001and they're here to share a little bit of the work they've started and the team they've gathered and also i believe they're going to give us some input on the resolution that we've been discussing so i'm very eager and with that i'll turn it over to katherine and ben i want to say thank you it was really exciting to get the invitation am i supposed to call you scott or mr stockwell i'm not sure what should i be scott works great scott okay um because i do want to share ben and i want to share what what's been going on on our side and how things kind of got started um we have spoken um we've really kind of connected with tren and scott um in the summer and before we got things going but
002we we were trying really hard to kind of think about two things here one we want to look at what has already been started what you guys have started um and with the resolution and um i have some questions you know just kind of um not not deep questions or like specific questions but i want to kind of start opening a dialogue with with with you because i want you to realize that ben and i really want to have this open communication with you um my mom always told me that you know whenever i went over to a friend's house if i really liked being over there the main goal was to be asked back and so i want to take that approach with with the board because i really do want to have you
003guys ask us back and continue the conversation with us and the learning and the growing um and a lot of that starts with with all of this work since we started this we're realizing the importance of communication the importance of talking with people and probably the most important aspect of it is the listening um and that goes for all of us here um and i would love the opportunity over time to sit and chat and have good conversations with each one of you um because we all have our journey and our experiences which then add to our actions um ben do you want to add anything to that no just that again we're excited and grateful to be here um and just to be part of a a larger movement you know just recognizing it's
004one thing in isolation to have thoughts and dreams and um wonderings uh it's very different to actually see that there's like-minded people with you on that um i know catherine and i had talked a little bit in the last week or so around tonight and it's you know we're excited and pumped to kind of share what's been going on with our equity stuff but we thought it actually would be you know wonderful to just hear a bit more about the resolution um initially um because it's really kind of like your story and so it's a way to kind of hear how your story and and hopes and dreams and maybe fears even with the resolution how is that kind of aligning with with eq with equity work um because in many ways we just recognize
005that for a statement to be a reality that um that can be a lot of work and that can be a lot of extra um you know effort and in many ways we feel like this equity team and this equity infrastructure could probably be kind of the how of the what that you've written that you've written this and for that to be a reality um you know takes a team effort and that this team you know we would love to be part of making that resolution you know felt um beyond just words so but i just want to see you know katherine you know i know we were kind of wanted to feel feel that out a little bit can anyone tell me the history of how this resolution got started so just to tell
006you where we are you know um scott shared us with it shared it with us about a month ago um and i was just kind of wondering what's what what was that connection of where the actions started is there you know can anyone talk about that or was there one of you that or was it a group of you was there an event yeah i can start and then trend and the rest of the board can can fill in the gaps that i may leave out based on my aging memory so right right when um right after the george floyd incident and we were seeing huge protests probably within i don't know maybe a week or two after i reached out to my wonderful assistant christian said we need to we need to do some
007searching and looking for some sort of resolution because we know from previous incidents that we've had in this district that our students of color our families of color teachers of color and our are all of our students get anxious and want to hear how we stand and what we what we support um and so christy and i set out and perused through multiple resolutions from many districts from previous years that made a statement on where school boards stand in relation to um social equity racial equity gender equity and we found one that we thought fit i did some very little wordsmithing on it and we brought it forward to the board and the board took a look at it and read through it and i explained you know i feel this is important because our
008community needs to know where we stand and and our children of color need to know that we support them as well and the board looked at it read through it and we had some pretty good conversations and really ended up on you know this is nice scott this is what we want but we need to make this personal and we need to make this meaningful to us and our community and what you've shared with us doesn't seem like it quite fits so let's start talking with people and so we reached out to the leaders who organized the student leaders who organized the march through the community and took some input from them um we had some more discussions um when we found that your group was coming together the board thought this would be a
009great opportunity for staff to have a voice we've also had conversations about having students have some voice so in the end we have a meaningful document that represents the st helens school district in our community and not a boilerplate document that was borrowed from some school that which won't be named in washington so that's the the kind of the short story to it um i'm not sure is it anything else to add from the board i have some things but i would rather reach out and say does anybody else have anything from the board that would like to to say on that before i say my stuff well i totally agree with what scott said as far as we wanted to include more people we felt it was better to put one together with all
010of you representing it also from the students all the way up so basically for i think for all of us it just wasn't good enough from washington and we wanted a whole lot better i was going to say um for me i think we had a little bit of hesitation um really not in that it wouldn't be executed but so we wanted to make sure that we were doing something that was capable of being executed and that we weren't asking too much um and also just that we were doing what our community wanted but also educating our community at the same time because we know that everybody's at different areas of education in this whole process so we didn't want it to just be thrown out there and say yes we made it good but
011we um wanted it to be done right it felt a little like something we had a lawyer write so we could throw a band-aid into hemorrhage that's just what it did it okay now we did our duty we wrote a resolution let's move on and it's another resolution in the pile of resolutions and you don't want it to be let that way you want the the grit behind it we want a living document that actually is going to do something okay it just really felt to me like as as i read it it was a really pretty resolution that i don't know it's right on the time it's right on everything we had the lawyer check it yeah you didn't you're not going to get sued over this one and and now let's just throw
012that at it and we'll pass it all real quick and and then uh by the time september rolls around because this was back in july or whatever it was um you know we can move on and that's just another thing that went in the stack in the book and yeah we already passed a resolution on that and we're done and and that just felt a little unsatisfactory i believe to everybody on the board it was just like i said it's a it was kind of a band-aid on a hemorrhage and and i think having the dialogue and the conversation that we're having and not being in such a hurry if we use the exact same wording i would be satisfied i just want to make sure that we have buy-in and acceptance from a broad
013group of people and not just we are we often rely on scott okay you you go get us something we'll sign it this isn't one of those things that we were happy to do we just said no no no no we need to have greater it needs to be part of our community our school community and our uh our total community it needs to be part of seeing how it's in it but there needs to be buy-in and and like i said it could be the exact same words but we want to make sure that people have been heard and not just we hand you a resolution we did our job now move on so when we when ben and i arrive here and talk about this so it sounds like to me to kind
014of clarify is that you guys are willing to keep this dialogue open because you want it to be a living document you want to make sure that it isn't just a band-aid that there is action behind it and you're seeing the value in the work that we're doing um and started and we'll go and talk a lot about that because we can talk a lot about that um it really makes me you know i i was a little concerned you know there's a piece of paper and it has really great words on it um and we've looked at it and there's you know it is it's it's lovely but how do we actually get that to your right you know this living document of what we're gonna do for this community and for i mean
015especially for our students um in the community like we have to really recognize the community itself and we're not like any other community and so keeping in mind how do we take on those efforts to figure out how to do that because it is this isn't you know this is huge and this is time-consuming and we have to be have a focus and and um patience and understanding and then the most important thing is we have to actually speak the truth because if we're not speaking the truth we're not going to get as far as we truly want to do and be and so i you know i was telling ben and and scott that my goal is you know to retire in 30 years which is in 10 years knowing that the equity team
016is still moving forward because this work is never going to end i mean this is a committee that should not stop and so it takes a lot of time and energy and i just love the fact that you guys are with us and to open that communication and to be asked back and see see each other as equals of in this in this journey for sure well for me the history goes back to when saint helens high school played richard washington and benson high school and yes he did tell me what year would that i don't know anything about that might have been 70 71 maybe 72 but richard washington uh went on i think you probably know him as he he was he he he played in the nba and went on and was
017a pretty famous athlete but we played them and when benson came out here it was horrible then and it was no different than when we had the incident with park rose this has been going on forever and i can also tell you as a teacher what i felt like when chester hixson i mean i i think of all these things he always comes to mind because chester came to me and said you know where he'd only been in class for like six weeks he says you know our family's gonna have to leave and and that has just burned on me for many years and i liked chester hicks and he was a great kid and he liked me enough to come and and we talked about it but um those things those things just kind
018of burned in me so so i i think you can understand that this isn't weeks of distress this isn't parked rules this isn't any of that stuff this is a this is a systemic thing in the community and has been for 50 years that i've been here and active in this community and it was true when i went to high school i there were events there too because i went to david douglas and we were largely a white suburban high school and and a couple of my friends uh claxton welch played played for the dallas cowboys has a super bowl ring he was in my class but i talked to him once at a class reunion he says imagine what it was like when we had a cotton cords dance in the spring and the
019seniors elected me king cotton and those same i mean i so this clear back from when i was in high school this stuff has has i i just i don't know i i these things have hurt for a long long time and i want to see them fixed i mean i i i have more than stories like that but those are things that i can see uh i i witnessed it in school i you know i was pretty innocent kid but um yeah you felt it it's not just witness you felt it yeah i i did and and and uh claxton's mom retired as a school teacher but she had to teach in the ghetto school from david douglas over at russellville and they lived in a small house over there and and she was
