School Board Meeting (7/30/20)

001okay uh hello everybody i just want to highlight that we just found out that the youtube live stream did not go live until a few seconds ago so because of that we will reset from the beginning uh so we can have everything that was discussed and happened uh be live streamed simultaneously while we're having it so we apologize for this inconvenience and for the delay uh but probably we'll just reset the meeting from the get-go from the beginning and uh the initial uh was recorded so people can access that as well so uh the meeting for the june 30th 2020 has been called for to order and uh the first item on the agenda is the pledge of allegiance please join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the united states of

002america to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all right thank you everybody uh before we get started with our meeting uh again i want to apologize for everyone who was waiting on youtube and i want to welcome everybody for joining us at that corvallis school board meeting for june uh july 30th 2020 and the one thing i want to mention is that we always welcome community input and we encourage it there are several opportunities to communicate with the board at any time you can email the school board and by going to the corval school district meet the board you can access ways to communicate with the board and also ways to be able to see all the material that are shared during board meetings including

003the agenda uh next opportunity to provide a verbal comments public comment during a board meeting will be in our next business meeting which is august 6th next thursday and the information on the school district website on the meet the board page provide the details on how to provide input so with that uh we will get started uh with a presentation from superintendent ryan nas and the team regarding the reopening of plans and the progress on it so andy gets on to you ryan all right well thanks everybody um gave me a chance to practice and um so now it will be streamlined um there will be fewer ums i guarantee it so lindsay would you want to go ahead and starting the presentation all right so um we have been working really hard over the

004month of months of june and july in preparation for the start of school we've had to be adaptable and change as we've received new guidance and at the same time we have really been trying to make decisions that focus on primarily on student academics and safety and also making sure that we are creating plans that account for changes that we may see as we move closer and closer to the school year so what we wanted to do tonight was to have each of our rapid development teams share updates about their status and the work that's been taking place because i think it's a good opportunity for the board to hear as well as the community to hear what's going on and to understand the complexities of this work the other thing i'm really proud of

005is how integrated it is we'll we'll have one person presenting for each area but the integration across these teams has been really important as we've thought about all the implications for starting um the new school year so with that i'm going to go ahead and get started with the slides our plan is to share the information with the board and then leave plenty of time at the end for questions so um let's go ahead and move to the next slide and one more all right so we wanted to open with the hopeful words of our students this is a group of students from rebecca schneider 7th grade 3rd period language arts class who work together to write this piece what i like about it is that it brings continues to elevate student voice um in

006our decision making and it's a piece that has been used not just by our school district but by cold gill at the department of education with the state board so um it's getting um a lot of publicity at the same time i think it's i'm well deserved because it really speaks to where we're at so i'm going to take a moment just to read it to you we must ask ourselves what do we want to get out of this we have the choice to choose whether to go through this uncertain time with an open heart perceiving others with compassion and grace or we can isolate ourselves in fear our world can be changed for better or for worse because people are suffering the economy is uncertain and appears shattered people are losing loved ones to

007a virus that is affecting the entire world this is hard for every single one of us but this isn't all bad it's an opportunity for change in our schools our family lives and our planet we have a chance to try something different and we should take advantage of that we must remember that we are all in this together so again i think it helps to ground us in recognizing where we're at but also the optimism of our students and the optimism i feel now as we've continued to be developing our plan for the start of school on the next slide there's a second quote go ahead lindsay and again i think this is one that i've shared before but i think it's an important one for us to remember um and i think the reason

008it's important for us to remember is because it also accounts for giving each other giving grace um in these difficult times so you don't make the timeline the virus makes the timeline and it's a reminder that while we are developing plans the plans also have to be adaptable and we have to be able to change them as we need to and also that understanding that all the implications the um component about grace for one another as we work through um unpre unpredictable and unprecedented times okay the next slide uh lindsay i think this is important to share with the board again because it highlights the scope of work um and how things have continued to evolve over time so initially um in may on may 22nd we started with our rapid development teams with the

009understanding that this is a crisis at the same time there have been other crises in the past and there are things that we know that we should be working to employ and characteristics that we can and learning we can take from other situations that have happened in the past that help us to be better prepared and more resilient and so those rapid development teams are the groups that are going to share tonight talking about the work in each one of those areas may 28th we had a message to families with a survey asking about returning to school asking about our models on june 10th we got our first guidance from ode related to the beginning of this upcoming school year prior to that it had all been about the end of last school year and

010distance learning again june 18th we sent out a message to families announcing the hybrid and corvallis online options again one of the important pieces there has been that that hasn't been a place for registration necessarily but it's been allowed us the opportunity to receive guidance and to understand from families where they were leaning as we think about staffing for the beginning of the next school year an additional executive order from the governor we've completed a return to work survey with staff asking about their ability to return to work and considerations there again talking to families and encouraging them to let us know where they were leaning for either hybrid or distance learning which is also the you know the equivalent of online learning the ode released updates around health and safety which was an important

011piece for us to recognize around the requirement of masks which was a change in practice and a change in guidance for us to take into account we've met with the health department to talk about our blueprints and what those blueprints needed to include an opportunity for feedback and questions again we'll have an opportunity for you to see those blueprints tonight they're in the board agenda to packet and then to finalize those at your board meeting on the 6th and then we'll share that out with families and finally we are continuing to wait for additional guidance from ode specifically in support of our students experiencing disability and that's a piece that has some important implications for us and for our students and we're waiting patiently to receive that guidance knowing that um ode continues to put

012out information at a pretty quick clip but there's additional information that we need to make sure that we're supporting our students um completely and then september 9th is still our first day of school so while we made some changes to how that's going to look this last week it's still the first day of school for our kids lindsey go ahead and go to the next line so again those rapid development teams that i mentioned before again understanding that we are in a crisis and how to make sure that we are accounting for and covering all the decision-making areas that we have to account for one of those teams is health and safety racial equity social emotional mental health summer programming ed delivery budget and finance workforce and operations and again as you think about the

013structure of our district with about 900 employees and nearly 7 000 students in 13 buildings these groups and these areas really account for the majority of the work that we do and are designed in such a way that they can spend time focused on receiving feedback and then coming back together as an integrated team to make decisions and understand the implications of the decisions that are made by other other groups or other teams so with that each one of our rapid development team coordinators is going to take a couple of minutes to share two or three key pieces about where they are currently um understanding that they'll be an opportunity for questions at the end but also this in some ways this is a status report um and again i just want to recognize this

014team because they have been working incredibly incredibly hard to be prepared for school and to think about all the implications of the decisions that they're making and how they relate to maintaining student safety maintaining that caring connection for our students maintaining high academic expectations and also understanding aspects of cultural relevancy in our teaching the implications for use of technology all those pieces are really important in our planning and these team members have been thinking about that non-stop since we started to plan for this school year go ahead lindsay so we're going to start with health and safety melissa harder was going to talk a little bit about that area and rinda gregory has also been supporting that area of health and safety i also want to have erica be a part of this as well

015our slide is going to be pretty short because really our operational blueprint is the outcome of our group's work so i'll let erica speak at this point okay so the first point is that we employed multiple perspectives when we looked at developing the operational blueprint we looked out for parties that had expertise in student and community health and safety perspectives from our group included a cross-section of district departments the district nurses building staff and we had a great knowledgeable group from benton county health department which was extremely helpful and we're in constant communication with them the next point is um our current safety standards so we kind of this was a little bit it was an easy task because we already have a baseline we have procedures already in place that promote health and safety

016we have um you know such as health education disease management and community health already in place so developing our plan um we just kind of built on these internal systems and bolstered those the third point that we have here on our slide is flexibility and so as you can imagine we met with a larger team in june to really get this work started um but we've been continuing to work on this it's a daily task as we update our work to reflect um changing guidance and questions that come up so like i said we're in constant communication with the help with the benton county health department so that when questions do arise um they can work with us to adjust accordingly so um it's definitely been a work in progress and um it's it's been

017very um we've had a lot of help from a lot of different departments so thank you all right thank you thank you erica and melissa lindsay do you want to go to the next line racial equity so rcn will share okay good evening everybody um marcian here and um i i put their three points but one of the things that i wanted to start off with is to share with you that um corvallis school district accelerated their racial equity work back in 2013 and and as i think about what has transpired over the seven years i never would have thought that we'd be living through a pandemic and really needing to shift the way we provide public education but one of the things that i think is very important is that those seven years of

018this work have really prepared us for what we embarking on in the fall of 2020 in terms of building our capacity around racial equity and really ensuring that all our building principles administrators and coordinators have the lens and focus for really keeping our students and our most historically marginalized students families and staff at the center of our work so the first bullet point there is really around how we intentionally are really trying hard to keep our historically marginalized students and families at the center we met as a racial equity development team we met quite a few times but we've also been working with the other developmental teams as well and one of the things that i'm really proud of is that each team did have a focus and does continue to have a focus on

019racial equity and that was really central to and continues to be central to all of our meetings um second point is around focusing on culturally responsive teaching prior to coven 19 we accelerated our work around culturally responsive teaching we did when we were in the schools we were doing care walk throughs and care audits and really digging into what culturally responsive teaching is and what it looks like in the classroom so that is our expectation going into this year even though we will be virtual we hope to support our teachers and staff to create rigorous classroom virtual classroom environments build authentic relationships with students have real world learning and have relevance the relevancy in their classroom so we will continue to support our staff in that way um lastly uh focusing uh authentic connections with

020our communities of color are black indigenous and people of color and one of the things that we talked about extensively in our rapid development team in terms of the racial group was the difference between conditional care and authentic connections and we felt that throughout this whole process that authentic connections is really key to engaging families and students in a virtual setting so we will continue to work with the other rapid development teams to support and provide guidance in these areas we will continue to meet throughout the 20 20 21 school year so our work is not done it never is done and we will continue to have ongoing analysis and measurements of how our racial equity work is impacting and what it looks like in our system by providing different measures of ensuring that we

021are keeping an eye and evaluating and measuring this work we have also created a document with multiple resources for our staff to provide some guidance as well as some additional materials that they could be using in the classrooms so i'm looking forward we are excited to continue working with the other developmental groups and working collaboratively so all right joe would you like to walk us through the social emotional mental health piece can everyone hear me now yes great thank you uh apologies technical difficulties um so uh yeah um the social emotional mental health and this this rapid development team also includes counseling and special education so this rapid development team which i've joined sabrina alexander to lead cuts across the district in a pretty broad swath over the last four months we've done a lot

022of listening to families teachers and other key stakeholders around the experience students have had through our initial distance learning 4a and we've learned a couple of key things first off families that experienced marginalization prior to a distance learning environment continued to experience this and had it heightened the core issues that affected that marginalization were surrounding grading practices specifically a grading model based on attendance or compliance inconsistent practices between our buildings and communications that were not in a in a family's first language of origin in order to really build a system that's able to bring students back into the sphere of success and elevate the voices of marginalized communities we've found that we really need to address those issues in terms of specialization while a lot of the other rapid development teams have core products that

023they've developed at this point we have a lot of guidance that we're going to have to apply coming up pretty soon to specialize the work most of the groups that we address in terms of social emotional health and special ed are about adapting the educational model to be accessible for all students so our work is just beginning at this point a thing that i would highlight within this is that our planning to address a consistent return to school meaning superintendent nasa's plan for us to hold for six weeks is a good example of a trauma-informed practice that will help students that consistent stability and knowledge of a plan reduces traumatic stress as opposed to the inconsistent unknown which increases traumatic stress i also have a short report on child care work that we've been up

024to lindsay would you be willing to switch to the next slide thank you in addition to a lot of that other work hearing from families and developing guidance around special ed we've also been reaching out to our community and local experts regarding child care it's a super large issue that comes up in many many community meetings often as a number one concern for other stakeholders after an exhaustive exploration of our resources and our capacity we have determined that we do not have additional resources to provide staff or community-based child care services at this time it's also out of sync with the health protocol material that's come up recently and our decisions to have students at home online learning to start the year our focus really needs to be on educating and supporting the social and

025emotional needs of students and child care just is not within that it is something that's likely needed in our community but we've encouraged partners and stakeholders both in governmental and non-governmental organizations that they need to take that task out thanks joe um rinda is going to share a little bit about the work that's been happening around summer programming thank you ryan good evening everybody um as you can see through this slide that the majority of our focus for the summer programming programming was on karen connection we have already reached out to over 200 families and it is a group of staff members already employed by the corvallis school district who applied to be the hub of staff who would be reaching out to these students in these families who were identified by each school students

026and families who they thought would be in need of connection throughout the summer and moving into the fall the role of the public school foundation is something that needs to be identified they support our summer programs consistently and this year i have to speak to them in their flexibility of um responding to the reallocation requests for summer programs that were granted and giving some additional funds to keep this ongoing caring connection support over the summer and then lastly as far as the bullets go is that the ryan mentioned this earlier that the collaboration between all of our teams and even other work that is going on in the district so you're very aware i'm sure of all the support that's come out of the the welcome center with chris hawkins leadership and um sarah devine

027and annie bittner and we've been working closely with them through a referral process so the caring connection with these families that have been identified can be everything from getting them some food to helping them potentially with some housing situations and just checking in how are you doing um how is the family and then if there's a need for a referral of any sort then we connect we have our staff connect those families with the appropriate people and the welcome center staff has been a big part of that the one thing that's not in in this slide is that we did have a few academic programs stay and those were at the high school level around credit recovery to keep our high school students on track for graduating as far as their credits go thanks rinda

028now we're going to turn it over to amy and nikki to talk about the educational delivery program process and where we are right now hi everyone nikki and i are excited to be here to share with you about our ed delivery team when we put this first draft of information together i think ryan was like no a few bullets and it was like 10 pages so we could be here for a long time so trying to prioritize what we wanted to share with you tonight was a little tricky but um we'll be here for questions afterwards we wanted to make sure that you were aware of the goals that we were starting off with um and they're listed there in these bullets and that we really stuck to those goals and and we did this

029through a series of meetings and so i'm just going to talk a little bit about the the structure of how we came to what we came to and then nikki's going to address you know where we landed and a little bit of details about that so we and we had um meetings we went back on the calendar and counted at least 15 and those those are not the meetings that included just nikki and i but each of those meetings had anywhere between 10 and 125 participants we worked with teachers administrators and classified staff we had input from parents students and really just dug into what is it we need to do for the fall about halfway through as marcian mentioned earlier we we had the social emotional group and the racial equity group join because

030we saw that the connection was really critical because we're talking the same thing and we could we didn't want to create three different paths it's really one path for all of our students um i think the other important thing before i hand it off to nikki in the next slide is that we started we acknowledging that nikki knife is facilitating these teams as to white women that it was critical that we started every meeting with a grounding activity to center ourselves on race and equity and if this is the work that we're doing is starting to build a structure that's going to work for our most marginalized students it was it was really important for us to start in a place where we were getting um grounded and centered in race and equity to begin

