pay on every dollar of our staffing um health care the same thing kind of a more modest increase because
015right now it's kind of set but we also have an increase then in that teacher contract as well as well as we see just a general trend of our health care dollars in school continuing to increase staffing changes is kind of everyone that i know of at that time has been put in already and then as well as you'll see on all the way out to fy 25 anything that was temporary and done identified in our grants that could be removed was is removed from there already but as you can see there's um i'll point out a couple of points in our one-time revenues on the next couple of slides um two of the big things that i wanted just to point out was a significant increase to utilities so our electricity fuel gas in
016the buses the same thing as as you you might see in your homes and things like that we see as a school even parts to to fix things and things like that it was a significant and so in this budget that continues those at that high rate i use our today's you know numbers to do that so if we do see you know relief in those things and those costs go back down and it's not as significant then those would be cost savings to those numbers that i've projected but it really leaves those at a high rate in case that's where we stay as well as the same thing we're seeing and our staffing our staffing cost goes up the ic the same thing for our fiber or internet consortium there's a significant increase in
017that and they have to staff to keep that countywide network fiber going so this kind of breaks down the one in the white you'll see is the 2021 so that was last year's actuals and then the yellow is our current year budget ending this month um and then the blue is the one we're adopting and like i said the the peach color and the green color are the two just for reference of trying to play out as we roll off of some of the one-time money what that looks like and you'll also notice that on the state sources i've pulled out on the separate line item pulled out any one time things that are not reoccurring so that those showed out in a kind of a separate line item and that's kind of again going
018off the assumptions page if you look across the local sources you'll notice that those dollars are don't really change between those multiple projection years and that's just kind of like i said as showing the big two pieces of the state foundation level and enrollment are the changes that i wanted to make obviously if um state or the local taxes go up then the state kind of comes down but they kind of in balance stay with each other so just kind of wanted to keep those similar this is another one before we switch over the expenditure side showing one of our our biggest revenues coming in is our foundation level so that's in the blue and on the left hand side of this this graph and then on the right side is percentages of our ors
019retirement rate and this graph goes very far back in our history but really kind of shows they're two different scales so one's dollars and one percent so they're not actually like exactly there but you can see the trends and you can see during those um really difficult years of recession that the line in the red is our percentage that we pay in retirement significantly increased a big expense for schools at the same time the foundation our revenues coming in took a huge dip and so you'll see that that in the middle of that graph they really cross over so you see that trend was really negative for schools and to be honest at the very end we're seeing our foundation level if we're able to keep up with this foundational level that's a great trend
020that our our ors rate is starting to level off a little bit and not seeing these steep increases so it's one of those things where the state predicts both of those and so it will see how it goes but if it if it's attainable though that's a great sign of the general trend here's one way to break out our general fund expenditures and so we still see a lot of our percentage of our things goes directly under instructional programs and then a lot of other little pieces this is pie to go all the things that support the whole the whole school we see a lot of these stay stay pretty similar they adjust a little bit from year to year but this is a large portion of how our expenses fall this is a different
021same numbers but a different way to break down those those categories so this is basically the salaries and benefits is what makes up 87 of our expenditures in our general fund and so the purchase services supplies materials just make up a small one but breaking down the same information and a very just different way to look at it so a couple of things that i kind of talked a lot about these in my assumptions page but you'll notice that the on the expense side it is assuming kind of a worst case scenario as we go along and saying if fuel stays higher utilities stay high all of our staffing continues or goes up in in that kind of round realm what would our our our new tomorrow look like in 2025 so you'll see see
022quite a few of those changes um this continued to trend to go up so in general the the on the revenue side we said that was going to go down and then the expenditure side going up so it's kind of playing out that if we do nothing into the back this is what will look like in in in future years um there's a lot like i said with the um there's a technology piece so the consortium costs of the isd was a a very large one the utilities and maintenance as well as just staffing overall throughout the whole thing in all of the different races on the different steps and percentages so this kind of takes the revenue side and the expenditure side and you'll notice i still copied back in the one-time lines so
023i let that's a little bit different from last time as you'll see i've left those in there at the top just for reference and the middle of the slide here is basically taking that yearly revenue minus the expense so last year our revenues were 5 million more than our expenditures were and i'm predicting at the end of this year that our revenue is going to be short by 83 000. so one of the big things to notice and it's going to be very difficult in this year these next three years so the yellow the blue and the peach is this one-time funding is how that it plays out when can we actually recognize the different um grants and things that that go with the rules of the state and where things are approved and how
024they fall if if we're not able to recognize them in this year then it would swing over to the blue so if there's a lot of play we're in this unique scenario where we've never really had grants that go over this much since back in the day when they had our grants and things like that um we we usually live within one year and then we go to the next and we live very much in this year a lot of the covent funding is that you can spend it on any expenditure all the way back to march of 2020 so there'll be some recording of some expenses that have already happened we've already accounted for them they're in there but those are going to be utilized to recognize revenue so it gets quite complicated and
025that there's going to be a swing but that's why i tried to look at the whole overarching the whole time of those kovic grants and then see where we would be coming out of that and then we can plan ahead because that's quite far out there in the world we the school world that we live in will in 2025 will look different we're going to make choices along that way so looking ahead at that 3 million dollar deficit in that 24-25 it's kind of also a worst case scenario if we do nothing and we let all these one-time expenditures fall off we continue to lose kids that's where we would be so we have lots of time to make choices it was kind of a very starting point and a very kind of worst case
026scenario all the expenditures kind of continue to rise for our staffing levels and then also lots of students and a lower foundation rate and then at the very bottom you can see the fund balance just basically taking the prior years where it leaves off and and then rolling it forward to the next year so see even we we'd like to see a controlled kind of fall from from the one-time expenditures but as we see like we still end up with a 12.9 fund balance at the end of the year so this is another slide that goes way back into saline's history it's a fund balance in terms of and the green is the predicted fun balance so the blues in this slide are actuals that's where we actually ended up at the end of each
027year and so obviously we see in the very last year where i've predicted revenues go down and our expenditures continue that's a sharp decline and so it's kind of one of those things if we see and we did nothing about adjusting if our if our enrollment continues to drop that we would seek that continue but that's kind of where we are in that point of taking that those and making that conversation so that we don't see a sharp decline and we kind of see us leveling off instead so it's kind of a starting point that three years in in the future to make sure that we're we're starting to love see that level off as we see the reality of the next three years happening and then as well we kind of spent a lot
028of time in the general fund but these are all also the the funds that you'll be approving tonight and parts of um in part of the action item so in general a lot of these don't necessarily fall in the end of the june 30th timing especially a lot of our capital projects they span across the summer so it doesn't necessarily make exact sense that they ended a fund balance and bond is very different from our general fund but we we saw that we took in you'll see the 13 million that we ended last year's because we just sold the last series of that bond and then the next two years you see us playing out that that we're spending that down on those planned projects for the next summer and some during the school year
029as well and the same thing for the debt fund you'll notice that our 2016 refunding debt that came off but then the same time we sold our 2021 building inside our last series three of the past bond so you'll see that that even though one rolled off another one kind of came in as well as you'll see this year's compared to last year's the old sinking fund that that had the old uses that also we played on that balance and so that is no longer um kind of on the books and now we just have the new singing fun with the new uses that got added in 2018. so any questions thanks miranda i know we have this on our regular agenda but it's probably easier to ask questions or have comments while we're having
030her here um so i just wanted to point out that the board received this on monday and it's 65 pages long i personally was not able to review review much in detail or ask anything in advance because friday our board packet was 220 pages so um to be honest i haven't been able to get all through it you know thank you for the broad summary on that i appreciate that and i'm wondering if the um when the finance committee um has went over this we spent significant time on it i mean like our entire time today we had our finance committee tonight this this evening before this meeting in general we're passing the two budgets the other two budgets are there for a reference and as well as the we by law have to to
031to pass something by june 30th in general too then we can amend as many times as we want throughout the year so it's something that we can bring back to the board if if we feel like there's more amendments that need to be made because of that a lot of times when we put out this budget that happens this time the same thing we don't know necessarily where where the state's going to align and then if it comes in very different student accounts comes in october that's dictated about 90 percent of our funding is based on who walks in the door you know in end of august and september so we can amend those at any time that we can put in um refresh kind of like students refresh who who is still staffing-wise that
032goes in there but this is a working document and it's not a final it's not an audit kind of concept where those are final numbers it's basically you know a plan a working document to kind of move forward to yes i understand that it'll probably change tomorrow right yeah exactly thanks but i will also follow it up by saying that like we regularly as a finance committee look into you know we we talk a lot about bond projects and dollars and what have you but student enrollment is like the biggest driver of our budget right and it's something that we are regularly talking about as a team right and making sure that we're monitoring we look into we look into percentages we look into making sure that our costs are consistent and but i mean
033we regularly like review and and bring these things and we have our finance director to thank for that so yeah susan thank you for bringing that up and you know i i felt a lot more comfortable after today's finance committee meeting just being able to walk through um all of the information and really felt like this is a conservative estimate and that makes me feel you know better about moving forward and just comfortable with the numbers and where we are with the understanding that we can revise as needed so i just wanted to mention that i was just going to mention similarly that in looking at this and in looking at previous budgets that you have um provided to the board and revisions that have are made throughout the year i just appreciate that you
034take a conservative approach one example today is that you are not anticipating any retirees or resignations in not not right now but for the next two years and so and we know that that that is is likely so i think that right there just to me um is one example of how you run a very conservative budget without making it feel so doom and gloom um and and we're still able to maintain the excellence and and um and the programming for students so um so i appreciated the presentation tonight which answered a lot of my questions in fact i would write a question down and you would answer it so so um thank you and uh thank you for being on top of this in addition to always being aware of like potential grants and
035other revenue sources that we can that we can use to supplement some of these areas so i appreciate that thanks um thanks to the finance committee even though it's not you know that item right now um you know it's helpful i mean it's kind of like policy right we trust the work that um policy committee is doing and bringing to us and also you all so i appreciate your your input on that and all the work that you've done as well thank you we always end up talking about the fund balance and i i know this we got up to a high of almost 19 percent and you would call i forget the exact phrase you called it a a controlled plummet no yeah okay controlled decrease um but i guess my question is are
036we in the long run i i'm not asking you to prognosticate out even a couple more years but is the plan to kind of get back down to a what would what's a comfortable fun balance for okay i suspect you've had this conversation so i'm just so i'd like to know what do you feel comfortable i know five percent is is the warning bells start to go off yeah that's state treasury kind of course gets involved kind of things so yes but are you are we aiming to to manage it down or manage it in this like 10 range correct the the finance committee as well as with superintendent lodge we've we've talked about at least trying to at least and kind of keep it on 12 to 13 percent but we'd like to even
037see as as great as 15. you'll notice not on the agenda this evening is cash flow borrowing where we borrow millions of dollars from the state pool that's not on there because and kind of a direct result of i had to project out cashflow for 14 months of what comes in and out on all those funds and just a cash basis and we don't have the need to borrow you know and obviously that can change but that's kind of a direct result of holding our own a larger fund balance to not do that i can't say that we'll always be in that case but um because cash flow isn't always exactly the same as kind of like budget terms you're referring to that bridge that we usually do in june yeah yeah it's a it
038happened we we put it on the agenda it happens now but then because we have to do things with the throne law firm and to to join into the pool with the michigan um treasury and so in general that that hits in our august time that we get that so that because we don't get that payment in september but there's also other cash flow things that affect us as well we're a summer tax flow so we get all our tax dollars there and then obviously the state has that but there's so there's lots of different things that play into that factor and how our payrolls hit and things like that but that is one of the largest things is is that that timing well just let me amplify the the thanks from the other people
039that have echoed it at the front and to the finance committee uh we know you were a bit under the gun this last couple weeks yeah there's a lot a lot of extra funding that doesn't normally there as well as trying to really then the need for looking at that longer term having those two extra years even though you're not adopting anything on those tonight i i felt that they were very important to to kind of talk through because this like i said this is a very unique time in finance where you know we might be recognizing past expenditures in a current year which usually does not ever happen we are you know an audit sense kind of comes in those are only recognized in the year so it's kind of a as well as
040not only this takes a lot longer these couple years the same thing the audit is we will see we will have to do increased amount of um checking and we'll have additional single audits and things like that because of those funding so well and i'll even back up on on that and say that i appreciate the long-term forecasting as well because for me that allows us to to be stewards as we go right so then we can be talking about how do we make you know i always hear dennis in the word structure in my in my mind and so like how could we be continuously mindful of our structures to maintain that we don't have a seven percent decrease between 23 and 24 we've already planned ahead for for some of those things and
041and i could tell you we're on top of that so that makes me uh as the finance chair i don't know more even less concerned how about that thanks brad um i just want to make a comment about the pie chart with school administration at five percent and we had this conversation in um in finance and uh i think several of us have been asked about that expenditure um so i went back to 2016 through 17 i went back the last six years and averaged it we're at 4.98 on overall general fund expenditures so that is very constant so you had made that remark in the finance team meeting and i just wanted to reinforce that so starting with 4 4.7 back in 1617 up to just over just under 5.1 this year so um
042very stable that that showed up in general throughout like these ideas of our percentages so that also lets me know whether our organization is a 62 million or 68 million dollars as long as we keep those general percentages in the same places then i think we're spending our money historically what we have and then again that's not a red flag then for me all right any other questions comments and you'll have another opportunity before the motion as well okay thank you miranda we appreciate you um i'd like to now please entertain a motion to adjourn the budget hearing of june 14 2022 at 6 37 pm i'll make the motion miller thank you jenny support jones thank you candace all those in favor please say hi hi hi opposed hearing none motion carry 7-0 we
043are adjourned if we can pause for just a moment and invite all of our friends out in the waiting room in we have plenty of seats like to call to order please the board of education meeting for june 14th 2022 at 6 41 pm thank you for being patient while we had our annual budget hearing we appreciate that i'm skipping over item two because we did already do our pledge of allegiance in our budget hearing so we're moving forward to 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
044limited to one half hour 30 minutes and limited to agenda 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 and policy number 167.3 which has been reprinted on the public comment form collected this evening individuals addressing the board should take into the consideration the 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 i have two public comment forms from community members betty these are both for agenda items okay uh first agenda item um chen ming fan thank you if you um so we're live streaming this as well oh no we have no students this evening so
045you are definitely number one but if if you could stand at the podium and toggle it on so the the green light shows then everyone watching the live stream can also hear you yep and and just so you probably know this but um you have three minutes to speak on agenda topics secretary jones has um the cards so when you're 30 seconds out of the three minutes you'll see the yellow card and then when you see the red card that's the end of the three minutes and if you could just complete your thought and we'll move to the next public comment section whenever you're ready do you want me to start again sure you look like a studio so would you please look at this picture and this is gary morgan a black inventor to
