09292021 Board of Education Meeting

001ready okay it is september 29th 2021 and adequate notice has been given so we are going to get started i apologize that we're a few minutes late we were having some technical difficulties um i am going to uh actually first we're gonna stand and do the pledge of allegiance pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america republic religious okay great and i think dr patel is going to um actually are we going to start with our tax rate hearing tonight okay yeah but are you no are you running the slides yeah alrighty okay so good evening tonight is the district's public hearing of the tax rate this works this is all new so the purpose of a public hearing is to have the discussion and receive public comment prior to approval so

002public notices were posted as required by statute as well as being posted on the district's website from my understanding according to chris we have had no verbal or written comments received so the state auditor provides tax forms that we're required to use to calculate our tax rate we are also required to submit the form back to the state auditor for review and approval the tax rate calculation was approved by the state auditor the district's tax rate is dependent on st louis county's assessor's determination of the market value of real property both land and buildings within the district boundaries which does include a portion of richmond heights these properties are revalued or reassessed by the assessor every other year in odd numbered years so therefore 2021 is a reassessment year when the assessed values increase the

003tax rate decreases or vice versa so the tax rate is inversely related to these assessed values what that means is the district will not receive a windfall of revenues when assessed values rise with reassessment because we will roll back our rate but if the assessed values drop we can increase or roll up our rate so this is intended to provide stable public funding also keep in mind none of these rules apply to debt service we are allowed to set this rate to ensure our debt is paid and we have sufficient reserves so during the prop s and w campaigns in 2009 and 10 we told the community a debt service rate of 62.3 cents would be sufficient during the 20-year term of the bonds and that rate remains the same at 62.3 cents so when

004we talk about recruitment we need to understand that this is a process so it starts when a taxpayer protests or assessed value on their property from the county assessor and then they win that protest when this happens the district has to pay back an amount of taxes that we received on the assessed value that was reduced so as i said on the last slide the overall tax rate is dependent on the assessed value of the properties so when the assessed values of these protested properties change it in turn changes our rate and that then is changed through a recruitment calculation so typically the district reimburses taxpayers over one million dollars a year for the payback of sell protested property taxes that are settled in favor of the property owner but recently we've been seeing some

005significant fluctuations in these settlements and i'm not quite sure if that's due to covid or perhaps a new trend we might see moving forward because it's not a consistent trend so for example last year during 2020 there was not as many settlements paid back to property owners resulting in over six hundred thousand dollars of additional revenue to the district however as you can see on this next slide during 2021 and i was hoping to have a pointer so as you can see on the bottom row is 2021. um we've seen the largest number of settlements since we began dealing with this in 2012. already in 2021 we have paid back over two and a half million and protested tax settlements so that 60 is that work so that 60 million right there in assessed value

006change is resulted in two and a half million in protested tax settlements back to the taxpayers so this table represents changes in assessed valuation and actual revenues recouped for each respective year and as you can see there were significant changes in assessed value through 2012 so this column here all the way through 2019 resulting in significant amounts of revenue and so that 2020 year has very little change in assessed value so specifically looking at 2021 there's been commercial appeals at the 56 million dollar assess reduced assessed value and then uh residential appeals at the 4.6 million and that in turn like i said resulted in two and a half million dollars that we've already um had to pay back so if you recall did that due to the high increase in assessed valuation back in

0072019 during the prop e campaign the district voluntarily rolled back the tax rate 15 cents and in both 19 and 20 tax levy calculations so that we would only calculate what was projected during the tax levy campaign so just so you understand 15 cents represents about 2 million dollars a year to the district that we did not collect so missouri statutes provide that a voluntary reduction taken in a non-reassessment year or an even numbered year like 2020 results in a reduced tax rate ceiling during the following reassessment year or an odd number year like 2021 meaning that we are required to roll back the rate in 2021 this year and we cannot remove that roll back so because of this voluntary reduction our ability to recoup the two and a half million that we see

008on these protests it's basically impacted by that so as a result of that roll back it's actually not recommended to do a recoupment and approve the do a recruitment to the approved balance or to the approved tax rate due to the voluntary rollback that was taken in 2020 and how it impacts 2021. so i don't mind giving the board detail on this on how it's impacted but in general if you understand the tax rate is a very complicated calculation and confusing and this just makes it more confusing so i have had conversations with kim and steve on this and i and i gave them the couple of options that we have and i think they understand the reasoning for this but i also want to let the board know that even though we're not recouping

009it this year we have worked with the state auditor to determine an alternative way to collect the funds over the next few years which is basically not rolling back the 15 cent levy on commercial properties so it will take us we won't receive the funding this year and it'll probably take us at least two years to get the money back but there is a way to do it in the future so um our nice gesture of rolling back the tax rate is implicating our decisions as we try to deal with these appeals moving forward so um and we can also just eliminate the rollback on commercial and still give it to the residential because most of our protests are in commercial and that's where most of our significant funds are lost so it really doesn't

010impact the residential taxpayers at all so and as always i will run any possible scenario when calculating the tax rate to see if there is a potential recruitment that we could do and then have a discussion with board members on that so i before i move forward i want to just ask if there's any questions on what i've said not just a question but joe we discussed this last year right about rolling back we were both going at a little bit about whether we should roll back and we did and this is the result of that right but what we're saying now is is that we're not going to roll it back to commercial anymore because kind of doesn't really make sense to do that potentially yes yeah and then and so we're also we're

011looking at this at a snapshot in time each time it happens right we're not looking at like a five-year run which then it looks like it balances out anyways but the hassle of having to roll back recoup recoup roll back is pretty tedious in the waste of time i'm assuming right essentially right yeah i mean well i don't know if our residents right district families would agree that you know our rolling doctor taxes is a waste of time right less than taxes but yeah i think what the what the challenge here is there's a lot of complexity because the law itself in a way that interprets how taxes are assessed for commercial entities in particular and for even even to funnel down further to non-taxable commercial entities that then become taxable is what is affecting

012our decision to roll back on the residential side thank you um and and so it truly is kind of an unintended consequence um but there are a number of different things that we're looking at pursuing and you're right it has to do with kind of holistically looking at the statute we actually had a meeting with mary jo with the state auditor he was a state auditor the county and we um we read the statute he read the statute he gave us his interpretation of the statute we provided our interpretation of the statute the statute itself is silent to either interpretation and so that's where we are in terms of trying to figure out how to move forward um but there is meaningful tax money we believe that can be recouped on the commercial side that

013doesn't affect our families from a residential tax payer standpoint which is what i want to emphasize well yeah and that's what i understand that i agree with but but i do mean like how we look at this annually and then having to run back and go to the camera trying to get the money back the process yeah can be time consuming it is is there is there a way to look at it differently is there a way to interpret this information by looking at it three to five years over time and yeah looking at the so it's sounds like i guess the oven flow which shows you at the end of the five years this is where we are we're even yeah unfortunately now uncle sam collects every year whether we want him to or

014not each one is really a snapshot i mean and that's part of the reason why i run multiple scenarios i actually presented four different scenarios of options that we had to them because if you only look at the one and you're not looking at how it does impact you moving forward you know this in this we could be trued up this year but it it makes us lose money losing moving forward which that's annual every year so you know you're gaining 1.2 million this year but you're losing 1.2 every year moving forward so it's a much better decision to waive the 1.2 million that we could collect this year and try to get it over the next two years because we're going to keep the 1.2 you know every year moving forward so as i

015said it's it's confusing i sat down with them and we had probably what over an hour long meeting discussing it no it is confusing because it was confusing last year and then even after after that tutorial that we went through it's still when i read for the first time this time i was like no what did i you know i said i was almost against it and i was like okay i got it so yeah all right cool i appreciate that it's just one of those things where people think you can just always recoup and every recruitment is not an assumed recruitment you have to look at it and make a decision based on well and there are some properties that we should it should be i don't think it's gray and either does mary

016jo where we should be getting a tax collection these are not residential properties and that's the stuff that really yeah we should be focused on yeah we're trying to get the county to work with us more on some of these decisions that are causing these issues yeah i think i don't know what probabilities you're talking about okay and and so and what does and does this affect business at all like businesses coming to clayton setting up shop knowing that we're like it's mostly developers yeah property commercial property developers right so could that affect could that affect business in the long run this i'm just asking i mean we thought that through yeah i don't think so yeah all right cool all right thanks appreciate it good job steve kim great job go ahead see so

017at that meeting we talked about uh discussing with our attorney uh of taking the county assessor up on his suggestion about suing him and i don't did you have that conversation we fight we were waiting some for some additional information from the county which i did finally get and so i would i'd like to meet with you guys again to kind of talk about it so i'm actually trying to get some clarification because i'm confused with it it wasn't what i was expecting so i'm trying to ask a couple other districts um if they if they're under the employee from the county would suggest that the school district sue him yeah i don't think any of us were it wasn't wasn't actually that but the information requested didn't it it was by nowhere what i

018was expecting well it would be a friendly lawsuit to get a judge to have a final interpretation of that law that i was talking about which is silent to the details of whether or not a property should be on the tax roll for assessment yeah so on the you know there's one interpretation that says no because it doesn't speak to it and the other is well if it doesn't it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be how do you have a non-taxable property that clearly it's a taxable entity so so that would be why you know that would be the rationale for a suit because then a judge would so i just want to go back to um just make sure it's clear for everybody for from last year right i mean for prop e we

019raised over seven million dollars of funds from our community from businesses and residents and then because of the way it worked right because of the increase in assessed value and we could collect on that also we could have actually got a two million dollar windfall so i just want to remind everybody i think we did the right thing which was to say to the community you know what you gave us seven million dollars right seven plus million dollars in an increase it that's why we roll back that 15 cents i know it's created complications and i'm sorry for that and thank you for working through those but i will say that i do think it was the right thing to roll that back because it would have been perceived to the community is double dipping

020right so i just want to say that out loud and we've been dealing with the paybacks and everything so this is the largest payback we've ever had but it's not something we're not used to dealing with so we'll deal with it and we'll keep going no question for you on the double diving so so but in the we're going to need some more money you know based on how how school districts operate and taxes operate we're going to need more money in the future sometime down the line could be five could be seven years right what was the uh the performer that you put together how many how many years are we looking at before we think we might need some money basically i had told the board that we i i could pretty much

021guarantee five years and the reason that i had only said five or like on the last one we had said 10 was because of that commercial assessed value change so if we would actually take this recoupment it actually puts our commercial at its ceiling the highest it can go so because we're not doing that it's not actually at its ceiling but commercial is very close to the ceiling which means we will max out on the revenue we can get and we won't be able to get any additional even if assess value goes up we will not get any additional funding for it so once we hit that which we are just floating right by it right now then we will kind of see but i just don't i can't predict when that's going to hit

022because assess value is just all over the place so but we just we're monitoring it and we're watching for it because i was just thinking like when you get when you have the money you kind of keep the money you don't give it back that's kind of what it is like you get the money you take care of that money you disagree [Laughter] because we're in business so yeah so i was just that's why that's why i'm thinking that's why that was my notion last year that we're gonna need it in the future anyways we're not really double dipping i mean i get what joe's saying going we it changed a little bit right so right why not give back but i'm just saying i just want to make sure would it be is it

023better to keep it or not so it's not if you think it's not better to keep it then i will go with that but that is my favorite we're keeping i think we're keeping an adequate reserve so if you if you look at the chart the manager has to show the chart of this we are building the fund balance in essence what you're requesting which is a rainy day fund right yeah now can you did ask a question two week two uh meetings ago which i thought was a great question which was about can we take some money and put it into uh some kind of financial yeah we can't i know and that's unfortunate because if we could i know all right all right we're getting our awesome half a percent and we're excited

024about it all right so since this was a reassessment year and there was a significant change in assessed value this chart shows those changes so please keep in mind that although that commercial shows a decrease of 3 million those protested taxes actually means that commercial went up 56 million and so overall if we wouldn't have had those protested taxes we would have actually had an eight a little over an eight percent increase in assessed value which is pretty typical for us on a reassessment year but we just had some pretty significant protests which gave us a three and a half percent increase in assessed value so this is a further breakdown and so as i previously mentioned you know the reassessment was the key that was 39 million of the changes in assessed value uh

025we had some significant personal property increases which we don't receive the details so i'm not quite sure what i don't know if that was from sentine coming online or something like that um and then the commercial the the construction the new construction as you can see that's just typical homes and improvements there were no new developments that came on this year so we'll be looking next year for the um the the hotel that's across the street basically off forsyth and then the larger building that's coming on those will those are in the projections for next year and you'll see that increase in the revenue so as i previously mentioned the operating rate is inversely related to the property values so we saw the largest increase in assessed value with the residential properties therefore that rate

026is rolling back 11 and a half cents and then commercial since they had a drop in assessed value their rates going up slightly a little over three cents and so personal property is at that ceiling kind of like i mentioned with the commercial so that's why that's not changing and we kind of maxed out on what we can get on the personal rate this slide represents the proposed rates by fund and so as you can see the capital fund is the only fund that's increasing which is primarily due to the capital projects we've been working on and part of prop e's discussion was that we were going to do some capital improvements that we've been wanting to do that we didn't want to finance and so we're still building that fund in order to do