031with i think i'll let nikki talk a little bit about the hybrid model and where we landed and then um i'll jump in nikki if anything else comes to mind and lindsay you can go to the next slide thanks thanks amy for kicking us off so i just want to share a couple of quotes before i talk a little bit more about the hybrid model so one of the goals that amy mentioned was that our team wanted to reimagine education and in thinking about the hybrid model we kept also thinking about how how awesome learning could be in this hybrid model and a couple of things really um things that people said stuck with me so a student said i think we need to think about how to utilize online platforms to create active learning

032spaces and opportunities versus passive learning and a student shared that and a teacher followed it up by saying i believe project-based learning is a long-term investment that will revolutionize teaching in corvallis both during the coven 19 pandemic and after when we can be back in the classroom and so keeping those two things in mind as well as using guidance from health and safety the teachers came up with these guidelines for the hybrid model so um as you have read we are looking at two days of in-person or synchronous learning and the focus there really is care and connection and then also project launching so understanding that students at home will not be spending all of that time in front of a screen or doing worksheets the teachers have talked about how to launch students in

033the independent projects that are relevant to them and connected to their to the real world and so in those two days there there's an opportunity to interact with peers interact closely with the teacher understand um what learning should be looking like at home and then get into a project and so those three days of virtual project-based learning are described in that section below and teachers have there are teachers throughout our district that have experience with project-based learning and i think it will be a skill that our teachers will work on and continue to develop starting small and getting bigger as we move through the school year so as amy shared we've met 15 times and we will be continuing to meet with this group in august and our kind of next focus is co-developing a

034plan for professional learning and remote learning implementation so staff are prepared to meet our students where they are so we are making some shifts in this hybrid model teachers are very good at building relationships face to face and are still learning how to create that karen connecting space in the online format especially with students who are new to them and then they also have some other learning to do related to project-based learning and the new learning management systems that they'll be using to share learning with students i think thank you the only thing i would add before we move to um the next slide which is about our corvallis online i did want to make sure that marcian had a chance to talk a little bit about doi and that component of academics before we

035move on to the other model which is our online crevas online model yes um so in terms of the dual language program i'm working very closely with our building administrators at all our dual language schools as well as collaborating with byron and mark in terms of what the possibilities are for our dual language students at this point one of the things that we are really keeping in mind is really the focus and the vision for dual language which is really providing language modeling language interaction and cross-cultural connections so in terms of students that are in the k-5 dual language program we really want to encourage our students to continue with the hybrid model because that is a place where they will have the the student interaction the teacher support and where language can really happen

036in a very authentic way we do realize that there are students that could only be fully online so we are working very closely to create a faq that provides some additional information of what that could look like for students who can only be fully online but in terms of the programming at the secondary again we will be working with the with the middle and high school administrators to really come up with um working with them in terms of what the instruction will look like but also to make sure that we have very clear communication to staff and students in terms of what deal like will look like in the 2020-2021 school year thanks marciana i appreciate that um we're going to shift now lindsay if you wouldn't mind um to corvallis online i just want

037to take a moment to thank byron and mark for taking on this additional responsibility for the school year um as the coordinators of these two programs and i wanted them to have a chance just to share briefly about the two two models one of the things that i've continued to advocate for or make sure that people understood is that corvallis online will be corvallis school district teachers teaching with an online curriculum and so it's maintaining that relationship between our students families and schools long term and so it's something that i'm proud of and something that i'm glad that we're able to offer this year and so with that i'm going to turn it over to byron and mark all right um so i'll kind of kick us off here real brief briefly so good evening

038um corvallis online is the new program um and it's the option it's an option for families and students who need to be online maybe for the entire school year without without the possibility of needing to pivot and switch back into a hybrid model or be in a building it also fits that need for staff who need to still be working but cannot return to a building and be working during that time the elementary pieces of corvallis online right now a couple of the big things that are happening there's two things going on um one is working on the technical piece to make sure all of the technology and the curriculum and pieces are set up kind of in the background so that when families register or choose corvallis online that we are set to go

039in our technology components and that they have access to all the curriculum and pieces the other piece that's happening right now is rapid development of communication for families to fully understand what corvallis online looks like what it feels like what the student experience will be like in that and to have clear communication and details about that elementary we're partnering with and using florida virtual curriculum and that is a comprehensive um fully online curriculum um that is the part that can sometimes be misleading because it's called online um for the elementary age it's really developmentally appropriate in that components are online in addition to hands-on projects paper pencil type work it's not completely and solely online and it can be self-paced along with synchronous and asynchronous lessons with individual feedback and from from the teacher we're

040beginning to work on the the core courses and the types of the special classes or electives of the elementary students and families can choose from as part of that experience and then um working on kind of three parts of what it what it looks like online and hands-on what it looks like to keep a community and build community throughout that platform and then what it what it takes to help support families and students to build the schedules that um work for them um within that good evening um mark we'll talk about our 6 through 12 program thanks ryan um really excited to be a part of corvallis online uh with this pandemic i think it's so important that we have a an online platform that's both rigorous um and comprehensive at the secondary level we're

041going to be using apex learning courseware um the thing i like about apex probably the key features for me is is how relevant and applicable the lessons are every lesson starts with some sort of real life example where the concept that the student will be learning they can apply to that i also like how student-centered it is it gives the student so much control over the pace of the lesson the time and place where they interact with the material and because this learning is so much more asynchronous a little bit different than the florida virtual school in k5 one focus for me with our teachers is going to be really around care and connection especially there's because there's not going to be that student-to-student piece that we might see in the hybrid so i'm excited

042about it and we're deciding on what courses are going to be offered right now and get that published out to families soon thank you thanks mark and byron for your for stepping up and um helping out to develop this and get it i'm ready for our families to school year next slide budget and finance olivia hi okay so i just want to talk about a couple of things that have been going on in the budget and finance world starting with the cares act emergency relief funds so in total the district we expect to receive about a million dollars in emergency relief funds made available by the federal cares act these are coming to us in a couple of different segments and we're going to be using these funds to implement our robust comprehensive distance learning

043applications and that will include professional learning and collaboration time for our staff i will also be using these funds to support at home learning by providing providing students with internet access and connectivity supplying our schools with signage tools to promote physical distancing protective barriers personal protective equipment and sanitizing equipment and supplies training our staff on their school's operational blueprint for re-entry and allowing for some additional staff time to develop our student cohorts schedule students develop new transportation routes supervised students during transitions and additional time for cleaning and sanitizing our school facilities so these funds are much appreciated and we have a lot of new expenses that we're experiencing and so this will help alleviate some of our our tightness in our budget and so it's a great thing regarding the state revenue shortfall on july

04416th so just a couple of weeks ago the co-chairs of the legislature's ways and means committee released their proposal to rebalance the state budget for the 2021 biennium and this plan included some good news for k-12 public education it proposes maintaining the state school fund at nine billion dollars utilizing 400 million in education stability fund reserves providing 150 million dollars in student investment account funding that's a significant reduction it's a 68 reduction or 322 million dollar reduction from what was initially proposed for the 2021 year we're also i'm expecting that the high school success grants will be maintained at full funding and so um really great news regarding the state school fund and the high school success grants and um we were optimistic to see that student account investment account funding was still included although

045at a much lower level so when it comes to rebalancing our budget and what does this all mean when we if we assume that the co-chairs rebalancing plan comes to fruition our current general fund revenue projections reflect about a 3.75 million dollar budget shortfall and so our first step was to look at our general fund reserves to align those with our lower operating revenues and so after that we needed to reduce our operating expenditures by about 3.1 million dollars in order to achieve a balanced budget and so earlier this month our district departments implemented reductions totaling 1.6 million dollars that reflect decreases in spending on professional services repairs and maintenance travel supplies and materials and dues and fees the remaining 1.5 million dollars in reductions will be achieved through the elimination of approximately 20 full-time

046vacant positions and we're currently working through our staffing reallocations and reassignments to reflect these changes so looking forward um there's going to be a handful of things we're going to be carefully monitoring as the year starts the first is student enrollment that's important because our state funding is tied to our student enrollment and we made assumptions about what our enrollment will be and so we'll be closely monitoring enrollment to see if it's coming in as expected or lower than expected or higher than expected we'll also be keeping our eyes on property tax assessments which will come out in mid-october and then the results of collective bargaining so we made a lot of assumptions in our budget around our salary and benefits for next year so the results of collective bargaining may have an impact on

047that as well so those are the things we're still going to be monitoring to determine if any additional budget reductions need to be made and we're still planning to present a supplemental budget to the board for your consideration in december all right thank you olivia now kim's our jennifer goes next um with hr talking about our workforce rapid development team hello everyone um in regards to workforce our group has been discussing the work survey that you heard ryan mentioned that was sent out end of june we had almost 700 of our employees complete that survey we also have been talking about staffing because not only are we staffing at our building levels we're also needing to staff for corvallis online as well and then the biggest one we've been tackling lately has been on working

048conditions as we looked at coming back face-to-face and also online um the working conditions need to actually be handled many of them through bargaining which we have started in the last couple of weeks with both associations and some of the key topics in that area is around workload leave safety and training and we're continuing to work through all of those pieces to ensure that our staff are supported during this reopening all right next will be kim patton talking about operations so my work is very technical so we've been working on how we're going to keep buildings clean which is a really critical part of the safety for staff and students so we've created cleaning matrixes to talk about in every building what part of the building is cleaned by whom how often and how with

049protocols associated with all of that we've also taken on the role of ordering all personal protective equipment for the entire district so i'm going to give you just a sent a quick rundown of the things that we've ordered so masks alone we've ordered two cloth masks for every staff member so that's 2 000 cloth masks we ordered 300 000 adult sized paper masks 150 000 youth size masks we ordered a thousand face shields we have vinyl gloves gowns for staff who are working with body fluids we've got um hand sanitizers by oh gosh i can't tell you how many gallons of hand sanitizer disinfectant spray bottles disinfectant microfibers laundry service to go with that we have um sanitation sprayers that spray a disinfectant similar to what the airlines use where you can walk in and

050just spray down the the playground equipment thermometers garbage barrels so that we can support eating in classrooms uh directional signage so we've got stickers for the floors we've got signs for um signage for hand washing and masks required and how to direct kids to wait in lines we've got backpacks for elementary kids because we want to keep them from bringing too many things to school we've got bins for sanitizing writing utensils so that we can delineate clean utensils and to be clean disinfected utensils supply boxes for all elementary students um head coverings and and booties for um the isolation spaces the list just keeps going on and on this is taking up the in every storage space at the district office right now so there's a lot to think about and it seems like something

051new pops up all the time um screening state worth considering screening stations so how to uh create those locations at every inch planned entry health and safety stations so throughout the school and in every classroom you'll have a health and safety station that has disinfectant microfibers and this the hand sanitizer masks gloves everything you need to really keep our students and staff safe i hit on the signage a little bit and then student transportation so it's been a little bit um tricky to think about student transportation because we need to keep physical distance on the bus so we're looking at 21 students on a bus up to 21 students on a bus depending on the size of the bus and we aren't able to create those routes until we have our student groupings created and

052their day meets schedule so as soon as we have all that ready we'll be putting together transportation routes and we are looking at needing our entire fleet to transport at every grade level so that reduced amount of capacity on each bus is going to really change how we do transportation and then i just want to put a shout out to our food services department because they've been really they've been serving meals this whole summer and they're working on how they're going to provide meals for our students while we're doing distance learning and when we come back to school how they're going to do that do food in the classrooms and provide physical distancing so they've been working hard on that as well all right thank you so much kim so then we're going to ship

053to one more slide and that is the kiwi message um we like that the the play on words there on kiwi but really it is the sort of that shared message about what's happening and it's really hard to narrow it down to three key points as you've heard all the work that's been going on over the last couple of months in preparation for the school year so for the board just to be thinking about these three key points um in their in your communication so the first one is that we have two options we have the hybrid model which starts remotely and that's going to be that way for six weeks and we also have corvallis online so there's two options for families safety standards we're planning safety standards that account for all those pieces

054that we we shared with you earlier and that we are always going to make sure that that's a part of the decision making we have for returning to school and then also the flexibility piece um we also know that they're we have to maintain that flexibility as guidelines continue to change and so we have two options for families for the fall in terms of educational delivery we're going to maintain safety as a key standard of the of how we determine what to do next and how and then also understanding that there needs to be a flexibility adaptability because conditions continue to change and that's an important piece for us to be able to to move and adjust based on those changes of condition so with that again i wanted to recognize this team asking everyone

055to hone in and narrow to three key points about that work that's happening is really challenging because as you can see there's an incredible amount of work that's been done and accomplished and at the same time there's an incredible amount of work left for us to do before the first day of school on september 9th so with that i'm going to turn it over to the board for um for questions okay thank you very much thank you very much ryan and thank you uh staff it's been amazing to see this work this hard work throughout the summer and even spring uh planning for this so thank you for all of what you do and i'm sure our board members have so many comments and thoughts i want to remind our board members if you have

056a question or a comment uh let's do the virtual hands up i can't see all of us in one screen so you can do that through the participants and then raise hand and then lower hand after the end of the question uh do we have any questions from board members and let's go first with uh vice chair sarah finger mcdonald and then vince adams and then jay conroy sarah thank you all for just amazing work and dedication to our students um i have a few questions somebody's about to walk into this room sorry um i think they got the message um i'll i'll just ask one and then if i get another chance i'll ask them there one question that um i think a lot of parents who are doing this juggling balance of trying

057to work and have children at home are really concerned about is is the time commitment that is gonna that parents are going to have to put in facilitating the learning on the hybrid schedule and the online schedule um because if there are a lot of people who who don't have the flexibility to work outside of sort of normal hours so do we have any idea of what that's going to look like for parents all right um i'll i'll attempt an answer and then maybe nikki or anyone else can chime in i um i don't think she has to mute so um i'm wondering if um amy and nicky would talk a little bit about what they can foresee parent responsibility in the hybrid and then um byron and mark to share a little bit about

058corvallis online with that regard perfect all right i'll i'll start and then uh maybe byron can go for the other half of the elementary um we are hopeful that when we when we're able to get some projects out there that there will be as independent as possible and i was a kindergarten teacher so i also understand that you know some of this is seemingly impossible we are working hard to have a small group of kiddos associated with a couple adults at a time so there can be regular check-ins even when they're they're not synchronous or live and um we're just well aware of how hard it is when they're at home and and have that in our con constantly in our mind as we're planning i don't have any specific like no you're only gonna

059need to do one hour a day to help with this i i don't think we're at any point like that yet for the k-5 pieces for corvallis online um it is a widely used uh curriculum in lots of states and districts and so the estimate for elementary students it varies on the time um it can be anywhere from 18 to 25 hours for the for the full week um as part of our communications that we're planning on working out for parents um with that um we're putting together some sample schedules on how different lessons and things could fit in not time bound but how they could be pieced out throughout throughout the week at the same time our elementary online staff will work through some training so that they can also help families develop schedules

060and pace out the lessons that way the workload for students can be is anywhere from 10 to 18 assignments through the online modules throughout the week through florida ritual if if i can just add one quick thing sarah that i think will help something keeping the hybrid model throughout with the cohorts so if your child is assigned the a cohort that's monday tuesday that's the days that the synchronous live teaching will occur and so there won't be a shift of that at the elementary level so so we'll and we'll also have schedules like this isn't it a potential schedule for your child for monday tuesday and here's one for wednesday through through friday i think at the secondary level apex is really designed for more independent work and i think we're dealing with older students