046invent the traffic light in 1922 and mask you never get paid enough i'm not come here to say discrimination i'm saying is technology my topic today is about the salt and my friend earlier already delivered something to the board if you ever want to know about this technology which so important related with the people's life here in saline especially students to learn the new technology so i just want to be very brief this salt project which is saline area light tower is partly is based on the community gave me a lot of feedback encouraged me to talk to the board which is i really did talk with the suit susan and mr mckay mcveigh and other members long time ago so today just want to be brief and then we have to really really initiate
047this project in order to change the way of the education the way of develop technology and the way of solve the social problem such as between white and black between the rich and poor saline area light tower yes briefly is high rise landmark similar like eiffel tower but i'm not a rich i'm not famous i'm just like you i'm not nerd however i do believe the educator have bigger load i hope i can be like you great educators which is not however i am an engineer i'm universal alumni i like to work with you parents and everybody i think it's still green light nobody holds anything okay thank you maybe in conclusion what i admired is the ecosystem insulin from the board and to the city everybody tried to work something new recovering from the
048losses but there are some problems as i said yesterday when i come to the meeting the 2s so okay sports and sex but not salt i'm introducing technology i believe this is the solution thank you thank you sir next we have raelyn davis parent whenever you're ready reeling okay i'm so glad to be here and i'm glad that um that i want to report about the sex education report that's going to be talked on today for your thing first of all um i would like to quickly talk about the report that is in i have a copy of it it talks first about how because of kovid we only had 14 percent of students in in the districts actually take this survey and yet the seab has decided to make assumptions and make recommendations based
049on less than what they claim the 60 percent statistically uh numbers needed so one of the things i would like hopefully you guys can ask is actually what the recommendations they come forth um where is the scientific data to prove it because of the current numbers i don't believe they're there i assume they would have waited another year wait for the data come out again so i don't believe the recommendations they have are statistically proven second of all i would like to know why we are 2019 was the last report and we are now three years instead of the state law required two years for this report um and again just that you know i am watching um but again that's another refraction i still believe that both the c ab the policy the board
050needs to make on sex education advisory board is needs to be updated and it's not complete there are issues being handled and decisions made by dr lotch that should be the board's decision to make specifically again why are the board members private no other county in washington and about 90 percent of the schools in michigan follow oma with their cab that lines up ann arbor televises their meetings publicizes their meetings minutes are online parents are invited to attend again i'd like to formally complain that parents should be part of this process and we should be allowed to watch the cab meetings and be able to be part of that again there are processes i believe that there are the ciab should regulate more than just the formal sex ed in our community such as english
051languages assignments and other things it doesn't say that sling can't teach it but i believe there is a process and a law in place that's that there are things that talk about sexuality and sex issues and i know they're late books but there's assignments are coming from the teachers that we need to have a process involved to actually make a decision made and not just the whim of a teacher um and again i just like to say that i think celine has a lot of work to do in regard to the ciab and i hope the board takes it seriously and and fights finally some feedback to the public we should be parents should be involved and included in this process thanks alright thank you ray lynn moving on to item number five please revisions
052and 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 must be approved before proceeding further like to please entertain a motion to approve the agenda as printed i'll move to approve the agenda is printed jenny thank you support kirby brad thank you all those in favor please say aye aye opposed hearing none motion carries 7-0 moving on to our first scheduled report which i think we have a lot of folks here for welcome honoring our district retirees i'd like to introduce assistant superintendent for human resources kurt ellis thank you president stubborn and board of education um i would like to welcome a lot of long-time friends uh for
053sling area schools back this evening for our annual retiree recognition it's nice to be able to do this in person again and and have folks back in the building and whatnot we did put together a real short slide show it's about five and a half minutes long that has some pictures and some quotes from some of our retirees we did have 32 retirees this year across all parts of the district and a number of them are here with us tonight so we'll start with this real short little slide show and then we'll get into the recognition of these plaques [Music] do [Music] certainly many thanks to anna brittnell and ben goodman for putting that together it's really a bittersweet thing to watch that when you see 35 36 37 years of experience retiring but it's
054also hard not to feel tremendous amount of joy for them when you see pictures of people with their grandkids or quotes about you know i've worked hard so now it's my turn to play hard and live off the clock and whatnot so really excited for these folks um one of the things that we've done for the last 10 years now and we're going to do it again here tonight is we give each of them a poem and i'll read the poem real briefly if i could the poem is called the builder and it says i once saw a group of men tearing a building down a group of men in my hometown with a heaven a hole in a mighty yell they swung a beam and the side wall fell i asked the foreman are
055these men skilled the kind you'd hired if you wanted to build he laughed and said why no indeed for common labor is all i need i can tear down in a day or two what it took the builder 10 years to do and i asked myself as i walked away which of these roles am i going to play am i the type that constantly tears down as i make my way foolishly around or am i the type that is trying to build with care with the hope that the people will be glad i was there and i can tell these retirees we are very very glad you are here you've done great things for us so what i would like to do uh cara and anna will help us out here we do have plaques
056for the folks that are here uh so rachel ammon go back i think what we've done in the past is if we could grab a picture out in the i know nobody probably wants to stay for the rest of the board meeting so if we could grab a picture you're welcome to if you want to i don't want to i don't want to let anybody think they don't have to stay um jolene cruz yes i'd also like to thank sasa they've got some gifts for our retirees as well so jolene cruz brian cuff dave fisk hemi i would try to say your last name i have can you say it for me one more time yeah there you go now you know why i did not even try it is and it's beautiful and i
057just ca i know how to spell it now after all these years i just cannot say it um sherry harsh is not here mike hill kim hyun jim sote jackie sprunger deb waterman and last i think but not least here mary williams i was going to ask mary to bake a cake if you have never had a graduation cake mary did that for years but i feel like she could deserve a break i don't think i missed anybody else oh linda's not retiring until the middle of the year so she goes just like brian did last year so she goes next year so like i said that is the group that's here now there were 32 total um and we're we're ready and working now to find capable replacements for these people so please join
058me in again thanking this group for the wonderful things they've done they all left before we could say say anything so we're we're mentally showering them with all of our gratitude um and i don't think betsy marla is here but she would want me to say please attend the celine alumni banquet and picnic in the fall she'll be in touch i'm sure um okay thank you and thank you kurt and thank you to all of the 32 retirees including the ones that couldn't be with us in person tonight moving on to our second scheduled report foundation for saline area schools update and hearst whenever you're ready hello all right i'm here for my annual update from the foundation so ben's going to be my cue card guy or whatever my turner all right next one
059here we go we're going right in okay maybe not all right so and here we go there we go all right all right i know and i'm going to have to keep looking over sorry because i i'm going to read a little bit of course of this so the mission for those of you those of you who don't know it which i know you all do is the foundation for scenery schools is a non-profit organization that provides private funding to support academic projects enrichment programs and other activities aimed at enhancing the quality of education in the saline school district we do this by raising money receiving and distributing funds for projects that benefit students throughout our schools next slide our elevator speech though if we were to have one would read something like this of
060course we are a 501c3 nonprofit we've been around since 1987 and we provide funding to support creative and innovative initiatives that benefit our students that's what we're all about and contribute to the educational excellence of saline area schools we award teaching building district partnerships student-led grants throughout the district and we have almost awarded 1.6 million dollars since 1987 so i'm very excited about that so our history again started in 1987 as a full uh volunteer organization a little bit of the history is that i came on in january of 2016 as a part-time executive director currently so i'm covering this year 21-22 so our board consisted of president amy sanchez vice president ben lilly treasurer tom cast again our secretary sarah quanah and then our president emeritus katie murphy we just turned over a few
061of those positions added a few few rotated off but again that was 21 and 22 so i want to give a shout out to our current board that just served our current officers that served this past year so i'm digging right into the numbers because that's one thing that of course we do we give and i'm proud to say that this year even still in a covid year we gave more in grant money than we ever had before we gave 129 thousand dollars 612 for 39 grand isn't that wonderful and you can see the breakdown uh sean kelly would be really proud of me i did my first pie chart and i was like i don't know how to do this took 10 minutes but that's okay so i got it but um obviously that's
062a out of the different schools and and where we're putting our money but a lot of dei initiatives many book requests this year just amazing which is wonderful stem related subjects of course social emotional lifelong fitness special education and much more but an incredible breakdown really proud of that 129 000. so these are just a couple um a couple pictures and uh you know i had to put that in there dr lach so um one of the teaching grants this year was jessie markey and abby seavers in the life skills program they asked for the cardio drumming balls for our kids and life skills and so laura and steve a little reluctantly but did it for me at the at this island of spring event um uh girls who code what we did a second
063year i think we're giving giving away books for the club over there at the middle school like i said lots and lots of diversity equity and inclusion materials and books which is wonderful joe weldon and rocky and nikki and all the all the good folks over at the high school asked for a big grant for strength and wellness and training and all sorts of fun fitness stuff for the high school that really at some point every kid will have and will use because there's lifelong fitness i believe is for every child in high school so wonderful yes it's true i put a dead pig on the screen so sarah still i know you're okay with that brett so sarah stuki is a stookie stucky we love her she's full of enthusiasm you know you know
064her and she's like we need to go back to good old dissection right and so there it is the pig she sent me so that was one of the teaching grants this year as well like i said just a snippet building and district grants we got quite a few this year top left hand corner that's anna brittnell she put together a whole grant for the district really pulling in all sorts of historical information about celine in fact it's going to be located right here outside of the lobby so we're really excited about that a couple cute pictures of books it was a multi-lingual grant that i believe was katie o'keefe that wrote so that our students um in uh she's teaching um well i gotta write this and i wrote this down that she is
065teaching english as a second language too she wanted still books in their primary language so that was wonderful she already told me she's like anders i'm going to ask for a grant part two next year she goes this is wonderful it's throughout the district there's our own kelly woodman who actually wrote a grant to for an alumni a wonderful alumni uh young man who graduated uh from here and then graduated obviously well graduated from college got a really good job and then he wrote a book and so kelly wanted to put that book in every single library and media center in in the district and just celebrating the celine's success is what she called it so that was wonderful something called well they called it collaborating the little collaborators but basically it's a light bright
066board that is now throughout all of the media centers and elementary schools and kids can collaborate communicate if you all of you remember good old light bright so that was fun an augmented reality globe that the elementary kids get to do and go on on all sorts of adventures and do all sorts of research that way kenyatta hughes put a social emotional learning grant in at the very beginning of the year for all of pleasant ridge and so that's a cute picture of the kids with that curriculum infused into their their entire day and then there's deb waterman and lisa york who came up with something wonderful called digital signage and so it's in the middle school and i think eventually maybe the plan is to have one some of these uh these tv monitors
067throughout the entire district right and really access for all students they wrote specifically by adding the visual modality of communication and so how wonderful so many things we hear and then we forget about it but when you see it it's different so those again just a few of the many building industries one that'll always be close to my heart and you know that is the connecting club so the first student-led grant that we ever did was for the connecting club so trish farron a bunch of her kids had a great idea and i remember running into her the parking lot one day and she said and she was talking to me i said write a grant and sure enough that's how the connecting club came out of that then the next year i think they
068wrote the kindness rocks project grant then the next year they did outdoor seating and then this year they just did the pathway to inclusion which i know many of you were at the ribbon cutting of that but what an incredible space if you haven't been there at the high school right and now accessible to all and um just always remember this is one of those stories of grants that's just heartfelt so always remember that when we're talking about our the incredible kids that we have here so our current financials right now we are at 1 million 195 000 is our net asset we were higher until of course everything hit and we all lost a little money in the stock market so um but we are doing extremely well so there's a breakdown of the
069net assets broken out by donor restricted funds donor are board restricted and then unrestricted and then our different sources of income the fund raising uh the individual donations and corporate sponsors and again given the situation we have had really incredibly good years um just want to share since i jumped i went came into this role in 2016. these are just some of the numbers i'd like to share with you uh we raised one thousand five i'm sorry one million five hundred and forty seven thousand since nineteen since 2016 we have awarded 677 thousand for about 200 grants since then and if you look at the fact that since 1987 we have awarded almost 1.6 million almost over 40 percent of what we have awarded has been since 2016. and again those are just a financial
070breakdown even in the midst of it people were giving sponsors were incredible donors just were phenomenal and this year was the first year we ever hit that three hundred thousand dollar mark so we're really excited about that we had one really really big gift um that are going to some specific things but still we we went over 300 000 so we are only we'll only continue to do well so we got back to normal with some of our events which was really exciting so the hall of famers god bless them all the class of 20 20 and 21 i mean they waited a long time to get recognition and so we had that wonderful event typical patio event on the friday night and then the induction ceremony the next night the night fall razor we
071actually fall fundraiser we actually got back and did that which was wonderful a few of you are up there we raised forty five thousand dollars at that we um uh nicole phelps was one of our speakers my wonderful student rep elise narbit spoke as well and we launched something called the superintendent circle that night if you gave a thousand dollars or more we had a nice little gathering in march and so that really inspired a lot of people to give and then our sail into spring event we made a really wise decision not to do snow blast uh given all that was going on but april it was so one or the end of yeah end of april was wonderful to come back together in uh at imagine and we again had a good amount
072of money raised and had a lot of fun at the bottom right corner i do want to point out those are student reps that we have on our board elise is graduating andre is this junior going to be now a senior and then our newest rep is a gal named sarah youssef so we're excited to have her alumni we acquired them a few years ago and just continue to do wonderful things always have a presence at the fair i have a presence at the holiday parade we had a special event for a coach sippl a while in the winter and a banquet that they had that they got to get to do again the alumni banquet back in september it will be back in june this year and then my dear friend david helmer and
073i was a highlight of my little world was being the grand marshal at the holiday parade you know i had to throw that in there and uh and david my dear friend and alumni got to be the emcee so what what a special time that was and then our goodwill project two of my trustees came up with this idea uh last year and where we actually spent money and bought things from our sponsors and then just lavished our staff letting them know how important they were so popcorn for imagine and scones from kim and brute awakenings hello zach and bush is wonderful fruit tray so hopefully they'll continue to do that our sponsors i love this cute picture with elise they are incredible they continue to give they continue to support and they're all in
074which is absolutely wonderful always have to shout out to my sponsors so couple dates that you do need to remember uh june 25th is the alumni banquet they're back doing it in june which is great september 9th and 10th will be the hall of fame weekend it's one week earlier than usual this year and there are our 2022 inductees and then october 13th we've already set the date for the fall fundraiser which is wonderful i'm going to read something to you on a personal note as i am leaving this position and then if you have any questions or anything at the end i'll be happy to answer them so as me as you've heard most of you have heard i submitted my resignation as the executive director of the foundation about a month ago i'll
075be staying on until mid-august as we hope to have a new person in place by then i've had a 10-year run with the foundation starting off in 2012 as a volunteer being elected as a trustee in 2014 and becoming the first ever executive director in 2016. my first year was challenging to say the least but by january 2017 i gained my wings and began to soar strategic planning a 30-year a 30th year celebration continued growth an engaged board and many fabulous volunteers helped take this organization to the next level successful fundraising aboard endowment a new website many generous corporate sponsors current donors and new donors and a plethora of fresh ideas from a well-rounded and high-functioning board of trustees we do all of this to raise funds to award grants for our incredible celine school