027some of these projects so even though the rates in the general and the special are decreasing they are sufficient to cover expenses and maintain the strong fund balance in those two funds so budget revenues for 20 and 21 22 were based on assumptions that included a 1.4 cpi growth which is what we received this year due to an increase in assessed value um it was based on historical five-year average for normal new construction and we knew no developments were coming new developments were coming on and it included that 15 15 cent rollback so the revenue from new construction was approximately eighty four thousand and overall we anticipate the uh tax rate to generate approximately fifty million which was uh two hundred thirty two thousand over budget because um basically it was due to the increase

028in personal property stuff values we did get a little increase on that and so the projections have been updated based on the changes as tax revenue as i had described so you can see we flattened out because we're going to be losing that two and a half million this year but then i this bump is basically showing i don't normally include recruitment and projections because i don't know but this is different we already know we're not going to most likely roll back that tax rate and so i put about a million dollars each year coming back into the fund balance on those two years so that puts the line about where it was this fund balance line even though it dips it's coming back up because we'll get the money back so any other questions

029steve question about the uh the debt service rate so um you indicate that that is not affected by the the change in assessed value so does that mean we do we pay bonds off faster or we just accumulate the debt service fund balance you would build up the debt service fund balance so when we first um did the rates back in 09 that was prior to the recession and so initially with the several years of recession that we had we did not have a fund balance that was projecting to be able to pay off the bonds they thought we would be short about three years however due to the increase in assessed value we built that up so we did restructure a bond issue back in 2019 and we sh we cut a year off

030of the payment cycle so they all expire in 2029 instead of 2030. um but they are telling me that with the continued assessed value growth that we will be probably by 2027 be able to roll back the rate even more that we won't be able to set it at the 62 cents that it will actually right now we are rolling back the rate a couple pennies um we could set it at like 20 68 cents i think or something like that and we're setting it at 62. but by 2027 we'll probably only be able to set it like say it's 60 cents or something like that so the board will have to make a decision is there would we want to do a another master plan study would we want to look at doing some

031bond funding or capital plans or something to keep the rate flat would be like a no tax increase bond issue or something like that so we have a couple years to make that decision but i think it's something we need to be looking at there any other questions okay stacy um do you want to go ahead and read the motion i move that the board of education adopt the tax rates by category as presented with the blended tax rate for 2021 and the amount of is that dollars right okay i'm just sorry it's blurry on here okay four dollars four point three five three four dollars that includes a fifteen cent voluntary rollback to be distributed with a special revenue fund rate of two point three three two one dollars general fund rate of one

032point one four eight three dollars capital projects rate of 25 cents and debt service fund rate of 0.6 to 30 cents okay sorry all right it has been moved and seconded are there any further questions okay all in favor all right motion passes i'm sorry okay so we're on uh number five now so we i guess we need to just adjourn the tax rate hearing i move that the tax rate hearing is adjourned and the board of education will enter into the business meeting portion of the agenda okay okay all in favor aye aye all right so i think now we are going to turn it over to dr patel um for recognizing our own thank you good evening everyone so tonight we're going to start off as we approach the month of october october

033is designated as the disability history and awareness month so we have some amazing students and parents here that are going to be part of the recognition and you should be able to see them on our screen behind us i believe and dr wiens is here as our assistant superintendent of student services who will read to us and the board part of the proclamation and do the introductions of our students and our parents that are joining us today so welcome students and parents all right good evening everyone we see a lot of friendly faces in our zoom meeting here and before we get into our proclamation i just wanted to invite some of our special guests to introduce themselves so if you could just state your name and which building you are associated with in the

034school district of clayton that would be great so we're going to start with the bradford family that's you what's your name conrad so what's like conrad bradford and jomena and kale great welcome and then i'd also like to introduce the crow family hi i'm jenny crow and this is my daughter can you tell them your name come on this is maggie and she goes to y down welcome maggie and then i'd also like to introduce kirby hi i'm kirby miller and i'm in my junior year at clayton high school welcome kirby and i also wanted to introduce melissa logan hi melissa logan director of special education and the families who are joining us tonight are also involved with ed and so i thank them for their preparation for this evening so we're going to go

035ahead and read this evening's proclamation and we're going to do some shared reading together and so i will start us off so disability history and awareness month is in october twenty one the month of october in accordance with missouri house bill 555 has been designated as disabilities history and awareness month in the state of missouri this legislation encourages schools to provide instruction and activities to expand student and community knowledge understanding and awareness of individuals with disabilities the history of disability and the disability rights movement does the bradford family want to unmute whereas approximately one out of every five american person with a disability that's right whereas the americans with disabilities act of 1990 is founded on four principles inclusion full participation economic self-sufficiency and equality of opportunity for all people with disabilities and whereas the

036key method of promoting these four principles is for our schools to recognize their contributions by people with disabilities to our society and provide instruction in disability history people with disabilities in the disability rights movement through school curriculum school assemblies and other school activities and whereas as citizens we should recognize the value and intersectionality of the disability experience in our schools and communities in the important role it plays in our rich diversity recognize the barriers presented to those with disabilities and the negative impact they have on both individuals with disabilities as well as our communities recognize that equitable experiences in full inclusion for individuals with disabilities is a matter of social justice thus creating equitable inclusive environments is a shared community responsibility and whereas as citizens we should advocate for policies and practices that create and

037support systems that are truly inclusive and equitable for all especially those with disabilities in all aspects of life so now therefore be it resolved by the school district of clayton board of education clayton missouri that the board urges their schools to provide intensive instruction and activities to expand knowledge understanding and awareness of individuals with disabilities the history of disability and the disability rights movement encourages institutions to conduct and promote educational activities on those subjects thank you to our families and to our students and to melissa logan for joining us this evening you guys did a great job thank you thank you thank you [Applause] thank you dr wiens thank you parents and students and now i believe for our next group we should be having some others join us i think we're doing so a

038transition so for our next recognizing our own we actually have a junior from clayton high school his name is graham and i want to make sure i pronounce your last name correctly it's zucker and he's going to be joining us with two of his coaches head coach mr gr um i want to make sure i get that right mr robert locks and mr darian williams and i thought it would be wonderful to recognize graham today he broke a 33 year record at clayton high school for the 100 meter backstroke and he actually this is what i found out also that this is his third swim record that is breaking for clayton high school so we thought that we would really recognize him because a lot of learning definitely happens in the classroom but you learn

039a lot also outside the classroom so graham and his coaches are here and i'm going to hand it off to you mr locks if you'd like to add anything else no please thanks for having us we're really excited to be here to celebrate graham's accomplishments graham had already earned his place on the record board his freshman year by earning three really relay records but since then he's continued to train hard year round with cst which is a local olympic development team and often he trains twice a day graham's consistently trying to learn more about swimming mechanics and he works hard to be the best swimmer he can be he consistently displays displays a mature balance of pride in his performances while always looking to find ways to continue to improve the way he approaches his

040work and celebrates others achievements makes him a natural leader and he's a great asset to our team we look forward to his many achievements graham congratulations thank you and mr williams no if you wanted to add anything uh so just to throw in there kind of what kind but uh coach locke said graham is not only just an individual swimmer he's a team swimmer as well so he consistently uh cheers on other athletes in the pool and tells them good job even after a tough race so graham i can't even can't say it even any better than coach locks did so congratulations graham keep it up thank you graeme congratulations on behalf of the administration and the board of education and i did not know if you wanted to say a few things as well

041um i don't know i i don't really have anything to say i mean i guess i'm proud of myself but a lot more to come still a lot of season ahead of us in state in a month or so and hopefully i'll do well there so just beginning graham we're excited to see you at the next olympics i don't know about that but thank you you never know graham you never know congratulations thanks so much for having us and thank you coaches as well for all the support you provide for graham thank you take care thanks goodbye all right so that was great i'm really excited that we did that proclamation for uh disability awareness month and wow what uh what an incredible athlete we have here at clayton so we are lucky to have

042all those kids with us tonight um dr patel you want to go go into your superintendent communications yes we will do that um so a few things i wanted to touch base on obviously with the community and the board knows that but i wanted to make sure since this was our first board meeting after the announcement that we officially do recognize why down middle school for being recognized as a national blue ribbon school that's a very very high achieving school and it was recognized by the state of education in the national award so i'm very proud of all the staff there for all the work that they did and especially during a pandemic so definitely want to give them a huge congratulations on that and then it seemed like we've been spending a lot of

043time at wydown middle school recently in addition to being recognized as a national blue ribbon school one of their teachers who's outstanding mr dave powers who teaches math over there was one of the recipients of the emerson teaching and excellence award which is an award recognition given to educators from kindergarten all the way through college and about a hundred educators get this recognition so we have colleagues nominate each other and then there's a committee that's put together from previous emerson award winners who then select this and so mr dave powers was the recipient of this and i actually wanted to read one of the quotes that one of his colleagues said about him and it's saying he said dave sees the whole human being whether student or teacher he gives everything he's got with joy

044and enthusiasm in short dave wants the very best for his community and those around him he's a shining example of what is imagined when people think of that teacher that changed their lives clayton is lucky to have him and i couldn't agree more in just my short tenure here the number of interactions i've had with mr powers is you can just tell that he loves what he does he loves his kids and he's amazing at his content so congratulations to mr powers homecoming week we just finished off all the festivities and it was a success i know itana is going to be talking a little bit about that later on as well but i know the students had a great time it was great to see thank you to the board as well who joined

045us in the parade we had a lot of fun the football game went well and we won we're a two win two game winning streak just so we know um and we play you city this week and then according to the clayton high school administration the bonfire that they usually have which is part of the tradition that they had the largest turnout there that they've ever had in clayton so that was huge so overall i appreciated everybody you know following along with all the mitigating factors i think we did it in a safe way and all of our students and families had a good time so that was great and then later on today cameron is going to be giving an update on our strategic goal number one which is a place for everyone and

046just so you know throughout the year we'll be giving updates and we're going to branch it off as that's the first one that we're starting with tonight and then later on we'll have to grow as learners and then in head and heart so we'll be sharing that throughout the year because that's important as well and then let's discuss a little bit about the kovit 19 update this is the dashboard with our current reality right now we are from 585 total staff as of right now we have one total active positive case zero staff that are in quarantine and as far as the students we've got two positive cases right now and 23 that are in quarantine which is point zero nine percent of active cases that are positive amongst our students and staff and the

047reason we want to definitely discuss this is that we know that even though we're having homecoming and we're having our kids in school our priority is making sure our kids come to school every single day and that they're safe and we also know that covid19 is still a reality and how are we dealing with that and how are we putting mitigating factors in place for that so i wanted to make sure that we share this to let you know that i do believe that what we have in place is working and we just need to stay strong and stay continue to have that balance of having our kids be in school a couple of other slides i wanted to share tonight this is the positivity rate in st louis county so if you look at

048that um it says right now our positivity rate is about 7.9 percent and this chart shows you all so one of the good things is we now have data for over 18 months right so if you look at the bottom it's from march to october and the part that's shaded to the very right that's the last three months of data so you notice in july it starts picking back up and it goes all the way into the high zone which is over 10 percent positivity rate and then it starts dipping back down which is where we're at right now we are seeing a slight decrease of 7.9 percent but what's more interesting is the next shaded area and chris do you mind um clicking that for me please the next column right there you can

049compare the two so from last year the same three month time slot you can almost see the same trend in positivity positive positivity rate what you will notice that obviously this past few months is slightly higher than the last year's three months and that we could attribute that to the delta variant with the high transmission rate so that's just one of the interesting things that we can now almost track being over a year into it and predict so if you look at this it's not meant to be scary but it's a reality right if you're looking at this chart starting in october according to last year it starts peaking in november drops back down and it really peaks around november december january again now we don't know if that's what's going to happen again this

050year but if you were looking at a pattern that's something that you could point out so that's the positivity rate the next slide is the transmission rate this again if you look at the yellow portions of this graph you can kind of see the pattern anything obviously reproduction number over one means it's spreading more than it should if you're at one it's stable anything below one is we're in a better state where it's going down so if you look at this year we are starting to get closer to the one mark but it's pretty comparable to last year at the same time as well again it could be the delta variant but we're not sure but you can almost predict last year october november december you see the spikes again and that's around the holidays

051halloween thanksgiving christmas and then the last one is school aged cases now this i recognize it's a bunch of lines when you look at it right so let's try and break it down the first one we want to focus on is the green line the green one is 15 to 19 age group so the the shaded area is the most recent three months if you click it again chris for me we can compare the two you can compare the green line for school age cases last year around this month was pretty high this year it's the for around the same months it's also high but the thing you notice the most is the zero to four five to nine and 10 to 14 last year was pretty low right compared to the 15 to 19.

