July 28, 2022 Board of Education Work Session & Regular Meeting

001okay get things started on time we're going to start with public comments so anyone wishing to address the board of education will be recognized by the board of president speakers are requested to identify themselves in their topic comments are limited during this session to two minutes public comments will be limited to a total of 45 minutes but may be extended by vote in the board of education so just to give everybody we're limiting our comments tonight so that the board then has time to discuss the two topics that were put out um since we only have an hour and a half before regular reading starts so that's why we've limited it to 45 minutes um and we'll just call as you come up we just want to make everybody aware of that that hand is

002part of the regular right so anybody wishing to address the board thank you so much um so i'm brian okava two three five sign drive and i want to talk a little bit about the house bill 99 and just prepared something really quick um so i could be concise really so while i have many reasons to be in opposition to teachers caring firearms it seems most pertinent to me that you you should ask school teachers and students and find out if this is an appropriate response to the increase in school shootings in their nation as i see it the function of school boards provide oversight and support for both students and teachers to both learn and teach in the most nurturing and effective environment so any response to hospital 99 should consult educators and student

003educator and student opinions in the gallup poll in 2018 73 teachers surveyed said to deal with that position of training teachers and carry carry guns in school additionally that 72 percent of that 73 63 were strongly opposed to the proposal when asked which specific measures would be most effective at preventing school shootings 57 percent of women favored universal background checks another survey i reviewed california state university that posted similar findings teachers in all states were interviewed and one of the states with the most respondents was ohio and in the survey the overwhelming majority said that 90 or 95.3 do not believe teachers should bear responsibility protecting students by carrying them to the classroom of all the gun owners surveyed 78 were in opposition to army teachers despite their their own so of 70 percent surveyed

004they were gun owners and they even themselves said that they were in opposition to gun ownership finally another survey funded by the department of justice said the student between the courts aren't teachers um i'm sorry time is up my point is that we should ask the teachers and the students if the thank you anyone else hello i'm richie knows i'm the one who sent you the presentation regarding your responsive classroom i'm a first grade teacher at parkside first i would like to open my time up to answer any questions about the slideshow or anything that any of you had i really appreciate it i thought it was really insightful at least just to kind of get a glimpse into how you feel like it benefits your classroom i first learned i mean i could sit

005here and talk and talk about the merits and the benefits of responsive classroom i first learned that as a career switcher at john carroll in the 90s they were using it in their collegiate classrooms as well as into the things and they did a lot of the same thing where they explained it to us then they said go out and see it and that's what we do as educators um one thing that i brought tonight since there are no questions was you know i again i could talk about it for hours and i've often done that um but let's hear it from kids this was from a six-year-old um he's now going into fifth grade and when i asked the parents if i may use this i have it hanging in my room but this

006is something their grandparents have and she just wanted me to reiterate how important it was not only to the child but to the entire family we did a poetry unit as part of our curriculum and he wrote this um at the beginning of the year we make a classroom family poster so we hold each other accountable to get to our hopes and dreams that we have discovered which is all part of responsive classroom and that poster's up all year and it says when you walk in your classroom you think of your family that moment inside your body a warm feeling what's loved to be a friend and you can get better at stuff and be who you want to be and so their whole family has this a six-year-old wrote this that's about all i

007have thank you any other public comments um laura fox third grade teacher at riverview speaking on behalf of rlea and my fellow colleagues on response responsive classroom firstly i'd like to thank the riverside board office members and anyone else from the district departments that were involved in adopting and training the teachers for a responsive classroom for those of you unaware unaware responsive classroom is an evidence-based student-centered social emotional learning and behavioral management system it consists of a morning message greeting sharing and a game along with modeling expected behaviors this program trained our staff to have an effective safe and respectful structure in the classroom and building it allows us to teach i have been trained in responsive classroom twice in two different districts and implemented it in my classroom the last seven years any school

008district that didn't require it i put it in my classroom anyway it's what teachers call a game team a game changer i love rc so much it's so much i in fact made it my number one goal i'm an iplan the data showed that rc had a positive effect demonstrating less interruptions due to the use of a chime that students respond to effectively here's a glimpse of my experience experience last year my student clientele was made a best friend that did anything and everything together throughout the week and weekend they played the same sports dance classes so on every day the conversations from those events carried into the classroom with my responsive classroom toolbox those problems diminished because they were included in the morning meeting sharing time each student was able to say good morning

009to their best friend be a greeter receive a greeting each voice was valued and respected each student was noticed by eye contact each student felt like they belonged every morning and they mattered secondly each year we had students that were extremely sensory based students who cannot make eye contact or say hello students who have triggers that will set them in a different mood and to end it because i'm going to be cut short there was a student who was able to not you do those things and he at the end of the year or one of the games that we played he turned to me and said mrs fox i get it now i understand why we're not supposed to make fun of people and he was a very extremely sensory based student so thank

010you yeah so i surprised to see that you're going into public comment right at the very beginning here today but uh i just want to say that you know of course you're going to bring the teachers in here and say that this is something that it isn't okay what the parents that are against critical race theory and social emotional learning are those marxist and divisive ideologies that we're talking about so you can parade all the teachers you want up here that are going to tell you oh this is great and this is wonderful okay but the parents are against is the divisive components of this and the fact that you're wrapping this up like a wolf in sheep's clothing okay we don't want critical race theory in the school we don't want these divisive uh

011kinds of things okay step back from that that's what we're telling you very loud and very clearly okay and if you'd like to see a couple hundred people here talking against it we'll bring them thank you any other public comment yes i wasn't planning on talking um um support my daughter but um i definitely want folks to know i want this board to know we've watched a lot of videos of how the board meetings have gone and there seems to be a lot of internet based conspiracy theory type stuff being talked about constantly and i i just wanted you to know that there are people in the school district who don't think that way who would like other perspectives to be violent as well so it i'm not saying anything negative about anybody um but

012things around social emotional learning and crt isn't taught anywhere um but there are things to try to understand what is good and what can be better in our school system so there are teachers there are parents out there as well as teachers who think these are good things i'm sorry can you just state your name chris salon thank you do you need an address do you want to give it that's 992 thank you any other public comment yes sir can i ask a question i'm sorry i just called on him not john music painting township i haven't won the question you know i do my homework and i look at people say oh we got this innovation look at where you got the information what is the source do your homework on the source and

013what agenda do they have it's like i've talked about the ospa the nspa and now we've got the cos sba look at the source where you're getting this information just because you get it from one of those sources doesn't mean it's good that this is what the people want here at riverside so i'd say the five of you like i said before the buck stops with you and the thing about what happens and what doesn't happen here at riverside it's all sitting at your table right there so i'm just saying look at the source where you're getting the information i called all of them i've been called a union and the thing about the thing about is i call law and talk to them i personally was in the union for over 30 years and

014i felt various physicians in the union and the thing about it is i also was management so i saw both sides of that so what i am saying is when it comes to looking at all these different groups to get information it's the five are used to do your homework to say okay this is something we really want here at riverside just because it comes from the cos any of them any of the organizations like the nsba we all know about that letter and so forth and so forth that's not what we stand for thank you um adrian picker staff i teach at buckeye and i work with the special ed population who they don't get a chance to show what they can do academically so when they're in the meetings in the morning those

015kids are able to participate and that's when they enjoy that so i would hate to see that go because you're thinking that i'm not even sure where crt is coming i don't nobody has explained to me what you think is being taught that's related to crt every time i ask nobody can tell me i mean it's a word that's out here because somebody made it popular and it's a buzzword but nobody's teaching that in elementary school so i mean if you can tell me what it is i really would like to know and i'm not being funny about it i'm so serious because you're saying this and teachers are starting to question what can i can i teach about martin luther king can i teach about ruby bridges i mean what can we teach what

016can we not teach tell me what it is that's what i want to know who can answer that we'll i would like to hear an answer to what it looks like thank you any other public comment i'm sorry what is your name [Music] any other public comment all right so we'll move to board discussion so i guess then i'll just remind everybody the two topics that we need to discuss here at the table the first one again was the request removes responsive classroom professional development um from what we're doing today so we'll start with that one okay um so i have a presentation if you give one to gary as well enough so i don't i don't know if you know how many of you know my background so i'm going to start just to

017show that that i have a long history with riverside i graduated 40 years ago this year class of 82 [Music] and this is a legacy event this past weekend i hung out with with three other classmates playing golf so i have a lot of good memories from riverside a lot of good experiences a good start to life the riverside i was elected to the board in 2011 took office in january of 2012 so i've been in office going in my 11th year so we've gone through a lot we've gone through a lot so when we i first got on the board looks like many of you are probably young probably don't remember this you may not have been with us at that time it's what i'm trying to say but the first thing we did

018was we cut 15 from our budget because we were we were overextended so so imagine not having a whole lot of experience coming in and having to cut the budget 15 having to take away specials having to take away pay to play or having to put in pay to play after that frankly we we had some some issues with with employment issues some of you may recall so for a period of time we had some issues with that luckily we worked together we worked that out but again it was a pretty tumultuous time and then we moved into uh doing some infrastructure improvements we were fortunate enough to pass a levy that allowed for two new elementary schools to be built which is a huge huge undertaking by the board and particularly the administration uh

019obviously there were things that that you needed to do you were affected as well then then as soon as we get those done we have covet right we have the coronavirus that comes in right so in the 11 years when i'm trying to drive home the 11 years that i've been on the board i i have we've all worked as a team and we've gone through hard times and we've come out on top right we have worked together we have been together we have we have sacrificed together and we have done good things for the district so so you may wonder why why the the state what's what's next right so who knows what's going on um so what's next i need to i need to set the stage because i really do believe that

020we have a problem with public education that needs to be addressed and i want to set the stage to kind of at least set some some guidelines and some some perspectives that may be helpful in establishing this this dialogue because ultimately we're going to have to work together to preserve public education moving forward so so if you would so what i did as well i you know this isn't just you know random opinion um i have the the righteous mind by jonathan heights some of you may be familiar with him he's a psychologist the devil's pleasure palace by michael walsh not an academic study but an excellent study on critical race theory in its origins got the constitution we have the colleen of the american mind also by by jonathan heights and and greg's luke

021johnoff talking about the issues that we confront today all books i've read multiple times i you know so i i take my role on the board very seriously i try to get up to speed i it's not just you know i see something on the internet and i say oh well this may be it this this is this is substantial work and and so i come at it from a perspective and then and then really we have two different world views that are in play so this is the communist manifesto and this is the bible so let's let's go in order so jonathan heights is a he's a phd uh psychologist and and i'll try to put in a nutshell i don't want to take too much time but although this is going to be

022lengthy what he did is he did research into moral values and he was able to determine that there were six different kind of domains of of values there's care harm fairness cheating liberty oppression loyalty betrayal authority supervision or authority subversion and sanctity and degradation so those are the six domains that are out there that he identified again a phd an expert okay and his hypothesis was that all political cultures and movements are based upon these so so there's a this is a fairly long book there's a lot of good detail in here i encourage you all to maybe take a look at this or read about it but one part of his experiment was this he took 2 000 people and of mixed political views left independent and conservative and they were broken down one-third

