Mentor Board of Education Regular Meeting

001good evening the july 13 2022 regular meeting of the manor exempted village board of education has called to order this meeting is being held in accordance with section 3313.15 of the ohio revised code mr wade will you please call the role ms breiner here ms cook here ms jeslin president miss payne here mr tuttle yes please join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge [Music] of allegiance to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all i would like to welcome everyone to the september 13 2022 regular meeting of the mentor exempted village board of education prior to this evening each board member has received further review and consideration the agenda and materials associated with each agenda item for the board's approval via the district's paperless

002board of education agenda system or docs the public can access the agenda through the school district's website the agenda is available through the district's website for public viewing the sunday prior to the board meeting board members have the opportunity to call the superintendent and chief financial officer for information concerning agenda items and to request if needed additional information this meeting is being televised on a delayed basis and will be shown on spectrum cable channel 1026 and mentor and channel one zero two five and men around the lake this meeting is also being videotaped and will be shown on our youtube channel cardinal tv manor ohio please place your mobile phones on silent mode during the meeting mr wade in his role as cfo and secretary for the board minutes will now share some protocols regarding

003our public participation policy thank you madam president the board welcomes public participation during our meeting the first opportunity to speak is on agenda items only there's a second opportunity to speak on any topic at the end of the agenda each person may only speak once per hearing of the public segment or per topic the comments are limited to three minutes speakers should announce their name address and where their children attend school if applicable the purpose of the public hearing is for community members to speak to the board we must insist you direct your comments to the board and not to other audience members it is equally important that everyone has a chance to speak uninterrupted so please do not call out or interrupt when someone else has the floor while we all may not agree

004on various topics let's demonstrate how to be respectful to one another during board meetings we need to continue to do better at this much like last month so please know that anyone who fails to comply with expectations of appropriate decorum or deters the boards from being able to conduct their business will be warned and then told to leave the meeting the hearing of the public portion of the meeting is informational gathering for the board administration so we can work to best serve the community if at any time at the end of the public participation we do not make a statement please know this in no way demonstrates a lack of care for the comments shared by the community rather that we want to be thoughtful in our approach and provide response in a timely manner

005when appropriate okay we will move to district highlights and recognition good evening madam president members of the board at this time i'd like to invite mr hammond to the podium for a very special staff recognition thank you mr heath before i begin i'd like to apologize for not having a suit jacket on i switched cars before coming to the meeting tonight and when i got here i realized where my suit jacket was so my apologies mrs mandy morgan come on up good evening madam president members of the board mr heath and mr wade this evening it's my great honor to recognize mrs mandy morgan second grade teacher at ridge elementary late last spring mrs morgan was notified that she was selected by a committee of peers as a 2022 master teacher award of excellence winner

006she was one of only eight ohio teachers designated for this award and she also received a one thousand dollar award that will be applied to her classroom in order to qualify ohio public school teachers must have at least three years of experience teaching in ohio each school district may nominate only one master teacher annually candidates must submit a nomination letter from their superintendent a nomination letter from their principal and a teacher narrative about why and how they teach both mr porter and mr mrs paremba were extremely positive in the praise of mrs morgan the district committees she serves on and her leadership during online learning nominees for this award should be those who have earned deep respect from students and colleagues remain intellectually alive demonstrate leadership in their field and serve as a model of

007excellence for the teaching profession mrs morgan's philosophy is to embrace each student's personality and stage of development so that they gain confidence to realize their full potential as they grow children are continuously developing a vision of themselves often students will come to her feeling like they cannot perform certain tasks as a teacher her goal is to help them find an accessible entry point and build upon what they know in order to grow their confidence once a child realizes that they can perform a task that they thought they could not endless possibilities open up for them helping students feel represented respected and capable builds their confidence students are more likely to take on challenges and persevere when they have a teacher who believes in them and can show them their strengths for mrs morgan the highest

008level of success as a teacher is empowering each of her students to believe they can do amazing things it is my great pleasure to recognize mrs mandy morgan as a master teacher award of excellence winner congratulations mandy [Applause] [Music] all right thank you and next we have approval of minutes we've got a special education hearing meeting august 9th regular board meeting august 9th and a special board meeting on august 25th so moved second any discussion please call the roll mr tuttle yes miss payne yes miss cook yes miss joslin yes miss breiter yes motion carries 5-0 thank you now we have hearing of the public on agenda items only being none we will move on we have superintendent's report and recommendations mr heath madam president members of the board i have the following recommendations listed

009under the consent agenda and recommend approval of item 6a 1 through 6 a 4. so moved second any discussion please call the roll miss justly yes miss cook yes miss payne yes mr tuttle yes miss breiner yes motions carry 5-0 madam president and members of the board i have the following board of education policy on the agenda for second reading and approval and i'm recommending approval of this policy so moved second discussion please call the roll it's justly yes miss payne yes ms cook yes mr tuttle yes miss breiter yes motion carries 5-0 madam president members of the board i am recommending approval of agenda item c1 related to certified personnel and c2 through c4 all related to human resource matters second any discussion please call the girl mr tuttle yes miss joslin yes ms

010cook yes miss payne yes mrs breyer yes motion carries 5-0 this concludes my portion of tonight's agenda thank you thank you board of education report and recommendations business madam president members of the board mr heath we need an appointment to of delegate an alternative to the annual business meeting of the ohio school boards association november 14 2022 i'm happy to do it i've done it every year since i've been on the board i'd like discussion on this if possible so i wanted to talk about a few things regarding the ohio school board association delegate designation it's my understanding that each school district is able to elect one person from their board to be the district's representative when voting at the annual business meeting in november for osba's capital conference that person will be voting on

011a number of items to be part of osba's legislative platform osba is a 501c4 which means it has the ability to engage in political lobbying and political campaign activities at capital conference the many school districts delegates will vote on a number of topics to be part of osba's official policy position on some of the most critical issues facing education according to the most recent memo from osba the delegate's work is not to pass laws but to consider proposed amendments to our legislative platform that platform guides our advocacy efforts and communicates osba's position on important education issues to legislators and the citizens of ohio it sets forth their united agenda for public education i'd like to suggest that we as a board at least talk through some of these proposed amendments prior to the delegate voting

012on those amendments um one of the many amendments that are set forth this year i found particularly interesting it was submitted to osba by several different districts including the local riverside district it is a new proposed resolution which is titled the parental right to know to highlight a few statements of this proposal i'd like to read two of the many bullet points on this possible addition to osba's legislative platform the parental right to know proposal would ensure that all parents should be notified of policies and even procedures affecting parents and students and shall be provided with an opportunity for meaningful feedback before any such policies and procedures are adopted or modified by the school district another bullet point is that it ensures that all parents have the right to inspect any materials used in conjunction

013with any survey analysis or evaluation of their children i believe that this particular resolution would be beneficial for osba and for our district certainly in light of the recent events and discussions surrounding pronoun surveys and parental rights this is just one of the many resolutions that the delegate would be voting on there are several while we as a board pay to be well we pay to be bored while we pay as a board to be members of osba we also use 9442 taxpayer dollars to do so therefore i believe that in addition to talking about these resolutions at least as a board prior to the delegate voting on those proposals we should also require that that delegate reports back at the following regular board meeting with the way that they voted i believe that since

014we are using taxpayer dollars to possibly help lobby for certain positions regarding education we do have a duty to be fully transparent with the citizens in our community i would like to nominate mr tuttle as the delegate and also would like to hear others thoughts on having a board meeting prior to the vote to discuss the amendments for osba and also require the delegate to report back at the next meeting with the way in which they voted on each resolution we can certainly have that discussion and go over all those platforms prior uh mr wade what type of meeting would we be able to have that we could do it at a special meeting that's just for that purpose or we could do it at a standard board meeting where we had the discussion as

015part of new business as we would here there are several proposals too so it might be a lengthy conversation yeah maybe probably special meetings yeah probably social media do we want to schedule a special meeting for that so we've got two we want to schedule a special meeting and then we've got the uh election of the delegate and the alternate which do we want to do first thank you mrs payne i accept the nomination thank you appreciate it [Applause] uh does anyone propose a date for this i'm pretty free when is ospa i forget it's november i think it's the 14th like the 13th through the 15th maybe is that right uh 13th 14th 15th you want to look at october sure what date we want to do it the first week of november or

016that week of the 7th before you head out to osba because we already have september is pretty full and then we have the meeting the 11th and we're looking to schedule a work session for finances the week of the 24th so do you want to look at the third week in october or the first week in november how's everyone's calendars looking third week of uh or third week of october i'll be at the league of innovative schools conference so maybe the first week in november how's the first week in november luck that's good for me i can make that work and at that meeting will we be also able to discuss having whoever the delegate ends up being whether it's time or you report back with how they voted oh yeah we can definitely report

017back that's not a problem okay does anybody have any issues with that week any days we have the citizens financial advisory the third okay so if we wanted to do it on the second or wednesday yeah so the first or the second yeah anybody have a conflict not me no conflict here you want to shoot for the first at 5 30 tuesday at 5 30. great the third uh november first first first november first november first you said yes okay and how do we want to do this vote you want to i guess we could just have each member state who they're voting for and i can tally him up okay that worked for everybody sure okay start alphabetically with miss cook i would like to vote for mr tuttle ms joslin so i'm sorry

018we're voting on who our delegate will be for osbn yes i think mary or tom could do a fine job but mary's been the one who's attended all the capital conferences for the last 15 years so i would probably since she's done it perennially i don't think that tom wouldn't do a good job but i you know mary's been playing that role for a number of years and is thoroughly familiar with the the process and so i would say mrs breiner okay miss payne mr tuttle tom me voting for yourself miss breiner i'll vote for myself based on that uh the delegate that was voted for would be mr tuttle would represent [Applause] thank you alternative representative i would volunteer i would say my alternative would be mrs breiner okay any discussion needed on that

