GFPS School Board Meeting (December 8, 2025)

001We'll call to order the regular meeting of the school board for Monday, December 8th, 2025. The first item on the agenda is the pledge of allegiance. Invite you to stand as you are able. item 1A, the reading of our school board meeting norms. Mr. Cleven, >> that might work better. Uh, first, be prepared. Second, be on time. Third, value and respect each other. Fourth, exercise thoughtful deliberation and conversation. Five, be professional at the board table and when visiting in the general public. Six, speak up when the norms are not being followed. And seven, advocate on behalf of students and keep the community in mind. Thank you. Item two is the approval of tonight's agenda. I would seek a motion to approve the agenda as outlined in your board packet. Mr. Manley. Is there a second

002by Mr. Palmino? Take a roll call vote. >> Manley, >> yes. >> Anderson, >> yes. >> Hodak, >> yes. >> Cleven, >> yes. >> Larson is absent. Pomino, >> yes. >> Flynn is absent. Lun, >> yes. >> Burger, >> yes. >> Seven, yes. Zero, no. Two absent. >> Motion passes. Item three, celebrating success. We have a team from Shrader Middle School. We invite you all to the podium at this time for your presentation. Thank you. All right. Good evening, school board. Um, President Berger, uh, Vice President Anderson, and schoolboard members, uh, we are Shredder Middle School. We're happy to be here tonight. Thank you so much for this opportunity, uh, to present to you guys today. Um, I'd like to just introduce our team here. My name is Dave Natsky. I'm the principal of Trader

003Middle School. Um this is Judy Anderson, our associate principal. Uh Blake Newower and Michelle Ruse, our counselors. And so we're all going to take a turn at the mic here um to tell you a little bit about Shraider. Uh just a little overview. Um we're going to talk about our mission, vision, and values a little bit and some of the demographics at Shrader. Um as well as our uh be legendary goals and some of the academic achievement we've achieved around those goals. Um some of the structures and systems for the success that we've seen. Um just to give you somewhat of an idea. Uh and then our counselors are going to step to the mic and talk a lot about their programs here and some of the success they've seen as well. And then we'll

004finish it up with a little panorama survey results. Um our mission at Trader uh middle school is to inspire a community of learners to strive for excellence through meaningful experiences. Um it was not long ago that the staff uh met over the course of a year to adopt a mission and a vision and a values that we thought captured um the things we believe at Shrader and our vision is to build critical thinkers who embrace challenges to grow as an individuals and a community. Um our values are the five you see up there. Um these are present throughout our building and referenced in a lot of the work that we do. So, I think that the things that you hear tonight, hopefully you can draw these themes uh throughout those. But we believe in growth

005mindsets. Um we're a middle school, right? So, we uh students make mistakes and um and so does staff and so does the principal uh for that matter. And uh so we all learn from the different uh things that we do and we believe that uh by trying stuff um that's how you learn. Um we believe in high expectations both academics and behavior. uh we keep a safe and supportive environment in our school. So um thinking of our HRS work with that we're uh level one and level two qualified and level one has all to do with a safe and supportive environment. Um we believe in forming collaborative relationships between the students and the staff at our school and our and the families involved. Uh and we think we are um basically creating um respectful and

006problemsolving citizens. So, that is a picture actually of our Baisy Bash. That's uh Kirby Crafting, one of our fire teachers, talking about one of our events in the fall where we celebrate fall activities in the honor of Troy Ba, a um a former and passed on staff member, beloved staff member of the Shraider staff. Yeah. Um this is a little bit on our demographics. You kind of see the breakdown um of the div uh the the div diversity at Shrader. Um these fluctuate quite a bit depending on the year um because as you can see there's not many numbers up there um in some of those some of those categories. A total enrollment of 575 students. Um here's a snapshot of our enrollment history. I pulled this off of the ND Insights um website that's

007available to our public. You can see our enrollment over the last nine years. Um it's grown. Uh we, you know, 9 years ago we were at 463 students. Um and over the years we've um we've pulled more students into Shrader from outside of our property lines. Uh right now 576 um is the current enrollment. Actually, it's not 576 at all. It's 574 because that number does fluctuate and it even did from the time I made this slide. Uh but just to highlight uh there's 87 students in grades six through eight that we um that we serve at Trader that actually live outside of our district boundaries. Some of these are general ed students, some are some are special ed students um that that come to our programs that we have and I'll speak about that

008here in just a moment. Um here's a breakdown of our student body by grade level. If you want to look at the eighth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, there's roughly 190 to almost 200 in each grade level. And then by team, there's two teams on each grade level. Roughly 90 to 90, well, anywhere from 92 to 100 students, uh, based on what I have up there. Um, and so if you were thinking um, maybe approximate class sizes, core classes run roughly 19 to 20 students. Um, students in elective classes are a little higher, 24 to 25. And of course, those numbers fluctuate just depending on scheduling and staff. Um our school motto this year is never back down, never give up. Um for the last few years, our seventh graders have uh created or proposed

009uh a school motto that they then vote on and then we adopt that for our eighth grade year. And so it's a pretty democratic process. Um and this year, just to get the students into it, we ran a poster contest. So all the posters you see up there are all student creations. Um some of the top ones are hanging in our hallways. uh right now and and we'll change those up as the year goes on because we had a lot of uh a lot of entries. So, it's just a great way to get them involved in sharing our school motto and we incorporate this into a lot of our a lot of our u events and and and speaking um like our award assemblies and things like that. Um so, a little bit on our

010staff and programming and building. Uh we've got roughly 55 teachers and I put kind of roughly because we have a couple of part-time. So I don't know how it all shakes loose to be honest with you. But uh uh we got two admin and two counselors and a point6 social worker that we share with an elementary school and then one instructional coach. Uh on the classified side, 32 pair of professionals, four classroom specialists. We're shy one cook. We should be we should have four. I think we've got one in the hopper here. Uh hopefully we can fill that position. That's uh gets to be a pretty busy kitchen without that fourth cook. Uh, five custodians, two secretaries. Um, I just want to say a little bit about our certified staff. It is about the finest

011I've ever worked with. Um, I've I've worked in a handful of schools. I think the Shraider staff is I don't know if I've I've I've worked with people that model uh behavior for students better than the students at Shrader. And so, we have a saying at uh at Shrader. It's um everyone matters. And it means that um we take care of each other at Trader. And the staff do an awesome job. I think we teach behavior, but we also model it. And that's really where students learn. Okay. And we see a lot of great examples of that day in and day out. Um on to the special ed programs there. We have four special ed programs at Schrader. Emotionally disturbed, autism, the intellectually disabled, and medically fragile, and the alternate learning plan or ALP. And

012so those 32 PAR professionals, a lot of them work in those programs because there's uh many onetoone parah needs in those um programs. It's an awesome addition uh to our staff. It it it does affect the way our numbers look sometimes when you look from a thousand thousand feet because some of these rooms have you know 8 to 10 students and they have a teacher and a team of pairs in there. So it um our our teacher to student ratio is pretty pretty low. I mean it's one to one about 1 to 14 and I think that has a lot to do with it. Um our building is was originally built in ' 61. If you see old pictures of it you're going to see a field south of the of Shrader which doesn't exist

013anymore. you know, it's all developed, of course. Uh, and then those additions you can see with the latest one being in 1998. That's our seventh and eighth grade wing. If you've ever been in our building, uh, we most recently had a safety and security remodel in 2025. Um, we do have an aging building. I mean, it's starting to show it in some ways. Uh, probably the one we feel the most is just there's no modern HVAC in about twothirds of our building. Um, and so that's a that's probably something that's been brought up here a handful of times. I know. Um, I know that uh on the website, the Grand Forks Public School website under the BNG tab, there's actually a facility assessment from Icon Architects and um and this was in 2022, so probably

014would be more now, but they estimated HVAC to be a $7.5 million project. So, um that is a that's quite a hurdle for a building our age. So, um recently here and and you'll see on our shirts, we were recognized as a blue ribbon school. It was a huge honor. Uh we kind of find out last spring it was a national honor and it became short right before it was awarded it in August it became a state level award. Uh we were still proud of it because it was based on those test scores that you see up there. I think that is I mean we weren't really given the details of how we were recognized except for that it was our state performance. And so I just wanted to share some of those percentages and

015I'll get into a little more detail here in a second. But uh the exemplary high-erforming category is based on um growth based on your NDSA or for us NDSA because North Dakota. Um that picture we took on the day of our celebration. Um did our best to get in the to get in a ribbon in our t-shirts. Uh of course, you know, a couple big evergreens cast a couple shadows, but I think it turned out okay anyway. Uh so it was a lot of fun that day. Uh we had some schoolboard represent and uh and uh uh Kristen Basler shortly before she took off for Washington DC uh got to come and speak at our school. It was a huge honor. Um and and like we said, it was just kind of a cherry on

016the top, right? We're just doing the work we thought was the best work and it's always nice when somebody comes along and recognizes your school in a way like that. So, um, so I think that our presentation today is going to shed a little light onto some of the things that I mean, not only our test scores, which I'll get into probably more depth than you even want to hear, uh, but it also we're going to talk about some of the programmings that we think influence this performance. Okay? And if you have any questions or we miss anything that you want to ask us about, by all means, at the end or if you even want to interrupt me, um, I'm don't worry about that. We work in a middle school. We get that all

017the time. Okay? So, feel free to stop me if you have a question. Okay? Okay, we're going to start with our goals, which um are reflected right from the district goals. So, you're pretty familiar with these. Uh we're looking for growth in ELA. Uh our particular levels, we're trying to go from 56 proficient and advanced and 23 to 64 proficient um in September of uh 2028. And so, it's NDA plus now, but of course, I'm going to show you some NDSA scores because um because that's what we have historically. Um this particular year we're shooting for 60% proficient or advanced in ELA math similar um a little bit lower just based on where we're starting out. So 45% proficiency or advanced in um 2023 to 53% proficient or advanced in 2028. And so this particular

018year we're looking for a 49% proficient or advanced um again on the NDA plus. So, I'm going to take you back a couple years here to NDSA results. Um, again, just a comparison from the state to the to the district to our school in terms of performance. And again, this is grades 6 through 8. So, this is all uh altogether. We had a 57% proficiency or advance rate compared to the district's 48, states 44 in ELA and 46% proficient in math compared to the district's 40 and the states 39%. And so the following year due to some efforts which we'll get into here in a second on some of the things we did to we believe that got us there um we had a 4% increase in proficiency in ELA and a 7% um increase

019in proficiency in math the following year. So when we share this with our staff and students and this is a big part I think of our success and and um and Judy will share a few more things that we think uh weigh into that is uh we talk to the kids about the NDSA and we and and so the teachers are preparing them in their in their classrooms in terms of um obviously with instruction just tier one instruction but we're also talking about um the importance of the test and so we we gather them before and after to talk about the results of the test and I share graphs like this um to try to pump them up a little bit. We say here's how you did last year. So this would have been graphs

020for after we were done, but I talk about here's how the sixth grade did last year. So that graph on the left is like 2023 sixth grade. Um so the blue is the previous year, the red is this current year. We talk about besting the class that came before it. Um on the right is is focused on growth. So there's the NDSA performance in the blue for the district as fifth graders because our our sixth graders are from all over. I mean they're they're coming from almost every elementary um compared to how they did as sixth graders. Um so seventh grade if you wanted to same same exercise seventh grade the previous year compared to seventh grade in 2024. Um and so as we talk to students about this, we also talk to our staff

021because um the NDSA isn't seen as the thing that people come to work to try to get their kids to do. We know it's a performance. It's it's a data point. It's it's and but it's important and um and so we do talk to our staff about and the staff about um about how we talk about the test in front of students and stuff too. Like so whether you're intentionally or or unintentionally um um talking about the test in a way that makes it seem like maybe we're just doing this to get it done with to get on to the next thing. Um it's a nocost effort uh to increase your results by uh talking about it positively and and saying hey show us what you can do on this or hey the we're we're

022trying to we're trying to show the growth at at uh Shrader Middle School compared to every other school. And so, um, these are results that get shared, things like that. We want kids to take pride in their performance and, um, and and we also put out, um, some incentives and things like that. We tell them if we get to a certain level, we're going to celebrate, uh, the the success and then we do that. Um, and I think it makes a big difference in terms of the effort that kids put forth. Uh, when we schedule these tests, and I'm just going to move to the next slide uh, because these eighth grade results are impressive. They kind of speak for themselves. So, I'll let you take a look at those. um when we uh when

023we uh talk about these uh results and things like that, we want kids to uh um um to know how they did. And so, okay, uh moving on. Uh these are the NDSA results by category. So, if you want to see how our our subcategories did, um red is in is 23 24 and the blue is 2223. Again, if you remember the demographics pie chart I showed you, the the numbers here are pretty small and so they fluctuate um almost based on that and you know it could be a it could be a handful of students that are causing things to to change from year to year. Um this is a look at our math proficiency rates. Okay. And um the I wanted to share the results because these became recently available to us. Uh

024NDA plus from last spring. And so you can see the sixth grade, seventh grade, and eighth grade. These are all ELA results. The state Grand Forks as a district and then Shrader Middle School. And then on the far right is our proficiency and advance combined together. So 53% proficient in sixth grade, uh 51% in the seventh grade, and 50% in the eighth grade. Um and then our math results in the spring of 2025 for sixth, seventh, and eighth. So 60% proficient in the sixth, 55% in the seventh, and 54% in the eighth grade. Okay. So that is why we were highlighted as a blue ribbon school, some of the growth that we've demonstrated on this test. But um we know that it is a lot more than that and and and the things that weigh

025into that. So I'm going to hand the mic off to Mrs. Anderson, our AP, and she's going to walk you through some of the systems and structures that we have set up for success. Good evening. Okay. Um so as Mr. Noski said most of what we're doing is middle school and we kind of live in that area. So we just we just keep doing what we're doing and it it turns out well. Um but it's something that's a constant effort every day every year with every new staff member explaining [clears throat] what why we're doing middle school the way we are. So um one of the part of it big tenant of middle school is to have students in teams. So breaking down that 575 students into grade levels. Each grade level has two teams.

