001[Music] so congratulations to all of them and i'm looking out in the audience melina since you're here congratulations as well and then dan dan's here as well so congrats to you as well anybody else that's here that i missed okay well congratulations to everybody there uh that's great on behalf of the board of education we are uh uh we congratulate everybody and uh more important lee we are uh we appreciate your years of service and the teachers and central office and uh everybody on the facilities team you guys are what makes this place what it is which is the best school district and we thank you for all of your hard work and your years of service so uh dr patel do you want to go ahead and move on to superintendent communications will do
002thank you so i'm going to start off by first and foremost thanking everybody including all of the board members including my co team and then all the administrators all the teachers parents and students for the support and guidance you've given me so far as i settle into this role so officially thank you from the bottom of my heart you have no idea how much it means to me and i get to work with amazing individuals every single day and you make me stronger every single day so thank you for all of your work for that and as we're getting ready you know where our kids are going to be here monday and we've had a lot of busy busy few weeks especially last weekend this week we had an outstanding week last week where we
003had our new teacher induction and we had all of our new educators come in and a lot of professional learning with them we've had our district leadership council retreat that we do every year to set the vision for the upcoming school year we've done a lot of professional learning this week with our teachers you know especially today we started our content pd and then building pd will be spread out throughout the week we've had opening day which is another tradition here unfortunately we didn't do it in person we did it virtually but for opening day you know we had george kuros the author come in and he did it via zoom but it was a great professional learning opportunity again to like show how we want to make sure our kids are empowered and through
004their learning by various forms so and his work really connected with goal two of our strategic plan so it was exciting to see that so a lot of busy um work but making sure that we're getting ready for our kids and so we're so excited for monday to come and get and i know that just talking to the students that i have been speaking to they're ready to be back in person and so with that i also want to thank everyone for the support that you have provided us in making sure that we are a safe environment in getting our kids back with all the mitigating factors including making sure that we're wearing masks masks is a very strong mitigating factor because it also will allow us to not have to quarantine if both the
005parties have their masks on properly that means the kids can stay in school and that means we can start to carry on some of the normal activities that we have so that is something i do want to thank the entire community for their support on that and then also one of the fun things i get to do is like i look outside the my office window or i'm walking around in the different buildings and you get to see students who are out in the fields practicing so you know fall season is here and practice has started so it's neat to see all the cross country kiddos literally at 6 30 in the morning right out here in shaw park enjoying in the heat running around and then the other day i think i looked down
006i'm like what are they doing and it was yoga they were doing a little bit of yoga right there so it's been great to see all of our students getting into the swing of things i think they're excited to be back in school in person so that's we're looking forward to it and we're looking forward to a very strong smooth start next week and we'll be doing a lot of building walkthroughs as well so excited for that thank you you should join their yoga practice i will definitely be talking to them i don't know if i'll be joining them amy okay um itana do you wanna uh can you give us an update on uh what's going on in your world yeah um just working yeah okay um so hi everyone my name is aytona
007rosas linhard and i'm gonna be this year's student representative to the board of education i'm really excited to work with you all and and to help represent the students in the district as we slowly start to move towards a sense of normalcy after over a year of a global pandemic i am extremely grateful for this wonderful opportunity and will strive to do as well as caitlyn and adam before me i would like to thank everyone who has supported me and also mentioned the classmates i'll be working alongside zoe hall the student director of diversity equity and inclusion anisha durang who will help the district advisory council connect with the middle and elementary schools and the district advisory council itself which will help to represent the students in the district across multiple grades although the pandemic
008is ongoing it continues to take a toll on everyone's lives slowly some things are starting to feel a little more normal and while a return to this normalcy is exciting and refreshing i know that many students may feel overwhelmed at this return after some students have been learning remotely for over a year i can't even imagine how stressful it would feel to go back to school in less than a week and it's not just school but many other aspects such as current events family situations and more that deeply affect students mental health this year that is why i think as kids come back into the buildings and back to a sense of normalcy it's crucial to value social and emotional well-being as well as mental health in the district we should continue to foster a
009sense of belonging and comfort no matter what race gender or sexuality a student is they should wake up in the mornings excited to go to school without the fear of being treated differently for who they are the construction of gender-neutral bathrooms at the high school is a big step in the right direction but we still have much more work to do together to achieve greater equity across all schools in the district as student representative i will focus on facilitating increased communication to not only the high school but the elementary school and middle schools so that the district advisory council and the board of education can better identify and solve problems at the root with a greater sense of communication across all schools and between all students comes a greater sense of belonging i hope that
010we can come together to create an environment where students feel heard and understood in the coming year and every year after that once again i'm excited to work with you all over the next year and i'm looking forward to seeing the great changes we will make together thank you thank you itana that was that was great thank you you did a great job um we are for those of us that are following along we're on uh section five which is the information item and we are going to get an update on our safety security and cyber security so if we can get chris and jeff please to head on up all right good evening everyone thank you for this opportunity to talk a little bit about safety and and cyber security and all the the
011work that we've been doing here lately in the district to focus on this so when we think about safety and that's actually the part of this we kind of broken this up into two parts we're talking about the safety piece first jeff is going to talk about the the cyber security kind of same topic but not a whole lot of overlap um between the two so when we think about safety here in in the district and and when i think when we talk about it tonight there's kind of really three things that we think about um that's driving this conversation um which is kind of the firm belief that next to learning you know keeping our students and staff safe while we're at school is one of the most important things we are charged with
012so that that's kind of an ongoing commitment that the district has two years ago during proposition e the the tax levy that we passed back in april of 2019 we made a commitment to the community that if they supported that that we would follow through um with you know a intensive study of what safety looks like in our schools and then take the steps necessary to to make some changes and make some improvements which is what we're doing and then we also have to to think about when we talk about safety especially in a public meeting that we we do have to keep it at a very high level conversation and and and and limit some of the details and things that we talk about because we don't want necessarily you know all of our