019note i suggest i nominate annie payne for the alternative alternate we're spicing it up tonight how's that thanks tom do i hear miss brian or miss payne so anybody else for an alternate miss cook mrs breiner there's justling this is bryner ms payne me mr tuttle mrs payne miss breiter i'll go for myself okay so we have mr tuttle as the delegate mrs breiner is the alternative we just need to firm this with a motion a second and a vote so moved i'll second it miss jessalyn yes miss payne yes miss cook yes mr tuttle yes miss breiter yes motion carries 5-0 man of president members of the board mr heath i asked for the approval of the contractual agreement between the exempted village schools and alliance for working together so moved second any discussion

020please call the roll it's justly yes miss payne yes mr cook yes mr tuttle yes miss breiner yes motion carries 5-0 members of the board excuse me madam president members of the board mr heath approval of the career and technical education program agreement between lenders at the village and auburn career center so moved second please call the roll miss jeslin yes miss payne yes miss cook yes mr tuttle yes miss breiner yes motion carries 5-0 thank you all right legislative report mr toe thank you mrs breiner a statewide computer science plant finalized the state committee on commuter computer science on august 30th voted judaism to approve a final report of the state of ohio computer science plan the committee was established in house bill 110 the budget bill to examine the challenges and the best

021practices for computer science in primary and secondary education the final report includes 10 recommendations create an office of computer science education dedicate one percent of the state educational funding to computer science education number three require one credit in computer science for all high school graduates by the end of the decade number four offer students the opportunity to take at least one computer science class per year five establish an ohio computer science council for after school and summer programs number six fund grants to cover upskilling teachers number seven connect with employers to learn what schools what skills are needed and align those with education programs number eight provide school districts with resources to implement computer science education number nine create a public service awareness campaign for computer science education and workforce number 10 develop an online

022career path exploration tool that explains which classes to take to pursue a career in computer science this report was sent to the governor and other statewide officials who will review the recommendations and decide which may be implant implemented let me interject at this point just this is not in the report that i published but this is part of the executive summary created by the committee in the wake of intel's 20 billion dollar commitment ohioans are expressing surging interest in computer science education far beyond this investment ohioans recognize the economic opportunity that computer science provides students access all 88 counties to attract employers ohio will need to adapt the educational system both pre-k to 12 and post-secondary to produce a workforce pipeline that is both larger qualitatively superior to competitors with historic increases to to stem

023education funding during the dewine housted administration progress is happening but ohio must do more to compete and win now i'm going to read a couple of statistics here that they also included computer science jobs offer median salaries 48 higher than ohio's median household income of 58 116 that's roughly 86 000 if you do the math and i did the math and are growing quickly with 4.8 times more jobs than qualified applicants according to the bureau of labor statistics from 2014 to 2024 computing occupations will grow nearly twice as fast as the labor market at an expected growth of 12.5 percent jobs ohio estimates computer occupation ohio grew 14 percent between 2015 and important to note in secondary education ohio ranks 31st in the percentage of high schools offering computer science courses for the committee they

024say we need to rank among the top 10 states nationally so we have a lot of work to do the state has a lot to do so i wanted to share that with you as well as the legislative report and one last thing on the legislative report that just covers uh recently introduced legislation this is introduced by represents adam miller and juanita brent to require educational regional service centers service systems to include services related to reading and literacy and services for english learners thank you that's my report thank you okay uh student achievement report mrs cook thank you our teachers have been busy collecting students fall benchmark data in reading and math these district benchmarks are administered three times per year elementary teachers are assessing students in phonics and other early literacy and numeracy skills

025using both one-on-one assessments and programs like iready our middle and high school students are also involved using star reading and math and teachers at all levels use this data to guide their instruction and support our students academically back to school also means opportunities for our students to connect with their schools beyond the classroom our middle and high school athletic directors are reporting strong numbers which is great to see for our fall athletic programs we have 156 student athletes at memorial 131 student athletes at shore and 434 at mentor high school mentor high school senior caden burkholder was showcased on fox 8 news last week for his display of great sportsmanship after a tight game and a win against riverside when the game was over cayden immediately went over to congratulate riverside's players on a great

026hard-fought game before going to celebrate among the cardinals i'd encourage you to head over to our social media channels [Applause] students from our mentor high school science research class led by mrs lori cohen received their ohio academy of science shaw award earned at the state science day last spring on monday september 12th our current students receiving the award include grace chen hania imran ali klein and lucas spencer congratulations and also congratulations to matt dawson who was selected to the 2023 ohio music education association all-star band we wish you well in columbus and you can all see matt perform with the fighting cardinal marching band thank you chief financial officers report and recommendations mr wade madam president members of the board uh pleased to present the fy23 annual appropriations for this school year obviously our appropriations

027are the budget if you will for the fiscal year we presented the initial budget as a temporary budget back at the june 30th meeting in preparation for the fiscal year which starts on july 1st and when we built this budget i'll get into a little more of a timeline here but we obviously we build it around our strategic plan which is you know together we will ensure a safe learning environment provide a balanced high quality education which maximizes district resources and encourages strong community partnerships with the goals that really rely on the treasurer's office of maintaining enhanced physical stability by focusing our attention and diligence on short and long-term financial planning which this is the first piece of that our annual budget is more of the short term and then we'll present in november our

028five year forecast which is updated which is more of our long-term planning we have our explore options for alternative revenue to maximize existing personnel facilities and resources and we do that through shared services and our new advertising agreements that we have on our new scoreboard with the help of dr glavin as well as ensure a continue to balance approach toward an equitable distribution of resources to maximize opportunities across the district we build our budget on all physical decisions should be made in the context of a five-year forecast realizing that everything that we do today impacts what we can do tomorrow we realize that there's management dollars or management rights attached to every dollar that we spend and that we should make sure that we spend those dollars on enhancing the learning environment for our students

029by adding value to teaching and learning and we need to aggressively manage our largest expense areas which we know are salaries benefits special education and the facilities that we maintain here on campus and that we know that quality is always cheaper in the long term and that we really take that to heart when we do our projects for the district just a general timeline for the board this process actually starts as you all know back in january when we approve the adopted tax budget for the next fiscal year which we have to have to the auditor by january 20th by law and then prior to february right around february this year was closer to march we get uh with our building principles and department chairs and we start sharing our allocations or having them build

030their budgets with the zero-based budgeting model at the department level and we give allocations to our buildings based on our per-pupil costs at the elementary middle school and high school level and our administrators begin that process of developing the budget that we're finalizing here tonight on or before april 15th we have those budgets turned into my office that's where i begin to review them with the superintendent and the leadership team to see if we're trending close to our five-year forecast we do make sure that our budget for the fiscal year is in line with that five-year forecast they aren't separate documents that we only do you know three times a year basically when we do the update in may as well we make sure that they're always aligning and adjusting how we do things before

031the end of may as you know we approve the may forecast update which is an update to our november forecast and we do our appropriations before july 1st and then on or before september 30th we're required by law to file our appropriations for the year which then leads to our as i said earlier update of the five-year forecast that's done in november if you look at our revenue for the current year we receive the majority of our revenue from our local tax base 73.7 percent comes from the local taxpayer the other comes from the state and state sources most of that 15.3 percent coming from the foundation in the form of the money that received for the state for educating our students in restricted and unrestricted funds and the other approximate seven percent coming from

032the homestead and rollback uh taxes that we receive as rebates on our returns that we've seen that rebates returns that we receive on our millage rates that we get from the state that we have the other three and a half percent coming from intermediary sources in the forms of rents athletic events fees that we get from selling things and investments i'd like to remind the board in the community this is what the state looks like where 43 percent of the revenue for the average district in the state of ohio comes from the state and 42 percent is coming from the local government ours obviously is different than that again 7174 coming from the local taxpayer because we're considered a wealthy district based on our valuation of our property and the median income of the people

033that reside in our community so we receive less state support than the average across the state of ohio so it's important for us to make sure that we're protecting those tax dollars and using them to meet our principles and align with our strategic plan that being said here's a four-year trend five-year trend excuse me of where we've been actuals four years of actuals in one year of budget what we have we are budgeting 106 351 985 excuse me for our revenue for the year again 78 million of that coming from our local sources and the other 23 million coming from state sources in the form of aid from the state or property tax reimbursement you can see we only received 591 thousand dollars approximately this year was what we're projecting for federal sources which is

034in the form of a medicaid reimbursement and then we get 3.7 million dollars in intermediate and other sources so just a graphical representation of our revenue trend as well as our projected budget for the year i think the reason why i like to show this graph is again it just reiterates where we receive most of our funds from our local taxpayer but it also shows that our revenue is relatively flat we don't see a lot of growth and revenue in the district because it's based on property tax and when we see increases like we did in valuations for example like last year where we saw 18 increases in home valuations i explained in my previous meetings really we only see growth on the inside millage of that so we don't see an 18 increase because

035of house bill which reduces the voted millage rate down to a lower effective millage rate so we see very little growth uh from a revenue standpoint unless we receive additional funds from our taxpayers in the form of voted levy in the form of a general operating permanent improvement or emergency so it's always important when we're looking at our budget to look at two things primarily because we'll see here in a second why it's important we look at our enrollment trends over the last five years and these numbers were taken from our enrollment that we look at from our district internally in may the second last week excuse me of may so this comparison those time points are the same as well as this year's was the first week of september so you can see that

036we've seen a steadily steady decline excuse me across enrollment over the last five years which is what our enrollment projections that we had done from 2019 shared obviously we can see in fiscal year 20 through 21 what is known as the cova drop this was a trend that was seen across the state in many districts in many schools where we saw students who were not coming to school because of covid and we expected for that to go back up in 22 but just like many state districts across the state that didn't happen so we continue to keep an eye on our enrollment we're just at about seven thousand kids in seats right now currently in the district uh and we have to take that into account because obviously that affects uh staffing just kind of

037a breakdown based on grade level bands if you're into data like i am to kind of see where that where we're losing students um it seems to be pretty steady across the board i think the key here is is that we see smaller kindergarten numbers than we have been so we would expect that trend to kind of level off and kind of continue where we're at as we move forward kind of going into the few years so i think what we're expecting based on the enrollment analysis that we did as well as what we're seeing is we're expecting this to stay clear right around that 7 000 student range for the district looking at our staffing adjustments because obviously the major increase cost for us as we'll see in a future slide is because of

