Board of Education Meeting 1/19/23

001foreign good evening everyone with it being 6 30 I'd like to call in this meeting to a attention with the Pledge of Allegiance okay board president Lang would have liked to been here tonight but regrettably she's at a funeral and has other family obligations so I'll be running the meeting tonight would I like a motion to prove the agenda for January 19 2023 as presented Chad and Janet all in favor all right any opposed eyes have I believe we have special recognitions Miss Jennifer joles thank you Mr ziggemeyer it's full house tonight I love it everyone's coming out to see our special recognition guests so tonight we are celebrating some amazing Educators from across the district who have recently received or renewed the highest credential in the teaching profession national board certified teachers are highly

002accomplished Educators who meet high and rigorous standards the certification through the national board for professional Teaching Standards is a voluntary process in which teachers work to advance the quality of teaching and learning like boards certified doctors and accountants teachers who achieve national award certification have met stringent standards through intensive study expert evaluation self-assessment and peer review a new national board teaching certificate is valid for five years with the opportunity to renew certification and here to introduce the fhsd teachers who have newly acquired or recently renewed their national board certification is Dr Jesse Altman thank you I'm very excited to be here tonight to honor these amazing Educators they have put so much time effort and hard work into this accomplishment I'm going to start with our newly certified teachers and so when I call your

003name up if you will come and be recognized and grab your certificate and if you will come to the very front of the diet and we'll do a group photo once we get our newly certified recognitions so I want to honor Jessica Fury Jessica Ferry is a Barnwell Ela teacher she has been in the district and been teaching for 13 years [Applause] next we have native Nadine friedline she is a business teacher at Francis Howell High School and she has been teaching and in the district for 26 years [Applause] next I'd like to recognize Francine Hill Francine works at Causley Elementary she's an English learner development specialist with 20 years total teaching and 16 of those at Francis Howell [Applause] and finally for our newly certified teachers I'd like to recognize Adam Catman Adam is

004a business teacher at Francis Howell High School and he has been with us and been teaching for seven years a another great Round of Applause for our newly certified national board teacher [Applause] thank you love it congratulations again now I'd like to recognize those Educators that have recently renewed their national board certifications so I'm going to start with Denise columbini she is a literacy coach at Henderson Elementary she's been in education for 21 years and 18 of those in our district congrats [Applause] next I'd like to congratulate Shannon Krebs who is a band director and teacher at Sager middle school and she is 18 years here with Francis Howell [Applause] next I'd like to congratulate Stacy whitnauer a second grade teacher at Henderson Elementary she has 26 total years in education and 17 of those

005in France's house thank you there are four teachers that also renew their certification that were unable to be with us tonight and I would like to recognize those Educators so Joelle Sanders Horner is an Ela teacher at Francis Howell North she has been teaching for 11 years and nine of those within Francis Howe Kimberly linnemann works at Francis Howell High School and she is an English teacher and has been with us for 18 years Aaron manfel is at Francis Howe North a journalism teacher with 25 years teaching experience and 22 of those at Francis Howe and finally Andrew mezerly is the band director and band teacher at Francis House Central with 15 years of teaching experience congratulations to all [Applause] thank you and one more big congratulations to all of our newly certified teachers and

006renewals hey thank you Dr Altman our student board representative this month is from Hollenbeck middle school and here to introduce her is Helen Beck principal Dr Ali Klaus need my readers I'm getting older here uh thank you so much to our superintendent and to our board of education for the opportunity to showcase one of our best and brightest at Hollenbeck as she will serve tonight as our school school board honoree uh Liam maag has been described by her teachers counselor and administration as someone who is a model student she is unbelievably kind responsible and leads by example additionally several teachers commented on her being extremely hard working and communicates effectively with her teachers when she is struggling because she wants to fully understand all Concepts that are being taught finally Leah values her education and

007the relationship she has with all of those individuals around her she supports her classmates but also allows for them to support her she is patient inclusive and understanding and we are so blessed to have her as part of our Hollenbeck Community please help me everyone to welcome Miss Liam to you she is just an outstanding representative of her peers and proud of her and her continued accomplishments please put your hands together for her [Applause] that's right [Applause] thank you welcome Leah Miss stiglitz will get you all set up there you can comment on anything that we're talking about tonight the only thing you can't do is vote okay all right and my last part of tonight Robin Engel and Miss Lisa Simpkins they're going to present our best practice presentation good evening board thank you

008so much for giving us an opportunity to introduce you to and share some information about uh the Francis Howell grow your own Teachers program we have titled this the how grown Educators program so recruiting high quality Educators is vital to the success of our students grow your own programs are designed to support districts in developing their own teacher pipeline by attracting and supporting our students to be future teachers we are helping to ensure a strong future in education research research supports growing growing grow your own teacher programs as a viable means of creating a continuous supply of quality and prospective candidates approximately 40 percent of Missouri's new teachers leave the teaching profession by their fourth year of teaching and over half of the teachers leave teaching before year six educational research also indicates that not

009only do people tend to go to college where they are raised but they often tend to return to their hometowns to teach furthermore more than 60 percent of Americans teachers work within 20 miles of where they went to high school grow your own programs across the state vary in the supports that they provide to students our focus in starting this program is to educate Francis House students about the profession and to encourage and engage them in considering education as a profession and as a career the department of Elementary and secondary education offered each district a ten thousand dollar Grant to be used over a two-year period to support the growth of a grow your own teacher program and Francis Howell chose to use this grant to create a position to start this program a grow

010your own educator coordinator the position was posted and it was open to any Francis Howell School District employee interested in helping us to develop this I'm pleased to introduce you to Robin Engel our grow your own teacher program coordinator Robin teaches family and consumer science classes at Francis Hall High School this is her 11th year of teaching and her third year in Francis Howell and she's going to tell you more about the start of this program Robin thank you um thank you for having me here today I am a teacher in the district but just as special to me I'm also alumni of the district so our program is called how grown educators our purpose is to support our students and alumni who are pursuing a career in education we're doing this by offering them

011Hal perks this benefits our community and our district because we're opening or aligning applicants up with open positions it's also promoting growth in the field of education and of course helping our students and alumni how perks are opportunities we can help to support our alumni and students as they pursue their career but it's also like going to be based off feedback and ever-changing based off that feedback so it's what our district can currently offers so we're offering like professional learning opportunities um communication job openings jobs while in their field of Education so this program is just starting out but we've already done quite a bit of stuff we started out by having brainstorm meetings we have about every other month and it's a great great committee that gets together I give them an update of

012what's Happening they give me pretty good feedback it's very supportive and um based off their experience my experience and our connections we plan our next steps so we knew our target audience to start out would be our College Alum College of Education alumni because we know they are student teaching or going to be graduating soon so we want to make that connection pretty quick to them so we started a database to get their communication uh we are able to see what certification they're in what college they're at when they're graduating and that's an ongoing database but we reached out to them and asked how can we help what can we do to support you so we planned a holiday lunch and learn which we'll talk about in just a second but we also asked them

013like what can we do to get into the high schools and get those kids excited too based off their feedback I went into each High School building and hosted a meeting at the beginning this month I promote the program I talked about the career of education and also told them about opportunities of work while they're in high school as well so focusing on our first Hal grown educator event over winter break we hosted a holiday lunch and learn it was awesome um we reached out to our alumni and said what can we do what what do you guys want to see what do you need help with and based off their feedback we created an agenda so we had a lot of speakers and they talked about why Francis School District is so great benefits

014working here job opportunities while they're in the field of Education or the College of Education and also allowed time for them to chat with Francis school district teachers and staff all the feedback was positive one of our alumni said it was beneficial to hear how supportive and welcoming everyone is with the district I still loved getting to learn about all the opportunities we have it as a future educator within Francis House School District uh we tried to make it very casual because we wanted them to feel comfortable so we got up and got moving they got to make connections talk to people around the room ask questions and it was a lot of fun another alumni stated I found it really helpful to see all the people in person that are emailing us and helping

015us along our journey to become teachers I liked how we got to learn from all different aspects of the district and learn about different opportunities so using their feedback oh sorry too far um using their feedback and our high school feedback we planned future steps so this is what we plan to do next for the alumni and the high school level we want to offer a summer learning opportunity they all stated they want more they want more help with resumes and interviews and job application process and talking to more teachers from each specific content area so we're we're going to do that and then the middle school and Elementary level we kind of plan on following that grow your own teacher outline and they suggest having some sort of career presentation about teaching getting those

016kids in lower grade levels that they can help out which a lot of our buildings do but trying to create an incentive like teacher of the day where they can really see how it is to be a teacher so this program is just starting out but we have lots of future steps and we're really excited to keep going do you guys have any questions board Patrick okay fine um if you need a board member or Community member I would be happy as a retired teacher administrator to join as just a patron to come to your meetings and I think it's a wonderful thing that you're doing um so many of our students are out there and it's scary you know and personally you know having people come forward with resumes and their applications and they

017needed a lot of help and it's sad that we don't provide that and I think it's wonderful that's something you're giving our students thank you thank you no two words forward any other questions thank you ladies thank you [Applause] all right we're moving on to our patreon comments during Patron comments residents of the district and staff members are invited to address the board on issues related to the school district s are called forward in the order of sign up and each speaker has three minutes to make their remarks please remember that only one speaker is allowed at the podium at a time and combining time or giving your time to someone else is not permitted the board appreciates that you have taken the time to come to the come this evening and we value both

018your input and perspective I would like to remind everyone that we expect that speakers will remain civil and respectful when giving remarks if anyone fails to comply with board policy regulations and rules we reserve the right to cut those three minutes short for your convenience our three-minute clock is ready we welcome Tom Ferry to the to step forward to the podium hey good evening um I want to kick off tonight's Patron comments by talking about our most valuable Assets in the district our teachers and staff how can we as parents and community members be more supportive I encourage everyone to watch one of our board candidates recent videos on this topic he talks about how we can and should show teachers the respect that they deserve and how we can come together as a community

019to find solutions for legitimate issues one thing he touches on but doesn't really detail uh too much in detail is money so let's talk about those and let's talk about the impacts these are on real dollars by the way I found some information on our 2010-2011 school year so compared to the 2010-2011 school year Francis Howell's operating budget is close to 30 million dollars behind that's 10 years ago and we're 30 million dollars behind this creates incredible daily challenges for our students our staff and everyone associated with the with the district from small things like tissues that were just asked about constantly to provide to bigger staffing issues like janitors or custodians I'm sorry and paraprofessionals we certainly can do better Francis Howell has the lowest per pupil expenditure in the county we aren't going

020to claw this back by making Cuts we need Revenue Solutions we can certainly do better despite having more education and experience our teachers are paid less today than they were 10 years ago less today with more experience and more education think about that our teachers average salaries are now just slightly over where Wentzville is today it's hard enough finding good dedicated staff as it is it's even harder with competition from in the county nipping at our heels we can do better over the past 10 years Francis Howell has to cut 75 equivalent heads that's not individual people Cuts that's equivalent heads which means it's way over that 75 number and think about all the students in those classrooms where do they have to go well they go into all the other teachers classrooms which has

021driven up our student-to-teacher ratio to the highest in the county of 19 to 1. oh and by the way that also includes all of the smaller classes so the actual Basics that we talk about a lot those classes are massive how are students going to learn when there's 30 30 students in one class the one teacher that's that's just crazy so what can we do so despite all of this our teachers and staff have persevered over the past couple years they've held their heads high and focused on their students I don't want to spoil it but later in the in the comments and in the in the meeting we're going to see some great map scores just a preview so wouldn't it be wonderful if going forward we can all come together and get the

