School Board Retreat

001okay it looks like we are good to go all right good good morning everybody and welcome i would like to uh welcome everybody who's joining us we're uh opening the uh meeting corvall school board meeting for this day which is august 13 2020 which is a corval school board retreat meeting and i want to welcome everybody the first thing we will do is an introduction uh of each other and also a prompt and after that i will do a very brief overview of the day and then well such with our business so first of all i would like to ask you to introduce yourself and your role on the board or in the district or uh how you're supporting the district or the board and also i do have a prompt question for all of

002us which is what are your expectations and hopes uh for the board for this coming year so with that i will uh start myself and uh i want to a preface that i gave my fellow board members a heads up about the uh prom so they can think about it uh and have some time while they're drinking the coffee this morning so with that i will start with myself my name is sami alla and i'm the crevasse school board chair and my expectations of the year is that we stay focused and maintain our focus on our school board goals we do have goals that we thought of as applicable in the time of stable operations and now as we transition to challenging times i believe uh the expectation that i should have for the board

003and for myself is to stay focused on them in terms of student achievements our students should continue to achieve and attain knowledge and skills in terms of health and wellness we want them to be mentally and physically healthy and their staff receive the health and wellness support that they need and equitable systems probably will be an expectation and a hope uh my expectation is we continue building and maintaining and transforming our equitable systems and my hope as we go through challenging times we might need to rebuild and build new systems that adapt to the challenges of the day and they should be uh equitable but also based on racial justice and social justice uh for all from the beginning of uh building those systems and so on in terms of real-world learning and delivering on

004our bond promise we want to really maintain course on gus expectations my hope for this year is that as we get to navigate this year and look back at it i hope that we can say our district our students our communities and families are more resilient than ever before and everybody's involvement in how public education is helping us to be ready for the future an unknown future we want to make sure public education is well equipped to do that and i believe there are so many challenges but at the same time opportunities for public education to support us doing this work and really that's my hope for the board to be able to empower that and support them and i would go i would like to say i want to go next spot probably i'll

005go through my uh yeah let's go for the board members first uh who wants to go next sarah yeah i um yeah right so second sammy's desire to stay focused on our goals i think um in our evaluation last spring we recognize that we want to really push our work on equity and racial justice and i think that um that's an especially critical thing to be thinking about right now because as opportunity gaps become chasms um really focusing on equity and paying attention to the students and families who maybe have been overlooked [Music] is is going to be critical to to keep that chasm from from becoming something that we can't overcome and um i think as we move into this year that's so uncertain i don't think we always need to totally agree with

006each other but i think we need to appear as you know i think there's so much uncertainty that i feel like as a board we need to appear stable so even if we're not always agreeing exactly and totally in alignment with everything i feel like the community needs sort of a solid something that it can trust um and so i feel like that's you being being sort of steady at a time of uncertainty is something that i would like us to do um because as we provide sort of a link between our constituents and our in our district his constituents are i think we all know very anxious and um and sort of giving the message that we're going to make it through is going to be really key over the next year [Music] thank

007you sarah who wants to go next i'll happily go that's fine um sammy i i took your your question a little more literally and um really thought inward towards the board so my responses are in that channel so interpret them that way i mean but this one on this first bit i would interpret for everybody that you know my my first hope is that we all remain healthy and that we have a swift conclusion to the pandemic so that we can move on from this but thinking more about the board i'm thinking about you know i'm very pleased with the composition of the board and who we have um and for the continuity of our district and our children i hope that you know those of us that are up for re-election this year get

008reelected if we so desire um to remain on the board i think we have a very good team here my expectations um i think my biggest expectation for this year is that we build trust and a deeper collaborative relationship with our staff we've had some events in the pa over this past year that um i think we broke some trust with our staff and we have some fence spending to do so i would like to focus on that and make and continue doing that um also i'd like to us to deepen our equity work into anti-racist policy making and stay focused on on doing harder work than we have in the past um and then integrate the board into the district's communication plan just becoming really stepping into our our role as communicators with the

009with the community i um i'm sort of in the middle with uh between vince and and sarah in terms of what i took from your prompt and your own i i i agree that our we need to stay focused on our goals for me that meant getting through this covid with a focus of clear evidence of strategies that we are able to catch up on the loss of learning and clear evidence at the same time of caring for our kids and their families and our staff i mean there's a there's a part of us that wants the the reading scores and the and the math scores to jump right back up where there were before and the pressure that might be on staff and kids to do that is is way too big uh at

010the same time um uh conducting um singing sessions with kids is not going to advance um math and english learning so it's a real hard job very hard work and i think we need to stay focused on on how to make that happen um i think out of the sides of our eyes my approach to inequities would be that we have to be real careful about systemic problems that is we have to look for where in our processes and in our system are we putting burdens on people that are just absolutely gonna cause big problems whether it's uh lack of access to internet to uh home day care for kids uh or support for parents who have to work it's it's gonna be giant and we need to be sure that we see those not

011just moving forward no problems and lastly for me i i would like to spend this year personally reviewing the way we go about governance and again looking for systemic inequities in the way we do our board work whether it's it became clear to me that that our notice to people today in this community might be a newspaper where about 30 percent of the families are receiving the newspapers so how would we ever believe that that's good notice to also the way we take input as a board in times of covid where we don't meet and have public meetings so i'd like to stay and look hard at that governance kind of model thank you jay terese yes samia happy to go next um so uh i i i don't know if i took your question

012in alignment with my peers or not so but here's what here's what i came up with so um in reflecting on where i see opportunities for us as a board in the coming year um i i think i echo sediments i've already heard about advancing uh the important work of of an anti-racist approach to education and to the way in which our district performs even the most basic daily tasks to ensure that we are you know really checking every procedure every process that we have for those hidden biases that subvert the important work that our community needs to do to really move toward an anti-racist way of of existing um so that's a probably at the top of my of my list um i would also desire um i appreciate jay's comments about thinking about

013the you know the context that we are in right now and what this means for our families and for learners and so it's i feel like it's impossible to imagine a board vision for the coming year that doesn't feel pandemic centric in the sense that it is really the lens through which virtually every decision that we make will have to be filtered in order to determine its feasibility its implications who's getting who's benefiting and who's getting left behind and so um it occurs to me that this provides a a backdrop for um real world learning one of our board goals in a way that um we have probably never experienced in our lifetimes before this and and hopefully our our children will not ever have it matched either uh but just thinking about the importance

014of um as a community um how will we weather this pandemic and allowing the reality of the circumstance that we are in to become um present in in the teaching and in the learning that is happening for our kids i don't know exactly what that means um i don't think it means swapping out our algebra questions for um you know x is equal to the number of vaccines etc but i do think that it does mean talking about why the skills that we are teaching in our schools are so important for how a community is able to be resilient in a time such as this i think there's a lot of opportunity for that and i i am excited to work with our teaching and learning teams to think about how do we do that

015in a way that helps our children feel connected to the present moment in a way that gives them a sense of um empowerment where otherwise it could easily feel um not not empowering and in fact quite quite reactive and not having any control we obviously there are things we don't have control over but there are some places that we do have some ability to really influence and i'm hoping that our approach to learning this year will really be able to to call those out and then um the last thing that i would say um is uh that i too desire for us to reflect on um our approach to governance and to more clearly delineate for the community and for ourselves um and and our relationship with the district staff at what the role of

016the board is with regard to bringing vision to our um to the leadership of our district and reflecting back to the community what we see the leadership in our district accomplishing what does that mean in terms of a governance role we obviously have some some diversity of thought in our community about what the board should or shouldn't do and to what extent the board should defer to the greater community or perhaps not even need to broadly consult the greater community where are those lines i don't think they're particularly clear for me and they may not be clear for the community and so teasing out more clear parameters around uh what in our model of governance is really with within the purview of the board to act on and what is within the purview but perhaps

017shouldn't be and what is not within the purview of the board to act on would be i think a tremendous gift to the community and to ourselves to bridge that kind of community involvement that we want to have while not burdening our processes of governance that we need to have wonderful thank you and i i just want to jump in and say i have to leave for about half an hour i will be back yeah wonderful thank you sarah so yeah sarah needs to leave for half an hour and also i wanted to share the apologies of director tina baker uh who couldn't make it with us today for uh emergency reasons so with that i would like to move with lou are you here i was muted oops wonderful morning everyone yeah i had

018my screen off um i had to eat some toast have that on the i have to have everybody watch me do that um good morning everyone my name is louie whitebear i she her pronouns and i'm really excited to be here this is my first border treat and so when i was reflecting on the question sammy that you brought up i was thinking a lot about um community engagement which as most of you know is something that i really am hoping that we can work on and in a way that is more open and more than just engagement for feedback on what could be perceived as hot topics so how do we get community input and engagement beyond that um i think is really important and it kind of leans into what therese was saying

019about understanding the role of the board and so help that be more clear for the community um i think is really important and something i hope that we see this year and also using this time that we're in right now to really think about system changes in general right now there's a lot of moving parts and seeing what we can learn and take forward beyond the pandemic and thinking about more access to the board like how we've been doing the youtube live has created a different level of access with the community um i feel like we've had before and that's actually feedback that i remember hearing from folk too like how can we actually go if we can't physically be at the meeting for whatever reason and so i think that's a good example of

020taking things that we're learning right now and thinking of ways to carry that forward beyond the pandemic and also supporting the needs of of students and families based on the needs of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged so i know like we're seeing some huge inequities um related to access and how students are going to be doing this year and we're going into the year knowing that i know ryan has that on on his mind too as well as the rest of the staff and just like how do we think of systems changes within the district that can help support the learning outcomes for students and also meeting those needs where it's not looking like they're being singled out and helping people understand like that there are these um inequities in access and then um thinking

021of things beyond just the district like a lot of times i know like folk and this goes back to the point that was made earlier too that they think that we can do things that we cannot and so thinking about like how to provide information for the community on where those changes can happen and at what levels and where the scope is of the board and what we should be focusing on um and then lastly i would say that just ensuring that that commitment that the district made to anti-racist work is stays in action mode and doesn't turn into a buzzword and so i think that for me that's one of the things that we really need to um to keep um keep an eye on is that easily happens with work um that it

022becomes like a word to describe the work instead of the action part of it and um so those are just the things that came up for me this morning thank you so next i would like to have the rest of staff and attendees to introduce themselves briefly so uh your name and the role in the district and uh ryan you want to go first sure um i i know all of you so it feels a little odd to introduce myself but ryan superintendent and i think for me what i'm what i'm what i'm taking away from the goals of this group is that our agenda for today um aligns with what the conversations i've heard with a component around on public engagement and a piece around racial equity work i think that the agenda we

023have for you this morning will um will help to move us forward so um i appreciate you sharing your goals and aspirations for our school year and it helps us to know that we're we're aligned in what we're going to talk about today so so thanks again for that awesome thanks uh melissa hi everyone melissa harder assistant superintendent and um i thought a lot about uh what had the work that's been done this is just my first year finished my first year in this job and the work that i've seen the board do and i would love to see continued focus on student voice which is something that this board takes a lot of pride in ensuring that they hear um continued positive and open relationships with our um staff in the district and most

024importantly um i wish for you to stay bold in your path to more racially equitable systems for our children thank you thank you uh so brief introductions uh your name and your role in district i think we have mercian uh run introduce yourself briefly good morning everybody marcian riverococci and i've um i'm the equity and elo coordinator for the district and i think for me i wanted to say i'm just honored to be in the space with all of you and as i listen to your hopes i too share your hopes in terms of creating an anti-racist school district that really focuses on removing barriers for our student staff in communities of color so just thankful to be here and to support this board and that amazing in like um melissa said bold work courageous