026Um and they kind of have their own identity. Um they have different celebrations. They have different activities that they do as teams, but they're working together on shared expectations. Um they had the shared teachers that they work with. Some in the seventh and eighth grade even have shared areas of the school like shared hallways that they can work with that um keep a closer eye on the students and through those teams. Then that each student is broken down into a smaller group about 10 to 12 students that um they have a raider time advisory time. Every single morning we have advisory time. Um it's got extended a little longer this year um because we have added flex time in that time too. Um and I'll talk about that in a moment. But other things that

027we do in Raider time is we walk through have them talk about their grades, have them talk about their behavior, their citizenship. Um the teachers teach a second step lesson which is our SEAL um lessons for students. we have an opportunity to do circle time um celebrations and of course always um having some fun on Fridays and having some competitions. Flex time is something that we um kind of piloted last spring. Um we have a guiding coalition at Shraider that decided that we didn't want to give up any other instructional time. So, we do take two days a week out of raider time to do flex time and um we are still working through it, but the point of this was is to get those students that needed the most help, get them some extra

028help with that expert teacher. So, it might be the math teacher that's pulling some students for this 25 minute time um or other teachers just being there as a guided practice. Um so we started this year in September and kind of working through that. Um we have a whole calendar of days that we we follow. Um and we have everybody involved and I'll get to that. So there's different session types. One intervention that would be that small group. um we work together as a team from what they've worked with um with our content PLC. Also how to reach those students to get them based on the standards but also sometimes it's just getting them to turn in their work or to do their work or to assess those um students in a smaller group. Um

029we have guided work sessions. Um a lot of times our students just like need someone near them um to help them finish that finish their work or to answer questions. Um each team has a study hall also and though that is for students who are doing everything right. They have all their homework and they are um it's time to read a book or to do finish up on projects and things like that. And there's an opportunity for teachers um if they want to hold an enrichment session. Other sessions that we are starting is um us as an office admin team um we have behaviormies um that we're working through pulling students in that may not mean need the academic help or we understand that their academics is probably a result of their behaviors also. So,

030working more one-on-one with students in those areas, too. So, here's just some data from this year. Um, this is from the RTI scheduleuler. It's a a program that all teachers have access to to actually schedule students into an RTI session. Um, you can see what kinds of sessions we've had. Um, the open versus closed means, um, we do not allow our middle school students to choose where they want to go. at the high school level at Red River, they are allowing students to choose. We we do not we want to make sure that they get where they need to go. Um and then by department, too. Um we don't want to have students see it as a punishment. So, we don't have like fun activities for the kids that have everything done. So, you may

031look at like a PE session. And we probably don't have too many of those because we don't require students to make up PE if they're missed a class or things like that. Um or everybody would want to go play floor hockey instead of getting their work done. Something else that we do at Trader and we've done for a very um long time, we call it Wonder Wednesday. Um so in our middle school schedule, another part of that is that our teachers have team time every day. They meet with their um core team of teachers for one period a day. Oftent times that's used for um parent meetings or special ed meetings or um planning, you know, working on data, writing good news notes, but one day a week we ask them to come out of

032that team and meet with us or our instructional coach. And we have planned a schedule for every Wednesday of the year. You can see that. Um last year we started doing some book studies. We did um Culturize by Jimmy Casus. Um working on just kind of revitalizing our culture at Trader. And then um the we started Teach Like a Champion last year and then we're finishing it this year. Um again, just more tools on our tool belt for um working with students, instructional strategies. It's nice to be have in-house professional development. Um, other things that we do during wonderment Wednesdays, we also do instructional rounds at least once a quarter where teachers get to go visit other teachers classroom and learn from them. And we can also pull data from that too. So when we

033were looking at our HR certification, Cognia, that type of thing, um, we can quick have some quick data like are teachers posting goals? are they what kind of strategies are they using um in their classrooms? Um the other thing that our instructional coach does help us with is um besides wonderment Wednesday is that um we ask all teachers to set goals. Um what you see there is the uh new art and science of teaching has those design areas but all the elements that are listed there and we've asked um our teachers to focus on content um choose one of those elements as their own individual goal and then we asked them to set a content goal. Also our newer teachers we asked them to focus on those red highlighted areas. So either um setting rubrics

034in the classroom um tracking student progress, celebrating success or more of the um rules and procedures and building relationships which as a new teacher they often are that's that's the world that they're living in is just setting up um rules and procedures and getting to know students. So and then um Dave and I each split our certified staff. So we support and observe and evaluate about 30 30 people each of our certified staff and our um instructional coach. She um meets with them to develop their goals and gives them some tips and tricks on how to write that and they help input them into the eye observation system. Um last year Shrader was able to have a part-time literacy intervention person. Um Jessica Sundine has been working with our students. First started out by um

035just focusing on our sixth graders just to identify some students, screen them, and then also give them the extra boost hopefully so they can be much more successful in seventh and eighth grade. Um so you can see some of the data there that she started out looking at students who are below the 25th percentile on the star um assessment. We give the star four times a year once per quarter just so we can see some of that trend data um grow. Um she also uses the letter screener when she meets with students. She uses the UFly curriculum. Um it's about 15 to 20 minutes per session. And then she also uses like the intervention plans in Panorama that she lists that you can see that um their growth is graphed out there also. But mainly

036working with our middle school students on fluency um does some work on spelling and this is the other one encoding spelling and reading fluency. So these charts that you see um that's our star reading scores. So it's just a yes or a no. So it's just shown if these students have shown any growth and so our students right now have shown growth just on their star reading uh assessment. um when she works with them on root reading fluency um she explained this that it's really difficult because as they get more and more content specific in middle school the vocabulary is that much more difficult and you it's very hard to take out the vocabulary words to get them to read more fluently and then they lose the part of the content. So like you can't

037teach science without that vocabulary. So that's why it's variable for the fluency scores um if they're improving or not. So they're reading more um advanced words, but they're just not as fluent with it. And then she does um do the encoding and spelling scores also because we see that is a huge issue with our middle school students. Okay. Um the other thing that we're going to talk about is attendance. And I'm a member of the attendance task force here in the Grand Forks Public Schools. And so um some of this data that you will see is is unique to Shraider or unique to um maybe a couple schools in the district. As you can see here, here's our uh data, our attendance data, average daily attendance compared to the district in the state for the

038last three years. Um on the far right side, that is our attendance data as of December 1st. And so our goal is always to have 95% attendance or better. Um and we're not there yet. [snorts] some things that may be uh occurring and this is might be unique to Shraider is that um you can see that we have a higher attendance rate on Fridays and this gets worse as the year goes on and we have students leaving for traveling hockey, traveling basketball, traveling volleyball, dance cheer vacation ations, everything. And so, as we talked about on the d the task force is that how can we involve some of these community groups to say attendance and school matters, you know, um I don't know how far we get with that, but um and then Wednesdays is

039hard to um we have a little dip in attendance on Wednesdays. We do have those early release days that we find some people if they schedule an appointment, they just don't come back. They don't come into school at all on Wednesdays. Then um the high schools, I know you've heard about the high school's attendance plan. Um they have a little bit more teeth into it because um they have credit and other things going on at the high school. We do not have that at the middle school. So, we are um developed a tiered plan, but basically what it is, it's working with families and students and educating them and building those relationships and explaining all of the things that needs to happen because you are in school or aren't in school. um our social worker

040um Heidi Ordin right now were has met with every eighth grader who is at risk with attendance right now and talks about what this would look like if you were in high school and how many how many days you're missing and how that affects um your academics. So, we have um worked a lot with um an early warning system started with our sixth grade, but now it's schoolwide that even before school starts, getting to know families, explaining to them what we do as a school and why it's important to be there. Um and and identifying a trusted adult or building those relationships. The students want to come. And something you'll hear a little bit more later on about is our involvement with um clubs and activities and everything going on at Trader is a kind

041of a testament to why we have as good attendance as we do because we feel like those students are connected to our school. >> All right. Thank you, Mrs. Anderson. I was just going to uh talk a little bit about the extracurriculars and clubs that we offer at Trader. Um like Judy said, um some of these activities are the things that students look forward to. So if you can see a wide range of uh not only clubs um but also some of the co-curricular activities and um some of our academic competitions like math counts are in there. Um some extensions of our classroom like chamber orchestra. Um homework club is just what it is. It's a it's um an opportunity for kids to come after school and um work with one of our paras that

042runs a homework club. Um babysitting club is is a um you know students that are interested in becoming babysitters, they can and take the certification test. Um they learn on the information that they need to know through that. Um and and our musical is wild wildly popular. Um, I don't have uh numbers for these groups, but I can say like you're going to find out because the sources of strength. I'm going to let uh Blake and Michelle talk a little bit about that because um I mean we currently have over 100 students in that activity alone. Um but I do have some numbers for the athletics and we had a really great fall. Had over 180 uh seventh and eighth grade students that participated in football, volleyball, and boys soccer. Um, and if you think

043we have about 400 seventh and eighth graders, so we're looking at almost roughly half that participated in a fall sport. And we've got a handful of students that take advantage of some of the high school sports that we of course we don't offer at the middle school like swimming, golf, tennis, and cross country. Um, so here's a little bit of data um for just this year. And again, these are just seventh and eighth graders because sixth graders participate in intramurals um if they choose. But this is the um in the beginning of intercolastic sports, if you will. And so you can see like the numbers. Volleyball is obviously popular. It's popular everywhere. And that is definitely um a big one. In the fall, we had 163 students participate. Um this is last year again. Uh

044winter um boys basketball was probably the high group there with 79. And then in the spring we we do have boys track and girls track. That's the top two bars there. So add those together. That's a pretty pretty good uh participation uh partic participation. Let's skip that one. We have 95 kids that played in track. There we go. Uh so there you see some totals there on the bottom as well. Um and so even last year was probably a little lower than the previous years in terms of uh the numbers of kids that have participated. Now, when I showed you the staff um slide, and that was quite a few ago, um you'll notice we don't have a lot of extra people at Trader. I mean, we don't have deans, we don't have coordinators, we're

045not a title one school. Um it is really the office staff. And so, um um there's a lot of things that Judy and I do that uh um um in our office um and and and our office team do as well, too. But I can say that these sports run as well as they do because of Mrs. Anderson and the work that she does as our athletic director. And it is a huge job because when there's that many kids participating, there's that many teams, there's that many coaches to hire, there's that many events to organize and coordinate. And so she does an awesome job and that's part of the reason why we have that kind of participation is the support that she shows um our coaches and students in that group. So um wanted to

046talk a little bit about our parent involvement. Um uh that flyer on the right is is our PTO is kind of end of the year thing they put together. It shows you a little bit of some of the ways they're involved. It's very active. Um there's a picture of our middle school dance from this fall. Um and some of Well, no, nobody in here was supervising, but we did have some middle school parents actually show up and help supervise. Uh and they loved it. They thought it was great. You know, we run it from 6:00 to 8. I mean, it's a really early event in the night, but uh um set up some uh some some dance lights. I happen to have those for some reason. And uh and we use the gym sound system

047and the kids the kids have a great time. Uh we we have an excellent uh participation rate at our open house. It's it's it's we we see a lot of traffic at our parent teachers conferences as well. Sorry I don't have those numbers. I do have them. If you want me to share them though, I can I can get them to you. Um are we have quarterly ACE award assemblies where we recognize uh students for academic and character excellence as well as grit. Uh, and so the um grit stands for help me out. >> Growth, >> resilience, >> integrity, and tenacity. Yeah. And so we have parents that come to that award assembly as well where we have a speaker and we usually play a game at the end. Um, so that's a great way

048to get the parents in our building. Um, we we have fifth grade transition meetings for parents. Uh, we call them parent coffees and we run three different ones and it's this team you see right here. uh that basically explains to uh parents that have an incoming sixth grader what their child's going to experience and maybe what they're going to experience with a brand new middle school student. It's like hang on to your hat, things are going to change, get ready. Um but we give them a lot of useful useful information, hopefully lower some anxiety. Um just our athletics and music um events, we give a a lot of traffic at those as well. and and those team meetings we talked about during the school day is a great opportunity uh to bring in parents that

049we need to visit with. So it might be for a 504, it might be for an IEP meeting, or it might just be able to be a way to connect with parents face to face. Um and so our teams take advantage of that when they need to. All right, up next are our counselors. All right, good evening everyone. Uh we're here as your Schrader counseling staff. We're going to talk a little bit about our goals that we have, how our tier one lessons play into those goals um and what our next steps are. And then we're going to shift about halfway through there just to talk about some of the highlights that we think that we have. Um and that's mostly the eighth grade getting them ready for high school, our sources of strength program

050and club and then our expansion to career education. But we're going to start with our program goals. the district has a program uh a goal of Native American graduation rates. Um and we have a subset goal in our Shrader building about improving Native American test scores. So we wanted to come alongside that. So when we were making our goals, we're looking at the data uh we focused on our panorama data on the Native American students. So by the end of the school year, uh, for the Native American students that are reporting no strengths in theCle category, we want to decrease that by 10% from 79% to 69%. And then we also looked at the Native American students that are reporting as critical in Panorama as far as academics go and we want to reduce that

051by 10% uh from 42% to 32%. And all those kids right there, Mr. Noki referenced that we had an average of 102 students. That is our sources of strength group. Uh we could not figure out how to structure them for a photo, but those kids knew what to do. So they they kind of run that group for us. >> Okay. Every quarter, um Newower and I go into classrooms. So we see every student once a quarter. >> I just have you slide right over to the mic for those who are checking in online. Thank you. >> And we do um lessons and the all of our lessons are franchised across the middle school and the district. So everyone in the district is getting the same lessons. So our eighth grade lesson, this is some data

052from our eighth grade lesson. And we our first quarter lesson with them is how to help a friend. So we go in and we talk to them about warning signs of depression, suicide, how to recognize those and your friends. And then we um give them resources as far as um counseling, therapy, um how to call and use the crisis lines, what you say when you call. We also tell them um how to call dispatch if you need a safety check done or wellness check on your friend and we go over what to say and things like that. So in our lessons we do a pre and post test and we ask them questions because we want to gauge how well we're doing in the class with teaching the lesson and also what information is being

053gained. So on our pre and post test we asked them what they would do if their friend said they wanted to die and told you not to tell. So, in our pre-EST, you'll see that 84.1% of our students said that they would break that promise and tell a trusted adult. And after the lesson, we had 95.4% of our students said that they would break that promise and tell a trusted adult. So, that is an 11.3% increase. >> All right, our seventh grade quarter 1 lesson is all about um healthy relationships and how do you disagree respectfully. Uh so in that lesson we're focused on perspective taking. How do you handle conflict when it arises? Whether that be with some friends or teachers or parents and then we try to give them some skills on how

054to um bring down that conflict whether that be using eye statements uh focused on what you can control um and then active listening. So we try to give them those self-efficacy skills. Um for our pre-est on this one, we start with how important do they think it is to disagree respectfully. Uh you can see that we had um 63% as a four, 31.8 as a three. And then by the post test once we were done uh we got almost all of them up to a 16.2 for a three and an 81.1 for a four, 18%.1 increase. The nice thing about these lessons, we can tie them into some of the different panorama data like our self-efficacy, challenging feelings, emotional regulation. So, we're trying to hit uh as many categories as possible when we go in

055for these lessons. >> Our quarter 2 lesson for our sixth grade, we talk about grit and why grit is important and what it is and how grit is one of the most important predictors for future success. So, we talk to the students about that. Um, we encourage them to make mistakes. middle school is about making mistakes but rebounding from that once you have done it. Um so we our pretest asked them was grit and um we had and our post test asked the same question and so we had a 24.2% increase from the pre-est to the post test and they're being able to accurately define grit. And that is a picture of our grit challenge that we do during that lesson. And so they have a minute to stack as many metal pieces as they

056can up with chopsticks. And so, as you can imagine, that's pretty hard to do. Um, we do show them how to use the chopsticks um when we're in there, too. And um but anyway, this is a picture from our quarter 2 lesson this year and how our students were doing that. >> It's fun for us, too, because we get to stress them out while they're doing it. All right, so our uh next step. So, that's just our tier one classroom lessons. Our next step uh as we work towards uh our goals is we're going to be doing individual counseling sessions with our Native American population. We've already started with a third of them uh just to get some of that individualized what do you need specifically so that we can try uh to help them.