013safety plans or security measures live streamed on youtube for for everyone to to really see and and listen to [Applause] so what what drives a lot of the conversation that we've been having about safety lately in the district is the safety study that we completed we actually uh finished it up right before we all scattered for covid back in winter spring of of 2020 and it was an opportunity to really look at any gaps or opportunities for improvement that we had in planning training and physical security of our buildings and and to really look at all of our district facilities so not just our schools but our administrative center our facility services uh buildings as well as all of our outdoor fields and and complexes so when we went through the the safety study like
014i said we really went through all of our campuses and locations and we looked at a number of different things kind of four main things really that that drove um the the questions that the group that was evaluating this were asking and and that group that was evaluating this was an architectural firm called bond architects who is actually um well known for their safety and security work within the k-12 public school environment and a group called tier one tactical solutions which are the kind i wouldn't say inventors but they are the proponents of the model that we use for active shooter training the four e's escape evade engage and educate i always forget about the educate part thank you so um and and they do a lot of consulting and and work with bond architects
015on safety studies so we looked at all of our facilities and looked at entry control and visitor management we looked at kind of what are what are opportunities again for improvement that we have in those buildings what are this what are the training procedures that we're using with our students and our staff as part of our ongoing safety program and how can we improve those across the district and then you know what are the plans that we have in place in case we we do have something really bad happened and we need to get students out of the building and and safely to to rally points and reunification points so that kind of really is what what drove the the safety study the things that we've seen come to fruition as a result of of
016the different opportunities that we have in that safety study we made some changes to our active shooter and intruder training that we do with our staff we moved that actually we had that on monday of this week we moved that up into opening week to provide that training and a refresher for our staff at the beginning of the school year as opposed to previously we were just we would just kind of try to find a point in the school year where we could could slide that in last spring tier one went through analyzed all of the places that we had identified at our schools as as rally points and what a rally point is is that when is when a when a school when students and staff need to escape from a school rally points
017are pre-identified points around that school there's usually two or three where they go to that they'll know they'll be safe those locations are shared with our partners at clayton police and at st louis county so that if there were an active shooter or intruder situation or something like that they would know that you know these three points around merrimack school for example are where students are going to be gathering and we're going to get them picked up brought to a reunification site or brought for medical treatment or anything like that that they may need this week we actually started the final pieces of implementing our visitor management system so that kind of ties into some of the construction that we've done in our buildings which i'll show you pictures of of later but there is
018so that'll be a that'll be a new thing for our students and uh parent well actually not for our students i'm sorry but for our families for visitors in our building and in line with what you've seen a lot of other school districts in the area do in terms of of being able to to manage and screen the visitors that are coming into your building and then we've got a pretty lengthy list of physical improvements that we're doing to our schools uh phase one kind of started and is is wrapping up um this week into the next couple weeks and then phase two we have work scheduled in in the rest of the buildings as well as here at the administrative center for the summer of 2022 when we looked at some of the physical
019improvements and different things that you'll see at our schools once this is all said and done so once this is all said and done it's still about 12 months out from now but creating opportunities for what they call a single point of entry and control into all of our buildings we have some schools that had multiple entrances um even though they were locked and and monitored we've we've kind of brought that down to to one single entrance that has a transaction window and actually a vestibule for a visitor to come into identify themselves explain why they're there before they actually gain access to the rest of the school again really kind of getting in line with with what best practices are for visitor management in in different schools this will also look at just places
020where we can improve you know security cameras and and monitoring looking at places where we can improve the security of some of our doors and windows and then as atana mentioned earlier we also looked at took this as an opportunity to create some gender-neutral restrooms in each of our schools as part of kind of the social emotional safety component of of this work so this just shows very quickly how we've kind of broken the work up in into two main phases the work this summer was focused at captain glen ridge wide down in the high school next summer we'll be at merrimack the administrative center and family center and and facilities and that's mainly for kind of the in ways with it we're changing physically changing the building entries as well as putting in gender
021neutral restrooms and then next summer is when we will do all of the work with security cameras monitoring changing outdoors working with with some different systems to automatically close off sections of our building if we needed to make sure that students needed to be put in a safe condition uh in a in a very short order a very short amount of time so just four quick slides that shows pictures if i don't know if you've been into our schools and seen what seen what you're looking at this is the the new visitor station at clayton high school now it is not complete because if this was complete you would actually be looking through a wall right now that would start you know right about this column and come across the lobby that would actually separate
022and create a little vestibule there for people to come into the building check in or drop off drop off a lunch have a child called you have a child called up front to take to a doctor's appointment that sort of thing then on the right is a picture of the the still under construction the gender-neutral restrooms that we're putting those are the ones actually on the ground floor over by the art wing and then at high school because it's because of its size there's a second location on um i don't know if it's it's i guess it's the first floor because it's up a half flight of steps but over by the music over by the music wing over back kind of tucked in behind the administrative offices there you see a similar thing at
023y down the front office there if you can kind of look back behind that door that has been reconfigured and that desk is up against that transaction window and then the the vestibule that's already there in the you know in the entry to wide down kind of becomes that that staging area for visitors to come in and check in or for parents to come into the building and pick up students drop off lunches that sort of thing and and do that in in a way where you know we can still provide that level of service and access but also um not necessarily let them into the building if they're just there to to drop something off or have some sort of transactional business yes steve how do you address the fact that buildings are used
