School Board Meeting (5/6/2021)

001the corvallis school board meeting for may 6 20 2021 is called to order i would like to ask you if you're willing and able to join us for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all welcome everybody for joining us i want to share the apologies of uh director tina baker who couldn't uh join us for tonight and uh director therese jones will be joining us shortly uh by uh video uh we have uh i'm here sammy wonderful so director therese jones is available by video and vice chair starfinder mcdonald is available by video director vince adams is available by video and director louis white bear is available

002by video and uh jay conroy welcome uh is available here in person uh it's a it's a good reminder that we're getting uh closer to the end of dependent pandemic but not yet and as we celebrate our students coming more in person we will have some of our board members joining us um as the time as we move on uh with uh with the time i want to share a few uh comments uh first which is i want to welcome the community members who are watching us uh over youtube live are recorded if you want to refer to any of the agenda material you can go to the description section of the video or on the website for the corval school district meet the board and there is the agenda in the packets also i

003want to mention that some our board members and community members speakers might not be able to have the video on all the time and will be available by audio only next item on the agenda is uh board members reports uh and i would like to share uh that actually i'll go last but i do have a list of three things so any board members have a report to share hello um i just wanted to share that it was great to um stop by a couple of the meetings along with sami to hear feedback on the equity policy um that we received feedback at um so that was nice to be able to hear some of those and i'm looking forward to that conversation later so thanks everyone for your input on those ahead of time

004thank you uh next up is sarah and vincent as a reminder for jay uh raising the virtual hand also for those who are here through the platform so you can be in the same line uh so uh sarah yeah i just wanted to say this at the beginning of the meeting when we might have more of an audience um i was at the uh vaccination clinic at reserve today with my son he got his second shot today and i just want to let the community know that the the clinics that are going on at reserve this week tomorrow and saturday are walk up you don't have to have an appointment they are extremely well run it is a operation that runs like clockwork right now so i encourage everyone who is 16 and older to

005head over there and keep donations thank you thank you sarah so thank you um it seems like every meeting i'm reporting on negotiations uh but this time it's a little bit different um so the district has entered into negotiations with both of our labor associations but instead of negotiating um memorandums of understanding around the pandemic these are actual contract negotiations so and just i wanted to note that our district and our labor unions practice uh interest-based bargaining um and that is a process you know a consensus-based process that tries to come to a win-win solution uh for for both parties so um we have lots of meetings scheduled and so that process is ongoing thanks sami thank you okay sammy thank you for the time i two comments one the oversight committee bond oversight committee

006has met and i just wanna i know we have a report coming but i just wanna commend them for the time they've spent and the conscientious attitudes they're they're taking their responsibilities very seriously and working very hard my other one is more of a personal um sharing in terms of my job takes me into schools to observe student teachers i've been for the first time in a long time been in schools and two of those were crescent valley and corvallis high we could go on and on about the impact uh i would say a couple of quick comments one kids are pretty quiet compared to normal which is an interesting perspective having not been near each other for a long long time secondly they are very excited i think and positive about work and so

007it's just a real positive time to be there arrows on the floor and lots of things being done to keep them safe but it was just actually very joyful and thrilling to have them back in buildings so nice to be here thank you jay any other board members want to uh provide a report sarah are you good so i do have three items to reports and the third item is a check in as well so the first item i want to report this is a teacher's appreciation week and i want to say we appreciate our teachers uh for their contributions and uh their hard work and uh they've been the heroes of uh the previous year and this year and for years to come as their supporter of this generation thank you for what you

008do and as a board we are committed and for your rights for collective bargaining and providing policies and funding so you have fair conditions working conditions and you continue to support our students of this community so thank you for for all what you do the second item i want to share is the constituents shared with me and emphasized that to report that with with the board that's corvallis valley high school debate team uh member uh keita vols who is also a cv student uh board rep was a state uh finalist in impromptu speaking and her performance in impromptu won the cv team fifth place in the 5a division this is the best cv team has done since 2015. keith boltz and chs's suraj kokornat koprani who's also a former students rep at the board have

009been selected both for the south oregon world school debate team so uh suraj and kate congratulations on this great amazing accomplishment it's one of the amazing testimonies that our students continue to learn grow and accomplish during these hard times and having the real world learning seeing you use these skills in real world with applications and competitions so congratulations um i want to also report uh and i do a check in with board members around this is the time of the year where we do self-reflection and self-evaluation for the board it's been the practice of the school board to do a board evaluation where we evaluate our progress and our goals and commitments and the first question i want to ask is and it's not about to just check in do we want to do a

010board evaluation this year and maybe by raise of thumbs or if you're on audio let me know all right so i see lots of thumbs up um now the second question is there is two ways to do it there is uh we could have uh the evaluation and we get the results in a brief summary or do we want the full in-depth 27 pages of criteria evaluation that will be provided by kristin miles from osba and that would need to have a specific agenda item uh to have a facilitated discussion during the july june meeting which has been allocated we have allocated that so the question is do we want to do that same thing thumbs up all right um during a facilitated conversation we look at what are the areas of strength that need

011them for the needs improvement and set a plan for the board to get there if we don't want to add another uh well that's yeah that's basically the idea now what i want to say is the process uh we will reach to ospa and they will send us a form for those who we all i think that we did it last year uh it will be an online form we need to fill and i'll communicate with you a deadline that's appropriate for christian miles to process the information develop the reports and give us the feedback with the package for next meeting i want to highlight something very important that that these self-evaluations are research-based and they are based on five roles at the five roles of the board and that they are anonymous so the

012anonymous responses will be provided in our reports and we're using this form specifically because it has shown a measurable impact on students achievements uh when fulfilled well so this is a practice-based science-based form that helps school boards itself evaluate and see how they're doing and that work really correlates directly to students achievements so that would be a plan and looking forward to that with that any further school board members reports see none moving forward to superintendents reports ryan all right thank you sami so i have a few things that i wanted to share tonight the first one is teacher appreciation as sammy just highlighted so the first week of may each year is teacher appreciation so for us that's this week after year a year like no other i want to acknowledge the dedication and

013commitment of every teaching staff to do what is best for our students teachers change the lives of kids every day and in a year your instruction could be virtual in-person or a mix of both their immense work and impact have provided a much needed sense of community and connection despite the challenges of the covet 19 pandemic teachers across our district are working hard to support all of our students and we're grateful for all they do so again appreciation for our teachers if you have the opportunity to see them be with them please make sure to continue to encourage them as we continue on with this year like no other so again thank you to our teachers i wanted to also bring up graduation ceremonies so last week we shared with our high school families that

014we're beginning to plan on-site graduation ceremonies for chs crescent valley as well as college hill as long as the benton county as long as that county remains that high-risk category according to the governor we're going to maintain and high risk so um the odds are continuing to go up that will be able to hold the ceremony uh but due to the social distancing requirements for the event that each student will receive two guest tickets um and also we'll have two ceremonies at each school because of the number of folks that tend to come so what it means for board members is that you will have to choose or attend two ceremonies rather than well you always attend two but now this year two of the four at our comprehensive high schools as well as college

015hill in wings um so it's a little different than in the past so parker will share some information with you about dates and times and you can let them know what works for you with regards to those ceremonies also a couple of other highlights for you again this is week one of our return to full onsite learning across the district and our staff are excited to have students back in our schools as well as our students as jay commented and we're following safety protocols to keep everyone safe and healthy it's important for families to screen their children for coca-19 symptoms each day and should not send their kids to school if they have primary symptoms when we're notified of the positive case of coven our health and safety team begins their protocols which are working

016the individual with the positive case of covid is contacted by the district nurse and details about potential exposure are gathered we then work closely with the benton county health department in terms of the investigation staff and parents or guardians of students who have been exposed are contacted individually by phone and depending on the investigation and recommendation of that county health exposure exposed individuals may need to quarantine for up to 14 days and individuals who were exposed are those who are within six feet of the positive code individual for 15 minutes or in a 24-hour period that's why our school staff are working hard to help students follow the safety protocols at school masks and maintaining six feet distance reduces the risk of exposure and those are things that we have in place that will continue

017to communicate to students and families over the next six weeks the number of individuals that have been required to quarantine is low and at the district website there it includes a link to our home from our home page with a direct link to our cova dashboard and staff and families can expect that in every case we'll notify exposed individuals immediately followed by notification to the entire school community and finally as sarah shared about the process of brown vaccines there will be a team day at research stadium on may 20th so that is going to be an 11 to 7 o'clock time i believe which will be there will be activities for teens to encourage them to come that day and ben county health department is still working on what that will look like with conversations

018such as raffles and other things for teens is part of the conversation and finally we're also continuing to pay close attention to the update from the fda regarding our 12 to 15 year olds we expect to have more information for them and their families sometime next week um lastly we will also have a samaritan mobile come to college hill to provide options for vaccine there again recognizing that that is a group of students who would be beneficial to have an on-site clinic so we're planning to do that alongside benton county another highlight is summer school our recovery of learning planning will take place in three phases and phase one will be summer programs that will take place from july through the end of august phases two and three will be a continuation of academic and

019other supports over the next two school years our students will receive additional instruction mental health support and opportunities to gain their confidence after the pandemic year while we have offered summer programs before this year we have additional funding that will help us expand and enhance the support available for students in addition we're partnering with the corvallis parks and rec program in july and august and with the boys and girls club child care program for the entire summer academic support this summer will include a five-week credit recovery program for high school students and academic boost programs for both elementary middle school students and families will be receiving more information next week about those programs so again we're very happy for the support that's come from the state to really allow us to have a robust summer

020school in the summer that that's really going to be important so we're reaching out to the staff right now to bring them up on board for that and again just looking forward to that opportunity and those partnerships with the club and parks and rec planning for next fall so we're planning to fully reopen for five days a week of in-person instruction in the fall we will follow all guidelines from the oregon department of education and the oregon health authority which may include protocols such as working and face covering frequent hand washing and some form of physical distancing the first day of class will be september 8th and calendars have been shared with families and are available on the district website also additional federal and state resources have been made available to the district to address

021the impact of copa 19 and continues and the impact it continues to have on our educational community we'll strategically leverage these one-time resources to make investments to strengthen existing operations and identify new expanded programs and services that will provide the support our students need as we emerge from the pandemic details of these proposed investments will be presented as part of my superintendent's budget message and the budget committee meeting may 20th this year both crescent valley and pearl valley's high school were again recognized by the u.s news and world report 2021 best high school rankings those rankings are based on a number of factors including academics college level exams graduation rates and we're proud of the success and continued success success of our high schools and their continued recognition on that list later tonight the board

022members will have an opportunity for a first reading of a revision of the educational equity policy the policy will will help us create more inclusive and equitable schools for students staffing the community as is stated in the background document our district acknowledges the historical generational and compounding reality of assist of the systems and structures that have intentionally created opportunities for some groups and perpetuated inequities for others listening to and seeking to understand the perspectives of our students staff in communities of color illuminates the urgency of this work after several discussions emails and meetings with former theater students we're taking immediate action to support changes to the csv theater program to ensure that all students feel safe and welcome to participate we've established a new advisory committee and the application for new members is open through

023the 8th the theater diversity advisory committee tdac will be a committee recruiting from district staff student representatives community members and alumni coming from underrepresented backgrounds and their experiences in anti-racist work to advise the theater department's play selection casting and diversity and equity efforts assistant superintendent melissa harder and equity coordinator martian riverakuchi will be liaisons to the committee i have two more updates for you the next one is school lunch hero day so tomorrow is school lunch hero day and i'd like to thank our food service team for their hard work and commitment to our students between preparing healthy meals for our students adhering to strict nutrition standards navigating food allergies and offering services with a smile our food service staff our true heroes and we thank them for the 496 thousand five hundred fifty five

024eight 558 meals they've served since the end of march nearly half a million meals wow a year yep wow and finally um at adams in wildcat elementary we have a story walk project thanks to the district librarian dana zachary and the library media technicians at wildcat and adams elementary schools two pilot story walk installations are on display outdoors at the school it's a creative way for our students and families to enjoy reading and be outdoors at the school um thank you to the library media tech technicians echo ed adams and christy kigler at wildcat and district staff elizabeth wyatt who worked with public library staff to make this happen laminated pages from children's books are installed along an outdoor path as you scroll down the trail you're directed to the next page of the story

025and the books used for the wildcat story walk was i'm every good thing and at atoms it's dreamers a physical activity is also included at each page of the story adding a suggested movement again thanks to the corvallis public library for their participation and partnership in that project so i had a lot to share there's a lot of great work going on and again we're just excited to be at the stage in the pandemic having students back in schools as we move forward with the five or six weeks of the school year so thanks for allowing me to report thank you ryan i really appreciate it uh board members any uh any questions or comments okay one comment and then a question i i don't know that you mentioned that i don't think you did

026but the graduation ceremonies will be live streamed in addition to the two tickets per student right correct thank you for adding that appreciate we recognize that that is that's a challenge for some families and at the same time we're trying to have those ceremonies in person and so that's the balance we're trying to see so a youtube connection or something like that okay my next question without getting into names or specifics perhaps could you give a quick picture of the concerns that were raised that led to the theater advisory committee i i heard you mentioned play selection and casting were those the concerns or more i would say that those were several of the concerns that have been raised and it's a piece that melissa has really taken on and been involved in those discussions

027primarily but is also meeting with past participants and getting their perspectives as well and so that's those conversations have led to this next step and those past participants focused on play selection and casting or others um as a couple of those points thank you okay thanks any board members to have a question or comment hello hey ryan i just have a couple questions and thanks for the um really detailed report especially the updates and fall i know that's on a lot of people's minds and so it's great to have that information um i had a new answer one of the questions i was really curious how the phase back was going this week and everything but um i'm trying to still get a um a sense of what the supports are for the cohort c

028and quarantine students what those look like um and i was hoping we would have received a little bit more of that with the fuller in person going back um and how families can get more information if they're not receiving those supports and then i have another question after that one too sure so um really what i would say to that is that um i have had um multiple conversations um since the over the last month with families and i encourage them to continue to reach out to their school to have those individual conversations about what their children need um today i received an email um that from a parent saying this is this is actually working out better than i had anticipated thank you for doing that so what i would say is that that's

029not the case for a parent that i would encourage them to reach out to their school um i think that our what we've been able to do that way has been to create some individualized planning and conversation and i think that's a really important piece of um of where we go for the next six weeks so if parents are still feeling like they there's additional questions or needs that i would encourage them to reach out to their schools okay thanks i feel like the uh big responses about the um the uh the support like with their peers being able to see their peers and how that was looking and so um i feel like some of the schools at least are having opportunities for connections and if that's not happening or they feel it's not

030happening with their class they should be reaching out to that to that specific um school right to make sure first okay just so they follow the steps thank you um yeah and i know that's really hard i like i've said before i have um all the kids and and students in my house are in cohort c so i understand like it's a little bit of a whirlwind right now and so it's um that continuity is helpful to have and um and hopefully that continues to be strengthened as we get fuller into school the next few weeks um and then the other um when i had i've asked this before like several times leading up to fuller in person what kind of supports are in place right now with this transitionary period it creates a lot

031of anxiety i know folk are both excited and anxious and there may be a little bit of fear as well mixed in with the excitement of going back to in person especially when there's notices about um being received about covet cases even if it's just one person um so what is that emotional and mental support looking at like for students for that transitionary piece and i was hoping we would have an update for that by now um yeah when you um when you say you were hoping to have an update um were you hoping to have a report on that or how clearly a sort um would be most beneficial to you because i don't because i want to be able to hit the mark and i just want to better understand that so what

032i've been asking about has been like what kind of support is offered to students like knowing that they're going to be feeling these anxieties going back to school after being out for so long and i haven't heard much or seen very much being released and notices to families about how students can access support for mental health and emotional support with some of those anxieties and i just want to make sure that because this is a huge shift like we've been mostly away from each other as a community for a little bit over a year now and now people are coming back together and that does that clearly is exciting but it's also creates anxiety and i just really hope that we have some resources available families know where to look that that's available um for

033them to help them get through because i think there will be people that may not reach out directly to the teachers automatically like students or families and so there's somewhere they can find on their own that'd be helpful so that's kind of maybe we can chat about it at the next meeting um but i'm i was hoping we can have some of that information during one of our the updates too uh yeah sorry i thought you are that's what was it i um and i also think it's a way for us to share information with our updates to families about where resources are available so um thank you for for mentioning that and so we'll work on getting more information out okay thank you i appreciate it because i know i've asked a couple times

034like this has been in the back of my mind like we need to have this in place because we know it's a need um so they appreciate you spending some time on that thanks absolutely that was it and thank you for the rest of your report too yeah all right thanks so uh we need to move on now to the student uh representatives report and let's start with college hell uh student representative jesse martin jesse hi i'm gonna turn my camera off just so i malfunctions can you guys hear me okay we can hear you jesse thank you um so right now college hill has about 65 students coming in regularly to work um we we were going in from 9 to 12 before everyone else started going in like crescent valley and uh corvallis

035high school kids started going but this week we switched from 9 to 3 p.m and it's been going really well um we should have about 18 students earn their ged along with 25 to 30 earn their diplomas and that number like we expected it to be closer to 10. so it was a very good surprise um but students and staff have really stepped it up and more kids are coming into school with tremendous efforts to graduate and from a student's perspective the teachers are working jesse i think we lost you and i hope you guys could hear that but now i can't hear you and i think last thing we heard is the students are getting started and that's where we lost you well the students are getting started um i don't know exactly where

036i left off we have 18 students earning their ged did you guys hear that part yeah we heard we heard about the graduates and then we we lost you after that okay the graduates okay um well we just have more kids coming into school every day and um we've seen really great efforts and from a student's perspective i can say that the teachers are really really motivating the seniors and they're really great advocates for all the students at college hill and i know that without them there we would not have the amount of students graduating that we would this year wonderful thank you so yeah thank you thank you sorry i didn't mean to interrupt thank you jesse next up is gravel high school and we have ezra hearts and person moon yeah um first

037just want to say that uh the return to full in person has been super exciting everywhere you look are people like we've never seen before um and the freshmen all seem really excited and engaged and super fun seeing the teachers that we had last semester that we can finally see in person it's all been really encouraging our sophomore class presidents have planned a few spirit events to celebrate our return the first one is a cookie decorating competition that's this week and next week and what's super cool about it is that all these spirit events are not only open to the people who are in person but also to the online students so we're still trying to create like a student body that's still together and on the performing arts front the choir program just had

