001acceptance okay welcome you can everyone hear me okay welcome it is so great to see so many um lovely faces in the crowd at this time I'd like to call this meeting to order and Mr Kavanaugh if you could leave us in the bunch the United States of America [Music] okay I would also like to take the opportunity um to have our college student introduce themselves uh I uh I'll be in Reno and then we have the more people walking at home who will also be reporting okay great thank you so much we love our Student News okay yeah this time um it is a public comment and so we allow 30 minutes for a cup of comment um you will be given three minutes to speak no individual will be permitted to speak more
002than one time we ask that you're respectfully comments and that you do not use specific names of students staff or community members we ask that for the safety of all you stay behind the podium and we are still accepting comments submitted virtually those comments will be read after all the in-person public patents per board policy the board does not respond to public comment um the administration or Warcraft president will follow up as needed so first comment and we it's in order of um it is Miss Susan Tiffany yes yes if you push the red button well if you push the red button now um no just push it um okay good evening we won't count that as your three minutes we can start the clock next good evening I'm here to talk to you about
003something that is on your current agenda and it is item 4.12 about kecc it's an action item for consent I am encouraging all of you to support this matter attached to this um board doc uh part of the agenda is a memo and the author of the memo is quite correct there have been multiple EC educator 2 position vacancies at kucc and in part that is due to pay if kacc does not have providing a step amount of staff just like our elementary middle and high school students they cannot run with an effective program however the action required tonight is raising the pay scale on a step 12 to a step 14 on these six the support staff salary pays you that is only one piece to the puzzle though unfortunately the support staff salary
004schedule is not similar to the certified Staff Schedule they don't know where they're going they are assigned an arbitrary number when they start based on experience and where the scale is at that time years of service are not included when raises are given it is a simple cost of living raise due to this there have been some upsetting news that I have found inside of our Personnel reports due to the fact that basically points to the fact that KCC is not evaluating these staff members evaluating these staff members and they need to be valued in this District I know this is happening HR knows this is happening you know it's happening because it's in the Personnel reports anybody can look at those about those eight staff members that have left Joanna m in July was
005inflated to May 1749 yeah the 22 please refrain from username sorry oh well then that makes my evidence very difficult even though it's a board doc yeah this is the Personnel report yep that's one of our all right so we have several members who have left the KCC team that are making 1749 and they have been with the district for three years another person who left the district was insulated to make 1783 for the 22-23 school of the year and they had only been with the district for one year continuing to be upsetting as there's been two new hires that are slated to make 1749. the exact same amount that the first hire who left in July who had been with the district for three years was going to be making this year it's disappointing
006it's unfair if we are to be committed to equity and be respectful of our employees as value our employees why is the salary support schedule for sports staff not attributing years of service there's a reason people are leaving it's not just the amount of pay but it's the fact that they're not feeling respected by the district for what they do which is educating our youngest Pioneers thank you thank you Miss Tiffany um next um Miss Julie Miss good evening this is my first school board welcome I'm truly Missy I'm a parent in the district of four children two have graduated um I'm here to speak about uh item number 302 library media center procedures review um it is true that every parent has the right to monitor what their child is reading it is not
007true that parents have the right to restrict what other people's children are reading around 50 years ago parents were arguing in school board meetings that children like my son who has Down syndrome should not be allowed to attend school with their children because they thought it would take teachers attention away from their own children luckily in 1975 Faith was enacted and these days most people would agree that having children with special needs in the same school helps typical kids to develop empathy and become all around better humans Channel sure what's going on yeah there's more people that won um children also develop empathy through literature I want my child to read stories with main characters of all abilities races religions and sexualities I want my child to grow up to be empathetic and kind to
008anyone who is different from her in August it was revealed that only 43 percent of Missouri students are scoring at or above grade level for ELA our nation actually the entire planet has just gone through a dramatic pandemic that has affected our children's learning teachers need our support to help get our kids get back up to speed they do not need parents to micromanage the classroom kids need unrestricted access to books the Kirkwood district has worked hard to provide one-to-one access to iPads and laptops laptops that helped somewhat level the playing field for many students of lower financial means or limited abilities many of these kids rely on these devices for their reading sources please do not let a minority of parents dictate access to online libraries my daughter reads books on her iPad every
009single day I say let her read thank you okay um next up is Isabel um to me if you move the microphone down just so that we can hear you and then is your red button up okay you're good to go hello my name is Isabel Missy and I'm in sixth grade at diaper I disagree with the statement to ban some online books I read an average of one hour a day online parents are always telling kids that we should read more but we can't do that in some of the books online that we read are banned it is up to the parents to decide what their kids can and can't read now what other kids can and can't read the Missouri reading scores have gone down since 2019 and that's because kids aren't able
010to access as many books last year I was on the winning team for the battle of the books and it was a highlight of my year my Librarians are great and recommend tons of good books and I trust them please don't limit the access to the books I love thank you for giving me your time good night thank you next up is Melissa Richardson [Music] um next up is um Miss Amy Barker and Cindy I know I should know this or Taylor sorry okay so we are back and our building Administration we are sure is hoping it's because of the early retirement incentive on I'm sorry separation agreements on the agenda or this evening but it's not that nor is it about lactation spaces again even though I'm trying to say that word as many
011times in public as I can from this calendar yeah um but instead it is about the wonderful library at Kirkwood High School uh I don't know about you Cindy but my students have trouble getting into the library during home runs because it's so popular all the kids want to go and I have freshmen so they haven't figured out that you have to reserve a spot at least one day in advance and why because what they want is in the library the materials they want the information they want and need and come the students they want to be the thinkers they want to be the readers they want to be the citizens they want to be it's there and why is that because of the amazing work and effort of the librarians they use professional guidelines
012to figure out what 1800 different students will need and they have made the place so popular that people can't get in how many school libraries can say that not many people vote with their feet and we ought to count those books thank you I'm also asked that you recognize my colleagues that are standing outside the door that have come in support of our Librarians there's at least five people out there that they are not allowing in that we ask to come to this meeting to voice their support for our librarians um I have to say I love our Librarians they are amazing professionals and as Dr Jill Biden said an Nea member in the United States of America we do not ban books I'm sorry okay next up is Miss Heather yeah come on now
013I'm fine um so like the few speakers before me hear about item number 302. um I am a parent in the district I have an eighth freedom and I have an 11th grade and um I have to say I love the purposeful dessert my family and I've moved around a lot through the years I've been in Rockwood School District Parkway School District but we've also lived in Madison Wisconsin um so I feel like I have a lot of experience and Kirkwood is a really wonderful place and one of the things that I really loved about it was the diversity that I found here that maybe I didn't find in other places um I know that the district is facing tough choices right now particularly the challenge of protecting their educators um now that some people
014might be open to individual um attacks due to the new Missouri law so I just wanted to speak up and share my support to our librarians the time that they dedicate towards serving all of the students um I like many of the parents in this District have students that are Advanced academically and I'm socially and emotionally so I can understand that in respect that some parents have objections about maybe their children not being ready for something it's very understandable I would know that there's not a librarian in this District that would work with those parents there's some teachers who wouldn't work with those parents to find other materials so they can need the requirements um and so I think that those things are already in place I however would employ the district to support and
015trust their trained professionals to serve all the students virtually students even like my own children who I think are constantly looking to be challenged and need that challenge I'll very briefly just share that I feel so passionate about this because when I was in the eighth grade I had a wonderful teacher who gave me a book called Lisa breitenberg I don't know if anybody already knows this book it was written in like 1968 it was very controversial because it dealt with topics of cutting and suicidal ideation and abuse um I wasn't really struggling kid and this is definitely a book I can see that maybe not every parent would want their eighth grader to be reading but for me it was my eighth grade teacher Julie Bloodworth who gave me that book that not only
016sparked a love of reading in me so that I came on to be a English teacher and English professor but it gave me the courage to go speak to my parents and to reach out to my friends because that's what the girl in the book did so even though the subject matter was really heavy and really scary and maybe not all kids would be ready for it my teacher knew that I was not only ready for it but that it might save me and it did thank you next up Miss Julie sells hi hello how are you all doing thank you for having us here I would comment that I think we could have more space I know there were other supporters I kind of had to talk my way in here I think I
017just slid in another the wire but as the size of our district I think we could probably squeeze a few more parents in here considering we have some passionate folks out there I am also in support um of item 302 talking about our amazing Librarians my kids are Tillman neifer and Kirkwood High School and um I can't name names but the Tillman librarian that we have worked with is one of the most amazing people ever she's back here um this is a woman who would go up to my kids and say okay if you like this you would like that how many students has she had over the years that she takes the time to go up to that student and say if you read this I can recommend something else that you'll like oh
018you're in this series you're gonna like this series that takes incredible amounts of dedication which would explain why we're one of the top five districts in the state top five districts in the state do not censor books top districts do not censor books I don't think Clayton is censoring books I don't think Ladue is censoring books we do not want to be in this group we have educated experienced and not only educated and experienced but special amazing librarians that take the time to cultivate and put together a book list that our children enjoy and on top of it get to know our individual kids to encourage them to read more so this this idea that there's some sort of conspiracy of underlying manipulation or something of our students is ludicrous and ignorant and fear bound
019which I don't think any of us want to be a part of I also want to say that I don't need parents parenting me but thank you conservatives talk about less government and less control and yet they want to control some of the most intimate things which is my relationship with my child and what I think is appropriate and the school that I choose to send my kids to which I think is a fantastic District so I want to be very compassionate I also want to be very firm that I'm absolutely opposed to book Banning overall in this District I also want to say that and and back to our Librarians we have an incredible librarian at knifer who is also fighting for health issues and comes to work every day professionally and with a
020great spirit and is also continuing to help our kids learn to read and to grow and to challenge and I just find it to be Fascinating People are questioning this so thank you for your time and I'm proud to be part of this District [Applause] foreign I've never said anything in three minutes in my entire life especially about something that I'm this passionate about I came to my first school board meeting in 1980 I have trusted school board members since 1980. I started working for this District in 1976. and I am worried all those bordering on scared Nazis banned books not Americans not school board members [Music] here to stand in solidarity okay I need you to stay behind the podium I know I know I know okay I'll stand behind the podium sorry fascist
021banned books Americans do not when you close a book you close a mind a child will find a way to get to the librarian to go and find that book I challenge each and every one of you I ask you examine the books that you've read in your lifetime did any of them cause you to fail you're here because someone put a book in your hand and I'm here to stand in solidarity with those people that you hired that you trust that you put the policies in their hands and said Implement these policies and their sound they're working and they're helping the children that are sitting right there that are being helped by these Librarians that are being helped by these English teachers and this old man who has been here since 1976 is worried