025work and provide some tools that we'll be talking about today to really get deeper into that work so thank you again for the invitation thank you and we have chris hi everyone i'm chris hawkins i'm a student support specialist for the district which means i support kids who are navigating poverty kids that are in the foster care system or kids that are being investigated by dhs i help coordinate programs around suicide prevention for the district and the state of oregon i facilitate threat assessments i support programs and implement professional development around kids who are transgender and of the lgbtq community and then i coordinate crisis response so in the event of a death or a traumatic experience at a school i coordinate supports around that and i too thank you for letting me be here

026um my role here today just so you know when we're talking about equity that i my hope is that we look at equity not only just with race which i know is huge and most important but also kids that are navigating poverty and of the kids that are um in the lgbt groups community and transgender kids and all of those kids at risk so thank you again for letting me be here today thank you and kristen hi everybody i'm kristen miles with osba i am thrilled to be working with you all again and have had the pleasure of meeting marciana and chris before this as we planned today um just very excited for another excellent promise scholarship program with you all that um that in in my experience is the model way to do it

027so um as i listen to all of your hopes and plans as ryan said like i'm sort of looking at our agenda and i'm like we're gonna start addressing this stuff right away so um so thank you for having me thank you wonderful and this is a really good segue to give a brief uh overview of the day uh i want to thank osba oregon school board association for having us involved in the scholarship program which includes the commitments from our board to for professional development and osba will give us a scholarship that we can decide to spend it on students on and it will be in the name of the school board so this is something very exciting and we've been committed to to it now i think for a second our third year

028second year and uh since last year i believe we have done a lot of learning and development we learned about what transformational policy means and school board governance mean and we identified through research we learned that proper board governance and effective board governance have been correlated to or has been correlated to student achievement outcomes directly so it is not only a good thing to have it is an important thing to do and it is the essential thing to do over the last year we learned about health and mental health and wellness and social and emotional learning in our district and the investment that we put in into this program and through our assessment we identified areas of development including public engagement and communication and racial equity and also there has been an ongoing work for

029more than a year now to identify how the school board should be developing its policy a way for our policies to be student centered with racial equity in mind and with racial equity lens but also in a way where there's community engagement and there is effective board governance in how we develop those policies so we will start the discussion with the review of policies on policy development and we will end the discussion with it as well and in the middle in between we will uh go through some discussion uh with public engagement and communication with kristin and then after a short break we'll have a discussion on racial equity so that's the overview of the agenda and it's available on the board website for those who wants to review the agenda and the times for

030it with that i want to give it to ryan to start the first point which is review of policies on policy development so i wanted to just take a couple of minutes and go through some reminders for us from the work that we've done over the last couple years as we think about policy and policy development which is a a key role of the school board and i you know ideally the way that the agenda's structured is just for us to spend a few minutes reviewing what we've heard and learned over the last couple years and then at the end after we've had time to talk about community and public engagement and we've also had the opportunity to think about our work around equity that we come back to reviewing the policy we currently have

031that talks about policy development and to start a conversation about does that policy meet our needs or are there ways that we need to change and modify it um this isn't a new conversation for us it's a conversation that um we've had for the last couple of years really since we started working with uh actually when we started working with chalkboard and we were involved in board development with the medford school district um that's where we these concepts sort of generated from and it's been an ongoing conversation over the last couple years we've also seen some changes in developing a policy um in the way that we we work through policy development um and so i think it's a good thing for us to think about sort of at um as bookends today as we

032start to think about and learn more around public engagement and around racial equity and also as we think about how development of policy which is the role of the board has that has those considerations um taken into account as policy has developed so again i just think it creates a kind of a good framework for us to be thinking about today as we review and move forward so um my goal is just to provide a little bit of a reminder some reminders for all of you and then at the end to really look at our policy and ask some questions that i think we'll come back to um in in future work so again just rem again we're just sort of reminders um and again this is from the work of crss that we that

033we've done in the past that there's really two kinds of policies that boards adopt there's operating policies and there's also transformational policies so operating policies are those policies um sorry you um with a screen and with all of your pictures i don't know if you can see that all of the text so i'll just go ahead and cover that piece so operating policies are intended to maintain the current current system and they also represent the majority of board policy so can you provide a quick shout out what are some policies that are operating policies that we that we have policy kl complaint policy good job vince how about one more policy f renaming schools i don't know that that's it's operating yeah that might be transformational go ahead jake how about budget adoption process budget

034adoption process that's right so those things that we have in place oftentimes they are buttressed by law and oars and supported in those formats and after every legislative session we have a number of policies that come back to us with revisions based on changes at the legislative level and oftentimes most often those are those operating policies that we use to structure our work transformational policies so this is that other kind of policy and it's designed to fundamentally change the system and it's intended to dramatically improve um performance for our students so around student achievement that's that's a key piece of those transformational policies eliminating the achievement gap i chose this picture specifically because it recognizes achievement in graduation and it also recognizes that we're in the middle of a pandemic and as we think about

035the achievement gap and transformational policy we are living i think lou did a nice job of describing the time the day the times we're living in and those considerations that we need to make and then transformational governance so boards typically have at least a few policies that are designed to make changes in the system so this again goes back to those transformational policies um again this i chose this picture because it represents our new restroom design at sheldon middle school i'm with um sarah and with sami um and this was our policy and support of our transgender gender non-conforming students highlighted the need for us to think about the structures in systems and physical spaces that we have in our schools and those considerations so i think this is a good example of of that

036in practice so i'm going to that was just a brief update and i'm going to transition over to kristen and and so she can begin to talk about public engagement but i want you just to kind of be thinking about um where this will be headed at the end of the time together and again it's looking at that policy that we have on adoption and revision of policies and some questions and so i'm going to share the questions with you now just so you can continue to think about them as we move forward so the questions are does that current policy support the development of operating and transformational policies so does it do both things for us does it take into account those policies that we have around overall district management and does it also

037account for developing policies that are transformational does it account for public engagement does the current policy explain the role of the school board that's a question i've also heard you um say a couple times this morning does the public understand our role does the current policy outline the pathway to policy development does it help us to understand if there needs to be a new policy or if i feel like there needs to be input on a policy as a constituent as a staff member as a board member do i know how the pathway to getting policy developed um and does the current policy account for equity so does it and when we think about that i think it's another great point that lou brought up about and jay brought up about public engagement and our

038how can the public engage with the school district how do we know how to um bring bring issues concerns ideas forward um having those pieces in mind so again these are the questions we're going to come back to and we're going to review that policy that we currently have um at the end of our time together but i just wanted to have a kind of a brief snapshot of where i think we're headed with that and with that i'm going to move out of sharing your screen and turn it over to kristin thank you and i'm gonna switch it up on you a little bit um marcianna and chris and i had a couple of really good conversations about um how we might flow through all of our all of our topics and i'm gonna

039hand it over to her first she's gonna introduce you to a couple of things then we'll talk about public engagement um so i'm gonna hand it over to marcian oh thank you kristen thank you so much everybody and i think uh before we begin i know that when we um had i remember receiving the invite to uh participate in the board retreat and we were going to have all day and we were going to be sort of in person and so i realized that being in this virtual space we don't have the luxury of of seeing each other's in you know nonverbal cues and seeing each other's eyes i mean we do but it's just a little different um but i also need to recognize that no matter where we are even if it's in

040a virtual space that we are um on the traditional homeland and so i wanted to read a statement and i've asked i reached out to director white bear to say a few words but i wanted to read a statement before we begin we are situated within the traditional homelands of mary's river or apinufu uh band of kalipuya following the willamette valley treaty of 1855 calapriya said a treaty calapriya people were forcibly removed to reservation reservations in western oregon today living descendants of these people are part of the confederated tribes of the grand ronde community of oregon so i think it's important to situate ourselves in that space first director white bear thanks marcianne and as we continue to recognize the traditional lands um of the caliph that we reside on it's always important to remember

041that's not a past tense that's a present tense and that the two tribes that the calipuya people were removed to the grand ron and celets tribes are both actively engaged with the community in a multiple different ways they have tribal members that live here and attend our schools they work in the community they're community members and they also contribute to the success of the community through some other grant programs and through their volunteer time to help educate the community on the histories of the land as well as the current day lived experiences of their members and so to recognize their sovereignty as a tribal nation and remember that there is that relationship with them it's always important to remember them not in the past but as active members of the president as well so thanks

042thank you director whitebear really appreciate that um so um kristen so just for me to clarify i know that we spoke earlier we talked about time and so i um and again i the work that we're about to do could literally take us six hours but we're gonna condense into small uh it's a smaller chunk right and so i just wanted to ask you um just uh in terms of my time um and in terms of i know that you wanted a break uh i think that's what i heard yeah how often do we want breaks we want i i heard something like a 10-minute break every hour is that what what is your agreement as a board uh we didn't have an agreement but on the agenda we uh had a 10 minutes a

043break in the middle of the meeting but i would like to ask the board members if you have any thoughts if that looks good or if you think we should have 10 minutes every hour any thoughts one way or the other so how about i'll leave it for you to fill the room and decide on the break as you see fit okay sounds good so uh kristen i'll go ahead and jump into my chunk and then we'll i'll hand it back over to you so again i just want to thank everybody for this time i feel completely honored to be here with you and as i listen to all of you speak to your hopes and dreams in terms of the direction that you you want to go with the board as well as the

044work that you've already done have to acknowledge that you've done some amazing work and so i appreciate the focus on racial equity and the acceleration of this work and so what i'm going to be sharing with you today is again if we had typically our staff who've participated in beyond diversity it's a two-day training and it's not a training it's an experience because it's so much about localizing yourself as a racial being in this work and doing a lot of reflection and i heard that in a lot of your your responses when we first started so know that what we're about to engage in is something that typically takes two days and but we're going to compress it because i think it's really important especially as you're talking about board governance and policies and i

045heard in ryan's presentation he talked about transformational policy and i pulled out just my definition that i've been reaching to in terms of when we talk about transformation what do we mean about transformation in in terms of racial equity and the the definition that i have here is excuse me conscious of the impact of systemic racism and speaks truth to power in a way that provides agency in transforming oppressive systems so what we're about to engage in is a tool that our system has used excuse me since 2013 when we accelerated our work in racial equity and um back in 2013 um we engaged in a different kind of governance and a different kind of of work because we looked at our data we looked at the predictable patterns of our data and unfortunately those

046patterns persist so when we think about our achievement data our behavior data and um the the patterns are still similar and they're similar not only in in our system but systems throughout the nation so the tool that i'm going to be sharing with you today is a foundational tool um in that it gives us a space to be able to have courageous conversations about race in this tool is one that can be used when we're having courageous conversations around gender identity it can be used when we're talking about students navigating poverty or homelessness but it's a tool that really grounds us in our racial equity work so i will be walking you through that tool and know that for some of you this is this may be new um for some of you uh this

047might be uh something that um that you've never seen before and for some of you it might provide more insight into your racial equity uh development as board members um so i'm hoping that lindsay wouldn't mind uh sharing the screen we have a powerpoint for you thank goodness for powerpoints okay can you all see the powerpoint yes okay good um lindsay can you switch to slide as the next slide so this uh if hopefully you can all see that this quote um just really resonated with me and i wanted to share with all of you today because in the years that i have done this work two things i know for sure and the things that have come up for me in working with staff and students and communities is that self-discovery is key to

048this work as well it because it requires a heightened level of listening right listening to understand and not to respond and so this quote from margaret margaret margaret wheatley is just a beautiful beautiful testimony of that and i'm hoping that somebody wouldn't mind being brave enough to on me and read it out loud for us glad to do it marcianne thank you vincent human conversation is the most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the conditions for change personal change community and organizational change if we can sit together and talk about what is important to us we begin to come alive we share what we see what we feel and we listen to what others see and feel margaret margaret wheatley thank you we share what we see what we feel and we listen and that's

049i think what brings a lot of humanity and a lot of space for us to have those courageous conversations about race so i wanted for you to think about just for a few seconds think about something as a as a young adult or as an adult think about a time where you learned a new instrument or you learned a new craft so just kind of have that in your mind okay i see some smiles vincent i love your smile um and think about what it felt like to learn a new a new craft right what the what it did to you physically and mentally right the the mental metacognition that you had to engage in to learn that new tool what you had what you had to research what you had to learn and think