020an amazing amazing educator i would name a school after her if i was individuals but um i i just have to say that you know some so these things are felt by our your school board uh in many ways and and that we would like to partner with you and and we don't we're kind of i'm a little removed from the situation in in some ways but we we're actually asking for your help to make this be we're not we're not saying here's our thing uh bless it we're asking we need your help we need your help in developing the path that we're going to follow thank you i have a a clear well a clearer connection the thing that happens to me is when i sit and talk with someone we had these interviews
021with some some of the staff who signed up for the equity team and they were supposed to be you know technically a half hour and i think because i do have some kind of history with some of the staff one person i had never met before these these conversations ended up going on for about an hour and 20 minutes um and so the more you reveal just like bill i'm gonna call you bill if that's okay what bill just talked about um i don't know if all of you have heard that before and being connected to that emotional background kind of has a better under we have a better understanding of who's sitting in this meeting and we have to have those conversations to figure out who is sitting in front of us what our
022strengths are and what really motivates us for this for this work um i actually called scott after interviewing six people in one day and i couldn't breathe i was so exhausted and in fact between interviews i actually had to cry so um then you want to talk means you're the right person for the job yeah it just is it's powerful to ask even just one or two questions and sit in it and it takes courage of course to have that vulnerability and as as all of you have seen with catherine you know for decades in this district of being someone who wants to listen and people feel that genuine curiosity pretty quickly so that even someone who she doesn't know knows oh catherine's safe for me to be honest about my fears and my dreams
023with this work um and if those typically go together is this recognizing that you know when you're leaping off the edge um there's a lot of panic and then but something motivated you to actually take that risk and so it's exciting to know that yeah this this resolution is big and there's a lot in there and it's exciting to think of what the impact could be and of course there's fears we're human in that um and so it's it's a real honor to have heard those 26 people in three days that catherine and i talked to um and it's an honor and privilege to just hear your own stories um and to know that that conversation can continue um and and the wondering and that also draws others into a story and that's very different
024than that that paper and resolution that you were talking about bill of knowing people aren't going to be drawn to a piece of paper but if people are living that out and it's embodied and felt then calling them into that is way more captivating so hang on one second oh sorry train you want to talk just for a second um so i'm somewhat unique on this board in that i don't have a historical connection to this community so i came from somewhere else came from a very vastly different environment and yet the same environment that i came from have many of the same things that exist there that exist here so the problems that we face are simply not strictly inside of our community that we live in here they're they're pretty large and when
025scott brought the resolution to us to look at um it was a really big thing for me because i really appreciated the concept that we needed to stand by and say that these things are wrong but we've been doing a lot of standing by and saying these things are wrong for a very long period of time in a lot of different locations and yet here we are we're continuing the conversations so what we've been doing in the past may not necessarily be reflective of what we need to do in the future and everybody has their own unique experiences they have their own unique views but the struggle for me at times is without empathy it's really tough to really kind of understand some of the things that are going on when you look at somebody
026across from you and say what's your life experience and for me equity and inclusion is about learning to have a better sense of empathy and a better sense of how to connect to people and at the end of the day our job as a board is to create policies and help scott to continue the great work that he does and so we really need to be focusing on how do we educate all of our students to the very best of our capacity and what have we been missing all of these years as we move forward with that and so when i see a resolution that says we absolutely stand against these things and resolutions are not designed to tell us what we're doing next but for me it wasn't enough it was not enough to
027just say we stand against these things it was yes we do we have policies frankly already that say that we stand against these things but really it's about what do we do to change the situation that we find ourselves frequently in how do we find ourselves to move forward and not just say we stand against it it's an awful thing and now we're done and so that i think is um where we started with resolution and then in the middle of that the equity team came to our attention and i can't tell you how excited i was to hear about that because the truth is is that nothing really happens without the grassroots movement inside of our schools to be able to have those conversations and to be able to have people feel comfortable and
028vulnerable enough to start saying maybe maybe we do need to take a look at this because many of us sit in positions of privilege that we've never really had to contemplate what that actually means for us and so to really start looking at these things it's difficult and i can tell you my own journey in many cases it was a raw emotional ragged scar that i've still tried to kind of work through but it's necessary work and the resolution is merely a part of that process and so your input on the resolution for me is important because it's going to be reflective of the entirety and it's not just coming from from on high saying this is what we expect you to do it's we are all in this together and we're trying to navigate
029these very troubled waters and here's where we're getting and we're all moving in the same direction so for that i am most appreciative of the efforts that you've been willing to take on and the board is their own entity but me as the individual on the board i support this 100 and i cannot tell you how much i appreciate your bravery your passion and and and the heavy lifting that you're going to be doing because this is incredibly difficult work and so whatever i can do as a person i want to know or want you to know that i will be there to support you thank you so um i there's a couple things is there a deadline of input for this resolution um can we sit and talk about it i mean um do
030you want it you know signed and sealed and and finished and then kind of start the work i mean what are what are your thoughts um on the resolution and the timeline of the resolution i i guess i'll i'll speak i i don't i don't believe we should put a timeline on the resolution i i really believe you know they'll talk about it being organic or trin or a few of the board members um i i think we'll know when it's ready okay and the conversation and the awareness that it will bring as we discuss the different aspects of the resolution is all part of i think the power of taking the time and doing it right so you know and there's all sorts of words that have become politicized and that's not what anyone
031here is interested in doing um you know we've all had obstacles in our lives um i've had obstacles to get to where i am but they're different than people of color they had different obstacles and so as we explore those and kind of codify it so to speak in a resolution um we'll know when it's ready and i think if it takes a better part of the year that's fine because you know the core word of resolution is resolute and that's what we want right we want to be resolute in what we're putting forward okay so that kind of gives us an idea a little bit about you know you know where you guys are in the history um not everyone has spoken does anyone want to speak who has not talked about this yeah
032i'll speak a little bit um they covered everything that i would want to say anyways that we can take a fancy piece of paper make it all with big words and just throw up on the wall in a pretty frame but it doesn't mean much if we're not all working together i like the fact that we're using everybody on this to make a you know a document that we can educate our children with um you know like what bill said in the 70s um is what i i experienced in our the high school that you know in the mid 90s thinking now that i would be gone and there's still stuff that's happening today that happened in the mid 90s which is appalling because we've made huge headways since the mid 90s and yet they're
033still happening and it's and you'll hear people say oh we're not you know there's no racism here and saying hello but that's not true we can say that all we want but it's not true it's still here and we you know if we all work together it we get a lot more done it means a lot more if you know we just work together and if we don't but if we put a timeline on it we just rush it you know like what scott said it will be done when we know it's done okay yeah i was curious as as a group with this statement um like how you're thinking of kind of presenting this or rolling it out because i know that worst case scenario kind of like some of you mentioned like are
034we just you know uploading this document to a website and that's it but knowing oh we want to be meaningful um and so yeah i just don't know if you've thought of you know whenever again no timeline with it but um when we when you as a group and as a district we present this as here's where we stand um have you thought about you know how that would look so from my perspective you know we do a lot of pomp and circumstance with resolutions oftentimes a lot of whereas and whereas and whereas and um you know the the the power in this is not in the pomp and circumstance at the destination it's going to be far more about the journey that takes us there and the number of people that we communicate with
035along the way to figure out what makes the most sense so whatever the destination ends up being and and whatever the final iteration of this document becomes to me it's far more important to how did we get here who did we connect with what were the individuals that we reached out to that had provided input into these things and at that point i think i'd like to you know we'll do the whereas because that's part of the process but i think sharing the story of how we get to that final version to me is probably more important than the words that will be written down on that document by that point that sounds great that sounds really great i'm excited about that part because we've got to make that journey and document that journey behind
036and that's the action behind this you know this document well that's impressive i like that so i'll tell you a little bit about how equity teams started um i was upset about george floyd really upset i was at home with you know with the pandemic i have a suppressed immune system i'm not going out i sit on the couch and look at my phone and i was crying quite a bit and i just was tired of of of being upset um my personal opinion is if we weren't sitting in a pandemic i don't know if we would be talking about george floyd i don't i don't i mean i personally don't think that would be happening so i think this timing i keep going reflecting back on timing and because the timing piece i i
037love the fact i pay attention to when things kind of come together um so i was asking myself really hard questions alone on my couch this summer um i have two sons i've married a man who's hispanic and and most most of our marriage i could say um he was undocumented and we were fighting immigration so i have a little bit of history um with my own personal journey that's been rough but um and then i have sons who are pretty i don't know not lippy but in your face asking hard questions that i could not necessarily answer and the bottom line was i could probably say to myself i didn't think i was racist but i could honestly say that i wasn't anti-racist and in fact that was a new word for me um
038many of the times i'm asking then new vocabulary and so there comes a point where if you're going to start this journey you got to look at yourself and what you truly know which goes back to vocabulary if you're an educator it goes back to vocabulary so i was upset with that idea you know like okay i can't necessarily call myself anti-racist and sometime in july and some of you already heard this oea reached out to me to ask to be a part of the empowerment um academy and it was run by aaron whitlock who did a lot of she she was our guru when we did quality assessment practices which i was a big part of so i saw i got an email from aaron whitlock i better pay attention because it must be