061here um there's also the flexibility that they could potentially work on that later in the evening when parents are around and our teachers will certainly work with some of those students who we find have parents that need to be around a little bit more so we can develop a schedule for them so okay and then at the secondary level so similar to elementary we've talked about um the synchronous days the days that would have been in person being synchronous and while there's karen connection there's also project launch that happens there what i heard from parents is that when teachers set the stage for what the learning should look like at home there was greater success so talking to the kid about what they were going to do instead of just putting it on to the

062learning management system or platform the other thing that we have been talking about is college hill used a model in the spring where they had some staff that they called distance learning coaches they were coaches for students and so they were connected to students and regularly checking in with them on their goals and monitoring progress and so i am planning to work with eric wright from college hill as well as joe because i know he's had a lot of success in summer outreach to to think differently about the role of our educational assistants in some of that ongoing connection and coaching students through their learning thank you uh sorry if it's okay i'll move to the rest of the board and then we can do uh next question unless there is any uh other clarifica

063clarification from staff or from sarah awesome so next to up is vince director vince adams well first i have to say that i'm just kind of overwhelmed at the amount of work that you have all have done it's just really it's kind of staggering and i think that you should be rightly proud to be presenting this and to the board and to the community today or tonight this is just really astonishing and amazing work and i know that a lot of people are feeling anxious about what the fall looks like but from based on what i i've been hearing you know up to this and then what this presentation tonight i'm feeling really hopeful i really i really am um i got to hear a little bit about this uh this morning but i'd love

064to hear hear from the the tnl team and also from the corvallis online team about professional development our our staff our teaching staff has been off we've given them a break over the summer but there is a steep learning curve that needs to happen in a fairly short amount of time so i'd like to hear about the plan around professional development getting our staff ready can i can start by talking about um secondary and i think a lot of this is applicable for elementary as well so um i have pulled together the secondary part of the educational delivery team to ask them what their professional learning needs are they learned some about canvas in the spring but right now canvas the learning management system they're feeling like is their their biggest need for learning and

065so i have a team of the of our canvas experts in district kind of thinking about their own learning so we're meeting next week they're thinking about like what were the my stumbling blocks and where did i get stuck and then what moved me ahead to try and create a plan for our teachers related to canvas and once i feel like they're comfortable in canvas then they'll be ready to take on more of the project-based learning um learning for themselves and so but the direction for professional learning is really coming from the teachers so that ed delivery team is saying what do we need to know and how do we think we can learn it and what should be our timelines like what should be our metrics and what should be our outcomes so they're

066setting those for themselves because it will be different based on teachers experiences and i don't think professional learning will be one size fits all i think in addition we're doing very similar things at elementary and nikki and i've talked about getting some synchronous and asynchronous so some that you can just do on your at home just at any time and have that ready to go and then some here we're doing this as a team and as a as a group to make sure that we're all having the same understanding and we'll be working through those um in the next two weeks to hopefully have a pretty clear plan for the rest of august and all of september i additionally are the schedules that we have built i have built in professional time every week so

067um it's our intention that we know we can't get it all done right now and we'll we'll chunk it a little bit and have professional learning opportunities um throughout the school year for the elementary staff for online amy and i have worked a lot together recently to make sure that our elementary staff is also receiving similar pd and that's aligned to board goals um because they're not a separate staff they're still part of of our corvallis staff and we want to have the same lens and working on the same things at the same time um that role is a little bit different doing a fully online program and so part of that is a deeper dive directly with florida virtual for a few days to learn that curriculum and how to how to use that

068i think that i would expand that question a little bit more or like that answer a little bit more um for the online piece it's really a partnership with the family and the student and so i see us as we start as really we're all the professional piece has gone right we're all just learning together um and and so with that we're working on developing how do we do orientation um for families and for students to do all of their florida virtual um work together online um and so i think a lot of the learning for our online staff will actually happen side by side with students and families as we learn to work through that system together and so we'll provide training orientation that way and at the secondary level it's going to be

069very similar to the elementary with the purchase of the apex system we've uh professional development comes along with that and so there's going to be a few days of training on the system and right now we're in the process of trying to decide who those staff are going to be so then we can set that training up that's tremendous thank you you know as i was listening professional development what was that ryan uh melissa is there anything sorry around professional development i think nikki hit the highlights we're really focused on um working together with our teachers so that we can create alignment making sure our workload for our students is similar in the fall because that was an area that we struggled with i think during the emergency distance learning that we did in the

070springtime and we're also listening to our teachers who really do want some help with canvas and nikki addressed that already so thanks yeah i just i'm i'm just so impressed about this particular uh aspect of the work that you guys are doing the planning that you've done you know developing and create creating systems and then preparing yourselves to be delivering it out to the staff and i'm just reminded of a quote from rahm emanuel um he says never let a crisis go to waste what i mean by that is uh it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before and i mean this is just a key example of how the district team has really is really rethinking what education is going to look like and he's using this you know

071really adverse situation to be very very innovative and i'm just very very impressed thank you very much thank you vincent thanks steph for the answers uh next up is jay oh thank you can you hear me yes vince i appreciate your positiveness but i have to tell you my stomach is rolling right now and i i'm i'm really torn because i love schools and i love the work that this group has done i mean this for purposes of the public i'm here to cheerlead to say this is a wonderful group of people who've worked really hard but my analogy would be this is asking a school district to put together an airplane in flight and we don't even know the right design and whether it's going to work and and i'm saying that because i

072don't think we should tell the public it's going to be great i can go back to my school days when i said education is a shared responsibility between mom and dad and student and teacher and this is really going to stress that because we've really relied on teachers big time in our recent 10 15 years of education and this is not going to work really well because our teachers are not going to get to be tight with them so i my stomach is rolling because i love to truly eat about 509 j and what we can do but let's not kid ourselves this is a giant struggle so i have two questions with that downer and i i i'm sorry so ryan could you tell us and the public two questions one how did some

073districts get to do k3 every day all day and what did we think about that and then what went into our thinking about six weeks is there any chance that that can be pushed up with meeting uh governor's metrics all right so let me i'm going to start with the first and move to the second or start with the second move to the first so um this the six week um decision was really based on a couple things one is that we wanted to provide as much predictability for families as we could um up to that point we didn't have metrics for reopening or guidance in that regard and it's still a local decision to be made and so i wanted to get out two families as soon as we knew to be able to

074say this is how we feel like we need to start the school year i think that in communicating that it also allowed us to start to focus on what does it mean to teach in a distance learning or remote learning um successfully yeah it's you're right it is it's a huge undertaking and if we're trying to do that while we're still trying to figure out how to get 21 kids on a bus um and the ppe in place and all of those um safety measures um if it became a situation where we needed to make a decision that was going to work and we were going to be successful in so do something well and focus on it um the other thing i'd say about that is that if you think about the beginning of

075the school year a number of districts now have gone have said sort of similar things but most of them have said nine weeks um i thought about that um because you think that's half a semester but the problem in that in my mind in that decision is that that is the beginning of november november 11th november 12th it's right around veterans day um and if you do that you're really anticipating anticipating a flu season along with the pandemic and to me it felt like if i made a decision for nine weeks i was really making a decision for february um and so i didn't feel like that was a um a decision that left a lot of room for impossibility and so that's really why i thought about the six weeks um in terms of

076the metrics um there are state metrics that have to be met in order for k-12 to come back there's separate metrics for k3 which is an exception and we are in a situation where we would be able to in that exception look at k3 at the same time there's the piece about predictability about all those aspects about safety which was a huge decision component a component in my decision making about safety of staff about safety of students about safety of the community that was concerning enough to me that i thought that it made sense to say we need to go with six weeks we now everybody knows it we can plan around it and as we get closer to the end of that six weeks we'll continue to look at the governor's or oha metrics

077and make a decision moving forward but as of now i felt like that was the most important decision to make based on the information i had at the time and at the same time in an early enough stage to let families know again it's that scenario of back and forth if we look at the metrics for three weeks and we're able to come back and the week later that the data doesn't look as i'm good then would we we'd have to close down again and then we would look at another week out would we reopen i think you i don't think that that is um good for families either um and i know none of this is good all of this is a challenge but to go ahead and make a decision and say this

078is what we're going to do and this is why um is really where i've landed on that so thank you for the question um and thank you for the um the honesty in your in in sharing how your stomach is feeling um because my stomach has felt like that a lot over the last couple of months usually in the middle of the night when i wake up um but i honestly feel like we have um take um it's been a herculean effort and i'm really proud of the work that's been happening agree thank you thank you next up is director uh chloe white hello i'm sorry there's feedback i was like um thank you um i did first want to say thank you to ryan and all the staff you all put like such an

079incredible plan together and you can tell there's a great deal of care that went into the plan too those karen connection component over the summer i think has been really amazing because i think that's just showing an extra step by the district that you're wanting to make sure that families are doing okay even though school's not in session and that's just like an extra step you don't usually see in the summer and so i think that's been really nice for families and there's so much to consider for you all and so much that's out of your control and i appreciate that there's this wanting to help lessen the anxiety that families are facing right now of not knowing whether or not school is for sure not waiting to hear and so just putting it out

080there i think is a really smart move for a lot of reasons that you've already stated ryan and to prep for what's to come a lot of other districts aren't doing this and may make similar announcements later down the road or the state may make similar announcements and at least we know the families in corvallis school district have some advance notice and can start prepping for this um i just wanted to also say like i'm really excited that you all decided to use canvas across the board for like i have several children in my home that all were using different things in the spring and i know we were doing we could but it was really hard to keep up with the different modalities and so it's exciting for me to think of other parents

081that may have been struggling with that too to have one thing to um one thing to learn and luckily i know how to use canvas and it's super user friendly and the module components are really great too my one question besides all that i think you all did a great job because i do is about what kind of considerations are going to be in place for students that can't keep up with the online um even though it's going to be even if they choose hybrid they're still going to be online for the first six weeks and so that may be a struggle to not have the kind of support they were hoping for um and even students who for various reasons whether it's health or family or other reasons aren't going to do the hybrid

082and are doing corvallis online is there any thing you all are anticipating on how to support those students who may fall behind quickly with online learning i know oh just real quick i know you said you're going to have i know you said you're going to have um like support people and i agree like how they do college hill is was awesome like to check in on students because i have college hill kids and so that was nice for them to check in but um the check-ins didn't mean they actually ended up doing some of the stuff that they were hoping and so i'm just thinking ahead like some of these kids are going to probably get behind and that was one of my concerns to begin with in the spring when the pandemic started

083was like the the longer term impact so i don't know like if there's anything we can even do about that but just thinking about any flexibility with students with their um lesson plans i guess is what i'm getting at i think one thing i would share that i heard from a teacher this week who's doing summer school is we didn't do a lot of synchronous learning um in the spring because we knew that families were experiencing so much change and like that a set schedule could have been hard um so a teacher that's um teaching summer school she said that she's meeting with students much more frequently synchronously and that they're making a lot more project progress and that she feels like it does have to do with that connection that she's better able to

084make so i think that that's one you know kind of general strategy that we'll be employing um that will be different than the spring um and and and she she just felt like um it's been much more successful the other thing that she feels is more successful is higher expectations and i know ryan has spoke a lot about robust learning online and so that is something that we um continue to talk about is that the learning is robust and it and it matters um and that it's relevant and real world and engaging and so i know that those are some of the universal approaches i know that we'll also be working closely with the tier four team is joe still here not sure i can't see if he's still here um to continue to provide

085ongoing outreach and support to like some of those families that we were working with over the summer i think that last year and the summer helped us to better know some of the students who may need ongoing support and more intensive support to make progress nikki i am still here can everybody hear me all right okay good sorry just monitoring technical stuff um yeah sabrina and i have talked a great deal about how do we address students that are falling outside the sphere of success and so um you mentioned you know students who are not sort of uh achieving i think that really addressing our grading protocols is going to be one part of that but there are several other pieces that we need to address within the standardizing practices across buildings so that students

086have consistent expectations as well as ensuring that our communication protocols go out in family first language this was feedback we got consistently from staff families and community members and the language protocol information was the most consistent piece of feedback we received so we're hoping that the adaptations we can make from the learning we did in the first three months of distance learning will help us in online and hybrid models we're going to have to do a lot of adaptation to make sure that students don't fall further behind paul thanks y'all that's um really great to hear because like in higher ed i know that the adding extra work for remote was not the best idea for that some folk were practicing and the recommendation was not to do that and it sounds like you all

087have some flexibility with what you're building and i'm excited for the students that they'll have the extra support so thank you thank you lou and uh next up uh before i go with the next two questions i want to say uh we're reaching a five minutes warning for this agenda item so let's make sure we keep the answers as concise as possible if that's possible uh but i'm really enjoying these answers and this really good discussion uh next up is director tina baker uh tina flores you ears everybody for all your hard work um i know this isn't easy for anybody and it's an insurmountable amount of work um my question [Music] um i was just wondering what kind of support should we have in place for our parents and students uh who have for

088the parents who have students to really trouble engaging whatsoever online since we're going to be pretty much online for the first six weeks how do we help these parents get these k-5 kids engaged and stay engaged whatsoever online i'm sorry oh i mean i can i can just speak to one part that i didn't speak to earlier i think um one of the benefits of the hybrid model is the connection that students can make with peers i know that in this time like so many people have been isolated including our students and i know um the students that we've heard from were very excited to get back to some kind of socialization um and so that is one aspect i think the social piece that could be um bring more students to this format i

089also think um some of the learning that our teachers have talked about in the ed delivery team related to projects could also be more engaging than just screen time um our teachers are talking about students doing more than than than worksheets or everything on the screen but actually creating and and innovate being innovative and developing things that are of interest to them versus being as teacher driven as they sometimes are in in-person classes amy i can let you add a few if you'd like to i think we're close to time so i don't have much to add all right thank you very much uh next up is therese thank you sami um well i have lots of questions but i'm going to choose this one with the limited time that we have so i just

090i'm thinking through a scenario where we get to the six week mark and our kids go back to school in person on the hybrid schedule and then two weeks later we have to end the in-person experience and so i'm just wondering what um what uh effort thinking um planning you have put into uh anticipating how we're going to care for families in the and for our children in the event that that moment arrives and i realized before i asked my question that i did not say um this is i don't envy you the task of having to spend time thinking about this and you've there's been a lot of community input and and i guess i just want to preface my well i guess i can't preface it because i already asked the question but

091i just want to add to uh this conversation that um i i'm well aware that there is no one solution that's going to uh equally um serve all families and all of their needs we don't have the luxury of being able to customize our response um i've appreciated the fidelity to the data which definitely for my perspective does support that uh there are more benefits to not putting all of our children in a room together from eight to four and so uh five days a week and so um yeah i just i just recognize that that hasn't been easy to do and with so many comments and so many different uh ways to think about the information i appreciate that you have stayed stayed the course with the data that i i have i've assessed