038their second virtual coffee house um which is where students perform and share pieces and it's all up on youtube if you want to watch um and the program is currently preparing for their spring concert which is scheduled for the end of may um csd theaters recently announced that they're looking to revive mamma mia for next year which is super exciting to think about having students and community members back on stage performing and sports are going great and the long-awaited winter sports season will finally begin on monday and ezra has a few more things yeah as we get closer and closer to graduation we have lots of things planned to make it memorable for our seniors one event that is really exciting is grad night on june 1st seniors who visit participating restaurants and stores downtown

039in their cap and gown gain access to some great discounts and chances to be entered into raffles and then finally kristen and i would just like to say a big thank you to the board for this opportunity to serve as student representatives we've been extremely impressed with the work that has been done this year and feel just really grateful that the board's position this year has been keeping equity on the forefront of all their plans and we hope to see that in the future as well thank you thank you that's thanks to you for holding us accountable and helping us with this work i'm leading this work uh crescent valley high school uh wraps kate balls and calvin kowski okay uh so pardon any background i ever doing a bit of construction because it's like

040we're trying to get our house ready to move but and stuff but students in cohort a and b are now back at tv full in person for past week and are still in person for the past couple of weeks and this week has been so exciting it's like it's a very different change of pace um athletes from tv are also enjoying a great season and the class president and afb elections have finished up and applications are now open for core council uh speaking of core council uh we're hoping to have some sort of senior day for class 2021 yet to iron out details but it's something to potentially look forward to and also for seniors graduation and facts approaching so that's exciting and it's teacher appreciation week so huge thanks to all the teachers who

041have been there for us when we were just black boxes on their screens or just anything else in this chaotic year one last thing before i turn over to kate uh it's been fun to work with the board this year like this is the last meeting i think that we're going to be going to as student representatives but since i'm attorney representatives i i'm excited to work with you guys next year as well good stuff yes yes um i couldn't agree more about both the opportunities that the board has given me as a student rep and also our teachers teachers have done so much for all of us this year and really got us through this all while getting through themselves no teacher has a degree in teaching during pandemic they have been both handling

042that and handling us at the same time so we just cannot say enough thank yous to our amazing teachers so after that i'm going to move on to a slightly more serious note as student representatives we have a duty to represent the needs of our peers and that means advocating against the proposed half billion dollar statewide budget cut for education uh that will stretch far beyond the federal relief funding that is going to temporarily cover it at this time of transition and difficult adjustments the last thing students need and school districts need is to be handling budget cuts like this which means fewer staff and teachers and less programs and opportunities for students when they need it most at our last meeting we talked about the covalence public schools foundation and they have been incredibly

043generous but this proposed cut will decimate the great work they've been doing and ultimately this is a misguided decision from the joint ways and means committee of the oregon legislature and we wanted to take this opportunity to encourage any community members watching to reach out to our representatives in the oregon legislature to ensure that this doesn't come to pass please as students we are asking the adults here to do what they can as we are which is to protect funding for education for the next generation which is us and this funding is not only crucial for programs overall but for the equity work that uh as are you mentioned as well um uh that the district needs to prioritize now and always and i think we'll be hearing more about the need for equity work

044tonight and at the next meeting and then in closing i do want to acknowledge that this is my last meeting as a student rep it's been both this year and last year that i've been a student rep it has truly been an honor to be included in this body and i can truly say i've learned so much from my experience i know calvin is going to be a great rep next year as he has been this year and also uh he will serve well with whoever replaces me which we will be finding out more about soon with the core council applications so i also hope to continue to be involved in district activity and advocacy going forward outside of this role you have not been rid of me yet uh and thank you also to

045the board members who have been great to work with while i've been a rep so that's all from cv thank you i wanna provide the usual comment which is uh we appreciate your input always and your participation your active participation in the board meeting and board room and as usual by 8 o'clock you are free to go but if you want to stick around and that's also okay please continue to provide the feedback the questions and participate in the deliberation uh but as a reflection for the year and as we transition to farewell to students representatives i want to say uh thank you you've shown us the blind spots when we don't see them and you shown us the students lens of how our decisions policies impact students so thank you for that in some

046other districts they do not have any student representatives and some of them have only one representing the whole district so having you all represent your high schools and uh college health program it has been enriching and helpful and i hope one day you decide to run for office and be a city councilor or a school board member or whatever you feel uh doing to continue contributing to your community and representing your community as you did very effectively as a student truck for your high school so thank you very much and with that i want to hand out to ryan uh regarding the student representative representatives uh reports sorry uh farewell to student representatives yeah and again i just want to say thank you for your participation this year again it was it's been nice to

047recently see some of you out in your schools i saw calvin not too long ago at cv and i've been able to see jesse throw the discus so i'm looking forward to seeing you all um in in your schools moving forward over the next uh over the next month um which will be which will be nice because we've had this relationship in the last year where you have shared your experience with us um learning through this environment and learning through a pandemic and so you've taught us things as well things about how even when things are challenging we still have our commitments we have our things that are important to us and we want to be able to speak up on them so you've shown that all along this year and i really appreciate it

048and the perspectives that you've brought so we have certificates for you um in a normal year i'd have you all come stand next to sammy and i and we take some photos we're not going to do that this year obviously but we will send you your recognition in the mail and again thank you for thank you for um sharing the year with us thank you board members students representatives so i saw that question yeah uh just just wanna say something uh jessie put in the chat that she that she didn't realize that it was last me but uh she says that it's been fun working with everyone and that it's been good to and stuff so yeah she was just echoing this time to mention i want to make sure she got heard because yeah

049thanks calvin i appreciate it and yeah and to you too jesse thanks for um yeah thanks for being with us all year any further comments lou and then therese um thank you all so much for bringing your voices um student leadership is so amazing and um you're gonna be going on to do great things with what you've learned i know this from experience and um appreciate all your work and i'm wondering sami if um we could have an opportunity for jesse to read their um what they put in the chat that way um other folks listening in can hear it is that okay jesse absolutely yes you want to go for that awesome yeah i felt really bad i had no idea this was the last meeting i've been like very busy and chaotic but

050um i just wanted to say thank you for allowing me to represent my school i've never ever done something like this and i was really nervous especially being alone um doing it and also i put in the chat thank you guys for putting up with my terrible wi-fi as well i know it's very annoying but um i'm glad my first experience was with caring and hard-working people so thank you guys very much thank you thank you theresa and sarah therese thanks sammy i'm going to try to have my camera on to say this um so first i just wanted to say always that it's such a a treat to have students come in and it's such an important part of the work that we do because you know i mean i don't want to say

051it but every year i'm further and further from my high school experience and a little further away from really the embodied experience of coming through a public school system as a student so it's really it's important to have you guys here this year in particular i want to thank you because you were you were you tethered us to spaces and events and activities that we didn't have another way to really participate in there weren't games to drop in and watch there weren't concerts to attend in person uh some of the ways that um we get to really as um experience the uh the high school um the high school activities we just didn't have those this year and each each board meeting you came in and you reminded us that you guys were still living

052your lives and things were still happening and despite um the pandemic's best attempt you were continuing to move forward in your education and your learning in extracurriculars you were resilient beyond uh beyond words and um it was really very special each meeting to have you in the room and to be reminded of that in ways that were different from how we normally would experience that but we're really just very meaningful this year especially and with that i want to say that i i truly hope that we see all of you community leadership positions and before you step out of this role permanently there are seven people that have watched you participate in um civic engagement this year seven volunteer people staff and administration of course have to um remember us we will remember you but

053remember us when you go forward and you want to put in that scholarship application or you need that letter of recommendation because we can say some really um amazing and profound things about your contribution and we would love to do that we would love to have a chance to brag about the work we've been able to do with you so take down our information don't walk out of here without knowing how to get in touch with seven people who will be phenomenal recommendations for you when you need them and um yeah so and if any of you were coming uh by way of lynn benton it would be a pleasure to have you in class um and make you co-host and let you maybe even teach a lesson or two so look for me if

054you come that way um but again thanks so much it's been just a real joy to get to watch all of you grow and um to get to share in part of your journey through school so awesome thank you sarah yeah therese said most of what i wanted to say but i have appreciated the perspective and the hard work that you all have brought to the board um this was a year where it was would have been very easy to to check out and we definitely did not have um our student reps doing that you all you worked hard and represented your schools well and and brought us you know as tree said really critical voices and perspectives at this time when you even though even though even if we if we all had been

055closer to being high school students we have no idea what it's like to be a high school student in the middle of academic so um i just thank you for your hard work and for sticking with it and you make our school district proud so thank you awesome perfect thank you so much everybody and uh vince i think jay raised his hand first oh okay i'm sorry yeah it's okay i can't get my hand to work um i just wanted to have two comments if i were writing a letter nice idea terese words that come to my mind are about you all are you are very thoughtful sincere passionate energetic and mature that's really and that's saying a lot because we don't always get that so thank you i want to add one more thing

056sammy urge you to think about serving on boards i would urge you to think about working as an educator maybe a teacher maybe a school leader you love schools obviously so maybe think about how that might translate thank you for your work though i'm glad you threw that in jay amen thanks so i'm just going to echo what my colleagues have said and certainly offer on the table on recommendations but i want to share a story so you may or may not know i work for oregon school boards association i'm a board trainer and so i i interact with boards what we have here this arrangement is not common in oregon most school districts don't have student reps on their school board and i would say of those who do very few have many many

057students on on their board and so i have from time to time gotten requests questions from from boards reaching out saying how do we do this how do we bring student voice because it's something people are realizing is so important in school board governance now and i get to share this experience the experience of having authentic true engaged kids in you know as a part of the governance process and i get to explain how powerful that is and so thank you for bringing your voice to our board it's not the other way you know thank you for the opportunity sarah and then calvin calvin i just want to say one thank you to everyone on the board who not only has been willing to work with us and has heard our voices but as vince

058said not every board has student representatives let alone student representatives to this magnitude so just thank you to the board for allowing that to even happen in the first place because it's really something that's so special and it helps the students feel a lot more connected and like our voices heard thank you thank you and uh continue to hold us accountable uh one thought that came up uh recently that we should inscribe this in a policy so we have a policy that speaks for students representation so that would be some work that could be done then next year uh and i look forward to that uh kate and i'll let kay to have the last word because we're 20 minutes behind schedule uh kate yes i will make it brief uh that was actually a

059hilariously good segue because i was going to say that i'm working with uh other student reps because while this position is rare there are other people whether it's one person for their whole district one person for their one high school in that district they have different ways of doing it but there are others of us around the state um and i've been working with them to figure out how we would draft a statewide mandate for student representation on school boards because i think you guys have just highlighted tonight why that is important and hearing from people like you who have seen what we do is going to be really important as we do that because you know it's one thing to say you should hear student voice but it's another thing to hear actual adult

060board members saying it's important and valuable to hear this because it makes us a better board not just because it looks good but because it really helps so um i will continue working on that and it's great to hear that you guys have found this helpful because that speaks to why this is really important both in our district to have an official policy and for the state to have this as a as an official thing thank you kate all right with that i'm going to open the public comments period and as a reminder public comment period is open for members of the public to provide their input through signing up and for those who would like to provide the public inputs and they did not sign up you can always email at the board by

061going to the website's meet the board on corvale school research website or you can sign up for the next meeting in june uh and i will read a few remarks uh regarding uh public comments and i would like the um members of the public who will be testifying today to acknowledge hearing those guidelines and then state their name for the record and then start so the guidelines say speakers may offer objective criticism of district operations and programs but the board will not hear complaints concerning individual district personnel complaints shall be handled in accordance to with board policy kl which is available online the board chair has the right to terminate a speaker's privilege of address if after being called to order the speaker persists in improper conduct you will have three minutes to make your

062comments the secretary will alert you when you have 30 seconds left when your time is up and here's a sample of that words following your comments uh when your time is up also you'll hear another uh tone following your comments the board will have three minutes to ask clarifying questions and for board members please raise your virtual hand anytime during the public comments so i know that you have a question with that our first public comment is coming from isabella medina and stravia thank you sammy um my name is sravya and i graduated from crescent valley high school in 2015 and my name is isabella medina and i graduated from corvallis high school in 2013. last week the corvallis school district announced the formation of a theater diversity advisory committee or tdac this is an

063exciting development but what some may not know is that this process has been entirely driven by recent csd alumni of color in june 2020 in the midst of protests black and brown students began sharing their experiences of racism and unfair practices in the corvallis school district theater program beginning with 2017 chs graduate briana brady issues included students of color not being cast in shows or cast integrating in villainous roles the use of brownface the exploitation of student labor the overuse of adults in school productions and several other concerns we provided administrative staff with 40 pages of testimony and a proposal for an oversight committee and set of guidelines to promote diversity and equity in the department these guidelines were carefully created from the input and experiences of many alumni of color specifically to address the

064ways racism and discrimination took form in the district theaters we see this process as a template for how marginalized communities can direct programs they have been a part of to improve and reform tdac will likely be one of the first if not the first public school theater diversity oversight committee in the country and could be a model for other school districts looking to make their theater programs race conscious and equitable the theater diversity advisory committee will review plays for upcoming seasons and be part of the production process to ensure casting costume decisions and other elements of play production are race conscious the theater department will now have a stipended equity advocate responsible for ensuring best practices for anti-racist productions we are still negotiating on final edits to make this committee as empowered as possible but

065most professional theatre departments do not have anti-racism guidelines in place that are this comprehensive we recognize that this committee is fortunate to have a district that believes in equity work and we are glad that the district has been willing to create this committee at all at the same time we want to bring up some issues that came up during the process of creating tdac that show the challenges of creating anti-racist change in the school district we had asked directly for the tdot guidelines to be published online and for the district to begin staffing the committee in june 2020 11 months ago however the application was announced only last week for comparison the school renaming committee was announced in august and completed its work in january in six months the school district removed old names procured

066a contractor and completed a committee process tdac should have been created just as quickly but the process was unfortunately quite slow as the process dragged on many members of the original team of organizers stopped attending meetings because they were exhausted and felt like the school district just didn't care we faced long lapses in communication put downs and threatening emails from the theater department staff and repeated requests to rewrite and soften guidelines which we agreed to within limits it's important to acknowledge that it should not be the burden of marginalized communities to make these improvements and we would love to see more independently motivated changes in the district but when bipar community members do point out changes that need to occur the district and community should support implementation as swiftly as possible had the process begun

067in earnest as soon as issues were brought to their attention the school district could have completed the work and half the time it has taken especially since organizers did 90 of the work instead this process has revealed that redistributing institutional power in corvallis is not an easy task only accomplished when marginalized people take up the burden of ensuring things get done the corvallis school district should be a model for progressive anti-racist institutional change in education by continually improving and streamlining these processes we bring our concerns to the school board today because we care about creating intentional practices around diversity at csd we ask that the school board won support and empowered theater diversity advisory committee and future committees to take anti-racist action in the district two ensure that bypoc organizers trying to create change have

068their concerns addressed in a more efficient manner and three re-evaluate policies and practices to make it easier to correct racism and online harassment perpetrated by staff and school departments i would like to uh sorry i would like to just highlight to the guidelines that we need to uh be strictly talking about programs or operations and uh the board cannot listen to uh specific district personnel complaints or grievances if that's okay we understand thank you we are cautiously optimistic that tdap will make a difference for students in the theater department but this can only happen if tdac is an empowered body that actively informs decision-making anti-racism work as a whole can only be successful if school districts treat it with urgency while the tdot guidelines aren't perfect and there will need to be revisions in days

069and years to come we are proud to celebrate this achievement for corvas and the educational community educational theater community at large thank you all for your time thank you advanced ravia do we have any questions kate yeah so um i'm also happy with the fact that tdac exists but i also share your um concerns that you know it needs to actually be an empowered body and so i um first of all sravya um i want to say hi but also um to both of you uh how can students both in the theater program because i know i personally have a lot of peers and friends who are in the theater program but students in that and students who aren't in the theater program support tdac in not only doing the work that it needs to

070do but uh like continuing to be empowered and following those guidelines improving those guidelines going forward what uh what would you need from us what can we do to support like you were saying not putting all the burden on by poc organizers what can we as students do whether on or off of the advisory committee i think well hi kate um i think being part of the advisory committee and just getting people to apply is obviously a great start but one of the aspects of the guidelines that we included is that there is a mandatory meeting between the advisory committee and students so at that time you know encouraging students to come if you hear something from someone and they're maybe not comfortable sharing asking if you can bring that up to tdac if you

071feel like someone has faced racism or any kind of discrimination i'm encouraging them also to come forward i think that's the most important thing because it's from students themselves who are really going to create long-term change in the theater department and every other school department thank you reiterate that also this is something that you can do in any part of the school district not just in the theater department but anytime that you feel like there need to be changes and improvements you should feel empowered to make note of those changes share them with your fellow students and staff and talk about ways that they can be improved because i think this process has showed us that getting together to discuss how to make changes actually can have a result wonderful thank you very much and

072have a wonderful uh recipe or evening uh savvy and isabella next our next speaker is keona mcfaden and could you state your name uh for the record and uh acknowledge that you heard the instructions hello um yes my name is kai noah mcfadden um and i understand the instructions thank you you may start whenever you're ready hi yeah thank you um again um my name is kainoa mcfadden and i am a graduate of corvallis high school from the year 2020. um thank you so much for allowing me to speak today i like to offer my support in um for the theater diverse diversity advisory community um my experiences in theater have been in high school community theater college and professionally i studied the actor's equity union standards uh theater intimacy training and how to navigate

073through the industry as a person of color the corrales school district theater program in particular has taught me a lot about having a strong work ethic given me a place to grow into myself as an artist and assured me to have pride as a theater artist however many of these feelings have come to me only retrospectively the theater program without the current um tdax policies uh theater policies that we wrote up can be easily lended to an ethical power dynamics with those in power being allowed to make decisions with personal bias without having any techs or balances um creating a culture that can be hostile now i've never experienced this sort of hostile culture um at all since graduating from the program um high school contained some of the most influential moments to my growth

074as a student person i was always given the advice to give my all and work as hard as i can yet i'm still learning my limits myself and i believe i pushed myself far beyond my means one phrase in particular that was frequently shared in the theater department was you are always auditioning and the phrase everyone is replaceable um these phrases bring constantly in the back of my head during class rehearsals while offering free labor for summer theater programs and many other occasions it affected my ability to concentrate on my studies and also affected my emotional stability i spent much of my time in a role of subservience to those in power overworking myself and constantly being told that i need to prove my worth this is accompanied by the fact that many plays were

075chosen without roles that would be um that would be cash me because of my race and that i would need to convince the powers in charge to choose place with a role for me in mind now i've only heard these phrases once in the five years since graduating broadway is currently under controversy we're following some of the principles that for not following some of the principles that we set place in this policy respect um i just want to encourage everyone um to implement the policy as it is right in place thank you for your time thank you kai noah any questions see none thank you very much and have a wonderful rest of your evening uh next next comment is from brianna brady brianna could you state your name for the record and acknowledge if