023into three different groups so each group was was equal in size one-third of the time they were asked to answer the questions asked themselves so if you're on the right here are the questions and you answer is yourself uh same for independents and people on the left one third of the time they're asked to answer as if they were the typical leftist and one-third of the time they're they were asked answers if they were the typical conservative so what were the results of that right because it's it's a pretty interesting experiment what how how do people when they think about other people's perspective what do they think how accurate are they in understanding what other people believe so who are the best at predicting how their political opposites would answer the survey conservatives and independents

024were consistently the best of predicting how people with other moral views would answer the questions leftists were worse at predicting how people with other moral views would answer they assumed the worst about conservatives what really is happening these are here's a this is a poor you know i did the best i could but this is a a poor representation this is a picture you can't see it i will give this to mr flacco we can put it online but this is this is a a representation of of the typical uh liberal slash leftist matrix all right and the takeaway here is that that liberals and leftists really only have three domains that they focus on care harm liberty oppression and fairness the other areas the the loyalty the authority the sanctity not not a part

025of their story this is again this is from the book this is not my reconstruction this is from the book conservatives unders are have have a moral basis in all of the areas conservatives understand fairness and harm but they also understand authority loyalty and sanctity um as well as liberty so so we right here we have a problem in my opinion and that's why i think that we need to figure out how to work together to save to save public education because because a lot of the people please if i may a lot of the people who are we're all in this together right everybody funds public education whether you're left independent or right and and here we are in a situation where where i don't think that that everybody's hearing each other right and

026i think that the again jonathan height phd has pointed this out that there's a problem that that that certain characteristics of people are not listening to one another okay so here here's here's why i think this next slide is important and the next slide is a representation of the this is from 2018 from democrat to republican ratios by academic field okay and you you wonder so this i think this is this is pretty descriptive so it starts out with engineering where there are 1.6 democrats per republican it works its way down through chemistry in progressive order uh history 17 to 1 biology 20 to 1. you get down to sociology 43 on basically 44 to one you get the anthropology and communications there are literally no republicans in this sample size and so it doesn't

027have education in here as it is a as a academic field i'm not sure why but it doesn't but if you average all these up the the average across all of them is 26.4 democrats to one republican okay so here's here's a quote from the study and i've got it i've got the the link here indeed faculty political affiliations at 39 of the colleges in my sample which were top tier liberal arts colleges are republican free having zero republicans the political registration in most of the remaining 61 with a few important exceptions is slightly more than 0 but nevertheless awkwardly skewed against republican affiliation and in favor of democrat affiliation the 78.2 of the academic departments in my sample have either zero republicans or so few that makes no difference we've got a problem you

028you may you may think that that you know i'm some yoco sitting on the board don't know what i'm talking about this is a problem this is this is we don't have trust because we don't have inclusion a word that is very popular these days we don't have diversity of thought in education that's a problem we don't have diversity of engagement and that is a problem if we want to save public education we need that we need all sides at the table having a voice so so here's the next question can we save public education i know you can't see this but that's what it says so so i as i said earlier i am a product of riverside schools graduated in 82. so believe it or not back when when vemmoth was called auburn

029road junior high school i was in a class and and i have no idea why this stuck with me but as an aside a teacher just randomly i i can't remember the context of it but but kind of randomly put up a different diagram of politics right most people think of the horizontal bar right the right on the right the left on the left and the middle in the middle but he said no there's there are other people as well it's a circle right it's a circle diagram and you got the totalitarian folks at the top communists and fascists you're working way down i have done some things but but you work your way down to the realm where you can talk about a representative republic which is what we we live in right and

030and how to gauge the you know where people are at on the spectrum right so so again i will make this available if anybody's interested but here's what it looks like i know it's a long long distance view but but you may ask you know you know what what are you doing tom putting communists and fascists together well you know communist and fascists actually have a whole lot in common they believe in the state over the individual no freedom of speech or thought no freedom of religion the god the state is god and ideology over truth are they different right they're not exactly the same right we had nazis we had fascists although they you know stalin did sign the the non-aggression pact with with stalin so excuse me with hitler so so you know

031are they really that different the difference between the between them is that fascists believe in the government singularity based on nationality or race and the communists believe on getting there based on government utopia the government utopia via class so one is is nation-based national nationality based or race-based the other is class-based that's that's the difference fundamentally between a communist and a fascist so you go down below so i do have the do not cross line which i'll talk about in a minute i have again just for descriptions i have liberal over here and conservative over here i have them both under the do not cross line so so why are liberals and conservatives together right we you know liberals and conservatives hate each other for a long time right think of all the all the

032races things have gotten worse certainly i think most of us would agree with that but even think back to the the 50s and the 60s and and in earlier times there's always been tension between these two and yet i have them both below the line why is that because frankly liberals and conservatives have a whole lot in common what they have in common is they believe america in america freedom they believe in freedom of speech the individual over the state judeo-christian principles objective truth freedom of religion and obliging capitalism so all those discussions that we had all those those those loggerheads that we had we still had fundamentally fundamental agreement on what america was about and where we were headed as a country we had different views on how to get there but but we

033were all all together right so what are the differences so so obviously we've hated each other right you know in a political sense so what are the differences so so conservatives believe on getting to representative government again which is what we have based on meritocracy and limited government power and liberals believe in getting there based on government is a course for good and that equal opportunity is important it's not that conservatives don't believe in equal opportunity or that that liberals don't believe in meritocracy but it's what they believe the most right it's what they have most faith in so that's that's that's the ranker so so what's the do not cross-line it and i i didn't describe this fully so at the very bottom so you have communists in in batches at the top at

034the very bottom you have a line that talks about libertarian libertarian extremely limited government uh so they're they're definitely on the opposite end and at the very bottom you have anarchy no government so what's what's the do not cross line the do not cross line is the line that you go over when you take away the fundamental principles of that support a republic you take away the common values you take away the freedom of speech you take away the freedom of of religion and you take away capitalism you take away the individual so that's the do not cross line and that's that's something we're going to talk a little bit more about i'd like to talk a little bit more about okay so so that takes us up to to you might be saying well

035what's this have to do with sel and that's a good question so what does it have to do with seo sel is has some positive things right we've heard we've heard multiple teachers give positive reports about sel but i don't think that we are thinking about it in a critical enough light education is trending right so you can't just take a snapshot today and say that's the way it's going to be 10 years from now what's what's next what's next with sel and and you can find out a whole heck of a lot more you can go to marxist.org i talk about in information i sent to the board and to the uh to the members of the administration i talked about um a lot about the books i gave references so you can smirk

036if you'd like but but you need to you need to learn you need to understand i am one of the least woke people here i am really not interested right now again uh public comments done so just to keep us on track so so the the bottom line is is this is that there there there's going to be a bait and switch you talk about you know be nice don't don't make fun of people but this is this is the problem is that you're going to the next switch is going to be if you make fun of people who are lgbtq then then you are unacceptable they're going to shift the the focus of the values and what they promote and and what well here's a reference i have two two things for you to

037ponder this is from aei the american uh enterprise institutes and and i will say this you know there is no literature from from academia against sel in my view the reason there is no literature against sel is because you're in an echo chamber there is no device there's no there's no other opinion you are you're in an echo echo chamber and you are listening to one one another and you're not getting any other opinions but here's from aei before it before 2020 sel was a broadly bodysuit bipartisan enterprise what happened well because in 2020 castle infused sel with crt aligned sel 1.0 as we would call it focused on morality neutral student competencies such as self-awareness and self-management back in 2019 it struck me as an unsustainable enterprise a morally free attempt at moral education

038in 2020 those world competencies became valuating with values derived from the left academic ideology popularly known as crt castle embraced this ideology shift under the name of transformative sel okay now you can you can discount this if you wish because it's not quote unquote academic but but i will tell you that you don't have i don't believe that you have the tools to critically look at this to critically think about what's going on with seo i agree that that there are some positive aspects to seo that because you've said it you've experienced it but it's never static what's the next step what's the next shoe to drop this is the next shoe to draw it's going to be you can only be kind and nice and and and good if you frankly accept the the

039crt guidelines on morality which are frankly based on ultimately the marxist the communist manifesto so so next up the other the other the other point i would make i don't know how many of you are aware but uh we we have a currently have a stay but the usda yes the u.s department of agriculture has put out a decree basically that says that if you have money that you're getting for poor students to help feed them during classes that if you want to maintain that you will have gender neutral bathrooms i'm sorry i just want to stop a second because our question today is there's a lot of information right i understand but our question today is about what requests to remove responsive classrooms so i think we just need to stay focused on this

040so let me let me justify what i've gotten on this path is because sel may not be you know on the surface they may not be issued you need to go behind and look at what's going on you can't take a snapshot and i'm telling you that there are things coming down the pike that are going to affect us this is not a static situation and there's a next step so we need to be prepared if we're going to be reasonable board members and do our job and be prepared for what's next we need to understand that this is critical information so so i'm listening to all this and you know i'm not here to preach about morality or values i'm not here to talk about republican versus democrat i'm not here to talk about

041conservative versus liberal um just people just people who don't understand one another who don't communicate who are afraid to communicate because they don't because they're not comfortable with it and you know i've been through some trainings and and listened to things and fear is in my opinion is what prohibits change and creates strife um that the conversations that make you the most uncomfortable are probably the conversations that will create the most change and while we may have some uncomfortable conversations i think they're necessary but change is good and change is where we have been headed and i'm proud of the change that we are making in our classrooms to make young people responsive to what it is that they will experience out in the real world and i have a couple of other things so

042like i said i believe that uncomfortable conversations will drive change i believe that the practice of inclusion is what makes people feel valued and that they're able to contribute and thank goodness for our teachers who are doing that in their classrooms every single day it just makes me really emotional sorry thank you that the more you know about individuals the more you break down the implicit bias and create equity in our society which is so needed it makes me sad that our society can't see that and then [Music] not everyone is hearing one another and that it means more to have open and honest communication and that's why responsive classroom is absolutely necessary in our classrooms and our jobs in our world everywhere not just here it's not about education it's about society and how

043how we work with one another [Applause] thank you for your comments i'm glad that we're having a discussion but but change change change is not necessarily good change is inevitable progress is optional right change is going to happen but progress is not guaranteed and i will tell you that that if we get away from the founding principles of the united states which is on the individual we are we are going to end up in tiering is where we're headed right now so so you you talk about again mrs krasinski we need to expand the conversation we've been waiting for a long time what what's next so the gov what happens if the stay goes away are we comfortable collectively with with having uh non-gender-based bathrooms so so there's a stay on it and and that