092to be the most reliable so now my question when we can't stay in the classroom how are we going to care for our students and our teachers when that disruption comes i i'd say a couple things about that the first is that um last time we basically learned on a thursday that we wouldn't be coming back on a monday um and we ended up not actually having school that friday because it was a i can't remember if it was a conference day i think it was a conference today um so we had to make that decision overnight what what i would say is different this time is that we have had a lot a lot of learning so we understand what it's we're going to understand what it's like to start a school in this

093in remote learning our school year in remote learning we're also going to continue to work on what does it look like when our kids do come back into school because while i shared with jay or in response to jay's questions we've started to hone in on what does quality remote learning look like we still have to answer questions about what does it mean when kids come back to school and how do we make sure that their safety protocol is in place so honestly therese i'm my concern right now is that transition back more so than if we have to leave school a second time what i worry about if we do have to leave school a second time is the emotional toll of that and understanding how disheartening that's gonna be i you know yesterday

094i shared um an um in a quote about you know the athletics being one more disappointment um and so i feel like we've faced so many disappointments right now that i worry about our sort of that piece of us that starts to kind of get um whittled down as we continue to face adversity after adversity and so i think that at that point what's going to be most important is that that caring connection piece gets um elevated and enhanced and further further developed what i appreciate is that kids will have been with those teachers in the scenario you just gave and so some of that relationship will have been built which is really going to be hard for us at the beginning of the school year when we can't be face to face so i

095think that um what i would say in sort of a long answer is that that's when we're gonna have to totally continue to focus and put our attention on caring connection for our students and families because then at that point people are gonna feel really um down and really um sad about the loss of school one more time well i appreciate uh that your attention has had to be on how we can have a successful start and i think that as much as it is logistics it's also fear as a parent myself about that moment arriving where we have to have that separation again i do think that the way that the way that um uh our the rollout of announcements about changes in um our social distancing policies at the state level has been

096thus far it isn't something where we are finding out today that go effective tomorrow morning and so hopefully um you know we would if this were to be in the situation we'd learn on a tuesday that this is happening starting friday and we'd at least be able to give our kids the opportunity to have a face-to-face chance to be involved in because i i think that was probably the the hardest part for some of the kids was simply that when they walked out of the building for the last time they didn't know it was going to be the last time and hopefully should we face that again this time we can be prepared to help them with that but anyway but thank you yeah one thing i would add just to what you shared is

097that so i am out in schools right now um visiting um because of construction and i'm going into classrooms that feel that way that kids were there one day and there's you know this weekly schedules on the board and they went home and they didn't come back to school which completely it's it's just it's just sad and disheartening every time i see that um because that's how quickly the whole thing changed for us um you know it's i'm getting kind of emotional just thinking about it and i think that that's what is worrisome about thinking that that could happen again because of what those um what the implication is especially for our most vulnerable kids and families to have that rug pulled out from under them one more time and that's why i'm trying to

098be so conservative about giving lots of notice and making a decision and saying this is where we think we have to go even though i know it stinks thank you thank you and i want to apologize from the board members who want to uh speak right now but i would uh seek your acceptance that we would transition for recess and then to the next agenda item uh because we we spent uh lots of time on this but definitely not enough time there is so many questions we have and i want to encourage uh all board members who have additional questions or comments to send them to ryan and lindsay and we can get an update uh next week uh foreign answers for those questions i know uh we are giving some a certainty to our

099community and to to to us about what's going on but one thing i'm certain of the thoughtfulness and really thinking really critically about what it means to maintain the mission of our educational system which is to support every child to grow to their fullest potential prepare them to be capable of navigating an unknown future uh and and i want to really thank you for maintaining that mission uh front and center and your work uh thank you and again i want to encourage board members to send the questions so we can have a follow-up as soon as possible about that uh with that i want to seek board members uh unanimous consent uh for a a period of recess how does it feel to have a 10 minutes break so we'll come back at 8 20.

100is that sounds good if there's no objections all right see no objections we'll have a recess until 8 20. thank you very much for orion and staff for leading the ship you're you're great captains navigating a very difficult storm thank you and we'll go for a recess and this is a one minute heads up before we come back from recess sorry i just appeared for a while back there i got brought dinner so ah no worries you're justin i decided not to chew on camera i have done that too sarah i totally understand all right do we have uh tina and therese yes i'm here all right tina awesome all right we're back in session reconvening for corvallis school board meeting and i want to uh really give this uh topic enough time so i

101know uh jay uh vince probably tina and also sarah you had extra questions anyone else have extra questions or comments uh i know uh ryan is available to answer those questions or any further comments so i'll give us uh sufficient time to really have any other things that you want to mention so let's go with the order uh where the hands are raised and let's go back to sarah thank you for giving me another another stab at asking a question um i just continue to be impressed by all of the incredible work that you all have done i um have i um have questions about the dli program and it may be things that haven't been worked out yet but i feel like we are potentially running into a big equity problem for a program

102that's there to serve our spanish-speaking students um i worry about students who because of their own health risk or family risk are unable to continue in the dli program next year and um are to or unable to be in in person so i'm not not able to do the hybrid system and so is there any way to accommodate those those students who are in the dli program and or are other students that's there to serve um so that they can continue um or or come back to it when we return to just attending school on a normal basis uh yes well let's raise your hand unless you wanna go first so the so as far as the corvallis online program if we have students who are in dli who have to go to online because

103of health reasons themselves or their family that was what marcianne was alluding to earlier is that she is working both with mark henderson and with byron on what kinds of options are available within those programs um specifically we're looking at how can we maintain that that high level of spanish so that's what she's going to be looking at she's working with the principals and she's also bringing a group of teachers together and that work will start next week it's definitely on her mind we completely see it and we need to do something about it so thank you and i'm also you know hearing about high school students who are concerned about their ability to to get the seal of biliteracy um which is important to me also but less important than my first question so

104i'm sure you all have thought of all these things um but it's it's what i'm thinking about and hearing about so thank you yeah and that's um again the marciana in that group is working through a list of frequently asked questions to be able to respond um on that list are things like the clo by literacy we have several students who attend cv but are also part of the di program how do we make sure that they still receive that seal when we're not going to have kids crossing campuses next year in some of those pieces so all those things are a list generated that they're working through and when our principals are back next week this di principles of rdi schools will be working closely with marcian and again some of our teachers around

105that curricular piece but also getting some of those questions answered and out to families i've been receiving them as well um and sharing that um as next steps and and understanding and recognizing that those questions are coming and we are generating that list so we can get that information back to families all right next up is uh jay jay are you still there yes i am thank you sorry i'm slow um two questions um one a real serious one one a lesser serious one um we know that we struggled in the spring in classrooms saying we could tell how much kids are learning it's it was just virtually impossible it was so hard of a job so the question would be i think as as a system we want to say to uh ourselves to

106be accountable and to parents here's how we know how much we're getting students to learn do we have any kind of plan or hope or are we just going to do our best in terms of assessing growth of our kids i mean a specific example might be how many of our kids were able to complete ap exams because that's sort of an exterior thing that we could go and take tests and see how we compared to other years but but a bigger one is after what nine or ten weeks of no uh good classroom engagement potentially in the spring and now six weeks what might we use to measure that's question one and i don't know that there's an easy answer question number two easier one maybe for mark henderson is is could you give

107us in a public way what the most recent wisdom is on sporting and theater and activities when we're not going to school what you tell us all is going to happen to those kids and the things that a lot of kids are coming to school for maybe not for good reasons but that's kind of one of their big hopes so jay i'm going to answer both of them because um i let staff told staff that they could um get back to their families after the first 90 minutes and so um i'll be answering that one on behalf of mark so the first one is around assessment of learning and i think that um one of the things that we're gonna that we're continuing to focus on are what are those essential um standards that we

108really need to make sure kids know in that courses that they're taking and we will continue to use assessment to measure that we won't have it i i don't anticipate um it's hard to know but i don't anticipate we'll be using those standardized assessments last year there was a reprieve on sbac i would anticipate there'd be something similar to that this year it made it hard for me to establish some of my goals for you for this fall however for the school year however it makes a lot of sense so i would say that what we will have will be more teacher teacher made assessments that they used which we honestly know are probably the best assessments that we have about knowing how kids are progressing um more so than those standardized assessments that we're

109required to give every year so i think we'll be able to still know that the other conversation we had last spring with teachers was understanding um what it might look like as kids came back in the fall and recognizing that there would be some need to make sure that if there are were gaps in learning that we're feeling filling those as we move into that next either class or grade level um in that content area and then oh the second question um so now i'm gonna play mark um so with that one i think that it you know i think that there are kids and you know as having been a high school principal there are kids that um are drawn to school because of those extracurriculars that they're a part of um and it

110is um disappointing not to have those right now um i also know that um when we don't meet face to face um and we're not meeting face face across the whole league then we can't compete um and so um so yeah that is going to be a challenge for for our kids and families and that disappointment not to be able to have those opportunities um as we think about what the fall looks like in schools typically across the country and some of those things that build community we're just going to have to be looking at how do we build community in different ways wonderful uh let's go next up is sarah and then vince i already got my second stab so um like vince go ahead all right vince thanks sammy so ryan i'd like

111to return back to that you left off just before we went into recess on caring connection and i just i really appreciate that you're elevating that and keeping it as a top priority because kiddos that are in crisis that are traumatized aren't able to learn and i would say the same thing for professionals that are trying to teach that if they're in crisis as well they can't effectively teach so i just i just want to echo and affirm that that that needs to be the top priority that the social emotional well-being of both staff and students has to be top priority because otherwise we can't fulfill our mission i'll leave leave that comment there the i knew i have a dry question for olivia now olivia you mentioned um in your comments that there may

112there would be use of reserves and i just would appreciate a little more detail there and if you expect that you'll be coming to the board to tap into the rainy day fund sure so um we we automatically looked at the reserves because our reserves are always based on a percentage of our operating revenues and the budget assumed full funding of the student success act and um so in the budget preparation process we we had to increase our reserves by quite a bit because our operating revenues were increasing quite a bit and it's tied as a percent of operating revenues and so now when we look at our operating revenues shrinking it allows us to shrink our reserves and still stay within the parameters around the board policy on reserves and so the change it

113doesn't change anything about our compliance with the policy it just it's this it's like that proportionate change revenues are going down so we're going to lessen the reserves a little bit does that make sense yeah that makes sense but so what i'm what i'm hearing from you is that you're not going to need to tap the rainy day fund this year to balance this budget or you don't expect we don't know what's going to actually happen so but is that your expectation um as of today um i'm not anticipating that we'll need to tap into our rainy day reserve but those three things that we're keeping our eyes on our student enrollment property taxes and the results of collective bargaining those all could have impacts that may require us to revisit that of course of

114course thank you for that yeah no problem all right do we have any other comments or questions on this topic all right see none uh will transition but again a reminder that uh please uh send your questions or comments uh to uh ryan and lindsay and will definitely continue to have follow-ups uh throughout the rest of the summer and the year now the next item on the agenda is the resolution the first reading for the review and removal of racist school names it's a resolution presented by or introduced by director vince adams and just for a clarity for anyone from the community uh hearing about this and tuning in you can have access to the material as uh published and introduced uh there is a report action report and resolution working draft in the school

115board meeting material and today is a discussion this is the first time it's been introduced and a board members have the opportunity to discuss them we only discuss in public and we will not be voting today since it is a first reading usually any resolution takes more than one reading so there is opportunities for the community to send us emails at a board at a board email or to provide public inputs next week as well with that i would like to entertain uh uh to give the floor to uh vince uh to present the speak to the resolution and then provide an opportunity for board members to speak about any uh observations uh comments uh questions or opinions about it so vince the floor is yours thank you sammy and thank you for clarifying that

116that this is just the first read and that the board and the public will have more opportunities to see this resolution as it moves forward if it moves forward so uh members of the board before you is a resolution that does two things first it removes the names of individuals that held attitudes and practices that were most racist and offensive in my opinion because i was the one that made the choices to list those and for me there's little room for debate on the racist histories of the three people name that would be herbert hoover woodrow wilson and thomas jefferson and the standard that i used to judge these individuals was their affinity for racist beliefs not necessarily practice of slavery because they lived at different times in american history the second things that it

117does is it launches a process for our community to have a conversation that otherwise wouldn't happen and it is intended to explicitly bring a diverse group of people together in each of our education communities to look at the school names and what they represent and if that is in alignment with the values of the district and of the community so you're probably wondering vince why are you doing this right now well i'll be honest it you know it's part of the season right now we know we're seeing the black lives movement in media all the time but i'll tell you that it was uh over earlier this summer princeton university removed the name of woodrow wilson from one of their buildings and this was what really reminded me of conversations that i had had with

118one of our principals eric beasley and this is my time to apologize to him because um he's been he's i've had a few conversations and i uh while i heard him i didn't listen closely enough i probably should have brought this resolution um a couple of years ago for that i'm sorry but this is something that he and his education community have been talking about and working towards but across the country we are seeing school boards taking up resolutions around [Music] anti-racism and i was actually proud last month that our board chose not to just take up a i don't want to say generic necessarily but a just a resolution stating our our commitment to uh an anti-racist agenda instead you know choosing to just take action and so since that meeting i have been

119reflecting on what what our board could do what action can a school board do and um changing school names is something that we can do and uh you know buildings are being named renamed all over the country right now and it just seems like high time and i if we don't do it now i would beg the question when should we uh take up this resolution and do this work um well i'll be honest it was my conscience that compelled me to do something um and move forward with this i i was really troubled i am troubled by the message that we are sending to children that attend these schools and i think i'm just going to leave it at that oh no wait i have one more thing i need to say i i

120need to clarify what this resolution is not doing uh or what it's not intended to do um it's not intended to erase american presidents and their accomplishments from history or its education i personally admired thomas jefferson and woodrow wilson since i learned about them as a child and the accomplishments of thomas jefferson um have been a touchstone for me my whole life this resolution is not a first step towards removing presidents from american history curriculum children can't learn about the founding of the nation or the creation of the league of nations or you know the even the descent into the great depression without learning about the accomplishments of these presidents and the last thing i want to mention here is that above all this resolution must not distract the district or this community from the

121important work that educators and our partners are doing to support children in this time of need while the work of this resolution is very important we must always keep our students at the center of our thinking and i'm bringing this resolution this time with the full knowledge that will it will take likely a couple of years to fulfill its mandate but right now you know as we just heard from our staff you know they need to keep their focus on launching the next school year and with that i'll yield back thank you vince i appreciate your remarks and i want to open the floor for board members you can speak to or against or provide your opinions or questions and we'll go one round for all board members first and then we can go again

122with the second time comments that first we'll go with vice chair sarah finger mcdonald you're muted it said i was unmuted but i was wrong um all right it was wrong so vince thank you for bringing this resolution um i had heard comments from members of the community about school names um you over the last couple months also and um as a virginian i learned history proud you know proudly discussing the accomplishments of thomas jefferson and and his you know critical role in in writing the document that our government is founded on and the aspirational words that he wrote um unfortunately thomas jefferson himself and his personal life did not live up to those aspirations and he he was hoping other people down the line would solve the problem of slavery for him that's not