024for voting no and i mean we you know when we had buildings set up to um to to be used at polling places we usually had alternate entrances for them that were um as best we could locked off from the rest of the school so we would continue to do that um if we want to continue allowing our schools to be used as as polling places this is the front office at glenn ridge coming in and i think this is glenn ridge is probably where we'll see the biggest kind of procedural change in terms of you know there will really only be one official entrance to the school which some would consider now the kind of the the back of the school um but the the a phone and the buzzer to come in on
025on the front side of of glen ridge will no longer be active and and parents or visitors will need to come around through the back part of the school and we're working with beth and her staff there on making sure that that she communicates that out to her parents as well but again you know bess and the white down photo showed you know doors that were still missing just because of of covid and some of the delays in construction and manufacturing um mary jo can talk a little bit about that if if she needs to but we are seeing some of these projects that will will be finished up you know probably a week or two after school starts um just because of of the materials delay um and then on the right is a
026a shot of the gender neutral restroom up at glen ridge and that is up in the fourth grade area right now is where they decided to place that and captain's the last one if you walk into captain you'll actually see the see that this little visitor station has actually been built out into the front lobby that will actually separate off one side of the lobby or one side of that vestibule from the other again what's missing here is a glass partition that will will create this little entry area over here they haven't had a chance to put the doors back on yet that would that used to be there and again creating that single point of entry and control for parents and visitors and people coming to our building and then on the right is
027um as of today where we are with construction on the the gender neutral restroom up at captain that is up by the fifth grade area if you're familiar with that um talking to mary jo a little bit about this before the before the meeting and she said they have plans to work all weekend and have a lot of the materials in place so they do think that they'll have these restrooms online and and working when students return on monday we talked a little bit about the visitor management system so that is a new that is a new procedure that we'll have in place at all of our schools we finish up the last bit of training with with all of our different school front office staff tomorrow so we will ask all visitors volunteers and
028and vendors parents guardians or you know oasis volunteers um to check in with us with this system it does perform a sex offender check on your you know on the the name and and date of birth that's on the id that's given to them um when when it's you know when someone checks in with the system uh the system also has the opportunity which is um which is actually probably the the biggest benefit that we will see from it of putting together lists of just all the other issues that front offices at schools have to manage so if you have a non-custodial parent who's not supposed to be there with to pick up a student or or something similar to that we can create you know we can put that information into this system create
029a notification that automatically happens that lets the principal the counselor that school school resource officer know that that somebody who you know is shouldn't be there or is not supposed to be there at that time is actually there so then we have a team of educators that can come in and help diffuse the situation it's also something that integrates with our district issue id badges so it also in addition to being a visitor management system replaces the paper sign-in sheets that we have in a lot of our schools that we use to keep track of who's actually in the different buildings district staff can just use the barcode that's on their id to scan in and check in when they go to the buildings and then in terms of kind of what our ongoing safety
030program contains i mean these are a number of different things that we look at probably the most significant and important on that list and which is why i'll kind of give it a slight of its own is our school resource officers and the partnership that we have with the clayton police department we're fortunate enough to have captain mark smith here with us tonight as well as jack bogger and herman whitaker our two school resource officers that are there and and in in talking with uh with with our sros talking with all of our principals about um the the work that they do i mean yes they obviously play a you know a large safety and security role um in our schools but i think the the expression that i use is that they're just there's
031so much more than just that um in there i mean our sros are our mentors they're counselors um teachers positive role models to some of our students i mean they they spend the bulk of their day um not dealing with with with discipline issues or you know anything related to that but building relationships and connections with students and and and making you know a meaningful impact uh on their on their lives they get regular professional development through the nasro which is the national association of school resource officers so they go to state and take turns going to state and national conferences every summer in addition to completing a course with them when they're actually assigned to first become one of our school resource officers and then in terms of the rest of the things that
032we have um in our ongoing safety program of course we have all of you know the the required drills that that the state and dece and our fire officials here in clayton um asked us to do on you know regular in in in regular intervals we talked a little bit already about the the kind of extended version of the active shooter and intruder training that we do with our staff we also do school-based intruder drills with our students once every semester not to the level of intensity that we do with our staff that we just did on monday but do go through um you know the the idea of escaping evading or engaging and talking to students about about rally points and where they would go if if they did need to leave their building
033in a hurry so that's really kind of the bulk of of what we see as our ongoing safety program and that also covers you know all the various improvements that we're doing so i don't know if we want to do questions about this now or we want to do jeff's piece and questions we can go ahead and do jeff's piece and then do questions overall if that works yep okay there you go [Applause] hi everyone it's good to see you in person um mr singer nice to say hello to you uh welcome i thought i got to say hello to you so um good evening everyone before i get started i want to introduce a couple really important people that are here tonight so adam jones wave adam some of you know adam he is
034our technical operations manager and i wanted to really highlight him because he is an amazing individual who is so crucial to what we're about to talk about so i wanted him to be here and also sitting next to him is chris chris de will who is our data systems manager so as you can also imagine is very connected to the work here tonight and so i wanted them to be here as well because it's such such an important topic and they're so critical to the work that we do so thank you guys for being here so um as we think about cyber security i think each of us has a notion of how important that is to us as an individual person um where we're thinking about things like our bank accounts or thinking about
035our digital footprint um thinking about our computers at home all of those are really important considerations for us as individuals when we start to scope that out and scale it out to a large organization it becomes you know critical because it's not just your own information that you're worried about it's everyone's information that you're worried about so i put a just to sort of ground us in what we're talking about tonight with this i put a definition up here that is pretty widely accepted definition and it really talks about how you're going to protect your stuff your data from from the people who shouldn't have it and make sure it's accessible to the people who do need to have it what it's not really saying though is that really it's not about the information as