044if you look at the article if you look at it there's a stay on it and and there was an article that described it as well okay so so you're welcome to your own opinion but what's coming on it's coming here we have a district next door to us that has preferred pronouns not required but optional are we going to have transgender in sports do we believe are we are are you feminists over the next few years um responsive classroom i did a lot of research myself and the one thing i did ask for that i did not receive was what is that that professional development specifically is bad and i did not get a response to that and i'm sorry when i go when i hear the teachers telling me that it's working their

045kids are engaged that they're learning and everything that i found on it i look for non-partisan even though we're non-partisan i should not have to go and look liberal or conservative i shouldn't have to do that we're not a person we should be thinking that way and we should be making sure that our kids are learning all kids are learning and i'm not seeing that and i think the other things is they calm down we'll have to talk about them and it's going to be very difficult discussions and just because the school next to us is having to deal with us it doesn't mean it's going to come to us it may it may not and i think we have to tackle them as they come are we looking at shutting down this discussion right

046now or are we looking at continuing well i think in regards to this question that you asked us to remove responsive classroom professional development i i don't know i'm personally i think we keep it i think we continue to do what we're doing we're seeing problems right now are we open to further discussion and information or are you looking to shut this up this work session was the brief in regards to responsive classroom the specific question that you asked if you want to bring up something under new business and start a different discussion i think we do that i'm looking at talking about responsive classroom i'm asking are you trying to shut that down right now no i'm not i'm just okay so i have something i want to ask i thought you were interrupting

047saying okay we need to stop well no i'm saying that she'll never speak about it what i'm saying is we're not talking about the bathrooms or anything like that we're talking about responsive classroom i want to make sure that we have a chance to speak about that okay and so in the training manual and i'm assuming the teachers went through the whole training manual right and there was a question asked at the last meeting that i couldn't get an answer to and it was what does as much as mean is it more than less than or equal to okay and i think that's a pretty simple answer as much as means equal to right can all agree on that so in the training what it says is that they want the teachers to spend as

048much time on sel as academics did you see that in the training so we're not doing that i'm going to talk about and so i'm making a statement a question is in the middle of that statement and maybe that question should just be looked at as rhetorical okay instead of being interrupted so as much as and i and i just heard someone say well we're not doing that well the training says you're to do that the question is why are you not doing that and also the quote the the training says that you as much and as much as you know your student you are supposed to know the students families you've gotten to know each of your students families the mother the father the brothers the sister the grandmother and so have all the

049teachers gotten to know each of their students fan pass okay so what i would suggest is that if there is a teacher or a few teachers that have done that it's going to be the great minority and that's not being done because it's my understanding the teachers as a union have a contract and at a certain time of the day at the end of the day they're done and they're not required to go beyond that nothing can force them to do that and it's a contract so when is when do you take the time to meet each of the students families do you doing do that during the class day do you go to their homes do you invite them into the classrooms okay and so are you leaving the school to go to their

050homes during the class day and and so how are you getting to know because as much as is a very serious statement okay how are you getting to know each of your students families as requested and required by the training in in the training manual okay so i'm just suggesting that there are things in there that are next to impossible to accomplish okay and that being said the responsive classroom website will tell us very clearly anyone that goes on there can see it it's equity equity equity equity i also asked a question at the last meeting what is the definition of equity and i didn't get an answer on that either okay well some people look at equity as equal opportunity well that's not the truth okay equity means that everyone has the same outcome

051okay and the goal of marxism is to socialize to people okay and have equity and what that means just like in shaker heights when they removed an ap math class this year because the lower students were not able to achieve the higher scores they just removed the class altogether okay that means the upper performing students do not have any longer the opportunity to take that class okay it was suggested to me by people that had no idea what they were talking about that it was because shaker heights maybe didn't have the money or the teachers to do it that is not the case okay and at shaker heights and i can tell you because we have a friend that has taught there for 20 years the same thing happened over there with their rides program

052it came in at a very low innocent level and now it's full-blown and it's a major problem it is so bad over there the kids are basically running the asylum the the fights the violence the the disrespect for the teachers and the teachers are not backed up by the administration to do anything about it okay so it starts as a very innocent thing and then it continues to grow and grow and grow there's another another facet to this which is gathering information on everybody and part of part of the growth of the program if you will will be to gather information and have files on every student okay so how do you create a file while when the teachers are required to make notes you're creating a file okay when those notes are done on

053computers those computers aren't locked up to where only you see them the people that own those computers actually sell that information in many cases and sometimes even internationally okay so you might not be aware of that but it's just like facebook and google okay how do they make money well they make money because we're the product they sell our information to companies that want to sell things to us but it's a whole other whole other topic okay so when we are creating information on students it becomes a file which can follow them through their whole lives that's dangerous because it can harm those those kids it can harm them when they get older especially if something is in there that that someone wrote that's not favorable to that student and somehow a a potential employer

054gets a hold of that it can be harmful so anyway when you're looking at what's best for the student okay well basically reading writing and arithmetic okay is best for the student and when we are saying we need to spend as much time as on sel as academics we are taking time away from the three r's okay in my mind that's not healthy that's very dangerous and it's heading us in the wrong direction especially since over the decades the united states has gone down down down down down compared to the world in testing test scores okay and and so when we we look at riverside specifically on the chair of the curriculum committee and i'm looking to make some improvements especially in the math area where we've declined some and and so i'm looking at

055opportunities as to how we can do that okay but that that's a very very small area if you look at it globally we would like our scores to stop declining let's arrest that and start increasing those well that means we need to spend more time on academics so if we're spending the time on socializing the kids we may believe that that makes some kids lives better and very well made but when you're looking at all of the students we're not then giving the opportunity to all of the students that should be available to them and i i also suggested in a presentation to to the curriculum committee that teachers are not therapists how many teachers have psychology degrees well i would suggest that probably not very many so then they're not qualified to be therapists

056so as teachers become therapists and are writing therapeutical statements in in a kid's file on a student's file i think if it becomes outside of what should be acceptable um i'm not i'm not going to go to a carpenter to get my eyes fixed okay so you know we we have general rules and guidelines and we do hire people specifically with specific specific degrees to teach specific things and i think that we're off on the wrong track when uh responsive classroom says that that the teachers are supposed to be therapists another item that's in there is one of one of the items in the responsive classroom training is in this again is a small item but i'm just going to put it out there it says that if a student a child is confused and

057doesn't know the answer their training is that that student's supposed to figure it out themselves it's right in the writing and you may have seen it if you've gone if you've gone through the whole training so i could talk for hours about this but those are the highlights so can you tell me where at in the book it says both of those things as far as a teacher being a therapist and if the kid doesn't know you well it's in the training book you can find it i couldn't find it and that's why i asked okay it's not it's not in that core it's in the training manual is there another manual yes there's a trainer and while superintendent is looking for that what i would also suggest is this i believe anytime we do

058something differently in the schools we should be telling the parents we're supposed to be an open society i specifically asked uh first last year uh i wasn't on the board then but when the board purchased the product and the training occurred the parents were not notified when the training had completed and the program implemented parents were not notified today parents have not been notified nobody not one parent has been notified by email by the superintendent therefore i had asked superintendent kayla's if he would notify all the parents that we have in the district brought in a social emotional learning program called responsive classroom and he said no he would not do it why are we hiding the information from the parents yeah i don't think we're hiding it i think we're having discussions about it

059it's out here very little bit yeah there's been an email that went out to online requested it we've never done that so it needs when we bring in something new and this is amazing i mean it's 130 140 000 we spent that's a major change we should be well let's go back to let's go back to the the bond levy vote how many communications were sent from the school to all the parents so let's step back was that requested by the parents to be done no we we the board so you are one we as a board voted on that to send out all those numbers to voted that we were going to put it on the ballot so they sent communications with information that's okay but my question is did we as a board

060request and the school send out all these communications to the parents yes we did we did not finish by vote of the board that was the will of the court you know instruction is that they will do that right so following that thinking when we've spent 130 some 140 000 on something it would be logical to go ahead and inform the parents so we do we've done many things like that through the years we don't we don't send out emails on everything we do especially for professional development and it's discussed here at the board table so that was on the agenda it's available to everybody it's public that way that it's available to people and it was discussed i'm going to tell you there was not much discussion it was a rubber stamp vote it

061was discussed in the curriculum committee which you are now the chair of and that's where new things should come in and be discussed president last year in april when it was voted on to purchase the program there was almost no discussion in the meeting it was brought up as a line item and approved because the public would have no idea what it was because of how we handle we have committees we have a committee chair at that time it was so mr miley was our committee chair mr hack sat on it it was discussed at the committee meeting the role of the committee is to bring that information back in with any concerns anything we need to know about so that we can have a discussion about it so that's how it is done it's

062how it's been done if you ever if there's something with the committees and the way we operate that's a whole nother discussion but that's what we do okay so you what you're saying is it's not the school's responsibility unless they're directed by the curriculum committee not a board vote but the curriculum committee to send out that community that's not what i'm saying how would the communication get sent okay what i am saying is we have never sent any communication out about professional development at this time would anyone disagree with that there was no request by the board saying hey we need to send a communication out so the administration would not send a communication out all right when the teachers sit down and somebody can correct me if i'm wrong but i remember sitting in

063an elementary classroom not too long ago the teacher sits down and they tell us we're going to do circle time we're going to do this we're going to do this this is how our day is structured so as a parent i know how my day is structured the things we're using morning meeting is just like circle time it's always could you please explain that again when the teacher says we're doing circle time you know how your day is structured so when other parents alright as a parent when i would go in for orientation to meet with a teacher the first thing they do is they sit down and they tell us here's how your child's day is going to be structured here's what your child is going to be learning because this is only k-8

064so it's not high school okay that teacher tells us that as a parent if i'm concerned that my child is going to participate in a morning meeting that teaches them how to greet somebody teaches them how to say hello teaches them how to have a discussion i need to say something through my new little portion of seo and responsive classrooms i mean we're talking about one small item and so i'm talking about the global program of response and classroom and so all i'm saying is as a board our responsibility should be to inform the parents what we're doing in the district and i'm saying we failed to do that can we now as a board agree to inform all the parents that we have a social emotional learning program that we have brought in and

065has been implemented into the school program so we have social emotional um professional development where teachers are using certain tools that help their classroom engage right i am not i don't know at this point that there's a reason to send a broad communication personally but why not you're still denied i'm not denying anything mr officially i mean you don't want to send out a communication i don't afford already with information all the time i'll tell you i haven't had an opportunity to talk about this yet but mr official said something that about hiring professionals we do hire professionals we are teachers with degrees we hire administrators with doctorates they give us these recommendations based on years of training and years of education my job i work at lake erie college but i'm not a pro

066i'm not a faculty member you work in the roofing industry you work we all work in different like different worlds it doesn't make us like i should know if you're making a decision on this dr malachar is our director of curriculum we pay her as a director of curriculum she's a doctorate these people do this for the job and they are telling us that it is hugely beneficial to their classroom i would never take from that ever and i think the fact that we're sitting here and actually having to talk about it for this team time already is getting ridiculous and yes when we talk about it we're going to end it we talked about this the reason we were doing this today was because once we come to the decision we have to finish