022that you're not going to have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to a few extreme voices that are telling you that this is damaging children it isn't I know it isn't because I've been in this school where this librarian works and I watch what she does with the children that you're charged to educate educate them do not cheat them out of the opportunity to have a book in their hands because they'll get it one way or another thank you [Applause] Mrs hey Mike are there any online um this first one is from Kimberly singer I understand that the changes in library procedures are at least in part a response to the new law Senate Bill 775 while it pains me that books that have been carefully chosen by our Librarians our students have to be
023removed from shelves and classrooms I appreciate this thoughtful plan to adhere to these new guidelines and improve transparency and communication with parents next one is from Dan Langford the librarian at knifer does an amazing job getting to know readers and putting great books in their hands she works so hard to foster a love of reading and learning at nightfort my kids have come home and told me about their experiences in the library and how much they love it if a family does not want their child to reach something then they can make that decision however they should not get to choose what other children read or don't read we love our Librarians and libraries thank you Mandy Melton I wanted to take a moment to commend Health skilled the Kaiser librarian and her team are
024at meeting the needs of all readers our daughter excels at reading she is able to Jen is able to challenge her by sponsoring the book battle team and providing all the Mark Twain book awards to read the librarian gamifies reading by setting quantity and time goals and providing rewards for those who achieve them most importantly she also has the ability to provide access to books above grade level with online access to the public library our son is a struggling reader the librarian has provided graphic novels to encourage his comprehension and confidence when independently reading he has a love of science engineering and building and has been directed to many texts on each subject with her help I'll never forget the amazing architecture book she sent home with our son it was technical with brilliant pictures
025despite his low-level reading she never discouraged him from the book the keyboard over every picture and claimed to every word despite it reading like an encyclopedia similarly similarly the Kaiser Library has on-level texts with dragons and Magic to engage him to um comment from Kathy Fisher I'm so thankful for our highly qualified expert in their field library media specialist the time thought and expertise that they put into our school libraries should be appreciated and their work and time should not be wasted as a result of both Banning efforts rather than done books a collective effort to ban assault weapons would be a better more effective strategy if we're tooling to look truly looking for women's dangerous woman [Applause] Erica Morrison our KHS Librarians work tirelessly to make sure that every single one of our students
026can find a book that will ignite a passion for reading and learning in general our school libraries offers an aggressive and diverse collection of texts that Empower our students to be critical thinkers and Future Leaders of our community our Librarians are integral to the success of our district and must be wholeheartedly supported comment from Michael George I was very disappointed to learn that several members of the Kirkland School Board are demanding that a report be made about the libraries and our schools our Librarians within the district work tirelessly to provide students with the best books periodicals and other information sources so that they can learn and grow as human beings in our current political climate it is all it is becoming all too common for these dedicated professionals to the unfairly scrutinized criticized and even
027prosecuted in order to satisfy the demands of an extremely vocal minority I believe that any report given to the board should focus on recognizing their hard work and expertise rather than feeding into the false Narrative of liberal indoctrination that seems to have taken mood with a small number of people in our community and then the last comment is from narrative Spider-Man buyers and it looks like several other people um dear Kirkwood School Board District Board of Education directors and superintendent Ulrich we as parent perfect parents and working professionals were shocked and disappointed to learn that our school district is Banning books and our school libraries Missouri Senate Bill 775 which went into effect recently prohibits Educators from providing visual materials with explicit sexual material to students and makes exception for works of art when taken
028as a whole that have serious artistic significance or works of anthropological anthropological significance or materials used in science courses including but not limited to materials used in biology Anatomy physiology and sexual education classes the intent of the law is to prevent sexual predatory behavior and grooming as students by school Personnel however our district has preemptively moved to banned books which fall well within these exceptions including the visual Works Mouse 1984 and the human body in action the Missouri Association of slow Librarians specifically advise districts against preemptively removing books in its most recent online statement also the Missouri Library Association has denounced the new law as an attempt to criminalize Librarians and censor free thought as a healthcare professional I can tell you that the human body in action is a highly respected well-curated Illustrated representation
029of the vast human organ systems written for middle school students it contains a chapter called making babies which accurately and scientifically describes the human reproductive system we discuss human sexuality in our health curriculum I explain human reproduction in my discussions of puberty with patients and I use this text as a visual example it is not explicit graphic or inappropriate its accurate information presented thoughtfully and intellectually in a way our students can understand by Banning it what do we accomplish we remove information or reproduction sexually transmitted infections pregnancy and physical awareness we don't prevent anything that only limit the educational resources for our students the additional books listed prevent access to information and representation to many other families families of color families of Jewish descent gay and queer families Etc are these not taxpayer families do
030their students not deserve to see themselves in our libraries we chose Kirkwood School District because of our policies of progressiveness inclusion representation scientific accuracy and diversity to take these books and opportunities away is shameful and exactly opposite of what a public school education represents I'm sure the explanation for this action is to protect our teachers and Librarians that instead you have silenced their voices and tied their hands infern the freedom and right of our students and taken away our rights as parents to be open educational doors to our students to declare this action and the ramifications are unjust and proper offensive scientific scientifically prohibited and then this and violate the KSD mission to equip students with the skills knowledge and understanding into the empathetic successful and to Value all people okay thank you for all
031those lovely comments um at this time um I need a motion in a second to approve today's agenda ceremony it's okay all those in favor of approving today's agenda please raise your right hand and say I okay usually passes okay next up is our summer school report um Dexter Ulrich thank you very much yeah Dr man why don't you come up and um I believe you're going to ask the folks join you uh tell me we're gonna move some chairs here and do like if we have if we have chairs no it's okay we'll get chairs to move down um [Music] thank you for being so flexible and willing to bring your chairs with yeah musical chairs okay well welcome well thank you very much uh president Andrews I very much appreciate the opportunity and
032I know our folks who um who have led our opportunities for our students this summer to get that enhancement jump start and all those extended gear opportunities they have joined us here so Dr painter I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves and I know you kind of got a run-up show here so we'll uh we'll get right into it um I will tell you that the the format before the board is uh is to summarize the data to talk about what went well and what are our next steps and so you will see that repeated here the buyer folks so Dr Banner please get us started yes thank you very much I am very happy to have these fine individuals with us today I will introduce them in just a second um but I
033know you've received additional data we're not going to go into that tonight we but I I will be honest and say that they probably their enthusiasm they probably could talk for a couple of hours that's not what you want tonight we get it um but I just want to say thank you very much to Elizabeth Locke Phil Dice and Matthew Banks who led our elementary middle school and high school programs this summer and I will say that they let it under as we all know less than ideal circumstances we had to do a lot to try to not only encourage students to participate but also staff to participate because they've quite frankly were exhausted and it was very difficult for us to entice them I want to say thank you to the board for encouraging
034us to find ways to incentivize them that really helped quite honestly and so and I think you'll be pleased with what we've what we're able to share with you from our results standpoint as a reminder of last year's strategic plan 1.2.5 did call for us to enhance our summer our student support of participation across K-12 in our summer programming and as we shared last spring we were able to expand this program in many ways not only in the number of days that we were able to offer to our students but also at the elementary level specifically the amount of time we went to a full day program this year and and I think you'll hear more of that from this lock I will also say at the high school level we continue to grow our
035online opportunities for our students and they continue to take advantage of those and I'll let Phil talk more about that as well I pass it off to Elizabeth right now and just once again say thank you very much not only did she um she saved this quite honestly because we had hired somebody else she was interested and then decided not to apply and the person who had been hired in has been in place for over a month got a job in another district and Elizabeth swooped in and did a masterful job she did such a wonderful job in the feedback that we've received from the teachers and students has been very possible thank you very much I actually was very um thankful for the opportunity I carry them it was I had the time of
036my life this summer I had so much fun being with a guest um so the slide that you have in front of you is um just shows students um the percent of students that were meeting benchmarks in the spring of 2022 and then that same group of kids in the fall of the students who attended summer school in the fall the percentage of kids meeting Benchmark and you can see um in four out of five of the grade levels we made an increase and that is a really exciting thing not just because it is an increase but because they took one grade level assessment at the end of the year and they took a different grade level assessment in the fall and so to see the same percentage would have been just great because we
037wouldn't have seen summerslide but we saw a growth in the majority of the grade levels so um that was that was super exciting very nice so this next slide just goes a little bit deeper into that data just to say that this particular slide is talking about the percentage of kids who started in the below average range So Below the 25th percentile in the fall just looking at those groups of students um the number of students that moved up a performance level or moved up a color when you're used to seeing the red yellow greens blues um you can you can look at the numbers yourself but just to highlight Rising first graders 60 or 9 out of 15 of those students grew a performance level almost half of the second graders grew a performance
038level in the area of reading um saying with fourth grade huge growth 50 of the fifth graders moved up a level so again just not just maintaining Benchmark but actually improving their level from where they were so some of the things that went well with summer school were took a full day programming was a huge was a huge benefit it gave teachers more time obviously to dig in the smaller class sizes obviously are a huge help and what we did was focused on just a few standards of those foundational skills and then had time and themes throughout summer school so that they could apply those skills in fun engaging activities whether it with games things that didn't feel so schoolish and and made it feel we were trying to kind of have a fun summer
039camp one one parent feedback was that their child was disappointed there wasn't a pool at um we also had dedicated time for community building and social emotional skills and I think that was another huge um Factor we really wanted to develop a community and I feel like you think we had a great um community of between the adults the children and everyone at summer school and then this summer we had PE every day for every class um so being able to have movement was was great for the students and it also gave a little added benefit as it gave teachers a few minutes to get together as a team to plan together so going forward we definitely want to keep the full day format something I would recommend in the future was is coming up
040with some better communication with families about how their students progressed across summer school some additional time before summer school starts just to do a little more training and have the teams have planning time together obviously there's always things with Logistics that we could improve on so just streamlining some of those in the future in terms of identification and enrollment those kind of things and then we would want to continue to explore that transition possibility for incoming kindergartners I know we talked about that a little bit this spring but continue to explore that option as well um and can we do questions after each presentation that's okay um we'll start down with you Mr President I just want to say it was a fun time to be had my own was like I'm not going to
041summer school he was totally against it after the first day he was ready to go to bed at seven o'clock so something good was going on I just had a question um with the data the that you presented the first the growth we got into Benchmark data with the data compared to were these this is the student's data not necessarily per grade level right so these are students who were in summer school and this is comparing their beginning their spring data set okay yeah foreign just diving in a little bit more to see who actually not just maintain Benchmark or improve Benchmark but looking at some of those kids who had a little bit farmer to go with seeing their growth perfect so they're individual not like all in first grade right right so of