052this year that number's gone up as a whole that whole group has gone up um again it could be the delta transmission it could be and you can couple that with not having a vaccine for the younger aged kids as well so i share this information obviously to make sure we're cognizant that we are still in this it is still a reality but one of the things that we can talk about is the covenant with in terms of covet 19 we have a strong mitigation plan in place and that's in consent agenda item today and it's the same that we started the school year off with which is universal masking indoors trying to social distance as much as possible when we can the hand washing the sanitizing all of that we have continued this year

053and we're adding one more thing right now which is we if anyone enters the building and your student facing like parent volunteers that come into the classroom because a lot of the elementaries want to start having maybe one or two volunteers that are consistent coming in just having a proof of vaccination if you don't have the proof of vaccination we would be requiring a negative covet test so that communication will be going out and that's part of our mitigation plan it's just adding one more layer right as many protective layers we can we're going to do that and then we're also exploring that for the staff the last time we checked our staff and we're trying to gather that proof now in terms of showing us your vaccination card is that we had 90 percent

054of our staff report that report through a survey if they were vaccinated or not and of the 90 97 percent were so now we're just trying to make sure that is accurate and then we're going to ask you know we're exploring how do we get them to either be vaccinated or um go through a weekly test to just do it you know 48 hour negative test and you come to work so that we're still kind of working out some of that and we'll be bringing that to the board probably hopefully at the next board meeting to go through that so with all that we're going to continue to monitor and adjust as needed our plan but i just want everyone to know that we're staying strong and we're going to take it quarter by quarter

055so as we approach the end of first quarter we're going to start making plans for second quarter and we're going to try and remain tight i want to thank the parents for their patience as we go through this because i know that we want to get back to as normal as possible but there's some things we just have to be a little conservative on for right now you know so thank you for all the patience through that and now i'm going to hand it off to our student board rep itana this is exciting because i'm going to show pictures today yes you are okay so yeah just let's start off um so the past week um i think it was yeah during our homecoming week the all-in coalition had a donation drive where they were

056collecting items for the little bit foundation which is focused on breaking down barriers to learning so i believe they focus a lot on getting um students who are in poverty and helping them to get the best access to any education that they can have so basically they were out there in the cafeteria over the past week that's some of our students and then those are the students who are involved in the on coalition and yeah they were doing this right next to where all the homecoming tickets stuff and stuff were being sold which i think was a great way to really raise awareness for it all um okay and then we had spirit weekend homecoming and all that that i think it was a really fun week we had a lot of hallways decorated the

057cafeteria had a lot of great decorations which i was believe was because of the seniors our theme was lights camera homecoming so a lot of movie type decorations and then for our different theme days we had pjs country versus country club class colors movie characters and greyhound pride and it wasn't just at the high school we also had theme days at the middle school and all the elementary schools and so at the middle school i know that they had a decade's day and like a fall harvest day and then elementary school they had like crazy hat and crazy soft day which i was a bit jealous of but yeah so and then you can see in the bottom right is one of the junior signs um i just want to show that because i'm a

058junior and i think it's pretty good um and then we had all our homecoming festivities so starting with the uh the class games and the bonfire on friday night um the bonfire yeah was pretty gay there were a lot of students a lot of people that i hadn't seen in a while which is good to see um it was very hot at one point and it was burning my face a bit but that might have been just because i was too close and we also had one of the clayton high school's student bands performing there for about an hour it's a band called buy her candy i think you can find them on instagram so it was pretty great to see them performing there then saturday morning we had the parade it started here at

059school and went to gay field and we had different floats from different sports teams and all the different classes and the band led the whole way there and then stayed throughout the whole game and played a lot of the time which was pretty impressive so congratulations to them then we had the actual homecoming game which was a bit of a nail biter because i'm going to be a little honest we weren't looking too good in the first half or so but then we came back in the second half especially that last quarter and we ended up meeting principia at our homecoming game and the class of 22 class of 2022 got the golden greyhound this year so congratulations to the seniors um i think that's it for homecoming oh and of course the dance which

060happened in the cafeteria the gym and outside in the quad it was a lot of fun i think they also had a pretty big turnout there um [Music] even though apparently the sprinkler system decided to go off halfway through it was just i don't know i think it was a good idea with the separation even though it was a bit more sparse than usual it seemed that all students were able to distance themselves and we were able to keep it safe so now with the um more boring stuff we've had a lot of i've heard a lot of opinions lately on the new grading system um so i'm going to i've been working with dr rachelski and we're going to make some sort of google form to see what a lot of students think about

061this new system because i've heard a lot of students say they feel very anxious about it because they think that their grade only depends on their specific test grades and they say they're not very good test takers and i've also heard about some students who think they're completely indifferent to it because they think that as long as these tests are like good markers of progress then it shouldn't really impact their grade so i'm hoping that by the next meeting i can have some sort of update as to what students think about the new system and hopefully we can kind of clear up what exactly the new system is and then we are still working on expanding our district advisory council so for the high school we have all of our applications in and then we're

062setting up some interviews to find out who exactly is going to be in the council and that should also be done within the next week or so and we also have been making a council both at the middle school and at captain elementary school we decided to just stick with captain for at least these first few months or so just as kind of a test run because we haven't really had an advisory council at um one of the elementary schools before so yeah and we did a system where students were made aware of the council and then they could go up to their teachers and ask to be involved with it which is different from what we did last year where we had a sort of like teacher nomination system and we had a pretty

063good turnout so i know we had i think 15 students at wyodon and 15 students at captain that were all interested in joining the council so soon we're going to start meeting with them once we can figure out different times and dates and then lastly i just wanted to say on behalf of all students that we would like to thank our custodial staff because i believe this saturday is custodian appreciation day they really do a lot for us and they help us to help to keep our school safe and clean and something that i've noticed a lot lately and i'm guilty of it myself is that especially like during the lunch hour we aren't the best at cleaning up after ourselves sometimes so i'm hoping that we can work together as a student body um

064and we can motivate each other to clean up and do some of the work that we should be able to do like throwing away our trash to make the custodian's life easier um so i think that's something that we are going to try and work on over the past or the next couple of months yeah thank you that sounds like a very good plan thank you for that update it was great um so we are going to talk about our audit tonight um let's study item number 10 and i believe mary jo and our fine auditor is going to they're gonna give us some information good evening my name is brian wertz i'm a partner with correct and breckel and we're the independent authors for the district and i've been asked just to kind of

065give it up there or give a overview of our upcoming audit what we plan to do and and some of the procedures that we're going to perform get that clicker okay um if you if you look at our engagement letter the first couple of paragraphs sort of describes what each other's responsibilities are when it comes to an audit and so when we do an audit it's performed in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards governmental auditing standards and uniform guidance which is related to federal program testing um so the next bullet is the management's responsibility as it relates to a financial statement um it's management's responsibility to prepare the financial statements in accordance with the basis of accounting they are selecting which is the accrual basis of accounting for the government-wide financial statements and for the

066modif for the fund financial statements they're presented on the modified accrual basis of accounting it's also management's responsibility to maintain an internal control structure to safeguard the district's assets and to make sure that the financial statements are free of a material misstatement whether it's due to fraud or error so if you're having us perform this audit thinking we if there's a misstatement in the financial statements oh we'll find it as a result of our audit we are no longer independent because we've now become a part of your internal control structure so we you can't get an audit and rely on your auditors to find errors or irregularities in the financial statements it's our responsibility then to basically audit the financial statements and determine and give an opinion on their fair presentation um when we when

067we plan an audit every audit there as it relates to internal controls there are two things that we have to assume uh in every audit that's a risk and one is improper revenue recognition and the other one is management override of controls so in this audit we can confirm a significant amount of the revenue so that sort of goes away because we the best when you're doing an audit the best um audit evidence you can get is a third party telling you what the number should be and that's what a confirmation does so we can confirm the tax revenues we can confirm a lot of the state revenues and we can also confirm all the monies that comes from deci whether they be state or federal so we get a lot of third-party confirmations on

068those revenues so then the other risk is management override of control so when we when we plan our audit we as it relates to the internal controls we will get an understanding of the internal controls we may test internal controls if we if we think it's necessary but we never give an opinion on the internal control structures of an entity that's outside the scope of an audit when we also review or determine the audit procedures to be formed it's all professional judgment we determine where we think there are risk in the financial statements that there could be a material misstatement we then formulate audit procedures to address those risks and make sure that that everything's going as we would suspect it is going and so every audit is planned different there are different risks in

069every audit and so the procedures are always different the other thing that we're required to do is have a procedure of unpredictability so that's a procedure that we may do once every three years we may do it once you know every 10 years it's something that as you get an audit you know the authors are going to look at not 80 of the things you're going to know and so every audit has to have an element of unpredictability where we're going to be like oh well you guys never asked for that before and it's like yeah because we just decided that this is the procedure we want to do as it relates to unpredictability so when we do the reviews of the internal control we get memos from management as to how the internal controls

070work as it relates to the the payroll cycle the cash receipt cycle the cash disbursement cycle and the financial reporting cycle and then we will do walk throughs to determine that those procedures are working as they have been described to us so we'll maybe take five things that we think are significant internal control items in those structures test those five items but we're only doing a couple transactions unless we're actually testing the internal controls which we do sometimes as it relates to federal programs but we also will test internal controls as they relate to expenditures and payroll because those are the significant expenses of the district so what the auditing standards will allow you to do is basically say you can look at x number of payroll transactions or expenditure transactions and if you find

071one error in that sample then you have to go up to the next layer you have to look at more if you find another error then you get to go to the next level but if you find another then you're basically like the internal controls are not working and you can't rely on them and those those are just uh mathematical formulas of how all that works as to the number of transactions that you have to look at the other part of the audit that we are required to do is it relates to the schedule of selected statistics which is the budgetary and disbursement procedures and the accurate disclosure of attendance records so on the budget side what we well those procedures are performed in accordance with attestation standards established by the aicpa but in those

072procedures so like we'll look at the originally adopted budget look at all the resolutions and and roll that forward and make sure that that total equals the budgeted numbers that are given to us by management from an attendance standpoint we will review the attendance um procedures like we would if it's a cash receipt or cash dispersed so if every school does it differently we'll get a memo on how each school does it to get an understanding of how each school does it we perform a lot of analytical procedures so we'll take membership data for the two count periods and look at what the percentage of attendance is as it relates to those numbers look at it as related to prior years it's sort of odd but maybe you don't think it's odd but you'll see

073like percentages by school will be pretty consistent from year to year and and as you go up the ladder the attendance gets worse you know as you get to the high school the tenant's worse than it is for kindergartners and but so we kind of look at that to make sure that it makes sense from year to year we do computations to make sure by looking at the the calendar and determined that no student can have more attendance hours than what the calendar even says so we do a test of that um just to make sure that that we're not over reporting our attendance and we recompute the ada and look at that from year to year as well to make sure it seems reasonable and comparable to prior year um i talked a little

074bit about the internal controls and as they relate to federal programs so if we're doing an internal control test as it relates to a federal program we'll also look at the procure procurement part of it the processing of the disbursements and the processing of payroll which i talked a little bit about that's just basically doing an expenditure test um our audit planning is sched it was done um earl in mid july of the 15th and 16th we plan on coming out in november for two weeks which is about what we do every year and then we always present at the december 15th board of education meeting there are some new standards that are effective for 2021 and 2022 i wasn't going to go into detail on these things we do have discussions with management as

075as they may need help implementing those standards so we'll we'll might help them with that but we're not relied upon to make sure that these standards are implemented correctly we we can help do things before we come out to do the audit but if we do the audit and it's wrong then it could be an internal control problem there are three types of internal control issues that we would may or may not report to management so it are or to the board so it an advisory comment is a is a minor internal control richness that we would just probably report to management and then there's a control deficiency which is a little bit more of a weakness in the internal controls that would be reported to management and the board and then a controlled efficiency

076that's a significant uh material weakness which is basically to find that the the control is so weak that there could there would it's more than likely that a material misstatement in the financial state would would exist and go undetected so obviously we would have to um report that to management as well um i think that's it any questions just to make sure i understood you guys do not provide recommendations to improve internal controls you just assess internal controls and then to the extent that you find any type of material weakness or control deficiencies you flag those and we would hear about those we might not hear about some of the lesser advisory things but you don't make recommendations on how to improve no that if if there's a weakness in the internal control it's basically

077reported that it's a four or five step process that says this is the weakness that we found this is our recommendation of how we would strengthen the internal control and then this is management's response to that weakness and their how they're going to correct it and then the next one is who's responsible for it and what's the timeline for getting it implemented okay great that's great that's consistent with my understanding experience with auditors and in my outside life outside of the board and then you are doing reconciliations with financial and operating information for your expenditure testings and all of that type of thing and it sounds like you are monitoring compliance with industry standards and laws based on you know wasting whatever the state requires for school districts um are you investigating instances of any

078possible fraud that you find if you were to find them so yeah so basically as it relates to fraud we're not required to develop audit procedures to look for fraud okay but what we are required to do is have conversations with management and employees of the district as to are they do they do they have any knowledge of fraud if they did who would they report it to and um and how would they report those things and then at that point we have to develop procedures to determine that there isn't any fraud okay but if we go through or if we're doing a procedure let's say it's a payroll test and we're like well there's something wrong here and then we look at three more they're like well there's something wrong here we will then

