July 12, 2022 Alpine School Board Meeting

001what's up oh um sorry it's getting quiet so i guess we ought to get started before the noise starts again uh we would like to excuse uh board member bateman and julie and shane who are joining us remotely and we will go ahead and i'm just going to turn to our business business manager to uh to lead us through the study session items all right thank you president clement we've got a couple presentations we've got uh first up i think a presentation from jason and our assessment team and then following jason i think we have um eric woodhouse and our safety team and then lastly a i think a scintillating discussion on blood governance circulating keep that in mind by the way i have to tell everybody if i seem in a bad mood today

002my uh the bottom of a sprinkler valve cracked i've never heard of this even happening before i flooded my basement i have been trying to dry carpet and hauling stuff out of there and so it's like you should have called we could have had this at your house yeah by the way all the stuff from the basement is in the rest of our house so there's literally nowhere to even sit down so it's like uh yeah it's uh however i got the sprinkler system fixed this morning and you weren't on vacation when it happened i wasn't on vacation when it happened which would have been even worse so it could be it could have been worse but i could not envision how right now well thanks for having me my name is jason crowton um

003in the district um as a teacher coach tfa and principal last year at greenwood so i'm excited to be here um last year you'll hear the word it was challenging right you'll hear the teachers say oh that was challenging it was hard but as we look through the data you'll see some celebrations and some things that we're doing some takeaways that hopefully um you'll see that we're headed in the right direction so i'm super excited for what we have so i'll present that one okay um as i go through my presentation um there's more to cover than i have time for with elementary assessments we have a lot of assessments um a lot of data to look at i want to highlight where we are how do we compare and some takeaways and celebrations um

004so you have this book this has everything all elementary data in it this has overall numbers fed ell and as i go through the presentation you'll be able to find the page numbers in here so you'll see what we're talking about in the front i have the links to our slides and then also to the data itself and so this first bitly versus report asd 2022 report will take you to this document that has all of the data that you could click in filter by school division subgroups just to see if you're looking for something specific what i will show will just be some screenshots from that data okay um on page three in your book it has all of our data from elementary from last year so that's a snapshot of how we did

005overall and i will talk about our keep assessment acadian's reading and math rise and district benchmarks so the keep assessment that starts on page four in your book the keep assessment assesses skills that students need when they start kindergarten and skills they need when they are exiting kindergarten so they're different assessments one is like preschool skills as they enter and then the exit would be kinder so you can't look at the numbers and say it's the same assessment they're both called keep they're both healthy there's an entry and an exit i'm sorry to interrupt can we make sure that stacy and shane and julie can actually say something and we can hear it they can but they can test it and see if you did that before oh they did you guys want to say

006something stacy or julie or shane yeah i'm here i can hear everything perfect i'm also golden nice shane are you okay i'm doing well thank you okay so i just wanted to make sure if you have a question just belt it out so since we interrupted you once let me interrupt you a second time i missed two things number one craig brinkerhoff is with us i think this is his first uh study session um grateful to have him here with us a member of our leadership team and scott sumner over here most of you know scott scott's here with us uh and again we're grateful to recognize both of them and then jason would you also just introduce your group who's here with you who may or may not participate so i know there are

007several and so again i want to make sure that those who do so much work behind the scenes also are thanked and recognized yeah we have our elementary team we have all the directors and the supervisors and so we're super grateful that they're here um with us because a lot of work went into asking them questions and to see what we could present on because everyone does everyone know our voice and sam and carrie yeah boyce campbell and carrie milner the director of literacy and math i just want to make sure thanks hey rob can i just enter yes please let's come on jason again jason can roll with it yeah we're good okay so um we also have two members in different roles from our technology team that are our av specialists now in

008the district that are going to be taking on the challenge of making sure we have great audio visual as part of our learning powered classroom plan so they're been newly hired as of about a week ago and they're going to be the ones that are coming for most of our board meetings and helping nicholas with this whole dj setup so this is kelly and this is brad so just reach out to them with any questions reverse that they're not helping me they are in charge so you'll see them at meetings and they're just here to help you it's kelly and brad kelly and brad kelly burke and bradley it's probably better not to have your name known i'm just saying you know what i mean i might say bread and go okay back to you

009okay any other interview okay um so on the keep there's three levels a one two and a three these are all of our students so you'll see on the left we have entry literacy and then the exit and then numeracy and then the numeracy exit so as students all students came in 68 of our students had those preschool skills to succeed in kindergarten as our kindergartners left in the literacy you'll see it's 63 different tests different skills numeracy you'll see that level 3 80 and 82. something interesting about the data on that same page in your book this is filtered by oek our extended kindergarten students you'll notice as they came in at beginning of year only 10 were at a level three in literacy and when they exited 58 of them um had that

010level three proficiency and you'll see the numeracy went from 34 to 75 percent and so it's exciting next year as we have all-day kindergarten in some of our schools to see how that increases next year so here's some celebrations that we found in the data oek students they were 75 beginning of year in level one and we only have nine percent of our students right here in level one at the end of the year in literacy which is awesome um they increased from 10 to 58 end of year in literacy and then 34 to 75. we've listed some schools where we've seen some great data and there are other schools we just listed some that we found as we were looking at the data cedar valley 100 of their students left at a level three

011in numeracy and 89 in literacy which is awesome you can see the increase in bonneville their kindergarten students on how they increased and then orchard elementary as well 72 to 80 and 85 to 94 which is awesome so some takeaways um for this next year our oek students have greater gains so what does that mean for all day kindergarten as we start that which would be awesome good case for our legislators yes our literacy scores are lagging a little bit and we recognize that and you'll notice that keep is a more comprehensive assessment than occasions it assesses standards they're reading at the end of the year in acadiance kindergarteners aren't asked to read passages the literacy team has been working on making checkpoints throughout the year for the keep assessment in in the past when

012the keep started there wasn't anything like in between to check like where are we at is there to keep entry and then the exit it was kind of waiting to see and as teachers use those progress monitoring materials and measure throughout the year then they can kind of gauge where they're at which would be awesome okay acadian's reading is our next one and that's on page seven has it been the habit in our district it seems like we have struggled more with numeracy than literacy like we've always been ahead in literacy is that true i'm not exactly sure historically i think literacy has lagged a little bit yeah i think literacy is lagged before yes okay so page nine acadians uh mckadien successes skills that students need to read there's four levels above at below

013and low below so let's look at state averages from this year and our district on the left you'll see beginning of year and you'll see state numbers um so for example state kindergarten students were and our district started at 66. and so you can see those state numbers and then how we finished end of year and in some grades we are higher than state averages and other grades were lagging a little bit that was on page 11. um something that we have from the state is the state goal for growth to see are our students making growth like a year's growth and the goal is for grade levels one through three and the goal is sixty percent that's our state goal and we hit 61 percent um on our growth goal which is awesome um

014that's something that we always strive to hit to make sure our students are making that typical or better growth and we did that this year and one through three and one through three yeah yes yeah back to page 11 again yep i'm looking at the end of the year proficiency yeah we are below seat average in both of those and we went down in both the fifth and sixth grade we went down from beginning here to the end of year and we're below state average is that something we should be concerned about um yes i think it's something that we um need to look at more a lot of schools jumped onto four six the last couple of years this is the first time that they've been assessing these skills and something that we've seen

015with acadians and letters our teachers are now diving into phonemic awareness and those skills to be able to help students that don't have those basics jason wasn't the uh the end of your window this last year the first time all four through six were tested yep and so some of them weren't tested middle of the year even because this was the first year that all that it was available for everyone unless they chose to purchase it on their own like they're stressed out but then not all of them gave it throughout the year because it wasn't the district started providing testers for four through six only in the final window so how about for this coming year is for forces gonna be testing yes okay thanks okay we went to the girl okay so celebrations

016we did hit 61 typical or better growth our average grade level proficiency is close or above our state out state averages you'll see that 50 of our schools met that 60 growth in grades one through three um and our proficiency from historically from 2021 we are higher than our 2021 year and that um is in in the book you can see historical scores on page 17 to see where we've been over time so we have spring side sharon and northridge so springside our first grade um they did amazing went to 58 to 81 which is an incredible jump sharon kinder 45 to 81 and then northbridge we put that on there because second grade is a grade that we are still struggling with yes and they did have an increase and so that's something we

017wanted to recognize and and kind of dig deeper and find out what's happening with our second grade students and why are we flatlining so i guess the uh the downside is 50 of the schools didn't have typical or better so any observations you have from looking at the data as to what that was correlated with or oh that's hard that's that's a hard thing overlay a lot of them are close they're like in the high 50 range um but we kept that strict number of sixty percent okay and so we could kind of figure out like who was on that threshold which would give her give us a better picture of how many we couldn't get an overall of 61 if we weren't close well i think this is something that um by the way

018we as board members we just want to have a feeling for this right we trust the supervisors yeah and everyone else that they're looking at this in depth but um yeah it's just kind of um uh maybe part of our purview is to look at data and ask questions and now this was great so yeah i uh i mean it's good to hear that second grade is a hard grade to the benchmarks on any ideas why that second grade is um the assessment the end of your assessment is when they do start reading doing the dwarf and the um and so that is difficult those cut scores are difficult for students to hit and it's just getting students in text quicker before the end of the year to make sure that they're ready with stamina

019of reading three text passages for the tester and doing it without pictures in the text because a lot of times they get that picture of support and they don't have the stamina to test seeing too yeah that we're trying to address is um a lot of times when there's a sub measure like homework thread or something like that we see schools focus on a sub measure but they're not focusing on the accuracy the fluency and the retail so you have the phonics but you need the accuracy you need to be able to retell it and you need to be fluent doing it so when we go to schools and we visit with schools and we see that they're setting goals just on one sub measure that's where as the supervisors can say you know what

020it's the whole picture we need to set a goal on proficiency but we need to track all of these sub measures along the way to make sure all of these components are happening so i think that's when you see stuff like that we're focusing on little sub measures instead of a little picture okay is any of this coded related just the second grade struggling because i saw that right away too yeah potentially and it could be and we'll show some data on just attendance and over time of what has happened and we can kind of look at those numbers too yeah what is our goal for this coming year 61 seems like a very modest goal very modest and i would like to see that a whole lot higher and i know we're coming out

021of cove and all that but what are we looking at to build on letters built on you know post coven successes where where are we headed with this so that's a great question for the state it's always at 60 percent but as we've been visiting schools and we've been looking at student student achievement goals and school achievement goals um schools are setting their goals at like 80 90 100 of students they can grow and so that's been great um to go with go to schools and kind of you know set those goals so it's an individual school thing yeah the state always reports 60 and that's what we have to hit but schools are making goals that are higher um just some quick um takeaways um you can see that we have decreased from beginning

022to end and that's something that um we want to continue to look at um this year the schedule changed teachers usually had that small group instruction time and now they're grappling with how to embed that during the day which they've done a great job and so just that dynamic that change for some teachers in schools could be difficult letters will be completed and we have noticed that teams that are tracking progress with small goals along the way are the teams that are getting good results and that's through pathways of progress our el and sped numbers they need more more support and that's you can see the data in the book about that our district goals for next year um for the state is a nine percent increase in kindergarten and then that's 60 typical or

023better those are just the state those are the state goals can i just say to everybody here i think 60 is not good enough i really don't like that i don't think we should set up for 60 that means 40 of our kids aren't reading where they should be and as a school teacher is that what that means no no what does it mean this is a growth this is a growth spartan even so i agree with you but it's but it's not perfect it's not proficiency it's growth okay can you explain jason better what that is i get it now that you said that yeah but i still think it's a concern because every student should be getting a year's growth in a year well what it means is they they take this for

024a goal and it really is literally compared to students that scored the same as you did so for example like in title 1 we were talking about this the other day if the student comes in and scores the same way a student in florida scores if they're not making the amount of growth it's the same students who scored like them it really does go back to tier one instruction like kids are not making growth with the instruction that's happening in the classroom so they really are compared against students to score just like that so should we have more growth yeah we should okay so what are our proficiency scores where are those in the book those are page 12 thank you all kids didn't thank you i think um okay the uh i mean part

025of the reason that we are doing letters right is because we noticed this was a problem and yeah do you think i mean obviously you have to be patient like particularly doing letters training during last year when i was crazy is hard but do you think that we'll start seeing results in a year two three or what do you think would be realistic anybody i'm glad we have everybody here so letters needs to happen the pb we only went through like the lower strands of scarborough's growth right now so we went through a big process and volume of awareness we didn't even hit the language comprehension so what you're going to see probably in the acadians is we're going to see good scores probably on homework red we probably did better on her word thread