042the 22 students who are initially below the 25th percentile five of those 22 improved a performance level or in color so to speak thank you thank you I just wanted to ask um and also related to the deeper back into the Benchmark data these are students who are below the 25th percentile so I'm wondering if you did a comparison with the subgroups working at the achievement Gap and I also wanted to ask for students who targeted for the enrollment and identification was this a specific group of students for summer school or was it open for all students we initially focused on students who were below the 25th percentile would have been our best people but then we were willing to have other as well and yes I do have some more broken down data by
043share with you guys good good thing so I'm sure I'll talk with you later about that but thank you very much for the information appreciate appreciate it okay I do have a quick question um with regards to the kindergarten jumpstart is that something that you'll you we could be possibly seeing maybe as soon as like the well I maybe this is a Dr Oliver's question it would be that was one of the things that we were hopeful to maybe even start as soon as a couple of months ago it would be my it would be my hope again of looking at Elizabeth she's like please don't uh please don't over commit me however in our in our review of meetings that we've had uh we do believe we have a capacity if we get a
044communication out early uh that we could have something in place to help our students transition to kindergarten as soon as this next summer and and then my only other um ass would be um as soon as you kind of have the summer school dates that we kind of publish those two families as soon as possible just so families can kind of plan around you know plan around that um and then the other piece said that um that I would just ask and this is a doctoral to ask but um that we kind of timeline out um summer school and bringing it to the board and kind of making sure that we're bringing it in a timely fashion that we're you know what I mean if we're adding programs or we need things approved that that
045we kind of back that out and so a timeline might be helpful um for that right and again um um I would just like to thank you on behalf of the board because um you know we were in a meet and you stepped up and so um we're grateful for you and I just love calling you principal walk so great job Health before we pass it off to 90 degrees I just wanted to say we have basically we've committed to we want to have our calendar in place and have our administrators hired for next year by December 1st of this year so they need to be moving on that like we're excited about the possibilities with that because I do think that that will help us secure staff earlier and then secure next up um
046Mr Banks who in his other job is as a band teacher in our district and we are thrilled to have him I was totally delighted and impressed by his enthusiasm as he approaches he's also a member of our klpp administrator growth a leadership program and so I'm going to pass this way down to him you want to tackle this or do it um you could be his Clicker good evening Board of Education once again as Dr Payne introduced me thanks Matthew Banks I'm so excited to be here and talk to you about Middle School summer camp um a couple things if you see in the chart um you solved like 145 ryzen 6 8th grader students as you can see 30 of students identified as non-white um all grade levels but instead of students need
047benchmarks in at least one area so that was a very uh I I to me that's that's very huge because of the way the program was set up each um it set up as an exploratory type of summer school so each week was different so what Okay so yeah I'm not trying to you know like yeah okay so can you hear me now yes you're good my apologies so I'll start over so you can hear again um 145 Rising six eighth grade students uh 58 Rising aprons and um Alfred jump start 33 of the students identified as non-white and all grade levels increase the percent of students meaning benchmarks in at least one area so it's a huge growth considering how the program was set up each week was different for the kids so one
048week kids would take cooking and woodworking next week they would take food truck business and uh cardboard game and so all in each of those courses it included a math and reading standard in there so to make it it was very simplified because we even had teachers and were teaching Spanish too so we offered a lot of opportunities for our kids and at least they got to experience uh going through the program um look at the deeper dive into the Benchmark data looking at the students you saw a lot of huge uh in the sixth grade level 53 um in there also seventh grade and eighth grade um you saw them uh the students rising up in certain areas of the name um the numbers I'm going to throw that out there right now because
049I'm sure it's gonna be a question numbers look low yes because the way the program was set up some of the parents pulled out their students early because of uh I want to go on vacation or some of the parents like hey we can only do this week in the way the program was set up is we weren't getting enough kids at the beginning kind of like what you talked about because it was um earlier so we opened it up to everybody so it wasn't just targeting just a small group of uh kids we opened it up to everybody because I think this opportunity for every kid should be able to be able to participate in this and not just limit people um so that's that's how I I run things that's how I you
050know I would want that and you know and my staff would want it man that's that's how I kind of live um uh what went well um half day programming in the mornings with two sessions daily so I didn't want the teachers to teach it originally was supposed to teach two teachers going to teach about three and a half hours straight that's not conducive for any teacher that's not conducive for the students and I wouldn't want to do it so why would I make the teachers do it so I kind of live by example be a servant leader and so therefore I we set up the two sessions daily which worked really well um with the students they a lot of the parents loved it the exploratory enrichment program Style with the kids because the
051kids weren't just going there okay yeah got it reading okay yeah we made it to where it was fun that's why I like the Montessori approach to this because he gave a different Outlet so we're kind of tricking them into learning what they want and so so um greater than 96 the students have rolled it out to a jump start moved into the algebra in eighth grade so that's that's pretty good you know so at least those kids are getting that opportunity to move up there uh where do we want to go I some of the parents you know a lot of these are not my ideas I I exit ticket the students and parents and staff uh expand on exploratory opportunities um more opportunities for explicit reading instruction enrichment math and Eli opportunities kind
052of like how we had that algebra jump start set up maybe doing something like that for reading for those students who might be struggling in those areas so give them a better you know creating course so that's it and then obviously additional teacher training and playing time before summer school um so that's kind of the same thing with Elementary another thing that um that's not on here but it's we're looking into is um talking that it didn't get listed on me and I apologize back to your back painter um but doing the kind of same thing for future sixth graders that transition into the middle school because that's huge going from fifth grade to sixth grade and all of a sudden like so maybe doing something like that a program some of the teachers have
053expressed that to me and say hey I would come back if we need if we did this because I feel like this will set our sixth graders up if it's just that way so that's something I'm going to look into and some of of people yeah okay name names but gave me that I did that's not my idea I don't like to see other people I did but that's that's what we like to do so thank you for my for your time okay [Music] all right so at this time we'll we'll take this yes Thank You for Your Enthusiasm all the new great ideas um and I just want to say I hope that we start playing sooner even in December because I think the students that needs summer school is so important and he
054said you feel like everyone should have it available as well so yeah I just hope we look at other programs and best practice and start playing early yes exciting thank you appreciate your advice foreign so you mentioned that the low numbers could possibly be to parents pull in there it was parents pulling kids or other it could be a situation too where kids parents said I just want to do two weeks here and there and so that's and that's when we put the way the program was set up it's not a continuation right thing so every week was going to be different so that's why your test numbers are going to look skewed because some parents like we could only do two weeks can we be important I was like yes I wanted your job
055to be a part of this I didn't want to you know we had the room I was just like no if you don't do four weeks we don't want you that's not fair to them no of course yeah yeah and that's not my question so my question was um do you think with it being a half day program do you think that could contribute to some of like the lower uh growth if it was all day do you think kids could show more games in reading and math well when I did the exit ticket with them that was one of the things I asked the parents say hey what would you like to change in the program is it you want it to be longer in a day a lot of the parents like the
056half day so that was from what is feedback I said down to there was like over four or some emails I got about at least 45 or 50 response in a life um uh the length of the program actually they actually wanted to make the program three weeks because for the day like yeah I know how much time are they spending on Ela and reading so they didn't that wasn't a party that was exploratory uh it was facing sport through so they were learning cooking and and woodworking during that time but we included like a math standard in there and the English Standard oh okay it wasn't like a math class or an English class okay there was an algebra Jump Start program right that was separate from those yeah but there was no um
057there was a like cardboard game so that was one of the things literally still it was integrated in today hopefully that makes sense yeah okay and I think you hit my question which was going to be the transition from fifth to sixth grade yes I really appreciate it because I think we've heard that in the past right really focusing on those students and I'm the same for the 8th to ninth grade right I think there's two transitions any way to address and help those students through the summer Academy would be advances thank you your ability to serve a certain number of students was ever limited by the amount of teachers that you could you could access for work in the summer no I was able with uh with the 10 with the 10 teachers I
058hired I was able to have every student in there was no there was never an issue when we didn't have enough States and then if you needed 20 teachers from Kirkwood do you think that's doable we'll see yeah yeah we'll see you know it's like it just depends on the map the numbers are going to drive my staff so if I don't have that model number I can't well I guess what I'm saying is um wouldn't we ever be limiting the kids if page due to the lack of our teachers participating in the summer school we we I had to turn there were some teachers I had to turn away just because we just we reached our maximum capacity as far as the student and teacher ratio okay so if that makes I guess I
059hope well I guess what I'm saying is if you had to increase the number of students that want to go to summer school by 30 percent yeah and you applied that ratio to the number of teachers that you go out to ask yes do you think you would have enough teachers within the Kirkwood School District I think so um I can't really it's hard to tell yeah it can't hard to tell but it will make it work we're going to make you know that's the thing you know Dr Peter hired me for I got to go out there and hustle and get them okay okay I have a quick question so I know that you had said there wasn't specific like if a student was below grade level on say reading their math there wasn't
060a specific program that really targeted that yeah so what what what one of your recommendations would be that you kind of developed a program yeah to shoot to specifically Target the students who are below the 25 in Reading yes okay okay so is that that girl work is that something that will be kindled moving forward with yes along with the idea of the transition from the rising fifth graders in the sixth grade that will be something that will work with Mr Banks on uh for the 23 Summit you know I really like the idea that we're looking at the data and then we're making decisions uh moving forward based on on some of that stuff I think that that's this is really good and thank you Mr Banks no problem thank you for your time
061president we need to get more bikes I think one thing that we that we definitely need to mention is middle schoolers are a different type um and we love them but it is not always easy to get middle schoolers interested in attending summer school particularly last summer and so the design of the program which I thought was really creative was really about enticing them to be there and the flexibility for that I think there was a lot of interest from staff particularly with the model that they use and they really targeted those priority standards in math and Ela with to try to teach them within those with those exploratory areas but I think we'll definitely we have great teachers at the middle school level who can focus on reading math and and some of these
062other areas that may need some additional support and still make them enticing for the kids to attend um just as I said let's lock say this this summer Mr Nice saved us seven years ago seven or eight years ago when he took in he slid in at the last minute for somebody else who had done some of the work I mean he has continued to do a terrific job in the high school since then and so I'm going to pass this off to him good evening everybody I'm back so we have the slide that's got the data I just want to point out in the day's secret itself but extended school year the recovery program those numbers are down and historically for the last seven years that's the lowest number that I've had to deal