079make sure that it's not fraud we'll we'll expand our test to make sure that it's not but we're just not required to develop tests to find it or audit for it and the fraud questioning that they do they normally wrote they like pick different people everywhere so it's not yeah we're required to we're required to pick different people within the district okay on that part of it um and then these new these new standards that you you put up at the end are those at all related to like the 842 lease standards that we see well public it's going to be that's the one that's coming up in 2022 and that thing's been delayed for years you know they've been they've been messing with that thing yeah basically what it's going to do is get

080rid of operating leases everything's going to be a capital lease unless it's under 12 months is basically what's going to happen today we actually don't we the only lease we technically have is our certificates of participation that's kind of considered a lease um but we don't other than that we don't have any leases yes the other thing i'd like to add i kind of missed on but when we when we when we're planning the audit we are required to compute materiality levels and so and it kind of gets broken down in that this is um clearly material this is the sort of the next level that if we have eight things underneath like in there we have to make sure that those eight don't all go in the same way and now we got a

081material problem and stuff that is clearly immaterial and um we also you also do it by fund and by district so there's multiple materials right but the point i want to make is just from an auditing perspective when you when you're talking about taxpayers five thousand dollars if somebody stole five thousand dollars that's a lot of money how could you not catch that but five thousand dollars is clearly immaterial from an audit perspective and so just so everybody understands that you know that audits are they're up here not getting into the dirty details like a state audit will they'll look at every transaction because they have the time and that's just what they do they're under different standards than we are so i think that's important for everyone to understand those and those material they're

082probably you know 100 grand or something early on that you don't if you ca if there's an error you you don't that's not that's not what you're concerned with that's the first thing i think you mentioned if there's like an accounting error like you won't necessarily um point that out right is that what you said well it depends if it's if it depends on the the significance of it and if it's an error because the thing that you have to that we have to look at from an internal control standpoint is um you may have a weakness in the internal controls and your financial statements are still not materially misstated that they're still in accordance with gap but from an audit perspective we're just sort of like well did you just get lucky or because

083the the weaknesses there that could allow for it and we would still have to make you aware of that even though it wouldn't didn't change the financial statements at all so for example if you said we need duplicate signatures on every check over a thousand dollars and we saw ten of them that weren't we'd probably like look just it the po existed it was properly approved but you had 10 checks that weren't dual signed like your your documents as they should be and we would make you aware of that all right i'll make sure i understood this i have just a quick question for you um first thank you for being here tonight um so my understanding of this is that you know we have all sorts of obligations um that are related to um

084we have to comply with all types of state and federal laws um and i i did look through your engagement letter i'm wondering if anywhere in there that i know that there's certain state and federal laws and the code of the state code that five csr 30-4 i think it is that you guys have to comply with as auditors and i'm wondering if that's anywhere on your engagement letter that you guys conduct your audit and compliance with that csr it's the code of state regulations it's just uh i think it's actually referenced in the missouri statute and it sets forth all of the the audit policy requirements um i i'm sorry i'm not sure what that really is like audit policies we don't really audit policies what we would audit is if you if no

085no it's not paul it's just like the requirements for when you're auditing a school district it's the requirements that the auditors have to comply with well we i mean we adhere to any requirements imposed on us by the government auditing standards or by deci that's why we have these extra expenditures as our tests as they relate to attendance and transportation because we ought to some illinois school districts and they're not we're not required to audit their attendance and transportation because it's not required by isbe where it is dusty um but so like the budgetary requirements as they relate to the budget like you can't spend above your budget you know that's a budgetary thing that we make sure that you're in compliance with that um so i'm not sure exactly what it all entails i

086don't know that i could shoot it i mean i was surprised today i was just i don't i i came across it so i was looking at the statute and then it there's like four pages of requirements that the auditors have to comply with so that's why i was like oh i didn't even know this existed i mean it's probably everything that he said that they're following you know attestation standards and you know gatsby and and um you know the new pronouncements and and doing the things that we're supposed to do well there's and the single audit if we and if you if you send it mary jo i'm going to send it to you right now if you look at the schedule selected statistics that's hard for me to say but there's about 10

087or 15 things in there that we have to is there you know is the is there a bond for the treasurer is there i mean professional development funds right are certain things spent the way they're supposed to be spent you know there's about 10 items it's attendance transportation budgetary there's some finance questions there's some there's i don't know two or three pages of stuff in there as it relates to that that i'm assuming that's what they're making reference to um i just i'm just gonna send it to mary jo and let you guys we can follow up with you guys okay i just don't know that specific reference the board policy i joke is d-i-e die i think that's great for an audit so um but it's not a super long policy it's fairly short

088actually that's how you feel when you're subjected to beyond i wasn't audited i always said auditors are your friend they're awesome we love our getting on it all the prep up to the audit that we do that's what we're doing now so i had a couple of questions relating to um reporting and then sort of discretionary testing so um [Music] my understanding is that the audit at least at a conceptual level is a report to the board as opposed to reporting to management correct okay so um as you were going through and i understand clayton's we're in the fortunate position uh you know most of our on the revenue side as you indicated most of it is is relatively easy to verify on the expenditure side i assume that there are um as you were

089outlining uh you know how you audit those there are uh there's a kind of a range or a discretion in um uh the the i don't know what you'd call it the the the the number of tests and the the intensity of the tests uh that you make i mean it's a judgment call on your part um is that well not not if we're testing internal controls it's defined well i'm talking about like as you're testing expenditures for example uh uh payroll okay is that uh is the process if you're i mean because obviously a big a huge portion of of our total expenditures are payroll um [Music] is there discretion in how you go about um you know testing the the validity of those payroll numbers yeah i would say there's some there's some

090um professional judgment used if we're going to look at i may say we're going to look at 10 attributes another auditor could come along and say i only need to look at five if that's what you're asking you know the attributes of the test yes is is professional judgment what do what do i think it's important as an attribute to make sure that the the internal controls are working um versus what some other auditor might think yes that's what i guess so so that is professional judgment there's a there's a lot of stuff to that you know we can uh confirm the retirement um expense okay for example like the that's a third party it's a third party they tell us what we submitted and then we can also look at salaries of each you

091know certified non-certified determined from a reasonableness standpoint does that make sense even though we also confirm the tax revenue we will still compute make sure it seems reasonable based on the assessed value that we have and the rate that we're using and the percentage of collectibility that we have historically and say okay well if we're collecting about 98 on the average we think we should collect this what did we collect so we'll we'll have a test where where we develop our own expectation and compared to what actually happened and if it's significantly different then we will reconcile why it's significantly different well i guess what i'm what i'm trying to understand is um in this ex in this example we're using if you said that maybe in your judgment you're looking at six variables and

092another auditor may say well no we need to do 10 or you know or whatever um [Music] is there uh um is there a way that we we the board could under could be either part of or understand what the trade-off is okay i'm not trying to take away your your judgment but i am [Music] concerned that frankly this the audit is the most important [Music] tool we as frankly as volunteers uh have to to make sure that um that the financial statements are are what they say they are okay and uh it seems like if someone in this example uh told us that well you know we have a range of options one option may cost a little bit more but the trade-off would be you know a higher probability of i don't know

093finding discrepancies versus a lower probability that would be something that i think the board should be engaged with and uh so that really is my first kind of question uh and that i i believe the board should be more and in involved in um helping to kind of make those trade-offs and then i guess my second question really is relating to reporting so um you you outline these types of um where you've identified sort of increasing levels of uh of problems you know a small as uh uh jason was talking about a small you know a posting here or something that you're not going to bring to our attention but advisory and then a higher level do we get the reporting only when you do your final report or is there some sort of interim

094that say hey i discovered that example you just said you know we audited checks uh uh check over a thousand dollars supposed to have two signatures uh we discovered that you know half the checks over a thousand dollars have one signature is that something that we would uh we the board would find out about um [Music] and so that that's why i'm trying to understand um and uh you know how it's going to be reported if it's just hey you know we get all the way in december and they hand us a nice report and it will be in there or do we get it uh no we found this out in september and we need to know about it so that's when i'm yeah so a couple things i would say is in our

095opinion we don't give absolute assurance that the financial statements are free of material misstatement but we are required to develop procedures to bring that risk to a very low level so that that it's not absolute because we don't do 100 transactions so if i mis interpret or my professional judgment didn't get that risk to a low level that there's a material mistake then we have a defaulty audit so i guess my point being is i may come up with 10 things and another auditor may come up with six but i'll bet you five of them are the same and those are the most important ones from from an audit perspective um so i'm not arguing that i'll answer a little bit about your question so in the past we in in my 20 years of

096being with the district we've had um three instances of non-compliance one and they're all put in this in the audit and none of them where were to the point where it was considered like um they were material in the sense that they were put in but they weren't like material in the sense that it was maturely misstating the financial statement so all of them were reported at the end of the audit during the audit committee meeting and like i said they're also included in the audit as he mentioned with the five points um and so you know one of them that was about eight years ago which was actually in the audit for about six well probably ten years ago was in the audit for about six years was we had a purchasing issue that

097we worked through um and then you know so it was a material like um materials but it wasn't impacting the financial statements at all and so and then we had a just a communication and management last year that we're following up on this year that was not reported in the audit because it wasn't considered a you know material um so timing if you had something that was really significant and would be materially mistaken you probably would bring it to our attention earlier we just haven't had any of that and so everything has been reported during the audit committee meeting before the board presentation i think if we thought it was significant enough i shouldn't say if we thought if it was significant enough we would make the board aware of it as soon as it

098happened yeah we wouldn't wait till the here's your audit and oh by the way here's this thing out of left field that you guys didn't know about i mean we would want everybody to know as soon as we possibly could let them know that that's a standard procedure we would reach out to the board president and have a conversation about what we found and um i guess my concern is also is just you know we're talking about a material audit or just or you know financial audit versus looking what you call controls audit right because you're making sure all the controls are in place to mitigate risk essentially right risk for mistakes miss yeah so we are required to review and understand the internal controls as it relates to our audit to get our risk

099of a material statement down to a very low level but we don't give an opinion on the internal controls that's just outside the scope of an audit and so you can have those audits which is sort of what happened after the enron thing and i can't remember the stand because we don't do any public work but sarbanes-oxley is basically what came about was you got to look at these controls now and um so i'm just we that's not what our audit is entailed to do just by the standards we're performing it under based on on the sarbane oxley and the coso standards we have about a 28-page document that goes through all of our internal controls ties it to our board policies and then we have um procedures that we have internally that we check

100and then we have recommendations that we try to implement and then they also get that we call it our sas control document that they get and they review let me ask you this question what's the cost of this our audit yeah like twenty thousand dollars and what's the cost of having a more um detailed audit what does that mean i mean it would i don't at that point your powers yeah it really at that point becomes what we call it agreed upon procedures and you basically you be saying look we want these these are the five ten fifteen hundred procedures we want you to do tell us what you did tell us what you found and help give us the recommendation and and it it could be a weight loss yeah i'm happy to share

101our sas document with any you guys with how we've audited our own internal controls it's more so just you know i'm thinking about like um you know this is a big this is a big operation right it's a big operation and there's really no tricks and balances outside of an audit and outside of you doing a great job of collecting the documents and make sure all that all the controls are in place and the data is in the right space and i'm just trying you know it's just interesting you know it's just it's just uh yeah just never know what could be we see our role as almost as an auditor and um so you know we're constantly auditing everything that crosses you know there's there's really checks and balances and segregation of duties that's

102right so one of the biggest internal control weaknesses would be somebody doing everything right in your department well no district-wide right but there's not an auditor every at every no but everything we do we look at it through an audit lens so it's just interesting to know just that you know and just so anything could happen essentially and you'd be on the hook for it because you know if we so yeah i mean if if if if it was determined that our professional judgment was just not even good i mean it was it's hard to audit professional judgment but there also there could be procedures that you're supposed to do in every audit that if they didn't get done you know then sure we could be on the hook for that we go through peer

103review once every three year we do internal inspections every year which means we have an internal inspection of within each office looking at other offices audits looking for weaknesses and then we have a peer review that comes in once every three years and we are part of the government quality control and what that means is there has to be a separate like internal in quality control related to our government audits to be in that program and so they have to look at more hours of our got of our government work to make sure that we're adhering to uh the governmental accounting standards and all of those things and um so we get audited ourselves and i can tell you it's changed that peer review came about with enron as well and it's it's changing in

104that it used to be the norm was you would have um a no comment letter and then the aicpa started coming down on the peer reviewer saying you're not doing your job and the norm should really be you you don't every audit every peer review should have a comment letter because nobody's perfect so to speak um and so that process is i think getting to where they wanted it to be when the enron thing started it used to be in my opinion it was sort of useless you know like because nobody wanted to be the bad guy we're i don't want to tell another cpa firm they're doing a horrible job i mean that's that's our own profession but you were to um the audit that you do here sorry just got the signal from