022district to pass a tax levy that we so desperately need thank you thank you next we have Jesse Fieri or fairy sorry hi at the beginning of the year I tell my students that I will never challenge them to do anything that I wouldn't do which is how I once found myself in a break dancing competition and how I find myself here tonight speaking up hopefully this will go better than the dancing did I was just recognized for achieving national board certification and I would be remiss if I didn't share some of the work that got me here part of the process asks Educators to identify a student need formulate a plan to address it and gather data to show Effectiveness analyzing student belonging data painted a clear picture our kids were not okay especially

023kids who are black brown and lgbtq I designed and implemented my dream unit with one main idea in mind when my students could see their place in the texts and assessments I provided they would also find their place in my classroom here are some insights I gained good relevant books bring kids to the table representation matters when we request new text it's because there's no such thing as a non-reader there are just a lot of readers who haven't found the right book yet when we can offer students options they are more likely to engage when they engage they perform I don't teach books though I teach teenagers building relationships is how we achieve success academically this has been a Cornerstone in my classroom but nbct challenged me to be relentless in my pursuit of knowledge

024about my students and gaining Insight from all of their people and their own insights this paid off in dividends teaching the basics and fostering social emotional learning are not mutually exclusive one is an Avenue to the other reading is more powerful when it's used to explore your own perspective and those of others writing becomes a useful tool when you can express your ideas and your stories and have them Affirmed the rigor and relevance you can bring to students by providing diverse choices extends far beyond basic we're not just teaching students to read and write but to be readers and writers here's the quantitative bottom line through intentionally building a sense of belonging in my classroom providing choice and partnering with parents and counselors to address students needs that stretch Way Beyond academics we made huge

025gains in just one quarter of learning on District Benchmark tests these students grew their average score on writing assessments by 14 grew 9.1 percent in informational text comprehension and 6.7 percent developing narratives close the super subgroup achievement Gap by over five percent on all standards and executed a hundred percent on-time turn and rate for their final writing if you've ever bugged your teenager to do their work you know what do they deal that one is this work inspired me it also got me thinking what if we created a Dei culture and coordinator someone who could identify these opportunities for all of our kids in all curricula who could extend these ideas across Staffing plans who could find the pockets of students and community members who don't feel as if they belong and work to bring

026them to the table what gains might we see then I have Pages upon pages of stories and data to share with anyone who's interested well I'm really thankful to reached the end of these remarks I hope this is just the beginning of a conversation thank you next up we have Harry Harris good evening board um well I've been here before to talk to you I realize it's been a while December had me laid up with the flu but I joined you all online um a patrons comments though resonated with me he mocked the equity work being done in the district um but he posed the question to those of us who have asked for more di work and he said what would you change folks you want more Equity work you want more diversity work

027and I was thrilled that he asked so if I had the magic wand here's my answer I'd help those like himself understand that equity and diversity are more than racial connotations his mockery of the equity committee showed that he didn't understand how the committee talked about resources needed for students who didn't have homes students who didn't have access to needed technology or students who who were from non-native English-speaking families part of the education process is making sure all of our students have the tools that they need to be successful a hungry child will struggle in school and that's why I've been impressed with our food outreach program that addresses that I hope that we continue helping residents understand the steps we've already taken towards Equitable solutions that we've made in our district and that it

028becomes much stronger I even commend director cook for promoting equity in an online post earlier this week writing not all students have the support your kids have at home some kids need to get it all from school I'd ask for a centralized position to put on a district-wide events like the opportunity we missed to do something for the MLK holiday district-wide this isn't a newer radical idea since the districts we are usually compared to like Zumwalt Rockwood Parkway they all have these positions and they do great work with them promoting learning to live and work in a diverse environment is important to the future success of our graduates since for example the 20 largest employers in the STL region according to the St Louis Business Journal all have openly focused on Dei training as a

029part of their culture these are companies like schnooks Mercy BJC Edward Jones Boeing you recognize those names we haven't even reached the part where I'd love to have a more diverse teaching staff Studies have shown again and again that representation matters and students Thrive when they have teachers that look like them we aren't asking that we hire people of color based on their race we are asking that we make our district desirable and engaging for people of color to come beating down our doors to get hired here you can even apply this to out this Outreach to Veterans the physically disabled and others too obviously this isn't the whole list but since he asked I wanted to make sure that I came and at least put a few things out there I understand that change

030in differences can be scary or intimidating but this is where education and knowledge can really work to eliminate those feelings so I hope we can all agree that a commitment to diversity isn't some signal but a part of our life and culture that our students deserve to have more exposure to thank you foreign up next we have Ted house vice president zigger Meyer ladies and gentlemen of the board good evening my name is Ted house it is a pleasure to be back before the Francis Howell Board of Education thank you for the opportunity to share an exciting Endeavor that is being initiated by several citizens in our community I'm here tonight to announce the formation of a political action committee called Saint Charles County families for public schools our nonpartisan group is composed of citizens

031of all political Persuasions who recognize the vital role that public education plays in the strength of our communities and in the quality of life that we enjoy in Saint Charles County we believe that public education brings our community together as a former state senator and Circuit Judge I embarked on this initiative with two former superintendents Dr Mary Hendricks Harris and Dr Pam Sloan as this Grassroots movement continues to build we plan to raise funds to support various candidates who are committed to public education as well as to engage in appropriate elections that improve prove revenue and additional resources for our school districts we are families who want to mobilize the vast majority of Saint Charles countians who respect and appreciate our teachers and who want to support Public School staff and administrators who unselfishly give

032of themselves to achieve the academic Excellence that we have come to expect and most of all we are committed to the students and parents of our school districts seeking to help provide the needed support as you provide hope and a bright future for the children of our community we support the provision of the Missouri Constitution which reminds us that knowledge and intelligence are essential to the preservation of the rights and Liberties of the people public education is the foundation of democracy and in particular we strongly believe that public funds and tax incentives should be used for public schools we celebrate the incredible accomplishments of the Francis Howell School District and want to highlight the variety of amazing things that are going on in our schools every day we hope that you will consider us a

033resource to spread the good word about the many ways that public schools enrich our lives and allow us to live in this prosperous community St Charles County families for public schools is grateful for your service ladies and gentlemen to the people of our school district we know that it can be a thankless job but we also know the indispensable role that you play and the critical value of public education in our community thank you [Applause] up next we have Grace and justice good evening board Happy New Year my name is Grayson Justice I'm an alumni student of class of 2013. you got to be taught to hate and fear you got to be taught from year to year there's got to be a drum in your dear little ear you've got to be carefully taught

034you got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made and people whose skin is in different shade you've got to be carefully taught those are lyrics to Rogers and the Hammerstein's musical South Pacific it was sung by Lieutenant Joseph cable after talking to Emil to back in Act 2 saying it's not born in you it happens after you are born the song talks about racism and hate Randy cook his Fellowship in yellow and the people who voted for him like him think that's CRT which we don't have in this school SEL and the conferences that think they're bad for FHS SD but that is your opinion you have a right to your opinion but you don't have the right to have your opinion sub into uh to everybody else an

035elementary school district in Florida a teacher resigned because one of the staff members told him to get rid of some of our American Heroes some of them are black you wonder why or how that happened it's because it was age inappropriate a high school and a high school teacher in Missouri resigned because the administrations told him to take down his pride flag and he couldn't discuss sexual human sexuality and sexual preferences teachers are resigning because they care of all of their students whether they're gay straight bi black white male or female it's the parents that are making them harder on them with their ignorant and bigoted views on life I approve the travel requests on these conferences that have been talked about that have been questioned by two board members who are against learning different

036things that are good for this community of this District it's a good opportunity to learn new things to help the districts students teachers and staff to be better people for all communities and if you want to go back to the basics we need to know if our students are safe physically and mentally because schools are their second home so they can be themselves from things like troubles in home or families and parents that doesn't accept them for being who they are remember that thank you [Applause] next we have Marissa Polson foreign and everyone who's here um I'm Marissa polzing and I'm a parent in the district um tonight I just wanted to come talk for a minute about a recent discussion that was in the Francis Howell parent face um it was kind of a

037topic where we're getting like you know we need to just teach teach the basics and there was a comment saying the number of students who need remedial college courses tutoring tutoring and interventions is proof that the basics need more attention as of last year we had 1 000 students grades six to twelve who were not reading at reading level or reading at grade level that's about 12 to 13 of 6 to 12 graders who are not doing the most basic tasks that a school is supposed to be teaching so um I want to talk about one of those thousand students that's not doing the most basic task that a school could be teaching and that's my daughter um in the kindergarten we knew that something was at play with her reading uh her teachers at

038Cosley have worked hard with us to give us the interventions she needed through many if anybody anybody who's gone through all this the years of testing the tiers the IEP meetings all of that we discovered that she's dyslexic um she can build complicated Lego sets when she was six um she an exciting Friday night is for her to like build my Ikea furniture um she loves industrial Tech let me tell you this but she's in sixth grade currently uh she is not at reading at grade level and she has a 3.98 that is because she has interventions and technology that helps her be successful is she somebody that you would think is not doing the most basic that a school could be teaching her teachers would say no her teacher comments would say no her

039um grade point average would say no her interest in the classes that she gets to take says no um so I wonder how many of those 999 other students have that well 10 to 15 percent of the population is dyslexic so I'm sure the rest of the 999 students probably don't have all of that but other people spoke about we could have food insecurity we could have um things at home that aren't doing so great um on her map test scores she gives it does a great job on everything but reading because she can't use those Technologies so um uh I'm getting a little off of my I wrote this like five minutes before um so they've also shown that students who so so should my daughter take no more electives and just be trying

040to get on reading level she's probably never going to be on reading little she's the highest she's ever been which is exciting but she's successful without being on on the exact I remember staying up at night crying about that like I gotta get her on reading level but then her teacher's like she's got threes back when she was in you know she's doing great all right thank you thank you your time is up up next we have Matthew Martin no Matthew Martin next we have Kaylee windmiller all right next we have Justin McCoy hey everyone Thanks for uh listening to me speak tonight my name is Justin McCoy I have two Elementary age kids who attend Becky David Elementary I want to speak tonight about a few things they see happening around us and hopefully

041help open a few Minds to forward progress we so desperately need in the district over the past couple of years I've been alarmed to observe the lack of new funding provided to our schools in correlation to the population growth in our area we have politicians out here who are actively working to decrease the funding available to our school district and dismantle the concept of public education altogether our current school on our current School Board we have a couple of politicians who believe school choice is inevitable as well there are also District residents who are concerned about who are very concerned about paying higher taxes yet constantly Demand only the best or consistently Demand only the best for their children's education the way I see it is you can't have your cake and eat it too

042at some point you must realize the ingredients that go into making the cake delicious we are walk we are walking towards a crisis at the bakery as a district we must figure out actual sustainable ways to increase funding we can't bake the same cake with less flour half the number of eggs no sugar and expired baking powder we also can't generate the same quality and quantity of cakes with less Bakers we have an upcoming School Board election where we have three candidates who are running under the guise of Back to Basics fiscal responsibility and family values the underlying notion of all these points suggests a direction of disinvestment in our district and that should concern everybody this brings me to my last one of concern attracting and retaining qualified teachers and staff it's alarming to