063with in recovery credit enhancement the Pella courses the health Lifetime Fitness personal uh Finance those numbers are up dramatically that's the largest numbers that we have had in those three classes as a total just as a comparison number the last time we offered Lifetime Fitness on campus live as opposed to electronically there was 14 students attention at 77 let's finish their online so that's a large number and then with the launch courses I'm not directly kind of related to that most of that goes through other folks but in my knowledge that seems to be that we're training high on the launch coursework with the 350 enrollments in 220 students taking courses so that's the data go ahead um what went up well I I feel like when I'm looking at that numbers that we're meeting
064the needs of kids both in getting back at uh graduation rate and those who want to get ahead um so that decreased need for Recovery those lower numbers those are good compared to 2020 2021 and in the increased enrollment pillow so I feel like again we're meeting new to kids foreign forces around I believe the December 1st because I get emails in December about when summer school is uh and and it's usually the parents training plan their summer vacation and I give them the best answer I can but as soon as we move that up and set those dates now if we set them earlier for parents I think that that would be a benefit um the second point I really can't speak to I'll have to pass that back to Dr King when you're
065done asking me questions okay so those are the high schools three squat slides any questions great do you have any idea or indication why the e-learning academy was so high no feedback or anything uh no I I just think it's an opportunity for kids to take classes and get ahead and not have to come to campus this was the first summer that we offered all three of these classes online so that's an it's an opportunity for somebody who's at vacation in Florida still take this course as opposed to well I can't take it because I'm in wherever Mr boica I have a question actually for Dr Alward that sort of transcends the three presentations so and it's going to be somewhat unarthful but um my impression the summer program has been from these presentations um
066just can't say enough good things about the effort of everyone on the team to put this together and you know relatively difficult situations under relatively constrained time frame and something new and innovative um but I also know just for personal experience some of the efforts that I've undertaken that I'm most proud of are in cases I've lost and sporting events that haven't been successful at uh and so as I look at the Benchmark data and I'm not presupposing a level of satisfaction or not but kind of like when I watch baseball statistics I kind of know what I uh batting averages with some of the numbers they come up with now I just don't know the significant stuff um and so I guess my my question for you and for the team is whether you're
067satisfied with the outcome that you've seen from last summer that's a very fair question Mr boyco and I think it's a fair question for the board to ask as a whole um uh the fact is is that this board uh actually if you'll recall uh came and challenged by myself and the KSD team uh to have a more robust and enhanced summer school that wasn't without his bumps um that uh that we did this summer in terms of doing something new uh and we I believe that we presented to the board of just how new it was and how aggressive it was based on what we had done in the recent past I think the short answer to that is yes I believe it was very successful I believe we can point to very specific
068data that shows in many cases not only did we stop the summer slide we actually improved our students and their performances they went into the next grade level and so the effort of these three folks the efforts of the teachers that they worked with this summer I can't say that it was a success I won't say an unqualified success I think that in terms of of our communication of our timeline as Miss Andrews mentioned earlier of our timeline I think we can do those things better and you've heard these folks speak to that but ultimately overall I believe that we can show objectively that our students are in a better place that we have accelerated learning in terms of what we have been what this board has been committed to from the very beginning of
069the pandemic which is to accelerate learning and to make up any losses that that our students might have had and this uh this summer summer school efforts went a long way towards doing that I guess um I also will direct my question after all works so you guys can relax but uh and mine is more about the advanced planning that I mentioned because uh he's looking at Best Practices of other programs and this was great and successful but always we're trying to do better and the sooner we plan those vacations the happier people will be and the more they want to participate and hopefully we can Target those students who need it the most so I would just again urge about the scheduling is Miss Bernardi is there a certain timeline or um that you're
070shooting you know that you in your experience uh sure sure thing uh so there's uh of course some other programs and they do begin in October with their planning and then start recruiting the students even sooner so that might be a Target to start that timeline planning as early as October if it's possible [Laughter] I have a summer school meeting tomorrow afternoon uh uh where the calendar will be uh obviously will be one of the topics sounds like they're starting in September already okay thank you very much okay um well again um what's oh did you say that Dr painter has something that he needs to you oh yeah yeah I mean I think we've talked about this specific already I I won't pretend that I know the exact best model for this but I
071think that we can learn from what other districts are doing this area our middle school principals have talked about some of the possibilities in the past as well there used to be a Pioneer prep program at the high school that was focused specifically on on basically English and math courses for those students in June I don't know that I envisioned something that is purely academic based I think it probably would be more about transition support and that might look in some ways more like our freshman day that we have right before school starts than than a month of math and English in June probably somewhere in between there not calendar-wise but as far as intensity and what we would do but I think our freshman teachers really have a lot to say that well and
072I think we want Dr Gavin who's going to be the Freshman principal to be really involved in this so um I think we have a blank slate there on what the possibilities are and which would support the board we know that we can not only entice our students but also our staff just participate okay well it sounds like at each level we kind of have something you know we did lots of great things but there are also at each level something that we're kind of working towards um and I just appreciate that I appreciate your leadership um and this is exciting so thank you so much oh yeah feel free to leave you don't even have to take you don't even have to put your chairs back just leave your chairs ready I would never
073put my chair back thank you guys yep foreign ER you can't leave sorry I know you probably won't run okay next up is library media center and board before I turn this over to Dr Ulrich I want to remind you guys of a few things our last meeting where we discussed books was on April 4th and we were told the following were the next steps one the process that had been developed to document selection will serve as a template for librarians moving forward the office of cni will work with building level Administration to provide support for implementation two um we determined how best to designate or otherwise communicate to students and parents that a particular book may have more mature themes and review options for parents Guardians to formally request their child not to be
074able to check out specific titles in our library three we would review and update library media policies regulations and administrative procedures with subsequent alignment of library media procedures manual and then four work with crd to develop communication plan prior to the start of the 22-2023 school year along with this Dr Oliver committed to having the 22 books in question taken through the selection process I also want to let the board and public know that Dr Albrecht wanted to place this on the agenda in July but we have other agenda items necessary that pertain to the culmination of this end of the school year so we moved books to a later date so this item was placed on today's agenda as a follow-up to Dr Albert's request to placing books on the agenda in July that's
075all working all right thank you very much President Andrew that is uh I appreciate that summary and bringing this the opportunity to bring this to the board this evening one of the things that has obviously changed that Dynamic is specifically the Senate Bill 775 that has uh has captured kind of the spotlight as we have moved into the into the school year so um uh one of the things that I want to make sure uh that I say and that I have said uh multiple times is that certainly I do have a trust in our Librarians and the processes that they follow as we have gone on this journey since January they have engaged throughout and have been engaged throughout each step of the process to ensure that their voices are heard and so as
076we have moved through this and you will see in terms of the presentation that we have for you this evening we have set it up in terms of a truly a follow-up from what you summarized there and so I can say uh but certainly since that process started in January but I do have absolute confidence in the process that has been followed uh with regard to um the template that the Librarians put together um because as I have said very publicly that in before that process before we uh we engaged in that process in January one of the things that I wanted to make sure that I had confidence in and you had confidence as a board is that we could demonstrate uh not only for today but the colleagues that come after us uh
077we but that we can demonstrate that we have gone through a process and considered uh these books so when and if a library material is in fact has to be reconsidered that this board of education is knows and can be confident that that is built on a foundation where we can demonstrate that in fact that consideration came about or took place and the template that the Librarians came up with I believe is a template that can be an Exemplar an Exemplar for not only our district but districts across St Louis County and the region specifically being an easy reference for um again for our our current library of media staff but certainly for those that go beyond because as we all know these things haven't flown I was a high school principal in the mid-2000s
078and we were dealing with many of these things uh back then and so having that as a foundation again I applaud The Librarians for tackling that and having that as a foundation for future reference not only for me not only for this board but as we move forwards and uh and superintendents and processes moving into the future and so Dr painter I'm going to turn it over to you as you know the board of education has had access to uh to this since last week obviously it's been up on our public board docs since Friday so what I'm gonna I just ask you to do is uh again keeping in the spirit of of just a summary from what we've done so our our board and just as importantly our public knows how we have
079followed through on uh and did what we said we were going to do all right thank you thank you very much I do appreciate that uh good evening once again um and you want to recognize the fact that we have a number of our Librarians with us tonight and and just re-emphasize the support that I know on Administration that our teaching staff and our community has and the appreciation that we have for the work that you do and I know that the board appreciates you and respects you as professor professor as well and so um I just want to put that out there I am here tonight to provide an update on several items related to our library media processes and books that are available to our students through our libraries but it's important to
080note that tonight's update is about voluntary reads and by that I mean self-selected library books that are not assigned to our students readings that may be assigned in classrooms for classroom use have a different standard and different processes that we have to uphold as noted in previous updates going back um toward January and even as late as there are a number of documents that got our work uh the work of our library media discussions first and foremost we looked about policy and our strategic plan both of which are aligned with our library media procedures manual and if anything changes in those then we would align our manual with that library media work is also Guided by several laws and court cases including Island treaty inquiry School District versus Pico and in the recent Missouri state
081law Senate Bill 775 that went into effect on August 28th Kirkwood's process to formally Challenge and reconsider books was actually shaped by the Eco case from 1982 which all the public schools cannot review books to suppress ideas we will discuss that bill 775 in more detail shortly the efforts that's being discussed tonight are reflective of at least four of our 13 objectives within our strategic plan I've highlighted those here on the screen it's worth noting that that there's a tight alignment in my opinion between objectives 2.1 and 3.1 as practices that promote equity and inclusion are great are likely to advance a greater sense of belonging dignity and our staff and our students students need to see themselves in what they're reading make connections with and learning from the characters to other pages that may
082be navigating the situation similar to their own they also benefit of course from books that offer exposure to new ideas perspectives and characters that May challenge their thinking Kirkwood's library media Specialists are deeply committed to knowing our students as individual readers understanding their interests their needs and their aspirations so that we can better provide access to inclusive resources that meet the needs we've been increasingly purposeful in our purchase of diverse books in recent years adding additional titles that feature diverse characters and or are written by diverse authors before we highlight several things that we have done in recently I wanted to address some things that we talked about as late as April but have chosen not to do first we have not labeled or designated books in our libraries as having this Ultra mature themes
083this was based on conversations with other librarians who found that they regretted such moves because it actually Drew kids to those books when you label them as opposed to checking them away from them we have also not segregated our books by age or grade level specifically within a school library students with our with our schools have very green levels and interests that may at times not always conform to the limits of external age recommendation especially true purpose finally most notably we have not circumvented our existing processes to challenge or reconsider books while some books have been pulled from our collections to confide percent Bill 775 no votes have been removed from our libraries due to content so what have we been doing since January and even since April most importantly our library our Librarians have