039really good and on the same day i got an email from ben ben and i really didn't know each other very well at all in fact the only interaction we had because he's at the high school and i'm at the middle school but then i was actually at lewis and clark for a while but um because of sixth grade being all over the place but um i got an email from ben asking about can we start an equity team on the same day we had i had the oea invitation um and i was just like wow this is timing so i better be paying attention to this because i just thought it was serendipitous so i actually called oea or emailed aaron whitlock and said hey i got this guy named ben who would be
040really good for this empowerment you know he's asking me to do this can you extend an invitation to this academy to ben and he did of course he applied you know and he did really well with his answers and i did not when i applied i was like whatever i was so angry and upset i just you know i was so tired of the summer and feeling that way so he got in right away and i was on a wait list until he actually had to interview me again but we were the only two um and so what they did was accept people in this academy um they called the you know the i5 corridor like these people along i-5 different communities and see what they can do to start their own equity team within
041their own district ben and i are the only ones that are a team and so we're a little bit unique on this team so we both got accepted and then we just started you have no idea how much time i've spent with ben um and ben has spent with me um to be honest with you we're looking at 20 hours a week of work ben is outside teaching and all of that um and i'm trying to keep keep up with him because his pace is pretty pretty big so we got started with the oea and then we started talking to scott and and tren and um greatness happened i'm not joking we decided we were going to pitch it to every school um and so we had we have a mentor from oea who helped
042us pitch it and we went to zoom meetings of every staff meeting um at one point the elementary had 111 people in a in a google meet and how to pitch something and be emotional on with 111 people but we did and then we watched our inbox and our inbox started ticking away with people inviting people to join the equity team and in my head we were kind of laughing i said hey then i think we're going to get 63 people right and i had this kind of like kind of optimistic kind of excited and he's you know he's very i don't know correct in his mannerisms and so he didn't say catherine that's crazy because i don't think he really thought that but his his his number as he's admitted is was a little
043lower we have 70 people who volunteered for this group and we've extended the invitation to the school board and some of you are on that and i totally appreciate that but we have 70 people from everyone was invited right classified certified all of that i did the math the um yesterday and to be honest with you that's 21.5 percent of this district who want change and want to be part of this system the flip side is we have 70 people now what are we gonna do right that scares me to death and in fact ben and i talk about fears all the time how do we take care of the needs of 70 people finding the areas of equity that they are curious about and want to have introspection of of themselves and guide that
044work because now i asked and they started to show up so ben you want to talk a little bit about what we've been doing too yeah that was exciting um and just a little context for where my path aligned you know with catherine was you know i'm i'm pretty new just two years into the district and just trying to get oriented to the community and the school and the district um and so really last year was when i first started thinking through equity more intentionally and that for me this was kind of just the intersection there's the crossover of a lot of other work so we're looking at trauma informed care we're trying to see just different health in our community we're trying to look at the well-being of our staff and students we're trying
045to have culturally responsive teaching there's so much that can go under that equity umbrella that i know i often feel crushed by that a lot of educators do a lot of people who are caring about their community that can be overwhelming um but in the spring kind of my own sense of well what's at the center of um a host of issues that we can feel passionate about solving and for me it was more around like how do we handle our discomfort and so when we're trying to handle our discomfort of how do i reach this kid academically and i can't reach them um or a culture that i really don't understand at all or a family that i haven't connected with a topic that i don't really even know how to begin that conversation
046that it seemed like that was a common denominator in many of my conversations and also just knowing like i s i'm just beginning to uncover this and so in reaching out to staff i guess it was in june or so when i sent that email to catherine and a few others who i knew had been in the community and had a better sense of the pulse of what's going on and so i knew that that would be a crucial part of moving forward of just having partners who knew way more than me and had a better grasp and relationships with people this knowing that that vulnerability isn't is likely not going to happen very easily with someone who's you know face you don't recognize at all um so for me again that the word that
047catherine used was serendipitous in terms of that timing of knowing okay her story and my story and knowing that this partnership just allows for a pretty authentic modeling of what we hope for our group is that in in some ways i may be ahead in some areas of equity um for catherine and then it flips with another topic and so that there's a give and take rather than there being a sense of um any shame or guilt with where we're at just knowing wherever you're at we want to grow and that growth isn't going to happen if you're never uncomfortable and so learning to accept that discomfort is going to be there and what do you do with it and that takes some vulnerability to trust each other and so that's the exciting part about
048seeing people trust each other in maybe new ways and again as catherine said i think this pandemic has probably created some more honesty and awareness about that need to maybe be courageous in new ways um so we're relieved frankly to have you know of that 70 know that we have 23 people who've said hey we will are willing to commit a little more um we're willing to give some more time to support this so that core team um you know just lets us know that this can help it be sustainable and going to that team too and knowing yeah this isn't um you know just a blip on our life but we really want this to be lasting you know like catherine was saying we want this to be sustainable and that means creating like
049an infrastructure and that's the exciting part about talking with you and knowing that yes there's a grass roots and i think it's very unique to have top and bottom aligned with our heart and our hope for the community and for us to not want these words to just be words but want them to be lived out where we would you know just dreaming together and like i was sharing earlier that dream always has some risk you know there's always um there can be a for boating joy of like i can't really enjoy the moment if i'm always living in fear of what's next but that diminishes when you know you're not alone when you know that that connection is expanding and that again people are drawn into that together um so just those numbers are
050helpful just to give you some raw you know sense of where we're at in gathering input and that honesty i don't know if i'm able to share my stream but just having some surveys where stu or staff are opening up about where they're at and willing yeah so i know captain we'd talked about sharing and i know we've already had a good chunk of your time um but i could share my screen and just show just nice pie charts when people do surveys where it just shows staff's um willingness to open up and wanting to partner and um and even doing a survey that they don't have to do in the midst of their schedule um and so that's you know exciting to to see and friday is when we'll we'll meet and begin to
051form small groups so we know that it that trust isn't going to happen with 70 people um overnight is um for for us to have that will often be come you know little by little you know one or two people maybe more um and uh that's going to get uncomfortable at some point but the work is beginning and so we're excited and part of that core team is um really what we would love to have in this conversation is sharing their own fears so we talked to them about what are you afraid of you know what are you worried about but also what are you excited about and identifying their own unique strengths and that being an asset just like all of you have identified strengths as a board of how you can work together
052um and be a team in that way and we're excited to kind of share maybe next month um being able to come and say hey this is these are all the strengths of our core team these are their stories and and more specifically we'd love to narrow down our values to have more of a um a framework um to know okay what does equity look like when it's felt and maybe there are four or five key values that we can you know land on as a core team and just hold open handily to you next month and say hey where do some values you have it and where did these align and again that collaborative piece to know that it could be ideally a collective vision this isn't ben and catherine having a vision uh
053this isn't our team having a vision we want this to be like much like you were saying with this resolution as wanting it to be a community saying we can come around this um and want to live it out the thing that i think ben and i do well is i think when i presented to the schools i was i mean i was very authentic i wasn't trying to sell anything but i think what people felt was they could relate to where i was in this process which is pretty early on right i feel really um at a beginner's you know path what do i know about race what don't i know i mean i'm focusing on race this this year um my journey um but what ben taught me which is a lot is
054i think you know i am very passionate about dyslexia and it is because it is close to me it is i am dyslexic my son's dyslexic and what ben taught me was you know i've been actually on a board to go past laws in salem um a couple years ago about dyslexia but dyslexia is also equity right i'm fighting for something that's not equitable and what ben taught me was that same passion i have for dyslexia other people have in this district about trauma other people have about um poverty right and so we have these experts or our passion but it doesn't matter what our passion is it's all equity right and if you can identify that um and a lot of us right now really need to um you know i want to learn
055about race because i feel like i am really weak weak in that area and so what we've presented to the 70 is what what falls under equity could be a variety of things and the majority of the 70 do want to look at race but equity is not just race it's all over the place and what happens is i feel like we've been shouting and screaming at each other all about equity this whole time like all these teachers who are upset about trauma or poverty or dyslexia or sped or quality assessment practices it's all equity right and if you realize that falls underneath that we've been screaming at each other for decades to pay attention to me and listen to me because this isn't right for this kid um and so we really i feel
056like i'm new to this benefit with race ben ben is my guide and i what i'm telling people is you have to be honest and vulnerable it takes a lot for me to call ben and say i don't know what that word is on this survey you just sent out and i am one of these leaders how am i supposed to fill out this survey you've created and i don't know what one of those words means right i could not tell him that and guess my way through it but it's time for me to learn the vocabulary right and so we're asking the same of everybody else on this team what do you want to focus on what do you want to be be able to talk about eloquently you know i'm tired of being
057uncomfortable and not knowing what to say to people when i know something's not right that's not right and the other part of it my mom taught me to be polite and now it's time to not be so polite you know you know interrupt someone and say i don't feel comfortable with that word instead of being quiet so that's kind of what we're doing with 70 people thank you and and i think to your point um i i really like to hear that you know equity is a number of things and it is a wide umbrella and you're absolutely right the conversations that have been going on amongst different factions are all speaking the same thing they're just not talking the same language and so a way to speak together and to guide those processes so