067talking about and say how we each feel about this and it goes 3 2 zero four one whatever we can't talk about this every single month we cannot because we are getting sidetracked from all the other really great things we should be working on instead of allowing our teachers to do their job and trust that they're doing their job because that's what we hire them for we hire them because they are professionals these two are professionals but but i'd also say this that that our job as a board is to be a sanity check all right and what do i mean by that would anybody in this room outsource whether or not we go to war to to the department of defense would anybody would anybody no of course not you would have you have

068um you have the the politically elected body the president as commander-in-chief it is not the military that decides when we go to war he's a sanity check do we do we outsource policing do we let police do whatever they want in order to protect protect us the answer is no they could if they want security they can put a checkpoint at every single intersection in concord or paintsville township or wherever the point is there is a check there is a sanity check on everybody's domain there needs to be a sanity check in education as well and i know that that your many people are unhappy with what i have said but i am telling you we're going to save public education you need to engage with people you need to read things that you don't

069know normally read we need to we need to come together i was going to suggest that that i want to i want to save education i that's why i went through the let me of all the things that i have done for the district my history with the district my commitment to the success of riverside right i think the coddling of the american mind would be a great book for us to to commonly read and understand what's going on because there there's a lot of things going on that that frankly social uh social social media and other things are are totally disrupting american life it talks they talk about that here we need to talk about those things there's a one of the things i'd ask the members of the board to look at is

070something called the creepy line if you have access to amazon prime video i suggest you you you view it it's about an hour and a half and it talks about what google is is doing and taking information and manipulating it storing profiles you everybody kind of smirked i mean let me just take that back some people were surprised at mr officials uh comment regarding regarding google and and what have you you need to understand you you are being profiled everybody who uses it is being profiled our students are being profiled you as a staff when you use google and we use chromebooks you're being profiled there are things that we could band together with to increase the circle of inclusion in trying to to save american education starting with riverside and i would like to

071be a part of that but but we've got to figure out a common goa common ground and i would suggest that and that i will not i will not ever vote again to approve acquisition of chromebooks because it is it is it is absolutely the wrong answer i and i recommend you may disagree with me but i'm sure the vast majority of you or many of you have uh amazon prime i would i would look at the creepy line and see if it doesn't change your mind so i would just like to ask what all this has to do with with the social emotional learning programs that we're using i'm not exactly sure i'm following this line of thought for for myself i think i'm confused but i'd like i'd like to answer a question

072from mr fishel when he asked about equality and equity and if i can maybe give an example because it was an example that struck me and it it it meant something to me so you have three people and one is five foot and one is six foot and one is seven foot and you have a fence that is eight feet and they all want to look over the fence okay but the person who is seven feet he only needs he you give everybody a one foot step well one person can now look over the fence and the other two can't well at the end of the day that's equality that would be equality but equity is the fact that i get three steps and now i can see over the fence as much as the

073guy who was one and needed one step to look over the fence okay that is equity and when i look at equity in our district and i look at what teachers do in their classrooms and i've been around for a long time here and and was on you know the dlt and whatever and that we had here and i remember talking about the third grade reading guarantee when that you know that came out and how how much how much teachers had to give some students more than others in order to get them to be able to read is that wrong that's what we're supposed to do in our classrooms we're supposed to be reaching students where they are and where they need to be in order to be successful in this thing called life that's

074equity and if somebody has a problem with equity when you look at it in that term man i got a problem with you like at the end of the day i'm just going to be honest like that is honestly so i'm sorry real quick i we just have also house bill 99 so how much do we have i have an hour okay so i'd like to make one more statement so you said you're confused about the sel so maybe i could wrap up what i'm saying i'm saying like this is just about we're on this google and tracking and like all that okay okay fine and and so just to be clear so that everyone here and anyone watching and anyone who will ever hear or see this i think that we have a really

075strong district in the riverside local school district i think we have a lot of very very good teachers and i believe we have a lot of good staff and administration i think we have a very good district okay my goal is to make it the gold standard i think we have work to get there and i believe that the social emotional learning programs as it uh continues on would cause us to decline so that being said that's an opinion so that being said the social emotional learning program of responsive classroom was put out to k-8 and for the training for the teachers therein okay so how is this program being measured what is the metric because as i understand it teachers can pick and choose like an a la carte whatever they want to do

076or not do so if a program cannot be measured it can't be managed okay because you don't have consistency who's doing what this teacher is doing this this teacher is doing something else well how do you meld that together and measure that what is the tool the measurement tool that we are going to use to measure this program okay so i think that we don't have one right now i think we're deficient in that and i think that will cause us to have failure because if you don't have some consistency if you can't measure something you can't measure it you can't assess whether it's working not working or excelling okay so i just wanted to put that out there i think that it's a program that has unfair uh requirements of the teachers and of

077the staff and the administration as support and as much as getting to know each of the students families uh i'm about 99.9 99.9 sure that is not happening in the as much as no if you know the student this much when you see that student every day and it's impossible to see their families every day okay as much as uh teaching them or doing the sel program as much as academics well that's taking away from academics so i'll wrap it up that way i i would so in my opinion it should be remarkable i would sort of beg to disagree with you that we don't have measurements measurements of success in classrooms we at our k through eight we have test scores and it is my understanding that you go from the district to the

078building to the teacher-based teams that they communicate with one another about best practices and there's lots of data that dr mullocker will will take about students test scores and they have those conversations why is this classroom kids doing so much better for example and then they talk about what are you doing in your classroom and they share they share those best practices what are you doing in your classroom that's making that's making it work for your students so we do have data so to say we don't have data on on what is working in classrooms and what is not i think is is not accurate well i'd like to see a report of that data on the responsive classroom data mr if you can get that to me i don't think it's our responsive classroom

079i think it's just what practices are you doing what is it and it could be a bunch of things in combination it may not be any one thing but you may listen to another teacher say i do this and i do this and i do this well i do this one i don't do these other two maybe i should try them i don't know like i'm not in a classroom because it's professional development it's meant to help them in their classroom to do things better it's not a curriculum that we're removing it's not a curriculum that we can help make everyone better because the communication is exactly yes well i'm genuinely interested in that data i don't think there's anything exciting on how the classroom is doing so i think you're trying to kind of

080turn what was said it's on how the classroom is doing it's on how the teacher groups are doing one classroom or all the classrooms we have i mean every classroom takes tests there are state required tests they're reading tests there's all kinds of tests that kids take that that will measure their success and many times you can use that data to determine like what practices is this teacher using and you have that conversation i have no idea what this teacher may be using let's let's find out what is making that teacher successful is that could that be written down so we have a template i mean there's has to be something you can measure there's some data that they have in the teacher-based teams that they have documented all that i mean there has to

081be one way to measure just like like two plus two is the same through all the classrooms so real quick there has to be a template a measurement tool we can use to measure the success of the program and i'd like to see that okay so we have another topic to discuss can we sign that at a curriculum you guys can explore there's a way to measure it so so let me if i may just in conclusion i it is if we are going to have public education thrive people like mr fishel and i we need to be we need to have an inclusion in in the conversation we need to work together to figure out how to make it work for everyone there's you you know maybe it was too much information maybe you

082just disagreed but but we talk past each other and jonathan heights i think this understands why that is and there are a lot of things going on that the cuddling of the american mind touches on and is relevant to everything that we do in this district and i know this i don't know mr debassi if you you saw the creepy line did you watch the preview line i i would recommend that all of you watch the creepy line because you may have different opinion on whether or not google is good for you you have access to it's about an hour and a half and and i'm sorry that you didn't watch it because it may have changed your mind as well and i am i provided that you know two weeks ago it is it

083is important we have got to come together we i am flashing red because we are in a in a dangerous situation we need to work together to recover i want to be a part of that i'm not being i i am i'm trying to bring things forward that i don't believe you see and it's important that we have lights flashing in all directions so that we can see what's going on i am dedicated to riverside i wanted to succeed we have got to work together thank you don't call us fascists so real quick just to close this conversation the question that was asked let's talk afterwards let's talk about this so real quick the question that was asked of the board was to say are we going to remove responsive classroom professional development i can

084say that my where i stand right now is that we continue to use it and let the teachers use the tools i agree i would like to see it continue in the classroom as well so we're going to take a vote there's really nothing to vote there is nothing to vote public participation is over and we're moving on to the next subject of house bill 99 it's over it's over i mean it's over we decided to keep it yes okay yes the next question was should we change current policy to allow school employees to carry a gun which was signed into by governor dewine i think dr kayla you have had some conversations you can just provide us some information from the teachers union um i've received an according to the boards two emails um

085that represents the stance from the rla our teacher union and also the association of public school employees we think of our uh non-certified or non-licensed employees and both have suggested that they will not support um having our staff bring weapons or events in schools for the purpose of protection um i also asked other school districts what they're doing soon it doesn't seem like any school districts at least an immediate area looking to harm their teachers i know i had a chance i spoke to some officers that i know one of their main concerns which i had not originally thought of so i'm glad i talked to them was when you have somebody who is not um in uniform walking around a school with a gun during an active situation they said it's very hard to

086understand who's the shooter who's not the shooter you know what is going on and i thought that was something very valid that i personally hadn't thought of and anybody that i spoke to also kind of just understanding opinions were not in favor of it i would like to make a recommendation to the board as well is the fact that we all hold this whistle strongly about school security and safety that maybe we can work with the sheriff's department to see if we can get a deputy in which one of our schools right now we have um one sro assuming they have two uh they have different training than some of the deputies that work at the door here um we have also a deputy at but uh with the new sro talking to the sheriff's

087department at sro into some of our elementary schools as well with that being said our citizens is pretty large and the way things are going in this country in terms of the frequency of these violent acts that i believe we should pursue putting a deputy in each of the schools um one of the things the board also did was we increased the pay for the person and the door also for hiring them on our books not on the sheriff's department and also providing benefits which make this a little bit more appealing than what it has been since 1998 when we started having a personal work outside the door there are other things we're doing as well i've spoken to a couple of board members is trying to shore up um some of our safety protocols

088on august 9th we have an architectural firm coming in to walk some of the buildings that we think need attention one being the riverside campus entry also melridge and buckeye and uh looking at what those stuff and well yeah i'll move too we'll that one's a little bit easier when we're talking about that mr fisher and i were talking about that but also a little bit um but we already have a good deputy there but we're looking at security ventures um and uh that's what i would suggest like i said before it's not it's not that we don't believe uh we need um security we do but there's so many other things that happen in school that one might think that having many weapons in school even if it's by a person that has been

089trained although i do think this will be about four hours before you get 24 hours is not enough um i believe that there are some things that could happen um regrettably in the school just because of proximity and the number of digits so i have some some comments as well i mean so i i i called down to ospa and spoke to a gentleman by the name of little schwartz uh apparently part of security uh asked him you know if he knew how many districts already had you know basically armed teachers he did not have that information but he was able to forward to me some information on districts that do have armed armed teachers the first district i called does not match our profile they were uh our uh teachers and our staff sure