076you heard the instructions and after that you may start whenever you're ready brianna brady heard you and uh thank you you may start whenever you're ready first i would like to thank corvallis high school and the school board for providing me with the education i have today to succeed and propel myself further into my dreams i am however in all honesty exhausted about a year ago i decided it was time to speak up about what i believe was racism and exploitation in the theater department i knew that it would cause a disturbance in our small town i expected misinformation hysteria i expected pushback to lose friends i expected to become a villainous i expected i believed that i absorbed this stereotype that was pushed upon me at the very beginning of my theater career it

077caused me to act reckless my first year of college objectifying myself and allowing it from others i have since moved on and i'm no longer anyone's jezebel but my own brianna a fully fleshed out human worth more than her aesthetic allure and prosperous sex appeal it may make you uncomfortable to hear that that at 18 i thought my only worth was my profitable sex appeal i'm very glad to see how far i've come from that broken young girl but i'm disappointed i felt as though i was reached out to i felt as i was reached out to by the parties involved so they could save face that is a normal small town behavior and i am unfortunately assured in that as once again the victims the alumni of color are expected to fix the problem

078we had no control over for no compensation not even the assurance that more kids like us won't get hurt in the future so please honor the work that was done by the alumni and implement the guidelines of tdac and its committee don't let our work die in vain ultimately i have moved on from this ordeal and would like to be left alone at this point and continue continue my life outside of corvallis but do not let it be lost upon you that i am forever grateful for what i could get out of this experience and even the hard lessons that come with it so thank you for your time thank you brianna for sharing any questions for brianna thank you again brianna for sharing your experience and uh good evening thank you um jimbo ivy

079could you say your name and acknowledge the instructions if you heard them yes my name is jimbo ivy and i heard and understood the instructions you may start whenever you're ready all right thank you so much for letting me speak tonight srabia invited me to come and talk and support the tdac my name is jimbo ivy i'm the theater supervisor for the city of corvallis parks and recreation department and i believe it's important to support this work that this amazing community of students and alumni have done in drafting this strong clear and wide-ranging plan for ensuring that historically marginalized communities feel welcome and wanted in cst productions um as the theater supervisor of the majestic we've gone through a similar process over the last two years when we took over the majestic in 2015 you

080know we inherited a theater that was really very much uh only centered white uh dominant culture voices and that tradition continued and as we were sort of the new tenets of that uh tradition the community started calling us out and they started you know acknowledging uh bravely the the harms that our productions were perpetuating upon the community with things like cultural appropriation and use of accents and white facing and brown facing and a lot of the things that these brave students have pointed out um about their experiences and so that's hard stuff to hear as an organization as the people who are perpetuating this harm that you are harming the community by doing what you thought was right but you'd been trained to do by by your your personal bias and and background and so

081as hard as that was we only had to imagine how hard it was for our communities to feel that the theater wasn't for them and so we took up the work of forming a diversity council of people who from historically marginalized communities both professionals dei professionals and uh performers and patrons and and people that were just interested similar to the process that the tdac is is engaging in now and i can only um just talk about briefly how important this process has been to the the success of the majestic over the last two years um you know and that the most important thing for the administrators and for the the theater staff is to listen is to listen to your community to not be defensive to engage this work um you know with all the

082heart that you put into you know everything else you do because this is critically important to the future of our community and the future of our art form over the last year or so since we took up this work we've had four times as many directors from historically marginalized communities and as as many new actors from historically marginalized communities we had our first black director on the mage stage at the majestic which is a frankly embarrassing thing to say for it being uh 2020 and the pandemic taught us not only were we not serving historically marginalized communities but communities with disability and and people that need that weren't able to access our theater uh during our kind of typical operations and so please uh you know take this process and and and have it be

083something that's functional listen to your community and let them you know talk to you about accountability and it's really made a huge difference for the majestic thank you thank you jimbo much appreciated uh any questions for our jimbo hey jimbo i have a question um has the um theater program reached out to the majestic about their dea work at all um no okay thank you it's good to know thanks any further questions see none thank you jimbo and have a wonderful uh recipe or evening uh rebecca goslow uh you're up next uh could you acknowledge if you heard the instructions and after that state your name and you may start so immediately after i heard the instructions can you hear me okay good and um my name is becky gosselin good evening i'm a retired

084teacher i'm proud that my two children attended wilson elementary school for the last 11 years my late husband bill gossel and i volunteered our time and resources to establish a repairing strip of trees and vegetation in front of this school we did so with the support of the city of corvallis arbors becky murga school district personnel child from grounds department and many other community members our purpose was to create a sense of pride and beauty in this school for the students and staff my request tonight is twofold first i ask this strip of landscaping be retained and the scheduled bulldozing be cancelled instead i request that irrigation and additional evergreen plants be incorporated to this area most of the sidewalk along the satin wood that is slated to be removed already has more than adequate

085vehicle parking and a wide bike lane therefore vehicles are already more than 10 feet from the sidewalk and established strip second i asked the commission retain the 23 parking spots that are scheduled to be removed from the school parking lot wildcat has a high number of parent volunteers students being transported from other schools and staff during the school day most of the parking spots are utilized this does not include handicap or time-sensitive parking by reducing the number of on-site parking spaces it will negatively impact the adjacent neighborhood and create an unsafe situation for children both as passengers and walkers i've heard from many parents neighbors and staff that they were unaware of these changes to the landscaping and the parking facility at wilson as of yesterday i am grateful for the on-site dialogue from the

086response with kim patton of 509 j principal eric beasley david dodson willamette valley planning teresa jones 509 j school board and michelle maczynski neighbor as a result of this conversation the school district would be willing to plant additional evergreen shrubs and irrigation in front of the parking lot to comply with the city's screening requirements another small area that is under review is 48 feet of school property frontage along walnut boulevard put an awkward jog in the sidewalk as proposed create straight concern safety concerns and will be more difficult to navigate than the straight sidewalk that exists today students walking westbound along walnut boulevard use the existing private internal sidewalk that ex that extends to walnut boulevard before they walk to the intersection of satinwood to go to school in conclusion today you will see volunteers

087beginning to tidy up the sat wood strip um yesterday i mowed wilson wildcat's lawn the commission wanted to know why the receptacles were on the sidewalk it's because volunteers are now pruning and we're moving those all around to make sure that the school is tidy so we're weeding we're pruning uh becky emerson's gonna come help prune one of the red maples we're spreading bark dust i asked the commission and i asked you to roll up your sleeves and come join us the satinwood strip received the highest honor of the city of corvallis is out there can you conclude conclude well i've just got a little piece first citizen this award is reflective of the beautification to school grounds based on the countless volunteers resources of community and support of 509.j the meeting i was asked

088by jim dear the kevasa gazette times how i felt about the outcome my reply was as follows i feel good about the outcome of tonight's meeting with the planning commission david dodson planner used a word to describe the satinwood strip that resonated with me investment it is an investment of time resources volunteers community tonight with the support of alice rampton mark vomister eric beasley principal therese jones school board who actually visited the site twice most impressive and countless other community members we're thankful we will work extremely hard with dachshund planner and kim patton of 509.j to honor the bond i need to be level with other public testimonials uh however uh we have three minutes allocated for questions uh from the board of student representatives if they choose to uh is there any questions from

089the board to reece do you have a question i wonder if we might yield our time for questions and allow her to finish her statement all right sounds good becky you may proceed okay as a team we hope to be a model to the community working if it takes truck together it takes trust and communication as part of the outcome we will be holding a towns meeting to share with those interested in knowing more about wilson elementary school wildcat facility satinwood strip parking lot drain pond the date and time will be to will be arranged that will be set by eric beasley the principal and we will be meeting at the wildcat garden area everyone is welcome thank you very much becky and i apologize i have to be fair with the three minutes oh

090no that's fine i get it i get it everybody any other further questions thank you becky appreciate your input and your uh service uh and have a wonderful recipe or anything great thank you next up is pallavi um and pallavi uh could you uh uh acknowledge if you heard the instructions and if you did state your name for the record and he may start right away i have heard the instructions my name is pallavi target and thank you for the opportunity mr chair and members of the administration i am first and foremost the mom of a ten-year-old who attends husky elementary school i'm also a professor of electrical engineering at oregon state university and have served as the president of the largest professional organization worldwide in my field of expertise i'm here today to talk

091about the decision to not offer math education to elementary school students at competency levels above their grade level about their grade standards i bring with me a perspective that of an educator and a professional so broader than that of a mom who's only interested in the interests of her son america has long been heralded as the place for scientific and technological innovations these innovations we do not have to look far to see from the app that we are using to connect with our friends and families to teach our children during the pandemic to the signs that has enabled the vaccines that has benefitting the american citizens as well as people world over the decision to not offer math education that befits the level and the aptitude of our first through 50 5th graders is denying

092them the opportunity to grow to their fullest potential it is like asking america to hit pause to sit still while the rest of the world catches up instead of moving forward making the advances that make our world a better place people's lives better and world a cleaner place if we do not give them the opportunity the bright kids the opportunity to move forward with advance with the math that they are capable of we are killing their interest in math even before they have nurtured we have nurtured it boredom is hard it will destroy their interest in mathematics and not give them the opportunity to be the leaders and the innovators the educators that we need in the stem field it runs counter to the discussions that are happening in the us congress to invest in

093stem like now like never before in the past my ask today is that i understand that the board must have some reason some rationale for why it made the decision to not make mathematics be available to our students at the level that they are capable of which may be beyond their great standards to share with us the parents the stakeholders what that rationale is we would like to work with you to make sure that all of our children have the opportunity to receive an education that enables them to grow to meet their potential as future of this country and that in that i would ask that you engage us with an openness and a fairness and communicate the decisions with us before implementing them thank you thank you and i think we might talk about

094this a little bit but you might need to leave earlier uh do we have your information your email with uh parker is that correct yes i believe we have wonderful thank you thank you any questions for pallavi calvin um so i can't it's not real i kind of want to like echo the state the sentiment because i know kids who are above their grade level and i myself was above my grade level math when i was in ellentree and i think that it's necessary that there is work done on this because sure the board has probably have some rationale but i think there should be something good for that and so i also echo that that maybe the board at least makes their act unknown as to why that is the case that above grade

095level math is not offered for kids in elementary school and yeah that's all i appreciate the comment calvin thank you kate do you have a question yeah i just uh question in the sense that um i would also question perhaps the rationale for doing this because i also have concerns about high schoolers math i know i was in ap calc this year and i will be taking ap stat next year and that's because i got a head in math in elementary school that i was able to take these ap classes that are often gateways to higher education which you also i'm sure know a lot about as well and so i just want to echo that not only are you cutting kids off from moving up in elementary school but if i hadn't been allowed

096to do that i would not be in ap math classes now because that allowed me to escalate to ascend the ladder of math early and that's what we have to do to take ap classes because of the way that math structured in high school so i want to ask the board to consider the ripple effects of such a decision on secondary level math education because being able to skip grades or ascend grades in math in elementary school allows us to take honors and ap math classes in high school which allows us to go into those fields get experience get internships get into the colleges we want to and that starts believe it or not in elementary school i just want to emphasize the importance of this and thank you thanks um thank you pallavi and

097uh please tune in to the uh live stream afterwards uh uh for the continued discussion about this uh we might have some comments about it um and thank you and have a wonderful rest of your your evening next up is thank you uh next up is natasha uh and i apologize if i did not pronounce your last name correctly um could you uh state uh that you have known to the instructions and then state your name for the record and you may start immediately after no worry sammy uh my name is natasha mallett and i did hear the instructions and i understand them hello i am a mom an educator and a professional engineer and i will soon have two kids in corvallis schools i come today not because i need opportunities for my kids

098but for other students especially those from identities under represented in stem education and careers i strongly believe our schools should have equitable equitable systems i strongly believe our education has some structural inequities particularly in the areas of history textbooks who has a voice in education and now apparently theater in terms of math education i strongly believe eliminating math education opportunities for everyone is the wrong approach to addressing these structural issues in fact limiting access and opportunity is a foundation of white supremacy the district seems to be misinterpreting how mouth opportunity in elementary school would lead to inequities later on the research agrees with eliminating lower level math courses quote unquote lower level but anti-racist principles do not agree with eliminating opportunities for some students to work at a different rate or progress through the curriculum

099in different paths for example think of the young katherine johnson the former nasa mathematician of hidden figures fame would you deny her the opportunity to work ahead in math progression or move around differently if she showed interest and motivation i mean no that would obviously be unjust adults deciding to hold students back even if at grade level is what the stride dismantlism dismantling racism reflection tool that was sent to all all teachers in the district identifies as a white supremacist concept i see math tracking quote unquote tracking not as an equity issue but as an inclusion issue a strong and fair math curriculum is important to improving the inclusion of underrepresented groups in stem including by bipac lgb tq and women specifically there's a wide body of research that shows the elementary and middle school

100ages are formative for girls perception of math and strongly correlated with later interests and outcomes if we are eliminating math opportunity at these ages the research is clear that girls participation math will decrease in high school and therefore college and stem careers it's easy to identify programs such as advanced placement or math tracking as part of the problem because as implemented they have historically served and catered to white high-income children and deciding to just eliminate those programs altogether without considering the intended consequences is also easy instead i push the district ask harder questions how do we offer opportunities to motivated students in an anti-racist way consistent with district goals how do we create inclusion in these programs by dismantling existing barriers and which factors help these barriers persist unfortunately this requires focus and resources in

101a space that has been historically steeped in privilege but if we aren't asking these questions and creating change in these spaces then we're preserving power and privilege for those that already have it and not shifting power and opportunities to students who need them thank you so much for taking my comments and all your continued work for all the students in corvallis schools thank you natasha i appreciate it any qualifying questions in ipsc okay thank you natasha could you i think i heard you say or you could just send us a copy of what you just read but did you say something about something was distributed to teachers i couldn't understand what you said um i mean it was sent to me by someone else i heard all the teachers got a copy of it or

102maybe they're planning to get a copy of it there's a stride report it's called dismantling racism in mathematics education okay thank you and i can i can send i mean i can send that to the board if you want as well which it's a reflection tool i think it's it's a great tool a lot of so i teach engineering at oregon state and a lot of the same concepts that i reflect upon in my teaching is in there right there's they don't use the word meritocracy but it's in there there's lots of these things i think you know when we talk around issues around equity they're complex and sometimes the easy way can actually do more harm than good and that's my concern with this math education change thank you thanks um i really appreciate

103your inputs and comments uh kate you have a question yeah i know we're like super over time so i'm just gonna like keep it really brief i know i um i just wanna in a sense also echo that in that i know that the district has been working on getting more people involved in ap courses not eliminating ap courses and i think the same logic applies to getting more people involved in higher level math at younger ages it's not about um because you know research has shown that yes underprivileged populations are underrepresented in those things but eliminating those opportunities doesn't help anyone it and it also allows people who have resources at home to accelerate get further ahead and it doesn't give the idea of public schools a chance to work in that advancement so

104um i just want to echo that again and also um yeah i'm just you know as someone who got put in that just is it equitable the way it is no but is the solution saying that no one can get advanced at all because it's unequitably distributed as it is i don't think that's the solution either i think to be anti-racist and dismantle all of these systems we have to be thoughtful and i really appreciate public commenters coming in and emphasizing that thank you appreciate it so um with that uh i want to uh thank you natasha uh for your input and have a wonderful rest of your evening uh and before we move to the next uh public comments uh i want to highlight maybe ryan if you want to briefly talk about this

105uh i know that the board wasn't uh did not deliberate on this subject before but maybe you can give us a highlight on it we have one more public comment so i wonder if we should do that first all right yeah okay probably let's do that better uh so jen antler jen are you with us yes i'm here awesome so could you acknowledge that you heard the instructions and if you did uh state your name for the record and you may start immediately after yes i acknowledge and understand um my name's jen adler and um gosh you know listening to kate i think she has expressed my comments better than i can myself um we you know we we're all sort of in agreement that marginalized students are underrepresented in accelerated programs both math and

106otherwise um i have my own personal experiences in the um the selection processes for programs at the math and sorry at the elementary and early middle school levels and felt as though it was flawed in some areas and that biases did in fact exist let's make a plan to fix this we we also have students that develop at different rates and maybe shouldn't be pigeonholed into one track or another beginning at the end of the elementary school level or the beginning of middle school again let's come up with a plan to address this these are solvable issues i'm here on this call tonight despite my intense fear of public speaking because i've heard that there is a plan to eliminate accelerated programs instead of fixing them but i really feel like this plan is addressing

107the symptoms the systemic systems without identifying the causes and i learned a long time ago that correlation is not necessarily causation and though i truly believe that we're all well intended um as a as a parent of a bypack and a tag student within the district i believe we can do more to service to serve historically marginalized students but i don't believe that removing accelerated math opportunities is the answer so i do have a question for you all tonight do students within proportionally underrepresented populations agree that the continued reduction and elimination of accelerated programs is going to help further their own education what percentage of those within our district who identify as students of color students questioning their sexual or gender identity students who have ieps free and reduced lunches who qualify for ohp or

108those that are first generation high school diploma seekers how many of them actually want leadership to eliminate these opportunities i'm curious because my own son checks off these boxes as well as being a former theater participant he wasn't asked about his experiences and when i explained what was happening he doesn't understand how this is going to help when i helped him register for classes for next fall he told me that while he knows he has a choice to take advanced or honors classes he's just not interested in taking them and in his words he said why take an honors class when you can for you know for the same credit you you just don't have to do any extra work so uh and and this semester and um and honestly against his will he's begun

109getting tutored by a ninth grader she's a daca student who is in ap classes and i wonder if she supports the elimination of accelerated classes and wonder how this well-meaning decision might affect her and her opportunities so my request is this and although it kind of makes my skin crawl to say this please send out another survey send us a survey um allow all historically marginalized students and not just those who represent them an opportunity to share their thoughts on the causes of this gap before before finalizing a decision either way find out how important school is to them find out if they want to get what they want to get out of school and find out if they think that this will eliminating these programs will help i have to tell you i'm sorry

110because your time is up and i apologize for doing that but no problem for allocated for questions if board members choose to is there any clarifying questions from board members all right again with that i want to thank you very much for your input and uh and uh public testimony and calvin what's your question uh could it be moved that we allocate like a minute or so of the question potential question time for her to finish her closing remarks sure uh jenny you have one minute well um thanks for the minute but actually i my last uh line was just that um i just urge you to send out a survey a google poll and and that um i wonder if the data that you get back might surprise you um thank you wonderful much