057So we will continue that as the school year moves on. We're also going to be looking at small group planning. So we want to make sure we're being intentional when we're forming groups. So we're looking at different data pieces whether that be uh academics and power school panorama log entries whatever and we want to try to figure out how can we utilize groups to try to further us towards that goal. So that's kind of where we're going uh with our program goals and now we're going to shift gears a little bit about some of the highlights that we have as a program. >> So with our eighth grade students new and I spend a lot of time with them getting them ready for high school. Um, we recognize that it is somewhat early for them

058to know some of these things, but hearing it over and over is a good thing. So, we have a 4-day unit with our eighth graders. Um, and we also we start kind of our high school planning with them in November. We send out an interactive slide deck to all the families in the district. So, we tell them about what courses are offered in high school. We talk about GPA calculation, how middle school and high school are different so that they know what the expectations are. We spend a lot of time talking about the differences and expectations. Um, our 4-day unit starts in January. So, we work in collaboration with our middle school career counselor. And so, we go in, we talk about the course offerings again, we talk about what a credit is, why it's

059important to be at school. um and we register them for those classes and give them their um power school registration and all that. And then our career counselor comes in and she does four-year planning with them so they can see the sequence of the classes they would have and she also does a career assessment with them so that they can line up their classes that they're choosing in high school with what their interests are. And then at the end of the year in quarter four, we um meet with our eighth graders again and we talk to them about how college admissions works and how scholarships work and financial aid. We do some mock scholarship committee selection. We let them choose who would get the scholarships um based on certain criteria that we give them and

060we have a lot of lot of fun with that. Some of the kids are are pretty good critics um I will say and they're picky. So um we do teach them those things. All right. As Mr. Noski said, we also run the Sources Strength Club. Uh if you're unfamiliar with what Sources Strength is, it is a suicide prevention program uh that focuses on changing the narrative from more sad, depressing when you're talking about that stigma of mental health to a message of hope, health, and strength. Um, so it starts as a counseling curriculum in elementary schools and then when they get to middle school and high school, it turns into a club where we're using the eight pieces of the wheel and that's the eight things that people fall back on when they're going through

061tough times. So we run this program uh we pulled some enrollment data um from the 202021 school year up until now. You can see that we started with 12 students and now we have 102 middle schoolers that come with us on this journey. um with the message. He's laughing because I'm going bald because of it. Uh but we are what the the whole point is we wanted to expand this club because we part of sources is getting uh people connected to help. So we wanted to make sure that we tried to reach as many students as possible from as many different groups as there were. So uh we opened up our enrollment and uh marketed a little bit different. We run campaigns and it's very peer- driven. So the students lead it and we have

062so many students now where we even have a leadership group out of those students where they're starting to take over making an agenda. What campaigns are we running um running through notetaking themselves um and making sure that we are doing what we need to do as well and then Ruse will talk a little bit about the campaigns that uh we run. So, some of the community projects that we have done um last year and this year, we have done a food drive for North End Rescue Mission and we've collected about 4,000 items each year for that. We've assisted um 1,200 families in Grand Forks area through our food drive. We're very proud of that. We also do holiday cards. Our students write cards to the um local nursing homes. We did about 500 cards last

063year and we're on pace to do that many this year. Um, I drag Newbower out to the football game one night and we gave out a thousand hot dogs to all the students. We fed the players on both teams. Um, we had a really good time with that or I did. Um, and so we also do a lot of building projects. So, um, we handed out hot chocolate to our students right before the holidays. We recognize that's a really stressful time. So, we try to get out and about in the building. We have run the photo booth for the sunrise dance that we have every year. our students for sources of strength made a video about what helps them um that we showed to our students. We also helped the the fine arts department do

064the coffee their coffee shop. And so that's a lot of fun too. And then we do a door decorating competition. And our sources of strength students, if you have ever been over to Shraider for the fifth grade visit, if your student has come over for that, um our sources of strength are the ones that lead the tours and do a lot of that organization and planning. And so we are very proud to showcase them. >> Still me. Okay. All right. Um we do a couple of career experiences for our eighth eighth grade students and for the second year this year we um did the T4 conference out at Northland and our students there were about a thousand students that attended around the area. All of Grand Forks Public Schools eighth graders went to this and

065so they go over to Northland and they get to do um some hands-on career experiences. So we had a welding simulator, we had um the fire department there. Um we had all the health sciences, they were doing intubation of the mannequins, taking blood, things like that. So you'll see some pictures from that and some data from that in just a minute. And then also we have an eighth grade career experience. So, New Bowerer and I um give the students a career key assessment and we take that data on what careers they're interested in and we contact local businesses and we send them out in April for a 2-hour block in groups of about 10 to 12 and so they get to go into that business and do some more hands-on things and um it's a

066way to showcase our local businesses as well as get our students in there and see what a day in the life of would be. Um and we have some data to show you on that too. All right. So, this first one's for the T4 uh event that comes in. So, of 563 students that took the survey. It's a scale of 1 to four. Three and four is positive, one and two is negative. Uh the sessions that I attended were engaging and interesting. We had 81% rank it at three or four. If you've ever had a conversation with a middle schooler about how their day went, getting engaging and interesting is amazing. Uh you can see how uh in this session it was for uh the firefighting uh team there and they're using the jaws of

067life to play a game of Jenga as they go through the uh different experiences as a firefighter. Uh the hands-on activities help me to understand the career better. We had 87% of students rank uh that as a positive results. And we have our other friend getting dressed up in the gear getting ready to go uh with the firefighter team as well. I learned about a career today that I didn't know existed. 61% answered that positively, which is great because the whole point of this is try to get them to see some new things, open up some new paths so that they when they get to high school, they can explore some of the CTE programs that they have and get a better idea for uh life after uh K12. So, you'll see uh someone working

068on the mannequin in our orthopedic surgery. I would consider one of the careers that I learned about today as a future career. 57% answered positively. Uh, which is great because that gets them thinking along the lines that we want them to. This young man was doing the flight simulator, so you got to see him working the buttons before, getting ready for takeoff, flying the plane, and sometimes landing the plane. Um, I would recommend this career experience to other eighth grade students. 85% answered that positively, which is great. Uh, since this has only been going on, this was the second year uh, doing it. So, that's uh, a positive response there. We just had some more mannequin work there. All right, for the one that Ruse and I run, um, did you learn new information by

069participating in this experience, we had an 84% which is great because we want it to be educational as well. So, you can see our friend here posing with the weather balloon from UND atmospheric sciences. Uh, they had a good time there. Do you think that the careers you learned about today would be a good fit for you? We had 67.5% answer positively. Uh that's down uh we take a group of students to the courthouse, they got to sit in on a trial, talk with the sheriff's department, so they got to do a lot of really cool things down there. Uh and then the last one, should uh New Bower and Ruse plan this activity again next year for Shrader students? We got a 94.9% yes, which was good for us. So uh we are currently

070in the process of running that lesson so that we get our results and then we will be cold calling businesses uh to hopefully partner with us. So, that's a little bit of what we got for the counseling department, and we'll turn it back over to Mr. Noki and Mrs. Anderson. >> Thank you, Blake and Michelle. Um, since they're not going to say it, I'm going to tell you uh these two are rock stars in our counseling department in the district. Uh they are leaders and um just a couple of examples of that. That T4 event uh didn't exist until they went out and found it. um which meant a field trip down to attend one at Valley City and they came back and they said we should get this in Grand Forks. And so they

071worked with Eric Ripley and his um his crew uh to um to bring that to Northland. And um it's been a great event since. I can't tell you how much I appreciate being a principal saying, "Hey, I wonder if like we could get our kids out into the businesses and maybe they could like do a field trip like that." And I give some throw out an idea like that and they're like, "Hey, let us work on that." And then they created that event that they talked about there. um which has been incredible. Um so it's just a just a proof that um and they're involved too. And so I just want to they're not going to say these things so I have to like Blake is a tri chair which is a leadership position in

072our counseling department. Um and and and Michelle also coaches robotics. So in addition to all those things they're doing um there's still more on top of that. Okay. So just a little bit about how our students feel about school. Um this slide and the next four and we're almost done. So, if you're looking at the, you know, if I time this right, you don't have any time for questions. So, that'll work out great. Um, uh, panorama data is is the same. These are the same questions asked, uh, districtwide. Uh, these are our students in this, uh, last fall. And so, you can see some of the results there and maybe how they've changed since the last survey, which would have been the spring, right, of 2025. And then compared to the district, uh, we we

073visit with our staff about uh, this data because it is uh, it's useful. It's got some trend data there at the top. Like you can you can drill down and take a look and see how maybe this fall compared to the previous fall or compared to last spring. Uh but more importantly, you can go into the questions. And so there's about five or six questions for each of those indicators. And so this one here is probably a high one, right? How many of your teachers are respectful towards you? And you can see um all of the teachers, most of the teachers, about half my teachers, and how the percentages are there. Um pretty pretty positive. Um and so the other survey that the kids take is a well-being survey and this is the results uh

074from that as well. Um so same thing we go into teams and we and we take a look at um some of these items and we kind of let the teachers point and tell us where we want to go. Uh Judy and I have admin access so we can drill down for them and take a look at that and maybe answer some of the questions that they have about it. So here's a low point, right? self-efficacy is something that has been low for us and it's it's probably relatively low across the district as well but you know kids especially at the middle school don't always feel confident about what they're doing so I always think it's kind of nice to drill down and to say this question that we have here um how confident are

075you that you can do the hardest work the hardest now the hardest work that is assigned to your classes and if you drill down and take a look at even students that are somewhat confident and I'm going to echo what uh Mr. Newbower said is that sometimes middle sometimes that's as good as you're going to get when you ask a middle school student like do you feel confident? Yeah, I think so. You know, like I think this is good to go. Um you know, you have almost 80% that are somewhat or or better in term of the in terms of their confidence. Um and so some of those items are they're hard for kids to answer. I mean, one says, "Will you remember next year what you learned about this year?" And I'm like like

076I know how I would answer that question if I had was asked that, you know. So, it's it's those kinds of items that um when you take a look at it and consider um some of the other pieces to it, um they make sense and yet we talk about how do we how do we make improvements? So, um some free response questions. Uh thinking about everything in your life now, what feels the hardest for you? Thinking about everything in your life now, what makes you feel the happiest? And what can teachers or other adults at schools uh do to better support you? And so, we we sift through those u answers as well too. and sometimes even the mental health coordinator will reach out and say, "Hey, you've got some pretty concerning responses here and

077um wanted you to know about that." So, we follow up on that with both students and families. Um all right, that's a little bit about Shraider. Uh do you have any questions? >> Questions from board members for this team from Shrader Middle School. I have just one just out of curiosity. When you see, you know, some of this reporting out, the blue ribbon school comes to mind, the um the strides you're making in many, many areas. Um what's the process look like for sharing this out to our other middle school campuses or is it such a unique every place is its own unique fishbowl such that it may not may not transfer someplace else. What what what does that look like? What does the huddle look like that says, you know, can this be replicated

078or can any of this be duplicated? Just a just a thought. >> No, that's a great question. Um, I think, you know, on a more uh boots to ground level, those discussions take place in our PLC meetings, our early release meetings at at content areas cuz you know I I I'm a firm believer that every moment, every every minute, every hour that we're spending at the school is is weighing into something, right? And so, um, I think, um, our staff does an amazing job of just being present and handling things as they as they will as opposed to looking forward to the future. So, if if you're talking about the kinds of things that happen in the classroom, I mean, that is where the magic happens. I mean, one of our classroom teachers is here

079tonight, Brady Olsen. If you've ever been to a Shraider band concert, you see the product. I mean, he's got a really unique class in in the sense that he has to publicly show if his product, you know, and so there's no question what's going on in Brady's band program. Um, but, you know, for others, I think those discussions take place and in the PLC meetings and those opportunities I think teachers really cherish when they get to have those conversations about their craft and and and the things that are going well. Um, anything else? Do you have something, Dr. Glatch? >> Yeah. Hopefully I'm not stealing Dr. Brener's thunder, but um you heard Principal Noatsky sing the praises and the extra duties that all the folks behind him does. I want to do the same for

080him. It probably goes without saying that he is the model for that school. And that blue ribbon um process was no small undertaking. It was basically a dissertation. And I'm pretty sure Dave lifted 99% of that himself alongside Jen Becker. >> Jen Becker. Yes. I'm going to give a shout out to our instructional coach. >> So, I I just want to send him the same accolades. >> Thank you. Are there other questions from board members, Miss Flynn? >> Um, I am very proud to be a Straighter Middle School parent. Um, I asked my middle schooler what uh she would change about middle school, if anything. Um, and she decided that she thinks that they should all have partitions between the middle school boys and girls. So, that was, you know, she must like everything else,

081but that was her answer. Um, but in all seriousness, um, I, uh, have the privilege of walking the halls sometimes. Um, and it's just a wonderful school. You guys do an amazing job with what you have. And, um, so it's it's fun to see in in person. I always ask this question um to the celebrating success folks and I know you've alluded to some things but um perfect world if you had the funds what's a top priority for you at your school that you would want to bring in or implement >> at the middle school level. Um we pride ourselves on being um like the exploratory model. You may have heard that uh you know our elective classes and things like that are opportunities where you know we have it set up where students can

082try a lot of different things before they get to the high school and kind of get a flavor for maybe fax or tech and engineering or music and orchestra. Um I just don't think you can do that enough. And so if if if you know to add more classes which means more staff and probably be more classrooms. Uh just to be able to broaden the experience at middle school would always be something that I think would be you know better. I think we do a great job at it and our teachers do an awesome job considering um you know the class loads they have. But uh yeah just to broaden that experience and and let students um explore more options. Sorry, I raised my hand to Miss Flynn Flynn's comment. I thought she was going

083to say that she's an alum of that school. I always say about a hundred years ago, I was a Shraider Raider. So, I was trying to claim my part in that as well, but it wasn't quite where you were taking the comment. Others, Dr. Hodc, >> congratulations. Good job. One of the um points that really resonated with me today was not only the fact that you talked about the student data and what the students are doing and how the teachers are supporting them, but the fact that you brought up that you have an instructional coach that works with teachers as individuals to develop those professional goals and instructional goals and then that both you and Judy work to assess those goals. and supervise those goals. Um, that's true educational leadership for the development of teachers.