076district teachers and students most importantly for me it's been an incredible joy i do need to give out a few thank yous special thank you to katie murphy for being the yin to my yang for the last six and a half years she and i came on the board together in 2014 and with much persuading on my part she became the president 2017 she was a huge support to me and continues to play a very important role in the foundation thanks to the current president amy sanchez and the entire board past and present for all the time talent and treasure that they give to the foundation we have a truly dedicated group of wonderful people that care about our students staff and district special thanks to scott graydon for being a mentor and confidant through
077the first years and always working closely and collaboratively with me and the foundation special friend special thanks to my special friend steve lodge for also being a confidante committed supporter of the foundation for many years and all that you continue to do for the schools you know i will always support you having served on the michigan education foundation board and being involved with other school foundations throughout the state for many years i came to find out and i've shared this before that it's not necessarily common for a foundation school district to work together so well like we do that relationship has started in the past and only continues to grow the entire administrative team entire staff has been more than supportive throughout the years and we're always willing to help with anything that i asked
078for is so appreciative and i'm serious about the entire staff hustling school district i am forever grateful to all of them i've made great friends over the years established many relationships that will continue to be strong and only grow in the future and for that i'm very grateful on a very personal note i'll always be a proud saline alumni and my husband and i have two sons who also graduated from saline i'm especially proud of our phenomenal special education program that my son jonah is currently in and will continue to be in for five years further i special thanks to nicole phelps our angel who had jonah as a three-year-old in ecd and for now having megan coleman who is our current teacher in the young adult program i cannot say enough about the love
079the care and the support that the special education program has given us through the last 17 years kudos to every pair educator teacher administrator and every person that served on one of our teams over the years all of them are exceptional at what they do i now move on to new opportunities ecclesiastes 7 8 says that the end of a matter is better than the beginning for me that is very true i leave the foundation having accomplished many personal and organizational goals over these last seven years i'm hoping that the next executive director will be able to take this wonderful organization to the next level i'll be around town still very involved in the community you can't get rid of me that easily but i want you to know that it's truly been a great
080honor and privilege to lead this foundation thank you so much thank you you're trying to make us cry we are so grateful for you so the first thing i'm going to say is you're still here till august because that's what you would tell me um but we're so grateful for you and you are such a force for good and positivity um i've really enjoyed being with you for these um a little bit early morning meetings every every month as the board liaison together with steve and with cara each month and we wanted to get you a little thank you present for always being collaborative positive and a wonderful ambassador for our school district oh my gosh taran are you getting the pictures [Laughter] tag lilies i'm just kidding i'm teasing um but i'm sure everyone
081else would like to say a few words you guys are sweet thank you you can set that down would anyone yeah jenny go ahead well as someone who first met amherst many moons ago when my babies were little little little and you pour it into me and i will always remember that so thank you for that i also um just thank you for the 10 years that you dedicated to this particular position but even before then your presence in our community has just been positive as someone who has been a recipient of many of your grants when i of many of the grants when i was working in the district your encouragement and just um you know every time i saw you you'd say write a grant what are you going to write a grant
082about what are you going to write a grant about um so you're just constant your creativity and your constant encouragement and your positivity um has just been something that i know the entire staff has appreciated um during your tenure and i think just as you said you hope that the next person can take the um take this position to the next level take the foundation to the next level you have exceeded that you have gone above and beyond and the work that the that the foundation is doing now just blows my mind um even just in the last five years so congratulations i wish you all the best thank you thank you thank you force of nature indeed i ran into you soon after we met in the first things i saw he went to
083cvs and it was like oh my gosh we're old best buddies and pals and it could be because your husband and i have the same barber [Laughter] but i went to my first snow blast and said what is this all about and was blown away and i continue to be so and especially looking at the grants that have come out of the fsas they've been amazing including you know literacy computer coding uh and now with with anna brittnell and companies the historical grant too and i'm sure we'll be hearing more about that later too thank you so much for all of your efforts and uh we're looking forward to uh helping helping your your whoever follows you to fit into your shoes so thank you michael yeah so we haven't known each other long but
084um i had the opportunity to attend the fall fundraiser and just was blown away i didn't even realize how much the foundation was doing until you know coming into this role and i was just like wow sitting next to teachers that were so excited to have their creativity encouraged and you know being allowed to or being able to build on their ideas in so many creative ways so i i'm just impressed by the work that's been done and really inspired and and look forward to cons to seeing what continues to come out of that and just grateful for the support for a more inclusive district as a whole so that's that's powerful i love seeing the books and the diverse um reading that students are able to do so thank you thank you candace i'll
085never forget the day i met you i remember on the campaign trail your energy is infectious and it is something that inspires people around you whether it is to donate to the foundation or whether it's you know whether it's you impact classrooms and so from an educator like that is just we are able to do i i kept seeing the word and kept creativity and things that go above and beyond the call and uh so you you enhance outcomes for our students and and so for me but i i tell you that that day that i met you i knew i i i was like she you have so much passion and energy and enthusiasm and it's uh we are we are losing a good one in you but uh you have left this foundation
086an incredible place and thank you very much for me as an educator on behalf of all educators on behalf of students thank you thank you brad thank you any other comments all right steve i will be brief and hers thank you very much for teaching me a lot about love care and leadership but also friendship that i'm really gonna miss that and i appreciate all that you've done to support me and the district oh as well thank you thanks again so much beautiful thank you very much they kind of match your shoes a little bit very nice um okay with a big smile on my face going from from one very pleasant well the retirees to another pleasant thing next up we have our district parent council i believe we have representative from all is
087sarah here darcy's be okay wonderful so um for those who don't know our district parents council is made up of our pta and our pto presidents or their designees and this is an invaluable team of partners for our school district so we're very pleased and i hope this won't be the last time our ptas and ptos are in this board room we are very pleased to welcome all of our buildings so we have a presentation if you guys could do me a favor and introduce yourselves in your building when you're speaking so everyone can hear that that would be awesome so we have nicole jackie kathy michelle amy and darcy don't leave me hanging darcy berwick as i said shs pto oh are you going to present it is on amy good middle school president
088pto jackie sweet heritage kathy giles harvest nicole rocky pleasant ridge and i'm michelle chekowitz the principal of woodland meadows representing our amazing ptag do we have a high school slide yep [Music] the pto uh at the high school um was pretty involved this year uh it was it was nice to sort of get back into the the flow of things and hoping to do so more next year we provide a lot of volunteers for different events we did schedule pickup and school pictures the biggest thing that we do and most of our grant money goes to teachers in their classrooms and they have a hundred dollars per classroom the other fun thing we've done for the past couple of years is giving snacks to students during school-wide testing s-a-t p-a p-s-a-t a-c-t our most popular
089event is when we bring in someone to talk about colleges and careers and we've also partnered with the foundation to bring in to send teachers to some training for link crew link crew is a sort of a national organization and it's a great benefit for the kids this year we did send some money to oxford to support their kids in their school and uh the middle school was very gracious and organized uh celebration for transportation department so we partnered with them in that and of course staff appreciation and like i said next year we're really hoping to sort of get back to a little bit more normal getting some more volunteers in the schools and the exciting thing we're trying to do and working with teresa is to get some student reps for the pto
090and i think that's probably pretty much it for us thank you don't go anywhere too far i forgot to tell you she was going first sorry um so i represent the middle school pto and our stuff is pretty similar to the high school we do a hassle-free fundraiser at the middle school which is a breath of fresh air i think for middle school parents when they get to that stage um we had a really successful book fair this year which was kind of interesting usually as they go up in grades i think usually it falls back but we had kids went crazy and bought all the books so we made like over six thousand dollars in scholastic books that we gave back to the teachers which was nice um that's free money so whenever teachers
091turn in grants for books of any kind of reading material we went to our scholastic books first and tried to spend those and so now we have more for new teachers and things for next year as darcy mentioned we did a super special breakfast for transportation and grounds which i really liked and i would love to bring that back each year they were so appreciative and it was really nice to get to know them um we do conference dinners um holiday you know celebrations staff appreciation week is a big deal because it's full full day full time all day the whole week and we did a lot of fun things and the middle school staff is so so appreciative um next year so this is my first year at the middle school next year we
092have some big ideas and i'm really excited this year we worked a lot on forming relationships with our staff we had a really fresh new board this year so a lot of staff didn't know us so i'm really excited um to further that relationship with the staff but also to partner with the chill with the kids because we did a lot of stuff but we didn't get to be with them as much so i'm really excited for that next year one thing we i've already talked to some of our clubs and organizations and lori dawson about having a partnership with our clubs and organizations and student groups inviting them to our meetings and also bringing in student-led grants so we're looking at bringing that on board next year as a brand new thing um and
093also doing some fun events outside of school as well so some people have mentioned things like tailgates i know that the porch is booked whoever's in charge of that i already know i didn't book it in time but doing fun different things after school so that's what yeah well no no we'll do the hill or something okay thanks thank you all right at heritage this year we had a really busy year which was really awesome because this year the students were able to enjoy their first full um full school assembly with the spirit of harriet tubman presentation we had a return of field day at crabtree and fifth grade celebration was also at crabtree and that was enjoyed by all of those students and we also had popcorn fridays which had a great benefit in
094the end which i'll cover later families were able to connect at the fall family fest at coleman's farm through the enrichment nights which were literacy night in science and through the end of the year activities that parents were able to come and be involved in the staff felt the love from the community for staff appreciation week during the sas staff shout outs and through conference dinners and then this year we made a difference by providing roughly eighteen thousand dollars which included the assemblies field trips transportation classroom funds curriculum enhancements marches reading month and the band experts to make up for last year's covid gap where we didn't have band so every year they bring in experts and so this year they had to have double so we covered that cost um the year-end fund which
095was a lot of fun we had we covered all we covered um field day fifth grade celebration the ice cream truck all of that um all of that fun stuff and then we had from the popcorn fridays we were able to make a 2200 donation to chad tough because chad will always be part of the class of 2029 so at harvest this year we were really excited to bring people back into the building whether that was parents coming in for back to school night different things like fun run book fair but also um we brought the hands-on museum into the school for some enrichment opportunities which was really nice the teachers really enjoyed that um we had some mini grants for some new pe equipment which was much needed um we were able to do
096some outside field trips so bringing back paying for the transportation for that which was nice we still stuck with some of our harvest helping hands charities reached out to some new organizations we started something new called the kindness olympics to go along with what was happening in the world and getting the students interested and engaged in that but also bringing up the idea of being kind to themselves to their families the community and the world we also did a big staff appreciation event and um brought back field day which is a big deal at harvest we like to do it big there um next year we plan to bring back some of the seasonal after in the evening events we did not do that this year we just weren't comfortable doing those so we're happy
097to bring those back hopefully next year i was also informed yesterday that it's the 20th anniversary of the harvest building this upcoming school year so we are also going to look to do something fun for that all right so i'm representing pleasant ridge tonight um we had a really busy year and we started off our fall welcoming both students and families back into the school at back to school night we hosted pr on the hill to try to get families together in the fall we had pizza and snacks for the kids and um and then families could walk over to the football game after that our big fall fundraiser was the color me silly fun run this was a huge success this year we had a big push to raise money for all of the
098student enrichment activities that we helped fund throughout the year as well as classroom parties and field trips and teacher grants and all sorts of stuff but in addition to that we were really trying to raise some money to help make our playground more inclusive which i'll talk about a little bit more in a minute and then in the winter we um were bummed not to be able to have art shows so we worked with mrs marsh our art teacher and had a new event the outdoor winter luminary walk which was a huge success very well attended all of our students young fives through third grade made luminaries that were on display we had hot chocolate and popcorn and ice sculptures we had a campfire mrs hughes read stories to the kids by the campfire it
099was a great event this spring we had a sensational dance we had a dance for the students and we kind of paired that with a silent auction which was a new event for us and and was also very successful we raised over seven thousand dollars and this again was to help fund our playground um donation so uh the playground donation is kind of a big combination of support from the foundation nicole phelps got a grant from the foundation the district is putting in a lot of money towards this and we were able to donate 20 000 towards this project so we were really excited to be able to give that and help make our playground more accessible for all of our students this spring we did family play dates at mill pond park and again
100these were a huge success really well attended with very minimal effort on our part we just said this date this time at mill pond park we had a kindergarten night a first grade night second grade and we really felt this huge desire for families to meet other families and to get to see their kids playing with friends and meet those friends so i think that's what made some of those play dates such a big success also this spring we had we supported staff appreciation week lots of fun events that week help support field day and as well as class picnics next year we hope to do a lot of these events again and and really i think one of the things that we learned this year is that our families were really um desiring that
101connection and meeting each other and so we hope to do some of those play dates and some of those um interactive events earlier in the year well i am really honored here to represent our pta from woodland meadows they have done an amazing job along with the other ptas and ptas that are here tonight highlights for woodland meadows include our fall fun run which is our main fundraiser of the year students were able to go outside get some exercise we even brought in bouncers this year so they had a lot of fun with the fun run and some additional exercise and activities additionally we did our fall festival around october where we were able to bring families in and participate in bingo and other fun fall events and then our pta was incredibly responsive to
102what was happening with our community and our school covered numbers and we saw a slight spike so in the winter when those gingerbread when our traditional gingerbread night came about they were able to pivot and they pivoted to this amazing plan to continue to sell our gingerbread house kits and they did a grab-and-go kit night so they could you could go home pick up your kit and make your gingerbread house at home we continued with our amazing birthday book um initiative where every student at win the meadows gets a book for their birthday and the month of their birthday and they get to celebrate that we funded field trips as we brought those back this year we funded our leader and me program woodland meadows is incredibly proud to be a leader in me school
103where we help to build leadership habits and traits amongst our students additionally we funded more library books for our media center classroom materials and classrooms staff appreciation week where our staff is showered with appreciation and special treats for the week conference dinners where we know those are long nights for our teachers and our staff and for the principal and our pta was so generous it's really nice to know as you're sitting through those long nights that there's a yummy meal waiting ahead for you and they were just amazingly generous with that additionally we had a mud hens game where we all were able to go to a special night at a munhenze game and we brought back field day which was a huge success i know you heard that from the other schools as well
104it's a really big deal for our elementary students so to have that opportunity to celebrate and to participate in those community partnerships that are so important for field day it was really a huge success we had a spring auction where students were able and families were able to bid on events a very special group of students were able to have ice cream sundaes with me and just a really fun event and all of our staff participated in that and our pta was so generous with that and then as always anyone who's been through witness within meadows knows our third grade handprints is our tradition where every student that leaves makes a mark on our heart but also makes a mark on our wall with their handprint and their name and we were able to do