036much as it is about protecting people and i think that's really what i want to stress tonight is i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the things that we do from sort of a system standpoint but i'm not going to spend a lot of time on it i'm going to give you some highlights of that because really what this is about is kind of protecting people so all the things that i'll be mentioning tonight are about that we use a variety of resources when we're thinking about protecting our people and our data all the way from national agencies some of these you may have heard of you know even the department of homeland security we're connected in with with lots of national resources to help us stay ahead of potential vulnerabilities potential
037threats that might be coming our way so some national resources help us with that we recently joined an organization that's called well they love their acronyms by the way but ms isac we thought we were good at acronyms in education but i think they might beat us ms msisac is an organization that the school district of clayton belongs to that basically is a is an information sharing agency that's connected to um to the center for its internet security and then funded also by the department of homeland security so the idea there is it's not about just getting information about possible threats it's also about sharing information about possible threats with others and so i'm excited about that partnership because that's fairly new but what's happening happening in the world is a constant progression it's a
038constant move to try to keep up with some of the threats that are out there you're never done with cyber security you're just strengthening your cyber security stance as time goes on so we have these national ones that we look at we also look closer to home we use a variety of resources just in the area to help us kind of keep up with with what we need to know and that includes things like a missouri consortium that we're a part of for student data privacy we're actually on the leadership board for that group and it's a startup that happened just a couple of years ago right before covid and we've continued to strengthen that organization and there's there's a number of school districts now in the state that are participating in that work about
039protecting student data we take advantage of lots and lots of additional resources including some some sort of penetration testing and auditing of our cyber security uh so we can get a third party you know perspective on this and so all the re i mention all this because all of it sort of plays a part in informing us and helping us not only um sort of prepare but also respond in the event of something happening so i talked about you know protecting people and really that's what what this is about some of the things that we do to to help our people are listed up here but i'm not going to go through all of them but this idea of thinking about we're all just we're all just people trying to do our jobs we're all
040just students trying to learn we're all just families trying to connect and so we we can sometimes fall victim to all kinds of you know bad guys trying to get our information so to try to help the end user our our stakeholders our students our staff to protect them we have a lot of things in place so whether it's spam and content filtering whether it's the approach that we take to allowing certain applications to be run on a computer those kinds of things are really important and one of the most critical is really the training for the for the person to try to remind them of some of the you know some of the dangers that exist out there so whether that's our staff with annual staff trainings whether that's our students that we work
041with digital citizenship lessons those constant reminders are really important and they're really important for all of us whether we're at work or we're at home and we're going to protect our credit card information etc so we really kind of take that approach about about protecting the the end user on a more technical note we also do what they call system hardening as much as we can so this is the idea of sort of applying best practices you know for our data systems so whether that's like off-site backups and patch management whenever there's a vulnerability that's detected and you guys you know you watch the news and there'll be like microsoft vulnerability apple this you know breach those kinds of things all of those things inform the rest of the population in the world to watch
042out what to watch out for and a big piece of that is um is making sure that you are you know staying up to date on um on these applications and these operating systems we have vendor controls in place we have a lot we encrypt our connections uh from point a to point b we have a lot of physical controls to keep kind of people out of a data center for example um and it kind of this list sort of goes on but again the point here is more about the if you had if i had given you a list five years ago it wouldn't be this extensive and in a few years if we have this conversation again some of the things on here will be replaced with something new but it's an ongoing
043process and i think that's what i really wanted to bring tonight was that sort of recognition that we're never 100 percent protected against anything but this idea that we understand our mission about about keeping students safe and our staff safe and so the things that we're doing are going to continue to do and continue to evolve are really pointed in that direction and doing the best that we can to make sure that we're we're watching out for those vulnerabilities we know the bad guys are out there we know that we have something that they want and so we're taking the measures to try to prevent that as much as as we can and make those steps and so i again i asked adam and chris tonight because none of this would be possible without the
044work that they do and if i was to be honest that we if people listened in our conversations they may be a little bit like bored to tears because we're talking about safety secure maybe not bored they're just like okay we get it privacy is important um but that is the reality that those are the conversations that we have on a daily basis um that we're constantly thinking about that and putting it at the top of the list so with that um i would kind of that was the end of my piece and i'm we're happy to answer some some questions so jeff you're basically saying that i need to make sure i change my password you do need to okay thank you jeff um thanks guys that was great um so i have a
045few questions um what is quick tip the the anonymous reporting system that our students use or which is what's quick tip yeah quick tip is is i mean it's not it's available to more than just students but that is the that is kind of our anonymous tip line um you know we've had students use it i mean we've had community members use it when they've seen things going on at our school playgrounds that sort of thing so it is it is out there and available and does do you think everyone knows does everyone know about it like how do we publicize that that exists so we um throughout the school year last year um ran you know regular pieces of information on social media to push that out um had posters up at our secondary
046schools about that and we planned to kind of renew that push this okay good thanks and um i wanted to um thank you for giving such detail on our on our sros and this might be a question for later when we're talking about the contract but are are officers boger and whitaker staying are are they going to be our sros again this year okay i think that's great and the reason i ask is i'm so glad you brought up that like such a big part of their role is building relationships with our students because i think um you know especially for our students of color and our black black students who maybe have a mistrust of the police i think these guys developing relationships with all i mean all of our students to create a