084So, congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Other questions from board members. There final thoughts. Did you have something, Dr. Brener? >> Just a concluding comment. You know, we all went through the be legendary training here a couple years ago, two, three years ago. the focus really was on academic progress, particularly in the two areas of of math and and literacy. And I I hope everybody sees and understands that while that grabs the headlines, there's more to school than test scores. And I think every one of our presentations that we've had under B legendary celebrating success uh offers the uniqueness, the unique culture of every one of our uh campuses. Uh and it brings something for every one of our students who comes to school every single day. So, just wanted to point that out

085that um so when you ask the question about what's transferable, some things are transferable. There's some structural things that could be transferred, but it's the people, it's the culture uh that really brings your building alive and like our other buildings. So, I just want to thank the team for being here tonight and for presenting. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. Move on to item four, our public comment period. I don't have any comment cards turned in. Is there anyone here tonight who wishes to speak during our public comment period? Moving on then to item five. These are superintendent's recommendations for discussion. 5A, government affairs committee report. Mr. Anderson, did you chair that? You want to lead this off? >> Thank you. Uh, yes. The government affairs committee met uh last Thursday, December 4th, um

086and and um went through uh with with guests of our high school principles. And then uh uh Mr. Bombach received uh um presentations regarding some recent legislation and effects of that legislation on uh those those uh loc their locations uh the high schools. um and then uh got gave feedback to our legislator uh Senator Meyer who was able to attend that meeting. Um I would turn it over to Dr. Brener and Brandon to provide a little bit more context as to what we we reviewed. >> Please. So, Senator Meyer was able to engage uh with us around conversations around our new attendance policy. Uh specifically what our high school folks are doing at Central and Red High School um and some of the challenges when some legislation was introduced a couple of bananas ago that's

087actually put some restrictions on our schools. So, uh in terms of having some teeth and if we need to make a referral uh to county social services, uh there's some limitations to that. Uh so he was happy to hear um how he could advocate even during the uh interim session on some committee work, how he could help support uh what we need at the state level. Um Dr. Erison and Mr. Strandell also highlighted the bell-to-bell schedule and how that was going uh which you know we had that process in place. So um actually by by all accounts that's that's going quite well. um some of the behavioral uh challenges that that we can have at at all levels. Um sometimes it takes more than just the school. Sometimes it takes more than just the parent

088uh to remedy some of those behaviors of those gap skills that students haven't learned. Um and it's important that uh the community is is really aware of that. And then uh Mr. Bombach talked about the interim committee that he's on looking at uh special education funding and seeing see seeing if we can see that metric grow uh a little bit more attached to our foundation aid payment because uh when we see uh when we see the cost per student uh from general ed to special ed what we receive from the state what we receive uh from the feds uh there's a a pretty large gap there that's born on the taxpayers of Grand Forks. So, we had a really nice conversation and Senator Meyer was very receptive to helping us out and leveraging and and

089moving things forward for us. Uh, as is the case often when we have uh reports from committee, I'll turn it over next to any others who were present at that meeting. So, that would be Mr. Cleven, Dr. Glatch, Mr. Bombach, if there's anything else that you want to lift up from that uh time together and then we'll open it up to other board members for for questions. Mr. Glenn, do you have something? >> First apologize because I wasn't on time, so I didn't follow our norms. Um, I came into the discussion a little bit late. Uh, but the minutes are an accurate assessment of that meeting. >> Anything from either of you, uh, Dr. Glatch or Mr. Bombach about the time you shared together in conversation? Okay, I'll open it up to board members for

090questions for the committee. Anything that you have, Dr. L? Just a quick question. I I know we're probably going to have a special session early next year and I realize it deals with rural health, the $500 million grant. Do you know if any of that would pertain to school nurses or anything school related? Do or do we have any idea of what that might pertain that special session? Yeah, President Burgerer, board member [clears throat] Lun, I I'm not aware of it if that's a subject matter that's going to be taken up, but we did [clears throat] just start to get the early inklings that in later January is when they'll pull together that session. >> Other questions from board members for the committee. Okay, this again is under discussion only, so no action is required.

091We'll move on to 5B, the annual report for 2024 2025. Mr. Baky. >> Yeah, President Burgerer, members of the board, it is my honor today to present to you the 202425 annual report. Um, as you'll see in the audience, we have a number of guests who have uh who are going to be presenting here today. Um, just to kind of give the lineup for everyone in the audience as far as so you're aware of where you're at. Um I will start off with some uh demographic data with enrollment and free and reduced lunch counts and then I'll hand it over to chief academic officer uh Bart who will go through some of our academic data. Um then new this year we're going to be highlighting each one of or one program um each year um

092as far as just to highlight some of the work being done within our schools. And today we have a number of guests who will be talking about our AVID program um led by Katie Arthur, our district coordinator um district AVID coordinator. Um, and then from there we'll hand it off to Dr. Dietrich for our special ed count. Um, Ivona Tadorovich, our ML coordinator, will also talk on our ML counts and then I'll finish it up with some HR numbers. Um, in Griffin Gillespy's absence, our HR director. So, um, just so everyone's kind of aware of where we're going with this. So, um, to start off, I'll start off with enrollment report. As you'll as you anticipate, um we had a lot of conversation last year relative to our enrollment um count and and the spike

093that we saw again an increase of 220 students um roughly about from 23 24 to 24 25 school year and we've seen the opposite of that this year. And so um nothing that the board hasn't seen before, isn't aware of um to this point, but we saw a nice increase last year. Um we're seeing the tail end of that on the opposite way um here. uh national school lunch program. As you'll see, the 2425 school year, uh we saw an increase um 1.7% increase um across our district as far as the free and reduced lunch count. Just a reminder on the 2920 201920 school year and all the way to the 202122 school year, um you'll see a consistent trend there. Again, that's during those COVID years in which we were able to maintain one

094year um for our free and reduced lunch count. And so that's a an anomaly you'll see there. Um but we're starting to see that trend go back up um from 24 25 school year. Again, the numbers that um we see right now are also trending in that direction uh for next school or for this school year as well too. Um, so we'll hope we're hopeful that we'll see that trend continue to increase um, from a funding standpoint for allocations and our federal dollars. Any questions on that before I hand it off to Chief Academic Officer Bart? >> Looks like we can move at Mr. President, members of the board, thank you for having me this evening. We'll talk a little bit about achievement data before I go to the next slide. Just know that there

095are about 852 asterisks in this slide deck that I'll share with you because we've had so many changes. So, I'll try to talk through them, but if at any time you have a question, just please let me know. So, the first thing is we love acronyms in education. So, we use NDSA, which was the North Dakota State Assessment. But this past academic year, the state of North Dakota transitioned to what they're calling NDA plus, which is the North Dakota academic progression of learning and understanding for students. So, I just want to make a note that everything prior to the 25 data that I'll show you was the old NDSA test and now it's the NDA Plus assessment. Two different vendors had produced that assess those assessments. If you see a number blacked out, that just

096means the cohort size was too small to share. it's under 10. And if we share that data publicly, it could um potentially be identifiable. So, we don't share that data. Um I'm not sharing star cat data. That's a computer adaptive test. That's our progress monitoring that we've talked about because currently it's not predictive of NDA+. We can share that at any time if you would like to know, but tonight we're not going to share that. And the reason why is Star Renaissance is the vendor for that. And what they do is they do a correlation data study at the end of each NDSA cycle. So that's the old assessment and they have not yet been released data from NDA plus to correlate if their test is a match or not. So that those scores aren't

097being shared yet tonight, but they are available. And then NDA plus NDPI did release the data in late October, early November. They did establish cut scores with teacher groups this past summer, but what they're telling us is it's there's a possibility that those cut scores may shift depending on some correlation data studies that they do. It doesn't mean that the data is invalid. It doesn't mean that it doesn't tell us the story, but there are just a whole lot of asterisks where we sit right now as we look at data. Okay. So ACT, which has nothing to do with NDA+ or NDSA, another um acronym ACT. Um what this is showing is our um achievement over time over the last three academic years. Um I did it in correlation to the state. So you can

098compare the green to the green and then it's broken out for our three campuses as well. Grand Forks Public Schools and average ACT score this past academic year of 19.6. I think what's really important to note here as you move forward, anything after the 23 24 data, you need to understand in relationship to what. So in Grand Forks last year, we gave the assessment to all of our juniors. You could opt out, but the majority of our juniors took the ACT, which is not the same story of other schools within the state because it's no longer um approved for the accountability measure. So, previously our juniors could take ACT instead of the North Dakota State Assessment and that counted for accountability. So, I think it's just really important to know that as you do comparisons,

099as those datas are released, I believe this Friday on ND Insights, you need to know like who took the test and who's in that cohort. And then this slide shows um our student groups and how their achievement and it's based on the state, our whole district and then central and red river. The community demographics are too small to share. Okay. And then the only um other subgroup outside of ethnicity that we have is male and female because this information comes directly from ACT. Okay, now moving on to our English language arts school goal. Always want to be forward facing with our academic goal. So we're hoping by the 2028 school year that 56% of our students retreat are proficient or advanced proficient. So NDA plus this is the new assessment. So everything this is our

100first set of asterisks here. Everything prior to last year has an asterisk because it's the old assessment compared to the new. What we saw with the new assessment, which the vendor of this assessment is Pearson, is what I would call a statistically significant reduction in achievement across the board from everyone within the state. So you'll see a significant reduction from state, but also within Grand Forks public schools. If you want to know, I have a,042 questions about that because the variables, we always wonder about the variables. We wonder about the reliability of the assessment. We wonder about our students preparedness to take the assessment. We wonder about cut scores. Dr. Hodak, I'm trying not to make eye contact with you because I know this is your world, too. That whenever you give a new assessment,

101part of it is norming it and making sure that your questions actually measure what you want to measure. and there just isn't data yet to say that that's true. So these are the scores. Um so this is reading then um broken down by student groups. You can see asterisks of course in 22 23 and 23 24. >> I just have one clarifying question where where you just were. I think this is slide >> I can't tell if it's 13 or 14 in our packet. Uh, yes. Is it true that those should also have the headers of state and then Grand Forks public schools the same? >> Correct. >> The same way. Okay. Thank you. >> Correct. Thank you. >> All right. Another set of student groups to compare datas by. Okay. Moving on to math.

102Um our goal be legendary goal again is to improve from 41 to 49% proficient or advanced by the 28th school year. When we look at math um not quite quite as big of a decline across the state and we even saw some increases. I will say the asterct here isn't on your slide deck but we have a lot of wondering around high school math achievement. the state um achievement rate for mathematics at the high school level is below 25% and ours was at 26%. The reason why we have more questions there is it doesn't correlate with our ACT math data. So if the test was measuring what we want it to measure, which is the North Dakota state standards, it should be in the line with achievement with the ACT and right now it's not.

103So, student groups for mathematics. Last set of student groups for mathematics. And then we have a Native American on-time graduation rate goal. We were going to improve from 72% to 80%. And remember, we had met our first goal. So, this was our goal where we had already achieved it and bumped it up. Okay. So, the asterisks on this slide, um, we noted in about Katherine, I'm looking at you, late July, early August, that something seemed off when we looked at our graduation rates. It first started when I was looking at the graduation rates for Grand Forks Central. And what we noted was that it just didn't even the math wasn't mathing is probably the easiest way to say it. And so when we looked, we worked closely with the state and what we discovered is

104there's two reporting systems. So P school is our student information system. That's where we keep all of our data. And then that rolls over into the North Dakota stars platform. And what we noted is that it wasn't talking to each other accurately. So we called the state and said, "This is what we're noticing." And they said, "Oh yeah, that happens a lot." And we were like, "Okay." And so they had named several other school districts that this has happened to in the past. And so we petitioned to have our scores kind of unfrozen or unlocked and then resubmit the correct data. Our appeal was denied. Um they just said that it happens a lot and we're aware of the issue and part of it is on us too. We need to do a better job

105of making sure the power school data goes into stars correctly. So what you see here is if we just look at the first line why you see an asterct is the 74% grad rate is what you'll see on ND insights but when we did the manual calculation the actual rate is 85%. So that's when you see the parentheses, those are the actual rates. The numbers with the asterisk, those are what's going to be displayed on ND Insights. Questions or wonderings there, >> Dr. Glach. So again, I want to reiterate if we get criticized by our constituents for having a low graduation rate because they got that information off the state website, their information is incorrect there. This is the accurate information. So you as board members may receive criticisms or questions about that about how

106I digressed. We did not. So thank you Amy for explaining that. >> Looks like Dr. Hodak and then I'll come to Mr. Palmy. Just a question. Do we have any district leaders that attend the Native American Conference in July that's put on by DPI? And if so, was this discussed? Because this has been a longstanding issue. And I would urge us to make sure that someone attends this summer and brings us up again and says, "What is happening?" Because this is not only happening in our school. Some of the reservation schools have had the same issue. >> Mr. Baky, >> yes, thank you. I'll respond to that. So, we I have attended in the past, not here in Grand Forks Public Schools, but in a previous district. We have also had our Native American liaison