050about where you were when you started and where you are now right and so i wanted to start with just a quick example and and i want to connect this example to the importance of learning the tool of the courageous conversations about race protocol when this when this protocol was first introduced to us i remember just it was kind of like learning a new instrument i was taking notes i was trying to figure out like how do i do this and and how do i engage in this conversation and it felt like learning a new instrument where it felt like learning a new sport it hurt and i quickly realized that i had been normalized to not have courageous conversations about race i didn't have the language i didn't um i didn't know how to

051enter into the conversation and oftentimes being raised in a bilingual and biracial home those conversations happen in my home but they didn't happen in public settings and so often times when something would happen or somebody would say something i would just like close up and leave the room this courageous conversations about race protocol is a tool just like you learned that instrument just like you learned that new craft it takes time to to master it right but the only way to master it is to use it even if it's clunky and so the example i want to share with you is my daughter uh she uh learned actually both my daughters they learned to play the violin um around five right and i remember my daughter coming home and her violin was literally this big

052it was tiny and she would come home and she would pluck and play the violin and you can just imagine the screeching sounds that came out of that violin do you all have kids that have or family members right it was painful and i just remember standing by thinking okay she's learning she's learning i'm not going to give her any feedback i'm just and she's just learning i'm just going to let her learn so time went on she took more lessons she got more brave um she uh started doing her recitals and i saw this confidence in her and this like she all of a sudden was like becoming a violinist and one day i remember she was around 12 years old and she said mama can i go and play at the farmer's market

053and i said uh sure and so you might have seen my daughter at the farmer's market and so she got brave and but she got brave because she used it the years prior to that boy it was not a pretty sight but she got brave fast forward about two or three years she started trying other instruments the viola right and the viola and violin are very similar one day i think she was around 16 years old um again she'd been playing the violin for quite a while i hear somebody playing the acoustic guitar and i thought who's playing the acoustic guitar and so my daughter had actually gone on to youtube so she'd done the work right she had done that self work and she had taught herself through youtube videos how to play the

054acoustic guitar right and then um and what i see the beauty of that and the connection of the instrument in this tool is that it takes that personal work to really understand how to have courageous conversations about race right if i would have handed my daughter an acoustic guitar and said play what do you think she would have done she would have been like what but she had to have all that theory and all that understanding of the of music to be able to finally pick up that acoustic guitar so the last part of this story and as you'll see today i'm a storyteller um uh last year i invited my whole family this is pre-coveted right to our house um we hadn't seen each other for a while and so i invited my entire

055family to come to my house if so if you can imagine a latino family it was very loud very boisterous a lot of music and a lot of fun and so my my sister's daughter who's about 25 now she had brought her um her boyfriend and so her boyfriend was new into our family and so i wanted to ex welcome him and let him know that you are too part of our family and so i could tell that he was feeling a little awkward right so he was new he was the he was the multiple perspective of our family right he was a new person to our family and so he we found out that he played the electric guitar so my daughter um went up to her room picked up her acoustic guitar and

056invited her our new member to our family to play together and so they had a jam session right so um he would play a couple of chords and then she would play a couple of chords and before you knew it before we knew it they were playing together and so the the connection of that to the to the courageous conversations around race protocol is the importance of the counter story and the multiple perspective my daughter learned so much about music because she had somebody else in that space that knew a little bit more and she was able to really connect to him and play music together so all that to say is that today you will be engaging in learning the theory around the courageous conversations about race protocol a protocol that we have used

057in our system to engage in systemic in in really under un unpacking systemic racism in our system and i believe that we are in such a beautiful place in our world right now where people are paying attention and all of you as board members have the access and the influence to be able to do some amazing things but again if we go from just handing you a violin without doing some of that internal work imagine how your music will sound okay so i'll be done with that analogy but um but we'll move on um so i wanted to uh if you don't mind lindsay switching to the next slide okay so this slide um kind of give me a thumbs up if you've seen the compass before yes so okay so a lot of you

058have um what i really appreciate about the compass is that it it provides us a way to enter into a conversation about race right and it's a navigational tool that's why it kind of looks like um it's like a nap it looks like a compass right and so it's our navigational tool that gets us through courageous conversations about race it helps us understand where we come into the conversation personally as well as recognize where other people are coming into the conversation so most educators enter a courageous conversation about race in four different quadrants and actually there's five i haven't told you that one yet but there's four right so usually when a conversation about race starts um you as a community member as a parent you might come into that space in the believing quadrant

059right um and you're gonna feel that in your gut right and this the believing quadrant really asks us it really um it really points to our deep beliefs around right or wrong the way we were raised zoretta hammond talks about a cultural archetype it's our deep deep culture right the way we were normalized in our homes in our educational system so when you enter into conversation in the believing quadrant that's where that lies in your body right the emotional quadrant the one um below believing this is in your heart right so usually in the feeling quadrant when we're having courageous conversations about race you might enter it with fear disgust or joy or i mean fill in the feeling right um and basically what what that what the feeling quadrant helps us understand is that

060this is situated in our heart right so when we move to the right side of the quadrant that is the thinking that is in the mind right and oftentimes when people enter into a conversation it is in it is in their brain it's very meta right um and so often times people will in when they enter into this conversation they might not quite understand because or not understand they might not be able to connect because they need more information often times in conversations i might hear people say well show me the data tell me more right so that's a thinking quadrant the last one is the acting quadrant when people enter into courageous conversations about race this is about hands and feet these are the folks that just want to get things done right away

061they these are characterized by behaviors and actions all of these quadrants are we they're all quadrants that we want to visit when we're going into a conversation about race but at the end of the day we want to center ourselves and that's that fifth space in the middle right because we want to not only understand how we're entering into the com into the conversation but how are other people showing up the last thing i want to tell you before we move on um okay um sarah's coming back the last thing i wanted to share with you is that there are shadow sides to the compass so with the believing disbelief is the shadow side with feeling is fear was thinking is ignorance and acting is fatigue right and so oftentimes we see a lot of

062this especially now when people are stressed and when people are working gazillion hours a week trying to to figure out what distance learning will look like in the fall and those shadow sides of the compass it's that isn't bad it's just a way of us recognizing where we are and how can we get if so if we are in disbelief how can we get closer to belief if we are in fear how can we get closer to feeling okay so that is a compass that is how as educators and community members we enter into a conversation about race so the next slide okay thank you so the four agreements this is how we have a conversation right and the four agreements stay engaged speak your truth experience misconvert accept and expect non-closure this is the

063container for the conversation and think of these four agreements as the wall that surrounds a room so i know we're all in our homes or our offices so just think of that space that you're in so these are like the walls that are in the room and each one of these agreements represents um represents one side of the wall so think about if one of those walls weren't there the room would lose its integrity right it would just topple over but also that's true for the the the four agreements it's one of those agreements isn't there the conversation loses its integrity right so when we think about staying engaged um think about um if you're currently teaching or think about your nieces and nephews and your students staying engaged we pretty much know when a

064student is engaged right but we also know that sometimes some students can be strategically compliant or they can also be authentically engaged right when i was teaching i remember i had some students in my class that looked like they were engaged because they were looking at me they had a pencil and they were taking notes but then i would ask them student what what you know can you summarize what i just said and they were like what and then as opposed to a student who's a doodler right my daughter is a doodler and she could literally be listening to somebody and could be asked what what was just said and she would recite everything that was said so part of staying engaged just ask us how are we staying engaged and can we stay engaged

065in the conversation about race with our soul our heart and our mind and if you're doodling that's okay okay speak your truth um this one they're all important but this one is the one that resonates with me the most because your voice is valued in this space and it's also valid okay experience discomfort um this is the natural part of a courageous conversation about race um i know that there's been a lot of conversations not only within um this group but also within our community and within our nation um in in the last while and i know that you probably felt a sense of discomfort and that's a natural part of this process um feeling discomfort in this work is actually a good thing um it's it because it builds our muscle it builds our

066equity muscle and think about when you were learning that new craft just kind of sticking through it was very important and also recognize that we have been normalized as a society to not experience discomfort how many times have we been in conversations where it gets a little and then the subject is changed right so what we want to do with this protocol is push through and push through anyway and then lastly is accept and expect non-closure um these conversations sometimes don't have a bookend right um we just need to keep on going and commit to staying in the conversation even though um it you know it might get uncomfortable and just you know you might need to take a breath you might need to walk away but just to encourage us to come back speak

067our truth and re-engage in the conversation so i want you before we move on just take us uh 30 seconds or so and either think or write which agreement will come most easily for you today in which agreement might challenge you so just take a second to write that those down and give me a thumbs up when you've done that okay see some thumbs up okay thank you so my challenge for you today is to think about the one that might challenge you the most and practice that one okay because that's going to build your racial equity muscle today all right um if we could move to the next slide okay um as we said earlier uh so much of this work is so much about doing that internal it's like looking in the mirror

068it's around looking internally to understand how as racial beings race and racism impacts us all so i wanted to share this video with you i know some of us have already seen it i've probably seen it 50 times and every time i see it it just you know raises the hair on my arms just because it's so true to me and it's so true to our community and our students so i just want you to take a just uh take a step back not back back back just relax and um please uh just take a few minutes to watch this video and then we will um reengage after the video is over to say i am not virtuous is one thing to say i am without virtue is entirely different worlds apart i have parts

069of worlds in me i learned about honor in the third grade mr hamm's class it was the hardest word for my tongue to trace for i knew what it meant i just didn't know how to get it so i took my last name and the word honor and learned the two were exactly the same shape but unlike my name i had to earn honor first so i carry the surname like a samurai sword and swore it would keep me safe it was both what i was protecting and what would protect me when i was 10 years old nobody could pronounce my last name i guess it had to do with the fact that all of my friends were white okay maybe that's unfair no actually it's because all of my friends were white so at

07010 years old i stopped caring my name sounded like it became white noise and white mouths and i was too afraid to be too brown in front of them so i drowned out the voices watched my honor stumble and be slain every time someone dropped my name on its head i told myself it was funny forced a laugh so loud it could cloud the culture i did not want to consume me ha ha yes my last name is very mexican yes this is all over the taco cabana bathrooms no it doesn't mean bathroom you can just say caballero if it's if it's easier but what i didn't realize is i wasn't just shaving my name to whatever shape these strangers tongues preferred i was ripping my grandfather's calloused hands apart when he gave this name

071to my father to give to his sons pops i apologize for all the times i did not think twice for all the times i refuse to speak up for all the times i did not protect what grandpa gave to you to give to me daddy i am so sorry for being so selfish i now know my name is where my honor lays it was born in a one-story house in lockhart texas i've learned how to wield its blades you will learn how to say my name caballero it means gentlemen it means night not like the sky or an outfits of light but honor is my birthright we will get this right in spanish the double l makes a yeah sound the er makes the sound gaba yellow when you say my name let it scrape

072across your tongue like you're paving an ancient highway to take you somewhere you've never been i'll take you all somewhere you've never been i like my name it's cute i like being cute but if you say caballo cabrillo cababrero that's that is not cute when you say my name let it hang in your throat like a cloud of smoke on a rainy day rising from the flames i set when i set myself on fire inside of your cheek hoping to leave a spark in your teeth so next time we speak you feel my name sting like it's something like it's something you don't ever want to forget so locate yourself on the compass being the feeling the thinking the believing the acting so for many of us our name was the first word we heard

073as infants it ties us to our heritage it ties us to our people and it ties us to our ancestry so i want you to just take a moment and just reflect um and think about the story behind your name its significance to you and your family and your community so just take um and kristen you have to kind of keep me on time but just take a moment to think about and reflect um on the story of your name and we'll come back together we'll give you about let's say about two minutes just just either jot it down write it down or think about it and i would love for us to share come back and share the story behind your given name three more seconds okay so one of the things that i