047trusting relationship is so important so i was happy to hear that and i i'm glad also that you said there's a lot of courses and conferences they attend for training but um one question i did have as far as our role in it is do we share with the officers our discipline data that we know is historically skewed you know that our that our african-american students typically have you know have higher discipline rates that we've talked about you know in our equity work and i'm just wondering do we share that data with our sro so we can work together to alleviate that um that that's a question that i would i might not be articulating that well did that make sense i think i think what you're asking is do you know do we do
048we work with them or do they understand um you know where our discipline data is yeah and and how we're working to correct the inequities really right yeah um that's probably a question that would be better answered by somebody else um besides besides me so i don't know if um i would kind of look at that at robin you know or dan maybe or dan just as just to see what that role is well i think it's important to clarify that um suspensions are given out by building principles not sros but there are times where a disciplinary incident does involve us having to report to law enforcement and we may rely on our sros to help us gather information or help us connect to resources that they need but they do not actually play a
049role in like the actual administration of consequences with disciplinary incidents right do they have a general understanding of some of the disciplinary things that our building administrators are working on yes because we do at times need to rely on them but they do not play a role in the administration yeah that's actually that's exactly what i was looking for so that's great thank you i just want to make sure like they're a part of that community and those discussions and understanding the inequities that exist you know with students that are either disciplined by administration or require you know the sros intervention so thank you that's all thanks and stacy thanks for bringing that up because as we talked about earlier looking at disciplined data is part of one of our action steps in terms of
050analyzing that right so having the sros be a part of that conversations once we do have the data in front of us and we're analyzing it would be a great lens to have as well so appreciate that great joe so uh so thank you guys this is great um i appreciate in particular that um we used the opportunity to um look at sel physical safety and you looked at the you know we we're doing something with gender neutral bathrooms that's awesome um maybe not necessarily your guys role but i encourage us to look at uh other mental health supports right i mean when we think about right this is the physical piece but you know there's also the mental health um support piece too so i this is a general comment but uh just two
051two questions um one is so i think the visitor management system is great but um my question is right in the age of kovid uh and my nemesis delta is there anything that uh we're doing differently with the visitor management system around covid or or is it just kind of as is in other words are we restricting in a different way folks coming into buildings because of covid or is it you know per this protocol folks can come in as long as they meet this protocol yeah i think i mean do you want to talk a little bit about our visitor protocol or the visitor management system with covert or do you want me to oh no so what we've decided um as far as covid and a number of visitors coming into the building
052right now for first quarter we're allowing it obviously the expectation is that if they are in the building they're following all of our mitigating factors which means wearing masks at all times when you're with somebody else and making sure that if there is a meeting that's being held that's a community meeting you know we're trying to social distance as much as possible but we're trying to get back to as much as normalcy as we can while still keeping all the safety places and safety factors in check okay um and then my next question is uh you didn't speak to it but in the presentation there's something about uh the consideration of vape detectors and obviously vaping is a big deal right i mean kids are doing a lot of vaping maybe even in our bathrooms
053in our schools because we can't video there um so talk a little more about what you're uh um well it's true um and um talk a little bit more what you're thinking about vape detectors and that piece of it so that is that is something that we would like to take a look at during phase two um we've we've done enough research into it to know that it is a pretty heavy lift from a standpoint of budget a budgetary impact i mean to um you know the the vape detectors i believe are anywhere from about twelve to fifteen hundred dollars per p you know per per detector um you would need two to three detectors in a restroom because they're based on on square footage so um just in looking at what that what that
054budget lift would be to do that i have had conversations with kim shironi who is the the director of the allen clinton coalition and she has been exploring some opportunities that are out there to possibly find grant funding to come in and and help support something like that but those are you know that is what's there would be a low voltage installation in terms of like the power and and all of that work is is intentionally bundled in phase two so it's it's in what we would be looking at doing next summer uh we're just going to need to to figure out it doesn't really make sense to do them just in some of the restrooms at the high school if you can't do them in in all the restrooms so i think it's looking
055at what that would be and then you know what the what the cost benefit analysis is thank you just uh on the question that um joe asked about coming into schools and uh and um colbert protocols what if someone comes into school and doesn't want to wear a mask have we gone through a process on how we're going to deal with that that's a great question i wouldn't say we have actually mapped out exactly what we would do the conversation would be just like anybody who would walk into let's say into even this board room and refuse to wear the mask you know we would start off with trying to have a conversation with that person trying to help them understand this is our protocol this is what our expectations are and they say absolutely
056not then at that point we would ask them to leave you know but we would hope through our conversation we can get to a place where they would be willing to do that thank you um both and uh the uh other guests for being here with us and talking about this i do think it's really important um especially tying back to what we told the community that we were going to do in proppy and these updates are really really great so i appreciate that um i too had a question about um first question about the visitor management system and i think i understand that and it's a great improvement and it's a bigger change in some schools than others i just want to clarify chris a little bit that this is a program that we
057can if i understand it correctly we can implement during school during the school day it's not necessarily something that when our schools are used for other events correct the intent and the way you see most public schools using it is that that that program operates during school hours so in any any time that you would actually um if you think about our schools and and the way the new visitor stations are set up or even the schools where you know you have a person who is responsible for greeting guests anytime that that person is there during kind of what we'd say normal school or normal business hours yeah i just i just think it's important that everyone understand in community and we we have a lot of events in our in our schools at other
058times and i just think that's important for people to to grasp that distinction so when we have board meetings in schools as we do sometimes or pto meetings or other events it's a different type of regime correct or when we would have you know band concerts or something like that at the high school we would not have you know would not have that system in place um after hours we we do have you know alternate ways to explore how we would use that system for an event that would attract a large group of parents like during the school day for example so we've been having those ongoing conversations with mainly our elementary principals is where you would see you know those those are the schools where you have big parent type events during the school