123what i learned in school but our understanding of history now is much more of a both and he was both you know a critical founding father who gave us the structure of our government and this um amazing document and he was a man who believed that black people were less than white people and it was okay to own them um woodrow wilson played an incredible role in in establishing the role of the united states in the world and the founder of the league of nations and he was a racist who actively desegregated or actively segregated our federal government removed the voice of black people and opportunities from black people and did not allow them to access the new freedom that he talked about herbert hoover also racist thought that black people were less than white

124people um and he was also one of our presidents who was there at the start of the great depression and is you know played a role in in the history there these are important things to understand it's important to understand the both and and i want our children to understand the both and because none of us are black well other than you know these artificial racial designations things we are not black or white we are shades of gray in our moral standing and actions in the world and that's a critical thing to know um does it make me did you it made me uncomfortable to think about moving removing the name of thomas jefferson from a school to some extent because of the great contributions he's made but we're talking about the name of a

125school this is different than a monument in washington dc in the seat of our government that's celebrating this the founding of our government this is a school where children attend and where i came down as i thought about the names of schools was that children should not be asked to go to a school named after someone who thought they were less than who thought they were not possible it was not possible for them to achieve the same things that their peers could achieve and so when we think about about school names school names need to be inspirational for everyone not just the privileged few so vince thank you very much for bringing this i am very glad to see it move forward um or hopeful to see it move forward and um i think it's

126it's something that will be important to some of our kids all of our kids i hope thank you sarah next up is uh jay and then therese director j conroy can you hear me um i um have a couple thoughts um as a history teacher and for the record who supplemented our ap us history book with zen of people's history i felt it was absolutely critical for our kids to understand that there were no saints in us history or in any history there's nobody perfect and zen does a good job of pointing out some of our traditional heroes and their problems and some of our traditional policies and and i really believe that's good for kids to learn so how does that fit with naming schools if i were a school board back in the

1271950s and decided on ways to name schools i would not have picked hoover and i would not have picked wilson somebody thought those were important somebody as smart as me perhaps uh maybe smarter thought those were absolutely good things to do and my problem with the resolution is twofold one it's saying number one there's an emergency and we should cancel three named schools in effect i think in two weeks because we have another board meeting that meets next week and we could we could wrap this up in two weeks with almost no deliberation or community input and to me that's a major problem but secondly no great analysis of what would be good school names and why are these not good school names because sarah you do a great job of capturing the goodness of

128of jefferson but also his big warts um but there's no one who doesn't have warts i'm sorry that's a fundamental and so what i'm concerned is is that a we are pushing through potentially quickly and be without great uh input and then finally um there is i think room for for question um again if you asked me to take a vote i probably wouldn't put mr wilson if we had a a new school to name he wouldn't be my top list i also believe we are grossly inadequate in terms of naming women and in terms of naming people of color or minorities who have made great contributions or should be aspirational so i think we have lots of room to grow in but i just don't want us to do it without doing a lot

129of thought my final point is is that we have received within two days of the newspaper article a ton of input i have gotten the same board letters that you all have and then a few more and they are saying whoa stop especially around jefferson this is not a good idea and finally we'd like some input so my recommendation is is that before we leave this topic tonight we reach some understanding about how quickly this might move i gave to you all um some quick research that i did on how other boards have structured naming policies and my my biggest request is that we look at those policies not as the magic not eugene doesn't have all the answers but they i think capture a really good process for when you're naming or renaming you

130do some heavy duty committee work and community input and you take some people's thoughts and then you bring back to the board some recommendations but i don't think that's what this resolution is about this is about doing away with names which would be very hard to bring back up as far as acceptable names and so i'm i'm really concerned about what we've got going i appreciate you vince and and sammy and and sarah and what you're getting to but i don't think we're doing it in the thoughtful deliberative transparent way that really needs to be done um my last comment and i promise it is my last i am absolutely concerned about our racial equity and we need to talk to the public about all the good things we are doing to improving that uh

131i don't think school naming is the one we want to hang our hat on and do a lot of divisive conversation but um i'll stop thank you thank you jay uh before i move to terese i want to really thank you of laying out a couple of points of discussion and i want board members to note them down if they want to speak to one point of discussion i can note here that the speed was an element and also a community input was another element so we could speak to each one of them after we go with full round with board members but also i want to note a point of clarification to the community uh if there is no objection uh the email there's documents that uh director jay conroy shared with the board

132over email and if there's no objection there will be a part of the meeting material after the end of the meeting the public can examine those documents and the documents that jay mentioned is in relation to corvallis school board policy ff as frederick and ff hyphen ar and of course and similar policies from other school districts as well so thank you jay for doing that homework and sharing that that documents and they will be available for the community after the end of this meeting uh so next up is terese thanks sammy uh let me turn this off it's kind of loud sorry about that um so before i uh before i make my comments and ask my questions i noticed that the resolution did have co-sponsors and i wanted to ask if either of the

133co-sponsors wanted to add anything to vince's um uh presentation of kind of the process um because i i would hate to make a comment that in fact actually your your reflections might address in advance so i i'd love to comment and i first i would like to ask if you have anything um that you would like to add uh lou would you like uh to claim the floor and give any remarks at this stage um i'm okay just waiting as we do the rounds theresa i appreciate that i don't know if how you feel sammy but um just it's helpful for me to hear the perspectives because when you put something together and you work on something sometimes it didn't come across as clearly as we had hoped so maybe some of the stuff you

134say will bring some of that up if you're if that's a concern so yeah i'm okay with that too i'll speak to the motion and to the resolution uh a little bit conflicted usually chairs are uh supposed to be unbiased and say who wants to speak for and against but uh i will speak very passionately about it but i'll i'll give you the opportunity teresa to say uh what you want and uh i would really appreciate your perspective and if we uh overlap with our thoughts that's completely fine well thank you both it's not so much that i have um criticisms or feedback or gaps i've identified so much as i just wanted to make sure since more than one person contributed to the formation that everyone felt comfortable that the kickoff to this conversation

135felt okay to you so if you are okay with that then i'll go ahead and make a couple of comments and um for us to think about so yeah so some of my comments are um are were kind of inspired directly in resol as a result of reading the public uh comments that came to us uh that got me to think a little bit about you know yeah it's a great question you know what what what does it mean that we're going to re-read our history and and go back and look at it and of course we've got this hindsight now and so how can we apply that to people who aren't here anymore and lived in a different time and things like that things that people thoughtfully put together and shared with us that

136prompted me to do some thinking and so a couple of thoughts that i have the first thing that i wanted to say is that um these three individuals um for whom i had prior to this uh varying degrees of knowledge about their specific contributions um i was thankful to be married to a history major in this conversation who could point me in the direction of some concise but meaningful readings to help me contextualize um what exactly hoover did as a president it was not i really couldn't name something that he had done and so it was helpful to find some sources for that so i did try to read up on that so the first comment that i want to make is that i appreciate that the work of jefferson and wilson and hoover has

137a historical context as all um as all of us do we live as a as a contributor in a bi-directional place of reciprocity between the environment and the time that we find ourselves in and the person that we are and we make our mark on it and it makes its mark on us and so we cannot ignore when a person uh has has been what they have been through what they have seen what they have participated in as we try to understand what they think what they've done their accomplishments their contributions their flaws as well so i'm appreciative of that and i i think that it would be very unrealistic for us to expect to go back to um particularly in jefferson's period well honestly all of them but i'll just tell them it would

138be unrealistic of us to go back to that period in time and expect to find a preponderance of people who do not hold racist views um because we have a an entrenched history of racism in our country our country is literally built on racist principles of white and european superiority and um so i don't think that that's a very helpful lens to say well you know they look like their time they do look like their time and i'm not i don't know that we would find people that don't look like their time so given the historical context this is my thought these individuals probably made some contributions that are super important and that we run into all the time the question that i have to ask is if the contributions that they have made are

139in service to everyone and actually support equity and i think you can make a case for each one of them as you probably could for most leadership sadly probably even until today that there is uh a backbone of racist ideology that informs what they perceive to be good when i look at the declaration of independence i am i again i'm appreciative that that was certainly quite an accomplishment to write that and to take the steps to enact uh the idea of a free society but we know that even as they were writing it they did not intend it to be a free society for everyone and so rather than exalting the thinkers who put that together i think they were aware that they didn't have everyone in mind and i don't know that we get

140to let them off the hook because they were culturally um it was culturally expected that they wouldn't have everyone in mind it was still wrong to not have everyone in mind and i think we can say that so uh in um in social policy we have a phrase um that we use um it's a feature not a bug in a system if you keep finding something over and over and over again that looks like an unintended consequence it's not a bug it's a feature of the system we built the system exactly to do that and our declaration of independence built a system to leave people out so i don't look at that and say well it was an unfortunate unintended consequence of its time i look at it and say no they did exactly what

141they meant to do with that why they meant to do what i'm not privy to if they ever thought about doing it differently we may not know but the fact remains that many of the things that we would see as accomplishments by these thinkers have been accomplishments that have benefited a particular group of people and not others my second thought is um in response to statements around um how history remembers people and the need to be understanding of the cultural limitations somehow meaning that we have to um allow their legacy to be preserved and keep their name on something so what i would like to say is i i don't know 50 years from now what will happen i i have no idea i hope that my son and his generation is part of pushing

142the issues of equity much much further than i ever even could envision because we've given them a platform to work from and if 50 years from now if they were to look back and they were to say therese jones got it wrong on this i hope that they will hear now that i am saying please take my name down if you think i got it wrong because i'm sure that i have gotten it wrong in some places my heart is to see this work move forward always to be moving forward and my expectation of the next generation is that they will be critical of our shortcomings because i don't know how they will grow if they're not and so i'm not afraid of our shortcomings because i expect them to be present and i expect

143that the good work of the children that we are educating and raising in our district will later find those shortcomings and then they will do the hard work to address them and if in doing so i made comments thought things promoted ideas that are detrimental and work contrary to the good work they are trying to do i don't want to be honored because i made a good effort so i'm okay with my name being taken down and if these men were the thinkers and if the spirit of the contribution that they made is what some members of our community have stated it to be i don't know how they couldn't agree with that statement and recuse themselves lastly um i wanted to say uh that some feedback came around tensions of focusing on racist comments

144that seemed to highlight or elevate comments made um individuals who made comments about um african-americans about black history in particular and a couple of comments that came our way indicated that we are being short-sighted in pretending somehow that indigenous populations were um performed better than white people do in terms of how they treat their community members and to that i would say that when you are part of a group of people who came in and took what was not yours you surrender your right to critique how that community um how that community manages its own self how they respond to the limitations or the cultural relevance of their own history we don't get to do that that's not our place so there are people in our community who can advise us about the appropriate way

145to respond and those are people who actually have a history within the indigenous communities and i am quite certain that if we call on them they will do that they will help and as a white person i need to step aside and trust that uh that they are able to um adequately help us to understand um why or how it is that we can recognize their contributions even in the times when um what we think we are observing runs counter to our values i would just remind our community that we we killed a lot of people who were already here because we didn't like how they were doing things things that absolutely were benign fine healthier even than some of the things that we were doing healthier than the practices that we brought with us

146so it is not very meaningful to me to hear uh from the white community that we need to um bring a critical lens to the practices of indigenous people before we ever got here and um i hope that that point was clear and then the only thing that i want to say about this is that i would like us to be mindful of the timeline i am concerned about bandwidth overload of the amount of things that we are asking our families to process right now and uh not because i think that we shouldn't move forward in trying to pursue this but simply because there are so many places right now where people and some of our most marginalized community members um don't have a lot of voice and don't have a lot of control over

147what is happening to them i do want to make sure that our plan forward finds a an inclusive way to allow people to be heard even opinions that might dissent from what gets expressed by the board members this evening um i think that's it i think that's an important process and so i would ask us to um as part of this process come up with some kind of a timeline that we feel confident doesn't force families to contend with both that their children are going to be home for six weeks and that and wrestle with it they might not even get realistically to go back after some counties are having their faces rolled back right now and also make time tomorrow to comment on this for us if they haven't yet so i don't think

148it's something we should kick down the road very far i do think it's something that we should it would probably be a bit much for us to ask to take a vote on this in two weeks but perhaps in the meeting after um might be a timeline that i think could be could be comfortable um and then the other thing that would be helpful is if we could declare more um art deliberately and specifically the criteria that has been applied because as was mentioned there everyone has a questionable past there's a reason why this particular questionable past is being addressed and maybe others are not and i think that it would be smart for us to call it what it is um that and and vince said that and i appreciated his acknowledgment of that

149that this is timely for things that are happening in our world um and we can we could dig around and find things in everyone's past but we don't have to dig very hard to find undisputed issues with these three particular individuals that are very timely to issues that we are talking about right now so if we could just declare that criteria that might help um assuage some of the community that this is some kind of a targeted witch hunt um that it is not but that in fact there was a rationale that was applied uh that might be helpful and uh that's all that i have to share thank you very much for the hard work and um yeah um vince i see your hands up would you like yours sami i can speak to

150the the criteria and how i looked at each president uh if that would be helpful for the board absolutely uh please go ahead if uh uh tina you're okay with uh uh leading the uh giving the floor to uh vince and then we'll go back to you is that okay yeah absolutely wonderful so yeah the the essentially what i did is after i heard about princeton and them removing woodrow the name of woodrow wilson from one of their buildings i went and looked at who he was and his background um and he was an avowed racist and and segregationist and for me that that disqualified him um herbert hoover um was a social darwinist he was in engineering by tran engineer by training and some of his professional writing was repugnant is a nice way

151to say it uh he he talked about the differential productivity of the different races um he also um helped orchestrate a purge of the republican party purging black people from the republican party um he was just he was a racist fellow thomas jefferson was committed slave owner um you know that and if you look at the public comment that we've received so far and the conversation that we've had i think that's the one that most of us have difficulty with john adams or john quincy adams i don't know for whom the the school is named but either one of them as far as i know they didn't own slaves and i couldn't find any if they expressed any uh opinion about the practice of slavery some people have asked why i didn't include uh benjamin

152franklin franklin owned at least two slaves in his lifetime but late in his life he disavowed the practice of slavery james garfield was actually anti-slavery and he ran and won on an equal rights platform some people have asked about abraham lincoln because when he ran for the senate he was an avowed racist and swore that he would never advocate for equal rights between whites and blacks but in the course of seven years his his thinking changed and it was a speech where he did advocate for equal rights for blacks that uh caused incense john wilkes booth so much that he killed him mountain view is an anodyne name it's non-controversial linus pauling um i think we all most of us know who linus pauling is and uh the work that he does he did he

153actually had a correspondence with martin luther king but there are questions about uh eugenics and i don't know it was not clear so i didn't include him the last one is vernon sheldon who is a biochemist who lived here locally and he was a long time school board member and he died at the age of 50 tragically so that's so really it was how strident their their adherence or affinity for rice racist ideology was how i how i chose the three names and i can speak more about my my views around thomas jefferson but i i want to give time to the rest of the board to speak thanks vince uh i'll go next uh for board members who didn't speak yet so next up is tina and then jay actually i might recognize myself