105the from the audience thank you for the assist if you were compared to the audit that we do here to using that analogy like the aicpa or the pcaob audits this is like a very kind type of aicpa audit right this is i mean the uh does it even approximate an aicpa audit through through what do you mean by an aicpa through peekaboo or something yeah um no because but but it's it's considered a high risk engagement because of the federal funding that's related to it and so that gets higher scrutiny within our office and higher scrutiny at the peer review level okay they could also be reviewed by desi as a desktop evaluation we've also had we've had other government entities audit our or look at our work papers pretty um in depth and

106came out with no findings on our part so um just to to our own heart a little bit we're we're celebrating our 90th anniversary this year so not many cpa firms can say that they can do that and the reason is because you haven't gotten sued so um i think we're proud of the work that we do and um you know i don't think we i to be honest with you i think we over audit as a firm more than when i look at work papers of other auditors i think we over audit we get into the woods way more than the standards probably need us to be but that's just my opinion we know in the state there's auditors that they call and drive by audits and they're their day and they leave oh

107sure i mean at the end of the day aside from the um you know some of the objective testings a lot of an auditor's work is art versus science right i mean there's a there's a fair amount of subjectivity in the interpretation of controls and yeah it's it's it's it's what i would say now it's really shifting to a risk-based approach i mean it was it's it's been going that way for a long time but we just implemented it's called knowledge coach and the the questionnaires that you have to fill out as it relates to each individual client and it's not it's not boilerplate anymore and they will tell you you spent where it used to be we'd spend on a day planning now you should the bulk of your audit should be in planning

108now and determining where your risks are developing your procedures and it's really fine tuning to where you think the risks are and that's where you spend your time and i would say we're still at 50 50 between planning and and audit because i do believe we probably spend more time in areas that we don't need to but we just do because it makes us feel better we can i don't know and you guys are you guys on site even during this covered year for performing your audit work and putting together yeah that's sort of been at the client's discretion we didn't interim last year virtually but final we did in person and this year we've done in person okay and then is there an interim draft report kind of um or is there just a

109final that you guys put out us yeah that's just the final report that they prepare we prepare the statements right okay we do it all but you know you're getting know part of the financial reporting in the good old days if one month if one month was going to be right on your financial statements it was the last month but now we have to make sure that we'll look at financial statements throughout the year and make sure that that they're accurate so what you're getting is that because we're not making audit adjustments because that would be considered a material weakness as well if there's an audit adjustment that tells you you didn't put out gaap financial statements and that's a material weakness and so you're the the information you're getting monthly you should consider reliable

110because at the end of the year we're not i mean there could be a month that was wrong and we didn't catch it because we picked a different month through the year we're cash basis so i kind of joke we have three sets of books so we do cash basis all year and right now we're working on our fund which is modified and then our district y which are full accrual so we have an audit software that we do to convert all that and create the statements so and your budget to actual is cash so you in your financial aid you have three bases three basis of accounting to make things the most complicated it could possible and then there's reconciliations in all those so you're the only district that we do that's like that

111what do other districts do well they they report to the state on the modified accrual and i just told the state we're not doing it because everybody else is cash basis so our comparison to like ladue it's easier to compare and part of the reason why we do the full cruel basis is because it's better for our bond rating all of the aaa rated bond districts in the state do a full accrual statements and so it's it gives s p a better comparison just to be honest with you dussy would rather be on cash basis because if you submit your asburg on modified accrual you have to reconcile back to cash basis for them your revenues you have to show your ins and outs your receivables and get them back to a cash basis anyway

112so it's it's so all the other districts that do follow career like we do they report to deci on unmodified and we don't so and then they have to take care of all those error messages right and get it back to capture the state can't handle it so they give you all kinds of errors so what amy said i looked at and actually it says this publication entire text material which is incorporated as reference because the portion of this rule will be unduly cumbersome and expensive um so basically what it is it's our policy boiled down into a small thing but it basically states that they'll do the audit in accordance with either october or gaap that will get a single audit if we need to that will report on attendance and it basically states

113all the things that he's doing but it's more the dusty's requirement and then if they do the desk auto they're checking all of that so that's why we don't really that reference wasn't for us it's duffy's general administrative rule so so yes we do do it all okay does um anybody else have any questions go ahead steve yeah i i did just want to say one more thing i want to thank you for the presentation i i do like the idea of having you know as i told you you know a sort of a dual uh i'm sure you have other things you'd like to do other than come here twice but i i i think that that is a a part of our calendar that is valuable the board is constantly changing and i

114think it is really important that the board understand you know what the audit is and then you i think you've articulated well what it isn't and um and that um uh you know what the kind of reporting would be uh if you found something and what it wouldn't be um i think that should be and you know obviously it probably wouldn't be in september but uh you know should be in the spring it should be in the spring because your engagement's pretty short you start november first and then you have your report ready by the december it should be before interim which isn't yeah so anyway i think that that is a valuable exercise uh for for our board um uh and um and to the extent uh that you um that there is you

115know as i indicated choices uh that you make uh in that decision process um i would i'd like to hear uh what kind of the options are and it won't be me but uh whatever whoever is sitting here never say never steve i can say that conclusively so we we do have an audit committee that this is normally what we do with the audit committee and so just so you know the audit committee includes me and nisha also two board members which typically was the president and the treasurer but i think amy allocated that to designated that authority to steve and then we have two staff from my office the director of finance and the accountant internal auditor that we have and then we do have a community member which serves on the financial advisory

116committee and that has been historically rick bliss and he has taken on that role again for this year and as steve will find he will take an hour and a half of our meeting asking brian every question he possibly can he is extremely thorough so i think it's an effective audit committee we do go through a lot of conversation during that meeting before we present to the board so thank you for coming thank you happy to be here come every month if you want me to we appreciate your time and um i think we are going to move on to our information item for the evening which is no a place for everyone hey cameron good evening how we doing we're good perfect perfect um so again update is a place for everyone especially in

117looking at our our first strategic goal within our strategic plan we will ensure all learners regardless of their identity feel safe and valued so the report today will mirror that goal within our strategic plan and highlighting a lot of our professional learning um as well as how we're uh you know changing our hiring practices and also looking at how we allocate our resources so those will kind of be the three main points that we'll look into so uh we can go to the next slide so i want to start off and kind of um hinge from you know profile of the graduate and you know as you all remember from our strategic plan process from last year developing the profile of a graduate and what we want to see in all of our graduates who

118come out of the district from that profile of a graduate our strategic plan was born that also gave birth to our equity policy as well and i want to reference all three of those documents because i think it really shows where we stand as a district and committed to creating an individualized learning experience for each and every student on the slide i have the district understands that there has been some national state and local opposition in this type of work that we're doing um and having an emphasis on equity and individual individualization of student experience however the school district of clayton remains committed to truly creating a place for everyone i mean i think that's super evident and when we look at our bullet points under our profile of a graduate if we want our

119students to be self-actualized or intellectually curious and culturally competent that means you know studying all facets of our history that means looking at things from multiple perspectives and that also means that we need to create a level of empathy you know for one another and understanding each other through tough conversations and through updated individualized curriculum in a curriculum that is um equitable and portrays everyone's experience um for people to discuss and for people to understand to not only empower our learners but for our learners to you know learn about one another so you know there's been a lot of talk about you know critical race theory and how what that looks like in clayton and if it will have an impact on what we do um and i'm here to say you know through our

120profile of a graduate our strategic plan and our equity policy which are very concrete documents i feel like it shows where we stand on that issue and how we're committed to giving each child an equitable education so again like i said our report um as i go into that now and segue from that um our report is hinging on our number one goal within our strategic plan and if you look at the sub points on the board a place for all learners to thrive regardless of their identity the diversity of clayton's teaching staff reflects the racial diversity of our students but then also committing to an equitable anti-bias and anti-racist learning community and where we're going from a professional learning standpoint will be a big part of what we talk about today so that's kind

121of where we're hinging from that and i really love that goal because i think it really pivots well into our educational equity policy uh which we passed last june um right before we commence for the summer up there a few couple points that are super important in it how we define educational equity which is what we strive to reach as a district and then how we define equity literacy which is pretty much our continuous quest to continue to build capacity so that we can create a place for everyone and then on the uh on the bottom of that slide it kind of gives the preamble um of our equity policy as well in terms of where we stand as a district and where we hope to be so i think pivoting from all that i

122also like that within our educational equity policy there's a focus and accountability section and pretty much these are the areas that we're going to continue to monitor and work toward in order to you know gauge where we are as a district and given us some level of direction so in today's report we're going to be looking at numbers three four and five hiring and staffing practices professional learning and growth as well as distribution of resources so i'll be given an update on where we are as a district in each of those categories so a lot of what you'll see from a hiring and staff practice standpoint are is a lot of what we talked about at the end of last semester before concluding for the summer um you know dr arnold you know did an

123awesome job in terms of you know creating learning opportunities for you know our staff you know in terms of interviewing and hiring practices analyzing our current models and systems that we have in place to make sure that they're giving every applicant an equal opportunity to be a part of the district and then developing an implementation of the state interview process one of the big areas of hiring especially within you know trying to up our minority numbers is you know making sure that we retain all of our staff as well so that was a huge um that was a huge emphasis as well that uh yielded some great results and gave us some great insight on how we can improve as a district um and then we also created a diversity hiring statement too you know

124kind of to put you know our actions into a concrete language so that is something that we're held accountable for so this is just a slide just kind of talking about you know our retention of our diverse faculty we returned we retained all of our faculty from the past school year um that had a diverse background so that was something to be proud of as well as looking at the progression of our new faculty diverse hires we were over 50 percent for our diversity hires in the district and i think that is something that's super awesome that i don't think a lot of districts can uh say that they're able to do that regardless of their demographic so i know we talk about these things and why they're important and a lot of studies have

125shown that especially when students are able to have a teacher that looks like them and shares their background that you know it does wonders in terms of where they look to accomplish academically and socially um you know within the educational process so having a teacher that looks like you really gives you a higher likelihood of scoring and doing a lot better so um in looking at this situation and us bringing in more teachers i sat down with a few of our students and had some conversations just in terms of what their thoughts were um and how they feel when they have a teacher that looks like them so on the next slide we'll have a video it's always just been a positive reaction just knowing going to a classroom and knowing that your teacher is

126black it's like i'm seeing it's like a relief you feel if i don't feel kind of at home like you found like your safe place in the classroom and also like it's a person for you to go talk to during lunch if you're having any issues or you just need someone to chat or have a adult perspective of what it's like to be here and claim to be black it's really nice to talk to them it boosts my mood make me feel more like energized that i have somebody like me to to teach me something like somebody like that's black and i can relate to yeah i agree like it's more motivated yeah and to see somebody who looks like me it's like we we kind of like bond and stuff like the art teacher

127she's really nice and she has like same the same culture like me is like very welcoming to like their people or people who have the same skin color as them and it's like maybe they can relate more to the teachers and have more connections and it's kind of like family a little bit you know like home it doesn't have to be specifically black teachers because i know like the teachers that made the biggest impact were either asian or native american and i think they made a huge impact knowing that there's also another minority teaching me not just that that they may not look at it like me but they understand where i'm coming from so we were able to have some good conversations and i think you know on top of you know it being

128great for students to see someone in their own likeness i also think it's awesome that you know we we humanize other races of teachers so when all of our kids see them it's something that is normal to them you know we talk about these phenomenons or disproportionate numbers that exist you know our kids can have an experience where that doesn't apply to them so i think it's awesome you know for everybody and you know it's been great so far this year and it's definitely seen a difference in mood and morale so the next part we want to jump into is kind of the professional learning and growth and i'm going to kind of start from the summer and and kind of work our way up on where we're looking at really building structures and systems

129of professional learning especially as it pertains to equity so on this present slide as you all know we do our district summer institute which are you know choice learning experiences for educators and teachers to take part in that you know are of interest to them you know in regard to them individually choosing something to help them grow you know within their practices so on the first uh under the first heading we see those are all of the uh those are all of the um sessions we offered that had an equity focus so you can see kind of the wide range of choices we had that uh you know that were pertaining to equity and kind of growing as a bar uh educator and then one thing i want to point out which was an awesome

130experience uh dr wayne's and i attended the equity exchange uh this summer and the equity exchange is a year-long cohort you know uh based form for public and private school leaders to advance their work in solidarity solidarity and community so it's a bunch of you know uh advocates of equity within their districts our respective schools in which we came together collaborated and some learning and have kind of built the network you know with one another i know just in terms of my jobs and my practices i've built some relationships from from the uh from the cohort and have been able to grow you know from others as well as hoping that others grow from uh from me as well so it's a good network you know and i've met some outstanding educators that could definitely

131help me grow and help us grow as a district as well so then in looking at professional learning i think it is super important you know that from the top one down that we embody a a culture of learning and growing in equity i've been partnering and meeting with the midwest collaborative for culturally proficient proficiency in schools and we've been looking at professional learning on two levels the first level is for our board of education and talking about what does professional learning look like in the realm of culturally proficient leadership and we're still kind of hashing out the details in terms of what learning looks like for the board and perhaps a year-long asynchronous learning engagement you know with kind of a kind of online learning component as well as having individual check-ins with the