058that at the end of the day the students that we need to be reaching that we may not be reaching we find the different pathways to connect to them we may not have been thinking about and a lot of that conversation revolves around equity the thing that's most exciting for me is if we have 70 people that have equity right here in the front of their brain and then they go back to school and are watching and looking like when we go back to school even now but like if it's on the forefront of their brain and you're thinking about it all of a sudden you see things very differently and so if you if you care about it and if you're paying attention to it if it's here and activated you see it all
059all over the place and so that's 70 people in every you know like throughout the whole school district so i'm excited about that piece yeah and i think this one thing to i guess we've said before but i just wanted to say here is that really our our focus this year is the internal work um of course we do want like impact we know we would love to change the community tomorrow but we're just recognizing that we can't expect what we don't model and so we can't really you know expect change from our students or vulnerability from our students encourage if we haven't ourselves had that journey um and and of course that allows us to draw our students into something that's authentic and real too to be able to tell our students and community
060that yes like this is scary and i can understand that fear um and it is exciting and something personal drives me to continue that journey um is very different than just you know here's paper and here's what you're supposed to do and this is the rules now a very different conversation and so that's again um a lot of that work that that we're going to be working with oea around just reminding us of like going slow allows you to actually go fast that once you have that ownership and that trust um you can do a lot when that happens um and most of us have felt that in some way with some group whether it's with sports or your family is you know okay once you have that trust then that change can can happen
061much faster and much deeper than you might have thought of earlier yeah so last last week tren and i um participated in a workshop hosted by oregon school boards association on equity racism microaggressions and one of the key takeaways for me was a discussion about the difference between awareness and mitigation um and many times we work on the awareness piece and expect it to take care of racism or you know any other type of issue that's facing confronts equity right so i think it's important and i hear you guys saying this that awareness is the first step before we try to jump to mitigation or anti-racism and so it's important to keep that in mind that we have to have a better understanding of what that is collectively and we can't expect any real action
062to happen until we start working on the mitigation piece and they're two separate things awareness and then mitigation and too often we try to do them both together at the same time and aren't successful but i hear the conversation that both of you are having is we need to talk about what it is topic journey pure stories and i think that's fantastic so thank you for that does the board have any other comments or questions there's probably just two more things that i think that are kind of important that would be something that you two and your team and as it gets larger and larger are probably going to be running into that i think in a smaller town would be harder for you to be able to do what you're doing than maybe in
063a larger town is that just like bill said who was my teacher and then there's kelly who was one of my child care and then there's ryan and trinity and they're all and they're dealing with all their things um we've came from different eras through the last 50 years that we were in high school and at different times scott along the way too and it's pretty interesting when you listen to each one of us everybody almost had a different perspective of what it was like here and and thought that's the way it still was because that's how it was when we were in school or or maybe some things we've dealt with since and adults but i can guarantee you two-thirds of my class which is the class of 78 they honestly thought martin luther
064king took care of all of it and they didn't know there was any issue anymore and then that's how small and it was almost all white complete community and even back then park rose and forest grove and some of these other schools that we've now had to deal with in a different way they were completely white schools so when we competed even in sports we honestly never even saw a kid of another ethnicity unless you got to go to state and then you signed everybody but you didn't even know what it was like so there's just so many different heiress and they still live here so they might be the parents and they might be the grandparents now who either can say oh no there's an any problem here or they'll go oh yeah i
065remember in 1972 and i remember in 1984 and 99 so it just depends but that's one of the things i think that you're going to continue to run into and then my only other thing is that i also know just from being on the school board a lot of the times i totally understand something because i've gotten to be in all the meetings so like you're 23 people or you're 70 people what i'd like to work on is that it's not just them up here that we're bringing everybody with us if that takes a very long time [Music] then we need to do that because i can do it all i want but if i then go out into the community and my husband doesn't understand or my children don't understand then we took a
066great big giant step back again so it's then how to make it to go home and go to your friends and your family and spread it around instead of it's only just the team so anyway which is sooner or later you all know that we'll some will quit doing it so anyway so those are just my two things oh thank you for sharing bill i have a question for you um what is what is your biggest fear with this with what we're doing yeah i think that fear is kind of an interesting term but my greater concern would be that um if you work real real hard at it that there is a good chunk of the community that's going to give you some pushback uh denial you know denial is bad medicine uh it's
067a good river though uh it it it just really uh doesn't work but there is a lot of in this community has been is uh even within um my immediate family i have had some pushback of like hey what are you talking about man that's not an issue um we have we have students of color that will reinforce that thought and that's a that's a real challenge so i think that the biggest fear i have is that people get discouraged and give up um that they will think that the job is complete and then go back to where they were um i was sick for a while and and it changed what i did and afterwards it changed a lot of what i did but i have to fight going back to my pre-sick condition
068uh that is that is a real challenge for me because um i find that habits from 10 years ago and 20 years ago are still there and yeah i made all these grand improvements um and then slowly they try to they try to um erode so that's i i think my concerns are then that there will be direct pushback and also that they're just you know from denial and then there's just a kind of a complacency that that sooner or later we we devolve to normalcy it's hard to stay active it's that's a look at i i think the the best example is a person that starts working out and exercising and and trend can tell you you know you make lots of progress and and boy you develop those good habits and you're eating
069right and everything and then you get used to that and then it's really easy to miss a miss a workout or gosh that really looks good and then pretty soon you're back to where you were yeah i i can tell you that covet gave me some some challenges until i i i i've been working the last two weeks to get back to where i was in in april um i i've done that but but those are those are the kinds of things it's it's we're we are creatures of habit and we take the easy way out that's uh it's just water flows downhill it just does and so i i think those are my concerns thank you my cons i have those same concerns you know i mean this is kind of the focus point
070of what our problem of practice is with the union which is how do we sustain how do we sustain how do we sustain um and to be honest in this district we've had a lot of professional development we're going to try this we're going to do this and then it stops we're going to try this and we're going to do this and then it stops um for whatever reason right it doesn't necessarily good or bad and so our problem of practice with oea is how do we start something sustain professional development with staff and maintain it when i was working with oaa before we had this grassroots experience of teachers trying quality assessment practices and then we asked for volunteers to come and um you know we'll teach you what we've learned what which was
071what what the object was we had a couple really good years like that because the people that showed up wanted to be there and then they then they suggested or mandated that everyone show up this is all in the elementary level and then the environment changed because it was very difficult to teach teachers who were basically against what you were trying to say and then made sure that your professional development didn't go as well because they didn't believe in the idea and that really personally hurt my feelings because i spent three and a half years with quality assessment practices in elementary school and the last year or so was just not fun because i had to teach teachers who didn't want or respect me or what what we were actually talking about so we're our
072problem of practice is we have 70 people who volunteer to be with us ready to learn my fear is i don't want anything forced upon staff but can we implement you know the idea of always having equity you know professional development available that admin can reference to their staff like how do we get this out there to all admin to all to all staff members in a way that doesn't kill the existence of the team that we have because the last thing i want is anyone on the equity team who doesn't want to be on the equity team because that it's too i mean it's hard right now getting started um i can't imagine having trying to teach someone about equity and telling them that their thinking is off or biased it's not going to
073go well so i'm thrilled that we have 70 people who have volunteered to participate in this um and to look at oneself and so our problem of practice really is how do we sustain this because this is the one area and my you know quality assessment practices is also equity by the way um how do we maintain this this team and have it be in existence by the time i retire in 10 years or 11 years that's a big thing yeah and it's it's part of the analogy i'm kind of more into analogies and so i was telling you kathryn um that you know if we're trying to plant this seed of equity just recognizing that if you have really infertile or really crappy soil that you're trying to plant that in or that's really
074resistant is you know how do we begin to till that soil and really make sure we're feeding the soil and knowing that there's lots of other seeds that are pretty scattered in the district and kind of a history there and and there's and so i think there's power in saying okay how can we prioritize our effort in trying to garden growth um and gardening um there's just a lot of pre-work and so again that internal work there's a lot of growth that happens before you even see a sprout and so this recognizing um inviting people into that i think can be really captivating and really humanizing to recognize hey like we want to you know we want to feel like we're part of something bigger and maybe we have confusion about how to do that
075and fear around how to trust people who are growing right next to us and growth is vulnerable so at least that that plant analogy for me just reminds me about how fragile this is but also the potential when you recognize like this tiny seed could become a tree um and we don't know um but there's just a lot of care that goes into it and in care that in many ways may not be recognized and care that's without titles often um is often more meaningful so um we're just again that professional development is you know that's part of our interviews and with our team is just building a capacity to imagine what that could look like and just thinking yeah what when have you had a spark when have you felt growth and what was
076that environment like because some of our staff don't even know what it is like to grow in fertile soil so it's hard to talk about what you don't know but some of us have had that experience even if it was for a one day training or if it was for a few years like with this cap work for catherine and just knowing hey what was it that was fertile and nourishing and nurturing and how can we identify that and maybe capture those moments and try to reproduce that in our soil and invite people to grow in ways that they may not have even been open to earlier in the season and maybe there will be a new growing season that we can invite people into so i think for me at least that's an analogy