043note all of the amazing teachers veteran teachers amply qualified paraprofessionals and staff that are fleeing from our district if you sit down and ask them why they're choosing to leave it's usually a variety of reasons some of the big reasons are paid efficiency compared to surrounding districts lack of support from the administration and you all the elected Board of Education and lastly the daily emotional abuse from ill-informed parents and misguided students as a parent property owner and taxpayer I'm exponentially concerned that if we cannot properly fund our Public Schools attract and retain qualified Educators and continue forward with Progressive diverse and challenging curriculum we will all start to experience a flight from the district as a whole moving forward towards the school board election time I want to encourage everyone to consider and pay attention

044to each candidate's platform and how they plan to increase funding attract and retain qualified teachers and lastly support a diverse quality curriculum conducive to a top-notch school district thanks [Music] up next Michael Shea Michael Shea all right on to Christopher Brooks oh where to start tonight uh there's been so many amazing speeches I'm not sure it's like shooting fish in a barrel here um so first welcome Mr House to the non-partisan pack area here I mean you're a Democrat and uh I I assume our former former superintendents are as well uh I invite you to find a republican to put on your steering board so you can claim non-partisanship uh you might also be interested no there's currently a pack in the district that advocates for raising property taxes and prop s funds citizens for

045Francis Howell which had about twenty thousand dollars in their bank accounts last I checked and was funded entirely uh by businesses companies that do business with the district including several out of state ones so there's a lot of money going around here speaking of money a number of speakers tonight have have discussed their concerns with uh with funding I hope you go do your homework and take a look at the actual values of the income of the district over the past number of years uh income in the district is as high as it's ever been now inflation takes a bite out of that nevertheless Revenue per student is as high as it's been since 2011. now the funny thing about 2011 property values were going down if you remember after the Great Recession but the

046district didn't lose money in fact the district continued increasing its tax revenue during that time as a result of the Hancock Amendment so it cuts both ways and this last December as a million well not Millions but thousands of people across the county open their property tax bills and discovered that the district among other entities was taking a rather large windfall of those increased vehicle prices we understand that the district is doing a fair amount of increase in its income here so I I hope folks that you go back and actually look at some of the numbers or provide those numbers now Mr Ferry indicated earlier that our average teacher salaries have decreased and you'll understand that that the beautiful thing about averages is when you increase the total numbers especially if you take away

047at the high end the average does decrease it's amazing right so so when the district was having its financial difficulties a few years ago a number of teachers retired these are teachers making a fair amount of money and they were replaced or not replaced in many cases with newer teachers right so if you take away the higher end of the spectrum and bring in the lower end of the spectrum you get a lower total average it dropped pretty precipitously as a result of that nevertheless I uh appreciate those teachers and the work they're doing and I think we will see later tonight that that many of the district teachers have worked very hard in helping our students to recover from the map testing difficulties we've had nevertheless there's still a lot more work to do

048in fact we see that some of those inequities across the district have grown in terms of test scores of high schools Mr Harris brings up interesting points about his Dei coordinator nevertheless I still don't see what that Dei Coordinator would do that other wonderful and engaged individuals in the district are not already doing we already have administrators teachers many people doing things of their own free will not compelled by anyone and not not paying a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year to to do these things that are trying to make a difference in the lives of our students and I encourage them and commend them for that tonight foreign [Applause] good evening my name is Amy easterling I have been a resident of this district for about 20 years I have two children that

049have benefited through their entire lives from this amazing school districts from parents as teachers to Hackman early childhood education center all the way through High School um I have a sticker on my office wall that I love especially as somebody who grew up in the South it says y'all means all to me this perfectly encompasses the idea of diversity as our students grow up and become citizens of the world they're going to encounter many people who are different from them in higher education and in jobs they'll have the opportunity to meet people with different backgrounds race gender religion socio-economic class abilities and on and on and on right in my own career I have learned that the most successful projects and initiatives that I've been involved in are those where there are many voices around

050the table but don't take my word for it many studies show us the benefit of diversity as noted by an article in Scientific American exposure to diversity Alters the way individuals think by promoting creativity and Innovation as well as decision making and problem solving skills the article summarizes diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneous simply does not and companies recognize this too 96 percent of major employers according to the century Foundation say that it's vital that employees are able to work with people from diverse backgrounds I know that's true for the Fortune 500 company that I'm employed by all of this is to say that we should not be afraid of the concepts of diversity inclusion and Equity they are not bad words quite the opposite I'd encourage us all to recognize

051the benefits that these Concepts will have to our students and look for opportunities to embrace them for example and these are just a few let's figure out how we can improve the number of black teachers in our district because we know that their benefit from those voices and perspectives let's continue so many of the great efforts of our Educators that are happening today from a variety of Student Activities to exposure to College and Career to encouraging our students to think critically let's embrace the philosophy that y'all really does mean all thank you up next Ken gontars all right moving on to fhea good evening on behalf of the Francis Hall Education Association I would like to welcome everyone to our second semester of teaching and learning it is fitting that our first day of the

052semester was the day after we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr who taught us all to dream about a future filled with diversity equity and inclusion the newly national board certified teachers Jesse Ferry Adam Catman Nadine friedline Francine Hill as well as the teachers that have renewed their national board certification Kimberly linnemann Aaron manfel Denise columbini Joelle Sanders honer Shannon crafts Andrew mazarelli Stacy wittenauer and with our other excellent Educators who we are who we are working each day to craft learning to help students achieve their dreams for their futures we are looking forward to meeting with Administration to have a successful negotiations and collaborating with them to be Forward Thinking so that Francis Health School District can be a leader in making Choice making choices that support students Educators and our community we hope to

053bring a ratified closure document to the next board meeting for approval to position Francis Health School District to be able to retain and attract the most highly qualified Educators for our students as schools everywhere begin the hiring season foreign that I just read if you are planning for a year so rice if you are planning for a decade plant trees if you are planning for a lifetime educate people thank you [Applause] all right moving on to prop us Matt Frank hi uh I'm Matt Frank with SM Olson I'm filling in for Jeremy Butler tonight to give an update on Francis Howell North High School project um I'd like to start just by thanking the district um it really takes a lot of work to build a high school is a big project and everybody's just

054been great along the way from the board Administration teachers staff students we've interacted with a lot of people and it's just been a great experience so thank you for that um we'll go ahead and jump right in so a few prop best highlights um we did receive bids for bid package six on the France software project and that's for fencing uh we got multiple bids the low bidder was quite a bit below the budget included in the GMP so that worked out great we recommend going with the low battery on for the scope of work and it's currently with the board for review um next item is the site preparation work for the stadium in the track we are getting ready to start work on the stadium the track which is super exciting I know

055that's kind of something that everybody's interested in the area is cut to grade and uh it's just wet right now because of the winter as soon as it dries out we have our subcontractor on board to start work there so that'll be pretty exciting to see going coordination work uh for summer 2023 last summer 2022 we built a new student parking lot which was quite an undertaking it took a bit of coordination with the the school and uh and everybody surrounding there with Henderson to get that work done this summer we're going to be replacing the drive from Hackman road to Henderson Elementary and we've started that coordination work now so by the time we get to summer we have a great plan and we'll get that road replaced over the summer before school starts

056so the goal is to start after school lets out and then get it completed before school starts next item is the FF and E the furniture fixture and Equipment budgets and schedules Atlas and honer and the dis Administration been working pretty intently on those budgets in those are in review currently construction update so a lot of work going on on the side those of you driven by you see a lot of things happening outside and there's even more happening inside the building this winter has been pretty favorable weather-wise so a lot of brick veneer is going on it's been great we've been able to keep working next year to the building structural steel all the structural steel main components have been installed for a month or two now the iron workers are working on small

057stuff like stair installs and small bits of Steel that we call detailing throughout the building they'll be doing that for another month or a month or more and then they'll head outside to work on some of the exteriors the old canopies and things of that nature mechanical electrical Plumbing fire protection systems are being installed throughout the building we're really working probably in two-thirds of the building we have these contractors working and selling duct work piping sprinkler piping and things of that nature interior Framing and CMU really the southern half of the building most of those walls are constructed a lot of the interior walls or Black Walls and then we have metal frame walls as well it's well along the way in fact even in the South areas you can see we've started interior painting

058we have finished coats of paint on some areas of the building and working working through it ceiling grid installation the ceiling grid for the acoustic tiles we've got that in and a quite a bit of the building really the classroom Wings which allows us to put light fixtures and diffusers and just get a higher level of finishes completed in the building and then as we have mentioned preparation for the stadium in the track is underway so you can see this is a drone photo of current progress from January you know from the outside of the building you don't see a whole lot change right now for month to month because a lot of work is happening in interior but you can see additional brick veneer that's taken place from the south side which would be

059the left side of the screen the South the right sides North so brick veneer is working south to North all the dark black areas the roofing membranes on so those areas are dried in that's actually dry parts of the building last month we had a bit of the steel decking that wasn't on kind of around the auditorium which doubles as a storm shelter that's a black box near the top of the screen so um that's all installed and over the next couple months you're going to see a lot of the curbs and uh Drive lanes and parking areas coming in so the site's really going to start taking shape which would be exciting as well so this next photo was last January and I think it really just tells the story at 12 months ago

060we had a concrete retaining wall we had some slab concrete slab and some footings in you can kind of see the footprint of the building 12 months later we've got what looks like a high school so just a ton of work put in place over the last 12 months okay these are some photos of the exterior of the building um so the blue blue box in the background that's the practice gym the blue is the air barrier that's on it keeps the building dry when it's final constructed but allows it to breathe at the same time and then on the Forefront of the picture you can see the Hydra mobile scaffold that the Masons use and it's a brick veneer going up and you can kind of start to see what the building's going to

061look like with the multi-colored brick and the bands giving it some detail which is pretty exciting this is an area these are the classroom wings and the that single story area is the industrial Arts portion of the building um here we've got a guy washing the brick they after the bricks installed they wash it to get all the mortar residue off and uh make it look great so this is one of the lower level classroom Wings on the south side we work south to North so the south side of the building is more completed than the North side in this area we've got final coats of paint on the walls you can see the ceiling grid installed light fixtures are on mechanical ductwork and piping is installed above the ceiling and really once we get

062some some permanent cooling on we'll start putting flooring and and some more finishes in there so this is an upper level mechanical room um it's exciting to some not as exciting to others but these are all the hot water heaters for like faucets kitchens things like that pretty big heaters so there's some tanks and then kind of the heaters are actually almost like instant heat but on a grander scale and then those storage tanks store the water it's an efficient system for Energy savings so then you can see some electrical switch here in the background that's installed as well this is the main mechanical room um so this there is just a ton of piping and work in this room there's been guys working in here for months this is where the chillers and the

063boilers go the building it works off of a chill water system heat and water system which is really efficient and so all the piping and ductwork and electrical systems throughout the entire building we we spent several months going through this process what we call Ben it's a building information modeling and what we did is we took the design teams design and then we basically shifted everything in 3D and built it in a model before we built it on site now all this is measured in the model down to a 16th of an inch and we find conflicts is what happens so you go through you get complex you can move everything it's cheaper and faster to fix it in a 3D model than it is on site if you bring it out so we spent

064several months going through all this stuff was detailed the subs fabricator directly out of the model because it's so precise and what's great is throughout the whole building we've had no conflicts at all and you can see the the level of piping interaction and that makes all that very uh streamlined when it's installed so let's see so this is a video um we're going to highlight the industrial Arts area in the mechanical firm that we just talked about so these areas in yellow kind of that L-shaped areas industrial Arts that box on the left is the mechanical room this is what's going to be the wood shop we're pretty far along this will have exposed ceilings which would be kind of kind of nice the students will see all the duct work in the final