090right okay that's very yeah it's not just teaching that's a that's a fair correction so so that's it's our personnel in the in the school right is a better way of saying it thank you well because i mean sometimes the teachers say look it's all on us and it's not it's not you're you're that's something that's a great correction thank you so so are our armed employees in the school how about that okay so so uh so not our profile small district we're all concerned about getting um response time 30 plus minutes they it made sense in my opinion right in that circumstance talk to another district which pretty well matches our profile 3 700 uh students seven different buildings more of a suburban setting than a rural setting um and and what they did

091was was i thought unique which which is a derivation a derivative of of what what we have been talking about they have a an emergency response team and and what they do is the only the only person who knows all the members the members know who they are the only person outside of the response team that that knows who they are the superintendent nobody board members don't know nobody else knows what they do is they're not they are not armed throughout each of the buildings there are bio shapes bio-controlled cities so a thumb print on i don't know what it is but in some bio biometric that opens to safe in that safe are are the weapons that that would be used in such a scenario and uh as as was brought up how do

092you differentiate uh between you know good actors and bad actors in such a situation in in that safe as well is is our uh our best ballistic vests that that are that have some so to identify them as good guys and um in addition to that they do regular training with their local police department on a consistent basis so it is a different there's nobody walking around constantly with with uh with a weapon but they have that as a as a backup and this is my background is it information technology and project management and what do you do with security in a system you do it in layers you you might have a password up front but you want to get to another module you need a card with a chip you want to get

093to another module further in you do biometric you have it in layers you may all we're all familiar with all day there's no failsafe right we had armed they were armed personnel outside that door outside that classroom for an hour before they acted and by then it was clearly too late there's no if there is no way to guarantee safety but what if what if there was a biometric safe in that in that classroom maybe the outcome would have been slightly different would have been completely different the the other thing in parkland there's a uh which happened a number of years ago down in florida the the sro is is has been indicted and is actually on trial for his for potential dereliction of duty there is no outcome so we don't know what the

094what the the uh the status is but but i security in layers is something i think we need to consider and not walking you know having kind of a hybrid of having availability but not necessarily being armed throughout uh the day i think it's something we need to consider and i guarantee you in a hot situation each of you regardless of your opinion of what of of this would certainly wish that that you had that somebody near you was armed so so in that in the heat of the moment this is it's it's uh an abstract thought today so i think we know where we are but i throw that out there because because having security in layers makes sense in my opinion and needs to be have further discussion i agree additional discussion being

095what can we do to improve the school security like sort of walk through and understand what if there's any suggestions and what they where they would start i think is absolutely appropriate so i i would add a similar comment to what mr hack said if the person in the classroom had been armed with a firearm the question rhetorical question is would more students have died or fewer students have died i think we all know the answer to that because if someone had a deterrent in that room at the very least even if the person was totally freaked out and couldn't follow their training very well just pulled out that gun and shot towards the perpetrator that perpetrator almost in every situation would have fled at least from that scene and and so i put that

096out there and then what mr hack said i think makes a lot of sense uh for people that are fearing that a lot of people really fear that guns are walking around in a building having them locked up in a safe and biometrically available it's not immediate the recent case in indiana where a guy pulled out a gun started shooting into a crowd of people and someone who had a concealed carry within 15 seconds pulled that gun because they had it on on their person and killed that that perpetrator and saved a lot of lives okay so if we were in a no gun zone a lot of people would have died and and so this is a separate item and you may not agree with this i'm just going to put it out there

097i've heard the studies and since we've been giving kids people psychotropic drugs basically starting in about the 80s we know that it has a negative effect on the brain and a certain number of people lose their minds literally and now we're seeing a lot of this when we go back however far you want to go back cowboys and indians or whatever people were carrying guns everywhere we didn't have this problem but i don't know if you would tie it together i think there's a little bit of a link with the drugs that we're giving kids and and i think that it changes people's brains in certain instances and sometimes people can't handle it and they literally lose their minds and do crazy things so anyway it's it's we're in an environment where the that's not

098going to change and so what how do we respond how do how do we protect the kids and then our in ourselves and and so i just put that out there as as a proponent of at least some additional safety measures uh and i think that was a good idea dr kayla let me make sure i understand this correctly so in order in order to have this in our schools we would have to vote on it as a board to approve that amongst many other things usually as a board we don't take that up for consideration unless the administration is a proponent of that um or somebody from the board requests and there has to be two people that want to put that on an agenda so as as i'm understanding it you you would

099prefer as the administration not to have the board vote our last stop correct and the staff right but at this point time have been of two board members would like to have that they could do so but then we would have to vote so right now like we don't have it because we're not voting on that all [Music] um i believe and i'm not 100 sure but i think men are when we talk to them and said it was recommended that the resolution regarding not exercising the authority under household 99 be approved i believe it's a requirement from the bill itself that if you do approve it that you have to make a public announcement i believe it is neutral is it says nothing about not doing anything um i i think the guidelines were

100sent to us on june 22nd from uh dan our legal counsel he has six items to consider here yeah the way i understood it from talking to dr hartman mr mcintyre also is the only thing we need to do is if we want to put a resolution on to adopt something that's when you put it on if not we're just not changing something i think i think the conversation is what i would say so we're not making any changes at this point so i don't have to bring the special this work session for closed captions we have five minutes if anybody needs to take a quick break before we actually start our regular board meeting at seven so hi coach here come back here scott official here melinda gracie here here can we stand for

101the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to recover one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice on behalf of the board i'd like to welcome all students staff parents and interested community members tonight's board of education meeting i'd like to remind everyone that this is a meeting of the board of education held in the public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business it is not to be considered a public community meeting there is time for public comment during the meeting in the public participation section on the agenda our first um business approval of minutes the june 30th 2022 board minutes can i get a second any discussion [Music] motion carry next is special reports unless uh mr platform has a special report no special reports

102tonight that might be a burst right so next is old business i did not have any oh we do have one piece of old business and that is our facilities discussion we were trying to find a date um and after a lot of confusion i wanted to throw out can we have that discussion before the next board meeting in conjunction with our um creating our board self-evaluation so our next meeting is the day first day of school august 25th right really doing 5 30 again i think it's 5 30 good i'm okay with that if everybody's fine for me that's fine that works for me and this is for a facility yeah we'll do support self-evaluation which i think will be pretty quick you know just add a few pieces to that and then we

103can do the facilities well the one thing that we did want to do though with that remember united i think we talked about it briefly that mr hag and i had a phone call with osb about the school board member handbook and so we were supposed to be getting that first draft of it soon and we were going to present it actually to the board at the next meeting hopefully so i don't know if it would be you want to bring in as a new old business well i guess i was just thinking that well maybe a whole business we've been talking about this handbook but i guess my point was would be would it be beneficial to wait for the board self-evaluation until september to have the opportunity to present the handbook that we're

104still waiting to get from our sba and have the opportunity to reflect on that and then create what we need to self-evaluate ourselves because they actually buy one right now in the handbook so they said three weeks and it was what was it last week or was it two weeks ago i think it was two weeks so i think the time runs together it may be that we get that that draft handle of this coming week right because you and i it was a wednesday are your suggestions suggesting present the draft for us during the next board meeting on august 25th and then postpone our great nap evaluation until the i feel like we just kind of all go better together and that does that be my opinion to give us the opportunity to present

105the handbook and because you and i were going to talk about the policy committee meeting on the agenda you know i think that that that would be a reasonable way forward they're very related right okay and i think that in all fairness i'd like to give facilities our full attention to that so working session before the next board meeting on august 25th at 5 30 to continue our discussion on the facilities you okay with that yeah i defer too and then self evaluation to the next one yes for administration thank you gary can you can you amend the invitation thank you any other old business i just wanted to toss out there that uh i saw i thought i saw six new buses out in the parking lot uh is that accurate yeah we did

106bills or purchased two uh two months ago uh using two different credits on the state of ohio as part of that so as part of the old business they have arrived yes great it's always good to celebrate these buses good job by mr flashball executing that whole program any other old business right any new business all right so that brings us to our board of education committee and liaison reports so first one is business our superintendent's business advisory liaison which is myself there is no update at this time i just had one thing a new business just a short statement mr weiss and i are inventorying all the classrooms and laboratories and other rooms and we probably have two more days of doing that to be completed mr white's having engineering background is looking at

107putting together a report so we should be done with that hope while at least looking at the rooms next week and then however long it takes to put together that report that'll just help in moving forward and knowing what we have and and we know a lot of what needs done but we're going to have more information as we move forward into our renovation project and and um when we were in the building uh yesterday we had a nice conversation with superintendent kayla's and him a little bit to that earlier a little bit about safety issues and possibilities and opportunities in that regard and we had a nice discussion about that about 45 minutes and so that was good and just wanted to know ms westbrook was we had conversations he's interested in that is

108just exciting moving into her new position and i i just want to say it was a nice conversation and you know again seeing people especially ms westbrook you know excited about you know a new opportunity in the school and and um and i i think they have great wonderful i just wanted to say that so great um so again back to board of education committee and liaison reports um so again superintendents business advisory at this point there's no update on any kind on the report the next one is mr fishel who is curriculum and programming committee and alumni association so we had um an alumni association meeting on july 11 and a lot of this is repeating with what has been going on with the alumni association and uh they would like everyone that had

109ever gone to riverside to please join be a lifelong member they keep saying that so we're looking for new members uh the golf outing is september 24th at haynesville country club they're looking for people to be involved in golfing uh maybe getting a foursome together and also maybe possibility a little bit of sponsorship and then there's also a duck race and uh you know that i believe is in october and um that's really all the alumni association had it both in the party in the park uh the three-day event that just occurred and uh to have a presence and maybe sell some duck race ducks and opportunities and also t-shirts and just interact with the community so that's it for the alumni and as far as curriculum again just looking forward to an opportunity i

110know there's a program in place to to gather some more information that's going to take another year we're looking for an opportunity maybe to look at a way to improve some of our scores especially especially in math so i'm putting that out to the community i'm focused on that and hopefully we can we can find a way to improve our situation with those scores was there i'm sorry i didn't write down was there a curriculum meeting there not where you have another curriculum meeting schedule so there's one coming up so nothing to report on a previous meeting all right mr half buildings and grounds operations committee and legislative liaison updates um so the buildings and grounds committee met on on july 18th um and uh we did get an update on various things that are

111going on for with the summer work and things are coming along i've not seen the final product for example of the cafeteria john r but that work has moved all along and i did i think i saw something along the way that said it was basically done maybe still curing um there was progress made on the floors in buckeye just very quickly they're grinding the floors down to basically the original surface the new sealant they're putting on as long as you maintain it uh in certain ways it's supposed to last literally forever so i guess we'll find out and if it works at buckeye then it will be applied elsewhere including a campus where all our brewers are giraffes as well it doesn't work in the kitchens and what have you there are some other