077i kind of come back to in recognizing how how hard it is um and there's so much mystery when something's under the ground it's really hard to know what's going on um and it may not be till later that we see the impact and yet as educators we know that all the time i've you know kids go in and out of our doors and we may not know the impact till years later and it takes a measure of faith um in knowing that the investment we have will bear fruit that we may not even know when they come back and visit right the best thing ever well that's that's true i you you can't be offended by the fact that there are those that say we don't have a problem they're they're there they're there
078they just say hey this is not an issue i don't know why you're wasting all this time it almost feels like they're saboteurs when really they just don't want to be bothered with reality so um it's probably safer for you to work in the fertile soil and and and maybe some seeds will spill over i saw so i i i really think that if you if you look at how if you've ever planted petunias in your fertile soil pretty soon your yard is covered with petunias and uh i think that that it takes a few years but it truly happens even in the crummy soil they're growing in the street and the cracks in the sidewalk and everywhere else so i i think really that's what you need to do is is cultivate that fertile
079soil i would anticipate that your 70 will turn to 60 will turn to 50 will turn to 25. those things happen and and you can't feel like i'm a failure i'm not reaching people they are they were marginal they were enthusiastic with the idea but they're maybe not enthusiastic with the amount of effort it's going to take so those are okay that's it's no different than than starting out with little league and having 200 kids and by the time you get to high school there's a dozen kids in that class playing baseball so um the trick is to keep those people that are growing and working with them and then spread their influence and and i i want you to keep your eye on the prize rather than uh the things that happen naturally around
080you that may not be really what you prefer so i'm going to stop you bill you told me that they are our i mean ben's in my 70 it's hours yeah it's not just about us right it's ours and so i think we need to start thinking about it that way it's not 70 teachers it's us it's us and in fact one two three four five one wait four five six of us here today are on that team so um i want you to start considering it that it's ours because it is ours um i appreciate your fears and understanding i get that and and yes it could drop off it could get higher i don't know kelly what are we going to say i was going to say well he doesn't know it's not
081going to grow to 140 people no i just i don't want to i i just wouldn't be discouraged by by those kinds of things that they happen for heaven's sake you know um i i i you have the support and if certainly if you need me at a meeting see the thing sometimes i don't go to these meetings so you get something done um no that's the point bill is we want you at the meeting so that you know the thing is we want you to come without your titles and be human i'm sitting here thinking what can bill do that's not on this team he can start a coffee club with his generation in saint helens talking about this right that's what i think bill could do in his community if he doesn't want
082to be part of this team but what can you do i mean i think i'm throwing it back on you guys too so we're doing the equity team it's our equity team but what is it that you're doing to put the action behind this resolution and bill maybe it's a coffee club with your generation talking about hard subjects from the 70s that are exactly the same things that was happening a couple years ago here with park rose right yeah you know that's the challenge what are we doing right i'm like we're ignorant we don't always know that we're ignorant so there's a lot of education right there but one one thing that as you were speaking bill it reminded me of katherine and i repeatedly are trying to emphasize to people our gratitude is this
083is a weird year in the midst of a you know a larger pandemic and we're all stretched in different ways and that that changes every day for many people let alone like their week or their month um and so um so i just want to say i hear you in the sense of us wanting to be mindful of for me again that nurturing of recognizing if someone can't come this friday it's okay i'm we're not interpreting we're not making that mean something um their identity is not at stake based on their attendance um and so definitely looking ahead at this year for educators we know there's a lot of unknowns and so that's part of the authenticity we're trying to make sure we we keep at the center that people um like our own well-being
084is so so significant and um i was just talking with another educator this morning about that like if we could actually um kind of just honor our own selves better and then be able to invite people into that that hey it's so it's okay like having self-compassion and self-kindness when you mess up or you need sleep or you can't come um all of that's okay and for me that's some silver lining in this whole pandemic is that um i think i think it creates a higher capacity for understanding so just as kind of a explanation as well we can't have a quorum if we're going to be discussing certain things and so having three of us in a singular meeting potentially has some concerns so um putting three of us into certain things um we
085try to avoid and that doesn't mean that we can't all participate at different times or other things but we don't want to be uh crossing or blurring any lines as we go through those things in the actual i don't like that in many cases is especially from your perspective um we will support it and we will do what we can and i use the we as you know me and my position and and you know from what you've heard on the board not as an official board stance um but you know the things that that need to be done on that end um those will be done but i think the most important thing is that um especially relevant to you know the numbers that you have now teachers have an outsized impact on a
086significant vast number of students and the value in in the 70 that currently exists now is an exponential number it's not just the 70 and the spheres of influence on everybody that's involved in that will continue to create ripples and there will be more ripples that come from that and so even if you have some fall off or some join in everybody is going to have the potential to have a conversation that could be impactful where we would have never had that to begin with and for me that is the true value of starting this work and beginning to have these conversations the conversations that we're having at the board right now um you know the this whole thing is being recorded and is being uh broadcast across uh and is accessible to a number
087of um people that have any interest in listening to this so merely having those accessible moments provides an opportunity to start really getting into that awareness piece and there are going to be people that don't want to be aware and frankly we're not here to push awareness on them no um however we have policies that do dictate behavior and how people are treating other people and and those types of things and so as we move forward with those these conversations help to kind of solidify whether those policies exist and how they might be adjusted or whatever needs to be done and that also is a big part of that equity work as we move forward so from my perspective there's a you know you are doing some amazing amazing work already way way ahead of
088anywhere i think anybody could expect but the value in this is going to be all of that work that you're trying to to demonstrate because truly our values are demonstrated in our actions they're not demonstrating a resolution they're not demonstrated in what we say they are what people see us modeling and the modeling that you are doing is going to be reflected into both the way that we educate our students the outcomes that we get out of our students and the way that our educators feel satisfied about the work that they're doing yeah we're excited and it's just again a privilege to have this conversation with you you know catherine and i weren't sure what to expect in starting a dialogue and you know i'm i'm sure that a lot of us are gonna still
089leave tonight with thoughts floating and wanting our own clarity um and so we're excited to continue that that dialogue knowing that in in the bigger picture you know all of that um like that those conversations need to happen and so it's exciting just thinking back to an hour ago uh just in hearing that you as a board already are wanting to include voices that maybe hadn't been included in previous statements um and make sure that with however it's rolled out we want those stories to be shared um because those draw those we know will kind of draw people in and i guess that's kind of my own summary of the power of katherine i starting this is just that it was just through those stories um that people hearing catherine share and um knowing okay
090even if i'm unsure um i'm drawn in by something and i'm willing to kind of enter into that journey i hope that uh you will never be afraid to come to any of us because i think you have nine of us around you right here that are probably the easiest people to work with and the most energetic and backing that you can ask for so don't ever be afraid to come and also you know you can call me you can email me you can do whatever you need i mean i'll sit here until the cows come home with this with you guys um because it is such important work and i i just want to let you know i when i did a presentation at the alternative school one of the teachers was worried he
091said you know catherine i'm worried that you're gonna get some real ugliness happening towards you and i appreciated that you know like this protective entity he was trying to show me i have gotten zero zero right there's a part of me like you don't necessarily want to mess with me there's that piece but you know what we have to do this work um and so not that i'm fearful um but i'm really really excited because i was wrong about 63. bill it's 70 and and as kelly says it's going to be 140 and then we will be calling on you because we're going to need help um but it's incredibly wonderful work and we have gratitude for some reason the combination of ben and catherine seem to resonate with people um i think that was
092serendipitous our personalities um so yeah and we want to impact students right we want to impact the students that are standing in front of us saying this is not fair it's not right well thank you both for sharing and participating and um certainly we will be asking you back to get updates and see where we're at and um we have had a very robust conversation and there is a ton of conversation to go so with that said uh if you have nothing else or anything else you want to chat about then we can move to the next item of the agenda and look forward to your next report to us i have one question what are you guys going to do individually in this process between now and by the time the next time we
093come i'll go because i uh unmuted um i would like to just i'll share some news uh our adoption we were told today was finalized on the 8th so we have a daughter now who is a black child so that is kind of super exciting for our family but in uh on thanksgiving she'll have been with us for three years and we've been going through a journey immensely over the last couple years and uh it is it's like uh just pretty amazing how you can go from one start place and learn so much so we will continue to do that growth and we continue to reach out with her family and her extended family and do what is best for her that's exciting that is very exciting kelly and thank you for sharing that that
094is amazing um what i will commit to is to continuing to be curious open vulnerable and willing to explore my biases and the privilege that i've had and also how that relates to my place in the world um there's you know that there is no end to this work as far as my position goes but it is about being open to new information or trying to be more empathetic towards things so the space is that i have opportunities to share that with others i take those advantages and as it relates to my day position i'm very focused on work inside of of that avenue as well where i can participate so that's what i will commit to yeah well i'll commit i've been working over this last year and into the summer with northwest regional