105that again this year so i want to thank publicly our wonderful pta for helping to make that all happen thank you thank you let's clap oh stay up here for just a second um you're not getting off that easy amy knows that um i am smiling so huge during all of these slides it i'm a recovering pta president that's what i tell everybody at pleasant ridge proud pta president of pleasant ridge um this is so important so when i think about next year and and steve knows i'm thinking about next year and i'm like let's set the table this summer we set the table for for next year you guys are such a huge important piece of that smiles the the the the promoting confidence in the kids the getting them outside the exercise this
106is not just about fundraising and sometimes i think when people hear bto and pto they like they run their other way and they're like oh god they're gonna ask me for money okay well yeah but this is very very hard work and it's hard work because you love children and that's really important the other important piece of this is parental engagement and opportunity to partner with staff because it's board policy parental engagement is actually board policy and data firmly states that the more parental engagement that occurs especially on the front end the better those students are going to do in school work with mental health with grades with everything so i'm going to keep it real and i'm going to ask you what you all want because i want to help you i'm going to
107help the middle school because i'm a pto member at the middle school i'm going to help pleasant ridge because i'm still a member of the pta pleasant ridge because they let me um but i want to know how can we help how can this board help you and so i guess my first question is for the elementary side of the house and then my second question is for the secondary education side of the house it's not lost on me that you all had feedback around the standardization of field trips assemblies holidays looking at kind of room parents and looking at things like that i think having guidelines i guess that's the word that i heard used from you all having guidelines is a good idea doesn't mean it needs to be board policy but having
108guidelines and suggestions for operations i think is a very good idea i don't want to take away i want to support the individual passion in each building i think each building is different and that's great but you know when we have you know one building so i'm just gonna pick on halloween for a second i love halloween but when you have one one classroom or one building doing one thing and another one it it's hard to explain to the children right that's what i'm hearing from you all so i guess my first question at any or all of the elementary buildings can take this how can we support or what can you do to kind of be inclusive of all and kind of help boost parental engagement and i hate to use the word standardization
109but but some um some support right and some guidelines so i guess this goes back i guess i guess this goes back to like the original request that i heard so thank you for asking the question and thank you for all of your support throughout everything especially in this difficult year but i everything you just said i think is things that we're asking for we're asking for consistency um and and not um i agree every building is different and teachers want to run their classrooms differently and they should be able to do that but um but i think that some standardization or guidance um in terms of um you know holiday celebrations and volunteers and like i mentioned that i think we're feeling like parents really are striving for that connection to connect with other
110families especially at the younger ages when maybe they were virtual for a year and now they're in first or second grade and they don't know other parents um and so they're looking to make those connections and so i think hopefully next year our covert numbers are better and we can have um more more consistency and more guidance um in terms of what's allowed and what isn't so that we can support those connections and healthy relationships among students thank you anybody else from elementaries want to say anything jackie cathy michelle [Laughter] um nicole covered a whole bunch but um another thing that what that we've been discussing is each classroom is different so we have classrooms that are have parents fully engaged coming in supporting everything that's going on in there then there's other classrooms that
111are have the parents that are questioning like why weren't we invited to go and do like a class party and stuff so that always comes back to us because they think that we have some sort of authority but um we just do the best that we can and um so that was just another thing that was brought up as a concern thank you jackie do you want to add kathy or michelle well i could just speak briefly i think each of the buildings has wonderful opportunities there and i would just caution that it's not about having a competition and i think it's really important that we support each other's events and i i loved hearing about the luminary walk we don't have that but rather than try to recreate that i would love to go
112and support your luminary walk so it's not about well you have this so now i have to have it as well but instead you have this and i have this let's support one another and i think the more we can communicate all of the offerings to the entire district the more opportunities we have to support all of our schools thanks michelle i love it i guess now my question for darcy and for amy for secondary education we hear a lot about mental health in all grades but i'd like to specifically talk about the middle school and the high school and know what we can do to support our friends there from a pto perspective i have a lot of thoughts about inclusion here i'll just say a short story that was shared with me when
113we have things like class trips or class activities all are welcome and not every student has a bank of a lot of people that they can invite to a party and that will show up and and when we have opportunities to do things as a community within the buildings and within the classes [Music] all means all and i really like that so i'd like to talk about inclusive activities that that you all are thinking about and also i'd like to ask about anything that the board can do or ptos and um you guys are both ptos ptos can do at the high school and the middle school to support these kids that are honestly struggling with um the last few years and where do they fit in and the social structure they're developing like crazy
114at the middle school um you both know all of this so any any thoughts that you have on what what you can do to support and what we can do to support i would appreciate i'll be quick um i was just going to mention that this actually came up at dpc and cummings presented um at our dpc meeting and was talking about ways that we can partner with with um her and kind of our teams and the mental health issue did come up and she said they're doing a lot of support for things at high school and i'm like hi middle school like i mean i know you know that we could also use resources so i did kind of um offer up to help be a bridge a little bit between them and the
115middle school i know the social workers psychologists everyone is so so busy and they're you know they their heads are spinning and their their workloads are are crazy so just in ways that we can support them um we're happy to do that i know at the middle school it's a little different with family and community events they don't necessarily want their parents there i get uh quite a lot of looks i'm in the building for my daughter um but i'm open to you know next year we're we're looking at working with the kids so one thing we're looking at is what do they want to do what kind of events do they want to do i want them to be in charge of some stuff and how can we support them as the pto um
116one more thing in inclusivity we have a wonderful leader who she was in the back laura um and she is every time we think of an event or something going on she has a most organized structured list of all the things that we do when we're planning and carrying out events in the school that involve everyone and make sure everyone's inclu included so i'm happy and thankful for that thanks amy i really like the idea of asking the students what they want that's the trick to middle school or something because i have no idea don't tell them just ask them what they want i agree darcy yeah my uh my heart goes out to the lower elementaries because that is really where the ground level the parents come in and are involved in the activities
117and watch their children grow and so i understand that the devastating impact of covet on that relationship for both parents and students and and making family connections because as uh you will find out if you don't already have older kids um that parental participation sort of fades off um they want nothing to do with you in high school or middle get away with a little bit of middle but yeah um they would rather never see you in the high school um and as you saw from the the list of activities there's not a lot of of student parent interaction we strive to support our teachers who are with our children all day every day and support them in other ways that they need like through link crew who will help them over the summer and
118um in the past we have supported what was termed at that time the hornet hatch which is clothing and food for students who would need it and there was a partnership with sass there so i think that my ask with the board supporting us is just to remember that you know we're looking at the whole child and truly teenagers struggle normally and particular populations within the teenagers also suffer covet has had a heavy impact on them and so looking at more ways to fund or find mental health wellness social emotional resources for them we do have finn the dog but we've only got one dog and there's like 1700 kids in high school so i you know as you're talking budget and and setting the vision for the district in order to be academic learners
119they need to come healthy and safe and ready to learn so i think looking at that would be lovely that's so that's my ask and money of course it goes without saying all of you want money i already know i thank you for indulging me this is incredibly important and as we move through the summer it's important that we listen to you and and to the other parents and to our our administration and our teachers and all of our staff to to prepare for next year and and just really knock it out of the park so i appreciate it and i apologize to my trustees because i could talk pta and pto stuff all day so i'm going to give them the opportunity to chime in uh yet susan then jenny um real quick real
120quick um well first of all um you are doing amazing things um and i was excited personally as a parent um to be able to get back and and build day and uh volunteer um and then also um you know seeing the other parents as well i think that was super important and having those interactions so i like that there was more in creative ways you know the gingerbread house and um being able to uh you know the outdoor events that kind of thing um to bring you know even though um conditions were you know not not good with covet and everything you all made it available to all parents and teachers and families um so my my big question is so you are the district parent council and so i assume you all meet
121together and talk and so um if you could tell me a little more about that how you all are partnering partnering um and yeah who's been out at the long is darcy you and are you trying to say i'm the oldest youngest heart um yeah we've been doing it for years i think it's six to eight weeks meeting up um sort of different agenda items i remember back in 2014 2015. you know here the bond is coming up this is what we're looking at doing and it's it's building community support and i do think that you know it especially at the elementary levels for them to be able to coordinate activities is lovely many years ago when we were all doing kalahari resorts that sort of gelled in the dpc meetings to do instead of
122individual fundraisers we did it as a district so i think meeting together every so often and sharing our information does sort of connect us all in fabulous community ways thank you all right well i was just listening and also reminiscing about when i was a teacher in many of your buildings and on and also when my kids were in many of your buildings and still are so first i'll say thank you to darcy and to this to the high school uh pto pta i never can remember which is okay so pto i can never remember which building is which um but thank you for providing ways for parents to um still be involved but not like you know in our kids faces all the time so when i can uh drop off a box of
123goldfish crackers at the front desk or something like that or send money in a venmo or and not venmo and um no well in the uh sling the rev track yeah yeah yeah so um those are those are ways that um i appreciate still being a little bit involved but also my kids appreciate that i'm not in their faces all day um but just a few things that i'm really impressed i am um i'm really excited about the partnership and collaboration that many of you mentioned by having some student reps and i think that that really um highlights our student-centered uh approach and and really um fosters and facilitates the growth and leadership in in our students so i i heard um shs and sms talking about that but i think even at our elementary
124level just having having kids who have that you know those ideas and that desire to be in those leadership positions those third graders because they're the king of the hill they they uh you know they take that uh and uh and run with that i know at one point at woodland meadows a young man wrote an essay and created a whole playground in our community so those young kids can do a lot too so i thought that that was really exciting to see i want to thank you for honoring our transportation and buildings and grounds people with that breakfast they keep us going and i know i as a trustee am extremely proud that we have have a school-based buildings and grounds department that is not privatized and that we can honor and support those
125people and recognize and appreciate them means a lot i cannot tell you how much the staff appreciation week means to the teachers i know that it it does create a little bit of a burden on parents who are gathering a food item or or a flower and bringing it on a special day but you have no idea how much that means and i don't think i knew exactly how much it meant until it wasn't there for me anymore and so i just have to say like the feeling of just knowing on those conference nights that it is going to be a long night and i'm going to leave with a sore face from smiling and sore feet but i know that i'm not going to be starving when i get home and then i'm going
126to have a good meal is just incredible so thank you for the work that you're doing to support our teachers thank you for continuing to honor chad and keep him in you know in the class so that i saw that and thought that that was really important the last thing that i'll say is just that throughout each of your presentations i really saw the compass reflected i really saw the district initiatives i saw creativity and communication and collaboration i saw student-centeredness and families and i saw just the ability for our students to grow and to thrive because that relationship between school and family is so important um yeah so those are the things that i was thinking there was one more thing i was going to say but i just i can't think of it
127off the top of my head right now but thank you for the work that you do i know that it is tireless and often thankless so i hope that you're hearing from us tonight that we appreciate you and and all that you do for our students well jenny you rocked it um so i i just want you to hear from me thank you for having fun with our kids right they they love the things you do and the opportunities you provide and uh just thanks for doing everything i know it doesn't just happen so appreciate it any other comments or questions for our pta and pto leaders ptas are k3 they have bylaws and dues right and then all the others well i think you all were a hit which building is which um i
128think you all were a hit and i think you have valuable contributions both in this room and in every single unique um building so maybe maybe that will make this a regular occurrence so thank you very very much for coming and we'll leave you alone because we also know how busy you'll be going into fall so concentrate there thank you very much okay moving oh michelle's coming back moving on to item d sex education advisory board update michelle checkowitz and chris kristen hoffman people are co-chairs it's the sex ed shimmy i just had to get a drink of water you know things grow and change brad so once again i'm michelle checkowitz i'm the principal of woodland meadows but i'm also a co-chair of a sex ed advisory board and i'm here with my co-chair
129my parent co-chair kristen hoffman peepler and we are very excited to provide a brief update of what we were able to accomplish this year and what we are currently working on as we move forward so in this short presentation if you want to switch to the next slide we're going to do a quick scab or cab at a glance we're going to review what our current goals are what we've accomplished this year and what's next you can switch to the next slide so while they're figuring that out there is some serious controversy within the the seabee world do we call it the seeb or the ciab and it depends on who you are and where you are in the state so i happen to be a seeb person michelle's a c ab person yeah but
130we we get along so it works out so who are we the ciab demographic is designed by the state of michigan we are saline area schools admin and teachers we have student representatives and the bulk of our people are saline area schools parents this current committee has parents with kids who are pre-preschool very little and parents who have kids that have graduated already we also have health professionals and a clergy member and again that is set forth by the state of michigan that we have a well-rounded um collection of people on the board what do we do in the siebe we establish student-centered educational program goals for sexual health and wellness we research we review and we recommend materials and methods of best practice to our school board you that are likely reduced rates of
131sex pregnancy and stis in our student population it's important to note that the seeb is not a decision-making body we basically take something off of your plates and do the research and review and then bring that back to you and say this is what we've learned this is what we know and you are the decision-making body for any curricular changes that might happen um when does our term end this term has one more school year in it the next um appointments will be in um the i think the applications will be april of 2023 with the new board starting in june of 2023. so that's who we are next slide please oh perfect great um so our goals part of our process is creating goals that um help us sort of establish our plan for
132the years our goals are that we will establish or equip students with the knowledge and skills to develop healthy relationships and to avoid sexual behaviors that put them at risk for hiv stis and unintended pregnancy in the next slide we'll look more specifically at what that means um we will make sure that our curricula aligns with state law district mission the school board of ed policies and initiatives and also be congruent with the strategic framework of our district as well as the compass we want to make sure that what we are providing our students not only fits michigan law but fits the the culture and the mission of saline schools our goal is also to engage our community and all of our stakeholders by soliciting feedback and data from all district resources as well as
133students guardians teachers and administrators we can do this through a variety of methods we can do it through surveys like the k-12 insight surveys we can look at mifi data we can look at and listen to boe public comment we can we hear i hear from people in our community asking me what's going on with the sex ed curriculum what's happening with all of this all of those pieces of feedback are really important in the process of our research and review so if you look at the next slide these are the specific objection objectives basically the goal is to keep kids healthy happy and safe and we do that through helping kids learn healthy and unhealthy relationships helping them take care of their bodies helping them to be able to communicate and work with their
134peers and their loved ones in a way that is healthy and safe for them there i'm not going to read to you y'all can read but the objections or objectives are right there i object to my i object to my inability to say the word objectives um that's about it healthy happy and safe all right so what has the sea ab established so far this year well one of the things that was really important to us is that we establish good working relationships with our board members you know the topics that we talk about and the topics that we cover have strong emotions tied to them and so being able to respect one another to hear one another to listen to one another and to find commonality was extremely important to us so as we