084been working with students and staffs across our schools provided access to thousands of resources and teaching into a curriculum that our Librarians had I will also say I believe I checked last Thursday or Friday and I think we currently have almost 11 000 resources checked out in our libraries across our district right now and so things are in the hands of our kids and that's because the people behind us specific to our conversation tonight we've centered around four ideas or four areas that we're going to focus on a little bit more first Dr Ulrich mentioned this uh our Librarians have basically they have they've complete they've completed documentation around the initial consideration of numerous books of using our Specialists that provided the information that solution here on the screen for roughly 80 books that are
085in our library collection if at any point these books were to be challenged for reconsideration down the road we will now have ample documentation as to why they were considered in the first place and ultimately purchase for our schools in addition we've been working to provide families with streamlined options to restrict their own child's access to specific essentially opting their own children out of these books after considerable research around how to best organize our work we decided to create an aggregate list of challenge books pulling from the American Library association's annual list of top 10 most challenged books the Ala website lists the most 34 reasons that each book has been challenged in a given year and those are readily available on on their website and actually on our offback performance as well 97 different
086titles have made have been have made the most challenge list at least once since 2001 through a lot of repeats in there and 59 of the 97 titles are available in one or more of our Kirkwood High School or appropriate libraries families can restrict their own child's access to individual titles from this list all titles on the list just by clicking one button or if they desire they can they can opt out of the title that's not on the list at all our families also have access on that same form which is available on our District's website they have access to opt their child out of sore access if desired Sora is our online app through overdrive that provides us students and access to um a large number of ebooks and audiobooks the third Focus
087has been around family communication and particularly efforts to ensure our families know that they can access Destiny discover to search our titles within our school collection while these links have been available on our school specific websites for some time we've enhanced our district site to include direct links to these sites information about Destiny discover as well as our opt-out process were included in the August 20th Spotlight just before school started and finally we spent considerable time over the last two months ensuring compliance with Senate bill 775. which is part of a larger Missouri Bill addressing child trafficking sexual assault and other related crimes this law states that a person is affiliated with a public or private school in an official capacity can be charged with the class A misdemeanor if they normally provide explicit sexual
088material to the students explicit sexual material is defined within the laws and subject only to pictures or images some exceptions as you might imagine there have been many questions about the law and how it might impact our teachers our library media Specialists and our administrator and questions about how the law may affect our students access to some books we've met the library media Specialists and any interested teachers to discuss this and provided an ongoing opportunity for our staff to request a legal review of any book images in the classrooms or in their libraries which they have questions pursue a success Senate bill 775. if you have any questions I'll be happy to try to answer those hours yeah Dr all work all right just a couple of things that I want to say thank you
089Dr painter I appreciate that um uh that review of what we've done since January a couple of things I want to make sure we will bring uh uh the the two Library related policies uh to the policy committee and we will review those um as there is a narrowing down on the following um I'll just give it I'll just make sure I will pretend that you guys have that memorized but there are some Clauses that are in those uh specifically in the policies that it that elevate in one sentence that elevate the Librarians the teachers and the administrators for the responsibility of the selection of materials and that it can be found in not only the not only in our policy but it's also found in the administrative procedure now in the library manual there
090is a sentence that I believe is there to clarify those policies that does say that the library media center Specialists are ultimately responsible for the library materials of that that are in the library with the input of students and parents and administration so the Board of Education can expect to to have that brought to the the policy committee um and then that will be then forwarded and brought to uh the Board of Education if there are any changes that are recommended to be made the last thing that I will say is one of the things that we um that is uh kind of I think it would be fair to say is an additional struggle is that with regard to the compliance with 775 obviously the things that with with our directly in our collections
091we can get that legal review and and we have been doing so and again I appreciate the work of our of our Librarians in being proactive in that work the one thing that is and there's been a little bit of a reference to it this evening is specifically surrounding Sora and our students access to online materials our students do have access to online materials through soar and more net that does continue however we have been and in communication with the folks at Sora to help them understand the laws that are in place here in Missouri to ensure that they are aware of those and they are being responsive to those to the best of their ability so those are the only two pieces that I want to add again thank you Dr painter I'll turn
092it back over to you okay at this time um we can ask questions thank you Doctor um painter for your work on this we'll start doing here with me thank you Dr panger for all your work Librarians and staff thank you I'm sorry that you have been dragged through all of this I really appreciate the work you have done um I have a couple comments I come at this from many perspectives I'm a mom I'm a grandma I'm a former English teacher I'm a published author and my newest role is as a board member the most important thing is the kids feel seen that kids feel heard that kids feel safe and Librarians and English teachers I got to throw you in there too because you're amazing you do this every day you help kids
093find themselves you help them figure out the world and that's hard especially when you're a kid who feels On The Fringe who feels something's wrong with them they don't understand something and the thought that we would take away kids ability to find themselves to understand themselves to feel safe is wrong and as a district we have to do better and I know that there's this law this state senate law 775. but I also know that it talks about works of art and taking a work as a whole you can cherry pick a passage from anything you can cherry pick a passage from the Bible and someone would say it's pornography that's right or it's inappropriate we have to look at these works as a whole and I know that there are these 14 books and
094I understand that we're dealing with lawyers and I understand that I don't want any of you guys to get arrested or get in trouble but some of these books that have been pulled I want to review a little bit more there are works of poetry that's a that's works of art and just because it's a subject that makes you uncomfortable as an adult doesn't mean it's wrong but doesn't mean it doesn't belong in a library kids need to be able to find things it's the world out there and I want to give one one example because I started reading these books a lot of them I'd already read I read slamer yesterday what an amazingly beautiful book I loved it I've got Beyond magenta I've been buying all of these so my you know Amazon
095wonders what I'm doing but this passage I want to read this because I think this speaks to everything that we care about the author writes like my character Aiden I felt overwhelmed by this culture of hatred also like able I once kneeled in a camp Chapel with a knife against my wrist I wanted my anguish to stop I wanted to silence my fears I was so scared of high school that I thought I would not survive it worst of all I hated myself but like Aiden I found the strength to live and although living is scary when we continue to suffer I would do it all over again to be able to write this book for you we need to remember that and these books need to be available for kids thank you I don't
096have any questions [Applause] okay sing it back oh okay we're checking to because maybe those books are not off off the shelf these aren't okay yes yeah yeah okay okay yeah I apologize the confusion with Miss Andrews and I was like those two books are still available to our kids okay just making sure yeah yeah so just stick clarify the two books that um director botica just talked about are still on the shelves we think Dr Albert's checking Destiny is that right now okay we all know how to check it okay um I just want to thank you he's a part of our board and you know I always talk about policy so I told her I'd bankrupt with my policy talk so I just want to say that I appreciate all our community members
097concerns on all sides but this year we've had agenda items related to library materials six times in the past eight months so we have done a concentrated effort our legal department we use the laws and our policies are reviewed by the msba and they recommend the policy to imply with those laws so that's where that's where we have to see the policy guidance and the reason for that is that we have to also be in compliance with the law I'll leave that to my colleague next email but the district has been very responsive ideal and offers parents options to opt out and as a public institution we serve all the families so please understand that there's many issues that must be considered but we trust in the expertise of our library professionals and thank you
098and also the legal guidance since we're not the experts there we have much work to do and I hope we can consider all these agenda items carefully as we go through these dollars and again and again this is my thanks to most of all the Librarians and our staff and also uh to what Ms machika says and Mrs Bernardi too um it's always a frustrating issue because I feel like we're we all know we're in the middle of a proxy battle it's not necessarily is that what it's about um something sometimes it's true to varying extents but uh I did have one question with the Sora access Dr painter you you mentioned that parents can opt out of that that would be opting out of sore as a whole or not as a whole not
099particular titles as it is right now that is the case we've been working with Sora and they're actually working internally to find a way to let people walk down particular titles they're just not there yet unfortunately um and our that's that's not just a sore thing there are other Libby which we used it's also an Overdrive at last year did not have that ability and then my other comment would be it feels when I look at these policies uh like it's a system that's designed to um can be a system that's designed to exclude in the sense that there's a lot of steps along the way that if if that stuff's not made the book doesn't enter our library report has to leave our library you can challenge a book coming into our library or
100being in our library you can't challenge through our policies to for both not to be in our library or to be pulled by our library under the existing policies and I think that that's something that uh perhaps we should look at whether um that makes sense in the climate that we're in and the climate that I imagine will be in in decades of both challenges have been around a lot okay um Mr Boynton we can we can address that further Mr I don't have much to thank you guys for your work um thank you to Dr primer and your team yeah this thing foreign books I think the second we start talking about banning books or removing choices from kids and that's not what our district knows about our district is about a mission for
101all of our students period so I applaud the efforts that you all put in place I applaud the transparency that's what we also need to be representative about um I applaud that we are giving the options for parents that don't or that want more you know control over what their students are reading but I firmly believe that you are all doing the same absolutely okay this is it's going to be okay Dr Banner I've got some questions for you for somewhat technical you're not to trap you and they're not to trick you but we do need to make sure that we're all set um so my first question is when we said that we were going to work on the policies the regulations and the procedures back in February why didn't we do that over
102the last six months I'll answer that Mr Kavanaugh that's been that's been at my direction in terms of working within the existing policies and our procedures prioritizing this work in terms of laying that Foundation specifically with regard to the template and the where we landed getting getting to the start of the school year the priority was and the commitment I had made to our parents to Board of Education was our new procedures that we would have in place would be in place by the start of the 22-23 school year and that's what I prioritized and asked the team to prioritize now again with regard to the policies we started looking at those at our most recent policy meeting we'll go back and make sure that we bring back to the next meeting specifically with regard
103to the clarification that I mentioned earlier in the news and I just want to clarify that the first step is I think that was last week and the first step is always to reach out to msba and we could have recepted an SDA in February and we got some information from them I mean that that wouldn't cost us any time or effort no and I would agree with that I I will tell you however that we but in terms of msba what we are up to date with regard to msda and and to those policies that we have so we're not out of um we're not what what not compliance is it the word we voluntarily use them to help us with our policies but we are in line in alignment with what you would