059day you don't have a lot they're they're far less frequent at the middle school or the high school yeah makes it makes a lot of sense and then i mean jeff i just wondered if you could maybe um we've talked about this a little bit too in terms of how cyber security and information security is an evolving and growing part of your um what you what you handle and and how you manage is can you give us some sense of um how much of uh the department or or yours personally like your your attention or time needs to be kind of focused on that i know it might be hard to kind of tease those things out but i just i just want to make sure that we're we're watching that that demand and that
060need as it grows and making sure we're allocating resources and time and energy appropriately yeah that's a good question uh there's no way i can give you a percentage but but you know it does it to sort of answer your question though you know a few years ago the board adopted the policy i think it's ehbc which is designates an information security officer as a person so that was a that was a big deal because what that did is kind of really put a pin into say we have a person we've named who that person is whose job it is to really be thinking and it would i was already doing it but like this idea to say now we have we're putting something behind it we're saying this is this is happening it wasn't
061just symbolic though because what it did was it really it was across missouri um it really sort of well maybe that sounds bad but like people are like wow this is a thing we really need to pay closer attention to and so as a you know across the state people that are in positions like mine started to really maybe take a slightly different stance the the system hardening part of things has already been going on for a long long time and i can't speak for everywhere but but here for sure i'm not spending much time more than i would have before but if we talk about data privacy specifically for students who are minors who are protected by different laws than adults are and how the number of engagements that we have with third parties
062so app developers right the free app well did you read the privacy policy and if you did you're gonna maybe a flag will go off so as consumers we often just click through those like because i want to use this app but we don't do that here and i think what that policy did is it gave us an opportunity to say okay here's why we're asking these hard questions about privacy here's why we want to see that privacy policy here's why we might have to say no and we we do sometimes say no if we if we have to say no sometimes we can actually convince the the vendor to modify their privacy policy so that we're it satisfies our standard so in that regard it does take a lot more focus and energy from
063that because when you think about technology moving as fast as it does the number of apps that are out there the number of in things that are innovative that we might want to try continues to ratchet up and so finding systems to try to manage the kind of the workflow there have been really important for us and we've done that but to be honest yeah there is more way more focus now than there was a few years ago and before that way more before you know than before that so i think we're just seeing that natural progression so i think that's a fair question i don't know how to put a you know enough but i can tell you how it has been evolving over the last you know especially the last three years it's
064especially in the student data privacy side we've seen some really good improvements in vendors in in state consortium uh to try to help manage it and take some of that burden off individual people and and spread that around a little bit so we can kind of use each other's work uh it's for the benefit of our students i appreciate at least trying to give some insight into that and um i feel confident that you will keep our attention on it and let us know what we need to be doing in terms of your passwords thanks you both so i have a a couple of questions and then a a slight editorial so i've been wondering what it was going to be like to be sitting here again it's been a very long time and i
065have to tell you i was stunned by the quiet this is not a critique of chris when you talked about the active shooting training and it saddens me tremendously that somehow that has become a normal that we have accepted and it's not normal and we should never accept this not in any way buying that we shouldn't do this but it is uh breathtakingly unnormal that a a school district is spending lots of resources and and time on that so that's the editorial part and it's kind of a time warp to me to think that um it was i wasn't on the board that long ago uh that we didn't talk about that and um and here where it's like you know it's like teaching math you know it's just sort of part of the game
066and and that should not be normal so but my questions really are about cyber security you talked about uh that you do an audit and penetration testing so um and as reference points this is related to what i do work wise do you do we have a third party company doing a a cyber security audit yes yes so we oh go go ahead it was there and i guess is there a document that then is presented to the board as part of that no nothing was presented to the board we've done this work we're we're due for another one and so there could be something we we think about uh for this next round but we we have engaged we we've engaged um an external company that we paid to to do this sort of
067vulnerability testing okay so this is like looking at our servers and looking at the the details about our network and and actually like poking to see what ports are open and those kinds of things it's very very technical you know like you would like you would understand then from the results of that then we can make modifications and adjustments and and um and take you know take take advantage of the fact that we have that data the second way we do this is with um a relationship with morenet with uh with our as you know as a member of morenet we get we get access to their cyber security experts um and so that was actually that sort of uh audit is really an interview process for us to for them to ask us hard
068questions about security controls uh and provide them with the information about how we do things and how things are um how things are configured so that then we can either get essentially sort of rated on a scale for each of the the controls and then offering suggestions so we are due for doing that again this winter and so that's our plan is to go through those processes again so we're really looking but we don't have anybody just so i understand you're not doing anything in in industry with like a sock 2 or something like that where you're looking at our policies and procedures and seeing how they measure against an industry standard or a governmental standard or something like that i mean that's that's essentially what's happening when we're putting them up against the cis
069controls which are the the the center for an art security controls that's what we do whenever we have that so that's the industry standard and we're measuring our sort of stance against those controls but and there is a document that's produced or okay um so you know it seems to me that the board's our job is obviously procedures and process rather than the details i guess i would be interested in understanding um you know more about that process how we mitigate um to make sure that you know um i assume that they are constantly uh um finding things and then you know how how do we mitigate all that and you know our is all that being mitigated not i i don't know i don't want to know the the details of what i want
070to understand the process better uh basically similar to you know on the financial side uh i want to make sure that we have uh controls in place to make sure that this is an area i think that the board should be involved in making sure of that process and then on the penetration testing you so do we have a third party [Music] i mean there are a number of accounting firms offer that service where they effectively try to break into your systems and then therefore identify weaknesses yeah that is a layer that we have not done with the full penetration testing where you have essentially a bat you know somebody posing as a bad guy poking at everything what we've done is on the end on internally we have intentionally let people it let let