132leaders of the work and possibly capping off with the retreat to see you know what this leadership look like you know from a culturally proficient lens you know from a board of education level and then on top of that our district leadership committee is going through um a year-long session of culturally proficient coaching um and why i think that's uh super important that me and dr patel sat down and have had a number of conversations in terms of you know it's important that our leaders and our administrators are able to to coach and monitor and lead a building you know that is culturally proficient which means that our cultural our cultural proficiency as leaders in the district should kind of have a pace that outpaces our teachers and educators so that we're able to be

133equity leaders for them and be the lead equity learners within our within our departments and within our buildings so we'll be meeting monthly having monthly sessions as a dlc committee you know working with uh the midwest collaborative and then also we actually kicked off our professional learning you know one one uh event that has become a huge staple you know within our professional learning is our courageous conversations that our district has been hosting internally and as a dlc committee we went through culturally uh i mean we went through courageous conversations uh part two so we've developed a part two of that and the goal is to kind of keep creating different parts so that we kind of take it to the next level and that they that that learning that growing never stops so we're

134excited to get going with that and there's a lot of excitement around that as well then on top of that i'm looking at our professional learning and growth through our strategic plan our professional learning as a district is mirroring around the goals of our strategic plan we had our first learning experience around those goals on september 3rd which we started with goal two so we're going a bit out of order and then in january and april we're hitting goal one and goal three uh which are you know primarily having to do with equity and social emotional learning today i met with our equity committee to start hashing out what those days look like that includes you know using a big portion of our panorama data as well as engaging students and their experiences and letting

135that kind of be the guide of how we um how we change and evolve our practices as educators so i'm excited about some of the brainstorming in the work that we were able to do actually today at our uh at our meeting and then on top of that each building's goals um in terms of their uh their professional learning from a building level is a mirror of our strategic plan as well so our strategic plan from a district building and poc level kind of has the same umbrella that it's all fallen under then one one program that i'm super excited about um over the summer uh well actually late last semester um i met and we created a as a district we created a partnership with mcdaniel college in maryland and they offer a equity

136and excellence master's certificate to where it's a 15-hour program to where at the end of it you'll end up with a certificate in equity and excellence and i chose this specific college because i think it offers a lot of you know a lot of great things that a lot of universities aren't able to offer the first thing is it's a combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning and the schedule was created by the members of the cohort so it's very flexible in meeting the needs of teachers especially with their busy schedules once we reach a certain number we're able to cohort our learning so the cohort only includes school district of clayton educators so there will be no other educators that are taking part in the cohort except school district of clayton educators in doing so

137we'll be meeting with the instructors of each of the courses to specialize the instruction to have a clayton lens i like this particular college especially one out of state because especially on the east coast and west coast equity work is something that has been going on for some years now so this program is over 10 years old so they have a lot of theories that that have been tested and that they have data on that we can use in order to better our practices so we can learn from their mistakes and things that they've done and like i said it's a it's a great user friendly program just in terms of the planning and the flexibility of it right now we have eight educators signed up to start in october and we're hoping that we

138can get another small cohort going either in january or next fall and i think this will be awesome as well because now we will have certified equity practitioners in every building to continue working and lead that work within their respective buildings so then the next portion of professional learning and growth is a system that we're building as a collective to really uh create a system and a curriculum of what equity learning looks like so we're rolling out rolling this out this year so if you come in if you're a first year teacher for example i'll walk through it if you're a first year teacher this year you'll have two professional learning um experiences each semester and the first year is more so kind of clayton equity 101 it's really looking at what equity looks like

139in clayton what are some of the issues that we're dealing with and working through also um what are what's the language you know familiarizing ourselves with equity policy our strategic plan or profile of a graduate um in our equity language to kind of get in the groove of how we do things year two is going to have more of a strategy focus so we're going to be using specific strategies that focus on social emotional learning and humanizing student experience and then year three will be more so of a reflective experience in terms of creating frameworks and using those in order to gauge a student experience and taking that experience and letting that guide um our our educational moves and you know how we run our classrooms how we run our systems with a student-centered focus

140so i'm excited to get that going so that's kind of year one through year three year four and year five is pretty traditional to what we've always done but it will also have an equity and social emotional learning component linked to that as well and that will involve coaching as well as different meetings and check-ins in order to reflect on practices and then i'm excited about this one as well for our goal implementation year two and career review teachers when their own cycle they will have uh three main opportunity three main learning opportunities that they have to embark upon so we'll start off kind of with an intro meeting in terms of what the learning will look like for a year and then but from october on through may they have to engage in three

141learning opportunities but kind of like i mentioned before courageous conversations has been very beneficial and very effective with our staff so we've come to the realization that it should be kind of mandated and within our curriculum for every employee to go through our courageous conversations part one and part two so if an employee for example has not gone through part one they'll go through part one if they've gone through part one they'll go through part two so um that'll be one they'll have to go to one of those and then also i've partnered with uh safe connections and we are creating a curriculum that revolves around lgbtqi plus literacy um so there will be a class for that for them to take in terms of familiarizing familiarizing our um our faculty with you know pronouns

142experience you know proper usage and how to engage our students you know and understanding what their experience is like on a daily basis and the awesome thing with these programs is that as everyone goes through them we'll continue building upon them so almost like you know we've gone through level 100 now we'll be at level 200 and 300 and so we're account we want it to kind of be a continuous effort to learn in those areas and then the third option is they'll have a choice to choose from any of the options below like the equity literacy institute and ed web webinar series there are tons of webinars that have been filmed especially within the last year as they pertain to equity so they can choose one of those webinars and host a you know

143either a professional learning opportunity to share what they've learned or write a reflection and upload that to their frontline file for their evaluations and they also have the opportunity to to do the same thing with getting into book learning through belonging to a culture of dignity we got this as well or two books that we've been that we've seen tremendous growth from as well as we have our equity challenge website so having an activity around that as well as choosing your own adventure if a teacher sees something that's worthwhile that does not fall into the scope so giving them the option on that as well so on the next slide i'm going to show a quick video as well and i'm super excited to see you know this unfold i think it's a perfect example

144you know through our theater theater department what individualized learning looks like what having a student first lens looks like in lesson planning and choosing our curriculum and kind of the empowering impact it has on our students when we think student first when we're modeling our educational processes [Music] really the the decision to do the miracle worker was because of holly the miracle worker is you know this pretty famous play about um you know helen keller and her teacher ann sullivan you know two famous american women the fact that we have a student who is blind uh who you know does have like the incredible ability to play the role um was the impetus for picking the play i was so excited i just i just screamed i was like i'm so excited and i i

145was just like jumping around and and i was thinking i i said i said i might do the breakfasting i'm going to do the breakfast scene you know it was like very very exciting it was it was like my first time playing a lead in clayton high school it's like it's like my dream my dream has finally come true i always wanted to be helen since i was in like third grade when disabled people come and see the miracle worker they will hear the description of what's going on and see the signs that they're interpreting there will be an audio describer of the show and a sign language interpreter of the show this show will be fully accessible no matter what my goal is to spread awareness acceptance and inclusion for people with all types

146of disabilities especially in the arts okay we have this text now but really like it it doesn't really match kind of where you know where we are now in uh the 21st century um kind of how we work with and and and educate and teach our kids um so yeah let's take this quote-unquote classic um but you know fit it to adapt to our our students who are you know by far the most important part of this equation of the storytelling when we choose a play we're looking a couple of different things we're looking at what is the story this play tells right to the audience and and the students that are working on it but there's also an aspect of whose story is being told and how how do our kids identify with the

147characters in the play so i thought that was an awesome example on what individualized learning looks like and creating opportunities for all of our students you saw how excited holly was in that so for all of our students to have that opportunity to feel empowered by the curriculum by their teachers and you know by you know just the way we we educate so i thought that was awesome it was a great conversation um just in terms of the thought process the learning experiences that the teachers went through to really view it through that lens and then talking well holly was a treat awesome so i know the play will be coming in the next two weeks will be coming out so you know there will be information out on that and i think it'll be

148awesome experience just with the accessibility that it'll offer to a lot of people that wouldn't normally get that accessibility to be able to see it so really excited about that so our next section is uh looking at distribution of resources um and that's just a recap from you know a techno technology standpoint of of course you know going to one-to-one with our devices distributed um especially at the onset of covet hot spots being available for request if it is needed and the good thing about this is i know within technology working together with our counselors and social workers to create a process to where um gauging the need for technology is a part of their workload and being able to reach out to families and you know see what support options they need in terms

149of you know whether that's a con connectivity whether that's accessibility um and whether that's just gauging how much the need is and how we need to go about that one thing that they implemented as well were the multiple customer service options in terms of phone email live chat making sure that we meet everyone where they are in order to meet their needs in regard to technology so that's something that's been going fairly well especially as we get more devices in one thing i also want to touch on too is um you know we we found ourselves in a bind especially at the beginning of the year in terms of transportation um as you all you know probably have read or heard on the news there's a nationwide shortage in bus drivers and that's really affected

150us from a standpoint of our vic students to where we were having a hard time getting students to school on time so you know between you know in student services between dr wiens and you know julie engelhard who's just been you know a rock star with everything that she's been able to do in terms of you know vic having you know some issues in regard to the buses and us having the opportunity to take that in our own hands so with you know parent-focused groups um and kind of brainstorming solutions as a team some of the uh you know solutions that we came up with were as a district we've taken over the glen ridge and captain bus routes from the vic program and we're running that with our own bus drivers from facilities uh

151mary jo has done an awesome job of rolling out and you know working with vic and getting the bus routes and you know we took a week for them to run through the bus routes to make sure that we can have the most efficient route as possible things have been running like clockwork since we've done that which has been awesome one thing that has happened for especially our middle school and high school routes is that you know again with julie englehart applying pressure you know it just being awesome we have solid you know in place drivers for those routes so they've been on time as well as time progresses we're monitoring you know what our bus drop off times look like and we're going to pivot when needed but um you know we've gotten to

152the point to where i think we have something solid in place and it's just been awesome of everybody working as a collective to make sure that everybody can get to school on time so again that's something that we'll continue to monitor as we keep as we keep going through the year so thanks um the next part to just close it out things to come um one thing that we're going to be rolling out it's something that we're calling the empowerment initiative and i think this this kind of was born from a lot of the conversations that that we had as a department in terms of what the experiences were like in the district so we'll start primarily with our black families and you know i'm we're sending out an email within the next week you

153know for a you know for a a session and a night to come together i think one of the big things especially as you know you know our numbers are are lower at the elementary levels creating a network you know with all of our elementary family all of our elementary black families across grade level and across the schools um also one of the main things that we talked about and that i that i uh continuously heard of were just communication on the processes in the district um you know what what's the process for an iep what's the process of you know getting into the gifted program what is what are the necessary assessments in terms of gauging whether a kid is gets intervention or not so really having nights to where we're we're giving information

154on those processes so you know we're making sure that everyone has equal access to all of the information needed in order for their child to be successful so that's something that we want to do another another way we're launching it as well i just met with our um you know el teachers in the district me myself and dr wiens in terms of brainstorming you know what are some of the challenges that we can get better for our el families and our immigrant families and what are some things that we can do in order to make that process easier for them so we had a great brainstorming session the next step is to have a few focus groups with some families to really understand their experience and how it can be improved and then the next

155steps would be to create programming um to make sure that their other process coming into the uh the district you know is a smoother one than it has been in the past so we're excited to get those two uh those two organizations off the ground and kind of using this initiative as we learn about certain processes that need improvement as it pertains to certain groups being able to brainstorm you know what we can do in order to uh to get better at that also um one thing that we'll touch on too at our next meeting with more update is kind of the expansion of our affinity groups as well here's a list of a lot of the affinity groups that we currently have primarily at chs and some of them overflow into the and to

156wide down as well so you know making sure that as there is a need for an affinity group that the students have a space to feel empowered in order to create that i know one thing that we saw in our panorama data last year was you know a somewhat of a lower sense of belonging for our asian students and one big thing that has come out of that that dr wiens has uh piloted is you know again getting the student focus group to understand what the needs are and asian student association um has started on the campus this year um so i know that that's brought a lot of excitement and creates an affinity space you know for um feeling the need that we needed to address so our next update in terms of a

157place for everyone with uh goal one of our strategic plan uh will be in march and on that we'll focus on you know part one part two and part six of our focus and accountability um sections of our educational policy that'll include updates with student community and family engagement curriculum instruction and assessment and then institutional structures as well any thoughts thank you cameron and i will just i'm going to just go around the room and call on people and see if they have any questions or follow-ups stacy thank you so much cameron is that um everything you're doing is so impressive and i could think of compliments on each page of this um presentation i really like how thorough um you've been and i really like the forward thinking as far as like the yearly