065design you can see there's a lot of duct a lot of Supply a lot of exhaust Dusty area so it's going to keep that area clean all CMU concrete block walls throughout for durability just a great space this is an industrial Tech classroom that's right adjacent to the wood shop all these areas have a lot of Windows throughout so it kind of opens up the space you can see the Json students working and it's just going to be a great spot and then from here we're walking into the office for that area and again where the office is there's windows that the teacher can see all the students working and they can see him and et cetera this is the main mechanical room so kind of a live view of the photo that we just

066looked at you can see the pump so all these red things or the pumps or pumps that'll move that water throughout the building 400 000 square feet so it takes some pretty large pumps to distribute this water um and then these boxes are the boilers they're kind of like instant heat as well um similar to the other ones and then the stainless steel flu piping up through the roof so yeah just a great space we had in December all the industrial Arts students came out to the side and we took them on a tour we had a full curriculum for that day hours one through seven came through we took them out there we answered answered questions talked about the trades they got to see the space that they're going to use and I was

067just it was an exciting day for everyone I think let's see so that leads us to the dashboard um you've been seeing the escalation allowance for some time it's been holding steady at about fifty thousand dollars applied to that allowance we just haven't really incurred that many costs that we've needed to uh use the allowance for which is great news for everyone um the GMP build about we're 51 build right now which is appropriate for the the phase of construction we're in um yeah the Project's just going great so uh it's exciting questions board I just uh I noticed in some of the pictures all the uh the roofing curbs are up there any idea when they're going to set the rooftop unit yeah so rooftop units start shipping uh February 10th is they're going

068to start shipping the last one ships in May there's 20 I think 20 rooftop units and some of our customs so they're a little bit longer lead but uh yeah so we should start setting those into February any other questions board I just wanted to thank you and and SM Wilson and all those involved I've had a couple people report back to me just how smoothly things are going and it's kind of unique uh giving the circumstances of post-pandemic with uh construction so it sounds like everything's moving along and that's a a lot of uh progress in in about 12 months so I appreciate it thank you thank you thanks everyone all right board on to the consent agenda I'd like a motion to approve the consent agenda for January 19th 2023 as presented so

069move second Adam Janet all those in favor aye oh any opposed eyes have it all right on to uh action item 10A monthly financial report can I get a motion board a motion approved the December monthly financial report as presented double second Randy and Patrick any discussion board all right all those in favor say aye any opposed say no motion of past on to item 10B purchases over 7 500 board I'd like a motion to approve the purchases over 7 500 as presented so maybe Adam and Randy discussion board I just have a question um I'm looking over the purchases over 7 500 and I'm not sure um I I should have sent in a question on this but on December 28th we had a water line freeze and busted Holland back and there was

070an emergency um purchase for repairing the pipe and stuff I'm just curious uh why we didn't use the preferred our preferred District vendor on that [Music] in a quick and timely thank you we went with the vendor who was able to respond in a quick and timely manner with all of the situations going on I'm not sure if the preferred vendor was able to respond at that time it ended up being not just Plumbing but they also had to replace some concrete and Asphalt in the area because they had to do a lot of digging they had to move equipment over to to get everything here get that repair made and be able to open school and so I know working with our maintenance team they tried to coordinate make everything happen as quickly as

071possible on that yeah well I was just going over the itemized bill I guess and and I see they had you know laborers operators stuff like that but I didn't see an actual plumber on there for repairing the plumbing pipe so that that's all I have on that but our preferred vendor on a different item they used for an emergency boiler replacement so I was just curious maybe they were busy I don't have the exact answer to that but I could look into that and get back with you all right thank you any other questions or comments board all right all those in favor say aye aye any opposed say no I always have it action item 10c at board I'd like a motion to approve change order number nine for the Francis Hall North

072construction project as presented second Chad and Adam any discussion all those in favor say aye any opposed say no eyes have it on to action item 10d board I'd like a motion to approve the 2022-2023 revised budget as presented so what's up Janet and Randy questions all right all those in favor say aye and he opposed say no Mr zigmar we have a presentation address the revised budget I thought I was getting him to know I don't have anything I would be fine with that [Laughter] all right we'll get this ready to present so I'm going to do my best tonight to try to take a very complicated topic and make it as simple as I can and as easy to follow and understand so I just ask if there are any questions please bear

073with me as I shuffle paper paper around um I've uh not only been working on the budget revision but also budget projections for next year uh this week so the numbers may get crossed in my mind if it takes me a second time cross anything ah being new to the Francis House School District I would say that our budget is one of the most challenging budgets that I have ever had the opportunity uh to behold and as a district we're in a very unique place I have phoned many friends who are Financial experts in the state and also who have Financial expertise and support schools Across the Nation and we're in a hard place as a district right now we're in an okay place we're going to talk about where we're at this year what's

074brought us to where we're at this year and then just a little sneak preview about our future so when we start out just as a general overview the budget the revised budget this year is presented in a different format than you've seen previously previously you've had a variety of charts and and tables um and I've tried to modify those charts and tables and also provide a lot of narrative to try to help explain what's going on in the charts and tables and so if you have any questions after today please contact me and I'll I'll do my Square best to answer any of them that you might have so the good news is right now our anticipated end-of-year fund balances with the revisions are at 20.6 percent uh oh six percent and that is within

075our range of 15 to 20 percent per board policy of what we would like to have for ending fund balances ending fund balance is kind of the magic number that tells you how healthy or unhealthy your your school budget is it's your your kind of your running money your operating money it's the it's a reflection of what you have in your operating account and that includes your teacher the account that teachers are paid from teachers classified staff supplies purchase Services everything except building projects is is reflected in this number now from my perspective while 15 to 20 percent is is the number that we have as a board policy to have enough money in the bank okay that because that fund balance kind of represents your savings account to have enough money in the bank

076to make payroll without taking out a loan we need to have about 24 is our estimate so at 20 percent there's a very good likelihood that our cash flow will be such that we may have to borrow money to make payroll this next school year so I just want to make sure everyone knows that that's not unusual in schools that are more heavily locally funded that is a reality in in many schools that have a heavy local funding base um just as we think through that we could have to do that as early as September depending on how our cash flow works we could have to borrow as much as 20 million dollars and it could cost us about a hundred thousand dollars to do that so that's kind of what we're thinking could be

077the worst case scenario in this best case scenario uh fund balance of 20 percent some of the highlights you're going to hear tonight is that our revenues have increased this year which is great news um over 9 million dollars just keep in mind that of that over nine million dollars that is coming from an increased assessed valuation due to one-time funding of driven by the increase really in vehicles and other personal property state aid it has allowed us to this year use what we call the pandemic provision so typically we determine what our state aid is based on the three prior years but because of the pandemic taking place we're using our state aid all the way back to 2019-20 so our numbers are being run on old data where we had more kids and

078better attendance than we have today there's hope that that may um may happen in the future we're waiting for announcements from uh the state uh to 100 confirm that but we're hopeful we may get one more year of the pandemic provision uh the numbers that I'm presenting to you tonight um do not necessarily account for that but there are a lot of other moving factors so another important highlight the expenses have increased about 1.8 million dollars um it is it's super important to note in the expenses that vacancies are not taken out of this budget if we have open positions they're budgeted for because we don't know when we're going to fill them so we have to budget for them because they're on the list so there may be a little bit of a reprieve

079if some of those positions stay vacant throughout the year we I I added this um point it is not in the budget document if you were to read through it because the budget's a living document it's a one snapshot in time and things keep happening and you discover revisions that need to be made one of those revisions that needs need we need to make and we'll come in our numbers next month as we did not account for in the and the numbers we're presenting to you today at 2.37 million one time impact when we made the switch from an accrual basis of accounting last year to a cash basis this year so last year it was a cruel basis so basically uh when we the the way that type of accounting works is we only

080ended up paying 11 months or showing on the books 11 months worth of payment to the teacher retirement system and the teacher retirement system it's about 2.3 million dollars a month that we paid it just for retirement for teachers so last month we only paid 11 months last year we only paid 11 months this year we're going to have to pay 13. then next year we'll go back to normal so that's a one-time blip on the radar um also we've had some a few uh increases with supplies and purchase services but for the size of our 200 15 million dollar budget they're really not much at all we've done a pretty good job in that area um some considerations moving forward and I'll try to make this more clear as we go through the presentation

081if we took out all of the extra covid related money that we've received and we were to say well where would our fund balances end at the end of this year if all of that covered money was gone we would end at about 15. percent factoring out that additional 2.37 14 so we would be at the base level of what is acceptable in our district for fund balances so I just want to make that's kind of the big takeaway if you don't hear anything else from the presentation uh remember those highlights the budget summary this chart is for the folks that love numbers it uh the most important number at the bottom there again is where are we going to end this chart is set up to look just like the asbr if you go

082online and you search Mo Desi asbr Francis House School District you can see years and years of data that we report to the state of what our numbers look it's a number story of who we are what we value where we spend our money uh where where where we where we invest our our hard-earned taxpayer dollars last year we ended at 21.25 this year we'll end somewhere between 19 and 20 percent um with an anticipated end-of-year balance that balance is made up of changes in Revenue which you can see we have increases in local County state and federal revenue so that's great news we're going to detail a little bit more where those increases come from that local money is coming primarily from that increased assessed valuation we told you back when we talked about

083the increase of assess valuation in the fall that we that overall was about 4.8 million dollars but only a 3.22 million increase on the books the reason you're only seeing 3.22 million on the books is because we'd already expected an increase we just didn't expect the level of increase that we received due to what happened with all of the vehicles um it's also important to note that this is a 99.5 collection rate so this is actually looking at both our delinquent taxes and our current taxes combined we most when we combine that annually it's about a hundred percent so that's a safe Recon number to recommend another big change that you're going to see this year reflected is a reallocation of funding so this isn't the funding hasn't changed this is tax money that we

084get in but we're taking it we have four accounts that we use we have a general account where we pay like all of the classified staff and and pay for supplies and purchase Services we have fun too so that's fun one fun to you we're paying all the teachers fund three we're paying off our debt fund four where is called the capital account that's where all of our bond money goes and it's also if we're going to put a new roof on or pay the folks who fix that water line that's where that money's coming one of the things for our district that has been tricky is we don't have money scheduled to go into that account we had about an 8.63 million dollar budget but we didn't have money scheduled to go in so

085we would do a transfer at the end of the year transfer about 6 million in run in the hole transfer money in run in the hole so it it the money's there but it's just you're constantly kind of chasing your tail so the idea with this is to to start trying to have revenue streams that will deposit into that Capital fund balance so that you have the money there to spend it as you need it um and to to build that up a little bit many school districts um most school districts are sized when we look across the state actually in addition to the 20 operating fund balance will have a capital fund balance the capital fund balance is what allows you to fix your roofs put in a new HVAC unit take care of

086your ability and your facilities we don't have a a capital fund balance we kind of live year to year hoping that we have enough money in there to fix what's broken and so that's something for us to work on long term as a as a community when we think about State money that's been super interesting um it it we have had an increase this year a total special education High needs fund of about four million dollars came through uh the books typically we see about two million-ish dollars uh come in in special ed High needs fund so we've had to increase this this year the interesting thing about special ed High needs fund those funds are set aside if we have an individual child who needs a lot of support and we spend more than

087three times what we would spend to support a typical student then that which is called our per pupil expenditure then the state get reimburses you the following year for anything over three times your pupil expenditure so if we spend 36 thousand over thirty six thousand dollars to educate an individual child the state will pick up anything beyond that so this reflects the state picking up the difference for us it can come from State money or federal money um another very unique thing that happened this year from a state perspective we had the what the pandemic provision we talked about that but we also had Transportation was fully funded for the first time and I think many many many many many many many years like maybe 20 plus years so long ago that I've never really