095esd there was a state grant for working on improving [Music] equity across the districts that northwest regional asd serves and we want a two million dollar grant and that's accessible to us through kind of a mini grant and i'll be working on that and working with both catherine and ben to see where it fits and if there's resources that we can tap into to kind of spur on the work so to speak i'm pretty confident there is so i'm kind of excited to begin that great i'm just willing to help wherever you if you if you have something you need me to do just tell me um what are you good at bill we don't have enough time for that answer relationships [Laughter] cooking cooking breakfast uh so building it building houses churches um keeping
096keeping one of your students in line or two or three but one in particular that's sitting on the couch right now doing xbox and we're supposed to be writing a what is patriotism essay for a contest uh he's we've been working very hard we have long walks at night we will go on our walk in a little bit and and uh we talk about things like this so so these are these are topics of conversation on a regular basis and and what is equity to you what is patriotism how can i make the world a better place and and and um he's you probably just see him on a cellist so he just had another student id number uh but he does well on his own so he doesn't feel a need to zoom um
097but that's that's the case and and and so those are some of the things that we do i i try to example for for my family and within the community i have for a long time and if there are specific things you need just tell me we can we can do it thank you i i would say too that i have some my i have a son that's dyslexic and i have dealt with mental health issues uh within the family uh and and so i i a phrase that you brought up that really came to mind was i i i that son's grant a daughter my one of my one of my grandchildren um her her comment was that has always stuck with me as is papa it feels like i'm in a room full
098of people screaming at the top of my lungs and nobody can hear and i you can probably identify with that at times and when you're in your meeting uh you can think that here's a little girl that's in total tears and and and i got her from a padded room of providence and and and that's when she came to live with us so i've i've seen some of these things and and equity and and things that were very non-equity and forcing teachers to read my son his test so that he went from f's to a's um because he couldn't read and and and gosh we knew that so i don't need a reading test every time he takes an exam i i need to know what his content was that he knows and fighting that
099for years and and that continues uh uh there are there are challenges so we we deal with those on a regular basis and i have a pretty thorough understanding of the challenges that some folks face thanks bill yeah is this the part where we leave you don't have to leave until trends makes the gavel this is the part where scott's actually you might want to stay and hear scott's message about the school district it would be i i would say don't leave until he's talked and then we're going to just end the meeting anyway but but scott's going to give some information on the school district and you might this this might be informative you it's a public meeting and so you're entitled yes we're both free to stay and remain and observe as you
100would like so i'll mute how's that thank you again both of you and i really look forward to the work that is coming down the line mr stockwell would you like to provide us with a district report sure so my my plan was to just give you an update where we're at with the matrix with the with the pandemic returning to school and we all we need to have a conversation about what what our timelines are for returning there's been a number of the larger districts that have already come out and said they're closed through the first semester for fourth grade through 12th grade i i i struggle with making that type of announcement because i want our kids back in our schools so badly and what is it that we can do to do
101that so i was going to share a little bit of where we're at some possible a possible option and then i guess the last thing just came to mind through the conversation is our strategic plan believe it or not is nearing its end this year and so at some point we need to have a conversation about either adding another year to this strategic plan or beginning the work um i think there's a lot of things going on right now that lean a little bit towards it's time to begin to work on a new strategic plan um i think it'd be pretty exciting as a team to really talk about everything that we've done that we set out to do at the beginning five years ago for the strategic plan things like raising the graduation rate
102i think we're pretty close to hit the target or just maybe shy building a couple new schools opening columbia city moving sixth grade to the middle school there's a lot of benchmarks that as a community and as a board we wrote down and wanted to see happen and in in the five years of the strategic plan we've been able to accomplish them so i think it'd be a good time to do some celebrating in the midst of all this chaos so with that though let's let's take a look at the matrix i'm going to share my screen and can i get kind of a thumbs up that you can see it all right thank you so i've shared this each time you know the the reopening of schools matrix we have to be less than
10310 cases per hundred thousand population um and that's for three weeks in a row including the seven days prior and then less than five percent uh positivity rate same thing preceding seven days and three weeks in a row what i haven't shared is the exception and the exception that we would qualify under in saint helens would be pre-pre-k through third grade metrics and the change is the case rate just needs to be below less than 30 cases per hundred thousand with the same five percent uh test positivity rate but what that does allow us some flexibility to bring back our primary children which is something that i think if we have an opportunity we need to do um and so right now as you're all aware we're in what we refer to as cdl comprehensive
104distance learning we hope soon to be able to move into hybrid learning which is small cohorts of students between 10 to 15 students per class per day and we have that on a b rotation we've set up our comprehensive distance learning on that same a b rotation so when we do move into a hybrid situation it'll be less of a transition for our students we've got the virtual academy that we've stood up we anticipate that some of those students will return to the hybrid model when we go to in-person instruction but we do feel that's a strong program that will continue into the future well beyond the pandemic we're reviewing um we're planning on shifting from aselus we've reviewed uh the flora virtual program which is used by a number of different uh online schools
105in oregon and across the country i need to find out what the feedback was with that but that's pretty promising there's a couple others that we're looking at particularly at the secondary school but we're we're eager to see that continue to move forward but with with that we do have a final option that's called limited in-person instruction and that's that's a volunteer only type of situation we the cohorts have to be less than 10 per 10 students per cohort we can have no more than 250 students in any given week in a school and a student can be part of no more than two cohorts and that would include a transportation cohort in addition we have to have 14 days without any student staff or community school community members having tested positive for covid right
106now as i understand that we don't qualify based on the 14-day piece and my concern is the volatility right now of the virus the pandemic we could be in and out of that pretty regularly and i worry about consistency when we make plans especially for some of our younger students or students with disabilities and then we end up having to say no we can't do this now so that's going to take some real careful thought on how we roll out that in person limited in person instruction but that's another option that we can work with the challenge is and this kind of highlights just how broken the system is for lack of a better word public health because of hipaa and you know uh health confidentiality laws can't provide us the information that we need
107in order to determine whether we can open up for limited in-person instruction so public health can't tell us how many students we have that may be infected or teachers we have to find that out on our own and unless we're open and have children in the school if we have children in the school then that changes the equation and allows them to share that information so it's this odd catch-22 that makes no sense and it's not by any fault of our public health it's just the way the system set right now that creates frustration for me as a leader when we're trying to get our kids back into the classroom but those those are the three different or four different options that we have that we're looking at i want to scroll down i've shared
108this before you know what what other countries who have successfully opened up the in-person teaching and instruction and where oregon was back in april we're in line with the other countries by july we had kind of spiked um we continue in this spike and this is our case for a hundred thousand the top red line right here as i'm moving my cursor along there that is the case per thirty thousand uh thirty hundred thousand which is where we could begin bringing in our k through third grade students if we were below that number the challenge that we have again in saint helens and scapus vernon other columbia county school districts is that we draw a fair number of our staff from the portland metro area and so we also monitor multnomah and washington county by
109law or by rule we have to have multnomah county and washington county below these red lines as well as columbia county to have in-person instruction which creates a pretty big challenge for us and you can see we had a spike we're right up there with everyone else well above the red line we were prior kind of trending underneath um i i believe that there are other districts that are significantly more rural that have argued additional exceptions i think that would be a significant challenge for the st helms school district based on our location and closeness to the metro area and if you look at these trend lines they all kind of follow each other right so we were low but our trends followed what washington county multnomah county did and as washington county multnomah county
110went up so did we and that's partly on contingent on our connection with the number of commuters commuting from st helens into the metro area and the number of staff members coming in to st helens and other people coming from outside the community the argument that we could make is if saint helens and columbia county was trending well below these red lines and was not mirroring the other counties we could probably argue an exception that look even though we have close proximity we have a large number of staff commuting back and forth there's no correlation but as you look at this now you can see that there is a correlation so i'm hoping that as a community we'll be able to bring that down through wearing masks social distancing and really just making good choices
111and if you look down below test positivity rate that's where we become pretty volatile primarily because our county is relatively small and it doesn't take too many positive tests to spike us up because it's not countered with a 100 000 factor and you can see now we've been below the five percent test positivity rate except for the last couple weeks we've jetted up and now we're trending back down this is an area where you might have heard governor brown come out and say they're considering changing making some changes to the metrics what i understand and i could be wrong because nothing's been written down just from the meetings i've been in and the other state leaders i've talked to it it sounds like the state may remove the requirement for the entire state to be
112below the five percent test positivity in doing so will allow this smaller counties like gilliam county who may not have any tests at all open up without being connected to the rest of the state so that'll help us but how much depends again on our trends following multnomah and washington county so with this you guys have any questions i don't necessarily have any questions i do it is well understandable somewhat frustrating to be tied to things that we don't have any control over and so if we can see a a line that provides us an avenue to start requesting some exceptions or to start investigating those um i am interested in you know whatever the future looks like at that point at the very least having a conversation about that because i think that being