111appreciation jen for sharing your inputs and uh and speaking up to uh today um with that have a wonderful rest of your evening and have a good night uh with that to ryan uh we heard a lot about the math tracking and i've heard it's from community members uh as well in the past a few weeks [Music] we have a busy agenda but maybe if you can give us an outline uh what is it and maybe how can we learn more about it yeah so um we've been working primarily with the teaching and learning department thinking about both ways of hearing from families and also sharing some information about um how we're doing in math and some of the research behind that so look for additional information we've been um you know we've been um

112[Music] we've been talking about it for a while at the same time we've been trying to move through this pandemic and so we're at a point now where we're ready to continue that engagement in that conversation and so it is something we're looking into the best best methods of doing that so we'll we'll be providing additional information as we move along um but as of now that's that's sort of where we're at wonderful okay thanks ryan all right um and i believe that's it's for the public comments so seeing there's no further uh public comments the public comments period is now closed and with that i want to um yes it's 809 so calvin thank you very much and anyone who wants to leave from our students representatives feel free to do so but you

113may stick around if you want to therese sammy uh first for those of you that are leaving thank you so much for joining this evening and remember to remember to get our information um i'm wondering if this might be a good moment to um pause for a short bathroom break before we jump into what i think are some longer sections of our agenda uh is there any objection for that and i think my uh uh uh sundown for it to break my fast happening soon so uh how do you feel about ten minutes is that okay with everybody all right we will break for 10 minutes until 8 20. thank you and have a good night folks we're at 8 20 and we are reconvening for the school board meeting i want to note something

114i just did the math with how much time we have and the engine that we have it's a busy agenda already and uh we're on time to finish at 11 15 if we keep the pace so just keep that in mind that as we ask the questions um and uh provide comments that uh that's that's where we're at i'll try to move us along but also give us time to deliberate and ask questions uh as necessary and for things that are first read make sure that you can share that with staff offline as well uh so with that said do we have all board members here uh available i believe so and um mark the next item on the agenda is muddy creek charter school animal report uh and we have mark page uh uh

115welcome uh and if you want to introduce yourself and i understand you have a presentation yeah my name's uh mark page i'm the interim executive director at muddy creek this year or at least for part of the year and i do have a presentation i'd like to share with you all right is that fine absolutely okay let's see if i can share my screen here correctly okay um so i think you can see my screen is that correct um actually if i could put it to full screen might be a little better there we go all right okay so um i won't go through the vision and mission um you i believe you've all been shared this report um earlier so this is the mission vision what was really interesting is what drew me to

116the school actually to come this year and help them out was the idea of place-based education which to me i find to be very progressive and i've not seen that in my going around the world looking at different schools and working in different schools so that was really an attractive thing about it a brief historical perspective of the school was founded in 2008 it was previously i believe a neighborhood school inside the corvallis school district and they created a charter like i said in 2008 it's a k-5 school it's servicing the beaver creek and muddy creek watershed area and also includes many students from philomath moreau and albany school districts as well as corvallis it is a place-based curriculum that is the main objective of the school being a rural community um with many farms

117surrounding it and also uh nature um preserves that's kind of been you know what their strength has been is utilizing these community relationships in regards to that also they try to um do multidisciplinary education um where you know they're obviously merging all the different subjects um incorporating that with the place based education as much as they can um they also have a um a very you know one of their strengths is to utilize art and science interwoven into the core curriculum that's something they're very proud of and they have lots of partnerships with the local land owners and some of the agencies around for example 4-h and osu their objective is to make sure that the students are on track with going on to their feeder schools and also within the corvallis school district and

118to be able to move within other districts as well that's obviously you know something a goal that they always have and we have a very very good working relationship with 509 j as bars employees go it is a k5 school we have blended classrooms in 2 3 and 4 5. each classroom has an instructional assistant we also offer 0.5 pe and art instruction as well we currently for the administrative staff we have the executive director a tech director facilities manager and administrative assistant this year is a change for us and that we're subcontracting out our financial management and what else we have here we also have quite a bit of help in regards from the district for sped we also have our own behavior management or behavior support specialist i should say and we also

119have a special teacher for disabled students the literacy program i'm gonna go through the three um it's very structured um you know i'm new to the school so i'm actually learning the um what their program actually consists of but they are very heavy on reading and literacy as you can see from some of the bullet points here i do know for assessment they are using dra or at least they did when they were in person um beginning or the end of last year before kovid really hit and we currently started a new program for us anyway which is lexicor and i believe it's used within the corvallis school district quite a bit and so that's new to us for math we're using bridges for k-5 obviously there's a strong emphasis on kagan structures actually across

120all subject areas but that's one thing that um i've been trying to push since i've been here for the last few months also within science um this is kind of like their repertoire of expertise they have many like i said previously they have many arrangements with the farms um and also with the nature preserves nearby like finley and they do a lot of work with them also they have a very strong relationship with 4-h and also they didn't do it this year it's been postponed but the season tracker program i heard is a very it's you know it's a really nice program that they work with for specialists we currently have um well they previously weren't very tech oriented in the past but now due to covid we have a one-to-one program we do have

121a 0.5 tech integrationist and so my goal is to work with the tech integrationists and to really use technology in a more authentic way they were really kind of thr it was really thrust upon them with when covet hit and so they've been making do with what they could do um i think that's a real strong point going forward for them is to actually utilize that tech across all subject areas like i said in a more authentic way also um we've just recently adopted the iste nets standards for students which is actually based here at out of oregon in regards to library we have a 0.5 librarian who also integrates lessons into all the classrooms and as mandated by the state we have pe health also and we just rehired an art integration teacher who

122works across all the grade levels for assessment um we have not done any assessments this year as you're probably all well aware in regards to the smarter balance um we'll i predict we'll be finding out about that shortly if we will be doing it this year but currently what i have up here is the previous results from the sba community engagement this is one of the strong points of the school in the past they had a very strong pto presence and community involvement unfortunately due to covid it's kind of taken a back seat however we've been utilizing technology the best we can to keep it alive we do newsletters monthly board reports and actually the board meetings we've been having it seems like at least one board meeting a week to deal with a lot

123of the issues that we've been um having um this year and which i'll get to in a second also we have scheduled town hall meetings we've already had one since i've been here is very successful a way for the community to voice their concerns with us and interests now for kovid this is the interesting aspect of the school and i'm not really sure if any of you are aware of what's been going on at our school but we've had essentially uh 100 turnover and staff that includes instructional staff and support staff um and there's been a lot of turmoil at the school i guess you can say in regards to that and i believe from my experience from other schools and from what i've learned about this school a lot of it i believe came

124about due to covid and the stress and anxiety that has come about because of that the work conditions for teachers has been extremely difficult um in my opinion it's uh almost unattainable what is required of teachers and how to teach currently but they've been doing a really good job we do now have a new staff that's very eager and energetic and i'm giving them as much support as possible and moving forward and it seems to be working i believe that everything is stabilized i've been getting a lot of support from the district melissa who is in the meeting currently and many others in the district has been very very helpful also i must state that the um muddy creek board is been amazing hands down one of the best boards that i've ever worked with

125um they unwavering their their commitment to the school and supporting me and getting stabilizing the school and moving forward now we have not sent out our climate surveys yet we're currently in talks to get that done relatively soon but from the feedback that i have been getting from parents in regards to communications that i've had with them it's been very positive what the parents are saying about the school and the direction that we are going future endeavors i've already started planning with the staff to in the board to move forward with uh getting the school back on track there are we have a five point initiative four points which come from or originate from the mission and vision which are place based education moving more towards a standard space assessment in in planning uh integration

126of an agriculture-based uh programs that are vetted by the state uh to bring us back that's also kind of tied in with the place-based education and also reestablishment of the community uh building you know components of our school which obviously we couldn't do during covid but that's a main focus next year the final point is once again um referring back to the technology and now that we have a one-to-one program i feel this is an opportune moment for this school to really learn how to incorporate it into the core curriculum and and really utilize it to its fullest um the school improvement targets that we have outlined um actually one of them's already been done which was a seismic rehab for the facilities that's been done we have two major uh facility projects that we

127still need to get done uh probably in the next year or two which will be the replacement of our covered area and which was we had to take down do the seismic work that was done and also the blacktop replacement which are two hefty uh financial burdens on our school but we hope to get that done soon um also professional development change i've already implemented a different uh or i should say differentiated professional development model where teachers actually get to choose where they want to improve their practice and we will support them in that also we plan to use the integrationists more in regards to training of the teachers in regards to the specialties that they um they're specialized in and finally to end it student educational experiences um you know uh we're planning next

128year in the fall obviously like you guys have stated to go back full time and we're planning that that's actually going to happen obviously we know that anything can happen uh over the summer but our plan is to move forward with full time and also we're planning on revisiting the curriculum the adopted curriculum for the core subjects on a annual review process that we'll set up because right now i believe we do not have that as far as the presentation go that's that's it wonderful thank you uh mark uh any questions for more luke or them vince and before the question is made i'm sorry if it's okay um melissa's been working closely with mark so there might be questions that melissa wants to add on to as well so as you as you're thinking

129about those questions board members that would be my suggestion sounds good all right um thank you mark for um sharing the report um looks like some really great things happening and i did have a question um i know that the vision has been around for a while um but it says that it has a program with its community it says the land and its people and i think from like an indigenous perspective that lands a certain type of way and so i'm wondering if there is any work with the tribal programs using that terminology and if not that could be something to possibly think about i know that the tribes in the area have a lot of great connections with the lands and there's some land-based uh materials out there even like some of the

130stuff they do at the mary's peak alliance and stuff like that and so thinking about some of those kind of place things that incorporate tribal perspectives as well um it was just like a kind of question comment you don't have to like dive into it but i was just a little curious if there are any connections so far yeah well um i'm actually not 100 from this area um so i've just come in uh i've been living overseas for quite a long time um i i actually am a little bit aware of some of the native american um you know goings in the history but as far as the school is concerned um i haven't seen anything in our program that directly addresses that um as far as i know um i don't i really

131can't comment onyx i really don't know cause i've just been here for a few months thank you all right great thank you something to think about perhaps definitely for sure hi mark welcome to the corvallis school board thank you to have you there at money creek um you know i really love this little school and i love what it the work that they do um and i know that this has been a really troubling time for the school and so you raised some uh really uh some disquieting things that happened i mean one is the the shift in leadership the other is uh the really dramatic turnover in the uh in the staff and then the other is the new uh the apparent departure of the of the finance director or whoever was doing finance

132i'm just is there a plan and maybe melissa you can speak to this or both of you can speak to the just the overall stability of the organization um and it's just in the health of the organization going forward don't melissa go ahead sorry it's a it's a hard question i don't know um i i don't know that i i know that um in that interim period when muddy creek was operating um without an executive director that their board was um was really taking action they were um very responsive and were extremely concerned about ensuring that the students that are there um came back next year and um how could they make sure that they're recruiting more students to come into uh come to muddy creek so um and you know all of that the

133money that flows through to muddy creek is admw so we know that having students and having a solid student uh enrollment is going to be important to their financial security so um then i would turn to mark i know you're in the midst of enrollment and registration and so um he maybe could talk to what he's seeing as far as kids wanting to come back and family staying yeah so there's a few points that um kind of touch on that vince and the rest of the board number one is the financial health of the school the budget i've been working we do have a contracted um financial manager now and she is amazing our you know her organization she actually works with private and charter schools in particular and so she really has a lot

134of knowledge of how these schools operate and um you know i've been working with her and also with um karen steele who's on the board who deals with finances for this in regards to the board and our budget is very healthy going forward but then um you know we've been working on it for the last month at least for next year's budget and it's very healthy as far as enrollment we just finished the enrollment for next year we're following along with corvallis on how you guys on your timeline and we have more than enough students we have more students wanting to come in than we have available slots and interesting issues the board once again itself the board is very strong and cohesive um really the only concern that the board has brought forth and

135um that i've kind of been thinking a lot about is retention of the teachers obviously because we had such a high turnover and i've never seen that ever before in school and uh um with that's being said we do we are going to lose some teachers next year but it's due to just life issues you know like people are just moving on so it's a very normal thing i believe going going forward we already have started the process for hiring and we've also the board has agreed to change our pay scale in order to perhaps and i know very well that pay is only one small aspect of having people happy in an organization however we are making it a little bit more equitable um or closer to what corvallis has and we believe that

136that will help in retention to teachers going forward great thank you for that answer it's all very satisfying thank you all right well mark thank you and uh sorry to cut it short but i really appreciate your presentation and the report oh teresa your hands are up so let's do one more question from terese and then we'll move forward uh teresa sammy my question is something that i think will be uh can someone get back to us on this so it shouldn't add too much time so um mark welcome and we're glad to have you um here virtually with us and um maybe sometime soon we'll be able to actually be in the same room um so my question is really something to for maybe some forward thinking for you uh to respond back to

137later being relatively new to muddy creek uh the last time that we actually had a chance to talk with muddy creek in person which i now can't even remember when that was um but anyway uh we had a conversation about the enrollment processes and some steps that the community was looking to take to increase the um diversity of who could access muddy creek um in terms of the student population and so we had i had hoped that there would be an opportunity sometime not too long after that to get kind of a report out about what the school had been able to do to um if they had done if they had been able to make any progress in terms of brainstorming ways to make the um mostly the distance i think of muddy creek

138um more accessible but also to increase the outreach so that families that don't necessarily know to look for it might find a way to hear about it and be able to be you know considerate for their families and so i'm curious to know uh particularly with all the turnover um where um what's the energy level at money creek right now for trying to reach some of those harder to reach communities of students students around um and again if you don't have a lot to say about that right now that's okay just want to put that out there is something that we continue to think about for our greater community sure and once again you know equity and and that's a big topic in every state now the whole united states and that is definitely on

139the front burner of our school as well however we als also are just trying to keep our heads above water we have a lot of new staff and we're just trying to learn our jobs um for example we had no office manager for two weeks um and obviously there was no interim director either for two months and so we're just trying to you know learn and we lost a lot of organizational intelligence um our knowledge um in the departure of the previous staff with that being said though the new staff is very young very tech savvy we're using social media to promote the school on far more than the school's ever done before also in regards to outreach and getting populations of students because distance our school is really far away from corvallis i mean

140it's eight miles it's not easy to get there um so what we've done is we are paying or actually i think you guys are paying for busing for us um and so we are you know we've dedicated that amount of money um that has been allotted to us for busing to ensure that we maintain those bus routes to the furthest reaches that we can possibly go and still have it manageable um in regards to time of students sitting on a bus in order to bring in those people who do want to come in from you know further out so it's promotion on social media and providing transportation for those families who don't have uh transportation to get to us so those are two things that we are definitely doing currently and you know we're always

141looking for ideas on how to improve uh you know access to our school but right now um we feel that's it was it was a big uh challenge just to get the busing done especially in covid right that was very difficult but we got it done and we're very proud of that um but yeah in our social media well thank you i really oh sorry i appreciate the recognition of the loss of institutional knowledge and organizational knowledge and i think that can't be overstated how impactful that can be so thank you i i would just like to add one thing if i may um losing the institutional knowledge was a major setback for the school but i also see it as also a major benefit um not having previous procedures and policies that were set

142in place allows us to have a clean slate to really think and look at our practices on how we run this school and rest assured this staff they're very energetic and we are very eager to service the population of corvallis in our watershed district and even the families outside that we're very eager and we're very enthusiastic about our mission vision thanks mark appreciate it and thank you melissa for your uh close work with money creek and the support looking forward for more progress and this thank you take care next item on the agenda is the bond program update and we have dale and kim here just as a reminder today we do have only our reports because where there is a very uh heavy and exciting work to uh have next month so next month

143we'll have a presentation but you have a report and dale and kim are available for questions uh or comments i want to just take a pause and highlight few things from the first page on the reports this is the third year anniversary of passing the bond so three years ago the voters told us with a landslide margin around 67 percent we need to uh do this work and since then the district has done a tremendous job uh bringing about 30 percent of the budget in addition to the budget in terms of money is because of uh matching funds premiums accurate interest and that's a testimony of a really good stewardship from the district uh that's 60 million dollars that the corvallis school district was able to bring in uh to managers can do the work

144and deliver on the promise that could have not been done without solid leadership so really thank you on that and also i want to highlight another thing the financial activity on the bond and the next uh six months will increase six times uh than what we had the last three years so that's exciting and we're looking forward to see that coming our way so really thank you for this work and more exciting work ahead of us uh with that i want to open it up for my colleagues board members for any questions or comments and we have this so i went to space lumber and they they wanted to sell me a 2x4 for 15 and then i just had a friend of mine um tell me that he got all charged almost 80 for

145a sheet of plywood so this makes me really nervous with the construction project crystal ball time dale and kim uh how are our wood products prices what's driving this first and how's that going to impact the bond project and do we have sufficient reserves to deal with in these fluctuations i'll take a shot at that the the lumber market is not unlike other markets but it's it's probably the most visible and a lot of production facilities were impacted by covid and that alone has driven up prices and at the same time the the market is kind of recovering um starting earlier this year and that's driving up demand which is driving up prices i think kind of a double whammy there loss of production and increase in demand all at the same time the good

146news is our bigger projects are mostly framed out of status steel which has not been impacted quite as much in terms of escalation there's been some and i've i think i've even talked about that before [Music] we usually build escalation into our budgets and estimates so that we're prepared ahead of time for those impacts the smaller projects um are are framed with wood the ones that are that are um behind this garfield mostly that was bought pre-pre-increase jaguar and wildcat we'll see some some impacts from that but we're we're budgeted for it um okay and for the projects that are yet to come we are still being conservative in our in our budgets like we have been all along and as and as sammy mentioned the the effect of the additional bond reserves has been

147uh you know very important to the success of the projects so it thanks thank you any further questions or comments so next month we will have a sort of a midpoint presentation uh it feels funny to say that that we're sort of at the midpoint but we're at the midpoint so it'll be an opportunity to hear a more in-depth presentation for sure exciting lou you have a question i was just wondering how this week has gone with the fuller return of students and traffic and everything things still going all nice and smooth i'll take that one yes we did a lot of prep with our construction teams and administrators at those schools that have construction happening and we have had success pretty smooth week that's great good awesome so with that uh thank you team

148i really appreciate your hard work and looking forward for the midpoints uh with that let's move on to state summative assistance uh ryan you do have a recommendation regarding the state uh assessments we do and um both amy and nikki are here also to help to present the information tonight and also um give it sort of an overview of where the recommendation comes from as well as that the input we received through our survey we did a parent survey um to help us to come forward with the recommendation um so that is where we are right now so we're gonna just go ahead and start with that presentation and anticipate that the board will have questions as we get to the end and are you driving where are you all right i think hi everyone