154after tina if jay you're okay with that all right tina yeah i just wanted to say thank you for vince lavoie and sammy for bringing this forward to us as a board to consider um i feel that it's a catalyst for anti-racism racism work that also aligns with our vision and alignment with cultural and racial equity um this is a way to open up conversations with our community and our staff and administration around why do we name places things and what's the thought process behind that and most of the time that is to honor people right so if we're honoring people then we need to start looking at how that plays into representation and how important that is to our families or families of color um and what how do we want to go about

155renaming this i would like to see that we get gains uh um some input from different our different families from different backgrounds so we get input from everybody um because representation matters and i think um since it's getting late i'll just throw it back out to you sami thank you uh if there's no objection i'll recognize myself to speak for the motion or for the resolution i want to thank yes go ahead do i get to what am i going after you because i think us two are the only ones that haven't gone oh that's true i apologize yes and if you want to go ahead uh first you can go i just wanted before you called because i know other people have their right your go ahead that's correct okay so um i want

156to say first thank you uh vince for your leadership on it uh lou on community members who uh reached out connected with us uh and i know it's we are actually following the lead of community members uh you might not have seen a letter to the editor campaigns you might have not seen uh the traditional ways where people talk about that but we hear the community members especially community members and students of color who say this is something that we need to discuss and we are following their lead now one sentence that should summarize the motive the need and the purpose of this resolution is the following school names should inspire our students and the community what inspires me is not what inspires the generation that's in k-12 right now what inspired the nation a

157hundred years ago is not what inspires the nation that's completely different today i i would claim the most american thing about this nation is this nation is always getting better so what inspires our students today is something better and i have to say i owe it to our founding fathers despite of their fall abilities but i know definitely for those who were owned by those founding fathers probably they would not think highly of their owners as much as white america 100 or 200 or 300 years ago thought about the founding fathers so we are inspired by their actions some of it and some of it does not inspire us anymore i can't fathom with what i learned from this process so far that we could assume our students of color a black girl will be

158motivated and inspired to be in a school that's named of someone who thought less of her and she could achieve less than her white spear or male peers for that i really thank jay for highlighting something very important about the problem of not recognizing women out of our schools none of them recognizes women i do have respect to the office of the presidency it's a an amazing and awesome office and those who hold this hold a huge responsibility moral and other responsibilities and i want to highlight this resolution is about imagine there is 12 or 13 spotlights those spotlights like the batman movie but they're on a school on a neighborhood and that spotlight is where our children look up and at it and they say this is why i can do better this is

159where i can succeed this is where i can find my potential uh power to be a public servant a scientist an engineer an artist whatever it is and i can see myself there and school names are part of death inspiration and that's the dynamic process of changing school names into what inspire our students better while it's almost clear if it's not very clear that some of the names include sins that are horrendous we are not here to cast the stones of who's the sinner and who's the saint and none of us are a complete sinner our complete saint as far as i know and because of that we need to recognize what we're doing here is not a measure of sainthood is a measure of who needs to be recognized today and tomorrow and for

160the next 10 12 50 years as far as we know that person or that name will be the most inspiring for our students that's the motive this is a student and a children problem it's not an adult problem and we should follow their lead telling us who inspires them and for that i want to highlight the two elements of the resolution because i really appreciate how vince developed it or designed it and i i support that the first element speaks to what we should do in terms of recognizing that problem and i provide an opportunity for at least three schools to be up for grabs for what inspires our students most so we're taking the names out we're opening up the discussion and that action will not happen unless we pass the resolution and passing

161any resolution uh usually does not happen and we will not happen we have the commitments unless we hear from the community and from our students families through mediums of public participation but the second element of the resolution which is very important is engaging our staff and community members and students communities to really uh a school community to really tell us the board this is what we recommend you to do this is what's inspire our students most so while the board by policy is empowered to make those decisions uh we are obligated to make sure this process is driven by our community and by our students first and foremost so with that i feel really motivated i still have the dream personally to one day i have the honor to swear an off office using an

162arabic bible which has fired me to really understand other religions in a language that's close to me the constitution the american constitution and on top of all of these two is jefferson's quran and i i feel inspired by the idea that he was interested in in the faith that i i subscribe to however i want to check my bias here is that the metrics that i should use no the metric i should use is what inspire all of our students today with that i yield for lu next well i'm just like still listening to processing you're saying sammy thank you um [Music] well there's a a few things that i wanted to point out and um and it's not clear i'm pretty much in favor of what's been presented since we were my name's on

163there as well but some of the things i did want to point out from some of the messaging and some of the comments made tonight is the whole idea of people being like a men of their time and thanks to jay for pointing out that these are all men um that's very clear that that time period wasn't inclusive of anybody that looked like me or other community members it wasn't inclusive of all of my identities actually because i'm not a white male and um and in fact there's been a lot of positives talked about what jefferson and the as a founding father and declaration and it's always important to remember that indigenous peoples were viewed as merciless indian savages at that time and are still described that way in the declaration of independence and that

164was the mindset that founded this country and that's a really i think it's something that people should really think about think about that merciless indian savages like we're sub-human we're not worthy of even being alive that launched there continued under a new government to launch a whole series of war for land acquisition against people like myself and other indigenous community members in this city and so to me it's it's history is complicated and i also teach american history but i teach it through ethnic studies and so i understand the complicated histories understanding all these multiple views and sides of history and right now we're upholding a very one-sided history and not looking at all the nuances i think that um people just need to remember that when they're describing people and they may have been

165men of their times but the it's a way to kind of dismiss the genocide and slavery and quite honestly spousal abuse that was going on during that time as acceptable and living descendants on the receiving end of those atrocities still feel those impacts today like those are lived experiences that we feel because of those actions that doesn't mean we're blaming people the residents of corvallis that share identities with these people that the schools are named after we're not blaming anybody for that or asking us for that to be acknowledged along with the other things as have been described earlier i see this as a really good opportunity for the community to be able to be involved with something that's really educational and that's one of the things that excited me the most about this um

166it's not like we want to say if we want to take away all these names there's actually we're not saying they have to be renamed immediately either nobody said that this wasn't going to be a process and vince actually mentioned earlier like we're looking at a couple years down the road it'll probably take to do all the research um to rename the school but um i'm excited that it involves parents students how it's outlined in the resolution of people to be involved in the process members of the community with lived experiences around race and expertise and social justice a lot of times people are left out of these kind of conversations on what to name something as significant as a school building and this is an opportunity to bring those voices in and if you

167think about how awesome that is for students to be able to do research and say like hey yeah we know nobody's perfect but like what did they intentionally perpetuate the things that are outlined did they intentionally perpetuate white dominance through slavery and racist and anti-indigenous views like was that an intentional thing that they were doing and so there is some like guidelines in there already of like what we're looking at um and to have at least one school in corvallis i really like that part that honor that has a name that honors the local indigenous people and consultation with the tribes we're on their land let's be real about it we've always been on this has always been their land it's always has been and always will be calipuyo land and involving the two tribes

168and honoring that relationship with their land if they would like a school named after something important to them i think honors that history and that continued relationship that they have with corvallis a lot of people don't know how much the local tribes contribute to the city or that like this lets tribe help build the new um vincent county museum downtown they contributed to that for the community because this is also still their community and they care about these lands so to me that was really awesome and then um i know that on here too i don't know i don't know how much community read the actual like read every line of the resolution and what stood out the most to them but one of the things that i was really excited about in the resolution

169too um right now like where my kids go to school they don't learn about the people the schools are named after outside of like the history class so like at lincoln they don't have this learning about who he was the multiple sides of him they just know they go to lincoln and there's a picture of him that right but what we're proposing in this resolution which i hope community would be excited about um i'm excited about it if you can't tell because i keep saying that but is to not just have interpretive signage on the site but also to integrate progressive curriculum in those schools so each school would be learning every year something more about the person they're named after that's grade appropriate and so by the time like if they're either getting five

170three four years of schooling progressively learning more things about this individual or this place that this school is named after and it kind of brings not just the students but the teachers and the rest of the staff a little bit closer into what that name means and to really like be part of it and so to me that was a um a part that i really liked and the resolution to but all that to say like we really value as it's been said the community input and whatever your thoughts if you like it or if you have um some critique of it you know how to get a hold of us through the email all of our emails are on the board site and i hope that people will look at it with an open

171mind and recognize that we're not trying to rip away history we're trying to tell other parts of history and we're trying to help students learn in that process and families and community members engage in a mutual learning process together and to me that's really important thank you lou uh i'm not sure who's next uh i believe probably uh we have tina and then therese and then jay and then vince no mine's a mistake sammy i'm taking it okay tina would you like to speak i'm taking it down i don't need you now thank you all right the next is jay and then vince and after vince the last crime he might have some operational questions that he would like to ask as well so next up is jay and then vincent and ryan so i

172really appreciate the conversation we've had um tonight and the perspectives um i don't agree with everybody's um understanding and perception of history um but i think that's called history it's not uh science h plus o equals water or whatever um history is about perspectives and so to me we're highlighting the the nature of history and our job as a school board i think is to pull all these different perspectives together think about what our role is in terms of inspiring students providing for good facilities i don't want to name a school sunshine school because it has no danger to anybody i love inspiration but i will tell you that inspiration has to come with really good education at the fourth grade and eighth grade and eleventh grade that explains who harding was or who hoover

173was or who jefferson was and that that can be inspirational it can be absolutely inspirational uh it doesn't have to be something that's thrown out so i guess what i'm i'm not real clear on is the timeline and the criteria that is if if we aren't an agreement then i need to put forth a motion that says we will slow this down and put together a good study committee and in my humble opinion we could we could name three schools it should be studied and and public should have an opportunity to weigh in pluses and minuses and then we will take the recommendations but the resolution that sits on the table right now says we are going to cancel three names and then do a study and i don't think that's good process uh and

174so i'm i'm looking for how open the sponsors are to to my suggestion which is to send it to uh kind of a 4j committee that says let's look at uh input and people's comments and and commit to saying i have no trouble i'll name my name right now i have no trouble saying that that uh hoover and wilson would not be people that i would if i had a chance support names jefferson is something else and i would love to hear other people's suggestions and weighing in i'm a history student but i don't have all the history so i'm kind of looking for guidance uh before i do the parliamentary thing which is then then i'm gonna make everybody go on record and say we're gonna push this thing through in two weeks and

175we're gonna cancel people's names right now that's not good politics that's not good policy and and i'm looking for where you guys want to go absolutely thank you jay so i would recommend uh after vince probably addresses some of those questions and then ryan produce ask us some questions as well we could have uh pathways on a language that we can uh deliberate on next meeting uh in between now and then you and vince probably could add that question or that possible alteration and we can talk about it right now as well um can i interject really quick i'm sorry defense but like i think it's really important that we don't say like we're canceling people because nobody is being cancelled in this process it's a request to rename a school like nothing in it

176is canceling people from the curriculum or history or anything like that and i just want to make sure that was clear to viewers that are watching this that that's not what's being asked because words are important just for clarification we are saying that those three schools names will not be their names and then we'll go look for three so i use the word cancel because it's a shorthand phrase that says it's not going to be the name anymore but what other name you would say would be i have no trouble right because right now that's actually a terminology that's being used as like council culture and that came through in some of our emails and i always wanted to make sure that's not exactly what we're doing and saying i just wanted to clarify that

177for viewers that are familiar with that terminology yeah i'm still struggling with the meaning of that terminology but i'm not sure there's a dictionary that defines this but my understanding when they say someone is cancelled contemporarily right now it means that person goes into infamy you're just deleting them from history and no one talks to them no one learns about them and uh that's my understanding i think i might be wrong uh probably i am but the clarification of what uh lou said i think that's very good representation of uh the intention and the result of this resolution uh we're still going to learn about our presidents and um i'm not sure if we count them or we learn about their history the same way that we do uh and actually this activity will help

178us learn more about them uh i it's my understanding however uh what we're doing is we're highlighting and putting a spotlight on who we think inspire our children most um rather than canceling an individual with the verb cancel um okay so with that uh j is there any other stuff you want to say or shall i transition to events awesome thank you so vince you're up next thank you um yeah i was remiss earlier i didn't express my appreciation for you and lou and the members of the community that helped me develop this language um it certainly was not in a vacuum and i certainly didn't do it by myself so thank you for that and jay thank you for uh for your caution i i really i realize that item one in this resolution

179is heavy-handed and i have struggled with it um i've struggled with it for the reasons that you've cited that that it uh it isn't good politics frankly this whole thing probably uh may cost me uh re-election next year i i don't know um it's certainly not the the comfortable course but i think i need to explain myself a little bit more about why i singled out these three particular presidents in particular and it really goes to um it's very subjective really it's my experience as a dad and what i did is i thought what message does having herbert hoover or woodrow wilson or thomas jefferson on a school send to a child walking into that school the reality is that thomas jefferson you know may have owned is upwards of 600 slaves and we think

180about him in the context of when he lived but he had people around him that counseled him against the practice of slavery i know that he had a friend that was in france slavery was illegal in france that visited with him and repeatedly counseled him against the practice of slavery but what really and i have to say that that thomas jefferson is someone i have looked to as a guidepost around governance he is the architect of american democracy but the fact that he he fathered six children with a woman that he owned i can't justify that to my daughter who's right outside that door and i i think about a little black girl walking into jefferson elementary and what am i saying what is this board saying what is the school district saying to that

181little girl what are we saying to her family by holding up thomas jefferson for all the great things that he did but he did very bad things too and it's just too far and that's why i retained item one in this resolution because it's really a moral argument is this something that we can tolerate is this something that we can justify to our children and it's not something that i can justify i can't rationalize my way to retaining these figures on schools and that's why i kept item one in the resolution and i'm i've talked to people who have counseled me jay that said this is bad politics it may cost the district down the road but it really comes down to a moral question and i i chose to to present it with item

182one and and that's why so thank you and i deeply appreciate this conversation this is not something that i can do alone it takes the board to do this it when it will take the whole community and i that is why item two is is really the larger portion of the of the resolutions because i trust the community to do the right thing and in my heart of hearts i think that if we took the action that you're suggesting jay that if we just referred this to the community i'm sure that those names would come off of those schools but i don't want a child on september 9th i don't want a child if of course we're not going to be able to open the school but i don't want a child to have to

183go to a thomas jefferson elementary school i don't want that little girl to have to walk in that building whether it's virtually or or really or for real so um i yield back thank you uh and i'd love to hear uh ryan's thoughts on on process and if you have any questions about our intent thank you i appreciate vince and uh uh brian explores yours so um as i've listened a couple of questions have come come up for me um the first one is um so as i have listened and thought about process one of the aspects of process that we have tended to use has been a superintendent's task force and in those instances we have a charter document that we've used and and so the examples i can think of are a fundraising

184task force we used that a number of years ago we've used it for the boundaries to have clarity about what what processes were going to be followed we've used it um for what else have we used it for as of late um a couple of other other times we've used it whenever we've had a superintendent committee that's been working long-range facilities planning we had that too we've identified what are our goals and objectives what's the scope what's the proposed task force membership look like in terms of numbers as well as making sure that it has a has diverse voice and perspective of our community who are those liaisons or ex-officio members how often were those teams meeting procedures and processes how those recommendations are communicated um and if there's any policy adoption related to that