074have realized especially in virtual spaces i've been really reflective about who holds the power and who speaks and so i think as we speak it's important to also ensure that we elevate the voices and perspectives of our bird members of colors first so if you're willing and able using sami's words um please uh if you're willing to share out um please do so on mike and if you could just share with us for one or two minutes each that would be we'd be honored to hear your the origin of your given name i'll go next if you want to go first lou okay i was doing the virtual stare down thing because your mic was already unmuted okay um my name is luffy whitebearer and i wrote like a mini poem i write poetry so

075i love this and um have a name that is challenging for most folk to pronounce so i just read a poetry response and i said my name is the resurgence of my people words spoken once outlawed this is the shedding of colonization my name is strength strong woman honorable woman represented by the island fox my name is my ancestors reborn in me basically in california our names were taken our indigenous names were taken by the spanish missions and replaced with spanish surnames and first names um and it took a long time for people to be able to even speak our languages again and our shumash language is actually one that is barely starting to make a comeback because of the impact of colonization and so um being gifted a name by my parents and elders

076in our language was is really important and something that i've carried on to my children as well and um my last name was actually a gift to my father um it wasn't his birth last name and it was gifted through ceremony and um it was something that he passed down to me thanks for listening thanks lou uh i can relate to what he was saying for some reason probably the challenges of uh having my name pronounced but i'm going to channel my uh frustration or anger about all these times where you have to coach people to say your name right or tell them no it's not samwell it's sami i'm going to channel to really bring in pride to what my name means i think that's that's how i felt uh with the moments of

077reflection and also listening to lou my name is and if you ask any middle eastern to say their name uh some will say sami or they might say ahmed is not a middle name it's my father's name and i carry that as part of my name and if i want to go and say my full name i would go with sami ahmed ali my grandfather metki my my grandfather's father and it goes is the name and al it's just like what the irish say mick or in spanish you say l that's the uh and literally means the person who prays or obeys or is a slave to his own god and abd means it's the word of worship word of belonging so we all belong to god and it's uh is his god basically that's

078the meaning of that family name or last name uh and my first name sami uh my uncle his name is sami and the meaning of the name in arabic and i believe in hebrew means highness or an elevated or exalting elevated status or exalting and i would say it's it's something to always aspire to aim for is to aim for highness aim to do better aim to be good and it's been a motivating factor of uh my life to know that my parents expected me to be good to aim high it's a it's a very honorable name that i take on my i put my on my shoulder with pride and and i carry it with me and as lou was talking about the gift i want to recognize the patriarchal side of the names

079i've been given in all these names that i said they are the father of the father the father and it's forgotten the gifts of the mothers who nurtured each one of us until i came to life and i've been nurtured life and and i i believe with our names we've hidden the the most important thing which is our mother's names and contributions i believe in islam we we know that in the judgment day my name will not be sami i'll be sami so my mother's name i'll be called in my mother's name and that's something brings me a realization that i should always remember that while i carry my name with pride and i want to recognize the patriarchal side of my community and recognize that we should always give acknowledgement to our mothers for

080the gifts that they give us they give us life and they get and we should always acknowledge that and it's not there whenever i say my name i'm sorry one more thing and if you want to say my last name just try to say it because if you say it you'll get it right thank you sammy however name jay sarah melissa somebody yeah um so my name [Music] is sarah dean finger mcdonald um sarah was my great-grandmother and a dean is my grandmother and i always loved that i had the maternal line and my first name and my middle name and my father's name and my last name um and then i continued that with my daughter who's a dean mary so she's named after her great grandmother and her grandmother and i hope someday

081she comes to appreciate the um that that line and continues that my son also is his middle name is my father's name so i told my husband when we got married that they could have his last name but their other names would come from my family um and so they do um and then your finger is an interesting name to grow up with because there are lots of jokes that come from finger um but it's also you know we know the story of of my father's family who were from the alsace um which is now part of france but is passed back and forth depending on who won the last war um and came to south texas um with the promise of land and what the immigrants were being brought to do at that point

082was to set up little towns that were buffers um because the native americans whose land had been taken were attacking san antonio and so they built these little towns of immigrants around san antonio to provide a buffer for those attacks so that's how the fingers my fingers ended up in the united states so that's my name thank you sarah i'm happy to jump unless someone else is ready to go can you hear me great so my name my birth name is james britton conroy jr i've never gone by the name of jim or james i was immediately nicknamed i love the word nickname jay i love the sharing so far in that britain is a piece of my great grandmother on my grandmother's side his name was britain barrett so my parents clearly were trying

083to bring family in and then obviously as a junior i i was the um the person following my father ironically i'm a middle son so my older brother who typically might be a junior he was named carl after my mother's uncle who passed away from polio and so all of that starts to mix into how do you get your names but what i reflected on as you asked us to do this was what impact where does that take us because um some of you know i became an attorney early on and no one ever is called just jay i'm an attorney you had to have something at least in my mind it had to be something fancy so um uh or somewhere prestigious so i became j period britain conroy and of course that sounded

084like i must be somebody a lawyer and uh frankly that was on my masthead and on my sign outside my brick office building and um at some point i grew up and then said i'm jay and uh when i became a teacher ten years after lawyer i became so much jay that at age 37 i said to my seniors at crescent valley you don't have to call me mister because no one in my 10 years of lawyering call me mister they always call me jay okay so the long story shorter is is that that that caused a whole lot of problems and and and how names matter i can remember mr nathan walking down the hall good math teacher saying jay you got to stop that because it may be cool and you may think

085that kids like you for it but then when they come to our class and we're trying to hold respect um uh call asking them to say mister really is is difficult and what that taught me in the education world was it is a team game that is staff work together not to be cooler than another staff but to be part of a team that helps kids get together and learn i learned about wanting to be liked but my long-term get out of this and i share that with my student teachers today is what they really want is not to be loved today but they want to be liked four or five years down the road where they say oh mr conrad really taught us a lot about or got across the example so it kind

086of helped me move from the feeling good about jay to the feeling valuable and valid and contributing as whatever mr conroy or whatever thanks for asking the question that's nice to see and reflect sure um so uh it's it's kind of funny i have loved hearing from each of you and as a teacher one of the things that i have always tried to reinforce with my students is that and to encourage in my classroom is that one you you are in charge of what you want to be called as long as it is not going to create a problem a safety issue in our classroom you're in charge of what you want to be called and it's not um it's my responsibility to learn what that is um and to and to practice and to

087own when i don't get it right and to keep practicing until i do it's not your responsibility to make your name easy for me um so uh you know i don't have a um a really very interesting story behind my name um i always say that i was the i was a product of the 70s and so my mom just picked the she gave me a middle name of whoever was you know considered to be super popular actress at the time and somehow that unfortunately for me that happened to be suzanne summers and so i got suzanne as a middle name i hated it all my life and i vowed that as soon as i possibly could i would ditch it and then i did and um and in place of that when i got

088married i took my mom's maiden name as my as my middle name my first name is truly there because my mom liked it i don't think she had any other reason behind it she just liked it and so she decided to to use it um but so i've never felt a lot of attachment or anything particularly special about my name how i got it or um what meaning it might have had for anybody but i did experience people not being able to say it correctly and i remember feeling that tension inside of is it worth correcting do i do i take the time to tell them it doesn't end in an a actually no it's not teresa there is no h you know how important is it and as i grew um i i i

089was able to settle into that my name is is is my mine and i get to be in charge of how important it is to me and the expectations that i get to place for other individuals on the use of my name and so uh that um i think was something that just came over time growing more confident and becoming more comfortable in who i am um but you know when when we when our son was born we we took great pains to think through how do we want to name this person we want this person to have something that will be um that will that will have meaning that at least we will be able to say this is where it this is where it came from and so um when after we named

090our our son uh when he was small every night when i would put him to bed i would go through his name and i would tell him this is your name my son's name was quinlan and i would say your your name is quinlan because we liked it and charles for your grandpa and your dad and everett for your great grandpa and jones because that's our family name and i would say this to him every night until one night when he was about three years old and i started to say you know good night to quinlan your name is quinlan he goes because you like it and then he recited it all back to me and and i that was very meaningful for me to realize that we had um that we had a reason

091why we had chosen those names it wasn't random they were important to us they were it was important and thoughtful on our end to name him but then to hear him in his little tiny voice saying back to me these things that we had told him i you know i'm quite certain at that age that the idea of a family name in and of itself didn't have a lot of meaning i think it ha you know as he's grown of course it has more but for him to have heard that and make that association of some sense of who he was and connected to us and um was that was really um that was a really nice it was a very special moment in parenting to realize that we had um that we had um

092been deliberate in teaching him that his name has meaning and it is it is his it's his right to use his name have his name be used correctly by other people he does not like to have his name shortened and so even now if people try to give him a nickname for it he'll say my name is quinlan it's not and then whatever they have used because that's his that's his preference and so um but it is interesting not having you know i mean we we are if there is a cultural heritage somewhere in my family that anybody ever wanted to bring in to the mix i have never really experienced that and so um it has been it is interesting to me now as a white you know i guess i have to be

093honest and say now a middle aged woman uh to think about the idea of how names mean things in different spaces and to different people um having spent so much time basically having really no no real relationship to my to my own name um as connecting me to anything of um that felt meaningful um so you know i i love hearing that there are reasons people have reasons why they got their name and um it might be just as simple as this was what my my parent decided on that day that's what they liked it might have much more significant his family history but either way whatever that reason is the the takeaway for me has always been that it's not mine to comment on or judge or evaluate i don't have any right even

094to ask a question about a name it's someone's story to share with me if they if they want to offer it and if they don't then that is also their prerogative my responsibility is to learn to say it the way they want it to be said and take responsibility when i mess it up and so um i i am enjoying the conversation and just thinking about that many different ways that each of us has come to think about names as something that that have meaning and i firmly believe they do even though mine was quite possibly picked off of the cover of cosmo magazine in the waiting room somewhere um which is fine because um because i have i have been able to carve out a sense of meaning for it for for myself thank

095you terese vincent can we jump to you yeah so like teresa i don't have a great story to go with my name or how i got it nothing very exciting so i started thinking about about my experience of my name and how my name is well just living in that name and so like lou i started i started writing statements and it became kind of a prose poem so i'll just read that for you and you can take it or leave it um my name is like a jet plane it slices through our culture without leaving any disturbance it always appears at the top of the list it flies with presidential authority it's too slick to make jokes about my name is cool and it's camouflaged all at the same time thank you vincent ryan

096sure so um my my dad's name is ron and my mom's name is nelda and so they um they had a name for me if i was a girl which was rhonda which is the combo of those two um but i ended up a boy and so i'm so i'm ryan but my middle name's thomas and thomas is also my son garrett's middle name um because it represents my mom's side my mom's family my mom had one brother and he didn't have kids and passed away and so um i appreciate the um the thomas middle name for both garrett and i because it represents the the continuation of that lineage so um that's that's how my name came to be and one of the things i i've had a chance to watch this video a

097number of times um and every time it gives me goosebumps um just because of the the power in the voice but it also it has led us as a district to a number of conversations about our students and how they feel when they come into classrooms and other other settings and when we can't pronounce their name and when we can't pronounce their name and how those two things interact amongst teachers amongst staff last year i noticed it um often when i went to athletic events because um because there's an announcer and oftentimes they um don't get it right and so um i reached out to osaa to change the way that students are listed on um for for athletic events and having a place for pronunciation as well so we can do a better job

098and i often saw that when you're in athletic events when you go to an away game you're already feeling a little bit compromised because you're in somebody else's space and then when names aren't pronounced correctly it it i think it um magnifies that so um what this has been for me and going back to the compass is it really often puts me in the acting quadrant and it makes me think about so thinking a little bit but also acting how do we make sure that students when they show up are represented by their names all of you shared a story about your name and how how it came to be and i think that that's powerful as we think about connection with our students um and our staff and in our community so um uh