104find in their recommended policies fair enough what we talk about the template I'm assuming that we're talking about the template where we took the 22 books and we overlay them on the policy and the Seven objectives is that what we're talking about that is correct okay and when we did review these books basically the rain re-ran them through is this any different than it was prior to that people there's a cities different than what we would normally do this Temple uh no that that template actually was created by our librarians brain around the original 22 books that we had questions about and they have applied that now to know in addition to those 22 to the 59 books that are in our current life there in our libraries that are also on the aggregate alien
105work list okay and so what we do is we line that up with these seven objectives under policy iiac right correct consistent with educational goals relative to today's world appropriate for the subject to our area age emotional development ability level one East Side Etc right I'm talking about these seven objectives that we're comparing these books to I believe that is accurate so I'm looking to make sure that they're not part of a regular if yeah they're part of the regulations maybe AC Dash R1 yes that's right yeah perfect is that perfect and when we do that and I think this is where the misalignment and the vagueness and policy wise in that if you look at one it says you have the ability to uh the administrator's feedback community members parents students Etc but one
106elevates a librarian versus those at a different level when it comes to this is that fair is that correct and that's where the problem was well I yeah that's the comment that that's the comment that I was making um Mr Kavanaugh that's the comment I was making in terms of the policy and then the regulation that you just referenced if you go back there in both of those there is a point where it says that the librarian the teachers and administration are responsible for the selection of Library materials that that is in the policy and in the regulation itself in the policy excuse me in the library of media center manual um that is where that again I think there would be the intent of that not having been at the table when that was
107done I believe the attempt of that was to provide clarity as it kind of funneled down from policy to regulation to the manual because in the manual it very specifically says ultimately and it uses that word ultimately the responsibility for library media center materials lies with the library media center Specialists with the input of administration teachers and so that's what I'm talking about when I say that's what we will look for clarity uh with regard to to that because I think that it's taking that re if that reading literally it elevates our teachers and our administrators for having the same level of responsibility for selection of library media and clearly by virtue of the comment that or excuse me the the Clause that can be found in the uh in the policy excuse me in
108the library senior manual clearly that the intent was to say ultimately that responsibility lies with a library of media center folks that is not supported by the by the by the uh the procedure and the um with the policy about it okay absolutely and then as we use this template and we decided that these books met one through seven didn't even not make it of the 22 that were re-reviewed I do not believe so no okay and who made the ultimate decision on the one through side was it Librarians was it administrators was it a combination of both was it teachers you know what the Librarians were asked to go back and basically recreate their consideration process and identify um basically if the book was not in our library right now and they had to
109just they had to go through the process of determining if it should be in our library they were looking at the reviews again they'll be looking at the connections to our curriculum they were looking at the needs of the student s so reviews curriculum and needs of students now when it comes to the reviews was that the main driver the professional reviews I think the main driver is always um of our students but I do think that the reviews as the policy regulation one of the two parents states that was a questions then they have to go to professional reviews so that they can make sure that those are that those are there within tidal wave most of these titles have four to six professional reviews that are available for them to be looking at
110on any given book well let me do the professional reviews Trump policy and walk no I'll just ask no not at all so today where we're at is if I'm a parent and let's be very clear and you have respect everything you said don't disagree with you but there are books with sexual pictures correct just like this one yes this is American guys and prior to the law this was selected purchased approved and put in our library yes okay that's in it complies with policy in the board and everything's good right so if I'm a parent does that work on it I don't think that books on the ACA list and so we did not actually we did not do a review of that book The reconsideration through the template was not done on that
111book um if it has been pulled no I get that I'm not worried about that exactly right should be in our library it's approved and meets all the standards correct the curriculum we're all good I'm a parent I want to ask my kid out of books with sexually explicit graphical pictures or content how do I do that how do I know about that I'm sorry say it again I'm asking Dr Penny how do I know this is in the library because we're not identifying right correct to be honest with you I don't know that you would know that that graphic novel has that picture in it um that's what I'm trying to say yeah I actually know what I don't know yeah and I think it's it's I think it's fair to say that there
112are books like that in our library that because we have not had a process in place to review every single page of every graphic novel for example if I think it's possible to say fair to say that our Librarians have followed the processes that were in place but some of these books could also be in our library such as that one our they are going back now and reviewing all of those books because they're recognizing that there are books that may have images that might be concerning to some or all people I don't know we've had conversations internally policy yet this is just us having conversations internally that books such as that graphic novels that may be based on other books that are still in our libraries that are not graphic novels that are just
113text both such as that can be purchased if the reviews are are appropriate but they would need to review page by Page before we would process them and make them available The Librarians agree that that is necessary get into this given our circumstances and given the situation we're in particularly with 775. okay so take for example handmade's tail graph right that was rerun through the process that that's one of the except at least it's on my list of the 22 that went back three and it it had it says it meets one through 70 policy objectives has that has that book been removed according to the law yes okay so that one is was approved the first time then it was approved the second time and I think he even says potential AP vet independent
114a staple of college literature collections so if I'm a parent that that is that on the list with Amazon events on the Ala is I would I would see your email I'd say I'd like to look at that list oh I don't like that book I could opt out correct that is correct okay but yet we've proved it twice and then we have American guys are they necessarily would not know saying maybe in the future I think going forward we are taking steps to make sure that there are no images that may be putting our students or our staff in the wrong position session there okay so from a parent I wouldn't assume but that's correct okay so so the message to the parents I want to be very clear we're not Banning in the
115books here on that censoring books yeah other parents no we're not the state um asked books well I think we're going to review I think Miss Byers has a valid point there's probably some books and they have pictures in them for a technical reason that that probably should be reviewed that's fair that's not accurate I think that is correct I think that is fair the public I need to remind the public that this is is not an interactive meeting and so I I know that this is a passionate topic I know that lots of people um have opinions but this meeting is actually the meaning of of the board and so we're doing board business here and I would ask um that the public remain um silent and if the public can't remain silent you
116you will be asked to leave oh absolutely yes yes so if I'm a parent I just want to clarify and I need to I'll have to comb through thousands of books I have a problem with stuff like this that's what we've written our picture it's my responsibility to go through it and that's what it is you don't have to defend it I'm just saying that is the state of affairs right and the only thing the only thing I would add to that Mr Kavanaugh is we have communicated to our parents that our parents can at any time go in and access and and know exactly what their students have have checked out and so it would not be it would really would not be a a question of of parents being somehow responsible for all
117the material that's in the library certainly if a parent wants to check and see what his or who's to do this checking out they have that opportunity to do that okay you're absolutely right and I would just say achieve after they've checked after that versus understanding because there are some parents who will have concern with books like or even books that just have written right sexual content and people can disagree on that that's fine that's fine in our library and they would have to find those books if their kids didn't chat about it and that is just the way it is but a parent can access Destiny access Sora and the new filters are set for our middle school and Elementary correct that is correct we've applied sora's own filters on those okay so those
118are not something that we made up or otherwise came up with yeah thank you okay um just let me make sure I'm kind of looking at it okay I do have a quick question what was the role of the principal um in the 22 book review the whole principal and I'm sorry the 22 of the original last spring um yeah the book well the 22 bucks what was the principal's role in the 22 book review I don't know that they had a significant role I think they probably had conversations with their Librarians but I think that the Librarians went and did the research that they normally would do in identifying books for the libraries and the only thing I would add to that as the as the principals that report directly to me I do
119know that they were in communication with their librarian specifically regarding the template and which books with the attempt that would be applied to yeah okay um I need a motion to extend motion a half an hour yeah sure yes yes I think okay motion to extend by half past made by pinkborn seconded by second guess um all those in favor of extending please raise your right hand and say I hi oh come on you guys all those um opposed me sure but we have a motion path she's just trying to lighten the move right um so in in go moving forward right so the principles didn't have a role in the 22 box uh moving forward what do you envision the principal's role being in um in this process I think that to answer that
120again is as the principal's uh report directly to me of what I would say is I think that we're gonna we we definitely need to look to specifically um how that policy is clarified um to make sure that we um we can further Define that uh for the for the role specifically surrounding our administrators um and then I can tell you um again it was a topic of conversation um and certainly every summative evaluation that we did um uh last summer I know it is uh um the the principles definitely have a heightened awareness about the selections that are available in their uh in their libraries and I do know that our Librarians are in communication specifically with their principles in our include the principles are included in any communication surrounding any of the review
121processes or they have questions about okay God I I think that it's important that um that we're not just putting this all on Librarians that's that's a lot for for librarians and so I think it's important that there is um some shared responsibilities um Librarians I want you to know that we are on the same team I want to say that again I want you to know that we are on the same team it's really unfortunate that this conversation has been made into a class versus them this conversation um never has been about not wanting kids represented in books the conversation is not about Huck Finn or classics is that about race sexual orientation gender identity or CRT every single person up here including the two who've been made out to be book banners believe
122in representation this is and always has been about sexually explicit content that represents pornography this is about content in books that if a staff member read this out loud to a student or students they wouldn't be in violation of multiple policies and in direct conflict with our mandatory State student training this is about content in books that if a student had it on their school issue device they would be recommended it's not as simple as many would like to make this out to be I would ask that we stopped making this about representation and book Banning and address it for what it really is we can represent all students without sexualizing them we can do this thank you Dr payner and thank you librarians next up is class size reports Dr Fields well thank you
123so much um president Andrews I find a class size report to be certainly interesting and um exciting to provided for the last time for the 22-23 school year after this it will be an enrollment report and if you were to need information related to the class size report I would certainly provide you with that information and so as Dr Ulrich already alluded to you all have access to this information I will direct my attention to the second to last slide which essentially are the notes all of these data are from Infinite Campus as of September the 21st 2022 and again I want to direct your attention specifically to five sections that we are paying close attention to Kaiser first grade Kaiser third grade Kaiser 4th grade North Glendale kindergarten and Robinson second grade the reason
124why I want to direct your attention there is because Kaiser is currently one student away a little bit if you come he found the kitchen please make sure you pay attention to the Artistry on the slides the Dr painter is not the clicker this clicking would be Dr Bailey [Music] this is good enough for Tony and Dr baby I'm further clicking but no in all sincerity we're looking at five um classes in particular sections whether Kaiser first grade they are one student away from needing to open another section Kaiser third grade which is three students away from leaving a new section Kaiser fourth grade three students North Glendale kindergarten three students as well as Robinson second grade and so they are one student away we constantly monitor the class sizes as you can imagine at