038salaries and benefits so we have to make sure that we're appropriately adjusting our staff to our enrollment trends you can see that this year we're down six staff members comparison to last year you can see that back in fiscal year 21 we saw a spike again because of covid the decision was made by the board and the superintendent at that time to increase staffing so that we could have smaller class sizes to spread students out we started to decrease those numbers last year and again this year and that's something we have to be cognizant of as we continue to move into the future as we continue to watch our enrollment is getting our ratios back down to pre-covered numbers so that we can sustain into the future the other aspect that i wanted to show

039i'm not going to go into this a lot because we've presented this quite a few times to the board into the community is that we have our five-year spending plan for our capital plan which we fund each year through transfers out of the general fund into our capital improvement budget our 070 account and what we did this year is we we made the transfer over in one year that will cover fiscal years 23 24 25 and 26. we made the decision so that way that we had that money in the account where those projects will be funded from to make sure that we have complete transparency on where our actual cash balance is with regards to those as we continue to sustain the facility maintenance and upgrades that we're doing through not only the support

040of the permanent improvement levy which generates about 1.1 million dollars a year but also through about a 5 million a year subsidy through this general fund also wanted to point out that this year's budget has no assumptions for covid built into it you can see last year we spent about 28 670 out of the general fund once we paid for the substitute long-term substitute teachers that we have in the district working on helping students regain the learning loss that happened during covid in summer school costs offset by our sr3 funds and then we had additional costs through the purchase supplies and other purchase services that we had for covid we have assumed those costs for the supplies mainly being in the form of cleaning materials into the budget this fiscal year and offsetting the additional

041staff and summer school costs again through s or so should have no impact on the general fund so we wanted to share that assumption from the beginning and you can kind of see at the bottom that we've spent just over six million dollars that had a negative impact on our budget because of covet over the last four years where does our money go our money goes primarily to salary and benefits which makes sense because we're in a service industry where we provide education to the students of the community along with the support of the support staff that we need to accomplish those goals in the form of secretaries custodians classroom assistants lunch room assistants as well as bus drivers and the like our next largest piece of the pie this year is transfers which i'll

042get into a little bit more but typically it's purchase services and then supplies this year so what you have again up here is a four year look back along with this year's budget because i think it's important to show trends to the board and to the community and you can see the year-over-year change on the bottom there percentage-wise and then you can see that the number that really matters the most is the 126.3 million dollars for this year's budget which looks like it's a huge increase or 11.12 percent increase that is bigger than last year's budget of 113.7 approximately a million dollars but most of that comes in the form of advances and transfers 14 million dollars is being transferred this year from the general fund to the capital improvement account to go back and

043fund those projects as i said in fiscal years 23 24 25 and 26 because those are projects that the board has voted and approved to move forward with so to make sure that we have that reflected in our bottom line in our cash balance we made the decision at my recommendation to make that transfer all at once to the 0.70 account and then if the board and the community decide to put an additional permanent improvement levy on we could move those funds back to the general fund and pay for that out of an increased pi levy again this is something that i we look at i look at specifically to kind of as we prepare our budget to see if there's anything that's abnormal or doesn't make sense or something that i can't explain as

044you can see that the blue and orange lines represent salary and benefits and you can see that increase over time and obviously health care costs we cannot control the increases that are in blue or because of negotiated agreements and this reflects the 2.75 percent increase that the board negotiated with both unions and administration the exempt employees for this this current year and then the biggest difference is that dark blue square at the top but that goes back to the transfers that i just spoke to so when i look at this there's no real un explicable reason why that we see anything that doesn't cause me any concern in the sense that i can't explain why we're having seen the trends that we're having so it's a check it's a visual checkpoint for me as well

045to the board in the community to say okay can we explain why we see the differences in each of those areas as we go across from left to right another way to look at it is to break each respective object out and look at the trends that we see on the respective graphs you again you can see uh the salaries and benefits that are increasing based on uh the number of employees that we had as well as our negotiated agreements and increases to the base wage you look at benefits and i'm going to come back to that one and then you can see purchase services is relatively the same from year to year you can see supplies and materials appears to have an increase right here and we might go why are we seeing such

046an increase in supplies and materials when we haven't seen that before the reason is is because we changed our policy if you remember back in november of last year where we changed the threshold for capital assets from 500 to so that causes things that used to be in this area to now be coded in this area so we saw an increase here and a corresponding decrease in our capital outlay okay so so for me that's just another check to go okay right that makes sense we're going everything seems to be kind of going in the right direction this again is because we started committing uh years ago to transfer money from the general fund to help pay for the projects that we're doing to maintain and upgrade the facilities so we can explain this in

047this one i just want to remind everybody because it's important when we look at some of the later slides is in 2021 the last month of the fiscal year we had a premium holiday because of the built up reserve that we had in our insurance fund so this actually dropped because there was only 11 months of 12 months being collected in 2022 again it looks like it remained relatively flat because we had two months of partial premium holidays so we collected 10 full months and two partial months so we don't see the increase so it just makes this increase look at more exaggerated than it really is because we're going to have we're expecting 12 full months of collection so that's something just to note and be able to explain because i think it's important

048to explain to the board in the community when we see these variances so when we look at salaries and benefits year over year when you break things out we're projecting a 4.6 percent increase based on the negotiated agreements from last year to this year we're seeing a corresponding increase in purchase services about 10.76 percent which is just a little bit over a million dollars we see an increase in supplies and materials of about we're seeing a decrease in capital outlay of minus 50 percent because this is going to be the first full fiscal year where our new policy change comes into place so again we're going to see higher than continued expected supplies and materials and lower capital outlay so when we look at our budget and these were the numbers that i share with

049you originally but we back out any of the transfers that we've made to the reserve or the five-year capital plan i think it's important to look at that trend as well because it kind of normalizes everything and you can see that last year if you look at what we spent in fiscal year 21 to what we actually ended up spending less the transfers we actually spent less than the year before so when you look at actual expenditures not true you take those transfers out we spent less so we had flat expense growth we're expecting a 4.57 percent growth based on the assumptions that we've made at the beginning of the year i would assume that we're going to be better than that you know if we even spent a million dollars less that's going to

050be show improvement there um and you know we're going to continue to monitor our budget as i do every month where i'll share where we're trending versus our forecast to continue to do that and my expectation is is that we'll you know that we're we're trying to be less than that we won't be more our goal is to always be less but as we presented this to the citizens financial advisory they always challenged me to be as close as i possibly can both on revenue and expenses so based on the analytic software that we're using and the assumptions that we're making i think we are going to be relatively close on the revenue expenses are a little bit harder to fluctuate because you know for example you don't see things that happen with like gas

051last year we didn't expect gas to drastically jump like it did in the middle of the year and those are things that we can't control but we can control some of our purchases so we can we'll continue to do that so i share this slide because obviously i've talked a lot about transfers with the board in the community and it really goes back to the fact that we have a permanent improvement levy that was voted in in 1988 it collected just over a million dollars if you were to take that out that one mill now is actually below i think it's like 0.38 effective mills so through inflation or if you were to look at it from what it would actually collect today at one mil it's like 2.2 million dollars so it's the the

052buying power has been lost right we haven't asked for additional permanent improvement money since 1988. so it's like if you were living at your house and your wages stayed the exact same since 1988 obviously you could do less with that unless you had another revenue source our other revenue source of late has been the general fund you may ask because you're inquisitive like me and you love my presentations and you know where i'm going with this jeez mr wade what do we typically spend out of the general fund to help maintain our facilities and i say well i knew you were going to ask that question we spend on average about 5.2 million dollars a year once you back out what we currently collect or with so with the current so we're spending about 6.2

053million a year to maintain our facilities and make upgrades so that means roofs pavement window projects some of the upgrades that we're making to the stadium maintaining our sports facilities science labs that we have on the docket other renovations that we know we're going to need to be able to do and as i've shared with the board of the community before i like to like fact check things right so we look at what's what's what's the trend what's the research show us and i use the carnegie mellon white paper quite a bit and i talk about how the fact that it's about two percent or 2.25 percent where you're at with regards to your total insured value or total value of your plant and ours is roughly 250 million dollars just to make simple math

054two percent of 250 million dollars is five million dollars is about what you should be spending to maintain that doesn't include enhancing that's just maintaining your your your facilities so if you look at it we're spending on average about six because we are doing improvements at the same time we only collect a million dollars but at the same time the reason why i point this out is that we're spending out of the general fund 32 or 31.1 million dollars that could be spent out of a permanent improvement levy and this is where i could get into the educational piece a pi levee can only spend on buses bricks balls books there's specific things that it can be spent on it can only spend on things that have a useful life of five years it cannot

055be spent on salaries and benefits general operating dollars can be spent on anything but typically they're spent on what we're here to do which isn't educating our students so really what we're doing because we don't have a pi levy that funds the needs of the district is we're spending 31 million dollars of our general operating fund over the next five years on permanent improvement levies so this kind of creates a problem right we can see that we're spending on a general fund quicker than it needs to be spent down we have fixed revenue and increasing costs we're deficit spending so we know how that works in the state of ohio that means we're going to have to get additional revenue to just maintain what we have there's ways that we can do it though right

056we can make the decision to increase our pi levy which directly tells the community that we're going to spend that money on the projects that we had listed back here somewhere i thought i must have skipped it this is i i've screwed up here there we go because we know we need to spend our money on technology we know that we have furniture upgrades that we need we know that we have buses and we know we have vehicles that we need to replace and we know that we have the enhancements in the funding needs of improvements that we have to do and the community could say we want you to spend x amount of dollars on those projects and then that what that allows us to do is reduce those expenses that are being taken

057out of the general fund for all these items it puts that money really back in the general fund so that reduces how much we're definitely spending each year and fixes those costs to a specific fund so as we share with the citizens financial committee that does two things it allows us to push off the need for a general operating levy if we were able to increase our pi levy which obviously is an increase in the levy that would be a tax increase because we'd have to go from whatever millage rate that we have now to probably about 2.25 to two point two five perc mills which roughly costs i think i think for a hundred thousand dollar home is just under six dollars per month that allows us to push off the need for general