135plan each meeting we do it with intentionality every meeting starts with our adoption of the saline bridge to civility norms making sure that we all commit to those our meetings continue with a finding common ground activity whether we're playing commonality bingo among us trying to make those connections or if we are building sculptures of our hopes and dreams for the season or sharing about our families it's really important that we find commonality among us and that we don't let differences of opinion stop our ability to connect with one another so that was really important that we did that at every meeting we've also gone through when we presented research we reviewed information we made a recommendation to the sport of ad we had two public hearings and the board event adopted the 3p curriculum for
136our special education and young adult programs and finally at the end of our calendar year we completed the 2021 program evaluation during that process we were able to evaluate what our new goals would be and what our next steps would be on the next slide the 2021 program evaluation is linked there in your packet but it is also available on the district website under this underneath the academics link in our curriculum there's a sex ed advisory board area and you can link right to that program evaluation to see it the main points of our program evaluation is that we continue our commitment we ins we want to ensure that students receive a robust and relevant sex ed curriculum during their tenure throughout saline area schools we've identified some action items that we can act upon
137we want to evaluate and investigate our current and our new sex ed curricula to see that we can increase support and engagement of cilinary school students and address the needs of our student body that is increasingly diverse and constantly connected through technology another action aiden is to evaluate the equity and inclusivity of our current sex ed curriculum as it relates to our lgbtq students in our district and our final goal is to our final action item is to create and send new surveys to our stakeholder groups our teachers our students our families and to go through with our partnership with our insight k-12 on being part of that part of the cadence of surveying that we do as a district and so now we're going to talk about where we are with the surveying so
138what's next the next thing we need to do is we need to hear from the community we need to hear from our students our parents our teachers we're going to put out a new survey in the fall in october after everyone is settled in and get that data the most recent data that we have is very old and we need to hear from our community again so we will send that out in october 2022 we will review all of that and then based on those findings um we will be able to move forward into next steps for um looking at our current curriculum and looking at what we need if anything to make sure that our curriculum is relevant for students today the our students live a very different life than we did growing up
139we were not connected 24 7. we did not have technology at our disposal all the time so we need to make sure that our curriculum helps kids navigate this new technological world as it relates to relationships and to each other finally we would like to thank thanks thank you for all of your support with our board of education to thank dr lodge for his guidance to thank danielle drost who is our new regional director and to thank lori beckover at our state level for guiding us and helping us whenever things come up and we have questions and i also want to thank the rest the other members of the ciab who are not here today who do an amazing job with this commitment volunteering their time because we all share in our desire to help
140our students throughout this community so thank any you or comments from the board or steve yeah candace yeah just want to say thank you for all of your hard work on this i know it's not easy um you know not an easy topic but i love the idea about finding common ground because that's that's so important in this work so just wanted to note that specifically and then also say that i'm looking forward to working with you all um as a as board liaison to this committee so thank you thank you it has been a joy to work with both of you i like how you mentioned about the finding common ground i personally you know we talk about bridge building but don't actually ask each other what that means and i think that's something
141that you all have demonstrated um at least what i what i've witnessed very well um also you know people who completely disagree with me like i you know have talked to um i've cried to one of them about connecting with family and so um you know i really appreciate those open and honest conversations um even though you know there's disagreements um so you all are a great team so i guess moving forward so i want to talk about research and data which was mentioned um earlier um i know recently um i don't know if you all are aware the mifi um i call it my phi some people call it my size [Music] [Laughter] so that that survey um was um removed for seventh graders um i know a lot of i mean i personally
142before even getting on the board have looked at that data um you know when there's been meetings and forums at uh the schools and so i know you mentioned the k-12 insight i don't know if that's going to capture our younger students um i don't know if i'm just thinking what's the my my me fee my fight that we will possibly lose extremely valuable data for those younger folks even though we start at fourth grade with the sex education reproductive health so i just wanted to see how that will impact you and how you will adjust i have some more questions after that yeah you know the my phi data is one very small piece of the data that we use to make decisions the thing that's really nice about the myfi data is that
143it is hyper local to our county but there is a plethora of of data and studies out there on sex ed curricula and the the way that it functions within young people's lives it's nice to be able to look at our little pocket of the world but we also have u.s data that we can pull from state of michigan data is all in there so while it is always nice to have hyper local data we can absolutely continue to do our work without that piece yes absolutely i recognize what you're saying and i think you're right i think we will lose that localized data however we can look for county-wide data and also the importance of the surveying that we're going to do we will be reaching out to our students and for the youngest
144students we'll be reaching out to parents we want to make sure that we are really hearing those voices so we're going to do the best that we can and move forward and instead of focusing on what we don't have we're going to focus on what we have great thank you um i have one other um i guess comment um as far as um you know some of your suggestions and has been conversation for years and years um about uh looking into our lgbtq youth and their needs i've heard a lot of children who are lgbtq and do not feel represented and also some families who aren't um don't fit into you know some of the stuff whenever you talk about reproductive health and dna and you know family structure and inheritance and stuff so i'm
145just you know just thinking broadly right and and um so so i just encourage um you all looking at updated policies um as far as like the dei advisory committee policy or even you know consulting with maybe some of those folks and our transgender and non-binary students policy hopefully that'll help guide some of the the work that you are doing and looking into what would be best based on our policies and our student population and being inclusive thank you i'm wondering um you you were talking about you know potentially some loss of some local data and um i appreciate that you're using that there's going to be new data that would come from a k-12 survey of parents and students and community this fall and so we'll have that fresh data i also wonder if
146um if there is opportunity or if there is the inclusion of data like for example community mental health or public health data that relates to student behaviors and student needs as they approach the ages where they're learning about reproductive health and and all the other components of sex education so are there other pieces are there other professionals that um that we seek to have their expertise yeah so um the the siebe is um is has a very narrow focus in that we look at sex ed curriculum only however humanity doesn't exist within a vacuum and our sexual relationships and our sexual identities um encompass our emotional health and our social health and all those other pieces so while we don't look at social emotional learning in particular we do very much look at mental health
147percentages as it relates to the sexual health of kids absolutely and then just one little addition to that i think that's also why it's so important that when we look at the makeup of the c-ab is that it it has community mental health professionals on there and health educators on there and so they bring that information with them that comment is adjacent to my question about the s-e-a-b nice avoidance technique how long can we run the joke like is it being encompassing of all uh is the sea be fully seated at this moment yes yes okay um didn't you get a new board on june 23rd is there a complete rollover or do we have a lot of fresh faces how does that work go ahead so there would be an appointment process and an
148application process at this point those decisions have not yet been made but i always believe it's important to have someone that brings a sense of history of where the group has been and where they're going i think that's an important piece to continuing momentum and not having a full throttle stop with the new board coming on so those decisions have not yet been made but i do believe that's an important piece i absolutely concur about continuity the 23rd year of this century correct i did say june 23rd but yeah anyway there's a process laid out in the policy too right right and um i just this is just also for anybody's listening to um and you are required to report to this board annually and this is it no i'm just curious about the number
149of times you need to report to us the program evaluation is required every two years to be submitted so that has been done and then we try to give you an annual update i don't know that that's a legal requirement we do we do that as part of saline area schools all right super and i guess the last one is no that would be it right now and danielle drost did you say she's the new statewide director she's the new mary bino yes regional director regional for wisd and ellie essay perfect thank you very much i appreciate that um i had a couple very quick things so first of all i'm just going to echo what my colleague said about the common ground i really appreciate what you said and what you're trying to do
150there um the first question i so i i listen to feedback and so i guess these two are coming from feedback so the first one is about consent and and we talked a little bit about this within the ppp curriculum but i'm interested in gen ed also sometimes i get feedback from folks wishing that was more of a focal point so i was just wondering is that an example of something that you talk about um incorporating down the road or or what can we do like instead instead of just looking at like a new curriculum overall like do you can you look at pieces of that that can come back to us because that's one that i i've heard a lot of feedback on yeah so right now the state of michigan requires that we
151teach refusal skills and the difference between refusal skills and consent is that refusal is a no no no thing whereas consent is a yes i consent to that so it it flips refusal skills on its head and makes it a i am actively choosing to be part of this scenario versus i am pushing away something i don't want does that make sense so right now we we have refusal skills within the curriculum but best practice is to teach consent and consent is something that is already naturally taught to our kids through very developmentally appropriate ways saying yes you can borrow my marker that is consent hey joey can i use your crayon when you're done yes you may thank you that's a that is a very developmentally appropriate young fives kindergarten first grade second grade
152thing to learn to say yes to something or no i'm not done with it you can't use my marker you know so yes short answer is yes consent is very important and yes you can look at pieces of curriculum you don't have to overhaul the whole thing but we also selene prides itself on best practice and so we want to make sure that any recommendations that come before you to the board are something that is reflecting best practice in the area of sex ed curriculum we don't want to give a partial product for something that could be better and reflect best practice of the curriculum area yeah and i i would concur with all of that i think the only piece that i would add is so when we talk about reviewing of what our
153current curriculum is and the needs to update it is pieces like that it is pieces where we we now know that active consent is something that's really important and i hear that from the community as well and because i believe the process for approving new curriculum is is quite robust um sometimes our curricu like can age itself and so in the past when we were focusing only on refusal and not on consent um it's important that we make sure that our our curriculum is updated that includes those pieces all right thank you the other question um kind of comes out of the experience with the ppp curriculum because the the two public hearings as you said and the the questions that we were asking here so we like policy because that's our job so we
154do have a a pretty well well-defined policy um for the sex ed board do you all go through that i know we talked about the student representative last year do you all go through the policy and kind of checklist like yes we have clergy yes we have x number of parents and and kind of what is that that checklist or or process within the committee since i'm not on that committee just understanding how do you make sure that you're in compliance of school board policy so that is also many of the things you're talking about is not just school board policy but also state laws so as this group came together the very first thing we did at our very first meeting was review the laws the policies that were relevant to our work together
155so we had them posted we all went through them we asked questions so we went through the makeup of the board we also went through the relevant legal mcl laws that that we have to follow through the michigan school code um additionally we took a look at the salinary school district policies as well as the district commitment statements like our dei statements so in in addition to things that may not be policies but they are district commitments in line with the district mission we felt those were relevant as well thank you and state law so yeah i absolutely agree i just go to the policy because that's my little area um so that's very good and and i hope that that can continue because i know sometimes if you have turnover in the application process
156for next june depending on how many legacy people you have that kind of know to do that versus incoming you know just hopefully mentor um incoming members yeah and part of the application process is identifying what is your role in the community so when i filled out my application you know it's my name i'm a parent i'm also a registered nurse i you know i added all of those things so i fit in two boxes i'm a healthcare person as well as a parent largely i function as a parent in this role but um you can't put away the nurse from a nurse there's always there um so that that is very clear within the application process and steve i believe you're the one who goes through and like color codes the whole thing i'm
157not part of that process because i'm not part of admin so yeah all right thank you anybody else yeah david uh sure thanks um a lot of my questions have already been addressed but just to go back to the um data question for a minute to not to um uh get too exacting i guess but just to clarify on the on the my fi data um the the data note about the low response rate refers only to the 2019 2020 2020 data correct and those those previous years um had like normal response rates i might be putting too much too much too much on the spot there but um um you know the response rate was significantly lower and the myfi data is there's there's no it's not like um journal article data where you
158have to account for um a certain percentage of responses we only get what you get right and so you are we have a data person actually on the board right now who said you can assume that these numbers are higher because we have such a low data set we don't make assumptions with data we let the data speak for itself but we are my fi is not beholden to a certain percentage of data it is merely a snapshot in time of who showed up that day who took the test that day but you would have an but we get an idea and a trend through over time okay did that answer your question um i i think so okay and and these are washington county numbers but do we also have access to the saline
159specific numbers in order to make you know you guys make your decisions based on you know in in terms of evaluating because you're talking about evaluating um our our programming so it makes sense to evaluate our programming based on celine's on what's going on in silly not what's going on in washington county as a whole right i think it's important that we remember that we would never make decisions or recommendations based on one no no but but if yes that's the if that's what you're pulling out is kind of something to highlight that would make sense to highlight what's happening here or not what's happening so we'd want to look at as localized data as we have and if we don't have localized data then we spam well how close to it but we do
160we do demographics data right yes okay so and then i would i would just you know kind of amplify what everyone else has been been saying in terms of since we're missing that myfi data for seventh grade this year because of what happened then it's really important to next year yeah make sure that we we try to recapture some of that i would agree with that when we participate in in the mifi then we use that data for sure so um okay yeah so i think that was my only question question and um thank you thank you for the the diligent work that you uh you guys do and and uh i like the recommendation to clarify the survey data when you get take this when you uh deliver the survey next year that's going
161to be gathering local data from our community to be asking questions about such things as when do you think that the sex education curriculum should be introduced at what grade level there's going to be a lot of local data gathered there which likely will give us quite a bit of good information as to what to do next for our sex education curriculum the myfi data is it's still our local data gathered but it's compared to county data as it relates to some of those questions but this question this survey line of thinking is more of what are some next steps we need to take with our sex education curriculum based on what our parents are largely saying our parents and guardians correct that is only one piece of information and our k-12 insight the surveying
162will bring us lots of local information so would it make sense to also survey students at the same time that we're serving that is the plan okay yep older students we're not going to ask first graders about sex ed no no but middle schoolers high schoolers parents and teachers in a developmentally appropriate way yes absolutely and just to further clarify it's my understanding that myfi is every two years an even year so we would not have a myfi survey next year would be 2024. so for secondary education and odd years it's the youth risk behavior survey i believe okay thanks which is a little bit different um so so i have a question about um and i probably could just talk to you separately or at the meeting or whatever um but as far as
163the um communication um you know the board um you all bring recommendations to us um on the curriculum piece and um you know we pass it or not um and so i don't know if you all partner with or communicate with the staff who are implementing it in that process i want to bring up a couple of things i know we've established legally that of course families can be notified the state of state of michigan are notified about the curriculum and also um option to review and opt out so that should i mean that's legally um the opt-out however as a parent um i i was hoping that it would change but um i received and opt in or and opt out and that my um that that needed to be turned back in um