088had any recollection of it ever being fully funded when we say fully funded what that really means is we turn in allowable miles basically driving kids back and forth to school not ball games not field trips just getting kids to and from school type of money we turn in all of those expenses and the state says we'll fully fund it fund you at 75 percent of the total but the other 25 is on you well typically they never really fully fund us at 75 percent you might get 16 or on a good year 33 but this year we really truly got funded at 75 so that's exciting but you'll if you're going to the transportation Roundtable you'll learn more about the fact that we also lose some of that funding a couple million dollars comes

089off the top of our fully funding because we're not efficient so there's something to explore there as well but all of that said and done we increased a total of 3.8 which we from last year and and that's showing up here and then the big kicker is the federal dollars um 10.7 million dollars on the books of open covid related funding we have that covered out or that we have all of that going in and out as uh revenue and expenditures but after it's all said and done about four million of that is being spent for salaries of existing staff that's one of the allowable expenses so you're seeing kind of an inflation of four million dollars to our budget that is not normally here it's we're using covid money to pay four million dollars

090worth of teachers salaries this next slide talks about changes in expenditures by object an object's just a big way to group things into big buckets so all of these areas are going up too we're bringing more money in but we're spending more money not near as much it's only 1.8 million more uh compared to the 9 million more we're bringing in where are those expenditures going um 85 percent of our overall budget is salaries and benefits so we pay that's most of our money goes to pay the people to do the work and if you are going to try to save money you can only buy so many fewer pu pencils it starts turning into people or you have to have more money to spend that's kind of where we're at as a district we're

091gonna either have to have more money to spend or or spend less money um we have a combined increase of almost a million dollars in this area 500 000 of that is a substitute cost we've got a lot of increased Subs over what we budgeted for um we also did a mid-year classified salary adjustment we were having such a hard time finding people to work uh one dollar extra for all of our classified staff per hour and 250 extra for our custodians per hour just so we could get people here to work and be competitive and we still have work to do in that area it's once again I just want to say it is very likely that we will be able to offset this cost due to unfilled positions we're working together with HR

092and Finance on getting our systems really tight so we could predict that on it on the Fly um and it's a big project the sex next area that we're talking about is just taking a look and these are really nominal but I think worthy of note because if you count if you watch your pennies then your dollars take care of themselves uh you know 131 000 increase in purchase services and 309 000 in supplies when you take a look at that a good chunk of some of this is related to some grant funding that has Flo that came in and increased budgets that we weren't expecting uh additionally some building budgets as we made the conversion to the new system getting everybody's budget in right in the system and also some increased professional development needs

093and Technology subscription fees those just continually go up year after year in every area this next slide is just an overall summary of the budget and uh you can kind of see the total revenue change and total expenditure change by fund and then what that net difference is and so as we wrap up some words of caution um if we think about that 20 and we were to back out the one-time Revenue that we would lose with a 4 million extra income the 3.8 million in transportation that puts us at 16.6 percent this year no raises nothing changing everything exactly like it is if that was not there if we took out the additional uh impact of of the uh of the money that we're getting from the state for state aid about 3.5 million

094that would bump us down to 15.13 if we take out that additional 2.37 last year we were high this year we're taking out 13 payments we're down to 14 percent and so we really need to be thoughtful as we build our budget for next year I give great kudos to our principals and administrators we've held steady on our staffing plan we've held steady on our department budgets our building principles have held steady on the amount of Supply they've looked hard at how we could redistribute the supply money that we have to create Equity between buildings and make sure that all of our kids are getting a slice of that Supply money uh in a in a in a fair way and so those are all things that that we're doing already to try to plan

095for the future um just I want to revisit this everybody said I don't know if you really need to tell people about it but it's complicated and I want to try to make it make sense for you when you we talked about that allowable transfer earlier Desi allows us they put a cap on how much money you can take out of operating and put into Capital because they don't want you rat holding all your money away to build buildings instead of paying people because the money is there to educate kids so they put a cap on that and for us the capital would be about eight percent when we combine all of our transfer options we're budgeting here for a 6.6 percent or not eight percent eight million dollars uh we're budgeting here for a

0966.6 million dollar transfer which is a 600 increase over what was in the budget now with the change of what we talked about with reclassification of the fit and the M M Tax and this transfer we're going to have a little extra built in do if we choose to go this way we're going to have a little extra built in to the transfer to take some of that one-time Transportation money that we receive this year move it over into Capital thinking that that could potentially give us the option uh to offset some of the cost for um our transportation facility work getting them moved in here to 45.45 and all of the work related to that and then maybe alleviate some of that off of the prop s budget we may that that may or

097may not be a great idea but the budget's built to allow us to do that um depending on the work of the prop s groups going forward and then Community input we have the flexibility to not do that but I tried to not let that look like there was an extra two million dollars on the table if that's how we want to use it we may choose to leave it in operating some hard decisions to be made so just in closing I would say they're you know there are a lot of considerations and salaries benefits Capital our fund balances uh lots of folks said take this slide out but really this is at the heart of the decision of what we're doing like we've got to remember why are we here what are we about

098what are we trying to do and to me these considerations are all con are all something that I think about whenever I'm working on the budget next steps um in our office we're doing a lot of work of just trying to improve our financial management system uh we're 18 months into an adoption of an our new system Skyward or one of the first in the state to we are the first in the state to have the system Skyward so the great thing about that is you get to help develop all the reports to be what you want them to the bad thing is you have to develop the port reports to get them to be what you want them to um but it's easier to work than a lot of systems because it's basically a

099giant database that you can pull numbers out of about anything you'd want to pull our goal is to get reporting set up so that we give you live data about your the bond expenditures every month our goal is to get you revision budget revision and transfer numbers every month and to instead of waiting till the end of year or mid-year to bring this to you just as things happen to bring it bring it to you guys so you can decide if we're gonna if you're okay with it and we can and we can account for that because we are we're having to watch things really close we can't afford to be off by a couple million dollars gives you a little heart palpitation when you find out that's what's going on and long-range targets is

100just we we want to be competitive with salary and benefit planning we want the best teachers and the brightest teachers to come here stay here and leave other places to come to us we want to have great buildings and we want them to look beautiful in last for years and years to come and we want to have an effective operating and capital fund balance where we're not sweating bullets all the time worrying that we're going to be able to make ends meet we want to live comfortably like we would at our home we don't want to run things on our credit cards to pay our bills and hope that we have enough money to make it to the next payday so in closing that is the budget revision that I have and I would be

101glad to answer any questions that you might have forward questions thanks Dr Hawk um maybe I just want to try to try to follow along just wanted to maybe boil it down and see if I'm getting everything kind of correctly so what it sounds like is you're kind of saying we had a tough year uh based on linear and covet effects based on maybe past decisions that have carried over for previous years but but overall I've done pretty decent for this year yep that's been affected by a one-time funding which all schools got yes um and we've done some good things within your department as well as the districts as a whole to kind of manage those funds where we get to carry some of those over into next year um yes by by moving

102that funding through with free up buddy that will give us a little more flexibility yes and I guess I guess the next thing I'm hearing is uh things don't get easier from here and potentially tough decisions tough choices things that we need to work through and plan for going forward that would be 100 True okay thank you I have uh and I'll just say you know I've brought numbers to Ken and I'm like here's where I think we're in with revision and he's like run those again I ran them again and try something like I can't get them to run different we're headed to on a hard place any other questions I just wanted uh I had a question or two uh you mentioned some kind of examples uh about savings and kind of relating

103that to the budget and just wanted to also point out because you talked about uh possibly borrowing money to make payroll and whatnot and so some of that complications from a school budget perspective is it's not like uh homes or households where they get weekly paychecks or bi-weekly we get large chunks at sporadic times throughout the year and part of the other difficulties is also predicting what you're going to get in the future and so that's also then Complicated by we have to have these different fun buckets and so some of the stuff you can put funds into and then not take out and so there's a lot of different nuances from a school budget perspective to a household budget that just might not resonate with people when they hear some certain things some of

104the questions that I had was uh I'm trying to recall and I was trying to look back as well but that 24 ending fund balance I'm not sure have we when the last time we've ever had that amount because I think if I'm recalling correctly we've only had to take out a Tans one time I think we've taken out of tens twice in recent history that I'm aware of um and and things have fallen where that has worked um when you pay your bills makes a difference I I believe that if our bills are due we should pay them to the people that we owe money to at the time that they're due um you know there's a lot there's a lot of ways to try to make things work when you don't have you

105just like you would at home if if your house if you're if your house payments do and you don't have enough money in the bank you might make a late payment you know so there's a lot of ways that ways that you can try to squeeze through and is it with the District of our caliber I think we should not be at a place where we're having to do that and then the last question I had was the uh retirement payments you're saying that 11 equal payments each year were we skipping a payment every year or was that getting shifted to the next year or how's that work to where we now have 13 payments instead of 11. so normally it would be 12 payments a year and we pay we pay three pays at

106the end of the year three teacher pays like in one pay batch but because some of those pays don't go out until the next fiscal year with a cruel accounting the way which year you put that payment on is different than the way you put that payment in a cash basis accounting and so we've been accrual for years and years and years and when we made that switch to cash basis um that was kind of one of those unintended consequences um of making that switch really that's that's the only one that has caught us caught up with us that we weren't factoring in so it's not like money just is evaporating it's just a different way yeah like last year we didn't if we didn't pay a month's bill this year we had to pay

107two bills in January so to speak would be kind of the equivalent of what you'd do with that it all balances out in the wash it just makes it look like we had a one percent higher balance last year at a one percent lower balance this year but really it would have all averaged itself out sort of just a different way of accounting for it okay just a different way Charming the books comments questions board time right after this year once you do it next year we'll be right back to just well yeah 12 payments every payments everybody okay yeah yeah thank you guys for helping explain that because it is complicated a lot of this all right board all in favor say hi hi any opposed say no eyes have it on to action

108item 10 uh e board I'd like a motion to approve vacation Station and preschool tuition proposal as presented Adam and Randy so in this uh conversation we're taking a look at the vacation Station and and our preschool programs that we have which we have amazing amazing after school care and amazing tuition based and early childhood special education preschool programs in our district it's a lot to be really proud of um as with everything else the costs keep going up and so on the costs that are fee based we try to pass those those costs along to the parents who are paying for those fee based programs we have a one percent increase in the preschool program scheduled and a three percent overall increase for vacation Station that that was a hard decision to come to

109but our directors did a lot of hard budget work and feel like those increases should hopefully make things sustainable throughout the year if we see that we need to make any additional adjustments they watched that bottom line closely and and we'll bring that to us if changes are needed any questions or discussion board all right all those in favor say aye all right all those opposed say no motion carries Ford I liken uh motion for action item 10f motion to approve the 2324 Staffing plan as presented Adam and Patrick Lisa thanks I don't have anything to add today as we went through a full work session last month but happy to answer any questions the board might have report any questions all right all those in favor say aye all right all those opposed say

110no motion carries action item 10g board I like a motion to reapprove the return to school plan as presented second Adam and Randy Ford this is the reapproval of the return to school plan that per federal guidelines districts are required to approve every six months through September of 2023 related to the Esser Finance funding there are no changes from the plan that was presented to you in July which at that time we highlighted we were returning to all of our pre-pandemic policies and procedures within the district covid continues to have a very minimal impact on our current operations primarily just some student and staff attendance and even that is much reduced this plan does highlight though that we continue to have contingency plans and mitigation strategies in place should we have any Spike within the