058operating dollars and it also allows us to ask for less general operating dollars from our taxpayers because we would be removing all these expenses so we'd be spending money out of a specific pot for specific projects and then keeping the general fund dollars where they belong focused on the day-to-day operation of the district and the instruction and learning of our students and the costs associated with that because at some point we're going to have to ask for additional revenue it's just how do we decide to do it as a community a board to do that because well we could always make the decision too right not to and that results in our facilities not being maintained which is going to have go against our principle of it's cheaper in the long run to to to

059buy quality because we're going to have to have more expense in the long run to catch up and then we just get behind it or we can make the decision to [Music] not have some of the programs that we have cut some of the staff and i'm not suggesting that i think those are worst case scenarios those aren't things that we should be thinking about but as we think about the big picture and think about moving forward this year's appropriations brings to light the fact that we need to have these discussions and hence the reason why the citizens financial advisory committee committee approved the budget with the recommendation that we have these discussions with the board and i shared with the board in our friday update that we should have those discussions towards the end

060of october because we have a timeline of a renewal levy that we have to pass before the end of calendar year 24 for the expiring emergency levy that comes off after 10 years so we need to pass that as well as look at other funding sources to maintain the trajectory that we're on while also at the same time being prudent and tightening our belts and sharpening our pencils and doing that and we did that through negotiations with the health care changes that we made and we continue to do that with making sure that we question every dollar that we spend so when we look at a summary [Music] of kind of where we're at from a budget reserve we do have a five percent policy balance that we're supposed to look at along with a

061set aside the board when we were expecting it was exceeding expenses was able to put away 5.1 or 5.2 million dollars so we have that set aside that's not included in our current cash balance if we look at kind of where we've been and where we're at the last time we definitely spend before fiscal year 21 was back in fiscal year 15. that's when we went out in 16 and actually passed the new money operating levy when mr miller was here which has gotten us through this point we're projected this year to deficit spend by almost 20 million dollars that seems it is a large number it seems larger than you see in other pages but what this will also happen is in the out years the four to five million dollars that we were

062going to transfer out into the from the general fund to the capital improvement won't happen so those expenses will be reduced in the out years so we're kind of just lumped them all into one year that being said if everything goes as projected we're expecting to have 34 million or almost 35 million dollars in the bank after our 11.7 million set aside because the district has a policy that we should be not going below the five percent reserve plus an additional ten percent of the prior year's expenses because of the fact that wouldn't be physically responsible so that puts us at 16 million dollars set aside on that is not accounted for in this 34.9 million dollars happy to answer any questions uh about the appropriations mr wade i had a question um the ratio

063for the teacher to student because of the decrease over the last couple years have we had better ratios with the teacher-student ratios with for the classrooms yeah we've seen two things happen during that time we saw a decrease in enrollment and increase in staff because of covid so the ratios have dropped um in the last three years or the last two prior two years so fiscal year 21 and fiscal year 22 they were lower than we had seen historically before before that happened we are continuing to right-size that so to speak with regards to bringing the staff ratios back down to pre-covered numbers but they're still lower than they were pre-covered currently right now and do we know what the student-teacher ratio is in the like within the classrooms in general or i don't have

064that off the top of my head i could i can get that into a friday update for you though okay cool thank you any other questions madam president members of the board mr heath i ask that items eight a through eight g be approved so moved second any discussion please call liberal miss justly yes ms cook yes ms payne yes mr tuttle yes mrs breiner yes motionscary50 that concludes my section of the agenda thank you any unfinished business i do um i wanted to kind of just recap on some of the things that we've been talking about the last couple months especially at the board meeting so last month i had questioned if we were able to provide parents with the list of books for their kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms that were recently purchased

065a couple meetings ago through collaborative classrooms with a 3-2 vote by the board the reason for requesting that this list would be provided to parents was due to the nature of some of the books in elementary schools now and they are referencing sexuality police brutality and other politically charged content that some parents may feel are inappropriate for their children to read since the book collection is now purchased i am very happy to announce that we were able to provide that the list we were able to provide the list through the teachers at meet the teacher night if you are a parent or guardian and you didn't receive the list because i received feedback that there are several that didn't receive the list you can feel free to reach out to your building principal and i

066was told that they will be able to provide it to you so i wanted to give an update on that also i wanted to provide an update since i received many questions as to why the pronoun policy i proposed last month with mr tuttle's support was not being voted on this month as a reminder the policy would essentially prohibit pronoun surveys for kindergarten through eighth grade it would also require parental notification to be sent prior to being conducted by the teachers for 9th through 12th grades it would still allow students to go by their preferred pronoun and name at their parents request the policy has been temporarily tabled so that the board can meet at a special meeting open to the public at the end of september to discuss the many different facets and perspectives

067of this proposed policy and the issues surrounding it however about two weeks ago there was an email sent out by our administration and as far as i know it was without bored knowledge because i didn't have any knowledge of it to six the 12th grade teachers advising them that they do not have to update infinite campus or google if they have a student that wants to go by a different name or pronoun this email was released due to students approaching teachers and asking them to go by another name or another gender pronoun then their biological sex the email said that our district stance surrounding that situation was that the teacher can just use those preferred pronouns or name with the student and there's no need to share the information with any other staff member or

068family member unless the student would like additional support throughout the year the email did point to some legal guidance provided to the district surrounding this issue due to the recent news i just want to clarify that to my knowledge the board was not made aware of this email i personally found out about the email through several teachers who sent it to me with you know many of their own concerns and questions that they had about our stance i have yet to receive the legal guidance guidance provided to our district but i do believe it will be provided for the entire board as well at the work session at the end of the month i want to reiterate that our teachers are wonderful educators they really do sincerely care for our students however they lack the

069certification and expertise to talk to our students about gender identity i strongly believe parents need to be full partners with the schools and ultimately this stance undermines parents rights parents have a fundamental right to the upbringing of their children we should not undermine their right by deciding for them what is best for their child we also should advise parents of the affected grades 6 through 12 of our stance so that at the very least we are being honest and fully transparent we cannot take the parent out of transparency in addition to the pronoun survey policy we will be discussing our district's stance and how we should proceed with guidelines for this type of situation going forward we also have to examine other board policies that are currently in place that may be violated with our

070current district stance to withhold critical information from parents regarding their minor child's decisions our current board policy 9.01 that seems to stem from the elementary and secondary education act stresses the importance of the involvement of parents and foster caregivers in directly affecting this success of their children or foster children in their educational efforts it also states that parenting skills are promoted and supported and more importantly the policy explains that parents are full partners in the decisions that affect their families and children i am looking forward to our board work session at the end of the month to have open discussions between the board members in regards to this very complex issue and controversial topic while this meeting will not be open for public commentary since it is not a regular meeting it will be open

071to the public for those who would like to attend i believe we are trying to finalize a date for this work session for the end of september possibly also the board retreat i know we have that one scheduled but didn't know if there were two separate things the work session will also include conversations that a lot of people have reached out about to many board members surrounding safety bullying and possibility of hiring retired police officers to staff all of our schools the meeting will be notified to the public on our board of education website for those who anybody who wishes to attend anything else yeah i'll go ahead uh first i want i want to start my comments tonight with some positive news that's happening in the district our students and our staff have had

072an excellent start to the school year i've been able to get into all the buildings often during the first three weeks of school and have numerous conversations with principals teachers students and parents [Music] to a person they've talked about how smooth the start has been and how nice it is to just have a sense of normalcy here at the beginning of the school year students have been thoroughly engaged in the activities in the classrooms that i visited and there's true teaching and learning happening every day i know there are other issues impacting the district currently that we're going to con continue to work through and we're going to work through those together we're working through the substitute bus driver and substitute teacher shortages that are happening across the state and here in manor we continue

073to monitor our class sizes especially at the elementary level to keep them as low as possible while being fiscally responsible another issue that we are currently working through revolves around the board policy around surveys that ms payne brought up in our august meeting we're looking into that the best way uh looking into the best way to address that survey question moving forward as it relates to teachers asking students for their preferred pronouns we're committed to looking at that policy in a board retreat and or a board work session so that we can have open and transparent conversations around every aspect of this topic we hope to bring that to another reading here in hopefully october this is obviously a cultural societal and political hot button topic right now so much so that federal regulations state

074guidance and court cases in the justice system have inconclusive and oftentimes conflicting statements the recent article about mentor schools and the use of preferred pronouns focused on one email that only tells part of that story the words that have caused the most concern were mine not mr hammonds my statement regarding the parent communication piece was in response to a singular scenario about a singular high school student approaching a singular teacher about using their preferred pronouns in the classroom they did not want to change them in infinite campus or google because the parents would need to be involved and they were not ready to have that conversation with their family yet in this situation we're now moving out of the pronoun survey question and we're now moving into the transgender student rights question this is a

075significantly different topic my statement goes back to the singular scenario and was made to follow the regulations about a protected class of people based on federal regulations we work hard to meet the individual needs of each and every student of our each and every one of our students while they are in our care each child's safety physical social and emotional is our utmost priority when entrusted with sensitive information we'll always do our best to support our students and their families on a case-by-case basis the part that we need to determine in this particular scenario is how we support the student in approaching this conversation with their family we had already scheduled our board retreat for september 21st so we knew we would be able to add this topic of discussion to the preferred pronoun survey

076question that ms payne had brought up in august i am committed to working with our board of education members to use current federal title ix regulations current state law and recent court case history to develop the appropriate policies or guidelines that will allow us to protect both the students rights and our parents rights and navigating these topics in our school district thank you [Applause] mr heath i just had a couple questions if it was just a one you know off scenario why did we send it to sixth grade teachers and up that was part of the miscommunication amongst our staff so did we send anything to those teachers since then to say this was a was it no we have not sent that clarification out yet we were waiting for this meeting and then obviously

077our board retreat next week to have some of these conversations so we can give them the accurate information okay thank you thank you do we have any new business for the board saying none we have hearing of the public on any item hi my name is debbie bolefeld and i reside at 664 silver mound drive and i'm a 40-year resident of mentor deb i apologize i didn't catch the last name debbie bolafeld i may need you to send me an email and spell that i'll do my best phonetically though okay i'm a 40-year resident of mentor i'm here tonight as a professional in the real estate industry who understands the value of superior schools in a community i'm here as a person and a parent who had two children go through the mentor elementary schools