149it's amy eason elementary teaching and learning coordinator and and i'm here nikki secondary schools teaching and learning coordinator all right and we are going to work with parker thanks parker so we wanted to start tonight um to just talk a little bit about assessments in general i think when we say we're not we have this ultimate recommendation that this spring to not do the smarter balance assessment understanding that there are multiple assessments that we are doing and have been doing all along i think is real critical and so one of the things we wanted to point out was just some different types of assessment that we've been using throughout the pandemic and that we use all all the time good teachers are doing assessments all the time there's um the four that are on the

150slide are for probably the more common types of assessment that we talk about diagnostic and formative summative and benchmark and um you have some of this in your report there's some details here so i'll give you just a minute to look at that i'm not a fan of reading slides but but basically we're continuing to do diagnostic formative and some types of summative assessments throughout this time nikki anything you want to add no i mean i don't i don't think so i just think that um our teachers as amy shared have been doing assessments throughout the pandemic um and they're continuing to do those performance-based assessments in our elective classes like world language and choir and band standards-based assessments in our math and science classes a lot of work sample assessments in language arts and

151social studies and then teachers are continued continuing to create real world learning projects um across all subject areas and so those are ways that our teachers can understand kind of where our students are now compared to where they were when they began the year and help us get ready to serve them in the beginning of next school year yeah i think the important thing is to think about what we're using it for and what we're doing right now like we use those assessments right now to guide our instruction into guide teaching and to be thinking about how um how what how what my lesson design is going to be we don't necessarily use the summative assessments to guide any sort of our instruction right here and now so thanks parker you can go so in

152addition to a variety of assessment types we also look at different kinds of data at our school to help understand how our students are doing and so we look at attendance data we have behavior data in our student support team meetings we will be administering the youth truth survey i think our first school goes on friday um and then many of our secondary schools i think are a couple weeks later and then at the secondary level we also look at grades at high school we are always tracking whether students are earning those six credits per per year school year and on track to graduate and then overall credits earned as well i think nick you mentioned that the student service teams are meeting they have been meeting all along and those teams at our school

153level will be helping determine who's coming to summer school who needs summer support and so they have data that they're looking at and they're continuing to do that and use those to guide where we're going now all right so before we go on to this piece i just want to sort of reiterate the the concept here which is that um the information that teachers are using um to inform their just their instruction are things that people will continue to have what we're saying is that's the the sbac test is that some of the tests that gives us information long after this year it won't even have percentiles because of the number of kids that are taking it so in terms of the information teachers need to have to be able to instruct the students in

154their classrooms that information is still available to them and we're spending our time with students in classrooms and using those tools that help us to help kids um as they move along rather than something that that takes away time that doesn't give us that information this year um one of the reasons why we don't have percentiles it's just the number of students taking it across the state and so and we don't have a comparison from the year before so those are the kinds of uh issues that are are around us back this year and that's why we're asking for the recommendation is the postponement this year yeah i think ryan the other important thing is that it's every fall we start off the year with finding out where our kids are and so that's not

155going to change we have assessments planned already for the fall we have a process we've used in the past we'll we'll be looking at that and more as soon as we have kids in our in in front of us in september yeah okay i'll go ahead yeah so we sent out a survey to our families and we you can see um what our response was like and we just we weren't really asking them yes or no but we wanted to gauge opinion from the community before bringing this recommendation to the to the board to postpone the smarter balanced assessment and so you can see the results from that survey on the next slide and what you see here is a pretty overwhelming response toward postponing where that it was five is like i strongly support

156postponing um the assessments until the next school year we do still um you know we as amy and i both shared we have a variety of assessments that we use to understand to just better know our students we also are planning to spend some time while we're in person administering the youth truth survey which tells us a lot about student experiences and student perceptions they have modified the survey this year in light of the pandemic so it should provide us some some good data about how our students are doing so we can serve truly serve like the whole child and be thinking about the data that's coming in from our classrooms but also their perception data um that they share through youth truth and i think it's also just kind of important to note that

157this is information we won't wouldn't necessarily get through those formative assessments um through our through the curriculums that we're using in the class and so this is a piece that we felt like we still wouldn't have as much information around as we think about the social emotional needs the fixed school connectedness components those other aspects of being a student in school and you've all seen that data a couple years ago now because it was scheduled last year right when we um closed um so we did postpone that last year but i do think that it's something that we would still want to continue because it is different information than what we would have otherwise so i think you have our report and and this slide i think is the last one and we have um

158a little bit of time for questions and answers can you talk a little bit more about the full assessment and what is it what does it measure and how does it compare to aspect so we have we'll have multiple assessments that'll happen in the fall depending on grade level and curriculum and and um and school level one that the benchmark assessment that i noted at the bottom this our star assessment and that um it gives us a chance it's similar to a summative but it's it can also be super meaty so depending on how much we can dig into that we can get some individual data we can get some really good big picture data from that too like of all of our second graders here's how many second graders we're worried about that are

159not even close to reading at grade level and so then we can think about our resources and what does that mean and and how are we going to to to work about our day um based on how many kiddos that we see across the grade level across the classroom and um and usually we give those we give a little bit of time for kids to settle in it's not usually the first thing we want to do when we see a kiddo in the fall but we'll have that data pretty pretty right away and and definitely be using that does that help sami yeah i'm just reflecting it's more reflective of where the students are as they begin the year than where they were before a summer drop basically right it gives the data the comparison

160all the norm data is based on fall of that school year so it's a first grader in the fall here's some norm data to tell you what what's typical what we would expect what we're worried about so yeah thank you okay so i have a couple of questions i can understand that time is important in class for the last six weeks can you tell us how much time at what levels would be asked of students to take these tests in these six weeks it depends on the student i would say i would not expect it to be less than an hour and a half at the very minimum for the a content area probably closer to two hours per content area and we don't do that all at once so that's not like you're just

161gonna sit down so it's just one day and you go in for two hours and you're done um it's it's usually done over multiple multiple days and there's stamina and stamina that we look at and um multiple other factors besides just that student time but that's if you're just talking about just a test potentially that's our best guess we don't know we haven't seen it yet and um well in in your experience give me some examples of let's say third grade what does every grade take two hours or five hours or ten hours so so her her test is that per student per test so at what grade i mean i read your letter and to be blunt i don't think it was a fair letter because i don't think it told parents how much

162time are you going to spend with my child doing assessment so if you told me as a parent i'll spend 20 hours on testing i would say oh that's too much but if you said i'll spend three hours on testing in the next six weeks i would say oh that might change my answer your your letter doesn't say that so i'm i'm asking you to help us understand how much time generally are we asking students to be testing instead of picking instruction so it would be about two hours per student because it's going to be one content area um this year either reading write reading math or science it varies a little bit content area to content area and it varies a little bit from student to student the other piece that to keep in

163mind is there's also some training that staff will have to do in order to administer that test um that they would need to do as well and so and what i would say jay is that we're not saying that we're not assessing kids we're just not assessing kids with this assessment um and i just and i and i just think it might be a distinction out of what i heard you say um because you said um kids would be testing three hours or six hours or 20 hours and there will be assessment that kids are involved in regardless if we do this or not and that time is not incorporated into that response for me i think the other thing is right it's more it's not just the time to take the test is the

164only reason we're making this recommendation so there are multiple factors that are leading us to think that yeah that so yes we don't want to waste the little bit of time we have in person with our kiddos doing a standardized formal test the other really big reason is that the outcome data that we're going to get from this is not going to be usable for us in a way that we would use it every other year it's this when ryan mentioned there we're not going to have any norm data we're not going to have the percentile data even the students who take it you don't have we won't have that reference for how this compares to them for other years and with the amount of anxiety that always goes into these tests even as much

165as we want to be calm about it knowing that that kiddo is doing their ultimate on on this when we're living in a pandemic is also data that we're not i don't think any of us would take and and and be able to use but i i hear you saying i hear you saying percentile data because we we don't have a number of districts in the state to compare to but then you said there's no norm data can't you compare to other years my under i'm sorry amy if you want to answer it but my understanding that tests is uh has been differentiated from previous years is that true new test is that right yeah so the other thing i was going to mention is this year's test is not the same it's shorter and

166it will look different so we can't even like it's just not going to be a comparable test okay my last question sorry but this is i mean to me we have gone through an amazing year and in any sort of evaluation it would be good to know what if any deficits and where we have and i think what you've said is we will know what deficits based upon teacher analysis in the classroom they do their own assessments they can share with the next teacher up the level that they got to or whatever and and so number one do we have time set aside for teachers to talk to each other about how far i didn't get in history or didn't get in language arts or didn't get math question one and then two tell me

167again about the star benchmark testing who all takes that in the fall because i think that may be a great solution to say how deep are we if if there's a hole in math or in reading who all can who's going to get those kind of benchmark tests uh all of our kindergarten through eighth grade students okay that's powerful so i'll look for vince louie and therese and then sarah so didn't you have a second part of that question oh about time and that's the purpose of that um plc time um for those things that happen as well as the sst in the fall and the spring is all year long okay so that's that's a target we could say we're having teachers talk more perhaps this year than ever how far am i getting

168my my group of kids for the next class that's built and that has been built in over time thank you yeah awesome all right let's go to this so thank you for answering one of my questions which was really the utility of this uh uh patched s back model that it's not going to be comparable to previous years it won't be comparable to subsequent years and so as a tool for the board to hold our overall system accountable it really has no utility and what i'm hearing from staff is that it doesn't have utility for educators in the classroom [Music] and so it that really recommends against it the where i really want to go is a point that jay raised which is okay so i know from a board member's perspective this year has

169been kind of a black box from an assessment standpoint um and so i know that we're all eager to get a really good understanding of what the what are the learning progress landscape looks like in our district what information are are you going to be able to pull from this year that you can bring to the board like in a summer retreat that we can really you know sit with for a while and get a deeper understanding of what the needs of our district is um looking forward and then and then we'll get that second shot when when you deploy star we'll get results in the winner and we'll have a much better sense of of where we're headed is that is what i described something that's that's realistic a realistic especially expectation for this

170board i get the secondary level um grades and on-track data will be worth looking at um for middle school looking at grades and then looking at the data the on-track data for high school is going to be pretty valuable i also think looking at who is in our summer programs and and where they're spread out looking at the demographics of our summer program participants i think is also going to be telling of of what we're seeing and who is going to need some additional support over the summer and just i mean and some of that is just relearning the routines of learning in person yeah i think the only thing i'd add is our the reason why we're still pushing for some youth truth data is thinking about what matters and how do we get

171kids in a place where they are able to learn i think knowing where social emotionally our kids are is going to be our critical first step in finding out what we even do at the beginning of the year so knowing you know actually i'm i'm i'm doing okay through this pandemic or this was awful and we have this you know a whole grade level that is suffering more than others and and it's going to make us approach instruction maybe a little bit differently so i will say any data that we have will be filtering through and looking at and and using that to help guide a kick off and then we'll also figure out what what important data we can we can filter to the board yeah i'd say first don't mistake my silence on

172youth truth as as not being interested i did it's just implicit that that's a priority for this board it has been consistently um i guess the the only comment i would say is that just be prepared to walk with this board i mean you're going to be presenting data that's going to be really different probably than what we've seen in the past and helping us navigate that and make sense of that is going to be really important we're going to need staff support to do that absolutely so uh thank you and next up is lou and then terese um vince actually asked one of my questions which is about like what kind of information we'll see from the data from a board level and i just wanted to underline that that is something we'd be

173interested in also knowing that we're not the ones developing the curriculum plans based on that data and so knowing that that's the most useful for the teachers who are actually doing the work with the students um i think my question is more um if you can clarify for just the um the community that the the i'm sorry it's getting late i'm losing my words sending more copy um that the assessment that is being done already that has been being done is something that has been guiding um or students need to are where they need to go next year and where they're at already is that the same kind of assessment that's going on now that you're talking about doing and the other thing is i appreciate you bringing in data to back a conversation about

174data too like showing that survey i think was really helpful from parents um as well so thanks for using data about data and i hope my question made sense too because like i said i'm a little bit off at the moment right now yeah so if i heard you like the the information that we're collecting now this spring is helping guide teachers now and we'll use that same information to help teachers of the next class the in the fall and that's that's for sure happening and that's way more useful than um the other numbers and some of those numbers get astricted out as is right now right yeah so this feels like in those instances that these this data is way more useful to implement what needs to happen next year with the um where

175students are and where they help them get to where they need to be yeah sometimes it's tricky to use even end of year data to help where we start the year because so much happens over a summer and so i'm often it's good data to go into with but i always i always recommend that we start the fall with a fresh set of data to see what happens you know maybe a kid learned to read over the summer and we're using old information so i it's really good that we're continually doing this and that we'll start the year off with really finding out where our kiddos are and i think the only other thank you and i think the only other question is this is not having the assessments is not going to hurt any

176students for like their future plans like for college or um for um vocational school or anything like that right this is like those numbers aren't even in the equation yeah um ode has already said we're not using this data that's not being it's not a requirement for our 11th graders and so we're we are we're good with that and there's not going to be any detrimental effect for our kiddo not taking it this spring thanks so much i just want to also just add on to what amy said you know like our teachers are constantly responding to to the the data that they get from student and students and whether that is straight from an assessment or from looking at engagement so today um when i was meeting with high school principals i asked them

177to share a highlight and one said it you know we're we almost have our first tiny home complete so they had students that were disengaged during remote learning that were coming in and building a tiny home and doing math and doing construction and learning real skills and that's like that's nothing like s back and it's pretty amazing that that's the kind of response that our teachers are giving to our students when they realize there is a need for engagement and support and and it's like you're not going to see that on a test score but that students came back and have been engaged and it's a brand new project for that teacher like they saw a need and said this is what i'm going to do and this is how i'm going to serve students

178and i believe in our staff to do that thanks for bringing that example and that's a really um really powerful story and i appreciate that really intentional work going into like assessing where students are and looking at like there are other ways to do that here locally and so thanks for all your all it's hard work on that thank you and then next is teresa and then sarah and after sarah i'm going to entertain emotion or this decision series thanks sami a lot of things that i was curious about have already been asked so i'd like to talk about the survey that you sent out to parents and the response rate i'm curious um you know you've sent surveys out to parents before and there's a pretty overwhelming difference in the response on on this

179survey regarding how many parents said we'd really be very fine with not having testing what is it like eight was it 898 i don't have the slide in front of me but anyway so my first question is how does the response rate on this survey compare to response rates you you've had on other surveys you've sent out to parents i'd say it's um pretty a thousand respondents is probably pretty common for us to be honest i'd say that's probably within the range we tend to typically get okay and how many families do we have in our district ball park we have 6 700 students um so we probably have close to 4 000 families so that's like 25 then of your student of your that's like that's a really great response rate so um so

180uh really i think i can probably leave my i don't think i need to ask any more questions about that that's really huge and i don't think the survey is giving you any gray areas about what parents think on this topic and i don't i can say as a parent when i got that survey we absolutely talked about how much time might be spent on testing so just to to jay's question earlier i'm guessing if my family talked about this other parents talked about um what they thought would be the pros and cons based on how much they how much time they thought would take i can tell you in my house when we answered it would not have made one difference to us to know if it was one hour or 15 hours because

181we were responding based on what we thought was going to be an unnecessary psychological stressor and further interruption to the social emotional opportunities that returning to school provided which made the return to school and the potential uh implications of coveted numbers in our county worth it to go ahead and take that risk not to have him sit alone and take a test um so i you're probably figuring out where i landed on that um survey um but uh i um so i just i have more confidence that the survey was probably thought through my parents before they put down an answer i think that your numbers they're very telling i don't even know that you need to hear what the board thinks because 898 parents out of you know what 1100 that responded they told

182you what they think and that's a that's a overwhelming majority so thank you for sending it out i appreciate the attempt at including the community in moving forward in it and i when the opportunity comes i'm going to be happy to tell you to use your time doing something else sarah yeah um thank you for bringing this to us and as soon as the survey went out i give the anxiety and questions among parents yeah i was hearing things from parents immediately um and really you can answer these questions with yes or no if that's all you have to say but these are the things that people were worried about as they were asked as they were answering the survey was when are we going to know where kids are when we start school next

183year yes and okay find out more yeah um and and so and and sort of following that and will teachers have the information they need to serve the students as they as we finish this year we start out next year yeah i think that the beauty of our timing is this is what we do this is what we do in september ask what we do is we find out where our kids are what do they know what do they not know what do they like what and and so we're going to use that to help guide us just like we always do and the gaps might be a lot bigger than we've seen in the past but we have systems in place to start to deal with that so the good thing is that doesn't

184feel unfamiliar to us then that's what we do and we're pretty good at it so we're ready to get back into a routine of finding out what our kids know and can do and then and then bridging the gap okay yeah i think that's good i think that was the the real concern that parents were having was it this there was sort of a conflict between we don't want to take the time to do testing and we're so worried about this last year what it's done to our kids and we want to make sure that we're able to really figure that out and so i think you know i'm confident with what you're telling me that um [Music] that this is what teachers do um we we will know where our kids are and what

185holes need to be be filled um and we can use the time that they have in school this year to for them to be together because the last thing they need to do is sit in front of a computer and take a test because that's i can see the anger that would happen in my house if that was what was happening at school one day so um thank you that chair would like to detain emotion if there is any vince what's your motion i move to authorize the district staff to maximize instructional time by not administering state assessments for the 20 20 21 school year second second i think it was therese am i right series has it i'm not competitive sammy you can give it to sarah if you want either seriously seconded and

186uh any any deliberation and i would like to deliberate actually or maybe clarify my understanding this is that this is for the good of the district this is the for the good of the students the good of this for the staff and our teachers to do what's right in terms of focusing on caring connection processing trauma processing needs and and maybe reflecting on the growth that's happened unmeasurable growth there's no ruler or assessment i believe maybe youth truth but there's no assessment that has been designed to measure the growth of our students over the past year and a half and i feel there are tools that our teachers are developing that will help that measure it and process it and be able to be ready for the summer and the fall to women also i'm

187convinced that the assessments and the diversity of assessments that we saw in the first one first our second slide gives us a better understanding of the system uh as an instrumentation systems engineer i know what it means to have only one sensor at one part of the process and i'll be honest s back is a faulty uncalibrated sensor that's going to give us data that cannot be tracked with the past and actually it's not i'm not gonna call it redundant because uh what i heard from what we're doing we're doing much more work it's not redundant to the other work it's uh less quality less resolution the sampling is not right so i i think that's that's for the common good of the students but also i want to clarify it sorry i usually have