107Chad Ward attend um as well too. So we have had representation from time to time. Not this past summer though. >> Mr. Palmino. >> Yeah. Have you heard from the new maybe administration, new superintendent? Is he working on correcting some of these issues of misinformation being sent around? I know he's going to attend all schools and maybe when he does come to our district we can have our crew visit with him and and see you know this is false information going out to the general public. >> Yeah. So the conversation has been that when infinite campus rolls out which is the new state platform or SIS the student information system that they won't need to talk to each other anymore like power schools has to talk to stars right now. It'll all be housed within

108Infinite Campus. Sorry, I'm shaking. I'm so cold. [laughter] >> Do Do you have a timeline on that? Just for clarification. Um that roll. >> The integrations for IC or Infinite Campus starts this summer. I the work has already been started. >> Other questions at this point since we're at a natural pause. Dr. L. >> Amy, I just have more of a global data question. >> Sure. you know, going from NDSA and then and then plus and all that. It's like changing a three-point line and moving them back four four feet or or changing the goalpost and moving it up to the 20 yardd line. How long will it take till we have what we can say reliable, accurate information on what's actually happening to the 7,000 plus kids in our school, whether it be graduation

109rates or all that, because to me it looks like a mess. And maybe that's my medical background with when they change things there too. But it it how long do we think and then will they change the test at that point to something else? >> Those are questions that I cannot answer for the most part because um first of all Pearson is the vendor that is responsible for developing the questions. Um I think it's very much a work in progress from what I've heard. things that are concerning to me are like um the interim and the summitive pull from the same question pool which I don't have a problem with that except if you take the interim more than three times and then the summitative there's a chance that there's a redundancy in questions and

110I defer to Dr. Hodak on reliability that would decrease reliability of an assessment. So until they work out some of those things, um I think it still does tell a story though because the question should be aligned to the North Dakota state standards. But when we see big gaps like we do in high school math, that's when you question the reliability of the metric, I have less of those concerns globally in math and ELA outside of high school. But you just have to wonder the norming process is unique too to have um and I'm I'm not trying to cast doubt or or throw shade here, but when you have teachers come together to cut do your cut scores, I just I wonder typically there's a more heavily researched based on on that process rather than

111asking Amy Bart what she thinks the cut square should be based on the student data and results. One more, Dr. Lun. >> Just a quick follow, just a comment. I don't think we should sit back and just accept accept all this. I think everybody in this room and everywhere, including back there and us, it it's so critical to have have it valid and accurate. Uh because we're going to make big decisions about things. I I think we need to be loud and clear that this needs to to be to be fixed, not just for Grand Forks, but for every school district in the state. So, I think we should be advocating every chance we get to say we need to do this correctly. >> We've done that too through the appeal process. Part of it

112is when they release data, they host webinars and so we respectfully push back on some of the decisions that have been made. We also want to be a thought partner and invited to the table. So, we try to do all of those things with professional discourse and and do, but you're you're exactly right. There's a lot on the line when it comes to our funding and perception of the public and how effective we are in what we do. So, >> other questions, Mr. Cleven. >> Thank you. So, did I hear that right that not all Grand Fork students take the ACT anymore? Correct. Um, so last year what we did is we had all of our juniors kind of pre-registered and they could opt out. This year what we did is we said here is

113the opportunity we will host it because really we are the only one hosting the ACT opportunity in Grand Forks but this time we charged students to take the assessment. We did have two um alternatives. One, if you qualify for free and reduced lunch then your um fee was reduced by half. We also had waivers available for a total payment if financials were a barrier. >> so what do you think will happen with that with the composite score? Do you think that'll shift now because fewer students are taking it? Um, typically what you would see is if it's an opt-in, you would expect your stores to go up because you have students who tend to be more four-year university or two-year university bound. When you have everyone take it, if that's not where you see yourself,

114there's a number of variables to consider. One, is your buy in on the assessment there? Or two, if it's not your path, you might not be shining light on your strengths either. Okay, thank you. >> Other questions? All right, let's move on. >> I will turn it over to the fabulous Katie Arthur to talk about AVID. >> Hello. Thank you. I must apologize. I woke up this morning without a voice and a since has come back just a little bit. But um this version that I'm about to present today might be a little more shorter than planned um to try to save my voice. It's horrible timing. Um, as I'll share later on in the presentation. So, thank you. I'm Katie Arthur. I'm the AVID district coordinator. Um, we're going to ground ourselves in the

115AVID mission first. Uh, AVID mission is to close the opportunity gap by preparing all students for college and career readiness and success in a global society. So, you see that all students is highlighted there and it's highlighted for a reason because college and career readiness must be an opportunity not a privilege. All students reflect our belief that every learner can grow, achieve, and thrive when given the right tools and support. So, there's a lot of alignment that happens when it when we think about Grand Forks Public Schools uh district's mission, mission, and vision and how it aligns with AVID. Empowering every student's unique strengths. So, AVID has this unique way of pulling potential from students and educators. Um sometimes it's it's unlearned potential. We don't know that we have that potential and AVID has a

116way of doing that. Growing together through collaboration, what that means is that uh AVID's fundamental foundation is all about collaboration. We know that growth happens best when students, educators, families come together in partnership and that's one of the fundamental values of AVID. Um preparing students for college and career readiness or meaningful contribution. um had some early conversations with our new state superintendent and is looking to add aspects of AVID into the North Dakota choice ready um dashboard or the framework. Um so th those are proposals that my our partners in West Fargo and Bismar and ourselves are working to add and putting proposals together. Um I will add that AVID is incorporated into our strategic plan. It's really not an extra. It's a strategic accelerator. um it helps us enhance rather than add to our

117work. You'll see here here are our five AVID schools. We have three elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. And you see our lovely site coordinators. This group has been instrumental in um they've been instrumental leaders that lead and support schoolwide implementation. [snorts] They coach, mentor, and grow teacher capacity at the secondary level. They manage the AVID elective and are AVID scholars. Um they excuse me they are drive the driving force behind whether AVID is simply present in a building or transformational. I would say these AVID site coordinators have been instrumental leaders and have put in a ton of work in helping all of our AVID schools be transformational. Beside me I have one of our AVID site coordinators, Lisa Voch, and she's going to take over a little bit. All right. When

118she texted this morning and said she didn't have a voice, I thought she was joking. So, here we are. Um Katie is wonderful and she's led with such I just such a vision, but also um celebrating the people behind the scenes. Um Abbott is nothing new. It's been around for a long time. Uh it's in many different states, many different countries. Um and we had the privilege to start this journey about 5 years ago. So, it's really um about leveling the playing field for kids, providing them opportunities and breaking down barriers. Let me keep going. All right. So, um this is our framework, the AVID AVID college and career readiness framework. We do all of our work as a site team within this framework. So, grounded um in the background there, you see the four

119elements, the four domains of instruction, systems, leadership, and culture. uh the things that exist at every campus. But what makes AVID different is we recognize that um students need rigorous academic preparedness, opportunity, knowledge, and student agency. And in order for that to happen, we have to have some key moves by our educators. And those are on that bottom part of that triangle. Um insisting on rigor, breaking down barriers, aligning the work, and advocating for students. Um something we really pride ourselves on at our AVID campuses is our high levels of relational capacity. And what that means is we understand that in order for students to do the heavy lift that's acknowledged in the top of that triangle, we need to come alongside and build some solid relationships with them um grounded in trust. Um really

120[clears throat] our own collective agency as educators to build their um efficacy and agency as students. So that's where comes in um in a lot of different elements of our instruction. >> You ready? >> I think so. Okay. Uh, so this is a slide that just talks through about how the different parts of AVID, AVID elementary and AVID Secondary are schoolwide. What that means is that it's not a curriculum. It's how like helps with those strategies on how to teach. Um, so for example, we have if an a a site is working on focus note-taking, then all students would get the benefits of learning how focus note-taking happens. or our elementary schools were working with what collaboration strategies help our new wit and wisdom curriculum. And so they look um they implemented those strategies that

121all students schoolwide would have access to. Part of AVID is AVID Excel and that's not something we are currently implementing here in Grand Forks Public Schools. I will say that um we had our ELD curriculum summer bridge with our ML students this this summer and that curriculum was um used and I went and observed it and it was fabulous. that was very rigorous. Um we have our ML population of students working on Socratic seminars on how to do a have academic language or conversations on the importance of education in the United States and it was an incredible to witness. Um I will say um we also have another part of at the secondary level and that's the AVID elective class and I think that's back to you. Yeah. Um so both at Valley Middle School

122and Central we have the AVID elective class. Um this year we launched it in sixth grade. Every sixth grader gets to participate um for about a quarter's worth of instruction. Um we have it fully implemented in seventh and eighth and then we have it in 9th, 10th and 11th this year at Central as well. Um it's a curriculum so we follow a very it's up there on the screen for you. So it's it's pretty routine. Mondays and Wednesdays our elective students are really building skills um that prepare them for college and future readiness. um grounded in wicker, which Katie is going to talk about in just a minute here, but um developing those skills that we know are important for post-secary success. Tuesdays and Thursdays, they do something called tutorials, um which are collaborative study

123groups. And once they're up and running and we've set those norms and really established some key players in that, um, it's a really powerful way for kids to really huddle around their points of confusion and advocate for their own learning and ask good questions of each other. Um, we do have a partnership with TRIO, which Katie will talk about. Um, they've provided us with some tutors that have come in and helped facilitate these groups this year as well, which has been huge. Uh and then Fridays, [sighs] you know, it really could be anything, but it's all grounded still in the work of this elective class and building capacity for these kids and helping them exercise their voice and their agency. Um we have two students here that want to talk to you. So we have

124um Lacy Lacy and uh Leila that would like to share a little who's coming first. Laya is coming first. So, >> hi, I'm Laya Vaky. Um, I've been an AVID student since 8th grade and we are the first class in Central. Before I became an AVID student, I frequently found myself extremely nervous to go to class because I felt like I was always behind than everybody else and I didn't understand to the extent everybody else did. Um, I never asked questions because I was so nervous and I didn't want to be seen as dumb in front of my classmates. Uh, school always seemed to be like a chore chore for me and I never wanted to go and if I had an excuse, I would use it. I didn't really like going to school and

125until I reached AVID, I didn't see it as an opportunity to expand my knowledge. I just saw it as something I had to do. Uh Avid has helped me approach uh different difficult subjects without thinking that I can't do it. Instead, now I'm able to break it down into easier steps that help me really figure out and help retain the knowledge for me to use in different classes. I've been able to take better notes in my classes that help me with my test taking and really being able to put it forward in outside of school towards work and just my everyday. Yeah. Um, AVID has helped me to feel more confident doing my schoolwork and also asking questions. Instead of dreading school, I now look forward to it, and I come to school prepared and

126feel as though I'm able to engage with my class when necessary. My teacher, Miss Lord, has supported me throughout my entire high school career. Last year, she was the first person to notice when something was going wrong with me, and she checked up on me multiple times, and she really was just there for me until I was fully feeling okay. And even then, she still checks up on me now. She has helped me create relationships within the class and outside of class. And she's always there and supports me when I have my little excitements. And she shares excitement with me. Avid has provided me the wonderful opportunity of being able to tour colleges. We get to visit two colleges per year and hopefully our senior year we get to have an overnight stay at colleges.

127So then we're able to really experience the full college feel and be able to be choice ready when it comes to graduation. We have guest speakers who come in and they talk to us about their jobs and their careers and give us the opportunity to ask them questions and really have a feel for if we believe that career is a good thing for us to do. Um, AVID has helped me think more about my future instead of just being, oh, it'll come when it comes. I never thought about scholarships because I didn't think that they would apply to me. I before AVID, I was a solid C to D student, possibly Fs, and I never really seemed to care. When I joined AVID, I became a solid A to sometimes having a B in my

128classes and having a GPA that was always above a 3.5. What I want the school board to know is that Abbott has helped me with not only my schoolwork, but also with attaining a job. I am so very grateful for AVID and because of AVID, I'm able to confidently speak in front of groups like this. Before AVID, I would have never done this. I would have been far too scared to talk in front of five people. Um, I don't believe I'd be in the same place without AVID. I don't think I'd have the same opportunities that I have been gratefully gifted. And I think that without AVID, I might not been able to graduate. Thank you. [applause] My name is Lacy Ramos. Currently, I'm a junior at Grand Fork Central. I'm a part of AVID,

129which stands for advancement via individual determination. And it's not just a class, it's a community. AVID is recognized as a career and college preparatory class targeted to building valuable skills for use during and after graduation. Ensuring AVID students are choice ready upon graduation. My participation in AVID has provided me with a variety of resources to ensure my academic success and college readiness. Some resources include note-taking, tutorials, access to college visits, scholarships, and a community of people committed to learning. Before AVID, I didn't care whether I passed or failed. Academically, I've always tested well and been intelligent at school, but my mindset lacked stability. I lacked motivation to attend school and do assignments. My teachers, my parents, and my peers told me I was smart, but I didn't care about learning or what they had to

130say. I didn't know how to ask for help, and asking for help made me feel embarrassed. Socially, I cared about fitting in. Academics, especially my future academically, were not on my radar of concern, even when I was failing. However, I was recommended to AVID by my teachers who saw potential in me that I didn't see or feel in myself. I joined AVID because I felt confident when my teachers believed in me. I admire the principles of AVID and at the time I felt I could have benefited from the program. At first, I was scared. AVID was new and exciting and I was part of the program out of all people. But AVID has been one of the best things to happen to me. AVID has ignited my passion for learning and driven me to pursue

131any educational opportunity that comes my way. I now have a positive attitude towards learning and feel excited and confident to pursue secondary education after high school. AVID is a program that has strengthened my emotional and academic awareness. Community service has made me more selfless and kind. College visits have introduced me to the college atmosphere and made me curious about the possibilities of my future. My peers and I describe AVID as rigorous, ambitious, challenging, and helpful. Avid has taught me how to ask good questions and realize that asking questions is how you learn and to never be shy about learning. Because of AVID, I've become a successful, ambitious, and determined student. Before AVID, I never thought of going to college. I doubted my ability to do it. Neither of my parents went to college, so I'll