071this company pope from the inside and so we're it's a little bit different approach but it's not it's not a bad approach it's a good approach it's just a little bit different but that was that was a couple years ago that we've completed that we're coming back to it again and so that's definitely on the list of things that we're considering okay going down the row here so it's funny mine's a follow-up kind of steve's question i had penetration testing and auditing and have we done it it sounds like we did some form of it a couple years ago and it's up for renewal again so it's kind of similar question to steve usually there's like a red flag report that comes out of that and is were there any red flags that came out
072of that that then were addressed two years ago or between now and two years ago that now that it's up again these yeah i don't would say we had any red flags we had we had things that were suggestions for us to to change and we we've done those things okay um at least and more so this idea of like you know that was two years ago so you know we said you know it's constantly evolving and so this idea of what happens on a you know it's not like something we just put on the shelf for two years right and then come back to it this is something that is constantly on our you know conversations and our adjustments um and our environment changes so every environment change kicks off another review of that
073and your environment changed a ton in this past 15 months of covet too right so when you talk about the number of apps that are being used and the privacy policy around apps and um you know penetration it's also penetration through you know things like zoom and which we've you know all experienced in some way shape or form either here at the board or our kids experience so this next round of penetration testing and auditing you probably incorporate something because i think we're retaining some of that stuff right which wouldn't have been on the radar two years ago and i know in your world i'm looking at your whole team here um you know the pace of change with which that stuff changes is almost impossible to keep up with whether you're an army of
074three or an army of 300 um and then i heard you use the the actual term server so i'm assuming we have physical servers and we're not in the cloud right we're a combination we're accommodation okay and then with the physical servers are we do we have backup servers that we're downloading to off-site or okay we do so and we feel pretty good about that in terms of i feel good about that um i'd like to thank the sro officers and um for being here tonight i know you guys all have family at home and cuts that you'd probably really hang out with we appreciate you being here tonight um at some point this year i'd love to get uh you know maybe an update from hear what the sro are on how our kids
075are doing with drugs and alcohol and along those lines i just wanted to mention i don't know if we've had any conversation i know homecoming is coming up um you know how we're going to manage that night i know that's a experiment i am sure dan and his team have been thinking about it for quite a different in quite a different ways especially having homecoming in the middle of a pandemic and how we're going to address it dan i didn't know if you wanted to share things do in terms of like the parade and the bonfire in the spirit games that sort of thing we're still kind of uh holding in a holding pattern on the on the dance uh just kind of being perfectly frank we were gonna see how the first two or
076three weeks went uh the school year so we've been kind of focused on that and then we've got some other ideas about possibly moving it outside or doing something of that nature but we're still kind of in the and dan do we do um breathalyzers okay well and amy not to go back to the future anything but 12 to 1500 for a vape detector does not seem cost prohibitive to me so that's the other thing that i would add i mean it sounded like you needed two vape detectors per bathroom and you probably need them just in the middle school in high school and to me that's not a cost prohibitive number so that doesn't include wiring also on the gender neutral it must be in every stall so overall the initial estimate was about
077a half a million now that is cost prohibitive so okay that's a good point of clarification because when i heard you know three thousand dollars a bathroom we can't have more than 15 bathrooms but half a million dollars is yeah that's a big nut question for you so just real fast what's the um i don't know anything about vaping and how you buy it and what the ages are what's the age on like buying vape products depends if you're talking anybody who might know anybody who might have them yeah same as tobacco it's 21. so so i was wondering i'm just thinking about like we can find it at the at the back end here right when it's too late they're already smoking in the bathrooms or we can as a board be more um
078proactive and try to fight it at the legislative level trying to prevent these things from becoming um available to these kids same thing with our issues within guns we uh in 2013 2010 we passed some egregious laws and we've had horrible suicide rates ever since then and so we could do a better job of playing more offense at the legislative level as opposed to always trying to spend money to play on and play on the back after these bad decisions have been made so there's something for you all to think about what's the thing about and i need to recuse myself okay um action item 6.01 i moved that the board of education approved the ptte listed below second okay been moved and seconded hi are you opposed motion passes and we'll get joe for
079us you get joe joe come on back joe okay so we are on to seven uh number seven which is consent items uh before we i stacy before you read the motion i want to recognize a donation um from the mel-min family for their generous uh they they uh made a generous donation for the natalie mellman memorial award natalie mellman graduated from clayton high school in 1996 as an exceptional student and student athlete she was a vital component of the baseball program and her role as student assistant she loved clayton high school and clean high school love natalie tragically she passed away on march 2nd 1999 and we will continue to honor natalie and what she meant to the high school by post hosting the natalie mellman invitational at clayton high school so um thank
080you for the donation with that i will uh ask you to please read the consent agenda yes um item 7.01 i moved that the board of education approved the consent agenda item 7.02 through 7.13 second okay it's been moved and seconded i have a question yes um i have a question about the sro contract and i think it's a three-year contract so i think i wasn't on the board when we did this last time but there's like a clock there's a clause in there that says the district quote unquote monitors and evaluates the officers develops the job description the goals the procedures who when it says the district is there is that chris like who in our district oversees all of those things chris do you want to respond to that so we we work
081so the the administrator who is the the safety supervisor coordinator which is which is me um we work with our principals um as as well as our student services folk to gather feedback and and make that evaluation and um you know i i probably didn't emphasize this enough earlier but what what great partners the clayton police are actually in this and they've always wanted to to work with us and engage with us to make sure that we have the right officers in the right place doing the right things for our students thank you oh i'm fully supportive these guys are great i just was it was such a broad term to say the district oversees those things i was just curious who in the district does and i guess that's you thank you okay great
082so it's been moved and seconded um any further questions okay all in favor aye aye any opposed motion passes unanimously and we are on to number eight which is uh the financials you just need a okay i move that the board of education approved the payment of current expenditures and investments from may 2021. second moved and seconded are there any questions yes [Music] kim so i want to thank you for putting together the summary it sounds like there's most of the delays and the expectations in cash are because of delayed really tax revenues or protest revenues that are coming in that might that so that's last year um uh we had 14 million dollars of protested taxes withheld which was about three million dollars higher than the year before and so um i had an