188to abide by we ask questions before the motion but uh ryan could you clarify it if i have a parent from the other hand from number one and i come in and i say s back is the best thing for my kid i wanted to sign up if this motion passes how are we navigating that with that parents is there an indication is there a response yeah so i think what we would do is have a conversation with that parent and if they're adamant that their child should take it then we would find a way to provide it for them what we're asking is that the standard be that we're not doing it across the board but if there's a specific request we're gonna we're gonna meet that request at the same time there's a

189lot of other information that we have that we can use that will give us the information we need um it was when sarah was asking those questions says amy um i was also thinking um it would name you would say yes and i was thinking and s back doesn't do anything more to enhance that and it does you know it doesn't further that um at the same time if that request came forward we would um do our best to honor it wonderful well um yesterday so a question or comment that i would make regarding trying to understand what impact because i trust our teachers and administrators that given a regular situation we're going to do well and mom and dad you have to help us and student has to help us i can only imagine

190that if i were a parent right now i would be very nervous about how much my child did not gain during this year so i would also say i don't want to build on the anxiety i i hear uh sarah in your comment that that makes i don't like my anxiety on the other hand i also want to know where my child is so my question goes specifically the tests that are offered k8 early in the year when would we get back data that tells us how they're doing or how they where they are how quickly is it three or four months or is it weeks no it's pretty immediate data it's we will have it in our hands that day like however long it takes us to process and test it's our data it's

191our system we implement it we set the timelines it's it's not a state-directed system it's something we've chosen to purchase and use in our system and and like any test it's got its limits be careful about what you judge but do we share that material with parents very quickly or what do we do with it and or what do you plan to do with it next fall we typically share it at some points it's really we've talked a lot about our plc teams our student service team student study teams our our rti process that's the kind of data that we look at across the board to help us to help determine how second grade is doing so we we take that data and we look at it across a classroom across a grade level across

192the school and we we do a lot of fun data work so my final point i will be voting in favor of this but i will have big assurance at heart that number one we will share with all our disaggregated groups because i have a feeling that there's an equity problem here that a lot of students who did not have support at home may not we may be further behind than we want and then secondly that that we we use it as a way to say trust us parents we're not going to hide our performance your performance as parents and your child's performance we're going to use it as a tool to build on but if we're if we're playing that we can't afford to look at it because oh my they might think badly

193of this bad idea so that's my i would support it thank you jay um sarah vincent and lou and then teresa and let's keep it to a minute to two minutes max for a board member sarah no i just keep forgetting to put my hand down okay thanks no i'm looking forward to voting for the motion because s back even when it was prior to the pandemic was a marginal measure for system outcomes particularly for our district at high school levels because so many students opt out so sammy you spoke to this point really well i don't think that that investing in it now it doesn't help children and it's not going to help the board understand things we got a commitment from our staff that they will help us navigate the variety of different

194ways that that educators are measuring the growth of our children currently and have been over this year and so i'm feeling very confident going into next year and we get started uh fairly frequently from this staff it's that it's that green blue yellow red zone data that we get and it's very high resolution very handy very nimble um and then series i should have wrote it down because it's that time of night but um i just wanted to add in that as far as finding out where students are that we also get a different type of grade report for a lot of students this year like we're getting a more full understanding of where exactly students or our um where our kids are as far as what where their learning is happening or not happening

195and so i think that that kind of um that kind of assessment that's happening helps me see it a little bit better than i would see it on a state test where the numbers are lost like an individual level like this is exactly where my child is and i think that's really helpful um for thinking about i was thinking about what jay was asking in particular about like how old parents know where their students are that's one way um is through those kind of assessments that are going out but what i was going to ask is there's no funding repercussions on the district for not participating and i think that's really important for the community to know like well it's not like our funding is going to get lowered or taken away or anything for

196not participating in this and i that didn't come up yet and i thought it was a really good point for community to know thank you to race thanks sammy i just want to um affirm that our educators and our administrators uh i i think this is a vote of confidence that they know what they're doing that they have all along known the best way to get information about our children's learning and what needs to take place in the classroom and for our community who has expressed repeatedly confidence over this last year about the teachers we trust the teachers we believe the teachers have been doing a really great job yeah this hasn't been ideal but man the teachers are our heroes i think we have to show up for them tonight and we have to

197vote in favor of this request on the part of the district to back our teachers and to back our administrators that their leadership has been everything that community-wide we have been preaching that it has been since the pandemic started if we don't vote for that this evening it will be really difficult for us to walk out there and say yeah this whole year we've been saying that our teachers are the glue holding this together this is our chance to come forward make sure that our community knows that our board listens to our administration we listen to our teachers and they're sending us a very clear message that this is not in the this is not a tool that they need to serve our children well so i'm i'm gonna vote for it and thank you

198so much for putting our kids first for listening to your staff and for uh coming out and sharing something that um is not is a challenging topic talking about standardized testing is not ever an easy thing but i think it was really brave of you to say we don't think this is the thing that our district should spend time on and so thank you and and you have my support director jones has inspired me i recall the previous question all right without objection uh the uh question the motion on the floor is to authorize district staff to maximize instructional time by not administering state assessments for the 20 20 21 school year um signify your votes by a a i or may uh director adams aye doctor conroy aye dr jones aye dr white bear

199aye vice chair finger mcdonald hi pasadena thank you team uh for answering our questions and for the reports this has been very informative and uh i look forward to sharing this discussion with the community members as well because this is very informative and i believe we're doing the right decision at the right time thank you thanks so now next up is uh the first read there is no action required for the first read regarding the racial educational equity policy fka replacing educational equity religion and we have marcian here and i want to thank ryan and marcian for this work and the leadership on this work the school board has committed to anti-racism and racial equity over this year we have focused in our professional development and involvement and engagement on this work and this is

200getting into the conclusion of this process however the beginning of a very important work for years to come so with that i want to open it up marcia and ryan is there anything you would like to share at the beginning before we enter into discussion um yeah just that this has been a year-long process if you think about the work that happened with kristen miles starting in august and throughout this year to get to this point to provide a draft policy that marciana has then been able to take out and share with communities and come back to you i just want you to kind of maintain that perspective as we talk through it tonight it's it's more than a policy written by osba for adoption it's um transformational and it has received input from a

201number of a number of stakeholders and with that may turn over to rcm yes and thank you everybody it's such an honor to be here and i as i was uh um logging into zuma was reflecting on when we first started talking about um our work together with racial equity back in september and what a year has been um you know we spent a lot of time throughout the year talking about the why and the importance of having racial equity at the center of this policy we spent some time talking about some historical perspectives and then we really tried to tie this racial equity policy to your other board goal which is community engagement and so for me this has been an honor it's been an incredibly humbling experience to reach out to our community

202and ask for their perspectives and their voice in this document and again it's not a document with words it really does represent our community and so in the board packet i shared the different focus groups that i met with throughout the last couple of months and i'm just really looking forward to having you um go through the document and again just really honoring the perspectives of our community so thank you again for allowing me to be here with you tonight thank you marcianne um any comments or discussion um and events mercy and i think you touched on the emotion that i felt as i was reading through this i steeply humbled the document has grown past what anything that i could conceive on my own it certainly has transcended all the example policies that we

203looked at it and it's something that's you it's even hard to see what our original paul our original policy in this it has grown where it's escaped me it's large it's powerful it's compelling i remember saying that our policy needed to state why and it goes so far beyond just saying the why but it it really states so clearly what our core values are and i'm just um i'm so proud of it i'm so proud of this process and i really um i look forward to championing this this policy going forward i just um echo what been said like this really reads like that there's community involvement in it it doesn't feel like it's just something that was written by one or two people it feels like there's investment in it by multiple people and

204that process of getting that information um thank you marcian for leading that work because being able to spend time to hear some of what was shared about the policy and the suggestions is really powerful and you can see that reflected here and um it's like vince said it's grown so much from that first draft and it's just amazing to see that um the only like edition suggestion is on number 11 is that we put gender expression if we can start including that language in our policies that would be great instead of just gender identity um that's a comment i have for another policy as well but i really really just appreciate seeing how strong that this is and how much um it brings in some of the gap areas that we missed right like we

205missed that part about pulling in student voice when i'm like how do we not put that in there we know it's we know we want the student voice and this is for the students but we didn't specifically list them as being part of um as part of that i'm looking at number nine um on that one and so bringing in i think having that student input really helps strengthen it because this is who it's for it's for the students and for them to bring their voices in is really awesome so thank you and i'm really excited about this sarah and therese and then um jane yeah i you this is a really powerful thought when i was reading it was how we had and i like that it gives us work to do um i

206also really appreciate that we we worked so hard as a board to set goals and now i see a lot of those goals that are now written in our policy which gives them strength and longevity in our district and i think that's that's really um and i i just the voices you can hear through the the pieces of this policy and yesterday sammy and i met with students and the things they were saying is reflected in this policy and so i think it's it becomes a really powerful document in the way that it embraces you the real concerns and the real steps that need to be taken and takes your aspirations and puts them into things that now we are required to do by policy so thank you terese and then jay and then i'll

207recognize myself [Music] thanks sammy i just have um it was just a really profound experience to read this policy and to in so many ways look at it and think what was the original policy and how did we think the original policy was going to get the job done after seeing this one um my what i love about that though this is what i love about it is that that's what this equity work is and i think that what i so appreciate about the thoughts that went into the first policy is that the people who spent the time to write that are not even a little bit upset that the policy has been improved upon that it has been real in many ways really functionally gutted and built into something that much more reflects our

208community and i i appreciate that leadership from the people who put this in front of our community in the first place and then those who came and said no you didn't get this quite right and the people who took up the mantle to say let's make it better and i want to pay my respects and my gratitude in advance for the people who i hope in a couple of years come back and point out to us but we still didn't get right so that we can continue to make it better because equity will be an ever moving target to um you know to really reach that and so thank you for all of the staff um support i didn't have any wording in it that really stood out to me as problematic but i have

209to confess i probably need to read it again because i think i was just so awestruck the first time going through that um i probably do want to make sure i don't want a wordsmith but just really on my end nothing but but gratitude for our community and for the participants and could this become the way that we do our policy could we make sure that we we not only expand the voices that are included but we name the voices that are included because later some people may realize that people got left out of that conversation and if we're not transparent about who was part of it and was instrumental it will be hard to know who whose voices need to be you know part of of revisions and rewrites and and recasting that vision

210for the next group so um yay and let's keep doing it because it's policies iterative so thank you thank you seriously so this is a big big undertaking issue that school in my experience has wrestled with for about six years i think um events you talked about maybe two years prior to me coming on the board you had worked with the prior board to develop the equity policy and then this takes and you use the words trees i think functionally guts that equity policy and changes it to a quote racially or racial equity policy so i want to walk you back through the wording and then ask to maybe rethink up in paragraph one in the black ink we use the word student identity i'm sorry i might it's so hard to work with um

211including racial identity so right at the bottom it says when um the original paragraph says we will achieve equity when student identity does not predict or determine success in school i think that's a strong statement what we change in the rest of this is we don't add that including ratio we just call it racial identity and so i don't know totally with great respect marciana who you talk to but i think there are a lot of people who would say that language is divisive now you talk to people who maybe focus on race but i'm not sure that race can actually take up and pick up all the other areas of equity whether it's social economic gender any number of identities and so for us to keep narrowing back in the wording of this with

212the amendment back to racial i think it becomes very divisive i think it becomes very narrow and it puts people i think in some groups oh they're not being taken care of so i'm very concerned about that i think it would help the discussion today or down the road tell me again because i think i heard it last time why does it help to make race the central piece of this policy give me two or three sentences marciana or next time around i think that's that's the problem yeah do you mind uh very important i want to pause and highlight something just to make sure i read the policy the way i see it the sentence that you highlighted the way i see the proposed policy will say we will achieve equity when student identity

213comma including racial identity comma does not predict or predetermine success in school and you have a problem with that sentence correct i do because i think the original statement was well done that is we will achieve or equity means student identities including ratio so it was broad and inclusive and this and then all the subsequent changes focused too much on race okay okay yeah um marciano you want to answer that or sure i think several of us can um i think back on some of the conversations that we've had previously in and i think this has come up several times so one of the things that when i think about why the impetus to move from an educational equity policy to a racial equity policy is to really highlight jay the importance of if we

214are able to support and really do the best we can for historically marginalized communities first it will support all groups and so that's the reason the main reason kind of a elevator speech per se of why we have to include and have this be a racial equity policy because if we center if we center our work around our our historically marginalized communities first it will support all so that's why you see the word race come up multiple times and when we met with the community that was actually one of the things that came up during our focus groups as many of our communities were very appreciative of the fact that our district once for once was really highlighting the importance of race in this work and um felt very proud that we were doing that

215as a as a collective thank you uh i'll go to lou and then vince and i want to go back to you jay or you could no i've said my concerns awesome thanks sarah lou and then vince yeah and i think it's also important to highlight that it's not just like historically um unsupported and marginalized but institutionally marginalized groups and they're usually um from certain racial demographics in um and historically within our state especially and um the policy how it reads it is a racial educational equity policy how it's reading but it's it also includes all the other identities and demographics that were listed farther down in the policy so um and it's not only in the front part with the emphasis on race but also farther in the policy it lists out all the

216other pieces that we would include which includes socioeconomic and gender and all of the other pieces are still in here so all of those um all of those concerns i think are included it's just farther down in the policy where um perhaps people didn't see it if there was concerns brought up from community about it um and i would encourage folk to check that in out and also to check out the recording of a previous meeting where we talked about this too i think would be good because i know we talked about it in depth before the importance of focusing on that um but yeah that wasn't the main reason i raised my hand i forgot i end up listening so intently if i don't write my notes that i'm like welcome i'll come back

217to you vince yeah jay uh to speak to your point one of the things that i really like about this policy is that it addresses the the concept of intersectionality without saying the word uh you can't search intersectionality in this document it's not there but it does address that and i in one part it's in the last paragraph on the first page it says racial educational equity promotes the real possibility of racial equality of educational results for each student between diverse groups of students and then on the next page it gets kind of nuts and boltsy and on number two where it says consistently using district one individual school level data disaggregated by race ethnicity language special education gender socioeconomic status blah blah blah blah and it and there are other parts in the policy

218where it it lays out in layman's terms in terms that even i can understand what intersectionality means so while this i understand that it's branded as a racial equity policy it really addresses a broad array of identities that's one of the things i like most about thanks do you remember or shall i go for it i remembered i think one of the main things that we need to keep in mind too um is this is upholding our commitment as an anti-racist school district like the district has made that commitment already we're like almost a year into that commitment and this is putting that into action and it's kind of hard to be like we changed our mind like we already made that commitment we can't not commit to it anymore until we get there and

219so i think that that's something that's important to keep in mind that um we're all aware of that commitment as a board and that this is one piece of doing anti-racist work as a district is to focus on race specifically and so i think that's important for community to keep in mind too is that is that is a district commitment thank you um i want to comment that the way i read it especially the sentence that was called out uh previously that this is a racial educational equity that looks into that intersectionality that vince and lou and my colleagues mentioned uh called out it's just like a rising tide uh will lift every boat and when a race has been and continues to be the common denominator of predicting and predetermining success in school not

220for an inherent issue in race but because of the system the society and the historical the momentum of the historical and justices that continue to be now race continue to be the major predictor and predeterminant of of inequities and when we address that health safety nutrition housing environmental equities will be addressed for those who are racially disadvantaged and for those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged those who are experiencing disabilities and i believe i believe that focus will address more efficiently inequities everywhere that's how i see it also i want to call out something important this is a compassionate policy a policy of compassion i'm reflecting on conversation i had with the white parents who asked me do you feel in 10 to 12 years when my uh when his son would be in high school a

221white child would they feel the guilt if they go through policies like that and anti-racist work and the way i answered it is no they're going to feel the accountability and the responsibility and the compassion for privileges that exists and for that responsibility that we need to make sure that people who have been disadvantaged for years and decades and generations deserve our support and our compassion uh it's a compassionate policy that will help us look into each other and how we can support each other and close the opportunity gap in science math arts uh everything so that's that's how i see it personally that's being said uh there is a reason why this is a first reading because we're presenting it to the public right now and we would like and i would like to

222encourage the public to give us feedback to give us comments whether sharing their lived experiences over email or their stories or their perspectives or language i believe part of our responsibility you know to ask the community and the public to provide feedback and i would like to encourage that vince yeah i'd like to i'd like to well i wouldn't like to speak as a white cisgender male heterosexual person from the dominant culture i'm just really one of the things that's the hardest things about being a white man in society during this time is that we may if we're compassionate we want to do something but once we come to terms with the reality that racism is is fundamentally uh that people in the dominant culture are responsible for there's a deep weight there because we

223don't know what to do i live most of my life not feeling responsible for racism or to address racism in my life what i really appreciate about this policy is it lays out very clearly for me as a school board member as a white male school board member i can see very clearly what i need to do i can see very clearly what what work i need to do specifically this is a nice very very convenient road map for leadership for anybody but particularly for a person with my background so i really really appreciate this document a lot because it's so clear and so powerful and for a person who doesn't have the lived experience of being racialized yeah i i need a crib sheet so i know what to do so i'm more than

224just an ally playing along i can actually get something done on my own thank you any further discussion i guess i just need to respond i believe that the original policy captured the goal of what every teacher and leader and board member should have which is every kid needs to be treated to move them up and succeed no matter what their background is secondly you said you think that the biggest predictor of educational performance is race i'm not sure that's the data that i pulled from my training in that i think a bigger factor may well be number one social economic and number two in some cases gender that is we tend to have tended to have categories and then we have a number of other issues whether it's disability or ethnic background or even

225in some cases religion or faith so i think that this mistake policy says we have faith that if we do this well for race we'll have everything else taken care of that should not be the standard the standard should be every child needs to be looked at and if there are burdens in the way that are unfair unjust and equitable we need to work on cleaning them up so i i will go home and do some research on race versus social economic and other factors but um i i appreciate the fact that we've done some heavy work thank you marcianne and all the group um i just don't think it's right-headed so we'll see thank you all right last uh word or two words uh from theresa then lou and then we need to move

226on to corvallis online so it's a reason to move okay i'm just gonna be short and say that i i do think that every kid does deserve to be lifted up it's just that a lot of them already are and you know as a parent of a white child a white male child um that's just not something that i worry about i don't worry about representation for him and i just think every parent who is not the parent of a white male child deserves also not to have to worry about whether or not their school district is going to be able to represent their kid and i think that's why we have to call that race because your average i grew up in a low-income family i understand that socioeconomics matter but i also know