125this stage of the school year anytime we are after that August start of school date unless it is quite difficult to predict whether we will have students coming in or out as I looked at the trendado over the last few years we couldn't find anything that was statistically significant that would help us determine any predictability and where we are now and so certainly the HR office will continue to look at the numbers as frequently as possible and if there are any major changes we will certainly make you all aware so with that I'll turn it back over to Dr Orr okay um at this time board if there are any questions I'll start down with Mr Kavanaugh Miss um so Dr Fields as if let's say Robinson because I can speak to that if we
126have another student come in in second grade how easy is it for us to hire you know a second grade teacher quarter into the school year um thank you for your question I think it um hanging out with so many lawyers that respond for me typically it depends right it depends in this regard because our Trend data suggests that since the pandemic anytime you're hiring after school starts specifically in July or August you're going to have less candidates having said that I have a document right now that shows all of the individuals who have applied for jobs that were posted in July as well as September and so we have 17 48 11 19 29 and then one that's open right now when we compare that to 2021 we had a job that was open
127in July and it was 20. and so comparatively we're right there having said that there are some other mitigating pieces that we're looking at that will make it more difficult than it has been prior to the pandemic and I want to be clear when I say prior to to the pandemic we have situations where the trend data suggests that Kirkwood school district for instance will receive a lot of interest from teachers who are already teaching in other districts as you can imagine a number of school districts are adultly no longer even considering letting people out of their contracts this is the start of year three in the number of school districts that either don't answer the phone when I call or and just simply said we're not even going to take that support I think
128that has an impact having said all of that I have not had a conversation with the principal but have stated they have not been able to hire a high quality educator when I say high quality educator I'm speaking in terms of those who are certificated and then there's one more piece anytime we are posting positions after school start it is a one year only position not a one year only position is certainly a safeguard I believe for the school and forth Edition but I also understand that it could be a deterrent as well from individuals who may want to or even consider working income Lieutenant Kirkwood School District so I'll go back to the it's not difficult but it's not as easy as it as it has been prior to the pandemic especially with the
129educator shortage that we're seeing in all districts in all regions Mr boycott I think it's uh academic question for this year but if we were in a situation where we were one student above where we would collapse a section this late in the school year and a student does leave do we still collapse at that point or did we leave the students who the teacher that they're already in well it depends I I think um one of the things that I did not speak to is that we are looking at Kirkwood School District class size guidelines which is still under the MC5 which we were last school year and currently episode six and so even with that there's a little bit of flexibility where if we were over the guidelines we could essentially have a
130TA or assistant be assigned to that grade level the conversation that I've had with at least two principals when that was a consideration was to talk to your team and see how do you want to move forward and so in those regards as it relates to just a little more context we may not have to collapse a section once we get to that point this late in the game however all things are on the table because we we have to determine what's best for the district and ultimately what's going to mitigate disruption to the learning environment of our students right and I want to make sure that I pick up on the last part of that we want to make sure that we mitigate and any opportunities we have for disruption so I will say
131to the board um I think I could say this unequivocally is that while Dr Fields is definitely speaking from our class size guidelines which thank you for to the board of education for supporting guidelines that are actually the low of what they are for the state of Missouri we definitely appreciate that I can tell you unequivocally that I would not come to the board at a September board meeting and say we would collapse the classroom if that was in fact the circumstance so so again thank you to Dr field you're uh in terms of representing you and your department but from the superintendent's level and from my the relationship with the board what Dr Fields said there last what rule today we want to mitigate disruption to our students frankly adding a teacher in September
132is disrupted to our students but we do it because our board of education has given us the guidelines to say this is what's best for kids so again I want to make sure that that I say to you I I cannot imagine a scenario where I was a supervised the superintendent after school would start uh would come to the board and say we are going to collapse if it was just under and then we would do the the numbers that we have thank you Dr Fields for saying their guidelines and it depends I always like that flexibility and thanks for all your reports I'm looking forward to Mr well may doing the enrollment report next month so uh look forward to those numbers so I guess you're off the hook thank you well Dr Bailey
133just got off the hook because he normally does he normally does the enrollment numbers Miss Bernard so he's already about Dr Bailey sorry you miss minority even though I skipped over it there is the comparison in the actual report for our comparison data from this time last year so that information is in there yeah I I um really appreciate that and I know that you've increased enrollment by 66 students in elementary and lost 41 in secondary so we're about at that same enrollment numbers but thanks for keeping all that straight and always letting me know what we did last year I appreciate it this Miss Boutique one quick question I know that Kaiser added a kindergarten section already this year and they might be adding a couple more sections where are we putting them it
134depends that's part of the reason why in our sincerity of the conversation with Dr Taylor is to speak with your team if you know anything about Dr Taylor she's already processing that information it's we we can't predict what's going to happen but again we're looking every single day I do believe we're going to find something that's feasible for at least one more section I feel good about but if we have to add three more sections then it's going to be a different conversation but again we will find what's best for our students and go from there even if we have to get creative okay I have a good question so just as you wouldn't collapse the section because it would just be disruptive add in your section and kind of giving kids new teachers might
135be a little bit disruptive so do you have other other things in mind to help alleviate the T the the teacher or um having like a larger class size but not having to unless like the teachers that thought this was a fabulous idea or something but I think it would be you know I mean I just go back to my teaching days and all of a sudden if you redid my class in October it might throw me for a little bit of a live I couldn't agree with you more I think relationships are Paramount yeah across the board and so we do other things to like I mean support them yeah so we um I don't want I don't want teachers like hearing this and all of a sudden being like Oh my God the
136class I have today might not be the class I have tomorrow if I get one more student but we've got to support them absolutely we have some um safeguards and play one of the things that I kind of reiterated um previously Dr work will say it often is making sure though we're looking at things from this level not getting into too much problem solving where it gets to the point that we're doing things two people as opposed to with people and so my conversation with Dr Taylor in this instance was to make sure you speak with your team obtain teach your boys to see what's best for the student there may be times where we have to say you know what we have to post any event these numbers continue to grow especially in first
137grade we may have to have a T8 but that's going to be a decision where that team has conserved all things that may not show up from the HR office or participants level perfect I love to hear that the principal and teacher's voices are included in that thank you you're welcome okay moving on to support staff compensation study Dr Oliver all right I'm going to turn it over to Mr romaine and Dr Fields are going to give just a brief update and as we look at the clock it is a 905 and we have exactly 25 minutes so a brief update gentlemen because I've got a report right after this on committee so essentially I want the opportunity for every opportunity we have to adhere to our guiding principles specifically in this case transparency we
138want to make sure that all of our staff members are hearing when we have made a commitment like we did for the support staff compensation study that we are keeping it to the Forefront not only of our board of education but our community Dr Fields Ms Romaine good evening I'll get us started um I don't have the clicker but if somebody did it already who's gonna be his Clipper Tony Tony wants to be a clicker so I'll be brave this spring we heard see this and do a compensation study of our support staff pay grades and one of the main goals was to get our midpoint pay for our support staff to the 50 percentile of the market and so they looked at the market and our peer districts and so we have the report
139um Dr Fields and myself we've been looking through it there's a lot of analysis that we have to do which we are doing to determine all the implications one of the major implications is the budget so we're doing that we plan to bring a recommendation to the board soon in coming months but we know that um because of all these different implications there we may have to have some sort of layered approach to proving this some of the recommendations that we were given so with that I'll turn it over to Dr Fields and again thank you for that Mr Rome just to be quite brief there are a major implications that I want to make sure we say loud and clear so that we can repeat this over and over again regardless of the findings
140no employee from a support staff standpoint will be negatively impacted by any proposed changes again no employee from the support staff will be negatively impacted by any of the proposed changes and recommendations from from HR as well as from the finance department I will say that as we are looking at the midpoint across all um fields and we're seeing that there are some some positions where we are already above the midpoint who that is their current situation if in fact that is the case they may not be included in a recommendation for increases again as we are looking at the midpoint and as we're trying to determine compensation I want to be clear that we're not just recommending all things that showed up in the report we are trying to create a structure where Equity
141is certainly at the Forefront of it and in this case there are some individuals who are below that midpoint and those are the individuals that we're looking at as well as their pay grade as Dr Ulrich as well as Mr romay already spoke to we anticipate having some additional recommendations or some final recommendations and subsequent board meetings I'll turn it over to.org to see if you want to add anything I don't have anything more to add I think the biggest thing that I want to put the board to take away is that we've taken the work from the third party that we had and we are taking that and we are making that work our own so the recommendation will be the recommendation from our HR and CFO uh and that department and again I
142just want to reiterate not everybody will be affected the same but we have have made a commitment and this board has supported the commitment that no support staff will be negatively affected I think so if we continue to reinforce those three points uh I think we will be a long way on our communication that's interesting okay I started out with Mr Kavanaugh okay thank you Mr romaine and Dr Fields okay moving on you're gonna wake up um board committees after all right all right thank you president Andrews I very much appreciate once again the opportunity to uh to speak to the board I was asked to provide a review of the 2223 committee membership um I I Dr Phil I don't know how to take it that they're not listening to the this report either
143uh uh as I drive people away on a school night um so I have been asked for review of the 2223 board committees first I want to make sure that we do reference policy BCE I want the board to be aware that our past practice and in fact our website reflects that we have four current committees uh that are approved by the board budget and finance committee Communications curriculum and wellness uh as you can as you will see when we look at the board committee membership for this school year there are actually 10 things listed eight of which are truly committees so I'll kind of get back to that here in a little bit but we have four additional committees that we assign board reps to that's the calendar committee Safety and Security the policy
144committee and our Equity committee according to policy BCE the board establishes the purpose the terms of service or in other words how long each member of is to serve the resources the board will provide and the board also establishes a date for the committee to report to the board or to myself the board excuse me the board policy does not prescribe or Define the makeup of the Committees beyond the board participation it does not prescribe how many members are chosen it does not require board approval of the actual membership of the Committees that that's not found in BCE however our past practice has been poured or deported members appointed members and the most relevant senior leadership team member is identified as the leader so the budget and finances Mike excuse me Mr Romaine curriculum is
145Dr Boehner and so on Down the Line Wellness is Dr Bailey the calendar Committee of course is Dr Fields so uh the most relevant senior leadership team uh member is is invited to leave that work who then in turn identifies the relevant KSD Personnel including teachers and staff solicits parent and patient participation and there is also an online form on our website for those who are interested in participation so for the purpose of our Sunshine laws I want to make sure I review this in terms of the training the Titanic has received she came back from a training I believe it was this summer and from msba and for the purposes of the Sunshine Law and model cbce we do need to post our meetings in accordance with public meetings so that means 24 hours