111district do we need to be responsive any discussion or questions board it looks like we're on to the work session and doctor all those in favor say aye aye aye any opposed say no all right eyes have it Dr Buckman so yeah this is going to be the highlight of the board meeting are you ready uh well good evening I'm excited to have an opportunity to share a little bit of an academic update with everyone tonight David is joining me at the podium David Brothers is our director of curriculum and assessment in his role David works with Zach Brady Zach is our data analyst and the two of them are the Wizards that obtain and analyze all of our academic data for the district teas also our internal msip6 expert which we'll kind of highlight

112tonight so I just want to honor them because well I'll do all most of the talking tonight all of the charts and the graphs and the data you see that is really a product of their hard work each day so um we're lucky to have them so as you know Dusty has moved from MC5 to msip6 as their accountability system and under this new system districts will be measured against our performance metrics which really measure student outcomes and then also our continuous Improvement metrics which assess the quality of the work of a district towards improving opportunities for all of our students and all of that information is what's used for our annual performance report or the APR which informs accreditation and classification of districts and so the performance metrics that you see on the slide

113here that makes up 70 percent of our APR and then the continuous Improvement metrics that makes up the other 30 of our APR we'll talk more in depth about msip6 at a future board meeting typically when I come to you and I share the data Desi has released everything and they've issued our APR this year's a little different as you know Desi has recently released our status data that was District Communications and that really is how our students scored last spring on those end of course exams and the map test however they haven't released the growth data yet so that's why you see that yellow line through that square up there we expect that to come in the spring that's kind of the best estimate Dusty's given us and so once we have that data

114we'll come back and we'll share the growth data with you I just wanted you to know why we don't have that tonight so tonight what we will talk about is all the areas of the performance metrics where we do have the data um so we'll look at status how our kids scored in the spring we'll look at overall and then we'll also look at our student group performance we'll take a look at success ready that takes a look at the College and Career Readiness assessment so for us we'll look at our ECT data and then it also looks at student completion of advanced coursework and so for us we'll take a look at some of our advanced placement data tonight and then our graduation rate how many of our students are graduating in four years

115or five or more years and then also our graduation follow-up and that's what are our graduates doing six months or about 180 days after they leave us um one thing I do want to mention before we get started is that I've said Dusty hasn't released all the data yet we do have our MPI scores for our students which is usually what we bring you in this presentation however we don't have access to the MPI scores of other districts yet and so in the past we know that there's a lot of value in our community of seeing how we stack up against other districts we kind of Benchmark ourselves against some consistent districts each year and since we don't have the MPI scores of those districts that was going to be a little challenging to do

116what we were able to do is take a look at the percent proficiency of our students so how many students are scoring in that advanced proficient range and use that as our comparison across districts so it is a little bit of a different um measurement that we're bringing you this year and we anticipate that that's really just a one-year change we should be able to be back to MPI scores next year now in full transparency there is a chance that mathematically um we believe mathematically this will correlate to the MPI scores so the charts you see we think that that's probably how the charts will shake out as well when we get MPI scores but there is a slight chance that things could change a little bit on some of those comparison graphs so we

117don't anticipate that but I don't want to lead you astray if I'm wrong all right so let's switch over and take a look at our Ela score or well actually we'll start with our combined proficiency so this chart shows our overall map in EOC performance so this is our Ela our science our social studies and our math all combine into a single data point and so you could think of it kind of like a summary of all of our assessments together you can see by the chart we have the highest percent of proficient students when you look at all of the other districts in St Charles County and also the three St Louis County districts that we always use as our benchmarks I'd also note that we have a little over 20 percent more students

118proficient than the state average obviously this is a huge point of Pride and our teachers are phenomenal I mean these are scores to celebrate from the rooftops uh we'll start by breaking that down and looking at each area individually so we'll kick it off with our Ela scores mapping this is our map and EO EOC test this is what our students in grades three through eight take as well as English 2 which is typically 10th grade the chart on the left shows you our overall student performance and then the chart on the right shows the performance of students and what the state calls our student groups the yellow highlight shows how we performed as a state compared to our or not as a state as a district compared to the other St Charles and St

119Louis County districts that we typically Benchmark and then it's a little hard to see but one of those rows is shaded and that gray shaded row that's the state average so if you want to kind of compare us to the state average you'll be able to see that up there one thing I'll mention is that the version of the presentation that's posted in board docs it does have a few extra slides that go into an additional layer of detail than what I'm sharing with you tonight so if you were to look at what's in board docs you would see uh similar information for third grade for fourth grade for fifth grade for each breakdown for those that are interested in in that additional layer of detail and then we'll switch over to math so this

120one shows math this is grades three through eight it's algebra one and then also algebra two and again the chart on the left shows overall student performance and the chart on the right shows our student group performance and once again you can see that we outperform the state and all of our peers and just like Ela the math breakdowns are also included in the presentation that's posted online I will pause here there's been a lot of conversation especially about algebra one and so I just want to take a minute to talk a little about that if you were to look at the detailed sides you would see that we saw gains in Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 gains that we're very proud of both of those yielded more than 20 MPI gate Point gains which

121is certainly to be celebrated and we believe we're on the right track with the work that we're doing at the same time when we look at our Algebra 1 scores we acknowledge that we do think that we could be performing better and and know that our students could be performing better so one thing I want to point out we've talked about it in some different committees if you are to compare the algebra 1 scores across a district something to keep in mind is that there is a little variance in how districts assess and so we know a couple local districts have students take their Algebra 1 EOC after they've taken Algebra 2 and so that extra year of algebra would certainly impact their score on that Algebra 1 EOC we follow the deci guidance and

122we give the Algebra 1 EOC after students take algebra one and so when you're comparing districts it's important to note that those scores could be higher because the students had a whole other year of algebra before they took their Algebra 1 EOC so just something to keep in mind if if you're getting into that level of detail regardless we still believe our scores could be higher than what we currently see we've met with the districts who are outperforming us we've had conversations to try to figure out is there something different that's happening or what can we learn from your success just like we do every year we've had an immense amount of internal collaboration around it and all of that resulted in some intentional work this year that we hope would impact those algebra one

123scores we know we're on the right track our gains from last year to this year would indicate that and we want to see that growth continue so David is his team he and his team and then I would also give a little shout out to Dr Lammers as our director of secondary they're really working with that PLC of teachers and David's going to share a little bit about some of the highlights of what that work looks like you know like Dr Buckman said one when we want to become better we look at what those better performing districts around us are doing and also internally what what else is working and so when we look at what some of the higher performing districts are doing um they're assessing their students intentionally more often and if I

124look compare that to what we do at our Elementary Middle School levels we do something similar with our benchmark assessments so um over the summer and first semester um we created common unit Assessments in algebra one aligned to the most current deci priority standards and then once those assessments have been created then we're working with plcs you have to form plcs to have conversations about what what is data saying where our students strengths are where our student weaknesses are and then having meaningful conversations around that data to purposely plan instructional next steps whether it is our content leader um our director of secondary and myself we are all here to support our plcs and help them drive that conversation and really focus on what is going to look what what are the ways that we're

125going to improve student performance and instruction in the classrooms one of the first things that we do though is and and I'm a dad a nerd um very early on in when we get our data back we get something called IBD data which lets us know how students did on individual standards that were assessed on the Algebra 1 EOC and other efcs as well and then how often that particular standard was assessed we create something called a heat map and that allows us to see the impact of how students score in a particular standard and how much how often it's tested so we have PLC conversations with each of our algebra and plcs around that data so we know exactly where those areas Improvement are going to be throughout the school year um our secondary

126math and science content leader um some academic directors as well as your building Administration are constantly constantly providing strategic support for alter one teachers including some release time to go over those common assessments our content leader continues to provide instructional coaching to our Math teachers and in particular our brand new Math teachers that are teaching algebra one and something else that we're going to do um the school year is we are adding a practice algebone EOC that will get data from about a month prior to the EOC so we can see pretty um summarily where students are at and have about a month to take action on the data that we're seeing around very specific standards thanks David we'll switch over now to science so we've talked about Ela math science is the third of

127the fourth areas that we'll look at this includes our fifth grade eighth grade and biology student data something that's unique here about science is both the fifth grade and the eighth grade assessments are what they call grade span assessments and so that means that fifth grade covers the standards from third fourth and fifth grade and the eighth grade test covers the standards from sixth seventh and eighth grade it's not just a one-year assessment a little unique um so once again on the left you'll see how all of our students performed and then on the right you'll see our student group performance and like the previous two areas so much to celebrate there in where we're performing comparatively and then finally we'll take a look at social studies and so this one is also a little

128unique in that it's only one assessment where all of the others are a combination of multiple different assessments this is just the government EOC it was a new assessment last year so this was just the second year of taking it and it's typically junior year that our students would take that EOC and so we did see a gain compared to our scores from last year while we outperformed the state we certainly would like to see a little bit of growth here you know where we like to fall on those charts especially for our students who fall in that student group cohort we've got a little work to do there so you might notice if you look at the student group chart that a couple districts don't have a number and that's because they have such

129a small number of students who fall in that category um that that data isn't sheared out much like algebra our social studies content leader is working with our government teachers to make sure we have those common assessments that are aligned to State Standards they're utilizing some technology enhanced assessments with the goal of resembling the EOC questioning methods so ordering labeling drag and drop sorting matching things like that the goal is really that our kids understand the content as well as the testing methods that are used on the EOC so that they're they're best prepared and then they're taking the data from that assessment it's kind of like David talked about and making some instructional decisions as they collaborate during that Weekly PLC time really they're trying to get it what's the root cause and what

130what strategic and intentional work do we need to do to adjust at the building level and then at the district level where might we find some potential gaps in curriculum or resources that we provide that will help us get those little gains there I might mention here AP government did get a new resource this year that better aligns with the AP government test which is different than the EOC but just a little point of information and all right so we'll switch over to our second indicator tonight success ready students so once again this measures students Readiness for the next phase career that mirror okay so for this indicator Dusty measures two things they take a look at our performance on College and Career assessments so that would be the act the ASVAB the act workkeys

131and they also take a look at participation in advanced academic or career oriented experiences so for us at AP advanced placement courses is what we'll we'll take a look at um oh I think I skipped we'll start with act performance so this is just one of the assessments that students can use for that CCR assessment need however it's most popular among our student body it's what the the vast majority of our students take so that's the data that we'll take a look at this slide shows the ACT composite data that's given to us directly from act we received act data and then or uh data from act we also receive different data from Desi this is the last ACT score that is on file for a student it's not necessarily the highest score that's what

132we get from act the last test they took however Desi provides the highest score regardless of when they took it and what's unique is that this year our composite is actually exactly the same whether you look at the last test students took or the highest test on record that's usually not the case I don't know Jason I'm not doing anything okay um what else everyone should know you can see that we outperform both the state and the national numbers there the the dark dark Navy and lighter blue boxes something to consider if you were to compare ACT scores among districts we elect to test the large majority of our students so unless they're taking the work keys or map a all of our kids are taking act there's some other districts local St Charles County

133districts that currently don't test all of their Juniors Rockwood is one of our comparison districts they do test all of their Juniors so they would be a district that we could compare to in terms of how many students are included in those numbers regardless of how you look at the data we agree we have some work to do when it comes to our ACT scores we certainly believe that as a district especially when you look at all of our other data points we should be performing better on the ECT there's there's no question about that we've spent a considerable amount of time with some internal conversation analyzing variety of data points talking with other districts to try to figure out what is the root cause that's causing the drop over time we know a few