078back when i was proud of the schools i'm also here as a taxpayer who supported every single school levy in the past even when my kids attended lake catholic i knew quality schools bring higher property values and i and it also attracts people to raise families in manor i was totally embarrassed and totally disgusted when i saw our school system made negative national news here was the system that i live in and promote daily proudly claiming they have no concern for parental rights and jumping on the whole woke agenda bandwagon who decided parents have no say in raising their own minor children i have no issues with adult lifestyle choices or discussions within the walls of family homes i've heard the name calling at these meetings of homophobic transphobic and the foolish reasoning that all

079children need to be bombarded with details of the different one or two percent that make up this world this is not a subject that's needed or our educators have the right to discuss without parental knowledge keeping information from parents is just wrong it's bad enough that you're exposing and pushing books that have inappropriate sexual material at our elementary schools that's another huge mistake this board has made our future generation have already been set back socially and scholastically due to the ridiculous china virus lockdowns and masks it's time we put [Applause] it's time we put family values back in the schools and in our country this all starts with respecting parental rights i had high hopes for the new superintendent thinking he would run the system with professional input and respecting the families he serves the

080decision is hurtful to the majority and causes major distrust of teachers i'm hoping the whole private pronoun survey will just be scrapped for kindergarten through 12th grade it is confusing and unnecessary school boards and unions need to get off their high horse and stop copying the woke corporate agendas you have no business discussing pronouns and genders with immature developing minds if i had school age kids or my granddaughters lived in mennore i would be homeschooling or enrolling in private schools parents and citizens need to start speaking up and taking back the schools that we pay for the term of domestic terrorists given to the informed concerned parents is exactly what is wrong with this country my final words to you are please please get back to teaching the basics of education be valued leaders and

081stand for the citizens who purchased homes in the mentor area because it was a family-friendly place to raise innocent children they will be out in the world of government control soon let them be our kids they're not yours [Applause] mr gaske if you could raise your hand for me when it hits because i can't there's no project there's nothing in front of me to see this time thank you i'm going to stick to my script here i'm lindsay wall 7250 beechwood drive and munner a parent of two men are students i've been coming to meetings for a year now and it's the same thing every month all of you on stage conducting your usual business and openly sharing a lot of information with our community through some extremely hard times there were still so many

082great things about our schools to share unfortunately the same criticism concerns and loud voices have been stuck on repeat our school board teachers and even students have been bullied time and time again in this room a small minority of people have been loud they have been consistent but they are the minority their concerns are based on the same toxic nonsense that others are dealing with around our country we are done with the lies and conspiracies we are done allowing them to think they are the majority the majority showed up tonight they may not be in this room right now but please let me assure you the majority in this community does support you they trust you and we all appreciate you we collected close to one thousand flowers in one short hour this evening some

083of those were placed on stage for you before the meeting started complaints about availability to view the idr books the minority showed up and one night i'm sorry the complaints about the idr books about the the hours and the the short hours the the days that were available there were very few that showed up and in one night in one hour people showed up to show their support to all of you and our staff our schools are great our teachers are wonderful but to the bus drivers custodians lunch ladies nurses librarians and everyone else the village that is minor public schools your community appreciates you the majority stands with you the majority knows what is going on in our schools and it's nothing close to what the fake news recently reported tomorrow we will be

084delivering all of these flowers around our district to each school we have more than enough to symbolically show our support but i will say it again now thank you we support education and mentor we support all of you and we support our teachers hi my name is sharon moton i live at 6400 center street and mentor and i do not have children in school but i am a very concerned citizen about what i see happening one thing that i noticed when you talked about the retreat the number one topic you want to talk about is pronouns and the lgbtq movement i didn't hear one word about education what are we teaching our children it is not your responsibility to worry about moral values that is the parental right you are treading on parental rights all

085over the place and you're also violating the constitution that is a crime you're forgetting who you work for you work for the parents and citizens of mentor not yourselves we've got wonderful teachers in mentor and i applaud them because i think they're in a tough place being forced to teach things outside of basic education i see mentor students every day incapable of critical thinking how to reason they can't make change and probably can't even define what a pronoun is i'm just disappointed that these teachers are having their hands tied about really teaching what is important a real education to these kids and worrying more about critical race theory and personal identity instead of the education that they are supposed to be receiving from you i completely sympathize with anybody who has gender dysphoria i completely

086have empathy for them and there there's needs to be support for those students it does not involve forcing that on every student in the school without the parents right or knowledge it does not involve letting boys use girls bathrooms or participate in girls sports [Applause] if you feel the need to be sensitive to those students i suggest you build a separate bathroom that they can use without feeling that their feelings are being trampled on you do not violate the rights of all the other students for the few you just be sympathetic to those students and as far as gender is concerned i've heard different things come from the board and i want to remind you there are two genders only two you can decide to be whatever you want i can decide tonight to be

087a member of the board that does not give me the right to vote for you with you and if you have any confusion about gender i would invite you to my friend's farm and feel free to try and milk a bowl see what happens [Applause] and as far as levees if you don't start doing the will of the citizens of matter i promise you you will get no more levees passed until you remember who you worked for and i'm going to close with one more thing that i have not heard mentioned when you talk about all the things thank god we're going to bring god back to school and all of you need to pray before you make a decision hello my name is kelly slovenkay 8715 applewood kelly what was your last name 17k

088slo b-e-n-k-a-y thank you you're welcome um my husband and i moved to mennor in the year 2005 when our boys were young we came to mentor because we were proud of the schools that we were watching from a smaller community that we lived nearby in when we moved to mentor we had a child that was having some learning just differences and then we had one-year-old twins when we moved to manor we were blown away by the quality of education that my oldest son was receiving in the integrated preschool and then he moved on to orchard hollow all three of my boys are amazing human beings and that is in large part because of the if my math is right over 240 teachers that have impacted their lives that doesn't include nurses lunch ladies bus drivers

089counselors you name it it's all there i'm i'm guessing close to 300 if i had to add it all up from the bottom of my heart i want to thank the teachers and all of the staff and the board for providing that education for my children to grow up to be well-adjusted young men i have friends in this room on both sides of this room and i think that's a true reflection of our community we can live together we can have different opinions my sons have friends whose parents are on either sides of this room and i think that's amazing so thank you for providing that to us and thank you to our teachers and i ask that we continue to provide a wide variety of programs for our children thank you hello my name

090is ann fiorelli i have a fourth grader in the district and three younger children i realized that the hot topic tonight is evolving i learned some new information tonight that i wasn't aware of but i would like to convey that i am dismayed that the mentor school district has just made the national news and not for academic achievements but for a controversial procedure which i hope evolves from where it is right now i hope during your work sessions you take into account teachers rights and what this could mean for them because as far as i can tell this procedure encourages deception from teachers and staff if the school nurse for example calls home because a child gets sick do they have to remember to call the child by a different name when speaking to the

091parent and call the child by something different when they are in school it seems to be putting the teachers in a very tough position to sort this all out if a child brings home graded homework will the teacher white out the name on the paper so they don't expose the secret that this kid goes by something different in school i'm concerned that if deception is encouraged for pronoun use or this topic what could be next if my daughter someday has an unintended pregnancy or gets involved in drugs will i be kept in the dark about that because the school decides to honor her right to privacy over my right to care for my child i also believe that this policy puts the burden on the teachers to take on the role of counselor they have

092to judge with little information is this kid okay to take on this decision of socially transitioning by themselves with no family support do they really have an unsafe situation at home where they shouldn't you shouldn't make the parents aware and if so if their deception was un was discovered would that put the child at risk i think this is too complicated to burden the teachers with they're in the classroom to teach i'm sure you also have procedures already in place that if you suspect a bad home environment or abuse or neglect you have procedures to deal with that already that i don't know the ins and outs of them but i think it's a dangerous slippery slope to have a policy for one specific incident that codifies deception towards the parent there has to be

093a better way if the school administration continues to operate in a deceptive non-transparent way you will not be able to pass school levies attract new families to our community or grow and improve you will see more and more families choosing other ways to educate their children we implore you to keep us informed be transparent avoid socio-political distractions and focus on solid education for our children thank you thank you good evening i'm christy bellahovic i live on dalia drive and men are on the lake and have two children currently at lake elementary first and foremost i would like to express my and my family's support for mentor educators staff and administrators in all they do to make mentor public schools a good place to get an education as well as efforts made in supporting diversity and

094practicing inclusivity for mentor students creating a safe place for all students to learn and prioritizing students well-being are important goals goals that this district should be always working towards goals that i would like to see the board be able to focus on rather than having to direct their attention and resources towards misinformed grievances threats and non-issues such as pronoun surveys and idr books that are not even part of the curriculum i would also like to take this time to complement lake elementary the principal staff and especially my children's teachers both of whom they love so far by the way for their wonderful communication with their students families so far this school year as has been my experience in previous years i always know what they're doing in class thanks to seesaw and their completed work

095from class being sent home daily i'm informed about what they're doing and what they're working on what's being planned through the class calendars i receive emails remind messages all those things and these are super helpful jumping off points for awesome conversations i then get to have with my kids that go beyond the howard school line there's lots of opportunities to be involved and any questions i've had are addressed promptly and i really do trust i do i trust that they're in good hands and by the way it appears i'm not alone in feeling this way because according to a recent poll by baldwin wallace university for the children's defense fund in ohio 91.6 of ohio parents agreed with the statement i trust my child's teacher to support their academic learning and success and 93 percent

096agree that they trust teachers to deliver age-appropriate instruction including topics about race and gender identity so in closing a big thank you to all of you and to lake elementary especially for their support and all they do for the students and families my children and i are looking forward to another great school year thank you thank you [Applause] hi my name is mike williams my wife and i live at 6064 walden court in mentor and we put four children through the mentor school system dear mr heath mr wade and school board members i would like to bring to your attention a lawsuit followed by mr wendell perez against the clay county florida school district this past january he and his wife are suing the district after his 12 year old daughter tried twice to commit