026this year because of that training like we learned about phonics we learned about coding and everything when we go into the comprehension where it's the writing the reading the vocabulary the comprehension and all of that in the second book it really does all start coming together because you have to have all of it to be a skilled reader right so um so it will all come together but i honestly think like that pd and the strategic plan that we're putting forward the um the three goals that we're tracking in the schools the supervisors like like it will take more than letters it will be like a comprehensive plan from all of us but yes they they did get the first half of letters and we saw that overhead and now look at the second half

027and hopefully we'll be able to see that in retail we'll be able to see it in fluency and and i think path was in progress if teachers will pay attention to that i think that will have an impact so how do we explain the fact that the end of the year scores are consistently lower than beginning what's happening there the the path isn't progress no i'm just looking at page 12 here the end of the year scores are lower than the beginning of the year different tests is it yeah that's what's happening there i mean there are some measures that change and the cut scores are harder at the end of the year um but it is just those basic literacy skills i'm struggling with this guys i just have to tell you i don't

028think the end of your score should be lower than beginning of the year scores so can you tell me a little bit more about that like is there something going on that we're not seeing or something going on is it the testing is it the instruction is it the kids is it kovid is it what is it all of the above michelle said a combination of a lot of things solid tier one instruction has to happen and eighty percent of students need to hit that tier one instruction before we intervene do tier two and tier three sometimes we jump to tier two and our groups are too big to intervene with our students you really have to have a multi-tiered system of support in a school to make this happen like you have to have

029opportunities to intervene with kids that aren't getting it you have to have solid tier one instruction you have to have great plc's like you can't leave anything to chance within a structure for literacy to happen so if you have a couple of things then you need the rest so it really is this multi-tiered system of support that um supports literacy and i and i really like like looking at this you can see we had a drop like i'm looking at second grade and we did have a big drop in second grade and again i can look at that and i can say you know what we probably did pretty good on accuracy and not on fluency because we hyperfocused on the phonics and we we didn't get it to automaticity when it came to fluency

030so we just really have to be strategic and we have to make sure that teachers know like we need to get kids into text we can't leave things in isolation if we teach as we get into text we get to authenticity do we have any field for oh i'm sorry shane go ahead oh i just want to uh clarify if i make for a second i appreciate the comments here um i think a couple things to take into consideration uh we were not trending well with respect to literacy for the last couple of years and so we made some structural changes we made some professional development changes with the letters training and so it's going to take a little while for us to get back where we need to get or to get where we

031need to get i would also remind you of just the challenging year that teachers had with respect to student behavior and absenteeism we had teachers to say this was the hardest year they've ever had in their career i don't think we're going to see high levels of return on those until we get some of that behavior and attendance addressed the third point i would ask for board support on is that finding that teachers who set goals and monitor progress find significant gains in student achievement now we've got to work carefully and proceed in a supportive manner but there are some pushback from time to time about setting goals and monitoring progress the teachers say oh we're overwhelmed with that so backed off of those uh expectations that the district is studying for goal setting and

032progress monitoring that is the key to student achievement and so in order to see this increase we need to go forward with the reasonable expectations for teacher teams to set goals and to monitor progress as students throughout the year so they can respond to those concerns that arise as we do a formative assessment i think you'll also see as we review the strategic plan there is a focused effort on literacy it's a key performance indicator and then what we're holding schools accountable is that teacher teams will set goals for achievement and monitor progress so i think we're we're putting the support in place we need to give that additional professional development but also hold teachers to those expectations and provide this support theme i don't think anyone would in the room would say they're satisfied

033with those results but i think the challenge is that they're multifaceted especially given the conditions that we've been working under the last couple years yeah i was just wondering if um if mobility is part of the scene too like what in schools where there's high mobility with teachers or students do we see an impact on test scores there that's something i don't have data for but i could look into that just one of those things something that we're interested in i know that um one of the things that i think we have speculated had an impact on some of the that the teacher fatigue was you know class sizes were are pretty pretty large um i think it would be interesting to tease that out at some point in the data i think we did

034look at i think we got that data at one point but as we're moving forward it would be just nice to have that uh examination as we look at the data i think there's also some really interesting comparisons to be seen here like i was just looking at on page 13 where it talks about for our ell composite scores i was concerned seeing that the west was only 18 proficient in sixth grade but if you look at their growth score on the next page for sixth grade their growth score was 81 and so they're having a massive amount of growth so i it would be interesting to try to drill down and figure out what's what's causing them to come in so low because they're not leaving the year before that low i think are

035they so it would be interesting to maybe try to figure out why they i mean it was that covid related was that do you know what i mean they came they came in so low this year that it's interesting to see anyway if they made that much growth and their proficiency is still that low right what's going on there um i have tons of stuff here but i'm going to go to one slide just so we can talk about this real quick or you can see it the question came up from sam boyce vicki they asked about absenteeism and so we pulled that data if you look in 2018 um and 19 we had 43 000 students and students that had that were in school zero tonight absences 29 30 000 kids were there like

036hardly missing and we had only about 500 students that missed 30 days in 2018 30 plus but if you look over time this last year now we have 5 000 students that missed more than 30 days of instruction even worse than the our worst coveted year and you can see that see in 2018 70 of our population was in school most of the time and now 30 of our students were in school most of the time this year and so seeing that trend um just makes us realize that we need to connect with students and families to get students to maybe come to school and that's you know something that we're doing with that coherence map and that strategic plan is to make those student connection goals yeah that is that's linked on the data

037on this bitly so in your book that's a link and so you'll you have that you also have an electronic copy that was forwarded to you with the links okay so you should have access to that electronically so that's something to think about or the last one this is that's by the way we board members love this kind of data we really do um so thank you so much good news the good news and the bad news we want to know what's going on and most by the way another thing is we love to know how we can help so really we feel like we're part of the team and we're part of the we're part of the good things and part of the bad things we know we could have done things better as

038a board so thank you for participating jason what do you feel i mean this is a personal what do you feel is the most impactful thing that we're doing to help um students cheat that's a big big question that was a big question um giving teachers time this year has been amazing giving them professional development um has been awesome helping our teachers um they're doing letters training they're bettering themselves as practitioners in the classroom and this year as we've been visiting schools this summer we are looking at schools that are setting these goals for school-wide achievement for student group achievement and for connection we are looking at that data more than we ever have and i think by tracking those small goals is that will have big gains in the end and so i think

039it's an exciting year an exciting time to be in education thank you other questions for our elementary team if not we'll transition to scott in our secondary okay jason thanks um i don't have a booklet i told jason this morning i'm like man that's a great start so great jason's incredible get to know him just a great mind for this kind of thing one thing that wasn't mentioned i want to point out you have the elementary supervisors here one of the things they're doing with directors is they're going to every single school and individualizing it so they're talking to specific schools about their specific data and they're going over student almost to student by student and setting goals from there having that type of attention focused hyper focused on some of the learning that's happening

040in individual schools it's one thing to look at overarching data for the entire district but they're taking it to individual schools and saying okay here's where our current realities are let's take a a real narrow focus into what you're doing as a school to help improve and i think that's just speaks volumes to the work that's that's happening with our across our district right now um i'm going to take like just a couple minutes and here's here's the main points what i want to share we have some data that we can share back and forth with rise it's great there's some dashboards i'm going to let you peek at it that's all then i'm going to go to um there is more information here i am i am more than happy to share these links

041with you because you can pour over it uh i do want to focus on some of the the processes we're in uh the current reality secondary is we're just in the beginning stages of some of the secondary assessments which i'm i'm super excited about our content leaders are incredible and our curriculum department is just outstanding with the leadership that's there each of our areas and i could i could go through each of the departments and talk through what world language is doing one i'll focus on two um math has a pilot this year that they're taking secondary one with four schools and they're creating common format assessments across the board with those four schools to talk through and get together create them talk through get their scope and sequence set and then they're going to

042look at their their data information to create that standard of what type of rigor they want but also what type of direction i want to take to help support we know from those four schools that's just a smaller sample that we can work with and then expand as we go from there we've already had other schools start talking like oh can we be part of the pilot we're like no because we want to do four schools and have it really done well and then we keep expanding it out and when those starts happening big really big things will happen our science department right now our science content leaders in each the each of the areas they have been the last couple years really building out uh their assessment pieces but also just building capacity of

043the teachers of how to align things how to work through things how to trust each other and have those open conversations it's taking it slow but it's the right work as they get together at a table just like this and say okay how did you do and it's just i mean it's kind of a tougher conversation at times when we want to say well my kids scored 80 is that good or bad we don't know a context yet until we have some comparable data well if if mark comes in and all of his kids are 97 and i'm 80 we got to be able to have enough trust to be like how did you do it and be able to have those conversations so that's what science is doing and they're really doing some uh

044just excellent work um english is a pilot's year world language has got some incredible data i'm not going to go into that piece we can do that at a later time next time we present but one thing i do want to share with you is and i've mentioned this last time when we presented but we've expanded on it a little bit um not a little bit quite a bit is when we look at each of these schools when we talk about individualizing it for every specific school every school is on a different continuum they're looking at their current realities where their teachers at where the training is all the different things that they're looking at as a school when they when they sit down and talk with their leadership teams we're not telling them hey

045here's the five things you've got to do from the top that is going to work they have to come to those conclusions now we're we're visiting them each month to talk through those processes with them and it's been fantastic to learn where their current realities are and then each of them keep i mean to see where schools have started last year to where they're now meeting the three priorities and setting goals and the priorities in their school and then getting it down to their teams is just it it's awesome i'm going to show one case real point one case in point uh skyridge right now this is their profile page um in the three priorities of the district they've set a couple of school-wide achievement goals that they're looking at and they've also set with

046their faculty they did this incredible plan with their faculty where it wasn't just uh john the principal coming in saying hey here's what we're doing y'all but this is what the plan is it's taking time for the leadership team where do we want to go let's look at some data that we have to make those decisions and they have the entire faculty come together and list out where they felt like their highest need was and when they had that with the faculty the faculty now has ownership they have a partner like yeah that's right that's what we said we're going to focus on and we're going to spend our time to develop and how to measure it the process was cool if i've got john's presentation we had them come share with the other principals

047but they had these i mean every teacher had an opportunity to give a say and give a voice into it but you can see the priorities and that the ways they're going to measure it um in the student group they've got an ell and a sped goal they've got a couple of items to track and then here's what we're we're help trying to create the alignment piece we've listed the current district support so they're also doing letters training in the secondary uh skyridge has been part of that cohort and because their teachers also want to learn to make sure that they've got the right methodology to teach kids and then they've got some other items they're working on with jamie sadler hawley and curriculum to uh to create that district support so we're listening to

048district support and the reason why is because each of our schools can get into this page and say hey if we're pursuing literacy what other schools are pursuing literacy what can we learn from them and it just creates a a complete learning environment for them as well we also and this is one um so they all have access to each other on this page they do and sarah i think it was last year you made the comment are we aligning goals and how are we going to get those and that is one of the other pieces we're doing is when they get their land trust goal it's it's big dollars and those dollars we want to align to the work they're doing their priorities so the money is aligned to the work not just here's

049a here's a shiny thing here's a shiny thing here's a shiny thing it's really the shiny thing is what we're doing together and so that's in constant conversation uh to help that along but then we also have when our secondary schools are accredited they have list of priorities we're helping them talk through the points so they can align those accreditation priorities or at least attempt to with the team that comes in to get with those same trust lands goals with those same school goals and be able to align that work so it's not it's not going here and then here and what meetings we need to focus on here they're working together um one thing we're doing is um another thing we're doing is we keep notes we've got last year's notes down here in

050the visit notes but the last visit we went to skyridge talked through the cool thing about it is we have next steps with them so they're pursuing next step items where they're coming up with the plan and in many cases they're pushing it's reciprocal accountability is what we want is admins asking their teachers to do stuff but they need to provide the resource so their teachers can accomplish it the districts also work with schools like hey we have the coherence map we're working on this what can we do to help support that that same reciprocal accountability back to the schools and so they're pushing the wrong word but they're they're pushing back to us saying well here's some there's some support help we need now we're getting into really some specific things that we can

051help the school support with and these next steps that we're following up with working on um and then final thing really quick is in each of these tabs we have a school area focused so we can keep track of what the priorities are for each school and we've created little cohorts that they can come in and start looking we had i think i believe it's 23 out of 28 schools attend the cohorts last year where they're just coming and learning from each other to build their capacity if if i'm a high school principal i might have some skills in one area but i i might not have them all in every area but my my my peer across the town with the gold music skyridge we've talked often about how to improve things but if