132be going in blind. However, AVID has given me the skills and resources that improve my confidence about going to school and doing well in high school. As an AVID student, I represent something important in my school. Going to meetings like this one, speaking to middle school students, and participating in videos just to spread awareness about the program makes me feel proud and motivated to do more and be better. AVID has contributed largely to my success in high school, and I'm thankful to those who have helped me through my high school journey. The relationships I have built and people I have met to thanks to this program have undoubtedly changed my life. Without AVID, I would not be half the student and person I am today. Thank you. >> [applause] >> I don't know how you

133follow that. That was kind of a [laughter] we should we just be done? Um, so the AVID elective class is for a certain population. It's for the academic middle. So not your students who are at risk. It's or not for your high-f flyers. It's for that ac academic middle to help pull that potential, that unlearned potential that maybe they don't know, students don't know that they have. And those are two great examples of pulling potential from those those students. So, here's some data from last year. Um, last year we just had AVID elective classes and that's again the Avid elective class in 7th through 10th grade and we had Nick Peterson at Valley Middle School who taught our seventh and eighth grade. and he had 66 students and you can see the demographic um graph

134there and our ninth and tth grade AVID elective that was taught by Casey Beck and Becca Lord. You can see the demographic there too. AVID center will tell us that um your AVID elective course should mirror your school demographic and I think we do a pretty good job of that. Um current data we added the sixth grade AVID launch like Lisa had mentioned. Um, we still have our seventh, now we're going through 11th grade and we will be in full implementation next year. So, we'll have our first graduating class including Lac Lacy and Ila um of our AVID elective students next year and that's to be that's exciting. Um, our AVID elective teachers, we added Scott Cantrell. Um, he's teaching our sophomores. We also have a partnership with TRIO. This is really exciting. So TRIO,

135Derek Sporbert at Trio has opened up a work study position. Um, so he is paying college kids to come tutor our students in our classroom, which is just incredible in my mind. Um, so that's exciting. So they are the ones that are helping run those tutorials. Um, 193 of our sixth grade students will experience that AVID launch. It's a quarter class. It's like a get it. They're pulling curriculum from the AVID elective wags is what they're called. and then incorporating what they're focusing on as a school. And then our 7th through 11th, you can see our number of students. We would like anywhere from 32 to 40 students per grade level. As you can see, when you get into the high school, the 9th, 10th, and 11th students have other elective course options. And so

136sometimes the AVID elective class just doesn't fit in their schedule. That just means maybe it's not this semester, maybe avid elective will fit next semester. But with the course offerings at the CIA have impacted our numbers, which we fully support students going to the CIA because that fits right along with the AVID mission and vision. Um, but that also just kind of affects our our numbers in the Avid elect of course. Um, we will do some heavy recruiting with our the boundary line changes, lane changes next year. We have more recruiting to happen at Schrader. We were just over at Shrader doing that last week. Um, we have more students coming from that school as well as from Valley. I think we have a couple Valley families, students who are currently in the AVID elective

137class that will be bound to go to Red River. So, we're navigating that new change as to what what we should do there, but those are all new changes that we still have to work through. Um, some of our data, our ninth and tth grade data from last year, uh, one AVID elective student completed a dual credit course, which is incredible as a sophomore student. Again, this is your a academic middle um student completing a dual credit course as a sophomore is pretty incredible. Six Avid elective students completed an AP course. And then you can see the breakout for how many students were enrolled in at least one AP dual credit CTE or project lead the way course. There's a peak at our 2526 data which is our current um data. 11 students are currently

138enrolled in a dual credit AP course. 22 are enrolled in a CT course. And you can see the data per grade level. One thing about that AVID elective class is we really encourage students to take more rigorous courses and to again tap into that unlearned potential that they don't know that they have. And then our AVID elective class is there to support them do that. That's when they bring their points of confusion to those tutorials on those Tuesdays and Thursdays. So how we avidize a lot of uh one of the core components one of the teacher inputs or wicker or avid inputs is our wicker strategy based instruction. So wicker stands for writing inquiry collaboration organization and reading. It is the core of AVID and it's the engine of high quality instruction. It provides consistent

139research-based framework for teaching and learning across all content. It's not an extra but it strengthens the instruction teachers are already doing. Um, it makes learning active, rigorous, and student- centered. It they ensure that students aren't just receiving information, they're processing it, questioning it, discussing it, and applying it. And so when we ask our teachers to leverage wicker strategies to increase the level of rigor, that's a mouthful. Um, we as our AVID schools all needed to have a common a common definition of what is rigor. So we adopted AVID's definition of rigor using inquirybased collaborative strategies to challenge and engage students resulting in increasingly complex levels of understanding. So when all of our student when we're asking our teachers in our schoolwide AVID model to increase and leverage those wicker strategies like we just discussed I

140as a district director was like how can I help help support our sites and then also how can I help like manage and and collect data on whether or not there it's happening. So, I created a template on an Avid app that has all of the skills that we would use to increase or that would meet the level of rigor using those wicker strategies. And I do monthly rigger walkthroughs in our AVID sites. And I spend an hour at each building walking through classrooms, collecting on my app, collecting that data. And then at the end, it spits out information like this, where our gaps are and where our strengths are so that we can use that data to help um our to help make our school improvement goals for the following year. This is the

141final slide. I think I I think I can make it. [laughter] Um, so one of the big intentions with this slide and and I want to say it first and I'll probably say it again at the end is that we have intentional conversations whenever we're sending somebody to an AVID professional learning event. We have intentional conversations with each site and those people going on a are we being fiscally responsible with sending those and and what we're doing what we're sending and b what is our return on investment and how are we going to measure that and how are we going to what does that look like? So there's many different AVID professional learnings and some come with our contract and some don't. The summer institute is not something that comes with our contract, but four

142of our five schools use their title one funds to send small groups to attend and that's typically in the summer. Um, Valley Middle School had created their own summer learning opportunities where they created their own summer institute here in town. One thing that's part of our contract is we get AVID Live, which is a virtual PD, one per site. It's like a two-day event where you can send somebody to get training on their community of practice. Part of our contract is also AVID professional learning modules. Those are completely free and those are modules that our site coordinators have been trained to deliver to their staff and that helps with those wicker strategies um and how to teach them and how to deliver them, what that looks like. And that training typically happens in the fall

143or in their instructional learning times. We have our AVID professional learning workshops which we partner with um West Fargo, Bismar, Morehead, East Grand Forks all have our AVID schools. Um and we just hosted again partnership with TRIO. They um set us up at the UND memorial union or student union and a space up there. They paid for a space for us all of those schools and district sites to come and learn. Avid Center sends people to us to train us. We had our site leadership teams and then it helps us plan for our upcoming goals and then the national conference and this is this is exciting. Um we will have Grand Forks public schools representation myself, Dr. Katherine Galatch and Mr. John Strandell will presenting at the national conference which is really bad timing that

144my voice is losing because that happens on Friday. [laughter] So I'm hoping that my voice comes back but we get to speak at a national conference while there'll be thousands of people there across our nation. Um, and so we are excited for that. I think that's it. I think I think I'm gonna be done. >> Great. >> Does anybody have any questions about the AVID piece? >> Do any board members have questions or cough drops? >> Yeah. >> Thank you. >> Questions about AVID? Oh, a comment from Mr. Baky. >> Yeah, I was just going to comment if if this didn't highlight the impact and the work that's being done by the these fine individuals, the other individuals in our audience that are making a extremely big impact on our students, I don't know what

145would. Um but the stu the two students uh highlighted exactly the impact that this program is making across our campuses from the elementary to the high school to the middle school all the way across the board. So I just want to thank these individuals for all the work they're doing. Questions about this program from board members? >> Yes, Dr. Hodc. >> I just have one comment. Can you take the two students with you? >> They'd be great national speakers. Excellent to show >> for sure. >> Any others? >> Okay, thank you very much. We'll move on. I'm going to hand it over to Dr. Dietrich to cover special education numbers and give us some information on what our numbers looked like last year. So, Dr. Dietrich, >> good ne evening, President Ber and members of

146the school board. I am Lisa Dedrickch. I'm the executive director of special education and I have just a few slides that show our numbers in special education. Every year on December 1, it's a big day in special education nationwide. That's when the federal government conducts their annual count. And so from December 1 on, that's the count that we use when we talk about special education. So for the 2425 school year, our count was up was at 1532. that represented 20% of our students were served [clears throat] on an IEP. And you can see that was up quite a bit from the 1473 from the 2324 school year. December 1 just happened, of course, last week. And so those numbers aren't quite in yet, but we do anticipate that we will have another increase. This is

147a question I get quite a bit. What does what does that 1532 look like in Grand Forks? And this is a picture of what we serve. Um you can see that specific learning disability. That's the 28%. That's learning disability that really makes up the bulk of what um the students that we serve. Um autism is at 9.3. That's a category that's growing. And emotional disability. I just wanted to point out that the label there did change. It was formerly um emotional disturbance North Dakota. It is still recognized as emotional disturbance nationwide, but North Dakota took a step to call it emotional disability instead. Um the the other um thing that I did want to point out is that hearing impairments is what we call um what we the label that we have for students who

148have an impairment with their hearing. Um federally it is deaf and then deaf or heart of hearing. North Dakota this year decided to combine it and so you have deaf and heart of hearing combined into just the one category of hearing impairments. So any questions about our data here and what it looks like in Grand Forks >> from Dr. L. >> What's the state average for IEPs? We're at 20% and I noticed we we we're up over 5% in the last 10 years. Do do we do we know what the state average is? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And I believe the state averages somewhere between 17 and 18%, some districts are a little bit lower at the 14%. We are on the higher end at that 20% mark. >> 15. >> I'm going

149to piggyback on that if if you don't mind. And then question number two. >> Well, no, it was about that. So, I >> do you have the why? Why? Why? And I've asked this, I've been on the board too long, but I've asked it a lot. But I'm I'm curious if you have any ideas about why why are we at 20% and other schools are at 15 and 16 and 18. >> Yeah. Why is why are our numbers higher? That's a great question. I get asked that a lot. We don't really dive in and and uncover the why, but we have a few um speculations that we can make. We do have some group homes that do attract people from outside of our um actual city and they come to live here with us and

150we're happy to welcome them and to serve them. Um but it it does increase our numbers. We also are known to have a good special education program so people move here to get our resources. Um again we're always happy to serve them but um it does drive our number up. >> I just want to piggyback on that because you've heard me say this before. I'm I'm a I'm a math elite. I I I say that loudly and proudly. And sometimes we make a uh we I think we make an error by saying we're up 5% in 10 years. Um the the percentage of overall enrollment has has increased 5%. The number of students on an IEP has increased 44%. A as a raw number. So I just I just want everybody to hear that we're

151not talking about serving 5%, you know, like an increase is 5% more on a 1067 number is is 50 some. We've actually uh gone up about 450 students. So it it's it's a staggering number in in a decade. So um it's not lost on us the the impact across our district. So any other questions? Yeah, Dr. Lundig again. >> And I correct myself. I'm a pediatrician. I don't go above the number 10. So, so, so you're the math wiz. The one of the reasons I ask that is is I hear from people is, well, you guys have different criteria for IEP than elsewhere. And my understanding is our our criteria are the same as any other. It's not like we're over diagnosing things or anything. It's it's standardized criteria wherever. Am I correct on that?

152>> Yeah, that's absolutely correct. So our state publishes the guidelines to define what each of these disability categories looks like. So we use that those disability criteria and when we conduct an evaluation every single time we look at what disability category might fit that student best. And then our our school psychologists most of the time lead the discussion of um what category is the best fit if if there is a disability. um with the speech language impairment. That is the one time that the speech language pathologists lead that conversation. Our psychologists don't lead that conversation, but um our school psychologists are really instrumental in leading that conversation, making sure that we're thoroughly looking at the criteria and if a student doesn't meet the criteria, then the student is not identified with a disability. But yes,

153there are defined criteria and we follow that very closely. Do you have a follow-up comment, Dr. Brennan? >> Dr. Dietrich, do just want to enlighten the board on the other health impaired that's almost at 20% and who those students are, please. Thank you. >> Yeah, that's a great point as well. So, other health impaired would about five years ago um when we looked at ADHD, um we really looked at that as more of an emotional disability. And when we really dug into our criteria, we realized that it felt more under that other health impaired. So other health impaired is really a generic term. It we it encompasses so many things. Um if you have a medical diagnosis like ADHD um you can it encompasses many more um um medical diagnosis than just that though. Um,

154so other health impaired has really been the category that catches all the all the times that students come to us and they have a reason that they're not learning and it's medically based. They typically have a diagnosis when it come when we identify with somebody with other health impaired. >> Other questions? All right, we'll move on to the next the setting slide. >> Yes. And then this is just where our students are served. Again, we have a lot of um acronyms here and special education is known to have um a lot of them. Setting A. So setting A is the setting that most students are in. To to be in a setting A, students are in that in the gened classroom 80% or more of the day. Our setting B students are in the GED

155classroom anywhere from 40 to 80% of the day. And then our setting C students are um in the classroom 40% or less of the of the day. We um federally are required to serve some students in our private school. So it's really parentally placed in a private school and so there's a proportionate share of our federal grant that we um use to serve those students. That amount is set each year. And so that means that we set the amount of services that we provide at our prochial schools before the school year starts. And that doesn't fluctuate even if the number of students fluctuates throughout the school year. And then of course our early childhood special education. That category is one that is growing for us. We have many students identified, young students identified as have

156having an educational disability and we're serving them and um of course that setting looks different because they're young and they're not in our gened school quite yet. Um there is also a federal setting D and that is a separate school and that's not a setting we have at this time. Any questions about where we serve our students? >> Any questions? Mr. Baka is here. Mike mic is on. Are you posed and poised? Just checking questions from board members. >> Okay. Thank you. >> All right. Thank you. >> Thank you, Dr. DRI. And now we'll hand it over to Avona Toddorvich um who serves as our ML coordinator um and she'll go through some of our numbers um from last year. as you anticipated and as you heard loud and clear from us last year, you

157would see quite an increase this on this annual report as you'll see in the numbers. So, I'll let Aona take it over. Thank you. >> Well, good evening the president and the board members. Um I'm really honored that you are giving me this opportunity to share about the multi lingual education program. Um [clears throat] we have the past two years especially 23 24 25 we had an an influx how would we say it uh a lot of families international families immigrant families coming to our community from different sources and um a lots of kids. So as you see last year on September 29th we had 462 kids with 247 immigrants and 80 refugee students. I just want to point out that refugees are immigrants but they are not included because they will we will be

158doubling doubling up the numbers and that the math would not match up. Also among those we have the USA born eml students and I think up to the point when I took over actually uh that was kind of a overlooked fact. So from now on I think we will be looking at that too because we we have actually quite a few USORN um ML students there are over 100 and to be honest with you I'm still cleaning up the data when they're talk you know when uh chief officer Amy talked about the stars and power school I've been talk you know since this position and I since I took it over and um they kept telling me stars is not talking to power school But when we get infinitive campus, it's going to be perfect.