099appreciation of marcian for for bringing us to this this conversation thank you ryan melissa so i um the story of my name i think is really the um the expression of the family that i grew up in you know my father is mexican and my mother is white and my name um at birth was melissa don celaya so it was again that feeling of not white enough not brown enough but somewhere kind of in the middle and um it really reflected i think my father his attempt to be um white because that was what allowed him to progress in society so his name enrique francisco salia changed to henry um so that he could um be a salesman or work for the government or whatever it was that he wanted to do and he i

100think put that upon me i laugh now because i have four siblings one whole sister and three half siblings and they all have from my father and they all have like very um uh mexican names amalia sophia gabriela and enrique junior um and then there's melissa so um i i laugh at that but i think one of the sweetest things that i always remember is how my mexican grandmother didn't call me melissa she called me melissa and it was um like the the one piece that i could hold on to for um from that so thank you thank you melissa okay so chris sure i was born christine marie hawkins my mother gave me the name christine my mother was born and raised in morocco and robot and was from italy and her family all

101their native language was french and so she wanted a name in which her family could pronounce so she gave me the name christine i became chris when my middle school math teacher decided that i was chris and i kept telling him no my name is christine and he kept saying nope now you're chris and from that day on i have been chris and so that's how that came and my middle name was my grandmother's name and it is also my daughter's middle name and my granddaughter's middle name thank you for asking thank you chris um olivia i see your face but i'm not sure if you are here okay she might just be listening okay um kristen thanks for including me um so teresa's story resonated with me a lot as a child of the

10270s now you know begrudgingly a middle-aged person um my name was also chosen because it was cute and um you know i have i am somebody who grew up in a white middle-class family whose uh whose origins were not particularly important to them so i have done my own look into my family history but i was given my name because it was cute my parents liked the sound of kristen and it went really well with the middle name kara which also starts with the k and and my last name is miles and i retain that that last name when i got married um and the the names themselves have their own meanings but they were not given to me because they they have meaning um i discovered that i have family that that came over

103on the mayflower and i know that i am of um scandinavian descent as well as german and irish um but none of that was passed forward in storytelling um my my parents don't know much about their grandparents or great-grandparents and it was not that important to them um it's it's more important to me especially since i have done my own racial equity work like it's become more important to me not just to assume that my background is the default background i remember hearing in my uh in my own racial equity work a lot of people say well i'm i'm just white i'm nothing and and and that was always felt to me like wow that is an assumption of default that everything else is othered and um so it's been really important to me to

104look into um my own my own identity and my own background and i've done a bunch of that as an adult on my own but it was not passed down to me and so um and my name is also frequently mispronounced i am you know i am christine sometimes i am cursed on with an o like it's funny so um but uh so so i named my daughter also a little more intentionally with some history um but but it this is such a great conversation to listen to you as board members have as as you have had as board members because as ryan also mentioned um how how do we as instructors speak to our students is there any is there any time in the beginning of the school year where teachers also really access

105a student's name so that they that they do know how to pronounce it correctly and they're not accidentally nicknaming somebody who doesn't want to be nicknamed um or and i've learned so much about you just through the story of your own name that um that this is such an easy um step into what is personal to you and and i'm just thinking about kids in the same way like how often do we ask them um the meaning of their name or or you know or who they're named after if anybody or or what it means you know in their language or whatever but um anyway that's a story of mine thank you for including me thank you so much and i think it would be beautiful to hear from your amazing board secretary lindsay would

106you would you mind sharing sorry i was trying to find the controls to turn the thing back on because it moves now we see oh there we go all right hopefully i didn't cook on the spot lindsay but i've i've had i think we've all had the pleasure of getting to know you i mean i haven't physically seen you but i think you're doing amazing work it would be great for you to share as well if at all possible thank you um i uh i was adopted so my names aren't necessarily the ones that i would have had um yeah sorry i don't really know what to say okay that's okay you have a beautiful name my middle name is hawaiian um because my my parents uh honeymooned there and my brother's middle name is

107hawaiian too so i feel like they did that intentionally so we'd have that connection what's your middle name it's ulani fulani oh i love it love it thank you lindsay thank you so much yeah yeah and we'll come back to this you know one of the things that i've realized in our racial equity work it's the spirit of taking a second look and sometimes when we're engaging in courageous conversations about race it's okay to come back it's okay to come back and take a second look um yes oh me huh darn it would you would you mind sharing with us thanks ryan i was wondering if that was gonna if she was gonna call on herself as a facilitator i thought i'd get off the hook so um my name is uh marcianne and i

108only have one name i don't have a middle name and when my mom came to this immigrated to this country when she was 19 years old she wanted to have her children she came from venezuela caracas venezuela and she came to this country wanting her children to have a name that can be pronounced in both the spanish-speaking community in the english-speaking community and so my mom named me marcian which i was named after um a nurse uh that was also a nun that was taking care of my great-grandmother who was passing away in the hospital and my grandmother had told my mother before she passed away that she um because nurse marcianne was taking care of her and said that uh you know if you have children if you and my and her my dad

109decide to have children that please name one of your children marcian so i was actually named after a nun and the funny thing with my name was that when we lived in venezuela as that's where i grew up when you say marcian in english it sounds fine right but when you pronounce it in spanish marcian sounds a lot like martian so if you say marciano or marciana it's a martian and so i remember just being teased endlessly and when we lived in venezuela and i would come home in tears and ask it kind of if we're thinking about the compass i was in the angry side of the compass and um i would tell my mom why did you name me marcianne because i was getting teased endlessly when we moved back to united states

110so my name was shortened to marcy right um because you can't make fun of that name when we moved back to the united states i realized that i never really identified with the name marcy because that's not who i am that's not tied to my great-grandmother and my heritage and so i quickly realized that marciana and you can't really make fun of that name in english when you pronounce it with english sounds and so i went back to marcian so i felt like that i'd kind of done that full circle with my name so that's the that's the the significance of my name thank you for asking ryan so i am just so honored and i know that this kind of takes us in a different place as a board but i think this this

111is so important because i think as you shared i saw you um as you shared your words and shared your perspectives i saw you really live in different parts of the compass um and i think as i reflected on what you said you all literally actually lived the last part of the protocol which is um conditions that we need to have in order to have an interracial conversation about race a lot of you brought your personal local immediate a lot of you isolated rays a lot of you talked about the historical components and how they have impacted your name and so you literally just lived in practice an interracial conversation about race one of the things that um is i know for sure is that when we think about the sankofa bird and the sankofa

112bird is a a word from ghana is that it asks us to embrace the past in order to inform the present so to have a courageous conversation about race requires this level of connectedness when we connect heart to heart and i know that the school board's charge oftentimes is to really be on the right side of the compass the thinking and the technical but i would encourage us to always visit the left side of the compass because that's where we as racial beings that's how we build connection so thank you so much for your your sharing and your vulnerability and sharing a piece of you i think it was invaluable for all of us um lindsay would you mind um bringing us to the next quote all right um could i have somebody unmute and

113read this out loud for us i'd be happy to thank you james race matters for reasons that really are only skin deep that cannot be discussed any other way and that cannot be wished away race matters to a young man's view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes no matter the neighborhood where he grew up race matters to a young woman's sense of self when she states her hometown and then is pressed no where are you really from regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language which he does not understand because only english was spoken at home race matters because of the slights the snickers the silent judgments that

114reinforce that most coupling of thoughts i do not belong here thank you jay what comes up for you i'd like to hear just from one or two people what comes up for you as you heard jay share that quote i think for me sorry go ahead okay i think for me what came up was um how embedded race is and how much it's influenced by um who is considered the norm and it just builds on that the other ring that we just heard about to like everybody else's other if you're not part of the dominant and um in the context where this is coming from a lot of times um like the norm is based on whiteness and the construction of whiteness and that um that erasure of past connections is part of that for

115folk so i think that um it's an opportunity to take a deep dive into some things but i'll pause there thank you um i think that that um unless theresa do you want to speak up is there something that came up for you no i think that uh lou's statement it captures anything i would want to add so i'll leave it at that okay beautiful um so i think uh director lew's talking about a deep dive right so when we think about and the next piece i'm going to move you to is um and lindsay if you could uh move us to the next slide is the last part of the protocol so we've looked at the compass we've visited the compass we've talked about the how we have the conversation right experiencing discomfort and

116speaking your truth and accepting and expecting non-closure and all of you have modeled that beautifully so when we talk about the what what are we going to talk about especially as the board is looking at transformational policies as the board is looking at creating a racial policy it's important to know what to talk about and so i wanted to just read you a quick quote that comes from glenn singleton and he's actually the author and the creator of the courageous conversations about race protocol which was actually created over 25 years ago so think about what was happening in our history 25 years ago so it's been around for quite a while but this is what he said about the protocol and when i read these words i'm like ding ding ding okay i finally get

117it so i just wanted to read this to you before we jump into the six conditions we need a way to get into it again this is around our courageous conversation about race we need a way to get into it we need a way to stay in it and we need a way that while we are in it we aren't just skimming the surface okay so i think director lou alluded talked about this it's like we've got to take a deeper dive right often times when people engage in courageous conversations about race they just stay in that first tier which is engage right but what we want to do if we're going to be a transformation transformational board we've got to get to the deep tier three right so the deep your understanding of whiteness

118in the interrogation associated with racial privilege and power okay so in the first in the first tier we have uh condition number one which is focus on personal local and immediate and all of you have done and modeled that beautifully you've talked you've spoken from the eye and you've talked about your personal belief and here we want to talk about the eye because it's your personal local and immediate experience oftentimes brene brown talks about the phantom army i don't know if you've ever heard that but what she means about the phantom army is when somebody says we they actually me i so when we're having courageous conversations about race we want you to stay in the i pronoun still in the engaging tier isolate rays here we acknowledge the intersection of social factors and race

119and here we need to ask what does race have to do with it and here we want to identify ourselves how we show up so you probably heard me say as a white latina but we want to isolate our race and how we show up into the space the second tier which is the sustaining tier asks us to normalize social construction in multiple perspectives so here what that means is we normalize social construction of race and engage in multiple racial perspectives and we've actually practiced that today as we've had board members share their and speak their truth here we want to ask what is my perspective what is your racial perspective and what perspective is missing and i think the family engagement piece that you will be engaging in that's what we want to tap

120into what perspective is is missing when we are making decisions the fourth agreement is monitor agreements and conditions and established parameters we're actually doing that now we are working and living with the protocol we're monitoring our time and we're also monitoring the agreements the last two again i feel are the the most uh influential in terms of really getting us to transform systems and number five is you use a working definition for race so that means that we are using our the definition for race really asks us to um it's about skin color and and it's different than nationality and ethnicity okay and we also need to understand that how we examine race is for um folks of color as well as for white is different so we have to just be um aware of

121that and lastly exam examining the presence and role of whiteness and its impact on the conversation about race so that just asks us to really interrogate how race privilege and power manifests itself in our system um next slide so i wanted to ask miss miles in terms of uh time how are we doing or do we need to take a small break or can we just move forward just wanted to check in with the group well how are folks feeling about a break do you want a break now or would you like to discuss the equity lens first kristen we're thinking a break would probably be in order okay it's 10 51. um just give us nine minutes come back together at 11. okay because this gives us one more hour that's great okay may

122i uh make a comment before we take that break i just uh a few moments ago i um i realized i probably looked quite distracted on video i didn't turn off my camera in time to not have that go out for everyone to see um unfortunately um i need to step out of our meeting um my husband's uncle uh was uh diagnosed with covid uh five or six days ago now and right in the middle of our meeting right as people were telling wonderful stories of their names i learned that he passed away and so i think that my house is not a space that can facilitate yeah my attention on what we're doing right now and i also would i think it would be helpful to all of us and to myself as well