052i'm learning if afi's looking at literacy and societal value well let's learn from each other and talk through what breakthroughs they've had and so we have this list but we're also keeping track of um the data pieces that they're looking at and setting goals and how they're doing things but these are the list of schools that are working on things um final thing is we just have a list of resources so when our principals and our our plc coaches leaders in the schools look at the needs they have they can go to a one-stop shop and pick up all the resources they need in one place instead of who do i call where i do this it's all in one place they can use resources out but that's it any questions can you go back

053to that cohort page uh this one it kind of shows oh the schools that they were working on so this is something they can refer to yeah so what we have here is so like last year we had four high areas of need that our schools indicated to us that they need more support and training in uh connection grading intervention and literacy and so we created two different full days where the morning was connection the afternoon was grady and it was a volunteer basis the schools come and they they signed up came to it and we had some guiding questions but we really had just a an ability for them to share back and forth what they're doing the cool thing about that is we were kind of ready firing aiming if you've ever heard

054that cliche before and when we found that is we're like wow we're really onto something because we only have the meeting room for two hours and the team the group behind us was like knocking on the door like uh we're just really getting good and so um we took as much time as we could until we actually had to leave but the conversations continued in the hall and in the parking lot and then schools were actually meeting with schools on their own time to help learn from each other that piece has been pretty powerful so we expanded that to give more time but then we started getting phone calls from other schools asking hey why wasn't i invited to this we didn't know you were talking about braiding and so they said well invite us

055next time so all schools get the invite to come to every one of the cohorts and we have teams that are just kind of sitting on the wall kind of fly on the wall observing because it might not be in their current one-year plan but it might be in their five-year plan so like hey let's at least get in tune with what's happening so we can see it and learn it um we have these date salary set for the fall and we've added two more areas that we've we've just identified from our school saying hey we need help in these areas one was attendance um i'm sure when we solve the attendance problem we won't keep it a secret we'll share it the other piece was student groups and student connection we just our schools

056are just like we just want to do better we care about these kids and we want to connect better let's learn from each other so we've got six groups right now we've got three days kind of back to back to back and if you if you want invites to those i'll invite you to just come watch and see yeah okay i'll make sure we put that on there because it should be great i like annalise we've talked to her about the connection piece and she i mean we just have so many great experts in this building and in our district that we have the resources here we just need to give them the right venue opportunity to share out and talk through things any other questions so that's taking place when um starting september yeah

057i can get i'll i'll email you the link to this profile so you can look at it and then you can see it kind of grow as we keep meeting with schools and adding notes and then i can get you the dates of those two and then make sure each other okay so i just don't let you get off without any hard questions all right i'm sorry if we were too no that was great i just hope you get the feeling that we really care yeah just trying you know anything you see poking above the water that's a particular problem or is there anything that is poking about water as being really uh an area where we're really nailing it i know you're new so yeah but i mean just as you came in started

058looking around anything i think that the thing that stands out to me and i mentioned this a little bit just prior to this is the amount of quality people that care about kids and have expertise in areas um to give them the platform like for example this literacy cohort we have jamie sadler holly that just is so knowledgeable when we bring her in the first time we gave her direct instructions like you're not leading the group you're taking notes to see what we our people need and so she sat there and took notes and just made a list of things and then she went back and researched about and then we talked through them and planned them out now we have some different presentations where we're going to give them what they wanted to learn

059from and same thing with each of these areas i mentioned annalise with this the connection piece and student or not the connection piece with the equity piece with students the connection piece all those things we have expertise that we're just seeing people really blossom in their roles and really be able to leverage a lot of impact on the schools individually when they have those needs so that was one of the key openers is i went around and started meeting people and i'm just like this is incredible and they just we just have a pool of talent in this district do you anticipate these groups will continue to grow like you had four now you have six like math or something else would be included or yeah when when we start talking the cohort the content

060leaders taking on the assessment pieces when we have these smaller groups of four schools we will learn a lot from those focus groups and then from there we'll invite the schools to come and be a part of it all this will be an invitation right now right now it's not even an invitation they were already invited if they were invited but once we learn then we'll start doing the invite and that should keep expanding where we can continue those types of those types of uh assessment groups we also have uh the areas of focus groups that students are ortiz schools they're looking at so we were talking earlier about how much uh administrative turnover we have is that another issue you run into or is it just part of being in secondary ed um when

061you say well i know we had a number of uh positions growing but the night one thing we are continually focused on is the principal pipeline and what that means is training our p training people here in the district to be ready to take on leadership roles and when the changes happen like if i if i stayed at lone peak for another two three five years i would have been completely happy but opportunities presented themselves and i had the opportunity to apply i was appreciative of getting getting the position but i know that group of administrators was ready because we're we're continually building their capacity training so while one person leaves i know that we we need to continually make sure that people are ready to take the role but i mean it's all turnovers

062always tough i think that's um like it used to be really hard when teachers would leave and i'm like we just got getting good with some stuff and they left but i know that in the benefit of the whole they were actually if switching schools or switching family circumstances changed that they were still benefiting kids so you're saying that pipeline sorry that principle pipeline there's some consistency in their training i guess there isn't we're just barely starting to i mean we have that is that is the piece that we want to get really good at so when we do have change our principals are ready to to jump in and just constantly cosplay and we and there's always room for improvement but that's one of our one things i want to continue to talk with

063as we've talked many times as dlt is to build that capacity department news so scott since there's no schools on your attendance focus group does that mean that there's no concern at all in secondary accounting well we haven't had the focus group yet these are the so the ones that yeah that's actually a good question um the ones that the names of the schools that are there are the ones that came to last year's focus groups attendance and student groups are new this year and so we'll add that data when school is attended so um this question is kind of going to go over there so um my question for secondary for a long time has been it's difficult to compare how students at different schools are doing in a subject in secondary because we

064don't have state testing for each individual subject like there's not like a secondary three honors testing and then secondary two testing you know for math and so it's difficult to compare how a student at one school is doing versus a student in another school and how we're doing as a district compared to other districts so my question is um how what do we currently have that allows that kind of comparison to help us know where we are and how are we maybe trying to improve that situation as we're collaborating with different schools in different areas how do we know like if i'm a secondary to teacher how do i know who's knocking it out of the park and secondary too that i could go talk to to improve my instruction yeah it's a great question

065some of the current data we use we use act scores we use aspire scores we use rise scores rise of the more junior high aspire more of the high school on the act scores we also pull ap stuff but that's not what we're talking about in this context that the challenge that we met with this this june may june with our math content leaders they're so great they they just really are outstanding people that are working hard with teachers building the the pedagogy piece but also the instruction tier one for teachers the challenge was that question and so hopefully this cohort is one that starts those conversations with so the secondary one pilot we have four schools involved let's hope that well not hopefully we'll get to that question where they're doing similar assessments in

066the in kind of a quiz format but also a form of assessment at the end of the term where we can't compare the data back and forth because they follow the same scope school to school we have a lot of those examples within schools where they can have that comparative data and that's the plc process working in a school district-wide where we leverage our resources those four schools are different schools in different areas now we're going to bring them in and have that across the board so we can learn from schools across the board so we're just just scratching the iceberg with that piece but getting better that's that's i just thought i'd love for us to know i mean i know we can take our act score but even that like if we're trying

067to compare nationwide or something a lot of the nation doesn't do the ect really like they still kind of do sat and so it's it's difficult to compare as we're talking about how are our students really doing in comparison to other districts other places other schools even it's difficult to really pin that down and then i i don't know it seems like we should have some way to but i don't and especially when you're looking at like if a student took chemistry that year and then they take the act i don't know that they might do really well in the act but that might not be because their chemistry teacher was doing a good job i shouldn't say that but do you know what they mean like it might be because they got a 36

068on the english portion and so it's i've just wondered how we can improve our measurements especially in secondary because we want to make sure that our our kids aren't just doing so aren't just being successful in that particular teacher's class but they're being successful in learning the subject matter that they're supposed to be learning and i think you will find really good pockets of success not pockets but schools will have that that exactly what you're saying across the school conversations to build that across the district that's definitely a a priority that many of us have started talking to like let's get some things but that also has to be in the right time and place with the right capacity the right trust build and as we get that i really believe those four schools will

069turn to eight next year we'll turn to 12 the next year and then it will just keep well we have secondary one done now let's get secondary too the subject where all kids take that we can have those conversations so it's kind of that to be continued but at the same time it's definitely on a heightened awareness of we need to do we can do better there okay so do you see science doing that same thing you said they're doing wrong science is really for a lot further down the road if we're going to compare them on our race i guess but science has in every subject from 7 through 11 has identified some of those those and they're not district-wide and they have the same pockets of schools i think i want to say

070they're eight to ten different schools but those are the ones that are they're starting to have those conversations a lot sooner than uh board members bateman and king superintendent any questions for scott or jason none for me thank you scott appreciate the presentation and the data excellent presentation the attendance numbers that was elementary only yeah correct yeah we could we could get that for secondary it would be interesting yeah okay thank you thanks scott awesome kimberly's going to take over and while eric is setting up i'm just going to give you a little bit of background for it um boy we're transitioning from that rich conversation of instruction and data and learning but now we're going to we're going to sit kind of in the same level but we're going to talk about conditions for

071learning and sometimes those conditions not sometimes but a lot of times it has to do with safety so after the incident that occurred in texas at that particular school and we were also in a transition from mike browning who i mean his passion was with school safety and culver kind of took him out of going after some of the big things that he wanted so as we replaced mike and hired the great eric woodhouse two exceptional leaders and you're going to see the passion that eric has here in just a minute but it now this is surfacing again that kind of surfaced right before the 2016 bond we in fact organized our 2016 bond campaign based on new new uh growth and new construction and in addition to that aging facilities or renovations or rebuilds

072um this this does not contemplate maybe specifically that portion of the build part like what frank would bring into the picture with safety on renovating and rebuilding but there are safety components that do work closely between operations and facilities that are they might seem small and minor but what it's doing is we're we're synchronizing our efforts across the district to be very good at some basic specific things that we think can address issues that come up broadly for safety so we would say safety is going to be addressed in our overall capital campaign in august as you guys are contemplating what your decision will be safety will be one of our components and so shane thought it would be a great idea for eric to do a presentation for the things that we have learned

073about safety where he hopes to go with his team and where he's working closely with facilities on other areas and we want to welcome eric woodhouse to the team and we're excited for his presentation thank you and i want to be cognizant cognizant of your time but i also don't want to rush through this because safety is one of those areas we really do need to focus on this we want to make sure that we are using research-based practices as best we can mike browning it's true he was a unique individual and he was uniquely passionate about this area but i've been able to work with him over the last month and a half and i'm finding that i have just as much passion as mike and i really want to make sure that whatever

074direction that we're moving that we're doing it following research based practices and so mike has really been trying to get me up to speed i'm about 50 there so the other 50 i've really tried to read and do my research but if there are questions that you have please ask them i want the hard questions i want to make sure this is something that we're really challenged on and that we're discussing how to do this best with our community but as i uh did my research i've studied the national center for school safety and they're kind of a collaboration between multiple entities throughout the nation but they give a very comprehensive website for training and instruction that are research-based practices but also i focus heavily on the threat assessment center the united states secret service

075they put out manuals in 2018 2019 and 2021 and each one of those manuals dives into exactly what a comprehensive program safety program would look like for a district a lot of times when we think of school safety our mind goes to one thing and that's hardening our buildings securing our sites that's only one prong of it but every one of these research-based entities suggest a three-pronged approach that means the physical facilities and that's really your hardening of buildings that's what you want to focus on there but also you can't neglect the social emotional well-being if our students are having these challenges sometimes that pathway to violence begins early stages where there's bullying or other areas so if we neglect the social emotional component or the well-being component then we're not a comprehensive plan as

076well as our partnerships and that's one thing that mike did a really good job of setting up those partnerships with our community relationships with the police fire ems but we also want to make sure that we're partnering with social services i don't know how many of you have been to our interagency meetings um as board members in our community but those are excellent avenues where we can collaborate with all these community partnerships but we also have to collaborate with parents and our school teams as well because teachers know exactly what's going on in their classrooms and they can really spot where those challenges are for students what i wanted to focus on today is there's an excellent summary provided by the cops which is the community oriented policing services and it's an arm of the

077department of justice and they gave a series of 10 things that a school if it's a comprehensive program should really focus on so as your eyes go down you can tell that there's a physical safety component and then there's an emotional security component i want to focus first on these first five under physical safety because that might be where a lot of your questions might arise is how are we hardening our buildings but i also want to make sure that we're focusing on the emotional security because you can't do one without the other so first comprehensive school assessment we want to move just like the elementary and the secondary got up in the shared data we want to make sure that our safety plans are based on data i can tell you generally how our