112uh they went through the alarms the fire alarms and things like that making sure that they all worked and and that uh you could hear them throughout the building so that that's really an annual requirement and everything uh checked out and the other thing is they as part of that effort the the um i think it's really more fire rather than police but the fire uh department needs to be notified within two minutes of the of the handle being pulled and uh and that was uh that occurred so so we're in compliance and looking good with the fire extinguishers um the uh the you know one one thing that's been a continuing story has been the boiler at the moon and uh we originally thought that the boiler was going to be complete the new

113boilers are going to be installed uh by the end of this month uh unfortunately they they ran into supply chain issues and so that that project has been delayed and they anticipated being done by the end of august i you know there's always concern i believe that i think we have enough lead time i don't think we're gonna have any issues going into the fall the cold weather at this point but we are in a situation where we're not able to complete that aspect on the original schedule we also had a pretty extensive conversation on the athletic fields those of you who are familiar with our baseball program know that our baseball fields uh apparently have much to be desired i've never played ever played baseball at riverside so so i'm less familiar with the

114fields but they need some improvement we talked about some different options potentially going down the path is kind of hypothetical at this point but but that is something that needs to be on the on the uh uh on the docket and on the radar going down the place we you know we have uh by working together uh dr kayla's leading the way we have a terrific field um and stadium and and now we need to make sure that the rest of the facilities are on the same par as as the stadium so i there's some other things as well and i'll turn over to mrs rossi here shortly in case i missed anything but uh the big thing that that mr arlesik passed out uh is a spreadsheet that that covers all of the major

115systems in all the buildings and he rated them as critical critical meaning that you know work could be done today fair fair basically in a maintenance maintenance program but but have a shorter timeline and then good which he categorized as three plus years so um that that will be useful information as we go into our facilities discussion in august and and we can talk about that he will be able to expand he's not here because he is actually at his daughter's wedding so we should all wish he hadn't brought in room soon to be a good luck and married yesterday well they got married yesterday well terrific do you think that they're good so i they don't have these i mean we do we do like also if you could is this peeking that's not

116really small it does so that's it and mrs cross you were there as well did i miss anything important um the only thing that i that really wasn't on the agenda but we talked about putting out a request an rfq for owner's rep services for the district so that we could have some representation on our behalf to give us some construction knowledge and experience as we're trying to go through some of these projects or things that we are thinking about what they would see as critical and whatnot so that's actually on the agenda today correct are you actually we've already put this it's already been put out so we put it out just in the essence of time uh we released it on july 20th it was advertising the public notices section which the construction

117firms all picked those up all the time to the head several were reached out to me to express interest um statement of qualifications are due obviously we set aside some time on august night to introduce depending on what kind of responses if possible might have something right as reach out to kind of clarify what we were looking for what kind of projects we were taking which obviously is still to be determined all right mrs hardin policy committee or booster organization yeah so um like i said mr heck and i need to get a policy meeting on the agenda for august prior to our next board meeting i don't know tom if you just want to have an email sign between you me and chuck since he's not here today i don't want to probably say

118without having him yeah can you shut up oh just kidding i mean i can well i'll not be able to get an answer on it correctly at all either but take from the three of us right um and then i did the biggest thing with booster today at 6 30 unfortunately missed the meeting but today was the first meeting with the riverside um pta i believe i it was 6 30 isn't it right it was the second meeting and i think it was six six years right so we missed that but there was another one at the high school pta so it's exciting to see that continuing they're meet and get some support from high school right now thank you that brings us to the superintendent's report obviously there's a lot of things going on

119in the summer but we don't have kids in the building uh departments are busy getting the buildings ready for the school year transportation getting the buses ready and some questions we received over the course of the summer it's anything about bus stops or even about schedules so before i start with my presentation melissa's gonna talk a little bit about this tip so there may be some question about what schedules will be released always at this time of year that that talk starts high school schedules are ready to go they can't be rolled over and released until summer school closes so at the first probably around the first week of next month high school schedules should be released within the first and second week lemoo's schedules will be released and then elementary schedules teachers which is

120really what elementary parents and students are worried about will be released the friday before school starts so we just wanted to everybody to know and that's kind of be out there that's when schedules will be available for access [Music] so the difficult part about this though is that the numbers are so fluid in the kindergarten area that's difficult to tell you whether or not it's going to look like this in a month what i can tell you though is the numbers that you see out there will probably increase because we don't have all of our communities registered and for example if you look at kindergarten registration as it sits right now we have 203 registered well we had 328 kindergartners on june 3rd which was our last day of destruction but if you look at

121um buckeye first grade project first grade this year is 75 last year we had 61. so that was an increase we also had uh 58 last year if you follow along with me in second so it's an grade 61 last year and 61 so far this year for an even number and 66 in fourth grade which is an increase and then fifth grade 52 last year 40 this year i started jim in fourth grade you said how many 39 last year 66 this year now that and out of all the grades you have won that stephen and then we have other three others that have increased and one that decreased you would think throughout through the roof well really the difference right now is 343 last year as opposed to 345 this year for an

122increase of difference of two the thing we have to realize though is the kindergarten numbers again excuse me last year okay we had 72 kids i'm sorry we have about 72 and this year so far melridge again we have 57 in first grade last year 43 projected which is a decrease last year in second grade increased third grade is 48 a slight decrease of one student last year we had 38 in fourth grade an increase and then 47 uh last year and 44 projected this year for a decrease the difference between total enrollment and knowledge from last year this year is only 10 students and not too much of a difference in the kindergarten last year we had four in the now we have 34 projected so numbers are pretty stable there parkside first grade

123we had 93 last year 106 this year so far before an increase 88 last year in second grade for an increase from 97 third grade 81 last year this year is projected at 94 for an increase fourth grade 88 last year that's our 88 last year 86 this year slight decrease 68 last year and 90 students projected this year last year's full enrollment in the building is 5 34 on our last day of school and right now we have bike 17 for a difference of 17 students but again kindergarten numbers we have 919 last year we have 61 registered this year so not too bad pretty stable riverview i think one of the bigger numbers is the fact that you got seven we have suddenly projected in kindergarten and we had 117 last year we

124actually had five sections in there we had 76 uh first graders last year we have 122 this year second grade 117 last year 77 projected this year third grade 111 last year 117 projected this year 91 last year for fourth grade projected 111 uh and fifth grade 92 last year and projected 97 this year if you look at the numbers last year in june we had 604 right now they have projected the 590 for a difference of 10 students but again including members might change that okay so the total um if you look at all this of the enrollment the elementary schools last year we had 1735 we got projected this year uh 1754. again that's probably going to change again for the eighth time um sixth grade [Music] we had uh 300 last year

125we have 267 conducted this year seventh grade 306. last year 309 this year and if you go to the eighth grade the high school is pretty stable as well you have a decline in eighth grade slightly 346 to 320 ninth grade 363 to 348 those are the two grades that are declining the remaining grades increased slightly 10th period that was 362 last year projected this year's 365. 11th grade 358 projected 365 in 12th grade 348 last year in the production of 356. it's only a decreased total of 23 students thus far the district total right now is 4084 last year was 4 256 for a difference of 172 students but if you look at it the difference of 125 students from kindergarten last day of school to um projected uh of 203 so we configured

126probably another 100 150 kids distributing them so i think we'll be pretty close to being are we seeing growth like i mean like where there's development in our district like is it impacting all schools or specifics um i it probably will outlive my time here but riverview in the next couple of years because of the development i mean there's a lot of development going on you know possibly renovate the high school but what we're going to do about the enrollment in some of our elementary schools uh we can be district probably a little bit but it's not really going to do a whole lot for us because if you look at the members at hawkeye knowledge you're actually really want them to meet you know we're talking about 22 students in the classroom around there

127they want to be too high and they have a community so have you gotten any further information as to when they plan on breaking ground because they've had a lot of different thoughts discussions and different kinds of plans as to what they're going to do how long it's going to take because the last i heard they're planning on spreading that out over 10 years that new development and part of that county infrastructure yeah i i i i work straight from the horse's mouth but i thought that they were going to start doing things in the next couple of years uh over there i know they're in the development stage but they were in the development center we bought the property behind madison uh before we built and i had a discussion with at property back

128here and he assured me back then that someday there's gonna be a sewer over there and by dolly i think he's right you know it's not too many people know you don't have to sue her schoolwide all right so the uh strategic plan update uh central office administrators met with patty and lisa our facilitators on july 15th we discussed next steps and strategic plans includes meeting with ability administrators and directors i'm going to give you the scaled-down version of what we're going to do in each of these scheduled meetings um on august 11th the board-proof plan will be reviewed detailed with central office administrators buildings and district directors remember some of the administrators had more to do with the nuts and bolts developing this plan than some of our other administrators we will discuss how

129within the projection assessment serve well into the next plan like i said it's a new plan but we want to you know we want to make sure that some of our efforts aren't repeated and some of the actual stuff that we took in the previous plans are still working for us to look at them and just update what we're doing is this something and maybe valerie's better like for this but will we bring in new um staff members whether they're teachers or designers are we reviewing our strategic plan with all of our new hires we're going over the culture playbook we can talk a little bit where we have new entire orientation coming up on the 16th for teachers so just to kind of update the slideshow and see what information is that the one

130page [Music] those degrees september 27th uh we have dean fernandez withdrawal the central office administration discussing the progress and creating the action teams who are on the action teams what are the expectations of the group where and how often meetings should take place in terms of the time commitment it also seems like in the past when we ask people to come and help some of the same people over and over again the ones that step up we want to make sure that uh if people are going to commit to this that they do have the time uh to commit uh to help with this job also uh communication expectations so the stakeholders as well october 19th uh meetings from 1912 of the central office administration building principals and directors action teams as well determining how

131we are going to measure our progress and how do we intend to make our staffing process and in january we're going to review the data that we collected the goals and the communication and in may we're going to do an end of the year review about how barbie got the goals and um as we progress with this process i will update the board as well uh last couple meetings have been uh having a long anatomist but you know in the end um to see if it's out there already or not yet it is you know as much as you've been complaining to the boy that can't find people to work um complaining wasn't getting us anywhere so if our a fair director and our other administrators got together and put a plan together they have

132our very own job uh fair and uh there's done a few problems in the live management like i said we had 34 individuals attend submitted applications all classified as departments for representatives and that individual applicants in other words we had a table set up with the directors there um interviewing people that were just coming in there was no you didn't have to uh schedule a meeting to show up and do the tables with science if you're interested in say food food services custodial maintenance you know or both we've talked to both directors um it's done very very well we also have the transportation department offered live school bus driving demos in the parking lot i got over there um [Music] issues or accidents over the years we'll get there hope to at least hire my

133guest is going to be at least a dozen little slots that we had open and we got a lot of uh responses just for general substitutes too perfect we're thinking about possibly moving maybe that semester that's great all right we have community kindness days uh thursday august 4th there's not no you know info here other than the fact that we're headed on august 4th as most of you know participated in you go throughout the community work with wilderness um engaging in the acts of random kindness and it's a lot of fun and you'll have a riverside time there's a group of them that graduated together that started this fund i want to see maybe two years ago they have a memorial scholarship in memory of emily ringler but they also collect and they get donations