164however the date you know the day of it is it it is a curriculum that is adopted um we you know have it um so i guess they're they're you know the i don't know if people and you all probably don't but just that communication i think is key um another thing um this came up um actually um we we had a uh public comment um yesterday and so um i want to ask that um whenever children are opted out um is there like a consistency about like what activities they may do is that per classroom um just trying to get an idea you know as we talked about controversial issues of course that's um the only component is is this the sex ed and so um i just wanted to to kind of get
165um how you are communicating and helping with on the admin piece so that's a lot to consider and i guess the one thing that i would remind you is that we are an advisory board we simply advise we don't police we don't make sure that teachers are doing things if something happens that you believe is against policy i would encourage you to seek out your building administrator report that and go through those channels and that process just like you would anything else if you were unhappy about something that was happening with mathematics or or what have you to seek that process because we are not we are simply an advisory board um so in terms of that that is where i would leave that lie so when things come up i think if someone opts
166out i believe that the administrator would work with that family for an appropriate and appropriate alternate activity thank you um sorry i just in my particular situation um the teacher when i asked some questions about that um sent me to you all and to the top and didn't have any building contacts so okay thank you i tried i i just wanted to mention and not necessarily to you but to the to our trustees and and to dr lotch that as we um as we look at policies like 2240 that we discussed last night at the policy meeting um you know sometimes things bubble to the surface and then we see like oh maybe we also need to look at at other at other things and so one of the things that i took away last
167night is that while we have policy there's also some need to firm up our administrative guidelines and that can be supportive of a student who may be or a teacher actually when a parent when a parent approaches um a teacher with the desire to opt out um what is the guideline for or the procedure for how that goes and i think that that can make things really transparent and really helpful for administrators and for teachers so if we can come together or as as the administrators are reviewing administrative guidelines that might be one area that could just make things um you know run a little more smoothly for students yeah i think sometimes the the bridge between policy and implementation feels really long and um i think at the building level is where those conversations
168need to have because like michelle said we are an advisory board we're not part of implied implementation of any policy okay also oh okay well first of all i just want to thank you for for for your work on this committee it is an easy work so thank you so your recommendation is just to be clear it's going to be october of 2022 you're saying and we're going to survey middle school teachers students and because your recommendation is what is middle school teachers as well as parents and students is that correct teachers and parents of current students and students old enough to have those that surveyed but it's going to be middle school high school secondary secondary yeah well really four through 12 because they're the ones who teach it so yeah okay and then
169based upon that you have a recommendation in here about it being incumbent upon to evaluate and investigate current and new sex ed curricula is that the plan going forward and can you give me like yeah a little bit of a timeline i guess or well on that it is the our recommendations going forward if you if you go back to the what's next slide that slide is a really lofty goal to be able to complete in the next one school year that as we know change is very slow and if there are going to be changes that need to be made to the sex ed curriculum it is a long process so our main goal is data collection next year of our current stakeholders in saline area schools and then from there we it is
170either going to be a very clear path toward change or a very not clear double path of taking everything and pulling it apart into lots of little pieces so the next step beyond survey is data analysis collection and analysis and then from there research review and recommendation the timeline is it could be a year it could be five years i mean it it takes a long time to make change for sure yep okay thank you i know we're going to get questions on the survey that would be my guess so that would follow board policy for surveys within the district which means it gets bubbled up to steve for review and approval is that correct yeah and the district has a long relationship with k-12 insight which is going to really really help in the
171survey process to make sure that it is saline area schools appropriate michigan law appropriate and are community appropriate and we will be we will be following all of our practices procedures and protocols that we have been following with surveying data all right michelle you want to stay for another one you can do three in a row you're tired of seeing me now merced looks like she wants a partner i don't know patrick come on thank you i just want to end and say that michelle has been a fantastic leader of this group she has been able to create a real community within our board and i want to thank you very publicly for everything that you have done for this group it is you have been an amazing amazing leader thank you and thank you
172not like you're not busy with a whole building of your own so all right thank you um thank you both um musetta you've been so patient thank you uh our final scheduled report this is this is one of those months this month and next month where we only have one meeting and we're trying to get a lot done to prepare for next year and to close out this year so thank you for being patient whenever you're ready we are ready for our wellness committee update okay great thank you thank you for having me this evening absolutely so i first want to get started um with just kind of going over our membership and kind of our goals for this year so while that's coming up so essentially we had members to kind of represent our
173whole district so we had teachers administrators social workers students parents board members so thank you for those who are on the committee this year and then some other district staff members so our district nurse karen hervey our director of food services uh larry d'andrea has some examples of other district staff and some some goals for us this year were to really make sure that our practices in the district align with our board policy and then also how can we support social emotional learning and wellness this school year and so the next yeah perfect so with regard to our board policy alignment what we did is we took essentially the board policy is pretty clear about what they want to see right at the in the district and so we took each of those elements and
174we are putting together a draft of how you can if you were to go throughout the district where you would see that what that looks like so we've partnered with our pe teachers food service department and nursing to get some details around that so you can expect that that draft will be posted on our website by the end of august and so we've been working on that so we'll continue to work on that through the summer that way it's in a good place for the website posting so in terms of social emotional support a focus that we had was how do we support not just students but also staff and families and so we've put together a partnership with stillwater's counseling and we did some focus work during the month of may and then we
175also did a student support survey so more surveys but we wanted to kind of find out how students felt when they were in school and we'll go into some more detail about what that survey looked like and some of the results that we had so as i mentioned we partnered with stillwater's counseling during the mental health awareness month which was may of this you know for this year and so what that looked like was still waters their staff so kindly put together a video on anxiety and so this was called the abcs of anxiety so they kind of went over what anxiety is how does it manifest itself physically how can you what are some tips and strategies to manage your own anxiety and then some tips for parents for how they could support their
176students when they're anxious and so we during the parent sessions that we had we had two sessions one in the middle of the day and one in the evening they reviewed the video this is mita negpal one of the co-founders she also answered questions for parents on how to support their students with anxiety so that was helpful she also provided some additional resources for family so book titles and online resources that focused on some mental health concerns such as things if you have questions around adhd autism depression anxiety she had a whole slew of resources so we shared that with all of the buildings so they could share and push out to their families if stu if parents excuse me wanted some more information and then lastly mr john jonathan buckman from stillwater's put together
177a zoom mindfulness session for our saline middle school for their students and staff and that was held in the evening and from what mr stimac said who's a member of our steering committee shared that there were lots of you know questions people were really pleased with the experience they were probably families per zoom screen so maybe i think there was about 11 or so you know people that joined but there are lots of people in their families kind of sharing one screen so that was good to hear that that was good and well received and so then with our student support survey so you know lots of research out there that shares that if a student has at least one trusted adult they feel more connected to school and they're likely to perform better academically
178and so our social emotional goal is to see so how many of our students have a trusted adult right could they identify somebody if they needed something and so what we decided to do is put together a survey so we administered that around end of april may time and so it was going to be a focus area for us for this school year it was optional so any of the results that we kind of go over in the next couple of slides are students that are self-reporting and it was optional so we had you know each of the buildings at that four through twelve level kind of gave the option for students to take the survey so a couple of things kind of go over the questions that i asked so i did share this
179with families too ahead of time but just so we have it all here in one place so we wanted to know what grade students were in we asked them in general how supported do you feel by the adults at school and then we asked do you have at least one trusted adult at school that you can go to when you need help with a personal problem we gave some examples that way to guide some students especially some of our younger participants and then if yes we want to get an idea of how many right so quite a few students had two or three or four so it was nice to see that but most students had at least one and then we asked which adult or adults would you typically go to so we wanted
180to get an idea of which sort of what role right are students gravitating towards or they can identify as trusted adults so is it teachers counselors social workers coaches kind of gave you some examples just to kind of get an idea and then lastly we also because it's anonymous we wanted to figure out so if a student didn't feel like they had a trusted adult how do we help them in making that connection so this is an opportunity for a student if they wanted us to help them connect with somebody they would share their name here and so this was the only space that a student's name was asked for and it would be purely up to them so students if they wanted to they could share say hey you know my name is so-and-so
181and i'd like to be connected with somebody and so that raw data would come to our steering committee and then we can kind of go from there and so we'll kind of jump into a little bit of the numbers i won't go into detail but essentially just kind of gives you a breakdown so like i said earlier we focused on our 4th through 12th graders this school year we had about 587 participants so not a ton but i think it was it's a good place to start you'll see that majority of the respondents were in our ninth and eleventh grade um you know grade levels and so we thought that was interesting so maybe what about 9th grade and 11th grade maybe people are more gravitated to trying to figure out finding trusted adults we
182don't you know we'll kind of look into that maybe next year but we thought that was interesting and then the next piece is that first question so if you look at the next slide you'll see a bar graph and it asks in general how supported do you feel so we felt really encouraged by the idea that around 87 of our students feel supported by an adult at school and then 12.4 percent of students don't feel as supported so some you know the 7 to 2.9 that say no that's concerning so hopefully some of those students shared their name so we could connect them with somebody but we felt like we felt it was good to see that most students felt supported so we're doing good work or we're heading in the right direction and so
183one of the so obviously right we have all this data so what did we do with it so as a committee we so on the steering committee we were we were given the raw data kind of in real time so we were able to kind of track and see what input students were sharing right which students wanted to be connected with other adults so we were able to look at that and then for our last committee meeting with the whole district members we kind of looked at just some trends and things that we saw and then the names of the students that were seeking a trusted adult i shared those names with building principles that way they could connect them with an individual there so those names were shared with building principles some of the
184principals shared replied back that some of those students had already been on their radar so that's helpful too that they're still trying to make those connections and there's some consistency there so we felt good about that and then some of our takeaways like i mentioned earlier we did feel really good that we had a high percentage of students that felt like they had a trusted adult but also like i mentioned with 587 students representing 4th through 12th grade we'd like to get more representation so we thought about how we you know how much time did we give to kind of advertise or market the survey to make sure students that they did want to participate in it they could i'm so looking at that so how do we get more students to participate still be
185optional but how do we get some more representation for that fourth through twelfth and then if there's ways to even include some of our lower elementary how do we do that and what does that look like we kind of touched on that this year but didn't quite get a chance to roll that out so that way we represent the whole district and not just the 4th through 12th grade students all right and then lastly so our goals for next year we want to support staff and student connections to promote school unity so during some of our wellness committee meetings the students that were present did share this desire to connect with their teachers even outside of the classroom and possible to kind of build that you know human connection with them we want to continue
186our efforts with ensuring students feel supported at school and then lastly we want to increase our focus on staff wellness too so those would be the three things that we would like to look at for next year and then i'd like to just thank all the members of the wellness committee um i appreciate the opportunity to work with them i think we did a lot this year it was a hard year in general so i think what we were able to kind of accomplish i think is a great foundation for us as we move into next year so and then any questions from the board thank you thank you yeah go ahead so thank you for your free thank you for your commitment to health and wellness i would say that in this day and
187age especially coming off of this particular school year these things were more important than you than any year i know personally in my career so i appreciate that i i appreciate the focus on on staff wellness i i think that go-to adult piece is a is a big deal and so do you have survey data specifically on how many students and then like how to go to adult because i see the one about um how you know how generally supported by the way i want to say how that affirms the our staff right and the incredible staff we have but do we have data specific on the go to adult and then i'm wondering did we share that go-to data with the staff like with the staff members themselves because i i know that's affirming
188for me as an educator and and to seek out those students who didn't have those connections and what have you so did we share that with them so the staff they we did not share this data with the staff as a whole but i think that's something we could definitely do in the future especially since we have the grade breakdown so building principles can have that info and then that way they could share it i think there was a balance of respecting the anonymity right of participants um i think that was a big piece we were trying to balance that but i think making sure that more people see the hard work that they're putting in that's working is a good idea so we can definitely do that um in terms of the data of
189like who is that trusted adult yes we have that um and i can pull that up but essentially we had about i would say over half or so around had at least one to two one and or two to three people that they could um connect with so it was strong data in that sense how appreciative i am to your comment time thank you um so oh sorry so i was on the wellness committee i'm no longer on there um and trustee hayward is and i know i was there from the beginning of your leadership i know there was some transitions prior to that but um i think you've been doing a wonderful job for the meetings that you know i previously have been at i think it's a great team that you know contributed
190i know we have students who come and contribute and part of that the hornet sorry what's the team i can't think of the team yeah yeah the student leaders um and how how you've um pulled them in and um you know with that partnership i think that's wonderful um i noticed with so i'm going to go back to the my phi data that was i don't know if that's something that you all use plan to use we've lost again our seventh graders did not take that i know there's a lot of valuable health information that's gathered from those surveys i know a lot of so anyways the survey that um you did um i noticed here unfortunately that sixth seventh and eighth grade um i don't know if they're those tiny strands um i did
191the calculation and and so is that 0.9 was middle school yes we had we didn't have we had a small number of middle school students participating in the survey so that was an area for next year for how do we get some representation at that sixth seventh and eighth grade level so i would say maybe like one or two students per grade um so that was something that we talked about as a as a whole district wellness committee in our last meeting for how do we you know get to our visitation at the middle school what are some things that we can do to be proactive about making sure that there's dedicated time right for taking the survey so for those who want to at the high school our schedule is set up in a
192way that is easy for that um horrified time was a great way to kind of put up a qr code and for those students that want to take it it was there for them and so as a team that's definitely something that we talked about and have some plans moving forward and we'll kind of still brainstorm when we kind of come back in the fall that way that group is represented and i see that fourth and fifth grade um had a high number too so maybe some of that communication at the top level um but yeah i think that's such important data um you know here at hearing uh you know just just that age right um and and so i um want to encourage you to do that sooner than later uh you know
193what you all can and so thank you um just to build on that i i do think time is a is a big factor having two kids at the high school i know that if you tell them to do it on their own it's it's going to be really tricky because our kids are so scheduled um and so providing time during hornet time for example i'm sure contributed to the higher numbers at the high school so um i think time being being critical for that um and but i also can appreciate that it's it's tricky when it's optional so so really creating an environment that um supports students and and um so i appreciate that i also just wanted to say well first i want to say thank you to you and your leadership on