078school is doing when it comes to the direction of school safety but i can't tell you specifically where each school is at we want to and i've been working with rhett larson who is over the safety for the state office of developing some kind of a comprehensive school assessment where we could go in with the multi-disciplinary team which is the police fire other eyeballs so when we're going into a building we can assess based on a standard protocol and see exactly where that school is when it relates to the drills or how hard their school is as far as secure entries that nature of things so that we can see as a district is there an individual school that's an outlier that we can learn from is there one that's an outlier for the wrong

079reason and we really need to go in and give support but we're using data more as a learning tool so we can make sure that we're exactly where we need to be try to do that every three years for every school we have a lot of schools but i think that we could get around to every school every three years if we're doing that then we're going to be consistently improving please if you have questions feel free to ask them as we're going through this amber um any school that's had some type of building or facility changed would you then review that school more often yes three years yes and i think that's a great point especially as we're going through bonds or especially as we go through seismic concerns because even if you had

080a big trailer you know brought in or something that would that might change your plan enough that it might need to be reviewed that's a really good point because when we're talking trailers we're talking access points right right that's one more access point that somebody could have what are we doing to make sure that's secure or a satellite like we move satellites we're moving satellites right now and so that's i mean if you've got 15 classrooms in that satellite that's 300 kids out there that weren't factored into the previous plan that's a good point though yeah sarah you've used the term hardening of the buildings i'm not familiar with that term i so when we talk about hardening the buildings we're talking about is there a secure entry there are you locking all of the

081doors one of the problems is um some of the our schools if you have the dog down method if they're dogged out in the morning they're dogged down for the rest of the day so that means that that's an access point we need to reduce the number of access points okay the next one is campus building and classroom security we have been vigorously attacking this actually over the last six years as i've been to the conferences and i've seen what alpine has been doing over the last six years i'm impressed where we're at mike has done a really good job in the district leadership team have done a really good job of making sure that we're directing funds in that area after sandy hook we've got a lot of questions as elementary supervisors and there

082were there was really a heavy call to what are we doing to harden up our buildings and so there was a concerted effort to make sure that we had secure entries push button door locks camera systems and key card access but i want to talk about each one of those but if you're already familiar with it i can move forward but our secure entries are there any questions about this every one of our elementary schools now has a secure entry which is incredible i don't know if there's any other district that has that now the protocol that we follow is varied right now we need to get more consistent and making sure that we're following a precise protocol so in it sometimes it's annoying for secretaries or for the patrons but when it comes to

083safety you know i think that we can handle that amber i know that secondary is a lot trickier of a beast when you start talking about secure entry is that something that we're contemplating or not really or so i think when it comes to secondaries and this this is tricky and i asked this question at a lot of the conference why i went to one conference in texas i'm going to another at the end of this month and that is one of my questions and a lot of other secondary schools because it is a different beast they try to eliminate as many of those entry points as possible so you know there might be seven or eight access points can we narrow it down to three as far as one secure entry i think a

084lot of our schools two of our uh secondary schools have secure entries um which ones is it frank cedar valley mountain view yeah any new schools even in the secondary level we we build them so their threats are ready to be as secure when they want to implement and practice like the elementary schools so viewpoint lake mountain canyon view down in orem is set up and we remodeled their front office area a few years ago we put in their secure injury so there are a couple of them but again it's only going to be as effective as if you're funneling everybody to that entry so if you've got a secure entry but you've got six different access points it kind of is a move cost and you don't want to pass that on to your

085public if you're not going to enforce it so that's some of the research on that uh go to the next one this was interesting when i went to the texas conference this was a big problem a lot of schools are wrestling with how do we overcome in a crisis situation the first thing that you lose is your mental dexterity and so if you're trying to jump juggle for your keys to make sure that you lock that door it's too late one of the things that we did in elementary school is we outfitted every one of our elementaries with the push button lock what that means is in a crisis you've got one second to push that button close it and you're good research shows that the safest place you can be during a crisis like

086that is behind a locked door when that perpetrator comes in that building it's gonna last maybe three four minutes if they come to a locked door they're going to move on they're not going to take the time to try to shoot down the door they're going to move to an open door so our greatest chance that we have in one of those areas is if we can lock that door so we want to try to get these in our secondary schools as well our teachers should still be carrying their keys on them with them at all times i mean if one of the students comes up and pushes that door lock and closes the door then they've locked the teacher out but that teacher should should be able to get in in elementary we haven't

087seen that we haven't seen that problem so the elementaries are all done but we're not done with secondary yet that's right we haven't started on secondary yeah but that is one direction you'd like to go frank we some of our secondary schools are done amber because any new school that we build regardless of the grade level this style of door lock is inspected thank you okay milestone cameras so all of our secure entries are outfitted with this milestone camera so when someone comes into those secure entries in elementary schools it's on a centralized server so we can pull that up any school and see who has access to our buildings it even records the audio but not all of our elementary schools have the camera systems throughout school-wide secondary has done a really good job

088and i'll tell you secondary administrators can testify that having these cameras in your school when it comes to doing investigations are critical so it's not just an incident where these cameras are essential it's for any investigation because if something happens out on the playground or something happens in the hallway and all of a sudden you have to investigate if it's a he said she said that takes up a lot of time for administrators to sift through what the truth is but if you've got a camera that's really going to help and aid in that investigation so we really want to see if we can push that forward in all of our elementary schools i know as elementary supervisors that's one of the main goals is to try to get every elementary sys school with one

089of these milestone systems so how many are we talking about in a small campus uh how many cameras in a school campus that varies depending on the campus but i would say what between 40 cameras about 30 to 40 at an elementary school you're right around about 60 years old for a middle school and you can be a hundred plus in a high school each school is unique just depends on the floor plan and their design and areas that need to be viewed camera technology is continuing to get better and better and so individual cameras are able to see wider views and multiple views so you can start reducing the number of cameras because what it looks like on camera but you're seeing down three or four different hallways because it has multiple lenses so

090that's changing it would have been very helpful like this week or last week at northridge um where someone broke in and used a fire extinguisher and went to town on all of our classrooms would have been great to have a camera system in there do we have i remember a couple years ago either mike was telling us but we had kind of the security system where it was um we partnered with the city of police and with a click of a button your secretary could get those cameras so that all so the police department had those so if there was an incident they had complete access to all the cameras before they even get there is that do we start yeah on the wish list that was in partnership with a software company to be

091able to provide that that the police can't have access to our cameras in an emergency system emergency situation but i i don't think that that's what mike was talking about there well oren the city of orem is the one that we were partnering with specifically on that sarah where they would have access to any any of our schools so that they could know how to best take care and minimize the timing of the situation but when i mentioned that we're going to have a section in our capital campaign if we go that direction our team's recommendation is the first priority is a centralized um dispatch type center that would do essentially that not just in the city of war but in all of our cities so that we can have access points that police agencies

092can tap into our information they don't just have 24 7 access to it but when there's an incident and it is it's like a dispatch center that we're we're overseeing then they can tap into our cameras and go live and assist us however but that is our first priority that we are trying to go after in terms of right it is a safety issue yeah and it's expensive to get all those community systems too um employee badges when we went to card access uh this is critical because each one of those doors if it has card access that means when it's closed it's locked and we can control exactly who has access to those doors who doesn't so that was another really good thing that the district did thanks to mike so it's true right

093that if somebody loses their badge you can just turn off directly rather than having to repeat the whole building yep like if you have a master key and all of a sudden you lose that we're re-keying the whole district but if you lose this within seconds we can deactivate it install a new one and it's it's slick okay coordination with first responders we meet with all of the chiefs um twice a year and we coordinate with them on how we can do collaboration better we meet with fire as well the interagency meetings if i went to an american fork interagency meetings and my eyes were open the possibilities of that when you've got dcfs police social workers administrators and sometimes board members that are attending there it's a powerful thing so they'll go student by

094student and say you know this student his father was arrested last night is there anything going on at the school and so now all of a sudden our administrators are armed with a lot more power and information to be able to make decisions that they didn't have before these interagency meetings are critical we want to make sure that they're consistent like american forks across the district and i'm also working with our sros to make sure we have a leadership team and that leadership team will run a lot of the professional development it's been mike and i really feel like we need to develop that leadership team so they're the ones running it too in collaboration with me so the interagency means did you say that it's twice a year no interagency should be once a

095month and it's typically the cluster rep that's responsible for those so really it depends on who your cluster rep is on how effective those are in collaboration with the city they start off well sometimes and then all of a sudden attendance from some of the other community members kind of peters out over a while if it's not active is there a way that we can get a schedule of that so that we know when our communities are meeting absolutely i'll coordinate that with you and so you let you know because that is something that you would want to attend thank you school resource officers we implemented a memorandum of understanding with each one you guys made a significant investment to try to equalize how much we're paying our sros across the district which that was

096a really good move we need to make sure that we're in good terms with our partnerships with the police but this memorandum of understanding is really going to help and one of the things i'm going to reinforce is making sure our administrators are aware of this they don't really know what is expected of an sro and sros aren't really sure what to expect from administrators either but in that memorandum of understanding it's spelled out and so if our administrators are reviewing that every year with their sro then they've got a lot more of an understanding of how to utilize that sro and leverage them in a meaningful way research shows that sros in our building is definitely beneficial but it depends on the relationship that the students have at the sro if it's more of

097a it's more of a policing type of a relationship and it's fear-based then it's not encouraging those students to go to the sros and have that meaningful relationship right from the beginning but if those sros can go into our elementary schools junior highs and high schools and start developing that relationship with those kids that's a powerful benefit to those sros and we can't do our work without drills we're going to try to make sure that we're following our standard response protocol or all of you familiar with this okay this is something that we implemented in the district uh quite a while like three years ago i believe instead of the flip chart and that flip chart no teachers ever looked at this so the fact that we have reduced it to this increases our ability

098to actually follow this protocol by like a hundred fold so in the case in the case of an emergency we've got this is the administrator's copy and this is the teacher's copy and it should just be right underneath your badge if if you're in a crisis mode you don't know who to call or you can't think of it you can go right to that card and get your answers right there i want to be cognizant of time how much time do we have all kids we would like to have another 15 minute presentation but you know i can do it in five you know i mean he's finished okay i'm gonna skip through the emotional security then but the school climate is essential the implementation of our tier one instruction for those students early on

099is going to be critical when we talk about student groups analysts i think the more inclusive we can be of those groups i think the more we're going to minimize that pathway to violence but one of the main things i want to get to is this was interesting data that you talked about mark when we talk about plots to violence this is interesting data on from the secret service 61 of the plots that were reported were by peers the other 12 percent were from family seven percent from adults nine percent from school sros but if you look at who they reported to this is interesting 42 percent of those reports were to school staff the other 30 percent well 42 were to police officers but if you look at the power that a connection can

100have a teacher or a school adult that's where the biggest payoff is going to be so when we start talking about school connection is that critical to school safety absolutely it is we need to make sure that those students feel safe in a connection with at least one adult in every building so anonymous reporting we have safe utah app safe ut are students using it well i don't know that we are very good at teaching our kids it needs to be more than a conversation once every three years i don't know that our secondary schools are talking about it i asked my student who's a junior in high school and i asked my daughter who's uh an eighth grader if they knew what safe ut was they didn't so even though we have this and

101we've publicized it before we need to do a better job at helping kids understand what it is sorry can you go back to the previous slide yes is is there a segment for um reporting to another student i don't see it there uh other students are not really peers peers but peers peers know i mean they're following social media and that's usually where they hear about it is from peers talking to other peers and then that peer reports it when i was at my c-stack training which is comprehensive student threat assessment guidelines there were four different reports where shootings were thwarted and the number one way that they were thwarted was by peers telling an adult that adult investigates it and then they take appropriate measures but it was through that peer report but that

102isn't it that is a thing it is huge yes yeah okay so we need to increase safe ut yet but i want to talk specifically about c stack this is a comprehensive student threat assessment guidelines so whenever there's a thread at a school you as an administration need to make sure that you're following a specific protocol there's not one specific protocol that we have as a district that's the one area that we really need to make sure that we are leveraging and implementing with fidelity across the district because if we don't then we're at more risk of a threat actually happening so we have two schools right now that are cstad certified and that's cedar valley and frontier they've both been to conferences this year we're really working on moving forward with making sure they're