134they buy backpacks he came in and talked it was either last year of the year before um so they're continuing the work um their supply drop will be on august 13th um oh and and so nick i'm assuming you got these specifics because i did not have the hazel towns apartment 10 30 a.m tractor supply company over there on mentor avenue at noon and then morley library at 2 30 they'll be in a riverside bus so we do as a district provide that to them to be able to distribute the supplies and that anyone who needs them will get a bad pack and the backpacks are full of school supplies so if kids come up families come up they can get a backpack from the bus on august 13th it's a really good organization the

135kids super proud of what they're doing and then they carry it forward because they all are starting to graduate from college now and move out in fact that's why matt's not here to speak tonight because he's not in pedro right now with one of the other kids kids emailed me and said i can't be there tonight so i will speak on behalf of them so anyone who wants to either donate or may need um a backpack you can reach out i know they're on twitter or august 17th at 7 o'clock we have the king's night at the riverside stadium um where we introduce the fall athletes and coaches we're also have a performance by our great band or the riverside regiments we're also giving a special recognition to a couple of students one is antonio

136bo who's a junior this year is coming here he qualified for the state wrestling tournament and also julia hickson who was going to be a senior this year she was a state champ in the para 50 freestyle swimming and also the para 100 backstroke she was a state champion she was actually a repeat state champion in the 100 um so we're going to recognize them in that program so we're very proud of those two kind of themselves as well and finally we have a community tailgate august 19th from four to seven beyond riverside campus prior to the home opener against cary there's a couple things i want to talk about with athletics um some of the things you may have read in the paper and just some other pieces of information um we are in

137the process of updating our sports schedules on this website um we don't have kim uh mcdonald anymore she finally decided to be tired um i just want to give a just a short shout out to her for all that she's done to support the athletic program for the last couple of years um she wouldn't be hardly replaced but um yeah camille uh zendros that will be coming and helping out she's actually leaving her um position to there's a newspaper article as well from the news herald a lot of our friends wanted to increase pay this fall not only for football but for volleyball and soccer and um but the issue that we're having right now is if you look at area conferences in northeast ohio most of them are paying between 75 and 80 we'll

138use football as an example they have five nights at a rusty football game the wrc is actually i think the lowest in this area we spend we pay for 75 dollars in the wrc now the way i understand is the referees want to be paid 100 per contest and i'm not sure what other school districts are doing but they know that that's probably not going to happen so now they've developed a plan where it's a six year plan where in the first two years they'll get a minimum of eighty dollars per contest for the first two years this year and next year and then after that in years three and four ninety dollars and then a hundred dollars in the fifth and sixth year there was some discussion too that possibly there was going to

139be a boycott in the first year of the season [Music] anyone that i've talked to and that's you know involved with schools and we're not going to let um a few dollars right now we spent 45 dollars uh 10-3 last year with royals it's going to be our second game they're 9-3 we're playing better our third game they were five and six and they lost the playoffs ignatius by only three points then our fourth game was chardon and they were 16-0 so that's a combined record of 40-year-old um the first four games are going to be a a meat grinder for our teams but they're up for it i mean we wouldn't have scheduled it if you didn't think that they were competitive especially with our mentor and um in week five we have madison

140this is the last year madison is going to be in our league i don't know if you know that madison will be leaving the wrc and they're going to join the cdc they believe that at this point it's probably better for their competitively for their students and the student body in the last couple of years they've had a tough go i told them that i didn't think it was a good idea because for a long time dennis has always been big physical kids but they want to go in another direction and my workings but they are the biggest starting cdc the 2023-2024 uh thank you great that brings us to the treasury report and committee update so mrs rossi finance audit personnel committee and strategic plan liaison um i'm not going to talk about the

141strategic plan because mr dr just did that so he just gave us an update on what the plan and agenda is for that for the year we had a finance personnel meeting on the 21st at eight one of the largest things that one of the most important things i think that we talked about was our upcoming school year's new agreement with the sheriff's office to provide resource officers that are at our school that's been a long time coming and i i appreciate the work and effort that went into putting that new contract together that makes more sense for the staff that will be working here i think um like dr kayla has alluded to we'll now be you know hiring the resource officers that are out in the front of our buildings we'll be actually

142hiring them on as employees of the district which offers them like an attractive job to come to they'll be able to be eligible for benefits and whatnot which they haven't had in the past and i i'm really grateful to the committee for putting that that together for our district for actually having many many conversations with the sheriff's office to get that taken care of so that was probably a good portion of our meeting we talked about doing handbook updates administrative handbook updates which we need to do because then we have the assistant treasurer's position which wasn't in that handbook so we have to update that we talked about safety and security um and some of our monthly financial reports we went over cash balances which uh we don't we don't normally talk about our cash

143bill but mr platko had reviewed what our cash balances were five years ago comparatively speaking to what they are now and how much of an excellent position we are in and the recommendations that that are put out there by the state of how much we're supposed to have out there in cash reserves what do they say three months three months and so we're doing very well as far as that goes and so that's good to see um and there are a lot of items on our consent agenda this evening in the personnel section specifically that have to do with contract language and salary increases and whatnot and after asking a couple of questions we did talk about all those because we are offering pay increases for our classified positions and instead of just offering those

144as a one-time thing we actually went through and updated the contract which is actually again we're trying to be proactive in what it is that we do to attract people to work here and whatnot so you know great work with our administrators for putting all that information together so that was our that was basically our meeting thank you mr paco the treasurer's report a few slides of gold why that's going around the osba capital conference this year is the sunday november 13th through tuesday november 15th but anyways not the board's interested in attending the stuff uh um every july i go through our financials very brief overview our fiscal year end is june 30th of next year so technically right now i mean i'm in 2023 in my world you know the rest of us

145are still in 2022. uh so each july we'll go through a summary to kind of show where our year-end actual numbers come in at compared to opportunities in maine so this breaks that out this first slide breaks out all of our revenue accounts um the first two lines general property tax public utility and then my 1.05 property taxes which is actually the state of the original homestead those numbers were already known so those numbers is the way that the silence coming so those already know it's those numbers there's no variance on those numbers um line 1.035 undistributed state funding uh there's a variance of 0.73 percent from projected restricted transit which also comes from the state budget restricted for particular purposes that one came in pretty much where we expected experience of 0.4 all other

146revenues that includes the revenue from the joint finance and district levy interest income rentals classroom fees and pretty much anything else that doesn't fall in the other categories that came with 55 000 higher than expected or 1.15 percent higher and then other financing sources which is essentially either advances that we make funds that are returned to this fiscal year or refund to prior expenditures which would include an item called catastrophic cost reinforcement which is a filing that we do with the education for students who are special education and costs over certain thresholds depending on their condition to the finalists with the state uh all school districts do that throughout trial and they have money to live kind of show what happened there so our total revenues came in at 51.5 million about 310 000 and

147higher than expected for a variance of 0.61 percent i just talked about the cash off the cost reimbursement this kind of shows a five-year history on those numbers so the um the new state biennium budget called fair school funding plan includes uh 10 set aside so they can increase funding for the catastrophic one so what they do is they take our special education funding line which we get around two hundred and ten thousand dollars they reduce it by ten percent and put it in the state pool catastrophic cost um so the universal percentage in 2020 we got 26.95 percent that increased to 47.73 so essentially we needed an increase in cash flow for caution 136 thousand dollars we expected an increase but it's hard it's hard to project what that would be because it's dependent

148on what all 658 school districts ohio file and when that pool of money is available in a nutshell they conducted 10 percent of our special funds which was 21 000 83 but our cash drop costs so it's addition by subtraction this is the best way to describe that there are other school districts who are on the other end of it who lost money based on the way that this kind of letters and losers are based on us being a more wealthy district and having a lower special education funding is how we benefit from that so it's kind of odd and again that's very there's very specific ways that we can spend that money it's pretty much a reimbursement of the funds that are expensive so it's basically being classified as if you found your prior

149expenditure it's really unrestricted it's kind of goes back to the general public funds that we had spent already and this would be actually for the reimbursement payment in july or in june which is this year 22 was actually for filing for fiscal year 2021 expansion so it's a year behind and we start that process again for the spring on the expenditure side the first lane personnel services are expensive for 66 000 higher than expected or 0.26 um retirement insurance benefits item uh 73 000 lower 0.69 purchase services came in at 0.45 percent variance supplies came in at 0.93 variance uh the outliers capital outlay which we use our permit proven fund which is not collected in these numbers but most expenses are so there's a large variance there that's because numbers were so material that

150wasn't much experience it wasn't much of a number to cause that variance other objects were things like banking fees property tax collection pieces um as far as if there was a large amount of outstanding conferences or purchase orders that got paid in july it might affect july for the next fiscal year numbers but those are we don't think that on the next slide that goes through this each year just to kind of work with interest income so on the left-hand side it shows all the funds that the interest directly then you earn our investments so we earned just over a hundred thousand dollars the interest was passed here that includes structured funds on total operating funds on the right-hand side of historical one shows a 10-year history of interest income so if you look at

151prior to my rival uh this year's 2012-2016 our cash balances were much lower interest rates were lower and the funds were you know not being invested available at that time and as we've built up cash balances interest rates improved um so as our current investments mature we'll reinvest those and higher industries to get back to the 2009 uh obviously what are our terms on our the uh what do they come up it's kind of staggered throughout everybody rolling one two and three yeah yeah there's most of it's shorter term a lot of light becoming mature months you know you have a lot of money you can stop highlighting on two which is the state and that is more volatile towards interest rates but that's earning 1.7 1.7 right now i think a year ago so

152it's it's start ohio account is good that it's liquidating the interest rates on everyone our other investment calendar investing in municipal lines and commercial paper and cds he kind of is waiting for those i'm sure i'll stay or we'll be able thank you all right that brings us to public comment so anyone wishing to address the board of education will be recognized by board president speakers are requested to identify themselves their topic and comments are limited for three minutes anybody have yes ma'am hi uh my name is allison hiram i live at 885 outrigger cove i've worked in the district for six years one year at buckeye and for the past five years i've been a saab at riverview i have four children three who are currently in the district and one who graduated last

153year mr hack you listed all of your accomplishments and your relationship to our school district but i'm curious how much time you've ever spent in a classroom to cast judgment on the responsive classroom program you say the lack of opposition to the program is due to the echo chamber that it exists in but have you considered that you can't find opposing information because it does actually work mr fishel you are chair of the curriculum department following up on what ms bickerstaff asked earlier please give specific examples of how crt is being taught in our schools i'm more than happy to give you my contact information so you can send me that again i would like specific concrete examples and just out of curiosity what is wrong with using a student's preferred pronouns to switch subjects