159So I'm really waiting for that day when all the data was going to be perfect because uh a lot of things are not matching and then um so we just have to dig a little bit more. Um so some of the highlights I want to just share with you. um a year later right now of December last Friday we have 477 kids tomorrow we'll have 478 because we just got a new uh student from Brazil Matu and we among those we have 156 level one students there are six levels 83 level twos 136 level threes and 102 level fours. One thing that shows our growth that 68 students from last year exited hadn't they we would have over almost 600 students in the program. So that's a good thing and that shows also the growth.

160Uh another thing is it shows that we had more of the level ones and newcomers last year but then a lot of them jumped to level three which is a good thing. Um it is also harder to go from level three to level four because it takes a lot of uh academic language and you know cognitive demand and goes with a grade level two. Um so uh as of now this is the second year that we have actually Spanish as our number one language in the district 196 and then uh for a long this time of period with Nepali and Somali. Now we have second and third still are Nepali 59 and Somali 38. And then we go into French, Mandingo, Pashto, Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese and so on. Some of the languages we never had.

161>> [clears throat] >> So so many of them in numbers we have now also uh there is another culture that's coming in a GE or formerly Wendell Empower is bringing Brazilians um to work at the company and then so we have experience bless you uh a lot of uh Brazilian families coming in and then uh the student that's going to show up in power school and hopefully in stars tomorrow It's it's one from Brazil. Yeah. [clears throat] So, um other highlights would be that we were awarded through [cough and clears throat] refugee resettlement agency last year a nice amount of money to support uh refugee families and refugee students in our district. So we use that money for the two-year of piloting implementation um computer-based platform for learning academic language which is called summer K12

162and uh this is the first year that actually we have something that's concrete that measures the midyear progress of these students and I think another thing is that every student has comes with the four licenses so the whole family can learn and even more so the last month or so I've been busy training those families. Uh we started with the windship we had a huge crowd there and then Viking um Red River and so on and this year this tomorrow unless we have a storm day I don't know we'll see I am at Discovery and then Central and then finishing up with Century. So anyway, so it's been a really great um just for a families coming and and willing to learn and also other uh businesses in our town to reach out to me

163and social services and say, "Hey, what's we heard of that that program that that is giving every family for licenses? Can you tell us more about it?" So that kind of led to this [clears throat] year's recipient of that award is actually global friends coalition and that they are going they are working together with our program in our district to support those families because we do have a quite a few of those [sighs] students who had interrupted schooling or no formal education. So when you have to learn how to read and write in another language and you never learn how to do that in your first language, it's really hard. So we are meeting and collaborating together and um probably me training their volunteers how to go into their homes and work on some of

164the K12 but also you fly and everything else that is available to us and because it's it's it's really important. uh how do they say literacy is justice and that's what it is and I think they need to have that in order to do anything else. Um and um so so I think that's another one and then so speaking of a great community that we have here um Alyssa or I should say Dr. Cedric [laughter] and then ML coordinator, MTSS coordinators uh Jess and uh Amy and I and Brandon uh start meeting together with one of the psychologist Lisa Vivo from Fura and we are actually working on referral processes for MTSS for the ML students. What we found out here in our district, we are un under identifying our kids. So some of our

165students we call them experience MLS or long-term MLS actually [sighs and gasps] we are finding out that's not just a language barrier linguistic barrier but there's something more. Uh so we are actually meeting on Thursday morning and almost completing the that path for the secondary and then our next job hopefully by the end of January beginning of February will be completing for elementary. just the amount of collaboration and working together and being just uh I just I'm just in awe and and being on the same page and talking and it's just amazing that networking piece but also the full adoption of the new ELA curriculum which you heard of with wisdom I call it WW which is a language which incorporates the science of reading it is great to see many of ML students I

166was this morning at Viking And I had this little girl. Oh my gosh. Her name is Sada from Afghanistan. She didn't know how to say hi in English. And this morning, she there. We were learning about sharks and she opens the shark book and she just reads to me even the hard works. And I was like, "Oh my gosh." I almost actually test texted Jess poor and say, "Hey, my gosh, science of reading is really working even with our kids." Anyway, so it's just amazing how much of progress they had and I think thanks to our chief officer Amy Bartcher and all the team members that she has on that they included me as soon as I step you know in this role and we meet every month and we plan and we see what

167is working what is not working. we are on the same page and we are just you know going further down and researching to add more ML strategies whatever we doing into our curriculum and what our kids deserve that's and that's our job to teach them and these families are really amazing. They're so thankful being here in this community and um my heart goes to them every single day because sometimes we have some hard days and some easy days and then hard days and easy days but if we work together we can accomplish a lot of things. So I think that's basically what I have today for you. Any questions for me? >> Questions for Mr. Dorovich? Mr. Baky, do you want to kick it off? >> Yeah. Can I just highlight something that uh Ivona

168started her position in the fall of 2023 uh the same fall that I started and in that time frame you'll see the data up there we doubled in numbers in the last two and a half years. Um also since then um she was serving in her first year as a full-time teacher and full-time uh ML coordinator. Um, also since then, we've added two programs at the elementary level, one at the middle school and sheltered classrooms at one of our high schools. I just want you to understand the breath of work that this woman has done in the short amount of time that she's been in her role and the impact that she's made. Um, she's done a tremendous job and we're lucky to have her as an asset in our district. So, I just want

169to compliment her for the work she's done. So, >> he's making me blush, but thank you. I I do think it's the teamwork, honestly. uh it's the community of educators here. It is the schools, it's everyone. I mean last week and week before I did PDS, you know, during the team time at Valley and and it's it's the small steps in the right directions, I would say. So anyway, so I mean thank you Mr. Baky, but honestly it's just not me. It's my staff number one and my and our families are just absolutely amazing and everyone here. [laughter] So, any other questions? >> Questions. >> Okay. Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. >> We have one last little bit. Is that back to you, Mr. Baky? >> Yes, it is. I just

170>> standing in for Mr. Glasby. Okay. All right, Director Gillespie wasn't able to be here this evening, so I'm standing in here for him. Um, the first data point that he has pulled for you is the teacher absences. Um, as you'll see, he's uh narrowed down um for sick leave, professional development, personal leave, family illness, extracurricular briement. Um the other category that we have is other and that other category is primarily parental leave. Actually um 1,133 of those days are just from parental leave. Um and then the rest come from jury duty, military, GFA, dock days or emergency leave. Um, I know the board has asked about the leave um for our our teacher absences and so um director Glossby wanted to include this in the annual report so that you could all see that.

171Okay. Um the next uh category of the next slide I have here for you is the certified demographics. Again, this just lays out uh the number of teachers we have um from year to year as well as our other licensed staff. Other licensed staff would include our instructional coaches, literacy specialists, um administrators, um counselors, librarians, um you name it. Um and that other licensed staff. And as you can see, um we saw a slight decrease in our our staffing from 23 24 to 24 25. Then the last slide here is the classified demographics. Um again um we have our paras our custodians um/bng staff nutrition services secretary admin assistants and then other other would include um our IC or I'm sorry our classified would include our classroom specialists um our nurses um any of our

172B and um business office staff our HR staff here in the district office really any of the individuals that don't hold that certification um in educational um in education. So those would be the other categories and as you can see uh we saw a slight increase um from 23 24 to 24 25 in those support staff. Um, one other thing, um, Director Gillespie wanted me to point out was the the increase you'll see from 2223 to in the total number of classified staff. Um, primarily um, in relation to other that jump as you'll see there from 94 to 133 is primarily because of the class or the classroom specialist position became a classified um, category. And so those those individuals, those employees um previously were paid through COVID relief dollars um actually came on to

173our classified um staff personnel and became part of that. And so that's why you see that jump of roughly around 40 employees. So just to mention that questions on these last couple of pages that Mr. Baky might be able to answer on behalf of Director Gillespie. Dr. one. >> Can we go back to the other for just a second? Because if you look at if you look at other I'm looking from 2018 all the way to to today. I mean it went from 65 to 143 and that's more than just the 40 of the classified not getting COVID. Is there are there other things going on there that we should be aware of or know about? It just seems like you know when you look at the other ones they're all relatively flat. >> Can

174you can you rephrase exactly where you're looking at Dr. I'm I'm on the other category. So if you look back at 2018, there were 65 and now there's 143. >> So So I'm just I'm just wondering are there other things besides that and you may not know the answer and that's fine. So >> yeah, and I don't know that answer, but we could definitely dive into those numbers and get back to you on that. Yep. >> Well, only if it's really germanine to to the board. It may it may be perfectly logical. It's just different than the other categories. So >> yeah, great question. Other questions? Dr. Hodc, >> mine aren't necessarily questions. Um, but I did do what I would consider a deep dive into this information. I first want to thank you because

175when we are looking at um those budget issues that we're having and so forth, um, this has come to mind. And so when I look at it, I went back to because of the the year all the way to 2024. Basically what I've seen within the district is that we've increased our students by 314, but we've also um employed an additional employees. So that's a pretty good ratio um if you were to break that down. But at the same time, and I as I so appreciate um looking at all this information, I also noticed that the special education numbers have increased, the multilingual um issues have increased um from all of the reports that we've gotten before on the behavioral issues that have increased and such. So, basically what I'm commenting about is when we

176get recommendations, if I understand it correctly, for where we're going to be doing some budget cuts, um I'm going to hope that we can have some of this hardcore data with us um to look at that because in my mind um I too go to numbers and so if I were to take those 314 students and I just grabbed the number of oh, let's say we were getting $16,000 a student, which we're not getting federally funded, what we should be when you talk 44% increase in special education. Gee, did we get that from the feds um for those mandates and such. But if I take those 314 students and multiply that by 16,000 that we're getting, that's a little about over $5 million. But when I take those employees and I was thinking, okay, go

177to the lowest number um of paying seven um $17 for our paras because that's where we've really seen a huge increase, $17 to $22. And so I multiplied that by those $223 employees just at a minimum of $30,000 in um in salary for them. Uh guess what? That puts us over seven almost $8 million. So when we start to take a look at that um we have a budget that is 87% um towards um employees and staff. We can actually see this picture just from these few graphs that you have handed out. But I think we are still going to need a lot more when we start to look at what we're going to do with the budget. So I just wanted to make those comments. get other comments or questions from board members. Well,

178that concludes the annual report. Again, this was uh an item for discussion tonight and and not for action. But before we uh move on uh to item six, anything else from board members? Anything else from you, Mr. Baky? I would just like to say thank you to all the presenters today. um they spent quite a bit of time here um and and organization and planning to to prepare and run all these numbers for you and I just want to say thank you um um to all of them for all the work they do um but also for doing the extra work when it comes to the data and the information for all of you. So okay uh again one final time board members on this annual report from the last academic year. All right, we'll

179move on then to item six. Uh 6A is our consent agenda. I would seek a motion to approve the consent agenda as outlined in your board packet. >> It's been moved by Mr. Cleven and a second by Dr. Lun. Is that correct? >> We'll take a roll call vote. >> Pomicino. >> Yes. >> Lun. >> Yes. >> Larson is absent. Flynn, >> yes. >> Anderson, >> yes. >> Hodak, >> yes. >> Manley, >> yes. Cleven, >> yes. >> Burgerer, >> yes. >> H, yes. Zero, no. One absent. >> Motion passes. 6B. Consideration of curriculum proposal for 2026 2027. Dr. Glatch. >> Thank you, Chair Burgerer. So, in front of you is a memo that basically is a summary that was reviewed last time you met. Thank you, Dr. Brener, for pinch hitting for me during

180my absence last time. Um, you can see the curriculum review members listed there. It's a broad uh array of people from different positions from the high school level and you can see the consideration criteria that we take um under regard when we are making these decisions. We look at the number of electives already offered in the department. Expansion of what we call multiple pathways andor enrichment opportunities for students. Inclusion of 21st century skills and choice ready alignment. Similar content not already addressed in other curricular areas. mandated courses. Um, in other words, state law driven collaboration between high school staff regarding proposals, staffing, material costs, and equitable offerings at each campuses. Um, there was an update provided to you in Friday focus that answered, I think, some of the questions that came out of the last

181process. So, I'm going to motor through the recommendations here and just take questions at the end hoping that's acceptable. I want to emphasize the fact that no course recommended for addition will result in an increase in staffing nor incur other general fund expenses. So these are costneutral recommendations. Uh so the courses recommended for approval include drumline. Exploring healthc careers, advanced manufacturing one, advanced manufacturing 2. So those are two paired semester courses. Dual credit anatomy and physiology A and B. So again two paired semester courses. Spanish for native heritage speakers one which was piloted last year. So we want to make that a permanent part of the course um catalog and Spanish for nativeHeritage speakers too courses recommended then for deletion would be the robotics course and I believe Dr. Brener highlighted the why behind that.