097suicide by hanging in the school bathroom the suit the suit claims that the school counselor had secret after-school meetings with his daughter about her gender identity the counselor encouraged her to transition to a boy and called her a boy's name and used male pronouns when referring to her the counselor also did this in front of students the bullying that ensued led to her suicide attempts after the second attempt the school alerted the parents about the gender issues the counselor claimed that because the family was roman catholic they would not affirm their daughter the counselor backed by the administration took it upon themselves to withhold critical information from the parents based on the family's religious affiliation this is outrageous the stance this school district took almost cost a young girl's life there are also cases like

098this pending in california and wisconsin the reason i bring this up is that i think the mentor school district is actually inviting a similar lawsuit here with this mandated policy of keeping student gender issues from their parents there are these are still minor children under the sole responsibility of their parents and this school has no right to keep this vital information from them mentor schools are playing with fire by keeping secrets from parents eventually this will backfire on all those involved in promoting such policy this new mandated policy flies directly in the face of the existing school policy number 9.01 e which states and i quote that parents are full partners in the decisions that affect children and families let me repeat that your own policy says that parents are full partners in the decisions

099that affect children and families how can you impose a new policy that completely contravenes the existing policy without a vote of the board or fair hearing of the public [Music] can any of you answer me what has happened to the existing policy is it still in force this policy contravenes that doesn't make sense this new policy claims at first this first priority as student well-being and safety well they circumvent the very people that have the child's best interest and safety at heart the parents the assistant superintendent pushed this policy through right in the midst of board discussions about these very issues which demonstrates to us that they have no intention of listening to other board members or parents and have no interest in transparency to the public they serve this is the reason we are

100petitioning this school board to adopt a formal written policy thank you that is heard by parents and voted by the board and not just instituted unilaterally excuse me remember [Applause] i would just remind both sides that we should not be speaking out or clapping i know we've had that quite a bit which is taking time away from people as well so i would ask both sides to remain respectable and let us continue to control that i apologize if it goes a little bit long tonight because i don't have a clock in front of me i have to turn my head so if just give me the opportunity to do it i will make sure that we keep everybody to the appropriate time frame thank you good evening mary jo stack 8131 independence drive madam president

101mr wade mr heath welcome when i listen to some of this it just reminds me of a story that some of you might know it's called the blueberry story a famous ceo an award-winning ceo for a ice cream company with outstanding blueberry ice cream went to do it and this is a true story went to do an in-service for teachers and staff and had the preconceived notion that schools should be run like businesses at the end of his speech a teacher asked him and what do you do when you receive an inferior batch of blueberries he replied i send them back and the teacher said sure you do we can never send our blueberries back we take them big small rich poor gifted abused frightened confident homeless rude english as a second language everyone and

102i will add to that we take gay by trans as well because school is not a business and public schools must take everyone which means everyone should be included public schools do not get to choose their students they must take everyone and i end with if your god tells you to love each other as i have loved you maybe you should follow that teaching thank you [Applause] thank you uh leah mccullough 4680 homewood drive i have a son in the school district now the superintendent did kind of clarify a little bit of what i'm going to talk about first i do want to ask what is a federal regulation for a trans individual second off this goes to tim hammond who seems to be the leader of the email this is the second time i'm

103calling him out at a school board meeting the first time i call i talked to him over the phone two years ago about how crt was intertwined into our public mentor education he told me a lie the teachers haven't attended any training mr potter openly admitted at the school board meeting yes they did better lessons plan a topic check your lesson plans for whiteness during the pandemic many of the lessons i witnessed personally were not very educational but political and racially led propaganda that was being pushed on my children now tim hammond i again am calling you out for sending out an email that was supposedly for one person to all the staff members teachers staff members etc how can you justify sending that email how can you justify not notifying parents of anything of

104our children's education or personal well-being also with this topic why does the art teacher at shore donna fjord have a pride flag hanging in her classroom i am questioning this because now that you want to hide pronouns and have teachers hold things you've mentioned you're going to go talk about this in three weeks but now that you have mentioned this now i feel if i see a teacher with a pride flag or with a shirt with that or favoring a little bit more to that side what are you pushing what is your agenda now i feel like you definitely have something going on against my child not just my child but everybody's in this community it's not right she shouldn't have it in there you have made us all skeptical and skeptical of this whole

105education i just that's all you said i don't think she should have been there thank you [Music] hi my name is brady anderson and i go to shore middle school as a transgender girl i want to thank every supportive teacher and staff member at shore and let them know how important it is for them to show their support for lgbtq students whether it's a rainbow flag or a pronoun pen or even asking how my day is going i see you and i appreciate you and so do all the other lgbtq students representation matters so if teachers are wondering if the rainbow flag matters it does if it matters if you use the right pronouns it does sorry and the reason that i'm saying this is there's a quote from the trevor project i want to

106read to everyone young lgbtq people are not prone to suicide because of their sexual orientation or gender identity they are at a higher risk for suicide attempts because of the harmful rhetoric and rejection they hear from their friends and families that they that can make them feel like their life is worthless than their straight or cisgender peers not to mention i have never heard the word lgbtq in my school from a staff member or teacher if anything my school doesn't if anything my school doesn't talk at all about the lgbtq also not to mention if anyone feels as if their child will be affected by rainbow flag they need to take a 10-minute walk outside and actually be in reality thank you thank you good evening to all members of the mentor school board my

107name is kim beza and i'm a resident mentor and a proud homeschool mom who pays the same tax dollars into the district just like you the only difference is i am never informed of any of these issues unless i attend these board meetings tonight i'm going to speak on behalf of all parents who are not able to attend this meeting and for those who are still trying to build the courage to speak up currently there are inappropriate books at the elementary level that have no business being in the hands of those children to indoctrinate them examples the colin kaepernick about policy brutality and black lives matter heather has two mommies that can cause confusion to the minds of our youth also books such as transphobia deal with it and become a gender transcender are are

108or have been on display in the middle school the board and the administration decided to keep these when they were challenged by many parents males are allowed to use female bathrooms and vice versa this is very inappropriate and can be an easy way for predators to pray and attack this is not dramatic it is a gateway for anything bad to happen pronoun surveys do not go out to the parents which in turn leaves it up to the students and teacher to make the decision without parental consent crt indirectly being taught this program may seem fine to some but it is truly grooming and teaching racial and radical behaviors my opinion better lessons presentation for all staff surrounding whiteness we pay two hundred thousand dollars for the training and almost two hundred thousand dollars for the

109k through five book collection i've been made aware of a government teacher who has been pushing their theology and bringing their political views to the classroom and speaking ill of anyone who is a trump supporter teachers should always be neutral otherwise they should find another profession this is not where i want my tax dollars to go and for this teacher they should be replaced certain flags are being placed in classrooms which is fine to have your beliefs and be prideful but that pride should be flown outside your homes away from traditional education my teachers never brought their ideals views or beliefs into the classroom when i was growing up the classroom was meant for learning about the specific topic for the day week month from the chosen curriculum for that year where does it end

110when you have so many topics supporting political ideals that take away from the traditional education of our youth and replace them with the agendas of a one-sided and have no purpose into the school setting our decision makers are making poor decisions and our tax dollars are going to go towards the wrong things like lawsuits if this district doesn't get it together thank you hi my name is lauren marchazza i live at 7816 oak ridge drive i have two kids currently attending the mentor schools one of memorial one at hopkins i'm also an alum i'm here tonight to express my exceptional disappointment when i learned that a member of our school board chose to call into a partisan radio show announce herself as a board member of mentor public schools and went on to denigrate misrepresent

111and thus embarrass our district and its leaders per the mentor school board policy quote personal statements or commitments made other than in board meetings frequently produce misunderstanding and embarrassment for individual members the board and school officials since such actions tend to reduce the effectiveness of our schools you know why we're all here they should be avoided the board of education shall concern itself primarily with broad questions of policy rather than with administrative details the application of policies that is an administrative tax task to be performed by the superintendent and his or her staff who shall be held responsible for the effective administration and supervision of the entire school system board members should refer individuals having questions and or complaints directly to the superintendent or chief financial officer end quote i strongly encourage the board to

112regroup and come to a clearer understanding of what it means to be a representative of this school district it's not about personal agendas or the agendas of people you think are your constituents you're not here to launch a political career you're here to make choices for the kids who attend these schools my kids even if you can't claim any of them as your own yeah wow [Music] in short you're here for my kids you're up there with no kids in the district but you're making policies and choices about what my kids are being taught in their schools your assumption that you were entitled to make those policies and choices about my kids what my kids will learn please is appalling stop it's my time stop please it's my time stop and i will point out

113the irony i'm sorry miss march which seems to be lost on some stocks we're gonna stop the clock i'm gonna politely ask everyone to please respect the speaker please i think she can handle respect the speaker and we will continue [Music] thank you i'm for our first amendment right so i will be glad i would i would be glad for her to to finish her thank you review of me that's fine i appreciate it i like to use mine as well so you go ahead you get to sit there i don't that's the difference that's the difference okay all right thank you i'll also point out the irony which seems to be lost on some folks which is while some board members may claim to fight for quote-unquote parents rights despite having no children in

114the school district they are usurping and trampling the rights of the parents they claim to represent whose rights are you fighting for anyway certainly not mine finally since i'm up here i'll take the opportunity to share with the board a recent survey which i think somebody already mentioned this evening which demonstrates that the people who are up in arms about social emotional learning and the like do not represent the majority of parents in mentor or ohio i'm not going to repeat the survey since it was already shared but i just want to point out that just because this majority of parents may not be here tonight doesn't mean that they don't care it doesn't mean that they agree with the folks who have been shouting throughout my entire speech so i want to point out

115that they're here we are here and i encourage the board to remember that bear that in mind as you fight for parents rights [Applause] thank you my name is laura dillon i live at 7177 hayes boulevard i raised two children here in the school system and i have two grandchildren here teaching children to keep secrets from parents is sending an awful message to children and no i'm not talking about the flower pot for mother's day this is different it's also telling this child that their decision should be hidden and not talked about another wrong message that we would all agree on do you know that the depression and suicide rate is higher for these children questioning their gender so if one of these students who kept the secret from their parents committed suicide who is