227that i was better off as a white poor person than the non-white poor people in my community i got opportunities that were not afforded to them there were things people were willing to do for me because of my racial alignment with them that were not provided to other people and i cannot deny that and i'm not responsible directly for why people were willing to afford those opportunities to me but now that i'm aware of it i am responsible for what i do with that knowledge and that responsibility to that knowledge says that i i absolutely have to both name it for what it is and then wherever i am able to call it out and work to dismantle it in other places and so i very much hear i don't want any child to be

228left behind but i can't that there are individuals and race is a significant predictor that are going to be left behind if we're not intentionally crafting policies to keep that from happening and to and not to keep from happening like we're they're like we're saviors to keep it from happening like taking deconstructing the systems that continue to make it so easy for it to happen so implicitly and without intention i want to be really clear that i don't think we have teachers in our district that would intentionally marginalize any child but the implicit processes are very real and so i want every parent to be able to have the confidence that their child will be seen by people who look like them like i am able to have i know that that's not true right

229now and i hope this policy would be something that would help us move in that direction and i also realized i wasn't short i apologize lou um i just want the community and and students who put their efforts and love into this policy to hear from somebody that this policy isn't wrong because for it to be framed as the wrong direction when that much love and effort has been put into it by community and students and staff i feel is disrespectful to that work and i want them to know that they're supported in the work that they put in here and i would encourage folk if they do have um questions about the importance of this to please i don't know if somebody can give the exact date of which meeting it was um where

230marciana kristen presented this initially before it went out to community because we already talked about this at length and kristin also offered um to provide resources about the research that talks about race being the dominant predictor um and so i would say that if folk are curious that are on the board that need that research in that backing to reach out to kristen since she offered to share those materials with us um and that was all all right sami can i say one last thing that's okay i know it's late um are you sure okay um one thing that i wanted to uh close with is the intentionality of the we language in the policy and i think it really goes to lou's point when we met with the community members health navigators affinity groups

231safe students our delta families all of them felt that adding the we language does a couple of things it equalizes power and it really brings a community into a policy where the policy that was that we had before was untouchable to them and it didn't represent them and so i heard many of you talk about the word compassion and how this policy really represents our community and when i think about the board goals which is racial equity and community engagement from my perspective i think this is one of the first policies that really represents our community and one of the things that we talk about the policy can be words on the page but it's the action it's the follow through that we are committing to as a district and so i also too want

232to thank our communities for putting their their not only their perspectives but also sharing their stories and these focus groups were i think it's true testament of the importance of reaching out to our communities and bringing their perspectives in these policies and so i believe that this new policy really represents our community and um and values and honors them in so many different ways so thank you so much and i look forward to our next session together thank you very much marciana i appreciate it really appreciate your work and everybody's work who uh and time that they put into this uh next item in the agenda is gravel's online application and um i believe this item is for action and now we have melissa you have something to share or brief about the application so

233so brief here's what i can tell you um we had corvallis online this school year and we had quite a few students who were enrolled we have looked at what's coming up for next year and ode has really kind of telegraphed to us that schools will have to provide a cdl option and corvallis online was our cdl option this year we also polled our parents who were involved in corvallis online and asked them would you do it next year and as you can see in the board report 64 of those respondents said absolutely and 128 said we kind of need to see what next year looks like and that had to do with what the school district's doing in person but also what covid looks like and looks like for their family so um based

234on that and those those kind of two big players for us we want to provide the corvallis online option again next year but we'd like to offer it as an independent school so that we can track data so that it is not kind of all kind of jumbled up with all of the other schools in the district and it's its own separate entity it would not be a program where out of out of residence students could apply to come to it is solely for corvallis students we would um we would still have a an assistant or i'm sorry principal for the elementary principal for the high school and we would work on staffing and staffing's like a chicken and egg thing we'll like we want so we're gonna put some stuffing in place and then

235we're gonna see how many kids enroll in august and then we might have to add more um but what we need from the um from the board tonight is authorization to seek an institutional id for corvallis online which is kind of like one of the first steps in getting our application into the state all right therese and then therese so my understanding of the reading and and i think was confirmed by what you just said is that the seeking the id is the initial step uh which is not necessarily a commitment that we will i mean i think that we probably will have to be prepared to offer something because of ode but my question is just this what's the threshold at which because i you know i just i don't know so what what

236uh i lost her oh can you hear me now you said well you said threshold and then we didn't catch your question oh dude no i can't remember it it's after 10 o'clock that's okay if we wait like three minutes we can replay it on the youtube channel right and then we can just get it that way i think my question was what number makes this not sustainable how many families have to do this for it to be able for us to be able to afford to dedicate the staff and the resources to pull it off ryan have you given yeah so i would say um that this up for the upcoming year we would be using some of those federal relief dollars for corvallis online um in anticipation of having it in place for

237one more year and then making it and then making a decision again i don't feel like we're in this space where we're saying we're making a 10-year commitment like we do with uh money creek when we sign a charter for five years um we're really saying we're going to try to maintain this for another year because we've had that request from families through our surveying and we will assess it again um and so i i we have not spent a lot of time teresa looking at what is the break-even point because we've had these federal dollars that are around recovery and maintaining that option for kids that is something that we'll continue to assess as we move forward but for this upcoming year it's really the intention is to continue to provide that option on

238a for on a one-year basis okay so then i assume going beyond that we would be looking at those numbers to figure out if it's sustainable yeah and my follow-up to that and then i'm done is um if it if it is um successful in this coming year if we have participation and enrollment is this something that you could foresee down the road opening to um people not in corvallis or do you imagine or maybe you can't answer that right now but that's my question so my concern with that is that there are some virtual charter schools in the state of oregon and they have kids from across the state and they have created systems to travel the state and do state testing and all these other factors um that come into play as you

239grow beyond your geographic boundary and that would be another really important conversation to have before we would ever move in that direction um because of the because again that impacts our ability to do it well one of the things i've liked about corvallis online has been it's been our teachers with our kids and then you begin to lose some of that so um i don't i don't see that necessarily as a goal from this for this school rather than it creates another option for families in our community okay thank you um therese kind of asked my question it was more along like they're still corvallis students right and um in how long this would go on for because i think it's showing that need and hopefully we can find a way to meet that need

240beyond the pandemic and so this could be a good pathway to that but i was yeah it was basically a thing i've had conversations this week with oregon superintendents and superintendents um who um primarily in the midwest a group of superintendents i meet with and they're all having the same debate about and some of them didn't um put up a online school last year but they're thinking about it for this upcoming year and so there's a lot of a lot of flex or flux um pardon me um and what to do and that's why i think we know we want to continue it for next year and then we're going to have to reassess my questions have been answered so i would ask will the chair entertain a motion yes what's your motion i move

241to authorize the district to submit an application for the new institutional id for corvallis online for the 2021 2022 school year is there a second second uh i think let me take out it i think jake sorry though all right any further discussion see none uh the question on the uh that the the motion of the uh on the table is that to authorize the district to submit an application for a new institutional id for profiles online for the 2021-22 school year director adams what's your vote hi director conroy what's your vote hi director jones what's your vote hi dr white bear hi vice chair peter mcdown hi and i and we do have passes unanimously we have a new school and i think it's been at least sincere time events when was the last

242time we sought a new institutional id probably more than a day that's before my time yeah i don't know long time so that's the milestone probably call it chill i was going to take home that one because it's embedded in the other school so yeah even it's over not even yeah so that's a milestone let's reflect on that for a second all right next item on the agenda is consolidated action and uh for the record and i want to uh highlight for uh that we do have item eight d non-resident transfer allocation that was added uh earlier uh today so just uh for uh this quality and that's part of the consolidated action uh with that does any important member wish to pull out or discuss or ask questions about an item from the action

243since so i have one question on policy jfcm and then i would like to comment on policy bf licensed personnel action and uh the appointment of the budget committee member all right you're living faster than me can you say sorry sorry so you got the jfcm that's the actual real work then comment on bff comment on license print personnel action and then comment on appointment to the budget committee thank you yeah absolutely any other board member i wish to pull out something okay i have the same two or two of those sounds good so let's start with jfcm uh events so jfcm um i found one i well on page two paragraph oh no i forget which paragraph i didn't note it it's the one that starts with the building administrator or disney and i

244forget where it is in the document but it's at the bottom it says design instead of designee so there's a typo there got it thank you yep and then i had a question there's a mention here that the district will obtain a student evaluation by licensed mental health professional before allowing the student to return into the classroom setting and it just i understand that for our district we have additional capacity to meet this requirement but there are some it just feels like a high bar uh both it just seems like a high bar for the district i'm just i just want to ask is this boxing the district in or placing an undue expectation on the district to place a licensed personnel on a person or on a child before they return to the classroom

245and it's just a question i i it just seems like a very high bar to me when you look at um uh so one through five so that starts on page one and then goes to page two number five says obtain a student evaluation and remembering that these are um these are these are actions that you could consider to implement so this isn't something we have to do um the section that is highlighted about entering into contracts with licensed mental health or or were you specifically talking about five it was just that particular provision well i understood the contract piece and so that that is optional okay so if uh so if we have a licensed person there in the building already i just i don't want undue delay if the kid de-escalates and is

246going to be regulated and you know let's get the kid back in instruction if we can it was the thought the thought process that i had when i was navigating that but since this is it leaves it to the administrator's discretion right then that i'm completely comfortable with that so thank you for that any further comments from jfcm so with that uh melissa i take it from uh what this mentioned uh where we're going to put jfcm with uh the exchange and design into designee right and and i'm looking on that so i see i see designee in the sentence prior to number one and two at the bottom of page one my copy says designee so is it somewhere else sorry i'll hunt it down for you and then we can come back around

247melissa i found it okay changed it thank you erica thank you erica all right so that we will be approving this with that change right um lou uh on jftm i'm just confused i thought that that was under information it is and i it is an information because these are all for jfcm is a first read but okay that's why i was like i'm i was just completely scrolling up and down like what happened i read brook wrong and so okay because i have comments on some of the other ones and information but we're just doing action right now right yeah you're right clarification as the saying goes with the robbers rules yeah that's right point qualification in order and uh yes thank you so we got the dfcn let's go back down to consolidated

248action and within the cell reaction we have bf and this all the action so let's talk about bf um defense [Music] you're good sorry i'm the one that pulled this down then the consolidated information my bus sorry all right but you didn't stop me [Laughter] are you guilty not my fault you're tired no i was just gonna comment on policy be up that i just really enjoy the i really like the way this policy reads now the revisions i know this has gone around several times but i think for me it it read really well so i was just i i put in my notes love this policy [Music] that's it awesome uh any other comments on vf hello oh you're good okay so next item on the action we have uh the uh licensed

249personal action as a reminder uh yeah uh vince you know what what you need to do so what's your comments well no i just wanted to say well i just wanted to say welcome to uh sean bernard the new sped coordinator um it'll be nice to have that that additional position and then our two uh assistant principals at chs uh jermaine joseph hayes and emmett whitaker i can't wait to meet these people in person i'm not liking this pandemic thing and then i saw on people retiring um just saying farewell to peg cornell and donna caim um i've been with this district for a little bit now and so i don't i don't know what a corvallis school district without pig or donna it's it's hard to see these people retire that you know that

250are are real they're mentors uh to board members and so it's just thank them thanking them for their service um i'm sorry it's late words are escaping so just being modeling and and just uh sorry to see those folks go and congratulations i just want to build on what you said vince um peg at cv and donna at college hill and then offering her work with uh the annual interviews and helping kids get beyond cd and chs and then a name that you didn't mention a good friend of mine and a great teacher gerhard behrens he had been in adams for years as a classroom teacher and then stepped a little bit sideways and became a health pe teacher he's just a great mentor for all three are great mentors for kids they're they're just

251real practical trench people and so congratulations to them and thank you for all the heavy work they did for all those years yeah and i wish there were there are in-person retirement parties but uh if there's any i would love to attend those there's our mentors they i've learned a lot from them and my short time so far and i know that they've educated generations literally next item on the agenda is a point uh budget committee member and vince what's your comment about it so i just was delighted when i read that that our colleague in the campaign shauna tommeny is applied to be on the budget committee she comes with immense budget experience uh in her um in her management of it's called opec and i'm gonna butcher the name it's the oregon parent

252education coalition or collaborative or i forget what the c stands for anyway it's a statewide program and she just comes with great budgeting skills and deep deep experience and expertise in child development i think she's going to be a tremendous asset on the on the budget committee and so i'm just was just really delighted to see that and i'm looking looking forward to voting for consolidated action uh to take all these actions but uh bring her on to our budget committee thank you and as before the record that's uh a vacancy that has been vacant since february and uh this was the only applicant uh sarah yeah i just wanted to make sure that the public understood that this was a position that's been open for a while that it's been advertised anybody could have

253applied for this position and we got one application and um just because i don't want there to be any um perception that there was anything special happening here this has been since february one person applied so yeah i think that's important for people to know okay i would go one step further we had a chance to meet with shauna who applied for a board vacancy a while back and she was very impressive and got a lot of good positive reviews there so i think it's a positive follow-through not a concern yes thank you all right with that uh the chair i would like to entertain a motion for regarding consolidation any motion i move that we approve the items in consolidated action do i press second second all right any further discussion see none uh

254director jones what's your vote hi director white bear what's your vote i know that i am muted director conroy what's your vote hi dr adams hi and vice chair mcdonald hi all right now you saw the information and uh for the record we deliberated on jfcm uh is there any further discussion in jfcm i have no further items all right any anything that you would like to pull out sarah and lou what would you like to collab sarah oh okay no i just didn't put my hand down i'm not good at that how about them a question for sake of um time and efficiency um melissa do you just want me to email you all the links that didn't work instead of pulling i know i'm the weird one i am the weird one who

255does look at them but i think you need to read every one of them into the record so that every all three people that are still listening can look them up themselves i'm kidding for the record lou is mentioning uh linxa for uh the oregon revised statues and uh things on the pdf that don't work you always point those out thank you luke it's so important because it seems to be frustrating for me when something doesn't work yeah it's not wooden for being the second read um but i did want to ask if we could talk about um jb and i just had a comment on the one that has a really really long one it's like the last one it's says h c j h c d a dash a r medications no motivations

256yeah um [Music] i had a clarifying question on lbea and i had a question about bcf just okay any anything else i i mean i could have pulled all of them sammy but just for the weeks hey for the record uh for our board organization are you comfortable with the language that we have from osba i am thank you for doing that i appreciate that very much awesome thanks so as a note the board calendar is just there for information and it will come back next month when you take action on that policy bcbca and then we'll bring that calendar forward um because the mechanics are right now we have a calendar that has a july 1st board meeting but with the adoption of bcbca then we would um potentially remove that july first meeting

257because that wouldn't have a purpose does that make sense it does to me okay yeah so cool uh with that let's talk with uh item b1 which is bcf uh lu um yeah i had a specific question about that before it did not include resolutions when we first had this conversation all right wait not resolutions proclamations is that the room wait let me double check i'm sorry i need to pull it up um parker says that's one of the parts we added was the um the resolutions not just policies like how we did the hold on let me pull it up okay so uh parker can speak to it if you want uh are you talking about you're talking about um bfc the adoption and revision of policies that one bcf yeah it was resolutions

258i thought it was just talking about policies being two weeks and then did we talk about resolutions too we reached out to osba based on uh jay's questions and they gave us this response is suggested language he did say that the resolutions if we wanted to could be moved to another policy but i believe that jay was also talking about resolutions as well in his statement so i included it there just so we can have the discussion about it okay i do have a little bit of concern about that just thinking about some of the work we've done this year like with indigenous people's day were those would that have would that fall under this and yeah like yes okay oh sorry that's okay yeah um all of our all resolutions would fall under that

259um if that was a if it was adopted like this okay i do have uh i do have concern with that because i don't think that unless we have some really thinking i think sometimes we're like oh look at these deadlines and how far out do we need to plan and like if we would have had to do that for indigenous people's day it would have had to happen like in what june because i'm trying to think back of like how many meetings maybe it could happen in august but sometimes we are we become aware of things that are important to the community that will end up excluding by having a policy like this that we didn't mean to exclude and i don't think that it would be good to have something in policy and

260then then say like there's all these urgent situations coming up now to ask for exception to policy um so that's where my thinking was with the concern about having that in there in particular based on the two that we did bring in kind of a little bit later um yeah okay just to respond i think that the my intent was that there isn't a clause that allows us to declare that we don't need to wait two weeks and we can justify that to the public like just what you said oh it came up emergency we need to but otherwise i think we talked about a goal of the board being more focused on community communications and adequate transparency and response time so i think it sets the bar as generally speaking we like to have

261a certain amount of time but we always have a reasonable exception and i think it i think the the opt-out gives us that exception i think resolutions are are very valuable but if possible if they deserve good transparent and and open uh back and forth with community as well so yeah i'll i'll provide my two cents on this i've seen honestly i'll be honest uh about how trans not transparent how heads how much of heads up we give i've seen governmental entities in the region here local i couldn't see the language of the resolution until the entity uh the governing body voted so after they voted i was able to get it exactly and jay is checking things out it is sad unfortunately i think that's a very low bar now we have a higher

262bar here where we get our the public connects the material as soon as we access it as board members um and uh sometimes there are those urgencies where you need to create a resolution presented to the board i i feel conflicted between expediency and deliberation that's where they're why there's a senate and a house probably i don't know but the idea is there is this complex between these two things expediency and deliberation and and both in both of them we should be doing it in the public eye which is the minimum bar uh as we deliberate we need to show the community what we're doing they need to access it honestly i feel my experience with another governing body where i can't even read the language until it's voted on is not acceptable people need

263to have the right to say hey jay lu samia i don't feel uncomfortable with this resolution or that resolution before we vote on it would that lead us to say we want to have two meetings 14 days in between i think that's a much higher bar i think there's a potential consequence to it or like a i don't want to call it negative consequence but there's a cost to it and as i think lou is highlighting here um and eventually maybe the future awards if we adopt this every resolution will be an um emergency i think that's what i was trying to avoid was like we i know we have the claws but it's like i think it's going to create a lot of requests it could i'm not going to say it will but

264it could create a lot of requests for policy exception and then at that point it like kind of counter is counterproductive to have the policy if we continually ask for exceptions and i'm not trying to say i don't want the public to have um like advance notice i think that um we have our materials ready i think friday or saturday before the meeting is just a little bit under a week and um i don't see the board putting forth resolutions that are super damaging to the community at all like i don't think we do damaging work in general and so that's where i think the resolution when i just think there is some unintended things that happen and um and honestly it kind of feels like almost a reaction to some of the resolutions that