182It's being rolled into the manufacturing curriculum as proposed. So students will still have an opportunity to engage in that sort of um formal learning around robotics. Um, additional information, the committee approved virtual high school and school within a school staff to open up additional online courses within what we use, which is the Egeneuity platform, as long as those core standards are in line with DPI requirements and local priority standard alignment. So, there are some course titles there that don't have the exact title in egeneuity as the titles that we have in our buildings, but the standards align. So, we're we gave permission for those to be open opened up um working in conjunction with our high school administrators. So, the administrative recommendation is to approve the curriculum proposal for the 2627 school year as presented

183tonight. And I'm poised to take any questions. >> Questions from board members for Dr. Glatch. >> Oh, there's been a a motion to approve the curriculum proposal for 2026 2027. Is there a second? >> Second. >> It's been second by Mr. Anderson. Uh any discussion about uh any of the seven courses? Questions about the seven recommended for approval, the one for deletion or the additional information from board members. Mr. Cleven, >> the uh pilot program for the Spanish as native language. What's the how did that measure did it do the program we thought it would do? >> Yes. So I actually had the um pleasure of observing that classroom when one of our Fulbright scholars was there as a a co-teer and it is a phenomenal learning environment. It's a place where um you heard

184Ivona talk about students who are ML learners who maybe didn't learn proficiency levels in their native language. That's the population that is largely served in that classroom. It's also a place where our ML learners can connect with other students with lived experience and feel um completely themselves welcomed um that whole school culture uh type uh connection that is so important to the learning process. So they've had wild success in that program which is why you see it um recommended to be um part of the next uh catalog. They also have done some correlary. I don't have the the data in front of me, but uh the students achievement in their um their other courses because of that because they're building academic foundational skills, vocabulary skills and things of that nature that help them in their

185other courses as well that are kind of mainstream courses if you will >> and that academic performance was measurable. >> Yes. Yes. I talked to the I I talked to the teachers about that and they were tracking both um uh the student proficiency levels again within the English language but also student academic achievement as far as credits earned and things of that nature and other courses and there was a positive correlation there. >> Other questions from board members? >> Uh Dr. Dr. Hodk, >> thank you for the explanations because I was the one that was asking a lot of questions last um time, but I do need some further explanation um on the drum line and I have some assumptions there um when we have a pep band performance of that $2,42. So, it's no

186longer going to be a co-curricular course. So, that would be a savings then to the district. Uh, no. So, currently that pep band stipen covers both what you see if you attend any of our games when the entire pep band is there and the drum line. So, there will be no additional stipen on top of that. But, we weren't looking to remove that. >> But the drum line will be removed from the co-curricular and into the >> there's no separate statement currently. So, it's it's cost neutral in that regard. >> Okay. So the drum line, what happens to the a student that has had um able to take drum line because it was a co-curricular so it wasn't against any other courses that actually it's largely going to be the same end result because drum

187line is typically offered either during zero hour or eighth period. And when the um instructors did the math on the number of hours that they were committing to either showing up early or staying late, it equated to why aren't we giving them a credit for this half credit for this experience? So it really should be a net neutral. >> That was my assumption that it has to be zero hour or eight. Okay. So I think that takes care of my questions. >> Other questions from board members? Mr. Cleven? And it I might have asked this when we heard our first reading like we're not concerned that this kind of creates additional complexity that's distracting from a fundamental CA or secondary education outcome. Like there's just a lot of stuff here. >> Yep. >> That doesn't

188seem like part of a core curriculum. >> Great question. The majority of these classes, you're right, they're not required classes. They are elective classes to a large degree and it aligns with our alternative pathways commitment, our robust program of studies commitment where we want students to be able to have choice that aligns with their career paths eventually or their current passions and interests. And the way that the registration process at the high school level works every year irrespective of what we add or delete from the course catalog is that the enrollment drives the staffing. And so we have offered courses I I'll give you an example. There was a course that we approved. I think it was three years ago now that is um AP uh art history. It seems like every other year there's

189um enough enrollment to actually run that section. On the off year that teacher is teaching a different section to have a full-time equivalency in their workload. So it works out quite well in the end. So um again in the whole program of studies, not every course that you see there is offered every single year. It's driven by student interest, which is something we've committed to. >> May I ask one followup to that? Is it sometimes the case where between our our two uh high schools, Central and Red River, there's enough to offer one and students would travel or learn remotely or does that ever enter into these conversations? >> It does. It's not perfect. In an ideal world, we would have the same exact opportunities at both campuses. That not how it manifests itself. We

190do try to uh the two high school principles work together so that when there is a discrepancy there could be an opportunity to travel but sometimes that's a barrier for kids as well in all transparency. Um but we do the best that we can in those in those instances. >> Thank you. Other questions for Dr. Glatch. There's a motion on a sec and a second to uh to approve um these changes uh the curriculum proposal for 2026 2027. Uh we'll take a roll call vote. >> Hodak, >> yes. >> Cleven, >> no. >> Manley, >> yes. >> Larson is absent. Flynn, >> yes. >> Lun, >> yes. >> Anderson, >> yes. >> Pomacino, >> yes. >> Burger, >> yes. >> Seven, yes. One no and one absent. >> Motion passes. Move on then to the

191district calendar for 2026 20 excuse me 6C the general fund financial statement. Did not mean to skip you Mr. Bomb. >> Thank you President Ber. Happy to present the financial statement. This is through the first five months of operation year fiscal year 26. General funds account for $49,868,912 whereas expenditures are $40,787864 resulting in revenue over expenditures at this point in the year of just over $9 million. the two reports in front of you, the first being the variance. It's first column budget, second column actual for those first five months. You can see that of revenues 38.3% of what's been budgeted has come in and expenditures uh 30.1 uh% of what is budgeted. I would just note too what gets my attention by looking at that is you know revenues states are right on track. It's

192really quite formulaic. Local will come in as property taxes do and the feds are reimbursement based. When you look at the comparability report, the next one is you'll notice a difference in just where we were from last year to this year. That could be a combination of of grants that are in and also just where we're at in calling those dollars in. Um we are going to be you'll see that number come up here as we get um those federal reimbursements back in. But from last year, um I I take a number of notes on that variance report. Um as you can see here, uh I've articulated a number of those. Some are still variance, but we're getting now where we get a bit of a track record in and we start to see things.

193So what I'm watching, um closely is our our classified staff costs um as well as I would say even [clears throat] our utility costs, watching closely those um going forward. Um some bright news too, other expenditures overall are down 2%. Um which um could be variance but like I said as we get a track record in now it's good to see given that most things only increase in cost. So looking at the aggregate um that's a positive sign. Graphical depictions the final three slides of the report can show that exactly what has been numerically valued of the revenues are right about the last couple years. Um whereas expenditures are down from two years ago but up a hair from last year and the general fund balance is is right where we'd expect it to be

194is um down with last year's um loss but tracking the same overall trend um that you would see on that. So the administrative recommendation is to approve the general fund financial statement for the period of July 1, 2025 through November 30, 2025 and happy to answer any questions. Questions from board members for Mr. Bombach. I'd seek a motion to approve the general fund financial statement for July 1, 2025 through November 30th, 2025. It's been moved by Mr. Palmino. Is there a second? Second by Mr. Manley. Any further discussion? I'll take a roll call vote. >> Cleven, >> yes. >> Larson is absent. Pomicino, >> yes. >> Lun, >> yes. >> Manley, >> yes. >> Flynn, >> yes. >> Hodak, >> yes. >> Anderson, >> yes. >> Burger, >> yes. >> H, yes. Zero, no. One

195absent. >> Motion passes. 6D. District calendar for 2026, 2027. Mr. Baky. President Burgerer, members of the board, it's my uh distinct honor to present to you the district calendar for 2627 school year. In accordance with the schoolboard policy ABAB, um the district calendar shall be presented to the board each year at a regular board meeting no later than February. Additionally, the board shall approve the start and end dates and teacher blackout dates. Um the district calendar committee, which um last school year was led by Dr. Glatch um met two times last spring and then um this fall we have met three times um to review options for the 26 27 school calendar. Um I've attached that school calendar just for a visual perspective so you understand um what it all entails. Um I've also outlined

196in this memo what our commit committee's collective goals were as well as factors that were considered when um making this calendar. Um after reviewing all of those factors um putting those collective goals together um it was unanimous um recommendation to move forward with this school calendar. Um, as you'll see, um, the recommendation, um, administrative recommendation is to, uh, start and end dates for the 2627 school year include kindergarten through 9th grade beginning on Wednesday, August 26th, and 10th through 12th starting on Thursday, August 27th, 2026, with all grades ending on Thursday, May 27th, 2027. Um, also below there is a list of the members of the district calendar committee um, for your um, reference. I would stand for any questions that you may have. >> Questions from board members for Mr. Baky, Dr. Hodc. >>

197Yes. Just one question. Um, did Eric Ripley serve on this or help because of the scheduling with the out at the career and tech? I mean, >> he he does not serve on the committee. Um, but we do um communicate with him as well as one of our items that we consider is the CT scheduling. Um, and something that we always coordinate with him >> because of the other school districts as well >> that on top of just some of the the way the schedule the schedules fall as well as the CTE um has an event that they put on. I'm trying to rec recall. Thank you. The career the career uh day um in which we always try to coordinate around that as well too. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Other

198questions uh Miss Flynn and then Dr. L. Has the IND US calendar been published yet for 2026 2027? And do you know if the spring break lines up? >> Um, so this this next upcoming year, the spring break does not line up unfortunately. However, the 2728 calendar is looking to uh line up with that. >> Is it because of um >> It typically is because of Easter and and the way the holidays fall. Yeah. >> Okay. >> Dr. L, did you have something? Well, one quick comment that I know they'll be h families that'll be happy because they have a week of spring break again and even though we as a board don't have anything to do with that. It'll be interesting to see how many kids miss Monday and Tuesday next next March when

199there's only only three day. Um I was wondering did did the budget realignment process or concept play into a factor at this at all? >> No. I I just have a couple of of quick comments. Some of it's been touched on already. Um, first of all, it's a a robust in number of individuals. You have 16 people to to agree on how to uh get all of our contact days with students and and work around holidays. Um, I know if we were to do polling, no matter which year, no matter which calendar, it would be 5149 either way on some of these key questions. Uh, and what makes it the most difficult to Miss Flynn's question about why can't it always line up with with this thing or why can't it always be the same

200number of days? Why can't our our winter break be, you know, some something countonable? You know, it has to do with movable holidays. Uh, you know, this this December, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are on Wednesdays. That's different than when they're on Saturdays. Uh, Easter can move as much as four weeks. Uh, it's based on the moon. It's not anyone's fault. Uh it's just it's just how it works. Uh and we walk back from that moon phase to to find out when those dates are. Um and so there there are things beyond our control uh that can get in the way of what some people's perception might be is consistency, but the consistent work is this committee is doing the best it can within the framework. Uh, and so I think I've I've probably

201tipped my hand uh in terms of which way uh I'm going to be voting, but but for those listening, if you're still listening, thank you for hanging on. 2 hours and 40 minutes. Um, we have these movable pieces that are just different from one year to the next. So, I think it's it bears it bears mentioning. Any other questions? Yes, Mr. Baky. >> And so, I'll just add to that. Well said by the way, President Burgerer. Uh the administrative recommendation is to approve the 26 27 start and end dates and blackout dates as presented. And then later on this school year, I will bring um the tempor or the the uh preliminary start and end dates and blackout dates for the 2728 school year um which we're already working on. Yeah, thank you for that

202reminder. Any any other questions, Mr. Cleven? So motion on the floor to approve the 2026 2027 start and end dates and blackout dates as presented in your packet. Is there a second? >> Second. >> A second by Dr. Hodc. Any further discussion? >> Take a roll call vote. >> Anderson, >> yes. >> Flynn, >> yes. >> Hodc, >> yes. >> Cleven, >> yes. >> Larson is absent. Lun, >> yes. >> Manley, >> yes. >> Pomacino, >> Burger, >> yes. >> H, yes. Zero, no. One, absent. >> Motion passes. Uh 7A announcements. Any weather related announcements or others? We are watching the weather. Uh I'll have another phone call uh Zoom call with community leaders tomorrow morning at 5:30. So we won't make any decisions until until that time. Thank you. Okay. Just a reminder, uh

203we are in in just a a brief moment going to adjourn this meeting and reconvene at at Valley Middle School for the facilities committee meeting of the whole uh tour of that uh completed nearly completed facility. An update uh as you can see in the minutes or the agenda, excuse me, uh for that meeting, an update on the transition plan from the current Valley Middle School uh over to the new school, which now we're talking about happening in a matter of weeks. uh which is amazing to be able to uh to say. Um but just wanted uh wanted you all to travel there safely. Uh so we won't know exactly when we can call that meeting to order, but as quickly as we can all safely reather uh at the New Valley Middle School. Are

204there any other announcements? Yes, Mr. Bombach. And then we'll come over here. >> Yeah, thank you, Chair Burger. Just to mention the parking lot at the New Valley Middle School will be open for parking. Uh be careful of the conditions though cuz it's still an active construction site so it might be slippery but we'll convene in the um site trailer first to get the proper PPE before entering a school building. >> Thank you for that. Are there other announcements? I thought I heard or saw someone over here. Mr. Cleven, >> not an announcement but for point of order. Could we convene the facilities committee meeting here, take care of the minutes and anything else and then go to adjournment of that committee and reconvene at the site? >> I don't believe so. I believe that

205has to take place within within that uh that framework. We certainly could look at doing that inside in the trailer, you know, uh call the meeting to order, uh approve those minutes. Uh it's a fairly short agenda beyond that. Um but I hear what you're saying. Am I correct in in that assumption, Dr. Brener? >> You're correct because it's advertised to be at the New Valley Middle School. Yeah. Thank you. >> Uh Dr. L, >> just a quick one because I have to leave for Fargo, so I'm not going to state to go to Valley. I just want to make sure you guys still have a quorum to conduct business when you get over there. So, you may just want to make sure at least five of you are going to go there because I

206I I have I have to leave and get on the road. >> Yeah, that's understandable. Are are there just just so that we we know that for certain are there any other board members who are not able to uh to make that facilities committee meeting of the whole >> I've been recovering from the flu and I'm hitting a wall so I will not be going. >> Okay. Uh so I think by my count that leaves us at six and I think we would be able to conduct the business with the six of us. Thank you for that. Yeah, thank you for raising that question. Any other announcements? 7B board request for future consideration. Dr. Hodc, >> it's not really um request for future consideration. It's more of a comment that we are getting towards um

207our retreat this week coming up on Friday. And I really want to emphasize that well, I'll start quickly this way. Brandon, I thank you so much for what was in the paper regarding the new facilities position and how that that you did a lot of vetting of the description and that you're looking to see what needs that we have and how the job description could change a little bit um with that and such. With that, I want to stress that I really think that if we're going to be cutting positions, um I would like to see more information regarding um building, those numbers that we got today, regarding um each building. um how how many paras per um students? What are some of the case load numbers that those special ed teachers have? Where are

208those um positions being used? Is it academic support? Is it teacher support? Um even when um they spoke tonight about um the teachers and getting an assessment, I just I'm really cons I just want to make my point. My point is in order for me to make any discussion, any good decisions that I don't want them based on emotion. I don't want them based on anything anecdotal. I want them to be based on the facts that look and stare us in the face because when we are $4ome million dollars deficit spending, I need that information. So that's it. >> Thank you. other board requests for future consideration. And thank you also for that helpful reminder about Friday morning 8 am to noon. That's uh that was an announcement and a request. So thank you for

209for both of those. Okay. Finally 7C schoolboard meeting norms. Mr. Cleven, how did we do? Did >> well. Okay. Thank you. And we are journed.