113tied to things that we don't control is is really you know again understandable but i at least like to explore some of those conversations when and if that ever hits yeah absolutely and we'll be monitoring this and i will closely as well as as well as watching other exceptions that might be approved um so that's definitely something because we all we all know that everyone's doing their best and we also know that this isn't what we want for our children we want to be in school and although distance learning um people working really hard and there's some good work coming out of it it's still not in person instruction so we'll definitely work towards that any other questions okay the next thing that i want to talk about is there's some of the larger districts
114in the metro area have already as i said notified families that they're going to be closed particularly fourth grade through 12th grade through the end of the semester and i'll kind of i want to share why they're able to make that prediction and then have a conversation as far as what you as a board would like for me as far as direction on this so can every everybody can see this new calendar right and you can see kind of centering it up here we have october and we have november and our original plan was to open to the hybrid model if we could in november by the end of the first quarter and so the first quarter is right here in this green x now if you think back to the matrix that i just
115shared with you we're not in underneath those red lines so we have to be underneath those red lines for three weeks in a row and we also need one week for a transition so if you back up from the day here so our plan was to start hybrid november 18th after the end of the quarter one week two weeks three weeks that means there is the three week mark where i've got this red arrow right we have to have uh we have to be below those red lines on this three week mark to even come close to making this deadline and that doesn't include the week of a transition from hybrid or from a comprehensive distance learning to hybrid so the reason why the larger school districts are able to make that kind of projection
116is they know that they're at least four weeks out at any moment to open and if their their numbers aren't even trending close they know that that likely six seven eight weeks out at best so that's kind of the scenario that you're in that we're in the other piece i've marked um so we're here on see october right october 15th is where we're at and when you roll forward that doesn't give us enough time to make it to to the 20th so one of the recommendations might be is every four weeks move move forward and say okay if we don't if we don't make that deadline by the 20th if we haven't made it below the red lines then we move forward another four weeks for planning part of my question i guess would be
117for all of you how critical is it and how much lead time do we need to give our families before we switch to the hybrid model i think the greater danger is creating false hope um the reality is that all the projections we see that it's not going to suddenly miraculously jump up and get better in the next couple months and to start kicking the can down the road short distances is a problem um i i would love to see us get back but and as if you see that okay we've hit two weeks or we've hit we're coming up on it we've hit two weeks of it and it's looking good and you know all we need to do is squeeze one more week and we can start talking transition i think two weeks
118notice is adequate but i think we need to have at least two weeks before the red line before we start yakking it out to the people because they get hopeful then they get angry and you said you would and and i i think it's just a little it's it's and uncertainty is rather disruptive right now it just looks like well we're going to go till the semester because that's what beaverton's doing and portland's doing and i'm hearing that from all the others and i just have kind of accepted the fact that she at the semester and we'll talk about it the other thing too i see where the numbers went up pretty much matches exactly with labor day and through that weekend and then it started heading up 14 days later so if we go
119by your four weeks even just right now we then have hit thanksgiving holidays where people be together again and so if you were to say okay after thanksgiving then just right before christmas we could have everybody all getting sick from the thanksgiving and then the same thing following christmas so i think it might be is to get the message out is let's see how things go with everybody being together through thanksgiving and if our numbers can stay down we can talk about going back in january but if not and they shoot back up again then it's another four more weeks after christmas at least and like bill said at that point i'm not sure at any point in giving them hope you're so close to february that it's going to look like we just might
120as well have done what everybody else did so anyway so i think the holidays are going to play a big role in what's going to happen unfortunately i am on the other side where i would send children back tomorrow i would i mean we're it is really really hard and we are all doing the best we can and i do think that our teachers probably need the biggest notice most parents are going to be like all right my backpack is packed tonight and they are gone someone start teaching my kid because i'm not doing a good job uh i'm okay with kind of moving along at that four week pace and uh seeing how it goes i don't know i also when my kids ask me am i going to play sports on a re
121ever going back i kind of i say no i'm like i don't think so probably not it's probably not going to happen but keep doing the best you can and that's all we're doing i absolutely agree keep the four-week thing i just wouldn't be notifying parents of you know every four weeks start bringing it up bringing it up bringing it up but but i'm i'm with with kelly if you can get that baby open open her up i the teachers will deal with it they'll be so glad to get back to school i quite frankly uh just to see some sense of normalcy um they're they really they miss their kids and the parents won't [Laughter] so i i understand the four-week piece because it provides plenty of potential time to get everything planned and
122to account for anything but i also look at it as if we do a four-week check every four weeks and we're not there or we already reached it um i mean what we're then talking about eight weeks instead of four weeks because if we wait four weeks and then we hit the mark that yeah we can start planning for this and we're going to open it and then we move forward another four weeks to get that time frame done that's not four that's eight and so i'm not really thinking a solid four more like a crawling four so it would wrap with you i if you did make this week as a positive number the next one is your negative then you have a negative and a negative you would know hey i can maybe
123open in two weeks um but once you have that positive again you start over right and i think that's the question because if the way i understand scott referencing this is that um if we don't meet we're not going to meet this mark right now so we don't have a conversation about reopening until another four weeks down the line and then we look again at that point and say are we getting these marks and if we are then we can say yes we're going to start in four weeks saying we're going to do this and then you know anything can happen in between there but that prior four weeks let's say right now things look awful but some miracle occurs and you know next week all of a sudden things get back into the the
124ranges that we need to we've lost that prior four weeks so that's where i'm not saying that it's the better option i just am concerned that we lose a ton of time if we don't work out some sort of detail to be able to do a retro look and not just say you know because if we hit the four weeks in the next four and everything's been looking really good maybe we say we do two weeks and say you know we're gonna ramp up i don't know what that answer is i just get concerned because then i'm it's not four to me it's eight and then we really are at the semester yeah a semester is always an easy easy place to go anyway yeah that's true a rolling four weeks might make sense if
125if i understand kelly correctly so we don't if our date was the 18th i'll look at my my calendar here so my numbers jive if our date was the 18th and we miss it by a week then the date jumps up to what would be the 25th because that's thanksgiving so it'd be december 2nd if we missed that date then it jumps up to the 9th is that what you're referring to so so people know okay we're looking four weeks and so then each time i make a report i can report where we're at in that four weeks i guess is that what you're thinking yeah because you would always know approximately where your opening target would be based on what the state is allowing i have a sample like in excel if it helps
126visual people like what what it could look like too if you want to see it i asked the non-equities question about teachers what about um essentially keeping those from other counties at home to teach and still allowing columbia county students to go to school it is kind of the opposite but if we aren't doing the transition allowing them to come in with their germs then what what happens then i think kelly if you looked at the at the last graphs it would be them coming in getting out of germs but that's all different i i don't i don't know if that's logistically possible i i just don't think we have it's not a perfect world so we don't have the right number of first grade teachers second grade teachers or even elementary staff we have
127some pretty big gaps i we have really big gaps anyway but we also have a million schools at this point when nobody's in them we could be spreading them out and doing areas and pockets that are a big need right what right well i think we could do the limited in person piece that way but you don't even need to have them go a full day at this point they're only you know say some of them are getting a total of an hour and 20 minutes a day instruction time so they're going in to get help with the things they need where the parents are failing right now and i'm not sure why there is a thought process that we're not allowed in the school period right now when there are students that really really
128do need help so with the limited in person allow for small sized cte classes because in the hybrid you might only have 10 in a group anyway it would it has to be all volunteer and it cannot replace um cdl so it can't be well you didn't show up to class so you don't get credit it has to be supplemental okay but still if a kid wants to learn to weld and he's in welding class and he's tired of videos he can go buzz rod yeah i mean those kids are generally pretty motivated they want they actually want to be there that's why they took the class they want to work on their car they want to do something right right and they're hands-on learners that is how they're learning to begin with so not
129kelly kind of brings up a question that i guess i'm a little curious about is um while we can't certainly have in person i mean we've established that we're kind of not able to have school the way we want to have it but is there a way to do some sort of social distanced in-person supplementary tutoring or something that may be a little bit more functional for those learners that everything that we've been putting together is just not reaching them so is there any mechanisms that that might exist yes and that's the the limited in-person instruction we can have kids can be in two cohorts that includes a transportation cohort there can be no more than 10 kids per cohort cannot be mandatory cannot replace instruction so it can't be um you know some districts
130have looked at it as as hey this might be an opportunity to serve our high needs special education students so we're just going to have limited and personal instruction for those kiddos and we're not going to offer comprehensive distance learning that that's something that you can't do the challenge next is you can't have a test positive in the school community within the last 14 days which i believe we're getting close to that date but i then have to try to confirm if there's any others so that's something that we can begin looking at and i'm wondering about putting some things in place and looking at transition time so i can start putting some stuff together and bring it back to the board for a discussion [Music] but i think having a good win on a
131good transition and planning for what staff are able to do that similar to what kelly had mentioned is going to be critical and it wouldn't necessarily be those from only columbia county it would be those who maybe are not um at high risk that we could pull in to support kids that wouldn't be anxious about coming in and teaching because we do have some staff that are for good reason so that would be something that we could you know definitely work on um so that that's one thing that we can do and well i guess that also relates to some degree to athletics and practicing i strongly feel that as much as i love athletics if we don't have the school open for instruction we can't open the school for practices and some folks may