116liable ask your attorneys that all children need to be supported by parents and teachers as a team thank you [Applause] hi good evening my name is jessica hardesty i live at 7194 hotchton road i have three daughters who are so lucky to go to the mentor schools um so thank you for everything every teacher it's just wonderful um i just really quickly want to point out that the our kids aren't coming home and talking about pronoun issues they don't i talk to my girls every day i mean they are just absolutely just spill everything i know everyone who's going to homecoming with who i know every teacher i know what they did in math today i mean it's endless do you want to know that they are never like oh someone asked my pronouns or

117oh there's someone using my another restroom it's not happening in our schools the kids aren't being handed books that are like hey turn yourself into something else it's just not happening and it just breaks my heart that we could all be doing things to benefit our kids and grown-ups are just pulling it down why are we talking about pronouns in every meeting why if if you are transgender and and you go by different pronouns i support you your teachers should support you your parents who support you that's fine that's not hundreds of kids in our school i love every one of those kids but why are these meetings focused on such a small thing just be kind be kind to the transgender that's not hard and it's not happening but kids come home and they

118talk about what they learned in history they come home and they talk about the debates that they had with this other kid about this other thing and what was on their test by spanish teachers mean and that's great that's wonderful that's what school is and for grownups to constantly you're right you're not having conversations with these kids parents or with these kids teachers have amazing relationships with my kids teachers and great relate i know what's going on and it is not this what's the grooming right it's not happening they just want to support one another it and we have the right district we have the right teachers we just need to get the focus back it is what the focus is we need to make sure that people stop making stuff up and focus on

119our awesome kids and their awesome teachers and the kick-ass education they're getting that we are so proud [Applause] thank you good evening my name is michelle pochelsick i'll spell it for you because you'll never get it right if i don't p-o-k-e-l-s-e-k i have no kids in the school district at this time i had two that went through mentor schools as a citizen of men are on the lake and this school district i and everybody that belongs to the school district has every right to say what we think that the school district is doing correctly or needs some help with and that's why i'm here i have no kids in the school district either so but should i not say what i i believe everyone that pays their taxes here has a very good right to

120speak on any of this as a matter of fact we're trying to raise good citizens for our country when they get out of the school district and they go into the job place do you think everyone's going to worry about have they called them the right name you better believe they're going to column what is on their reports they're not going to say he she they they won't they'll they won't consider that if they do they're going to have a lot of trouble with older adults because we're not going to put up with it if we don't believe in it we're not putting up with it you can do what you choose i don't care but i don't have to put up with it i don't have to deal with that we want good citizens

121we want them voting we want them to respect the rules of the country they want we want them to learn about our government and how it works we're not doing that the job is poor all the kids grades have plummeted okay we had covet but you got all the substitute teachers in have they risen that much have the kids grades and scores risen that much they lost more than a year i think that the school district needs to get back to the basics they need to teach what we want them to teach not just all this frou-frou stuff sorry but the money is money and you talk about it all the time we don't have the money to spend on all this other stuff spend your time on what we need do you know that

122the homeschool kids only need to do two hours of schooling a day to get all of what you do here for what is it six hours come on spend your time wisely spend your money wisely and let's get back to the basics thank you [Applause] hi my name is christine henninger i have a graduate senior a fifth grader and a third grader over the past few months the board meetings have become a consistent theme this is what i want this is what i think or this is how i feel my hope today is that we start utilizing these meetings to discuss what the students and the teachers are saying that they need to try and take the time to actively listen to each other's perspectives try to understand where one another is coming from we

123are failing our students when we are unable to compromise collaborate and by not being able to meet the needs of all parents instead of trying to satisfy the needs of a particular group of parents there are so many other issues that we could be utilizing these board meetings for like the third grade classroom sizes at hopkins for example my son is in third grade at hopkins we have phenomenal third grade teachers that's not even a question but we are not setting our students or our teachers up for success in the classroom when we overfill the classrooms with students the students want to get to know and build a relationship with their teacher this is a struggle with everyone competing for attention with the different learning needs questions and different learning levels styles of our students

124and it overfilled the classroom my son is a wonderful caring and amazing third grade teacher this year he will remember this pivotal year just like my older son remembers his third grade year with mrs mclaskey for the rest of his life but in order for this to happen we need to make sure that my son along with the other students in third grade have a conducive classroom size to learn and grow in did you know that reducing a class size by just seven students was found to increase student achievement by an equivalent of three months of schooling four years later that's a 32 percent increase with significant long-term effects this is a critical year for the third grade students they need to meet reading requirements to move on to fourth grade and they will start

125taking state tests this year we need to be proactive by reducing their class sizes from 27 or 26 students per class to 19 or 20 students per class to improve the quality and retention of their education we can do this by adding an additional teacher adding teacher aids classroom assistance to each class collaborating with the early childhood education program and giving those seniors who are students the opportunity for real world experience by helping out in the classrooms or any combination of the three together our student numbers are climbing at hopkins and we need to figure out what we can do collectively to ensure that we are setting up each teacher and each student for success this year and in future years to come and i want to say thank you to mr heath who actually

126came out to hopkins several times and met got to visit our classrooms and meet our students thank you good evening amanda alafey 5428 marshfield lane i have a son at shore and a daughter fourth grader in a private school i'm going to keep my remarks brief and i'm going to be careful to direct them to the board and mr heath up up on stage as it seems to be a bit of an issue this evening i don't know if any of you heard the radio broadcast that was referenced a few minutes ago that mrs payne took part in this week i listened to it um she said nothing other than other than facts nothing that she would not have said up on that stage any meeting that we've had this year and i would encourage

127you as i'm sure she would as well to listen to what she said um again there were nothing but facts nothing but support for all of the men are students and families in our community and i would also encourage you you would do well to work with her over the next year you have an asset in that school board member up there because she represents i would say a majority i'm not sure how she would it be if she hadn't gotten elected up on that on that board um i don't know that you want to find out if she's not the majority when it does come time come time to put a levy on the ballot um so i would encourage you to work with her she has the families all of the families all

128of the students in our district they're uh in her in in her mind um i know that um for a fact so i would encourage you to listen to that broadcast and i'm sure any of you are more than welcome to do anything like that she as she said freedom of speech she did not resign that when she uh took took office here um but again i'm sure you would it would be something that you could listen to and you might learn from thank you [Music] [Applause] good evening my name is bambi vargo i live in mentor i am a retired montessori and special ed teacher with 20 years experience from pre-k through high school and i love teaching children to learn how to read and that is why i felt compelled to offer a

129different viewpoint on a book that was discussed last month the librarian of basra it's written it's written by the award-winning writer and illustrator jeanette winter the value of a book is not based on word count but rather on the story that those words tell us as we read critical thinking helps us to comprehend what we're reading and make meaning of it the setting of this true story in iraq and the heroine a muslim librarian aaliyah who takes matters into our own hands to save the collection of library books before the war breaks out makes this story a very valuable piece of inclusive literature for children who are muslim or of middle eastern ethnicity this book is a mirror enabling them to see themselves in the brave librarian for all girls who read this book it's

130also a mirror reflecting the heroic efforts of the librarian to save the books even after war breaks out for other children the book is a door allowing them to appreciate the middle eastern culture and universal qualities of bravery and community now with a nod to levar burton and reading rainbow just don't take my word for it the american library association awarded this book the notable children's book award in 2006 citing quote vibrantly colored pastel acrylic paintings create a sense of distance from the most brutal horrors of war while celebrating the courage of a brave woman in an interview with book page the author jeanette winter said that in the face of war you can focus on optimism by telling a positive story it was the quote it was the optimism of aaliyah that interested me

131she wasn't getting help from her government but she knew that to save the books she would be saving the past present and future of her country unquote so for all the parents mentor teachers and librarians who have included this book in their book collection i support you and i thank you thank you [Applause] my name is jacqueline mick i am a resident of mentor and i have three sorry can you restate your name monday jacqueline mick and i have three kids school age mentor schools has been making headlines with local and national news services first there was the high school student protest held november where students walked out of their classes to protest the administration's lack of discipline and consequences for bullying in response to the event mentor schools began their comments with these words

132providing a safe learning environment where students can grow academically socially and emotionally is our number one priority in mentor schools we are striving to cultivate an environment where each student feels valued and safe in school in april of this year mentor schools made the national news yet again and multiple stories published about mentor schools hiring a company called better lessons to give an in-service to teachers and staff amongst the top bullet points an ohio school district instructed teachers to become anti-racist co-conspirators to challenge a curriculum rooted in whiteness where teachers are provided with instructions to evaluate and alter curriculum which includes examining the effects of capitalism on the environment and biological systems and the oppressive nature behind enforcing standard english when media organizations called the board office for comments mentor school's reply was no comment

133last week mentor schools again made national news as reports of a memo sent out to all teachers at the high school and middle schools instructing teachers in how to handle interactions with transgender children as young as 11. if a student shares with the teacher what preferred name they would like to be called and the student does not want it changed in ic or google there really is no need to go any further that teacher can just use the preferred name with the student and there is no need to share the information with any other staff member or family member at the end of the memo assistant superintendent tim hammond proudly states that this is our district stance at this time i would like to hear comments from our board president on this issue especially given

134that she shared a post that sex education should start in kindergarten do you think it's fine to keep students interactions with staff members a secret from families why no comment on potentially controversial alterations to curriculum transparency and proper notification of legal responsible parties the parents should be the first step in any of these circumstances do you think our community the voters going to the ballot would approve of these practices if put to a vote please keep in mind these are children our children quit labeling these kids as black kids white kids straight kids or gay kids none of that should matter in school academia has drifted too far from its core mission there are no special circumstances where information should be withheld from parents thank you thank you hi i'm melanie majakis i live on

135birdie lane i have two students who graduated from mentor i wanted to say welcome to mr heath and thank you again to the board and the staff for everything that you do for our families and our students i just wanted to make a point that i don't think has been made about parents and the pronoun issue if a student is reluctant to share this information with their parents that indicates right there a concern about the family relationship and and how the parents and the the student interact in the home and instead of you know projecting blame on the school or projecting blame on teachers and educators who are just doing the best they can to help that student perhaps parents that are concerned about that should do a little self-reflection about why their children would