134things to be true our data our internal data clearly indicates that the frequency in which students take the ACT so how many times do I take that test that there's a direct impact on their score we also in looking at our data can tell you can choose when we give the ACT to our Juniors you can choose what month you do that and we we do think that the timing impacts the score there seems to be a correlation there so David again is going to talk a little bit about some of those internal steps that we're taking to address the ECT to get that score back up to where we believe it should be as something unique that we're doing this year is we are piloting um two programs one IXL and one adminum test

135packs that students take an actual act and then they are prescribed practices based on their score and with test specs in particular even prescribed lessons that they can watch that will help ideally improve their skills before they take the ACT um in addition I'm Dr Buckman just mentioned we did we conducted an um in-depth analysis of the coursework that our students are taking and we compare that to what act recommends as a course pathway that would best prepare students for college so for instance we looked at by our freshman year for the most part our students were right on track taking the courses they need to take um to be best prepared for college but by the time they get to their sophomore year we're noticing not all of them are taking the prescribed math

136pathway Algebra 1 into geometry and Algebra 2 and precalculus um if we look at towards our junior year we have noticed that students are not accessing the science pathway that we that act would tell you this is what's going to best prepare a student in science which would be at biology chemistry and physics so things that we have done is make sure that those ACT prep courses are highlighted in our course guide so families can make more informed decisions as well as helping counselors understand and then helping counselors have conversations with students during course enrollment time about these are the courses that probably will best prepare you for college Dr Buckman also measured and I've looked at act a lot of different ways but one of the most significant things that I found is that

137over the last five years the number of times a student has taken the ACT has has dropped considerably an example is in Prior School in about 2018 probably about half of our students would take an act um at least two times and that's dropped down to about 30 percent of our students um what research would tell us and if you would even look at our internal act data over the last five years it would tell you the same thing that yes there is a considerable jump more often that students take the ACT uh things we're doing is we're bringing back a practice act for our sophomores which will give students at least one more opportunity before the real test to see what in the ACT is like um and also trying to help families understand

138the importance of taking the AST multiple times and if you don't know recently act has instituted a super score which if a student takes the ACT multiple times they get a super composite that takes their highest math or highest Ela their highest reading their highest science scores and calculates a composite that way and so how a communication campaign to help families understand that with that superscore that really is going to help your overall composite um we're in the process of building a crosswalk between acts standards that we can look at and say in math here are the standards that a student needs to master to get between an 18 or 21 on the act or between 21 and 24 to meet these standards we're looking at that CR that those standards compared to our curriculum

139and building a crosswalk and helping our teachers understand what that crosswalks um the the purpose of it and how to best use that with their students um for the last three years we have had to give our Junior AC during the early spring administration because the later date happened on a non-school day so this year I'm talking because at the later date in April actually is a school day for us a school year via conversations and we're moving to test students during that later date and then finally we've conducted an analysis of our student groups and compared their ACT scores and we do know that we have several student groups that are underperforming where our all student group is and we're trying to work with buildings to make sure we provide the best possible support

140for all of our students and then particular student groups thanks David all right we'll switch over to AP which is the second of those indicators under successor ready students and so this is that participation in advanced academic or career oriented experiences so for this indicator we'll take a look at our AP classes we know on average about 80 percent of Francis Hall students graduate and choose to go into college our goal is that all of those students are taking at least they're accessing a college level course before graduation for most of our students that's through our AP offerings some of our students choose to do like our early college program or one of the other options um currently we have about 54 percent of our students who take at least one AP class before graduation

141so our goal is that all 80 percent of those kids would be taking a class will continue to work towards that we offer a wide range of AP classes you can take anything from AP calc to AP Art and Design so there really is something for everyone we also know that success in AP indicates that a student is at that reading and writing level that allow them to be successful if they choose to go right into a career field and so one thing that we know that we want to work on is dispelling the myth that AP classes aren't for kids who plan to go right into the workforce it there's a myth that it's just for college-bound students and that's not the case so regardless this chart here if you take a look at

142it the um to look at it on my screen it's a little bigger the blue bar shows students who took the AP test and then the number of exams that were written is what you'll see on that yellow bar so we saw a little bit of an increase in the number of students who took an AP test uh also an increase in the number of exams that were written last year and then the last piece of data I'll share with you from AP is how our students scored on the assessment so this slide shows in blue the percent of kids who scored a three or higher on at least one exam and then the yellow yellow bar shows the percent of exams where kids scored a three or higher you can see we saw a

143little decrease about two percent uh in both of those numbers all right our next indicator is graduation rate this is the uh were scored on um how many the percent of our kids that graduate in four years we also get points for kids who graduate in five years and Beyond and so this slide shows both our four-year and our five-year graduation rate um I'm gonna have you follow along with me if you look at the 2018 column and then you look at the four-year graduate rate row you'll see that 95.8 percent of our students graduated in four years and then if you take that box and you move on a diagonal you'll see that we picked up some additional students and we ended at 97 of that class in the fifth year so that means

144that there was just a small group of students who needed an extra semester or two to complete those graduation requirements one of our points of pride in the district is that we typically earn all of our points for graduation on our four-year grad rate many other districts need that fifth year in order to earn all of their points our graduate is certainly a point of pride in our district um if you were to look at the Francis Hall data for 2021 the that class uh you'd see that we had 96 of our kids graduate in four years and then if you follow that down on a diagonal we were able to bump that up to a little over 97 percent by the end of that fifth year that compares to the state average of 89

145bumping up to 91. so uh doing well there and then our final indicator is our graduation follow-up this is uh the extent to which our students are pursuing gainful opportunities after graduation and so we earn points for kids who are enrolled in college at a trade or a technical school employed or in the military those are the four areas that if it's not one of those four uh it we don't earn points for it and so this data comes from six months out we have to do 180 day survey you may hear that language and it's tracking down kids 180 days after they've left us and ask them what it is that they're doing um and so as you can see from our data we hover around 80 percent of our students attending a two-year

146or a four year college and then we consistently have about 13 percent of our students who go right out into the workforce so all that said we always like to wrap up with some conversations around celebrations and then also how we'll continue to grow so a few things to highlight when you look at our combined proficiency that was that very first slide that we shared where the highest achieving District in St Charles County and among our Benchmark peers that we look at in St Louis County when you look at the actual proficiency scores for each specific tested area every single area showed an increase over last year every single one I regrade every EOC which is amazing we developed and implemented some common Assessments in all of our high school EOC tested areas to align

147with our state standards both Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 saw gains over 20 MPI points our Algebra 2 Data is actually the highest it's been in four years we've been working to integrate phonics into our Elementary classrooms we we've completed what kovid turned into a multi-year PD plan to allow for that implementation we've made strides in our work to balance College and Career and lots of new opportunities are available to students especially in that career field all of our elementary buildings have a leadership team that's engaged in a professional Learning Community Academy and it's getting rave reviews and all of our secondary staff is engaged in learning around assessment we're successfully transitioning to msip6 developing lots of new systems to ensure that we're meeting all those performance expectations and continuous Improvement metrics I would tell

148you that I'm I'm part of the group at the state level who's scoring the um the csips for other districts and we are we have lots to celebrate when I look at the documents from other districts across the state we have much to be proud of we continue to collaborate with other districts just through professional networks I think one of my points of Pride when I think about how we collaborate with other districts is so often it's our leaders our staff that are initiating that collaboration we're establishing professional learning networks we're reaching out to other districts and asking to set up those conversations and so the collaborative nature among our staff I think that goes all the way up through our organization which is the PD in me loves to see that and at the

149same time we know that we always have room to grow and always get better when people ask me what I love about Francis Howell it's that Spirit of continuous Improvement that keeps my heart Happy And so in that we certainly have work to do um we've been working with our high school leadership teams to add the two trials for the different act supports that David talked about so monitoring the data around those trials so we can figure out what would be the best one to scale and potentially Implement fully next school year we're planning to implement the Practice Act in the spring to our 10th graders and then work with our buildings to figure out the best way to use that data we've also been more intentional about making sure that students are in the

150classes that'll best prepare them for the ACT which David highlighted our content leader and building leadership team is providing really intentional support to our Algebra 1 teachers through some of that instructional coaching the PLC conversations and then that assessment data analysis all aligned to the standards which we believe should impact those EOC scores every one of our schools has developed an improvement plan that's targeted on specific work that aligns to the unique needs of that building that are surfacing in their data and then members of of our team the academic team we visit with those buildings to to review to Monitor and support the plans of all 23 sites and we do that twice every school year uh we're continuing to learn about Senate Bill 681 that's the new bill that outlines the specific expectations

151in the area of literacy and make adjustments to those plans to ensure we're meeting the expectations we'll talk more about that during our upcoming work session we know that the career Readiness side of the house still has lots of opportunities to grow we continue to look for ways that we can offer programs and opportunities within our current Staffing and budget allowances we're planning to expand the PLC Academy next school year to our secondary buildings and then we'll continue that assessment focused professional learning as well and then just as always continuing to look for opportunities collaborate with other districts in our area and then Dave and I've been having some conversations lately about even Benchmark Kansas City Colombia Benchmark districts outside of just the St Louis region uh you know I can't end without giving a

152shout out just to the heartbeat of our district so it is harder than ever to be an educator the needs of our students are ever changing the pressures on educators are new and different and it feels like more every school year and at the same time our staff continues to show up day after day and perform at extremely high levels they are doing amazing things for our students every single day and it's evident every time you walk into a building every time you walk into a classroom you see it our staff is passionate about their students they work tirelessly to do whatever it takes to make sure all of our students have everything that they need and so just regardless of the seat in which they sit our employees are really the ones that contributed

153to the celebrations and the successes that you saw tonight with that David and I are happy to answer any questions or we've got the theme back there yeah I had a couple questions I definitely want to say though that I appreciate the condensed version maybe you need to break this up to two different meetings and uh so that's much appreciated but also the transparency as well also providing that extra information so that some of the detractors out there can't say that we're trying to hide something or cherry picking information so I appreciate the extra transparency and also uh acknowledging that there's some room for growth uh that again much appreciated and a lot of that hard work and those uh numbers that we do need to celebrate are uh direct results of just the work

154that's put into it from the teachers that you acknowledge but also the parents and the students that are a part of that uh I I also want to also acknowledge that we have these high numbers High achieving numbers and we just talked about the struggles that we have financially here in the district so there I just don't know how sustainable that is with those High achieving numbers without Community Support so I just want to speak to that and kind of put that thought in people's minds that there has to come a time to where we support uh the school district so we can continue to do the uh the great things that we've always been doing and somehow managing to get by at such high levels uh one question for uh Dr Brothers here uh

155you said super score with act right at any number uh what's the magic number to achieve for that comprehensive score do you know the the top score is still 36. okay so and then College the amount of times you have to take it to get that comprehensive I don't I I would have to pull research for you it's brand new so I don't know the magic number of times but with our internal data I can say about the fourth or fifth time is where our students are maxing out on gains so if you were to compare our internal students and if they take it a sixth or seventh or eighth time they're not moving the needle much more beyond that okay thank you forward any other questions comments yeah first of all thank you Dr

156Buckman for that presentation and Dr Brothers I really appreciate the fact like uh Mr zigmeyer said that you're you recognize where we're lacking and where we need what we need to do to make that and I think everyone I know for me personally I go ahead I really appreciate that that you recognize where we need to make better choices in our for our kids so thank you very much second of all I'm just thinking poor Leah she's had budget and academics in one night I'm just making sure she's still awake here and she's doing great so um I just want to say that Leah do you have any questions no you okay that was a lot of data you just got thank you again David you may have answered this sir Connie for all of