103implementing that with fidelity it's kind of hit and miss if you only train one administrator the chances of that being consistent across all of them reduces significantly all the administrators in that bull in that building need to be aware of what c stack is here's some data for you so the threat assessment team we went from three people to now eight people to eight people which is significant and these are some heavy hitters as far as being trained in what c stack is so we went from three to eight so we more than doubled that number in one year but we also wanted to look at data across our district to figure out where we wanted to start with implementing sea stack so nationally you can see i don't know what's going on in fourth

104grade but that's pretty big but if you look at uh seventh eighth ninth and then it starts to dip in 10th 11th and 12th in high school so the majority of all of the threats were occurring pretty much in the junior high range if you look at our asd data for the number of students that were referred to student hearings the majority of them are 7th 8th 9th and 10th grade so we really want to target our junior highs first if that's the area where the majority of problems are occurring then we want to make sure that we're hitting that with some fidelity so we're going to start training them in the summer and then throughout the year we're implementing a coaching system to make sure that every one of those schools are trained correct

105so this threat this is people that are threatening to do harm but not necessarily they're doing harm in middle schools they could be doing harm anywhere yeah or do we know where well okay so so this is this is admin hearing distribution by grade so they're referred to a school hearing for a number of reasons they might not have made a threat but they beat up somebody or they did something else to get referred to a student hearing and it's pretty significant if you're getting referred to a student hearing so are most uh threats carried out in elementary schools is that the data uh oh are you talking about the national like where where are the threats carried out where are the shootings happening is it elementary or is it middle or is it in

106high school statistically i don't know if it happens more than elementary junior high or high school i know the statistics that it's likely to happen at a school once every 6 000 years if you follow the trend for schools i mean whenever a school shooting happens all of a sudden we have a heightened sense of awareness because it's the worst thing that could ever happen is innocent lives especially children but the statistics of as far as the likelihood of it occurring it's not very likely that it will but it doesn't mean we're not going to prepare for it no all right okay good question any other sarah on this national chart i'm in fourth grade that six is that a hundred and six yes is it is that right okay you've got that 106. okay

107i'm just just wondering yeah i wasn't able to fit on there okay okay i'm going to wrap it up we oh tssa structure this was interesting so when i was at um the national conference in texas the one the one area that my mind did go to a lot of these schools have done a really good job of hardening their building but when it comes to a three-pronged approach the mental health isn't there our district as far as before the tssa funds were here were severely lacking we didn't have any elementary counselors we were short and psychologists we didn't have nearly as many social workers that decision right there was a significant one and then when i got back and talked to rob and told him he said that's interesting you bring it up that's

108timely because of the letter we got from the state but i thought it was interesting that my mind even went there before but that was a powerful decision and it wasn't necessarily a popular one but man it sure wasn't good but to make sure that we had a comprehensive safety plan in our district so appreciate the courage of your team and making that decision and that's really helped us out when it comes to our mental health resources and then our social media monitoring we need something in place that's where a majority of the threats are happening on our google platform there's nothing so some students are sending inappropriate content through a google doc and then they can share it with whoever they want we need a way of monitoring that barc is one of those

109things that we're looking at to make sure that we're monitoring anyway i talked really fast i apologize but i hope that that gives you a good basis for that i think let's just move right into sarah's comments and you can go into the we're we'll eat faster because we we don't have uh three people here eating with them okay well um i have been asked to report back on social media and the law which was the seminar that we watched online so let me just hand out a few copies of these and um i'll just kind of we can do this in five minutes uh because you've got it to look at right um this this is the second seminar and the first part of the seminar he reviewed with briefly what they went through

110in the first seminar and then the second part of it was questions and so let me just quickly go through a couple of things um so we're talking about social media for school boards and school districts and what the law says about what's grammable what you can and cannot do so if we look at the first section now that a lot of people don't have this handout so it's okay if i just kind of read the titles and stuff so you know what i'm talking about okay first section to grandma grandma he says content is the key so if they're talking about anything to do with our schools that counts and it can be granted second um retention policy and i don't know what our retention policy is do you know kim it depends on

111what what it is like seven years for something three years for other personnel files or a certain year specifically for social media no what i would love to see is like a list of the different kinds of records and and how long we retain them because i don't know what our policy is i think it would be great to that's a good point because if we don't need to keep it we shouldn't yeah because then we it's not grammable anymore right we don't have it but there are some things that we want to keep indefinitely there's other things that have specific schedules that are required so yeah so maybe you know like in policy maybe that's a discussion we can have at some point and then the other thing that can be grammared is anything

112to do with liability those those kinds of issues in terms of schools and kids and things then he said there are ethical considerations um he said look at the code of conduct for the board and if you remember last year we spent a lot of time creating a code of conduct so we have one i think is pretty viable but that would come into play in terms of looking at social media and looking at how we are using our social media and he said remember ethically for school board members you represent the district do it with dignity and make your make sure your discourse is always civil always he said don't disclose confidences this could lead to lawsuits so that means if something has been discussed in closed session or in some other meeting it

113should not go out on facebook before the district puts it out if at all right and the fourth uh guideline here is don't ever try to embarrass anyone and that seems like kind of like a no-brainer but i was honestly thinking about sending out an email having to do the arm city split and i realized that my first part that i was thinking about was just a little snarky um and and maybe could embarrass someone i thought okay we have to be very careful with that because human nature wants to be defensive and wants to maybe kind of the gotcha and that's not what we're about at all and then he said common sense things he says um watch the clock it's easy to lose track of time um i'm trying to see what he

114what his context was because if you're on social media is he saying that that you get very involved and you're going back and forth and you kind of forget what you're doing and how much time you've actually taken on that he said have a purpose if you're on social media don't argue don't let your pride get involved that's that's not what we're at don't ever post something in anger so back to that snarkiness you know um and he said social media is not the place for an in-depth discussion ever um he said don't get sucked into a response step away and this is something that i learned very very early on are still working on it i remember when i was running for school board six years ago i was sitting at my computer and

115somebody sent me an email that was a little snarky and i was preparing a response and my daughter walked through she said mom what are you doing and i said i'm responding this email she said no you're not stop i said no no they asked this question she said you don't have to answer that i went don't i you know because as a teacher um i'm used to answering questions you know student asked you answer and that was my go-tos i answer every question i respond to every point and you don't have to do that there's times when you just let it go because it escalates you don't want to add fuel to the fire sometimes so there are times where you just don't get sucked into that because sometimes that's what people want they

116want you to get you sucked into a response that maybe you write in haste and could provide some embarrassment for the district or for you or some legal problem down the road so this he says it's better to have a face-to-face discussion where you can see their body language you can look them in the eye you can see what their knowledge of the list and maybe be a little more discerning about why they're asking that question before you before you respond to it so those are kind of the things that he reviewed from the first session and then in terms of questions submitted by board members the first question was who should post on social media things about the district and he said it's kind of like a no doubt check your district policy but

117obviously the district should be posting a lot of things and not private individuals there should be one voice and he said you tried to correct a post and he said sometimes if you respond to a bad post it makes it worse you know you don't want to add fuel to the fire and you don't want to give them credibility that maybe isn't deserved in some respects so he said if someone posts something about the district that is incorrect work for you work with your district work with your superintendent you don't take that on individually as a board member and try to correct it and be the night on shining armor go through the channels and make sure that what you're doing is is correct and it's um not adding to the credibility of an incredible

118source then he said board discussions create interest he says sometimes things can get out of control and unrelated things can happen but remember those are always subject to grandma so be careful again uh question number four is it wrong to post to get public input he says there's a big risk in doing that um he said it can become deceptive it may not represent accurate perception so if you just say how many of you listen this and this or think this this and this and you get some responses it says number one you probably shouldn't be doing that number two the responses you get may not really accurately reflect the um the public at large or your clientele or whatever it is he said let the district sources do the posting so david order you

119on that one right um what if a fellow board member posts something that's wrong or confidential as another board member you let it go you do not respond to it social media is not the way there is no debate board members aren't debating each other or over social media if something that happens then you go to that member privately and you you discuss it i guess um and he says always remember that if you're talking about school subject it is grammable um let's see i feel like my board president is trying to censor me he says go back to your rules of conduct go back to what you agreed on and look and see what the social media policy is in your code of conduct and i'm not sure if we actually have one in

120our code of conduct we may want to take a look at that also don't tag other board or district members on your posts this pulls their site into the public and can cause legal problems so just if you're on then it's your site you're doing your thing but don't drag other people into it says do social media sites keep post does you know how long does facebook retain a post for example and they said check with your provider check with facebook or wherever and see if their policy matches state law i thought this is something craig another one for you here um is i don't know what is the state law about retention of posts and i am not sure what facebook's policy is on that i don't know what their timeline is for a

121conference that steven and i intended the last time together they told us we could not delete anything that was publicly posted on our social media um we could limit things that were inappropriate but as far as ours at that point in law and you know wherever litigation was we were told at our training we couldn't delete okay so we might we just might want to review that policy some of that maybe someone could take the assignment associated with it right also a question was asked about liability for district communications on a district website and they said check your state statutes on that and they said if you're operating within your scope of your employment there is not personal life there should not be personal liability involved with that so like if david post something on

122the website summary of our board meeting or something and someone objects to it or something he is not personally liable for that right okay now our time is up so you can read the rest of this there's a couple court cases i put in here um one of the important things though is to make sure the employees know they do not lose their first amendment rights and that if an employee posts something that is very very controversial there are three elements there to to look at and we need to remember that free speech is protected and especially looking at speech analyzing if it's related or unrelated to their job performance and also analyzing what damage could be possibly done to the district as a result of that post so you can look at the rest

123of that but i found that uh an interesting discussion and maybe there's some things that i'm possibly gonna want to look at to follow up on that thank you thank you thank you sir i really liked i thought your summary was really good because it was hard to go through the video will you guys see me taking notes i take a lot of notes it was really good but it but it helps me i i try to cover all the bases and try to write down as close as i can what they're saying is that i got it right so thank you very much so without adjourn until six o'clock for board meeting okay it's about a famous poem that we all know we all know the famous lines from is called this poem it's

124about two and a half pages long and we've been memorizing it for quite some time a judge who finds a lady out breaking day talks about their lives ups and downs and the judge when that day they met he turned around and looked at her and that was the last time we met talks about their lives and the famous line that we all know and may we remember this since we live our lives but beating them both god pity his own mainly the dreams of youth recalled from all side words thank you very much we appreciate that i was somewhat tempted to hear the whole thing though sounds like you've since you memorized i also wanted to uh excuse myself i usually wear a jacket but it was just too hot today i'm sorry so

125we will now have our recognitions as the board of education it's important for us to recognize accomplishments made by students employees and patrons from throughout the district as we honor individuals and groups tonight we acknowledge the families and others that have helped them to achieve their goals thanks for your support you've offered those we recognize we appreciate your attendance here tonight by the way after you've uh the person you're supporting has been recognized it's totally appropriate to go ahead and leave after the recognition that's okay although we have so many exciting things to talk about tonight we'll see how that goes to start with we wanted to congratulate cody mcdade and mike johansson in our transportation department if you would come up that would be perfect they have they've completed competed in the utah state

126mechanics competition in park city cody took first place and mike third place what a great showing for alpine thank you so much for your work can i also mention that cody has won this six years in a row because he's competed across the state so we're really proud of him hey can we also have those who are here to support cody and mike stan to be recognized maybe cody should go to the consulting business like i will come analyze your problem okay so next we have diane knight of north point elementary so congratulations to diane who is the 2022 best estate winner in the teacher kindergarten category in education talking to diane about education is an exciting experience she exudes passion and love for her profession but more importantly for her students thank you for

127representing your school district hahaha okay thank you thank you thank you for being with us let's see uh anyone else here to uh support diane that would like to stand and be recognized okay thank you we now have time for community comments we ask people who are providing comments to avoid discussing personnel issues because they're not appropriate for public comment if you have a personnel concern you can contact a member of the administration or your concerns in writing we also do read all of the there's a way of commenting online we go ahead and read through those as well as emails to uh to board members if you have concerns of that nature if you we have one person who has signed up so uh natalie clawson go ahead and hear your comment um when

128i saw that you had that day you're talking about instructional materials i wanted to come in and give some perspective just as a parent and um i um i'm grateful i'm in a time of life where i'm able to spend a lot of time with my schools with my kids with the sec room while i'm impairing a bunch of different activities and but i was concerned a couple months ago and my daughter was emailed from a document from her student teacher who asked her what her pronouns were and so she's middle school students we had to talk to that i didn't i was really uncomfortable with having that was introduced by a middle school teacher i talked to my teacher my principal who were both very supportive and understood my concerns and so i just