132disagree with me on that but we're first and foremost you know a learning institution and athletics are extracurricular and i've been an athlete my whole life but i i just think it gets the wrong message but with limited in-person instruction i think that would allow us an opportunity to also have some practices take place then so time frame wise what are you thinking would be a potential time frame for something of that nature based on where we sit now but let's say everything just magically rolls out the way we'd love it to roll out uh what kind of time frame do you think you'd need for that um i i think we need we need at least four weeks just for planning and and getting the word out and making sure that we've got got
133things set i think to be safe um we could look at november at the start of december or have things in place when we come back in january would be something to do so i can start looking at at the calendar and and write out a plan and share with you kind of kind of you know my thinking there was another question though about what can we do for others for those students who it's just not fitting or could use some additional support i've been in conversation with park and rec in the library and they have their program called let's play and we've talked about rolling out a program too called let's learn in partnership with them and maybe going out to different neighborhoods and opening up shop for students and parents to come get
134some additional tutoring that way so we're going out to them rather than bringing them in so that's one option that we're looking at and hopefully that may roll a little bit into some of the families who have teamed up in kind of that pod situation so that's that's another area that we're working on it's just it's complicated too obviously because it just takes one case and it all goes away and we have to start over so there's a number of things that play into it but wanting to get our students back that's a way that we can we can get to it well we have a board meeting essentially every two weeks so if we come to a board meeting where we've gone two weeks in a row then this becomes valid constant conversation that
135we'll shoot for the next two weeks so i i mean right now we didn't meet it this week but if we meet it next week and the week after then we really need to talk about this if we so each board meeting we come to is kind of a landmark where we can say uh we just had two clear weeks if we get another third week we're gonna go for it i think that's also fair um but right now we don't have we don't have one week so which starting today if two weeks from now we have two clear weeks why we can say hey we've got two clear weeks if we have one clear week we can say hey we have one clear week maybe uh at the next board meeting we can get
136serious yep so i i think that that's just kind of the rolling target because like kelly was saying just keep the target rolling and don't put down a future date and then maybe we actually skipped an opportunity i wouldn't want to do that either the kids are wanting to go i'll speak a bit of heresy here i was just going to send it in an email but i'll just go ahead and bring it up um when we're doing our construction of the building and let's say that we don't have building a anymore but we've got building b we might be in a situation where full classes hybrid learning so it's a kind of a combination where kids go every other day and a different group goes every other day so we can service our whole
137student body in building b instead of using building a and b and i just this just kind of occurred to me while we've been doing this talking so i i i'm not trying to generate conversation it's just just a thought that how do we handle capacity uh if we cut the size of the building in half that's the kids will be used to it it's not like it'll be something new um and it would be better than hybrid learning in a way in that yeah we have a full class of 25 or 30 kids and then tomorrow we have a different class of 25 or 30 kids but we could at least keep that somewhat going and it'd be far better than what it is right now it's just just a thought yeah we're changing
138the whole look of our education model in general where i think families are starting to wonder if we really need the nc time and question well you know i shouldn't feel guilty if i take that family vacation or if i do go hunting because my children are learning so much or they can go to work with me now a couple days a week or i can stay home a couple days a week so that flexibility piece is going to really be necessary for as we're looking to build this next you know change our school you bring up a really interesting point kelly because you we know that class size is a thing but it doesn't show research suggests that until you get below 18 15 kids it doesn't have an impact academically may have an
139impact socially in classes of 20 22 but until you get 18 feel below 15 a lot of research says is when you really start seeing some significant um you know educational advantages and so you know maybe when we return we have some of our primary classes that they still go four days a week but one of those days they're staggered and we have 10 kids in a class with one teacher they could make maybe greater gains than if they had a full day and not missing those if that makes sense right lowering class size they're still missing a day but the amount of growth you make by having that smaller class size could be significantly more than if you crammed them all into the class and continued with your five day week so i think
140there's some really interesting things that we can do um combined with our comprehensive learning that could have some great benefit for instruction in the future i think too this this still speaks to the equity work that we're doing that there are a number of students that frankly don't need a cookie cutter one size fits all system and they can thrive in systems that we have now created and so as we move forward into whatever we consider normal i think there's going to be a conversation of what is the best decision for the individual student and the parents are going to have to make some of those decisions but i think that the overall outcome of this is that there will be a you know a redoing of how we've been doing things and providing additional
141opportunities for the students that that that works for and for the students if that doesn't work for we're going to be able to provide a better service towards them as that is so i'm not married to any singular you know concept or anything else as we move forward with this i think it's important to continue to have these conversations and look at what's working what's not and what can we continue on once all of this actually theoretically ends right any other thoughts or comments i've got some work ahead of me that i can put together for you so it's exciting and hope hopeful it's scott um do when we're looking at the different kids and staff and everything as far as positive tests first of all are we including um arthur academy and any kind
142of numbers from there or even the christian school too only because those kids are going to school already partially already but they have siblings that would be in with us but might have a positive case there instead of us not knowing about it necessarily i was just wondering if we're working or have even thought about working together with them to make sure we we don't have more positives than we know about that's all right no um i have not thought about partnering with the the private schools i've thought about what that impact would be with arthur academy and what our obligation is my guess is we'd have to monitor arthur academy as well because you know just what you described their siblings may be in middle school or high school and they're technically still our
143kids it's just their charter school so i did want to ask about uh ode requirements for showing up for attendance especially in the online platform are there any or what we have is that school mandated right now or what is the guideline that we're actually following yeah so it's it's compulsory education it's expected mandatory attendance um attendance can be demonstrated in a number of ways it can be as simple as turning in an assignment to you know viewing a zoom meeting for our younger students or it could be a teacher contacting a parent and having a conversation about how school's going for that child so there's lots of ways that attendance can be noted and we have that in the in the q a and i can clip that out and send it send it
144to you that goes into greater greater detail on each thing that counts i know there's some districts that have kids at the beginning of the day log into a google document and just click but they logged in and that counts for attendance yeah i'm just finding that our attendance is so all over the board we have absences one period or four periods or what have you and some of the teachers say you have to send an email but some of them say you have to log in between nine and three and some of them say as long as you turn something that day so i just don't know if we have a consistent message across the board yeah we've been talking about that and the answer is yes to all the above that you just
145described would all count as attending we have had some staff members with concerns that you know students are logging in and they're not showing themselves on the on the screen which i think is pretty typical and it's a little bit intrusive you may not want others to see what your house looks like or where you live which is fine i think that's a respectful thing if a child doesn't want to turn on the camera but we do have some staff who question well if they just log on and they don't interact at all how should that be attendance well according to the state it is but you know how many times does a child walk into a classroom sit down and really doesn't engage with the teacher so you know that's a good opportunity for
146us to have a conversation with staff about what is engagement and if engagement if we believe engagement is important then how do you foster that not only online but in a regular classroom when kids show up so it's opening up many conversations but right now the uh requirements for attendance is pretty pretty low it's a pretty low bar for a solace you just have to log in and click back out takes about 30 seconds isaac wants to do he does one subject a day so he worked all day yesterday on humanities that was his thing and finished this week's humanities but he's logs into humanities every day and just clicks in and then it shows on the little bar that he attended so for with the sellers it just shows you intended if you click
147in um but i can recall i mean like scott was just talking about is it really attendance if a kid comes in and puts his head down and and is hung over and falls asleep i'm uh we've all seen that and it's kind of the way that it is or they stayed up all night with whatever reason um and um [Music] i i stopped asking why why you're sleeping in class because sometimes the answer was a little tough so um i instead asked how are you doing today i it's there's a difference um but we have a lot of kids that physically are present and they're they're completely absent so i i it's no problem i i can see now that what a kid is doing is he's taking his cell phone and logging on
148to the class or his chromebook and logging onto the class and then going over to the xbox and playing games and he has no idea what the class did and then in an hour he just knows to click into the next class i i'm certain that that happens there's there's no doubt at all but you do yeah and and i guess back to kelly i think your main point is is there a way we can be consistent there is and we're working on that there's just different degrees of what expectations are we need to help align that so good conversations any other questions otherwise that's that's what i've got for you oh tonight talking but he's mean you did still yes thank you good conversations should i yeah move to adjourn i was just i
149was just saying why are you saying i was just saying come on train call for it well we have one further piece to do i'd like to have their information so we have a meeting scheduled for next week um it's a planning session and i think we had that planning session on the books just in case something magical happened and i'm not feeling the magic right now so are we maintaining them the planning session or are we going to go to our regular meeting on the 28th i think our regular meet on the 28th would be just fine unless somebody else has magic that they'd like to share that's not sounding like it so any feedback or anything else that uh you want to address on the 28th all right well for having two things
150on our agenda it was an incredibly uh fulfilling evening so thank you all for uh working through that and uh do i have that magical words motion to adjourn oh my god that was unanimous christy yeah we're gonna roll with that all right have a good night everyone thank you