146more than 24 hours ahead of time then we also need to post our agendas and votes after the meeting and make sure those are online as we as it happened with quite a lot of things there was a little bit of disruption for the last couple of years where that wasn't happening but if you do go online you can see where we have intermittently been able to keep up on that we will make sure that that is that commitment is followed through on so my next steps the board can expect from me in at the October work session what I would do with Miss Andrew's permission is I will bring a proposed purpose statement and a proposed link of terms of service for each of those eight committees for the board's consideration and then after
147that I would bring in the at the October board meeting I will ask Miss Andrews to put on the agenda to approve those eight committees and then I'll uh Tony if I could ask you to switch over to the Committees to to promote approve those Aid committee board Representatives as listed here now if you wonder why there's 10 listed there and I'm only saying eight is because the foundation and city council sorry Mr Kavanaugh as you are the Mr Kavanaugh so now I read over Mr boito and Ms Pangborn uh excuse me motica that those are not that's not membership we would control those are for those of you are sitting as a uh as a member of those committees so what I would do is I would amend this as part of my work
148that I would bring to you Ms Andrews that I've read to you on the board next month to represent eight and then as I said a proposed purpose statement and length of terms of service for members as soon as the next time we are together so at this time I'll be happy to answer any questions specifically about a reviewer please I I just have a request in the past when we did this we would list when the committee meets and how frequent and the time of day because I think that really impacts some of our board members who everyone's got other commitments but some of these committees mean a lot more than the others and some be very early in the morning some in the afternoon and just so if you remember Miss Bernardi I
149sent or Miss Heidenreich between the help of myself sent out a Google doc where you could um you were asked to select your committees and I miss heidrich and I worked to make sure that everyone um every board member got I believe their first and second choice on a committee um and so that's that's what that's how that was determined where the debt policy committee meets all the time so I just want to make sure we uh we make sure we get some more members figured for that one yeah that's one which one you miss Andrew's wrong right so right so you're I guess I'm confused on what you're saying oh no I'm just suggesting that you include the meeting day and time but the schedule because also in the past um other board members
150might want to stop in for a committee meeting at some point get an update as long as there's not four of us I believe we're always welcome but it would be helpful just to to add that actually it'll be posted what what we'll do understand is what I'll do is where we have the meeting scheduled like I know I know Dr map has a meeting scheduled for the equity uh task force where we have meetings scheduled we will depict that um when I come back in in October okay thanks um okay so we'll Mr boy now uh I'll just quickly advise that um when it comes to having the public there you know it's very difficult right now for the public even know that there's going to be a meeting um because again some of
151these are done by Zoom which makes sense but anything that we can do to not just post it in the sense that we post standard meetings but to put a district calendar or some other way where you don't have to be following or Ducks every 24 hours to find out if there's going to be a week thank you and to the app because the app is really helpful um that that is a great way to I point everybody to it so if we can put put the meetings on there um but I I just wanna as we're talking about committees uh it wasn't Andrew's and we're not just talking about our board membership we're talking about greater membership so correct we've had some hiccups um in our processes for some of our board committees over
152the last year and so I want to make sure that as we are asking people to participate and donate their time that is very clear who our members on those committees who can vote and give input who is sitting there to observe it um that needs to be really really clear because our outcomes are going to be questioned if we're not following our own processes um so to that question how are we putting a call out for committee members in a transparent way so that people know that they can they can put their names into representation because what I've heard from multiple people is they had no idea what that was in the past and that's not okay okay and just just so we're all clear that committee members do not vote but they give
153input and recommendations just wanted to I know I know but I just wanted to like that that no one thinks that they're voting um that girl yeah it's just an answer to that question is thank you more than your point as well taken and I think that this is a perfect opportunity as we roll through these next couple of meetings to develop a a way to get the word out to our parents and our patrons specifically with regard to how they might want to serve our students in our district and I and I do need to I do see you looking at your watch yeah we've got we've got some things we have to get to okay okay and so this will be coming back on the agenda so I'm not going to say what
154I want to say on here when it comes back moving on um to approve I need a motion in a second to approve the consent agenda items 4.02 through um 4.15 okay all those in favor please raise your right hand and say aye all those opposed motion passes next up is Dr Bailey I need a motion in a second to approve the request for proposal to provide individual and group counseling services as presented so code okay Dr Bailey in the interest of time I'll just very quickly say that what we're looking at currently is that our high school and middle schools we have multiple supports available tier one would be a great level counselor tier two would be either the counselor or social worker at the high school now we have available our intensive support
155counselor tier three what we've seen already this year is a number of suicide risk assessments that our students have already turned in in the first five weeks or six weeks of school and so we're looking for an opportunity to have an embedded clinician whose specific focus at our middle school and high school is suicidal ideation and depression what we tend to see sometimes is even if they can get in to see our new intensive support counselor for some of that external support it may be months before they can get in so we currently have somebody from chance Coalition who's been at the high school for years and once a week and they are full every time and so we're looking to do an RFP to expand and have an embedded clinician in both both middle
156schools and the high school and currently we don't have anybody like this at the middle so just seeing the the response that we have from that and then just going back to committee discussion that our Wellness committee was again an emphasis from our students themselves to have people they can talk to right away when it comes to these mental health supports okay at this time board um are there any any questions I'm starting with cap no nope no questions thank you for doing this because mental email supports our students we need something I think okay um so seeing no further questions will move to a vote all those in favor of approving the request for proposal to provide individual and group counseling services as presented please raise your right-handed say I I most all those
157opposed motion passes next up Mr romay I need that motion in a second to approve the financial reports for August twenty um 22 as presented second Mr romay it's you thank you um revenues for August operating revenue for 1.1 million with most of that coming from prophecy and state tax or state revenue operating expenditures what was 4.1 million most of that being salaries and benefits and our construction fund we spent a little over one million dollars that is for Construction Services also Professional Services such as architect engineering and construction management and all that is broken down by School in the financial statement okay thank you Mr romay I'll start down with miss motica any questions seeing no questions we will move to a vote all those in favor of approving the financial reports for August
15822 as presented please raise your right hand and say aye I motion pass or all those opposed motion passes um next up I need um a motion and a second to approve the financial statement for period 13 as presented these are the final financial statement for the 21-22 fiscal year so we just completed our audit so the Auditors were here for a couple weeks so these financial statements have been audited um this um we use period 13 to make any final adjustments uh to the fiscal year revenues and expenditures uh we did make some they were minor none of these were adjustments that were requested by the Auditors um and so real quickly in the operating fund we increased revenues about fifty four hundred dollars for some deposits that came in late and so overall
159the fund balance increased by that amount and the technology fund we moved um the 940 000 purchase of laptops from a supply line to a principal payment line because they were included in the Apple leagues so even though we paid that up front it was part of the lease we had to record it as a principal there were Minor Adjustments to the activity fund KCC and Debt Service very minor adjustments no adjustments made to maintenance profile construction and for self-funded insurance okay any questions I'll start down with capital seeing no further questions we will move to a vote um all those in favor of approving the financial statement for period 13 as presented please raise your right hand and say ah all those opposed motion passes next up I need a motion in a second
160to approve the 22 tax rate for each class of property as presented okay Mr Romaine you're on the roll um last week September 19th we held our tax rate hearing and during this meeting the final 2022 assessment values were presented also the tax rates were presented which have been reviewed and approved by the state auditor's office this that meeting was actually the third time that we had discussed our tax rate for 2022 we discussed them in at the August and then September 12th work session and so the tax rates that are not on the screen but they include a school purpose Levy that includes the operating maintenance technology and prop eye levees also at that service Levy um and then it's by property class residential agriculture commercial and personal property there's also Blended tax rate
161that's only used to allocate Revenue nobody nobody pays that tax rate and so I am recommending that the board approved the tax rates as presented again they've been reviewed and approved by the state auditor's office thank you and I think I'm starting down here with me okay the only thing that I would have to say is Dr Albrecht and Mr romay you have presented this um to the board and to the community multiple multiple times and I think that that is um really good because there is is you know a recruitment that you've explained multiple times um thank you for doing that moving to a vote um all those in favor of approving the tax rate for each class of property as presented please raise your right hand and say I all those opposed motion
162passes now don't fall asleep on me Miss Sharon okay moving on 5.05 early separation incentive I need a motion to approve the early separation and Senate plan for certified staff as present second okay and to attend the doctor oh Mr bro may you are busy tonight here you go um we are recommending that the district offer an early separation incentive plan to all eligible certified and support I know you're only voting I'm certified now but can support the purpose of the plan is to provide cost savings to the district and also to provide a financial incentive to employees who elect to separate early from the Kirkwood School District if approved the financial incentive to employees will be equal to 30 percent of their regular 2022-2023 wages not including extended contracts extra tax Duty contract stipends
163or any other wages this will be a one-time payment made to eligible employees and separate from the district upon completion of their 22-23 contract or the end of the 22-23 fiscal or school year it's also recommended that the esip be offered to administrators with the incentive being kept at 30 percent of the higher highest future pay grade PhD 28 pay grade the deadline to apply for this incentive would be December 1st 2022 I'm recommending approval of the esip is presented okay so I have a motion in the second to approve the early separation incentive um at this thing do we have any questions I need to start down with Kavanaugh [Music] this is um different than the ones that we've had in the past if you could just briefly say um the difference Roi the
164difference is really the financial incentive so on the test it was we paid three years um fifteen thousand dollars per year over three years and provided three years of insurance and now it's 30 percent of the 2022-2023 wages so the the average for employees certified employees would be probably around 29 to 30 000. okay seeing no further questions um uh we have a motion and a second to approve the early separation and set up and for certified staff as presented um all those in favor please raise your right hand and say I by all those opposed or I should any abstentions though there aren't any there yeah um all those the both motion passes sorry that that was clunky um next up I need emotion and a second to approve the early separation incentive and
165for support staff as presented do you have anything do you have anything further to add the incentive would be the exact same 30 percent of their wages okay um we can do this okay we got this team okay um so I got a motion in a second to approve um all those in favor of approving the early separation incentive plan for support staff please raise your right hand um all those opposed and do I have any abstentions so we have two abstentions that would be this shern and Mr Boyka um one of the guys on the board okay motion passes okay um so next up is um information [Music] um we have um I know okay so we have added um a KSD Board of Education Patron comment report um please review the items under
166um the information regarding the patron comment report one of the things um that I would like to do is I would like to add an additional comment um um to advise like who um responded to the patreon um so any questions on that again next up is future events um our October board meetings have been moved due to scheduling conflicts with Administration and yes and celebration um we will hold the October meetings at our current location um so the events that we have are Governor Parsons is coming to visit um on September 29th um at Kirkwood High School and then we have a board work session on October 10th please note that is a change and then on October 24th um we will have a board meeting at seven um this