129wanted to express let the district know that that might be something that needs to be communicated further on to the they don't know where that where that was coming from but just as whatever the policy gets on that so that people know that people are not comfortable with having the entire school second one is the books and the libraries and i know that's going to be a hot topic of importance an extremely important topic that we discussed i was in our my middle school library a couple months ago and found a few books i showed my principal who was very concerned about these books also and as far as i know i think they are still in the library i don't know if any books have been removed from any of our libraries and school

130districts i know that there's a lot of discussion trying to figure out how to handle these topics but i'm concerned i was listening to the state school board as they were discussing these topics and it sounds like member client had a proposal that would remove a lot of the liability from the local school districts and it would be removed so it would go up to the state level and there's a discussion that's still ongoing but it sounds like a lot of that liability will now be pushed back to the school districts and local schools and so i think it's really important that our school district gets involved and talks has conversations with the state school board about about having some more protection for that because i don't want to have my local school be comfortable

131and concerned about removing books because of its ramifications from of liability and so on so i'm just encourage you to have these conversations with the state school board to try to have that protection potential being put in place for our local elders and our local school district our local schools so that our principals and every succeeds and everyone else can have the confidence to remove these books that are not pornographic um a couple more thoughts really quickly is as you discuss what to do with these books i would i think it'd be wonderful if there's a way to remove them from all the schools at once if we find a book is completely pornographic in future it's not a questionable level if we can remove it so we as a parent an sec member doesn't

132have to go and read all these books and the principles don't have to we have to expose that to so many more people if it's clearly objectionable let's just move them back from the also as a parent i'd like to know what our standards are how these books are introduced into our libraries in the first place what is what we do see is okay if it's not not okay and then and also at this point to understand what the process is thank you for your time thank you we appreciate that comment and uh appreciate that also that it's very timely because that's what our discussion is tonight so we'll uh hopefully hit on some of those items you've talked about but by the way we don't engage in a conversation but if you want to

133you can talk to a member meeting uh superintendent are you there i am oh i'm so excited rob's really excited too so pretty good up there i think i should uh this is a good way to attend board meetings now we are going to ask you if you're in your jammies so uh but uh hopefully you're comfortable an appropriate attire appropriate attire okay so first of all we need to approve our minutes is there a motion i believe that we please minutes from sarah motion from sarah hacken a second from sarah bison in discussion all in favor say aye aye i didn't hear you stacy did are you able to uh i sure didn't meet but i said i'm sorry okay perfect forgive me i'm just going to ask you if i don't hear you

134because i want to make sure you have the opportunity to be heard okay the motion passes uh claims superintendent yes board members you have received your claims for the month and i recommend your acceptance of those claims is there a motion i'll move to improve the claims second you have a motion from amber a second from ada any discussion all in favor say aye next we have routine business yes you've also received the routine business board members for the month include the budget summary alpine foundation board summary personnel hiring releases and student trip requests and i recommend your approval of the routine business promotion i hope that we accept the routine business i'll second okay we have a motion from sarah hackness that comes from sarah basin a discussion on the routine business i did

135notice some of the trip requests that were a little bit apologetic for i'm asking for it late in the game and i guess my response was hey we're all over this we want to help you to make trips of trips this time we're mostly local uh and i love that because i i think sometimes these uh when the excursions are far away they spend all their time traveling so we have a motion next second any other discussion all in favor say hi hi we motion passes action yes president clement thank you the first action item is resolution one 2022-014 adopting uh the flexible benefits plan and i will uh transcribe over to our business administrator rob smith to explain uh that resolution and we recommend your approval of that actually thank you superintendent board members

136i did have a couple of questions from you so thank you for reaching out every five years we go through a procurement process and we appreciate craig breaker top helping us through that and our hr team led this particular procurement and it's changing our benefit provider that works with our health safety accounts and those types of things that new provider health equity asked that we formally adopt the same plan we adopted when we had the prayer provider five years ago and so these are those documents that they need for approval that move that we approve resolution 2022-014 adopting resolution plus flexible benefits plan we have a motion from ada a second from amber discussion uh one uh one so is there anything different i think there are some rules you can't change plans and once

137you're into them the fact we have a new provider is there any more flexibility along those lines or is it just the same as always similar routes that we will follow to be consistent okay so that nothing nothing really has changed that can't be unless there's something else that you or your team that know consistent perfect so let's see we have a motionless second all in favor say aye hi if you post the motion passes superintendent yes the next item next two items are discussion items the first discussion item is the 2023 board meeting schedule that is on page 123 of your board documents you'll see that schedule laid out for the 2023 year the schools to be recognized are not listed we wanted to uh with board elections and the change possibly in board

138positions begin the year ronda morton and i discussed uh just leaving that open at this point and the schools can be determined as we get closer to those dates so you'll see the dates we believe we're avoiding any national holidays or other major conflicts with this schedule and on the months where we're recognizing a school you'll see a board member who covers that school will be conducting and then we'll determine the location if the board decides to change that from the district office to a school site depending on the school site that you're recognizing those are the only general comments that i have uh about the schedule and then would open it up for board members to discuss and then we can move this to an action item next month for approval of this board

139meeting schedule for 2023 great are we just going to discuss it do you want to do you want to wait or do if somebody wants to make it an action item they can have a motion otherwise we can just discuss okay so i am going to move to approve the 2023 board meeting schedule a completely define the board okay we have a motion to approve the 2023 board meeting schedule action item all in favor say aye hi i'm sorry i didn't hear you stacy my apologies i were you and i okay perfect promotion passes okay thank you board members president clement the next item is the discussion item policy 6161 that you mentioned earlier as indicated in a public comment the selection and adoption of instructional materials we are in the process of rewriting that

140policy i appreciate kimberly byrd executive director of internal relations and operations who works with our policy committee the board members that serve on that committee it has been a busy summer adjusting to and becoming aware of house bill 374 and those expectations and i'll invite kimberly byrd to come to the podium to answer any questions that board members had you receive some initial work on that policy and we will open it up for discussion okay can i give a little bit of background before the discussion that might answer some questions and i'm so glad natalie brought up some of her comments because the first thing i want to do is thank our parents who have brought to attention materials that have been found it's concerning to us as well i know of your work that

141you did at your child's school with your school administrator and our superintendent intentionally put a team together to begin an internal audit of our library materials this summer so again thankful for our parents for their input for their attention to that and um natalie specific i'm glad you're here tonight and thank you for your care and concern then i can see others in the audience we had an internal um library material committee that did the audit and these are people who they have summer plans as well but they accepted gladly an opportunity to work on this committee they represented k-12 spectrum we also had district officials so valen thomas organized this committee grateful for him and then we've got stephanie jones i almost said sir i don't know why i keep doing that but stephanie

142jones she's here she'll be moving into a new position who will facilitate our library programs media specialists and thank you for being here tonight as well they've spent three three particular separate day meetings this summer reviewing um i want to say 275 books that were identified from parents parent concerns so that's where we initiated our internal audit but our audit went even broader we wanted to make sure that we understood our procurement or the way we select materials natalie also mentioned that it's important for us to learn from a process that was based in good intention but how things have gotten through or slipped through so procurement was another critical thing so an audit procurement and then guidelines for how do we move forward how do we now from here on out select materials that

143have been through a well a process that's founded in good fighting principles so over there is valine so thanks for being here so i'm going to give you some initial stats from their audit uh findings are being published and it'll be shared with you as a board and you guys can direct us on how you would like that published to our parents but of the titles that were reviewed were found by this committee to contain sensitive material and they do not have literary merit so what this committee first did is they looked at the attorney general's letter that clarified the intention of house bill 374 which identified pornographic material and it's got some really clear definitions or an interpretation so from this committee again as you can imagine they spent a lot of time but

144they kept going oh my gosh okay we're glad we're doing this so 52 contained that so now we would say um our district leadership team will take these findings because literally the committee's last meeting was just last week so we haven't had a chance to have a dlt meeting but where we're positioning ourselves is now what do we do with these 52 is this do do we immediately take them off our shelves i mean that will be our recommendation but we want to work in coordination with the quarterback so that you guys are aware 52 were found that way 73 are not part of our asd collection so of that list that was given to us we did find that 73 are not part of our collection 66 do not contain sensitive materials as far

145as the definition from the attorney general's guidance there are 32 titles that our committee said we we need to do further study and this would be one that we would now take through that robust we're going to read from cover to cover because there is literary merit in 32 of the titles so they don't want to go off of a basic one excerpt there they found some struggle within their committee findings so we don't have a response yet on 32 of the titles that's just a quick overview again it's not our official published findings but i wanted to give you some stats that has have been generated from this committee who's been working very hard in addition to that we have been our policy committee was began rewriting instructional materials policy in the fall but

146we heard that there would be legislation in the upcoming session that would be addressing this so we put a hold and you probably saw how we addressed it with the public we said under revision and it held that way for quite some time we were fearful of rewriting a policy that we didn't know how it was going to be guided at this if the legislature was going to be um go you know one way or another and ours was very outdated it was 1980s is where it was sitting and we knew that we needed to do a rewrite but it's it still did fairly well but we had some problems so we have done and um we formed a subcommittee that involved dcc parents teachers curriculum principals district officials and we began initial work on

147how we would structure structure internal or excuse me construction materials into a policy we then submitted that once the legislation came out to legal counsel knowing that our legal counsel at that time also works with the state usba on model policy and we knew that he would have a really good eye on where that was landing their estate we also felt pressure in june to say we can't wait for every single committee and group to finish in fact we got the second letter of clarification from the attorney general on june 1st so as you can see we've had a very short window but we've been pretty intense on going after it the state school board met on the 30th of june but they did not finish their review but we are not waiting for that

148at this time because we can go back and edit policy anytime we feel like if we needed to get something into discussion today so that we could have hopefully something ironed out for august and then we can begin training principals librarians teachers anyone who deals with curriculum and our parents um we just we feel like we're under a tight timeline and for us to wait for it to be perfect um we just didn't want to go there we want to be best set up for success and making sure we've got some things identified in our schools and libraries and then we'll move on from there because this internal audit was library we haven't even gone into the classroom we need to teach teachers and school administrators on how materials are sitting in our classrooms and

149how they're selected so this is a big one this is not an easy policy but it's one that we think is in an okay position to discuss and then we'll iron out for august so let me see if i hit all the parts internal audit thanking the committee thanking our parents and then um our policy we have here david's got it up on the screen it's it started in the high 20s we've got it down to 19 point something so we what we did is we condensed some of the definitions that clearly described some words that are identified in the attorney general's letter we just said if you want a full definition you can go to the state statute to see it so we tried to limit it that way but you can see it's

150a pretty robust policy statement because we're talking instructional materials plus library materials plus how do you review and challenge something how do you review it for your own child and is there a process because i think it's so egregious that it should be for all children and you'll find that in sections seven and eight we want to address things on the most informal level with the parent who brings concern to the teacher to say you know what this this doesn't feel right i don't want my child exposed to this i want an alternative method that's where we want to resolve it either with the teacher with the librarian with our school administrator that's probably sections one through six when you get into seven and eight that's saying you know what i i don't just want

151to remove from my child but this this is significant enough that i want to remove for all children both in the classroom and also in the libraries that's section 78 that's kind of how it's sitting now i want you to know i got one more piece of feedback today that we're going to have to put somewhere in the policy as well and it has to do with being more clear about online materials grateful for blaine edmonds darren draper who have scanned this initial draft and although we do have a component of it it isn't bringing it out there to say no we're in 2022 most of our teachers are using online materials and therefore we need to have a specific process so we we do see ourselves adding another section or possible clarification there so

152that people understand that 95 of our secondary teachers are using canvas and many you guys might say well that's not instructional material it's just functionality actually canvas does have a portion of curriculum materials within it so that's why i appreciate that blaine was like oh no we've gotta let's get this out we said good thing it's only discussion today so we'll get another section out of there in elementary 75 of our fourth through sixth grade teachers are using google class classroom it too has a component of instructional materials this is good that we're doing this because it automatically alerts parents if parents sign up for their observation tab with canvas or with google they could just use their child's password on the fourth through sixth grade but you can see whenever a teacher is making

153a change to what they disclosed in their syllabus or their disclosure document so we like the idea of adding this section so that when we say if teachers are going to make a change to their curriculum that's different than what they put in their disclosure document or syllabus those that are using canvas or google classroom they have an alert system if the parents sign up for it so it's just another way to make parents get you know a va they can see what's going on they'll get an email and they can uh see those changes with that said now bring on the discussion and we'll take good notes okay so i'll start i have a whole list um the very first thing i wanted to suggest is something maybe the policy committee could do in