158plans and the cohorts as the year one teachers and when they what they do when they move into year two and year three and i think what's particularly special about that is how the teachers then become the leaders of their peers in the work so i think that helps them feel feel empowered and then there's more of you you know leaders to go around with the work which is great um thank you also side note all of you for solving the vic bus problem because when i heard about that i was really upset i mean i can't imagine how those kids felt getting to school late and you know to no fault of their own so i so i appreciate everyone's efforts on that too and um i also when you listed the um the

159things to come i especially liked how you're engaging the parents at the elementary level because i started thinking imagine where those parents will be as their kids get older through our district and they too can become a source of support for the younger parents of younger kids coming through so i think that's a great idea to engage the parents and the kids especially the parents at younger ages so that parents with younger kids come in and they have somebody to look to for help and support so thanks for all the great work keep it up and i i really like the um details and and the thoroughness of the plan and also that throughout the plan that you provide teachers with so many choices so they can pick kind of their own path through it

160is great too so thanks great jason so yeah cameron i think you did a great job that was awesome uh robin is a part of this too right so robert excellent job as well you know i want to say the first thing i want to say is uh is that i'm inspired by holly that is super dope to see that type of inclusion to know that um we had a policy in place to make us recognize the importance of inclusion and giving our people opportunity so um yeah that's i mean that almost made me i don't i don't i haven't cried since vietnam um bad joke forget it all right but i'm just saying i haven't haven't come to tears in years but that holly was that her energy her unbridledness being raw like that

161is super cool so uh thank you for showing us that video um and and yeah you know i was in the uh the equity meeting earlier so i i saw a lot of this stuff earlier and i want to say you know your plan is super fresh i like the fact that you haven't planned out for five years um i like the fact that everyone's engaged in the meeting um and you're just doing a hell of a job so keep that up but i i have something else i want to say though just so and this is not a knock i just want to understand a few things like how do we come up with the name a place for everyone because i thought this is going to be called equity equity meeting just anyone

162have an answer for that so when we set a place for everyone this is an equity a place for everyone was strategic goal one and there are lots of different objectives under it so equity was part of it falls under the umbrella place for everyone oh my gosh yeah and just walk me through this real fast so when we created this equity policy what was what was the impetus like what was the origin of the policy like why did we start that policy that's that's not rhetorical i really want to know the answer to that question it sounded rhetorical i sound like i'm speaking rhetorically but i'm not no that's a it's a good question you know as we you know i think at the center of it it's an accountability piece you know it

163holds us accountable and i think it's important that in order to hold us accountable for you know the commitment that we that we've made toward equity you know it gives our stakeholders a way to hold us accountable you know and i think you know as as we continue to really you know engage our parents on the policy it's educating them on the policy as well and if we're not doing our job from an equity standpoint this is a way for us to be held accountable and for us to you know do what we need to do as a collective in order to meet people where they are and create a place for everyone so you know more so accountability i think it it adds that there yeah and i think that's the that's the important

164piece of it right because i've always thought that you know if you if you're yeah i think i think i even mentioned this in the media if we ever had to run the tape back i think i mentioned it meaning that if we if we focused on racial equity and speci in particular when dealing with um the issue with black and white right racism right that everything else once you focus on that one thing then everything else can be tapped into my only concern is and it's not really a concern it's just the one we'll put on put it on the front of our mind to make sure we don't forget these things that are important is that we still have an issue with racism right we still have an issue with the data from

165that points to african-american students not performing as well so i want to make sure that we continue to focus on those things too because that was kind of like the the reason why we even decided to have an equity policy in the first place remember that's what got the ball moving and i just don't want to bury it uh with um you know an ambivalence or um as you can imagine someone buried it so just just let's make sure we keep our focus on that but i mean overall like this presentation coming back full circle was super great and uh nah man keep it up keep it up for sure thank you very much appreciate it thanks thanks and i think to respond to that i think you know one awesome thing about the policy

166is that a lot of it's found of its foundation if you compare it to our a bar presuppositions it's a lot of the same language so its origins and its foundations you know were were created out of anti-bias and anti-racist you know uh presuppositions you know so that as we move in the future that meat of that a bar focus i think will always be there right yeah i mean i mean yeah right i mean just that type of uh mentality is it's just not it's not conducive for our district and really it's not conducive for our young kids to grow and all those things i did have one more question though before i give the mic to joe you mentioned um that there's a master's certificate for the 15 hours from the school of

167maryland right um what's the incentive for these teachers to get that besides just wanting to be better in terms of uh how to instruct by from an equity uh lens it's a good question i guess i can kind of and a lot of this is contingent on some other things my goal is to have kind of an equity champion group in each building you know to where they have a level of qualification and certification in order to be equity leaders in those buildings maybe one day you know fingers crossed we can attach a stipend to those features so that you know whether it's professional development whether it's you know day-to-day conflict resolution within the building we have teachers that have a capacity you know to lead that work in the building so it's something that

168you know essentially every building has their own equity hub and system and foundation that they operate from you know to ensure that each kid individually on a daily basis is getting what they need right yeah yeah that's well that's my first thought was you know we want everyone to be essentially um i mean if it was if i was the superintendent i mandate this to happen but that's not gonna happen right so but i think it's a great i think it's a great idea and i think you know there being some kind of you know sniping on the back side it's incentivizing these folks to to get this type of training it's going to benefit this district in general and that becomes like the standard when we hire we're looking for you know do you

169have this certificate or not because 50 55 80 of our staff has this you know this particular um training so i appreciate that i mean good job guy good job that's why jason to that we're trying to build capacity at all levels you know including and cameron mentioned that including that the dlc level with our principals administrators making sure that they can't have any type of conversations they need to and so it's not just with our teachers you know trying to make sure that it's at all levels true go ahead joe so just echo i think great data great videos great um examples of creativity i think you know doing a great job [Music] i do have some questions some of which you might predict the first i've asked before which is it's awesome to

170have professional development but the how we measuring the effectiveness how we making sure it's go you know i mean so it's not about quantity right it's about quality and what folks are doing it in the realm of professional learning knowledge is the least and then skills and then behavior change right is the highest level and so how we making sure that all this great professional development is making a difference i think one thing to keep in mind is that it's a it's a marathon not a sprint i think we're changing up entirely you know how we create an educational experience for a student using our panorama data in terms of you know sense of belonging in terms of meeting social emotional needs in terms of each kid feeling empowered within the classroom you know side

171by side with our academic data our disciplined data or where we're scoring on standardized tests so i think right now we're in kind of reset mode in terms of changing a mindset in terms of what professional learning and growth looks like i think you know in setting up these systems like i said it's a five-year system in terms of what that curriculum looks like um in terms of building capacities with you know our equity and excellence cohorts i would say it's you know hard to gates what that looks like after one semester um i think often times we try to perform this work you know kind of in a microwave type of way and i guess data that i've read and have and i've you know kind of based how we're operating off of is

172that when we do it kind of in that quick fashion there are no results um and again i think you know in talking with a lot of universities in terms of what their curriculum looks like especially the mcdaniel college in maryland in terms of them having a 10-year program running what some of their data has looked like over that time period so you know the goal is that as we continue those numbers progressively get better and looking at you know the start of what that curriculum looks like and what do five years you know through the curriculum looks like especially as more and more teachers get that professional learning you know and like i said our learning is geared on student experience our panorama data engaging students humanizing you know their experience rather than you

173know just kind of trying things so there's no real like hey this is what we're doing it's like hey engage the kid if this kid is saying they're this is their experience and this is how they learn we're adapting to that we're usually we come in with strategies and hope hey this should work for most kids so i i i think what the change of mindset i think in terms of us having real data to really to really look at it'll probably take a bit more time but i think that you know by you know having kind of a low and slow approach you know we're going to be a lot better you know at the end than if we you know focus on numbers and focus on improving numbers we're taking away the humanistic

174aspect out of our students so by really focusing on the students i think we we create an environment to where we can see systemic change rather than you know right so i'm glad you mentioned panorama um because that was one of my other questions so are we gonna then do because panorama has equity scales so in in terms of the student experience right around diversity equity and inclusion are we going to then include those because then the students will reflect back to your point about student experience not just general sense of belonging but more specific to diversity equity and inclusion in the various elements of it are we going to kind of incorporate those elements of it because panorama just last year incorporated those scales we're on it in our equity committee meeting today we

175went through all of the equity questions to look at which ones we want to use which ones we like what what free response questions we want to use how do we put this in the in within our panorama survey are these appropriate six through twelve can we moderate this to be three through five so that's actually what we were doing today and we're looking to incorporate those questions in the next round of our panorama surveys in the spring good that's awesome um my next just two other questions real quick one is um so i think it is amazing that our teaching staff is getting more diverse but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's more representative of our student population because you know if we have 60 white population and 14 black population and 16 asian

176population et cetera et cetera but if we're hiring all latinx staff right that's not necessarily representative of the of the the so is it getting more representative also of our student population because to your point i and i think you're absolutely right on it's so important for a student to see some you know somebody that represents them right whatever it is um so is it is our is our teaching population getting more representative of the student population as well as getting more diverse because those could be two different things yeah it definitely can be two different things and i think it's a it's a couple ways to view it i think definitely we want you know if we could have complete proportionality across the board that is the goal and if we do have a

177teacher who isn't black that's asian or latino and they're able to meet a need then we definitely want to bring them into you know our organization as well i know last year you know we had a you know we didn't have as many teachers as we hired this year but i would say that last year we had a very diverse population in terms of multiple races that are in there um i think that again that's something that we'll continue to work on that will be a process and i also think it in terms of seeing also where is the biggest need in terms of you know academic achievement sense of belonging things like that and using that data to say if this is what sense of belonging looks like for a certain population of students

178or this is what you know academic levels look like for a certain portion of students maybe there's a need more so to bring in this type of teacher versus another one and not to say that you know all you know all levels of teachers aren't you know are aren't wanted and needed but i think it's a matter of kind of incorporating that strategically in terms of again when we look at those numbers you know academically you know or achievement wise where are we putting our focus so i think it all kind of correlates and works together with that so it would just be great to see the the change over time of the representative you know staff mapped out to your point correlated to student population so how that's moving too okay for sure i

179mean i think that would just be nice to see um and then my final question is just more of a comment i think it's awesome that you're also taking it to the board i think that's awesome and i think you should just take into whatever you do with the board you may want to take into account and i'm sure you're already thinking about this but the you know the april turnover right that you know if you have a year long from now right we're going to get to april and you could lose a couple board members right and so thinking through how do you have that continuity right you know kind of from as you bring you know you if you had six months of training and then you got to know you know how

180do you get the let's say two new folks as an example up to speed that kind of thing right because there's always that turnover in april yeah and i think that's where you know when we talk about kind of tiering it so as everyone gets to a certain level continuing to progress and if someone's coming at a different level meeting them where they are i guess the same way if we had you know turnover in one of our principal or assistant principal spots you know still ensuring that they get that foundation you know the same way your one teacher would get a year one administrator has that same type of system in bit in place too so um yeah it's keeping that in place so as we do have turnover we we are meeting that

181need good i appreciate it great update thank you hi tana yeah i actually have a really quick question um so these conversations that we're having with teachers is it and this might be unrelated is this like something that we're also going to be having with students because i think there's a lot of times when this is also like a conversation that needs to be have with students because for example like with the gender neutral bathrooms there's a lot of people who don't understand that like this is a safe space for a lot of their peers um which kind of causes some sort of disrespect between them which you know i think could be solved by like having a lot of these conversations especially maybe at early ages um so that they understand and see i

182guess i'm just asking like are we gonna be able to have this conversation with students too or is it just aimed towards teachers no we want to do it as a collective i think you know including students you know in the process is probably the most important thing um you know in terms of learning those experiences and knowing what's happening you know on the ground level um i think especially as we continue to dive into our panorama data in terms of i mean it's the students feeling it out so you know having those courageous and tough conversations amongst our our students in terms of you know what is happening and i think the big process you know with especially a trickle down from our teachers as well as this is the data that we have

183we can break it down by student by different subgroups now it's time to go engage those students and see exactly where where the needs are um and i think developing that level of communication you know is super important so yes that that that is happening right kim yeah thank you for the presentation i mean i've been a lot since then already i do agree with ivana that the more we can engage students earlier the better and i'm i'm not i guess i'm not sold that we i think the panorama didn't i know we need the panoramic data half of my muscle we need that we need it and we need to activate those modules that are more somewhat objectively or that in combination with whatever data maryland is using since that seems to be the

184model for best practice how they measure their successes but what i'm not convinced is that we need to wait for panoramic data to start having those discussions with students you know if we can have courageous conversations with adults and we're really here for students i would love to try to accelerate those conversations among students the older elementary and school stage you know the earlier that we could start having those the better and if we're waiting to train staff to be able to facilitate those conversations and then i understand the you know the delay the sooner we have them the better so because i think that it will um that capacity building that you're talking about happens in the student body as well so that the issues that you have seen at the high school with