123if i'm able to pay more attention to what is happening in the in the background of my my home and be more integrated into that so yeah absolutely i i have yeah really appreciated our conversation this morning and um oddly uh as i'm about to transition into talking to people about all kinds of things many emotions um i feel somewhat grounded in my own self a little bit um because we've been talking so much about thinking about where we are in relation to things around us so i am sorry that i won't be able to finish out the rest of this conversation but i appreciate everyone's flexibility and i will just say that he lived a long wonderful fantastic life just hit 64 years with his wonderful wife they had a wonderful time together it

124is always too soon um when you love someone for them not to be here but i am very grateful that uncle fred had such a very full time here um and that i got to be part of his story so i will not be with you when you come back from break um and i wish wonderful things for the next hour for all of you thank you therese condolences to you and your family and hang in there thank you so very much i will um be in touch with all of you very soon have a great rest of the morning bye so sorry to hear that yeah foreign okay all right all right let's give uh each other one more minute and then i'll go back i will come back together all right just checking

125in if lou you're available and ready wonderful all right kristen and marcia we're ready whenever you're ready uh and all right ryan wants to speak first if i can jump in just for a second um with every great lesson um or planning for a retreat you always plan more content than you have time for that's the uh the way these things always go and so recognizing that um what we're going to do is uh marcianna is going to continue with her information and then we're going to transition to kristin um because we're i'm fortunate to have kristen with us today um i'm always with you and so we can come back to the policy development piece but i wanted to make sure that we gave enough time for um for both marcian chris and kristen

126to be with us today and then um recognizing that the last 10 minutes or so kristin will be talking about what our next steps so um that's sort of a modification um mid mid lesson um but wanted you to be be aware of that and with that i'm going to turn it back to marcian sounds good thank you ryan maybe we should have done the full day after all there's so much so much to do um you know the as i reflect on the spring and when we went moved into emergency teaching i remember i don't know what it felt like for all of you i think we could all agree it just felt like um i don't know if you've ever seen those movies where everybody's moving really really fast and like the calendar

127pages are just flipping over and over and over and i just remember like at the end of the day just not even realizing how many zoom calls i'd been in and realizing that in all those zoom calls i had i had been making so many decisions right because um maybe because it was the pull from the community or maybe somebody needed an answer right away but i realized that i needed to slow things down because somebody once told me that in times of stress in times of like this hurried feeling that you have to get things done implicit bias rears its ugly head and that in these times we might inadvertently make decisions that re-injure and or re-traumatize our black indigenous and peoples of color because there's this insatiable pull to move to the status

128quo right because that's what sometimes whiteness that's what the dominant culture that's what pulls us because that's what we're used to so this corvallis school district equity lens um questions that you see in front of you they're actually not new i borrowed them from the portland public school district so really credit goes to them and we modified it a little bit and really these questions have been instrumental and critical as teaching and learning as our dell which is our district equity leadership team advisory group as we work with a lot of different organizations as we plan our professional development as we do everything these equity lens questions are at the forefront of every decision that we make the reason we have these equity lens questions because i love that saying you got to move slow

129before you move fast and it really gives us an opportunity to slow things down and interrogate and interrupt the predictable patterns and biases that persist in decision making right right is that does that connect with all of you yeah okay the other thing i wanted to share with you today is i'm sharing with you two tools right the courageous conversations about race tool right protocol which is foundational to our racial equity work but i'm also sharing with you this tool the one thing i want to mention is that these tools are not are not mutually exclusive they're actually interconnected because you can't use the equity lens tool if you're disk conscious to how race and racism shows up in every single space that we are in every single day so i'm going to use an

130analogy that i think chris will love um which is the reese's peanut butter cup analogy remember that chris so if we think of the equity lens as the peanut butter and we think of our the protocol that i just shared with you as the chocolate you actually have to bring them together and have this amazing piece of candy because you can't pull them apart they have to be together so these questions are questions that we go to on a regular basis we actually have them memorized our building principals use them when they're creating their school improvement plans we use them when they're meeting with their ptos and ptas you name it there's so many examples of how they are used but they also need to be internalized right so the questions are how does this

131decision align with our district mission and vision so if you think about your board goals how is a decision you're about to make align with that mission and vision who does this decision affect positively right we can probably picture who affects positively with many of the decisions that we make who does this decision affect negatively so who's harmed and who will be re-injured by that decision that the board is making how might this decision ignore or worsen existing disparities what are the unintended consequences of this decision right so what is the impact you might have an intent to do something but what is the impact on students and communities and staff of color how will these being how will those being affected by the decision be included in the process and that's exactly what kristin

132is going to be talking with you next with a community engagement we cannot make a decision unless we have the counter story and multiple perspectives at the table and that's the power of our delta the district equity leadership team advisory they have been instrumental in helping us make decisions that positively impact our students and communities of color two more questions what other possibilities were explored right so that allows us to reach out and reach far spread that net wide to see what other possibilities were explored and lastly how will this decision or outcome be sustainable right so think about that enduring decision how will this decision that we're making endure through the test of time right oftentimes we are pushed because of we need a decision right away we've got to make this decision by

133tomorrow to make a decision quickly but really we want to think about the sustainability of that decision and and vet it through the questions that i just shared with you so what i'm hoping we can do is just take ah running out of time um to just take two minutes and i just want to i'm opening it up to all of you to unlike and just what comes up for you as you look at these equity lens questions and is there another question that you would want to add mercy and i think for me like these are really great questions and one of them that i think would help clear things up and i'm glad we're the next one is about like community engagement and conversations is how can the importance of this um how

134can it make sense for the broader community because i don't i know a lot of people like you have mentioned earlier may not have this type of training or background you may not understand some of the decisions being made are the whys behind them and the benefit for everyone in those decisions and so that is where that question is coming from like how um how can it be clear for the community too thank you i also think about what somebody is like you know i think especially from my perspective as a white middle-aged woman i don't always know the answers to these questions and so sometimes when um i look at these like equity lenses i'm also looking at like i'm also sort of thinking in my mind like what do i not know because

135my perspective is it has been limited by being part of the dominant culture and who do i need to ask and be willing to ask because of that [Music] so what i hear you saying is um when making decisions sometimes you might find yourself in a place where you're you're needing to seek a counter story or another perspective is that right okay so as a board and maybe um kristen this is where you'll lead us next but how do you see that playing out for you what are some ideas or thoughts around that how to seek the counter story with the other perspective for me it it um calls me to be okay with things being messy and um not easily graspable uh not clear i'd love to have all decisions absolutely clear but these

136call us to have to wade into uncertainty and and messiness right i think that's an example of what marcian shared how those the equity lens and the compass play together and those agreements because one of those agreements is accept and expect non-closure and i think what you just talked about was how that that that's sort of what you described and so again i think that's a good example of how those two tools interlock in in the form of candy apparently thank you ryan to hear from a couple more board members or staff my other thought on this is also probably because of my perspective as a white woman i'm used to things being done in a familiar way um and so it sort of goes with this sort of non-closure idea that um i need

137to be willing to recognize that my way of doing things is not necessarily the right way of doing things um and by looking at who else needs to have a voice and who else we're affecting by making decisions um i need to be willing to be flexible um as we look through this equity lens and accept non-closure that you know i don't have all the answers and sir i just i appreciate what you just said because you actually modeled beautifully condition one which is personal looking immediate you isolated your race you talked about yourself as a white woman and you actually jumped to the third tier which is examining the presence and role of whiteness right so being reflective around how interrogating that right and how it shows up and realizing that as a white

138woman to seek the counter story and to see that another perspective is important in in informing the decision the policy making that um you're undertaking so thank you for modeling that beautifully to the group vincent yeah and for me personally you know you know and dovetailing on what sarah just said is that because of my lived experience my default setting is not necessarily to consider these things and so that's why it's so critically important that we systematize our approach to deconstruct deconstructing mechanisms institutional mechanisms that advance oppression people by by race or other social factors and so as i'm thinking as i'm looking at this and i have my notes on our policy process i actually screenshotted this and just dropped it into my notes for that because i strongly feel that this needs to

139be part of our policy development process that the board shouldn't consider policies unless they've been interrogated by by this lens yeah i appreciate that so much vincent and i think you uh spoke about the normalization right of oftentimes when we make decisions we are making decisions based on what we know based on our lived experiences and what has happened in the past right but if we're going to move to transformation it's being curious and i love that word curious about the decisions the conversations and the actions that we're taking and so these equity lens questions just help us kind of slow down and interrogate the decision that we're making to come up with a different solution right and when we first started earlier today i talked about the definition of insanity right to do the

140same thing over and over again and expect different results but if we're going to transform systems we have to interrogate and these questions i just i think really lend itself to slowing things down and looking at things from a different perspective so thank you vincent marcia can i share like two super short quotes about counter story please please okay um for folks that don't know part of my focus with my doctorate was on um cultural rhetorics and so i did a lot of looking at counter storing um in a particular way and richard delgado i think has a great um way of helping understand the power of storytelling especially counter stories and he's a critical race theorist that um uses legal frameworks and so in his plea for the narrative he says he's talking about

141the dominant stories and how they're constructed and i think that's helpful in understanding what we're talking about with counter stories and so he said that the dominant group creates its own stories as well the stories are narratives told by the in-group remind it of its identity in relation to out-groups and provide it with a form of shared reality in which its own superior position is seen as natural and so i think that's a lot of what we're talking about with that and then um for the actual um role of storytelling he also says um but stories and counter stories can serve as an equally important destruction function they can show that what we believe is ridiculous self-serving are cruel they can show us the way out of the trap of unjustified exclusion they can help

142us understand when it is time to reallocate power they are the other half the destructive half of the creative dialectic and stories and counter stories to affect it be affected must be or must appear to be non-coh coercive and so it's that welcoming of those counter stories where it's not this forced in order to justify things but i thought that would be helpful if you're more familiar what count with what counter stories are and why they're called counter stories so thanks for entertaining my momentary quoting beautiful oh that's beautiful i'd love a copy of those quotes beautiful may i surface a thought around terminology and and i understand that the the term counter story has a technical meaning but there's a part of me that that's struggling with that that um positioning of opposition that

143we have one story and we have another one that and these are counter or opposite each other and while i understand that that's important and some and oftentimes we need that a need to use stories or use ways of knowing in that way i think it's important that as a culture that we learn to embrace different ways of knowing that there's different truths different people have different truths and we need to be okay with understanding that so i'm not necessarily arguing against the the terminology of counter story but really just saying that we need to be open to different diff different ways of understanding how the world works and also that's great events because a lot of times people are thinking about counter stories as against people when it's actually a counter story to the

144system that's creating these experiences so it's not counter restoring each other necessarily it's like a the dominant narrative of how these systems operate so i don't know if that's a little bit helpful too and like thinking about terminology and framework and for folk watching to understand like counter stories are never intended to pit people against each other they're talking about the experiences to help understand the systems that operate for change and so i hope that helps a little bit too yeah thank you okay i would like to share one thing i i i love those questions and i believe as we integrate them into our decision making as a board and follow the lead of staff and district leadership on uh evaluating decisions this will help a lot and from what i heard just now

145i i got to really wonder about that this second to last question what other possibilities were explored i'm wondering how many times we said we explored other possibilities and actually we changed our mind and now let's go for a new decision and go through the equity lens one more time and i think there might be another follow-up question to what other possibilities were explored which one of these uh possibilities gets us closer to justice especially racial justice and i feel that could orient us to see other perspectives are there narratives and critically think of the decision at hand and other possible decisions or alternatives under the lens of equity in terms of allocating resources but also in terms of possible transformation of existing systems or rebuilding of existing systems especially in a situation where now

146we're rebuilding so many systems in our public education and community so i believe that would be a really good grounding uh question or follow-up question how can we which of the possibilities gets us closer to justice so we could do this iteratively until we get the best possibility with that goal in mind um so i i feel i feel also that could uh take us from the bias that we have a we have a child a decision and now we need to pass it through the lens and we always remember we could actually replace it with another decision that's better i appreciate that sami so i heard you say to add which one of these gets us closer to social justice would be another question as a follow-up to the second to the last what