083update in misha's friday memo but we have already paid back this year already two million dollars in protested taxes so those 14 million got a lot of them got settled in favor of the taxpayers and so i would like to know as soon as possible anyone who would like to have a discussion about how we move forward with that so okay great and i saw in the friday memo but i wanted the community that may be watching to hear that basically there were like seven or six seven six or seven major uh settlements that i am asking the county to look into and give me an idea what the cause was so and i want to thank you for your attention to that because you and i have been over in between detail what properties
084those are and i know that you're trying to chase them down and trying to chase them down it's like swimming through a sea of black holes so um i really appreciate your attention to detail on that trying to figure out how to navigate through a system where there is no clear path right down that line and then the only other question that i had as i was looking at our investment accounts and i'm glad to see that we're i'm excited about our half a percent on 20 million now that's really good [Laughter] yeah a lot of money in there right um and it may be a question maybe that we take to long-term financial planning committee when we have it but um i know the clayton education foundation for money that is not that is
085kind of held aside similar to this money this kind of rainy day money i would consider this held aside has looked at alternative investment vehicles um that i think might even have a better return than half that and i'm not sure if that's something that we do have a board policy on investments and it does align with the state and it's pretty restrictive it's pretty much just federal fund-backed yeah yeah c cds yeah yeah cds are our second best option normally but then you're capped at 250 000 and you have to go to 50 000 banks so which is a pain okay but we do every once in a while so but right now cds aren't even any better so if we wanted and we are restricted by whatever the state yes we're the same
086we have the same investment policy as the state so yeah not a whole lot take my night there yes be happy with our half a percent yeah that's what i want to have a conversation about there there are implications with that decision so i want to make sure the board is fully aware of the implications of that decision yeah however whoever you know i can't have more than three board members and then we will bring it back you know i just we need there's there's three options so i want to talk about the different options that we have so yeah thank you cam and steve yeah and that whole process is really transparent at the you know just we just need to figure out it's not something that we can make on the spur of
087the moment at the meeting we have to have a discussion of which direction i'm going before the meeting so because i have to have state approval before we do it so okay all in favor hi hi any opposed okay motion passes unanimously um chris do we have any public comment tonight no public comment okay so we are on to board communication and i will start that with a a meeting that i had on july 19th uh and it was for the development council and um we we at that time it was before the uh the august third ballot issue of prop a but so as most of you know that ended up not passing um we talked about um the rumor that has come to fruition that the starbucks at the corner of high down
088and white island and hanley was going to be closing which it has closed and there are several new developments in clayton forsyth point the resident end bank of america lee meridian bemiston place and the reds so hopefully those will generate some revenue for us in the coming years and um those were the highlights of that meeting and i know that uh parks and rec had a meeting uh gary or stacy you have any update on that oh you're not on parks and rec okay and yeah i'm that so that met last monday i think um i don't know that there was anything that was particularly newsworthy um patiology just does a great job of updating everything they one thing that i did kind of um just personally that stood out she talked about how much
089the their participation in camps this summer was was up so much and i think with um you know certainly a lot of some requests filled um you know demand that was left from summit quest and it seemed like that a really successful program um but there wasn't really anything that was um too too big news or anything to report back we are sort of just sitting listen on those meetings we're not making decisions with them so okay great yeah i mean so the committee assignments have been emailed out there i know there's been a few changes um there's a sustainability committee that in april will end up will appoint a board member to that but we're going to hold off on that until april does anybody else have any updates yes steve i have a
090question yes okay and that is i'm sort of confused on what the protocol is for for communicating okay i can only relate what we used to do which is it doesn't make it right or wrong but we used to if one had a question you were supposed to email it to the board president copying the superintendent and all the board members and then a response would come back to everybody and that doesn't seem to be your protocol so i'm trying to understand what your protocol is so that's fun it's that you brought that up i actually earlier today i had asked sandy to email me our onboarding guide with our protocols i didn't know if we had ever even provided that to you yet but i do have it in my sitting here in my
091inbox uh for you and so uh yeah typically what the protocol is is that for questions you would email the board president um and uh dr patel and the rest of the board is not included on that in that correspondence and then i think if if it is something that uh would benefit the rest of the board then we would uh discuss it and make the rest of the board aware of it so is that is that your recollection joe yeah and steve the reason for that is because of the um open meetings act because the temptation is if the whole board is copied somebody responds and then we have a discussion over email and if that's more than three people then it's actually a violation of the open meetings act and so that's the
092reason why the whole board typically isn't copied because some people forget right we're all human we just forget and we respond and then all of a sudden we've started a discussion that we shouldn't so well because the upside is is better communication somebody sees an issue i would certainly respect whatever protocol i would also add to that i guess the other part of that is that when any of us the other part of that protocol is that when any of us has a question for nisha that the amy is copied to protect nisha so that no one of us is bombarding her for lack of a better word um so that the board president can always kind of keep tabs on on our communication with her as a form of protections and i will whether
093it's a text or email or whatever it is i will email you the latest uh iteration of of our onboarding guide and our board protocols um obviously you know it's it's a living document and um that was our best thinking uh close to two years ago when we when we did it and so um you know that could be a topic that we talk about in a retreat setting uh later on this year um but i will i will make sure that you get that i'll send it to you right now amy can i just say one more thing about that which is and the uh thought was that if it's important information that um you know sean before and now nisha now would share that information in a friday memo or with the whole
094board so it wasn't to preclude the whole board from good information to your point it was just a whoops nice it was a mechanism to um to make sure that there wasn't a response but we certainly want to have the full communication and it's been sent to you so i will uh let's i think that if nobody has anything else um we can um have stacy read our motion to adjourn okay um 11.01 i move that the board of education adjourn second okay all in favor all right all right any opposed all right we're going home