154general not specifically for this policy i know that this policy is heavily drawing on state code the problem is for those of us that are not on policy committee and haven't been part of those discussions i don't know which parts are state code and which parts are not state code so if i have a question about can we change this wording can we change this language if it's state code we really can't so maybe when we're in draft form for policies state code could be in another color state code could be i don't know something let me show me a part because i this is the most heavy state code noted policy we've ever done do you see it's right okay so 53g dash 10-103 right and that's what i'm meaning so i don't know

155but i don't know which i mean is this whole the whole thing is not state code i think for example so here's i mean definition of what constitutes pornography is probably an example of the attorney general's letter yeah right but like i'm saying okay so if you go to page 7 4.3 it says one of my questions here is multiple times in the document we talk about how in fact just below in 5.1 it talks about how our instruction material will not include pornographic content but then in 4.3 it says whether or not an item of classroom material contains pornographic material apparently to me i don't love the weather or not because that says the parent has brought something to this that they think is indecent or pornographic and we're saying well let me see

156if it does or not first and then we'll see what i'm saying so i would prefer that to say something like regardless of if an item than a parent because i realize what you're trying to say here is you can have something evaluated regardless of whether or not the problem with the book is pornography like if the problem with the book is something other than pornography you could still have the book evaluated so i don't love that phrasing but now i don't know did that phrasing come straight from state code or was that phrasing yeah so we partner with parents so if a parent says they don't want their child to participate in the sharp survey that's not a piece of material specific to say oh it's got pornography but it might ask questions that

157they don't feel comfort right so regardless of it having pornography in it we are saying a parent has the right to say i don't want my child to participate so what my question is and to go back to this is something maybe in general i don't love the weather or not phrasing but i don't know is that phrasing state code or is that our phrasing because if it's state code it doesn't matter what i think we can't change it you know like i can't come to you and say i don't think pornography should be defined because that's how state code is defining it but if i don't love whether or not can i push for a change there is that our wording or is that do you see what i'm saying so i don't know

158the difference in this document i don't know what state code and what is available to be changed that makes sense and i like your word regardless okay so um i'm assuming okay so starting on page two with bullet number eight i'm assuming that this is all everything in these definitions is copied and pasted from state code that's specifically the pornographic um definition but i'm assuming all the definitions are first correct eight specific from the attorney general's letter oh on june 1st that's that's the clarification that said it doesn't need to be all it's any of these so if it met the description in a it's considered pornographic okay um and then later on in the document several times we refer to one of the four tests that's maybe unclear maybe it should be one of

159the four definitions here because there are four definitions here but there's nothing minus that it's in a whole bunch of places um it starts yeah instead of saying four tests we should probably say it's every time someone's a valuable like so 7.1.3.3 on page 10 in determining whether the item contains pornographic or induced material the committee shall determine whether the material meets any of the four tests i don't these aren't really tests they're definitions so that seems a little bit i think it's how he positioned his description in the letter it's interpretation okay but that's not here so i don't know i'm trying to read this as a parent who doesn't read the letter and doesn't know the history i just am a parent who is concerned about a book my kids maybe yeah so

160okay um so that was a concern um several times in the document starting on page three bullet 10 when it's putting together the different review committees one of the things i'm seeing is the makeup of the committees and um number 10 says two educators and two parents number 11 says at least two let's see two educators from at least two schools and two parents i would really rather in all places where we're forming a committee that we say at least this many rather than a hard number because i think that that walks us into only that many like if a principal wants to call in your entire scc to be on that committee awesome if they want to pull in you know i mean they've got to have a minimum of two but they could

161have 10 i don't care i would prefer in all instances when we're forming committees for us to say at least this many rather than our number of this many because i think more eyes is better so that is also in item 12 there and then it is multiple times later okay so then one thing i wanted to point out to the public that i think is really important page 8 uh 6.3 says um if a student's parent or guardian wishes to restrict that student's access to any particular library item the parent or guardian may make a request i would really like us to take out written requests to the library staff and student that will then not be allowed to check out that item i just know a lot of our parents are in their

162school tonight and if they come in and talk to their librarian and it's not written that they and say this is when the dated information this is when it was signed just to make sure that everyone was on the same page i think that's what we had in case somebody was gone there's not a record of it to say no that was important enough for that parent to come in and share that concern let's have it just written up it doesn't need to be intense like a two page or one pager right it's just i'm the parent this is what i'm feeding for my child it's a record i just know the one time that i had to restrict a child's library privileges for totally different reasons um i just went in and talked to

163the librarian and she said great and she put it on but it wasn't after that so i that would not have been able to happen that way and i purposely went in and discussed it with her rather than just emailing and saying do parents to this is really important to me and so i think i mean so what if so here's my here's my i'm going to look at the other side we always have to look at all of these different sides but what if a parent came in i'm sure it doesn't happen but if it did if a parent came in and said i spoke to the librarian and i told that person that my child could not do this and the librarian says that's never happened where's the record i just want to

164make sure that there's a backup for the parent for the child for the teacher for the employee that's that's where this is we're not trying to make it so that people won't do it but we want to hold accountability where it needs to be i totally see what you're saying so i think we can just wrestle with this as a committee you guys can see where you're comfortable with the way amber's described it and we can make we can change this up a little bit if we need to the boss so there's um okay so then okay you're right i should have cut them in okay so then starting on page nine i have some concerns that some of the language feels a little bit hostile towards those who may or may not be concerned

165about a title so um i think i think that this is a subject where parents really should have a lot of say about what their child is going to be consuming maybe not for their for every child in the school but at least for their own child and i think if a parent you know is sitting and reading with their child and so they're concerned about something that they're seeing about some we should be very welcoming of those discussions and those parents wanting to come in and talk to us and say hey i'm concerned about this how can we respond and so one of my concerns is that individuals are limited to two requests per year of a book that they are concerned about or material that they're concerned about i can see that we

166don't really want for their personal but i still think um i still think maybe i recognize that someone and i think it's important that someone needs to read the whole work or you know look at the entire material before they file their request but i think if they're willing to read through those then and to bring up to come in and say hey i've got a concern i don't two seems like very many to me just in case you've found something like i know um i didn't let my teenage boys read a whole series once because i thought they were very very violent i didn't like it i didn't ask for the school to necessarily remove all of them but if there was something that was even more egregious i might wanted to pursue that

167but there's four or five books in the series so if i can only request two items well i can only do two of the books this year and then next year i guess i'll do two more so it seems like it's a very hard number well for your child you can do it when as right so that's like the thing the information that was in that series around number four or number five we're not trying to hide anything so amber i want you to think of section seven and eight as removal of books or district curriculum for all there is um okay and i'm just gonna be honest we have parents who write in and say my child i i want them to read this and i and then we have another group of parents

168that say i want it out for everyone and there is a balance so the way as we work with legal counsel on this is to say how do we make it when we're trying to make a decision for all kids how is that different from my responsibility and parenting of my child i can have my child it's out for every single one of them but what if we have parent c over here who believes no those types of conversations i want them to be um enriched in that i'm not saying on the 53 that we're talking about that definitely have it i don't know why they would say that but i'm telling you i have evidence let's see the parent is saying that right now so i'm just saying right now the committee's going to

169rescue that list that specific list of 53 books it would take me 25 years so to me it seems like i mean i can see maybe you only have a certain active request or something that when those have been resolved or another part of that too what the committee was wrestling with and adam sarah can talk about this as well is trying to really find that delicate balance of because of course we want parents to say if there's a book in a classroom that they don't feel comfortable with or a book in a library that if it has to do with their child there's just hardly any questions asked it's i don't want this for my child and then the teacher provides an option uh another option for that child where it got sticky was

170is as we are thinking about these future committees that will be review committees at schools they won't necessarily be like a community council where it's always there it will only be set up as needed as reviews come along and trying to be cognizant of the time of administrators and teachers and parents that would be on that committee and so we were trying to find the right balance of there are books and we have a plethora right now that have been reviewed but in the future to say if we can just have you know parents have the two then we can take the appropriate amount of time because that's that's the key here is that this isn't a drive-through conversation it deserves a little bit more conversation and discussion of what this book is and the

171review itself and so it was that fine balance fine line balance of you know trying to support our administrators and with their time with parents time and other teachers time and making sure that parents have that right and for sure we erred on the side of if something makes you feel uncomfortable you have every right but when it comes to everybody else's children we've got to set up a little bit of a process to go through and that was kind of the thinking behind that yeah and the other thing too amber is one that has clear pornography in it see the list that we studied they weren't all based on that it was other hot topic social topics that were out there so there's a broad way people are coming and asking for literature instructional

172material i understand so what this committee did is they said okay this is we also have record of how many times it was checked out we've written a note to say this has to be age-appropriate if it's one of those classes a health related class on sex trafficking there's a note on this is only appropriate age appropriateness you know this particular grade they've noted those sorts of things they've got a bunch of notes they so they have tried to go in and say okay let's also see the merit of this and they didn't have to do a formal review they're going to be going after this without having to have somebody always write it down so if a parent came in an informal way and opened up the book to a librarian and said look

173at this this is so inappropriate in fact this is very graphic we talked about that a little bit earlier today but the picture the depiction of this what do we call it avatar graphic novels yeah anime we would just by seeing it right there alone yeah that's going to be removal that meets the definition that our attorney general clearly stated in a letter nobody would have to read that from cover to cover if there's one that's questionable that you're trying to say now listen look it talks about unwed very i mean just something that is not important to one family but it is to another those are the ones that have got to be cover to cover red and there will be a limit of two period i went and searched other districts as well

174they have limited the number of challenges as well i only looked at two districts though canyons and davis neither of them have done the rewrite of their policies since the june 1st letter so anyway that's it's a tough one and i think that your discussion is good we're going to have it we'll set up another committee meeting i just i just think um here's the thing like i mean i graduated in english so i've read a lot of things and i am not a book burner and i am not a don't let anybody read the survey together but i think that there's a different standard when we're talking about what we are using tax dollars to provide designers in our buildings and so um if a parent comes to us and says and i absolutely

175think there should be a process i mean examples i've used the book that my i want my kids to read the series actually all their friends read it and that's fine their parents said it was fine in that fight you know people have challenged harry potter mockingbird and huck finn and you know there's lots of books that have been challenged that i think are absolutely appropriate in our schools so i'm not trying to sound like um you know just get everything out because i would hate that i love the library and my kids love the library and the child that i had to talk to my brain about was because he was reading too much and not doing his homework so um but i think that we have an opportunity here to show our public

176who is regularly telling us that they have concerns that we want to listen to them and we want to know what they think and i don't want to limit how much they can talk to us and help us so we just need to be more clear because really sections you can see all the way through it we're not limiting them when it comes to material it's about a process for saying i want something removed for all children [Music] this is really good that we're having this discussion and i think that some of these this is negotiable because uh i mean the the committee members will tell you that my first reaction to that limit was what because i had that same reaction and maybe it's negotiable maybe we need to talk about books series what

177do we do with the book series the thing that that kind of swayed me a bit is the potential this process has to become so egregiously burdensome to the parent committee and and we're not talking maybe it's not just one committee we haven't really fleshed this out yet is it going to be are we going to have 20 committees for 20 books that are challenged at a school i think we need to track in practice what kind of burden this place is on the school administrator and i think that's key so i'm open to some change here and i'm and i'm totally willing to discuss that i think that is and i'm appreciative of the fact of many pepper i love it because you brought this you know as we were wrestling on that committee

178trying to we love that you're bringing this to our attention because this is something if you're thinking it somebody else is thinking it needs to be brought to our attention one thing i was thinking about is i was grateful that i came down from the state because i think my biggest worry is are we differentiating the difference between public libraries and public school libraries because there should be a difference and i had the opportunity to go through warren public library's procurement process and review that and it's um you know it's very pro ala but at the same time they're very cognizant and will not put anything that of pornographic nature out on shops if there's anything questionable then it goes in their closed stacks section and you have to go ask for it or um

179my father-in-law was the former public library director for 30 years we'd have plenty of conversations about this and i think that i'm so glad that kimberly mentioned at the very very beginning how grateful we were to parents who brought things forth because there were things that i think it's fair to say i'm not going to throw librarians at the bus because my father-in-law is a librarian but um that even librarians were not completely aware that those those things were in books and i'm appreciative of our public that have been working with us instead of calling librarians and administrators and school board members out in public forum to read these very vulgar terrible things that frankly i don't want to hear and i don't think you would want to hear that they have been so respectful