147i appreciate about that is that and i think about some of the decisions um in terms of the board goals you know i remember this was a while ago when we talked about should equity be as part of every single board goal and we know that it is right but we needed at the time um to pay close attention to how does racial impact how does equity really play out in all these different areas right because we really as a system believe that we really needed to continue to interrogate it and to build our muscle around it because um if we don't if if we don't then what's what do we default to right and so i think adding that it highlights the importance of we need to continue to ask the question about how

148does how does this decision get us closer to social justice and i would add liberation right okay thank you sami thank you so much jay you had your hand raised i wasn't sure about the process we're in right now but i thought there were two other questions that made sense to add and i i don't know whether that's something we don't want to lose them i mean we know we're cut for time but i heard and i think it was sarah say how can the decision make sense for the broader community um and i know that and then i heard another one that said what do i not know or who do i need to ask and i think lou added are there other stories to be heard those would be reminders to me to

149us about um the process and so i know we're word smithing perhaps but i think we're also adding some important um elements that should be captured right thank you jay okay so i appreciate that you said we're uh close on time and so if it's all right with you um you know we're going to accept and expect non-closure right when it comes to continued conversations about the equity lens but knowing with the spirit of taking a second look we will come back i'm sure and add those questions and and interrogate a little bit further before i hand it over to um kristen and she knows that we're going to show this video we thought it was really important to show you just a couple minute video that talks about um because what i hear you

150all today and i so appreciated the way sammy started us he was really whether you knew it or not sami you were really getting us to interrogate our why right ry as board members our y as community members and so um there's a saying um that michael jr says when you know your why you're what has more imp impact because you are walking in or towards your purpose right so the work that you've done today is so important especially as we're thinking about how racial equity and anti-racism is at the core of what we do and so walking through having you an opportunity to look in the mirror and and and reflect on your lived experience giving you an opportunity to hear the counter story or multiple perspectives of other people on the board this

151is the work this is what gets us closer to our what okay so i want to end my piece with a video and i know kristin um knows that we're going to be showing this in chris you some of you have seen it before but i just want to have you watch it again and maybe you'll see it with a new light so lindsay if you wouldn't mind playing the video mercy on really quick can i just clarify that the question i suggested adding was actually about like if it makes sense to community um that was what i was not to add more stories i think i'm a big fan of hearing tons of stories because clearly i'm into that and it's called how do i know but it was more about the um the

152if this if the what the decisions are made sorry if this is being made if they make sense to the community based on the equity if they're understanding the reasons behind them that was more the question yeah i i agree yes for sure director lou i i totally agree with you because sometimes um we put a decision out there or an idea or communication but it might not land the way we thought it was going to land right so thank you um lou could you share that one more time i'm just taking notes um in the background um related to um what i'm hearing um so can you restate that for me please yeah and sorry it was like way at the beginning of when we first looked at the questions so i'm not like

153it's paraphrasing whatever my question i suggested but it was about it was more around like how do we make sure that it makes sense to the community the decisions be made like they may have questions like how does this decision how can we make this clear why it was happening and um understanding it from the equity lens because part of the reason why i brought that up is because not everybody has the trainings that we're going through and everybody as it was pointed out is on their different um places and they're learning about racial equity and equity in general and so that's where that question was coming from thank you because i want to make sure that thank you lou because i want to give credit where you raise it because i think though the

154the thing that that rang then in my mind that related to the tenth question which was what do i not know or who do i need to ask and to me what i thought rang in there was are there other stories that will help me understand what do i need to know and who do i need to ask so i didn't mean to what is the word mishmash them together um but they both made good sense okay thank you and i put those down too jay thanks thanks great work listen you want to go ahead and play [Music] no and a lot of times when people hear the phrase how do i know the next thing they say is what how do i know what but the key really isn't to know what the key

155is to know why because when you know your why you have options on what your what can be for instance my why is to inspire people to walk in purpose my what is stand-up comedy my what is writing books my what can be going out with some friends to eat in fact another what that has moved me towards my why is uh a web series that we have out now called break time so every wednesday at three o'clock you should subscribe to the to the channel uh we do a series called break time on youtube so three o'clock we drop a new episode one episode in particular i'm about to show you a clip to we were in uh we're in winston-salem so break time this is how it works i travel the country i

156do stand-up comedy probably an hour hour and a half at an event and in the middle of my show i'll just sit down and start talking to the audience and funny just happens or i'll meet somebody who's really interesting so i met this one guy and he said that he teaches music at a school i was like all right you teach music you know um can't you sing and then uh i'm just going to show you the clip check it out so your musical director yes sir all right so um let me get a couple let me get a couple bars of like a amazing grace can you do the first part of that go ahead amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved like me that bro could sing you know what i'm saying

157all right all right um now once you give me the version is if uh your uncle just got out of jail you got shot in the back when you was a kid i'm just saying let me see the hood version real quick if you know what further i'm talking about just see if that exists let me see what you got [Music] [Laughter] [Music] like me [Music] right now [Music] so here's the thing the first time i asked him to sing he knew what he was doing the second time i asked him saying he knew why he was doing it when you know your why you're what has more impact because you're walking in or towards your purpose wow i love that video chris i'm gonna hand it over to you thank you i think i

158showed that last year as we began our psp work too i never get tired of that one um i want to take just a moment uh so speaking of slowing down uh we have done a bunch of that today because this these conversations have been so critical um discussions about equity are not and and especially anti-racist work is not something to be rushed through it's not training that you get and check a box right and and your conversations today have been talking about embedding this work in what you do how you communicate to your to your constituents your community your families and so we have taken more time on that today and i'm so grateful that you have i'm grateful that you've had this conversation that you've had a fantastic facilitator in marcianne and that

159i get to to to learn with you again like i did last year knowing that we have a number of sessions ahead of us i'm not worried that we're not going to hit the public engagement thing really hard i think it would be a lot less meaningful if we had been like all right marcietti have an hour and now you're done and we're moving on um so but but i but we are going to use the lens that you all just gazed through for a long period of time to start talking about how are you going to define public engagement and and what is it going to mean to engage your public we're going to answer well we're not going to do this today but we're going to look at the questions that you came

160up with last year to continue this work to answer what your role is how you currently engage the public and what opportunities exist and to to find a definition of public engagement that not only acknowledges what the roles of the board are but also that acknowledge this this equity lens that you're going to be putting into practice knowing that you're also going to modify that um i want to say that that marcian mentioned that the the questions on that lens were derived from pps and i before going going to um osba i worked at pps for 10 years and that equity lens was adopted while i was there and we had as staff every everybody had a physical copy of it that we were to look at when we were making recommendations to the superintendent

161or to the board or making big decisions in our own department and i ran the charter schools department at that time and i had a physical bookmark that i had hanging in my office right next to my computer screen so i couldn't miss it and we all did um as staff we all really utilized it and then the board had copies of its own that it kept at the board table and so to really use that that lens i i know that you will and i also have seen districts you know like they adopt it it's done they checked a box i know that that's not your interest but there are i'm just encouraging you to find ways to to have it in a place where you do look at it and you ask those

162questions as you move through things um i also just want to say that um as we looked at the the compass courageous conversations about race is that is the training that i also did at pbs for my ten years there and as you talked about believing and and that the board in its processes it's good to be on the left side of that compass in that in that believing those that moral quadrant that believing quadrant that this really also ties to the research that we use to work with boards because there is research that tells us that that boards simply believing that all students can learn has a measurable impact on student outcomes and that that can seem very like who wouldn't believe that students can learn but when you dig into that question do

163you believe all students can learn regardless of of any of their individual circumstances or you know it also if there is research that says that that belief has a measurable positive impact on student outcomes then the counter research to that also says that boards who do not believe that have probably a measurable negative impact on student outcomes and so when you're talking about student learning it's always good to reflect on you know what is my belief am i am i othering some students am i saying like but these kids over here as a subset like what what are we doing in our conversations about our district initiatives and when we talk about students so um so all of that that work that marcian just led you through is such a beautiful framing of now how

164you talk about engaging your public i don't want to just like rush into that in my very um you know linear like on time mode what i want to do is give you a moment to just reflect on anything that that is coming up for you or that that you want to say after completing that work before we transition into a little bit about public engagement and then marcian and i have some homework for you as well that we'll talk about but i just want to give you a moment and just create some space for you to to share any any thoughts that you have as we move on so i'm in the feeling quadrant right now and i'm feeling a lot of appreciation over the last year you've heard me call for um repeatedly

165for this type of space and having these conversations and i i'm just deeply appreciative to marcianne for facilitating us so skillfully you are definitely the jedi master of courageous conversations for our team so thank you very much but i think this has been a great way to start the year and a great way to build a foundation to springboard from but i think i would very much appreciate more discussions like this um discussing you know where i'm just getting at our why and really reinforcing our why and being very very clear and figuring out how we're going to say publicly discussing our why so thank you for the time i really appreciate it can i share for a minute too please um i i just also wanted to say that i know what i'm about

166to say is embedded in everything that you're talking about today but i really want to emphasize student voice being the base from all our decisions when i work around suicide prevention a lot of the decisions i make around that is based on letters i've read suicide notes and a lot of the work i a lot of the decisions that we make around working with homeless kids are based on the stories that i have heard while i was down at their tent along the river and a lot of the work i do around transgender kids is based on sitting in a meeting where we were trying to help a child who was transitioning and people in the meeting would not honor the child's pronouns and watching that child escalate you heard a very very powerful story

167the other day at the board meeting from ruby hoffman a child of color at wilson elementary school to me that was the most powerful statement made throughout that whole board meeting and i i just thought everything should just stop after she spoke because that was huge and so much power in her words her lived experiences and so and that's kind of what i bring to this table is that you know maybe we need to share those stories more so that you hear these stories and that should be really the center of all our work around equity in all areas thanks thank you chris that's a very important reminder and i think that um i know i've talked about this before in other contexts like the importance of hearing those stories but that shouldn't like be

168the expectation to do things that we know will help students prevent those kind of stories from needing to be told in um if that makes sense and how sometimes we know that things aren't right or aren't equitable but wait until there's a crisis mode or for a student to speak up and talk about the harm that they face in order for us to actually make changes that we know will help protect those students from having to endure that and so um i agree that those stories are super important and we also shouldn't wait until that happens in order to make changes and so i think that's um that's a philosophy i have that i work with um in multiple aspects of professional and community-based work is like sometimes we've heard this story like over and

169over again and um and often we're like well we haven't heard about it for a little while so things must be better when it's only and when it gets super to a point where somebody is experiencing physical or emotional harm that we're willing to listen and i think we need to be a little bit more proactive in that so thanks chris for bringing up those student voices um they're always central and we know like for every story shared like that there's many more that don't have a space to tell them or don't even know how to tell them are can't vocalize what they're feeling because it'll make it real thank you other thoughts speaking of courageous conversation i'm going to just jump in and see where it goes but what's nagging at my mind right

170now might be the concept too of i love i love thinking about the why the beliefs and and i'd be interested in knowing what we as a board wrestle with in terms of our beliefs about who is responsible for the education of ruby or bill or whoever else and by that conversation about responsibility it isn't about saying well it's the kids responsibility and they're not picking it up so it's their fault it might also include a conversation that says what is getting in the way of helping that student feel capable of handling the responsibility whether it's chris's comment about not feeling part of the conversation not feeling empowered feeling desperate um to um you know all sorts of other pieces but the whole the whole point of of the my conversation my my piece is

171to say one thing to say what do i i believe all students can learn and then it's about the quote accountability responsibility piece that we also have to ask and hear and listen to it's critical for us other thoughts i think for one of the things too before about this too about how we have that working philosophy that education outcomes should not be determined by income race gender disability or language and how can we articulate that with and knowing that that should not determine their educational outcomes but acknowledge that it does and i think like currently and that's the aspiration as a district that those do not determine their educational outcomes because of the access issues and the equity issues that exist um does that make sense and so for me when i read that