136be afraid to tell them that in the first place thank you anyone else campbell skyline view um i have one child in the district um i just have one thing to say about the person that was attacking annie that if what she believes is true then there's really only one person up on that stage that should actually be allowed to be up there because none of you have children in the system except for maggie cook correct so what she's saying is complete you know craziness so that's all i have to say thank you [Applause] good evening hearing well brandon towns marine parkway of two kids at orchard hollow um and uh took a lot of notes tonight and not sure where to begin i do only have three minutes thank you for reminding me uh

137the peanut gallery is talking right now i'm sorry um what we're seeing tonight um i remember hearing years ago after an election and it was it was causing a white lash similar to a backlash but a white lash it's what happens when people not people who are white but people who are defined by and clinging to whiteness lose and are losing they lash out and this has been happening for over a year from the coveted mass to d i and crt to now lgbt plus it's we're seeing it eventually we stopped responding to it and i'm just encouraging the board and our educators to keep doing what you're doing [Music] as an educator i know the difference between focus on the basics which i hate to say i like it now but i like it

138now and creating an environment where we actually can and that's what people aren't educators don't understand but you do at least three out of five of you do and i appreciate it because the educators know this we can't allow the echoes the the voices that are incessant yet ignorant to sway us i hope that this is the last time i get up here to talk about the repetitious ignorant hatred and bigotry by then by people who profess and proclaim to be people of faith i think there's a verse that talks about the part from me i knew you not you workers of iniquity i think we might hear that and the last thing i'm going to say is that the comment was made about more and more families not choosing our district and i want

139to just add two words to that just to kind of echo the importance of literacy in the three r's more and more families like you are not going to be choosing our district and we are fine with that [Applause] good evening linda o'brien 5842 tanninger court here in mentor i've been attending these school board meetings now for over a year and every month they get worse and now this evil agenda that you have been laying onto our teachers is now public knowledge your amoral anti-american indoctrination of our youth is now up front and center for the rest of the country to hear about as taxpayers we are your employers we voted you in you are the government we are the parents you work for us and you have violated our trust and continue to overstep

140into the role of parental authority parents are responsible for teaching their children morals truths and values and as redundant as it may seem the truth is even though you don't do it your responsibility is to do the basics that's reading writing arithmetic math science history and from the state test scores mentor is failing so the question is why is mentor failing and it's very easy to answer that it's because you are so distracted and focused on your secret curriculum the crts the sells the die and other programs that are there to just divide and destroy mentor schools are nothing but more than an indoctrination camp you are providing 12 years 16 000 hours of marxist education you are trying to dump down our youth and weaken them to be subservient confused and afraid you push

141transgenderism homosexuality racism dishonesty and deception and mary briner you want this to all start in kindergarten per your facebook post so the better citizens who are to have traditional values we are labeled as hateful and the bigots but i want to point out to you that we are not the transphobics the homophobics it is the people who are blaming us because of the values that they choose they are the bigots here we don't care what color your hair is we don't care how you dress or who you sleep with don't convert our children and i want to remind you of one thing we will vote you out we will fail your levies and we will protect our children thank you [Applause] thank you [Applause] good evening my name is jonathan broadbent i'm not from mentor

142i am bringing an outside perspective i'm here representing protect ohio children the first thing i want to say is that i want to recognize the board members who were up there of all beliefs and across the political spectrum kudos to you all of you for contributing your time and efforts to the betterment of children whatever people say and whatever religious or otherwise whatever their beliefs you people deserve a round of applause for what you do it occurs to me as i i'm bringing some outside perspective i'm in geoga county i drove up here at the invitation of some friends who communicate with protect ohio children about concerns in the district i hear predominantly concerns from the right that's just the nature of my position and protect ohio children and the concerns expressed in reaction to

143what i consider to be fairly far left movement within education people refer to it often as lurch to the left but i want to point something out as an outsider observing this this evening it's sort of interesting to watch the left side of the room make comments and then the right side of the room and the applause because it occurs to me that separate a few issues most of these people if they got into the middle or went out for a cup of coffee and talked about children and talked about education are going to agree on most every issue they're going to agree on most everything there are a few outliers and in my mind i visualize a venn diagram that's those circles where it shows overlap most of what we talk about most of

144what's important here and most of what involves today's children and mentors k through 12 education system is all in that middle circle where we can all agree we can spend in inordinate amounts of time picking at those little differences and driving wedges and being angry at each other but i choose to try to focus to the best of my ability on those common interests and just like people on the far right who might advocate for things that the the left would disagree with the left might advocate for things the right disagrees with education is that commonality and it protect ohio children what we have done to try to bring some commonality and belief and uniform action to schools like mentor schools is focusing on what we call the academic accountability project and what that's doing

145is charting academic proficiency i'm sorry to report that mentor is struggling get back please to focusing on those primary issues i recognize time has run out thank you [Applause] hi uh andy smith 7353 amanda place um i'm sure you would all like to go to bed at some point tonight mr heath welcome to the district i do not envy you you have a mind-blowing job ahead of you to settle into this role and also manage all of the chaos going on around us though i do not agree with the folks over there i do believe to my core that they care about the education and the protection and the growth of our children i have two sons here at the high school man they are not concerned about anyone's gender identity and how people talk

146about their gender identity they are they just do not care and that's it's beautiful i promise you it's beautiful because they just are at peace with it and they have been for many years our we have two family members that we call frunkles their two uncles they got married in new york state the moment new york state made that legal they've been our frunkles for almost 15 years they were children a little tiny children when that happened and i confess at the time we talked briefly how are we going to tell them it's so strange that kevin and steven are getting married and then they did and our sons were like okay so they're married now that sounds great and they are loving caring people that we adore but i also want to talk briefly

147about the things that we are teaching our students i think we are teaching them that if you don't like something protest against it even if the thing that you don't like has no bearing on you personally and i know you strongly feel many folks strongly feel that it has a bearing on their own life i'm here to tell you if we all take a breath for a moment some of these things are not the great huge issue that we would like for them to be and that there are forces and i'm just going to say political forces media forces long far outside all of our control and our influence that drive this it's the same reason why this same topic is happening across school districts across states across counties everywhere across the country in sync

148because there is this wave this inertia being driven by forces that are outside control of this room so what i would like to be able to leave my children with when they leave here is that they grew here at mentor schools if you all had a coach as a youth at any point in athletics you don't learn in your safe space we don't grow within our safe space that's where we go to retreat and take care but to grow you have to step outside your comfort zone and i don't mean to talk to you directly but i need you to step outside your comfort zone it's healthy it's how we show students it's how we help them learn how to learn they will not learn if all we do is protect protect protect we have

149to encourage them to experience new things uncomfortable things uncomfortable ideas uncomfortable experiences it's how you grow in life and that's what we want out of our students and that's what i hope that you all can help them provide thank you thank you [Applause] i spoke but i just wanted to say something towards annie um that's true everything i do is for the kids it's been that way i'm sorry ten years miss tennanture yeah we have a role you can only speak one time i thought it you could speak again if it's on a different topic one time they changed that oh sorry um that's fine but i'm still going to say this and walk away because somebody's got to do it the divide is causing a risk and it's affecting the students if you don't

150know annie i implore you to reach out and have a conversation with her i did and her heart is in the right place and she means well we don't have to agree on things matter of fact we don't bring on several things but you know what i understand where she's coming from and she takes the time to understand where i'm coming from so instead of us all just sitting and judging people without getting to know them reach out to her email call her anyone on the board but annie i like her personally and talk to her she calls me about certain things and just find out what your kids care about what they want and forgetting to say so just please for the love of our students [Applause] and i would just add that the

151same is true for all of our board members thank you miss senator go ahead hi my name is grace walser i just graduated from heist mentor last year i wanted to speak to the board because that's what we're supposed to be doing not to the people here and just picking battles about small things i want to defend myself um but i don't want it to be about the people here to cause fights i i've already spoke on this before it is happening in our schools and a lot of the tactics of the left are to deny deny deny and say that it's a lie and that this isn't happening to your kids it's happening to our kids because it's happened to me it's happened to kids i know that their teachers are telling them that

152they are as said earlier ignorant for their beliefs and what they stand for and who they side with in their politics and that doesn't belong in school unless it's a political government class we don't go to school to talk about our pronouns and what our political views are unless it's a discussion and teachers aren't even doing that there's many teachers and students who are aware that their teachers aren't having discussions with them they're telling them what they need to believe on either side i've had this and i've had this happen in my junior year and my senior year especially in my senior year i had to drop a class because my teacher constantly called me ignorant for not wearing a mask when i filled out the form and i have to wear a mask when

153that's a while because the school allowed you to do that thankfully to not be forced to do something you don't want to do against your will your will i'm sorry and my my beliefs that i didn't even mention him he felt the need to call people of my side ignorant and dom and that were conspiracy theorists and it's not true it that has no place in school it's bullying students it's not okay and we can all agree that we want the best i'm not i'm not a parent that parents want the best for their student their kids and they want them to or an education and i think most people want that but when it comes to learning about pronouns and lgbtq plus it doesn't matter in school because the point is to warn things

154to be like they said earlier i grow up to be a good citizen that's what we all want and it doesn't mean that we want them to be a good citizen as in they're a christian or that they're conservative or that they're republican it's a good citizen that has the right morals and values that happen to be from their parent that shouldn't have to come from their teacher and those discussions are to be with their parent and the student it blows my mind that people will let teachers um be their parent and and help them i'm sorry teach them the values that they need to have when it's the parent's job and i've experienced it okay i graduated i went through all minor schools it didn't happen until the end when the media blew up

155with all this left crap that we need to learn and therefore the teachers felt the need that they got to do it too and i know that they went through a cr crt whatever program and that's not okay either the parents weren't aware of that they're surveys that are sent out that parents aren't aware of and there's a lot of untransparency that's happening and the parents need to know and the citizens need to know and like this recent email that was sent out by one person not it wasn't approved it's it's insane to me that this is allowed and i'm fearful of the kids i may have in the future thank you thank you [Music] [Applause] anyone else no one else [Applause] okay thank you [Applause] all right do we have a motion to adjourn

156so move second please call the roll uh miss justly yes chris payne yes miss cook yes mr tuttle yes miss pryor yes motion carries we are adjourned at 9 23 pm [Music]