194the team i know that my own students benefit from your leadership on the wellness committee but also at the high school so i appreciate that the other thing that i just wanted to highlight is that i am continually impressed with the partnerships in our community and the generosity of our community to to really support support with their expertise and with their resources so i want to give another shout out to stillwater for the way that they support our students in and outside of school and i just appreciate that they are so generous with their time and resources so that we can better support all of our students so thank you for seeking out that partnership and continuing to maintain that partnership yeah absolutely they were really wonderful to work with because i didn't have a
195ton of like they were really great at generating ideas it was very much like this would be great what are some thoughts that you had and so it was great to kind of partner with them and they really planned a series of activities for all of our age levels so that was really great to see well and i just one thing that you noted um having had like personal family extended family um anxiety is just a really tricky thing for for people to navigate because it's one of those invisible things um invisible uh disabilities or difficulties that that people have and so often times it's difficult for kids to understand that they might be dealing with anxiety it's difficult for parents to understand that there might be some signs of anxiety so i think involving
196experts and expertise from people who are in the field and who have the latest and greatest best practice research is just extremely smart move for our kids thank you all right i think we're good i i failed to recognize your your promotion a new role when you came up here so i wanted to say congratulations i'm very excited to give you some eighth graders next year to help transition can have a few of ours you can have three of ours um so thank you very much i just had a clarification question the draft that you're preparing for august that will go on the website per policy 8510 that's that's the document that we need every three years is that correct so that's like the refresh um and the new policy that has to be posted
197per law so that's that's kind of checking the box on that policy yes because okay yeah yep exactly all right good that's what i wanted here all right thank you thank you very much thank you thank you for waiting i want to do a time check with the team because we are at um 8 57 and we have um a lengthy agenda um do we need a 10 minute recess yeah support we've been here through okay so would anyone like to create a motion to recess until let's say 9 10. i would like to make a motion to take a brief recess until 9 10. excellent excellent trustee miller thank you so much second support all right candace all those in favor please say aye all right we are adjourned until 9 10. thank you
198all right everyone ready ben says good to go we're live thank you for affording us that small break appreciate that moving on to our action items please i'd like to recommend a motion and move to approve the purchase of two model year 2023 ic clean diesel 77 passenger school buses at a combined cost of 248 214 dollars and zero cents and two 2018 i see ce clean diesel lift buses at a combined cost of 165 678 and zero cents as recommended by director of operations rex clary i'd like to make that motion mcveigh michael thank you support susan e step susan thank you okay uh discussion so this will be the 22nd new school bus 21st and 22nd new school bus over the years we have purchased used school buses this is the first time
199we're going to do it three years off lease this is a dealership bus coming from a i guess a a dealership provided mechanic so i feel good about the purchase of these three lift buses and these lift buses are with air conditioning and of course the lift door normally they run about 25 more than a jet ed bus um so coming three years off lease we're saving significant amount of money um and these will put us right in par in the same manufacture that we're currently purchasing and it puts us in good shape for next year to start of next year with lift buses lift buses is one area that we're seeing an increase in students um and we need these for august uh 26th so these will be delivered by august 15th and the
200new buses will not deliver until after january did you misspeak when you said three lift buses two yeah i'm sorry two two two sorry yes i do i just have one quick question it's um because we're doing this and i appreciate it like the budgetary force right here but how about with regards to like warranties and that type of thing like how are we covered there i did extend the warranties on these three on the two lift buses for our normal five years beyond this point so they will come with a five year warranty on uh same warranty that i get with all the new buses as well yes yes all right thank you very much thank you for waiting no problem i know we have a bulky agenda um okay so i have a
201motion made by um michael second by susan all those in favor please say aye aye opposed hearing none motion carries seven zero i that's the first time i've heard the start of school date too like out loud let's not talk about that yet um okay not not ready yet still basking in the glow of the last days um i'd like to move on to action item b please and move to approve i'd like to entertain emotion and move to approve the community education rental rates as submitted by brian puffer director of community education motion gerby brad thank you support jones candice thank you um discussion thank you very much for waiting it's a little taller thank you for having me uh yes um last fall we implemented new facility software called leo with the help
202of mr ellis uh it's district-wide not just for community ed so we've been using it since about september it's been very successful and so what we did is kind of look at our rates that we've attached and i've attached in there and so our old rates we had three classes and now we're going down to more of a streamline process what we did is we looked at about 10 different districts kind of see what everybody else is doing which we do yearly usually but to kind of see how you know they portray their rates and what facilities they use we looked at dexter chelsea pickney west bloomfield places they had comparable facility stars and so as you can see in there um the first attachment there's our current rental rate classification and then second one
203is our proposed adjustment and redesign rate sheet basically we did this like i said to streamline the process for our staff and for the public and what we did was eliminated class one on our proposed reishi and replaced it with group a which is all of our saline groups and then one and two or excuse me two and three were replaced with b and c so there are some groups that we have that were a on our one on our old sheet that would be going to be uh and they will receive it'll probably be to five to ten to possibly fifteen dollar increase and depending on what they're renting on uh there's not a lot of groups that fall in that area so we looked over that we did adjust some rates not much
204we do look at those every year but i'd say depending on the facility and what we're in between the middle to the top and our fees for our facilities i mean we've been renting our facilities where you know we started back in 2020 during the summer with our programs and then that fall we were allowed to run out to other communities and whatnot and so we've been i would say right now this year for our fiscal year uh we're probably pretty close to pre-pandemic for what we're doing facility rentals this year that's a good news and yeah brad knows i like revenue generations yeah any uh any comments or questions i just had a little one um so we have a policy it's 9 700 i won't quiz you um it's it's relations with special
205interest groups and this has come up in the past and i know michael and i have talked about this a little bit when we've talked about things being distributed in the board room and rental and rental spaces comes under this as well and so i would just ask that that you work with steve maybe to review any board policies about rentals i know we're in an election year and there are specific board policies around um signage what you do in facilities in salinary schools etc so i would just ask that you kind of review that and make sure we're compliant yeah definitely something here i i'd like to add that one of the reasons it is important that we keep up with um rental rates and and increasing revenue is that our facilities are so
206tremendous i mean we hear all the time about how well kept our facilities are people that come from other districts comment to me a fair amount wow your facilities are so nice and that's credit to the great work of our you know rex and kurt and brian and making sure that these facilities are in great shape therefore i think it more than justifies a a increase especially with signing the times you know we're needing to charge more for a variety of services yeah i totally totally agree i thought it was a bargain when i looked at the rates for our facilities and um yeah a shout out to the custodial crews as well that make make them very nice yeah i would just quickly just say that for the reason we're able to do this
207is just because support of the board obviously but obviously with our um rex this great crew the custodians they do a great job um obviously they work well with us we all work together and so we won't be able to do this if we have support from everybody yeah absolutely it's a destination for a lot of local clubs and associations any other yeah jenny just to piggyback on what you said uh i think it was last week the high school was on the news for a group from canton i think drives all the way out here for their dance recital multiple nights in the week and uh it just happened to be one of the nights um the power went out because there was an accident but anyways it was just interesting to see on
208on the news celine auditorium but to know that um it is such a destination that people are driving 30 plus minutes to get here um because the facility is so so incredible so thank you to rebecca grieve driscoll and her staff and to all the custodians and and everyone who makes that happen i know i know our own dance studio uses it in most of the community studios but also the surrounding areas are using it too so bravo thank you yeah and i just want to say thank you again for the support because when obviously covet hit we were one of the first districts to open up our doors not just our community but surrounding communities and we've kept some of those commun those groups that decide to stay with us because we are open
209then we're able to help them out but we wouldn't be able to do that wasn't for you guys thank you bro in the past there have been some organizations that use our facilities free of charge i mean some of the uh the jazz band new horizons i think was which is what it's called they're they're now paying fees there's a couple of them we're working with them though too certain groups that we've had some of them we've grandfathered in for a little bit and so some of these fees are the fees say they're effective july 1st but some of our groups have been with us we are working with them and making sure that they're still able to operate as they have in the past because some of their savings they've gone into scholarships for
210students and that sort of thing so it's like it works for the district at so you're well aware of them and that situation and i i really appreciate hearing that yeah yeah we are we like i said we have those we've docked them so a lot of the groups we know that maybe in transition a little bit we've already been in talks with yeah i can i can add a little legacy finance committee thing there so before covet hit scott was actually talking with a lot of the different groups about um a year in advance having them prepare for some some increases and then of course everything everything changed so it's kind of like resetting that but um for three years expectation has been that that there is going to be some increase in fees
211so it's just kind of getting back to that and helping people out and getting those levels so thank you very much um seeing no other questions or comments um i have a motion from brad second by candace all those in favor please say aye opposed hearing none motion carry 7-0 thank you all right thank you moving on to action item c i'd like to entertain a motion to approve the food service management contract renewal with chartwells for the 2022-2023 school year as submitted by assistant superintendent owsley i'll make that motion miller jenny thank you and mcveigh will support michael thank you any discussion or anything miranda says good to go all right any comments questions for miranda all right all those in favor please say aye aye opposed hearing none motion carry 7-0 she has
212talked a lot today in in finance and in the budget hearing um moving on to item d i'd like to please entertain emotion and move to adopt the amended general appropriations act for 2021 2022 final amended budgets the 2022 2023 original budget and the 2022 l4029 tax rates as submitted by assistant superintendent owsley so move jones candace thank you support miller jenny thank you i'm assuming no one has any other questions or comments since we had a budget hearing okay um all those in favor please say aye aye opposed hearing none motion carry seven zero moving on to discussion items vice president mcvay with our policy committee update thank you you built up anticipation this morning in one of your emails to us all that we were looking forward to hearing about last night's meeting
213so here we go um which usually doesn't happen so yesterday evening i'm gonna have to read this i won't be able to make eye contact so thank you last yesterday evening the policy committee convened to begin discussion of one of the final items on our running agenda for the year policy controversial issues as a reminder the policy committee consists of myself trustee estep and miller as well as dr lodge uh at both ends of the meeting we heard from about 12 members of the community in total who expressed their concerns with the policy as it is currently written the the comments reinforce my own thinking that there are four key elements of the of that policy that need review uh i don't would just leave it at that so number one the title of the
214policy and the general use of the term controversial issues is problematic on many many levels and for many and for a variety of reasons and we heard that time after time from members of the community secondly the issue of allowing parents to opt their students out of classwork is a mechanism that many but not all parents in attendance wish to see maintained and clarified the terms vague and murky were raised and administrative guidelines will clearly be impacted and trustee miller already alluded to that a bit earlier today tonight number three the process of approaching the teacher a teacher to raise concerns in a way that is both respectful and timely needs review and in the same respect there needs to be or the need to inform parents when possible of occasional classwork that might be
215uncomfortable for a variety of reasons also needs to be adjusted or addressed and finally number four the procedures for implementing how an opt-out happens so students are respected and not ostracized and similarly so teachers do not face too great a burden to generate alternative assignments there were other issues raised but without diving into details in this brief report as a result of our discussions at the table we determined not to let slide a deep review of this policy and we also determined to call in more voices to the discussion beyond the policy committee including kara davis of the teaching and learning team molly garcia of student services members of the dei committee and many other community voices and viewpoints trustees miller and estep have already done a great deal of research in the course of
216our review of documents and they'll continue to work on the policy we did find potentially helpful policy language and strategies from as far away as ellington connecticut and as close as dexter community schools and novi as well as ideas already well established in our own policies that trustee estep pointed out last night at the meeting so i personally want to thank everybody who was there who shared their views last night in a and i'm looking forward to sharing progress in the weeks uh ahead as we as this uh policy uh evolves so thus endeth my report thank you that was comprehensive and as as as the trustee team knows we had some board emails about this with varying um perspectives that kind of hit on each of these four so i appreciate because you i
217think you answered most of my questions and what you just said um the only question that i had is um you said it was a running policy and kind of the last checkmates how how did this come to be like i know when we usually review a policy there's a rationale and process that we follow how did this one end up on the plate well there as for any policy that comes up for revision and contemplation 0131.1 is our policy about making policies any board member can bring something on the table to put something on the agenda for discussion there are still other items that haven't yet been discussed and i'm hoping that we'll get to those in the fall from for myself it's the board operating procedures we need to figure out a process
218for updating and revising those for example um i i know a trusty eastep can add some details about how this one in particular came on but it is not the first year that it has been on the agenda of the policy committee we have talked about it we talked about it before uh well over the since my first term on the policy committee which was five and a half years ago it has popped up and it it we have put it aside over the years there have been conversations and there's been research and trustee e step has done a great deal of research in the intervening years but we are at the point now where we really have to move on this and we've reached a i hate this word a synergy uh we we've
219reached a point where a nexus point which we're going to move on so uh trustee east if you want to elaborate on that as to how where it came from no it i didn't even know the five five plus years thing that's inside we could talk about that later a long time ago as i mentioned last night when we moved from masb's policies to niolas we looked at every single policy yeah and that was one of them yeah and in my start um in 2019 is when i was first introduced to this policy um from uh superintendent graydon and paul heineck who was the chair at the time um who brought it to us for removal um so that's that's the first time that it came to michael was on mcveigh was on that committee
220as well it came to the table not for any sort of vote there was discussion about changing that title i don't know if i think it's just the three of us if you recall that um but it i don't know what happened after that change of language and part of the issue is that to a person we said the word controver the phrase controversial issues was outdated and irrelevant and it's been around in the neola policy since 2003 uh and probably before that in one form or another but then the whole policy got conflated with the idea of opting out and and challenging materials and and i think at the time three years back four years back five years back we just didn't have the stomach for it so we moved it ahead but we
221have some brave brave members on the policy committee this year who have decided we are going to address it once and for all and uh and with the help of the community we will do so just one more thing the past two years not this year um the previous two years when i was a policy chair it was always on my running list you know that that people who are on that committee are aware of and [Music] and additionally came up in a conversation with throne who did not support it but i've never been able to to get that in writing so um yeah i just wanted to add that um the policy meeting it was not recorded we don't record those meetings um so that we did have a number of community members come
222last night and share as michael stated community public comment and feedback um i do think that they're just seeing it on the agenda that was posted publicly there were some assumptions made and people thought that the board was going to take take swift action or or move in a certain direction and i hope that what the community heard and um and what was the feeling as we all left last night is that bottom line we want to make sure that for students who are participating in curriculum or not through the opt-in or opt-out options that it is a fair and equitable process that is that has procedure and administrative guidelines so that when those things come up teachers are supported in how to implement parents have parental rights and the ability to make decisions for
223their individual children and that students are supported and no one is made to feel ostracized stigmatized or penalized for making choices and and we have heard stories so if i uh that that is exactly what's happened in the past and if i could just add one and oh for me an overarching concern i have for this is respect respect of the parents respect of the students respect of the teachers respect of the people who have to implement the policy and it just an oh just an overall respect for uh the people engaged in the curriculum of uh that we uh we're we're trying to uh present to our students yeah a big point that came up was working with so when when we talk about conversations that we've already had in policy but with diversity