157us what is student group we know all students but next to it is student group what does that mean it's our students who have an IEP it's free reduced lunch it's black Hispanic English Learners it used to be called our super subgroup so nine sub five it was super subgroup they've changed the language to student group and when we're met when we're actually in student group progress a student might be in several categories like free introduced lunch and black but for accountability purposes in that student group we're only held accountable for that student one time even if they're in multiple subgroups correct and I knew that but I don't think the audience knows what do you mean this student group is that you know all the ones we like or don't like and and secondly

158you know people ask about scores and why aren't districts doing even better the frustration we have as an educator and as a board member you just heard our Nea president congratulate us on finishing the first semester and that's wonderful and we're just getting these scores how do you make improvements how do we expect those teachers to make improvements when they're not getting the information out they were strong here this worked we need to improve upon and that's something that we need to meet with the state on that we need to get these scores back in a timely manner in September if we're weak in phonics only because you mentioned that that school knows we need to work on finance and this school over here may not be financed it may be comprehension so what is

159one of those moving targets that we've been frustrated with for years that all this information is wonderful and it's come out and we have it January 1st half the school year is over and so it's something that state needs to change and thank you Patrick I will mention just in full transparency we have had the scores for a little bit they've they're embargoed and we can't publicly talk about them until uh December it was like a week before our last board meeting when they went public without much notice and so we're just bringing them to you our teachers have our buildings have had them for a little bit of time so I don't want you to think the buildings just got them in January yes it wasn't much before yes that's fair very fair forward

160any other comments Adam thanks Dr Buckman Mr Brothers uh there's a lot of conversation historically about like the gaps from covid and this this makes it sound like we're improving um so encouraging so just I want to thank you for all the hard work there and all the hard work and slicing and dicing the data and digging into it sounds like a whole lot of work you get you guys were doing the team was doing so I appreciate all that thanks right I appreciate it just want to say uh David and Connie for the presentation and also meeting with me just a layperson uh at the beginning of January for quite a while and uh talking about a lot of this already um one of the things I know we talked about there was one

161of my questions was what incentives you know do students have to do well on the map test and you pointed out that this our school district off you know teachers do their own little thing but there are some incentives there for the students to do well uh whereas with the ACT obviously they're in their incentives to get accepted to the College of their choice um that said I don't know if you mentioned it but I'll just mention it to the public some colleges now aren't requiring the ACT you can still submit it that's a whole another topic you can search on your own on the internet if you're interested but uh that may have an impact I'd have to compare with our surrounding districts to see if theirs went down accordingly but um something to

162something to consider with respect to map scores and um social studies sticks out so I'm just curious is there a have we had a lot of social studies teachers leave did we do a new textbook is there anything there that kind of jumps out or you think it's just we just need to work a tad harder I'm sorry I should have put these no that's okay I don't know if I don't know if we've had a lot of social studies turnover um I it's the second year of an assessment of that assessment David might be able to talk more about I think in the past it was a little more like trivia and it's a little less like that now um we did see some gains from last year to this year and so we

163believe that the work they're doing again we're on the right track with that um I don't know that I have an answer to those though yeah I know you guys knew the data much better than me and all the questions I had you already uh you already knew where the uh you know where the room for improvements were uh and I'll just say you know this you touched on it but in the detailed slides for the public um you can see this algebra one and Algebra 2 uh thing that that you kind of alluded to but um I'll say something a little more about it the there are schools and we're to believe here that school districts like Rockwood Fort Zumwalt had no students that took Algebra 2 last year that's suspect to me they

164have their high school students take algebra one if if I suppose you can talk a little bit about how that testing works but I think it's important for the for the general public to understand but some some students take algebra one in Middle School those students that are in pre-algebra and algebra in seventh and eighth grade um and then in high school they're required to take one math assessment is that right um so those students ideally should take uh algebra two when they get to high school or geometry but uh is the thought that these other districts are having their seventh and eighth grade Algebra students take the eighth grade EOC and of course is that all 8th graders have to take a math assessment and so if they're not giving their algebra one middle

165schoolers the ounce one EOC then yes they'd be giving the eighth grade grade level assessment map test yeah okay I I would also mention I don't want to throw other districts under the bus the the local districts in St Charles County some of that is an impact of covid and how they chose to to navigate covet in their District so uh while there's always been a little bit of inconsistency um I do think Jessie's been pretty clear with their guidance around mc6 and that their expectation is Right test right time so when you take the class you take the EOC and so we're very hopeful that moving forward we will see some consistency in the testing I don't I I'd like to believe nobody's trying to play the system that it was just kind of

166how they navigated some covid related decisions in their District we put it out there because we know that there's a lot of comparison between districts and it's not always Apples to Apples and so it's just a point of fact that we want people to know when they're comparing yeah but I don't think it was ill intent on other districts I guess is what I'm trying to say I hope not but it does stick out when you look at when you look at the detailed data um you can't help but notice it um so appreciate it thank you very much thank you board anything else thank you Dr Buckman Dr Brothers on to superintendent comments board first I would like to Echo the things um both for Dr Hawk and Dr Buckman in their departments and

167the works on the revised budget and that information presentation tonight as well as the academic report when I think about the two areas that our patrons and our staff have the highest expectations for us it's about fiscal responsibility in sharing that information being transparent and then the work that we're doing to prepare our students for post-secondary opportunities whichever they may choose and that comes back ultimately to our academic offerings we look at the reports and the information other districts provide to their boards into their patrons through their meetings and we really provide a greater level of detail than many other districts do both around our budget as well as around our academic report and I point that out only because we have spent a lot of time this year trying to be more transparent and

168clear with the data and just want to remind people that we get a lot of great questions from our staff from our patrons and from you related both to our academic achievement the work the systems that are in place what we're doing to improve as well as the budget and we we appreciate those questions it helps us think about the work that we're doing and hopefully continuously improve but um again the amount of time and effort that went into both those presentations it is the work but it also takes a lot for their teams to put all that together so I just wanted to Echo that thanks Dr Hawk and I plan to share at our February board meeting our prop best review with you you'll remember back at the September meeting we talked that

169we would be doing an internal review we were also planning to get feedback and input from several of our professional organizations that work with us around what took place over the last couple of years we didn't quite get the participation from some of those groups that we had hoped for but we do believe that we have enough information that we've been able to review that we'll be able to talk with the board about changes to our process for future work that will provide additional oversight and transparency both for you and for the community as we engage in future construction projects throughout the district this would be specific changes to the process for how we work through projects as well as working with our committee and the involvement we get what stop measures are there where

170that's being shared with the board of education for input and after we share some of those recommendations the board will then have an opportunity to discuss are those just process changes we put in place are there some things that we would want to ultimately put into policy for the district moving forward our plan is to share those recommendations as well as a timeline for prioritizing and moving forward with the remaining work at next month's meeting I know everybody's anxious to continue moving forward with the remaining funds that we have and looking forward to those projects as well as the Deferred maintenance that needs to take place one thing that I will say our review does not include is a formal external audit which I know has been discussed by both several board members patrons over

171the last couple of years at different points in time while I don't believe that is absolutely necessary or that it's going to identify any gross negligence or wrongdoing I want to be clear that we are not against that idea at all we welcome an audit whether that's something the district would ultimately choose to pay for from an external auditor that we hire or if the state would choose to come in and do an audit of the district we've heard lately that's going to be a focus under the new state auditor there can be a significant cost to either one of those depending on how it comes about but we don't have anything to hide we are working to be more transparent with you with our community and we realize that any findings from an audit

172whether that is a firm that we would hire or it's from the state it's going to provide us feedback on the work that we're doing there are always things that we can do better and so we'd be happy to discuss that further with you after next month's meeting and get the guidance around how the board would like to proceed with an audit of that we still feel like that's a part of the um formal process that you would like to take place a couple other thanks and celebrations it was mentioned tonight that over winter break we had multiple pipes burst impacting seven different buildings throughout the district some of that happened both on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we had over 40 different employees we had staff members support staff teachers administrators we even had

173parents and students that showed up at our buildings when these crises were happening to help you know get things out of the way move things around try to stop some of the water flow get water out of these areas you know that's a lot to ask anybody to do on any given day especially over holidays when we hope that people get an opportunity to rest and relax and enjoy time with those families that the quick action of people jumping in and doing that really mitigated a lot of the damage that could have happened if we weren't being as responsive as we were so I want to thank every one of those staff members and some of our parents and students that jumped in it allowed us to return to school right after break and open

174up that following Tuesday with very minimal disruption to what was going on in our buildings we will be hosting our third citizens Roundtable coming up on February 1st this one will be held at Westwood Trail Academy where we held our board meetings often during covid a reminder that this is a forum for interested patrons to come together to really engage and problem solve around a relevant and timely topic we've gotten positive feedback from patrons and staff who have attended the first two there's still time to sign up and join me and our transportation team at this Roundtable we'll be talking about potential changes that we could have in our busing operation that would allow us to be more efficient work through the sapping significant Staffing shortage we have in that department as well as ultimately

175have a budget impact for the district the link to sign up has been put out multiple times and emails it's also available on the website so we please ask that you join us Hall of Fame nominations are open our Hall of Fame is one of our most prestigious Awards and it's really an opportunity to recognize individuals who go above and beyond in their efforts to support our schools and the district in meaningful ways so if you can think of different parents volunteers Community organizations or staff members who really represent the best of the Francis Howell community and who've had a lasting impact on the district we ask that you nominate them nominations will be accepted through March 1st and that form is also available on the website or you can reach out to our Communications

176Department our Francis House Central theater program was actually chosen this happened last month but to perform they did a Renaissance Fair one act play that we had talked about over the summer at the renaissance fair that one act was selected to perform at the state conference this year that actually took place last week they were chosen to perform twice in Kansas City there were 10 student actors and a student director it's a tremendous honor for them and I want to congratulate them and Kim Harrison and the entire program the drama program over there at Howell Central last I'm excited to share that we really hope to hold our board meetings at 801 Corporate Center Drive beginning in February the home of Union High School and where our administration offices are now located on February 2nd

177we have scheduled a board Workshop that will focus on the literacy program within the district just sharing some of those details with the board and talking about some things we're looking at doing with interventions and things moving forward to remind everyone a workshop is an opportunity to come together it's a little bit less formal of a setting but it's an opportunity for administrators and staff to share with the board the work that we're doing and engage in conversation with the board that we don't always get to see in a formal meeting with just questions and feedback about the work that we're doing so there are no Patron Commons there's no other business at the meeting it's just the workshop but that will take place on February 2nd and then assuming everything goes well on February

1789th we hope to hold our first business meeting at that building and we'll plan to do a bit of an open house speaking at 5 30 before the meeting that evening to allow people to tour the building and then have the business meeting beginning at 6 30. so plan to be there unless we communicate otherwise things have changed thank you thanks doctor office on to board comments request any comments requests do we have anything Leah no any thoughts or impressions just happy to be done probably all right uh folks I just want to draw your attention that we have some uh information at the bottom of the agenda and upcoming meetings that Dr rump has talked about uh and if you didn't hear how to sign up that information is also located at the bottom

179of the agenda as well so uh and we have unfinished closed business so we'll be uh completing this uh open meeting and what do we say about 10 minutes take a recess and convene into the close uh session thanks everybody foreign