154i'd like to let everyone know that the boys alumni soccer game is saturday august 6th at 5 o'clock uh we're going to have the borrow day taco food truck there if you'd like to come watch we'd love to have you there's no charge and if we have any alumni that would like to play we would be more than happy to see you out there thank you thank you any other public comment yes sir john music fans will township i got a couple things i want to talk about to the five of you your number one job is to educate the students i've lived here my entire life started on menorah avenue 51 graduated 63 from riverside and so many of the people i've talked they're saying the same thing the kids are not getting into

155education and just like it was talked earlier you go talk to the hr people the fortune 100 and 500 companies they're all saying the same thing the colleges don't college design much faith in anymore but the thing about it is that is your number one responsible responsibility is to educate our students and in my opinion we're not doing it very i was 1.2 to 1.7 million students left the public sec public schools last year and there's going to be more we united states cost per stood more than any other school any other education system in the country in the world and what are we getting what are the taxpayers getting for their money and just like when i worked you know there was i always and i go to a lot of meetings maybe dc

156columbus or here in the county or whatever transparency oversight and accountability comes with being paid by taxpayer dollars that's a choice people make to work for the public and everybody should be held accountable in my position in my opinion and i'm asking them five years you know and just like the readings i talked to a school board member she and they said to me oh yeah the ring the way they approved redid the proficiency ratings changed four times in ten years and i said well let's raise the basketball hoop down to four feet so everybody can duck and the thing if i talk to the people who do the hiking up talk to him and the thing about is like i said in my opinion we are failing our children we we need everybody so

157what happens here how no it happens here when i went to riverside we didn't have to have sheriff deputies we didn't need this we didn't need that what what is happening it's happening here at riverside also to say it isn't it's not truthful so i'm asking the five years did you do a better job of educating our students i know a lot of taxpayers feel the same way i talk to them all the time so i'm asking you and the parents not just the taxpayers but the parents also they want their kids are our future so i'm asking you to do that thank you thank you any other questions um with the board's permission i'd also like to borrow my we don't typically combine time because we can't do it for everybody okay sorry okay

158hello my name is sarah salad my programs are shive and i'm a resident of kingsville friendship i graduated riverside as one of six valedictorians in 2021. i have come here today to talk about the growth of students and making money to examine their prejudices through my time at riverside eyewitness students call each other racist homophobic and neurodivergent disorders i've witnessed a student saying that he hates chinese people because they started coping i have heard stories about the student making holocaust individual students this is not okay there are consequences to letting students get away with harmful behavior like this discriminatory bosses people who dumped blackface and police members killing black people all started off as children this age who weren't able to examine the truth of equality now i'm not saying that all children are going

159to grow up to be some horrible being they might be someone who calls the cops when a young black girl is selling water on the street that occurred the point is when students don't know how to get better every day they are unable to there are multiple ways to address these problems two of these ways include critical race theory and social emotional learning i know there is a lot of worry about topics like crt and seo by hiding behind these letters and not saying plays out loud is a good way to forget what these teaching styles are all about i would like to emphasize that these are different teaching styles that sometimes combine concepts but ultimately are different teaching styles both are helpful in assisting students growth and understanding of the world the concept of

160critical race theory can be dated back to 1980 when professor derek bell left harvard law school after a career of analyzing racism in the justice system but the ideas behind credibility can be dated back to the time of martin luther king jr when he acknowledged the systemic race of the finances of 1967 white americans must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our societies social emotional learning on the other hand can be traced back to 380 bc when playa was questioning the development of character in relation to education in plato's the republic he proposed a holistic education this included art physical education math science character and moral judgment he stated that by maintaining a sound system of education and uploading usually the citizen of good character

161i can go into further details about these history and concepts that go from them with anyone wishing to converse i know a lot of things have been thrown around within the school board and the public about marxism being at the root of crt and the occult being at the root of sel but even though some of the facts used to push these theories are correct and the connections are correct the argument makes assumptions to push a conspiracy a source brought up at a previous board meeting the sourcing protect ohio children is used to prove that these theories don't work but don't provide sound evidence of the concepts being taught much less a negative effect on students um also respect people's pronouns thank you any other public comment yes ma'am oh yes my name is rebecca

162rooney i am recently in last year a new resident of riverside school district this is actually my first board meeting very interesting um my question is i've looked over the district website i've google searched i've looked i love how you guys send out flyers about what's going on and i congratulate you on i'm doing that because i didn't get that in my last district but i have seen nothing talk about what the district is doing regarding senate bill 436 and the current dyslexia legislation has come out i know that the dyslexia book handbook has just been um pushed out and let it give us a little extra time to do what we need to do but um speaking with other residents i've heard nothing from the school district about dyslexia dyslexia affects one in five

163people and right now currently nationally only one in ten are being diagnosed so i'm just curious curriculum department so forth what's being what you know eventually i'm sure you could talk about this uh prior board may apologize for bringing it up again but what are we doing to help those with dyslexic tendencies so that we can become a better society so we can actually put out kids who can read better than the national average of 30 i think it's 39 or 39 passing um all of our uh our reading tests and so forth so not in our district but across the nation so i would just like to know where we're going because i can't find anything on the website about the literacy plan or anything of that nature thank you any other before you

164leave stop and talk with your contact number any other public comment yes um yeah i'd like to uh i'd like to acknowledge and uh commend mr um arlessik and his entire staff of grounds maintenance and billing maintenance and janitorial for the outstanding work that i've seen them doing all summer long if you guys have looked around the school is looking quite a bit different than it did at the end of the school year parking lots painted in line the rooms are clean i think the terrazzo floor upgrade looks marvelous i hope that it lives up to how it was sold to the school district that it's going to last as long as it does i see that they put the lift in at the john rw stairwell and even the um cafeteria and john williams

165is looking amazing a couple things that i've noticed in uh approximately 75 hours that mr fishel and i have spent looking in as many classrooms as we can get to is that some of the things that really should be addressed between now and when school starts are comfort issues acknowledging the hot summer those being windows screens fans okay we've noticed i've noticed that there are numerous rooms that john r that have ceiling fans mounted to the ceiling and wired into the ceiling lights okay i've also noticed that many of the windows don't open properly don't stay up and many of them are missing screens so to that note i'm offering any of you teachers if you have screens that don't work in your room i'm going to start making screens and screen frames that can

166be mounted to your windows if you just reach out to me my number is 440-494-2683 and i will make screens for your room i'm going to be doing that for room 214 mr skarapa's room another thing i want to do is start a gofundme campaign to buy a fan for a teacher okay i'm going to commit personally to pay for the purchase and installation for four ceiling fans two of which are already earmarked for room 214j if the administration will allow those to be installed i will pay for the purchase of the fan i will pay for the installation of the fan if the school district requires a licensed electrician to put them up i'll pay for that i'm going to start a gofundme page to try to get people to donate to that effort

167so that the teachers can have something reasonable when fall comes when we know that first week of school is going to be unbearable and i can tell you that being in these classrooms in the summertime with mr fishel you know turn those fans on makes a world of difference okay and to respond to the comment about what's wrong with the pronouns well you know what if we're going to change pronouns then i want my adjectives my adjectives would be handsome fit and brilliant okay now when i look in the mirror i see a middle-aged fat guy okay i own that if everybody called me fat i'd probably go on a diet okay but once again pronouns deny who we really are they are contrary to science they are contrary to biology okay and that's one

168issue of the overall discussion that was he had prior to getting started thank you um i wasn't going to speak but i i felt compelled by the gentleman that just thought i wish you would stay because i'd like danielle brennan i have a recent graduate 2021 and a student to be graduate this year um kids nowadays are held to a higher standard than we were i mean if you look back in your high school courses and i took higher level courses the kids in school now are way are pushed way harder than we ever did they're taking ap classes they're some of them are graduating with an associate's degree after at leaving high school so i think there's this huge misconception that i don't know if it's just our high school but high school in

169general are not living up to expectations and i don't think that's true like i said my son finished his first years of college and again they're doing work beyond what we would have done at 18. so that's just from a mom's perspective of the college student and the student college student and i think you graduated 2021 your speech was really great your vodarian speech was really great so congratulations and good luck to you thank you so much any other public comment all right so that brings us to our consent agenda for finance and audits so we have a motion to approve the items listed on the finance and consent agenda is recommended by the treasury items age have a second second thank you while we're having a discussion i'd like to thank the donors and

170the donations that we got five hundred dollars um high school for black and gold students of the month and a thousand dollars from thomas and janet morris for the middle school football pants is there any other discussion about the finance items mr frank scott official hi elena hi roy hi motion carry that brings us some personnel sure we have a um a motion to approve the items listed on the personnel consent agenda as recommended by the superintendent items he are in a second second thank you for any discussion on these items all right if not can we call the role mr president hi jennifer harding aye roy christie hi i'm all right that brings us to the consent agenda for curriculum and programming motion to approve the items listed on curriculum programming consent agenda that's

171recommended by the superintendent of abc [Music] jennifer harding aye roy hi tom heck aye scott title all right brings us to buildings and grounds and operations motion to improve the items listed on the abilities and grounds uh same agenda items b through c as recommended by the superintendent is their excitement thank you any discussion please [Music] hey that brings us to the boarding education update any updates [Music] i would like to send out like congratulations to erie and arianna i'm hoping i say i'm saying that you're right arianna ariane hey who's going to be going to compete in italy for um baton twirling in august in turin italy i think that's super exciting um and i wish for the best of luck and she'll likely be back twirling with the riverside at the end of

172the month which is really cool that's super cool very exciting i received a letter from boy scout troop and it says uh dear superintendent felix i'm pleased to share these with you that boy scout alexander joseph till a member of the boy scout of america troop 62 and painful has attained the bank of eagle scout alexander worked extremely hard to attain this reign it is an honor which is reached by only two percent of the scouts that ended the program i'm asking you to help us celebrate with alexander by writing him a letter congratulations for passing a resolution of congratulations by your organization and forwarding it to the dress above alexander's project consisted of building the walkway to the flagpole at the south library meeting hall in leroy township alexander raised 1474 in cash and

173donations for the 250 man hours with the help of his troop in his boy scout troop alexander had served as a senior patrol leader assistant senior patrol leader patrol leader assistant and patrol leader and troop guide quartermaster gun chef and chaplain's aide helping others a second nation him and he is a role model for the other scouts alexander recently graduated from riverside high school in the riverside local school district he was in the riverside marching band as a two bus section leader in theater and on the track and field team for shot put and discus alexander lives with his mother and father two sisters and brother in concord township and lake county i hope you can assist us in formally congratulating the alexander on his achievement and i thank you for for your time and

174effort from gina parker typically we have our current students come since he's graduated what i would like to do with the board's approval is sending the weather congratulatory congratulatory letter to the non-beginner board it's just a note i think he just left for boot camp so yes i think he's gone now so yeah so he just left her bootcamp oh that would be something fun for his family to forward on though well as for sure anything else any other board updates no all right so that brings us on to a motion to adjourn to executive session for personnel matters for appointment and or appointment and compensation can i get a second um motion carries