185and then also how long will that committee be ongoing so the sunset class and so what i'm wondering is what i hear are a number of process questions both from community members and from the board and so i'm just wondering if it would be beneficial because we're going to have another conversation about this either at august 6th right now that was sort of the plan of but if that needs to be pushed back that's a consideration i think you all need to make but whenever it comes back forward i think spending some time on my end putting this into this charter document will give it um some bones and structure and that would i think help the conversation and it could also clarify what that process is going to look like i think vince did

186a nice job of trying to i see that um this document sort of laid out um in the resolution and so i don't think it will be difficult for me to modify and put into this format but i think it would be helpful to have it in this format because i think it would help the conversation to be moved forward and i think it would also be helpful for the community to see it in this format because again i think it helps the people to understand um first of all um how what the process is gonna look like and second of all how we're gonna make sure that community is involved in it and i think those are really two important pieces um for consideration so as i've listened like that's how i'm thinking about

187it in terms of structure and moving it forward um and so i think what i would what i would suggest is that um i um whenever whatever meeting that is i'm going to take the time to put this into this charter document bring it forward as well so that that can help to facilitate the conversation uh thank you uh ryan uh vince so thank you ryan um that's exactly what i was hoping for um the other thing is that i want to you know just share that i think taking the time and getting this right is more important than doing it quickly um i think that we are going to hear a lot more from the community um in the coming days and i think that that's healthy and i knew that that would happen

188as soon as this went public and that was part of the intended consequences to is to engage the public in this conversation so thank you ryan for that and i think that we should take whatever time is necessary uh without um losing uh operational capacity because i know that we do have committees we have groups of people around in our bond work that could help us in engaging this so i don't want to lose that opportunity but i also don't want to go too fast i want to this needs to be a deliberative process right jay before i go to you i want to clarify from ryan uh the proposal of a charter uh personally i'm in support of this and uh i i would like to see the board if uh there's a agreement

189for that too but the charter idea in terms of process it would apply whether we stick with step number one step number two or just go for step number two uh it could apply for both scenarios is that correct i think step number one is a conversation the board needs to have if we move away from using those names for schools immediately i think that's a conversation that won't necessarily change the structure of the committee or the participation or those those aspects around timelines so to me it feels like there's two pieces one is um actually three one is do we um are those names um removed from the schools at this point in time or are those names maintained until a decision is made for a new name second to that would be once

190that decision is made a timeline for those committees to come together and make a recommendation to the board i saw in the document that there's the opportunity to make several recommendations for a couple of a couple of options to bring that back to the board i think that makes a lot of sense because at the end of the day it's the board that needs to make that decision and i think that allowing community to bring forward a couple of different ideas is is beneficial um so anyhow i think that that's a good good aspect to this um one of the other questions i have is i saw the piece about doing some study and investigation around the names on other schools and i don't know how where was that wasn't that in here or i

191might did i just make that up i wouldn't recommend doing it before the board approves the the resolution yeah i think but in terms of timeline um it almost feels like those are two um parallax parallel activities perfect well thank you i i think this gives us a really good perspective uh i think we should take the time but also uh have the conversation among the board in terms of step number one whether to retain it or remove it so with that i'll uh yield to jay and then so just to maybe a parameter or a guide i sure don't want to open up a general discussion about all school names because i could pick two or three right off the top that don't make a lot of sense and not very inspirational to me

192but if we i like the way uh vince has has framed it in my listening it's uh these are our figures or characters that have good weight or good ness in them but the race part is racist part is outweighing it so i would recommend that one one parameter of the conversation is a conversation that goes something like do these people's racist backgrounds outweigh in substantial manners or in some manner or some weight their contribution and therefore we shouldn't name the school and then you move to a second parameter which is and who should we have and if we find one or two or three that say yes all they they should all be gone then we find another parameter of how what would we place along the guidelines of inspirational or whatever the criteria

193we use so the first first thing is about weighing the contribution inspiration versus the racism and and that could be a the work of a group thank you jay next up is lou um i think it can turn into a conversation neil some unintended harm by saying does their racism outweigh their good things that they did because that also sends a very strong message to community members that experience racism on a daily notice in corvallis but also in the schools and so like does the racist views outweigh the good that they brought i mean that might land a certain kind of type of way with folk just wanted to point that out but um i just had a question actually more about clarity um are we suggesting that we may not look at this next

194week and then our next board meeting is in september is that um yeah i i would uh propose if there's no objections from uh the board is that we come back next week with the agenda item there it's going to be a second reading however without an intention to vote on the resolution as a whole and with an intention of reviewing two elements further the discussion on uh whether jay's proposal regarding step number one moves forward or not and we can discuss that and have consensus or agreements uh or possibly a motion on that and also a second item would be if ryan would have the charter ready so we can have it uh ready for review but i don't want to put you on the spot if a charter draft could be available for

195next week yeah okay wonderful so i think that would be very good and it's inconsistent with it is consistent with uh the community wanting to know things as soon as possible and being able to review them and if they want to provide public comments they see the agenda item just to emphasize there's not going to be a vote on the whole resolution but if we end up with a discussion on point one we could end up with a motion if jay desires and uh jan uh you and i and probably with uh the authors uh author and sponsors could work on a language that uh phrase the point of proposal that you want and then we can present it to the board so we can have really clarity with the community about what we're talking

196about okay that's what i was asking because um when we've usually seen things as a second read we've voted on them so this isn't what i'm used to us doing that's why i was asking like so the second read is actually not when we would vote we would vote later on is that what you're correct whether or not we're going to adopt the resolution in general okay because i mean i just have a little bit of like we always take extra time to do the right thing for some reason and like sometimes doing the right things doing the right thing and we all know that but there's always resistance to that um as well and i just felt a need to point that out that things that um do lean towards maybe discomfort with change

197and that advocate for marginalized community members in one sided histories tend to need extra time for the comfort to be there and i wanted to just call it what it was absolutely and i wanna uh really acknowledge that thank you uh lou for highlighting it i i usually don't invoke a public comment that comes up and usually i read the emails and not give them highlights and if i disagree with them but uh in spirits of what you just mentioned lou and it's really touched me really badly honestly i'm still feeling shake up shook up uh because of you know once people say wait your turn and then when your turn comes up uh we'll give you an opportunity for whatever it is and i there was a public comment and with all respect to

198the commenter who mentioned that but the comment was uh regarding uh schools that acknowledges the native or indigenous communities let's wait until the corvallis community grows and we need an additional school and then we'll name the school number at the additional school for indigenous people and that was actually shook me a lot because it just gives me a realization for those first people who were there if there was one school in corvallis it should be in appreciation respect to them not saying wait your turn for that for the original people and i i think that's in the spirits of what you mentioned uh expediency is important deliberation community engagement is important we need to strike the right balance uh sorry i'm editorializing a lot on this so on that point i want to ask the

199board i i mentioned two elements here i want to get the thumbs up from you uh about number one we will revisit this next week and we're not gonna vote on the entirety of the resolution uh are we okay with both and feel free to say thumbs up or maybe something somewhere in between so you want to discuss it all right so i'll i'll give the floor for those uh somewhere in between our thumbs down to speak to it uh so we have sarah vince and lou i'll go with sarah first wait sammy i can't show you my thumb because i'm not connected with my camera but i am a thumbs down so how about we start with you since uh um all right serious go ahead if sorry is okay with that so we're

200talking about approach uh how do you feel about the approach okay so my statement about being thoughtful about the timeline was not about uh i guess what i wanted to be clear about was the timeline around re choosing new names not needing to delay declaring that we are going to remove these names i don't think we need to have any delay in declaring that we're going to change the names i also don't think that at this point that is something that we need to have more community involvement in because it is a it's in alignment with our our our expressed statement of equity i am uncomfortable with the notion that we would weigh anybody's racist comments when we have black staff people whose hair has been grabbed in our schools at work i don't there's

201no conversation for me on that that's not a safe space uh for them for those for those staff members and and i don't need to have any more discussion about whether or not it's appropriate for us to change the names i we need to have discussion about how best to do that in terms of incorporating the community but i don't think this is one of those situations where we need to kick it out to the community to decide if there's enough agreement that the name should go i think our mission our strategic goals they say that the name should go and i'm perfectly fine voting for the names to go i don't think that i could support splitting the resolution up and removing that piece out i think that's where its power is in stating

202we're coming into the school year and through some timeline and through some process that we don't yet know but that we're gonna figure out and maybe we should figure that out and bring that to the conversation when we when we vote for this um because i think that would be helpful that it is it is a matter of when it's not a matter of if and what we want is community insight about how best to do this in a way that is honoring to our community uh but keeping the names isn't honoring to our community and so in my mind that's just not a viable pathway forward all right thank you terese um sarah yeah i um want to voice my discomfort with waiting for comfort um as a member of the community that often

203gets to decide when we're comfortable and things should move forward um there this is one of those things that we can make up a lot of excuses to delay um my first concern was whether we had it in our capacity as a district to deal with this right now and i talked to ryan about that this morning and once i was comfortable that our district is capable of of educating our children and changing school names at the same time then i felt like okay well we don't need to delay anymore um there is going to be discomfort around this but that's okay we've asked other people to be just you know uncomfortable for a long time um so yeah i think we we don't want to sit on this and wait for the whole community

204to decide that that we're comfortable now thank you sarah uh vince uh i'm i'll just echo uh comments from both sarah and therese um for me this is i feel strongly i i wrote a good portion of the resolution i support it um i would like to see it move forward i think people of color in our community would like to see us move forward with it okay so with that uh jay would you like me would you like to speak to this thank you yeah i am i appreciate everybody's viewpoint but what i think you are saying tonight is that in the span of 10 days because we got this like monday and we would vote on it next thursday so roughly 10 days 11 days you have the wisdom regarding what is an

205appropriate inspirational or not inspirational name and i think we could go and talk and debate there are other models of of districts that i've shown you that says this is the kind of stuff that tears people apart and deserves community input and you're saying no we don't we know you have the power the board has the votes you could change those right now you could say done but i don't think that engenders trust it doesn't engender transparency it doesn't engender respect it says five of us or six of us know better and so we don't need your input we don't need a discussion and we're not even gonna follow processes that portland public and eugene have set forth is what they would require of them instead we'll just make the decision i think that's very

206insulting i think it's very damaging to the community that we represent and their support for things that we do going forward i don't fear at all making change i told you i could have lots of discussions about other people uh that should be named instead of hoover and instead of wilson but to do it on our own um to say let's boot them out for whatever i think that that really takes some people down it takes insults those communities uh and and i'm not saying it's good to be racist absolutely not i think we've all agreed that every people every person that we know in history has warts and context so i think those things ought to be discussed in an open way not in a 10-minute sprint to get this done so i think

207it's a real slam to the public all right uh if i'll recognize vince and then lou and then therese vince i just want to clarify that item one in this resolution only removes the names yeah that's all it does and that we entrust the renaming of schools solely to the district and in the community and it was written with that intention and i i spoke to the to the reasons for me personally i kind of view it in moral terms but i in people will view it differently but that is why i want to move with some exigence because i think those three figures are significantly offensive to people that um that hold racial justice dear to themselves and for others and i what those figures represent at least in their behavior is not aligned

208with the values of the district and i feel that we have a responsibility to move swiftly to remove those names and if we don't then we're abdicating on that responsibility it we are elected to represent this community and if we believe in those documents that we write for ourselves then we should be willing to act on them and sometimes that's uncomfortable and i'm i'm okay with living with the discomfort so yeah sorry go ahead thank you uh next up is lou and then therese um i just wanted real quick i don't know if tina had an opportunity because we can't see thumbs up or thumbs down for them but they wanted to point that out but also just express a little bit of sadness that it wasn't clear that we are i don't know why

209there was not clarity around we're asking the community to rename the schools because that's pretty clear in the resolution and so i just wanted to make sure that community members and jay since you were confused on that as well see that in item b um two b talks about that in what that process can look like item one is just asking for those names to be removed and interim it says it right there interim designations are assigned to those schools and so if community can if that was confusing if you can look at item one and then um to be that helps clarify we are that and i talked about that when i was speaking so i hope that community heard that too that that's one of the things i am the most excited about

210is for community involvement not just parents but students because they're the ones in these schools and then that would be a great project for them to learn about things and so and it's parents students guardian building staff members of the community and so it's a it's a group effort it's not all on one person and it's a wide variety of representation and so i just wanted to point out where those were in the resolution for people who may be watching but again sammy i don't know if tina had any i'm not trying to call you out tina but i know we can't see your thumbs up down yeah i apologize tina uh would you like to speak sure um [Music] my sentiments um are with the same as vince and sarah and therese there's no

211question there should not be a delay on um agreeing i agree that we should change the name and yet we still need some protocol around compu community input on the name change itself and get some ideas the uncomfortable work is taking the action and and following through with the action and the action from you know my viewpoint is we should not have a delay on um saying that we're going to change the name thank you tina sammy i didn't even say my part because i was trying to clarify that point um but it was just standing by that statement that sometimes we just want to wait too long to do the right thing and just to reiterate the uncomfortability it's not comfortable for everyone i mean even though i'm for this it's not comfortable for

212me like um as somebody that's targeted by some of the discrimination in town personally like it brings a sense of like well i get targeted more for speaking up for this and so i wanted to be real about that the risks taken as a local indigenous woman of color the risk that i take in advocating for something like this i don't think people realize that and so i wanted to be honest with the board with the staff and the community watching this that that is something i experienced here in our own community thank you lou for your courage and service and sacrifice thank you therese uh i don't think we should presume that we haven't heard from the community that these names are problematic i on the contrary have plenty of feedback that i have

213received but the names are problematic so i appreciate obviously that we want the community to be involved i think the renaming process is has been called out as a place where we need the community to take the lead on that but from an equity perspective we wouldn't go to the community and get and wait for them to confirm for us that we should address problems of racial of a racial nature of a racially violent nature and while i don't think that i i wouldn't go so far as to say the name itself is violence i would say that the name connotes though a history of violence for some individuals and we don't need a community consensus that that is happening we and we've had community members who have commented and shared that so it's true

214that they haven't necessarily commented and shared it in response to a statement that the board intends to bring this up and potentially take action that is a short timeline but to suggest that this hasn't been an ongoing community dialogue i think that misrepresents the voices if we turn this over to the community to decide this we will see individuals come forward to i'm sorry if we turn over to decide whether or not we should rename the schools i believe that it will be a repeat of when we went to the community to find out if the ptas should operate differently not how they should operate differently in terms of equity and i am not convinced that the voices of the individuals that are most affected by this will find their way to the top to

215be able to actually take the lead in that dialogue because that's not how privilege works privilege tends to be held by the people who have it pretty tightly and i don't see the community just saying let's just get rid of our privilege and let the individuals who for whom these these comments and these histories of these individuals is most uh is most um impactful to their own personal narrative and their and the historical narrative of their families let's let them have that conversation uh i don't see people just stepping aside and doing that and so and and because i'm quite convinced that community members have already made it clear um i think we are honoring at least some of our community members uh needs and expressed wishes about what we would do in terms of