265we've passed in shorter timelines and i know that's not the intent but i don't want the community to um read it that way either like okay we passed these ones on short notice and now we're asking for resolutions to have a two week this specifically and i know that's not what's going on with the resolution piece i know that was what prompted the policy piece but the resolution pieces came in later like we didn't even talk about the resolutions that was brought in by um by osba's recommendation and so that's where i was like that wasn't really what we had initially talked about i i do um blue i'm the one who asked the question of osba and i did in that conversation here um the resolution piece um again this is your policy so

266you you can decide one way or the other but it wasn't um i just want to be clear that it wasn't osba alone and just saying hey if you want to do resolutions do it this way too it was me asking that question okay but it wasn't like based on jay's recommendation in the first place is what i'm trying to say like this wasn't like necessarily it was specifically about policy it's not it but i think that correct but i thought that was your intent is to do policy and i don't remember specifically thinking resolution but the board acts in two ways either in adopting policies or adopting resolutions and to me the underlying value applies to both with the caveat that says and if by chance we catch up short for any sort of

267good reason we can quote make an exception but i think to worry that we're making exceptions is to miss the point the point is give people a fair opportunity to know what we're doing after a reasonable opportunity to deliberate unless you have to have an exception so to me it's worrying about something that you shouldn't worry about until it's a problem and it's not a problem to make exceptions i don't think but yeah i have the other added layer of concern of like um perception and how this could be read as in like it's a reaction to a very specific um very specific things that were passed this year is how it could be read so the things that would fall under this actually are the school rename and that was mentioned as prompting this

268request indigenous people's day in black history month are the ones that have that short timeline and i think like i'm not trying to overread it but i'm saying like those are the three things that would have been impacted by this policy being in place this year and so i think we just need to be careful about the message that's sent to the community and explain that that is not necessarily the intent even though it was expressed it was the intent with one instance so so because she's asked me for my intent so lou i heard the school naming policy i heard the in the book understand what's the other one uh the black history month yeah and so i'm going to be real clear i would have supported an exception for indigenous day and black

269history month absolutely because i get totally that we got a moving calendar and it's hard to remember all these things so if anybody wants any intent i am not concerned about that action i am concerned about school naming and other processes and i so i want to be real clear okay um [Music] sorry sorry i can't find the mute button uh i think maybe my question got answered so i've come back to me uh i i need to think for a second about whether or not but was just exchanged theresa we lost you in general now you're you lost am i there now yes can you hear me yes oh good i was just gonna say that i need to ponder if that exchange actually answers my question so and to keep us moving forward

270i'm going to remove myself for the moment and then i'll put my hand back up if i think it didn't sounds good vince next and before i go to vinson i'm thinking if we end up having different directions around this policy i would recommend maybe i want to listen to vince and if there's anyone else want to speak maybe i would recommend sending me and parker um i don't have quality or iterations or i'm thinking about process if you do prefer the policy pass in a different language than what we have in the packet maybe communicate that uh so we can bring in the second reading a policy that we can get consensus on uh is that an appropriate process well i think you would just bring it back and yeah okay so prepare your

271amendments for next meeting based on this language so the language here is the basis and if you want to add something or take something out just to acknowledge that we might not have full consensus uh tonight uh vince so as i reflect about this first i want to say i really applaud jay's intent behind this this policy change i think that it's it's addressing part of the problem that this board has had for some time um you know we have struggled to be available and with to the public um and we don't we hear a slice of the public we don't hear the whole public and this board has has stated multiple times uh that community engagement is an area where we want to do work and so when i think about this particular policy

272revision i see it as kind of like a little band-aid on a really really big cut and i think that we're just thinking too small here i think that this may be part of a larger solution but i don't think that this board has stepped back and really taken the full scope of the work that we need to do to be truly engaged with our community and so this could be part of a policy solution down the road but right now this just feels like a small step i don't even know if it checks a box i'm not even sure that it's going to address the intended problem so i i would ask that the board stop and think a little bit more about this and think more broadly about how we're going to implement

273different policy structures to be more engaged with our community and i think we have we have work to do in that area that note uh i'll uh from vince i would say let's uh reflect and if you have amendments uh please submit them to parker in advance so we can have the language uh and then we can debate it next uh next meeting but i believe uh vince you touched a really important point for our reflection that we need to have uh on this so next item in the agenda is jb equal educational opportunity and that's just from move right yeah it was that was a policy where i was going to ask if we could add gender expression into that one's that one's way shorter that was it on that one all right and

274any comments or feedback okay so policy jhcd jccda medication formerly known as prescription medications you're muted i think i left myself unmuted than muted myself to talk it's getting late um it was the one that's all the way down is this still in the right section it's like 9b12 yeah it's the medication ones um but it was the ar one in particular um it's the last one in our pack um i just wanted to say that that's really that's so important and i'm glad to see that in there was all it was a comment um to be able to perhaps save somebody's life um with an unfortunate if that was an unfortunate incident when some if somebody did overdose so i just thought that was a really strong and important thing to add in and

275i hope we don't have to use it but i'm glad it's there thank you our nurses agree and feel the same way yeah wonderful uh blue next up is sorry any other questions or comments on this one okay next up is lbea residential student denial for virtual public chartered school attendance i had a question on that one that would only ever so the way that's written that decision would come to us if it was over that three percent right anything other we wouldn't have to worry about it was just a clarifying question okay i just want to make sure that that was super clear okay that was all thank you thank you i have a question i have a question about that one are we expecting any change from the legislator about this or is

276it already dead in terms of changing the percentage i don't think that that's gonna happen in this session okay all right good to know um anything else from the salad information all right look at us we're not at 11 30. um so board member comments any board member comments events sorry everybody i know it's late so meeting in person i i'm totally eager to meet in person but i i didn't get the like the okay sign or or i know that there was some informal discussion about that but can we meet in person now yes the answer is yes uh we can i'm sorry if i did not communicate that clearly but uh okay yes the answer is yes i look forward to coming to the deo for our next meeting yeah we have your

277name ready but i i would say maybe i chose for me i did check in with board members i don't know i for whatever reason i miss that um no yeah budget meeting will be virtual yes okay budget meeting virtual do you want just all my i have three items do you want them all go for it okay so uh i just want to i don't want to pick at the tdac i just think that there's something there that the board can learn about i there's learning there i'd like to know more about that one of the things that i that this was a process that happened over the course of a year and this this was the first time i ever heard about it so i i feel a little blindsided having people show

278up and and i just didn't know it was happening um and i think there was there's some learning there and i think that there's something about these committees and i think that there may be some policy structure there to support the district in doing this work and so i just want us to i guess i'm looking at ryan and saying can we think about that and can you come back with maybe something there i don't know yeah i think we can come back with some more information for you on that uh it won't be uh it won't be at the june meeting um no no no no but but that is something where we can provide an update to you no and i was just and i mean that in the most collaborative sense um

279yeah it's just it's like wow this was a really good process may not have happened as well as it could have but i mean i think that maybe district you didn't have the support and that you needed from us to ensure that yeah anyway i'm not gonna it's late um and then you already talked about uh getting us some uh a report on math tracking and academic impacts apparently you know people are getting frustrated with that so i think the board needs to be educated on the science behind the changes that we've been making for some time now and so let's just get the the board skilled up on that i think that's what we need to do yeah and and just to speak to that for a minute um that that process has been

280underway for quite some and that when i spoke earlier um i was really talking about um more parent engagement um in that conversation right i just i don't know that i'm feeling completely solid on the underlying science and so i think i'd like to i'd like to learn more so maybe push us some reading or something and then we can have a discussion maybe the summer would be a good time to have that conversation okay thank you that's all i have just to follow up on that question i think clarification of has there been a decision that we will do x and y in the area of math needs to be communicated because i think they've got some parents and some schools think that they have some not and i guess remind us as to

281kind of like vince saying what is the process that we as a board are engaged in that decision or is it something that we to stand back and talk about math curriculum adoption and we said yes at some point or not because i think i think there is a big disconnect i i strongly believe that it's not based in solid math learning and it doesn't address the problem as people spoke really well tonight um but you know i respect people working hard and trying to figure out how to do it so uh sorry uh i went out of the bus but is there any further comments on the math tracking since we went into it sarah yeah i think um some of the things i've been hearing from from parents are not just around elementary

282school but this worry that that i think was expressed tonight that it's going to impact um math all the way through high school and what math students will be able to access so just fuller picture of how the changes that maybe are happening in elementary school will impact or not impact the opportunities students will have as they you know get into middle school and high school yeah um i have a comment about the math thing so that was on my list of things to um to hit on so um to not repeat what's already been said i will say i i do not feel clear on how firmly cemented the district is on this change um because i feel like i've heard some i've heard language from the district that feels like we're in process

283or we're we're we're considering but then clearly some communication somewhere has triggered for some parents that it is a done deal and so i think we have there's a there's a big miss somewhere in that communication that we we definitely need to clear up the other thing i wanted to say is that i would encourage i love vince's idea of educating the board on the literature behind why this would be potentially a good move for improving uh math outcomes i think there's um certainly although a case can be made for math leveling a strong case can be made for not and so i would i think it would be great for the board to get to hear from you um and to learn more it's going to be really difficult to advocate um on behalf

284of the district when we don't really understand it ourselves so we need to be students of this from you would be very helpful um the other thing i just wanted to say is that i think that one thing that doesn't seem to be clear to people is that not having math leveling doesn't mean that kids don't get more challenged in math and so that would be really helpful if we could communicate that not not uh disaggregating math levels the way that we did before does not equal if you already know how to do this you have to sit there and there's nothing for you to do because that's what i'm hearing from parents is their fear and i get that fear um but i also know having been in programs where leveling was done away

285with that is not what happens in the classroom experience and so bringing some of our teachers out our trusted teachers teachers that we have repeatedly you know we've waved our flags of support for and let them be spokespeople for why they want to teach this way i think would go a long way in helping parents understand both what's going to actually happen and um have more confidence in it which just kind of dovetails just generally with my my suggestion often that as a district we offer our parents more tangible um examples and and applications of what we mean about the way something's going to hit the classroom because they do not know this language uh the way that our instructors know this language and so it is really i as a parent it would be

286very disempowering to hear um that something it doesn't matter if it's math or english or sex ed it doesn't matter if i just hear this is gonna happen and i can't hear from the people that are gonna deliver the curriculum how they're gonna do it successfully it's that's a very fear provoking thing so i think this would be a brilliant um move for bridging the gap between our district and our parents and our general community and it would go a long way building on the confidence that i do believe our community has that our teachers do know what they're doing um i also i have to say about math i have a couple other things but it's not about math so i'll come back to that all right so i'll get back to you but

287i want to just add a very quick thing about math i feel there's a lot for me to learn too um and for public disclosure uh correct me right if i'm wrong we never did the deliberation or decision by the board on this issue right yeah just to make sure because some people told me like the board did or acted i don't remember anything of that yeah however i trust as we get into this conversation that it will be shared with us in a way where you will tell us how are we closing the opportunity gap that's what equity is all about um investing resources where they need is most by closing the opportunity gap and closing the opportunity gap never meant that you're eliminating the opportunity from the highest achievers yeah it's not a

288lump sum game it's not just one pie that you're dividing it right so um one couple things one is yeah the board hasn't taken any action um it has been decisions that have been made in some ways sort of um school by school as they as they've made transitions and they've been also looking at the the gaps that we have also found for some of our students um as they move um and and miss content so one of the concerns is how do we make sure that we don't leapfrog and we miss out on some really important mathematical knowledge that comes back later on when we get into more rigorous classes that impacts my my mathematical knowledge um some kids are really good at memorizing early on and when they get into more rigorous math

289that's a challenge for them so we're trying to address some of those pieces we're not trying and we're also trying to make sure that kids are challenged and at the same time that they have the skills they need as they move into more challenging classes we're not moving away from providing ap or honors math classes at the secondary level we're really looking at how do we make sure that kids have all the skills they need um early on to be successful throughout their educational career so those are those that's sort of the the conversation um that has been happening um primarily um amongst our elementary teachers and principals and it's obviously something that needs to be spread more broadly in terms of conversation with the community thanks okay now i want to throw in as

290a high school principal one of the most common complaints was that my child took algebra 1 as an 8th grader she he needs to be moving on so that they get to calculus and we have to battle again and again nicely great to stimulate to get to algebra one but we will develop and get your child ready for calculus as a senior so it's not an either or if you didn't get on the track as an eighth grader you weren't going to get there sorry we we can get there in our high schools we have in this in the math track so that's that's one end of the problem the other end is is not enough students of certain categories and identities not in why is that and so that's about math teachers and elementary

291teachers and bigger discussions yeah so it's so that's so that's where we're at yeah all right so teresa and then and now lou you will have the last word teresa did you want to comment on math or are we closing in the math subject now no okay okay uh great then i um it's late so i'm only going to say one thing i wanted to give a shout out to um the bond team and in particular to kim patton and um to our partner david um uh that she's been working with i wanted to really just say how grateful i am for the effort that they put in this week to really hear from and engage our community it was a really um challenging it started out feeling like it was going to be a

292really challenging way to find a way forward but um kim really showed up and she represented our district very well and she brought a really flexible lens to um being able to hear from the wildcat community and it was a privilege to watch them at work and so i just wanted to say that for those and members in the community which is almost everyone that doesn't get to see the on the ground um perspective of how hard our staff are working to reach the community and fi and invite voice um they really are and sometimes it really does take a community member stepping in and saying hey i don't think that i got heard there can we try that again so thank you to becky for bringing that back around and then really thank you

293to the district for taking it seriously and for being willing to show up and i don't know what the final outcome will be but i do know that whatever the final outcome is everyone is going to feel a whole lot more ownership over getting to it now than we would have if we had just left it if we had kicked it to the curb and just not not revisited it so thank you to uh all of the individuals who were involved and particularly kim's leadership in really helping uh navigate what the options were for that situation so that's it i'll leave everything else for another time oh wait sorry i can't leave this one sammy the student rep policy so like before kovid i had been working on drafting a policy to make our student

294representative positions something that would be actually governed by policy in our district and then covet happened and that fell way to the far to the wayside and so i would like to get that back on our radar um and i don't know the best way to do that because i'm sure we have lots of things to do so i would like some guidance about the best way to and also given the conversation about policy earlier this evening i think that we need to re-examine the approach to that policy so far um so i'd like to engage in that process um but i i would like to offer to take some ownership over moving that forward and we've had some really great student reps this year so maybe the window to move it forward is before

295we lose contact with them and that we can't access their perspective so i want to put that out there and you know you can do whatever you want with fitting that into all the many agendas that you have to plan sounds good i i don't think it's going to be in june but my understanding is uh ryan and the team are working on looking at policies across the state uh if there's any related to this and we will have something brought forward to us very soon um in the in the near future i would say and definitely i hope that we can stay in touch with that uh student reps for this year so we can have their input into this one of the things i wonder about related to that is that there's a

296policy from osba um that we've taken a look at and so i'm wondering teresa if you've done some development yourself and we should um meld those two to document so if you if you've done some writing on it it might be beneficial to send that to parker so we can incorporate some aspects of that into the first read i will do that yes i have done not a small amount of looking around to find how different policies different districts around the country have addressed the issue of student involvement and you know more codifying a place for student voice in decision making and while we are unique in oregon um and i do think that we do a really great job of engaging our students there are some districts around the country that are more progressive

297and even have spaces where student there are issues where students are permitted to vote and so i don't know we necessarily need to go there but i'm aware that there's quite a continuum and um so i would love to share i'll send that information on sounds good thank you so much and uh lou the last word is yours before we adjourn i panicked for a moment because i thought we had to go back to financials but then it was under consolidated info and i was like but um i just had a couple of points are questions not points and one of the questions is um brian if there's like if you can give us some kind of like rough timeline of when um parents and families can expect like being able to get information about

298resources for that transition back the mental and emotional support would be great um if it's like not in june that'd be good and i built i built time into my calendar for tomorrow to work on that um so i'll i'll be getting some information out or we'll be working on getting information out thank you so much um i'm sure a lot of folk will appreciate that and then um just the continual support for cohort c um like we know that there's significant differences in instruction and experiences right now and whatever we can do i know a lot of um the um administrators and teachers are doing what they can to support cohort c like um but just that continual like what can we do kind of question and then um i actually wanted to go

299way back to the theater conversation i should have jumped on earlier with this um i do have a little bit of concern over um the i'm really trying it's so late i'm sorry my words are really bad right now um i don't like having to have um alumni and students tell us their trauma in order for us to act and to be heard like to me that doesn't feel right and i've had i've been in that position so many times in my life and it's exhausting and over the course of one's life having to do it over and over again um it's not very sustainable for one's mental health and emotional health and even if they're alumni at this point like that really um the one particular story that we heard earlier of how that

300lasting impact of the trauma felt from the theater program impacted her experiences as a young person resonated really deeply with me and i'm trying to think of how we can prevent that in the future and i was a little bit disappointed to hear that that the theater program hadn't reached out to jimbo because i made that recommendation and i way back when during the um the sip presentations and um and that was months ago and to hear that they hadn't reached out i know that we don't necessarily direct like operations but that felt like a really solid like this is in place and it's in place and specifically in theater doing this kind of work and now here we are all the way in may having to hear people disclose trauma in a public setting

301and that just didn't feel good and i don't know what we can do to better support that kind of communication if there's resources out there recommended that really could help prevent that they can i don't know i just really wanted to express that and i know there's not much we can do as far as like because it is operational but i did um i just wanted to bring that to uh for us to think about for moving forward so it doesn't continue to happen and also yeah and the last thing too um was just that appreciation for you all for all the work you continue to do and um and your planning for next year i know is already starting and so thanks for announcing that earlier and i know that we have a lot

302of work ahead um even with the short amount of time we have left in this year so thank you all for your work and all the staff too yeah absolutely um and then um and thanks for the those comments for us to continue to to work through and think through much appreciated um i said the last word is yours uh luba reflecting on the trauma informed uh i hope that as we get into the work of public engagement and public comments i i want to reflect on how can we be inviting the public to share but also um two or three minutes to share someone's trauma is just not a trauma-informed way so we need to really revise how public comments and public engagements happen in a board level in a way that people feel

303empowered to share but also that their sharing is not going to exacerbate their pain and harm and suffering and i want to reflect on that as we move forward so thank you for mentioning that and hopefully it will be a continued learning for the board to be more engaging and more uh mindful of people's uh experiences while they engage and testify anything for the good of the order see none we are adjourned have a good night