224equity and inclusion the advisory committee this has come up multiple times over the years i'm not sure where i think there was a conversation with the leadership coalition and i'm not sure where that went but you know being mindful of what policies we've all already have um and so i know there's interest whenever we do hire someone in a position in the position um equity and inclusion um curriculum something something sorry i'm sorry yes so so anyways um you know uh hopefully a partnership on on um that level to make sure that um we're not just removing an entire assignment and text um that is representing representative of um someone in that classroom or their peers and so you know that that's something like how do you how do you balance that um you know
225is it one conversation you know it a parent you know the teacher and the parent um versus like the entire class being impacted and so i think that's you know super important to to say hey i want this for my child and that's okay right but yeah to take it away from everyone defeats the purpose of of what um what sas stands for so um you know we want to make sure that that's um that that will be um yeah and i think um the people in the audience um audience um people who who spoke and um you know i i we said that we were gonna we want all of their voices at the table and so um i'm excited to move forward with that i was very proud of our community last night
226so uh thank you very much to anyone everyone who was there and spoke up and um thank you all right um are you having uh we were discussing this in finance i'm not gonna steal your thunder are you having a july policy meeting no but i mean anyone can call a meeting if it right but you don't you don't have us we're not anticipating one next one will be august okay yeah all right perfect so no update the truth is we're going to be meeting every third day from here until november no no you're not no you're not okay i was asking for an agenda but i was asking for the public and for agenda setting all right um david brad candice stevenie any other comments questions yeah candace i'm so excited i just have
227a quick question if you all have i know you're not meeting again until august but did you all talk at all about what that timeline roughly might look like in terms of engaging the other groups you mentioned dei and some others thank you that's a great question just before this meeting started we had a very we sorted out a few issues really quickly and we're going to have a conversation about you know if i can offer any suggestions moving forward but uh i i know that i would like the trustees east up and miller to take the lead on working with the community and the various groups out there they've done a lot of research i've done research they got all my notes uh we've got notes from the community and we'll we'll leave it
228at that but they'll work out a timeline and perhaps we can ask in a month's time hey there's an update how's that going and i think it is our desire to have something at least um solidified by the time um new trustees might be appointed to policy so so that we could do this work and work with other stakeholders so that we could so that it doesn't happen what has happened before that when there's a turnover of the policy committee that it it dissipates and and i know that we don't have administrative guidelines and that's in process um so um i don't know if there's one associated with that um so hopefully i mean because we're at this point we're um we'll be looking at possibly revising the current one um possible uh new ones
229or i'm sorry can you just clarify so it revising what the policy or the administrative guidelines the pilot the quote controversial issues okay perfect yeah i don't know if that yeah so okay great we have yeah there are a lot of ideas floating around that i've heard we can fill a bingo card with with the and i'm i'm almost well anyway all right moving on to our next topic finance committee update treasurer gerby uh that's a quick update first of all i want to acknowledge the team tonight right like uh june is kind of like our our big you know time and all that and i want to i want to thank the the people on the finance team and and i'd be remiss if i didn't say that miranda owesly is incredible she really
230leads us in in a great way and she is on top of things her forecasting is is top-notch and we really really benefit from her stewardship so i want to make sure that i say that out loud how much i appreciate you and the team appreciates you okay uh when i look at our our budget and we we looked at it you know there are a few things that that kind of quote unquote have my um my our focus if you will and i just want to highlight those real quickly for us and then we've done enough on finance tonight but um number one like you know as far as talent goes right like just like anywhere we're paying more for goods and services and we want top-notch top-notch talent so we're not to be
231competitive for that talent so that's number one that kind of comes to the forefront for me right is is where we're realizing the incredible um talent of our people and and so that's number one number two energy costs in the way that they are rising is going is a significant item for our budget and it's something that we are going to have to just be continuously mindful as a team as a district all of it and then the third thing that stands out on the budget for me is our incredible reliance on the importance of technologies moving forward right with our budget um coming you know post covid kind of brought technology to the forefront of of education right and our staff was innovative and we're gonna we're supporting that and and so when you
232think about fiber you think about devices you think about the things that are there to support that technology um it's a really important thing and it's something that's that's a real it's a it's a bigger part of our our budget and it should be so those are kind of things that catch my uh my focus if you will as the leader is the chair of the team and uh but thank you for your commitment thank you for your guys's trust and i think that our our i think our financial position is strong and that doesn't just happen and i've already thanked her but thanks again all right big spread any questions or comments for brad or for the committee okay moving on to administration updates dr latch i don't have any tonight either so we
233just got through too anyone else oh and we're missing julian but normally this would be what he goes but uh jenny do you have updates i'm gonna just go really really quickly so first congratulations to the class of 2022 this is our first meeting since then so um it was i know an activity that that all of us really enjoyed participating in and it's always um it's always something really incredible to see the graduates um crossing the stage and and a special notable a special notable note this year was officer gassoway being there and just the um the reaction of the students to to him being able to hand them shake their hand as they came came up on the stage so a beautiful evening thanks to all who coordinated that i would be remiss
234if i didn't say lori dawson because she was there really on her radio coordinating everything and making sure everybody had what they needed so appreciate that also i know the retirees left i just want to say many of them um as i was looking at their years of service it's getting closer to my start date my my career as a teacher but many of those who were there were mentors who became friends who who became like family i know kurt mentioned mary williams but mary williams not only cared for my kids but she made the birthday cakes and so just congratulations to them and kudos lastly i just want to say that i along with some others was able to attend um the city council meeting last week and um the city council in um
235collaboration with mom's demand action made a um proclamation for the city um to their commitment to end um gun violence and one thing that came from that meeting that i just would like to say in this public forum is that if you have um if you have a gun at your house and it needs to be locked you can go to the dispatch um counter at city hall to the police station and they will give you the num whatever number of locks you need to keep your weapon safe at home um it's a small step but it's one that is extremely important and so i just wanted to to recognize that tonight thanks jenny well said it was a good a good event and good community bridge yeah i want to reiterate that i'm wearing
236orange for that very reason tonight right to mom's demand action i was really proud to be able to to give my support to to that resolution right and i'm so proud of our team for for being present there and for for joining together right like that's it's great when like when saline communities can come together right and uh recently i read about i don't want to read the whole thing but about a the pta right we met we saw our ptas and ptos tonight and they even have a position statement as as well on gun safety and in violence violence prevention and uh i'll save all the because i i agree wholeheartedly with it but i'm excited to see that there was some legislative potential movement and i could tell you as an educator this
237is long this is long desired and something that is important so thank you thanks brian susan oh just to add to that i know one of our saline students was at the march for our lives in lansing so i think that's wonderful i think we should be listening to those little voices especially not just us but our legislators our lawmakers um so yeah i thought that was kind of cool that um the student was there and stood up there and also spoke i'm person oh sorry go ahead get candice i should say i just have three things to add i'm personally uh sorry that i wasn't able to attend that and i'm really happy that it had been there uh the first school i taught at in tucson uh almost two days before i arrived
238experienced the school shooting in front of the school and at the university of arizona we had three three uh killed uh two professors and the shooter and so we've i've lived through that i know what that what that can do to a community and i also know that these horrible incidents can bring a community together i just hope we don't have to figure that out for ourselves someday if i can add on a brighter note uh i uh was a judge we have a lot of many inventors here in this district and i was a judge at the national invention convention that was held at the henry ford and uh one of the the pods of the kids that i judged for eighth grade went on to play second place for a a drone controller
239which not that i had any bias there a one-handed drone glove you know you tilt the hand and they say for for a variety of reasons sometimes you only have one hand the others for you know the beverage i guess while you're flying your drone coca-cola but in any case uh it was a wonderful experience and i hope that more and more of our students here at this district get involved with that sort of thing and finally if you shout out to class of 2022 let me shout out the class of 20 29 when they did their clap out i was i took i took about 400 photographs and it was a wonderful experience i even if i didn't know it was coming up i would have heard it and come over to say what
240the heck is going on here because i'm right across the street from heritage it was a great experience and a wonderful way to walk these fifth graders into middle school and some of you have gone through that experience and yourselves and i what i don't think i had anything like that when i was a going from fourth to fifth and uh so i thought it was a wonderful experience for the kids so thank you for everyone involved highlight i'm going to say one short thing i wanted to say i was very proud of david speaking at the flag raising for our city for pride you did an excellent job and i was happy to support so i just did when i had that um all right yeah no problem oh candace i'm sorry yeah no
241problem i was actually gonna mention that as well and say happy pride month and then also mention um juneteenth the city of saline well city of saline raised the flag for um for pride month which is great so if you haven't seen that go check that out and that's where david spoke but also the city of celine dei committee is really encouraging the community to go out and support ipsy's juneteenth celebration so ipsilani their dei is hosting a large event on june 19th so just encourage you to look that up that is on the city of saline dei page more information about that that's it okay all right susan i guess i'm going to add i thought about um the pride of flag raising june 5th as well um and my kids were running around
242like it was a mess [Applause] up so um but uh i you know i was happy to to see um trustee hayward um speaking and um also the youth that came out to raise the flag and had the opportunity to speak as well and that was really powerful and also wanted to recognize the youth who didn't feel safe to come whether they're not out or their parents aren't supportive or you know i just want to recognize them as well and hopefully people felt represented and and see that um whenever they passed past the city hall and yes all right thank you very much and we did reach out to those students to come and make a few comments i don't think it worked out um so we'll give them the summer to enjoy themselves um
243moving on to 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 please entertain a motion and move to authorize items a through i as part of the consent agenda so moved miller jenny thank you support kirby brad thank you all those in favor please say aye hi opposed hearing none motion carries 7-0 items scheduled on our next big agenda not as many presentations we but we do have two important ones one is going to be called superintendent listening sessions and
244dei next steps and then the second one is a teaching and learning update for continuous improvement and that'll be led by kara davis the teaching and learning team all right perfect and just a reminder for everybody we have one meeting in july we have no finance meeting and we have no policy meeting at this time now is there a second opportunity for public comment 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 all um previous rules do apply and secretary jones will show the yellow card at 30 seconds left and the red card at um at the full three minutes uh jp den den over is that did i pronounce that correctly okay denyer thank you whenever you're
245ready and just make sure you toggle the microphone for the green light to be on please so hello ladies and gentlemen at least those who stayed through the end of the meeting the marathoners my name is jp de neuer from ann arbor i'm a programmer for tiny light technology which was invented here in saline and i work full-time for as a programmer for a company in dearborn i visit my dad every week at the evangelical homes where he is taking good care of i had the honor to participate in the fundraising event a few weeks ago and meant met mr president mr mcveigh and miss mr lotz at that time i did not have money to give but i have technology and volunteer time you may call me a computer geek but i hope to
246be a great teacher like all of you uh and i hope more students could have a chance to work at nasa as i did several years ago or maybe we could get some nasa sponsored projects here at saline area schools one project is the selene aerial light tower i helped create the software for salt tiny view um earlier i delivered a few pages about the salt initiative to to um you to council members i hope to hoping to bring this new and ambitious technology into the classroom for teachers and students but more importantly to give younger six to 12 graders a tool to learn innovate and imagine and build for now and the future of celine and the world please let us know if we can help with guidance for a project such as salt
247which is student-led and guided by the four c's collaboration creativity critical thinking and communication above all creativity is pointing to the east thank you for your feedback actually we don't do that in our policy but but you um you are more than welcome to to come back another time we don't yield time in in the school district um it's just not part of the public participation policy but thank you for asking um and i do have ray lynn who is waiting to go next if you're ready i kind of wish my phone of dung dinged this before the meeting um so i'm actually calling about your vote to join renew your msab membership um it was just uh i'll go and add it was just announced that nebraska has now left the national school board
248association that is 25 states who have chosen to leave this association over the comment and about um i'm trying to find the quote here quickly um about basically the letter um according to parents that describes um sorry the letter that said that parents who speak up can be considered domestic terrorists and it's been proven that this was letter was initiated from the co-chair of the national association school board member and they led this direction which has come out that many parents took offense to 25 states have left the national association of school boards over it michigan has not um and so in i guess association you are just voted to be part of association who who feels that parents should be considered domestic terrorists when we disagree with school boards and obviously i consider myself
249one of those parents because i disagree with many things but not all um so hopefully you guys will take that into consideration and maybe even rethink that your associations have an effect and it says what the school thinks and and you guys are associated with that thank you all right thank you our next meeting the next board of education meeting will be held on july 12 2022 here at 6 30 pm um i would now like to actually modify the agenda i'd like to please entertain a motion to remove item two superintendent evaluation under section 8a from this agenda and i will place it on the july agenda instead this is due to time and focus on item number one uh the security planning i do you want a motion or do you want to
250support of your motion i if you can do the motion there okay i would like to make a motion to move the um is it quarterly uh yep superintendent evaluation discussion to the july um agenda thank you 20 second support kirby oh i heard michael first sorry either okay we're giving it to brad um all right all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed motion carry seven zero so we are deleting um and moving number two on closed session i'd now like to please entertain a motion to enter closed session of the board of education at 9 56 pm uh with a with an intent to reopen open session at approximately 11 pm for the purpose of for a school board to consider security planning to address existing threats or prevent potential threats
251to the safety of of the students and staff under section 8k of the open meetings act so move jones candace thank you for the motion support susan thank you all those in favor please say aye aye aye opposed hearing none motion carries seven zero um as we go into closed session i will note that there is possible business after uh after close we are in recess and closed session if i could have the mics off and if we could clear the oh it might have been already and if we could clear the room please we are in close session thank you foreign oh there we go um at 1106 a motion to re-enter open session of the regular board of education meeting was made by trustee miller it was seconded by secretary jones i'd like
252to now call for a motion please to adopt the emergency operations plan for saline area schools as submitted by superintendent lodge last revision date of january 31st 2020 michael thank you support miller jenny thank you um this will have no discussion because it was discussed and closed per oma um we can we can discuss on a base level right i thought we were looking at a different date here yeah that's a little confused about the date yeah we said today's date with the director um so what i heard is that we were going to adopt today's that that we wanted to adopt today's which i'm sorry the packet that's in front of us january 31st 2020 and that for our july closed session we'd be receiving an updated document with um some title changes and
253then we would re-adapt it way that way it's approved we have a bop or sorry an eop ready to go and that's right in existence but the document is march 8th 2022. it was last updated the content of the eop was last updated january 31st that i that i made that you made yes and i'll and i'll i'll keep my support this packet this one this packet that date and we're going to update it later that's correct that's correct because we don't have the revisions in front of us okay perfect all those in favor please say i i opposed hearing i'm opposed okay because of the date discrepancy okay um hearing one motion carries six one i'd like to now please entertain a motion to adjourn the board of education meeting for saline area schools
254at 11 11 pm so moved kirby brad thank you support miller jenny thank you we are adjourned