185the bathrooms and there have been issues um you know don't occur five years ago when we're looking at the that's fair that's right for sure i mean anything a student first is you know where we want to go okay great steve well i i [Music] first i wanted to tell you i i you know i went to my first equity meeting today and i greatly enjoyed it we had a our group had a really interesting at least for me very interesting conversation about the panorama survey and um um which leads me to my second it's really not a question but sort of a comment and i you know my comment is where the hell were you 15 years ago when my kids could have enjoyed uh the benefits of of the changes you're making you

186know we have been we clayton have been addressing this topic for a very long time not very successfully and so i was really pleased to see the things i saw so anyway um i want to make a slightly adverse comment to what joe is talking about on the hiring okay clayton is a really peculiar community okay but our kids go all over the country and so um i think it's really irrelevant to me what the ratio of uh you know black uh you know students asian students in in our little community what is important is our kids are going to be out in america and so uh as you you know look at what our i think our our teachers should represent what america represents as opposed to you know you know what the ratio

187is within our little clayton school district because you know they're going to be gone soon and they won't be you know necessarily many of them come back but hanging around in clayton so um and then i also a tie into joe's comment um you made a comment and i uh i'm sure they were powerful about these courageous conversations that these among some other things were very effective okay and i'm just wondering um was that you know sort of the people who were in it their feedback i guess how do you know i mean i'm listening to you a comment that um i understand that um quote progress in the overall issue is not going to happen in a semester but how what is in the interim what do you you know how do you decide

188that this is a great i you know this is a good program no that wasn't so good let's not do that one again or you follow what i'm saying yeah so following every professional learning experience we give a survey to our teachers or educators and and asking them you know about their experience if they felt they grew from it you know what the important aspects of it you know of it you know of what occurred within the learning experience and ways to get better um so we had overwhelmingly you know positive you had positive feedback from the teachers in terms of how it stretched their learning their thinking you know and you know really forced them to think in a way they hadn't had to think about you know especially as it pertains to their

189profession so a lot of our you know and and one thing that we're intentional on doing especially especially as we get a lot of things off the ground me personally if i see a a negative response to something that i've led i'll go engage that teacher one-on-one i mean the goal is to reach every you know every learner so as we're having that conversation you know the question is what what could we have done better as a collective for you to have you know a valuable learning experience and we've had some awesome conversations with a lot of our educators and asking those questions and i'm appreciating you know that i feel like that's a perfect opportunity to model the behavior we want to see with our our students if a student isn't performing or having

190a favorable experience let's engage it head on so i think you know that gives us a good opportunity as well and able to use that feedback from the person who had the most negative experience and apply that to to future planning great thanks barry thanks cameron um on the uh the busing um changes that we were talking about can you just remind us um the the vic buses how is that transportation paid for or allocated to us when it's working the way it has worked before this year are we we can just do do you know that i'm just just thinking about how that affects the class and where those things come from mary jo do you have details on that i hate asking a question that's yeah i was just kind of trying to

191put it in context on how that the funding for that is normally works and how it's being impacted now this this is the uh the routes that are in place prior to the one that we just took over are all funded through the vic program um and then separate from the vic program any students who are in transition that cost in collaboration with whatever the other district is that the student's coming from or going so but we are currently still working with vic to determine what um what the financial relationship will look like to the route that we just took over but for right now we okay so so it's not something that and sort of before this had to happen it wasn't that cost wasn't specifically allocated this is something that's a part of

192the vic program and so i'm sorry that was kind of an awkward way of asking that question so obviously it has some financial impact on us um and we'll determine how that if if that's adjusted with vic or whatever setting that aside i mean is it is it something that you think cameron and i don't know if you have an opinion about this or or or anyone else um but would would that be something that um we would think about even if we weren't in this current situation of shortage of bus drivers and things like that would that be something that we might suggest we take on on in a permanent role regardless of that and we think about putting that in the budget or is this is this truly like a temporary thing in

193this moment does that make sense i'm sorry i hate asking questions so i mean i have some caution in this so i mean it's great that we can support the program but currently we only have one additional bus and so what when you're driving buses on a regular routine route which we only have one you need backup buses we could be on an athletic run in the evening and then we could get it back home you know back to the school and we wouldn't be able to use it in the morning so you need at least one or two backup buses so i think and i'm not quite sure do they have three or four buses on our route normally um let's see we've got i did not mean to do this i'm sorry um

194for our elementary routes we have the kaplan combined route which we cover we also have um one separate uh vik bus that covers merrimack as well as a cab that is run through vic for some students who are a little bit out of the range of where the other students are and then we have um three that service the secondary schools so the number of buses that we would have to purchase and then also consider that the program is declining so we will vic is even trying to figure out how in the future they will deal with consolidating the bus routes for the decline and the students participating in this program because i think is this the last year of accepting students or two more years two more years two more yeah but the numbers

195are going down so that's the caution so i mean if we wanted to do it you know it would be probably purchasing at least five more buses for the district hiring drivers because all of we don't actually have bus drivers we have grounds guys with bus licenses because we just only do afternoon routes so it would be a i mean we can consider it but it would be an investment for the district but gary i appreciate you asking that because that is a excellent example of equity in action right we have kids that go to our district that are not getting to school on time so are we willing to have that conversation about how do we make that happen so i really appreciate you asking that question and in my opinion we can make

196it happen we just have to figure out how yeah and and while this current example is maybe an exacerbation of that it's not actually an entirely new situation so that's i i have a question you mentioned uh the reduction of vic students right because the program is being closed down my question though is how many black students right now are in first grade in the district you know i can tell you how many are in kindergarten or kindergarten go with that um one at glen ridge three at merrimack five at captain that's not just just black students yes so only on one black kid is in kindergarten and glen ranch right now one class correct tight that's tough so yeah so that that stands out to me that's tough because you know it's always tough

197being the only black kid and [Music] oh look at all your eyes make sure you all know i'm saying this there's always stuff being the only black kid in the room that's tough and and you said and it's five at captain set and like three merrimack or whatever yeah it's tough that's something we need to consider because there's a lot of emotional play happening in those and now i mean i have no idea i don't know that kid but i just know historically it's always tough being going black kid especially in a district like this so great yeah that i mean that's why jason remember we talked a few weeks ago and i said um you and i are on the phone that i think it's important for us to have a start having that

198conversation this year about you know what is uh the board what is our you know what our collective views on you know the vic program is being phased out that's our reality and what are we you know we talked a little bit about maybe having the conversation with the city too i don't know if they're willing to or not willing to but you know i do think it's an important conversation for us to have this year um so i i mean i mean i mean it's it's kind of so let me just put it in perspective you're right you you're right we did have this conversation on the phone and um but i didn't know the numbers no i did not know the second thing though is like um you know what can you do

199i mean you know we're kind of our hands are kind of tied right i mean at this juncture i mean we don't have this conversation now i don't want to get off yeah no i mean i like envision us having a retreat or and talking about it and and that format you know unfortunately it's you know way a way bigger conversation deserves a lot more time than what we have tonight um but i can promise that we will be having it this year yeah cool sure uh it's a combination of all of resident um you know district employee children um and then fix students as well and like i said those numbers get a bit smaller in terms of admittance each year and i know multiple kids are um in district employee children too okay

200if there's no further questions or comments cameron thank you so much um i appreciate the presentation uh is everybody okay or do you guys need a break or you want to power through keep going okay um we're close okay all right jason the timer's on um okay so we're gonna move on to uh where are we we are on number 12 which is um i think the second reading we need to approve our hazardous materials um policy uh item 12.01 i move that the board of education approved policy dk payment process presented in the report provided to the board second okay it's been moved and seconded any questions all in favor aye any opposed motion passes item two point twelve point zero two hold on a second do you need to recuse yourself here oh

201we're okay oh i'm ahead of me i'm sorry i was jumping ahead go ahead stacy item 12.02 i move that the board of education approved policy e-b-a-b hazardous materials as presented in the report provided to the board it's been moved and seconded any um comments okay all in favor aye opposed motion passes now joe's leaving okay item no sorry 12.03 i move that the board of education approved the ptte for sarah miller second been moved and seconded comments i i just it's not really a comment but just is it just pure coincidence i mean i've only been to two board meetings and we have the same thing right am i right about that we separate her out because of no no i understand that part but it seemed uh oh i see so normally sh

202because joe's on the board it would have been a consent item okay yes yeah okay yeah thank you [Music] okay oh um all in favor all right any opposed motion passes [Applause] okay well oh we need joe back all right go for it stacey okay item 13.01 i move that the board of education approved the consent agenda items 13.02 through 13.09 second it's been moved and seconded any comments i do have one yes i know we don't often discuss consent agenda items but i just wanted to um thank you dr arnold for your work on the um early resignation plan because i'm sure that took a lot of work and i think that it will be so beneficial to the district for many reasons one of which is the hiring practices that we talked about

203earlier with cameron because it just allows us more time to hire more diverse staff so i just wanted to um thank you for your your work on that thanks all right um all in favor don't vote guys all in favor aye any opposed motion passes okay uh uh financials okay item 14.01 i move that the board of education approved the payment of current expenditures and investments for july 2021 as detailed below second been moved and seconded are there any comments okay um all in favor any opposed okay motion passes so that brings us to public comment do we have any none oh nobody wants to talk to us tonight okay what about board communications go ahead stacy okay um i attended the first pto council meeting of the year over zoom and um it was

204great to hear and um dr patel was there as well i would say it was great to hear that all of our schools are finding ways to get the communities back together again like for example i know merrimack had a movie night outdoors last friday night which i think was really well attended and each of the schools are finding finding different ways to get back together and it looks like it sounds like everybody's looking forward to that of course after such a long break from activities um the clayton education sandy was there from the clayton education foundation and she gave us an update on what they've been doing and about the book donations in honor of dr dougherty's retirement we heard from the all in coalition and it was also nice to hear about there's

205a the district-wide food drive that the pto council is organizing in conjunction with the clayton education foundation and i just also wanted to say it's really nice i was so happy to see sandy from the clayton education foundation at the pto council meeting because i do remember a couple years ago that they were kind of overlapping or duplicating fundraising initiatives and so it's so nice to see them collaborating together and not stepping on each other's toes so anyway it was it was a great to be back with that group um and then i also went to the um special school district governing council meeting for gary who was unable to attend christina blankenship who's our pac-ed president is now the recording secretary of the governing council so she'll be attending all those meetings which is

206great to have her as well as tiffany has two representatives from clayton that attend those meetings of course tiffany's on the board special school district board of education um and we received an update on um the new partnership updates that a committee um put together and we're going to be getting an update that update on those partnership agreements um shortly i think as a as a district too so oh and then just i also wanted to mention that um i should say i attended in quotes i watched the high school curriculum night and um it was virtual again this year and i actually had mentioned to dr patel i just i actually think it's great being virtual and i would probably assume that there's even better attendance because everyone can kind of watch it on

207their own time and don't even have to watch it live i wasn't able to watch it live and so um i think it's a great way of teachers presenting their information and they you know it also can share their screens and and share lots of materials that way that's much easier and like i said parents can watch it on their own time so i thought the teachers did a great job with that um with that too and i'm sure i guess all the schools probably did it that way but the high school was the only one i saw and it was great so thank you um anybody else amy yes um so um thank you stacy for attending that meeting for me it was at the same time as the parks and rec meeting um

208which i was uh able to attend um not uh the couple of things that they're really focusing on right now one is the community survey that just the clayton just did and they kind of reported back on aspects of that that affected parks and recreation they're also getting ready to go through a master planning process for um for the parks and rec facilities so we talked a lot about that but one of the things that i thought was really um a a great takeaway for me with with with that that committee and that patty was reminding us about is that the um our y-down students our seventh and eighth grade students are right now able to use once again um the facilities that we have at the center and you know we've put a lot

209into investing in that and supporting that and i think it's something that i had actually forgotten about and hadn't realized what's happening and i think it's just a good reminder of the partnership between the district and the city um that we need to keep you know remember that that's it's something that affects all of our students we think of it as part of the high school and it's an important facility for the high school but um you know continuing that happened because this board pushed for it so i'm glad to see that they're they're able to do that again now as they've opened back up so um but um yeah that was about it so thank you anything else wellness committee no i couldn't go did you say jason to the wellness community almost committee

210all right you guys don't get gold stars for that one um okay um it's really late itana i'm sorry do you have homework okay um stacy let's adjourn you sure you want to oh yeah so i'm sorry i thought you might discuss what we're doing yeah so nisha and i talked about it earlier today and i i think kind of where we are is that um given where we are with kovid with the state of things um we're going to i mean i think nisha's gonna go um but the plans for the whole board to go as a group i think we'll will wait until maybe next year if anybody really wants to go um you're welcome to go nisha and i also talked about actually instead of that this year maybe going out to

211the national school board conference which is in uh in april um and that way we would have the opportunity to learn from some some national districts so we thought that was something that we started talking about this morning and dr patel sent me some information on that so we're going to talk more about that so if anybody wants to go to kansas city still let us know um but um just with covet and the and where the world is today we're gonna we're gonna um let it go gary do you want to go by myself all right uh i move that the board of education adjourn second okay all in favor all right okay motion passes thanks everyone