172before i was even on the board i was like kind of a little bit like what do you mean that absolutely impacts somebody's educational outcomes like all of those things and then um i appreciate sami helping explain to me like that that's where we want to be and so like how do we make that more clear of like that's the goal of the district and acknowledge that we are a work in progress and that's what we're striving for and so that's for me like helping make that more more clear in acknowledging yeah we do still need to have some stuff to do that's a great point there's a there can be a lot of distance between should not and do not right that's that is the work thank you lou other thoughts so i'm just

173going to show you the questions that we ask because i'm i'm also mindful of time and and i will say that marcianna and i talked a lot about like this should be six hours this should be eight hours maybe we should have a 12-hour day which of course we're never gonna do but um but what's great is that this is your project and um so this this will continue and and and morph as we go i'm just going to show you really quick the questions that you asked at the end of last year about public engagement and where we're going to try to go with that and i think between now and next time i am also going to try and um knit together both the five rolls of the board that we know our

174research base with um the additions that you've also put into your equity lens so when those get done so that we can have an overlay of what is important to you and you know our research-based components as you examine what the role of the board is so it's kind of good that we're not getting to this exercise today because i get to improve it before i bring it back to you um so let me just show you i think i'm sharing the right thing um yes i am i see the green box so the key question that we want to get out of at least as we as we talked about last year as we ended last year was how does the board define public engagement and then how do you operationalize that but the

175primary question that you have to determine first is what does it mean to engage your public one of the things that i have heard from you and next time i'm going to ask you to outwardly reflect on this but i have heard more than one of you mention that um that you feel inaccessible as a board and the question that comes up for me when you reflect on that or when you mention that is does that mean that do you mean inaccessible in that there are not systems in place to access you or is it more of a characteristic are are you um are are are folks afraid are you inapproachable like is it is it mo or is it both are there are there is there a lack of systems and um are you

176intimidating um because it could be either of those things or both of those things and i'm not going to ask you to answer that question today but next time i am going to ask you to speak your truth about that and and talk about what do you mean when you say you're inaccessible so so the questions that that we're going to look at are you know what is the board's role in public engagement what modalities can the board use to engage the public and what opportunities currently exist to engage the board some of this is technical right there are there are there are technical aspects of things and then there are systemic aspects to things technical fixes are easy they're easy to talk about but the systemic pieces that are rooted in more than just

177the technical fix um take more time and and more engagement and probably a different place on the compass than than just the intellectual space um so we're gonna engage with the multiple layers of these questions what i will go through and this is this is the work that i want to do between now and next time is i you know i copied pasted your equity lens but what i want to do is knit together this plus the the additions that you've made with the research based board role so that we're looking at that they are not separate that that it's a both and um so i want you to be thinking about that for next time and then um so so we're gonna move to what your homework is for next time because that you

178don't we don't have to have done this to to move to what the work that we're gonna ask you to do between now and then but i want to also just get thoughts from you about the plan to engage in this conversation next time and if there's anything after your discussion today that that you think should be added to this or that i should consider as i plan for next time or that you want to be considering and want your colleagues to be considering before next time i think just like i mentioned earlier like because of like the modality of everything because of the pandemic like being really creative with what we think about would be good and thinking about multiple ways to engage as well and what that can look like be something i

179feel like we should all be thinking about yeah engagement right now takes on a whole new meaning doesn't it i i've talked to districts a lot about what does student engagement look like this coming year it's it's it's completely different what will public engagement look like in this coming year i think we should talk and think about and i would urge my board fellow board members to think about culture what is the legacy of the of our community and on this board that we inherited um i mean the practice of this board is not just the people here it's the practices that came before us so i'd i'd appreciate it if we thought about that and brought that back and i guess i would add what what how do we want to change our board

180culture around community engagement so it's not just modalities it's not just the what there are unconscious i guess i'll say biases there's just unconscious factors that we just are making assumptions that this is the way it's always been done this is the way we do it or don't do it as the case may be so just reflecting on that i have a reflection i think it will speak to probably what i just heard and some thoughts in my in the past two weeks or three weeks and fellow board members receiving emails might relate to what i'm thinking when people vote one person one vote it's very clear cut but when in a representative democracy where we are seven board members voting on behalf of our constituents public engagement is a very challenging business more challenging

181than counting votes because part of public engagements there are privileges where people can share their story in a louder voice where uh people might have the ability to speak the language that's uh i understand as sami and i might relate to as sami and i feel there is a need for us to really acknowledge that that public engagement is not one email or one three-minute segment is equal to every other email or a three-minute segment there are voices that haven't been heard for years or decades there are voices that can't reach us for so many reasons because of the modality and so on and i want us to really think critically about that when we when we engage with the public we want to be acknowledging the privileges that comes in from someone have it's

182easy to be loud and clear and maybe sometimes overshadow other voices that hasn't been heard or are not being heard yet and also acknowledging the points blue mentioned which is some voices especially student voices who have been disadvantaged we don't want them to go through the emotional labor and sometimes to be really frank through the risks of sharing their stories and being exposed it's just very hard and challenging and we want to be really mindful of all of these things i don't know what others think about that or if that makes sense that totally makes sense sammy thank you yeah it totally makes sense for sure and um it's like a good reminder too that like we do hear from lots of people and um and to remember that it's not there's no way that

183every single voice is going to get the decision that they want and that doesn't mean we didn't listen or didn't engage with people and i think that's a misconception around like engaging with public is that um that if somebody does engage with us that means that they make the final decision because there's a lot of things that are taken into consideration um and it's not that we don't care or don't hear people it's just a lot of things to consider that is a great what does it mean to be heard right this question a lot does it mean that the board does exactly what you wanted or does it mean that there was a system for engaging and that your viewpoint was considered like what what does it mean to be heard that's great i

184i appreciate you saying that lou because i think that that is um something that i have seen and witnessed over time with our community one of the other things i've been thinking about kristin is are there some models or examples of school board community engagement that we could look at um or learn from and i know that right now is sort of a dynamic time because of the pandemic and it does need to look different so i don't think that there's any you know necessarily any best practices for right now in the moment but also as we continue to grow are there are there other examples that we should should be considering point i will do some thinking on that and bring in some some systems maybe that that i can find that that maybe

185are from a previous era last year and um and that may also be developing right now okay other thoughts before i hand it back over to marcianne to talk about the work that we'd like you to do can i just add on to what you just said because i spent a little bit of time this morning trying to find what does our policy making say our policies say about our policy making and what do a couple others so i i dove a little bit into eugene i didn't get to portland but but i think our if we looked at our policy about policy making maybe i'm jumping ahead the whole concept of community input is pretty limited in terms of definition and explanation um our agreements are pretty nice but i don't know and you

186got to follow if you have agreements or if you have policies it's whether you follow them or not so um i think that would be a good place to have us check what we've written down already and what our policies themselves say and then thank you ryan what might some other good models that we promise will follow if we adopt them say the last thing i wanted to say because i know martian is going to close us out with our homework is just appreciation for staff um last year you had a chance to spend quite a bit of time working with joe and sabrina and now um time with chris and marcian and just you know i i um and always with melissa and so i always think about this in terms of like my

187experience as a superintendent but also as a community member and dad who sends a couple of his kids to school in this district and just the caliber of the staff that we have here is really incredible and kristin's shaking her head because she gets to work with lots of different stems schools districts across the state but it is really a um a special group of people um and so just wanted to make sure to to recognize um and acknowledge that um that's sort of as we're summing up um and finishing up our our board retreat and the other thing i would say is that as you think about boards across the state um oftentimes they are um of one gender and one uh race um and don't bring multiple perspectives or diverse views and i

188think that that's really something that's also special about um about my opportunity to work with all of you because that is definitely um unique not just in oregon but across the country as you look at school boards so um so it just feels like we're represent continue to position for great things um in a community that really supports public education so um i guess i'm i'm in the feeling quadrant and i'm feeling somewhat blessed to be be a part of be a part of this as um as we're closing today so thank you thank you ryan again i think we could all agree that we could have used what the full day together but i'm so thankful that everybody's hung in there and stayed engaged i could tell by the looks on your faces that

189you were engaged um the the whole time so thank you so i think this last part chris and i and kristen talked about giving you some homework i'm going to give you some dadea uh homework in spanish and and again it's really not the purpose behind it is to build our muscle around our why around some of these different topics and going back to what the gentleman in the video said when you know your why you're what has more impact because you're walking in and towards your purpose so i was going to share with you a couple of slides but we just ran out of time i want to took a peek into some of the other racial equity policies around our area and did a text analysis which was actually kind of fun and

190looked at categories and themes and i looked at bellingham bellevue pps baltimore city i looked at ours and i found um in the text analysis i could tell in the racial equity policies which ones really were focused on race and also i could tell which in terms of the number of times the word race came up right i also looked at the different categories and what was interesting is that there were similar categories that each of these policies really landed on in terms of professional development and recruitment and hiring of staff of color and so those p there were pieces that really were resonant with that within all these different policies um and so i think that what we're going to have you do is do your own text analysis and do your own analysis

191of these different policies and look at um look at some different models for racial equity policies because that homework assignment in and of itself for me was really really helpful because it helped me really hone in on my why around what is my stance around black indigenous and peoples of color what is my stance around supporting students navigating poverty what is my stance around students our immigrant students and populations what is my stance around supporting our students with disabilities and lastly what is my stance around supporting our lgbtq community and so it's important for us as a board to really know our why and our stance before we can move forward right and so the homework assignment that chris and i have and i'll hand it over to chris just a second is for you

192to read those policies and i think kristin you'll be sending to them or they'll be a board packet okay and read them with a fine truth comb like kristen said earlier have that equity lens questions next to you and be mindful of what comes up for you as you're reading them in the the quadrants right believing feeling thinking acting and when we come back together we will have an opportunity to dig deeper into what into the creation of a racial equity policy for the corvallis school district which would be a beautiful thing chris also did a you know shared in this space the importance of student voice and also other models of plans that are out in the in in the global area and in the state level and so she's going to be sharing

193with you also a plan that um and i don't know chris do you want to talk about that so you can just give some context sure what we're talking about we're sharing with you um a very new document that just came out about it's from the student success plan and it supports for the lgbtq plus community and it's it's a great document because a big part of it is of student voice so they looked at the they did some surveys in oregon and asked students what what do you need from teachers and staff to help support you what do you need in the policy to make you feel more accepted and to be wanting to be more engaged in your learning and so it is a great document and it also has um some policy

194information in there as well so i just thought that would be a really good i've read it several times because every time i find something new but i really find it very beneficial so that's i think someone's going to share that link to you with you about to ask who are we going to get that document from me yeah thank you thanks i know it's uh we took you four minutes over but um we just want to thank you for your time engagement and persistence in this work i want to say thank kristen for her leadership and ryan and all of you for really engaging in this work in a different way and in such a transformational way so i i thank you so much for your leadership and leading this amazing community so i'll

195hand it back to you kirsten so what i'll do is um send and maybe maybe lindsay you wouldn't mind helping me distribute um i'll send to ryan and to lindsay the packet of materials that we've collected um along with and unless you've got a copy of it already the the current um equity lens knowing that we're also going to work to add in the questions that you suggested um but the current equity lenses you've got that in mind as you read through this material and then we will um we'll engage in planning for next time but i think you've got to look into what we'll do next time and and where we continue from here and ryan do you have anything or because that's it from me i know i i sort of did my

196closure closer already so um i i again um knowing that you are a intelligent group of people giving you homework that includes coding um is right up your alley so i don't have to worry about explaining any of that to any of you so get your homework done before you come back to class and end with that again appreciation and have a have a great afternoon thank you everybody we're adjourned have a good night have a good afternoon thank you everyone bye everyone thank you