180and so kind to work with us in the way that they have and i appreciate that so thank you for saying thanks to the parents thank you amber for bringing some of these things and i think there are thanks and sarah you probably have a comment but what if we have to put a number here what would you suggest what would be an appropriate number that would be reasonable for both parents and for the communities involved in terms of the time and so on i think i have to think about it maybe it may be that the definition of our quest even needs to be changed because like i said if there's a whole series of books that are all what i have found because i used to when my kids were younger i used

181to read everything that they read because i was worried about what was infinite right and then they got a little wiser and how they were making choices and i kind of cut back but what i would find a lot in the books they would read is the first book's fine and the second book got like a little bit maybe another third book got one more iffy and by book four i'm like yeah you can't read this series and so um it's tricky because which of those then do you stop at and i don't so you almost have to take the work as a whole like is this something that we're gonna provide is this do you know what i mean so maybe the request could have request one request to be a series could one

182request be i don't know but um i just feel like if we have parents that are willing to do that but they're reading books that their kids are reading to see if they're okay and they have found more than one more than two books that year that they're concerned about and that's a conversation we need to be having with the parent and you know for this policy that that would be one request like i had seven children in our k-12 schools i had five kids at an elementary school at one point so i only get two requests so if i have a you know i mean i only get two requests at that school now so my five kids i'm gonna only choose for sure you know like i mean i i just think two

183isn't very many okay so why don't you come up with a number that you think would be appropriate and let someone on the committee notice that we can kind of wrestle with that make your numbers five or seven or whatever it is um but there's also another thing too is that very often in a classroom if one parent doesn't like a book they may talk to another parent and say you know what i've had my two requested this year what do you think about this oh you agree well then when you request it i mean there's nothing that says you can't work with other people to bring those books to the forefront it feels like okay okay i have all sorts of thoughts but i'm going to address the one that just sarah just said

184um the last thing i want to do is to make more work for people so i exhausted my two options and now i gotta go find another parent right that feels kind of disingenuous to me so i definitely don't like that um and i absolutely am and i had a conversation earlier about code and um so i just want to say that i echo her her comments sir that it's really hard to read through things and maybe some of the feedback i'm going to give it you know can at least say oh that's actually a code so it would be really helpful especially for a very long policy like this one to know what part is has to be there what things are our words i think we can mitigate a lot of questions if

185we know where that's coming from but also just i also have a really big challenge i don't want to say issue or help but i do i don't i don't want to limit parents and i the last thing i want to do is to make more work for librarians that they don't have time to do but i also am never going to tell a parent that they only have two chances to bring up books that they feel aren't acceptable and so i don't know that i want to put a hard number on it i think the number of people who are going to come forth with i don't know 120 reviews i don't think it's going to be a lot of people so for me i would prefer to leave that open-ended and if it

186gets to a point where school's like you know if you really cannot handle the bandwidth of requests then okay then let's revisit it but i am not comfortable at all saying you only have two requests per year so i appreciative to all those who put this together but i don't want to shut anyone down or make them feel like they have to jump through hoops just to get things looked up thank you yeah i think we need to remember that the two requests applies to a district wide remote or a school writer or a library book um or instructional materials because seven results in the seven eight is the library materials those are full and i just don't want to be misrepresented that parents can do for their child's material ad nauseam okay i understand

187really clearly just just to be clear with that i get it but it's for you can do whatever you want for your own child but if somebody is looking at other things not everybody is going to want to jump on and read a whole bunch of books so if you have a parent who has looked through multiple things especially in a series or whatever i'm not going to stop them because you know there may be 10 other parents who would feel the same way and because of whatever their schedule and personal life looks like they don't have the time to do it so i i very much understand what you're saying and i'm still saying that i respectfully disagree thank you stacey before you took to your next item i uh i kind of felt

188the same way that emperor did about this section i wonder if we could just add 7.1 if we could just make a statement there we really want parent input we really want to know um okay and just to clarify um the two requests is listed in here at least four okay so the times one is um at the very beginning in the statement of policy it says the alpine school district board of education quote has the legal responsibility to adopt or textbook supplementary materials instructional materials including library hotels for use in elementary and secondary schools so i'm also a little bit concerned that in all of these sections we have limited board members to only be able to advocate about materials in their own schools that they represent to me if that is a duty

189of the board of education as a whole then it shouldn't matter if the parent that's concerned lives in highland or if they live in orem if they 7.2.1.1.4 board member a member of the board of education who represents the local school board district where the school is located that's on page 11. um page 15. 7.2 i'm sorry i'm just trying to make sure i'm writing specific notes on your feedback 7.2 what point sorry i went too fast that's not confusing whoever also said that okay and then it's also in um on page 15 7.3 0.1 0.1.3 i think you've got a point there because it is our collective you know we say repeatedly we don't have any power as an independent board member that we only have power as a group so that second one

190says a member of the board of education for a classroom or class in a school within the local school work district that board member represents so again you can only advocate for books in your area i just think yeah we can clarify that patrick was trying to say hey i'm going to put board members in there too so they can be a part of it it doesn't have to be their child and that was his his way of involving the board because we it was first sitting under you've got to be a parent of a student in the school an employee and then he was like um so he called me and he said can we add board member and i said yes definitely but we'll clarify that so it doesn't limit you to that

191specific area you represent multiple schools yeah we may just be able to put that in an umbrella statement period because i think if a parent i mean there are lots of reasons why a parent might be more comfortable with the board member that's on their own board member and they might you know raise a concern so i think that's um and then also in the one that is classroom use only employees have been well if you were the person that selected it you'll have a bias no it's to ask for a review of the item like if i'm an aide in the classroom and i see a book that i'm like i don't know if this is a good idea but the description of what is pornography almost felt like i believe it's page three

192on it's the end of eight we decided not to include the description under nudity masochistic i mean there were so many definitions they had definitions of the definitions and it it was hard so we eliminated five definitions and we just said complete definitions for nudity sexual conduct sexual excitement say the masochistic abuse and period interest in sex is available in the utah code mentioned above okay like abcd i think we could just refer to something else i don't think so i think each one of those each one of those has a certain angle that's very grateful because sarah hayden kimberly and i we all were kind of this is kind of embarrassing we had to discuss it for example for example mark like a has some things about the idea that there's no serious value

193or if it's just generally offensive b talks about contemporary community standards anyway those those are some examples of why i think we need to keep those it was so hard honest i know i don't know okay it's like we've ever been to so we are going to link all of those we could link the letter but i think we walked away from the meeting and i'm just going to say i think we walked away from our committee meeting feeling happy that number one we were partnering with parents that felt really good number two that we were on the same page with a lot of the things that were there that were concerning and number three that there was no question that if something has photographic nature it meets one of those listed criteria that exact

194and and that felt i felt like that was a win for parents and i feel like we're still in the throngs of trying to work our way through it but it's in terms of pornographic parts i feel like that was a huge accomplishment can we kind of scroll the screen so that we're not looking at those definitions right there thank you that was that's david david i found my place um page 14 under 7.3 it's a review of classroom materials yeah so 7.3.1.1.1 a student 1.2 a parent and then a board member um i i think it would be okay for there to be other employees you know and i'm reading with a kid's chosen they're like you know when i go read with kids in schools they pull their bet their bag of books

195and we sit out call and read books you know or whatever there could be a book in there that that teacher doesn't know is the problem uh good catch i don't know why that's missing because the play should be yeah that's what i think yeah um and then the last place is like i said and the whole two things started with this this concern every once in a while the language and the document feels just a little bit hostile to people who are asking for a review of something and i think that our parents that are us and our community members that are asking for review are doing so because they have genuine concern for our students and so i think i think that any language that we have that feels like it's putting on

196barriers or is a little bit hostile is something that we need to review so also in nearly every section i'm just going to put out the one on page nine so 7.1.2.3 says if the requirements and conditions for review are met and then it goes down and says the superintendent or designation will make an initial determination whether the form has been fully completed and the requirements for requesting review have been met this seems like if you don't have all your t's crossed and all your eyes dotted we're not going to look at it and i know that's not what we're meaning but if we can maybe find a way to rephrase that that's maybe a little bit more friendly to those that are asking for review that might be i think beneficial we'll clear that

197language up because really what it is is if if parents were having unlimited power and they just could come and turn in books that they really didn't know resided in their school's library for a committee to be brought together to go over each of them having a specific group that's very time intensive we would prefer that the parent know that that book is here in our library now that we've done it we're appreciative so we've just got to rewrite it so that it reflects how we're feeling because we are very grateful for it but we also want to make sure that as we form a committee now it's not based on one person's bias there's a committee that's representative right because now we're saying we're going to remove it for all we need to have

198a committee and not just one person who maybe purchased the material or they have a different standard than this person the committee is who should review it and then we thought of the frequency of how often the committee would review instructional materials plus library materials we just didn't want it to be something we couldn't accomplish so we need to rewrite and clarify it so that it accomplishes what you're saying is missing for you but we're the attention line we'll do that so that's i think okay those were good and i know like you three have been having this discussion for months but this is no they just barely got it we just barely got the draft so i just need you to know this team met after we have policy in june we didn't get

199our draft until a week and a half ago and then we sent it out to you guys these guys did double time and they met for four and a half hours on one day another hour and a half on the next last week just to do an emergency beat so we could get it through to this point so they haven't had more to do i promise may i make a couple more observations and the first one is to to your point uh amber that this kind of has a little bit of a hostile tone and i'm just saying that we have a new legal council in our district that we're very appreciative to have and it's just just to know we we like the kinder gentler language he already said in study session i've got

200some comments on the policy draft great and and i also want to recognize the professional training of our librarians um these are special human beings who have a lot of love for our students and i just want to recognize that they they know their students they know their needs the age appropriateness and the range of interest and abilities to read a are trained in how to curate their collections and two in their defense that the library procurement system is set up in such a way that that they often have to buy bundles of books and uh they are not always able to identify what is in a bundle of books and i hope i'm being accurate in what i'm saying but given that we are setting up a rigorous procurement standards and i'm sure that

201uh our stephanie will be training our librarians in our district to to meet those standards because these are libraries for learning for a certain age group and we want to recognize how seriously we take that responsibility to make sure that they are libraries for learning stacey did you have any other comments um were we going to talk at all about how this was going to be communicated out to everybody parents and employees so once we we've got to get some things fixed as you can hear today so we're going to get that's why it's discussion this month and hopefully we'll be at a place where we can take action next month because we've got to have a board approved policy stacy so we can begin the training effort so we've got to do a thorough

202training we're thinking school committee councils pta's our district community council and then maybe the guidelines being published for our public on the website to say here's our procurement procurement guidelines moving forward we also have a new board policy that's been adopted we do want to push it out but we can't do it until we feel good there's a lot of clarification that needs to go on we now need to have our new legal counsel look at it he does have a wonderful demeanor about him he can he can fix up some of the language and but our goal is we got to work intensely on this so that we're ready for august 9th and then we get the training organized so stacy good question we'll do it as soon as we have an adopted board

203policy i was just going to say with um school starting i understand that you know we have to work within the time but i really would like us to be able to get these things out to parents and teachers especially before school starts that i think it's already a kind of a crazy time of year so i don't want to throw something in like the first or second week of school by the way there's this policy so i just think out of respect for our teachers if we can have this have an idea of how this is gonna go out and things that would be helpful to everybody thank you by the way thank you for all those who did the hard work to get to this point it's a balancing act are we still

204friends kimberly superintendent do you have a comment um i also want to express appreciation to uh board members for their discussion on this it is obvious not only from our discussion tonight that this is a multifaceted complex issue there is a reason that the state of trinity general's office offered two opinions on this there's a reason that the state board of education still has not determined a model policy there is a reason that it was 46 some pages from legal counsel it is complicated it is multifaceted and challenging so i appreciate the discussion and we'll continue to process through this and try and do so in a timely manner so that we can get good information out to our patrons and get information out to our administrators and employees so they know how to act

205in good faith i think we all have the same goal we want our students engaged in appropriate material and if we can work towards that and come up with a process for determining that use our local school community councils and other resources to appropriately vet these materials then we will do our due diligence in providing that opportunity i appreciate all that have put into work for this i know in our state superintendents meeting this is a complicated issue that all districts across the state are working with many nationally so we hope to learn from others and go forward in good faith and do our best work so thank you for your discussion and engagement tonight i appreciate the feedback that was given the policy committee will go back to work and taking that into consideration

206that feedback and make appropriate adjustments thank you we appreciate that comment we now have board member and superintendent reports and information items does have anything i'd like to report okay well we uh we have a need for a closed session to discuss personnel property litigation and collective bargaining uh is there a motion to move the closed session i believe that we go to closed hi stacy hi okay thank you