216bringing leadership to this area and since we're not going to be able to make everyone happy in a situation where some people want the names and some people don't want the names um i i think we we're gonna have to take a position as a board about what's going to happen next so um again that's i think that i don't see a a reason why we need to continue to belabor the question of whether or not the name should be changed i feel very comfortable that there is both a rationale and plenty of community members who have made it known that they would like to see symbols that have um and signposts of institutional racism deconstructed removed and replaced with something that um is more reflective of who actually lives in our community and is

217more i don't want to just use like you know i'm not i'm just going to stop talking because i don't have another point i've already made my point that's it thank you teresa i appreciate your comments uh jay uh would you like to speak and then i'll try to summarize a possible alternative direction to the one that was proposed yes what i have heard first of all i wasn't confused lou i i absolutely understand the nature of the resolution it's a two-part one it says step one we will d name take off whatever the right word is change the name of three schools and we will embark on a policy on how to uh plan on how to rename them i absolutely understand what we're doing um we haven't talked a lot about the criteria

218that the resolution puts in but in effect it kind of says uh here's some criteria kind of like maybe the portland policy or whatever so we haven't talked about whether those are the right criteria but but i think what what bothers me is that a group of seven of us right now counts to be five or six of you who think that you know the right answer on something that the community has now had about what four days of input and that you don't owe them the standard that we've used uh again and again and again about listening and being open and being and you talk about courage it's about courage to listen to people who would say no no no don't change jefferson don't change uber and then having the courage to say i've

219heard you and i'm still going to say those are too much of a racist background people i'm going to change that would be courage it's not courage to to i think wait and let them have input and be open about it no one has explained to me emergency and so i i strongly oppose it and i i'm it's a team game so i will listen to what you all have to say and then we'll go from there thank you jay i appreciate it uh i do have a proposal from what i heard from the majority and from everybody is that we could come next week for a second reading with a vote on the resolution however with two uh caveats there uh number one entertaining uh uh alternative amendments uh that jay recommended and uh

220or might recommend and number one i think he might recommend uh or what i heard from jay you might want to recommend that we don't do step number one um and also another recommendation you thought of is regarding the stipulation on the criteria in step number two um you uh the parameters and step number two b uh you mentioned that there might be some other elements you want to propose or leaving it open to the process so you and i and probably with the authors as well could have a discussion on what that amendment might look like and we would have a motion on the resolution as is amend the proposed amendments if you wish so have a debate on that and then have debates on default resolution another thing that will happen is we

221will have uh from superintendent nas uh the charter which is usually f fyi not for action correct and it's in for feedback so we will give feedback to uh ryan on that charter and the charter is actually consistent with part two b which stipulates the superintendent has latitude to determine the scope of the process so rather than tell the community we're voting on this resolution here's the latitude of the scope of the process they will be also able to see the intention of the superintendent and we will be able to give feedback about the charter so that's i think the summary of a potential pathway and i would like to hear uh your thoughts on it uh let's do a raise of virtual hands uh so we can have a discussion on that uh what

222i would like to ask you if you feel comfortable with that approach and let me know if you want me to summarize this again uh who's next tell me i'm sorry i'm confused like what are you i know it's because it's late and also because we've discussed a lot um but can you like and i'm not asking you to restate it i'm just confused as exactly what you're asking are you asking if we want to which direction of the stuff you just said we wanted to do next yeah so okay brian you want to go ahead yes not at all what sammy just proposed is actually standard practice um for this board to bring something back for at a second reading for to take as an action item and if you decide not to take

223action on it you don't have to you can make that decision jay can come forward with an alternative proposal and sub proposals based on those um that set criteria so i don't think you have to do any sort of strap pulling right now unless you're not going to bring it back as a second reading for action on next thursday night i think it just progresses like everything else has that's i mean that's what you just described as a standard practice so i think i would say if there's something unique to the practice that you that that should be the consideration rather than what we tend to do okay okay thanks ryan yeah this was like i was just trying to get that clear for myself thank you sorry i i have a short question yes

224i just want to clarify the nature of our august 6th me that is a full meeting will we be hearing public comment in that meeting correct we will be hearing uh public comments uh on any topic including this topic from the community and for anyone who is listening to us right now they will be able to provide public comments through emailing the board secretary before noon on that day and they will be able to provide a telephonic comment in addition they can write to the board as well and that's the public comments will be open next week because it's a business meeting thank you sammy thanks vince series tammy when is the next meeting scheduled after the sixth um give me a second too so yes september 10th we have a board retreat scheduled for

225the 13th of august and the next business meeting is september 10th you got the answer terese i did yes thank you awesome and i would uh say the retreat uh schedule is very full uh so we can't i would discourage you doing any business during you that's retreating beyond what we're doing yeah it's not action oriented meeting all right uh teresa who else anyone wants to speak or have any comments before we move on and to summarize we're going to do a standard practice which is come out back with the second reading we could decide not to take an action or take an action uh the community is encouraged to provide feedback uh and comments as soon as we have any uh uh any language or a proposal from uh any board members as an

226alternative they can introduce it and we'll have it in advance in writing so we can review it and i will encourage that and as well we'll have an outline of the charter that will speak about the process so i think we've done really good discussion today i really appreciate everyone for the discussion and productive work any other further discussion on this item lou i will keep it brief i promise i just encourage folk to read the resolution and especially the parts that were pointed out earlier about the process stuff that's included in it so far and also the educational component we didn't get to talk about but during my initial comments that is something that is one of the most important parts of it as well to me that progressive educational curriculum component for students

227and thank you thank you any further comments see no further comments next item on the agenda is diane memorial scholarship program from ospa uh this is a for information only it's uh the scholarship that we had last year we applied again and we won the scholarship the application for the scholarship is included we have three sessions plus board evaluation if we subscribe and complete those sessions for school board professional developments we will get a scholarship which is monies that we can award to students so it's really an amazing thing and we've been doing it and we're very proud of the board commitment to do this work so thank you all and if there are any comments or questions or feedback and i'll start with ryan so um we would continue to work with kristen miles

228this year and the first meeting with with her would be a part of our board retreat taking the board goals and the board evaluation from last spring the two areas that were identified were community engagement and the second area was [Music] racial equity and so we would start um with our board retreat focusing focus on those two areas and that would be um for and so i'll be reaching out to kristin and working with her on that retreat date um and some of that time spent working with her so that would be the first component one of the things that's been good nice about it has been there's some ability to tailor to our district because we've gone through that program before um and so that initial board governance training um we've all seen the

229video um of the coach and the students wanting uh uh you know all the scenarios we've seen all the scenarios um which were between management and board governance so board level management level and so we wouldn't have to go through that piece again we would really just be able to tailor it to the focuses we need to continue to move forward so we're excited about that fence so i just wanted to raise a it was a conversation that lou and i have had about and it's the and you as well sammy about the social justice local social justice tour and i'm just curious what the possibility is of of bringing that into our professional development this year i certainly don't want to discuss that in detail tonight but i just want to put it on

230the boards um on radar and uh i think lou can speak more eloquently to you know the tour and what's included because she's actually been on the tour and i haven't right um so it's actually part of dr nache barnes ethno history methodologies courses um at osu and um basically it has different stories of um that you don't really hear about about our local community here in corvallis um i was part of the first class and i learned so much during research for that and there's three different booklets at this point um actually there's four now because they just had another class but um if order interested i thought it'd be interesting when i talked to sami and vince about it as a sort of development especially as we're talking about learning histories um it

231focuses on untold histories specifically so there's lots of early black community members indigenous community members there's more recent stories of queer community members asian asian american community members that you don't really learn anywhere else and they're really amazing they're um they're not they're written from a like historical fiction type um lens because it's not like a biography of the people but it's telling their stories um in another way but and there's a map too so you would basically go to the places that you read about and see that exact connection to that story in town so it's really cool i have copies of them and happy to do a rotation if you all are interested and ryan melissa to you all too but yeah so i guess email me if you're interested wonderful thank you

232and probably i'll connect you with uh ryan so we can do uh maybe incorporate it in uh in the structural part of the professional development i'm assuming probably after we all do it uh do the tours we could have a debrief i think that could be very valuable as well so thank you for uh giving that a proposal i'm really excited about it it will get us to walk around and really understand and appreciate the the history that's we're not aware of so i've been hearing about these tours and have never gotten to participate and i would love to have a better rounded understanding of the history of our community i think that would be fabulous so thank you for bringing that up for sure and they're um i really like doing them as a

233group better like how they're intended and having them the stories read to you on site but because of the pandemic um i kind of talked to dr barnd a little bit about some alternatives to work on that um but if other people are interested in that he's definitely the connection nice awesome thank you lou any further comments on this scholarship program i'd just like to say on behalf of the osba board development team thank you for making that investment and doing the work thank you thank you well we're really appreciative of osba leadership on this topic and our partnership with them has been very helpful for our school district and school board all right see now for their comments unless there's someone on the phone wants to speak we're good so see no further comments

234uh next item on the agenda is consolidated action as a reminder the items under this portion of the agenda are for action does anyone have a question about anything in the console consolidated action would you like to pull out anyone anything for a question events i would just like to make a comment uh item c under consolidated action is extension of the superintendent's contract i think it is you know you all know that i i now work for osba and i and i have much more contact with with superintendents around the state and i just i'm just going to tell you that we have one of the best superintendents in oregon and probably in the region as well and we are very very lucky and so it is with great enthusiasm that i will be

235voting in a you know affirmative for approving consolidated action tonight because we have an amazing superintendent who is a great leader and that was very evident at the beginning of this meeting i was just very impressed with the performance of our staff tonight and what you folks have pulled together and indeed jay you're right they're building a plane as they're flying it and it's just i'm just glad that our children are in your hands [Music] i would love to make i would love to make a motion as well um let's see if unless there's someone else who wants to pull out anything all right one two three see none uh vince messier motion i move to approve consolidated action do i hear a second a second that says by tourists correct yes awesome so moved

236by vince and uh second by terese to approve the consolidated action any further debates on the motion see none all up let's take a roll call uh jay hi therese hi vince hi lou hi tina hi sarah hi did i miss anyone else passes unanimously and thank you thank you uh we extended that part of the consulting action is extending the three-year contract for more year uh ryan we're enthusiastic and excited to continue working with you uh we we really trust you and uh feel very honored to work with you it's a partnership that's been productive and your ability to lead is phenomenal it's our pleasure all right any other uh items on the agenda i think we have board member comments so uh go on the ray's hand so we can know who's on

237that docket right we have first jay and then vince and then therese okay so i have two comments first um ryan i i would love to have said i'm enthusiastic because i am and so thank you for your hard work and um i have told all the people i run into the secret to a strong board is having a really good superintendent because you make our life work really well and so thank you i i'm absolutely uh supportive of what you're doing my second comment is to is to say to the board um without i hope predicting to a bunch of people that might be listening i'm sorry but i think this is going to tear us up a little bit in terms of the the issue of thomas jefferson um i don't think the

238other two will um so i apologize for not making it unanimous and uh because i think it's gonna be a a real darned problem for us um and we'll just move forward so i will be back with uh vince perhaps and and say here's my wording of my uh amendment um and you know you you get to vote the way you guys want to but uh i'm really sorry that our community is gonna he's gonna be excited now um that's the way it is thank you jay and i will just comment on that if you allow me i really appreciate us having a great relationship as a board where uh we're comfortable to disagree and also uh we agree to be uncomfortable and we venture into uh the good trouble necessary trouble so thanks for

239embracing that uh next up is vince first is appreciation it's good to see you melissa harder in the flesh the other is appreciation for our the construction uh tours and uh i'm sure dale kai kendall has already gone to bed if he knows what's good for him but i just really want to express appreciation for the amazing work on the bond and sammy and sarah and i got to go out and see the work that was happening and you know interact with the contractors on the site i didn't get to go to sheldon but we got to go to lincoln and garfield and it's just impressive in the impressive professionalism of our contractors and uh once again i feel very grateful for our bond leadership team and for winnehaw and uh it's just that is

240a real bright point in in all this pandemic the struggle with the pandemic and uh we're gonna have some great schools yeah lincoln lincoln's gonna be an awesome school so i'm really looking forward to it thanks vince next up is therese and sarah uh yes i wanted to echo the sentiment that as a board i do think we are able to work well together and able to have differences of perspective view even land in different positions regarding outcomes and still continue to work well together i am hopeful that our ability to model that will um deflect some of the concerns about our community not being able to well being severely disrupted in a negative way i'm hoping for disruption because i disruption is a great change agent um i'm not hoping for it to be

241destructive process but disruptive process absolutely i hope that we can um our board and our superintendent and district leadership um that we are able to uh and i am confident that we will be able to navigate this process in a way that um will allow for differences and still allow our us to do our work and for our community to still thrive so um yeah i guess i'm i'm anticipating disruption i'm not i'm hopeful for good things to come from it though [Music] thank you therese next up is sarah yeah thank you um so vince in all your contact at osba where you're talking to superintendents and districts and stuff please don't tell them how wonderful our superintendent is the last thing we need is headhunters coming and stealing them away so i'm sorry the

242rumor is out also this republic um yeah we and we need to acknowledge the strength of our superintendent and his whole team and everyone who's worked on this um plan to you know not only build a plane while you're trying you're flying it but build a plane that's carrying our children um which is you know beyond stressful and concerning because we have kids who um are gonna have a hard time and we just are doing our best to take care of them um i wanted to share that i had another conversation with oregon state today um i had reached out to them about some concerns i'd had about reopening and metrics that we had been giving as school districts but wondering if what their metrics were for um opening the university and steve clark who

243i talked to was not aware of any set metrics for osu opening um i think he is going to be reliant or not he osu is going to be relying very heavily on the community to um [Music] mitigate some of the potential problems with the incoming students which just unfortunately i mean fortunately because it's what we should all be doing but unfortunately because we can't mess this up it means that we need to be all the more conscious of the choices we make and the risks we take and we need to be very careful and conservative about um our social distancing thank goodness we now have a mask requirement in place that certainly makes things feel a little bit better um but it's really going to be on us and really what this determines is

244whether we can open schools again um and i kind of hate you especially as somebody who works with college students and so i think about kids kindergarten all the way through i i hate to be worried that one group of the students that i care about is going to be determining whether all the rest of my students can go to school but um i think that's what we're all worried about so please as a community for anybody who is still at 10 30 watching this meeting um recognize it's really going to be on us and our behavior to determine when and how our kids get to to go to school lou thank you sarah lou just wanted to circle way back to the beginning of the meeting and again thank ryan and the team for

245such a great plan you have in place for not just the kids but the staff too um it's so comprehensive so i just wanted to restate that appreciation and like been said it's really great to see you too melissa and um yeah that's all i have to say studying about the other stuff any further comments all right the the uh record i remember 10 35 so i'm not gonna have a filibuster until 10 35. uh see no further comments we are adjourned thank you so much we were so close sammy i want to keep my record thank you good night everybody